1. We’ll leave today for Hannibal and stay for lots of food and probably some shopping until Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. Edie has an appointment with Rachel’s dogs’ vet Friday morning to try to get to the bottom of her chewing, but it should be pretty relaxing.
2. We’ll head to Columbia Friday afternoon or Saturday morning to spend some time with Andy’s family and to play at St. Andrew’s with Mike Will from Missouri UMC on Saturday night. Sunday, Andy’s aunts have a baby shower in Lohman planned for us, then we’ll head back home.
3. It will probably take us four days to unload everything that we’ll have accumulated over the weekend, so we’ll see you late next week!!!
One more off the list…
Brooke mentioned a few weeks ago that we hadn’t made it to a Blues game yet while living here in St. Louis. We’ve attended many Cardinals games in our years here, and one Rams game, but the Blues had eluded us so far. Really, neither of us have ever had any interest in hockey, so it wasn’t exactly a priority. Still, it’s one of those things that people tell us is fun, so we wanted to go at some point.
Well, as it happened, the Graduate Student Association at SLU (of which I’m President) was hosting a social event where we could get student rate tickets. Due to high cheapness, we got both or tickets for $30 (total), and that included a hot dog and a soda for each of us (about a $10 value). So yeah, a great deal! The seats weren’t anything spectacular, but the view was surprisingly good. It doesn’t seem like there’s a bad seat in that rink, honestly. The seats we had were something like $35 normally, so those “nosebleed” seats are still a far cry from the over $60 “nosebleed” seats at a Rams game.
A hockey game, it seems, is also tremendously more entertaining than an NFL game, as well. The action was constant, there were some fights breaking out, and overall, the speed and pace of the game was faster. Of course, the scoring doesn’t happen all that often, but with all the shots toward the net, it still gave us much to pay attention to.
Anyway, that’s another event we can cross off the list. We had a good time, but left early. Apparently, we should have stayed longer, as the Blues ended up winning (!!!!).
Maybe next time! Believe you me, I’m much more likely to go to an NHL game in the future than any NFL game.
Monster??
It seems that Sam, our cat, has made it his personal mission to prepare us for parenthood: yowling incessantly while trying to take a Sunday afternoon nap; constantly needing to be picked up and carried around; inhibiting showers, meals, dishes, sewing, hair curling, and pretty much everything you NEED to get done right now; and the usual eating, shedding, puking, trying to escape, and annoying the dog. Anybody want a cute orange monster in February??
Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
We hadn’t seen a movie in awhile and this one caught my eye a few weeks ago when I first saw the advertisements. It’s actually based on a book by Jon Ronson about how the U.S. military so wisely spent our tax dollars investigating “alternative methods” of fighting other nations, including mind control, trying to pass through walls, and making another living being’s heart stop by staring at them (e.g. a goat). Ronson was on The Daily Show awhile back talking about his 2004 book, so I’d already been exposed to this crazy idea: then they made it into a movie. Keep in mind that the movie is based on concepts from the book, so parts of the movie are factually-based, but then there are large parts that aren’t.
The Men Who Stare at Goats stars quite a few heavy hitters, including George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, so on paper, the movie is already off to a good start. It centers around a news reporter (McGregor) that is trying to “make it” in the business by going to Iraq during the most recent Iraq War. Part-way through his journey, he comes across Clooney’s character, Lyn Cassady, who promptly tells him of a secret government program beginning in Vietnam that tried to make super soldiers, not through any genetic engineering, but through trying to get them to learn mind control techniques, amongst other things. Obviously, McGregor finds this difficult to believe in the beginning, but as the 1.5 hour long movie progresses, he begins to question the reality he knows.
I highlight “1.5 hours long” because that was a pretty good length, and I’m glad it wasn’t any longer. By the time they hit the last 30 minutes of the movie, it was getting harder to follow, and just generally more convoluted. Actually, a good 20-30 minutes of the movie really dealt with how McGregor and Clooney get into Iraq in the first place, and while it does introduce McGregor’s character to the concepts of this shadowy military troop, it doesn’t really end up being that pertinent to the story. So yes, I think “convoluted” is a pretty good word to describe this movie.
The movie is pretty funny, for the most part, but really mostly in a “chuckle” sort of way, rather than a “laugh out loud” manner. I guess I would say it’s more “amusing” than “funny,” in all honesty, and I was hoping for the film to err more on the side of the latter. In either case, it was still pretty entertaining. Certainly, the acting was as good as you’d expect from these actors, but I would have liked to see more out of Kevin Spacey. He did well for what he was given, but paying a high-profile actor like him to play this relatively minor role (compared to the other three) may have been a touch excessive.
I will say, however, that the movie did score hella points with me by playing up the fact that the military, apparently, experimented with using the “I Love You, You Love Me” song from Barney & Friends as a torture device against terrorists. I’ve always said that’d be a good idea.
In short, I liked the movie and thought it was an entertaining and amusing way to spend an evening, but I could have waited to rent it. At the very least, it makes you wonder where your tax dollars are going…
Happy 40th Birthday, Sesame Street!
It’s hard to believe Sesame Street is as old as it is, and still kicking. Today marks the beginning of its 40th season, with Michelle Obama as the guest, talking about healthy eating, amongst other things. It’s crazy knowing there are literally over 4000 episodes of Sesame Street, providing quality television for young children now for generations of people. I learned to count to 10 in Spanish from Sesame Street, amongst all the other things. This is a show that taught kids it was alright to be different, that reading is fun, and that playing outside is good for you…oh, and cookies are yummy.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Cookie Monster | ||||
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By the way, I still enjoy seeing celebrities go on Sesame Street. You can always tell that they have fun with it, even though they’re standing next to muppets.
Brooke and I were hoping to ask for Sesame Street DVDs for Christmas this year, but at least on Amazon, it looks like you can only get DVD sets for the really early years, and some Elmo-specific compilations. So if you run across any collections from the 80s, let us know. That, or they’d make excellent baby shower gifts. 🙂