The New Musings of a Quiet Geek

I could tell you where I've been but I assume many of you are friends of mine on Facebook and already know. Besides, I'm done talking about it. I could tell you about "the war" between Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and DC's Arrow . Right, speaking as a fan boy, the latter show, in it's second season, is showing the rookie how it's done.  To be fair, however, I'm going to wait to see if the ABC series picks up the pace in the second half... No, today, I want give my thoughts on the new CBS series Intelligence. Earlier this century, NBC tried to reboot The Bionic Woman . Her name was Jamie Sommers and she had the same abilities as Lindsay Wagner but that's where the similarities ended. The show bombed.  I remember pointing out at the time, the lead actress, Michelle Ryan was better at the role when she didn't have to hide her British accent so that didn't help... Anyway, this season CBS decided to not reboot the concept just blatantly ...

Recently, in movie news it was announced the Marvel speedster Quicksilver would appear in both Avengers 2 (with his sister Scarlet Witch) and in the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past .  (Then Warner Brothers announced a Flash movie would happen but more on that in a minute...) As many geeks, but maybe not average moviegoers, know, Marvel Studios does not own the live-action "X-Universe"; Fox does. However, some characters, like Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch can be used by both with a few provisos.  Marvel can't mention that they are mutants, meaning some other reason they have powers will probably have to addressed, and that their father is Magneto.  Since Wanda is not appearing in X-Men ,  Fox may not have to gloss over much.  Maybe the fact Quicksilver was married to the Inhuman, Crystal? That's not likely to come up in conversation... Anyway, DC Comics had a superhero with super speed first. There have been three Flashes in the comics.  All, impor...

Man, I'm unproductive today.  I'm also somewhat annoyed. As some of you may have noticed on Facebook yesterday, I related the story on how I got a call from my doctor's office that I still hadn't gone for lab work that had been ordered 2 weeks ago.  One, I don't remember hearing this before. Two, it wasn't mentioned last week when the pain in my side was determined to just be a, really bad,  muscle pull.  If such an order existed wouldn't it be cancelled after the ultrasound found nothing? Anyway, my second clue that this  clue this wouldn't end well: the lab test was set up at not my usual hospital but the other one.  Say what?  So I went that afternoon.  They had no record of the order.  They called my doctor and I waited though when she go an answering machine, I knew the damn office was closed. I waited anyway about 2 hours.  My entertainment was druggies and Fox News... I was going to review The Wolverine here but it's not pla...

Saw RED 2 yesterday. Just to get it out there, I fall into the "Better than Original" camp.  Mary Louise Parker was funnier than I remember her being in the first.  Perhaps her funniest role, if not best, since Boys on the Side .  John Malkovitch and Helen Mirren kick ass both in the comedy and action departments. Catherine Zeta Jones and Anthony Hopkins and even Byun-hun Lee were more than adequate replacements for Morgan Freeman and the late Ernest Borgnine. As much as I love nitpicking, I really have none... 

So I'm back in Portland. Still not 100% but I have the energy to do what I need to do.  (Isn't that the slogan for "Powdermilk Biscuits?") I have nothing more to add to that. Questions? Fingers crossed that I get back on the hospital's free care program because this upcoming bill (Still paying off the April fun...) will be horrible even after my insurance pays their part... Oh, Amos' self-cleaning litterbox finally bit the dust after the rake kept getting stuck and made noises like an MRI machine. (Machine gun for the non-medical among us).  Guess who, while recovering from neurosurgery, had to take the outercasing off to convert it to a normal box? Man of Steel devolved into non-stop action towards the end of the movie but I really can't say any of the action scenes were completely unnecessary. They made logical sense. They were just too long.  Readers of fanboy rants know the issues they had with all the previous movies.  Too much Luthor and not enou...

1. So for those of you not Facebook friends with me, the shunt malfunctioned again.  The day before my scheduled follow-up with the neurosurgeon,  the incision in my head started to leak cerebral fluid.  The cause was either an infection in my abdomen or the scar tissue build-up had formed  a "reservoir" or "swimming pool" and the system simply backed-up and out my head.  After being the hospital for about 10 days,  I am now back at my parents and feeling pretty well.   2. A couple weeks ago, my parents and  I went to see Paul McCartney's son, James, in Portland. In addition to many of his songs reminding me of his father,  my mother  and I were surprised that many songs sounded a lot like John Lennon including the song "Bluebell" which James wrote about his mother.  I had a good time.   The opening act was Jon Sandler and he was pretty good as well...   3. Star Trek Into Darkness was an awesome movi...

