This weekend we were supposed to be traveling down to Atlanta to pimp out our god forsaken unsellable condo (damn housing market collapse and a surge in foreclosures) but instead Robyn will be working Saturday and Monday which leaves me with a tough day on Saturday…
10am: Fulham vs. Tottenham on Fox Soccer
12pm: Manchester United vs. Sunderland also on Fox Soccer
2:30pm: First half of Empoli vs. Inter Milan also on Fox Soccer
3:30pm: Georgia Tech at Notre Dame on NBC HD
6:45/7pm: Oklahoma State at Georgia on ESPN2 HD
12 straight hours of unadulterated, unmitigated, unrivaled, undeniably hard work… A dirty job for sure, but someone has to do it and if anyone, anyone, disturbs me there will be a high price to pay unless they have beer and chips in their possession.
10th anniversary of Diana’s death marked. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I didn’t care then and I especially don’t care now… I just find the whole near canonisation of her memory to be, frankly, shit. Funny how her son called her “the best mother in the world,” I guess he forgets she died while out partying in Paris with her boyfriend while he was back in the UK with the rest of the Royal Family, thats motherly behaviour right there…
Rangers are handed a tough draw in this years Champions League. Barcelona, Lyon and Stuttgart, I wouldn’t be betting on any European football after Christmas…
After 31 years, the Braves will no longer be shown on TBS. The last game is on September 30th, an away game at Houston, it will probably be meaningless as they are currently 7 games out of the NL East and 4 out of the NL Wild Card, stranger things have happened though.
Last night I went to my first football game, well Scottish Claymores aside as NFL Europe was never really football, and not that the NFL is really football neither, but I’ll save that argument of semantics for another time… Last night it was a rematch of Super Bowl XXXVIII with the Carolina Panthers facing the New England Patriots. I wasn’t sure what to expect seeing as it was pre-season and all, I’m a Patriots fan so I wanted them to win, but at the same time I live in Charlotte and I’m not sure how rabid the fan base is here…
It was actually pretty enjoyable, even if it was like 92° at kick-off time… The seat I had was in the 4th row of the upper level at a corner (if you watched the game, the static fish eye shot of the stadium was directly behind me, in fact I took my panoramic shot right below it). So while I also had a view of the action, I also had a view of the city, which was excellent as the sun went down. And as it was a nationally televised game, I also got to see pretty much all the big names like Tom Brady (only a few days removed from fatherhood) and Jake Delhomme playing into the 3rd quarter.
In the end it was a pretty easy win for the Patriots, I left after it became 24-10 in the 3rd and it stayed that way, like I said it was pretty enjoyable, something I can now strike off my list of things to do. Actually it’s still pretty strange for me, I used to think while growing up how much I’d love to see an NFL stadium, now I drive past one two times a day and now I’ve finally seen a game and got pictures of people I’d only seen on TV before, like Brady, Delhomme, Steve Smith, Bill Belichick (not wearing his trademark cut off hoodie for a change) et al. Also not often you get to see something like this right after work too.
Panthers vs. Patriots – August 24th 2007 (set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.
I’ve been pretty lazy about reviewing the movies I’ve seen recently, I mean this post has been sitting in drafts for about 4 weeks now… More often than not it’s either been DVD’s or downloads I’ve been watch, we don’t get out to the cinema much, but we drove up to Raleigh to take in the new Harry Potter movie in IMAX 3D so this has prompted me to do quick, dirty reviews of the ones we’ve taken in in the last 3 or so months…
In no particular order.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Now, straight off I’ll say I’m not a fan of the books, I haven’t read a single page of one, I hadn’t seen any of the movies until a few years ago and if it wasn’t for the IMAX 3D part of this one, I prolly would have waited until the DVD came out. But that said I really enjoyed it.
Again that was probably because I didn’t know what was about to happen, I mean I know what’s going to happen but I enjoyed sitting there taking in every twist and turn shown on screen and not nitpicking what was left out. Anyways, Year 5 for Harry is his toughest yet, discredited by the Ministry of Magic following his encounter with Lord Voldermort at the end of the Goblet of Fire, now the dark lord is out to get him. To make matters worse, the Ministry is taking over at Hogwarts leaving Harry, Ron, Hermione and the rest of the children to fend for themselves in order to prepare for the upcoming battle…
This was great storytelling, and a great climactic fight at the end, wizards and witches squaring off left and right, Dumbledore against Voldermort, the whole shebang. I’m already looking forward to next year and the release of the Half-Blood Prince.
Hot Fuzz
What do you get when you add EVERY American cop action movie and place it in a sleepy English country village? It’s The Bill on steroids… And it’s awesome, seriously, seriously awesome.
