New Zealand has its own B-Fest: The Annual 24 Hour V Movie Marathon

From their press release:

Flying in the face of health professionals worldwide, New Zealand movie lovers are again being offered a chance to take part in a marathon that requires zero physical exertion but comes with a very real threat of dying.

The Annual 24 Hour V Movie Marathon returns for its ninth year and organiser Ant Timpson warns the sedentary participants, "that even though the marathon requires no cardio from attendees, they should never forget that death himself could be creeping up their leg during a movie."

Dr Royce Carruthers from Miskatonic University confirms Timpson's concern, "Research shows that movie marathoners are susceptible to blood clots, and in fact, one in eighty could experience deep vein thrombosis, especially if they are heavy smokers and are attending this movie marathon on a 747 thirty seven thousand feet in the air".

One regular attendee Steve Brough had this to say when confronted with a one in eighty chance of dying while watching a film at the marathon, "Well apart from cardiac arrest during sex, I can't think of a better way to die!"

The 24 Hour 'V' Movie Marathon offers adventurous audiences a mix of Blockbuster Premieres alongside some diabolical exploitation from the vault.

This year the Marathon is offering a 'Big Baby' ticket, one which cuts a break to those who fear death and want to arrive Sunday morning to just see approximately half the films for half the price. The only catch is that purchasers of the 'Big Baby' must wear a diaper and bib for the final 8 hours.

The 24 Hour Movie Marathon is presented with V energy drink , the long-term supporter of all things filmy in New Zealand.

If you happen to be reading this from New Zealand, you'll be pleased to note that there are two dates for the Marathon:

Auckland
Hollywood Cinema, Saturday Dec 6th, 2008

Wellington
Paramount Theatre, Saturday Dec 13th, 2008

Learn more at the Marathon web site.

Bento 2

I really like the idea of Bento, a personal, inexpensive database program that runs locally on your Mac. (As opposed to a personal database program that runs on the web – dabbleDB is the winner there.) Filemaker's Bento looks like the winner, and I've been using the first version of the software to perform light database tasks for the last few months.

A little less than a year later, Filemaker has released Bento 2, which looks like a solid update with some much called-for features (direct import of Excel spreadsheets for one) but the results, especially for migrating Bento 1 users, seem to be less than spectacular. Reports of scrambled database forms, slow launch times, and failed database upgrades have the Filemaker support team hopping – and since migrating users pay the same as brand new users (usually existing users of software can count on an upgrader's discount), emotions are running high.

I think I'll stick with Bento 1 until the kinks are worked out of the successor.