So to update everyone on my post-surgery recovery: I have returned to Portland and gone back to work. Still on painkillers and not at 100% energy-wise but I'm feeling well enough for my non-high energy life so woo hoo? Amos the cat is still making me pay for leaving him. Complicating matters, I don't have the energy to fight with him.  He could be pretty fat when all is and and done.  Anyway, he got up on the cabinets again after a catnip fix but got down before I could snap a picture. Oh well... News on the new fall season are emerging.  Really, the only two shows I care about given the axe were Body of Proof  and Vegas so that's nice .  Honestly, after their cast shake-up, Body of Proof 's writing went down hill. The first 3 or 4 episodes seemed derivative of Castle and this season mind you!  I think they hit their stride after that though. This week's episode was probably the best of the season. When the period drama Vegas was announced with it's ...

As many of you know, it turns out the flu I thought I had was actually classic shunt malfunction symptoms (horrible headaches and chills) that was always told to look for.  In 35 years, I had never experienced them and really am not looking forward to ever experiencing them again!  Again, this discovery came from going to a different doctor.  This time, instead of my eye doctor, it was my primary care physician.  According to this blog's archives, I was apparently irked, the first time I went to see her after moving to Portland,  she wanted me to touch base with the neurosurgery office.  My shunt has now malfunctioned twice since.  [Insert morbid laugh here].  The medical opinion is that this malfunction occurred because 35 years worth of scar tissue was impeding the flow of cerebral fluid into my abdomen.   Overall, I really don't feel as bad as the incident last summer.  My aunt says I'm an "old pro."  Luc...

Several topics have been ruminating in my head for days and I need to unpack them. Some are extremely trivial; especially compared to some of the other things I want to discuss, vent or whatever about but if you can't do that on your own blog, what is the point of having a blog? 1.  The Red Sox have been awesome and impressive this season.  What a turnaround.  I'm sure Juan Nieves  does the bulk of the work with the pitching staff . The improvement of the bullpen could be all him for all I know but Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz have definitely benefited from the return of John Farrell.       Pitching and defense may win games but the offense has not disappointed. Whenever the team is able to play again, Ortiz will be back.  Sure he's not going to hit 50 homers but we'll probably get 20-30 added to the mix which would be awesome! 2.  The search for the second fugitive has cancelled not only the game (despite all the talk yesterday from pl...

Maybe you wish I had...  Busy week. Probably mentioned a choral group that has rehearsed at my church before to some but may not have blogged about it.  Anyway, this year in addition to 6 Sunday afternoons in a row, this year, they used the church for a week as well. Longer days.  Much extra money for me. Yay!  I know I blogged about the prima donna pianist that accompanied the string quartet years ago. Well, this group had a harpist. (Or a "harpie" as I came to refer to her. )  Anyway, long story short, she got me in trouble with the sexton and managed to piss off the director himself with her antics.  Did I mention the extra money was good? Speaking of money, I officially sold another copy of my first novella, Winter Storm . You can't buy a candy bar (at the "high school price" for that matter) with the amount of money I made but how many books have you published?  So the health drama continues.  Clearly, mid-next month is longer than thre...

For reasons that are not really important for complete strangers that stumble upon this blog to know, I discovered that even though my health insurance's billing department has been here in Maine for years, and I've paid for 2 appointments with my PCP and 2 eye appointments (the last of which discovered my recent shunt malfunction incidentally) and a neurosurgeon office with no problems, it's now become a problem I have a Connecticut-based policy.  The problem here is if I need to see a specialist, I can't find out if one is covered by my insurance because the website search engine doesn't accept my Maine zip code. So I requested paperwork to transfer over to a Maine policy.  It seemed like forever for it to come so I called them back to see what's up.  Aside from being a huge corporation (Is it any wonder why I'm anti-Big Business?), I'm pretty sure their phone system was having problems.  Anyway, long story shorter, I get a hold of the right operator a...

On Monday, the holiday, the internet crapped out.  Calling my internet service provider to see if there was some kind of outage, it turned out to be my equipment that malfunctioned.  The woman at Tech Support seemed to think that given that I had an older model it had died of old age and to replace the cables etc. as well.  On Wednesday, the new modem arrived and I was back in business thought it was hideously sluggish.  Under normal circumstances with a DSL modem, when this happens you reboot it. Doing so killed it again.  Thursday, I realized I had switched out the Ethernet cable   (Firefox wants to capitalize it. Who am I to argue?) but I had left the original phone cord in place so I switched it out.  Nothing happened. Talked to my father on the phone and made lunch and then it worked.  Better than it had since last weekend. I spent an entire post on Mission: Impossible last time and that had low readership but I want to discuss another spy...

Finding movies (or sitcoms for that matter but that's better left for another post) on Netflix that look interesting but haven't already seen has been Mission: Impossible lately. Case in point, I re-watched Mission: Impossible III last night. The most recent installment, Ghost Protocol is even more Mission: Imnpossible -y and therefore even better but III is a nice first step. One of the little things I liked about Ghost Protocol was use of the Alias codename "Outrigger." In my third viewing of III , I finally noticed the use of the codename "Phoenix." Also, having watched Maggie Q, who played the "femme fatale" here, in her current role of Nikita , I found myself comparing the two roles. My cousin and I have contended for years the franchise can work again on TV. It was established in the '80's that there was more than one team simultaneously so the movies would not be affected. Also, it wouldn't have any of the issues othe...

