Krunk4Ever!

4 slipped through since my last post.
13,990 Caught / 154 Missed / 0 False Positives
(98.9% accuracy / 0.15%)

Animation was pretty good, but not superb or beyond my imagination. Seemed like a decent upgrade from the 1st Ice Age, but I didn’t notice much spectacular. Plus the storyline for this one pretty much stunk. No surprises at all.

Official Site
IMDb: 6.9/10 (12,414 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B- / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 58% / Average Rating: 6.1/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 6/10

Spoilers: (Show)

Story is pretty much, Manny is lonely. He thinks he’s the last of his species. He then meets Ellie, a female mammoth and thought his species could be saved. However, Ellie thinks she’s a possum and funny stuff happens. She later realizes she’s a mammoth, and Manny goes off and says maybe it’s their responsibility to keep their species from extinction. She gets mad.

So on and so on. The real enemies, some shark and alligator type creatures were easily destroyed.

In the end, they see a whole herd of mammoths, so the “responsibility” to recreate the species no longer existed, but Manny still wanted to be with Ellie. The End.

The only fun thing were the water slides. Those were pretty neat.

I always thought male elephants were the only elephants with tusks. But according to Wikipedia: Both male and female African elephants have large tusks that can reach over 10 ft (3 m) in length and weigh over 200 lb (90 kg). In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have tusks which are very small or absent altogether. Asian males can have tusks as long as the much larger Africans, but they are usually much slimmer and lighter; the heaviest recorded is 86 lb (39 kg). I guess Ellie having tusks isn’t that weird anymore.

A extremely funny movie. A definite must watch if you haven’t seen it. Talks about the spokesperson for the tobacco industry and brings in other MODs (merchants of deaths). Apparently, the movie is based on a novel by Christopher Buckley.

Official Site
IMDb: 8.1/10 (8,949 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 88% / Average Rating: 7.4/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 8/10

Spoilers: (Show)

Movie is about the PR guy for tobacco. He’s the one that goes on talk shows to defend tobacco. He’s the one that comes up with crazy ideas to get more people to smoke. Yep, he’s the guy with a smooth mouth and the reason why he does it is just like everyone who takes a job, to pay the mortgage.

He also has a son that’s pretty neat and looks up to his father, not because of what his job is, but because his father’s logic sounds very reasonable to him, and the kid ended up winning state debate or something.

The story goes to show you how the tobacco industry came up with an “institution” to study tobacco, pay off stars to keep their mouth shut, get movie stars to smoke in movies, and even saying that it’s in their best interest to keep smoking teenagers alive as they can’t profit off dead smoking teenagers.

If you haven’t seen it, go watch it!

Movie had tons of action and storyline was pretty good, but nothing spectacular and out of the ordinary. I think this is the 1st Mission Impossible movie I’ve seen, because I just realized at the end of the movie, IMF stood for Impossible Mission Force. Movie was somewhat easy to guess as I had a pretty good hunch halfway the movie who the real mastermind is.

Official Site
IMDb: 6.8/10 (23,209 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 71% / Average Rating: 6.7/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
My Rating: 7/10

Spoilers: (Show)

Storyline went like, Tom Cruise is out of the missions and became a trainer. His best trainee gets captured. He goes on a rescue mission, however, her brain gets fried.

He wants revenge, and finds clues, and ultimately gets himself into trouble as there’s a rat inside the camp. His financé gets captured and he goes off doing the impossible to save her, including breaking into a high security Chinese laboratory to steal something know as the “rabbit foot”.

I just watched it for the action, but the storyline was pretty good.

How the heck did a female doctor shoot like that on the 1st try?

For some reason, I feel that Philip Seymour Hoffman is going to return in MI:4 with plastic surgery.

The best line in the movie:

Listen, man. I don’t mean to cross the line, but was there something going on between you two? You and Lindsey.

Lindsey was like my little sister.

And you never slept with your little sister, right?

He’s so cute!!! A lot cuter than he was in previous cartoons. The movie was a lot of fun, basically a kids movie. And did I mention how cute he was!?!?!

Anyway, I have like 20 movies to review, so I’ll try to zoom past these. I’ll also start giving my rating (Xyon’s recommendation), though I’m not going back to update all the previous ones.

Official Site
IMDb: 6.7/10 (1,426 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B- / Yahoo! Users: B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 69% / Average Rating: 6.2/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 7/10

Spoilers: (Show)

Movie’s pretty simple. Ted (the guy in the yellow safari suit) goes to the African jungle to search for a lost 40ft statue in hopes that it’ll attract enough people in New York city to go to their museum, or else it’d close and be turned into a parking lot.

