And the sign said "Blindfolded Spinny People Need Not Apply"

It's raining in the Evil Empire today. This is a good thing, we never get enough of it around here. I think California must hijack our clouds or something. Let's drop a bomb on them ...as soon as my sister moves out of the San Fran area, that is.

My parents went to visit my brothers over the weekend, something I always enjoy. It's nice having the house to myself, the quiet and the absence of psychic pressure is a very good thing. On the other hand, renting the third Matrix movie and watching it at midnight was not such a brilliant idea. Even after watching another movie and reading for a while, I still had nightmares. When will I learn? Ever since the first Matrix flick came out, I've heard endless blahblahs about how wonderful and meaningful that series is. Now that I've seen all three, I can say with perfect honesty: bullhonkey. The effects are good, but that's pretty much it. The plot has holes big enough to fly a hovership through, most of the characters are either blatant movietypes (the Hapless Rookie, the Grizzled Sergeant, the Cute Little Girl, etc) or just plain balsawood, and there really is a deep philosophical message in all this, I just don't see it. The big bad battle scenes where the underground colony of free humans does its best to hold off an army of flying squid drones just made me shake my head. It should have been over in ten seconds, with the humans losing. Think about it, right now we have the technology to build an automated sentry gun (I forget what they're called, but the Navy has had them for a couple years at least) that can not only pick off a target drone but shoot off the links of the towchain from the drone to the plane towing it one by one. Given that we can do that now, why on earth wouldn't these sentient machines be able to do that much or better centuries in the future? Yeah, I know, it's a sci fi movie and not reality, but still, a little explanation why the human army with their machine-gun servo frames (that didn't even provide any cover, no less) weren't dying at first sight would have been nice. For that matter, why didn't these attack drones have projectile weapons of their own? The machines must be running on Windows, I swear... Anyhoo!

Back to something remote interesting. Many thanks to my brothers, who sent birthday presents back with my parents. If you gotta take your parents back, it's always nice to be bribed to do it. Dan sent me a little hand-painted sign that says "Time, tide, and the last chocolate chip cookie wait for no man!", methinks that one is going with me to the market next week. From Thom I got "The Essential Andreas Vollenweider", which came complete with a music video for one of the songs. It's good music, but I think Andreas's idea of which of his songs are essential and my idea of such are a bit different. I like Andreas Vollenweider for the 'soundtrackness' of his albums, I can pop one in while I'm baking or doing something else and enjoy the musical flow of things. A 'best of' album doesn't have the same flow, but I don't think it's hurt my enjoyment too much. Thanks, broski!

The thing that really makes me chuckle, though, is the music video for "Pearls and Tears". Music videos are kinda pointless organisms to begin with, but cross that with the overall "images rather than words" concept of new age music and you have the Seinfeld of video. For this song, you start out with this pretty shot of panning over some desert dunes while the 'ooohweeoooh people' do their thing. Then you focus in on one spot where these people dressed up like nomads climb up out of the sand and start drawing in it. Then they hide back under the sand again as these blind-folded people do this spinning dance all over the nice pictures the nomads just drew, wiping them out. when they go, the nomads come back out and start drawing again, and again they don't get very far before the spinny people come back... I'm not entirely sure who wins in the end, or if anyone was supposed to, but can you imagine what the people who do these videos tell their friend? "So, you do anything cool today?" "Not really, I just strapped on a blindfold and danced barefoot all over Ralph's sand paintings. At least it pays well..." Guess I must not be an artsy person, cause I just don't get the deep significance behind these kinds of things. ::shrug::

On the other hand, there's just something highly entertaining about this site. I have this strong urge to start a rock band and name it "Lost in Tram Station"...