Here I am in the Old Spaghetti Factory at Riverport, about to dig in to my minestrone, fresh from seeing Star Wars : The Force Awakens, anticipating a lovely Italian meal. I feel great.

Warning, I AM going to talk about the movie, but only in a very general sense, so there will be no spoilers. Being a spoiler hater myself, I would never even dream of doing that to someone else, let alone all you nice people who read me.

I loved the movie. It is what a Star Wars movie should be : lots of cool shit like space ships, battles, chases, droids, planets, aliens, and so on, but with a strong and compelling plot driving it all.

Anyone who thinks Star Wars has ever been deeper than that is deluding themselves. If you cannot get over the fact that the thing you have loved since you saw it as a kid is not exactly high in intellectual content, that is between you and your inner child.

I am just glad that my feeling about JJ Abrams turned out to correct. My feeling was that everything that made ol double J wrong, wrong, wrong for Star Trek movies would make him perfect for Star Wars. His love of effects laden battles, his penchant for overwrought drama, his disinclination to be bound by the laws of science and nature, his skill at spectacle, his essentially just being a nerdy kid at heart…. all of that is toxic to the somewhat more adult and intellectual, thought, science fictional property like Star Trek, but perfect for the adventure story nature of Star Wars.

And I loved the 3D aspect of it. It made it feel far more real. Within the first ten minutes, I knew that the extra seven bucks for 3D was TOTALLY JUSTIFIED. Like others have said, it make it feel more like a live performance than a movie.

It is still what I would call multiplanar 3D. You can clearly see that everything is in layers just like in animation. So it is sort of like watching an extremely high resolution paper puppet show.

But the eye quickly learns to fill in the rest. After that, it look very real.

Actually, one of my favorite effects was one of the simplest : on screen text looked AWESOME.  Like it was hovering right in front of your eyes. Both the subtitles from when characters who are neither cute droids or Wookies spoke Not-english AND the end credits looked amazing.

Figures that a text biased person like me would be impressed by something like that. What can I say, words are my friends.

On the bus home now. Will continue when I get home.

(—)

Back at home. Notes on my meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

I was reluctant to go to the OSF because I find pasta to be not very filling, and I didn’t want to walk away still feeling hungry. So I looked over the menu, and had just about decided to order my usual – the Spaghetti With Meat Sauce – when I saw my salvation.

Lasagna! Nature’s most perfect food.

So I ordered the lasagna, and man, am I pleasantly full right now. Phew!

Plus I had forgotten one of my favorite things about the OSF : their “everything’s included!” policy. All meals come with a cup of soup or a salad (soup for me, minestrone), dinner bread (very nice mini loaves with whipped butter), a scoop of ice cream for dessert.

You can have vanilla ice cream or spumoni. For those of you who don’t know, spumoni is like Neapolitan, only instead of strawberry or cherry, it has pistachio.

So instead of the Brown White and Red, it’s the Brown White and Green. I actually like it better than Neapolitan. I have always found that the red component (especially if it’s cherry) is too high and bright a sweetness to go with the more subdued flavours of vanilla and chocolate. Pistachio blends right in.

I am sure you were all dying to know that.

Outfoxed myself a little on the way home. I was fine being on the 404 (page missing) with only two other passengers on the bus. ^[1]

But then a stop marked Buswell came along, and I thought “Buswell? Great, I will save myself a block!”

And that would have been true – if I had gotten off at Buswell and Cook. But this was two blocks away from that, near Value Village. D’oh! If I had stayed on the bus till we reached Brighouse Station (aka The Skytrain), it would have been a two block walk. Instead, it was three.

Oh well. It’s a very pleasant evening out. Cool without being really cold, moist without being wet, are clean and fresh. So the walk home was quite pleasant.

And my knee handled it well enough. Perhaps the time off really has been good to it.

Oh, and I had another encounter with my beloved Lulu Island Bunnies on the way. That was worth the extra block of walking right there. There was a medium grey one, and at first I thought they were alone.

But then I realized one of the shadows nearby was actually a jet black bunny, with only a few bits of white here and there to give it visual definition. Otherwise, it was a creature of darkness and night.

So, a goth bunny.

Sadly, I got no footage of it, because my tablet was being super freaking slow and I really needed to pee and couldn’t wait for it to finally load the camera program. So I had to say bye bye to the cute lil bunnies and keeping walking, because the urinary pressure was way less severe when I was moving.

Made the ride up in the elevator seem longer than usual, though.

And that’s my Xmas Eve, folks. It’s been great sharing it with all you nice people. I hope you all have a very merry Xmas and a phenomenal New Year.

And I will, as always, talk to you nice people again tomorrow.