Night of the Klaw!!!

Well I've got a big mugcup of coffee here to try and sober me up for this little tête-à-tête. I’ve just come from a free evening of all you can drink at a crab restaurant. It was a traditional style Japanese restaurant where the numerous food portions were incredibly tasty, but so small that they’d leave a starving alley cat in the same condition.

It is the end of the school year pretty soon, and while everyone is busy there’s still time for a break up party. That business is one of the reasons why I’ve been slack with the blog. But really, I don't have to blame an excess of work. I can think of numerous excuses to avoid my responsibilities. So anyway, one of the schools I go to asked if I could go to dinner with them tonight. Sometimes I’m busy on Wednesday night with another class, but tonight that was fortunately cancelled. So I said, “OK.”

I was glad I went. Some of the teachers are retiring or moving on to marriage and/or children, so I won’t see them anymore. The conversation was fun, and the food was delicious. Many and various dishes of crab both raw and cooked were served in tiny portions. I haven’t eaten as much raw crab since I went down on that Lithuanian stewardess. I’ll leave that story there. Dessert was a frozen quarter of apple. How weird is that. Frozen apple. It’s apple, but it’s frozen. I couldn’t eat the peel. I tried but it seemed mightily resistant to my efforts. Maybe because of some kind of super power from being frozen. Who knows?

And the abso-fucking-lutely best part was that the school footed the bill. I’d say, “Your tax dollars at work”, but:
(a) You probably don't pay tax in Japan, and
(b) It’s a private school.

A lot of other things have been happening, but I want to work out how to post pictures to Blogger before I write about them. This is because I’ve got some good pictures to go with the words. Makes sense really. However the evil triumvirate of Blogger, Picasso 2 and Hello resist my feeble efforts at understanding. I seem to be pressing all the right buttons, but nothing appears on the blog. Oh well.

The Movie Maven

Alexander
Saw Alexander on Sunday, and really can’t see what all the complaints are about. Is the movie going to change your life? Unlikely. Did it bore me shitless? No, not at all. I really quite liked it. With only two major battles in almost 3 hours, is not an action-heavy kind of epic. If you’re going along for that you’ll be sorely disappointed. However the battles that are shown are really well depicted. There’s an earthquake happening now. Finished. The Indian one is especially humorous in an elephanty kind of way. It made me want to run home and start playing Age of Empires II. Go snuffy! Go the trample!

The movie is very talky. Who would have thought that gay old Alexander had so much philosophizing to do while he brought enlightenment to the world by the sword? But I've got a lot of respect for the warrior-kings of yore. At least they had the courage of their convictions.

The film is pretty brutal. Alexander and his posse show both the physical and emotional scars of their campaigns. It’s also very arty in an Oliver Stone way. If you don’t know what I mean then rent Natural Born Killers and you’ll get the idea. Or better yet you could watch Alexander.

For those who like experimental films with $150 million dollar budgets.

On the subject of movies...
The IMDB Message Boards can be host to a bit of a flame war. Sometimes the Administrator has to bite some arse to quell a firestorm. But Howie Long must have been doing the biting on this message board for Kingdom of Heaven.

Also check out The Fantastic Four preview to see more of that scrumptious Ioan Gruffudd.

And Batman Begins soon.

Sleepy I be.