Beta Girl looked like fairy tale princess. It was a beautiful (and brief!) ceremony, and then the group of us adjourned upstairs for a lovely and delicious dinner. My only regret was that I couldn't bring the pups along. But they'll be getting their chance to hang out with the newly-married couple very soon, as the Beta Mansion is nearing the completion of its renovation.

Anyway: I'm so very happy for the both of them, and I'm so grateful to have the privilege to know them. Godspeed, you two. I love ya.

"I had a really good time. Of the three X-Films, I still believe #1 is the weakest, mainly cuz it's a dumb bad guy plan in that one, and it looked kinda cheesey, too - a big weird glowing blob to threaten humanity? Really?

I don't know what else director Ratner has done, so like you, I had no agenda against him going in.

I regularly read the X-Men up until about a year AFTER the Dark Phoenix storyline. Kitty Pryde was the last NEW mutant I remember. So that DP story was the biggest and most memorable storyline that I recall reading, and it's the one that stayed with me, and that I most wanted to see adapted for the screen.

As we've discussed, telling that story like it happened in the comic would be pretty much impossible. All that Hellfire Club stuff - there's been no context for that in the first two films, and you couldn't cram it into this one. So they had to figure out how to show it some other way, and what they came up with doesn't bother me at all. If anything, what I would have liked was MORE of Famke as Phoenix. I would have liked to see her wreaking more havoc, being less reactive. But that's just me being a fanboy - storywise, I get why they had her more reserved. Famke looked almost exactly like those John Byrne drawings at times, and I loved it. She is just stunningly beautiful.

In the comic, she killed three billion people in the most impersonal way imaginable - so I liked that they made (most of) who she kills in this movie VERY personal. I did NOT like how Scott is dispensed with offscreen, though. He's always been kind of a non-presence in the movies anyway, and he was never my favorite X-Man. Still - I think he deserved more.

The other big death I thought was PERFECT. I love Patrick Stewart in that role, and I loved what happened to him. I loved how Magneto was right there when it happened, and could do nothing to stop it. I love how Magneto regretted that it happened. I loved how the whole house was flying, and Wolverine was plastered helplessly to the ceiling. I loved the whole "Linda Blair in the Exorcist" angle with Dark Phoenix right there. Yes, of course Xavier is a beloved character - but as Whedon would say (and is that plotline from a story he wrote?), you've got to raise the stakes for your characters, or no one cares. That scene was wonderful, and worth seeing the picture again for, frankly.

The cure was an interesting angle, not all that well-explored. The kid who causes it was a cypher, and they didn't bother going into the "hows" or "whys" with that. I did like how the government actually managed to surprise Magneto with their plastic weapons. Ian McKellen rules the world, I think.

And it ended how I knew it would. I still wish they could have extended the Phoenix stuff over more than one movie. And I liked how they showed her becoming nearly God-like at the end. Clever use of Wolvie's healing powers as he struggled to confront Jean. That scene was done as well as I can really imagine, too. I like how when he's holding Jean after he stabs her, the water that had been flying up into the air came down like rain. Great visual.

Overall - a solid time. There was a lot of throwaway characters, some really inappropriate dialog at times ("dickhead"?). And I kept waiting for an Ewok to pop up in some of those "bad guy campground in the forest" sequences. Why did the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants have to go camping in TENTS in the forest, exactly?

But that's quibbling.

Did you stay for the whole credits? Interesting little teaser scene at the very end - I had no idea it was going to be there, I just happened to stay seated through the credits this time.

So... maybe they'll make more? I think they'd be dumb not to, but who knows. This was by far the best "summer movie" of the year. I still think Superman Returns has the chance to be better, I liked the neat new trailer today."

It was better than sitting in traffic. And about as memorable.

Here is what transpired to generate the aforementioned hangover:

I got a call last week from Darin Di Pietro, who has just begun his hoped-to-be yearlong sabbatical from the Horrid Realm of Hated Day Jobs. Darin had a proposition for me - an extra ticket to go to Safeco Field here in Seattle to watch our Seattle Mariners play. It was going to be free of charge for me, a fabulous deal; and I was also glad for the opportunity to hang out with Mr. DDP, which, owing to an unfortunate budget-related recording sabbatical, I haven't been able to do much of lately. From every angle of the situation, all I could see was an opportunity for good times. I was in!

Little did I know what I was in for!

Safeco is a beautiful ballpark, and I've been there many times. I've sat just about everywhere you can sit, way up high in the outfield, by the first-base line, even in the bleachers. It's a great place to catch a ballgame.

But never before had I had the opportunity to sit in... The Diamond Club section (shouts of awe erupt from the peanut gallery). I didn't even know such a section even existed.

Well, it does. And the air in it is... rarified.

The Diamond Club seats are the ones DIRECTLY BEHIND HOME PLATE. You know, the ones you can see on TV when you're watching somebody batting? The faces you can see behind the umpire? Yeah, that's the Diamond Club section.

