Drink from the fountain, but never think of the paths, the underground rivers, that carry the sources to you. Don't think about the millions of dollars, the labour of thousands of people, the long path through mostly clean but occasionally rusted pipes that the water takes to get to you. It is worth it, you declare, whatever it has cost us, as you sip from the fountain. We even have fountains that never stop, regardless of need...

Abtahi has a funny story on his blog. It's only funny because, like a whip desired by some kinds of people, it touches on pain without intruding too strongly..

At the dinner party, one subconversation I found interesting was about a movie I really like -- the Dinner Game. N, who is from France, made it pretty clear that I misinterpreted the meaning of the movie because of cultural differences. Basically, I thought that the film was a biting satire on French society, in that the main character, by cruelly manipulating the secondary character, who is an idiot, and in doing so managing to lose his wife and get audited, in fact was getting just desserts, and was a bit of an idiot himself in the extent he took his cruelty. It turns out that the main character isn't acting in a way outrageous at all to French society, and that, at least from what N said, it isn't at all a satire, but rather a simple exercise of a regular French enjoyment of making fun of people, the destruction of the main character merely being an aside. I'm not entirely certain I buy it, but it seems to definitely be a possibility. I'm going to try babelfishing a few French film review sites (and reading a few German ones) to see if I can get a feel for if its seen as a satire or not... In any case, it's a film worth seeing, although if I was seeing some elements in it that arn't genuinely there, maybe not as much as I thought.

Oh, one thing I noticed -- it's really fascinating how Brazilian Orkut has become. If one does a search with no location specified, chances are very good that you'll be seeing almost all brazilians.

I found a good plot summary for y'all of one of my favourite bad movies -- Puma Man. This is kind of neat -- it reminds me of Myst.

I keep going back and forth when it comes to taking notes while reading -- I know for certain that I'm not happy writing on books themselves, and so when I do take notes, I do so on other sheets of paper. My worries are that in selecting things for writing down, I will tend to have an enchanced memory of those things, and less of one for other things, I will read more slowly, and that I'll stop reading if I don't have pen and paper handy. On the upside for writing while reading, I often have a lot of ideas as I digest a text, and I hate losing them... For example, I'm sketching out Trotsky's understanding of a more final form of communist society as I continue to read his book, and also noting things that I see as challenges for the philosophy, both in terms of how things have changed since Marx and Trotsky were around, and in terms of ways where Capitalism intuitively seems to work better. I think it's fair to say at this point that I'm giving Communism a good, honest evaluation for the first time in my life. I don't yet know how it's going to turn out, and that's a good thing -- while I've shaken off market fundamentalism and learned to see through the knee-jerk defenses of the current system people use, I honestly don't know if Marx's ideas, taken as a whole, are a better, or even workable, system. What I'm doing now is, I think, the best way to find out.