The Informant! is not as funny as I think it is.

Tonight Jenny and I ventured into Midtown to see The Informant! at the Studio on the Square. I loved it. The best I can do to describe it would be to call it a true-crime-comedy, which isn't a real genre. It might not actually be that good, because several times I found myself the only person in the theater, which was at least half-full, laughing aloud at the subtler comedic moments.

Being a true-crime thing, the mystery of it is lost once you've seen the end, so it doesn't have much re-watch value. I'd see it maybe once more for the comedy, but I wouldn't buy it. So my advice is to go see it now or rent it.

The Studio was strangely slow for a Sunday afternoon, but by the time we left the lot was pretty full. The place hasn't changed at all since the first time I went there. It was the first showing on the day it opened. I saw Gladiator with Garrett and Nikkie. I wasn't intending to be at their first ever screening, it just turned out that we wanted to see Gladiator that weekend, and the Studio was the closest theater. I ordered the first ever plate of sausage, cheese, and crackers, which is still on the menu. This time, we just got a large sweet tea, a large green tea, and a small popcorn (which was large). Since I had a $25 gift card from my aunt Linda from last Xmas, the whole thing cost me $2.50. Even $27.50 isn't too bad for a movie for two, so I might try to get us to do this semi-regularly on Sundays, the only day Jenny and I are both off work.

Unapologetic history nerd.

I'm all history-geeked out about my birthday gift from my dad, D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen Ambrose. I've just started re-reading Douglas Adams' The More Than Complete Hitchhikers's Guide for the first time in years, but I think I'll have to put it off. This book is five pounds of paperback World War II awesome, 655 pages complete with pictures, glossary, appendix, end notes, and index.

Coincidentally, yesterday I replayed the D-day level of Call of Duty 2, where you assault Pointe-du-Hoc with the U.S. Army Rangers. When I pulled my new book out of the gift bag and randomly flipped it open, the first thing that caught my eye was the phrase, "Pointe-du-Hoc." So I'll get to read about the actual event in much more detail than what I've seen about it on the Military Channel and History International.

I don't know why I find it so fascinating, but I do. Shut up. Don't judge me.

Perspective.

This is an image I saw years ago, and it always stuck with me. It's been making the rounds online lately, and I wanted to post the original shot, along with the one with Carl Sagan's thoughts.

As I remember the story, Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system, and Sagan wanted to have it turned around for a parting shot of earth. Most of the people in charge of its operation were more interested in what lay ahead, but eventually they acquiesced. It took this picture:

There's a tiny dot in the right-most band of sunlight refracted into Voyager's lens, and it's earth. Our planet. The place where every human who has ever lived was born and died. Where all of our revolutions, spiritual movements, and scientific breakthroughs occurred. On that single pixel. Carl says it better:

Can't blog, playing BioShock.

Don't read this.

Seriously, it's not worth the time. I'm up late for no reason. I'm wide awake and I don't know why. My face hurts. That's probably it. I couldn't get over this cold because I had to work. Three days doing manual labor in the sun is bad for you when you're trying to get rid of a head cold. I just found this out.

My new phone, it turns out, is a great MP3 player, but I can't put music on it yet, and even if I could, I couldn't listen to it. At work, I'm constantly having to decide what to do and take responsibility for everything, even though I've been at it for 11 months and I work with a guy approaching his eighth year. In almost all of my games I've gotten to the most irritating part and have stopped playing. I have this blog, but I never have anything to say. I take care of all the bills in my household, but I'm terrible with money. My fiancée is getting frustrated with me being tired all the time, and I'm too tired to begin to approach how to think about what I should consider doing about it.

This is turning into a world-class rant. I like it. There, I have something to write about on this blog, that's one problem solved. Now I just have to figure out how to replace all the major appliances in this house, and how to collate that decision with the one that will determine whether there's any point in doing so in the first place. I also have to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do about my truck. I have to replace it, but I can't. I can't even trade it in, because it doesn't really belong to me, and only one third of it even belongs to the person it actually belongs to (mostly). Do you see why I have a headache?

No, that's the head cold. And also all of the above. Mostly the head cold though.

Probably.

It's nearly 2:30 in the morning, so I might as well make myself go to bed, even if my insomnia is telling me it's pointless. Jenny is up there, and that will help. The only thing I can rely on with all this bullshit I don't know how to fix is that I love her, and she makes me feel at ease. Even when she's asleep.

I got some new stuff.

Mostly a new phone. It's a Sony Ericsson W760a, which I selected after approximately 10 minutes of research (wandering aimlessly around the AT&T store). It looks like this:

Only mine isn't usually floating in a black void, and there's only one of it. It's much better than my old bargain-basement-four-years-ago phone. I thought about going balls-out and getting something completely crazy that I don't need, like an iPhone, but I thought, meh. I'll probably just break it, job like mine and all. This one feels like it can take a few drops. Unfortunately, I'll have to go out of my way to buy some specific accessories: a USB cable, headphones, and Sony's proprietary M2 memory card.

What else? Oh, a camera. Ian left this little Fuji A360 digicam when he moved out. Turns out it kinda sucks, though it is small and light. The non-adjustable shutter speed is so high that it's virtually impossible to take a picture at any marginally close range without blurring. It uses a lame media card format that I thought was proprietary to Olympus: xD. Even worse, it has no on-board memory, and the xD card it came with is just 16MB. Since it's a 4.1 megapixel camera, and you can't adjust the picture size, that equals roughly four pictures. Awesome. I found exactly two xD cards at Newegg: 1GB for $11 and 2GB for $15.

That's enought random babbling for tonight. I'm jumping off to let Jenny watch TV on my computer.