"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Thursday, October 27
The Big Snore
If you're going to make a boring movie, at least have the common courtesy to keep it short. I'm talking here about Kingdom Of Heaven, Ridley Scott's movie set during the Crusades. Now, Scott has directed some of my favorite movies - Alien, the classic Blade Runner, the criminally neglected Matchstick Men - but this one is a 2 hour+ snooze, and I think the director is the prime culprit. There's just not enough variety. The pace is leaden and monotonous, with even the battles displayed in dreamy slow motion, and the tone is dreadfully dreary. Thank God for Netflix, my wife wanted to buy this turkey, so I saved $16 and get to watch The Adventures Of Robin Hood for the same money.
Still, Kingdom doesn't suck as bad as Alexander. What was Oliver Stone thinking?
Croupier. The whole family's been sick this week, coughing and sneezing, but the 18-month-old has had the worst of it. Yesterday the wife took him to the doctor to get him checked out. The diagnosis? Croupe.
Goddamn, I could have figured that out. "A baby? Coughing? At night? Sounds like the croupe." What is croupe, anyway? Is there a microorganism called Bacillus Croupus? And even if there is, do we live in Victorian England? Next he'll be saying it's consumption.
XML Update. Jon, you can stop reading now. My XML engine now groks binary data, so I have fixed up the Bleeker Books site so that the author photos are returned using this system. Before I had to maintain two separate methods of connecting to the database. Now it's all unified (if a bit slower). Best part: it only took about 20 minutes to put into place, much less than I had expected.
And I finally realized that the addition of CDATA support means I can use a simpler method to cache XML, so it only has to be regenerated after it's modified. Progress marches on, etc.
