Hungry Monster

After many months of delay, K was finally able to shoot the first three episodes of her new web series, Hungry Monster.

If one had to describe this program in Hollywood hybridized terms, one could say it's a strange cross between Thu Tran's Food Party and Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno.

But that doesn't really do a good job of explaining it either.

K wants to explore the history and preparation of various Taiwanese night market foods. The first episodes focus on stinky tofu, batsang (Taiwanese sticky rice tamale), and boba.

I don't know why most children's programming becomes so psychadelic and subversive, but I am happy to report that Hungry Monster seems to be following in that tradition!

Now comes the long editorial slog. Hopefully it'll be available in November or December, and then we can make a real second season!

No Ball B-Ball

I haven't been able to play basketball in over two years due to a series of nagging injuries, but lately I've been heading over to Santa Monica to shoot around. The goal is to work my way slowly back into physical fitness, get my shot back, then play some half-court, and finally full-court again, graduating back to my closed game over in Atwater Village on Sundays.

The courts are ideal as far as busy Los Angeles goes. There are two great full courts inside of a lush park, with properly painted 3-point arcs, new nets, and they are never busy for some reason - perhaps because the 10 freeway prevents too many people from coming in on the north side, the south side is abutted by the large (dorm-free) Santa Monica college, and well, because ballers are priced out of living in the area?

Anyway, it's a great place to shoot around, and the people who do come to play eventually are not that good. But what I'm running into is a weird phenomenon where people who come to the park will walk up to me and ask if they can shoot with me.

In short, they put me in a position.

And I have to say no.

Of course I feel like the bad guy, and for those who don't play basketball it might seem like I am being a selfish asshole here... But I feel like b-ball etiquette dictates that you bring your basketball to the courts if you want to shoot around. You just don't go there and hope you can butt your way into a game (that happens, of course). Perhaps this is a good indicator of their novice-ness. They are non-players and this labels them as such. Someone who plays basketball would never drive all the way to the park to go play without bringing a ball. I mean, what would happen if nobody was there and they had to drive home? They will invest in a basketball and bring it, for this reason. If 100 people are there, then that's okay too. The novice doesn't really mind if he goes to the park and is turned away by the lack of players (and balls). This is the problem.

My feeling is this: I came to shoot around by myself and as long as there are empty hoops I am going to do so. No, I do not own these courts. But I do own this basketball. You may think me an asshole for not wanting to share, but it is you, YOU, who are violating the contract here.

At least that's what I think on this one.

Then they give me a hurt look and they walk away. Like they've just asked me for the time of day and wouldn't give it to them.

And it happens every single time I go there. Am I being a jerk here?

Carmageddon: Post-Event Analysis

Carmageddon goes out with a whimper. I haven't seen such breezy traffic in my 13 years here. No one dared come to the west side. The LADOT traffic map was a web of green freeways.

My favorite headline: "Bad News: 405 to Reopen Today."

Next year will be different when they bring down the remaining half of the Mulholland Bridge. Next year people will remember getting faked out this time around. The roads will be choked with cars.

And then I will cry.

Carmageddon

The mother of all traffic jams is coming and will arrive this Friday evening when they start closing off lanes of the 405 between the 10 freeway and the 101. The entire length of this section will be shut down completely for all of Saturday and Sunday while they take down the south side of the Mulholland Bridge.

We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars diverted away from the 405. I predict total gridlock on all of the neighboring freeways: the 405 obviously north of the 101 and south of the 10, the 10 freeway from Santa Monica to Riverside, the 101 from Woodland Hills to downtown, the 110 from Pasadena to South Central, the 105, and then all of the surface streets (esp through the canyons) that people will take, thinking they can just skate around the problem.

Man it is going to be nasty.

Since we live right off this closed stretch of freeway, we're going to try to stay home all weekend and not leave the house, except by foot.

I will file a full report.

Even better, there will be a Carmageddon 2 next year when they demo the north side of the Mulholland Bridge...

Be afraid!!!!

Apocalypse Yesterday

Yesterday my laptop and iPhone both took a big dump. This timing is unfortunate. The iPhone wasn't truly dead yet, it had stopped wanting to charge, however, and it was taking the slow spiral into deadness. I couldn't do a restore on the phone because my computer (and its iPhone backups) bit the dust earlier.

So there we are. Or were.