I was close enough to spit on the batters in the on-deck circles, should I have been so inclined. I coulda said something really bad about the home plate umpire's momma, and he would have heard me.

Yeah. It was pretty freakin' sweet.

You can't buy those tickets from Ticketmaster. I checked into it today. They are season tickets holders only, and so the only way to get one of those tickets is to BE the season ticket holder, or to know someone who IS, who wants to give you one of theirs. Darin's uncle has four of these seats.

But the view is just one part of what you get.

Oh, there's a special entrance into the park. You get preferred parking in the garage. Once you get inside the Diamond Club entrance, there's a full buffet spread and bar, which is naturally, all-you-can-eat-or-drink. Inside that area the walls are festooned with big-screen TVs so you can see what's going on out on the field.

They've got softserve ice cream with toppings. All the fresh-roasted peanuts and/or popcorn you could want.

And, once you finally get out to your seat, they will BRING YOU an assortment of items from cleverly placed menus right where you sit. You want another beer? They'll bring you one. You want some food? They'll bring it to you. All gratis.

If there was ONE bummer about the whole setup, it was this: if you happened to head into the "club area" to get something, if you came back during somebody's at bat, you had to WAIT until they were done hitting, because walking up to your seat, you're close enough that you could DISTRACT PLAY.

I know, right? Crazy. So THAT is what it's like to live like a king. PHEW.

So, yeah - I had few drinks and many beers along with all of my free food and fabulous seats. Thus today's hangover.

Was it worth it? Hell yeah. Great company, a lotta laughs, great food, great drink, and hey - the Mariners even beat Baltimore 7-4!

So, thank you for making that call, Mr. DDP. I had an incredible evening, no matter WHAT I felt like at work this morning.

Summer movie season is in full swing now, that's cool. I love the popcorn flicks, even though they almost always disappoint. Today, The Da Vinci Code opens, and of course I'm going to see it, Am�lie is in it! I read the book in one sitting on a day off a couple of years back. My opinion: it's a fun story that reads like it was written by a sixth-grader. Completely obvious and bone-headed plotting. No style or cleverness at all.

But I think it could make one heck of a summer movie!

And Am�lie is in it! DUH!

But oh yeah, this is a DUMB movie. Lots and lots of very unrealistic CGI shots of crazy camera moves around the exterior of the boat. Strangely, the night-time ones looked less fake than the daytime ones. I wonder why that is.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. There are a lot of very brutal deaths, though - especially Rico from Six Feet Under; man, he really gets it.

The VM Season 2 DVD's will be out on August 22.

See? There is still reason for hope left in the world.

It's Mission: Impossible, so lots of completely unbelievable things happen. That's what summer movies are for. I had a good time, and I ate popcorn. Tom Cruise did exactly the same thing he always does in every movie he's in. Of course he did.

I did figure out how to prevent the spam posts from happening recently, so there haven't been any new ones of those, but I can't prevent the spam-bots from creating new users in the board. So I still have to manually remove them all, and the software makes me do it ONE AT A TIME. This morning I woke up and overnight 40 new spam users had been created by someone over in Russia somewhere, judging from all of the .ru email addresses. Just DIE, spammers, DIE.

All of this makes me want to move even faster to get my Wonky site back on a host that will host ASP.NET, so I can write my own message board software that will be IMPERVIOUS to spam-bots. IMPERVIOUS, I tell you!

At the very least, when I write my own, I can easily incorporate my own fixes when the bots figure out how to get past the security measures. The old message board I wrote myself certainly wasn't as "feature rich" as the UBB board I have up now, but I think in the 3 years it was up, there was exactly one spam user that showed up. Spam-bots go after the commonly used freeware that's out there, and UBB is as widely used a product for message forums as you can find. It's a great product overall, and it does have ways to try and keep the spammers out, but they are many, and they keep coming. Sort of like those battles at the end of the third Matrix movie - we who have UBB boards are the citizens of Zion, and the spam-bots are those squid robots that just keep coming in wave upon wave upon wave.

Argh.

Heh. You know by now these aren't "reviews."

Anyway, Friends With Money. By definition, a Chick Flick, with a capital CF. That's OK, I go to chick flicks all the time. Chicks are nice to look at, and there tend to be a lot of them in Chick Flicks. Duh.

I liked the movie just fine, but it didn't blow me out of the water. It felt like a pretty even-handed look at what (white, wealthy) women face as they hit middle age. There are four main characters, who have supposedly been friends for-EVAH, and now they're all in different places, but still friends. And then they have problems, and stuff. And talk about them. And stuff. And have realizations.

It was better than I'm making it sound. Frances McDormand rocked really hard, hers was the standout performance. Many of the things her character said really resonated. She's the "angry" one. She's great. Everybody else was fine. The most famous one, of course, was Jennifer Aniston, trying to play against type. She did OK. If I didn't completely buy her character, that may very well be because of the fact that she's JENNIFER ANISTON, and she's playing a sad-sack pothead who wears sweatpants and can't get a date and cleans toilets for a living.

