Fixed the time stamp. big woo hoo to me. The other bells and whistles intimidate ever so slightly, I'm not in the mood right now to deal with futzing with formatting/template stuff.

So far my weekend has been pretty productive, considering how bloody hot and humid it is outside, and how busy my work week was. Generally my summer weekends are about sleeping, avoiding the sun, and staying as dry as possible. I was on vacation week before last, and didn't go anywhere during the week, just caught up on things around the house and relaxed. When I came back to work, pretty much everyone who asked me how my vacation was commented, 'well, you had great weather the first half anyway'. I had to fake agreement because, honestly? I have no idea what kind of weather there was, I never set foot outdoors until Thursday, when I had to. When summer comes, I feel like Gollum, pretty much - find a cool cave, quick!

Friday I got the flick-out bug, and the best of the lot on offer at the nearest cinema was The Minority Report. I am not a big Tom Cruise fan - I don't hate him, I just don't see him being a great actor so much. However, I had been reading about some of the research Spielberg had done in creating this future world, plus I wanted to see this Colin Farrell guy in action already, so I figured what the hell?

I knew what the story was about, generally, but thankfully because of my 'ehh' stance on Tom Cruise I hadn't done my usual compulsive, comprehensive reading about the movie beforehand, so I could go for the ride once I realized it might be an interesting one. Which reminds me, I think another reason I was leery of seeing this was my extreme reaction to Spielberg's earlier futuristic movie, A.I., which I really disliked. (After seeing this, though, I guess I have to hold the grudge for AI against Kubrick only).

The movie wasn't a 'wow' for me, mostly because, overall greatness aside, both Cruise and Spielberg insisted on doing those Cruise-ian and Spielberg-ian bits that annoy me, but, let's face it I knew I wasn't gonna get off scot-free, so I won't hold that against them.

But the world - it really felt like, hey, this is what it's gonna be like in 50 years, folks! It was really detailed, and it was a clever assortment of farfetched and near?fetched ideas. And it all cohered, such that when the film moves into the most way-out there of the 'new ideas', one of which is central to the storyline (that of precogs), I could go there, I could suspend that little bit of belief because so much else of the world made a 'yeah, that could happen, hell I think that's already happening' sense to me.

Damn, I'm remembering there was a reason I was looking at bells and whistles - I wanted to get the link thing going so I could point you to the website of a friend of mine, who has done some work which presages the centerpiece of the PreCrime 'squad room', the computer wall and digital gloves. His dissertation was about freeing up the book model when dealing with texts on computers - he used the Talmud as his example. And recently he installed an interactive calendar, a permanent piece, at The Asia Society in New York, where one touches what looks like a railing bar to scroll through the musuem's Calendar of Events which is displayed along an interior wall. I saw a prototype, but haven't had a chance to see it since it moved to its home. This is the website to his business:
http://www.davidsmall.com
Last I checked it had sections about his works - I just tried to check it out, but my computer is an old-fashioned feisty thing, and she didn't want me scrolling in his site, for some reason. It's really cool stuff, and he's a great guy with fun links, so if you have fifteen minutes give it a whirl. The day when my first movie comes out? I'm going to ask Dave to do the credits and opening sequence. This is daydream #283946.