I spent much of yesterday in a gloomy panic about all this stuff, since my "recent backup" of my laptop happened over 2 months ago -- better than nothing but still kind of heartbreaking. I also have much of my data backed up to the Mobile Me service, which performed as hoped for some things but not others.

So here's a breakdown of what was saved and what was lost:

SAVED:

-Email

-Contacts

-Music purchased through iTunes

-My documents pre-May 1, 2011.

This actually turned out pretty well; loss of the stuff listed above would be a pretty big deal.

LOST:

-Bookmarks generated this year (kind of big deal since I've spent a HUGE amount of time organizing all of my bookmarks into a massive repository of links (what I call my IDEABOOK)).

-iCal info

-Any document created in the last two months.

-Stuff I haven't discovered yet.

This was partially my fault, since I thought my iCal and Bookmarks were syncing through MobileMe, when in fact they were just syncing through iTunes, when I sunk my phone to my computer... So that stuff never got backed up to the cloud like I thought it was... and those bookmarks and calendar items went back to the last time I did a manual backup for those things, which was about 6 months ago. Ack!

For awhile I was elated about my lack of artistic productivity this year ("Thank God I wasn't working on a novel or a movie or something, then I'd really be feeling the loss!!!"), but it turns out I've lost a shitload of data (I take and make a ton of notes daily) after all. And my Bookmark Reorganization Project was all for not, it seems.

Still, it could have been much, much, much worse.

Back up your data, people! Do it now!

Use online bookmarking!!!!

PS. I suppose if I were a better person I could look at this as an OPPORTUNITY and not a CALAMITY. Like hey, I'm finally free of the shackles of the to-do list, right? Right? Hmm, come talk to me in a week and we'll see about that.

PPS. And yes, I did try the HDD In The Freezer Trick, which never ever works...

Midterms

Middlebrow recently sent me a link to a site called Quantified Self (Self-Knowledge Through Numbers), which is all about self-tracking, as nerdy as that sounds. Tracking sleep habits, tracking mood, whatever. Using data to analyze and tweak one's ways.

It's a little obsessive for even me, but it made me realize that the year is halfway over and my own personal midterms are upon me. My own 52x52x52x52 project (52 weeks, 52 books, 52 movies, 52 blog posts) needs to be analyzed, data points need to be tracked and organized, and projections need to be made.

Last year's meager results are what prompted this push:

-52 weeks

-3 books

-10 movies

-7 blog posts

I had hoped I could accomplish the 52x52x52x52 project through increased efficiency -- and not really cut into my life in other ways. That I could reclaim this time from the murk of lazy wastering, just like the Japanese reclaimed land from the ocean to build the Kansai Airport in Osaka.

In this way this reading and writing and viewing productivity block is built on the landfill of hypothetically streamlined efficiency...

The results so far:

-26 weeks

-28 books

-29 movies

-26 blog posts

Not bad, really. But sort of misleading too because I got WAY ahead in January and February -- back when I was more excited about this task -- and have slowly been frittering away my early lead. So I look like I'm on target, but really if you track the productivity of the last four months and project them onto the rest of the year, the trajectory sends me to a place well short of my goal.

Pros: a success really considering how sometimes one can get results from just writing a simple goal down. Already I'm many orders of magnitude more productive this year in only half the time as last year.

Cons: But what is the cost? It's not something for nothing in this world. What is the cost of this time expenditure? And is it worth it?

This must be the true object of this study.

Ooooo Barracuda!

Tonight I cooked up a big ole barracuda in my grill pan. K brought it home from work; one of her staff fished about eight of them out of the Pacific Ocean. This one was large and muscly - MUCH bigger than my upper arm when flexing - and even though he was headless he was a terrifying sight to behold.

K was having trouble deboning him and I shouted something helpful like, "Just rip his spine out" or something like that until I went in to the kitchen and took a good look at his spine which was not like some cute and harmless tilapia bones -- no, this was a long train of herkin animal vertibrae, with long pointy-ass ribs that would spike you in the mouth if you weren't careful. "This is more dinosaur than fish," I said. "Prehistoric." And we didn't even have to look at his toothy face.

So after this battle royale to separate his P90x-ified flesh from his man-bones, we ended up with some lumpy filets that I marinated in some soy sauce and mirin and green onions and garlic and then plopped them in the grill pan and cooked them until they looked like savory corn fritters.

