Unlimited Pawns

Last night's tweets;

Swerve out of the next off-ramp suddenly.
Erratic driving brings joy to us all.
Let's reach destinations gradually.
Always will plastic cheese be at the mall.

Unexpectedly slow day to-day--for some reason, I kept taking my time doing everything. Maybe I'm dragging my heels to delay to-day becoming to-morrow, when I need to take my car in to get it fixed. As in, the dent on the hood fixed, not spayed or neutered. I am happy the other guy's insurance is paying for it, but mostly all I can think about right now is how damned inconvenient it is.

Oh, and! I've heard from the hospital and it seems they've decided to bill me again! 388 dollars this time, which fortunately I happen to have right now, thanks to Christmas, though I'm going to have say goodbye to my idle ambition of upgrading my computer. Hell, I can't very well think about spending money again for a good long while as it seems that a visit to the emergency room in November has given the hospital license to take money from me whenever it wants. What's the excuse this time? "Intermediate exam". That leaves an awful lot of adjectives and nouns they can combine, doesn't it? I suppose I might yet be billed for "Procedural survey", "Dedicated probe" and "Careful scrutiny."

I suppose if I'd known about this thing, I wouldn't have spent eighty dollars on movies yesterday. I picked up TCM's musical collection of The Band Wagon, Singin' in the Rain, Easter Parade, and Meet Me in St. Louis. I also got Disney's recent release of Snow White and Criterion's new release of The Seventh Seal, which I watched last night.

I hadn't seen the movie in at least ten years, and I was surprised by what a nice sort of road trip movie it is. It's almost a party from a Lord of the Rings style fantasy, comprised of the knight, his squire, the peasant woman the squire presses into housekeeping service, the smith, the smith's wife, and the two actors, Mia and Jof, whose names remain Mia and Jof in these English subtitles, unlike Criterion's previous edition which changed their names to "Mary" and "Joseph", creating an inappropriate biblical reference. Each character is crafted so fully, and they play off each other so well, I'd have watched a series of movies about these people travelling through plague infested lands.

I've been trying to discern the exact moves of the chess game Antonious and Death play. I thought there'd be a site that had them all recorded, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. It's hard to tell what's happening as the pieces are very blocky and look similar to one another, but a lot can be seen in this shot;



This is after Death's taken Antonious' Knight and Antonious laughs as though this was a great trap he had lain for Death, using his next move to put Death in check. But we can see here how easy it was a check for Death to get out of, simply moving his King over one square, and the position of Death's rooks tell us he's already castled, which indicates the movement of his King is no great sacrifice. It kind of gives you the impression that Antonious is trying to psych out Death.