A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

House of Wax is a horror movie. It stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Jared Padalecki, and the (in)famous Paris Hilton. I must admit that I did not expect much from the movie. Truth be told, I expected this movie to be a cheesy horror film because Paris Hilton was in it. The only reason I decided to suck it up and suffer through it was because my dear Winchester brother, Jared Padalecki of Supernatural (CW15, Thursdays at 9 p.m.--it's an awesome show!) fame, was in it and he's not been in much besides Supernatural . Alas, I was pleasantly surprised by this little movie. It follows a group of six college age friends on a road trip and, of course, they run into car trouble. They are forced to seek help in the small town of Ambrose where appearances can be deceiving and things are not what they seem. The small group of friends has no idea what horrors await them when a serial killer who keeps unique souvenirs from his kills decides they'll mak...

It's the number sequence that's clued me in: 3-4-5, the simplest representation of the Pythagorean theorem. Ely was obsessed with it. He heard it in the cawing of the grackles outside our Hyde Park bungalow and claimed the traffic lights on Guadalupe were timed to it. from page 12, The Night Villa The Night Villa is Carol Goodman's latest novel. This one, like its predecessor, The Sonnet Lover , begins in the U.S. before moving the action to Italy. Dr. Sophie Chase, a classics professor at the University of Texas, is working on a book about a first century Roman slave woman named Iusta who essentially took her masters to court to sue for her freedom. Iusta's fate--both the outcome of her court case and her life--is vague as she disappears from the historical record when her village, Herculaneum, is buried by fallout from the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The eruption buried the entire town and many of its inhabitants, preserving them in volcanic ash ...