Movies movies movies! We've seen a lot of them lately.

In the theater...
Borat: Hilarious. "When I bought my wife..."

Casino Royale: I'm not a fan of James Bond movies. Too much misogyny and ridiculous gadgets. And save the "But what about Sean Connery...!" Nope, don't like him either. That said, for a Bond movie, Casino Royale wasn't bad. Chris liked it too--he felt it really tried to get back to the original more serious Bond, which he prefers.

Stranger Than Fiction: Not quite all I hoped for, but satisfyingly entertaining.

Happy Feet: a solid Like. Hard to go wrong with dancing penguins and Robin Williams. But...why on Earth did they feel the need to give the female penguins curves and cleavage?! Come ON. Also suffered from the usual problem of very few female characters other than
mothers/love interest. And it made me sad about Steve Irwin's death all over again. (He voices one of the elephant seals.)

Netflix...
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: a little slow (Chris fell asleep...) but interesting. Who knew there were so many parrots in San Francisco? With quite an unexpected ending.

The Lake House: I wanted to like this movie. I love time travel romances. But they didn't even try to follow BASIC time-travel-story rules. Enh.

Syriana: A little difficult to follow. Mostly it just made me depressed that there are people in the world (including in America) who feel that war and death and fighting are an acceptable part of life, and whose end goal is NOT to end these things. How can you even hope to make the world a better place progress with people like that?

We've been subscribed to Vonage (broadband phone service) for almost two years now. What's the verdict?

Well, we're not giving it up, but I would not recommend it to to everyone. I still love the fact we're not giving any money to the traditional phones companies. It's still saving us money--our bill is about $19 a month, which includes more minutes than we use, calls to the UK, caller ID and voicemail. I like getting email notification when we get a voicemail, which is convenient when I'm at work.

They've finally added 511 service, and TiVo seems to be surviving without a connection. We have the phone jacks wired so we can plug a phone into any of our normal jacks.

BUT. The connection just isn't as good. We still have the randomly-generated DTMF tone problem, which I know other Vonage users have problems with as well. Also, the connection has dropped a couple of times. (That could be our Internet connection--hard to tell sometimes where the problem is.) Sometimes there is an echo on the line, or noise. The other day I was unable to get into my conference bridge for a work call--it couldn't recognize my touch tone entries. Also we've had to install some patches when we got our new router, things like that.

So if you are on the phone a lot, or use your phone extensively for business, or are not tech-savvy, I wouldn't recommend it. But for us, it works well enough that the benefits outweigh the problems.

I really want to post more but I just haven't been making the time.

We went to a couple of fun shows recently. One was the Barenaked Ladies (I have lost count of how many times I've seen them...) which was entertaining as always. We had great seats, 4th row, center section.

We also attended Judith Owen and Harry Shearer's Holiday Sing Along at the Great American Music Hall. Harry Shearer was Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap, and performs many of the voices in the Simpsons (such as Principal Skinner and Dr. Hibbert). His wife Judith Owens is a British singer. One of the guests was Jill Sobule, one of my favorite singers. They sang a bunch of hilarious songs and then during the second half they had song books for everyone in the audience to sing along with them. It was a lot of fun.

While we were standing in line outside waiting to get in, an old red Subaru pulled up and was parked expertly right in front of the concert hall. The driver got out and someone said "Hey Harry!" I don't know how I thought Harry Shearer would be arriving, but I I didn't expect him to just drive right up.