Christmas in July was great, and I think it lived up to expectations. We were even lucky enough to have snow falling on Saturday morning. I have to shout out to my sister for the new Porter & Cable router (we have two windows just itching to be refurbished with that) and to my pop for the camera tripod. Jen now has an entire library of gardening and cook books to choose from, Renie finally has a digital camera, Mom has a pile of wedding photos, and my Dad has a wireless hub to tinker with. It was great to see everybody, and we even got a visit with Grampy and Vince, who stopped by for bloody marys after church.
While we were there I updated Mom’s iMac—OS9 gave way to OSX, crashing Eudora gave way to Mail.app, and the lousy Director-based Kodak photo software was replaced with iPhoto. The only hitch was finding that her beige Epson inkjet won’t work with OSX (Epson didn’t bother to write drivers for it.) I will say that I was relieved when Mail.app easily imported her old Eudora mailboxes and iPhoto immediately recognized her camera. She’s going to have much better luck with her computer now.
Continued Geekery. On the way home, Jen and I played the Dream Casting game, coming up with our list of actors to play in the new Watchmen movie. (Jen hasn’t read the book, so I had to attempt to distill the characters down as best I could for her to understand. I have to bust it out for her tonight to look at.) Apparently somebody found a way to adapt the book (although Terry Gilliam tried to do it and couldn’t—now that would have been a movie). There’s no word on official casting yet, but here’s our list:
| Rorschach: | William H. Macy | Think about it. You need somebody short, sort of average (if not ugly) and able to play a resigned insanity. |
| John C Reilly | This guy is good at the loveable loser (think Magnolia) or frightening maniac. He might be too tall though. | |
| Nite Owl: | Skip Sudduth | I think he’d be perfect for this role. Paunchy, approachable, believable. |
| Daniel Baldwin | I think it’d be a stretch, but he could pull it off. He’d have to get rid of that annoying Baldwin “I’m too cool for school” thing. (Thanks Todd) | |
| Silk Spectre: | Jennifer Connelly | I forgot about this one. Perfect. Thanks, Jen. |
| Mariska Hargitay | This was Jen’s first idea, but I’m not entirely sold. | |
| The Comedian: | Robert Forster | Again, Jen picked this one, and I think she nailed it perfectly. |
| Burt Reynolds | Todd’s immediate choice. I think if he could be reigned in a bit (again, think what Paul Thomas Anderson did for him in Boogie Nights) he’d be perfect. | |
| Ozymandias: | Jeff Goldblum | Jen sold me on this one-he’s intelligent, he (used to) be built, and he’s taller than you think. |
| Dr. Manhattan: | Matthew McConaughey | Just consider it. He’d have to be tall, bald, blue, and nekkid. This guy looks pretty good bald, and we all know he likes to be nekkid and play the bongos… |
Extra reading: Wikipedia entry (excellent primer) | The Watchmen annotated guide. Your suggestions?