Okay it's been a dog's age since I posted here, and who knows if I'm going to keep this up, given how sparsely I post to my other blog/journal type thingies - but I figure if I start getting in the habit of virtually talking out loud to myself, that might prevent me from doing it in real life any more than I already do.

Yeah, right. I'm on track to be the next Little Edie, I'm quite sure of that.

Anyhoo, I'm thinking I'll use this for quickie reviews of things I've seen/heard/read that are more off the cuff and emotional response rather than analytical essay/criticism. Or not. Who knows - I see tons of films, and am always more than happy to talk about them, but when it comes to writing them down, something about that makes my brain cramp, and I can never decide if I want to go with the 'she blowed up real good' or 'mise-en-scene reminiscent of Ozu' style of film review. This is where I'll tease that out.

Also will have top of my head reactions to news/entertainment, not so much rants per se although I'm not ruling that out.

Be forewarned I'm going to let myself go to the maudlin/gallows humor room, too - but don't worry too much, because I'm Irish, which means I am a licensed melancholia* technician.

*melancholia as in the noun form of melancholy, not as in the psychiatric diagnosis, which in my mind misuses the definition of melancholy

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.

Somehow I've gotten The Carpenters' Close to You stuck in my head. It's starting to grate, and I'm too lazy to get up and put on a CD or tape to replace it with something else. This is a daily thing for me. I have various continuous loops of internal white noise running all day every day, one of them being my own soundtrack. Sometimes they are songs for which I have a memory of an earlier reference, but often I have absolutely no clue, and don't even want to venture a guess, because how does one explain suddenly humming the aria featured in the movie I've Heard the Mermaids Singing while on the way to make a presentation at a managers meeting? Of course, I really love that aria, and haven't heard it - in or out of my head - in a really long time, so that was a great treat.

Fortunately, on those occasions when I have a song I don't like stuck in my head, I have the all-powerful antidote. Pay attention, I'm only sharing this once. You know how when you get really bad hiccups, you block your nose and ears and force yourself to drink as much of a glass of water as you can to get rid of them? It's a similar sort of theory. When the chorus of a soul-sucking song chimes in for the last time you can tolerate, immediately break out into a chorus or even just a verse of 'The Telephone Song' from Bye Bye Birdie. Do it out loud, as loudly as possible. In an ideal setting, gesticulatory flourishes are also highly recommended. I swear. It works. Come to think of it, the better analogy would be that of an antibiotic....

It's going to be a while before I get this place set up all nice - no surprises there, considering I've been in my condo now for eight months and still haven't bought a vacuum...even though I am allergic to dust mites...

Once again I've picked an odd time to embark on a new avocation. Sometimes I think it's the sign of a healthy person, who recognizes that 'waiting for the right time' and perfect schedules will never exist, so why wait? Other times I think it is an obvious presentation for chaos addiction.

*I meant to do that*

Ah, just realized I need to fix the date-time stamp as well - for those of you at home, it's actually 10:42 pm, EST

*I meant to do that*

Alrighty, I think I'm getting the hang of this, sort of.

So, concerning the title of this weblog, Sweetness and Light. At some point during the past few years, when setting up my Outlook files at work, and being slightly paranoid about IT and managerial snooping, I came up with this as a code for my personal emails, shortened to S&L. Don't ask me how this phrase got in my head, how long it was knocking around in there, but there you go: at every job since then, I always have my S&L folder.

In any event, don't think of it as a descriptive but rather a proscriptive - you know, like 'Wives be obedient to your husbands' kind of deal. Paul wasn't describing how women were, he was trying to convince them how to be - which was pretty obnoxious of him, considering he spent most of his time sponging off all the rich women who let him crash at their houses during his touring. But that's another story.

This morning I read an editorial in the Boston Globe online, written by the ombudsperson, in which she noted that many of the complaints she fields are due to readers confusing editorials with news reports. She then goes on to do a basic overview of the differences between the two. It was fine, straightforward - but she didn't address the other reason why readers would get confused: because so many journalists confuse the two!

And just to prove my point, on the way home I read an irritating article in The Improper Bostonian (okay, yes it's a freebie 'cool things to do in Boston' type of deal at its core, but it really strives to be a free, younger Boston magazine-let). The article, ostensibly about 'what women competing in traditionally male sports really want', starts with "Are you a feminist?" (in bold color, font size twice of the text, to boot), addressed by the (male) author to a rugby player.

Okay, stop the bloody hell RIGHT there, mister! This is the first thing out of your mouth in your interview with this woman? An interview that you probably arranged by saying 'oh, we really want to talk to women in some of the lesser-known sports, give them a chance to share what about the sport they love, that kind of thing', some sort of sandbagging blather like that. Then you get the tape rolling and blammo! You use the f word right off the bat?

He says : "the question makes (her) uncomfortable. Normally playful, outgoing and chatty, she is now momentarily silent, contemplating her sociopolitical views. What she would probably want to say is, "I'm a rugby player," and leave it at that.

Nimrod, she wasn't contemplating her sociopolitical views, she was kicking herself for falling for this interview idea, trying to read you to figure out what your agenda was, then deciding to err on the side of caution. What she probably REALLY wanted to say was "If I say yes, is your follow-up question gonna be 'well, are you a lesbian?'"

(rant alert, rant alert - oh no, too late! - danger, danger)

This author should have been forced to cough up his sociopolitical views, his definition of feminist, and his opinion of women in sports. A mandatory sidebar to the article. Boxed. Shaded. With circles and arrows, and a 'READ THIS' header.


This just bugs the bejeezus out of me. Yes, I know it was not a Globe Spotlight item, I should expect this kind of thing from a periodical of any kind. It's not that I want to turn off my hermeneutics of suspicion whenever I read, I just wish there was still a journalistic standard out there as the rule, and not the exception. I expect it in TV, and I can identify it more easily on TV: what did that edit cut out? what isn't she saying? The print media is more difficult to get under - plus, it becomes part of the historical record more easily, so garbage in stays garbage in. Okay, rant over, you can all move along now...

Success! A new toy - now I'm not sure how to play with it.