Well...

Okay, yesterday's Smallville (which I finally got around to watching today) wasn't horrible. Certainly not as bad as I expected, but far from fantastic. We finally got to see Martian Manhunter in action (properly, anyway) although I kept wanting him to act more like Jackie Chiles. Acting was pretty darn good, especially the paranoia from Chloe (schwing!) and the anger from Lex. Tom Welling was his usual mediocre-at-best, but he fared acceptably. I give it a thumbs barely up (bureau42.com wasn't as nice as me this week, though) and I still hold out hope for good episodes this month.

So, why did I not see it until today? Well, my friend Jean-Paul was in town for a few days so I caught up with him and others to go for dinner and catch a movie. The others bailed so it was just he and I off to see Pan's Labyrinth (his choice). While he quite enjoyed it, I... I don't know what to think. My first impression was I didn't like it, but I didn't hate it. The story was iffy, the characterizations were flawed and some of the plot points were completely, well, pointless. For a new movie it's rated extremely highly on the IMDB, and I can definitely say I disagree with the rating it's received thus far. I'd have to give it somewhere in the range of a 5 or 6... decent, watchable, but nothing I'd care to see again or even really think about once I've left the theatre. The upshot is I got a stack of movie passes for Christmas so at least it didn't cost me anything to see the show.

Dad and Willi are off to Mexico this coming week, and I really ought to get over there and get this PCMCIA wireless card installed in his ThinkPad since he wants to take it with him... I wonder if he got his passport yet. I know as of last weekend it hadn't yet arrived and with all the kerfuffle these days at the passport office, it's quite possible he's not yet received it.

Disappointed

My Dad is amongst the hardest people to buy Christmas gifts for... much like me (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree) he's the type of guy to go and buy something if he wants it, and generally not wait for birthdays/holidays to let someone else buy it for him as a gift. Well, that was the situation this past Christmas where there was nothing that anyone could think of to get him as a gift. I'd decided to buy tickets for an Oilers game or two, but in order to do so I had to wait until today when the next batch of game tickets were made available. I could have bought tickets for other games at an insane premium (some places I looked at were charging literally double face value) but I opted to wait for today to get tickets. How hard would it be to get a couple seats together for a worthwhile game, right?

Well, Dad is taking some holiday time early this year, going to (I think) Mexico and Vancouver in January and March, respectively. He's also having cataract surgery on each eye; one in February, the other in March. So, with all that to contend with, my choices were limited. Ultimately I decided on the San Jose game January 26 and also the Calgary game March 3. I made sure to be awake early enough to hover at the Ticketmaster website right when the tickets went on sale at 10:00. I sat there hitting refresh until finally I could buy tickets.

Except, I couldn't buy tickets. I'm not sure how many seats were available in the first place, once promo seats and season tickets were factored in, but I could not get two seats together for either game at any price. At least, that was the end result after the retarded spam protection at the web site kept failing (the old "here's the obfuscated string of gibberish alphanumeric characters you have to type in to confirm you're blind and don't deserve to use our site" bit). I had tabs open for each of the two games and it took the better part of 10 tries for each game to get past that stage. I know for fact I was typing in what was presented to me but the system refused me access. So, I wound up waiting all this time to get nothing. Just for kicks I tried calling the phone number to buy tickets -- the line was perpetually busy, of course.

So, I had to go with Plan B to try to salvage something out of all this. The World Curling Championships are in town starting at the end of March, so I ordered a couple seats for the Championship weekend. The seats are at least decent considering general sales began in early November. If I knew they wouldn't go to waste (and if I could afford them), I could have had really nice seats for the whole 9 day event. However, $1000 was well beyond my means. So, the upshot from all this is the tickets are for Thursday night and for various times Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Dad's work schedule generally has him off Fridays, so we should at least be able to catch all the draws without anyone juggling any schedules. Unless, of course, I find a job before then... but then that's not really in my plans for the time being.

Christmas and such

It's been nearly 3 weeks since I've posted anything, and that's mostly been because there's been very little going on lately. Christmas was of course this past week and it was a fun one, with time spent with family for most of it.

Christmas Eve I went to my aunt & uncle's place as usual, this time with my cousin Graham rather than my mother (who didn't go at all). Turnout was smaller than past years, but there were a few people on vacation (like my cousins Ryan and Amy), or ill. It was fun as usual with a great dinner.

Graham and I left there about 9, so I was home by 9:30. For the rest of the night, until about 4:00 a.m. I played cards (canasta and crib) with the people upstairs as well as my step-brother Dallas (who's recently bought a house about 2 blocks from here). I drank too much (gin & OJ, yum) and played too late into the night, but it was fun despite getting beaten more than winning.

Christmas Day was spent at Dad's place (at least, after I'd mostly recovered from the excess of alcohol the night before) where it was just Dad, Willi and Janita since Janita's boyfriend was in Calgary with his family and Lindsay & Treleana didn't come to town for Christmas. It was a fairly sedate day, with a good chunk of it spent watching football. Dinner was wonderful as always and of course I ate too much. For gifts I got a pair of shoes (which were very much needed), some movie passes and a Chapters/Indigo gift card. I broke in the shoes last night and my feet were hurting a bit, but that's what new shoes do. They'll be fully broken in soon enough, then they'll feel alright.

I've of course been doing the movie thing a lot lately, watching as many as 5 flicks a day some days. I go through so many one blurs into the next and I can barely remember what I've watched. Yesterday, however, was a little different in that I went to the theatre to catch a couple flicks. My friend Jean-Paul was in town from Calgary so he and I went to see The Departed (which was wonderful and very Scorcese-like) at the cheap theatre before meeting up with a couple other friends for dinner then going to see Casino Royale after dinner. Casino Royale was somewhat disappointing (it was unnecessarily long and the writing really left a lot to be desired) but The Departed was fantastically acted and directed and held together well, though it could have shaved about 15-20 minutes off without losing any plot points (that is to say, it had some pacing issues).

That's about where things are at now. New Year's is still up in the air... I was invited to Dad's place but I opted to not go, rather intending to spend the night with a few friends or something. It looks like the front-runner is a shindig happening at Dave's place, meaning we'll hunker down with some craps or poker and video games and the like... or, it'll be drinking our faces off. Either or. Nothing's been finalized yet, but I imagine something will get sorted soon.

And to leave off with a joke, here are some rejected concepts for Wii games:

Token Halloween Post

I'm not a huge fan of Halloween... I dig the candy but that's about it. I don't enjoy sitting by the door handing things out, and I can't remember the last time I donned a costume.

That being said, someone has come up with a cute way of merging the pagan holiday with Apple technology.

CylonOLantern

My friend Sean mentioned this site to me. If I wasn't so lazy, and actually gave a rat's ass about Halloween, I'd love to build one of those.