The two-hour premiere opens with Blade setting up shop in Detroit, investigating the vampire House of Chthon.  Along the way, he forms an uneasy alliance with Krista Starr, a former military veteren who becomes entrenched in the world of vampires while investigating the murder of her twin brother.

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double pane energy efficient kind. But today I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I hadn't paid for them.

Hellloooo? Now just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I told him just what his fast talking sales guy had told ME last year...namely, that in just ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves!

Helllooooo? It's been a year!

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up....

He didn't call back. Guess I won that stupid argument.

I started out very disappointed in this movie, after it was hyped up pretty good by a friend of mine.  While the first portion of most movies is setup and character building, the build up went on way too long.  The first half of the movie at least.  We had to pause the movie to go do some Christmas stuff and when we got back to the set we decided to watch a SciFi Channel presentation that I was currently recording instead of returning to the movie.

Once my girlfriend fell asleep (she's sick, poor thing), I finished watching the movie by myself.  That's the point it got interesting.  Things started to happen -- I mean literally.  The movie started to actually get some action sequences and some interesting scenes as well as things moving and going bump-in-the-night on screen.

While I can't say that I shy away from spoilers in my opinions, I think I'm going to hold out any mention of what occurs at the end.  Don't skip forward to the last 2-3 chapters of the movie.  After you have seen it all the way through once, you could probably miss the first 5-6 chapters after that.  But the ending by far makes up for the slow start.

Have fun.

The SciFi Channel will release Battlestar Galactica, Season 2 DVD on December 20th, 2005.  With thirteen episodes in it's first season and ten in it's second, Battlestar Galactica is half as long as the other Friday Night SciFi series.  Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis both have ten episodes and then take a three month haitus and return in January for ten more episodes.  I had rather hoped that Battlestar Galactica would return for a second half of a season also.

While I haven't seen any official announcments yet, I'm confident that Battlestar Galactica, as well as SG-1 and Atlantis will all be around next year.  Although it's quite possible that SG-1's outlook past Season 10 is cloudy.  Depends on how many people watch the show this year, huh?

A wife and her husband were having a dinner party for some important guests. The wife was very excited about this and wanted everything to be perfect. At the very last minute, she realized that she didn't have any snails for escargo for the dinner party, so she asked her husband to run down to the beach with the bucket to gather some snails. Very grudgingly he agreed.

He took the bucket, walked out the door, down the steps, and out to the beach. As he was collecting the snails, he noticed a very inviting bar just a little further down the beach. He kept thinking to himself, "Wouldn't it be great to have just a little drink?" So he went and ended up spending the whole night in that bar, finally falling asleep.

At seven o'clock the next morning he suddenly realised, "Oh no!!! My wife's dinner party!!!"  He grabbed his bucket, and ran out the door. He ran down the beach all the way to his apartment. He ran up the stairs of his apartment. He was in such a hurry that when he got to the top of the stairs, he dropped the bucket of snails. There were snails all down the stairs.

The door opened just then, with a very angry wife standing in the door way wondering where he's been all this time. He looked at the snails all down the steps, then he looked at her, then back at the snails and said, "Come on guys, we're almost there!!"

Stargate Atlantis, Season 1 will be out on DVD on November 15, 2005.  The pilot episode, Rising, has already been released on DVD.

Complete Season: 
Pilot Episode:  

Complete Season: 

Complete Season: 
Miniseries: 

I've been seeing a lot of ads on TV for the Nintendo Gamecube game, Geist.  You are part of a Special Forces team that is infiltrating a secret lab.  You are safely on the way out, when one of your teammates suddenly flinches and shoots you and the other soldiers.  As you are glazing over and passing out, you see him come up and reach towards you.

You wake, to find yourself in one of the labs strapped into a huge machine.  You feel something that doesn't entirely feel unlike wind.  And your soul is ripped from your physical body and sucked into a the machine.

You are freed from the machine and sent into your game by a young girl ghost who teaches you ghosty things.  You have to possess items in the game and use your skills of telekinetic to make the items move and operated.  The guards and other people running around the complex are frightened, which allows you to possess and take control of their body.

You have to take control of certain people, animals, and items at certain times and do certain tasks in order to escape, save others, and hopefully rejoin your body.

The game starts out as a first-person shooter (FPS) but quickly retasks into a puzzle/strategy.  There is your share of shooting, but you also have to know when to possess or talk, instead of kill.

