I don’t watch Days of Our Lives most years. Soaps in general tend to be too repetitious for me. (That comment isn’t meant to be seen as a shot at the genre, which I appreciate. I have the same problem with police dramas, no matter how critically acclaimed.) The turmoil and strife among a group of familiar characters — trapped in a isolated setting and in a claustrophobic loop of repeating plotlines — just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of episodes.
Okay, so it turns out we’re not the only two people watching this show. (The premiere episodes, at least, turned out to have been pretty highly rated for UPN.) And, looking on some message boards, we’re definitely not the only folks who like Mose — it’s MOSE, not MOSES, English — the best of all the people in the house. However, I’m almost willing to guarantee, from the same boards, that we’re the only folks who like Ariel, the spaced-out vegan who believes cows might be aliens. Heck, I think she and Mose might work out as a couple. Too bad they’d probably have to live around cows. :) ...
Possibly as an antidote to the mind-altering tedium that is the working world, Lorrie and I decided to watch three documentaries on DVD over the weekend: The Kid Stays in the Picture Very good. Based on the book by the same name, the documentary tells the rise, fall, and rise again — sort of — of Robert Evans, possibly the movie industry’s most influential producer during the Seventies ( The Godfather, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby, etc., etc., etc.). Since the movie is narrated by him, and the story is told completely from his perspective, part of the fascination is how much could possibly be real. However, no matter what, it’s a great Hollywood story. ...
Went to the Sarah McLachlan concert in Raleigh Friday evening. While we’re both fans, neither of us had seen her in person before now, and I was a little worried about how the whole singer/songwriter thing would come off in an arena (the RBC Center…or Centre, since RBC stands for Royal Bank of Canada). Of course, I had forgotten that Sarah is Big in Canada™, and that usually means Good Live, no matter where you see the act. (Think Rush.) The RBC Center is a good venue for that sort of concert — it was built recently to house hockey and basketball, meaning the seats would need to be fairly close to the court area. She hit the usual hits, as well as a fair amount of material from the latest album, much as one would expect, and the crowd was really into it. We got two encores, one that was probably planned and one that perhaps was not. (Oddly enough, someone threw a broken lighter up onstage during the concert. I’m not sure what that was about. Those floor tickets were too expensive to buy just to show up and throw hard objects.) ...
One of the nice things about working where I do is that we occasionally have little sales during the day, primarily for charitable purposes. In this case the sale was of used books, and the charity was the Food Bank of North Carolina. Now, anyone who has seen our house knows we do not need more books, but I ended up with 11 of them anyway. Must keep the books circulating. The weird thing is, I almost never buy biographies new, but I’m compelled to when I see them used. Something about thumbing through a musty biography just seems right. Good haul in this set: ...
One brief moment of paralysis, right after you open a blog, seems to be “What’s important enough to be the first post? What momentous thing is going on in the world?” Well, there are a lot of momentous things happening, but I have to say the one article I’ve read lately that absolutely fascinated me is this one, about Josef Stalin’s movie habits. Any article that mentions Stalin, Scorsese, and Eszterhas in the same sentence has to be worth reading. That, and Khrushchev talking to John Wayne about an assassination attempt. ...