Stormy Monday

What's up with this weather? That's back-to-back weeks now of fantastic, sunny weather during the work week followed by clammy, wet weekends.

Great weekend for us. Rhonda's long-term sub position at Whaley is up at the end of the month, but she was just recommended for another long-term gig at Matsumoto. She's doing a tremendous job of balancing full-time work and her credential work. It's not very common to be working alone in the classroom while you're still working on your credential, much less to be commended for it, and I'm very proud of her.

Saturday we were in Stockton for Bubba and Rhonda's ten-year anniversary shindig. That was, of course, followed up by a poker tournament. I came pretty well-prepared this year, playing lots of World Championship Poker on Xbox and reading Doyle Brunson's Super System, "The Bible of Poker". I gotta say Super System was a wise investment (I got it on Amazon Marketplace for less than ten bucks), since I think it was the main reason I won the tournament. Hopefully, no one reads my blog, and no one will read the book, and then no one will get better and I can keep taking pots.

The happy couple got a cut of the winnings, and I think I'll be picking up a Sony PSP this Thursday with the rest. What can I say, I'm a hardcore gadget junkie. Looking forward to Metal Gear Ac!d and Lumines, but the real deal-maker was finding out how to encode video on the Memory Stick for PSP playback. I have been wanting a portable DVD player or a personal video player for over a year, and now I can have that and a super-advanced gaming console. And it looks so damn cool.

I've been taking full advantage of my library card and the outstanding collection of DVDs at the Campbell Library. Since I had some free time tonight, I decided to watch The French Connection, the 1972 Oscar-winner for Best Picture. It's not bad, not better than A Clockwork Orange, which it beat for Best Picture. It's definitely a film that was probably ground-breaking in 1972, but with the deluge of action flicks and police dramas both in film and on television in the years since, it's difficult to recognize it as an influential film in the action genre.

Nevertheless, Gene Hackman's a badass in this movie, long before he was the voice in the Lowe's commercials or the coach in Hoosiers (also on my list to see before March Madness is over). And this is William Friedkin at the top of his game, right before he peaked two years later with the scariest movie ever made, The Exorcist, and before he disintegrated into a total hack in the latter quarter of the 20th Century. The pacing is deliberate in the first forty-five minutes, demonstrating a patience today's less-intelligent action films don't have, and setting up some frenetic action sequences involving subway trains and some unfortunate sap's commandeered car. A director like Michael Bay could learn something from this film, since his films (think Armageddon) are so crammed with action from beginning to end that they are mind-numbing and, ultimately, boring because they have not character development, nor story, nor any tension or suspense built up by the film's pacing.

Whatever happened to Roy Scheider? He was in some great movies in the Seventies and early Eighties, and then he dropped off the face of the earth. He was Brody, for Pete's sake.