Simon Pegg is in great form as a cop from London planted into an otherwise quiet village where people mysteriously go missing and murders are brushed under the carpet, all is not as it seems and when he busts the cover open it’s all guns blazing in a showdown of epic proportions…
The first half is an excellent build up, but the second half is so over the top you can’t help but enjoy it, and the amount of blood shed was quite surprising, even by Shaun of the Dead standards. If you enjoy utter carnage and mindless violence and about a million and one spent bullet casings, you can’t go wrong with this, probably the best movie I’ve seen all year.
Spider-Man 3
I loved Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, and I wanted to love this one too but unfortunately it slides down to the “meh, I guess I liked it” pile. It’s no secret that I’m a Spider-Man fan so the prospect of seeing Venom on screen as too much for me to even think about, but now after seeing it I’m slightly let down.
Sure, they had the basics down, but the black suit just wasn’t right, a black version of the original Spider-Man suit it should not be (as the black suit was modelled after Spider-Woman’s suit). And even though it’s supposed to turn Peter Parker towards the dark side, he ends up a whiney little emo kid dancing in jazz clubs, what’s up with that? Then Venom arrives and they proceed to show Topher Grace’s face as much as possible… Killed any enjoyment for me stone dead.
Oh yeah, and the story was kinda lame too, not good, not good by far.
Ocean’s Thirteen
Ocean’s Eleven was a very good movie, unfortunately Ocean’s Twelve got lost trying to keep everyone on screen at the same time and Ocean’s Thirteen falls at this hurdle too. Don’t get me wrong, it better than Twelve, but it just seems like the same old same old all over again.
This follows the same formula, a bad-ish guy wrongs one of the Eleven, they set him up for some payback and we all have some near misses and various hi-jinks along the way. Though if you’ve seen Eleven you could probably give this one a miss, it’s a near enough remake…
Children of Men
Where better to set a movie of a dystopian future than Britain (see also: A Clockwork Orange and V For Vendetta)? This one is set in 2027, the world is left mourning after the world’s youngest person has been murdered. Women have been infertile for 18 years and nearly every civilization other than Great Britain has crumbled. England has become a neo-fascist state that has outlawed immigration and murders refugees in prison camps.
Put it this way, it starts off with a long sequence that ends in a cafe blowing up and doesn’t let go from there, it has lots of long takes (or crafty editing to make them look longer than they are) and it’s pretty awesome to see such cinematography put to use.
Highly recommended if you like your future grim and gritty and under the boot of totalitarian governments, and who doesn’t?
Before I begin I’ll state I know Mark O’Sullivan personally, I’ve know him for 8 years and I’ve even loaned him money, he’s a stand-up guy, he shares my love for Zardoz and he knows it. I don’t know Matt Mullenweg out with brief smatterings on his blog and the semi-dysfunctional WordPress “support” forums (at least when I was in there).
There’s a little bruhaha over the latest Lussumo Vanilla release. Mark, the sole developer, has decided to add sponsored links, fair enough, that’s up to him, in the same breath he also tell people how to remove them with one line of copy n’ paste code. Simple huh? Apparently not for Matt Mullenweg, who chimes in his 2 cents worth.
Now I use WordPress, I’ve used it for years now, it fits my needs, but that said it doesn’t mean you have to like the developers and the actions of Mullenweg have rubbed me the wrong way, and this pretty much stems from his cloaking escapade a few years ago. But I do find it funny that Matt would criticise one form of advertising while accepting another even if he did denounce it once caught red handed, but doesn’t everyone, I’m sure even Michael Vick will soon enough if he hasn’t already… But I digress. I’m in the belief that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and yes, I have said that Mullenweg is a bit of a two-faced douchebag in this matter, multiple times, epecially as my comments on his site about this were deleted (or not approved, whatever).
Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has also called him out on this, prompting a spiraling list of comments that varies from Duncan and Matt arguing while and lot of the “I am a big fan of WordPress and see nothing wrong with Matt is doing!” people sucking down the WP kool-aid. Heaven forfend that someone calls out THE Matt Mullenweg on shady spamming practises… Don’t you know who he is???
Unlike Duncan, I don’t have a problem with Matt and Automattic making any money off of WordPress, but he shouldn’t criticise Mark making any money off of Vanilla, that’s Mark’s decision to make, and frankly, I’d probably do the same if offered.
