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I don’t know if I will be posting much this weekend so here are some links to keep you busy:

https://del.icio.us/popular/
https://waxy.org/links/
https://kottke.org/remainder/
https://engadget.com/
https://metafilter.com/
https://feeds.mark248am1.wpenginepowered.com/

Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids
I watched one and a half movies yesterday. I started watching Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids but I got bored 30 minutes into it and left to go have lunch. I knew it was going to be a documentary but I didn’t think they literally meant a documentary. Plus there was no nudity and all they were focusing around were these young kids growing up to in the brothels were their mothers work. Pretty boring stuff, would rather it have been a movie about the prostitutes themselves and not the kids or atleast I was expecting them to focus more on the prostitution part. The first 30 minutes I watched was about how they were teaching the kids to use the camera and take pictures!

Happy Endings
The second movie I watched was called Happy Endings. I really liked this movie a lot and I think its my favorite Tom Arnold movie ever. I really like Tom Arnold but in most of the movies he is just too silly so it was a good change to watch him take a serious role. It really suites him a lot. I won’t summarize the story in the movie since the movie is actually made up of many little stories that all interweave, kinda like Magnolia just not as hardcore. I actually had the movie for a couple of days now but I kept putting off watching it because I figured I would hate the movie because Lisa Kudrow acts in it. I really hate her, she is really annoying on Friends and I wouldn’t have been able to stand her for 2 hours in a movie. Luckily shes a completely different person in this movie, she’s allot more mature, quieter, not as high pitched and darker. I think this is probably one of her best movie roles also. Oh and Will’s cop boyfriend from the show Will & Grace is also in this movie which is pretty cool. So anyway, from the recent movies I’ve watched, this is one of the top 3. Its a happy movie with many happy endings that will put you in a happy state of mind.

The Bourne Supremacy
Once again I was able to watch two movies yesterday. The first movie I watched was The Bourne Supremacy. It was very forgetful and I think it would be a waste of my time to talk about it allot. I don’t know how the movie scored a 7.4 on IMDB. It was better then Be Cool and Kicking & Screaming but not better then the second movie I watched, The Village.

The Village
Two days ago McArabian suggested I should watch the movie The Village starring Joaquin Phoenix. So I downloaded it and watched it last night and it was a really good movie. It’s not one of the best movies I’ve watched this year but not every movie has to be the best movie ever to be good. Here is the plot summary from IMDB:

In a quiet, isolated village in olde Pennsylvania, there lies a pact between the people of the village and the creatures who reside in the surrounding woods: the townspeople do not enter the woods, and the creatures do not enter the village. The pact stays true for many years, but when Lucius Hunt seeks medical supplies from the towns beyond the wood, the pact is challenged. Animal carcasses, devoid of fur, begin to appear around the village, causing the council of elders to fear for the safety of the village, the pact, and so much more.

So the movie starts off very quiet and “normal” but by the time you get to the last 30 minutes everything changes, you just sit there and go no fucking way, no fucking way. I like movies who can do that to me. McArabian was also right when she said that The Village is a good Phoenix movie. Since I watched Ladder 49 and now this, my views on Joaquin Phoenix have changed a lot and all for the better. Adrien Brody and Sigourney Weaver also star in this movie. I personally think she should stick to fighting aliens, it doesn’t suit her to be an old mother in a village. So if you readers can watch this movie I would definitely recommend it.

Two pictures of the same street, one from 1991 and one from 2005. It’s amazing how fast Dubai grew, I have seen pictures of Kuwait from 1983 and the places still look the same today! [Link]

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Kicking & Screaming
I am a big fan of Will Ferrell, so when I heard about his new movie Kicking & Screaming I had to get it. Once I read the plot line of the movie though, I had a feeling this was more of a kiddie movie not an adult movie. According to the plot summary on IMDB “Family man Phil Weston (Will Ferrel), a lifelong victim of his father’s competitive nature, takes on the coaching duties of a kids’ soccer team, and soon finds that he’s also taking on his father’s dysfunctional way of relating…” Reading that I was a bit reluctant to watch the movie but since it starred Will Ferrell I decided to watch it yesterday afternoon. The movie didn’t turn out to be THAT bad, there are some hilarious scenes in it, but the movie is really made for kids so there are a lot of silly jokes and cute little kids doing stupid facial expressions. This is nothing like Old School basically, nothing like it.

Unleashed (Danny the Dog)
Second movie I watched last night was Unleashed (Danny the Dog) starring Jet Li. I was expecting this movie to basically be a beat-em-up but it turned out to actually have a story. This is the plot summary from IMDB “A man (Jet Li) raised into behaving like a dog, escapes from his captor to start a new life, who seeks to reclaim him because of his unnatural martial arts skills that are triggered when unleashed.” I really liked the cinematography of the movie so no matter how lame the story was it still looked good. The way Jet Li acts like a dog in the movie was pretty stupid. I hate it when people act like animals and this time it was no exception. The soundtrack which was composed by Massive Attack is also very forgetfully so not much was going for this movie. Now I am not saying it was boring or as bad as Be Cool, because its not. The movie was just not special, the fight scenes were regular and nothing different and the story was stupid. I didn’t enjoy it that much and I would have rather watched something else.

