Among yesterday's purchases was a nice stand for burning incense. No longer shall I burn the carpet by wedging sticks into places where they fall as they rebalance. I will also, hopefully, be able to remove said parts of burned carpet without things being noticably different.
On Friday, N and I saw the film Hero. It was quite good -- right from the start, the visuals were fantastic, and kept me interested until the character development and story (well, stories) really grabbed me. I admire the way the film explored a nonlinear plot in several interesting ways. The music was fantastic as well, and the message of the film, and the depth of understanding that the 'Hero' underwent near the end, and the decision he made, is a lesson that too few people could do. I still don't understand the very last decision point of the film -- its message is lost on me. Rule of law, perhaps? It was nontheless a beautiful film, a masterpiece. I just hope I haven't provided enough info to spoil those of you who have not yet seen it. After the film, an interesting conversation about culture and awakenings that became incredibly deep occured, which I wrote about already.
We just saw "The Hunting of the President", which was pretty good, roughly on par with S911, and thus not as good as The Corporation. It didn't try to be as funny as either, pretty much a straight political documentary on a scheme to destroy Clinton. One of the problems that I have in believing it is that I don't see why it couldn't be just as falsified as the reports it points out were used to destroy Clinton -- my skeptical mind makes me wonder if it's just the mirror image of what it reveals. I believe it to be largely true in rough detail -- I've retrieved from other sources some of the facts it uses to build its argument. It's hard to know much to trust such political films. As N noted, schmucks like Bill O'Reilly draw on largely true things to be unhappy about to stir the emotions of the masses, and once they've become upset (perhaps justifiably), delivering the payload of conservative drivel is easy. Ahh, what a thing to realize.
Oh, yes, for Europe, we also got snowboarding stuff at a big annual sale today. I now have a board, boots, and a good pair of snowpants. I have not yet snowboarded, but I believe I will like it. This board will accompany me on the trip to Europe. I do need to work on seriously saving money now though, for the New York trip is in less than a month, and then there's the likely fairly expensive 3-week trip to Europe.
Right now, I feel loved, and I'm sitting at the Coffee Tree, listening to some Ani DiFranco music (as part of a random rotation through my large amount of new music that I need to classify/decide what to do with). Random people just walked by talking about politics, which makes me happy. I live in a nice area, in that people are interested and understand international issues. I am drinking tea, and have some caramel-chocolate cake waiting for me to get hungry enough to eat it (it and I have been here for about an hour). I have a book from the 1920s, holding Gulliver's Travels and Baron Munchausen, sitting on the table should my interest go that way. The day is young, and noone, friend or foe, has yet demanded any of my attention.
My work on the new BLOG software is going nicely. The software can now, barely, display wiki entries that are already in the database, always serving up the current version of the page (with some subroutines ready to display older versions on request). Markup is kind of working on one side, but needs to have CSS written to make things right (I plan to use CSS for absolutely everything, ideally using very little different than DIV, IMG, A HREF, and possibly FONT tags, using CSS attributes to handle everything else. I hope I can stick to this ideal.
Ahh, after hearing a bit more, I find that the band "No Doubt" is very much to my liking. One of the nice things about weekend holidays.. they make both the previous week nicer (something to look forward to) and the later week nicer (shorter). I like work too, so it's not that big an effect for me.