Movie Review - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

First the good news - it's not as bad as some reviewers have made out! Now the bad - it's not as good as the first one.

The basic plot is that Captain Jack Sparrow owes a debt of 100 years of service on Davy Jones' ship, The Flying Dutchman. Naturally, he's trying to weasel out of it and begins searching for the Dead Man's Chest which holds Davy Jones' heart - destroy the heart, kill Davy Jones, no more debt. But Jack's not the only one looking for it. Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann have been coerced under the threat of death into finding the Chest for the East India Company - control the heart, control the seas, East India Company makes a crapload of cash. And so it's a competition of who can get what first - Davy trying to get Captain Jack/everyone else trying to get the heart/chest.

I'm not going to bother with my usual analysis of the plot or the acting because lets face it, this isn't really a movie where you can question if the plot has giant holes in it or whether the acting is top-notch. Having said that, POTC:DMC still reminds me of the Monkey Island games (Best. Games. Ever.) and of the actors, Johnny Depp is still amusing as Captain Jack, Orlando Bloom is still wooden as Will, Keira Knightley is still kinda annoying as Elizabeth, Bill Nighy is damn near unrecognisable underneath all those tentacles as Davy Jones, but the standout is Naomie Harris (who?!) as the Voodoo Lady. She rocks!

The feeling I had while watching this was somewhat akin to my feelings toward King Kong and Harry Potter 4. Like King Kong, POTC:DMC can be broken up into individual set-pieces to be marked off on a list - Jack's crazy escape - check! The big pirate brawl - check! The cannon fight - check! And of course, the most ridiculous fight ever in a giant water-wheel - check! Sure, the pieces were entertaining but at the same time, I kept thinking that the movie really needed to be edited down - it really did not need to clock in at 150 minutes. The running time contributed a great deal to the feeling I had while walking out. Like Harry Potter, I felt entertained but that there was a certain something lacking which stopped me from raving about it the way I did with the first. Oddly enough, I don't think it was the cliffhanger ending of the movie.

Ah, the ending. This has been a bone of contention with a few people I've spoken to, most notably John I.T. Support who declared "I didn't pay $15 to watch half a movie! If I knew it was gonna end like that, I would have only paid $7.50!" On one hand, I suppose he's right - the *conclusion* of the movie as an end to the installment is unsatisfying because you can't view POTC:DMC in its own right. It exists solely to set up the third and, I assume, final part. But on the other hand, I soooooooooo didn't see the twist coming that I really want to see how the ending pans out! I just hope that it is more like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and less like The Godfather III or Matrix Revolutions.

Overall, I'd say POTC:DMC is an enjoyable movie, but there are enough flaws in it that I can't give it the stellar review I want to give it.
6-7/10

You can do better!

I always find it amusing when I hear this comment in relation to boys. It often seems to be given to girls who have great looks, personality, intelligence and jobs...and her guy is given inferior ratings in about three of those categories (hi Amandine!). Possibly my favourite instance would be in the Simpsons episode where Lisa is in love with Nelson and Bart says it to her when he find outs. Never mind the fact that it is likely possible that the girl might be with/interested in the guy for reasons that cover up his flaws, e.g. he's quite charming or owns an Aston Martin DB9.

I myself received this comment last night from a friend, and you know what? I think she's right. But seeing as there is a general lack of better opposition...if you want me to do better, throw the *better* ones in my way and then everyone can be happy ;)

gee, i'm not looking good!

You Are 60% Evil

You are evil, but you haven't yet mastered the dark side. Fear not though - you are on your way to world domination.

How Evil Are You?

You Are: 50% Dog, 50% Cat

You are a nice blend of cat and dog. You're playful but not too needy. And you're friendly but careful. And while you have your moody moments, you're too happy to stay upset for long.

Are You More Cat or Dog?

You Are More Mild Than Wild

You're confident, and you really aren't concerned with how "hot" you are. Other people's ideas of what's sexy don't concern you. And this is exactly what makes you attractive.

