Reviews and More

While we’re not what I would call avid golfers, my husband and I do like to hit the links or driving range at least a couple times per year. We also like to work a golf outing or two into our vacations whenever possible, which is why we try to choose our destinations accordingly. We’re currently talking about taking a trip to southern California in February, and think that would be a perfect chance to check out some legendary Palm Springs golf courses like La Quinta, Indian Wells, or Bermuda Dunes.

Today I started looking for deals on Palm Springs Hotels because I figured the sooner we book, the better our chances of getting a great low rate. Usually when I search for hotel discounts, I have to go to a bunch of different travel sites, input the same information (destination, check in date, check out date, number of people traveling) over and over again in order to compare prices.

This obviously gets tedious and takes a lot of time, so I decided to do something different today. I checked out a site called SideStep.com, which is basically a travel search engine that pulls pricing information from more than 200 websites to ensure that customers get the best deals around. The searches were easy to perform, and relevant results were returned instantly. Plus, I noticed that SideStep offers a feature not found on many other travel sites: I was able to browse through a list of popular activities to do while in my chosen destination city — and all the entries contained duration as well as pricing information. This will really be helpful to us when we’re planning our future trips!

If you’re tired of having to visit 20 different websites when searching for travel deals, then I know you’ll appreciate SideStep.com as much as I do. Try it today!

I studied Latin for four years in high school, and took a couple more classes while in college. I really loved the subject, so I wanted to keep studying it (at least every once in a blue moon) after I finished school. Towards that end, I occasionally buy textbooks that I think will help with my self-study goals. One of the books lining my shelf right now is Aeneas to Augustus: A Beginning Latin Reader for College Students by Mason Hammond and Anne Amory.

Aeneas and Augustus contains 90 short selections from Latin literature, both prose and poetry, that are designed to help students practice their translating skills. Although neither vocabulary nor grammar are formally presented in this text, there are extensive footnotes that help explain the more obscure words or sentence structures in the passages, thereby making it possible for students with a basic grasp of Latin to complete the translations with the help of a dictionary alone. Plus, there’s a vocab index in the back of the book listing most of the words used in the passages.

The excerpts come from a wide variety of Roman authors, including Cicero, Ovid, Livy, Sallust, Suetonius, Vergil, Horace, and Catullus. There are also a couple of verses from the Vulgate for those who enjoy church Latin.

The excerpts are arranged according to difficulty, with the easier ones placed at the beginning of the book. They then become increasingly challenging towards the middle and end. In fact, towards the end of the book, most of the explanatory notes accompanying the passages are far longer than the passages themselves — a clear indication of the level of difficulty, if you ask me!

Overall, I think Aeneas to Augustus is a decent book for those who want to practice their Latin translations. The excerpts are interesting and varied, so that kept me from getting bored with the exercises. However, it’s not an ideal text for self-study because there aren’t any master translations included so that you can check your own work. That means you have to go online to find the relevant passages and then go through to ensure that you caught the gist of the meanings in your own translation.

Because of this, I’d recommend Aeneas to Augustus only to high intermediate students who haven’t let their Latin skills lapse over the years. If you once studied Latin but haven’t picked up a book in ages, then this isn’t the place to start!

I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who think that wealth, success, and happiness are achieved by pure luck. They attribute other people’s success to good luck, while at the same time dismissing their own failures as bad luck. In either case, they remove personal responsibility and control from the equation, which of course is a huge mistake.

It has always been my opinion that hard work and perseverance trumps luck every time, and that you can become as wealthy and successful as you want to be if you keep at it long enough. But it’s also very important to have a gameplan to follow so that your efforts aren’t wasted on trivial matters. And that’s where the book Realm of Wealth by J. Tavian Alexander comes into play.

The Realm of Wealth is currently available for purchase on the 9 Cycles Prosperity Site. The book reveals the so-called 9 ancient cycles of prosperity that have been used for thousands of years to help achieve success. The cycles are still relevant and powerful today, mostly because author Alexander has spent two decades adapting the cycles to the modern world to ensure that you’ll know exactly how to utilize the techniques revealed in the book’s pages.

