(Yeah, this should probably really go in my movie blog. Eh. Whatever.)

So last night it was decided that, being Halloween weekend, and being as we had extra special guests Brian and Brian’s Sister (whose name I don’t know if I ever knew, but she’s nice *G*), we would go see scary movies last night. By which I mean “we did a double-header at the theater involving The Grudge and Saw.”

The Grudge was… creepy. Essentially, there’s this house where there was this murder/suicide, and the spirit of the old rage that led to it is still hanging around. (Except for some reason it manifests in the physical form of the murder victim, not the murderer/suicide. Wouldn’t one think the murder victim was just scared, and the murderer was enraged? But I guess even a sort of evil-looking guy just isn’t as creepy as a woman with long dark hair. Whatever.) It borrowed a lot from The Ring, I thought–at least visually. It wasn’t nearly as psychologically thrilling, though. It was all about the “jump” moments. Which comprised, like, half the movie. And since I hate those moments, and I had ample warning thanks to the music, I essentially spent half the movie with my eyes closed. Which is not what I paid my admission price for, thank you. Also, the end was not… Well, it wasn’t enough. I kept expecting some new twist about the murder/suicide (we’re told that it repeats itself–I was thinking maybe the “first” one we know about isn’t the first after all and this is an older hatred, which would make a lot more sense to me as a premise), but all we got was a predictable, cheap horror gag. Nice camera shot briefly, but cheap gag. I wasn’t so fond of the movie.

Saw was entertaining. Oddly, most of our group found this one scarier, but I found it significantly less so. It’s about a serial killer who doesn’t actually kill his victims, he finds ways to make them kill themselves. (Well, supposedly. There are a couple of attempts in the movie where I think it could be legitimately argued he had a more active role in things.) His latest victims are some guy I don’t think I know and Cary Elwes. Note to film directors: Please do not make Cary Elwes cry if you’re trying to make a serious film. I mean, he’s positively ridiculous when he cries. Which he does for, like, a quarter of Saw. I mean, seriously, it turns many a tense moment into a comical one. (Of note: Although 17 years older, somewhat heavier, not quite so hot, and a little deeper-voiced now, Elwes seems to get stuck in “Westley mode” a couple of times. There’s seriously a moment where, between the camera angle and his voice and everything, I really expected him to say, “Drop. Your. Sword.” And there’s another one that I swear is, like, the Pits of Despair all over again but with a speedier recovery and without the unfortunate whimpering. I actually leaned over to Tim and said, “He’s only mostly dead!”)

I guess The Grudge creeped me out because it involved supernatural forces. It’s a lot easier to imagine that some amorphous blob of black hair is hanging in the corner of your room than it is to imagine that some random person is going to kidnap you. At least for me. Ghostie ghoulies are much creepier to me than the twisted depths to which humanity will sink. But then I tend to read stories about notorious criminals and serial killers when I get bored, so maybe I’ve just become desensitized to it.

Today everyone else is going a-haunted-housing. I don’t do haunted houses, so I’m going to stay here, maybe go to the grocery, work out, and I think to stay in the spirit I’ll get out the VCR and have a Dark Shadows marathon. Russ and Jen got me a couple of dozen of the VHS tapes (at least); that ought to hold me for a while!

Tomorrow: Dress-up, trick-or-treating, and Halloween party in our garage.

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(Link to CNN story about the Red Sox winning the world series removed because the page is no longer available, sorry.)

You see? It was a simple case of Murphy’s Law. A film was being made which assumed they would lose, so naturally they had to win.

Silly scriptwriters. Don’t toy with Murphy.

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So it’s been a week now. The workout thingy is both good and bad. Typically, even when I’m having a “bad” workout (more on that in a moment), I’m still working hard and probably doing some good somehow–even if it’s not as much good or not in the same areas as intended.

However, the program appears to have some exaggerated notion of how fast one can progress through being able to do difficult exercises. Remember how I told you in my original post about this that I was only able to do three or four pushups (and these were girly bent-legged ones) when I was setting my profile up? And the program’s oft-repeated advice is that workouts should be “challenging, but not impossible”. Well, I’ve had two workouts where the focus was on upper body strength, and both have involved multiple sets of 12 pushups each. On the first one, I told the program I couldn’t keep up. So what does it do? On the next upper body strength workout it has me do the more difficult, straight-legged pushups. *scratches head* Of course, it also seemed to think I had an exercise ball (I don’t) on that workout, so maybe it was just glitchy that day.

