Putting away May 2013 items I find some interesting videos and a wonderful graphic on completing the square, and enjoy movies of Dead Snow, 2 Guns, and Truly Madly Deeply.

## May 2013 goodies

I came across a couple of folders from May that aren’t as easily despatched as the others, caled 2011 and 2012. These folders are ones that I’ll be digging on through though as time allows.

### Videos

An interesting viral video popped up, about how at an intersection, a scooter man ends up in a big hole after colliding with multiple vehicles, and an interesting Cracked video came out on the 3 hardest things to explain about Minecraft.

### Completing the square

It’s also when I came across a beautifully visual way of describing how to simplify a quadratic formula by completing the square.

The full details are found at the completing the square page, but basically it means that you can reduce two x terms to an equation with just one x term, which can make things easier to deal with.

$x^2+6x+7$

With the 6x you can:

$\text{complete the square }x^2+6x+(6/2)^2+7-(6/2)^2\\ \text{divide in to two parts }(x^2+6x+9)+(7-9)\\ \text{simplify }(x+3)^2-2$

and thanks to the concept from that beautifully visual diagram, we have only the one x term that we now need to deal with.

## Movies

Død Snø 2009 is a Norwegian horror of a ski vacation gone bad thanks to zombie nazi’s.

The premise sounds like it’s just another b-movie, but this one is done quite well as a horror comedy. It follows the effective trope of a wise local elder warning them about the area, and when dismissed as being a crank they learn the error of their ways.

### 2 Guns

2 Guns (2013) is a high energy buddy cop movie in the style of Lethal Weapon. Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) are both undercover agents unaware of their partners identity, with Bobby being DEA and Stig being Navy Intelligence. After a failed attempt to buy cocaine from a cartel lord they decide to rob about 3 million from him contained in security boxes of a sleepy bank, and find themselves instead with about 43 million instead.

As they’re learning that they’ve got on the wrong side of the CIA, they gradually come to learn each others identity and pair up to take things down in grand style. It’s all over the top in a cartoonish type of fashion, and makes for an enjoyable romp through a series of perplexing switches of loyalty that leaves questions that for the most part are answered shortly after.

It’s lively with an offbeat sense of humour that is hard to not enjoy.

### Truly Madly Deeply

Truly Madly Deeply (1990) is an enjoyable blast from the past, of a bereaved Nina (Juliet Stevenson) who has lost her recently departed husband Jamie (Alan Rickman) and is having a hard time getting over him. They enjoyed playing a Bach piano and cello piece together called Sonata No. 3 for Cello (Viol de Gamba) & Piano, and when she plays the piano piece, his cello accompaniment can be heard too.

Nina’s flat has seen better days and several things are falling apart. The plumbing is failing, doors need repairing, and has a problem with rats. After Nina has a breakdown at a therapist, Jamie as a ghost returns back to her, cheering her up immensely. As Nina tries to come to terms with this and what it means in regard to other men in her life, Jamie invites some other ghost friends of his in too, resulting in both full concertos being enjoyed and conflict when they get in the way for he two of them enjoying things together.

Jamie and the other ghosts are representative of the rat problem in her place, for Jamie spends much of the time wrapped up in a fur coat and when the ghosts have left, she returns to seeing them as rats.

Overall it’s a wonderfully impassioned tale about the strength of love that a woman can have for her man, and only after coming to terms with it is she able to find love with someone else again.