A couple of Lifestyle (barf, barf) topics

This is a bit off the usual topics covered in this blog but man doesn't live by nature study alone, so please bear with me!


Movies
As part of my Christmas presents from our daughter I was given a  2 month subscription to the Quickflix service.  In essence one selects movies over the 'net and they ship DVDs out to you.  We had been to the movies about twice in the last 20 years so this seemed a bit strange but we have now watched about 15 movies in 7 weeks.
Before getting to a few comments about some of the films I will deal out a large bouquet to Quickflix.  I suspect that we - living a little remote from postal; services - could probably get 2- 3 films a week (perhaps 10 per month) which for 2 viewers at $23 a month works out to about $1 per seat.  One of the discs they sent was buggered which I reported on line and within 2 minutes had a return email saying another copy was on the way which I see as very good service.

Review time
I wont go through all the films but will say the best we have seen thus far was Winters Bone.  Set in the Ozarks and a rather dark tale it was totally engrossing, and had good music. 5 Stars.

The Coen Brothers take on True Grit was possibly better than the original, which is a very big call. 5 Stars.

Hero: a Chinese martial arts film starring Jet Li and Maggie Cheung.  Visually stunning, the martial arts brilliant and the plot very complex.  At least 4.5 stars!

Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame - a Chinese made martial arts epic full of fly by wire stunts and the usual exciting business. It was visually astonishing and a good yarn.  4.5 stars


The Dark Knight - a Batman film - was very good.  I felt it missed a bit of the grittiness of the previous film (Batman Begins) but was extremely well done.  Heath Ledger earned his wraps for the Joker. 4 stars

13 Assassins was a Japanese martial arts movie in the style of Kurosawa - a mixture of the 7 Samurai and Ran.  The film goes for about 2 hours and the final battle goes for the last hour!  I suspect there was a world wide shortage of fake blood after they finished this.  4 stars

There is always a dog of the Week.  In this vase it was the nauseous Black Swan.  Full of emoting characters from central casting doing their worst on a script written in 5th grade.  I lasted 30 minutes. NO stars. 

Running progress
I a recentish post I commented that I was setting myself to run the Melbourne marathon in October this year.  That is still the aim.  I have got myself up to running 15 km a few times and am trying to do at least one run of 12km or longer per week.

Today was a Veterans handicap race of 6.3 km with a nasty course profile of 2km uphill, 2km downhill and 2.3km on the flat.  I did the course ~2minutes faster than last year averaging just under 5:30 per kilometre.  It is close to 3 years since I was able to run that fast.

It is probably not a coincidence that I have dropped my weight by about 5kgs since starting on this course of action!

Comments

Mary Chamie said…
Good luck with the run, Martin!
27 February 2012 at 01:54:00 GMT+11
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more