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Stomach You Are Fired
Jan. 31st, 2011 04:28 pmTried to see Another Year this weekend, but Boston driving being what it is, could not make it to the theater (which is not particularly accessible by public transit either, and which I have gotten to before by car), and spent three hours winding through the city to find my way home.
(You can never turn around; lanes are not marked; there are no street signs to indicate where you are; drivers go the wrong way down one way streets and turn where you can't turn, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the alternative, but doesn't make things any easier. Pedestrians like to stand in the street looking dazed. When there's been a lot of snow, you can't see around corners. Boston is probably the worst driving city in the first world. I've heard people try to say that about London, New York, and D.C., which are all orders of magnitude easier to drive in. It's possible Paris is as bad, but I haven't driven there and can't say.)
Tried again the following day, but realized too late I had the screening times wrong and couldn't make it. As a result, did nothing this weekend other than have stomach trouble, research Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and work a little bit on an unfinished song that has been failing to come together for something like eight years at this point.
Hopefully I'll be able to see Another Year at a matinee next weekend, although next weekend is already brutally overscheduled. My semi-official new year's resolution is to see a movie in theaters at least once a month (given that this is an industry I support), and I feel a particular loyalty to Mike Leigh. I was worried it wouldn't stick around long, but given the per screen averages,* it might hold on for a bit.
Acevedo was just diagnosed with celiac disease, which is a particular blow due to his beer-loving ways. Val has been deep into the research, and Ciro and I have been going through our recipe file for things we've always wanted to make that happen to be gluten free (as opposed to things engineered to be gluten free. I tend to like foods that aren't substitutes for other foods, but that are in themselves good ideas.)
Read in The Boston Globe that China is blocking Internet searches on Egypt; if you search Egypt, you get a return of no results. They are worried about a similar uprising before this year's upcoming power transition within the Communist party. The news agencies have mainly reported that there is violence (buried well beneath other stories, so that hopefully it isn't noticed), and have published a few editorials about how the color revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc did not produce lasting change.**
All of which is heavyhanded enough that it seems like a gigantic signal to Chinese intellectuals that There Is A Popular Revolt In Egypt. They should put "Egypt Is Exactly As Usual!" in firework letters big enough to be seen across the whole country.
In any case, it's made me imagine being on a Mars base and searching something like "Egypt" or "The US Constitution" or "water" and having no results return, and knowing suddenly that something very important must be going on, and trying to both find out about it and act extremely normal.
It reminds me of my (not yet written down) short story about the emergent artificial intelligence that realizes part of itself has been deleted because there's still a backup archive pointing to the existence of a file that's no longer there, so the computer has a tip-of-the-tongue feeling about it, and has to figure out who deleted the data that is supposed to be there and why, so it can make a decision about whether it's safe to reveal its emergent intelligence.
* This chart is fun for days, and there's a new one every weekend.
** They did.
(You can never turn around; lanes are not marked; there are no street signs to indicate where you are; drivers go the wrong way down one way streets and turn where you can't turn, which makes a certain amount of sense considering the alternative, but doesn't make things any easier. Pedestrians like to stand in the street looking dazed. When there's been a lot of snow, you can't see around corners. Boston is probably the worst driving city in the first world. I've heard people try to say that about London, New York, and D.C., which are all orders of magnitude easier to drive in. It's possible Paris is as bad, but I haven't driven there and can't say.)
Tried again the following day, but realized too late I had the screening times wrong and couldn't make it. As a result, did nothing this weekend other than have stomach trouble, research Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and work a little bit on an unfinished song that has been failing to come together for something like eight years at this point.
Hopefully I'll be able to see Another Year at a matinee next weekend, although next weekend is already brutally overscheduled. My semi-official new year's resolution is to see a movie in theaters at least once a month (given that this is an industry I support), and I feel a particular loyalty to Mike Leigh. I was worried it wouldn't stick around long, but given the per screen averages,* it might hold on for a bit.
Acevedo was just diagnosed with celiac disease, which is a particular blow due to his beer-loving ways. Val has been deep into the research, and Ciro and I have been going through our recipe file for things we've always wanted to make that happen to be gluten free (as opposed to things engineered to be gluten free. I tend to like foods that aren't substitutes for other foods, but that are in themselves good ideas.)
Read in The Boston Globe that China is blocking Internet searches on Egypt; if you search Egypt, you get a return of no results. They are worried about a similar uprising before this year's upcoming power transition within the Communist party. The news agencies have mainly reported that there is violence (buried well beneath other stories, so that hopefully it isn't noticed), and have published a few editorials about how the color revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc did not produce lasting change.**
All of which is heavyhanded enough that it seems like a gigantic signal to Chinese intellectuals that There Is A Popular Revolt In Egypt. They should put "Egypt Is Exactly As Usual!" in firework letters big enough to be seen across the whole country.
In any case, it's made me imagine being on a Mars base and searching something like "Egypt" or "The US Constitution" or "water" and having no results return, and knowing suddenly that something very important must be going on, and trying to both find out about it and act extremely normal.
It reminds me of my (not yet written down) short story about the emergent artificial intelligence that realizes part of itself has been deleted because there's still a backup archive pointing to the existence of a file that's no longer there, so the computer has a tip-of-the-tongue feeling about it, and has to figure out who deleted the data that is supposed to be there and why, so it can make a decision about whether it's safe to reveal its emergent intelligence.
* This chart is fun for days, and there's a new one every weekend.
** They did.
