The Thursday Buffet

I really should be writing for work right now, but I toil for you and yours. I didn’t watch any sports yesterday. Instead I watched the first two parts of The Staircase, a seven-part documentary about a murder trial in Durham, NC. I recently resigned up with Netflix after a two year or so hiatus, and I’m coming hard and fast with the documentaries. I can record most of the movies I want off IFC and TCM, no commercials or anything. It’s as easy as pie.

As for Netflix, in the last two years, they managed to lose all my movie ratings, which is fine with me. I was always torn on how to do the ratings. Netflix recommends that you rate movies so it can give you recommendations, but I don’t like the way it operates. I tend to overthink the whole thing and the star system rather than doing it off the cuff. So my new plan is to rate the movies after I watch them and that’s all. Here are my ratings so far:

Amadeus: 4 stars
Wordplay: 4 stars
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Doc about making of Apocalypse now): 3 stars
Crash: 2 stars

That doesn’t give Netflix a lot to work with, but I’m curious as to what they can do with such little information. I want to see if the recommendation system Works.

The other thing I did yesterday was finishing editing and annotating an interview with my mom for Last Exit Magazine (online). This will leave my youngest brother, Grant, as my only childhood household family member not to come straight in my crosshairs on that site. They say write what you know. Anyhow, I recommend signing up for the Last Exit newsletter so you can read it when it comes out.

I wish I had some baseball observations today but I do not. I see that Manny hit his 23rd grand slam. Good for him. And I managed to switch away from Miguel Tejada’s game-winning hit in Houston one pitch beforehand, because I was bored by the whole thing. On some days, a Houston/St. Louis pennant race seems very exciting, and yesterday was not one of those days. No, yesterday was exciting because I finally got to use my new rice cooker. After a failed first attempt to buy one (I picked the wrong one off the shelf at Target), I unpacked that baby into my still-cluttered kitchen from painting my apartment, cleaned it out, and let it fly. Fifteen minutes later, I cooked up a can of beans. Then I combined them, added salsa verde, and chowed down. Total time of actually doing anything: about 2 minutes. Heaven, they name is salsa verde. Praise to be Jebus.

Won with the Marlins to push my Streak for the Cash to 8, then lost it all on the Red Sox, which I sort of knew was going to happen.

Scatterbrained. The end of the week is in sight. Happy Thursday. Go read Frowner.