Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

Just in case you’re wondering where Beth and I will be staying from February 21 to 28, click here.

This is genius.  This guy puts together the pieces that look like discontinuities between the 1st and 2nd Star Wars trilogies, and explains them in a very interesting way – R2D2 and Chewbacca are the true heroes of the Rebel Alliance!  Read on…

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Keith Martin

This past week, I wanted to take Beth someplace nice for dinner to celebrate publishing her first travel article.  And I was in the mood for seafood.  O’s Steak & Seafood inside the Westin Westminster hotel gets really good reviews online, and since we’d never been I thought that would be a good choice.  The food was indeed good, though not outstanding.  But the service was really slow and lackadaisical, to the point of nearly ruining the experience and making me not want to go back there again.  They were so understaffed that one of the other customers got up during the interminable wait for his meal, found the pitcher of water, and started refilling other customers’ glasses.  Where was the wait staff during all this?  Who knows.  Most of the time they weren’t on the floor of the dining room, and when they were, they often traveled around in groups of 2 or even 3, as if they needed mutual support to deflect the glares of the customers they were ignoring.

It’s reasonably rare that a musical group’s 2nd album is as good as their 1st.  Many factors play into what’s often called the “sophomore slump” and I applaud a group that can break out of the slump and produce a 2nd album better than their 1st.

Two bands come to mind immediately: Van Halen and Iron Maiden.

Please leave a comment if you can think of another band whose second release is as good as or better than their first.  I wanna hear what you have to say!

And if you want to know why Van Halen and Iron Maiden come to mind, just let me know.

This is so funny, I just about busted my remaining stitches from laughing too hard.  I loved the “Clippy” segment.

Pranks Calls….to phone sex girls!

Here’s some really cool news.  A really good book by one of my favorite authors is being made into a SciFi miniseries.  And George Clooney’s onboard, which means it’ll probably be good.
Boing Boing: Clooney and SciFi making “Diamond Age” miniseries

I’m eating a salad at my desk at work, and my tongue just noticed that the sutures on the roof of my mouth are gone. Those are the ones holding together the flesh where they cut the strips off to sew onto my gums. I did get something crunchy in one of the bites of salad, but just thought it was a piece of dirt that stuck to a mushroom or something. Maybe it was a knot. I hope this isn’t a bad thing! My mouth isn’t bleeding, so I guess I’m OK.

This weekend, as I’ve been recovering from gum surgery, I’ve done lots of relaxing in front of the TV. I took this opportunity to catch up on some movies I’ve been meaning to watch for a while:

“The Tao of Steve” – I had this one saved on TiVo for several weeks. I’d seen it a long time ago, and rememberd liking it, so I wanted to see it again. And I liked it the 2nd time, too! What I didn’t realize until I read up on the flick on IMDB.com was that the lead actress also cowrote the film with her sister, who directed it.

“The Thomas Crown Affair” – I had seen the remake with Pierce Brosnan in the theater when it came out, but never the original version with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. So I recorded it on TiVo some time ago and finally watched it. I didn’t see the whole thing in one straight sitting, but broke it up into several viewings, as I often do with movies on TiVo. It was a funny coincidence that “The Tao of Steve” constantly refers to Steve McQueen (in fact, that’s where the title of the film comes from) and here I am watching both in the same weekend.

“Barbecue: A Texas Love Story” – I can’t remember where I heard about this documentary, but I bought it a few months ago on DVD and it’s just been sitting on the TV since then. It was done by a group of young filmmakers who travel around Texas documenting Texans’ love of barbecue. It’s narrated by Ann Richards, the now-deceased former governor of Texas.

Beth wrote a travel article on some of our favorite Colorado hot springs, and it was just published in today’s edition of the Arizona Daily Star.  Here’s a link to the online version:

Plentiful hot springs delight skiers | www.azstarnet.com ®

Of course I’m delighted that she’s published a travel article (the first in what I hope will be a long line), but I also like the fact that we can write off some of our vacation costs as necessary business expenses on our taxes!

Here’s another short film I wrote and directed. I also did the sound design. It’s called “The Gift” and was created as part of the Fast Filmmaking Incubator project in Boulder. See if you like it.