2011 Shaping Up As a Bad Bad Year 4 Movies

Thanks to the 2011 preview edition of Empire magazine, here is a list of the movies I will be seriously avoiding this year. The usual rules apply, No Sequels, Remakes, Comic Books and adaptations of old TV Shows.

Originality is all I crave.

So here goes:-

Transformers - Dark Of The Moon
Pirates Of The Carribean - On Stranger Tides
Captain America
Thor
The Green Lantern
X-Men - First Class
Conan The Ballbearing
Spy Kids 4
Footloose
The Hangover Part 2
Arthur
Diary Of A Wimpy Kid 2
Sherlock Holmes 2
The Three Musketeers
Straw Dogs
Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol
The Thing
Twilight - Breaking Dawn Part 1
Scream 4
Final Destination 5
Paranormal Activity 3
Kung Fu Panda 2
Cars 2
Happy Feet 2 in 3D
Fright Night
Piranha 3DD

And finally there's "Jack and Jill" where Adam Sandler plays his own twin sister!

Is it me or is this list even longer than the one from last year?

And they are remaking Straw Dogs? Peckinpah must be spinning in his tequilla bottle.

Stories that make you go "Huh?"

Every so often, you come across a story on the Interwebs that make you come up short and do one of those Lewis Black style double takes.

This week such a story was the one that said people in the Britain rank 15th in the world for yearly alcohol consumption. Yay! Go Team UK! The Old Country is still good at something after all.

So this ranking of 15th corresponds to a yearly intake of 13.4 litres of pure alcohol per person. Or over 445 pints of strong beer or large glasses of wine. In contrast, Britain's wimpy European neighbors can only pull a lowly 12.2 liters per person.

But then the story gets kind of surreal.

If you discount teetotalers and only put the drinking on the drinkers, the consumption rate in the UK jumps to 15.6 litres per person. Way to go Blighty! This number corresponds to 9.50 litres per woman and a staggering 21.5 litres per man. Surprisingly, a whole 14.4% of the population in Britain do not drink at all.

Now with these new revised and bigger numbers, you'd really think that Britain would move up from 15th to an even more respectable and higher place in this the World's Table of Serious Boozing Nations....

And guess what? If you think that, you are wronger than wrong.

13.4 litres gives to a ranking of 15th, but 15.6 litres puts you, to quote the article I read, as "out-drunk by about half the countries in the world". The report ranked 193 countries, so 15.6 litres corresponds to a ranking of BELOW 96th !!!

I think that is worth repeating. 13.4 is 15th, 15.6 is below 96th.

Huh? Huh? Huh? Whaaaaa?

The report even said that given these revised figures, Britain is overtaken by countries like Egypt and Iraq. Huh? What The F......?

I guess the action of "normalising for teetotalers" really skews the numbers. Say you have a big Muslim country where almost no one drinks. So 227 million people in Indonesia consume 40 litres of alcohol per year. When you put those 40 litres squarely on the 2 people actually doing the drinking, an initial alcohol consumption rate of of 0.00000018 litres per person becomes 20 litres per person.

Yowzer! Living amongst non-drinkers makes the imbibers go at it even more!

But you have to admit that initially reading 13.4 makes you 15th, you were not expecting that 15.6 litres makes you 97th.

Now it has happened twice!

Twice in my life I have had feelings, I don't want to call them "religious" or to use the weasel word "spiritual" to describe them, but these occasions definitely felt like my life was being guided when they happened.

The first time was of course, the famous -25 metre golf shot. After that happened a thought formed in my mind.

And it was "You do not have to play this stupid game EVER again. You will gain years of life in which to do other things".

And I took that thought and shaped my life around it - not even playing the hateful game when I moved to Florida. A place, let's face it, that might be called "St Andrews of the South".

And I am a better person for having done that.

And now a second instance of such a life changing event has happened.

Yesterday ( February 5th 2011 ), because I cannot play tennis ( "Damn you Tennis Elbow!" ), I decided to get out the bicycle and ride over to see my buddies playing our Saturday morning game. So I got the Raleigh out of the garage and pumped up the tires and took off for the courts which are about 2.5 miles from my house.

I'm tootling along and feeling pretty good, I'm about half way there are then there's a big "BANG!" Oh yes, the back tire just blew itself right off the frame and I had to walk the heavy walk of shame and push the bike back home.

But why is this moment number 2 in my life? Let me explain. As soon as it happened, I thought, "If there is a God, ( and there is not ), this is her telling me to not do this again." Seems to me these thoughts are arising because I'm being guided to stop doing activities that are both (a) mind numbingly repetitive and (b) as boring as an freaking awl.

So guess what? Bicycling is now out of my life and I am now free of participating in this most ridiculously pointless activity.

Free! Free!