Archive for December, 2009

What? Bicycle content?

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

The NHL Winter Classic will be on January 1 when the Bruins will play the Philadelphia Flyers in a specially made rink in the middle of Fenway Park.
Two guys are riding a tandem from Philly to Boston to get to the game.  The “Broad Street Bikers” left PA on Dec 27 and plan to be [...]

Bolt

Monday, December 28th, 2009

[netflix] [IMDb] (2008)
Bolt (John Travolta), a puppy in a shelter, is adopted by Penny (Miley Cyrus) and becomes a TV superhero who saves Penny from danger episode after episode. The thing is, Bolt believes it’s all real and that he actually has these superpowers.
Threatened with cancellation, the show’s producers introduce a cliffhanger and don’t allow [...]

Bela Fleck : Throw Down Your Heart

Monday, December 28th, 2009

[netflix] [IMDb] (2008)
Bela Fleck takes his banjo to Africa to learn about the origins of the instrument. He visits Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia, and Mali and records some of the local music, investigates local instruments, and plays with some of the local artists.
While interesting and certainly worthwhile, it wasn’t what I expected and as a result [...]

Hard Boiled / Lat sau san taam

Monday, December 28th, 2009

[netflix] [IMDb] (1992)
Hard boiled cop, Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) is, uh, something and there’s this other guy named Tony (Tony Leung) who is a bad guy but really a good guy, or something. And they meet and uh, something. And Tequila has a sort of girlfriend, kind of, who works for his demanding boss who, is [...]

Adventures in fine dining : Episode 6 : Morton’s

Monday, December 28th, 2009

Rumor has it that Morton’s (based in Chicago) was the place that started the steak house phenomenon (aged steaks with family style vegetables). Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say.
My dining friend and I went to Morton’s last Wednesday. They were having a couple of different specials, so we took them up on their [...]

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

[netflix] [IMDB] (1973)
A good movie. Not a great movie.
Small time thug, Eddie (Robert Mitchum) , is facing some hard time because of “that thing in New Hampshire” and tries to swing a deal with the cops (Richard Jordan) to get out of at least serving most of the time. He’s still involved in small time [...]

Once Upon a Time in China 2

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

[netflix] [IMDb]
Jet Li escorts his westernized cousin by train to her new job in the British embassy and runs into a fanatical cult, the White Lotus Society, whose mission it is to drive westerners out of China. They do this by beating everybody up, particularly those with any hint of westernization. The obligatory school full [...]

Website: FAIL

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I renewed my MedicAlert membership and found they’d changed their website. It needed it. It was terribly confusing and difficult to navigate. But it was doable. Now it’s just as confusing and difficult to navigate but now it has added AJAX that doesn’t work right.
In fact, few things on the site work right. When you [...]

RFC

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I need gifts for a 3-year-old boy and a 2½-year-old girl. The boy is really into Thomas the Tank Engine, but I’d like to stay away from that because I have no idea what he already has or the track size or &c &c &c.  Last year, they each got a Red Sox hats (he [...]

Awesome!

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

An online friend sent me an awesome link of total awesomeness.
Lexx season 1 is available online at Hulu! I just found out that it was available retail from amazon, so bought it and it should be here in about a week and my collection will be complete.
But now I can watch it now if I [...]

Symphony: Bartok, Martinu, Dvorak

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Sorry, no diacritics in the headline.
The program:

BARTÓK Divertimento for String Orchestra
MARTINŮ Violin Concerto No. 2 (soloist Frank Peter Zimmerman)

DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 8

BSO program and notes (warning: autoplay). An excellent program.
Guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.

The Bartok piece was for string orchestra and it’s the first time I’ve seen a string-only orchestra. The sound was awesome.  [...]