Rififi

Tony le Stéphanois, played with a gruff weariness by Jean Servais, has just been released from prison after serving 5 years, taking the fall for his substitute son, Jo le Suedois, played by the prototypical Aryan, Carl Möhner. His girl stolen, no prospects, and a haggard face to reflect the losses, but his old partners are planning a new heist and want him aboard. After a run-in with his old girlfriend, he decides to take them up on it - the robbery of a fortress-like corner jewelry store. Much planning follows, and then they pull the heist off. But the ex-girlfriend's new beau, a gangster leader, tries to horn in, with tragic results for everyone.

It was interesting to note that one of the 4 robbers was played by the director Dassin - the Italian dandy safe cracker. One of the extras with the DVD is an extensive set of production notes as well as an interview with Dassin, where he explained that the original actor backed out at the last minute so he had to step in, and he did a wonderful job. Also, the black and white filming of Paris is beautiful, and the acting is all around top notch.

As I mentioned before, it is the actual robbery that is breathtaking. In fact, until I read about it later, I didn't even notice the lack of dialog or music, that's how involved you get with the job. And the terrible repercussions don't feel like some kind of Hayes Code demanded retribution, but rather it somehow seemed pre-ordained and how it would work out for these guys.

Jean Servais was perfect for the part. He plays Tony with a real weathered outlook, both internal and external. He seems revived by the new "job" and gives it his all. But his eyes show no surprise in how badly it all turns out, and he uses all his cunning to get the kidnapped boy back. I really liked this movie and have added Topkapi and the Italian Big Deal on Madonna Street to my list of movies on Netflix, as this genre really showed its stuff.

• Daemon Dancing in the Dark : My FreeBSD and Linux blog. I started it May 2003 in order to keep track of the mountain of information needed to keep one of these alternative operating systems going. I love working with FreeBSD and I keep lots of notes. It gets plenty of hits and is reflected in a few different spots. I go through spurts of effort on it, depending on how much I use my BSD boxes. I have a big backlog of posts I should get to for it, and plenty of other things I want to try. It's a nice, focused, personally useful site, where I keep all my BSD notes.
• The Game Chair : a group effort, sort of a high end amateur web site where I write video game reviews and other musings. We specialize in what we call "Progressive Reviews", where you write up three or four reviews as you play through a game. I contribute bits and pieces and am due to dive into a new game. I might be getting Lego Star Wars II for review, which should be fun. My girls and I have have a great time playing Lego Star Wars.
• Wanderings of a lost [game] mind : This is my video game diary blog, hosted on Gamespot.com. I use it to keep track of my video game playing habits, just to track what I play for how long, as I don't usually play to the end of anything. It too has sunk into disuse.
• Incredible Brightness of Seeing : My movie blog, where I used to put up lengthy reviews and log my movie viewing habits. I still watch plenty of movies, but I haven't been keeping up with it, either.
• In Absinthia : My drinking buddy and I have started up a new blog about all things absinthe. It's a fascinating subject, and a fascinating drink to boot. Again, I have a big backlog of articles I have to put up for it.
• A Trifle One-Sided : a new blog I started in order to play with Six Apart's new community blogging site, Vox.com. I was experimenting using it as my culture commenting spot, talking about movies, books and music. There's some pretty nice Web 2.0 features on it, like dropping in thumbnails of movies, and book covers from Amazon, and the like. It's got some shortcomings, not surprising in a beta product. It will only list like the first 10 hits of a search string, so you have to play around to find your stuff sometimes. And you can't use HTML, and there's only a few schemes available. By the way, if anyone is interested in trying it out too, drop me an email as I have two invitations I can hand out. I'm not exactly sure how far I'll go with this, but it has been fun dabbling in it.

So, as you can see, I don't lack for creative writing outlets. So Jiggle's purpose in life has come into question. I could continue to use it for posts that don't naturally fit into these other places, like my cocktail postings. I have always felt that a blog should be useful to someone, even if just the author (like my FreeBSD blog). If others find it useful, so much the better. And a personal diary blog like Jiggle just doesn't offer that. So, while Jiggle will remain online, I'm not exactly sure if I'll be posting much here in the future.

Unicorn Golf Course

This was played a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to posting it. Started off great - a par on the first hole is pretty amazing. Then it went downhill fast and I struggled for most of the rest of the round. I've been hitting my drives off the tee pretty well, but my irons were shaky at best.

Probably my best round of the season so far. My drives continued to be solid, ever since I decided to cut way down on my back swing, keeping my left arm as straight as I can. Sometimes, I slice it off to the right, if I don't follow through. But I generally get it out there, which makes things much more easy. Michael has been having problems off the tee, so his score is actually pretty damn good, especially if you take away one or two disasteruous holes. As for me, my putting was abysmal. I three putted the first 4 holes and missed plenty of other short ones. With even an average putter going today, I could have had a round for the ages, easily cutting off 5 strokes. My short game was glorious, especially on the par 5 6th hole. I even mis-hit that one but it skipped off the fringe and came to rest about a foot from the cup.