Chillin'
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Catch!
When we play catch or practice hitting balls around the vacant lots and parks around here, people stop to watch. Hmm… I’ve never seen anyone else playing baseball in Thailand, either! I’m not a big baseball fan or anything, but it’s great for kids’ hand-eye coordination. I found the equipment for sale at a secondhand Japanese goods store in town. This was a very popular business until very recently – you could buy containers of household stuff from Japan at various Thai shipping ports for around 70,000 baht and up. A lot of people started used Japanese good shops with stuff from a single container. You couldn’t see what was…
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Star Trek Autocorrect
You mean the Federation can maintain a fleet of starships and explore the deepest reaches of space, but they can’t install a spell checker? Typical bureaucracy.
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Kon-Tiki – The Best Fishing Movie Ever?
I don’t remember the last time I saw this movie, but it must have been around 35 years ago… I can’t believe how good it is. This might be my favorite one-hour movie, and perhaps my favorite documentary, ever. There are just these gems of knowledge and experience spread throughout the whole voyage. Gonna watch the Hollywood remake from a few years ago next.
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Rogue One AKA Star Wars in Dubai
For me, this is the second or third best movie in the entire series, behind Empire Strikes Back and maybe A New Hope. Definitely better than Return of the Jedi. I really loved that Donnie Yen was in it, but kind of hated his mystical Tai Chi Yojimbo character (we get it, blind people’s other senses are finely attuned as hell, and Asians all have Jedi-like intuition except when driving ha fucking ha). And goddamn Star Wars weapons always piss me off – why does his sidekick with the belt-fed MG have to rack the slide like a goddamn Remington 870 after every shot at the end? Is it an…
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(Harry) Bosch
This is the best series I’ve seen in a long, long time. It features writers and actors from the Wire, which is evident throughout the first season. For some reason, it made me think of a certain character from 24 as well, and that actor suddenly appeared in one of the later episodes! If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can see it for free.
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Mary Bee
Watched The Homesman a couple days ago. It was dark and simple as hell, and refreshing because of it. Outstanding acting.
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Freed Fishies
I had contemplated throwing all of our aquarium fish back into the pond in front of our house for quite a while. I had gotten quite lazy about cleaning the tank, and with a big pleco in there, there was just shit everywhere. The remaining fish were pleco, a native plant-eater called pla kady, and a stickleback-sized minnow of unknown species who washed up on our driveway less than a week ago after rain and flooding (which is getting worse every year). Today I finally got around to washing the tank and cracked it, badly, when laying it on its side. So I asked Max and Mina what they thought…
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Trash Raider
There is a fat gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus) in our house that raids the kitchen trash when I leave the lid off. He runs away as soon as he hears someone approaching the kitchen, but I can hear the crumpling of the trash bag as he explores. Sometimes I leave the lid of the trash off just so I can hear him exploring…. He’s been with us for a couple years now (they apparently live 5-10 years), so I consider him a friend, but he’s still very skittish. Although he probably just hangs around the trash to catch flies, I like to believe that he’s eating our leftovers; perhaps a tasty…
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Until Game of Thrones starts again…
…House of Cards Season 2 and True Detective are the best recent shows on television. Fact.
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Essential links for October 21, 2013
I am at home enjoying a private day off. My wife has work, my kids are at non-summer summer school, and my sofa is beckoning me. Links already: My Life As a Young Thug Mike Tyson on how he became an animal. New line of underwear filters out farts Is muffling a bug, or a feature?
