I will regale you with my Netflix adventures soon, but first, misadventures.

Getting to this point, where I am blogging at ya, was trickier than usual tonight. Earlier today, the mouse for my desktop ran out of juice. That is the thing about wireless mice, their own real drawback : they require batteries, for obvious reasons.

After all, you can’t wirelessly power a device via USB. Yet.

So my mouse was dead, which means I can’t actually use my desktop computer at all because I can’t click on my username on the Windows bootup screen.

Okay, I will just do tonight’s entry on the tablet. Um, nope. Finagle’s Law played a little joke on me. Turned out the wireless keyboard for my tablet is out of juice as well!

Oh, my sides.

So the little keyboard is currently plugged into a USB port on the shared living room computer, and I had to knock on Joe’s door to get a couple AAA batteries for my wireless mouse.

The wireless era is very keen, but it is not without cost.

So anyhow, Netflix. I finished watching Life of Pi. Overall, it feels sort of empty and manipulative. The sort of film that seems pretty decent when you are watching it, but afterward you feel sort of empty and disappointed. I can’t help but feel that the movie, and presumably the novel upon which it is based, is trying too hard to appeal to bookish types like myself. It is clearly trying very hard to impress you with how uplifting and literary it is.

Go sell that shit someone else, Ang Lee.

Then again, that might just be my paranoia talking. Certain directors (I’m looking at you, Guillermo Del Toro) have made me instantly suspicious of movies that seem to be putting a lot of effort into dazzling visuals. I have come to associate that with a lack of narrative substance. Highly visual people are often not narratively driven people, and so they just want to go from one beautiful scene to another, and to heck with the plot.

For reference, see What Dreams May Come.

I will say this, though : The young man (Suraj Sharma)who played the protagonist, Pi Patel, must have gone through ten different kinds of hell filming it. The experience must have been grueling both physically and emotionally, spending all those days on a little lifeboat, clambering around and acting his heart out at the same time.

And the movie has some of the best special effects I have ever seen in a non-genre film. The tiger (and the other animals) really look like they are right there on the boat with poor Pi, and I know darn well they weren’t. It is all green screen and CGI. But it looks extremely real.

As for the film’s big conclusion (spoiler!) about “which story do you prefer? So it is with God.”, I say bleah. Those of us in the reality based community want to know the truth of things. The version we would prefer is irrelevant. I

Maybe that seems cold to some people, but it’s just the way I am built. I have a burning desire for the truth. Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of that. I have been trying to temper that with some human feeling lately, with some success, but deep down I will always have the soul of a philosopher.

And sometimes, that means going for the jugular.

The last thing I watched on good old Netflix is the pilot episode of the series Once Upon A Time. The premise is that all the characters from all our fairy tales have been magically transported to a little town in Maine called Storybrooke. (Oh, I see what you did there. )

They all have amnesia, and have forgotten who they “really” are. I know that sounds like a fairly terrible premise, and to be honest, I only gave it a shot out of sheer caprice.

But I actually quite enjoyed the pilot episode. The story is not nearly as cheesy and obvious as you might think. The fairy tale and real world elements are woven together well enough to not be clunkily cliched.

Of course, that’s the pilot, and pilots are often very well honed products created carefully and lovingly over a nice long period of time so they can get everything “right”. That is why a lot of series with very promising pilots end up not being so great when they get into full production and all the pressure and time constraints that entails.

So the show has earned me watching one more episode of it. We shall see how it pans out.

On a personal note, I am beginning to worry about my health. I feel like I have been out of breath a lot lately, and feeling kind of weak, and those are bad signs when you are a forty year old fat guy.

So I am going to go to my GP again soon, possibly this Friday. It might be nothing more than the stuffy air in my bedroom, but better safe than dead.

I have to handle this very carefully, though, because as a recovering hypochondriac, I know I have a tendency to fly into a panic about my health and become quite hysterical, magnifying every little ache and pain into sure signs that I am seconds away from dying from super cancer AIDS.

So I will have to keep my pragmatic common sense hat clamped down firmly on my head for this. No speculation, no self-diagnosis, just a careful gathering of objectively verifiable observations to present to the doctor, and the patience to draw no conclusions until I have seen him.

Who knows, maybe it IS just the stuffy air in my bedroom and that if I got out of the apartment more often, it will all sort itself out once my lungs were clear.

But on the other hand… well, let’s just say I figure it’s prudent to get checked out.

See you tomorrow, folks!