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This is usually how the CTA buses run. Two running together, a twenty minute gap and then two more.
Thank goodness for this bus tracker thing they now have. I used to have to just stand out at the stop hoping the bus would show up soon. Now I can wait until the bus is about to get to my stop before I leave my apartment. Standing out in the rain or snow sucks.
There is an interesting new plugin for Firefox called Ubiquity. It is kind of like Quicksilver, in that it is a popup command line which you can use to do many interesting things. For example, here's a map:
There would be a map here, but the 0.1 version of ubiquity doesn't want to play nice with Typepad's editor. It looks great in the editing screen but won't publish correctly. :(
To make this all I did was type "map hilo, hi" into the command line. Then an option comes up to imbed in this post. Pretty neat. Here's what it looks like:
It looks like it will be able to do all sorts of interesting stuff.
We went and saw Bottle Shock last Thursday, it was a very nice surprise. It is a very loose retelling of the Judgment of Paris, where some California bested some of the best of France in a blind wine tasting. I think they kept some of the names and the results and the other 90% is made up.
Not that it really harms the movie. The writers did an excellent job making a fun little story out of what they kept. Alan Rickman is excellent as Steve Spurrier, the British owner of a wine shop in Paris, who organizes the competition and travels to California to find the wines to compete against the French. My largest complaint with the movie is there really isn't enough of him in it.
Bill Pullman does a good job as the heavily in debt winery owner. Chris Pine is his surfer/stoner/70s hippie son. He is alright but his character has a kind of normal redemptive story arc. I thought it was funny that they chose to show him in the first scene in the movie in the middle of a big party and the first thing you see is a person taking a very long hit off of a bong. Can I has PG-13 rating please!! I guess it was to explain that he was stoned and not dumb through the first 45 minutes of the movie. I enjoyed Freddie Rodriguez's turn as a young wine making phenom, he had the most good speeches and really sold me on his character. Rachael Taylor is fine as the love interest, but she isn't given that much to do. Last and not least Dennis Farina is fun as a goofy American wine-lover in Paris.
The best single quote in the movie is from a red-neckish guy in a bar "Anybody can tell a Mer-lot from a Zin-fan-del".
There are two stories going on, the wine making competition story, and the "young sexy kids" story. At times there is too much of the "young sexy kids" part. The wine making part is very, very well told, Rickman, Pullman and Rodriguez all show very believable wine making passion. They filmed the movie in the area around the Napa Valley, including at the Chateau Montelena winery. Check out the kids:
Since this isn't a large budget film, they had to cut some corners, the most amusing one is the location of the wine competition. They say it is "outside of Paris" but it is blatantly, obviously somewhere in northern California around where they filmed everything else. They borrowed a few French cars and dressed up some kids in berets, and ta da, you have France. I thought it was funny, but it really didn't take anything away from the movie.
If you are a fan of wine or Alan Rickman you should go see this movie.
It's not Sideways, but they aren't trying for that anyway. It is a fun, and somewhat goofy at times, highly romanticized tale about what wine making was like in the 70s in Northern California and the lack of respect they were given by the rest of the world. If you want to see the movie, you better move quickly, I don't think it will be in theaters for more than a week. When we saw the movie there were only 10 people in the theater.
One last thing, check out this great poster, I really want a copy.
There is going to be a more serious movie about the Judgement of Paris in the next few years, hopefully that movie will give Mike Grgich his due, who was the real Chateau Montelena winemaker. Leaving him out (for the Freddy Rodriguez character) was too bad.
We are going through the worst batch of weather I have seen in years. Here's the current radar:
That's a 30+ mile wide patch of bad t-storms & a few tornadoes.
