Random Thoughts at 6:20am

Is our hot water heater dead, or is it just messing with us like the jerk that it is?

I’m working from home today. Hopefully there is a plumber coming to check on our water heater. I had one cold shower yesterday and I don’t want another one. Why is a cold shower such a soul crushingly miserable experience? Why can’t it just be… cold? I don’t get it.

I was talking about the lack of hot water with my step kids yesterday. I said they were probably going to want to skip taking a shower this morning. My step daughter got all indignant (well, a tiny bit indignant at least) and said she was going to take one anyway. Ah to be a cocky teenager again. Wait, was I ever a cocky teenager?


Hey, do you remember when the Olympics were interesting? I do. Back in the long distant past the Olympics were can’t miss television. We used to watch coverage every night. Even the most ridiculous events had us glued to the tube.

Oh, check it out! Synchronized Swimming is on again! Yeah!

When did that change? Was it the end of the Soviet Union? Was it when they added snowboarding? Was it when they let professionals compete thus creating “the dream team” and crap like that? Was it the year the network (was it NBC or CBS?) tried to tie in a pay per view option? What did they call it? Olympic Triple Cast or something like that? I only remember David Letterman ripping the whole thing to shreds on a nightly basis. It was probably a little bit of all of the above (but mostly snowboarding).

I still get really excited for Olympic hockey during the winter games, but other than that? Snooze. Rio this week will mark the first games held since we ditched cable TV and I don’t regret it for a second. I’ll be visiting my mom for a while tonight so she might have the opening ceremonies on. Otherwise I won’t watch any of the coverage at all. Part of me misses the pageantry of the whole thing, but given the mess that Sochi seemed to be two years ago, and the disaster that seems to be shaping up in Rio… well, maybe it’s time we start re-thinking the whole thing.


I didn’t post to my wordpress.com blog yesterday, but I did post to medium.com. Does that mean I am done with wordpress.com? Probably not, but maybe I am for a day or two. We’ll see. One thing that is infuriating me about medium is that it refuses to let me put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. I hit the spacebar twice but the bastard cursor only moves once. That’s definitive proof that medium is an evil, unAmerican enterprise. Two, two, two spaces following a period at the end of a sentence! Damn you and your markdown menace!

When I first started looking at medium.com as a blogging option, they had an iOS app but it was read only. You couldn’t post from it. That wasn’t a deal breaker but it was damn close. Now you can write and post and upload images from the app (at least from the iPad version).

This very post, in fact, has made use of both the iPad app and the web app. I started writing this while sitting at my computer. I got about halfway through the stuff about the Olympics and then had to stop for a little while. When I picked it up again, I went to the drafts list on the iOS app and continued writing. After finishing the Olympic stuff I had to stop again and now I’m back on my Mac. Pretty cool. I never did that with wordpress, although I know I could have. Still, living in the future is kinda fun.


Speaking of living in the future, I just turned on the lights in my living room, and my air conditioner using apps on my iPhone. Yes, living in the future rules.


I have to ask a serious question about a not-serious topic. When did Hollywood lose the ability to make a decent DC Comics movie? The first two Superman movies are classics. The first two Tim Burton Batman movies are fantastic. Batman Begins is excellent, and The Dark Knight is about as good as comics movies have ever been. Now though? I didn’t hate Batman v Superman as much as most people did, but some of it was just laughably bad. Hey, what was it that made Batman and Superman stop trying to kill each other and become BFFs? Yeah, that’s what I am talking about. Now Suicide Squad comes out today and, while I really had no interest in it at all, the reviews are vicious. Is it really that bad, or has Marvel just bought out all of the critics? Maybe they took some of that massive Disney money and did just that.

My step kids and I watch the DC TV shows. We all love Flash. They love Arrow (I think it’s okay). We just started watching Supergirl so the jury is still out. My only beef at this point is, why does Jimmy Olson look like he could bench press a mini-van? Isn’t he supposed to just be a nerdy little guy? Regardless, DC is getting the TV shows right but getting the huge budget films terribly wrong. At this point I can’t imagine it is simply bad writing or bad directing on an individual movie basis. If it’s a trend then it has to be coming from higher up the management food chain, doesn’t it? Is Suicide Squad going to be bad because the parameters within which it was written, cast, filmed, directed, edited, and marketed bad? It’s starting to feel that way. It’s starting to feel like the DC movies are going to be awful before the stories are even conceived. It’s like they have three strikes against them before they even start.

