Happy 2006 to anybody that happens to be reading this. My New Year hasn't started off with much of a bang but it did include a nice Korean BBQ induced post-dinner nap. Not much seems to be different from the last year and that was best exemplified by my strange inability to see the film Munich. This time my dinner being what thwarted my plan. Maybe it's for the better? I doubt it... I enjoyed War of the Worlds so much that I became a born again Spielberg fan. He's quite the craftsman when it comes to filmmaking, the only reservation I have about Munich is its politics. Hopefully I'll get to see it sometime this week.

Last Friday was spent playing Magic the Gathering for about seven hours. The game is every bit as enjoyable as it was when I was in fifth grade and that marathon Magic session left me wishing I hadn't sold all my cards in junior high. If anybody is wondering, I constructed a white and green deck geared toward protecting myself and slowly chipping away at my opponents. It proved to be somewhat succesful.

I recently finished reading American Sucker by David Denby. He's the film critic for the New Yorker and he's generally a very intelligent guy but this book was just freaky. It chronicled a period in his life that started when his wife left him. Suddenly thrown into a crises and faced with the prospect of selling the apartment they shared so that he and his ex could split it, he decided instead to buy out her half of the apartment using money he'd make off the stock market. His home was the last thing he had left and he was determined to hold onto it. This was right around that time that tech stocks were really taking off and Denby tried to take full advantage of it. Unfortunately, he and many others were bit in the ass by unfulfilled promises and shady characters in the financial world (Imagine that). Eventually, he ended up losing nearly a million dollars on paper and left me wondering how such smart people can be so dumb sometimes...

I'm currently reading a biography about Houdini that's really entertaining.

Yesterday, I was first introduced to Halo 2. Ugh. I'd played the original Halo about four years ago and that was the last time that I had played a first persion shooter on a console. Playing a first person shooter using a controller just doesn't feel right to me (I'm bad enough with a keyboard and mouse) and because the character doesn't move how I expect it to I end up feeling like I'm going to puke all over the place. In fact, just thinking about that feeling is making me feel queasy so I'll leave it at that. Halo 2 = thumbs down.

I've mailed off an application to the Director's Guild to get into the Assistant Director's Training Program. If I get past the first stage then I will go into what the program entails but for now I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed and try not to get my hopes up.

Does keeping ones fingers crossed imply a level of effort and hopefullness that one could equate with "getting ones hopes up?"

Also, does anyone know how to play the card game Mao?