I do find it funny, though, that the people complaining in Mark’s blog post aren’t members of the forum, in fact the Lussumo forum has been pretty quiet about this, they’ve been told how to remove the link so they aren’t kicking up a fuss over a pretty small issue… Unlike some…
Michael Vick’s lawyer said Monday the NFL star will plead guilty to federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, putting the Atlanta Falcons quarterback’s career in jeopardy and leaving him subject to a prison term. That’s Vick’s career now officially done… No one will want anything to do with him now, In fact I bet more people will be knocking down Marcus Vick’s door than Michael’s, and that’s not a lot.
Dominos launches Pizza by TXT service in the UK. Dangerous, that’s all I can say…
I feel really bad today, as we’ve resigned ourselves to giving Charlotte away. It’s the end result of a period of time where things have just become unbearable, and even though it’s probably for the best for everyone, I’m still upset at letting her go.
When we first got her she was given to us by a friend of a friend of one of Robyn’s old co-workers daughter (yeah, I know) and we knew she was a stray when found. We were led to believe she was only a couple of months old, but the vet who inspected her the day we got her believed her to be around 6 months old. 6 months of living on the streets and, we believe, a young child tormenting her in her old temporary home must have left a lasting impression on her as she flat out feared us from day one. To help matters the first thing we had to do when we brought her home was give her ear drops for mites. She didn’t like that one bit.
So there we were, living in a small one bedroom condo, 2 people and 3 cats and we rarely saw her, she would always run and hide if we so much as looked at her. It got so bad we even had to force feed her as it looked like she wasn’t eating anything. After a few more months she also looked like she shedded her entire coat away. She went from fluffy to buzz cut over the early summer time, and we wondered if it was stress-related. In time, however, it all came back. We thought that when we moved she would get better, because she would have more room to roam. She was getting slightly better, but she was still extremely fearful of us. She wouldn’t run if we looked at her and she would occasionally lay down on the ground close to us, but if we moved a muscle, she would bolt out of the room.
About two months ago, we decided to groom all of the cats because they were overdue for a brushing and nail-trimming. We decided to use Soft Claws with Charlotte, since her nails get extremely sharp and we caught her scratching our brand new couch. She was very uncooperative with the brushing, but the Soft Claws didn’t seem to bother her too much.
However, about a week later we noticed a smell from the guest bedroom (where she spends most of her time) and unfortunately she had urinated on the bed. So we stripped it, washed it, steamed it, sprayed it and tried everything we could to get rid of the smell. To deter her from wetting the bed again, we put a plastic tarp on top of the mattress. But when we got home from our trip to Pennsylvania, we noticed she had taken a liking to going on the tarp, since there were several puddles of urine on it. In frustration, we moved the mattress off the bed so she couldn’t get on it at all.
Things were quiet for a few weeks and a few weekends ago we noticed that several of her Soft Claws had fallen off. So we figured it was a good time for another brushing and nail-trimming. She was extremely agitated, going as far as lashing out and swatting at us. And a day later we found our bed was urinated on. Clearly this wasn’t going to work out…
Well, this was the beginning of the end. We caught her and shut her in the guest bathroom to prevent further damage (and in the process, she clawed Robyn’s face). We gave her food and water in addition to the existing litter tray in the guest bathroom and at night we opened the door to the guest bedroom to give her a little more space to roam. Since we no longer trusted her, we kept a very close eye on her and even slept in the guest bedroom at night.
In the meantime, we took her to the vet to make sure it wasn’t an infection or whatever that was making her pee outside of her litterbox, though we pretty much knew that it was a behavioural problem. The vet kept her for the day and the entire time she was there she was refusing food and water and stayed backed up into the cage corner… shaking. They ended up having to force urine out of her to get a sample. The results confirmed our suspicions, she was infection-free.
So we decided she was probably better suited as an outdoor cat. She’s obviously petrified of humans and not happy in the confines of our house. We thought about letting her be an outdoor cat here but there is a fair bit of traffic in our neighbourhood and we’d need to stop Felix and Sally going outside also. So, in the end, we decided we needed to find someone with a good bit of land who would take her and allow her to be an outdoor cat. Turns out, a co-worker of Robyn said his dad has a horse farm outside of Winston-Salem and he’d be happy to let her run on his land as a barn cat. I just hope she’s ok as a barn cat, I’m afraid if anything happens to her we’ll never know and she wont seek help from anyone but that’s the way it goes unfortunately.
I’m sure it’s for the best, and as much as I want her to stay with us, I know she’s not happy. So today we’ll be driving up to Winston-Salem and let her go. I’m not looking forward to it…
Originally uploaded by FLC.
A love letter to Southern football. “I love how people who get it are standing up in their office chairs right now ready to get it on and people who don’t are scratching their heads and wondering what in the hell is wrong with these rednecks.” That, my friends, is what they call “truth.”