In Africa, he meets this cute monkey which follows him all the way home. George being curious gets into trouble and Ted saves him most of the time. Ted sends him away, but later realizes that the monkey has been the best part of his life so far and goes and finds the monkey again.

Storyline was decent, but you just have to see it for the cute monkey.

One thing I was expecting but didn’t get was when the press started taking pictures of the cute monkey, I thought everyone was lining up to see the monkey and not the statue. Guess I was wrong.

Finally, I don’t get what gives them the right to take the monkey statue from Africa and put it in an American museum. This is such a controversial topic.

My queue just keep getting bigger and bigger. I have like 20+ movies yet to be reviewed.

I also spent sometime this weekend migrating my old site’s blog over. Seems to be a long and arduous process. Only got a couple months in 2002. It’s hilarious seeing how my blogging (writing) style has evolved.

I was also burning off a bunch of watched “stuff” to free up space. While browsing for stuff to burn, I remember I haven’t watched the AIR - Summer Special yet. Unforutnately, Potato (the cute puppy) didn’t show up. This special was more about the past between the journey to find the little girl’s mom. However, they did introduce a cute bunny. Click the following images to watch the videos:

Random Crap:

What if Tequilla was a Prescription Drug? (from MS newsgroup) - hilarious advertisement/disclaimers for Tequilla.

Alan Cox’s ThinkPad battery explodes - For a moment, I thought IBM had fallen into the bunch of manufacturers with bad batteries. Fortunately, the title was very misleading and I quote: Telsa does note, however, that the battery was third-party and was bought on eBay, so it may not be an authentic IBM pack at all.

Polish woman caught growing marijuana for cow - A Polish woman who grew marijuana to calm the nerves of her cow　has been charged with cultivating a narcotic by police in the western town of Lobez.

Court says $32,000 is too much to fondle bosom - A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled.

White & Nerdy (MS newsgroup) - “Weird Al” Yankovic’s new music video, from the album “Straight Outta Lynwood” (in stores Sept. 26) Hilarious music video once again! However, as Weird Al notes on his blog:

I’m very sorry to say that the AOL “First View” Premiere of the “White & Nerdy” video has been cancelled.

Apparently, the video has already leaked online, and AOL doesn’t feel comfortable doing a “World Premiere” promotion for a video that a number of people have seen already. (I can understand songs leaking, but a video? How’d THAT happen?)

Anyway, it’s really a bummer… it would have been great promotion for the album… but hey, life goes on.

So…

I’ll be uploading the video to this page shortly. Tell your friends!

You may also want to check out his other music video (animation) for Don’t Download This Song.

worlds yo-yo contest 2006 1A 1st - Hiroyuki Suzuki (mickey) (from Tera) - I’m not sure if the title implies he won first place, but he was awesome. I obviously don’t know how hard some of these tricks are because there were certain parts in the oooohs and aaaaahs that I didn’t see to be that complicated. Then again, I probably couldn’t do 99% of what he did. The song in the background was actually rather amusing. I had heard the Korean and Japanese version by 이정현 (Lee Jung Hyun) called ワ-come on-. Then Mechy told me about the Cantonese version called 獨家試唱 by 鄭秀文. Now it appears there’s a Mandarin version too!

Just finished watching this 12 episode series: 結婚できない男 (Kekkon Dekinai Otoko - Man Who Can’t Marry). Series is awesome and hilarious.

For more information, see:
JDorama
DramaWiki

Spoilers: (Show)

Series is about a perfectionist architect that designs houses with the kitchen as the focus. His designs are actually pretty neat. He also loves being single and living along. He never lets people into his apartment and his very stubborn about his work. He doesn’t believe in love nor marriage and finds them to be annoying.

So the series goes through his guy with an funny character and how he slowly evolves to take in friends and finally… *wink*

There’s not much else to say about it as it is a comedy. There appears to be a season 2 because somethings were left unresolved.

Things I noted was that on his 24″ Apple LCD (or was it 30″), he was using Windows XP (probably BootCamp on MacIntel) and the browser he was using was IE.

I also made some clips from the final episode:

There is a white box below you can click on:

I was watching this while eating dinner (I believe it was cereal - Frosted Flakes with milk) and then I got the sudden urge for sushi. Unfortunately, it was past closing time for most restaurants. If you want to understand what went on when his door bell rang, some newspaper salesman was trying to get him to subscribe to their newspaper. He’d even throw in a free box of laundry detergent. When his neighbor walks by, he tells the salesman that the lad behind him doesn’t have a subscription yet.

