Things Best Said

In case you’ve missed the news that a new Ghostbusters game is coming to your favorite console this Christmas…

Every year I’m hunted down by my birthday. And every year it catches me about a week after my wife asks how I would like to celebrate. I always seem to reply, “I have no idea”. For a week or more we’ll banter about a party, a dinner or a trip to some distant locale. Invariably a decision will be made way too late for most people to arrange for babysitters, dog kennels or mail order dates…as you’ll see in a moment.

So, as awkward as this may seem, writing my own invitation, I’m inviting all of you to join me for a pint and some food. No clowns, no facepainting, just a pint (or two) with some nice people in a decent place.

If you’re free on Saturday night July 12 @ 7:30pm, join us at Dan McGuinness on Demonbreun Street near Music Row in Nashville.

Additionally, as I get older, 34 this year, I’m reminded that the gifts I want (those I haven’t already purchased for myself) are too pricey to expect any of my friends to purchase. And, because of that, people feel shy about not bringing a gift to the yearly function -no worries here. In return, you shouldn’t expect I’ll pay your bar tab.

Bring whomever you like and use them to escape when you get tired. No need to RSVP, no pressure to say you won’t make it.

I’d have to agree with most of what the New Yorker had to say about Indy 4…

“It isn’t bad—there are a few dazzling sequences, and a couple of good performances—but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action that made the earlier Indiana Jones movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly gone. Stretches of this picture are flat, fussy, and dull. (How many times can we enter those papier-mâché tombs?) Trying to regain the old rapture, you have to grasp at the few scenes that work—mainly in the beginning, when Steven Spielberg, setting the picture in 1957, captures the era’s mixture of blandness, latent revolt, and apocalypse, showing the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture alongside nuclear fears. The plot is incomprehensible gibberish about a crystal skull, the lost Amazonian city of Akator, and a brain-fried archeologist named Ox (John Hurt, who is anything but an ox). But there’s a dandy, immensely complicated chase sequence in the jungle that links together physical improbabilities with the rhythm and speed of Buster Keaton (though on a much grander scale). Cate Blanchett is terrific as a slit-eyed, over-precise K.G.B. agent, but Harrison Ford, doing Indy again at sixty-five, doesn’t appear happy. He’s tense and glaring, and he speaks his lines with more emphasis than is necessary, like a drunk trying to prove he’s sober.” - Written by David Denby

And, one last thing…

Since seeing the first teaser trailer of Indy 4 I was struck by how old Harrison looks on camera. It’s, of course, okay to get old. We’ll all be visited by the sag man at some point, but as Harrison gets older I notice how much more like Tom Brokaw he looks. Maybe it’s just me.

How did I miss this?

Somehow I forgot to post this video of the photos snapped at our first company picture session. Not all employees are present but it’s a pretty good representation of the geekery around the office.

Thanks to Casey for creating and posting it to the ‘tube.