Are You Hot?

Your Stripper Song Is

Closer by Nine Inch Nails "You let me violate you, you let me desecrate you You let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you Help me I broke apart my insides, help me I�ve got no Soul to tell" When you dance, it's a little scary - and a lot sexy.

What Song Should You Strip To?

even more quizzes!

You Are 55% Normal

While some of your behavior is quite normal... Other things you do are downright strange You've got a little of your freak going on But you mostly keep your weirdness to yourself

How Normal Are You?

Exotic Dancer Name Is...

Felony

Exotic Dancer Name Generator

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Your Power Level is: 67%

You're a very powerful person, and you know that all of your power comes from within. Keep on doing what you're doing, and you'll reach your goals.

How Powerful Are You?

You Are 36% Sociopath

From time to time, you may be a bit troubled and a bit too charming for your own good. It's likely that you're not a sociopath... just quite smart and a bit out of the mainstream!

Are You A Sociopath?

You're a Wild Drunk

You can get enough drink. Seriously, you'll just go puke and start pounding them back again!

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

You Are a Boston Creme Donut

You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you. But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft. You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily. You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out.

What Donut Are You?

You Are A Martini

You are the kind of drinker who appreciates a nice hard drink. And for you, only quality alcohol. You don't waste your time on the cheap stuff. Obviously, you're usually found with a martini in your hand. But sometimes you mix it up with a gin and tonic. And you'd never, ever consider one of those flavored martinis. They're hardly a drink!

What Alcoholic Drink Are You?

You Are Cookie Monster

Misunderstood as a primal monster, you're a true hedonist with a huge sweet tooth. You are usually feeling: Hungry. Cookies are preferred, but you'll eat anything if cookies aren't around. You are famous for: Your slightly crazy eyes and usual way of speaking How you life your life: In the moment. "Me want COOKIE!"

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

alpha, beta, gamma, omega

Today I joined a conversation with Annie, Marlene, and Joyce about shy girls who attract guys and what type of guys get attracted to shy girls and why. This then degenerated into an analysis of personality types, the Alpha (the bossy asshole), Beta (the best friend), Gamma (mix of Alpha and Beta), and Omega (the one everyone kicks around). After Helen joined the conversation, it degenerated further into us sharing stories about asshole Alphas we've ever worked with in the lab and how you they'll be complete bastards until you do something that makes them respect you.

I can think of a few people who fit these personality types - CM as the Alpha and BFF as the Omega...I'm pretty sure I'd be a Gamma...although I must confess I may sometimes be a bit alpha-ish *wince*.

Tax time

I NEED my tax return. Seriously. But I find filling in that tax form so stressful. I wish I could afford an accountant to do it for me. Instead I have to just pick the brains of my accountant friends.

Sorry dudes.

NO! NO! NO!!!!!

I'm sure I've written at some point in time how much I love YouTube. If I haven't, it must be one of the imaginary posts I wrote in my head, then forgot to post. Anyway, I'm sure I would have spoken about it in person about how great a website it is. You can watch all kinds of cool videos like Dave Chapelle's parody of R Kelly or various classic Sesame St. clips.

Well now someone wants to sue YouTube for copyright infringement. While I can kinda see where these people are coming from (I reckon most of what I watch there isn't cleared), millions of people will lose a wonderful source of entertainment! Geeks will lose an outlet for expressing their creativity - who hasn't watched The Narutrix and wondered at the sheer creativity of it?!

Seriously, shutting the site down...don't do it. I would be heartbroken.

Madame La Presidente

I am now the President of the Postgraduate Students Of Anatomy Society. Technically, this position is not official because we didn't hold an AGM and I wasn't voted. But since I'm reviving it and doing the liaising with the Head of Dept and the Moneyman...yeah.

Let my reign of prosperity and benevolence begin!
Let's hope it doesn't degenerate into a reign of poverty and terror - although that might be a bit fun.

