Okay, I'm over my Darth Vader bad mood spasm from this morning. Phoned health care and apparently they have some new convoluted system that's designed confusing so as to maximally screw over its customers. Why be anonymous: it's Pacificare. My appointment may or may not be covered depending on its code but I have to wait until the bill wends its way to the Portland Clinic and if still screwed up, I can then commence mouth-frothing and so forth. The notion that this appointment *might* still be covered cheered me up. Not like my employer hasn't paid like $30 K in premiums over the past 10+ years when I've averaged less than one appointment per year. They should want me as a customer. That's free money. All they have to do is slit open the envelope and run to the bank.

The unauthorized visa charge looks less promising. I called the company to ask about the charges because it's not unheard of for us to charge something for "X" and then see a credit card charge billed as "Y" and be confused as to what we bought. I had to leave a message which doesn't bode well so if I can't speak to a live person tomorrow, I'm calling the credit union.

Onto the Chronicles of Riddick (very cool website, massive stuff to download, probably skip if don't have speedy connection and/or patience of 8 year old boy). I have wanted to see this movie since I saw the trailer way back whenever they started showing it. It's connected to Pitch Black -- I guess a sequel but I thought I read somewhere it was a prequel. Whatever, not important to this discussion. It's one of those movies that isn't nearly as cool as it should be. But I still liked it. It's one of those epic all over the universe sagas with Vin Diesel who I can't help liking and one of the villians is Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR).

The better story is about the place where I saw it. I went to the $3 theater at the Portlander Inn which is a truck stop center at the last exit before the interstate bridge on the Oregon side. They have food, mini-mart, bar and live music, a TV area with tables, chairs and a snack bar and stuff like FedEx and lottery. I saw the movie with a room full of truckers. Since I'm the kind of person who watches all the Lord of the Rings and Dune and Star Wars stuff -- I'm used to these strange otherworlds and massive info-dump in the first 5 minutes of the film type movies. The funniest thing was when the movie was over and I overheard a guy saying, "I've seen lots of strange things but I've never seen anything like that before."