So I went to a still life painting workshop today

Even though I'm Mr. Urban Art Graffiti Guy 95% of the time I don't want folks to think they've got me too figured out art-wise.

Hence:

To tie it back into the stuff you all expect from me, I want to do some letters in this painterly style- Real big canvases done in raw, expressive brush strokes.

the one thing I knew about On the Town before watching it was this number:

After watching it I now know that there are a lot of great numbers dotting the film's 95 minute running time. At times surreal, occasionally beautiful and almost always fun, On the Town is a thoroughly enjoyable musical.

There are worse ways to start off my year in movies than with a film like The Warrior From Shaolin. Sure it was dubbed and it's not the greatest martial arts movie from the era, but it's still got plenty of classic old school fight choreography to keep me occupied. It also features Lau Kar-Fai and Eric Tsang- two personal favorites. Lau, of course, is the focus. He once again proves why he's one of the greatest screen fighters of all time, with 90 minutes of sharp action. Tsang is along for comic relief and, sad to say, it's not one of his best performances in that regard, but it's still fun to watch him so early in his career.

Did I mention that watching a ton more martial arts movies was one of my New Year's resolutions? It is.

Good start!

I really had counted Palm out. My old Treo died on me last month and I never even considered getting another Palm device. I've owned Treo/Palm products for nearly a decade, but they'd finally lost me with the options I saw on the shelves. I'm super happy with the Sprint network, so my long-term plan was to hold out with the Treo long enough to see Sprint come out with an Android handset. Obviously that didn't happen, so I ended up going with a (free) Moto Q9. I'm happy enough with it (the keyboard is phenomenal and it was free) and I can get $150 for an upgrade after a year, so I figured by then I'd have a good option to settle into for the long term (I typically run phones into the ground before upgrading.) Apparently, I will have a good option, but it won't be an Android handset. It'll be the Palm Pre.

The device itself looks slick as hell (including the ever vital QWERTY keyboard) and the new WebOs feels like it was made for me- especially since it's running HTML/CSS and JavaSript! All that and it's built on top of Linux…

I'm seriously lusting after this device and it wouldn't surprise me if I end up forgoing the upgrade cash to pick up a Pre when it becomes available.

So I spent part of New Year's Eve day watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix again.

And yes, I finished the year with a comic book movie, a video game movie and a Harry Potter movie.

Got a problem with that?

I dusted it off because I'm annoyed that there wasn't a new Harry Potter film this Christmas. To me, these should be holiday movies so I filled the void left by Half-Blood Prince being held out until summer.

What a pitiful movie haul this year, by the way. 31 movies? There were weeks where I watched 31 movies back in the day.