Harry Potter and the Guy with Nothing Else to Watch

Is there a point to watching a Harry Potter movie 90 minutes after it's started and not knowing where it goes in the great chronology of Harry Potter? There's little else on and it's fun to play games like "Spot the distinguished British actor" and "What the hell is going on?" and "Please God let there be something else on".

I didn't do a whole lot today for the first 6 hours I was awake. Gmail was down for a while, so my morning went like this: connect to dial-up isp, check Gmail, see it's down, disconnect from dial-up isp. It got to be a weird obsession, this need to check my Gmail, so I couldn't do anything else. I turned on the tv and there was a Mythbusters marathon on. I'd never seen the show before, and now I want to watch nothing but. Apparently, if there's not a lot of cement inside, you can clean out a cement truck by tossing in a stick of dynamite. Also, if there's no longer a need for your cement truck, you can totally obliterate it by tossing in 850 pounds of explosives.

Around 4 o'clock I finally did something productive by cutting the dead limbs off a tree and propping up some low-lying branches. The work took less than an hour but it was so hot and humid that I was bathed in sweat, which gave me a tidy rationalization-after-the-fact for not doing more work outside today.

Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick likes the soundtrack to "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3", and I like it, too, so we're like buddies now. Secret internet 70's soundtrack buddies.

On Ebay I won a pair of Bushnell sunglasses. They must be from 1960's or very early 1970's. They look absolutely terrible and I love them. They've got just about no tinting on them whatsoever. I feel like Kevin McDonald from the Kids in the Hall when I put them on, or maybe Robert Deniro from the very last scene of Casino.

I got the" Newsradio" dvd's today. They are totally and completely awesome. I watched with the commentary on for an episode titled "This is not completely based on Julie's life" because it was one of the few episodes from the second season not titled after a Led Zeppelin album. It was great -- they reminisced about getting drunk at network functions and getting banned from the SAG awards. And then they started slagging "The John Laroquette Show" for no discernible reason.

Oh and hey -- my sister and her fiancee are going to be featured in an article about Ukrainian weddings in the NY Times next week. So that's pretty cool.