The final countdown

The final countdown
Just about a week or so before I leave the ATL for good. Been doing tons of packing, cleaning up, selling off most of my furniture on Craiglist (if anyone in the Atlanta area wants a couch, I've got a nice one available) and having friends and family taking me out to lunch to send me off. Still some more prep work to be done, including how I'm going to fit what's left in my car and another going-away party on Friday (my boss had one for me with fellow co-workers last week). Oh yeah, finished off my last night shift tonight, seemingly doing what I will be doing once I get up to New York.

But as for other stuff going around:
-- Wordplay: Finally returned to the movies after a long hiatus, and it ended up being the crossword puzzle movie. Fun stuff, although I swear I've come across many of the featured competitors in real life, even though I know I haven't.
-- An interesting July 4th for me as I saw Superman Returns with Alyson (seemingly only seeing each other on national holidays) before an aborted attempt to see the Lenox Mall fireworks. The movie was decent, seemed like Superman 2 1/2. Brandon Routh was fine as the man of steel, and he seemed to channel Christopher Reeve, while Kevin Spacey started morphing into Dr. Evil toward the end. On the other hand, Kumar got no lines, Superkid had an interesting Lipnick/Jake Lloyd vibe going for him, and Kate Bosworth seemed to be assuming Cameron Diaz's Being John Malkovich look.
-- As for the fireworks, some nasty thunderstorms rolled through just before the show was to begin. It sounded like things were going to get cancelled (at least according to a cop at the place we had established camp at), so we went our separate ways. Then as I got home, I could hear the fireworks from my apartment, so my last chance to see them live fizzled out.
-- I suppose I should comment about the World Series of Pop Culture. I like the show -- the questions are fair, if at times a bit easy, although it strays into some real trivia, which is fine, though. The concept is very simple, which is good. I'm not a big fan of the hosts -- the Studio 7 experiment probably clouds my opinion of Pat Kiernan, while Miss Tungsten seems to be showing her age a bit, even if she had a decent Hef spread last year.
I had too many strikes against me for being on the show (not to mention it taped the same weekend as TRASHionals), but I know I could more than take them on (as could plenty of my quizbowl colleagues). However, watching Wednesday night's episode on DVR, I realized I went to college with Mac from the Bobby, Ricky, etc. team (the middle guy in the team picture; he's a frat brother of one of my friends from school), meaning I'm not the only Filipino-American alum from Northwestern with game show and pop culture experience anymore.