And then we ate them and it was almost 9pm by this time because we had to allow for the marination and I must say they were kind of nasty. Gamey, if such a thing could be said for fish. Not at all delicate, like the sole I cooked up last week. The marinade definitely competed with the flavor of the fish, for better or worse. Better?

There's still another arm of barracuda in the freezer, but I don't think we can handle an encore. We've had our quota of 'cuda.

H2No

Six years ago I did a small movie in Atlanta called Randy and the Mob. My 2nd assistant was a guy from Orlando who had the same name as his great grandfather (and grandfather and father). In fact, he had a roman numeral four (IV) tattooed to his upper arm to celebrate this fact.

My assistant frequently told me he hated the taste of water.

"You mean the water," I said, "in Orlando?"

"No," he said. "The taste of all water."

"So what do you do?"

"I drink juice, or Vitamin Water... Something with some flavor."

Hmmmm. What would Charles Darwin have thought have thought about this curiosity? How does his family line prevent itself from going extinct?

Like, I hate the sensation of breathing. Hate it!

Don't know why I thought of this today. I haven't thought about him in many many years. A lot has happened since 2005. So much.

But I'm sure he still hates the taste of water.

Please Don't Put Me In a Position

To the woman operating the Calbi truck -- one of the numerous Asian taco trucks that prowl the Sawtelle area -- in front of Trader Joes yesterday:

Lady, I was the tall guy who ordered a chicken burrito from you yesterday afternoon. You told me it would cost $5.99 and I pushed six dollars through your little window. I saw you put the money in the register and I saw you slide a receipt back in my direction. What I did not see, however, was my change. A humble penny, sure, but still, something I am owed. Please do not assume that you can just round up for convenience's sake. You don't even know me. Please do not assume that I don't care about this penny, that it is insignificant somehow -- worth less than the act of removing a penny from the register and handing it over with the receipt. That thousands of years of commerce can be ignored and undone because you don't feel like giving me my f***ing penny. Perhaps you were low on pennies at the time. I understand how stressful this can be -- I worked in customer service too, for a few years. I would be happy to have granted you this penny had you asked for a favor. But no, you did not.

Don't get me wrong. The burrito was delicious. Worth six dollars even. I would have been happy to have paid six dollars. The thing that I dislike the most about this is that you put me in a position. You put me in a position where I would be the stingy bad guy if I brought it up. How easy to imagine the eye-rolling, the audible sigh, the re-opening of the register and the snap of the penny as it is deposited on the counter without eye contact! It doesn't even need to happen I can image it so clearly! And there I was, wondering about the best way to deal with my building irritation. Should I say something? Should I not say something and just take it? Is it more irresponsible to let you continue to do this to the next hundred customers down the line? I should say something, right? Or maybe I'm crazy? Maybe most normal people wouldn't overreact like this? I'm overreacting, right? Why am I feeling so... so used?

Because you put me in a position. Please don't ever do that again.

And don't think I didn't notice your hopeful tip jar up there in the window with you.

Better luck next time,

Sleepy E

PS. And what's up with the dearth of weird Asian sodas there? Shame on you.

Bruce!

K and I have been spending our Sundays looking at homes in the West LA, Mar Vista, Culver City, and Westchester areas. I feel like we're able to see about ten places during the four or so hours that these houses are showing. We meet dozens of desperate, sharky real estate agents who thrust their cards at us. We see million-dollar fixer-uppers. We notice that decent public middle and high schools are a total rarity, unless you're in Beverly Hills or Manhattan Beach. Culver City, maybe. We see that competitive parents are willing to pay a huge premium to live in these areas.

One such place is a house in Culver Crest, which is a tracty two-story thing on the former MGM lot. We hate it. It's overpriced, with a terrible floor plan, and no yard. Literally, no yard. Just a walkway around the edge of the lot where it abuts with other neighboring two-story monstrosities (also without yards). The older gentleman real estate agent introduces himself. "Nice to meet you, Bruce," I say, shaking his hand, then make small talk while K goes upstairs and appraises the awful bathrooms. Bruce keeps up his running patter, K and I make it known to each other that we hate this place, and we start to leave. "Thanks a lot, Bruce!" I belt out, then shake his hand, and we are out of there.

I had yesterday off and there was a place in Mar Vista that was showing so K had me go and look at it. Another woman is showing the house but guess who I meet in the backyard? "Do I know you?" he says.

