Now that Jason Kottke has provided us with a guide on “How to Order Food in a Restaurant,” I no longer have to worry about how I will pick just one item from a menu of dozens or hundreds of choices. I merely must decide which method to employ; another choice to make!
Month: May 2005
The Most Awful Time of Year
That’s right, it’s time for final exams. I want to write about a dozen things, not the least of which is the five-year anniversary that Annie and I celebrated last Saturday! The entry for that and one or two other events will be back-dated. I also have a few really exciting things going on right now, but no time to talk about them. By the end of May, I should be back to a few entries a week.
The Way to Cape May
Annie and I drove to the New Jersey shore on Saturday to do something different for our five-year Anniversary! It’s hard to believe that we started dating five years ago, but at the same time I can remember so many things from the earliest days, weeks, months, years that made the five years seem short. This trip was the first time that we went to the beach together and it turned out to be a great day. As it was such a momentous occasion, I felt the urge to bring the camera and take more pictures than has been the case of late.
We took a short scenic detour through Camden on the way to Ocean City where we started our day on the boardwalk. It was overcast and cold (for the beach), but that didn’t stop us from taking our shoes off and walking by the water. After about two hours there and getting lost in Ocean City, we picked up a Cape May County map and drove to the Cape May Courthouse Diner for a delicious lunch. By this time, the temperature was in the 70s and the sky was a bright blue.
After walking around the city and beaches of Cape May for a few hours, we drove to Cape May Point to end the day at Sunset Beach. We sat on some rocks near the water and shifted through the pebbles that make up the beach to find Cape May Diamonds and other interesting rocks to remember the trip. It was a wonderful trip—without an itinerary to constrain or stress us at any point—and the most relaxing day I’ve had in a very long time.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I’ve been a big fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams since I first read it a few years ago, so I was excited to see that they were making a new movie based on the book. My anticipation only increased when I saw the trailers for the movie were a bit quirky—like the books—and still appeared to be high quality products. In particular, I really enjoyed the trailer that was about the Guide‘s entry for “movie trailers.”
My brother, Jason, and I went to see the movie on Friday; the theater wasn’t very crowded, but it wasn’t deserted either. It was a good turnout for what—I have to admit—is a very strange and curious book. From the outset, I was nervous that the film would be much worse than I expected: the previews featured several hideous Disney films, one of which was in 3-D. Yeah.
However, the film turned out to be both entertaining and reasonably well-done. My biggest gripe with the film is that there was an obvious effort to develop a romantic tension and provide a clean ending without any of the frayed edges of the books. I admit that the task of taking the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the screen must have been a nightmare, given the intricacies, plot shifts, and narrative digressions of Adams’ stories. Like the book, the movie jumps from one locale to the next with nary a guidepost, but unlike the text, the film never fills in the connective tissues that allow the story to retain true coherence at the end.
Overall, I would highly recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie to anyone who has read the books. Those readers will understand why things in the movie happen the way they do and appreciate much more of the subtle humor and nods to Adams’ earlier adaptations of his story.