Raymond M. Reskusich

Last night, I finally saw There Will Be Blood. My main feeling, coming away from the film, is to be thankful for OSHA.

Also: WTF, Brian K. Vaughan is producing Lost?

I had a good, long weekend. My überboss gave the department the day off, partly because half of us were changing offices, partly so we would have time to get ready for the departmental holiday party. This was held at Parlor Billiards over in Bellevue. It was the best of the Microsoft holiday parties I've been to. The food was tasty, including what seemed to my untrained palate to be some pretty nice oysters. The drinks were abundant and top-shelf, although for the life of me I could not get across the idea of a Dark and Stormy. The pool tables were good, providing a nice refuge for those, like me, who can only take so much small-talk.

Saturday we got to a slow start. Eventually, we got out the door and took the bus down to Pioneer Square to get some Christmas shopping done. Oh, Elliot Bay Book Company, how I do love thee! Afterward we caught a showing of Juno, which pretty well rocked. Go see it. The dialog was fresh, unrestrained, and so funny that many lines were drowned out by audience laughter. I look forward to the video release so that I can hear what I missed. Ellen Page was fantastic. Two of my favorite bit players, J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, also put in excellent performances.

Sunday, we got up far too early to catch the second day of the ski season up at Snoqualmie Summit with lizzelda. Sadly, when we arrived the lifts were motionless. A power outage at the resort pretty much wiped out the whole day of skiing. We stuck around for about an hour and then sought solace in a pub lunch, a couple of beers, and televised football. The power outage apparently lasted until 2pm, two hours before the slopes were to close.

Mel and I spent the rest of the day around the house, watching old West Wing episodes, making gingerbread cookies, and finalizing some holiday plans.

I'm feeling kind of groggy today. Our voyage back from Champaign was greatly slowed down by a delayed connecting flight in Las Vegas, so we ended up getting home well after 1am. The Vegas airport is a bit of a culinary wasteland, at least on the A and B concourses. As a consolation, they offer free wi-fi, which is depressingly rare in the airports I travel through. There were also iPod vending machines, a horrifying concept all on its own.

We were flying US Airways yesterday, a company that always amuses me with its logo: an American flag rendered in black and white, with an atrophied, starless field and the wrong number of stripes. I think the effect they were going for is "national pride reduced to soul-crushing bar-code." Anyway, their latest strategy to make ends meet in the tough airline business involves finding new ways to advertise to the passenger, right down to making the tray table into a personal billboard. The in-flight movie on the way to Vegas was Lucky You, which is all about poker. I had to wonder if this was maybe an indirect paid advertisement, placed there to soften up the incoming tourists. The film was fairly lame. Drew Barrymore's character was paper-thin, and Eric Bana did a lot of unsubtle emoting through expression and posture, which looked pretty damn silly during the poker scenes.

On the trip home I finished Michael Chabon's most recent book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It was really excellent. The author manages to be remarkably faithful to the hard-boiled detective genre while twisting each of its conventions into the something unexpected. The language is smart and artful, peppered throughout with the sort of left-field imagery that should by all rights sound forced but somehow doesn't. The story is affecting, the scene well set, and the characters fully developed. The book was a surprisingly quick read; if, like me, you've got a large backlog of books to read, I'd recommend letting this one jump the queue. Now I return to my Harry Potter re-read mission.

The news of Alberto Gonzales' resignation is very welcome to me. It is comforting to see another of Bush's faithful lose power, even if he will not face any sort of real justice. The Senate should take its confirmation power seriously this time around and make sure we get someone who values the Constitution a little more for his replacement.

Zack Snyder Reveals "Watchmen" Details

The article includes some casting details, as well as the director's approach to the material. They really do appear to be making the film this time.

I find these details encouraging. If you've seen 300, you know that Snyder is capable of slavish adherence to the style of his source material. My only worry is that, as with 300, it will be so close to the comic book as to render it uninteresting to me. Even though I have followed the Watchmen film saga for years, it has never been because I thought it needed to be a film, but rather because I did not want to see it butchered.

Also, I will probably never stop wanting to see what Terry Gilliam would have done with it.