Thanks for the Memories — I Think.

	If only I actually had this much hair on my arms.

You never know who will track you down on Facebook. An old "girlfriend," we'll call her "Judy," just found me today. "I'm pretty sure we had an official thing going on for at least a week in junior high," she said. "Do I have the right Eric? Ah the memories of junior high!"

Lord, why did that memory have to be the one to bridge these (oh my god) 18 years? I much prefer to think about my abysmal performance as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in a production of My Fair Lady she staged with another girl in our 7th grade English class. It was a painful (but important) lesson in the need to project on stage. Sing out, Louise!

(Judy has video evidence of this staging — that none of you will ever see.)

"Official." Heh. I "broke up" with her (oh god, I actually remember this) in biology class. It was eighth grade. My friend Paul talked me into it. She and I had never once done anything boyfriendy or girlfriendy, and it was kind of a joke for anyone to consider us to be "going out." So I walked up to her during a break in class and told her "I don't think either of us is taking this very seriously. So, why don't we just stop it?"

She agreed, somewhat puzzled, "Um, OK," and I spun on my heels and bee-lined back to my lab table.

It's embarrassing to think of what passed for relationships in the eighth grade. At that age, I had a few very short-term girlfriends. My parents never knew, because they never lasted long enough to result in a chaperoned movie date or an invitation to a dance. I always went to dances with just friends. No need to kiss anyone or make out in the car afterward. Safe!

My record for shortest coupling is one day. It wasn't even one day. It was barely overnight. I got a call one night from a group of friends (all girls). These things are always done in teams, aren't they — one hand cupped over the receiver while nearly audible whispers are shared on the other end of the line. They told me roughly this: "So-and-so likes you. Do you want to go out with her?"

I stammered for a bit, and my back began to sweat. At first I didn't believe them. This was a joke, I thought. But they assured me it was very real.

I had never considered going out with the girl. (We'll call her "Sara.") But there was nothing technically wrong with her. She was sort of unusual. She had unstylish, sort of frizzy hair. She made her own clothes (which I secretly and fiercely admired). But she was smart, and she was popular in my circle of friends. And I had no problem with her. Plus, I was flattered to think that she was even interested.

Well, I thought... why not?

When these arrangements are brokered through a third party, it's always tricky to know how to behave the next day. A kiss? No, that would be absurd. Holding hands? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. So I played it cool, shyly saying hi to the girl I was supposedly "going out" with and hurriedly passing by.

Sara approached me a little later that morning in orchestra class, a little bravely, I thought. She set her violin down. I looked around me, not knowing what to expect, what do to. "Um, I'm not exactly sure what so-and-so said to you last night, but, just for the record, I didn't ask them to ask you out for me."

"Oh," I said. "So..."

"So, we're not really going out then."

"Oh, yeah. Sure," I said.

"So, uh. No hard feelings, right? I hope you're not embarrassed."

It was sweet of her to say, because I could tell that she was embarrassed — not about turning me down but rather, it seemed, about having to say anything in the first place. The whole episode must have seemed absurd to her, and I was mortified for having made myself a part of it.

"That's OK," I said. "I, er... I guess I didn't want to either."

And the truth is I didn't. But I felt like I was supposed to. And now I wasn't sure if I was being rejected, or it hadn't ever really gotten far enough for anything to be rejected. We hadn't signed anything. She wasn't exactly reneging. And yet, something was over.

My feelings weren't hurt. In fact, I kind of felt as if I'd just made a narrow escape. A free man, I found myself back on the 8th-grade market, and I ventured meekly back into the fray. (Which is to say, as a teenage boy, I did nothing.)

When Judy Facebooked me today, she said she wasn't sure if I'd remember her. The truth is, I do remember a great deal of people. Clearly. Her included. Mostly because I spent so much of middle school observing and not participating. I never carried much teen angst with me. But I do think I channeled what might have been outrage and arrogance and stubbornness into an even stronger sense of fear. Fear of embarrassment, mainly. Fear of failure. Mustn't draw attention to myself. I felt so invisible in school that I was shocked when I won two of the mock elections in my high school senior year book. ("Teacher's Pet" and "Most Dependable.")

