The English Patient

A few words. Not many. But they're necessary.

The movie 'The English Patient' is the antithesis of the movie 'Casablanca'. It says you can do anything for personal purposes. One's private matters are not just a 'hill o' beans' - they're more important than the considerations Rick Blaine recognised.

And that totally stinks.

There. That's it. Thank you.

183 Days

What an utter - and typical - waste of money. Tuva Novotny said it was going to be a great series and was going to expose the 'Big Brother' shows for all their crassness. Would that it had been so. For the writers really copped out. They wrote an extremely slipshod trashy teleplay around the idea but rarely delved into what was supposed to be the subject matter.

You got to follow cute Tuva as the winner, a rich boy with gambling debts as the runner-up, then three other total losers. The point that the 'Big Brother' shows ruin their lives was hardly touched on at all: they were trash before they joined the show and they were trash after they left it. The consequence of the idea didn't even last to the end of the first episode.

The series started five weeks ago and ended tonight with a less than spectacular final sixth episode. The series got terrible reviews from the beginning but an honest appraisal had to wait until the final tally was in and one saw what these loser screenwriters had in mind - how they tied everything together.

They didn't bother. They started with a basic premise with five main characters and a starting point and just 'hacked' it out from there, ad-libbing as they went along with their writing, creating more and more unbelievable (and often detestable and deliberately gory) situations. Such as the rich kid chopping off his own toe and an egregious amount of gross gay sex (where sweet straight sex with Tuva was cautious at best). You have to wonder what kind of perverts actually wrote this - what deep dark secrets they carry around and only indirectly and inadvertently reveal in the writing. Not cool people at all.

It wasn't good. And what a shame for Tuva for she's truly a first class actor and human being.

Suicide Rain

There's a place in the south of Sweden where it rains horizontally. Not at an angle - horizontally. People who are sent to the area often have to leave. They can't stand it. Rain comes right at you. Right in your face. You probably get paranoid. Why is this rain coming straight at me?

Where we are in our current 'paradise' it's been raining nonstop for ten days. Unbelievable. The combined weather forecasts give us a chance of partly sunny one day in the coming week.

It's time to ask for a refund and get out. This is bloody ridiculous.