I arrived home to find supper on the table! Awww yeah! Having Vero hang around the house during the day is a bonus! We ended up watching the first episode of Moitie Moitie which was decent (although I was dismayed to see that they don’t focus in on the extras!) and then settled down for a great pasta dinner along with Trish.
Trish’s immortal words “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the series finale of Friends” spawned the rest of our evening as we decided to have a marathon run of the final season of Friends. We started with the season finale of Season 9 (because they always lead into the following season) and I think I ended up around Episode 8 before heading to bed (had to study for the Philosophy midterm this coming week!) and the others followed suit a few hours later. That being said, my math is the culprit of us not finishing the entire season off. I proclaimed at the dinner table “One whole season of Friends? That must only be…200 minutes long!”. In reality, I was off by half for some reason and watching the entire season would have put us well into 4:00 in the morning. Ah well.
Season 10 of Friends in an interesting bird as they know it’s their final one so there are little plot points being tied up – Phoebe’s visit from her brother Frank, Phoebe getting married, the fate of Ross and Rachel…it’s all being slowly tied up. I love when a show knows that it’s ending and they can properly tie things up. Much like how Alias sucked for the 4th season and the first part of the 5th until they realized that they would cancel the show so they pulled a 180 and tried to tie up the plot points (although they only had a minimal episodes to do so!).
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story – Krista lent me some Chuck Klosterman novels which I thoroughly enjoyed. Chuck is an editor at SPIN magazine and his writings are chock full of pop culture references and gets into the minutae of music. I love it. It felt like I was sitting with a friend who is equal to me in my thoughts of music…I have yet to find a person who talks about the little things they love about a song…I have my suspicions that Karilee may fit that bill on the music scene. Or Sara. But I have yet to have those conversations with them. You know the conversations I’m talking about…the ones where you are sitting in a living room listening to some tunes and then comment on a random part of the song and thoroughly dissect it like it’s a frog in Grade Ten biology class.
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs – Another Chuck Klosterman great epic with essays on random subject matter ranging from Star Wars, Breakfast Cereals, the beauty of Saved By The Bell…such obscure subject matter which needs someone to talk about it for an entire generation. I enjoyed his essays although there were a few I skipped altogether (like when he talked about The Real World which is a TV show I hadn’t seen before). In the middle of book laid the Top 23 Questions I would Ask a Person to Answer to Determine if I will Love them. These questions are amazing and I actually have photocopied them and carry them in my backpack for a boring day at the pub.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Thanks to Trish for lending me this novel. Even though I heard the ending inadvertently on the bus one night, I still was anxious to read the last great novel in the Harry Potter series. While I won’t spoil anything here, I will say that it was quite the page turner and I finished it in a few days while in Sudbury with Mom and Dad over the holidays. All in all, a fitting end to the series. While a lot of people have spoken to me and indicated they didn’t care for the last chapter, I thought it was great. My only qualm with the novel is that fell outside of the standard formula of the other novels; in that there is a year at the school, there’s trouble with a new teacher, etc. So it was a different read and at some points I was feeling that the novel wasn’t moving along fast enough. There was literally a few chapters dealing with them wondering what they should do next while they camped somewhere. Meh, that’s a minor point really as we all knew the novel structure had to change. While I am disappointed that this is the end of the Harry Potter train, I was pleased with the last novel…much like I was pleased with Revenge of The Sith.
Moonraker – I picked up a few James Bond novels while in Sudbury and just finished reading Moonraker. From what I can remember of the film, it is nothing based on the novel whatsoever. I believe this had to do with the fact that Moonraker was created for a population who wanted some outer space action ala Star Wars. Nothing of that sort in the novel. It follows our great spy James Bond keeping an eye for sabotage on the Moonraker project and it’s fraught full of suspicion at every turn and red herrings. Can I point out that so far in all the novels of Bond I’ve read, James really gets a number done on him in the final chapters. That never happens in the films! Except for Casino Royale which faithfully reproduced the final torture sequence. But imagine that happening in every novel! It’s true! In Live and Let Die, he gets dragged behind a boat and thrown through corral all the time which slices him up badly. In Moonraker he gets his skin burned by steam. Gadzooks! If this is what being a spy is all about, it isn’t all that glamourous. Either way, I enjoy Ian Fleming’s writings as they keep the pace moving and it’s also interesting to see how the film compares with the original novel (in some cases very faithfully (Casino Royale) but in some cases, not so much (Moonraker).
Last night Vero met me at Place D’Orleans and we headed to Future Shop to pick up a new hard drive to outfit our video editing suite. Let me tell you…this hard drive is pretty sweet. It’s a Lacie 500GB drive which was designed by Porsche! Way nicer than my old hard drive. Sits out the way also and is unobtrusive. It was also only $129 which is pretty well unheard of for a 500GB drive (this particular model usually goes for $259.