Judy and I were never close. (Despite our torrid affair, of course.) How close was I to any one of those middle school kids? How close were any of us? I kinda hated those two years. It was like a cruel social experiment. What a ridiculous proposition to take elementary school kids, shuffle them like playing cards into packs of other kids, some to one new school, some to another, and then two years later, to do it all over again for high school.

Things only got better from there. (What alternative was there?) And now life is pretty good.

Rock and Rubble in the Motor City

There is a fantastic little site that everyone with an interest in urban decay should check out. It is called The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

It is a particularly delicious oxymoron, because they are in fact fabulous — in their grandness and in their sadness, documenting the "agonizing path" of the city through the '90s.

As the site itself asks: "What went wrong?" and "Where to do we go from Here?" An entire online community has risen out of this site to debate these questions — the DetroitYES project, a discussion forum about the city's problems and its future.

I am from the suburbs, but I call Detroit my home. I am not a baseball fan, but I wear a Tigers ball cap, because it is a piece of home, and it connects me in a real way to a place I have not lived for more than 13 years.

My home town has seen some rough times. Anyone with family there has heard stories of the fabulous 50s, the riots of the 60s, white flight and the decay of the following decades. Detroit city government is a mess and has been for decades, with one bright spot: the term of my last great hope, Dennis Archer. It is rife with cronyism, loyalism and blind racism, all at the cost of the citizens, who number fewer and fewer year by year. And the latest exploits of its current mayor, effectively stopping the course of local government, are not helping matters much.

But it's a tough old town. Down, but not out, as they say. What fueled this site's inception, and the community that has grown around it, is a clear love for the city. Not just the city of Detroit, but "the city" as a concept. It is worth saving and it is worth remembering. And in looking back at the former grandeur and pride of Detroit, we can begin to draw inspiration, and we can begin to hope that a phoenix will one day rise from the rubble.

Lessons in Mortality, with Pizza

	A little airy-fairy.

This cute musical duo called MGMT has a new video for "Electric Feel," the second single off their debut album, that I am obsessed with a little bit.

I'm always a sucker for thin, cute, scruffy boys. And these guys seem to perpetually have their shirts off. They're a little airy-fairy for my taste. They're, like, all mystic pagan and stuff. Which I'm sure is, like, really cool and stuff. But I'm willing to go along with them, up to a point.

	Kittens!

They dance in the woods with their cute human and animal friends. They pull the moon down and cut it open like a boiled egg and spread moon juice on each other. Then they put the moon back in the sky. What could be more adorable — and responsible — right?

The creepiest part of the video is about a minute and a half into the clip, when we get a glimpse of something that brings me back to an uncomfortable childhood memory. We see a hillbilly bear strumming a rough-hewn banjo, a space dog on drums, a disco gorilla on keyboards, and who knows what else, acting as their band. They are the animatronic characters from Showbiz Pizza Place (called the Rock-afire Explosion, I have recently learned), and they terrified me as a little kid.

Yikes! Who can keep down their dinner with this staring out at them?

Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese's and establishments of that ilk were fun for two reasons: mass quantities of pizza, and video games.

But they'd also stage these little rock shows where the robotic house band would perform some reworked pop songs and tell jokes and banter with each other. I sort of looked forward to it, they way you look forward to the money shot in a slasher movie. But, like those movies, when the money shot came, I found I could not look any more.

Whenever a character spoke, a spotlight would shine on it, revealing an eerily glowing plastic and fur behemoth with a curve to the mouth and a roundness of the eye that was meant to suggest friendliness but always came off as much more sinister. Their eyes and mouths snapped open and shut. Their movements appeared jerky and repetitive. Stand close enough and you could hear the mechanical skeletons clicking and clacking. The mouse cheerleader was the worst! And when the whole mess of them was moving at the same time, it felt like at any moment they might leap off the stage and carry me off to their evil robot lair where they would tear me to pieces and use me for spare parts.

They're all over YouTube now in videos where they have been programmed with songs hilariously inappropriate for their pre-pubescent audience. It is brilliant, and it underscores their unavoidable creepiness.

See what I mean? "Electric Feel" by MGMT


"Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira


"London Bridge" by Fergie


Yikes.

Kids Are Dumb and Therefore Funny

Babies are dumb. Little kids aren't much better. And what are adults at the end of the day but tall kids with bumps and more hair. But as we grow and learn and try to make sense of things, we can come up with some bloody funny things.