"I don't think so," I respond.

"Then you have a twin brother. I showed a property in Culver City -- "

"Oh, hey Bruce!" I say, and he is startled that I know his name, because he has no idea what my name is. I am even more startled that I can remember his name, because this has been a real problem for me for my entire life. I'll forget people's names at parties five seconds after being introduced. It's terrible really. It's like my brain is funneling all that info out of RAM and into the trash because it knows it's not important enough to remember.

And yet, here I am, a head like a steel trap. Bruce! How is it that I remember this guy's name but I can't remember the names of people I actually want to remember? We were in this guy's life for about 5 minutes.

So I think it had to do with 1) Actually listening to Bruce's introduction, 2) Saying his name back: "Nice to meet you, Bruce!", 3) Reminding myself: "What's his name again?", and 4) Closing the deal with his name: "Thanks a lot Bruce!"

And then I have it. It's in there.

I must try this out to see if it works again.

Tree of Life

Terrance Malick's Tree of Life is probably the most interesting film experience I've ever had that I cannot recommend. People should know they are wandering into a two-and-a-half-hour tone poem where nothing much happens. The "story," if you can call it that, concerns an aging Sean Penn who thinks back on his childhood and relives his relationship with his younger brother, when they were still innocent, years before that brother would go off to Vietnam and get killed. Penn's younger self is shaped mostly by his overbearing disciplinarian father, played by Brad Pitt. But Malick doesn't start there. No, he has to start earlier than that to tell this story properly. He must begin at the beginning of the universe.

About fifteen minutes into this Dawn of Man sequence people started filing out of the theater. There was open laughter, and then more filing out, probably 15 people or so in total. And still the earth's molten core was forming and the oceans were spewing and microbial life was wiggling and cells were dividing. Then there were CGI dinosaurs, and more laughter from a pocket of soon-to-depart folks. In some ways Tree of Life owes more of a debt to 2001 -- even Solaris -- than it does to Revolutionary Road or any other family melodramas from the period.

I found it mesmerizing.

K noted: "The problem is that this is a movie, so it's being marketed as a movie. If this were an art installation you saw at MoMA you'd adore it." I'd have to agree with that. People can't wrap their heads around it because it's like no movie they've ever seen. There's no plot or rising action or red herrings or anything dependable that Robert McKee or Gustav Freytag would use to build a narrative. It's an art event, not traditional storytelling.

But it's amazing in its own way. Malick is unafraid to go from macro to micro in one edit, from the dawn of the universe to the tiny insignificant details that make up this cosmic infinity -- a frog tied to a toy rocket, a mother's hemline, a neighbor's lingerie spread out on a bed, a tiny newborn foot cupped in two hands. I was browsing a review complaining that when all was said and done Tree of Life was just a scrapbook of pretty pictures. Is that not enough? Tree of Life IS a scrapbook -- the cinematography (shot completely without artificial film lighting) is remarkable -- and it catalogues everything about these lives, and life in general. Tree of Life is a celebration of what it is to be alive -- all of life's grand moments and banalities and emotion and dread in two and a half hours. It is by turns operatic and very still and quiet. And it is boring, and it is long, but it is definitely the film I'd put on the Golden DVD for the next Voyager spacecraft, the film that most completely explains us to whatever space alien awaits us. It is somehow the film that most totally details how life works -- physically and metaphysically -- and, like life, it is not always entertaining.

I asked K whether films like this would still be made ten years from now. She didn't think so. Malick is kind of a relic -- a true auteur -- and Tree of Life is the shotgun blast of an older director contemplating his mortality and the end of a filmmaking career. They shot multiple formats of film (35mm, 65mm, and IMAX -- over a million feet), and used no film lights. Malick is famous for shooting at magic hour -- 45 minutes a day -- on sections of Days of Heaven... to get the soft post-dusk lighting just right. On Tree of Life if it was cloudy and they were doing interiors they'd find something else to shoot. Or just come back the next day and hope for the best. Directors who came up in the 70s -- when there was more freedom and auteur theory was in vogue -- still cling to this control. Directors coming up now will never have this control, or this desire to have this control. They will be cutting different versions for test audiences.

