Yeah, I got nothin'

I hate Spring. It plays absolute havoc with my sinuses and forces me to get out the lawn mower. Stupid Spring... Summer isn't much better.

We watched Harry Potter 7.1. It was horrible. This is mostly due to the fact that the first half of the seventh book is just about the most wretched thing in existence. I actually have some small hopes for the second half this summer. They are based on the fact that the end of the first half did start getting a touch better. It will be interesting to see if nothing else. I really don't know why they let Rowling get away with that travesty that was the first half. Oh yeah, she made a ton of money...

Lovely wife and I went to Rubio's the other day. Fish tacos are yummy. I had the blackened mahi mahi and it was great. I may have to learn to make fish tacos now. I wonder if I can pull that off on the grill... Hmm. How exactly do you grill fish? Don't you need a smaller grill surface? Do you put something down? I shall have to investigate.

20th Century Boys continues to be fun to read. I'm somewhere in the middle of the series, so I won't bore you with details.

I suppose I should have an opinion on the absolutely massive data theft Sony went through this past week. Especially since I'm one of the people affected by it. It doesn't look like credit card data was stolen, but just about everything else was. I'm certainly a touch annoyed, but mostly we're trying to keep an eye out to make sure our accounts are ok. Time to change some passwords as well I suspect. I can tell you that I'll pretty much stick to prepaid cards from this point on. I almost tried to figure out how to yank my credit card data out of there a while back as well... That'll teach me.

Thoughts on Harry Potter

So we recently managed to watch Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in the theater (shocking in and of itself I know!). It was decent. I knew about most of the changes made to the film going in so those particular shocking moments weren't particularly shocking. I was sad they left out a couple of the memories/trips that Dumbledore and Harry encounter that related to Voldemort's past, but overall it was a fine film. And at almost 3 hours I never really felt that it was dragging, so that's something. The kids seemed to enjoy it well enough so that's another point in its favor. I think the director is in dire need of another film filter as I'm a little tired of the bluish tinge he paints everything with (this is SERIOUS! the story is SERIOUS! please to pay attention to my SERIOUS film making and story telling skillz!) But yeah, certainly worse pieces of cinema out there.

Which leads into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I decided to read through book 7 again as I haven't read it since it came out and I wanted to see how it held up. Not terribly well is the answer. Book 5 got a little better the second time through, Book 7 is definitely a little worse. Honestly the entire first half of that book could be ripped out, burned and otherwise deleted from the Universe and it would be fine. Things do get a little better in the second half, but only a little. I'm not crazy about the author wish fulfillment that turns Hermione into uber-witch Granger, the revisionist half hearted attempt at redeeming Snape (that still fails miserably in my book - he wasn't good, he wasn't really working for the good guys, he was basically a creepy stalker who with his dying breath wanted to see the eyeballs of said stalking obssession), the basic underwhelming-ness of Harry... Yeah I could go on. I think the publishers decided to just let Rowling write whatever she wanted. Editing? What's editing? Who needs a canonically consistent plot? Which is a shame as it is after all the end of the series. Oh well, chalk one up for the whimper column.

Which makes me worry about the movies. They're splitting the book into two movies. I've already made my thoughts on the first half of the book clear. This will not end well folks. Admittedly there will be a couple pretty nice moments. There are some flashes of brilliance throughout the book, they're just never capitalized on or used effectively. Oh well. I did actually like the whole Hallows subplot more this time around (and how crazy is it that a book named The Deathly Hallows relegates that bit to pretty much subplot status? Although come to think of it, it's happened before in the series - The Chamber of Secrets says "hi") .

We managed to make an actual side dish of the green beans from the garden over the weekend. Grilled some steaks and served them with said beans. They were yummy. Asparagus next year!

I finished up Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress. It was a fun little read. It's a girl's eye view into the world of D&D. Lovely wife read through it as well. It's a decent starting point for looking into D&D and you want a feminine perspective.

I'm very close to finishing The City & The City. Also an interesting read. But more on it later.