The spousal unit stood with the phone to his ear, brow furled, listening intently.

"Does something involving 'Water Cruise' ring any bells for you?" he inquired.

I wracked my brain, gave him a Jon Stewart shrug. "I got nothing," I replied.

We chortled.

The nearest English language movie theatre in Canada for us is about a 45 minute drive from our place. It tends to get movies long after they've been released, so we seldom see first run movies.

The theatre is barely scraping by, so it doesn't place advertisements. It does have an answering machine, though, which details what's playing. There's also a web site where I can go and see what's playing, but we always save that for later.

We start with the answering machine, taking turns playing Let's Guess The Movie. We each listen to the answering machine and make our best guess. If we can't match it to a movie title we know, we score one for the theatre and go to the web site to see what the movie is.

This is one of the highlights of our week.

Why yes, we *do* live out in the woods. How did you guess that?

Part of the challenge is that the tape in the machine probably hasn't been changed in, oh, let's say ever. It's seen a lot of wear and tear and probably doesn't record as well as a new tape would.

As an added bonus, the woman who reads the playbill into the machine seems to stand quite a distance from it and shout the information into the machine, making for a fair bit of distortion.

Then, because this is Quebec, the woman is a francophone. She speaks English as well as I speak French. Yes, it is that desperate. It makes for some interesting pronunciations. She once announced a movie staring Penny Lope Kruhz. I had to go to the web site to realize that this was Penelope Cruz. Toby McGuire? Tuh-BE McGuire to our local theatre.

This morning, as usual, we dialled the theatre. Perhaps influenced by the spousal unit's choice, I agreed that the title somehow included the words 'Water Cruise'. It became clear that this was another win for the theatre.

I went to the web site and looked up this week's movie. We were so far off I started to laugh.

"So what is it?" asked the spousal unit.

"Across the Universe."

We have yet to get one right this year.

--Marn