Kerinthian's

A couple of weeks ago I went to the home of some friends of ours. They have two kids with a 3 year head start on our young family. The smaller is just over a year old and every time I go round she hops up on her little trunks and waddles across the floor in a mammoth effort to make it to my legs and then tries to launch herself upward by tugging on my knee caps. They’re really cool kids. The three year old boy is already first in line to be my daughter’s husband (so far as I’m concerned) and every time I see him I make a point of asking him, “Are you going to marry H when you grow up?” He nods his head yes but sometimes gets confused and tells me who else he plans to marry. Actually he sometimes even tries to claim my wife as already being his! But it’s still early days and the brain washing process that I’ve started may take a few years, but at least the seed has been sown. He certainly enjoys kissing her good-bye at the end of each visit (In a perfectly innocent Anne Geddes sense). ...

I think when people heard the words “James Cameron’s first movie since Titanic” they lost perspective. It didn't matter anymore that this movie still might suck, it was James Cameron’s first movie since his last sinking ship and that’s all anybody cared about it. You could put the contents of a used tissue on a cinema screen for 3 hours and people would still go and see it if it had Cameron’s name on it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Aliens, I also swam in the Abyss and relished in the Terminator franchise in which Cameron proved he could make virtually the same movie twice and people would still go and see it. Heck, I also enjoyed that other Arnie movie he made, True Lies. But somewhere along the line I can’t help but feel some directors lose the plot. John Carpenter lost it, Spielberg sometimes loses it and even Lucas lost it somewhere between episode six and episode one. Cameron has lost it as well - he lost it and used very expensive special effects to distract us from noticing...

I have a new state of the art alarm clock with arms and legs and a mouth that chimes “Wa wa waaaaa” every morning at about 6.30 in the a.m. The difficulty is I can’t set it to any other time and neither can I return it to the manufacturer to ask for a replacement or a refund. So I have no choice but to adjust my nightly routine of staying up with the Xbox until 3 a.m. to actually going to bed when the rest of the world does to minimize the effect when dawn comes and I don’t feel like a sledge hammer just tried to blow a raspberry on my forehead. Some alarm clocks you just want to punch with a closed fist so that the springs fly in all directions and you’re forced to buy a new one, but this one has a smile so it’s harder to negotiate with. I wake up in the morning to its wines; transfer it to the feeding station – the mother of the alarm clock, usually half awake and dreaming of the days when she was something other than a milk processing place. When the winging turns into smoochy fee...