Roadtrip?

States I have not been to:

Oregon
Montana
Idaho
Nevada
North Dakota
South Dakota
Iowa
Maine
Vermont
New Hampshire
Rhode Island
Alaska
Hawaii

Possible trips:

Ontario Oregon, 28 hours would also knock Idaho off the list
Malad City, Idaho 24 hours
Busby, Montana 22 hours would also knock South Dakota off the list
Elko, Nevada, 26 hours
Hankinson, North Dakota, 16 hours would also knock South Dakota off the list
Sioux City South Dakota, 13hours
Kennebunk, Maine 20 hours
Warwick, Rhode Island, 17 hours
Bennington, Vermont, 17 hours
Winchester, New Hampshire, 17 hours

Google maps couldn’t come up with any thing to get me from Nashville to Alaska or Hawaii

That’s all well and good but I’m leaning more to one of these:

Here’s a route that would allow me to knock Oregon, Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota off the list, but it would take around forty hours going out there.

View Larger Map

Then I could do this to cross Nevada off the list coming back.

View Larger Map
Total driving time around 73 hours.

Something a bit more feasible would be this.

View Larger Map

It would be super easy to just swing down and hit Rhode Island on a little bit more direct route home. Total driving time would be around forty hours.

Something to think about on slow day.

Okay so that’s a bummer the maps don’t show the routes unless you click on the link.

Oh well what do I expect for free.

The Weekend

Well Friday was a nice relaxing night with friends. I like those nights. Which is good because I did the same thing on Saturday, except we broke it up with two movies. Up the Yangtze and Repo Man.

Up the Yangtze is a doc about the Three Gorges Dam project in China, watching the subtitles I realized I have been spelling dam, damn, for about the last month. More specifically it is about a young girl from an imporverished family going to work abroad one of the cruise ships that ply the river. It’s also about a young man from a more affluent family, there income is revealed to be around 3000 Yuan a month if I remember right, but how that relates to other families in China I have no idea. It’s also about the disappearance of old China, which is literally being torn down and flooded. To me it could have benefited from either tightening the focus or stepping back. Still well worth watching though.

Early Sunday morning around 2:05 Repo Man was invested into the Pantheon of “THE GREATEST MOVIES EVER according to Clovis Citwood.” It now resides in the same rarified atmosphere as Two Lane Blacktop, White Lightning, Thunder Road, and the sublime masterpiece Smokey and the Bandit III: Smokey is the Bandit. By the way not only motor movies are enshrined those are just the first three or four that popped into my skull. We went to the Midnight Screening at the Belcourt. I feel bad because I’ve missed half of them (uh, now that I’m thinking about it it’s probably more than half). I love what they’re doing but if people don’t show up why bother doing it. So I feel like I ought to be there for every one. It helps that they have all been movies I would like to see again. Back to Repo Man I sow this back in the early nineties. I don’t remember where or how, it may have been on TBS or something because I didn’t remember half of what was going on in the movie. I pretty much just remembered a weird movie with Emilo Estavez and Harry Dean Stanton, bout a bunch of down and out repo men, and there was some there weird stuff going on. I primarily remembered Harry and Emilo in that big green Impala blasting down the LA river. I don’t know if it would have made any difference if I remembered more or not, but I was blown away by what I saw Sunday morning.

Needless to say, I didn’t get into anything Sunday night. I barely got out of the house to make a quick run to Krystal’s, hmm chili cheese pups. Oh wait I did watch The Fellowship of the Ring for some reason I’m not quite sure of. I should have been watching the Comedy Central thing the I need to get reviewed. C’est la vie, okay that still looks super silly written out. Does it sound that pretentious when I say it?

HeHe

I just noticed my shirt was on inside out.

Just thought you would want to know.

How ’bout another photo?

Taken below the damn at Standing Stone State Park in Overton County. In September I think.

Random Photo Time

Somewhere downtown, not sure which downtown, but I think it’s Nashville.

