BilmBlog500

Up.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 17.  2.5 Slithy Toads Angels & Demons.  Seen Tuesday evening May 19, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen 6.  3.5 Slithy Toads So I'm sitting at home on a Sunday night with The Firm on as background noise ; it's a TNT Free Movie On Demand, and hearing that Dave Grusin score... It inspires me to write about movies. Up is Wall-E redux.  It starts out with some wonderful stuff that nobody but Pixar does in an animated film, a music-and-pictures sequence that tells the life story of the lead character from youth to old age, for richer and poorer and sickness and health with the woman he meets at a young age, marries, and eventually survives.  There's another very nice scene not long thereafter when he snaps at the pressure of a development going up around the house he's holding on to, providing an opportunity for evil developer to get his way.   [where is Gene Hackman.  I just hear his vo...

Star Trek.  Seen Sunday evening May 10, 2009 at the AMC Empire, screen #6.  3 slithy toads. This is the Star Trek meets Star Wars movie that we've all been waiting for, the one where James T. Kirk lands on the Ice Planet of Hoth, is attacked by a Tauntaun, gets rescued by Obi Wan, but somehow misses the Imperial Walkers. Or is it the movie where Sar-Ek saves his son Spo-ck from the destruction of his home planet Vulton (Kyrpcan?) by putting him into a rocket ship? I'm kidding some, but only some.  A large part of the pleasure from this very pleasurable re-boot of the Star Trek movie franchise is in finding all of the lifts not just from the Star Trek series but from any other sf movie franchise that starts with an "S" that's been around over the past 30 or 40 years.   I was never a huge fan of the Star Trek TV show.  It's not that I disliked it, but I wasn't part of the cult that surrounded it.  But I faithfully saw all of the Star Trek movies, from ST:TMP...

I've knocked on the Kindle a bit, but I should give Amazon some praise for having made some improvements in the Kindle operating system between my original Kindle that had something like 1.15y98y98u on it and the replacement in January with 1.2 (299870016) on it.  Still the first generation Kindle, but a slightly more developed version of the OS. The first Kindle crashed just often enough that I kept thinking how nice it would be to travel with a toothpick to hit the reset button, not daily or even weekly, but at least once every month or two.  And then usually one crash would be followed closely by a second crash before it would then be good for a stretch.  So far, 3 months and counting, the replacement Kindle with the slightly updated OS hasn't needed a reset. The first Kindle, every so often you'd put on the wireless and wait and wait for the Kindle to talk to Amazon and for the newspaper to download, and sometimes I'd have to give up, turn off the wireless, and try ...

A pint of Haagen Dazs is now 14oz, in the latest instance of stealth price increases.  I don't know if a Ben & Jerry's pint is still a pint or not, but they have started to sell more aggresively a 4oz container of ice cream that can go on sale for $1, instead of the 2/$6 pricing that's been more common on the pints, and which doesn't inspire ice cream purchases.  Wednesday was 31¢ scoop night at Baskin-Robbins, and I had my full 3 scoop allotment, 2 World Class Chocolate and one Oreo Cookies 'n' Cream.  But I did not walk from the Baskin-Robbins at 42nd St. to the Baskin-Robbins at 46th St. so I could have six scoops.

Many of you have maybe read about the Google settlement.  In the "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" kind of way, Google went to many big college libraries, got their OK to start digitizing their entire collections, and then the publishers and authors go to Google and say maybe you should have spoken to us before you started to do this.  The upshot is that Google has already scanned the books and the settlement would allow Google to do pretty much as it pleases with them with authors having the right to opt out and with Google forking over around 2/3 of the money it gets to publishers and/or authors as the case may be for the money it makes.  Some people have objected to this very strongly.  In order to determine who gets the money, the masters of the Book Registry the settlement establishes may have to look at contracts to see who has electronic rights, so it starts up a new Big Brother with rights to peer into all of our agreements.  The court sets Google up wit...

So I'm looking over a change in account terms for my AmEx card and see some new language on telephone communication. If I call AmEx from any # for any reason, they want to consider this to be permission to inundate that phone # with "special marketing offers."  It can be my land line.  Or my cell line.  It can be a friend's phone # or a relative's phone # if I'm traveling and my card stops working while I'm visiting John-Boy Bilmes.  "any number you give us or from which you call us, including mobile phones."  They can call.  They can send me text messages.  They make it very clear that I "agree to pay any fees or charges you incur for incoming calls or text messages without reimbursement." Furthermore, I can't ask them if they call to remove me from their calling list.  Oh no, the only way to do this is to go and log on to their web site.  That way, I can stop getting phone calls only if I give them my e-mail address.  Then they ca...

I had a great time last year taking the high ro ad , so I wanted to do another English Country Walk on this year's trip to London.  The ruler of the walk David Wenk was kind enough to swap the scheduled walks for the weekend so that I would be able to do my preferred walk to Bodiam Castle onthe Saturday. We met up at the London Bridge station to take the train out to Robertsbridge.  It's also possible to take that train from Charing Cross or Waterloo East, but this gives a few extra minutes.  David and I were joined by a Czech and a Slovak who David knew.  When we detrained at Robertsbride I did an extra side walk to recycle some newspapers at this beautiful bin. We then headed off into Robertsbridge proper where we stopped in at a small used bookstore on the high street, and then we headed off into the countryside.  Passing along the site of an abandoned rail right of way which some  volunteers are hoping to return to service for a tourist steam train I snapped this nice pi...