Lord of some things.
We saw that Lord of the Rings movie the other night. Got it on the DeeVeeDee (as Mark would say).
I can't stop comparing it to Star Wars - being that they are both big Sci-Fi stories with massive budgets, cutting edge CGI, and they came out about the same time. Say what you will about the movie itself, but LOTR was so much better done than SW: Attack of the Clones. In my opinion. LOTR just looked much better, and the CGI tricks were handled much more elegantly. And the acting, well, of course the acting was better. Cannonball Run II had better acting than SW:AOTC (it really did - watch them back to back sometime).
I enjoyed looking at LOTR, but I am not sure I was able to keep up with the story. Mrs. Robot and I have not read any of the books, and the only reference we have to this whole story is the Bilbo Baggins song by Leonard Nemoy.
Based on that song, we knew the following about Bilbo:
* He's only three feet tall.
* He's the bravest little hobbit of them all.
Actually, to be honest, that may be all we need.
I was just talking to my pal Scott, who really really like LOTR and read the books and all that jazz, and I made the tragic comment that about not liking trolls or elves...me: i am not sure if i liked LOTR
scott: no fuggin way
me: i am not a big fan of movies with trolls, or wizards, or elfs
scott: WHAT THE FUCK did you think it was going to have in it
me: SciFi stuff kinda bugs me to be honest.
scott: well then you are disqualified from reviewing lord of the rings
scott: you realize what you said
scott: "i didn't really like lord of the rings, it had, like, trolls and wizards and elfs in it"
Spoon
We saw the band Spoon last night. It was Sunday, which made it a bit tough to get in the 'rock' mode, but we still had a fine time. Spoon is a tight band when playing live, and they sounded great from where we were standing (near the sound booth).
My favorite spectator there had to be a guy standing at the corner of the railing on the top floor - and he would start rocking out and kind of do this goofball almost head banging thing, while holding onto the railing. The way his body would move, it appeared that he was humping the railing (ask me to show you this move in person if needed). I called him "the corner f*cker".
He f*cked the corner all night.
Hudson Hotel
We went to a birthday get together thing that turned into dinner Friday night at the Hudson Hotel on 58th. Now, let me say, I was totally not looking forward to going to a bar/restaurant that had reviews complaining about Euro-trash, bouncers, and velvet ropes. Being that I wasn't about to change clothes and/or tuck my shirt in, I was assuming that I could easily be hassled.
But, you know, other than the stupid high prices on everything, we enjoyed the Hudson and it's excessiveness. The food was fine, the menu was interesting, the drinks were potent, the dining room was really cool, and the staff was uber friendly to our rowdy party.
So, I don't think I would go there just for the bar (which is pretty cool looking), but if you are feeling loose with the cash and want to take out of town tourists somewhere really nutty - this might just work.
Welcome Sarah
Our friend Sarah is visiting us for the week. Come out and have a drink with us sometime. She's real nice.
"Are they still making BROWSERS?"
Netscape released their new browser, Netscape 7.0 It's based on a version of Mozilla, but AOL/NS has nicely added a bunch of AOL crap and also removed a few of the cool features that made Mozilla so neat - like the ability to block un-wanted pop-up ads (imagine - AOL not wanting you to disable pop-up ads).
I mean, I suppose that Netscape has some sort of conflict of interest with their advertisers on their portal or what-not, and blocking pop-up ads would kind of be shooting themselves in the foot (not that I am suggesting someone shoot Steve Case of AOL in the foot).
Remember the browser wars? Those were the days, weren't they? These days, Netscape's market share has dwindled to next to nothing - at least when I look at happyrobot's logs. Netscape comes in around 8%.
I mean, there is no real reason to use Netscape, at least for the PC. Mozilla, which they base these new versions on, is a much better package, with no AOL branding and crap on it. And Netscape 4.x was just bad. I'm sorry, you really can't argue that N4 was ever a good browser. I could go on and on about the problems I encountered with that thing.
