Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Susan and Mere are doing a rummage sale today (Friday) at at our house: 577 Hitchcock, in Lisle, IL. (Roughly IL 53 and 55th/Maple Avenue.) I will either be inside hiding from the heat or outside in my wheelchair; Susan and Meredith are running the table, and selling more of the boxes of books I [...]
My daughter Meredith is a competitive roller skater, and her skating club is doing a big rummage sale Saturday and Sunday at the Lombard Roller Rink in Lombard from 9-3. I will not be there; Susan and Meredith are running the table, and I had an operation earlier this week and in no shape to [...]
See it because you are curious about what it will look like on the big screen. See the original TV show for the story; it’s cut to ribbons in the movie because of time limits, and a lot has been reworked – think of the later HARRY POTTER books versus the movies for the level [...]
The family has taken up a new and very nice practice; having family reading times – not scheduled as such, but so everyone has something good to read and is in the living room together reading. It works pretty well, I think, and is an improvement over endless oh-I-can’t-watch-that debates about TV stuff. Tastes run [...]
I was watching an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode tonight about a boxer on his way down who charms a little boy, who enthusiastically uses his ‘big wish’ power that he goes on about during the earlier part of the show to change the result of the fight; instead of the boxer getting flattened and dropped [...]
Saw it with the family today; Mere and Kay have been whomped with allergies, and I think they’re turning into sinus infections. The kids hate taking stuff for the allergies and hate the nasal sprays, but they hate worse being sick. In any event, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the film, mostly because so [...]
Cecil Adams on Jim Butcher’s DRESDEN series (which I have not read; I saw a couple of the TV shows based on it) and how it does and doesn’t fit the realities of Chicago – and a bit on the ‘underground’ of Chicago (mostly downtown).
A note on this for the historically challenged: 99% of you will have never heard of Theodore Bilbo, Senator from Mississippi and ardent Klansman, and author of such ditties as “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization“. This item from SHWI, sent in to me by the writer, plays off that and this book on German [...]
CORALINE (7 out of 10) – Recommended, with care MONSTERS VS ALIENS (6 out of 10) – Recommended Meredith is a big fantasy fan, and was interested in both of these due to the heavy TV advertising. We saw both of these in Tru3D, which I recommend as adding to the story (as it did [...]
The tax program choked and died on me on install; had to clean everything out and reinstall. Had to also dig up our old tax files for the program, so that it could pull forward old information for multi-year stuff affecting our taxes, and those had gotten stuck away somewhere and were more of a [...]
The thing is definitely very useful, and I love it in a lot of ways. I have around six pages of Things To Read on it, and I’ve bought a small handful of books. Bought: Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation by Daniel Gross Escape from Hell by Larry Niven Rolling [...]
Supreme Court Rules on EPA Right to Regulate Ectoplasm and PKE Levels See also: EPA Shuts Down Local Ghost-Entrapment Business EPA Shuts Down Ghost Busters
ESCAPE FROM HELL (Niven/Pournelle): ***, especially if you dug the original Niven/Pournelle INFERNO and wanted more. It’s a rehash of much the same material; boy dies, boy goes to hell, boy climbs Satan’s leg, that sort of thing. In this case, it’s a little bit of seen-one-bolgia-full-of-hot-pitch-seen-them-all, but they do try. More real life characters [...]
The LA Times has a listing of upcoming 2009 movies; here’s the stuff I or Mere will go for…
We spent all of Saturday being very quiet around the house; everyone was very very tired from the bustle of the holidays, and Susan’s knee was swollen and painful. (She’s been fighting off this arthritis stuff a lot, and things like walking a lot or shoveling snow have just been killing her.) So we [...]