Day 3 of the Clean Living Room Experiment is well under way. Our children are spending their last precious days of Summer vacation with their aunt at the beach. She has them for a week and, yes, we’ve already sent in her application for sainthood. I thoroughly cleaned our living room the morning after they left. Hypothesis: the children are destroying the house. Results so far are promising if not totally conclusive. Four days to go.

In unrelated news, the Netflix version of the Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds concert is the 2D version despite the fact that they are clearly showing the 3D version of the DVD cover on their site. Boo. Hey, Netflix, there’s a little girl in this house who was pretty bummed out by that.

We finally were able to see The Dark Knight. Very satisfying. It didn’t quite have the impact of the the first one, probably only because my expectations for Begins were so low and my expectations for Dark Knight were so high. The cell-phone/sonar thing with the glowy bat eyes? Hokey. And can’t they use a mask that doesn’t make him sound like he’s got a head cold? But I forgive them. It was a great movie.

Speaking of comic book characters, they showed the Watchmen trailer. It looked cool and all but I think it probably left most of the audience—that is, the majority who never heard of Watchmen before—scratching their heads. I’ve never been a huge fan of comic books or graphic novels, but being a geek and an avid science fiction reader, it was impossible for me never to have at least heard of Watchmen. I decided to pick up a copy and read it through before the movie comes out. I’m on chapter three. It’s good so far. But I predict total disaster for the movie in that it will be impossible for a two hour PG-13 movie to be faithful to the book. You know, in the same kind of way that I, Robot (the movie) was a total, tragic, epic disaster.