Giles's Notes

I'm a huge fan of Groundhog-Day-adjacent movies.

Original French title "Incroyable mais vrai" (the English title is a direct translation).

I often complain about movies that are silly.

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

See also review of Season 1 Part 1.

Brendan Fraser is Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor living in Tokyo and scrambling for jobs.

Our hero is Subaru Natsuki, who Wikipedia refers to as a "NEET - I'd call him an unemployed shut-in.

The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life by Tiago Forte 2023, Atria Books, 194p.

Wikipedia's summary of this TV series is concise and good: "The documentary is composed of six parts.

There was this band in the U.K. in the 1960s called "The Zombies."

The follow-up to the 2021 film "Mortal Kombat."

The main characters in this 1986 film are Richard Chance (William Petersen) and his new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) as Secret Service agents.

This is a fascinating piece of film history - and a decent movie.

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield 1993 I've been aware of this title for decades, but I didn't know what it was about.

The Rotten Tomatoes summary covers it: "Dashboard cameras in Russian automobiles capture a range of spectacles through the windshield."

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

This blog entry shows the problem with reading blogs: most blogs are written by people who are learning, and detailing their experience learning.

Our main character Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) is in love with a particular glade that she and her grandmother visited all the time.

If you've seen "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre" and "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare," you've seen two Guy Ritchie films that are better than this, and the two most obvious places from which Ritchie has chosen to pluck parts to assemble this less…

Early in the movie our heroine is getting drunk in an alien bar, and my head got stuck on the cantina from the original "Star Wars."

I watched this back-to-back with a rewatch of the original "Lethal Weapon," both in their "Director's Cut" form.

Iceland is possibly the most ludicrously photogenic country in the world.

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

I was going to say something along the lines of "despite being by Sam Raimi, this isn't exactly horror."

Scene 1: our hero (Rami Malek) is restoring an airplane.

I started in to this one without any prep, just knowing it was a Criterion restoration of a well-regarded film.

Our flight out was at 1705, so we had the morning in Reykjavik.

We went to Brauð and Co. for (Sarah) Cinnamon Snuður/bun, pretzel (good, but not as good as our last!!)

We checked out of Lindartún around 0930, and drove a short way to our first stop, the Urriðafoss waterfall.

We got up very early to be at the Westman Islands ferry dock at 0745 for our 0815 sailing to Heimaey Island.

I've been using a very old Garmin Nuvi to record our car track around Iceland - we're not using the device for actual navigation (we use our phones) but just as a recording device.

Sleeping arrangements in the hotels are mostly European: the matress has a sheet on it, and you get a duvet as cover (nothing else).

It's beautifully sunny in Mývatn today - with 10m/s winds, meaning no drone flights.

We walked around the three pseudo-craters on the shore of Mývatn - there's a technical explanation of what a "pseudo-crater" is on signs at the site that involves lava, but I won't go into it here.

We checked out of the cottage near Húsavík at about 0945, and headed north through Húsavík on route 85 - technically not part of the Ring Road, but Húsavík was already a detour.

Every morning when you shower or shave, the slight but ever-present smell of sulphur ...

Breakfast was the sweet dense rye bread I mentioned earlier, and some Skyr acquired at a local grocery store.

Today we departed the southwest corner of Iceland to start our long drive around the island's Ring Road.

"Free" geothermal heat means that most hotel rooms have heat ... and no off switch.

[I'm going a bit crazy with the Wikipedia links.

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

I have a cellphone.

Sequel to "Castle," Season 1.

The third - and theoretically final - movie in the series that started with "Venom," and a direct sequel to "Venom: Let There Be Carnage."

This animated movie is presented in Spanish - although there was also an English dub on the DVD I received from the library.

This is how Anime programs are sold now: you can charge more if you cut the season in half and sell the two halves (12 episodes of about 20 minutes each).

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".

Read this first: Index of "Top Ten".