Beware Bird Flu!

Man, I had crazy dreams again last night. At one point I was trying to solve a mystery in a grocery store with Buffy and my Grandma. And then I was trying to get to Comiskey Park via a cab driven by two young Polish kids, but I was mugged by a midget. Really. Good times.

There's not much going on to relate today. I've been really cramming on movies because I have to nominate 15 best films and 15 most redeeming films by Friday for ChristianityTodayMovies.com. I've seen some good stuff recently.

Thanks to a mention by Mark Ahn on his blog, I saw Stranger than Fiction. Loved it. (And was delighted that it featured a lot of music by one of my fave bands, Spoon.) I saw World Trade Center and Sophie Scholl this weekend. I saw Apocolypto last night. All are good. WTC was better than I expected because Nic Cage didn't act like Nic Cage. And Oliver Stone didn't direct like Oliver Stone. Sophie Scholl is a little German movie about a girl who was arrested for running an underground anti-Hitler newsletter with her brother. It's sad and a little slowly paced, but very rewarding. Apocolypto is very good, but it's so graphic and violent. Yikes. Because of that, it's really hard to recommend to everyone. But it is very well-executed.

I draft for my second round of Fantasy Football playoffs today. UPDATE-- My team is:

QB Drew Brees, NO
RB Laurence Maroney, NE
RB Joseph Addai, IND
RB Deuce McCallister, NO
WR Marvin Harrison, IND
WR Antonio Gates, SD
WR Reggie Brown, PHI
K Adam Viniteri, IND

Now I have to decide if I want to play Addai vs. the #2 rush defense or Maroney (who splits carries) vs. the #6 rush defense. Life is full of tough choices.

I got two great e-mails yesterday. One was a press release:

Christian Community Not Prepared for Possible Bird Flu Panic

"Local churches and individual Christians have a tremendous potential to alleviant suffering if the avian influenza reaches pandemic levels, but right now most are sleeping. I'm afraid they will wake up too late to the threat," said ----------. He believes the Christian community is squandering valuable preparation time while they either ignore the issue or debate its validity.

If we all die from Bird Flu I will feel bad for giggling at the entire idea of the press release.

The other e-mail was from someone very upset about my negative review of the movie Eragon. He was mad that I said it was plot point -by-plot point a retread of the original Star Wars movie. He said, "If its soooo like Star Wars, where's Darth Sidius, Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, General Greivous, the droids and clones? I bet you haven't seen Star Wars!"

Of course, this letter writer has no idea of who I am, but that claim made me giggle since I read his e-mail while wearing Star Wars boxers and sitting in my nerdy office under a whole troop of Star Wars action figures, Pez dispensers and big R2-D2s.