(There was a topic I wanted to cover, but I couldn't remember it so I just wrote this entry instead.)

Psychic vibes?

I used to enjoy sectioning. I'm sure I talked about the joys of using the microtome last year. This year I'm using a cryostat to section liquid-nitrogen frozen tissue. It's not as fun as paraffin sectioning. For one, paraffin sectioning can be completed quite quickly if you can *create* ribbons of sections. You can't do that with the cryostat, thus the process is a lot longer. And colder. And tedious.

I had a difficult day on the cryostat today (man, that name sure is fitting!). I won't go into the details - lets just say that when I got back to toshi, I immediately changed my msn suffix to *I need a drink. Many drinks.* Something that didn't make the task easier was to have ppl phone me! For some reason, people always seem to phone me while I'm all gowned and gloved up and sectioning! They don't phone when I'm on the microscope or doing general lab stuff. I assume I must be putting out psychic waves of pain to my nearest and dearest. Today I got two equally pointless calls whose sole purpose was to make me more frustrated.

Firstly my cousin phoned me to ask where I got my haircut in boxy. It seems she was randomly there and wanted to check the place out. Right. And then Poosey, my sister, rang me to replicate one of Dave Chapelle's A Day in the Life of Lil' Jon routines. SHE JUST RANG TO SAY *WHAT?!?!* down the phone!!!

Me so angry after that!!!!

Peace out!

How to blog

I confess - there have been times when I've bitched at my sis for her lack of updates. There have also been comments that people don't understand how I can do a phd and yet I still seem to post updates fairly regularly. So I shall confess to how it is done.

The secret is to integrate blogging into random things that you are doing in order to alleviate boredom. For example, this post is being written while I'm completing some microscopy on a machine that's hooked up to a computer. I'm booked on this microscope for a 3-hour block. I'm not going to be staring down the objective for the entire time - hell no! So during those times when the microscope & compy are doing their automated stuff, I take the opportunity to prattle on.

There's another 2 hours left of my booking - it's possible that this may be a multi-post day. *sigh*

This is what I do when there's nothing on tv and the internet goes down...

Presented here is the Pontillist masterpiece, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (Sunday afternoon on the island of the Grande Jatte) by Georges Seurat.
And now, here I present it in the jigsaw, Simpsonised format.
It was trickier than I expected and completed in about two days.

Stories from the Salon

There's a hair salon in Boxy that's run by Korean people - they always cut my hair nice, but I always walk out with a hairstyle different from what I describe. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's cos the people who work there don't speak english and I don't speak korean. Anyway, for $30 wash, cut & style, I can't complain that much.

But when I got my hair cut yesterday....I walked out a lot different.
I've suddenly found my inner Korean girl. Nevermind that I don't have a stitch of korean in me. With this haircut, I had to take photos of myself in my best HK/Korean model pose!
(Hi Amandine and Pooky!)

Stupid Lab!!!

It made me forget one of the most important days of my francophile life!!!

HAPPY BASTILLE DAY FOR YESTERDAY, EVERYONE!!!

VIVE LA FRANCE!

Contemporary Art and Why I Hate It

I've been thinking about this topic for quite a while....like about 2 years since I saw Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle, and I think I've come to a conclusion.

I hate Contemporary art.

(Actually, a more accurate comment might be *I hate Modern art* but since there is some Modern art that I do like, that's not quite it either.)


The era of Modern Art arguably began during the 1850s when things like human rights, the Industrial Revolution, science etc., altered the perception of the individual in society. Following this, where art and literature would previously be a result of the whims of the person commissioning the piece (e.g. the Church, Rulers), into depictions of social awareness, starting the era of Modern Art with the Realist movement. Successive movements (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, whatever) develop out of contemporary philosophy, society, politics etc. But then after WWII...I hate most of the stuff that comes along. I mean sure, there's Pop Art that everyone loves, but that's because it developed out of using mass produced/popular images as art.

