Another Chess Post

Apparently the USCF keeps records for a long time. Very detailed records. Take a gander at my chess rating and history from waay back in High School.

It took me a good little while to pull my rating up over a 1000 after getting the most ridiculously low beginning rating imaginable. I remember at one tournament one of my opponents not believing me when I told them my rating was 599.

Wu Tang Clan Ain't Nothin ta F*** With

Play chess in the 36 chambers with the RZA.

Iron Man

Iron Man shows yet again what a superhero movie can be if taken seriously and given over to talented people who actually care about making a good movie instead of a merchandising extravaganza.

Everyone from the top down on screen in this film gets it right, from Robert Downey, Jr.'s cocky and personable Tony Stark to Faran Tahir's villainous Raza.

One of the things that I was worried about going into this film was whether or not the action and the characters would mesh well or if it would end up as two halves that never quite meet.

This is a really smooth movie and doesn't fall prey to the sins of most superhero films. There is no real camp, the progression of the character makes sense and is believable. There is no real forced love story. No one is hamming up their roles. The action and special effects are well done and believable (even the CGI is better done in this film than in many others of the type).

Jon Favreau has done an excellent job of bringing this film together with a kick-ass cast.

Tony Stark is not Bruce Wayne in this film, nor should he have been. If the proposed JJ Abrahms/Tom Cruise version had been made that is probably what we would have gotten. Instead Downey makes Tony a unique character rather than the standard millionaire playboy with lots of technology. He has all the technology because he built it, not because he bought it.

I also liked the subtle nods to the comic book fans such as the obvious S.H.I.E.L.D. references, as well as the terrorists belonging to the Ten Rings which would seem to foreshadow both Hydra and the Mandarin (the logo of the ten rings in the back of the terrorist base looked quite a bit like the Hydra logo and the Mandarin does wear those ten rings).

Excellent film.

Read and Owned

Saw this at Brenna's Livejournal:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you own. The ones you both own and have read, do both.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Coppeld
The Three Musketeers


I believe that is 36 owned and 37 read.

TNA

Just got a bunch of TNA PPVs on DVD, and thought I would share a couple of quick horribly egotistical screen captures:

Me and BST before a show.

Me and BST shocked by Kid Kash performing a hurricanrana on one of the SATs both Jose and Joel Maximo through a table at ringside.

Extra points if anyone really knows who Jose and Joel Maximo of the SAT's are.

Oh YEAHHH!!!!!

There's been something bothering me for literally days now.

Sunday I was eying a package of single serve kool-aid and the smiling Kool-Aid man pictured thereupon, and I started to wonder (Aloud): "Is Kool-Aid man sentient liquid in a type of pitcher containment suit, or is he a sentient pitcher with Kool-Aid inside?"

Also, is his "face" something formed by the liquid or the pitcher body?

Is he, in fact, some type of kool-aid fueled cyborg?

The Kool-Aid being some type of blood would seem to be the case since he does change colors on the different packaging, but does that mean it is a different Kool-Aid man, or perhaps he just has different powers?

If he is, indeed, as previously postulated, a sentient liquid mass, does that mean that if you drink him he would retain his identity inside you, or, much like the aptly named Spider-Man villain, Hydro-Man, does he have the ability to make any Kool-Aid a part of him, but when it ceases contact it goes back to being just ordinary Kool-Aid that has been touched by the extraordinary?

This doesn't help explain at all.

Neither do the descriptions of his comic book exploits.

My vote tends toward sentient liquid. I refuse to believe that a being with such an obvious hindrance as a completely open top of his head would refuse to at least wear a hat.

This also begs the question of sugar or sugar-free Kool-Aid. Which is he? I'm betting standard Kool-Aid man is Fruit-Punch with TWICE the recommended dosage of sugar.

Is there a giant wooden spoon man? Does that enter into some awkward territory?

Discuss.