On my days off, when I'm not watching reruns of Star Trek on TiVo, I watch CNBC for market news. One section that I watch but don't understand much is Rick Santelli's live reports from the pit at the Chicago Board of Trade (he likes to start most of his reports with the phrase, "Well, [insert host's name here], it's interesting...")
When the board is in a rally (or a really bad fall), the pitch of the guys in the background (who are yelling their buy and sell orders at one another) raises to the panicked level you and I might yell something like, "OH MY GOD THAT LITTLE CHILD IS ON FIRE," or maybe, "JESUS CHRIST JEHOSEPHAT YOU JUST DROPPED A GRENADE," or maybe even, "OH LIVING HELL THIS ANGRY-LOOKING OLIVE-SKINNED DARK-HAIRED PERSON HAS DYNAMITE DUCT-TAPED TO HER CHEST UNDER HER RAINCOAT." Sometimes the yelling is so desperate you can't hear what Rick is saying, and once I saw him get pushed the way New Yorkers push one another to get on the subway during rush hour.
We watched Long Way Round, a mini-series program on Bravo where Ewan McGreggor and his friend Charley Boorman rode motorcycles throughout Russia, Mongolia, Alaska, Canada and the US to New York City. It's a good show to help yourself realize two things: 1) Life elsewhere can be very beautiful, and 2) Life can't get any better than our standard of living here in the US. A third possible lesson: 3) Motorcycles don't cross rivers well.
We also watched the DVD release of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Almost unimaginably, they added yet another 55 minutes to the film. The Good News is none of it was the weird male-on-male eye-gazing that ran so rampantly in the original release. I liked the fact that the extra footage was added directly into the film (and weren't just in a separate "Added Scenes" section). The scenes helped flesh out the story. Like now we know what happened to the Orc General (the one that reminded me of the Strange-Looking Brother Locked in Chains from The Goonies), or how Faromir ended up with the daughter of the King of Rohan (I forgot her name), or why All the Stars of the Film rode horse-back up to the Gates of Mordor (there was some missing dialogue with a new character -- they weren't just there to yell epithets over the wall).
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