4/30/07

Dear Blog,

Another relatively uneventful weekend has passed. On Saturday I woke up in time for the very start of the NFL Draft, which very well might have set the record for the most boring round 1 ever - more on that tomorrow on the sports blog. I didn't stick around for the whole round, however - my sister and I left about midway through to go up to New Hampshire to test out some house keys for a friend of the family, who has a place on Lake Winnepasaukee - the vacation spot of Richard Dreyfuss's character in What About Bob? For lunch we went to a Pizzeria Uno - a first for both of us. And we were both very impressed, by the way.

That evening, I went down to Conlon's Liquor store to look for some beer, and I was very pleased to discover a Magic Hat Summer 12 pack. Magic Hat is a brewery in Burlington that my sister and I were first exposed to, oddly enough, in a bar at Fell's Point when we went down to Maryland to visit our dad after his surgery a couple of weekends ago. We both were very happy with their "#9", their signature ale, which was included in this variety pack with a Hefeweisen, a summer wheat ale, and their "Mystery Beer", which tastes like an IPA with a hint of fruit.

My fantasy baseball team beat the bejeezus out of Corey's friend Dan's this week - which is good, because we just got stomped last week. This will put me back in the upper tier of the League. There was a strong race for player of the week - it was either Jimmy Rollins, Vernon Wells, or BJ Upton.

Speaking of baseball, I've bought tickets to four Lowell Spinners games for this coming season. I plan on buying tickets for 10 eventually - two a week for the next three weeks. Season starts in late June, but you have to act early - the Spinners claim they are the only team in professional baseball to sell every ticket for the last 7 years, and it doesn't look like they are going to break that streak any time soon.

Next weekend I'll be down in Baltimore again. Holla!

4/26/07

Dear Blog,

Not much has happened since Monday, so I'll use this post to talk about a couple of movies I've watched On Demand the last few days.

First is DOOM. Now, I don't expect much from a DOOM movie, but it should, in theory, resemble the game on which it is supposedly based. In other words, I want to see a space marine battle back legions of Hell's troops. Instead, there was no Hell. The "demons" were really just zombies on steroids, by-products of bio-engineering gone wrong. And there weren't legions of them, there were about a dozen.In other words, it wasn't DOOM at all - it was Resident Evil in space. I don't want to see Resident Evil in space, I want to see DOOM. DOOM has demons from Hell. You know, like where Satan lives? This movie didn't even have the CyberDemon in it. For the uninitiated, a DOOM movie without the CyberDemon is on par with making a Star Wars video game and not bothering to include Darth Vader. It was just completely half-assed. If they bothered to do it right, it could have become one of the all-time great cult classics. Instead, it's just an obvious half-hearted cash grab. 1 star (for the admittedly awesome FPS sequence).

The second movie I saw this week was the just as bloody and about 100x as good 1986 classic, Platoon. Now, even though Platoon is only the second best Vietnam movie starring a Sheen (following Apocalypse Now), it's still a damn fine piece of cinema - one of the few from the 1980s that still holds up (others include ET, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Star Wars Episodes 4 and 5, The Natural - hmm, a lot of baseball movies on that list...). Look for a very young Johnny Depp - you'll be shocked when you see how young he looks, if you've never seen it before. Also on the cast list are Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, and Forest Whitaker. It's quite amazing what a great cast can do for a movie. Four stars. My list of the best war movies I've ever seen now looks like this...

1. Apocalypse Now
2. MASH
3. Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
4. Full Metal Jacket
5. Platoon
6. Lawrence of Arabia
7. Saving Private Ryan
8. Slaughterhouse V
9. Bridge over the River Kwai
10. Braveheart

The worst war movie I've ever seen, by the way, is Windtalkers, which is a crime, considering the story it tried to tell. It's also a crime because I'm fairly sure it was the reason I went on one and only one date with a pretty hot girl.

Ok, sports tomorrow. Till then...

4/23/07

Dear Blog,

It's been almost a month since I posted. Once something drops out of my routine, I have a hard time remembering to do it. If I can get going again, hopefully I won't have any more long lapses for awhile.

Not that I wouldn't have excuses, mind you. It's been a terribly, hmmm, bizzare time for me, especially these last couple of weeks. I'll fill you in.

Easter Sunday I met the folks, along with a bunch of the rest of the family, for the Easter meal. That afternoon, around 4:00 or so, dad had to leave and fly home. The plan was he was going to work the week, and then come up at the end of the week, spend the next weekend at the Cape, and then drive back with mom & Duncan the next Monday, which would have been a week ago today. That was the plan.

What actually happened was, my dad had been feeling tightness in his chest recently when he exerted himself. He thought it was a pulled muscle, but his doctor recomended he get a stress test, just in case. Turns out that was a good idea, because he ended up needing open-heart bypass surgery. Mom flew down to Maryland on Wednesday, and the surgery was on Friday. Everything went well, and Kait and I drove down with Duncan for an impromptu visit Saturday. I didn't get to see anyone, as the visit was completely unplanned, but that's ok, because I've booked another trip for the weekend of cinco de mayo.

Anywhoo, that was also the weekend the Nor'easter hit, which made getting back a pain in the ass - I had to call out of work Monday and Tuesday, because the earliest I could fly back was Wednesday. Then Kait and I drove down to the Cape on Saturday, and spent the weekend there, where we happily learned that Dino's, the bar where I was able to catch most of the Redskins' games last season, also had the MLB Extra Innings package, and so I can go there to catch the weekend Orioles games, as long as they aren't playing at the same time as the Red Sox.

I've subscribed to MLB.tv, but I'm having problems with the video feed, which is definately making me unhappy, since it ain't exactly free. I'll get that shit corrected this week.

So, like I said, it's been busy recently, but I'll get back in the swing of things this week. Sports entry tomorrow - I've got a lot on that plate to cover, as well.