Ninjas! - Too funny! The Official Ninja Webpage:  REAL Ultimate Power!!!! This is hilarious - a site dedicated to Ninjas (written to be outrageous). Not everyone has gotten the joke, judging by the hate mail.

Let it snow - The kids are home from school and there's shovelling to do outside. Must be a snowstorm! Yep, and the snow is still falling. We haven't had many of these storms in the last few years. It always seems to me that there was more snow when I was a kid.
This is the anniversary of the great New England Blizzard of '78. Any snowstorm on Feb 6-7 generates memories of that long ago storm.

- Audition - When Aoyama decides to stage an audition to find the woman of his dreams (under the pretense of making a movie) what he finds is a woman who is, perhaps, too good to be true. At first he is smitten with the demure and pretty Asami, and then a bit obsessed. But why don't any of her references pan out? Is this a love story, a dream, or an hallucenation? The only thing you can trust is pain, a lesson that may be harder to learn for Aoyama than he bargained for. Takashi Miike has created a fairytale gone horribly wrong, to the point where it will likely turn your stomach before the storybook closes. Look closely at Aoyama's face in the last scene of the film and wonder, just what is going through his head behind those still longing eyes... Not for the faint of heart.

Unnecessary War - Sometimes I blog something I hear about at work, but don't have time to read (I want to be able to remember when I get home). This looks like an interesting article, and it starts out by saying that Saddam Hussein is a man that is capable of being deterred, making war unnecessary. It's what I would like to believe, so I'm interested in what the author has to back up the statement: Foreign Policy -- Unnecessary War

Netflix - After seeing all sorts of online ads for it and reading a few recommendations from people of whom I respect the opinion, I've signed up for a two-week free trial of Netflix. So far, so good.

One thing I like about Netflix is that it's going to free me up to view all sorts of movies I might be reluctant to spend money on at Blockbuster. You can have 3 films out at a time, can have them out as long as you like and (if you return the movies quickly) can view many different films over the course of a month. I've already seen Hyôryuu-gai(City of Lost Souls) (a very interesting crime film involving Japanese, Chinese and Brazilian cultures clashing) and A wonderful con artist movie that beats the last David Mamet film by a long shot. It was an Argentinian film called Nueve reinas(Nine Queens).

I highly recommend Nine Queens. Try City of Lost Souls only if you like Japanese films and bad subtitles (which I find at least entertaining). For example, this film was called City of Last Souls in some locations. I'm about to watch The City of Lost Children.

Netflix lets you establish a queue of movies you would like to see, and as you return the movies they simply send you the next DVD in the queue. Odishon (1999) is a movie that Rui told me about (a disturbing Japanese suspense/horror film). This movie is released on DVD this week, and Netflix is sending it along.

I'll let you know if I continue to be happy about their service. It partly depends on how quickly they can turn these DVDs around. I sent my first disk back on Friday, and another on Friday. They're already sending me 2 more, which will probably get here tomorrow or Wednesday. With the turnaround I can probably get about 4 movies in a week.