Slumdog Millionaire (and the broken DVD), lots of homework, Gojira, failure to Strain, Squee?...

(00:35:36 CDT)

Slumdog Millionaire (and the broken DVD), lots of homework, Gojira, failure to Strain, Squee?...

Sunday night, Sarah and I watched Slumdog Millionaire, which was something of a big awards winner (true story: one of the awards it did not get was the MTV movie of the year, which went to Twilight) and got lots of press; but mostly I wanted to see it because of the fact it had Danny Boyle directing and A. R. Rahman scoring. Sounds like an awesome combo to me. Sarah and I both liked it. I will be watching it again. It was a good mix of humorous, heartbreaking, annoying, and satisfying. One of those movies that has a bit of everything so it tweaks most of the buttons. And while it did make a few plays and homages towards Bollywood, coming in at only two hours makes it practically a short. tee hee. I also have the novel it is based on, Q & A, but have not started reading it yet. I think I will tomorrow. Maybe. Just to relax between homework (Jesus, more on that in one moment). Just wanted to point out if you were an early buyer, like I was, and your DVD only has crappy trailers as a special feature, you need to return it. You can fill out a registration via the Slumdog Millionaire exchange in which you will get a postage paid sticker to return it to FoxDVD and they will send you a working copy. I have no idea if you get anything else for your trouble, or if this is merely another case of the early worm gets eaten by the bird, but there you go.

It's not enough that we pay more, I guess. We should have other hassles as well. Thanks for being a fan, suckers!

Outside of that brief moment of relaxing, well, and getting to watch the original Gojira half a couple of nights back and half tonight, I have mostly worked on homeworks. Lots of homework. It goes like this. Take 22 (23?) questions. Limit the databases the students can search to some of the more particular ones that require fairly specific search terms and some digging and cross referencing. Make the questions about a wide range of topics. Then, set them loose and let them dig for a dozen or more hours. One question, about fifteenth century martial arts in China, took me me maybe two or three hours to answers. One question. And since a lot of the sources we were working with were somewhat primary, it is not unusual for their to be two that disagree if you dig enough.

I am surviving though, through heavy doses of tea, toasted cavendish in a meerschaum bowl, and lots of fun side reading. No sleep, mind you; but I am reading some neat things.

One thing I am not reading is The Strain. A couple of posts back, I made a note that I would try an wait it out, to see if it hit the NYT bestseller list; because if it did it would drop to $9.95 on Fictionwise.com. Well, it seems to have missed, which is said. I was tracking its sales figures out of curiousity and found that after getting up to about #44 at Amazon.com, it seemed to start falling back pretty quick. It is currently at #67, though #2 in it's more specific sub-genre. Checking the other numbers, looks like pre-ordes on Dan Brown's next one are outselling it. Ah, well. I will buy my copy come Thursday and let you all know how it goes, naturally. If anyone else can guess what OTHER book coming out this week is a definite buy for me, I will invite you over to share spaghetti with me. GO!

Making up for my disappointment over not reading The Strain, I have this to look forward to, I guess. How not to enjoy the end of the world...

Si Vales, Valeo

• See other entries for June 09
• See Journal Archives (sorted by year then month)