…which is appropriate to getting the machine back up and running.

It was close to three days of not having a computer before I got this thing back this morning. That was something of a surreal experience for somebody who practically lives online.

Even on a weekend I didn’t really know what to do with myself.

Went for a run Saturday. It was hot. I’m not in as good a shape as I’d like.

Read Karl Rove’s book. Played with the dog. Went out Saturday night. Grilled some pork chops. Did laundry.

That killed maybe a quarter of the weekend. The rest of the time? No idea what to do with myself.

Which meant TV. And since there is zero television worth watching in July – and watching the Koreans take over women’s golf, wimbledon and major-league baseball in the dead of summer don’t qualify as “television worth watching” – that means trying to catch up on movies.

So I did.

If you haven’t seen Act of Valor, watch it. The acting is a bit painful, but you can look past that since the main actors in the movie aren’t actors; they’re real Navy Seals. The action scenes more than make up for the wooden dialogue, and the plot is pretty good stuff.

Act of Valor isn’t quite as good a war movie as Das Boot is, but that’s because Das Boot is one of the best ever made. You feel for the guys on that sub the whole way, but that still doesn’t take the edge off the satisfaction when the airstrike takes them out at the end.

Oh, too much information for those who haven’t seen it? Sorry. Hell, it’s an old movie; you should have seen it by now. Not my fault if I just threw a spoiler at you.

A movie I can basically guarantee you guys haven’t seen is The Guard, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Mark Strong, who’s the best villain in Hollywood, also has a small part in it. The Guard is an indie Irish movie, with Gleeson as a small-town cop in West Ireland and Cheadle as an FBI agent tracking a shipment of cocaine there from the Dominican Republic that Strong and his gang are going to distribute throughout Europe. It’s a buddy-cop movie with Cheadle and Gleeson developing some great chemistry, and there are some hilarious lines in it. Gleeson is horribly inappropriate and comes off as a bumbler, but he turns out to be a lot stronger, tougher dude than he looks.

Here’s the trailer…

I think it’s actually on cable now. Check it out if it’s on; it’s entertaining.

And the other flick I caught up on is Wrath of the Titans, which is the sequel to the remake of Clash of the Titans – the one where Sam Worthington plays the part of Harry Hamlin and Liam Neeson plays Zeus like he does even in movies where Zeus isn’t actually a character. It’s a big-budget deal, but it’s just so-so.

What’s better than Wrath of the Titans is Anonymous. It’s a movie based on the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write any of William Shakespeare’s work; that all those plays and sonnets were written by a British Lord for whom authorship of them was politically inconvenient and he gave away all that material, ultimately to Shakespeare, so as to get it out there. Not bad as historical fiction, though it’s slow at times.

All in all, though, I think I’d rather have had the computer.

Good news is it’s back, though.