Reviews and More

I watched episode 1×14 of House a couple days ago, and didn’t think it was that great after one viewing. So I tried watching a few selected scenes again to see if my opinion would change, but it didn’t. There haven’t been too many weak House episodes in the first season, but “Control” is one of them. Here’s what happened:

Mysterious Symptoms of the Week: A highly successful 32-year-old business woman (hey, it’s Nina from 24!) is brought into PPTH after getting sick during a business meeting. Her symptoms include: chest pains, breathing problems, and severe pain in her leg. As the episode progresses, she develops paralysis and congestive heart failure, and she shows some psych symptoms.

Mistaken Diagnoses and Wrong Guesses: Blood clot, inflammation, cancer, referred pain (in other words, cancer in one part of her body was actually causing pain in another part).

Final Diagnosis: Severe heart damage caused by ingesting large quantities of ipecac. It turns out the woman was a bulimic and took ipecac to induce vomiting. She gets a heart transplant and presumably will live for a long time.

Character Development: There’s a new president of the board of directors at PPTH. His name is Edward Vogler (played by Chi McBride) and he’s going to be one of those “hands-on” directors. He promises to make big changes at the hospital, which probably isn’t going to be a good thing for our favorite differential diagnosticians.

My Reaction: Not one of my favorite House episodes thus far. I don’t like the way the storylines are heading with this Vogler character in the picture. Obviously House does what he wants and he gets away with it because he’s a great doctor. They’re going to try to have Vogler come in and rule PPTH with an iron fist, and he and House will clash, etc. etc. But come on: the name of the show is House, not Vogler, so let’s take a wild guess as to who will win out… yawn.

My husband has a large group of friends who always go motocross riding together. They have even formed a team — with sponsors and everything — and compete in local amateur races all summer long. As a result, they’re always in need of custom stickers to put on their bikes in order to show their sponsors some love.

The team has ordered their stickers from a couple of different places to try to get a feel for what each print shop has to offer in terms of quality and pricing. Thus far they haven’t found a particular shop that has stood out from the rest, so I’m going to recommend that they check out CustomizedStickers.com.

CustomizedStickers.com is a web-based store that I came across while doing something else online, and after spending some time on the site, I think it’s a service that my husband’s team will really be interested in. After all, they offer full-color stickers at 1-color prices and the artwork is absolutely FREE. I know the team hasn’t ever found a deal like that, so they’ll probably jump at this opportunity. I’m glad I found that site!

I’ve had so many bad experiences with Oliver Stone films that I usually try to stay as far away from his work as possible. I did like Platoon (way back in 1986), but haven’t enjoyed anything else from him in the last two decades. I mean, this guy managed to ruin a football movie (Any Given Sunday) for me — and I’m one of the biggest football fans around! So I avoided World Trade Center when it first came out (even though I was interested in the story). However, my husband really wanted to see it, so I caved in and rented it the other night.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. The movie retells the true story of Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, two Port Authority police officers who were trapped beneath the rubble after the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001. You just knew a major motion picture would be made about the 9/11 attacks, and I thought it was interesting that Stone opted to take this particular angle with the film.

Anyway, Michael Peña stars as Jimeno, a rookie on the force with a pregnant wife named Allison (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) at home, along with a young daughter named Bianca. Nicolas Cage plays McLoughlin, a veteran officer who also has a family waiting anxiously for his return.

The morning of 9/11 started out just like any other for these two men. But shortly after 8:00am, the world would change forever. The Port Authority gets word of a plane hitting one of the WTC towers, and McLoughlin is called in for support. He was involved in designing emergency contingency plans after the 1993 attacks on the WTC, so he’s somewhat of an expert in the area. Jimeno goes along as part of his crew, and they soon arrive on the scene.

By the way, I thought Stone did a wonderful job of capturing the raw emotion of shock and dismay that the officers felt when they first saw what was going on at Ground Zero. Even though I’ve seen countless hours of the very same news footage, I was still moved by what was going on on the screen. I guess 9/11 is just one of those events that will never lose its power.

McLoughlin’s team gets conflicting reports about what’s happening up on the top floors of the WTC tower, so they really don’t know what to do. They have an idea that they can actually make it up there to start helping people evacuate, but they never get that opportunity. As they’re making their way through the lobby, they realize that the building is acutally collapsing on top of them. McLoughlin quickly tells his crew to get on over to the elevator shaft, and they do make it there just in time. Unfortunately, everyone is lost except for McLoughlin and Jimeno.

The rest of the movie then deals with how McLoughlin and Jimeno fight to retain hope while being buried under the rubble and how their families above ground deal with not knowing what has happened to the men. Even though we already know how the story turns out, it was still a very powerful experience.

My Reaction: As I said, I was really surprised at how engrossing and watchable this movie was. I think a lot of it had to do with Michael Peña, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors. I thought he was awesome as the locksmith in 2004’s Crash, plus he’s nice to look at for two hours!

There were some boring parts along the way, and, inevitably, there were some scenes that really didn’t make sense. For instance, I had no idea why we needed to see that random dude from Connecticut who went all gung-ho and rejoined the Marines. Was that supposed to be a message of some sort? Who knows. It was just weird.

Overall, I think World Trade Center is a good movie that is definitely worth watching. I give it 7 stars out of 10, and that’s saying a lot considering my past history with Oliver Stone movies!

I usually don’t pay much attention to other people’s yards, but one of my mom’s neighbors has the most incredible landscaping I’ve ever seen in person. First of all, the entire walkway and driveway is paved in gorgeous stone, which just looks so much more appealing than plain concrete. Second, they have an awesome little water garden in the back, complete with exotic-looking plants and koi. And finally, their lawn is a beautiful, deep green and is always mowed to perfection.

As much as I would like my backyard to look as good as that one, there’s no way my family could ever afford such an elaborate landscape design. We are going to try to make some improvements this summer, but I think this is going to occur on a pretty small scale. Even so, I’m anxious to see what our yard will look like when the contractors are finished!