I skimmed a few review quotes of this film and the word "pretentious" seemed to crop of up quite a bit. I actually think that Tree of Life is the opposite of pretension -- Malick made a film that only he could make. It's shockingly personal when you think about it. Malick's entire being is in this film. How often does a director so completely imprint his soul on a motion picture so that you feel like you know him personally? There's nothing pretentious about it. Bombastic maybe. Overreaching, sure. I myself will probably never want to sit through it again, but I'm so glad I went to see it in the theater because such a film could never be tolerated on DVD with all of one's household and its distractions circling.

So I refuse to recommend this movie -- or "art experience" -- because I think it IS problematic. It rides the razor's edge between laughable and laudable; on a different day I might be tittering in the dark and slinking out with everyone else. Tree of Life is big and baggy and messy and inspired and lyrical and tedious... and uneven and beautiful too.

Just like life.

Confronting the Invasive: Technology, Parenting, and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Total Interconnectivity

My brother and I often remark that we were born at the perfect point in history. Our childhoods were gloriously free of cell phones and the Interwebs; we had to go outside to play, or if we wanted to use the computer we had code our own primitive games in BASIC on the family TRS-80. Now that we are adults, we are able to fully utilize the miracle of the Internet. And it IS a miracle, goddamnit. Just two days ago I dropped my iPhone in a parking lot, and not only did it shatter the touchscreen, but it jarred the SIM card loose and my phone wouldn't really function until I got home and Googled some solutions. I was able to fix the SIM card issue in about a minute, and an iPhone screen replacement kit is on its way. It cost $2. Miraculous!

--

Yesterday, K was ranting about kids sitting at restaurants ignoring their parents and playing on their phones.

K: Is it really necessary for that 8-year old to have a cell phone?

E: Of course it is. Otherwise he'll be ostracized at school! And what parent wants that?

--

I came across this article in the Daily Mail a while back called "How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations." The author tracks four generations in his wife's family and how far afield they were allowed to wander at the age of eight. In 1919, his wife's 8-year old grandfather was allowed to walk six miles, unsupervised, to his favorite fishing hole. In 1950 her eight-year-old father was allowed to walk a mile into the woods. The author's wife -- at age eight in 1979 -- was only able to travel a half-mile to the local swimming pool. Now the son of the author and his wife is only allowed to walk to the end of the block.

I'm not sure what it's like to be a kid in today's day and age. From my middle-aged perspective, it looks pretty bad -- although that's what every generation has been saying about the next for all of eternity. But it got me thinking that something has gone awry in our culture and it's only going to get worse. I saw this book today and thought I might read it as an antidote to the relentless Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (which I shall blog about soon). Of course, it's the easiest thing in the world to theorize about parenting, and another thing totally to just survive the mayhem -- and it's still another thing to comment on all of these issues without actually being a parent.

Perhaps the lifestyle change between my childhood and today's childhood's has more to do with the change between my suburban upbringing and the highly urbanized environment I live in now. Perhaps I should check my premises. Perhaps my sample size is too small. Perhaps the people who surround me are overprotective because they live in Los Angeles, and not because all parents helicopter over their children these days.

Perhaps Middlebrow will finally write his book "Parenting Without Principles" that he pitched to me once. I think I would like to read that.

Kids today.... (sigh, grumble)

Tim Burton Broke My Heart

K and I went to the Tim Burton exhibition at LACMA today, which I believe is the same one put together by MoMA back in 2009. I don't think I've ever seen so many people at a museum. There was a one-hour-plus line to get Mr. Burton's new book signed. We didn't do this. Plenty of young goth girls did, though. Some dressed up in dark-and-stripey Burtonesque attire for the event. (These are not my photos, by the way.)

I have an uneasy relationship with Mr. Burton, having been something of a fanboy back in high school and early college. When you revisit his early work, it's hard not to have the same impression. At the time, he was such a fresh and visual young presence in the film world. Looking back, it seems truly insane that this young Disney animator was tapped to reinvent the Batman franchise.

It has become clear, however, that Burton is very weak on narrative. Very. I don't think he can tell a story properly, which is really the whole thing, isn't it? I actually walked out after an hour of Sweeney Todd; I couldn't take Big Fish, either. I did enjoy Corpse Bride, which he co-directed, but it's been since 1990 (Edward Scissorhands) since I've been able to endorse any of his films--and even this, I'm sure, doesn't really hold up. Indeed, if you go back far enough, I'm willing to bet that Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the only film of his that stands the test of time.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is still as fantastic ever, but I attribute this to genius director Henry Selick, who keeps the story moving along and the puppet characters emotional and interesting. There is a great note in the show from Selick to Burton about changes he wants to make during Jack Skellington's "Jack's Lament" song. He signs his note: "Respectfully, Henry S." I love that!

