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My last book of 2007 is Dreamcatcher by Stephen King. It’s not my favorite Stephen King book, but it’s not that bad. It’s about these 4 kids who save a kid with Down’s syndrome from bullies. They consider this act to be the best thing they ever did and they remain friends for years because of it. Years later when they are on their annual hunting trip, weird stuff happens. It involves aliens, telepathy, etc. It’s an interesting story. It took a little while to get into as usual and after I got into it there were times when I was bored. I think I’m a little tired of reading Stephen King books. Something about his style gets on my nerves after a while and I’ve read several of his books over the past couple of years.

Yes, there is a movie based on this book and I plan on watching it. The movie was mentioned on a podcast that I was watching a few days ago and it was described as the worst movie ever. It has some actors in it that I like. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

I can’t wait to get to something really good. I’ve already started a reading list for 2008.

• Timeline, Michael Crichton
• On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt
• Playing for Pizza, John Grisham
• Night Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Day Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Twilight Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Final Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• Watchmen, Alan Moore
• His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
• Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
• Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
• Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik
• Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare

I watched the last 2 episodes of Journeyman over the weekend. They were both saved on my DVR. I really wished more people had watched it. It’s sad to see it go. Maybe it’ll come back in some form. Early in the season, I found my attention wandering during the episodes. Later on, the show got much better and I didn’t have trouble staying focused.

I saw the pilot of Life before the season started and didn’t like any of it except for the final scene. Since then I’ve read a few times that it had gotten better and I found out my brother-in-law liked the show. I’m about 4 episodes in and I think it’s pretty good. I’ll keep watching.

I’ve blew through what I had left of season 2 of The Unit these past few days. I don’t watch a lot of shows like this, but I think this one is a great show. I had trouble making myself stop watching. When I got to the season finale, I wished that I had downloaded the season 3 episodes from Amazon Unbox before I left.

With this writers’ strike going on, I’ll have time to get caught up on The Unit and Life. I think my next project will be a show that’s not on the air anymore, but who knows.

John and I played Super Mario Bros. 3 on the virtual console. This was the first Mario game that I actually beat. The cartoon based on this game was my favorite Mario game. Playing it reminded me just how good it was. Most levels went by pretty easily. Some levels were pretty hard. It seems like I remember reading somewhere that they used to make games harder to artificially inflate the length. Oh well. It was a lot of fun to play. We skipped come of the levels and it took us about 4 hours to beat it. Remember when you could beat games that quickly.

While listening to Slice of SciFi, I heard about a movie called The Man from Earth. I rented it from Netflix and watched it last night. It’s about a college professor who is having a goodbye/retirement party that is attended by several of his colleagues. At the party he reveals that he’s been alive for 14000 years and that he believes that he is a Cro-Magnon. Every 10 years or so when people notice that he doesn’t age, he packs up and moves on. It quickly becomes a philosophical discussion about life, death, and religion. It‘s not the kind of movie I would normally watch. There are no special effects or action scenes. Most of the movie is a group of people sitting or standing around in one house talking to each other. To me, it never seemed to drag on. I really enjoyed watching it.

The only problem I had with the movie was the video quality. It changes at different times throughout the movie and gets noisy and grainy at times. It distracted me somewhat. I eventually got to the point where I was only listening to the movie and not really watching. If it seemed like something interesting was happening on screen, I would watch then.

Definitely check this movie out if you get a chance.

I figured that Wheel of Time fans would somehow find out what was supposed to happen at the end. If nothing else Robert Jordan’s wife Harriet could’ve written something saying what the ending would have been like. It turns out that Harriet has selected author Brandon Sanderson to write the last book in the series, A Memory of Light. I had never heard of him until now, but I’m interested in reading some of his books.

What a great game! It is so much fun! Last weekend we spent pretty much the entire weekend playing it. We beat it and now are going after those last few stars. I think we have two more to go. I’m amazed at how different the levels are from each other. I don’t know how they came up with some of that stuff. I can see why it’s the highest rated game of all time. The camera angles do cause problems sometimes and it may take a little getting used to playing sideways and upside down, but those are minor issues. It’s definitely worth the time. This is what we have been waiting to play on the Wii.

I had a weird dream on Thanksgiving morning. In the dream I was watching a musical performance on an awards show. This was one of those group performances that you sometimes see with several famous people singing together. For instance you might see Mariah Carey standing on stage singing her part and then they’ll cut to Celine Dion standing in the balcony singing her part and then they cut to Beyonce walking down the aisle singing her part, etc.

In my dream I think it was Christina Aguilera who had just started singing her part of some song. She was standing in the audience at the top of a set of stairs. All of a sudden she trips. I expected her to sprawl out across the steps, but instead she starts tumbling down the steps. The camera zooms in on her and follows her descent down the stairs, similar to the way it does during sports games when the camera is following the ball or the ball carrier. I start screaming at the TV for them to cut away or go to commercial, but they don’t. It must have been a long way down, because she was tumbling down for a long time and I watched the whole thing. Finally, Christina reaches the bottom and lands on the floor. And the song continues. The camera cuts to the next performer and she sings her piece. I start screaming that they should stop the song, but of course they don’t. In my dream I was horrified. Then I woke up and it was hilarious.

The end of the Harry Potter series may have gotten much more attention, but this year I’ve also been looking forward the final book in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. The book is called Confessor. I enjoyed the book overall, but there were a few problems.

One thing I hated was when Character A was trying to explain a concept to Character B that Character B either didn’t understand or didn’t believe. Sometimes it took pages of dialogue for Character B to come around. Usually some kind of analogy had to be used before Character B finally comes around. It happened a lot in previous books but it severely irked me in this one. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with me wanting to find out how the story was going to end.

Another thing that annoyed me was that Goodkind kept repeating a lot of the same ideas over and over again. Richard changed everything…the Order doesn’t value life…the Order is brutal…blah blah blah. I’ve read this way too many times. Just get to the end. I got bored reading Confessor many times, but I just had to put my head down and keep going.

Goodkind also kept putting charactesr in situations that I knew had to be resolved before the book could end. Examples are someone getting captured or something being stolen. I got annoyed every time someone ended up in one of these situations, because I knew I would have to read through a lot of pages of stuff that I didn’t really care about.

After reading these books for the past 7 years or so, it was sad to see it end. At the same time, I’m glad to have a resolution. I was very happy with the way that it ended. Getting there was only a slight pain.

• Dreamcatchers, Stephen King
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
• Summer of the Monkeys, Wilson Rawls
• The Hedge Knight, George R.R. Martin
• The Sworn Sword, George R.R. Martin
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• Timeline, Michael Crichton
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
• On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Long Walk, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
• His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
• Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
• Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
• Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik
• What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy, Thom Hartmann
• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
• Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare
• Confessor, Terry Goodkind

I finished watching season 3 of Deadwood yesterday. Season 3 was the final season. It was such a great show. I like westerns and I like historically based movies and TV shows. I wish Deadwood was still on. They’re supposed to be making 2 TV movies to resolve all the storylines, but it looks like that may never happen. Oh well. I’m happy for what we got.

Thanksgiving Break was pretty good this year. It was great seeing my family again. I got to finish reading the new Terry Goodkind book and begin another Stephen King book. I always got to watch the end of season 3 of Deadwood. I also undertook a major cleaning project here in Starkville. It took a lot a work, but I’m glad that I did it. I’m hoping that it can remain this clean…for a while at least. I wish I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow.