Coin collecting’s a lot like life; it stopped being fun a long time ago.

The Wife's been hogging the blog spotlight with all this jibber-jabber about home improvement for the last few weeks. Just like I need to have a stare down with the Dog every few days, looks like it's time to re-establish my blogging dominance...



After barely surviving the last week of April (somehow writing 73 pages of papers in a single weekend), I'm finding my schedule depressingly empty recently. I've managed to completely strike out when it comes to finding work this summer - no available classes to teach, various HR folks telling me I'm overqualified to be a security guard, etc. It's kind of a downer when people at a temp agency look at my resume, make me take a 2-hour-long clerical test, then tell me I'm overqualified.



So I've been hanging out with The Dog a lot. We've taken some w-a-l-k-s (just in case Dog reads this, I don't want it getting excited), caught up on netflix and DVR (I'm about halfway through Battlestar Galactica's season 3 and have all of season 4 waiting on the DVR), and actually gotten some work done around the house (including starting a bonfire that ended up smelling suspiciously strongly of ganja).



I'm seen a handful of movies that I'll grant micro-reviews here. No Country For Old Men was actually better than I thought it would be; I haven't read the book (I got through about half of McCarthy's The Road and got bored), but it was a very impressive bit of filmmaking and storytelling. I don't really agree with folks who claim it's a Western, but I'm no Kent Anderson, so who knows. After several semesters of badgering, I finally watched The Player - it was certainly interesting, but I might have gone into it with too high of expectations (plus I had a hard time getting over early 1990s fashion). I sat through all 180 minutes of The Good Sheperd, and came away thinking that I still don't buy Matt Damon as an old man. I watched the Quentin Tarentino half of Grindhouse, and while I'm still not a fan of 1970s-style horror-thrillers, I can appreciate what QT was trying to do in Death Proof; whether I actually watch Rodriguez' half, who can say. I Am Legend was indeed much more faithful to the source material than The Omega Man, but it completely fell apart about 2/3 of the way through the movie (right after the dog gets it); since it was on Netflix, I never saw the variant ending, so maybe things were better there. One pleasant surprise was Spike Lee's Inside Man, which had remarkably few cameos from Lee and was actually one hell of a heist movie. Along with catching up with old BSG, I watched the entire season (about 210 minutes) of Frisky Dingo, an old Adult Swim show by the guys who did SeaLab 2012 - it's insanely funny, especially when you can watch it all as one continuous story (instead of watching 15 minutes each weekend).



Since I actually went to the cinema to see it, I guess Iron Man deserves its own paragraph. While I'm a big comic-book dork, the character is so non-mythical (compared to Superman, Batman, maybe Spider-man) that I really didn't care if Jon Favreau took liberties with the established story. I was quite impressed with the way that Tony Stark (the 'secret' identity of Iron Man, you non-nerds) was given some psychological depth and development. A few other critics have pointed this out, but I thought it was definitely worth repeating - the film makes the armor actuall seem heavy. It moves relatively slowly and deliberately, the opposite of the fluid acrobatics of Spider-man. It makes logical sense, given that it's a massive collection of metal plates, hydraulics, and circuitry. I move slowly, and all I'm wearing are New Balances, bluejeans, and a machete. Plus, if you're not impressed with the acting from the entire cast (especially Jeff Bridges, who might be my new god), you have no soul.



Finally, I must end with fairly sad news - the Enquirer announced today that the Bengals released Odell Thurman after he skipped the voluntary minicamp last week in order to attend his grandmother/caretaker's funeral. This brings to an end not only the widely fluctuating career of Thurman (April 2006-May 2008), but dooms my treasured Thurman jersey (Nov 2006-May 2008) to a premature demise, with the possible brief post-mortum appearance at StraightCashHomey.







On the rare honest emotion - take a moment today and pour one out for Isaac Klosterman, who was killed last weekend in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident.