Entries tagged with “Firefly” from Things You Don't Care About

I spent last weekend up in Chicago with Marc again, perhaps at an inopportune time Eve-wise (more on that later), but it was definitely worth my while.  Aside from just being able to spend time with Marc, we managed to squeeze in a fair bit of fun stuff to the weekend.

• We went to another Wolves game on Friday, this time the first game of the conference championships against the Toronto Marlies (yes, that is a really silly name).  Unlike the last time I saw a Wolves game, this game was much cleaner and better played, and resulted in a pretty strong Wolves victory.  I had a lot of fun and am definitely looking forward to seeing more games next season, assuming I can fit them in (and that I am still living around here).  The Wolves do seem to have a problem with consistency though; you could tell during the game they swung between playing good hockey and just sort of lazing around on the ice, not challenging for the puck or bunching up.
• Saturday we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, another Judd Apatow production, and we weren't disappointed.  It was very funny, though I don't think it was quite as accessible or "friendly" as 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up -- closer to the level of Superbad.  Not sure it really needed that much Jason Segel full frontal, though.  Still, it did a good job of not going overboard with cheap laughs and having some serious heart to it, so it keeps with the other three movies I mentioned in that vein.  It also seemed to be longer than I expected, but not in a bad way; the story just seemed to keep going.  I wasn't annoyed with that so much as just surprised.  It's also impressive how the old Judd Apatow players are turning out to be good writers in their own right.
  
• We also started watching Firefly, which was probably long overdue; I'm not a completely rabid fan, but it is one of my favorite shows and a good reference for taste.  We've watched all the way up through "Out of Gas" now, and Marc seems to like it, which is good.  I wasn't sure at first, because he seemed awfull quiet during "Serenity" and "The Train Job," and he finds River annoying (which I suspect is going to make the movie a little less enjoyable to him), but the fact that he kept wanting to squeeze in extra episodes makes me a little less nervous that he's just doing it to mollify me.  I suspect we'll probably finish up the series this weekend when he comes down to visit.
• Sunday afternoon we had dinner at the Weber Grill Restaurant.  I'd seen the Indianapolis location when I was at GenCon (it's on the way from the hotel I usually stay at to the Convention Center), and I'm a big fan of the Weber cookbooks, so I have been wanting to try it out, but I've just never had the chance.  We thought about hitting it on Saturday, but it was a bit far from the theatre we went to, so we hit it Sunday.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but holy smoke (no pun intended) was it good.  The rolls they start you out with are awesome -- they call it pretzel bread, and it really is just like a roll made from soft pretzel dough, from what I can tell.  I had the herb-marinaded flank steak, and Marc had the tomato basil chicken, and both were, quite frankly, mindblowingly good, and the garlic mashed potatoes with both of them were delicious.  I can't speak highly enough of the place, which has a great atmosphere in addition to the food, and I will definitely be trying to stop at the one in Indy this year.  Even the prices were not that out of whack with what I'd expect -- a bit expensive, but not really disproportionate with the quality.  If you get a chance to visit (I just found out they are only in Chicago and Indy), I highly recommend stopping by.

I'll probably have another post coming up today in relation to Thursday's events in Eve, of which I've been slightly critical -- look for that later tonight, probably.

I'm usually pretty wary of most attempts to undermine the popularity of stuff like YouTube or other "upstart" websites by established media companies; usually they end up being pretty lame or at least critically gimped in some way.  However, after having both benoc and Deidei mention watching a few things on hulu.com, I checked it out just to see how it was, especially because Deidei was trying to get me to watch Kitchen Confidential (vaguely based on Anthony Bourdain's book, which I really liked).  So I checked it out this weekend, since it's easy enough to leave a webpage open while I play Eve in another window or something.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't suck too bad.  You are forced to watch brief commercials at certain points; this isn't horrible, since most shows would have them anyway and the commercials are only 15-30 seconds.  The only time it gets a little annoying is when it's a show that was originally shown on pay cable, like Total Recall 2070, where the commercial breaks can come at odd moments.  Furthermore, the selection of shows is surprisingly good.  I knew that it was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, but I forgot how many shows on other networks are done through them, and the catalog of old shows is surprisingly good as well.  They don't have full catalogs of all the shows there, but especially the one-season shows that were cancelled (like Firefly) they have there, which is nice if you wanted to see a show you heard about but didn't see, and don't want to take a chance on buying the DVDs (or the DVDs aren't available).

So far, I've gone through all of Kitchen Confidential (which was okay -- it was definitely better having read the book and being vaguely familiar with the craziness in a restaurant kitchen) and Total Recall 2070, which I only saw a few episodes of when it was in syndication.  It's worth checking out if you have some time to kill and you're bored.