I mean definitely an E ticket
I stepped out this afternoon-- I was going to walk down Wilshire to the Staples-- and there were one, two, three, four helicopters directly overhead like a squadron of Valkyries.
I went off on my errand and the side streets were all blocked to vehicles by the police. Is there a manhunt in the neighborhood?
On further inquiry it turns out that the school is on lockdown, perhaps because one of the students brought a knife or gun to school. Um, the middle school or the elementary school? The middle school. (Although for whatever reason, the helicopters were hovering closer to the elementary school.)
At this hour it appears that the four helicopters and countless police cars were called out because of a
report of a gun by a juvenile caller, which appears to have been a
hoax.
Walking in L.A., walking in L.A.
I have often read (some of) Jerome K. Jerome's
Three Men in a Boat, but it seemed to me that I had never finished it, so I finally read it cover to cover. It was a little different this time since the characters pass through
Henley, which I know now from the
Football Yogi living there.
Then I decided that I
had read the whole book before, but had forgotten about it. The thing is, it's really just a collection of amusing anecdotes with almost no sequential story (you could randomly reorder all the chapters of the book without really harming it in any way) and not much of an ending (it starts raining and they head home). So it's an easy book to pick up, put down, and forget how much of it you read.
Speaking of rain, the monsoon season has started in Los Angeles. I was walking home the other day and a bus went through a deep puddle and sent a wave of water over me. It seemed more like something that would happen in a movie (or, as Maribeth said, to
Carrie Bradshaw) rather than in real life. I was more wet than if someone had thrown a bucket of water at me, but slightly less wet than if I had just walked into the Pacific Ocean.
Speaking of Jerome (K. Jerome),
Jerome gave the quiz at the pub for the first time. One of his questions was, "Where is the
Loop of Henle?" So I joked, "I think it's on the Thames." But then his next question was, "On what river is the Henley Regatta?" I guess he was going for a thematic sequence.
We won the quiz because Patrick was very much in tune with Jerome... or maybe it's just that Patrick is very good. Patrick had written a handout (intended for use the following week) on identifying languages in unfamiliar scripts (did you know that Maltese is a Semitic language written in a Latin alphabet?) and Jerome had written effectively the same thing so Patrick had to start over. I told Patrick that they were like Harry Potter and Voldemort and one of them ought to learn the art of
Occlumency to keep the other one out of his mind. Eric said that they were more like Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
You better run all day and run all night
We watched the
Logan's Run DVD that
Joe gave
Maribeth on her 30th birthday. I read the book long ago but I never watched the movie until now.
I was struck by the many parallels between this 1976 movie and the 1982 movie
Blade Runner. There's, um, the "running" title, and special policemen chasing escapees who are unhappy about their abbreviated lifespans and "want more life." There's the ambiguous sympathy between hunter and hunted. Certain lines of dialogue are almost the same. There's some similarity between the Old Man who lives alone with his cats and the "prematurely senescent" J.F. Sebastian who lives alone with animate toys of his own creation. I wonder if this movie wasn't as much of an influence on
Blade Runner as
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was. In particular, Ridley Scott is said not to have read
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but maybe he saw the movie
Logan's Run.
In
Logan's Run, the Computer does a really abysmal job of motivating Logan for his mission. By refusing to answer or even acknowledge his questions, the Computer effectively says in not so many words: "I've been lying to you all your life, you're going to die in four years time without hope of rebirth, actually I'm taking those four years away from you now, no you won't get them back. Now go forth and do my bidding!" If you believe in Deckard-as-replicant theories, then this parallels (I think unintentionally) the miserable job that Tyrell Corporation has done filling replicant-Deckard with enthusiasm for his work.
I was interested to sort-of recognize bits of Dallas/Fort Worth scenery where the movie was shot, but I'm a bit confused about the exact locales. Some shots were from the Fort Worth Water Gardens. I think some others were from downtown Dallas, but The Internet doesn't confirm this.
I am the name in the writing on the wall
I got a complaint about the link text being too hard to read, so I will try to fix it...
Reading: I enjoyed the novella
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. A quick read.
Viewing: We finished all 22 episodes of
Alien Nation. Maribeth was initially resistant to watching this 1989-1990 science fiction TV series, but soon she was the one pulling out the DVDs to watch more episodes: to get it over with, she said. Also, I notice she has started using Tenctonese words in everyday conversation.
If I were David Byrne, I'd go to galleries and not be too concerned
We went to the
Murakami exhibit at the MOCA. There was a huge line stretching into the parking lot, that only got longer and longer as time went on. One could skip the line and go straight in by buying a MOCA membership for $75... Otherwise it was $16 for two people. Clever marketing by MOCA?
I'm glad that we waited out the line and didn't fork over the $75. The exhibit was just okay. I like a naked woman transforming into a fighter jet as much as the next guy, but the Lovecraftian nightmares of Things With a Million Eyes and Mouths got kind of old after the fourth room. There was an episode of an anime television series that reminded me a lot of a Nintendo game.
There was a short live-action film that (as I understand) was an excerpt from a full Murakami feature film that will be released in Fall 2008. It is nominally about a sexually impotent assassin who specializes in killing Japanese dignitaries. There was a text rollup explaining how this character has flown into Japan. Then the film excerpt begins and there is a long scene of an unintroduced, unexplained girl washing her hair in the sink, then an external shot of a building, then a shot of a monorail train going by. That's it. If what I saw is representative of the movie as released, it will be the Worst Action Movie Ever.
In other news, congratulations to O'Briens regular
Alex Boisvert for winning a Gold Medal (for Best Early Week Puzzle) and another honorable mention in the
2007 awards from the American Crossword Critics Association.