Then there’s the crunches. Oh, the crunches. Yesterday was “core body strength”. It wanted me to do “side planks”–I don’t even know how to describe these, but let’s just say my arms and sides were just not holding out. I decided to try the “decrease difficulty” option. And got side crunches (aka crunches with your legs lying to one side instead of standing straight up) which, OK, I could at least attempt. Even if I had bad form–my chin kept hitting my chest, I couldn’t get both shoulder blades off the floor, and my elbows kept coming forward. And then more side planks. WTF? So I decreased the difficulty again. By this time I was having trouble with the side crunches too, but they were supposedly already at the lowest difficulty level so I didn’t try to go down any further. And then I got some exercise that was essentially lying on my stomach and kicking my legs. Which made me feel like a big loser because it took going down to little baby-exercises to get something I could do. Between that and the frustration over not being able to do the previous exercises (and, OK, probably hormones too), I just lost it and started bawling. I did work hard anyway, for the most part (and the workout was almost over by then anyway), but I’m not so sure that workout didn’t do more harm than good.

Oh, yeah. Plus, before the side planks, it had me do some exercise that requires about five times the flexibility I’ve got to be done right–and I’m not talking yoga here where you can work up to it. This was a twist-and-touch-your-toes thingy that I really don’t think was doing me much good since I could neither get my legs as far apart as the program showed nor touch my toes, meaning my “core” muscles weren’t being worked much at all.

But today is my day of rest, and maybe tomorrow I will feel better about it. Or maybe I could do a short cardio workout tonight; I know I can do that, and it might make me feel better. I dunno, I think I’ll see what Tim thinks about it.

I have my next evaluation in two more workouts. I don’t think I’ll have made much progress, but I guess we’ll see.

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I am never, ever complaining about people hanging out in our office at lunchtime and talking so much that they’re a distraction. Why not? Because I’ve found something that’s worse–more annoying, more distracting, and can’t be completely blocked out by turning my headphones up all the way.

The fire alarm.

Apparently today is fire alarm test day. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just test them for a few seconds, but I swear that thing was on for a good fifteen minutes. (Not that it didn’t FEEL longer than that…) Constantly. Right over my cube. It just now, as I was starting this entry, went silent. Let’s hope it stays that way.

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Writing, that is.

I’ve officially said it elsewhere, so between that and posting here, I’m kind of stuck with it now. I’m going to try my hand at NaNoWriMo. I will not stress over failure. If I do not complete the task, I will not beat myself up over it. I will shrug, tell myself, “Maybe next time,” and move on with life.

To that end, I have set up a new blog to track my progress:
(link deleted because I got rid of the blog)
*takes a deep breath* OK. I can do this. I know I can.

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Well, today is day #2 of the new regimen. Yes, again. I know. I keep trying, hoping that one day I’ll hit on something I can stick with.

This time it’s… Well, I don’t want to call it a game per se, but it’s a… thingy… for the XBox called Yourself Fitness. Essentially it’s a virtual personal trainer. You input data about your age, sex, height, weight, etc. and go through a few basic tests to see how “fit” you are. You set a target weight if weight loss is a goal for you (mine, at Tim’s urging, is 170–30lbs lighter–although I kind of wanted to go for the less overwhelming 185), and then the program suggests a workout schedule. I think it’s usually 3 30-minute workouts and 3 15-minute per week, with one day off–or at least that’s what it suggested for both Tim and me. You can override it if you don’t like it; I basically just switched a few days around so that I had the same overall workout time, but could fit it into my schedule better. You can also get meal plans, but I didn’t. Each workout is tailored to your stated overall goal, your abilities–the trainer will periodically ask you how you did on the last segment of the workout–and even what kind of day you’re having.

Day #1 was kind of tough. For starters, I’m in awful shape! During the tests to set up my stuff I could only do 4 pushups. And that was just barely. The first workout actually wasn’t bad, though–it was challenging, but not “make me wanna quit” challenging. The focus for that one was cardio, and it involved a lot of side abductor thingies… You know, where you lie on your side and raise one leg up and down. Those are easy–for about the first two or three. After that, they’re harder than they look! But after the workout I felt tired in a good way–refreshed, I guess.