I'm back! I guess. We'll see how long it is before I don't want to do this any more and take another long hiatus... I could have just scrapped this blog and started afresh but then I would have had to change the signature thing in my e-mail and who's that ambitious? Though, my life is somewhat different now as my cousin now lives in Alaska which he had a blog about but I can't remember the address so you'll just have to take my word for it... I have a new roommate now who's a student at the seminary I work at... Oh, and the seminary finally hired me after 5+ years as Assistant Librarian. They're effectively going out of business as a seminary in June and becoming a continuing ed/support system for "ministry in the 21st century." It's really hard to describe. "You'd have to be there" is is an overused, and possibly too inaccurate, a phrase but but we'll go with that... Anyway, this new identity won't include a lib...

I'm sure I'll lose followers for this but my head is about to blow apart. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have made idiotic statements. Dan Quayle said "A Mind is a terrible thing to waste and not to have a mind is being very wasteful." Al Gore invented the internet. John Kerry's favorite Red Sox is "Manny Ortez." George W. Bush made up his own vocabulary. (Which may in fact just make him a trendsetter.) Our own Vice President Biden called Obama "clean and articulate" and later was asked on the ticket! I won't argue with Sarah. Maybe she can see Russia from her house. I mean it is a pretty damn big country... What I can't forgive her for though is her irresponsibility posting a political enemies list and actually calling it a "Hit List." Her folksy charm may be amusing to city mice with Master's degrees but that isn't the audience she speaks to; or possibly for. It's the everyman gun enthusiast or the CEO...

I did post a video from the Grace Potter and the Nocturnals concert (Well, from a concert...) but let me describe the experience in more detail. Best concert I've been to in years. Maybe since college when I went to see Bob Dylan with Natalie Merchant... (To be fair, the first time I saw Jewel she had just broken her collar bone and the second time she was forced to open for Rob Thomas...Jakob Dylan didn't like performing in a casino...Neil Young's set was too obscure...) Natalie had energy back then bouncing off this foot stool but this time the whole band crackled. Amazon describes The Nocturnals as "a modern-day version of Tina Turner stroking the microphone in a spangled mini-dress while fronting the Rolling Stones circa Sticky Fingers." A pretty apt description I think. To me, they have a jam band quality to them, like the Grateful Dead or Phish as well. (My boss pointed out they are from Vermont citing "Cherry Garcia" ice cream. Not to mention ...

1. Watched American Gangster over Thursday and yesterday. That was a great movie and so well acted. I'm not old enough to know about the true events that inspired it but I'm surprised no one made a movie about it before. Russell Crow, who was also in the recently watched State of Play (Like that period of time where I watched like three Jennifer Aniston movies , this is my "summer of Russell" I guess...), was great as a cop turned DEA, turned prosecutor turned defense attorney but "my man" Denzel Washington rocked as Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas. (Looking at the pictures of the real guy, he reminds me of OJ Simpson...) 2. I'm scheduled to go back up to Ellsworth on Monday as my father got tickets to see Grace Potter and the Nocturnals . I'm excited as they are one of my top favorite bands of the last 10 or 15 years. It'll be a quick trip but worth it, I'm sure... 3. So publisher is pissing me off. I haven't actually written ...

Before and during my vacation up to see the 'rents, I saw three movies but I decided to focus here on the one still in theaters. Eat. Pray. Love. begins Julia Roberts leaving her boring marriage. Really, why did she think it would work? She was a CIA Agent and he was mole planted at the IMF by an arms dealer. Then she falls for The Green Goblin ; who, frankly, was too young for her. She decides to travel the world and eat. A lot. In India, this Texan who supposedly looked like James Taylor but reminded me more of the pedophile/killer from the Lovely Bones , (No, it was actually the father/stepfather from Step-Brothers interestingly enough which I apparently didn't review...) nicknamed her "Groceries" because of this. One of my favorite parts... After Italy and India, and the eating and the praying, she returns to Indonesia where she meets Real Life Mr. Penelope Cruz . (I apologize I've never seen any of his acting before therefore no better links.) I've s...

My regular readers, if you're still around, may remember that at least twice in the past I've gone into my "I'm going to die poor and alone" mental state. It happened again about a month ago now. In the past, as you may remember, this feeling coincided with getting dumped or rejected from a job. Sure the latter has happened but, truthfully neither event coincided with the feeling this time and that really bothered me. (Still sort of does...) This may lead to real psychoanalysis later down the road but, for now, I've started vocational-related, but not vocational-specific, rehabilitation. So far, it's revealed a handful of things I never realized about my choices, which does not suggest they were bad choices but that they were simply done without me being aware I made them; like going to college. (Sure, grad school was conscious decision but college? Who knew?) I also, apparently, do not like the fact I'm only above average in math...Also my couns...

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