Pocket Change

While in the process of cleaning up my apartment, I collected coins that fell out of pockets and onto the floor. Commerce Bank has a neat coin counting machine called the “Penny Arcade”. You dump the coins into the machine, the machine counts the coins and gives you a receipt, and you just go to the teller to collect fresh green bills. The really neat thing is that unlike CoinStar, which does the same thing at supermarkets, Commerce Bank does not take any commission for the service. There is also a guessing game — you get a free prize if you guess within $1.99 of the counted amount. I guessed $35, but it turned out to be $51.47 — what a find!

Survivor Strategy

RE SSW’s comments in https://www.triscribe.com/wp/index.php?m=200312#post-69:

I thought that the boy scout leader’s strategy in keeping Sandra backfired. I suppose that if you had to spend your last night on the island with someone, it would be better for one’s sanity to not have Jon scheming and psyching you out all night. However, there was no way that anyone on the jury would have voted for Jon. When the questioning by Jon (I think) forced the scoutleader to renounce her uniform, that lost it for the jury, IMHO.

Movie season climax

Not a real big movie goer and having missed a number of big ones this year (like T3 and Matrix3), I’m definitely not missing Lord of the Rings. I saw The Last Samurai only because a couple of my friends wanted to go. I’m really glad I did, despite me not being a big fan of Tom Cruise.

I saw The Last Samurai twice. The second time, it was more powerful emotionally to me. I was able to appreciate the actor’s and character portrayals more and realized that was a big reason for its effect. Probably won’t get a lot of awards but definitely for me a big winner. The movie spoke to me and I wasn’t sure if it was due to my “Asian-ness” or because of the universal (maybe, maybe not) virtues of service and honor. My swedish friend saw it twice and was also completely taken in by the movie and the virtues the movie tried to depict through the movies characters.

Don’t know enough about Chinese history to say whether or not there have been any similar classes in China. Service, honor are also very Confucian type of virtues. Going to do some preliminary research into this but probably won’t turn up much. I think this movie is a Top 5 movie of all time for me.

=YC