Dinhternet

Daft Punk is not daft at all. In fact, I would have to call them geniuses, and one of the best things to have come out of France.

So for many Hal­loweens now, I’ve wanted to dress up like the dancers from Daft Punk’s “Around the World” video:

I men­tioned it again in San Diego because Christina Ly and I were talk­ing about Daft Punk, but she hadn’t seen the video before. Since we were dri­ving around look­ing for food at the time, I could only describe it to them. Joe was intrigued. Last night, I showed them both the video, and they both said they were down to dress up with me! If you want to be part of the magic, watch the video and pick a cos­tume. We’re either going to have one of each cos­tume or all the the same one.

Oh, and by the way, Daft Punk fans are also geniuses. Check out this fan video:

And this was made in answer to it:

I want to do some­thing like that for TNT! But sadly, I would only be able to do some­thing like this:

Thanks to Andrew, who told me about the McDonald’s/Fandango spe­cial offer. Every Wednes­day at noon for the last two months, Fan­dango would post an item from the McDonald’s dol­lar menu on their site. If you texted the item to Fan­dango, it would send you back a pro­mo­tional code that let you get any ticket for just one dol­lar. Sadly, I think yes­ter­day was the last day of the promotion.

Gio Linh and I used that yes­ter­day to go watch National Trea­sure: Book of Secrets with Christina Ly, her lit­tle cousin, and Eddie. Eddie and I were a bit skep­ti­cal about it because we didn’t enjoy the first one too much, but Gio Linh and Christina Ly’s cousin wanted to see it.

I have to say, this one was def­i­nitely bet­ter than the orig­i­nal to me. Although when think­ing about it after­wards, there were some things that stood out as slightly incred­i­ble, my sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief was not shaken dur­ing the movie itself. The plot flowed well, even if it was bit pre­dictable (Christina Ly’s cousin knew what was going to hap­pen next), and the end­ing didn’t scream, “We’re going to milk this fran­chise for all it’s worth,” like so many movies do these days. And I real­ize that my review amounts to “It didn’t suck.” But it was hon­estly decent. I just… can’t describe how at the moment.

Oh, and as an added bonus, there was a Goofy short before the main fea­ture. (National Trea­sure is a Dis­ney IP.) I do enjoy shorts. I remem­ber when Dis­ney movies would play every Sun­day night on ABC, and they were book-ended by shorts or encap­su­lated by a meta-story short. Those were the days! Every­thing was really well put-together.

Gio Linh and I were sup­posed to go to the mall after the movie, but due to heavy traf­fic, we went straight home, and except for a short break to have din­ner with the fam­ily and to watch Jeop­ardy with Gio Linh, I read Per­fume (also on Christina Ly’s rec­om­men­da­tion) all day and through most of the night. It’s short and def­i­nitely a page-turner. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is like a bizarre syn­the­sis and yet antithe­sis of Jean Val­jean and and Jack the Rip­per. Maybe I read too much Hugo and Dumas grow­ing up, but I’m a sucker for French period pieces. Add to that the excite­ment of a mur­der mys­tery told from the per­spec­tive of the killer, and you’ve got a for­mula for success.

In the last cou­ple of weeks, I’ve been replac­ing a lot of peo­ple for ser­vice projects. I stopped sign­ing myself up for ser­vice when the pledges ini­ti­ated so that they could all have a chance to do their hours, but when it gets to be around finals week and break, peo­ple sud­denly real­ize they are double-booked, and then I jump in. When I’m not also pre­vi­ously engaged, anyway.

Here’s me replac­ing LB Glo­ria at KVIE:

Then I replaced Merry at Santa For Kids:

Then I replaced Christina Ly at ACC Senior Hol­i­day Potluck:

Man, those were really fun projects! And we got stuff from two of them. The teacher of the Head­Start class we went to for Santa For Kids made cook­ies for all of us, and when we did the ACC Senior Hol­i­day Potluck, the coör­di­na­tor gave us Life­savers Orn-O-Mints for com­ing! While very cool, that does put me onto a bit of a rant. As a for­mer SVP, and just a con­cerned brother in gen­eral, it really both­ers me when I see broth­ers tak­ing things from ser­vice projects. It’s fine when it’s some­thing that was made for the pur­pose of giv­ing to vol­un­teers, but I don’t like tak­ing things, even if they are “extra,” and even if the coör­di­na­tor offers it to us. I think it speaks ill of us, and it may give peo­ple the wrong impres­sion that we do ser­vice in order to get free­bies, not to help oth­ers. I should have done more about it when I was SVP, but I didn’t. Maybe the cur­rent or the next SVPs will fix that for me.