This was a pretty entertaining action film. It was about a commercial flight that had to make a crash landing on an island in the Philippines, which happened to be an ungoverened island that was run by terrorists. What unfortunate luck!
My rating: 3.5/5
I heard about this show on Reddit and figured I’d check it out. It was pretty great. It’s a shame it didn’t get renewed after the 2nd season, but they wrapped things up pretty nicely, though there was a cliffhanger. I guess we’ll never know what happened.
The show had a really interesting concept: in the late 1980s, a quantum physics experiment went awry and created a parallel universe. Few people knew about the other world though there was an organization that controlled the interactions between the two worlds. People who worked for the organization were basically interworld spies (well, some of them–not everyone was in the loop). It was so interesting how they told the story of the “same” character in each world. J.K. Simmons (who played the main character, but who will always be Vern Schillinger to me), did a great job. I’m not sure how they filmed the scenes where both of his characters interacted, but it was flawless.
I was able to watch this by renting DVDs from Neflix, but those days are coming to an end. Netflix is shutting down its DVD rental program later this year. This will probably put a serious dent in my viewing. We currently have Netflix (DVD & streaming) and Hulu and I was able to watch just about everything I wanted to between the two, but that was mostly thanks to the DVD option. Not everything is streaming (well, maybe it is somewhere but I’m not subscribing to a bunch of different platforms). I have a couple more DVDs to rent and then I’m going to switch to HBO Max. There are a number of HBO shows on my to watch list and they seem to stream a lot of newer movies, so I’m going to give it a shot. I will likely switch between platforms (for example, there are some shows I want to watch on Apple TV+, so I’ll get that at some point in the future–probably once the shows have ended), but I refuse to spend a bunch of money just to watch TV.
My rating: 4/5
This one was very twisty. Just when you thought things were exposed, it went in another direction. I liked this book, but it took me a while to read. At first glance, it reminded me of Hark! but Connelly managed to pull off a similar idea without being cheesy. For what it’s worth, it was the first book in Michael Connelly’s Jake McEvoy series. I read another book from Connelly a while back and seemed to like that one a bit more, but it was from a different series. Anyway, I’d definitely read him again.
My rating: 3.5/5
Late last week, we received a Monthly Notice of Compensation Charged for Prime Design Solutions’ unemployment account. Guess who it was for? That’s right, me. It was somehow related to the fraudulent unemployment claim 2 years ago. Anyway, I filed a fraud report for myself on the PA UC website and need to call them this week about the company. So it looks like whoever is doing this signed up for unemployment again and tried to open a deposit account for the money.
I tried working through the fraud stuff for myself last week, but my grandmother died the previous weekend and I was tied up with funeral stuff the 2nd half of the week. But, I wrapped that up over the weekend and didn’t find anything suspicious on my credit reports, which is good.
My grandmother died after a short illness, so it was kind of expected. She had some other health issues in the past year and was slowing down. At the age of 94, she was still living on her own and if she would have made it, she would have had to move into a home, which she would have not liked. We should all be so lucky to make it into our 90s and still be living on our own.
Recently, I received a letter at the office saying that a savings account I opened was closed because they couldn’t confirm my identity. I had not opened an account so I called the bank that issued the letter and was connected with their fraud department. Someone opened the account under my name, using my SSN & birthday, and the office’s address. So, now I have to go through a bunch of BS to lock things down. I’m currently working through the recommendations on IdentityTheft.gov.
But, this is not the only incident I’ve had. A couple years ago, I received an unemployment check, also at the office. I filed a fraud claim with the state and never heard back. I guess I should have locked things down at that point.
I have to assume my information is in a DB somewhere…The strange thing is that I have credit monitoring through two of my credit cards and I haven’t seen anything show up that wasn’t legitimate. I guess it could be worse, but it makes me wonder if there are any other accounts out there under my name.