This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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2011 Cinema

Just like I did for books, I’m giving up on individual posts for movies I go to and such. Instead, going for annual summaries, and seeing if I can catch up that way. Probably not, but hey, you never know. The “Cinema” category is movies I actually saw the old fashioned way, going to a theater with popcorn and all that. Movies we watch at home are treated completely differently…

Anyway, 2011 was not a big movie year for us. As with the books, I backtrack and cover a second time a couple movies I made individual posts on earlier. But here we go:

  • 2011-01-17: The King’s Speech – Movie about King George VI and his speech therapy to overcome stuttering. This movie obviously won a bunch of awards, and I liked it too. Highly recommended.
  • 2011-01-23: Tron: Legacy – Well, I’m a geek. Tron was an important movie when I was younger. Couldn’t miss the sequel could I? It was a light fluffy movie without too much substance, but it was fun. Worth a look if you remember the original Tron fondly.
  • 2011-04-17: Hop – A completely forgettable Easter bunny movie. But Alex liked it. Well, enough to keep quiet during the movie. Unlike movies he REALLY likes, he never really talked about it again.
  • 2011-05-28: Water for Elephants – A movie about circus people in the great depression. I saw it with my mom. I enjoyed it. It pulled the appropriate emotional strings. Worth seeing.
  • 2011-07-03: Cars 2 – This one broke my heart. I really liked the original Cars. It was a love letter to the disappearing American small town, to Route 66, and friendship, and all sorts of nice things. It was sweet. It was sappy. I liked it a lot. And watched it many many times with Alex. Usually not all the way from start to finish, but in bits and pieces. But I liked it. Cars 2 spit on everything that made the original Cars good. It was a spy movie! It was just a bunch of action packed set pieces to build video games around. There were tons of new characters whose only purpose was to sell toys. I guess it was an adequate action adventure movie with talking cars (I mean, what do you expect), but it had no SOUL. The first one left me with a warm fuzzy happy feeling after watching it. The second one left me cold. Of course, Alex liked it as much or more than the original, and we ended up with a bunch of toys, so I guess that is what matters, right?
  • 2011-11-26: The Muppets – It was silly. It was fun. There were songs. There were Muppets. I liked it. The first time since Jim Henson died that I’ve watched anything with Muppets in it that really felt like it captured the original spirit of the Muppets. This one was Muppets done right. If you like Muppets, see it. :-)

And that was it for 2011. Six movies. Two of which were “serious” sorts of movies. Guess that isn’t horrible.

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-21 (UTC)

Congressional Velocity (March 2014 Update)

This is the latest update for the series of posts I have been doing on how the current congress compares to the last two in law making velocity. The last post was in December. Depending on your views on such things, enacting more laws may be better, or enacting fewer laws may be better. In any case, the 113th congress is continuing to succeed at enacting fewer laws than either of the two previous congresses. As of the last law currently listed at my source at Congress Summary, which was a reauthorization of the National Integrated Drought Information System signed into law by Obama on March 6th, the 113th has passed and Obama has enacted 86 laws. At a comparable time in the cycle, the 112th had enacted 97 and the 111th has enacted 148.

Here are the charts:

Screen Shot 2014-03-20 at 19.31.10603

Screen Shot 2014-03-20 at 19.31.27550

[Edit 16:23 UTC to fix a capitalization issue.]

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-20 (UTC)

Curmudgeon’s Corner: It was just… no.

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Random Stuff / Billion Dollar Bracket
  • Missing Malaysia Flight MH370
  • Missing Malaysia Flight MH370 Continued
  • Ukraine

Recorded on 19 Mar 2014

Length this week – 1:23:04

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@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-19 (UTC)

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-18 (UTC)

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-17 (UTC)

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-16 (UTC)

@abulsme tweets from 2014-03-15 (UTC)