Despite a really rough day at work, plus the horrifying news that I've got another international trip coming up, plus getting soaked riding to work on my motorcycle in the rain, plus getting a nasty email concerning a blog entry that's months old, and getting poked in the eye... there were a few cool things that happened today.

Quentin: The first good news event of the day: Quentin Tarantino has started a blog! This demi-god of filmmaking wonderment is my single favorite writer and director — and his acting is pretty badass as well (his guest-spot on Alias is easily one of my favorite moments that doesn't involve Jennifer Garner looking brutally hot! Please, please, please come back once or twice for season 4!). Here's a few old posts defining why Quentin rules the earth:

• Uma Kicks Ass! I wax poetic about the best movie of 2003, Kill Bill, and ponder hot woman-on-woman cat-fight action!
• Berardinelli Sucks Ass! I expose James Berardinelli's complete incompetence as a movie critic by dissecting his laughably lame "review" of Kill Bill from ReelViews.
• Kill Bill v2 My review of the breathtaking second-half of Uma's ass-kicking goodness in Quentin's action-revenge opus.

Lego: As if Star Wars Lego wasn't cool enough, now they're making a video game out of it! Is it too much to hope that you can build your own Lego starships to fly around in? The concept is gold, so they had better not screw it up! I mean just look at this...

Medal: I really don't care for "interpretive" sports, like gymnastics, because there's never a clear winner... it's all subjective as to who was the best. Never has that been more clear than the embarrassing screw-up by the judges in their handling of the Men's Horizontal Bar. After a stunning routine by Russian gymnast Alexsei Nemov (with only a small hop on the dismount) the judges handed down an unbelievable 9.725. What's cool is that the crowd would have none of it, and after a lengthy round of booing, the judges upped the score to 9.762 (which still seemed low). I agree that Italy's Igor Cassina deserved Gold, but Nemov should have had Silver (instead of 5th), followed by Hamm with the Bronze. Still, you have to feel bad for Hamm who had to follow Nemov and started his routine while the boos were still going strong (despite a noble effort by Aleksei to get the crowd to stop).

Ride: The rain stopped long enough for me to have yet another great motorcycle ride at dusk. There are times when I hop on that bike that I toy with the idea of not coming back. But then it gets dark and starts getting cold and I reluctantly turn toward home.