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I had a slightly jarring experience on my way back from lunch today which provides a perfect introduction to something I had already planned on writing. I absent-mindedly tuned my car radio to a station that until this week had been an English-language rock station and was briefly surprised to hear a commercial in Spanish. I then tuned to a Spanish-language rock station, and was surprised to hear a song in English. (It was by Shakira, who usually sings in Spanish – and IMO, her Spanish work has been considerably better than the English songs she’s released so far.)

This week’s passing of Cool 94.3 marks the fourth time in just three years that I’ve lost a station from my radio presets. It’s becoming harder and harder to turn on the radio and hear music I like without sitting through too much that I don’t.

Musically I’m down to Star 98.7, which suffers from the binge-and-purge method of playlist scheduling (play the hell out of a song until the audience is sick of it) and an increasing shift toward personalities over music. I can’t hear any music during my morning commute because they run the extremely annoying Jamie and Danny show, and during my evening commute Ryan Seacrest spends more time talking than playing music. To make matters worse, Continue reading →

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The Santa Ana winds are back. I spent a considerable amount of time last night wondering just how strong the glass is in our windows, particularly the big sliding door onto the balcony. We had several brief power outages, the first just long enough for us to head for the flashlights and convince us to not turn the computers back on, the rest lasting only a few seconds each, but plenty long enough to set all the digital clocks blinking again. Three cheers for battery backup in alarm clocks.

The drive to work was… interesting. First we saw one of the apartment complex’s flags had been knocked over, the pole sheared off at the base. Then there was the cop directing everyone away from a nearby street (we couldn’t see anything down there, but we figured maybe a tree had fallen across the road or something). Then there were huge fallen eucalyptus branches by the side of the road, and a number of young trees that had pulled their stakes down with them as they went. At one point traffic slowed to a crawl, until we passed several police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance, and a four-car accident in which a smaller car had hit an SUV from behind, actually pushing the front end underneath the SUV. (And just yesterday we’d been talking about the dangers being in a small car in a collision with an SUV.) After I dropped Katie off, I had to avoid a large tree limb that had fallen into the right lane.

On the other hand, I think all the tumbleweeds went last November.

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OK, first I’d like to stress that I did like most of The Two Towers the first time through. It was mainly the non-ending that bugged the heck out of me, and that was the impression I was left with leaving the theater.

I can say now that not only does the movie hold up to a second viewing, it was actually more enjoyable this time around. Perhaps because I knew where it was stopping, it didn’t bother me so much that it stopped there.

One review I read lamented not seeing the developing friendship between Gimli and Legolas. That puzzled me, since I saw it even during my first viewing of the film. From Legolas ready to defend Gimli to Eomer, to their camaraderie during the battle: Legolas offering to get Gimli a box to stand on (and Gimli smiling at the joke instead of growling), their competition over who can kill more orcs, etc. Actually, that competition was one of my favorite character bits from the battle, and I was glad to see it make it to the screen.

Most of the story changes didn’t bother me much. Continue reading →