This Week and End

Every week I have great intentions of posting a little something everyday. Of course that never happens. So here I am again on Friday summing up the week. Well last weekend was pretty nice. Let’s see what did I do Monday, besides work. Oh yeah I worked. My sister was having problems with her email so I went to take a look at it. Of course it started working by the time I got there. C’est la vie. Okay I can pull that phrase off in conversation but it just looks pretentions sitting there on the screen. Other highpoints of the week include doing the second CineGeek podcast and finishing my The Air That I Breathe review. I’ve turned in some less than stellar reviews. Not that I’m expecting perfection, but even I have some standards. So I’m trying to make a point of putting more effort into these. I’m really proud of the last two, this one and the one for Red Violin. Of course there is always the possibilty that it may be completely unjustified and misplaced pride.

There are two gun shows this weekend and I’m going to miss them both. Don’t have anything budgeted for guns right now so there’s not much sense in going. It’s fun to look around and drool though. I’ve still got to get my AR to the range. That’s going to be interesting, pulling the trigger the first time on something I put together for the most part. Of course the part that actually matters the most, the installation of the barrel extention on the barrel, was done by a professional so there’s probably less risk involved than the first time I fired the Nagant, the Makarov or the CZ-52.

What am I doing this weekend? Well I’m not sure about tonight, Maybe, Get Smart, maybe Love Guru maybe nothing. I’m not even sure if we are going to Opry Mills or Green Hills. I guess i should ask more questions. Tommorow is a little more nailed down.  Up the Yangtze and the midnight showing of Repo Man at the Belcourt. I am interested in anything about the Three Gorges Damn project. I’m awed, horrified, intrigued, dumbfounded about the whole thing. I’m not any kind of enviromentalist but that thing even scares me a little bit but you listen to the engineers who are working on it and they have such an optimism about the whole project and what it will mean for China that you start to kind of turn your thining around, but then you hear about the archelogists who have been working non-stop the last several years trying to recover and document what they can. The sheer unprecedented human scale of the thing awsome, in the traditional sense of the word, as well.

That should be enough for an interesting weekend.

Last Weekend

Last weekend was Hulk on Friday, Party at Fred and Mylena’s( I know that I’m butchering the spelling of her name) and family all day Sunday. Sunday was a triple threat. My Brother’s birthday, my Grandmother’s birthday and Father’s Day. We all drove up to see Grandma, who was in decent spirits, She seems to be much better physically, even has that bit of sparkle in her eye, but she’s a a hundered miles and fifty years away. This time we she knew all of our names but she was calling Dad her brother. Besides wanting out of her wheelchair, she forgets that she can’t walk, she seems satisfied. I don’t know if thats a blessing or a curse. On a much happier topic, dessert. It was almost like it was my birthday again on Sunday. Amy made cherry pie for my Brother and Father. I don’t eat cherry pie, so she made a S’More Pie. It was delecious. There was I lot more I wanted to say about last weekend put this is all I have time for now and if I don’t put this up I won’t put anything up.

Hulk

Last Weekend, saw The Incredible Hulk on Friday night. it was okay but hanging out at Kalamata’s and Maggie Moo’s before and after was more entertaining. I loved the opening shot. and the way they rehased the origin in the beginning credits. I loved the old school lab where they crammed Bruce’s brain full of gamma rays. I loved all the little hints about the broader Marvel world, and I’m sure I missed most of those, but besides a few scenes early on I just didn’t really care that much. It’s a fun action movie, but I guess I’m just getting tired of wathcing CGI monsters wail on each other or maybe my organ of suspension disbelief is atrophing in general. Every time that Bruce got big or the Hulk got small I’m wondering where is all that mass coming from and where did is it going. Should there be a huge sucking noise as cubic yards of air are sucked in and a huge fireball from where it’s transformed into green flesh. I can believe someone drinks a potion, gets bitten by a spider, passes through a weird belt of radiation, intentionally shoots himself in the eye with gobs of gamma rays and weird things happen. Maybe they get stronger, have more stamina, they’re senses become sharper, their baldspot grows back in. It’s all extremely unlikely, but I can kinda of believe it. The Hulk is just flat impossible.

Movies

Just finished The Air That I Breathe. I’ll write a review tommorow which should be up on Cinegeek later this week.

Oh, yeah saw Hulk Friday night. It was okay.

More later on both

Little Bit Closer

I know, blogwise the last week has been all style over substance. I’ve got my theme nearly nailed down now so hopefully I’ll get some actual content up this week.

Till next time…

“Almost there, almost there”

“Negative it didn’t go in”

Well here’s the new theme. It’s not comletely nailed down but it looked good enough to put it up. More later, I’m going to bed.