Stay Short Don't Go Long

Some short stuff for you.

I watched the latest "Die Hard" movie last week. The one that came out in 2007 that a lot of people liked. I found it alternately pretty good and a train wreck. There was the usual "Die Hard" type action that was well done but then it turned into "Spider-Man" at the drop of the hat. Certain action sequences made me laugh out loud and they weren't supposed to. Bruce Willis hit one of the characters with the SUV he was driving and it didn't even slow her down. She must have had super powers in that scene. A bunch of the characters seemed to develop super powers that came and went. There wasn't much consistency to the stunts.

To continue the action movie thing I also watched 2007's "Shooter" staring Mark Wahlberg. It wasn't great and had a bit of a cheesy ending but I liked it better that Willis's outing. Wahlberg is a military sniper (I don't remember which branch) and he gets caught up in a conspiracy with some bad people. There is not much more to it than that but the action scenes were good and the acting was adequate. The plot may have been far fetched but what do you expect from a Mark Wahlberg action flick?

I generally like the American version of "The Office" that's been running for a few seasons now. Not my favorite show of all time but one of the few sitcoms that I watch. I watched the original UK version of "The Office" recently and all I have to say is: boy was that depressing. It's not bad but it's no comedy. It's starts as a bit of a dark comedy and then gets just dark. I actually got depressed watching it. I'm not sure if that was the creator's intention but I found few laughs. Especially in the later episodes.

A TV show that I'm not sure if I like is "Big Bang Theory". I've watched it all season so there must be something about it that I like but it has a lot of flaws. It is a show about four brainiac geeks (there are plenty of non-braniac geeks, believe me) and their hot chick neighbor. Of course the lead geek has a crush on the hot chick but can't ask her out. Lots of anti social geek jokes and references. Some funny and some not. What bothers me is that these are all hard core scientist geeks with good scientist jobs. These aren't the geeks who can't get women. These are the geeks who, in their twenties, sleep with tons of women to get back at the ones who ignored them in high school. They have money, prestige, and success. It's geeks working at the local coffee shop who are undesirable to women. That's the flaw in the basic premise.

I'm still in the middle of reading Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". I'm not sure if I like it or not. The writing is pretty good as it's written like a page turning novel but sometimes I just don't get it. The best way I can describe the book is that it's "Lord of the Rings" for business people. First off it's about 1200 pages. It's also heroic fiction except the heroes are business people. It's black and white good versus evil like LOTR and it gets a little goofy like it too. I keep expecting the book to make a point besides "business people are noble heroes and the world is stacked against them" but it doesn't. I'm not sure if I'll finish it or not.

I haven't been into video games for a few months now. Sure I don't play near as much as I did in my youth but that's to be expected. I was playing the latest Zelda game on my Nintendo DS for a while but then I hit one part that was really repetitious. That's what always kills a game for me. It killed "Call of Duty 3" for me on the X-Box 360 too. I like a game that a can play for ten or fifteen minutes and then put down. I like to take a break with a game. Not play for hours straight. In most console games you can't save anywhere and come back to that exact spot later. Or you can for a while but not everywhere. Inevitably in a game I reach a spot where I die easily and then it take me fifteen minutes to get back to that spot to die again. It takes multiple times to figure out how to get past the spot but the repetition of getting there bores me and I put the game down. I have the latest version of "Advance Wars" (one of my all time favorite games) ready to play on my DS but haven't even mustered the interest to try it out. I haven't tried my "Marvel Trading Card" game for the PSP either. At least I got them both cheap. Expensive video games are not for me.

Well that's it for the small things that have been running around my brain lately. They are less bothersome than the big things. And more entertaining.