Be Cool
My streak of good movies ended yesterday after watching Be Cool. Although the movie features a lot of celebrities including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Danny DeVito, James Wood and Steven Tyler, the movie was still boring and slow. John Travolta plays the part of a successful movie actor who wants to get out of the movie business and decides to go into the music industry where he ends up getting into trouble with the Russian mafia and a competing music company. The coolest person in the whole movie was surprisingly The Rock who played the role of a gay bodyguard who wants to become a movie actor. I swear if it wasn’t for him I would have turned the movie off after the first 30 minutes.

Ladder 49
The second movie I watched yesterday was Ladder 49 which also starred John Travolta. This movie was a lot better then Be Cool and a lot more exciting. The movie is about a rookie firefighter who joins John Travolta’s fire station and matures to become a seasoned veteran. The firefighter who is played by Joaquin Phoenix gets married, has two kids and then reaches a point where he has to choose between his risky job which he loves or taking a desk job which would make his family a lot happier. The last good firefighting movie I watched was Backdraft but that was ages ago so it was good to watch another one. I usually hate Joaquin Phoenix in movies since he usually plays the role of a dickhead but he was pretty cool in this movie and John Travolta’s acting compared to Be Cool is wayyyyyyyy better. It really doesn’t suite John Travolta being a tough guy, maybe it worked in Pulp Fiction but it wasn’t working in Be Cool. I got a lot more movies still to watch and hopefully I won’t have another Be Cool.

The new NHL season just started after the cancellation of last years season. This time they are back with a new look and a new set of rules. To learn more about the new rules check this link. [Link]

Update: I just realized I haven’t watched Hockey since like 1994. Back then the Toronto Maple Leafs were my favorite team and they had Matt Sundin, Doug Gilmour, Felix Potvin and Dave Andreychuk. Now none of my favorite players are still with the Leafs, sucks.

Yesterday afternoon I watched Green Street Hooligans starring Elijah Wood. The movie is about Elijah getting expelled from Harvard and then moving to England where his sister lives. While there he starts hanging out with his brother-in-laws brother who is a leader of a bunch of hooligans. He starts hanging out with them, learns to fight and becomes part of their gang. The movie is pretty cool and half way through it you just want to turn it off and go out and pick a fight with someone. The problem I found with the movie is Elijah Wood. After watching him in Lord of the Rings as a tiny hobbit, its hard to imagine him as a soccer hooligan, the part doesn’t suit him at all. Still though it was a cool movie I would recommend watching.

I got my CueCat today from Aramex. So far I have been having problems with it. The CueCat works like a keyboard, when I scan a barcode with the CueCat, it types out the barcode number on my mac. The problem I have is that when I scan the number in the organizing software Delicious Library and when I scan a number into TextEdit (like Notepad on Windows) I get 2 completely different numbers where the one in TextEdit is the right one. For example I picked up a random book lying around here, when I scan it into Delicious Library I get the barcode “978908090103408” but when I scan it into TextEdit I get “9780891348382 90000”.

I don’t know whats wrong with Delicious Library, I am going to try and google it now and figure out the issue. Other then that the CueCat is pretty cool, works like a charm. Unlike regular barcode scanners you don’t hold the CueCat from a distance and highlight the barcode, you have to take the CueCat and touch the barcode and then swipe it across. It doesn’t matter if you hold the barcode upside down or vertically it will still scan it right.

Anyway if you are interested in the CueCat it sells for only $9.99 on Amazon. The cheapest barcode scanner you can get.

Update: Ok figured out the problem, or atleast figured out how to get the barcode scanned right. Instead of clicking on “Add a new item” and then scanning, I should just scan right away and it will add it for me. Cool.

Oldboy
I just finished watching two really great movies. The first one is called Oldboy, its a Korean movie that made a big splash at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2004. The movie is available with an English soundtrack but the one I manged to get was Korean with English subtitles. I can’t say much about the movie without ruining the plot but basically a guy gets locked up in a studio apartment for 15 years by some unknown assailants before getting released one day. Once he is out he tries to seek revenge by trying to find out who locked him up and why. Quentin Tarantino loved the movie and thats why it got the extra attention in Cannes.

The Devil’s Rejects
The second movie I watched was called The Devil’s Rejects. This movie reminded me a lot of Natural Born Killers except its way cooler and more violent but they both involved violently sick people who are on the run from the cops. The movie was written and directed by the freaky Rob Zombie and it features A LOT of violence, nudity and general weirdness. If you liked Natural Born Killers you would really like this movie then.

