Jeff’s been out of school this week for Passover, so we decided to take today off, too, and go see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We went to the 12:30pm showing, which was mostly empty (though there were a few truefen who were dressed in bathrobes, carrying their towels with them, just in case) — I think this movie would have been better in a more crowded house so that the laughter would build more.
The movie was mostly faithful to the book — to the point that I could recite a lot of the lines (though I didn’t). And when it moved away from the book, I found myself wishing it hadn’t. But, after hearing the original radio series, reading the books, and watching the TV series, seeing yet another treatment (even though it was on the big screen, with special effects) didn’t do much for me. Most of the reviews I’ve seen gave the movie 3 or 3-1/2 stars; I’d give it 2-1/2 at most.
I’m looking forward to seeing Serenity this fall, and I hoped that they’d show the trailer, but they didn’t. Almost all the trailers were for Disney movies — the best of the lot, by a long shot, was the trailer for Chicken Little, which played very nicely off Hitchhiker — even to using Louis Armstrong’s It’s a Wonderful World (which Hitchhiker didn’t use — at least they did use a bit of Journey of the Sorcerer when they showed The Book).
And on the small screen….
Our HDTV is still down; we called Magnolia Audio-Video, where we bought it, and their repair guy came out and diagnosed the problem as being in the ballast board or the power supply. It’s fixable at a reasonable price (much better than what I’d expected), but it has to go to the shop — unfortunately, there was some confusion, and it didn’t get picked up on Thursday as we’d expected. The pickup is now scheduled for Sunday — the good news is that we’ll get a loaner HDTV, so we’ll be able to watch on a reasonably-sized set again while we wait for ours to be returned.
Lemon Rinds, yes — Half Lemons, no!
Diane made an interesting chicken dish for Seder, one which calls for several lemons. We have a lemon tree in the backyard, so we always have a good supply, and when she had half a lemon left over, I didn’t see any particular reason to save it. And I knew that it was a good idea to send lemon rinds down the garbage disposal, so when I’d finished with the first batch of rinds, I sent the spare half-lemon after them.
A few minutes later, I realized that this hadn’t been a good idea, as the water started to back up in the sink. I tried using a plunger — no dice. Liquid Plumr didn’t help, either. So, as we finished dinner and got ready to redeem the Afikomen, I called our regular plumber, who was, as I was afraid, closed (it’s a small family-owned business) for the weekend. I didn’t want to wait until Monday, so I looked through the ads in the Yellow Pages and picked Drain Patrol pretty much at random. The plumber showed up just as we were finishing the fourth cup of wine (almost perfect timing), and took care of the problem at a tolerable price, in plenty of time to let us clean up and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Next time, though, I’ll save the extra lemon, or just toss it in the garbage.