Intelligent Design, for example.

Or The Bush Doctrine.

I was reminded of this when someone told me a story about his introduction, at the age of about 10 or 11, to a woman named Naomi.

"Hi, I'm Naomi," she said.

"Naom-you?" he responded. He thought that when she said her name to someone it was Nao-me, and when someone else said her name to her it was Naom-you.

I myself am guilty of such leaps in logic. In kindergarten, I loved to bring in record albums (those were the days) for Show-and-Tell. It made me popular for a day if I chose the right record. There was the Grease soundtrack on one hand, and a reading of "The Three Little Pigs" on the other. Guess which one won me respect and admiration among my peers. Lord knows I can't remember.

I forget which one it was — probably Grease — but a substitute teacher once forced me to hand over my record. My favorite song at the time was "Greased Lightning," which contained a sexual reference or two in its lyrics that my young ears were too green to comprehend. I imagine she was trying to save me from myself, or to have a word with my mom or some such thing.

She was on a relatively long assignment, filling in for our regular teacher. Those were the days of Miss Nelson is Missing!. We did not like teachers, but a sub was the Devil incarnate. So naturally, I thought she was using her bully powers of adulthood (Oh, I couldn't wait to grow up!) to steal it from me forever.

As I recall, I got it back by pouting at the end of class. Whether she had intended to give it back then or not I can't say. I hated her and feared her. But I had no idea what would soon happen to the poor woman.

One day she wasn't in class and we had a different sub. I asked what happened to Miss What's-her-name, and someone (a student? my memory!) told me breezily that she had been fired.

I'd never heard of such a thing, and naturally I was horrified. They burned her to death? Just for taking my Grease album? Word got around, I guess. Maybe she had been mean to other kids at other schools. I felt vaguely responsible. I didn't hate her that much. But also I felt vindicated, like a reign of terror had ended.

I Heart Ms. Pac-Man

More Treat, Less Trick

Halloween used to be fun. My mom and I would Scotch tape paper skeletons with metal rivet joints all over the house. My dad helped me carve the most elaborate jack-o'-lanterns, using the leftover pieces for ears and horns and other accessories. Then I'd take the biggest pillow case I could find and run around the neighborhood taking candy from strangers.

These days, it's all about Saw IV and pictures of pale, creepy babies with googly-eyes. What was once cute and cartoonish is now dark and serious and disturbing. The kids of the '80s have not yet grown up. They've hijacked Halloween and taken it away from the kids of today.

I was in line at Rite Aid a few days ago when I heard an electronic shriek behind me. It's not unusual to hear kids playing with the noise-making toys stationed throughout the store. This is most notable later in the fall, when the poor Rite Aid employees are assaulted for hour upon hour with a cacophonous melange of Christmas carols.

Sure enough, right next to an arts-and-crafts front-yard signpost directing passersby to Witch Way and Ghoul Gulch, a little boy was taking an appealing package's advice seriously: TRY ME! But this electronic shriek was far worse than tuneless renditions of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Silent Night" all playing over top of one another, because its source was a plastic skeleton about 9 inches tall, sitting in a miniature electric chair. At the touch of a button, a blue light flashed from behind the skeleton, and he jolted and jiggled about in his restraints, moaning and screaming. The light went out, the skeleton stopped shaking, and he said something like, "Whoa ... Let's do that again!"

This isn't even a proper toy. It's not something you can really play with. You just press a button and laugh along at the merry spectacle of a human's death by electrocution.

And the kid's mother was standing there without an expression on her face. I'd rather have the kid play with a toy gun.

Troubled Waters

	City of Lakes. I was treated to this every day for six years. [Greater Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association]

Jeff woke me up this morning by telling me that there are still cars in the Mississippi River with bodies inside. It's so, so sad, what happened yesterday.

The video I've seen on TV makes the whole scene look relatively small, I think. That bridge was just a freeway overpass across the river, but it was huge. A crack in the bridge would cause chaos, let alone the whole thing tumbling into the river.

It's cliché, but I can't help but think that I drove across that bridge almost daily for more than six years. It's freaking I-35, after all.

