Life in General

I finally got my Hollywood Video coupons. For some reason every 6 months or so I find in my letterbox 4 of these Hollywood Video coupons each of which entitles me to borrow 3 movies for 99cents each. That is about the only time I rent new videos, otherwise I wait for them to come to general display and then use BlockBuster's rent one get one free deal that they operate Monday thru Thursday.
The last time, 6 months ago I watched Mystic River and Mona Lisa Smile and Love Actually and a couple of other new(ish) movies.
This time I borrowed on the first coupon, AnchorMan, Mean Girls and Goodbye Berlin. I finished watching AnchorMan and am almost done with Mean Girls which my wife insists on watching with me. AnchorMan was not what I thought it was going to be, I thought it would be slapsticky like Old School, but it is more like serious farce, don't you think? All that stuff about dogs talking bear-speak and Luke (or is it Owen) Wilson getting both his hands hacked off. I thought the funniest line was "Bark twice if you are in Milwaukee"!

I wasn't in the US in the seventies so I guess I miss all the allusions. It was a funny movie though all said and done and worth the buck!

We are watching Nadodikaattu once again with my m.i.l. That is really farce for the most part and I think it is rather dated. Of course watching it brings to mind this imaginary era of innocence and simplicity and Mohanlal before he became a superhero.

Whatever was the appeal of NattuRajavu I wonder. The same cliches, the same attempts to make a catchy line like "Poda Mone Dinesha" and "Chummathe" and "Savari Giri Giri", this time it was "Kaaranam nee kuttiyanu".

I have a blind unreasoning dislike of the NE Patriots. I can distinctly place it to the time when Tom Brady got that most unreasonable call in his favour when they deemed he was trying to tuck the ball and so it wasn't a fumble. I was rooting for the Raiders in that game since I liked Gannon for some reason.
When NEP went on to beat Pittsburgh and the Rams I was really upset and most gleeful when the next year they didn't even make the play-offs. Imagine my chagrin when last year they not only go all the way but beat my local team, the Panthers in the process!

I will be rooting for Pittsburgh big time this weekend but in my heart of hearts I feel it is a lost cause. Bill Belichick is not going to let the same team beat him twice in a season. People say that Pittsburgh has the game to beat NE but the same people said that the Colts would prevail in the absence of Law and Seymour. Wasn't it weird that once the Colts lost all the analysts were like "oh it was bound to happen". Only Costas expressed some degree of surprise.

Atlanta might pose more of a struggle to NE in the final if nothing else because of Vick's unpredictability and even a brilliant coach like Belichick can't prepare for him.

I have been a fan of the Minnesota Vikings since 97 which is when I moved to Minnesota from India. I have been in NC now for a couple of years and continue to be a Vikings fan. I watched them play very poorly earlier today and lose. Watched would be an overstatement- my idea of watching is to switch off the TV every time something I don't like happens. This could be a 3 and out, the opposition scoring or about to score, an interception, any number of things really.
I really like to watch only if the Vikings are doing well, a performance like Atlanta's yesterday would be to my liking. Or then again I might decide to switch off 'cos it is a blow-out.
I follow other Minnesota teams too, the Twins, the T'Wolves, the Gopher football team. In 7+ years of fandom I have yet to see a championship between them- the 98 Vikings came the closest.

I think the last winner was the Twins in 91, so the sports fans of Minnesota are owed a championship of some sort- while not yet 86 years, 14 years times 4 teams (not including the Wild here) is 56 years of futility.

I was listening to a show on the radio last night, it was an interview of the director of the new movie "Hotel Rwanda". The show was succeeded by a newscast where, predictably, the lead item was the refugee relief operations in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and so on.

I got to thinking. The tsunami killed upwards of 150000 people. The big earthquake in China 30 years ago killed more than 200000 people. The cyclones and floods killed 130000 people in Bangladesh in 91. And so we talk about the power of Nature.
Between 1 and 10 million people were killed in Rwanda/Congo in 94. How? By other people. No natural forces here. Only man-made.

I never had thought that owning a home would have so many attendant headaches just in terms of day-to-day maintenance. And my home is new, at least it was new when we moved in, it is a couple of years old now. The windows are dirty and especially show when the sun shines right through them and need to be cleaned. There are cobwebs on the high ceilings which I cannot reach anyway. The ceiling fan is starting to lose its white colour because of accumulated gunk. I have lost count of the number of places that need caulking. The garden is a mess and I need to stain the mailbox post.

Of course I do watch way too much TV.