This video clip was made to show how organize he is, even when selecting something to wear; which totally reminds me of my friend Mechy. Although now subtitles are provided, if you want to understand the context, read on. Before this clip, he went to visit his doctor saying he’s feeling queasy (nervous) because he’s about to be on TV in front of millions of viewers. The doctor comments, in that [shirt]? Later, he goes home and takes out all his shirts and lies them neatly on his table and sends photos of him wearing them to the doctor asking for her comment. First one was too dark. Second one made him look too young. Thrid one made him look “cute”. Fourth one was perfect. And what made the situation hilarious was when he told the doctor, “Why am I taking your advice?” The doctor replied, “You don’t have to.” He then replies, “Well, if the million of viewers don’t like this shirt, it’ll be your fault.” She then angrily yells, “Like I would care.” *click*

Thanks to Cari for winning me a Blingo prize! I opted for the iTunes $10 GC once again.

Go Blingo!

With the new album views where you can browse your songs grouped together with an album cover, I noticed it was quite inconsistent with the groups, often splitting albums into multiple groups. For example:

So I consulted Belldandy (him being the Apple expert). He said this was a known issue with iTunes and the current resolution is to check the Part of a compilation checkbox. I never really touched that checkbox as I didn’t really know what it meant and really never had a reason to. I tried his suggestion and it indeed worked, so I went on and merged the remainder of my albums which were somehow mysteriously split.

However, I then hit the above problem. I had 2 albums called Heaven. Even when I enabled “Part of a compilation”, they didn’t merge, so I played around trying to figure out why they were getting splitted and not grouped together.

It turns out that iTunes will ONLY group tracks together if the ALBUM + ARTIST is the same. If you enabled “Part of a compilation”, it marks the album having various artists and then that allows grouping of an album with different artists. However, in my case above, I have 2 Track #1s on different albums titled Heaven. I couldn’t mark the other track as part of a compilation as it’ll group both albums together. So what I ended up doing was setting one album to be Disc 1 of 1 and that seemed to work as the other didn’t have any disc info.

Did I mention how neat the turntable view is?

Though it does take up a lot of unnecessary resources.

Random Crap:

And the grad students most likely to cheat are… (from /.) - The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business. Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students. Business students need to cheat?

Samaritans unwittingly help in car theft - People got behind and pushed and even offered an impromptu driving lesson to help a boy who was struggling to drive a car — failing to realize that the 14-year-old was stealing the vehicle, police said.

Eat a roach and be the first in line - Why wait in line when you can just eat a cockroach? That’s the question Six Flags Great America is asking its thrill seekers during its Halloween-themed FrightFest. The amusement park is daring customers to eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach in exchange for unlimited line-jumping privileges.

Sex or a long life? Guess which Britons chose - A large number of Britons would be prepared to give up sex if it meant they would live to be 100, according to a survey on Friday.

Brain stimulation produces creepy shadow feeling - Stimulating a certain area of the brain can produce a creepy feeling that someone is watching you when no one is, scientists said Wednesday. I hate that feeling!

Panda bites man, man bites him back - “No one ever said they would bite people,” Zhang said. “I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don’t remember much.“

Jerusalem? Never heard of it - “Jerusalem. There is no such city!” the Jerusalem municipality said in the English-language version of a sightseeing brochure it had published originally in Hebrew. The correct translation: “Jerusalem. There is no city like it!”

Virgin Atlantic Bans Dell, Apple Laptops - Amid a slew of incidents involving exploding Sony batteries, Virgin Atlantic announced that it won’t allow passengers to carry any Apple or Dell laptops onto flights.

How to Talk Like a Pirate (from /.) - A classroom educational film on the language of Pirate. A rather hilarious video on pirate linguistics.

Mr. Rogers puts in the wrong tape (from RayAlome) - It’s suppose to be a video tape about making hoes (or maybe hose), but someone edited those out and made it about making… You get my drift.

Mad for U.S. beef, herd heads for Tokyo restaurant - Hundreds of people queued up at a central Tokyo restaurant on Monday to savour a dish not tasted for more than two years — “beef bowl” made with U.S. meat.

Man sets sights on eye-popping record - Claudio Paulo Pinto is looking to break an eye-popping record. Literally. Pinto can pop his eyeballs out of their sockets at least 7 millimeters (0.3 inches), a national record for eye-popping according to RankBrasil, an organization modeled after the Guinness Book of World Records that lists Brazilian records.

X-rated font used on third-grade handout - School officials apologized after an X-rated font was used on a third-grade spelling packet handed out to parents. The font showed male and female stick figures in provocative poses to form the letters of the alphabet. How does a teacher mess up something like this?

First penis transplant reversed after two weeks - Surgeons in China who said they performed the first successful penis transplant had to remove the donated organ because of the severe psychological problems it caused to the recipient and his wife.

