Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

The game we finished this week: Back to the Future - The Videogame (Steam, $24.99)

Huz and I have always been fans of point-and-click adventure games.  We've played all the modern entries in the Monkey Island series, all the Myst games, and the more recent two Sam and Max games with varying degrees of enjoyment.  With an adventure game, the two aspects that really count for us are the story and the puzzles.  It's rare to find a game that executes both aspects flawlessly; most of them are strong in one aspect or the other.  Back to the Future is no exception to the rule, but its storytelling aspects are so good that I'm more than willing to forgive its gameplay/puzzle flaws.

( Take me away, I don't mind... )

Overall recommendation: Come for the fan service, stay for the story, and have a walkthrough handy for the occasionally overly dense or poorly designed puzzle.

As pretty much everyone with an ounce of history knowledge knows, the Roman city of Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, just shy of 2000 years ago.  There's currently a temporary exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science that features a sizable number of well-documented artifacts, and which is well worth your time should you be able to go.  (I can't find anything online about where else this exhibit will travel, if it does.)

( Wall of text talking about how cool it was )
The rest of the Museum of Science has been updated quite a bit from when I was a kid.  The 'old' T. Rex, who was built back in the 60's and was pretty much the mascot of the museum at the time, has been relegated to the great outdoors, with his dragging-on-the-ground tail mostly embedded in the outer wall.  There's now a new dinosaur exhibit which includes a 'new' T. Rex in running position with his tail properly up.  It also has one of only five complete Triceratops fossils ever found, which is kind of neat.  We didn't have time to really look at most of the rest of the museum as we had a commitment late in the afternoon.

At the ice skating rink that Huz and I frequent, it's not an uncommon sight to see a concerned parent, usually someone's mother, encouraging their daughter to work harder, to focus on this or that move or technical aspect. I always cringe inwardly when I see some of the more involved parents pushing their children to a point of what appears to me (a non-parent, I admit) as excess. Fortunately, none of them come close to Mama Rose's behavior in Gypsy.

The only thing that disappointed me about today's production of the musical Gypsy (by Broadway by the Bay at Redwood City's Fox Theater) is that today's performance was the show's last, so my reviewing it is almost without point. However, I could not let the opportunity pass to offer heartfelt kudos to the production as a whole and Heather Orth as Mama Rose in particular. From the first time she steps onto the stage, Orth is wholly and completely convincing as the stage mother who is by turns fascinating, delusional, and finally pathetic. Even in the scenes where the viewer can tell that Mama is losing her track (and any marbles she may once have had), Orth is never less than masterful.

The rest of the cast was very strong and a pleasure to watch - Samantha Bruce's Louise and Walter M. Mays' Herbie were beautifully and convincingly done. The newly reopened Fox Theater is a lovely historical venue with fully modern lights and amplification, and suits the time period of Gypsy very well. Make no mistake, this is local, nonprofessional musical theater at its very best.

We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this past weekend.  Unsurprisingly, it was a significantly better movie than the book.  Rowling was starting to suffer from Writer's Fame (a disorder in which an author is so famous and sells so many copies that editors become less and less willing to edit their new books) at the time she wrote Book 4, which is presumably why it was so much longer than the previous three had been.  The director of Movie 4 very sensibly cut out quite a bit of the book's material, and in my opinion the movie didn't particularly suffer for it.  Book 5 is the longest book in the series thus far, and needed editing even more badly than Book 4 did; it's my least favorite of the series thus far, and (except for 6, which I haven't reread only due to a plethora of other things to read) the only book that I haven't bothered to reread, due primarily to the fact that I just didn't enjoy it very much.

Happily, the director for Movie 5 cut out lots of stuff.  He also put in a few nice little modifications, most of which are not major, but do add nicely to the movie.  It's not the best film of the series, but it's pretty good. 


After the film, several of us went for dinner at a local chi-chi mall.  Tasty food court food.  We then went to CocoaBella for dessert, and are thinking that a visit there may be a requirement whenever we're in that part of the city.  They sell a variety of very high-quality chocolates, generally with absolutely amazing fillings.  The huz and I both chose a kind that had a strawberry, lemon, and thyme filling (called Kerry).  The thyme was actually the strongest flavor of the bunch, followed by the fruit notes, and there was an interesting spice burn at the end of the mouthful.  Our friends got ones with (1) tea, (2) violet, and (3) caramel with fleur-de-sel (3 individual chocolates).  I tasted #1 and #3.  The tea flavor is subtle, you have to kind of wait for it.  And the caramel with fleur-de-sel starts off with a perfectly balanced salt-sweet mix, followed by a gentle caramel flavor.  (Yes, I'm deliberately mimicking the BPAL-style reviews I've seen in several people's LJ entries!)  All delightful, and all more than worth the $1.50 or less per piece.  Yay, tasty chocolate!