{"id":467,"date":"2005-01-01T07:57:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-01T12:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vmalt\/?p=467"},"modified":"2005-12-05T14:16:02","modified_gmt":"2005-12-05T19:16:02","slug":"happy-new-year-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/happy-new-year-2","title":{"rendered":"Happy New Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

The official VM girlfriend and I spent New Year’s Eve watching the first two Lord of the Rings<\/em> flicks. No, seriously. She loves those movies, but I’d never seen them before, and after our disastrous attempt at watching all three Matrix<\/em> flicks back in November on Showtime, we decided to make a New Year’s event out of it.<\/p>\n

I did the reverse-tourist thing during the movies: while others watched the LOTR flicks and then went to New Zealand to see the sites, I watched the movies and pointed out likely locales for some of the scenes, from my travels in 2003. “If you can’t do it half-assed, do it ass-backwards.”<\/p>\n

My buddy Tina, an Australian I met during that trip, sent me a nice holiday package the day before, which was a nice precursor to our geek-out evening.<\/p>\n

At the end of the second movie, it was 11:55, so we clicked over to ABC for Regis Philbin’s fill-in on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. We drank bad champagne and toasted the New Year in private, a pleasant change from past years<\/a>, which tended to involve a lot of drinking.<\/p>\n

As ABC went to a commercial break, and Snoop Dogg gave a videotaped “Get Well Soon” message to Dick Clark, replete with cryptic gang symbols, I raised my glass to my love, and said, “Let these movies be the most drama we deal with in the new year.”<\/p>\n

Be well, everybody. I’ll try to write more, and on more varied subjects, in the year ahead. That’s the only resolution you’re getting out of me this time around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The official VM girlfriend and I spent New Year’s Eve watching the first two Lord of the Rings flicks. No, seriously. She loves those movies, but I’d never seen them before, and after our disastrous attempt at watching all three Matrix flicks back in November on Showtime, we decided to make a New Year’s event … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Happy New Year”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-7x","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3300,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/to-a-boyle","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":0},"title":"To a Boyle","author":"Gil","date":"January 22, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I was listening to The B.S. Report \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the podcast by Bill Simmons, a.k.a. Sports Guy \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in my car yesterday. Simmons was talking with \"Cousin Sal\" about the weekend's football games, when the talk turned to the recent spate of Oscar-worthy movies they'd seen. On over-the-air sports radio, which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sports"","block_context":{"text":"Sports","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/sports"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1403,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/lynch-mob","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":1},"title":"Lynch Mob","author":"Gil","date":"March 22, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I was grooving through Guy Rundle's review of Steven Soderbergh's recent film noir, The Good German, for a while. I thought the writer did a good job of explaining why the film is not the experimental triumph some critics have lauded it as, but rather a nice little mannerist exercise:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5438,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/movie-review-tuesday","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":2},"title":"Movie review Tuesday","author":"Gil","date":"July 20, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Since I'm on a movie-viewing kick for the moment, I figured I'd write about the flicks I watched over the previous week. I'd have included them in yesterday's What It Is, but it'd get too long and unwieldy, and take attention away from the all-important gin section of the post.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2075,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/what-it-is-52608","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":3},"title":"What It Is: 5\/26\/08","author":"Gil","date":"May 26, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"What I'm reading: Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad, and vol. 1 of Cromartie High School, an incredibly funny manga. What I'm listening to: That new Portishead album again. What I'm watching: Kung Fu Hustle, which remains one of the most entertaining flicks of all time, and The Big Lebowski, which I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Adventures in Rufus and\/or Otis"","block_context":{"text":"Adventures in Rufus and\/or Otis","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/adventures-in-rufus-and-or-otis"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0016HNOXQ","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":673,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/i-was-built-on-water-and-my-walls-are-of-fire","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":4},"title":"I was built on water and my walls are of fire","author":"Gil","date":"October 29, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I tellya, if I wasn't about to head out for Madrid for the CPhI\/ICSE conference, I'd be all over ChillerFest here in NJ. I mean, where else would I be able to see Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, Karen Allen, Elvira, and a bunch of extras from Night of the Living\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Madrid"","block_context":{"text":"Madrid","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/travel\/madrid"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":784,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/my-bad","url_meta":{"origin":467,"position":5},"title":"My bad","author":"Gil","date":"January 2, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that Woody Allen's films have sucked for more than a decade now. Last night, Amy & I watched Sweet and Lowdown, and enjoyed the heck out of it. Samantha Morton was just impossibly good, the music was great, and the fact that there\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/my-bad#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}