Punctuation author collects examples on Web site - “Goats Cheese Salad … tomatoes, onions, goats, cheese.” A misplaced comma in the list of ingredients gives diners a totally different dish — and gives British writer Lynne Truss new ammunition in her campaign for the proper use of punctuation. The author, who was totally stunned when her book on punctuation “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” became a British and U.S. hit, has set up a Web site (www.lynnetruss.com) that is collecting funny examples of wrongly used commas and apostrophes such as the above example. Here’s the direct link to the funnies. Not much so far.

Woman accused of hammer attack over gas - Police arrested a woman who allegedly attacked a San Antonio convenience store clerk on the head with a hammer after he turned down her demand for free gasoline on Tuesday.

U-Va.’s One-Year Wonder (from /.) - David Banh, an 18-year-old from Annandale, just graduated from the University of Virginia in one year. With a double major. His college education, almost entirely covered by a patchwork of scholarships, cost him about $200. And he sold back textbooks for more than that. Now he’s starting graduate study at U-Va. with a research grant. So at this point, he’s technically running a profit. … He was helped by the fact that U-Va., as a public school, costs a lot less than most private colleges. And that the university accepted many of his Advanced Placement credits from high school; many of the most selective private schools wouldn’t. As it was, he doubled up on course credits and took more physics over the summer to finish his second major.

USBCELL: Batteries That Recharge Through USB - Produced by Moixa Energy, USBCELL batteries are simply batteries that recharge from any USB port. They require no separate recharging devices, cradles or cables and can be used exactly like a normal battery. The design itself is rather like a typical memory stick with its flip top lid and they could be set to deliver the same killer blow to the battery market that memory sticks did to floppy discs. A very interesting concept, but one that would fail due to several factors. It’s only a 1300mAH battery (most digicams require ~2000mAH) and the price of £12.99 (~US$25) is rather steep for just 1 rechargable AA battery. I can get a NiMH charger and a pack of AA batteries for less than that.

The never-ending mortgage (from MS newsgroup) - I first of this from Derek and how there’s a mortgage in Japan that you can pass down onto your children. Appears it’s hit the UK (and maybe the states soon). In a revolutionary move, homeowners would never need to repay a single penny of their mortgage before they die. Instead, the debt would be passed to their offspring, allowing them to slash the amount of inheritance tax they would have to pay. One expert yesterday nicknamed the new mortgages ‘the debt that never dies’ because they can continue to be passed down through the generations.

Here’s some funny math solutions (from MS newsgroup):

Finished watching My Boss My Hero a couple ago. This 10 episode JDrama finally came to an end. It started out amazing, but the slowly lost its touch. The ending was rather bad. Here’s more info on it:

JDorama
DramaWiki

The English subtitles for this series came out rather slow (serveral weeks behind), so I ended up watching it with Chinese subtitles released by G.P.S. which you can find on D-Addicts.

Spoilers: (Show)

So I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts. Story’s about a son of a Yakuza boss going to high school in order to become the next boss and the rest is just his hilarious encounters, like flying over rooftops to get pudding, falling in love with a 18 year old (he’s 28), crying in front of the masses, and finally getting accepted as one of their own.

There’s really not much more to say then it was a really fun series. Though like season 2 of Veronica Mars, it appears to have many loose ends that hasn’t been tied up. I’m guessing it’s meant for season 2.

Like who was the old lady? At first I thought it was Sakaki’s mom, but it turns out not to be. What we learnt so far is that she and Sakaki’s father are what I believe to be lovers (as Sakaki’s father comments that she’s still so cute) and that they haven’t seen each other in over 20 years. She doesn’t know how old Sakaki is, so she must not be the mother.

Then there’s the ending, where Hikari asks Sakaki that when she grows up to be an adult, would he give her a date (do remember, there’s a 10yr age difference). Sakaki says that when she does grow up, she’ll be a fine lady, and he won’t match her anymore (配不上). Though he did promise her a date, but then turns around and tells her that Sakura (Sakaki’s first friend in the school and Hikari’s friend since babies) has feelings for her.

Here’s a clip I wanted to share:

Parent Teacher Conference - when Sakaki finds out that there was going to be a parent teacher conference (really parent teacher student conference - 3 person conference), the above is what he imagined would happened.

The final episode of 結婚できない男 (Kekkon Dekinai Otoko - The Man That Can’t Marry) was just released. Awaiting subtitles currently and will be done with another series. At first I liked My Boss My Hero more than Kekkon Dekinai Otoko, but as the story progressed, Kekkon Dekinai Otoko was a much better story and Kuwano-san has quite a character. From what I hear, HKenshin wants to be just like him.