‘When you’re in a rut of awful movies, why change things by watching a good one’, I always say. Dane Cook is relatively tolerable for Dane Cook, and Steve Carell has his moments, but sometimes, you just need a little more. What’s worse, this movie played on our airplane to Spain 2 weeks later.

For all you folks preparing for some sort of disaster, don’t forget your bacon in a can. It lasts for 10 years. Apparently it’s been around for a long time, and actually, I’m intrigued by this. Do you think it’s crispy or rubbery?

For someone so funny, Ben Stiller sure has the ability to make some mediocre movies, Night at the Museum being no exception. This movie was watchable and had a few funny parts, and Owen Wilson stands out (while Robin Williams does not). You’ll absolutely love this movie if you’re 12 years old.

The amazing writing in A Thousand Acres masks an equally unamazing story. There are parts of the novel where the writing style IS the narrative, which, frankly, were mind-blowing. Then there was the clumsy, half-hearted device of mimicking parts of King Lear, but not all of it – if you’re going for it, go for it.

My wife has good movie taste, and normally I wouldn’t make this about her, but the blame for this movie getting on our Netflix rests entirely with her. Remember how interminable the music numbers at the Academy Awards were? Yeah, this entire piece of shit was interminable, too.

Over the past couple years of skyrocketing gas prices, I had heard there would be a point when Joe American would finally change his behavior by driving less or carpooling and demanding more fuel-efficient vehicles in the face of rising energy costs. For several years, $2 was the price per gallon that would supposedly tip the average us into that change and when $2 per gallon came and went, that figure was shifted to $2.50 per gallon. It turns out the number may be $3.22.

For the first time since March 1979, there was a year over year decline in driving for the month of March. Better still, the decline was the sharpest year over year decline since 1942. The decline resulted in 11 billion less miles being driven this March than last March which is a remarkable reduction and one likely to continue and possibly increase based on the substantial rise in gas prices since March.

I don’t know how gas prices could go down significantly any time soon, which is having and will continue to have a major impact on the people who depend on their cars and gas for their livelihood, etc. Since we are past the point of having the ability to make a subtle cultural shift weening ourselves off of gas and oil over the course of decades, I hope the positive impact of untenable gas prices outweigh what will certainly be severe growing pains for many people and industries (I, one, cry for the traveling band).

One surprisingly simple plan, though certainly not a cure-all, suggests that if Congress were to mandate that all new vehicles sold in the US must be flex fuel ready, all new cars sold worldwide would eventually be flex fuel ready as well due to the size of the US auto market. (Edited to add: upon further thought prompted by the comment below, a better solution, in my opinion, would be much higher fuel standards mandated by Congress. This allows industry to devise the technology by which oil use would go down, as opposed to Congress.) The will of the people might not be at that point yet, but perhaps we will get there when we see $6 or $8 or $10 per gallon?

Updated to add:
It says here we haven’t reached a tipping point.

Not many people would go that far to save a few dollars. In fact, most consumers don’t adjust their driving patterns in the short term, said Chris Lafakis, an associate economist at Moody’s economy.com in West Chester.

“There’s no tipping point,” he said.

“For some years now we’ve been saying this is the threshold price that’s going to cause the economy to spiral in a nasty recession and consumers are going to stop buying gasoline, but each time that forecast has been issued people have continued to buy gasoline,” Lafakis said.

In other words, many suburban drivers are resigned to forking over a C-note a week for gas. Aside from getting a hybrid, they say there’s little else they can do.

There you have it, Chris Lafakis calling me a liar. We’ll see what happens when the driving report for April and May come out. We will see, indeed.

If I was a kid, I’d probably LOVE Horton Hears a Who!. I’d say that one the more understated improvements to child rearing over the last 13 years (since Toy Story) has been to make ‘kids’ movies’ palatable to adults as well. I don’t know if I could have kids if all the movies I had to take them to sucked.

Cute and sweet and better than it would have been if it was made in the US. That’s about all there is to say about that. Oh, and it was directed by David Schwimmer, which is strange.

Folks, I watch shitty movies like Eurotrip so you don’t have to. And, in fact, in a tribute to it’s eminant forgetability, I realized half-way through that I had watched most of it already. (I’m too embarrassed to say that when I say “most of it”, I mean all of it. :( .)

I can’t help it. I just do.