Very interesting game, very unique.  I'm renting it now.  Seems to be good, but I just don't go around spending $50 on a game.  Not for small children, which is why it is rated M-Mature.

In trying to avoid cluttering the Main Page with all one subject, even one so close to my heart as movies and shows, I post a lot of my movie reviews in it's own category and not on the Main Page.  Some of the more recent movies posted are:

Mafia! -- September 3
Omega Doom -- August 27
Girl, Interrupted -- August 14
Top Secret! -- July 11

Three hunters are walking through the field with their quarry thrown over their backs.  One states, "I love hunting, the kill.  Makes you feel top of the food chain."  At this point a huge pterodactyl swoops out of the sky and bites one of the men in half and kills the other two.  A college professor on a field trip with a few members of his class, including, of course, the ubiquitous buxom blondes that always trip while running from danger are attacked and lost several of their classmates.  A small band of American army special forces are in the woods capturing a terrorist end up saving the college group when they attacked by the terrorists and by a dozen or so pterodactyls.

On this blog, I've torn up the SciFi Channel for their total ineptness presenting us with a movie that is worth watching.  (See Alien Apocalypse and Alien Express.)  Previous movies were presented with very poor special effects. This movie was well worth watching.

We are so used to seeing aliens on the big screen with full high-quality surround sound, multi-million dollar budgets and paying $7, that we forget that an alien movie we see for free, designed for the small TV screen, a couple of 6" built-in speakers, and a budget of a couple hundred thousand, just won't have the same quality of effects.

At no point in history has there ever been pterodactyls that looked life-like.  Pterodactyls, and most dinosaurs in general, are poorly rendered in movies, with the exception of the Jurassic Park series.  But even in those movies, pterodactyls looked wrong.  So I was able to watch this movie without the expectation of well designed dinosaur birds.  I expected the effects to be bad, and am happily surprised that they aren't actually horrible.  A few scenes are hokey and cheesy, but only a few.

I expect real pterodactyls to be far more bat-like, than are ever put forth in movies.  That would make them believable, and very hard to animate.  In this movie, we find out that they are a lot like spiders and bees, in that they collect food and put it with the eggs, so that the babies will have something to eat when they hatch.  This is why the pterodactyls are attacking the people and dropping them in the nest full of eggs and newborns.

I spoke too soon.  Looks like SciFi ran out of budget for the last 30 minutes.  The worst effects scene?  A guy crossing a rope hand over hand.  I mean, how expensive is that to film?

A defendant in a lawsuit involving large sums of money was talking to his lawyer.

"If I lose this case, I'll be ruined."

"It's in the judge's hands now," said the lawyer.

"Would it help if I sent the judge a box of cigars?"

"Oh no! This judge is a stickler or ethical behavior. A stunt like that would prejudice him against you. He might even hold you in contempt of court. In fact, you shouldn't even smile at the judge."

Within the course of time, the judge rendered a decision in favor of the  defendant. As the defendant left the courthouse, he said to his lawyer, "Thanks for  the tip about the cigars. It worked!"

"I'm sure we would have lost the case if you'd sent them."

"But, I did send them."

"What? You did?" said the lawyer, incredulously.

"Yes. That's how we won the case."

"I don't understand," said the lawyer.

"It's easy. I sent the cigars to the judge, but enclosed the plaintiff's business card." 

When I first saw the commercial for the SciFi Original Movie, Alien Express, I was intrigued by how they were going to write aliens onto a train.  Did the aliens attack the train?  Was the train carrying an alien egg or something and it hatch?  How in the world, err, universe, did an alien get on a train?

Alright, so, I'm OK with it.  A car waiting at a railroad crossing gets hit by a large meteorite when the train was approaching.  The train screeches to a fast halt to help.  As often happens with meteorites which turns out to be an alien egg, it hatches.  The baby alien goes to hide in the train eating a conductor on the way.  Baby aliens come out of eggs with full spiky teeth and an appetite and pregnant.

This alien is one bad dude, err, gal.  A hyperactive, super-fast, cloaking alien that spits green pasty acid and has a nervous disorder and bad disposition is on a presidential campaign train eating everyone, starting with the presidential candidate.  The alien was born pregnant and laid eggs within the dead bodies, so now there is the mother and 3 babies to contend with.