The little Justice League tease they released at the San Diego Comic Con was pretty exciting, but when push comes to shove… who cares, there’s a Star Wars flick coming out in December.


Okay, so I’ve been picking at this for an hour now. Do I have anything else I need to leak out of my brain? Nope, just going to wait for the plumber to check in.

The Avengers

We just got home after watching the new Avengers movie. It was good. Probably not as good as the first one, but sequels never are. Once again the action sequences were out of this world, but the most memorable scenes are the ones with the super heroes just hanging out together and being normal people. That seems counter intuitive, but it’s the truth.

The Avengers

The kids are in school vacation this week because New Hampshire is a bunch of heathens who have their breaks the week after Massachusetts.

They are at our house on Thursday and Friday. I telecommute on Thursday so they can stay home with me. I took a vacation day on Friday so I can stay home with them. It just so happens that Friday is the day The Avengers movie opens. Well, I guess we’ll just have to go and see it then, huh?

I bought tickets today through fandango.com and saw something completely unbelievable. What could it have been you ask? Well I’ll tell you…

Reserved seating.

That’s right, my movie tickets have seat numbers on them. Assigned seating… at the movies… talk about heathens! This is Amrrica, and in Amrrica movie seating is first come first serve! Are they going to have ushers too? Why in my day we had to get to the theater two hours early or we’d be stuck in the front row. That’s the way it was and we liked it!

Reserved seating at the movies… communists.

Last Day

Two days off for the holiday, then one day working at home, then two days off for the weekend. All day yesterday I was convinced it was Sunday. I had to keep reminding myself it was only Saturday. You’d think today would feel like a happy bonus then, but it just feels like The End.

Two days ago I finally got around to watching The Worlds End. You know, the third Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright movie (did I misspell any of those names? Sorry). I don’t know why I waited so long. I was laughing my tail off. I think I woke up the house a couple of times. Last night I celebrated the funny by watching Hot Fuzz, but it was too late at night and I couldn’t finish due to need for sleep. Still, sick funny. I love all three of their movies.

I got a pedal board for christmas but all of my pedals are at Mike’s house. If we practice today I’ll bring them all home so I can Velcro the bejeezus out of them and set up my new board. It’s going to be strange to have everything in the correct position waiting for me to plug in and stomp on them each time we practice. Strange but good.

I need to take the car out for an oil change today. Maybe I’ll bring the camera and the new lens along and test drive it out at some of the usual spots in town. Sounds like a good idea, even though the sun will be covered with clouds all day.

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

Okay, first of all I am not going to turn this blog into a movie trailer collection. Yes, this is the second movie trailer I am posting in about two weeks, but that doesn’t mean this is the new thing, okay? You’re still going to get your usual blathering idiot stuff. Okay? Okay.

Second, this is not as big a deal to me as the Star Wars trailer I posted Thanksgiving weekend. However, that does not change the fact that this is a big cinematic deal for me.

When I learned that this movie was actually happening my first thought was that there is no way on this Earth that this movie can live up to the original. My second thought was that this movie is probably going to suck 37 flavours of ass.*

Then I saw the trailer and found myself laughing out loud.

I laughed out loud while watching a two minute trailer. That’s pretty impressive.

Now, here you go… The trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine 2!

*See what I did there? I used the British spelling of “flavor”, “flavour”. I figured this crappy little web page could use some freakin’ class for a change. Am I right or am I right?

Morning Movie

As we head off to a morning movie I can’t help but think…

I sincerely hope that a bus will be picked up and thrown back down while wading through buildings in the center of town and that helpless people on subway trains will scream, “my god!” as they are looked in at.

There goes Tokyo!

Holiday Math

Holiday weekend + rain every day = movie festival.

Saturday: Star Wars
Sunday: The Empire Strikes Back (with a bonus viewing of The Avengers)
Monday (scheduled): Return of the Jedi

This post might also have been titled, “Time Well Spent”

War Games

We just watched the old Matthew Broderick, Alley Sheedy flick War Games. ‘Member that one?

The kids didn’t get it. They didn’t understand why the situation was so terrifying to me and their mother.

Of all the things we have to be thankful for, that’s way up high on my list.