So. When The Return of the King was released, the day before the official release, New Line Cinema held special screenings in a few select theaters around the country.

All three films screened in one day, with hour (or hour-and-a-half) breaks in between (in don't recall precisely).

The screenings were, for the first two films we all had already seen, the new extended editions, so each was over two hours long. Then there was TROTK screening (which was new to everyone).

New Line Cinema reps were there, handing out gifts. We all got three framed cells of 35mm film cut from one of the original prints of the new film. I still have mine.

It was actually quite amazing, being in a theater packed with people who all wanted to be there. It was breathtaking when the first strains of the LOTR theme played in the dark theater. And people wept openly as TROTK went through its many endings.

What stuck with me was how much the three films felt like one cohesive film when you watched them back to back.

I think we arrived at the theater around 9AM. We left the theater around 10PM (not including jaunts out across the street to grab a burger or something during the intermissions). It was grueling, but it was marvelous, too.

It constantly makes me smile, whether it’s being smart, the actors are giving perfectly calibrated performances, or the action suddenly goes wham-bam VATS over the top.

3 eps in. Happy.

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

I understand the sentiment, but I reserve that disgust for this country - or more specifically for our national parties and their apparatchiks. If these geriatric nincompoops are seriously the best we, as a country, can put forward to lead us, when we are simply voting on degrees of shittiness, we are probably too far gone to recover.

If you're not holding your nose when voting for someone, you're in trouble. The two go hand-in-hand. Be suspicious of any politician who seems so good you don't feel the urge to hold your nose when you cast your vote for them.

If I have to pick one drink to take to a desert island, it's the classic Sazerac.

That is what I will want most of the time when I want a cocktail. However, I will allow a few others to enter rotation, depending on mood, time/temperature, and place:

1. Margarita.
2. Vesper.
3. Pastis.

And, finally, my embarrassing guilty pleasure (which I never order except when I am in company I know well or I am on a Caribbean island): piña colada.

As a person who has had (in the last week) three shots and a series of oral antibiotics because of a small-looking but very angry infection in my index finger from a splinter(!) that has required two trips to the doctor to (NSFL) squeeze out the pus, I can understand this. Sepsis ain't no joke and can come from the most minor wounds.

I was just at Canyon de Chelly a few months ago. It was so lovely I shed a tear.

I don't eat fast food much at all, but a couple of months ago we went into a nearby Shake Shack to get 2 burgers, 2 iced teas, and a shared order of fries.

The bill was north of $30. Not surprising when, apart from the fact the burgers were about $10-ish each, the iced tea costs $3 each for a small. 8oz of Iced tea. That's criminal.

Needless to say we learned our lesson and don't eat out fast food anymore. I can sling a mean burger at home on the stove top in my cast iron pan.

Permanently Deleted

I worked for a medical imaging company that got acquired many years ago. The CFO was a nice enough guy, with the perfect blonde wife, huge suburban house, matching Lexuses for him and missus, and his son was the handsome, curly-headed quarterback with the giant fancy pickup truck (that no teenager NEEDS unless they're the spawn of cattle ranchers...) at the best high school in the county.

But, as I said, we got acquired, and the new company sent over a junior-junior (ie, just out of school) accountant to do the boring duty of running the books. Poor kid tried and tried but he just couldn't get the numbers to add up, so he went to his boss and apologized for not being able to do his first assignment. Boss took a look, cocked an eye, patted the kid on the back for doing an excellent job, and took it to legal.

Seems the CFO was just writing himself $50,000 checks once a month to fuel his lifestyle and "nobody knew it". He ended up in the prison, divorced in a hot second, and his former wife and kid skedaddled out of town before the thing even went to trial.

When looking for my last vehicle, I still needed a midsize very-light-duty truck for my business (film production), I drove the Chevy midsize truck (Colorado?) first on my checklist of trucks to drive. It was a piece of garbage (and this made me sad because I was [trying to be] open to finding an excellent US-made midsize truck). The sales guy was super-enthusiastic, of course, to the point of pushy obnoxiousness. When he asked me "HOW GREAT IS THIS TRUCK???!!!??" I was like "I wouldn't complain if someone gave one to me, but I have other trucks to test."