With all this free time now that Ramadan has started I was able to watch a few movies the past two days. I watched Cinderella Man first and I didn’t like it. It was too long and it starts off very sad and doesn’t really turn into a happy movie by the end. Million Dollar Baby was way better. I watched Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy second, I had never read the book but the movie was pretty cool. I mean any movie where earth gets blown up in the first 5 minutes must be cool. The movie was filled with a variety of weird and strange characters so it was very odd and entertaining. Finally I watched Land of the Dead yesterday night. This was fun to watch. Its not as scary as Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later but it was interesting none the less and it did play from a different perspective. This is the only zombie movie I have watched where the movie makes you side with the zombies. It’s definetly worth watching.

Yesterday night I downgraded my PSP from version 2.0 to 1.5. The reason I did that was so I could play pirated PSP games and install Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis emulators.

The downgrade was a bit scary, whenever you play with a hardwares firmware you risk fucking it up so that it becomes useless. Luckily my downgrade went smoothly and my PSP is now version 1.5. Games like SOCOM which I received the other day need a software version 1.52 or higher, so I downloaded another software which makes the PSP think its another version, I made it think it was version 2.0 and I can now continue to play SOCOM online.

I ordered a 1GB Sandisk Ultra II memorystick duo from Amazon so I could install the PSP games on. I ordered the Ultra II version since its faster then the regular memorystick and will help when it comes to loading the games faster.

Until the 1GB stick arrives I am using my 128MB memorystick which won’t fit any downloaded pirated PSP games but will fit a ton of emulators and Roms. I installed a Super Nintendo emulator with the following games: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, NBA JAM Tournament Edition, Super Metroid, Super Mario World and Star Wars Empire Strikes Back. They all run very nicely on the PSP and I spent most of my time flipping between Mortal Kombat and NBA JAM, my two favorite games ever. I still need to download NHL 94 which is one of my favorite sports games also.

Using thepiratebay.org I was able to find around 30 PSP games which I managed to download. A 512MB memorystick would be enough to run most of them but if you are planning to install more then 1 game on a memory stick it would be a lot better to get a 1GB stick. Some games like Collin McRae take up 975MB of space which won’t even fit on a 512MB stick.

So if you have a PSP and want to downgrade and install emulators and downloaded games, here are some links to help you out.

Downgrading from 2.0 to 1.5 Guide
PSP Version Changer (WAB)
PSP Emulators
PSP Torrents
I have 1.5 now what?

French Connection, the fashion retailer, is scaling back the use of its controversial Fcuk slogan after a slump in sales. The acronym for French Connection United Kingdom has been splashed across the company’s clothing and advertising campaigns since its creation in 1997. But with sales down 10 per cent in the first half of 2005, the company has decided that the brand has tired and will be taken off its clothing and billboards. [More]

I think fcuk was cool when it first came out but I have to agree that I think it has been abused and is just lame now. When fcuk became popular the word fuck was still a bad word, now though you could have fuck on your tshirt and no one would look twice.

I haven’t reviewed a microwavable dish in a while but here is a good one. There is a local company called Livestock Transport & Trading Co. that have a line of frozen ready made meals that sell under the brand Jahez. Jahez have 24 different frozen meals in total but todays review is about the Chicken Masala meal.

Cooking the meal was very easy. You take out the tray from the box, punch a few holes in the plastic cover and then stick it in the microwave for 6 minutes. I have my own way of cooking the meals though. I place the tray in the microwave and let it cook for 3 minutes, then I open the microwave, take out the tray and peal open the plastic cover. Then using a fork I move all the food around and when I am done I close the cover again and shove it back into the microwave for another 4 minutes. I do this so that the food thoroughly cooks. I have had issues before with microwavable food where when eating, the food ends up being really hot in the center of the dish but cold nearer the outer edge.

Once the meal was done I took it out of the microwave and opened the plastic cover again. The smell was really appetizing and visually the dish looked very eatable. I took the tray and sat down in front of the TV and started eating. The Chicken Masala tasted pretty good, somewhere between a home cooked meal and the Mughal Mahal fast food restaurant. I finished the chicken and then took the sauce and poured it over the rice and continued eating. It was a pretty satisfying dinner and overall I think this might be one of the best frozen meals I have ever had. The best part of the meal is the price. Since its made in Kuwait its pretty cheap coming in at around 700fils depending where you buy it from. The Co-ops usually have a larger collection of Jahez meals and cheaper prices then Sultan so you can find it for as low as 670fils in some places. Great price plus good food gives this meal a 4 out of 5 rating in my book. For more information on Jahez click here. Also make sure you read some of our other reviews located here.

A friend of mine sent me this, its pretty funny but I still prefer the Dawam video. [Video 364KB]