Home Alone

I spent the weekend without wife and doughter and am quite exhausted. I was tasked with churning out cinnamon Star and Beehive cookies, but I went above and beyond and made a batch of Linzer cookies as well. So my back's still hurting from all that standing in the kitchen.

I was looking forward to using the fancy pasta cutter on my cinnamon cookies, but the dough didn't want to cooperate and the cookies now look like some crazy amoebas -- they still taste good, though. The Linzer cookies look perfects, but making them was eye opening. The dough has a one-to-one ratio of flour and butter, so for my doubled recipe a used a whole pound of butter! Just making them I could feel my heart arteries clogging up...

Beingsans family, I managed to see a couple of movies between all the baking. The first one was Syriana whith a very different George Clooney (this ain't Ocean's 11). The movie takes a sober view on how the middle east is ruled by oil. Quite depressing, really, without much of a bright future.

The other moview I saw was King Kong. With all the hype preceding it, I was a bit disappointed. The CG was incredible and Kong really looks real and alive and has great personality and emotions -- heck he "acts" better than some of the other cast. But I felt it was overdone at times. I mean, if you put velociraptors and a T-Rex (or three) into a movie, how can it not feel like a Jurassic Park knock off? Sure, the animation has improved by leaps and bounds and a dinosaur pileup looks cool, but those parts felt long and it seemed to me that some side development scenes were cut out to make the movie a reasonable length.

And then there were those incongruencies. For example, when Kong frolicks around New York with his lady love, it's supposed to be Christmas time and she's wearing a skimpy coctail gown. The cold weather doesn't seem to affect her, even though, by the time she makes it to the top of the Empire State Building she should be working up a bad case of pneumonia.