I tried to watch A Scanner Darkly last week. I had trouble paying attention as I was distracted. Rewatched it (with no computer available to me!) Friday night. Wow. Strangely, even on only one beer it all made sense in a drunken sort of way. Worse -- it was funny in a drunk way. I don't really want to go into the plot, possible meaning, etc., but I have to say the visual style helped the mood. Most of the characters are high (or coming off of it) for most of the movie. Having this somewhat realistic style but with smooth edges and simplified colors seemed to me to feel how being drunk feels. Or at least my visual sense is like that (although generally much dimmer .. but that's probably just because I do most drinking at night).

Saturday night I watched The Seventh Seal after reading a blog entry that mentioned Ingmar Bergman's death. There are lots of obvious things I could say (this is after all a "classic" film for a reason), but the main thing that struck me was how everything served the main point of the movie. Even near the beginning where all of a sudden it switches to this troupe of actors / singers / whatever the reason why the simple couple were in the story made sense eventually and was critical to the point of the film. Or at least it wouldn't have as much impact without that bit of story. The movie was stark outside anything that didn't have to do with the "point" or maybe it is better to say that nearly every detail seemed to relate to the idea of the film. This is in contrast to many recent films (and even 'artier' ones) where there seem to be all kinds of irrelevancies or accidents in the story. Sometimes this is intentional, other times it just seems like the director didn't care. Of course, Bergman may have just gotten "lucky" or I read more into things than I should, but it felt that way while watching.

Books

While on my way out to Philly, I re-read Magic Kingdom for Sale -- SOLD which I think is the only book by Terry Brooks that doesn't suck. It is actually quite good -- clever, witty, inventive, but still uses all the cliches of the fantasy genre. It's like it and The Sword of Shannara aren't even written by the same author.

Most recently I finished Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, which is the second book in the "Watches" series. These novels seem to be arranged in interrelated novella or short story length pieces. The style and structure is very different (even in translation) to "standard", English-language genre urban fantasy. (I should know as I currently am up on all the major good-selling urban fantasy series. Of course, saying that means someone is going to challenge me and I will be embarrassed. So let's just say I have bought way too many paperback fantasy novels in the last couple years and ignore the question of whether they are representative.) Day Watch was quite good -- quite light reading with a little bit of exposition of good vs. evil. For those unaware of the general world, the stories (mostly) take place in modern day Moscow with characters taken from the "Night Watch" and the "Day Watch" which are respectively the magical bodies responsible for maintaining the Treaty between Good and Evil (members of the former are aligned with the Light, latter with the Dark). Despite this seemingly straight-forward Good vs. Evil distinction, in reality members of both "sides" do good and bad things (although some characters I still think are pretty much just Evil).

I'm also in process of reading Are We Rome? which I basically picked up because I couldn't find much else that looked interesting in the crappy Chicago O'Hare airport bookstores. I'm not very far in, so if anyone wants to warn me off to tell me it's dreck, I'll sell my copy and inflict it one someone else. :) Salon reviewed it favorably, but who knows ...

Cleaning

So, given the recent and upcoming changes in my life, I'm doing a bit more cleaning than usual. Part of the marriage was that the stay-at-home person did a greater share of housework (this did not always work out). One thing I hadn't done at the new house was clean the wood floors. In fact, I've never cleaned wood floors before. Basically, I sponge-mopped it with warm-ish water with mild soap, then went over it with a clean mop to pull up the soap, then I got on hands and knees and used towels to get all the water up. (Water damage on the wood floor in the rented apartment frightens me.)

See poll on wood floor cleaning.

Biking

I'm still biking to and from work every day (minimum sixteen miles total, but it's flat). I bought some "safety" items -- bright yellow vest, some reflective sticker things, some reflective ankle / pant bands. I keep forgetting to call the bike shop to ask about my Shimano Nexus 8-speed Hub coming in (there are supply issues), but I'll remember sometime. That or I'll just buy another bike for weekend and long distance recreational purposes. :)

I've got the routine for getting places down pretty well. I go everywhere now using the bike (well except lunch with co-workers, but asking everyone to bring their bikes so I can bike there seems a little weird. ;) I've got grocery shopping down pretty good ... although I really only buy a few days worth of food, plus maybe some staple items. But it works.