I like art that tells me a story, preferably in a non-pretentious way. I hate stuff like Performance Art. I still remember a lecture where we were told about some artist whose *art* was to take drugs, have himself nailed to a VW Beetle, be driven around while nailed to it, then have the nails extracted and sell them to collectors - all in the name of questioning religion, mass production and consumption. No it isn't. That's self-mutilation in the name of publicity.

And The Cremaster Cycle. It's supposedly an avant garde film commenting on life, death, sex, biology, mythology...best viewed one after the other. No it isn't. Its seven hours of my life completely wasted and never to return. It has everything that's wrong with Contemp Art - prosthetics, ambiguous genitalia, blood, potatoes, pointless tap-dancing, and lots of melted vaseline. Okay, maybe you could somehow figure out that its about life, death, whatever...but as far as I care, it's just self-indulgent crappy crappy crap.

Suri Holmes-Cruise

Remember my complete disbelief at Katie Holmes' pregnancy? If you don't, you can see my entry right here.

Well, if you vaguely care (Hi Lydia!).....check out this link here.....

results...

Federer d. Nadal 6-0, 7-6 (7-5), 6-7 (2-7), 6-3

Italy on penalties (1-1 after extra time)

Far out. I need to sleep.

Zidane!?!

WHAT THE HELL MADE YOU THINK YOU COULD HEADBUTT SOMEONE IN THE GUT!??!?!

It was supposed to be your last international...to go out like that...*sigh*

Wimbledon and World Cup Final

Looks like I wont be sleeping tonight!!!

The great thing about laptops is that my sister and I can lie in beanbags next to each other, in front of the tv watching the tennis. I love watching tennis. It stresses me out incredibly but its so rewarding.I love the way the shirt lifts and you can see the transverse abdominus. Right now the score is two sets for Federer...the third is on serve.

Do-it-yourself surgery

I dunno about you, but I SURE AS HELL would not want to be doing surgery on myself unless its battlefield surgery and I need to dig shrapnel out of my leg. But it seems not everyone is as cautious as me.

Some guy in the US has developed Lasik Eye surgery that you can do yourself at home.

I repeat: you can now operate on your own eyes at home.

I'm really hoping this is a joke website, because I don't know about you, but when I read the four easy steps, it sure looks like a joke! My sister (an optometrist) said that a colleague of hers was sent the site by a patient asking if this was a safe procedure because a friend of the patient had purchased a kit.

I wonder what's next? Home dentistry?

heh

Time for some data!

It feels like it's been a while since I posted any data up here. Even though I've started doing crazy stuff like coming in at 8am to start work...I feel like my productivity has reached an all-time low. I think I'm also annoyed by the fact that I still haven't managed to perfect any of my techniques yet. I mean, I suppose they work, but they could work a helluva lot better for my liking.

Anyway, enough whining! To the right here we have a photo at 400x mag (oil) of a retina showing GFAP+ astrocytes in the (green) in the nerve fibre layer wrapped around blood vessel (red/yellow). Although I'm not particularly enamoured of this photo because the yellow indicates that something may have gone wrong with the colours, I do like how the shape of the cell lining the blood vessel (pericyte) comes up clearly - the little round thing is where the nucleus would be if I threw a nuclear stain on. But this is like taking a whole salami and just cutting it out to see where the fat is.

This (very bad) photo on the left is a photo of what the whole salami would look like if we could make it kinda transparent! This is a whole mounted retina with the blood vessel (green) surrounded by individual astrocytes (red). Ugh, this photo is sooo bad, I'm kinda disgusted at my inability to have made this experiment and the photography better *sigh*. Next time, I better make sure I mount the retina the right way up - I put it on the slide upside-down so when I took the photo, I had to focus through all the stupid layers of the retina! Add to that the fact that the retina I was using kind fell apart during the exp...I suppose I should be happy that I managed to get something like this at all.

That reminds me...

