Reviews and More

I travel quite frequently and I’m always looking for ways to make my trips easier and more convenient. For example, I try to make my flight, hotel reservations, and rental car arrangements through the same travel agency or website so I don’t have to book, pay, and confirm with several different places. Over the years, numerous travel websites have sprung up that allow users to do just that. Here’s what I think about a site called HotelReservations.com.

I used Tokyo as a test destination because that’s a city that I go to at least three or four times per year and I’m familiar with the prices of hotels in the area. Anyway, I submitted a couple of search queries and was impressed with how quickly the results came back. HotelReservations.com listed a lot of the top hotels, and the prices quoted on the site were in line with what I expected to see. The info for the hotels that I looked at was accurate (based on my personal knowledge) and it looked like booking rooms through the site was a pretty straightforward process (although I didn’t actually go all the way through the wizard), so maybe I’ll give this site a try the next time I head out to Japan!

I just finished reading Death in the Clouds, another murder mystery from Agatha Christie featuring everyone’s favorite Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Some people have commented about how much light reading I’ve been doing recently, and I agree: I need to get back to reading the classics sometime soon. I’ve got a volume of Trollope sitting on my nightstand, but I’m saving that for after the holidays when I can focus better.

Anyway, Death in the Clouds is about a woman who is found murdered after a short airplane flight from France to England. Poirot happened to be on the flight and was just a few feet away from the victim. But as he was alternately trying to fight off motion sickness and sleeping, he didn’t notice what happened. The fact that someone was murdered right under his nose is a blow to his vanity, so he decides to help the police with the investigation.

Poirot works — peripherally in the beginning, and then more closely — with two other passengers on the plane to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. They are Jane Grey, a beauty shop assistant who was returning from a holiday at Le Pinet, and Norman Gale, a dentist doing the same. Jane and Norman don’t do much investigating of their own, but instead just follow Poirot’s instructions.

Overall, I thought Death in the Clouds was a fun read. I missed having Capt. Hastings’s narrative about Poirot’s exploits and I thought the solution was a bit far-fetched, but otherwise, I enjoyed this book.

There are a lot of directories out there listing dentists, doctors, lawyers, and so forth, but a significant portion of those directories only include information for those medical or legal professionals that have paid for placement. This of course would limit the results that potential customers see when they enter search queries in an attempt to find a dentist.

EveryDentist.com is different in the following respect: they include all the dentists they can find and allow everyone in their directory the same opportunity to list office hours and additional information. I did a search for my dentist (William C. Kao) and saw that he was indeed listed — with the correct phone number and everything.

This seems like an excellent resource to keep in mind whenever you need some dental work done. EveryDentist.com allows you to search by specialty also, which is perfect for those times when you need a procedure that’s outside your regular dentist’s area of practice.

I was really looking forward to watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose because I heard that it was based on a true story. The previews made the moive look freaky and genuinely scary, so I was bracing myself for something along the lines of William Friedman’s The Exorcist.

Unfortunately, Emily Rose fell far short of my expectations. Unlike The Exorcist, this movie focuses not on what was wrong with Emily (played by Jennifer Carpenter), but on the ensuing trial brought against her priest Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) after she dies. So when we see Emilly’s “possession,” it’s all in very brief flashbacks.

Looking at the story from this angle made the action seem very distant. Therefore, I was unable to get involved in what was going on and never quite got a feel for who Emily Rose was. Because I didn’t “know” her, I didn’t feel any sympathy for her and didn’t really care what happened to her.

This was the second horror movie in a row that I’ve seen that starred Laura Linney (The Mothman Prophecies was the other. Very strange, considering the only other film I’d seen her in was Love Actually!