Still, the exhibit is inspiring for the sheer volume of art that Burton has created over the years. He draws because he must draw, and although much of the show is made up of doodles and sketches, there are some finished pieces supported by acrylics or watercolors that are remarkable. He also completed a series of large-format Polaroids (24x20) that are truly beautiful -- gloriously saturated and staged, with inches of ginormous Polaroid goop encroaching on the edges of the frame. No, a digital camera can't and will not ever be able to come close to this.

This feels like the best way to access Burton's mind: as framed visual pieces that the viewer can spend a lot of time or a little bit of time on. There's no story to contend with -- no tension, no rising action, no conflict, nothing. It's visual candy, and a lot of it, and the viewer is free to linger or leave -- as he or she sees fit. The opposite of being chained to your theater seat and enduring slack editing and dialed-in performances just to have the crazy design rationed out to you over two-plus hours. Perfect!

After shoving our way through the dense crowds of fans opening up their wallets at the exhibit-ending, money-making Tim Burton store, we head over to Ray's, based on Hightouch's thumbs-up, but there was a 45-minute wait, so we camped out in the bar and had some snacks instead. Perhaps next time!

I noticed in my literature that there's a Tim Burton film retrospective at LACMA's Bing Theater over the coming weeks, which seems appropriate. For a moment, I thought I might try to rekindle the old enthusiasm and see some of these films big. If I were twenty-five and idle I might take up this task. As it is, we're probably going to give it a miss...

Robinson Crusoe: Productivity Guru

Jonathan Franzen's remarkable New Yorker essay, "Farther Away," packs more life into its few pages than his new novel Freedom does in its 600 or so pages. After finishing the interminable slog of his latest book tour, Franzen visits Masafuera, the island off the Chilean coast where the "original" Robinson Crusoe spent four years surviving off the land. Franzen brings along the ashes of writer David Foster Wallace to dispose of into the Pacific Ocean. What starts out as kind of a quirky travelogue segues into an analysis of the English novel and individualism, and finally settles in as a meditation on loss.

It seems that Crusoe is really used as a device here to connect these things -- his journey to a far-off island and his need to contemplate the recent death of a good friend. This essay isn't really about Robinson Crusoe, but that is the vehicle we ride in to get to some other, more penetrating places.

And yet, after reading "Farther Away," I found myself wanting to read Crusoe, having never thought it an important read and having never have had to study it in school. And what a weird pleasure it was to do so! I don't know what I was expecting -- some kind of juvenile, swashbuckling picaresque, I suppose -- but what I got instead was a proto-Walden, a flat journalistic listing of crop rotation and canoe building and hut manufacture. But sort of fascinating too, like an 18th century Getting Things Done.

Rob is all about breaking his day into chunks and maximizing productivity, spending his mornings hunting, the midday hours performing chores around the house (while it's too hot to do anything else), and then spending the afternoons going out again and performing tasks at his second residence or in his fields. For a novel with such a reputation as a ripping yarn, Defoe delivers Crusoe's journal entries without any affect or embellishment -- it's simply an accounting of goods and tasks and results. More ledger than poetry, certainly. And yet, there's something gripping about it too, especially for a productivity nerd like myself.

Rob made the most of his days. Surprisingly, he doesn't look outward that much -- he gets closer to God, sure, and he's conscious of some kind of cultural relativism (when questioning his own personal moral indignation to viewing cannibalism first-hand), but there isn't as much imagination and lyricism and philosophy as one might expect for a twenty-eight year castaway. The descriptions are of how he built a canoe, from what tree, and how he hollowed it out... instead of descriptions of weather and sunsets and inner turmoil.

So let us celebrate the Protestant work ethic. And let us celebrate manual competency! Let us not celebrate the poopy film versions on offer (Aidan Quinn or Pierce Brosnan?), however. If anyone knows of anything superior, please let me know. In the meantime I may finally try out Castaway after all of these years. I'm sure Defoe would consider watching any of these offerings to be a total waste of time. And he'd probably be right.