It's a few days past Thanksgiving here. A couple of significant milestones approach, but I'll leave off mentioning them so all can savor their significance. By all, I mean me. Anywho, over the past few weeks the Cowboys have managed to resurrect their season when it seemed they were doomed to the scrap heap for another year. After several significant injuries to starters and their subsequent absence from important games, most of the key personnel are back and contributing to the Cowboys three game winning streak. The final four games of the season are now all very important while also being arguably the hardest. The Cowboys face Pittsburgh, New York (giants), Baltimore, and then close out against Philadelphia. All of these teams have winning records and although Philly is barely over .500 they won very convincingly on Thanksgiving against a Cardinals team that was the start of all the Cowboy's early season woes.
Aeyoung had sent me several cables and I was able to string the cable line from our satellite receiver so we can watch select games on my projector. Unfortunately the signal strength decreases so much over the distance (about 100 feet of cable) that we can't get a picture so I'm buying a signal amplifer and will get to see whether they actually work in practice. Hopefully we'll be able to watch select bowl and playoff games on the big screen.
On another subject entirely, there have been recent positive developments in the screen adaptions for two of my favorite fantasy book series'. George Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series was optioned by HBO a while back but had been in "development hell" (to coin the IMDB term) since then. It looks as though they have already made plans to film the pilot and this will be the biggest hurdle before at least getting the first book made into a season long series. Thankfully HBO is taking the approach of Peter Jackson and other filmmakers who realize that epic fantasy novels don't typically fit nicely into the two hour movie paradigm. I'm confident HBO can do the series justice after watching many of their other series like "Rome" and "Deadwood". I just hope that they get a good return on their investment since the book series is still being written and will most likely comprise at least seven or eight books by the time it's completed. I'd hate it if they get one or two books filmed and then abandon the rest due to financial reasons.
Right on the tail of that good news, I saw a press release from Red Eagle Entertainment that the first "Wheel of Time" novel was being made into a movie. After George Martin's series, this is the next series I would most like to see made into film. Unfortunately, I don't think an individual movie will be able to cover enough ground without making sacrifices to the plot, but at least it's being made. Maybe the "Ice & Fire" series will help establish the viability of a long form television epic fantasy series. Although there are examples of this genre in the past, they haven't ever had really good source material to work with. Xena, anyone?