I hope you all had a merry Christmas. As my family held our festivities last weekend, mine was uneventful. Mom gave me two presents, Monopoly for the Game Boy and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I played the Monopoly game a bit, and it's fun enough, but slow! There is no way to skip the animation segments of dice rolling and pieces moving, and the computer seems to think long and hard before making any decision. There are short game and timed options, but the short game is still long enough, and the lowest time limit you can set for the timed option is one hour. But I suppose a Monopoly game of less than an hour would be sort of pointless. But at least you would think they would give you the option of saving your game to resume at a later point. But it's an accurate enough simulation of real Monopoly, and if it takes forever to play, that's not really the game's fault. The computer opponents do some dumb things sometimes, like passing on Park Place when I already owned Boardwalk, and I wish there was a way to turn off the auction of property, since I don't usually play that way (there are some house rules you can play with, like the Free Parking jackpot and double pay if you land on go). It's fun enough, though, just not ideally suited for someone like me, who tends to just grab the game boy on the way to the bathroom if no reading material is handy.

I saw The Incredibles Christmas night. Again went to the Pacific Trolley theatres, and again they were pretty slow. Unfortunately, it seems like they cut corners in the presentation of the film; it annoys me to see all these signs telling me that it is illegal and wrong to download digital quality bootleg films off the interent, and then put a subpar product on the screen. The sound in the auditorium I was in was pretty bad. But I suppose it wasn't any worse than any other theater around here. Some kids sitting nearby were a bit annoying, but not too bad, no one was screaming or anything, and considering it was a kid's movie, I put up with it with gentle good humor. The movie was okay, nothing special. Held my interest, at least. Mom had suggested we see Spanglish, which I have no interst in seeing, and then she suggested Meet the Fockers, which I wouldn't mind seeing, but I didn't think she wanted to see. So I suggested The Incredibles as something we both could enjoy, and we both did. I almost suggested The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but my mom hated The Royal Tenenbaums, so I decided against that.