After test driving four other competitors, I ended up with Honda Ridgeline (which beat out my second favorite from Toyota), that I have now had for 4+ years and absolutely love it - it is a great midsize+ truck. It's kind of a unicorn in Texas (so many Fords and Dodges), but I saw a ton of them in Arizona and other Western states. Great vehicle, and it has CarPlay. Sadly, it's in the shop at the moment (I, uh, backed into a bollard, cough) and my rental is a brand-new Dodge Charger which drives like a lead brick on wheels compared to the Ridgeline. Interior finish isn't bad though...and the UI, while not CarPlay, is polished).

Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles...it boggles my mind.

Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?

Hear the AI generated narrator, tune that out immediately. Rubbish.

Sorry for being late:

https://filedn.com/lghoT7mSAQwSJ1ej9qTGJxL/My Recipes/Recipes/Granny's Greenbean Casserole.html

Just a rambling comment in general vis a vis Starfield. The loading screens mentioned in the article made me think of this.

I am a wierdo who really liked and played alot of FO4 (4 replays). My introduction to Bethesda games was FO3 and FONV just before FO4 released. After FO4, I tried Skyrim - which was ok, I was never blown away by it and have never replayed it. I have tried to play Oblivion but it was so ancient and janky I gave up. I played FO76 for about a year and generally enjoyed it to a point, but always wished the development effort had been applied towards a full-on single-player (or coop!) FO5 game.

I was looking forward to Starfield (I loved Mass Effect, replayed twice). But, I have not bought Starfield, nor am I likely to in the next year. I am going to wait for patches, mods that fix what Bethesda doesn't, and a banging sale on Steam.

In the meantime, I am playing a game I never thought I would play because I never thought it sounded like a game I would enjoy - ELDEN RING. I am not a very good twitch-muscle player (ridiculously bad, in fact), and I play exclusive M+KB games as I never had a console growing up and don't know how to use a control well. Am I enjoying ELDEN RING? Yes...I am with reservations, I still do not like "boss fights" (in any game really, when a boss fight boils down to a box you can't escape with a giant thing in it that insta-kills you, I just roll my eyes in disappointment). But, I am enjoying *everything *in between (glorious seamless no-loading-screens self-directed exploration and problem/puzzle solving) and hate-playing through the bosses.

In fact, the overall seamlessness (ie, lack of loading screens) of ER has spoiled me (it has them, but only during fast travel/respawn). Unvarnished in-your-face loading screens for doing something like stepping into a cave mouth or opening a door will take a full point (out of 5) off a my private evaluation of a game from now on.

We swap between two movies each year.

Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On "star power" alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)

Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun...)

I don't mean to polish my knob, but I am doing a vegetarian menu this year that blows those insipid recipes out of the water. I guess I should start a foodie website and rake in that sweet-sweet ad revenue from click-bait.

(Totally being sarcastic)

Here's the menu:

• Velouté de Châtaignes (creamy fresh chestnut soup)
• Spanish tortilla with homemade saffron aioli
• My grandmother's green bean hot dish (excellent, not your basic beans+soup+canned fried onions mess at all)
• Roasted root vegetables with garden herbs (rutabagas, etc, with sage and rosemary from the garden)
• Winter salad with buttermilk dressing (updated Waldorf)
• Fresh corn soufflé
• Onion-Mushroom-Roquefort-Walnut tarte tatin (centerpiece dish)
• Fresh homemade pickles
• Fresh homemade baguettes
• Risalamande (Danish rice pudding for dessert)

Isn't it like this Bethesda's go-to move now? I mean, it always seems like Bethesda releases a thing that people are really excited for, then people are all like "It sucks!" but then 2 or 3 years later people are still playing it and enjoying it and saying "OK, it's not THAT bad..."

Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap

For deodorant: I have had very good experience with "Thai stone" style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you ... a very long time ... and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.

Or so I gather...