My copy of Memoir 44 arrived Monday! I have heard and read a lot of good things about this game and was anxious to add it to the collection.
At a recent visit to a hobby shop in Provo I was informed that it was out of print. However, they were mis-informed and I managed to order it online (at a better price than they would have sold it for).

This past week Showtime was doing a free preview on their channels. I happened to catch this documentary the other morning. It was so good I have ordered the DVD.

I was only vaguely familiar with the New York Dolls band. I’m just a little older than the punk rock generation. But I had heard the name.

This documentary focuses on one of the members of the Dolls – Arthur Kane. Here’s the write-up over on Amazon.com –

For a look at a “Killer,” New York Doll is a surprisingly tender portrait. But then Arthur “Killer” Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls, was a gentle soul at heart. In his feature film debut, director Greg Whiteley ably explores the dichotomy between the stone-faced rocker with the “killer” bass lines and the mild-mannered librarian at LA’s Mormon Family History Center. Kane never had much of a home life, but he loved rock and roll, and found a second family with the Dolls. It was, to say the least, a dysfunctional one. Fame came fast, but money didn’t follow, and the band imploded “because of our bad behavior.” Kane struggled with alcohol and other problems before finding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1980s. He turned his life around, but refused to let go of the past. He wanted to get the band back together. Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders died in the 1990s, but Kane’s dream didn’t. “For 30 years I was ignored and told that I was a loser,” he states. Whiteley doesn’t preach or condescend, but allows Kane to tell his own story, bolstered by comments from friends and associates. As Morrissey, who kick-started the group’s 2004 London reunion, explains, “For everybody there’s an artist that captures you at just the right time… The Dolls were that for me.” Featuring David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, Iggy Pop, Chrissie Hynde, and Mick Jones, New York Doll was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize.

To me one of the most moving parts comes right after the credits at the end with David Johansen sings “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief”. And I understand that the DVD has some really nice bonus features.

I have had to re-institute the necessity of making commenters type the word johnstuff in the comment entry process again.

I was trying to get by without turning that back on, but today I had to clean 233 spam comments off the blog.

(click image for the IMDB info page)

It was channel flipping the other morning while puttering around the house and I saw Alice’s Restaurant coming up on one of the Encore channels. I know I have blogged about this movie a long time ago as one of the “60’s” movies that seems to be remembered along with Easy Rider and Woodstock.

I hadn’t seen Alice’s Restaurant since one of my high school buddies and I watched it in the theater in 1969. So, I popped a tape into the VCR and snagged a copy. Now I will have to sit down and watch it again – 38 years later.

** Entry Update ** I removed the actual video feed of the trailer and put in a link to the movie site instead. I figure you’ve seen it already by now.

Last year I read a couple of books in the Jumper series. The first is Jumper and the second is Reflex. They are the story of a young man who discovers that he has the ability to teleport himself anywhere in the world providing he has physically been there first. Of course, there are the people who want to use and abuse his ability.

Now they have made a movie of the book and there is a trailer now available. You can view it at – Jumper the movie.