What I remember most, and most endearingly, was the spectacular view of the Minneapolis skyline available crossing southbound on that bridge. In all the years that I saw it, speeding across the Mississippi, I never took it for granted. The sight of it at night, as the creamsicle sun was setting and the lights were beginning to show against the shadows of the city, made me proud to live in such a beautiful place. On winter mornings, with intensely clear skies and air cold enough to suck the breath out of your lungs, clouds of steam not normally visible rose from buildings downtown, and I was happy to belong to a city, my city, that had been radiating defiance against the cold for more than 150 years.

I still don't know for sure that no one I know was hurt or killed yesterday. My fingers remain crossed. My heart and sympathies go out to the folks who will never see that skyline again — and to their families, for whom that view will surely be heavy with memories and meaning.

Desperately Seeking a Tony

A musical-loving friend of mine informed me recently that a new musical drawing from Desperately Seeking Susan, with songs written by Debbie Harry, is making its world premiere on London's West End this fall.

A musical version of Desperately Seeking Susan seemed like a terrible idea to me at first, but the more I think about it, the more it seems the ridiculous storyline — amnesia, mistaken identity, escape from suburbia, true love vs. love at first sight, magic shows, "dangerous" jewel thieves — is PERFECT for Broadway!

I have read that the show will feature classic Blondie songs, including "Heart of Glass," "Atomic," "One Way or Another, and "The Tide is High," "brilliantly" woven into the story. The show will also feature the debut of a new song by Debbie Harry, "Moment of Truth."

Too bad Madonna isn't penning the songs, I say. But Debbie Harry's catalog feels more '80s these days to me anyway. Time sort of stood still for Debbie, whereas Madonna is far away beyond the '80s.

Apart from an original score by Thomas Newman, who went on to do write such masterpieces as the theme from Six Feet Under, Desperately Seeking Susan featured one song: "Into the Groove" — which, tragically, won't be included in this production! I wonder about these musicals being written from movies that had one song. Young Frankenstein, the musical version of which is to hit Broadway in the fall, had "Puttin' on the Ritz." Is that enough to work from? Who knows... Mel Brooks' The Producers made it big. Spamalot, based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which featured "Always Look on the Bright Side," was a runaway success.

9 to 5, another one coming up, has ... well ... "9 to 5" — an absolutely brilliant Oscar-nominated song — to work from. At least Dolly Parton is writing all new material.

My friend and I agree that there have been too many musicals that aren't using new songs and music. Or even worse, musicals that shoehorn pop songs into the drama (Mamma Mia!) — or yet worse: musicals like Movin' Out that simply string songs together with Scotch tape and distraction in order to jerk the action forward and dull the audience into an undeserved standing ovation.

Desperately Seeking Susan made Madonna's career. That is the only reason I am interested. And Debbie Harry is enjoying a resurgence in caché with her recent involvement in Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Tour. Let's hope this one works out.

I am Jazz

Um... great. This is the one who gets killed in the movie.


Find out which Transformer you are at LiquidGeneration!

The Verdict

Anthony and I decided that we didn't care if the plot sucked or if the dialogue was dumb, we just wanted to see them transform. It's a good thing we set our expectations thus. The film is a series of clichés strung together by a shoddy story. Still, Transformers is like the fulfillment of a life's dream. And all it cost me was $11. Thank you, Michael Bay.

It is kind of like a long car commercial for GM, but product placement is no big deal to me (Apple, eBay, etc.). The fake computer science and government-military goings-on are getting harder to get away with as more realistic representations are shown on TV shows and cable news; Transformers is no exception. The dialogue was overwrought and sappy at times and could have been toned down a smidge, but when it's sexy Shia LaBoeuf or dreamy Josh Duhamel saying the lines, who could hold it against them? (I guess it depends on what exactly you want to hold against them.)

The filmmakers screwed with the back story and the characters a lot more than they needed to. Bumblebee is a Camaro, not a Volkswagen. Fine. (They work a Beetle into the film anyway. I am satisfied by the nod to our nostalgia.) The cop car is a Deceptacon. OK, whatever. But they invent characters (Frenzy) and completely remake others (Devestator). And of course, Megatron can't really be a gun that fits into Starscream's hand — but what is he? Some sort of flying cannon?