Yeah. I mean - that's a stretch, right?

And then she falls in love with a slovenly fat guy, who turns out to be REALLY REALLY RICH!

Yeah, that'll happen. Anyway, I'm making it sound like I didn't like it, but I did. Rent it when the DVD comes out.

It is also nearly time for Storm season! In fact, the pre-season is happening now, we went to the Key for the one home pre-season game last Sunday, and as we always do, had a fantastic time. The Storm have a good team this year, the same starting 5 as last year (though a couple of the girls are a little banged up to start the season). There are what look to be some great new additions to the team as well. They should certainly be able to contend for a championship again this year. Our seats rock, nine rows above center court. I heart Storm season.

Nothing much else to mention, though I have a bunch of movie entries to get done. There's one for a movie I saw several weeks back and totally forgot I had seen it - heh. Memorable movie, eh? It did have its moments. Summer movie season has begun, and that's always a hoot. I have high hopes for some of this year's blockbusters - that new Superman looks good. The new X-Men terrifies me, though - I think they're gonna wreck the Dark Phoenix story, and that's sort of an unforgivable offense to an old-school X-Men fan like me. I mean, that is THE X-Men story. SIGH.

I'm still going, though.

I suppose that depends on what one's definition of entertainment actually is.

I did not find this film entertaining. But I am glad that I went to see it. I think it's an exemplary film, one that is in no way exploitative of the people who died that day. The last 20 minutes or so were nearly impossible to sit through. I wanted to crawl under my seat - this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

And yet.

Driving home after seeing this movie I popped the radio on, to the local "progressive talk radio" station. The host was talking about the movie, too - he was saying he himself had seen it that very day. Or, he had almost seen it. Actually, he said - he'd walked out ten minutes into the story. He knew what was going to happen, he said. He felt like he was watching a "snuff film" he said. And so he left, and spent the next 15 minutes trashing a film that he didn't even watch. After a few minutes of listening to him rant, I turned off the radio.

Of course, that line, and scene, aren't in the final film.

Quaid is still great in the movie, I perked up every time he showed up onscreen. Willem Dafoe does a pretty funny Cheney send-up. I've never actually seen an episode of American Idol, but I hate the very idea of it, so it was easy to laugh at the version of it in this movie. I dunno. Good but not great. Not enough bite to be truly memorable. A renter, for sure. In the end, I only ended up catching this because I was too late to catch my intended screening of United 93. At the time, I didn't mind very much about that.

I'm listening now to one of the episodes that Brian Timpe and I did on our old Internet radio program, "Poultry Of The Damned." It's been two years since we were doing these things, and that's a shock to realize it. Listening to our "witty banter" between sets of music - you know what, we were pretty danged funny, if I do say so myself. And say it I do, so there. We had some fun doing these shows. The work required to get the show uploaded to the Internet server was less than entertaining, but I'm glad we have all these episodes to listen to. It would be fun to find a way to host them somewhere as Podcasts (you know, what all the hip kids are listening to these days), but I think Podcasts with other people's music on them are illegal, right? That's a bummer. Plus, these shows we did are all pretty long, at least three-and-a-half to five hours long. We'd play a lot of stuff, and yap a lot in-between.

Urgh, so I've Been Tired because I'm getting used to having a jobby-job again - and I've already been complaining about that on here again, haven't I? Pretty sure I have, and no, I think I'll not subject you to more of same. Mostly thus far it's all been "getting to know the project" stuff lately. What I know so far: this is a big system. The architecture is dense, and the system is large. It's going to take a long time to really understand just what the hell is going on in there. I think that's why this contract is "open-ended" - with the time it takes them to get somebody in and get them comfortable with the system, they're going to want to keep me around a while. Assuming I can get through the learning curve in a timely fashion. Will I? Probably. Nothing is certain at the moment, though.

I do know that I'll get paid for the first time at the end of next week (direct deposit! Whoo!), and that will make this bitter pill go down easier, I must say.

Half Zaftig scheduled a show for mid-June, so that will be fun. Thinking a lot about what tunes to play. I'm trying to keep the number of "old songs" (that is, anything that's been released on a record) to no more than 30% of a set list. So that's like three songs out of a ten song set list. I like that percentage. Later this year I wouldn't mind getting that percentage down to 20% or so. So far we've never done a gig without playing "Lois". That song is like a security blanket for me - the crowd, even the ones who typically ignore us, always enjoy and respond well to it. One of these days I'll have to "cut the cord" as they say, and write up a "Lois"-free set list. Will it be next time? Maybe. I dunno.

I have two movie review entries to write. I'm not gonna do that right this second, though. I'm gonna go sit with the dogs and watch the next episode of Ken Burns' The Civil War, which I've never ever seen before now. It's good!