I am very interested in self-help books, especially when they’re geared towards attaining wealth and prosperity. The Realm of Wealth definitely sounds like it’s got some good things to offer, so I’m going to do some more digging on this title to see what other people have thought of the content, and I might even end up buying it soon!

It’s been a long time since I actually went to a theater to watch a comedy (I usually wait for the DVD release), but the incredible word-of-mouth buzz surrounding the film Knocked Up was hard to ignore, so I finally gave in. I could tell from the trailer that this would be a pretty crude comedy, which I don’t mind as long as the jokes are funny.

Unfortunately, writer/director Judd Apatow failed to find the same balance between real humor and lame, sophomoric stunts that helped make his earlier film The 40-Year-Old Virgin appealing to a wide audience. Knocked Up was full of unsympathetic characters and unfunny jokes, and it was hard for me to sit through the entire two hours.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Knocked Up stars Katherine Heigl as Alison Scott, a bright, beautiful up-and-coming reporter for the E! Entertainment Network. One day at work Alison finds out that she’s in the running for a coveted promotion because the New York bigwigs like what they see of her on TV. She decides to celebrate the occasion by going out to a club with her sister Debbie (played by Leslie Mann).

At the club, Alison meets a guy named Ben Stone (Seth Rogen). They’re both at the bar trying in vain to get the bartender’s attention when Ben just takes matters into his own hands by reaching over and grabbing a couple of beers for them. Later on, he goes back to talk to Alison, and they inexplicably hit it off. This leads to a drunken encounter that Ben doesn’t even remember the next morning.

Alison and Ben go out to breakfast together, but it’s clear that they have nothing in common. The awkwardness of the whole situation makes them both conclude that it would be better if they never saw each other again. Both are content to write it off as a one-night stand and get on with their lives.

Then two months later, Alison learns that she’s pregnant. She hasn’t been with anyone since Ben, so there’s no question in her mind who the father is. She decides to get in touch with Ben in order to tell him about the baby. After a bit of discussion, they agree to go through with the pregnancy — together.

The rest of the film then deals with the ups and downs of Ben and Alison’s relationship as they try to become a real couple for the sake of the baby. Knocked Up also has subplots involving Debbie’s deteriorating relationship with her husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and Ben’s aspirations for building a “celebrity skin” type of website with his stoner buddies.

My Reaction: The biggest problem I had with this movie is that I never, ever bought into Alison and Ben as a couple. Not for one second. There’s no way in hell that a woman like Alison would end up with a guy like Ben. I’m not just talking about looks here, even though that is a major part of it. (Let’s face it: Alison is conventionally pretty while Ben is pudgy, unshaven, and generally unkempt.) But beyond the looks, Ben never came off as even remotely likable in this film. He was annoying and selfish for 90% of the movie, and the writers didn’t make a convincing case for Alison to stay with him. Sure, perhaps if Ben was a pro athlete or a dot-com gazillionaire, he’d have a model on his arm. But instead he had $113 in the bank and had no ambitions whatsoever, so I didn’t buy the pairing at all.

Moreover, Alison and Ben didn’t even seem to have fun with each other or enjoy each other’s company. Everything was a battle for them and it felt like they were “forced” to be together or something. There’s no way that kind of relationship would work out.

Why is it that in movieland guys like Ben can land women like Alison, but it doesn’t work the other way around? We never see hot, model-type guys settling for overweight, frumpy-looking women. Whenever a hot guy does like a plain-Jane in the movies, it always turns out that she’s really just a simple makeover away from being drop-dead gorgeous. The closest hot guy, plain girl pairing that I can think of was the Rob Lowe-Mare Winningham hookup in St. Elmo’s Fire, but even then the Lowe character made it clear that he was doing it out of sympathy.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t accept Ben and Alison — and that ended up ruining the movie for me. He had nothing at all to offer her.

That was a fatal flaw for Knocked Up, as far as I’m concerned, so I have to give this movie just 4.5 stars out of 10. Maybe I’m getting too old and uptight to appreciate these types of comedies, but this film didn’t sit well with me at all.