Thursday, November 9, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Flickr work. Student database work. Researched docking stations for Mac laptops—how disappointing that there appears to be nothing except bookendzdocks.com. Chris is choosing between the latest MacBook Pro and a Dell. He already has a Dell docking station. Apple doesn't make their own docking stations. Bookendzdocks is slow to deliver docking stations when Apple releases new hardware. This could be the pivot point that pushes him back to Dell, unfortunately. And since Bookendzdocks is the only vendor for Mac docking stations, they can pretty much charge what they want, and it's not cheap. Set up e-mail for Steaven, our temporary replacement for Ena. Chatted briefly with Ena. Lunch from the cafeteria: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn off the cob, cranberry dressing. Met with Cindy. Made live draft winter schedules. Updated current students calendar. Flickr work. Student database work. Began installing Firefox 2.0 for the staff. Homemade Vietnamese dinner at PDD's. PDD had rented Spartan (2004) on DVD which is below my imdb threshold of 7.1, but we watched it anyway. It was really kind of horrible and also disturbingly violent. Why would the writer (or anyone) make the protagonist someone who is so obviously cruel and coldhearted that he would willingly maim, torture, and kill people in order to achieve his "objective" of justice (in this case, saving one particular person who happens to be the daughter of a wealthy and powerful white man)? How are we supposed to identify with that? That's no hero; that's more like our current presidential administration. Much of the dialogue and plot was snickerworthy, and we in the audience frequently had to check in with each other: "Do you know what's going on?", "Why did he do that?", "Who is that?", "How did he know to go there?", "Why are those news people there?", and my favorite during the farm scene: "Huh?" The answers are all there (pretty much) but it's work figuring it out. A kind of thinking person's violent action film (-- a new genre?), but this film is not smart like it could have been. This film could have been an examination of what justice means and whether the end result justifies the means to get there. The very end reveals the final bombshell: "Written and directed by David Mamet." Roger Ebert gave this film 4 stars (I can't tell out of how many tho), and he specifically praises the film's dialogue as though he was David Mamet's best friend. Left PDD's at about 10:35 PM. Got to the BART station at 10:45 PM. Waited 5 minutes for a BART train to Civic Center station. Took a street MUNI shuttle bus to Castro Station. (MUNI is doing temporary construction in the tunnel between Castro and Embarcadero.) Discovered at Castro Station that the next train home was 40 minutes, so we took a cab instead and got home in 15 minutes. I forgot to mention that a couple of days ago on an inbound N train I chatted briefly with Bill L who was on his way home. I can't remember what day that was—Day of the Dead?