Charles made the news, and the police aren’t involved this time. Check out the broadcast here.
Bad Movie Night
For the past few years, Samith and various other guys that we know have been going to see a movie once a month. Originally these were “Any Movie Our Wives Wouldn’t See With Us”, but as that almost universally means that it’s a bad movie, the vernacular became “Bad Movie Night”. Now we actively search out movies for which the theatre will be nearly empty. You and pretty much guarrantee that we’ll be at any movie that is (a) based on a comic book graphic novel, (b) based on a video game or (c) features lots of things blowing up.
This month’s movie was Casino Royale. It was actually a good movie, and so we had to fall back on the original Bad Movie Night charter to justify seeing it. It also happens to be one of maybe three James Bond books that I read when I was maybe 14 years old. As this isn’t actually a review of the movie as much as a review of Bad Movie Night, I won’t say more about it except that they new Bond didn’t look much like Bond at the start, but did at the end.
The theatre was pretty full this time, but usually we’re about half of the audience and thrice we’ve been the only people in the theatre. Once they held the movie for us because Samith (or maybe it was me) was running late. After the movie we go out to eat and talk about the movie and other manly things that our women folk wouldn’t understand –and by that I mean, “wouldn’t be remotely interested in”.
Checkmate this out
Every year I teach our 7th graders how to play chess, then around Christmas I send home an order form so that they can buy some nice chess stuff (by that I mean so that they can convince their parents to buy them some for Christmas (by that I mean that maybe their parents will throw some money my way to buy some chess stuff for school)).
We order from www.wholesalechess.com, and this year our order was over $500.00. They have great prices. This stuff would have cost well over $1000.00 anywhere else that I’ve found. At the bottom of the order form is a blurb asking them to consider giving a little bit to help buy some chess equipment for the school, and every year our parents are more generous than I expect. Last year, in addition to listing the price of a set ($6.90), I also said that chess clocks cost about $20.00 each. A parent sent in enough to buy three. This year I mentioned that a giant chess set costs $110.00 and a parent sent in $110.00.
It takes up both of my tables, but they were mostly used for playing smaller games of chess anyway. Interestingly enough, about the same number of people participate. Instead of having 8 people playing 4 games of chess, there are 2 people and a host of spectators. I’m training up a bunch of geeks.
The king is a little over a foot tall. So, my question for you is: Where am I going to store these?
1 new iMac, 1 visitor, 3 minutes later
Middle School Dance Decorations
We had our first Middle School Fun Night of the year 2 weeks ago. We stopped having middle school dances at Lincoln Lutheran about 4 or 5 years ago after a poorly supervised dance and a poorly done lock-in. But a few years ago we decided to have “Fun Nights” instead. We have a dance, a dodgeball tournament, a game room, snackbar, face painting and photography studio. We let the seniors run everything and they take any profits after everything is paid for. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.
We have the best dance decorations and they take about 15 minutes to setup. I bring in one of our iMacs and a couple of video projectors and we project giant 20ft by 30ft images on the gym walls. You get cool shadows when the kids dance in front of them and a nice variety of images: spacescapes, forest scenes, underwater images and abstract “flurries†shifting and dancing around the walls. Cleanup is easy too.
Happy Birthday to me
Lauren, finally picking up on the subtle hints that I’ve been dropping over the last few weeks, suprised me in Walmarts today by saying, “Yes, you can get an iPod. Now quit bothering me about it.” I got the tiny little one because (a) it’s so cute, (b) I really only want to play music in the car between home and school and (c) the kids these days don’t seem to have it yet, so I can be kewl and l33t for about a week. It holds about 250 songs which is nearly enough to get me to school and back. For a more historical perspective, St. Paul College High bought it’s first hard drive while we were in school there. It was about 500 times larger and held about 100 times less information.