Happy birthday, Katkim!

It's Katkim's birthday -





And have a wonderful year, too!

_{Images here are from my favourite graphics site, www.eosdev.com.}

Happily bloated...

Today was my second Thanksgiving dinner in two days. I baked a pumpkin pie this morning to take to my friend's place. My oven in this apartment is defective, deceitful, and spawned by agents of evil; by which I mean, it doesn't work very well, and things tend to burn however carefully I compensate. So I was mortified when the pumpkin pie came out of the oven with burned edges.

I was able to poke the burned bits of crust off with a butter knife, though - it was a crumb crust - and my friends never even knew it was burned. I was proud!

At my friends' place, we sat and talked for some time. There was exchanging of birthday present - these include some of my Libra friends, one birthday just past, one tomorrow. Then we ate the sumptuous and lavish dinner. Then we watched part of the DVD of "Apollo 13" - a wave of nostaligia for the space race of 1969.

Die Another Day...

I hadn't seen this, the latest of the James Bond movies. So we watched it after dinner.

A few comments:

• Pierce Brosnan has aged an awful lot since I last saw him. Well, haven't we all. I always think of him as he was in the Remington Steele days. He has a great body, and it was fun seeing him all hirsute and ragged. (Evocation of Aragorn and Wolverine.)




• Halle Berry is great to look at but I see so little personality there that I can't really enjoy looking at her. She had a little more oomph this time than as Storm, but... not much. To my ears, this woman always sounds as if she's reading her lines off a cue card. Is that just her normal diction? She won an Oscar, she must have talent. I just find it hard to see.



• I very much like Toby Stephens as the villain Gustav Graves. I often like Bond villains. (Robert Carlyle springs to mind, and Alan Cumming.)


• Numerous things made me think of scenes and items from comic books. The one-man flight thingummies were like the Legion of Super-Heroes used to have; the electric glove of the villain (with its purple lightning), the transformer-like armour, the exchange of DNA/looks/bodies, the ice palace (like the fortress of Solitude), and so on.... Of course, this was a good thing.



• It didn't seem so exotic this time: the settings (Iceland, Korea) were irrelevant and the only one with landmarks was London. I love that mysterious wall in the Embankment!



• Loved the final scene with Miss Moneypenny.


• As usual, I loved Judi Dench as M and John Cleese as Q.