Day #2, today… I did the workout first thing in the morning. It was a good way to wake up, but… Not a very challenging workout, mostly. The focus was upper body strength. The problem here is that a lot of the arm curls and whatnot were way too easy, but the pushups were way too hard. There wasn’t a whole lot in between, and since there weren’t many pushups, the workout overall was too easy. Which I told the trainer, and she said she’d make it harder next time. Since it was so easy, though, I might do another short workout later today. I might even try the “meditation garden”–yoga–although I’m not sure if I’m flexible enough for that yet.

Here’s hoping this sticks!

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This is an old, recurring rant with a few new paragraphs on it.

You know, I’m sure that our local paper thinks they’ve hit on a great strategy to get people to subscribe. “Let’s make the online version subscription only! That will be a great incentive!” They would be right if it weren’t for the fact that you can read almost any other newspaper in the entire nation online for free. As it stands, they just look greedy. It doesn’t help that they used to offer free online access, and have now taken it away. I mean, you can’t even look up movie times there without a subscription. How stupid is that?

To further the idiocy, incidentally, just because you get the paper 7 days a week doesn’t mean you’re “subscribed” to the Web site. You have to sign up through them directly, not through a carrier. Who brings you the paper no matter who you signed up through, right? So why does it even matter?

The really bad thing is, it looks like their site is beginning to develop into something I’d be interested in. They’ve got a little Firefox support button (yay!) and an RSS feed. Neat! Except I can’t read the stories, and just because they support my favourite browser doesn’t mean I’ll subscribe to their paper just to get the feed.

OK, H-T, let me explain something for you here. Currently, you have only subscribers looking at the pages because pretty much everyone around here knows the situation. And probably most of them even don’t because–hey, hello, they already have the paper. You’re not making extra money on their suscriptions or anything; the Web site is just part of it. You’re not making any money on the site by subscriptions, which leaves… Ad sales. Don’t you think if you had higher traffic you could sell more ads, or at least charge more for the existing ones? And do you know what the best way to get higher traffic is?

Honestly, with the RSS feed, y’all had half a chance of getting a lot of traffic from me. Instead, I’m running around telling everyone what greedy gits you are. Now, I’m just one reader (or non-reader, actually). I alone probably do not make that much difference. But how many other people are saying and doing the exact same things I am? Think about it, that’s all I’m saying.

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Decided to do my NaNoWriMo test run today. Sat down and wrote 1759 words of story. It took a couple of hours, but I had stuff at work that needed “start and let run” treatment. I wouldn’t have that on a normal day; can I afford to take the time to do this?

I don’t know. It was, however, easier than I’d thought it would be to get those 1700 words once I got started. Maybe this is doable after all.

Also, it sucked, but that’s not the point here.

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If you missed Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, you really should go see it. It’s well worth it. Download here, and thank you to Eyebrows for the link:
http://tinyurl.com/4upmy

Sounds like they were expecting Stewart to just come on and be funny, but he decided to use his appearance to make a serious point about the media’s role in American politics. And he caught them completely off-guard.

I hope you all caught Stewart’s follow-up (and coverage of the second and third Presidential debates) on The Daily Show too. It was great.

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(Link to story about anti-Bush letters from the UK sparking controversy removed because the page is no longer available, sorry.)

Oh, my.

You know, as ill-advised as this letter-writing campaign might have been, I’m so glad that we Americans have responded so maturely to it. After all, attempting to influence the election of the man who is basically the most powerful leader in the free world (even if he is not the leader of your country) is completely juvenile and clearly belongs in the sandbox. Whereas retaliatory remarks such as, “We don’t need weenie-spined Limeys meddling in our presidential election,” and, “Real Americans aren’t interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions. If you want to save the world, begin with you own worthless corner of it,” are obviously some of the most brilliant, cultured, cultivated things a person of any nationality could possibly say. Especially to their supposed allies.

I should also take this opportunity, I suppose, to note how ironic it is that Americans should be telling anyone to “mind [their] own business”. Beyond that, though, my comments begin to descend to the level of the shining stars quoted above, so I think I shall end this entry now.

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