Anger Management (Widescreen Edition) The irresistible pairing of Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler is the best reason to see Anger Management, a comedy that might loosely be called The Funny and the Furious. Nicholson and especially Sandler have screen personas that partially rely on pent-up anxieties, so there’s definite potential in teaming them as a mild-mannered designer of pet clothing for chubby cats (Sandler) who’s been ordered to undergo anger-management therapy with a zany counselor (Nicholson) prone to occasional tantrums and devious manipulation. Surely this meandering comedy looked better on the page; director Peter Segal scores a few lucky scenes (particularly Sandler’s encounter with a Buddhist monk, played by John C. Reilly), but a flood of cameos (Heather Graham, Woody Harrelson, Rudolph Giuliani, and others) can’t match the number of laughs that fall flat. As Sandler’s understanding girlfriend, Marisa Tomei plays a pivotal role in a happy ending that leaves everyone smiling, with the possible exception of the audience. –Jeff Shannon
Customer Review: Liked the better the 2nd and 3rd time I watched it.
I have to admit that my expectations were high for this movie and I was initially disappointed. The plot was unrealistic and the ending far-fetched. Since I had bought it, I watched it again and found that it was one of those movies that needs to be watched more than once because the enertainment is in the one liners and very funny scenes. Watch it again. It is hilarious. -gooosfraba

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So I haven’t gotten online once since last Wednesday after a small trip to the coast for the weekend to help build a deck at my grandma’s beach house. Among the highlights in my fully-packed inbox upon my return:Apparently bendBroadband is in trouble with one commenter saying they’ve already sold (no confirmation yet — I emailed “fred”). It’s starting to make their Bandwidth Cap look more and more like a money grab if this all turns out to be true. Can anybody confirm/deny? E-mail utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.Barney has way too much fun with alliteration (knowing him, he could’ve made it much worse, but refrained).Finding weed is apparently pretty hard in bend (thanks Kina!)COWPU and COISUG got some press.The US track team sucked it up.I haven’t gotten through all my email or my local blogs yet. It does appear that a local blog did make it into the paper, showing even more how bend Blogs are getting read by the local media (the Bulletin’s IP address is easily bendBlogs.com’s biggest reader, which is fine as it’s a great source for local information and commentary). Anything else I missed over the last few days? Update on 8/26: Full bendBroadband press release after the jump.

Video Dump
Staring at progress bars, setting up a new laptop for my in-laws (it’s Vista, and UAC really sucks), so here are a pile of stuff I’ve got sitting around. Videos after the jump…

Movie Times for the Week of August 1st - August 7th
Weekly movie times for the Regal Old Mill 16, Pilot Butte 6, McMenamin’s, Redmond Cinemas, and Sisters Movie House.

The Most Useful Coverage Of The Olympic Games
Slate has a great bunch of articles covering the Olympic Games, but probably the most useful of them all is the Sap-O-Meter. I had mentioned before how I could use a little less drama in these Olympics and quite a bit more sports on TV (there is already enough drama in a competition like this — do we need more?). That’s why I got a hearty laugh when Lori shared the Sap-o-Meter, and Slate has made a nice little widget where you can keep tabs on the latest Sap:

Free Games If You Have a nVidia or ATI Video Card
I’m not much of a gamer, but I can never turn down freebies:Through an exclusive deal with Nvidia, Valve is offering Portal: First Slice (demo) along with Half Life 2: Death Match, Lost Coast and Peggle Extreme. All you’ve got to do is install Steam on your system.ATI also has a similar deal, but the nVidia deal comes with more games. If you don’t know what kind of video card you have, there’s a really good chance it has a chipset from either ATI or nVidia if it’s an add-in card (meaning it’s not built into the motherboard). If you don’t know still, click here to install Steam, and then click on the nVidia link or the ATI link and see which one will let you install. If neither of them work, then go ahead and uninstall Steam if you don’t want it.

Google Street View Is Almost To bend
I knew the Google Street View was expanding rather quickly, but I had no idea it was spreading like a virus all over oregon. Look at this screen shot I just took (the blue roads are the roads where Street View is available — sorry about the large screenshot): It basically looks like the waters of the Columbia in Portland and the Willamette through the valley flooded and are slowly filling in the rest of oregon. The only reason I found this was that I was looking up my grandma’s address on the coast (where we’re headed to this weekend — if you look really close at the URL in the screen shot, you’ll see the city) and noticed the little “Street View” button. Apparently the little Street View car has been combing quite a few rural (and twisty) highways and is gradually making it over to this side of the mountains, even combing some rural roads over here. The nearest street-view image appears to be on the Madras side of Warm Springs (as well as an equidistant shot up Hwy. 97), and looking at the photo, it looks like the Google guy turned the camera on as he was heading into Warm Springs from Madras (based on the lane he’s in as the passing lanes are coming out of the Warm Springs canyon): Anybody want to make any bets on how long it’ll take for that camera to make it that next 60 miles into bend? It still hasn’t hit Eugene, so I don’t know when it will make it here.

“Don’t You Ever Touch A Black Man’s Radio!”
It’s really hard to blow up he Death Star listening to the Beach Boys. More dubs here, some of which aren’t work-safe.

Time Killer For The Day
Can you guess the 100 most common words in the English language in five minutes? Neither could I. How’d you do?

Some Call It Art
I call it crap. Dangerous crap. Thanks Cheryl for the link.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Central Oregon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.