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In many years June, you have been one of my favorite months. Not as hot as July, not as cool as May and your pollen counts tend to be pleasingly low. This year though you’ve been a right pain in the but and I’m not all that sorry to see you go. I know, I know it’s not really you, it’s me. I mean after the extra expensive car repairs, the loss of our neighbor’s tree, the 94° heat only on the single Saturday we planned a bike ride, the dental work and the broken eyeglasses; I’m just ready go into July for a fresh start. I’m not sure what I did to piss you off this year, but I hope we can be friends again in 2011.

Wii + Netflix = Bad Movie Marathon Madness

Posted by Mark | Filed under Reviews

I’ve been a fan and owner of Nintendo’s Wii console for some time. When I heard a while back that Netflix was going to start allowing people to stream movies to the Wii; I got very excited. I signed up for the service the first chance I got and waited eagerly for the disc to arrive. Eventually it hit my mailbox and I’ve been enjoying it ever since.

The thing I hadn’t really thought about was how it would change what I watch. While usually I don’t have connection problems with the service; it does happen from time to time, so I watch more TV shows than movies. Also if I have a couple of hours with nothing better planed or if the weather doesn’t cooperate with what plans I do have, I can quickly choose to watch most anything from my queue. And usually what I choose to watch is one of those movies.

You know what I mean. They’re that class of movie that looked interesting enough that you were kinda/sorta wanting to see it, but not interesting enough that you’d actually be willing to part with cold, hard cash to watch it at the theater. Tonight’s case in point, Echelon Conspiracy. Our main character of the film receives a mysterious cellphone that saves his life and starts to make him rich via well timed text messages. Only the casino he’s at notices and gets upset, worse the FBI gets involved (enough though said casino is in Prague, well outside their jurisdiction). Hijinks ensue, most of which appear to be either outright stolen from other movies or at the very least heavily inspired by them¹.

Was this a good movie? Good lord, no. Was it an entertaining way to kill a warm summer night? Heck yeah. Does it make me wonder if the instant gratification of streaming movies via Wii+Netflix is ruining my already questionable test in good cinema? Hmm.…

¹ My best example of this is the ending, so I’ve changed the text color here to hide it, to avoid spoilers. If you want to see the example select all text on this page. The ending was very much playing off of War Games.

Dear 2011 Self

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

Hey there self! This post is a quick blast from the past, to remind you of something. Namely when you hit the first, nice day in say April or maybe early May; get off your butt and clean those gutters. That way when you get up on the roof, it’ll be much cooler out and the shingles won’t feel like they’re burning through your jeans.

Side note: I hope you’re still liking that sun hat we bought this year. It worked really well keeping the sun off your face while working on those blasted gutters. Too bad it didn’t do anything to keep all the gnats and mosquitoes from pestering us. That one which bit us on the back of the ear is still annoying as all get out, but by the time you should be reading this that nasty, little bite will be all healed up.

Lucky bugger.