Redbox, I was beginning to despair but I think I love you. Because yesterday was President’s Day – a holiday, I had the feeling today was Monday. But it is TUESDAY! Tuesday is new movies at the $1 Redbox and I looked in and, even though it is almost noon, managed to get Michael Clayton and American Gangster.

Michael Clayton bombed, according to reports, at the Box Office, perhaps because it is about the big corporate law firms that consume lawyers. The “consume” word I grabbed from Slate Magazine’s piece on the movie.

Okay, I am going to go look up American Gangster and see if I’m going to get my dollar’s worth. Uh, four stars from Roger Ebert. Well, that’s good. Here’s his review. I may have to buy these when they go on sale at the video store.

Yes, Redbox, these past few weeks of nothing too good coming out of your little disc ejector . . . and now this. So, it’s okay.

UPDATE: In the comment below, Beemer makes reference to the use of her name. I would like to refer to the NewsOK.com (The Oklahoman) article of December 24, 2007 – an interview which she freely agreed to and is quoted in. Read the article HERE. She can also be seen on youtube in a CNN interview. I went to the maps section on the internet to get a feel for the vastness of Oklahoma and to actually see the paucity of neighbors.

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Once I get to researching something, I am usually fairly thorough and this is no exception. I looked up Ladd Drummond and Pawhuska, Oklahoma and then went to Maps at Live.com. I saw her pond from above – at least I’m pretty certain it’s her pond and her house . . . and a lot of “just land” around it. Whoa, there is a lot of openness out there. You can get lost scrolling along the aerial view, so I don’t even want to think about driving the roads at night. Yes, I would get a GPS – would it work out there? Okay, I would definitely have a county map and a compass and maybe a sleeping bag, extra drinks, a jar of peanut butter, bread, a mad bomber hat, my LL Bean gear – clothes and hiking shoes, one of those plastic containers for gas and whatever else I manage to think of.
I guess it’s cold enough right now that if/when I had to get out to . . . well . . . pee, rattlesnakes wouldn’t be lurking around to tag me. Better plan ahead, if it’s in the summer I would just do it in the middle of the road – no grass for me.

There’s a restaurant there called The Blue Gate and you can see a partial menu listing on the website; I say partial because they leave out what I consider the most important item – meatloaf. When I last went with some cousins who were visiting, I checked to see what the special of the day was and they didn’t list specials; in fact, they didn’t list meatloaf. I almost panicked.

As it was, on that trip we had the family style meal which is okay, but not my favorite, considering I don’t care for chicken.

My mother doesn’t like the restaurant and eats there only as a favor to out-or-town visitors who want to see what it is like. Decades ago, she and my father, first started frequenting a spot in Middlebury – a lunch counter with a small dining area. It has grown since then – Das Dutchman Essenhaus. My parents were charter members. Oh, look HERE to see what it is now. Then check HERE to see what it looked like then. I remember it like this and I liked it that way. (One of the cars in the picture may indeed be my father’s.)

The power just went out in Warner-Robins, Georgia and so the Internet is now not functioning in the place where our fellow i-chatter is now located. Lights back on. Well, that was exciting. See what passes for excitement here – pathetic. Oh well. Watched Breaking Bad tonight – episode 4 – and I really wish this show had been on for a couple of seasons so I could watch one after another on DVD. It looks like Walt will be having chemotherapy and cooking more crystal meth. In the preview, Jesse was complaining that it wasn’t as clear as the first batch. Perhaps this is because Walt does not want to have his meth be the same all the time so the cops won’t think it is from the one source. Or maybe I am wrong.

Last night I tuned into AMC and started watching Letters from Iwo Jima – so far, so good – then I remembered why I had not seen it before – it is in Japanese with English subtitles all the way through the movie. I read well and fast, but shoot, it’s a pain in the neck to have to flick your eyes off the actors to read what they are saying for around two hours. Look somewhere else, blink, realize the subtitle is obscured by the scenery in the film and it is all over. I didn’t make it for the two hours; I fell asleep and woke un during the encore presentation. I turned the TV off.

Would it be such a crime to have the dialogue dubbed in – or at least read as in narration? Mr. Eastwood, sayonara.

I think writing thoughts down, just not thinking them, is a good exercise for your brain. At the very least it can be an indicator of mental decline: Whoa, this sentence makes no sense; AmeliaJake is losing it. Of course, you yourself have to notice this if no one reads the damn blog. But that’s another plus for writing; nobody reads this stuff but it looks okay in a nice template and kind of makes you feel that you have done something.

Ideally, you should only write when you have something worth expressing. However, it is fun to see the little posts pop up on the computer screen, so you write about something – anything. That doesn’t make it interesting, but it does make your mind scramble around. This wouldn’t be a problem if something happened everyday to you that people might be curious about: falling off a roof, meeting a wolf, getting your foot caught in a register, meeting the Queen. But here you are in your dull life and so you just get your kicks from putting a noun and a verb together with an adjective and, if you are daring, an adverb. That’s okay. Nobody reads this stuff.

No, I don’t mean her real picture, the ones you see occasionally on her blog, such as the night she went out for date when she was 17. And I don’t mean the one you see on the still CNN screen video. No, I am referring to the little caricature drawing on the upper left sidebar. She looks friendly in that one and happy and cheerful. I don’t get that feeling from her real face. Now, I know this is probably just me, but there it is. And don’t be mad, but I think she looks kinder in the little image.

That’s my mother’s address. When I would call home from college, I had to spell it for the operator: Ship-she-wana. Now if I still called through an operator, they would recognize it immediately because Shipshewana is a huge flea market/auction in Amish County. I knew I should have invested money in the place. As it is, maybe I will reclaim my old address for the anti-panache of it all.

I have an Apple computer; I am typing on it right now. I am going to tell you about my research into Netflix which I have forever identified with $4.99 a month. Well, guess what? At that price you get a limit of two rentals a month and two hours of watching on your PC. In these $4.99 commercials, I kept hearing the word “unlimited”, but that only applies if you pay at least $8.99 a month. There most popular plan is $16.99 per month for three DVD’s at a time, unlimited rentals and unlimited PC viewing of the much small PC available list.

Of course,  you have to have run Windows Vista or some other Windows product.

So, Netflix . . . Flix Off.