RANGO

Almost all my posts have been about things that entertain me. But today I feel the need to write about something that did not entertain me. At all! Ok that’s not true. It was fairly entertaining for the first 20-30 minutes. After that it was pure tedium. Yes I am talking about Rango!

We were hanging out with a couple of our friends and couldn’t decide which movie to watch. One of us wanted to watch Red Riding Hood, two of us wanted Battle LA and one wanted to watch Rango. I was one of the two who wanted to watch Battle LA. I have always been a fan of disaster action movies. I loved Independence Day as a kid and I am a little embarrassed to say that in recent times I also liked Day After Tomorrow and 2012. I know you are judging me but ‘To Each His Own’ is my motto in life.

So anyway, we finally decided to watch Rango after a throw of lots. No one really protested because who doesn’t like animation movies! And that too one with Johnny Depp as the main character!

Initially it was funny. The western soundtrack and the lizard (yes Rango is a lizard) swaggering to it was hilarious. The dialogues were funny as well. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let me summarize the story. Yes my summary might have spoilers, but seriously, if you go watch the movie after reading my post I don’t think I care about spoiling it for you. Oh dear, I am feeling so mean today L. So the story is something like this. Rango somehow ends up in a desert town where there is a shortage of water. He convinces the people that he is some kind of hero (of course it is all a lie). Eventually the villain figures this out and exposes him to the people. Obviously in the end, he finds a way to bring water to the town and that makes him a real true hero.

After a point the jokes got repetitive and boring. There are only so many times you can laugh to the same lizard swaggering to the same music. You know a movie is boring when you become increasingly aware of how cold the theatre is, the awesome smell of the popcorn the guy behind you is eating starts tempting you and you start fantasizing about what you will eat for dinner.

After a lot of retrospection and introspection, I think I understood the real reason I didn’t like the movie. I don’t like lizards. I am not really fond of reptiles in general but I am absolutely terrified of lizards. They make my skin crawl and even right now, the thought of accidently touching a lizard is making me feel fairly ill. I can handle cockroaches and the other day I even bravely caught a spider with a tissue and threw it out (something the husband was not willing to do). Anyway, back to Rango. In this movie, Rango is the best looking character. Well actually his girlfriend looks slightly better than him. The rest of the town is filled with a collection of hideous looking animals, most of them reptiles. A few people will think I am being really mean by calling the animals ugly and hideous because beauty is relative and all that. But I found them gross ok! And I did not like watching a movie filled with gross looking reptiles.

I conclude by saying that the rest of the group did not like it either. In fact, one of our friends said she would have preferred writing her PhD thesis to watching Rango. So I rest my case.

Bing!

My husband loves thinking up games. He loves making up rules, assigning points and obviously loves it when he wins his own games. Last year, we made a game out of the Oscars. We had to predict the winner of every category and got a point for every correct prediction. The winner was obviously the one with the higher score. I am proud to say I won that one. This year it ended with a tie.

There is another game that we have been playing for more than a year now. We call it the Bing Wallpaper Prediction Game. Before you read any further, please visit http://www.bing.com/. You will most probably see a beautiful image. Sometimes it is the image of an animal but more often than not it is that of a place. Bing changes this image on a daily basis. Every day we have to guess which country the image on the site is from. The person who reaches 5 points first is the winner of that round. Then we start from 0 again.

A few weeks after we started playing, he got bored and decided that the game needed some more complexity. After multiple such tweaks and improvements, the rules of the game are something like this.

-          We get 3 guesses each everyday

o    If either of our 1^st two guesses is correct, we get 1 point.

o    If our 3^rd guess is correct, we get something known as a backlog. 2 such backlogs equal to 1 point.

o    Since, the US is frequently featured in these images, we get only ½ a point if we guess US and it is correct. We need to guess the state right if we want an entire point.

o    If both of us get it right, we each get only ½ a point.

I have to admit that I lost the first several rounds. Thankfully, just when I was developing a serious inferiority complex, I started winning occasionally. I am proud to say that I recently won 3 rounds in a row!

A few weeks ago, he surprised me with this.

As you can see, he sure takes his fun seriouslyJ Thank you dear husband for making manoranjan a constant part of our lives!

Last weekend we mentioned the game to our friends S and S and they are now hooked as well. It’s the perfect game for competitive couples to play. Rubbing a win in your spouse’s face really is a lot of fun.