The alien eats the conductors on this high-speed train and the safety "dead man's switch" doesn't engage, so it's running along the same track at 75 miles an hour with a freight train ahead going 35.  Not only do you have 4 mean, hungry aliens, but you have a runaway train with 58 minutes left

Oops.  More eggs, more baby aliens.  Oh and more bad news.  ("Gina, I think you've used up all your bad news for the day.")  The freight train ahead is hauling nuclear waste!!  I had to laugh out loud.  Oops, more eggs hatching.  Makes for a really rough day fighting something that is born pregnant and has a 5 minute gestation period.

The tide turns when they realize the aliens have methane blood, which is flammable.

As I've said before, SciFi does some really lousy "SciFi Original Movies" IF you expect them to be serious.  While some of them are pretty good movies, with a noticeable lack of budget, some of them are just bad.  The special effects in this movie are along the lines of the original Godzilla movie and the plot is half really bad, and half almost satirical.

While I expected to see the little hint at the last scene that everything isn't over, I didn't expect to see another half-dozen meteors heading to earth.

Sad.  Really Sad.  See it with popcorn and tequila wouldn't hurt.

Three handsome male dogs are walking down the street when they see a beautiful, enticing, female Poodle. The three male dogs fall all over themselves in an effort to be the one to reach her first, but end up arriving in front of her at the same time. The males are speechless before her beauty, slobbering on themselves and hoping for just a glance from her in return.

Aware of her charms and her obvious effect on the three suitors, she decides to be kind and tells them, “The first one who can use the words 'liver' and 'cheese' together in an imaginative, intelligent sentence can go out with me.”

The sturdy, muscular black Lab speaks up quickly and says “I love liver and cheese.”

“Oh, how childish,” said the Poodle. “That shows no imagination or intelligence whatsoever.”

She turned to the tall, shiny Golden Retriever and said “How well can you do?”

“Ummmm...I HATE liver and cheese,” blurts the Golden Retriever.

“My, my,” said the Poodle. “I guess it’s hopeless. That’s just as dumb as the Lab’s sentence.”

She then turns to the last of the three dogs and says, “How about you, little guy?”

The last of the three, tiny in stature but big in finesse, is a chihuahua. He gives her a smile, a sly wink, turns to the Golden Retriever and the Lab and says...

“Liver alone. Cheese mine.”

Since Arkansas has yet to allow a lottery, any time I travel I always try to pick up a ticket for whatever state I'm in.  One of these days I hope that the voters of Arkansas realize how much money we are giving neighboring states school systems instead of our own.  That, along with the gas, hamburger, and local taxes of everything we do in those states while we are there.  At the very least, I gave New Mexico education system another $1, not only at the expense of our own school system, but the $1 was taken out of Arkansas and spent in another state, removing it from our economy and community.

OK, so call me selfish.  I take a perfectly good Arkansas dollar and take it way away and spend it just for a chance to win a few measly dollars.  Sigh.  I'm such a bad person.

The people of Arkansas can rest easily and feel smug in the fact that my numbers, 14-22-26-51-52 and Power Ball of 23 was in no way similar to the winning numbers of 8-14-35-38-46+24.  So fine.  I lost.  I hope you are happy.

Just keep in mind that when I DO win, I'm spending the money in Jamaica.  So there.

OK, it's official.  Chili's fajitas are un-good.  The meat was marinated, but it was more of a teriyaki instead of fajita seasoning.  And fajitas are supposed to bite back when you eat them.  They are supposed to be strongly spiced (not necessarily spicy hot).  They are supposed to be well to medium well.  And served sizzling on a hot plate.  Darn.  Just got back and making myself hungry.

This is the first time I think I've had fajitas there, although I'm a big fajita guy.  The meat, which wasn't cut all the way through so it all strung together, was cooked and seasoned like a hamburger.  That was the consistency of the meat.  Just like a hamburger.  And not one of those lovingly done backyard hamburgers.  I'm talking fast food burger.  Zero love.  And faintly spiced.  At least it came out sizzling.

Not only did the meat (hello?  onion rationing, or what?) taste boring, the tortilla to wrap it in, was COLD!   We aren't talking room-temperature stuff.  We are talking refrigerated.  What sense does it make to bring out the grilled meat on a hot sizzling steaming platter only to dig it out and put it in a cold wrap?  Come on guys.  Think about these things.

Think.  Or get blogged.

As a computer consultant, I get to see all kinds of computer problems.  And since I've been in the industry for 27 years (Since 1977), I've pretty well seen them all.  Or so I thought.