Picked up the wine and rest of the food today. Finland is wonderfully white at the moment and it looks as if it will last through the holiday.

I just had some fish fingers - possible a new tradition in pre-Grand Bouffe crapfood.

My back is playing Old Harry after a session of snow clearing.

I might watch Dr Strangelove tonight, to get into the Yuletide spirit ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

I am fine, finally unwinding, done all the shopping and nothing left I have to do. :-)

How are you?

not only has it been wedensday so far, it'll be wednesday all day.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Similar here, Christmas Eve is the big event, however, it is not Santa who is coming, but the "Christkind" (Christ-Child).

The people in my surrounding have stopped a while ago making gifts, except for the kids.

Do I assume the women are just really attractive gold-diggers or are they wealthy also?

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

actually DID to become billionaires in ... where ... Communist China?  Were they given authority to oversee construction/start-up of a string of factories with instructions from the government to get the job done, become wealthy, or else?

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

I've now finished work and so can look forward to laying in tomorrow and then doing nothing but watching the fox trying (and failing badly) to catch pheasants in the garden.

at some point I'm sure I'll watch some telly and no doubt have a teeny-weeny beer type drink while i'm at it.

keep to the Fen Causeway

I am guessing you're referring to the Canadian band and not American drug addict.

how can they not have noticed they were being steam hauled ? Much as I love steam, the acceleration is rubbish compared to modern traction.

keep to the Fen Causeway

is a beautiful sight.

Of course I think steam in any other season is beautiful too.

Good friend of ours saw and highly recommended it.  He also said to shell out the $2 to see it in 3D.

The last time I went to a movie theater I vowed I would never go to another.  Kept that vow for 6 six years.  Most movies I have zero interest in viewing and most of the rest I can view in the comfort of my own home, hear the soundtrack over my own sound system¹, not have someone coughing flu all over us (happened the last time) by buying/renting the DVD for 25%/1% of the cost of going to a theater.  

And we don't have to watch 27 trailers of previews for films the producers would have to give me money, free sex, and drugs to sit through.

But I guess I'll end-up going to this one.  I do want to see what is happening with 3D animation.  If nothing else I'll get a nice 2.5 hour nap.

¹  In New Mexico the soundtrack is considered an optional externality: great if the audience can hear but, in the general scheme of things, not all that important.

No one could have predicted

I too tend to prefer DVDs to cinemas with all those irritating people munching snacks, pushing one's seat, etc., but I will make an exception for this one and try to see it in 3-D.

There's a positive, in-depth (pardon pun) by Manohla Dargis in the NYT. More important than the 3-D was the other technology:

"Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in "Avatar" back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn't exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor's physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI).

...
 In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot "Avatar" in 3-D ... an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn't the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema.
...

After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he's an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does.

... one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.

If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it's because "Avatar" is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie's truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.

... Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What's often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn't changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder."

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice. Blog - Nice Experience

We saw Avatar at the IMAX.  It's definitely worth seeing in 3D.  In fact, it's probably only worth seeing in 3D (this is deftly handled, unlike, say, Disney's Christmas Carol, which is one obvious 3D set piece after another), because the script really isn't very good, the story tediously derivative, and some of the dialogue close to giggle-out-loud awful. We walked back to the train ticking off the films in which we'd seen the key scenes before. And one of us was 11.

I don't want to give the impression it was unalloyed suffering-it wasn't. And I stopped looking at my watch during the battle scenes at the end. But without the 3D, a very ordinary film.

I thought that if you oberve you can't know the date, but if you know the date you can't observe.

Or am I being too literal ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

I feel a plea coming on

keep to the Fen Causeway

I think someone's pinched the blades for scrap...