Traffic jam of the year

Every time I complain about getting stuck in a major traffic jam for 20 minutes, my Moscow friends are laughing at me.  They say that I have no right to complain about 20 minutes, when they spend hours waiting in traffic.  And that’s on a daily basis.  It’s not anything out of the ordinary to spend 3 hours on your way to work and another 3 on your way back home in the traffic jam in Moscow.  But today I heard something that makes those 3 hour traffic jam sound like nothing.

Picture this: an epic traffic jam in China, where some people are stuck now for nine days! It’s been there for so long, that there are businesses starting up around this whole mess.  And some people go as far as to call it a temporary settlement.

Via kottke.

Lag

As they say, knowing the problem is already half a solution.  Here is my problem – lag.  I am lagging far behind in a lot of things, which slowly-slowly, one-by-one built up to an impressive list of tasks.   I knew I was lagging for some time, but yesterday I spent a few minutes trying to realize how much and how far behind really I am.

In terms of movie reviews, here is the list of films I’v watched in the past couple of weeks: Cop Out, From Dusk Till Dawn, From Paris with love, Hitman, Jarhead, Michael Clayton, Tenacious D – The pick of destiny, The Girl with the dragon tattoo, The great debaters, Un Prophete, Rush Hour 3, Remember Me, Repo Men, Armors of God, Armors of God : Operation Condor, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Terminal, Terminator, Bruno, Collapse, Tapped, The Rise of the Footsoldier, Ong Bak 3, Armored, Traffic, The Brave One, Religious, Capitalism, Goodfellas.  Some of these are new, some are old.  A few of these I have already reviewed before, but most I haven’t.

In terms of photos, I am even worse.  Latest pictures at Flickr photo stream are those of my Eurotrip last year.  And I haven’t even got half of those in.  More than a year!  Just the thought is horrifying.  There is almost 500 new photos that I still need to sort through, post-process, and upload.  At least I got them all off the camera and into my laptop yesterday – that’s the first step.

I am also lagging in a few other areas – work, side projects, hobbies, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I always had things on my todo list.  Never, for as long as I can remember myself, I thought that everything is done, all is in order, and I can sit back and enjoy myself.  But for the last year or so things are getting out of control.  I’ll need to reorganize myself a bit.  Starting now.

The Expendables

“The Expendables” – movie that I have been waiting for for so long didn’t disappoint me at all.  In fact, it was quite the opposite.  I enjoyed each and every bit of it.  It was everything I wanted it to be – a moderately paced, funny action movie with very simple story and lots of fighting, shooting, chasing, exploding, etc.

It was very well positioned in its genre.  In such a way even that makes it easy to excuse any shortcomings, be they holes in the story or acting or special effects. I’m not saying there were any, if there were any.  I’m just saying that even if you notice something that you don’t like, you’ll probably forget about it within a second.  There’s plenty to enjoy.

Of course I’ll rate this movie as 5 out of 5.  That’s both for nostalgic reasons and for a historical moment of all three superstars – Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger – appearing in the same scene together.  And there was so much more …