Reviews and More

I’m falling a bit behind in my Season One House recaps again. One of the problems is that I like to watch several episodes in a row, and I just don’t feel like writing recaps immediately after every single viewing. Anyway, I am up to episode 1×16 right now, but am only getting around to recapping 1×13 today. That ep was called “Cursed”, and here’s what happened on it:

Mysterious Symptoms of the Week: A 12-year-old boy is admitted to PPTH complaining of fever, congestion, and painful breathing. He’s also coughing up sputum, and later in the ep he develops an odd rash, throat nodules, and some really nasty looking lesions that cover a significant portion of his body.

Mistaken Diagnoses and Wrong Guesses: Legionnaire’s disease, fungal pneumonia, Lyme disease, anthrax poisoning, autoimmune disease, sarcoidosis.

Final Diagnosis: Leprosy, which the patient caught from his own father (who had spent a couple years in India).

Character Development: Chase’s father, a renowned doctor in his own right, drops by unexpectedly. Chase has had little to no relationship with him in many years, and he can’t figure out why his father would suddenly come by. (Um, think about it, dude. There’s only one reason long-gone television parents ever come back to see their kids. It’s cancer, duh!)

Anyway, House is intrigued by the overt animosity between the two and tries to get to the bottom of what’s going on. He eventually does guess that Chase’s father has cancer, but the elder Chase makes House promise not to tell Robert what’s going on. House agrees, and the elder Chase leaves without his son knowing that that would likely be the last time they see each other.

My Reaction: I thought “Cursed” was a pretty good episode overall. I liked the medical case more than the personal stuff this week because Chase is not my favorite of the underlings, so I don’t really care what’s going on in his life. I liked the way the patient’s worsening condition was presented. It was total disgusting and grossed me out to no end, but at least it was interesting!

Ever since I bought my first digital camera seven years ago, I’ve been printing photos from home. I’m all for convenience, so I love being able to print pictures and frame them or put them in albums whenever the fancy strikes.

Of course printing all these photos requires a lot of ink, which means that I go through a heck of a lot of printer cartridges over here. Replacement cartridges are usually quite expensive, so I’m always on the lookout for online stores that offer deep discounts on office supplies. Databazaar.com is one of my recent finds, and I’m happy to report that their prices for both original and compatible Epson ink cartridges are among the lowest I’ve been able to find anywhere. Databazaar.com has a huge selection of ink cartridges (from Epson and all other major brands as well), and I was able to quickly find products that would work with my printer model.

I liked the look and feel of the Databazaar.com website. It was very easy to browse through all the office supplies and ink cartridges by brand or product type, plus the search function returned relevant results that really sped up the shopping process. I’ll definitely be going back to this store the next time I need to reorder printer ink!

I like to watch a good mix of current films and movies that have been around for a while. I haven’t always been such a huge movie buff, so I’m sure there are plenty of good flicks from the last 20 or 30 years that I haven’t seen yet. During my last trip to the video store, I saw the 1996 movie Stealing Beauty on a shelf of Staff Recommendations. I like Liv Tyler well enough and vaguely remembered hearing good things about this particular title, so I rented it.

Tyler stars as 19-year-old Lucy Harmon, a young American girl whose mother has recently died. Lucy’s father sends her on a trip to Italy to have her portrait painted and to interact with some of the people her mother (who was a poet) knew when she was younger. I think some are relatives and others are friends. We also learn that Lucy is a virgin (she would like to change that) and that she’s not sure the man she’s thought of as her dad all these years is actually her biological father.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I got from the plot. This filmed crawled along at a friggin’ snail’s pace, and I gave up on it after 45 minutes. That paragraph up there? Is all I could figure out about the movie in all that time. I rarely ever give up on movies (I can usually watch from beginning to end no matter how bad they are), but this was complete suckage. Nothing happened in the first 45 minutes. Sorry, but I value my time too much to waste it on complete garbage like this!

So this isn’t a proper review of Stealing Beauty and I don’t expect to influence any opinions about the movie from what I’ve written here. Nevertheless, I’m still going to hand out a rating. I give this movie 1 star out of 10 and think that it is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Mother’s Day is coming up in less than a month and I’ve been trying to think of something good to get for my mom. I found a nice piece of jewelry that I think she’ll like, but I’m wondering if that’s really the best present I can give her at this point. You see, my mom has been spending the better part of two years taking care of her aged father and hardly ever has a chance to do anything for herself. That’s why I’m now leaning towards sending my mom on an all-expenses paid vacation — even if it’s just for three or four days.

I started looking at different travel fulfillment companies and came across one I’d never heard of before. It’s called United Vacation Network, and they seem to specialize in arranging customized vacations for their clients. For example, United Vacation Network can set up cruises, B&B or resort stays, and of course hotels and condos.

Sending my mom on a nice vacation would definitely be a fantastic Mother’s Day present for her. I’m going to have to think about this a bit more and see how much it would take to pull off my plan!

Monday night’s episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine was called “Faith Off” and it mostly dealt with Christine’s refusal to admit that Richard is a different (better) person than he was when they were first married. Here’s a quick recap of what happened in episode 2×19.

Lindsay (one of the condescending moms at Ritchie’s school) hires Richard to remodel her master bathroom, and Christine is absolutely horrified when she hears the news. The other moms already hate her (Christine) and will be looking for any excuse to fire Richard and ridicule Christine even more. Richard tells Christine she’s overreacting, and anyway, he’s actually a good contractor, so she has nothing to worry about.

It turns out that Richard was in fact doing a good job, but he gets fired anyway. The reason? Christine was caught on Lindsay’s nannycam going through the master bedroom and trying on Lindsay’s clothes. Christine actually feels guilty about getting Richard fired, and Richard decides to use that to his advantage. He makes her promise to quit holding grudges about all the bad things he did while they were married. Christine reluctantly agrees.

Matthew was also a big part of this episode for some reason. I still cannot stand this character and have no idea what purpose he serves. For instance, it was revealed that he had never been to Home Depot before and didn’t even know what it was. Um, hello. He watches TV all the time — hadn’t he ever seen a Home Depot commercial? Hadn’t he ever passed a Home Depot while driving or something? Oh, and he’s supposed to be in med school but he never goes because he can’t find his classes? Puhleeze. The writers have spent the last two seasons making Matthew out to be the smart one, and now all of a sudden he’s as dumb as a rock?!?!

My Reaction: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is definitely the highlight of this show. I think her acting is head and shoulders above the rest of the cast — almost to the point of it being a detriment. It just makes the others looks so … mediocre. She seems to be channeling Elaine Benes more and more each week, and that’s fine by me. Christine is the only funny character on the show; the rest are totally boring. It’ll be interesting to see if this series gets picked up for another season. I hope so, but I’ve been reading that the viewership isn’t where CBS would like it to be.