Refuge from Basketball

Daily Ramble 180: Refuge from Basketball

Well it seems the madness of March has certainly shown up for NCAA Men’s Basketball but will it impact the 2018 March Mammal Madness tournament? We’ll see later today as the contest continues with the Urban Jungle competitors. But without any mammal competition and with despair as I saw my basketball bracket implode, I turned to a movie and some TV to make me feel better…perhaps I should have stuck to the TV.

Half the Book

John Dies at the End was a pretty good book. I rate it a B and found it an easy read that I zipped through in 5 days. It was not so much horror as comedic horror which is not really a style I read a lot of but it was enjoyable and built a nice world with cool monsters and interesting heroes…I particularly liked the dog.

John Dies at the End, the movie, covered about half the book. It too was comedic horror which I’m not really a fan of in movies but this time I didn’t really get hooked. There were some decent special effects like the meat monster and some psychedelic imaginings of the cool scenes in the book, but it seemed to be more for show than substance. Not even a role for Paul Giamatti or cult favorite Clancy Brown could make this movie enjoyable. It was just bad. Ok, maybe not so bad it falls on my 10 least liked movies but it was still not worth the time I spent watching it. Too bad…not even the dog could save it.

Future Man is Great!

After watching that train wreck of a movie I needed some solace so I turned to Future Man and finished off the season. The humor and cleverness of this show hits the mark in every episode as opposed to that movie.

I’m so glad I found this “on accident” as I was watching Runaways on Hulu. I’m even more excited to see that a new season is in the works.

The idea of the show is similar to The Last Starfighter in that a kid, Josh Futterman, beats a video game and is then contacted by the creators of the game who turn out to be from the future. These militaristic time travelers (think Terminator) enlist Futterman to jump around in time with them to save the human race.

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to watch this show, you owe it to yourself to at least try it. I really don’t think you’ll regret it.

2018MMM Round One Continues

Today brings round one of the Urban Jungle division of the 2018MMM.

Time for the Hyena and Coyote to show how their adaptations that let them survive side-by-side with humans help them to compete in the animal world. And I’m looking to see how the Striped Skunk does. That’s my battle to watch since I really like the Bobcat as well but I think the Skunk may be able to get in a good shot.

So far, we haven’t seen as many upsets as I expected so I think we might start experiencing the madness starting this week.