Does anyone want to buy a 2001 limited edition Honda Integra?
For people who don't want to click on the link (lazy bastards), the details are here...

2001 Honda Integra DC2 Type R (manual)
Yellow
Alarm and Immobiliser
43,000 Genuine KMs
MP3 Player
Sunroof

Immaculate condition
Always garaged, hardly driven as owner works interstate.
12 months rego!

I know the owner personally and I can say for sure that the car is in immaculate condition - he loves it more than he loves his gf. (Hell, I'd probably drive the car if I weren't so chickenshit behind the wheel).

Monica Bellucci

A few weeks ago, Mr T (for those who know him) and I had an argument about whether a girl was hot or not. I still stand by my assessment that the girl he thought was hot, Dawn Yang, looks like a freaking alien from all the surgery she's had. This argument was followed by a conversation whereby he attempted to gauge my *taste* in women by asking me who I'd do if I went that way. I automatically rolled out the usual suspects of Jessica Alba and Angelina Jolie, but he said they as options were too obvious and therefore I have no taste in women.

Well, now I nominate Monica Bellucci. What's not to love about her? Actor, model, wife of Vincent Cassel, former law student at the University of Perugia, fluent in three languages...but what I love best about her is that she's not one of those stick-insects from LA or one of those girls with her head stuck in HK-model pose (Amandine, you know what I mean!). I especially liked the way she used a fan to kill the yucky girl in Brotherhood of the Wolf (hmmm...now there's a movie I should review!).

In non-related news, waste some hours of your life at paperdollheaven - dress up celebrity paper dolls!

Gosh!

There's so much big sport on right now! How can I choose between staying up and watching Wimbledon like I usually do or waking early to watch the World Cup?! *sniff*

Adelaide photos

So what is there to do in Adelaide? Well apart from the obligatory wine tour, I did the following...
I visited a bar in Rundle St. called *fumo blue*. Fans of the anime Full Metal Panic! Fumoffu! would understand why I found it so hilarious that I had to take a photo of myself with the sign in this pose. The cocktails there weren't bad - I've had better but I suppose they could have been worse.

There were also a bunch of bronze pigs in Rundle Mall that we had to pretend we were riding...couldn't help ourselves!

Weekend roundup

Well if there's one way to describe this weekend as it draws to an end, the word would be *eventful*.

The fun and games started on Friday where we began at lunch to celebrate Kirsty's leaving of the dept to move to Physiology. This of course meant that our weekly celebratory booze-up took on a more frenetic tone as we farewelled one of the chief departmental mischief makers. And what a celebration! Some ppl who didn't normally come out were gotten appropriately pissed and we discovered many funny facts - Annie's a biter when she gets drunk!!! But that wasn't the best bit. One laments the loss of old-fashioned courting behaviour in these modern times - but someone proved us wrong as a waiter came over to our table saying that someone we didnt know at the bar had purchased a drink for one of the gals on our table (not me). WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!! I'm quite eager to see how this pans out as the gal in question is lovely and I broke my rule of not giving numeral scores to guys - he's a H2A in my opinion!

The second one...I agreed to go to an *Asian* night at Blvd. I must admit, there is some fun in getting slutted up and wearing a full face of make up but....Oh. My. God. First of all, despite rocking up at 11pm there was a massive queue outside, and one eyeful of those 12 year old skanks and gangstas told me quite a bit about the kind of crowd would be present inside. Secondly, I had to pay to get in and enjoy the company of said gangstas and skanks! Like, wtf?! And then, I don't know in which world this kind of behaviour is considered acceptable, but I do not appreciate 40 year old strangers doing dance floor groping. Luckily attention was paid to the *elbow move* or the crowd would have seen my left hook. But don't get me wrong! Despite all the crappiness, it was still kinda fun! Skank spotting always is! And I learnt a new drinking game - kinda like musical chairs.

And now tonight I'm just resting at home after a nice night/morning sleeping in and dinner with the family. Toodles!