his'll do it for the week, and with pre-marital discord sown deeply throughout my condo, I'm not in much of a mood for writing.  I do have some news discussion written, and some Episode III stuff down below though, so you won't go entirely hungry.

There was Kali Thursday night, but talking about what we did would require far too much explanation to be of any interest. Basically it was a lot of stick stuff, and mostly just practicing countering and counter-attacking. We did running style, where we deal multiple hits while walking the whole time, rather than making each hit with good form and a pause upon impact. It's basically the same thing, except that you keep moving and keep walking and work your next counter into the movement, rather than resetting to a ready position between strikes. We did it walking both ways around the opponent, with very different hits each direction, and then broke it up into other forms to freelance and practice every sort of counter technique. I was paired up with the oldest student there, which was cool since I got to see how he did it, and was motivated to do better by his skill.

The exercise wasn't difficult in theory, but like most stuff in martial arts, there's a huge difference between doing the minimum acceptable form, and really throwing yourself into it and doing it as well as you can, to try and learn and improve. It's strange, in that I could have tried half as hard and looked better. I could have gone slower and stuck to moves I knew I could do, and I would have had better form and accuracy. I wouldn't have improved any though, which is why I was pushing myself to go faster, with more precision, a wider variety of hits, and so on -- even knowing it would  invite various corrections and comments from the teacher and the student I was working with.

I had fun though, and got a heavy workout too. I was soaked in sweat half an hour in, and by the time we'd been at it for an hour I was exhausted and really wishing I'd had a snack or a small early dinner, rather than just trying to make the big lunch platter of nachos last from six hours earlier. Energy reserves were crashing, and I actually went to check the time on my cell phone before class was over. I've never done that out of fatigue, other than when I was sick a month ago. Usually I want to hard work classes to go on longer and longer, especially if we're doing stick stuff, since I greatly-enjoy hitting people in the head with my length of lacquered bamboo.

Perhaps I'll have another opportunity next week, though.

To the news.

In a nation whose fickle skies make weather forecasts required viewing, Britain's national broadcaster proudly launched a new high-tech report this week — and sailed into a storm of protest.

Too confusing, said some viewers about the "virtual reality" graphics used several times a day on the BBC's domestic channels and BBC World international service. Too English, thundered a Scottish politician. Some viewers said the new graphics were too drab, others thought them too flashy.

I only link to it since one of the last lines in the article got me laughing out loud.

This is the BBC's second weather disaster in as many months. Last month, producers of BBC television's Newsnight program decided to replace the show's daily stock market and currency roundup with a weather report.

Many viewers were appalled. The show's gruff presenter, Jeremy Paxman, also seemed unimpressed, delivering increasingly terse forecasts such as: "It's April. What do you expect?"

Now there's a line that I can apply to so many of life's annoyances. "It's rush hour, what sort of traffic did you expect?" "We're in CostCo on a Sunday afternoon, what sort of line did you expect?" and so on...

The English are legendarily-obsessed with their weather, despite the fact that the UK is basically flat and the weather is generally cloudy, wet, and boring.  Or perhaps because of that very boredom and monotony, the people there study the weather more closely, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I know I got unduly excited about any sort of cloudy or drizzly weather when I was in 320-days a year of sunshine" San Diego.  Now that I'm up in the Bay Area, and we get a week of rain every month and temperatures fluctuate a lot, I never pay any attention to weather forecasts.

I'm going to see it with a bunch of other people on Saturday night, tickets have already been secured, and we've got at least one person planning to be there over an hour early to get a good place in line, so that should be cool. I'll review it Monday, more than likely. If any of you guys see it (safe bet) and want to offer up a quick or short review, feel free; I can post some sort of BlackChampagne.com reader average score when I post my review.

I'm hoping it'll be a good movie, or at least a fun one. I gave Episode 1 and 2 a 3/10 score each, so I can hardly imagine this one being worse, and I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be full of mindless action, Wookieporn, and a complete lack of awful side rat-tail hairstyles.

I've not read many reviews, since I want to preserve what few plot spoilers I can, but I have been checking out the negative ones to see what they didn't like, and I had to read Ebert's. He liked it enough to give it a 3.5/4 rating, but his opinion is suspect since he gave Episode 1 a 3.5/4, and Episode 2 a 2/4, when virtually everyone else seemed to prefer Episode 2, if only for the lack of Jar Jar. Even with his very generous 3.5/4 star Episode 3 review, Ebert couldn't resist having some fun with Lucas' script and direction, and I can't resist quoting him.

There are even more and even nastier comments about the film in the most negative and surely the funniest Star Wars III review of all, courtesy of the New Yorker. These are from a 1/10 score review:

It would be remiss of me not to mention box office figures, although I don't really care how well this one does, oddly enough. It's just more jelly for Lucas' neck wattle, it seems to me.  The following figures are all for US gross only. It's stupid to limit it to that, with so many movies making 2 or 3x more worldwide than they do in the US, but anyway...  The Box Office Guru is predicting a $107m opening weekend, and $147m for the first four days. The generally more-accurate Box Office Mojo guy is predicting a much lower $94m weekend and $132m opening four days.

I don't have an informed guess, but seeing that Episode 3 is opening in just the 12th most theaters ever, and seeing as it's PG-13 and has a relatively long 2+ hour running time, I can't see it breaking any all time opening records. Shrek 2 was shorter, more skewed to kids, and opened last year in nearly 400 more theaters, and it only made $108m its opening weekend. Episode 2 opened on 3100 screens and it made $80m, though that was three years ago and ticket prices have gone up since then.

Cutting to the chase, I'll say $98m opening weekend, plus $34m from Thursday giving it $132m for the weekend.  Not that I really care. Hell, it's 3am Friday morning; I could probably find a Thursday estimate online now, if I went and looked.