I hope you already know who Steven Spielberg is. He’s the guy who’s directed such movies you may have heard of like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones movies and many more.

Well, the guy who wrote the music scores to most of his films and a few others you may have heard along the way, like you know… a small film franchise called Star Wars, is named John Williams.

John Williams was a long time conductor of the Boston Pops in the 80s and 90s and for the last 10 years he has come back to conduct the Pops at their summer home in Tanglewood, Massachusetts for Film Night.

He performs his own works as well as other famous film scores. This year he did mostly his own selections along with a score from the original Robin Hood movie and another from a movie I had never seen. They changed the last number of the first half and strayed off course a little. They played Olympic Fanfare in honor of the Olympics coming up next month. None of us got upset that it had nothing to do with the movies. The second half, however, was all Indy.

In the writeup for the event, it was billed as John Williams with special guests. I assumed that since it was movie night it would be other composers or something. The first song of the second act was “Anything Goes” as sung in the foreign language at the beginning of Temple of Doom. A whole chorus ensemble sang along with it and the lead didn’t come out on stage until after the song was over. John Williams introduces none other than the original singer and female star of Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw! Cool guest, right?

Well if Kate Capshaw is there, it makes sense that her husband is there too right? So he then introduces Steven Spielberg! Spielberg is on stage the rest of the night introducing all the rest of the songs and giving little tidbits of info about the pieces and movies. It was awesome.

Throughout the night they had a screen come down on certain pieces and show the film or montages along with the music.

The Raiders March was supposed to be the last piece, but of course there are unannounced encores and the first was Marion’s Theme. And then they bring out Marion herself, Karen Allen! So cool.

The E.T. theme was the final number of the night which ended a magical evening. We had so much fun we’re ready to go again next year!

I’m on week three of the one hundred pushup challenge. I hadn’t been keeping up with my other exercise goals so I figured this one can be done in a few minutes a day, 3 times a week. I’m currently on the 2nd day of the week 3 regiment.

There are 3 tracks you can choose from which basically correlate to a beginner, intermediate and advanced track, based on how many pushups you can do before the challenge. I was doing about 20-25 a couple of times a week for a long time but never really pushed myself to do more.

Each track has you do 5 sets of pushups, 3 days a week. Each set is different in number, but is designed to push you to max out in the last set.

I started on the highest track and the first week was relatively easy. Week 2 started to get a little harder but I was able to complete every set.

After week 2, you do another test to see how many pushups you can do non-stop. If you can do more than 26, you are on the highest track, which I remained. Ow. Day 1 has you do sets of 25, 17, 17, 15, 25+. I got through this with a little exhaustion and barely made it to 25 in the last set. Day two is even rougher with 27, 19, 19, 15, 25+. I unfortunately barely made it through the 4th set and could only get to 15 in the last set. I’ll see how day 3 is and maybe do week 3 over again depending on how I do.

The goal of course is to get to 100 pushups in one set. I think by the end of week 6, I’ll be doing something like 250 pushups over 9 sets. That is, if my arms don’t fall off by then.

Now I just need to find a 6 pack ab challenge somewhere.

I’ve updated the site a bit. It is a work in progress but the majority of the elements I wanted to update are complete. I want to add in an updated header and footer but at least the bulk is up for now.

I’ve added my latest twitter post in the bubble and rotating tabs for feeds on the right. I may add in a couple more for tv or poker as we go along.

If you don’t know what twitter is, you can go to twitter.com. It is basically a micro blog and the concept is basically to answer the question “what are you doing right now?”. I will mostly use it for poker updates and little tidbits of info or cool links I come across.

I will hopefully keep this updated a lot more now since I’ve put in the time to redesign it.

time to blog again
wow its been almost a year
back in full effect!