Happy New Year!

What am I doing for New Year's Eve? Well, let me put it this way. The Missus is pregnant with twins and has a bad cold. I'll be staying in tonight.

Hope your New Year's is safe and happy.

Three Movies

Christmas weekend was a three-movie weekend at Cicada Manor. We finished off all three of our Netflix movies on the Big Screen. Here's a quick review of them.

I watched I, Robot without the Missus, a good thing. She's not as big a fan as I am of special-effects laden, marauding-robot killing Will Smith summer blockbusters. Actually, I'm not that big of a fan, but this was a pretty cool action-packed popcorn movie. The effects were really good throughout and some of the action scenes were spectacular, especially the one involving robot trucks and a big tunnel.

There was something missing though: Isaac Asimov, the author of I, Robot and other classic robot science fiction stories. The movie claims that it was suggested by the book, which is about right. I'd hoped the success of The Lord of the Rings would convince Hollywood that sticking close to classic science fiction stories would be profitable, but in this case they ignored Asimov and stuck in a bunch of standard characters that appear in hundreds of other mundane movies. Smith's "Del Spooner" is, get this, a misunderstood cop with a bad attitude. At one point his boss says "Give me your gun and badge." How original. (Another black mark against the movie is that even with the beautiful Bridget Moynihan in the movie, the only naked butt we see is Will Smith's.) The movie would have been a lot better with less attitude and more Asimov.

King Arthur was better, and still not a flick chick by any measure. The legend of Arthur and his knights, first written down in the Middle Ages, was based on a real man named Arturius who lived around the time the Romans abandoned Britian. The movie tells the story of Arthur and his faithful band of Roman knights who stay behind and join with the native Britons to fight off an invading army of cruel Saxons. It's a pretty good movie, especially if you like bloody sword battles. The Missus was entertained, though she hid her eyes during much of the fighting.

The Terminal was directed by Steven Spielberg and featured Tom Hanks. With star power like that I was expecting more than this pleasant piffle of a movie. Hanks plays a man from a fictional Eastern European country that undergoes a revolution while he's in flight to JFK. Since his country no longer exists, he's trapped in the terminal of the airport indefinately. It's kind of amusing to see Hanks return luggage carts for the quarters he uses to buy Whoppers at the Burger King and play Cupid for an airline worker in love with a customs officer. Some artificial conflict is created by making the airport head of Homeland Security be a real ass. It was, disappointingly, just an okay movie.

Sumatra

The recent earthquake in the Indian Ocean spawned massive tsunamis responsible for thousands of deaths. It also moved the island of Sumatra 100 feet. Sumatra is bigger than California.

New things

A new year, a new blog. Well, it's almost a new year, and this is almost a new blog. It's still the same old (and getting older) me. There should be a lot of new things in store for 2005, a lot of strange new things. That's why I named the blog Novitas, a Latin word connotating both newness and strangeness.

The strangest new thing in 2005 will no doubt be the arrival of Frick and Frack. That's right, I said Frick and Frack. Twins! The Missus is about fifteen weeks along as of this writing. The babies are doing well and have passed all of their tests so far with flying colors. Well, not colors exactly, since we've only seen them in black and white sonograms. Here's a couple of pictures. One is Frick, the other Frack. I leave it as an exercise for my Faithful Reader(s) to figure out what is what and which is which.



Nothing's ever perfect. There's been a complication. The Missus has been diagnosed with a condition called placenta previa. You can read up on it here, but why would you want to? Ick. One baby's placenta has grown in the wrong place. Everything should be okay, but the doctors are going to have to keep a close eye on things. The delivery will definitely have to be by C-section and there's a good chance that the Missus will be on bed rest for at least a couple of weeks before the end. She's supposed to take it easy now, at least until we see the doctor again next week, and is finding that more difficult than three months of daily injections.

It should be an interesting year.