And what's with this All Spark contrivance? A device that has the power to create worlds — and to turn a Mountain Dew vending machine into a deadly fighting robot — is, in the end, kinda dumb. I'd have been satisfied with the original story from the cartoon: The Autobots crash land on earth, chased by the Deceptacons from their war-ravaged home planet Cybertron and wake up millions of years later. They rebuild themselves to mimic modern machinery: the Deceptacons, to ravage Earth's resources to produce Energon cubes; the Autobots, to stop them and protect all human life. Elements of this made it into the film, but the result made even less sense than the original idea.

This is not to say, however, that I have any real problems with the movie. Without the transforming robots, there would be no movie, but the actors hold their own in the non-CGI scenes. There is a fair amount of actually funny comedy and some decent character development. Never before had I been tricked into thinking an 18-wheeler could be a sentient being.

They even made some improvements, in my opinion. I like the idea that Bumblebee has armor for his head and that Optimus Prime's mouth is not a jiggling face plate but a a set of mechanical lips (though, Lord knows why) that only get covered in battle.

Incidentally, did anyone else think Starscream looked a little bit like the rancor monster from Return of the Jedi?

The reasons I went to see it were all there: The transforming effects were breathtaking. They kept the original sound effects of the transformations. They kept Optimus Prime's voice! My heart swelled when he called out, "Autobots, roll out!"

Things I realized while watching this movie:

1. Even robots blink their eyes.
   
2. There is always someone in a movie who knows how to hotwire a car.
   
3. Don't worry: You can get through to the Pentagon from the desert in Qatar on a cellphone while under heavy fire from an alien robot in less than two minutes.
   
4. You can always find "the only man in the world who can decipher this code" just up the street.
   
5. Even though there are only a handful of evil robots invading Los Angeles, it is easy to forget that one of them is never accounted for when the scrap metal is disposed of.
   

Thank heaven, they set us up so nicely for a sequel.

"Paging spring. Please report to the customer service counter."

With each drearily passing day, I grow increasingly impatient with this bleak, grey, cold April. For a couple of weeks, it was odd — even funny. But now? Now it's just irritating. Add the rain up here in the Northeast, and I can hardly bear it. I felt almost human yesterday when the sun came out for about five minutes. Then it began to rain more. We had rugby training last night outdoors in a constant light, but cold, rain. Mud can be fun — and it was — but let's be reasonable with this temperature!

Frank Deford pointed out on NPR this morning that April is never a "seasonable" month. We always complain about April. But the problem this year is, rather than an unseasonable April, we're experiencing a 61-day March.

This might help to explain:


(Where can I get me a pair of those shoes? Mr. Snowmiser does not shop at Payless, I can tell you!)

Of course, when the spring does come (and go — quickly) I'll just be complaining about the heat and humidity.

Equinox

Today was the first full day of spring. It's the vernal equinox — in the northern hemisphere, at least.

The word "equinox" reminds me of two things. The first is my birthday, because it falls around, and sometimes smack dab on, the autumnal equinox, six months opposite the vernal.

Galileo was close. [nasa.gov]

The second is Matthew Modine, because he was in a movie called Equinox in the mid-'90s, which I never saw. I had a big crush on him as a lad. Oh, how I loved to watch him jump rope in Vision Quest. As a kid I found those one-piece wrestler get-ups to be pretty ... evocative.

Technically, the equinox is one of two times during the year when day and night are the same length all over because the sun is directly above the equator. You can read more about it and find head-aching terms like "ecliptic equator" and "celestial equator." All it really means is that we now have a reason to be impatient with the weather for every day we go lower than 60° F. It's spring, dammit!

I wonder what you would see at the poles on the equinox. Twenty-four hours of sunset?

Pretty close, according to what I read on Wikipedia, which I have no reason at present to doubt. As far as I can figure, we'd see 24 hours of just-before-sunset. These astro-mathematical models work for perfect spheres with no atmosphere in cold, empty space. But real life isn't so simple. Apparently, day is always longer than night. Because the sun is a huge ball of fire in space, not a single point, when it sinks halfway down past the horizon it's still day time. Also, because the atmosphere refracts light, it will actually bend the sun's rays around the curvature of the earth, which is why you can still see for a few minutes after the sun sets.

It's a good thing the poles aren't so hospitable to humans, or we'd have a heck of a time getting to work on time.

Don't Judge Judy

	Sit down and shut up! [parks.cityoflansingmi.com]

This gem from the New York Daily News about bad bus drivers reminds me of my youth spent in school bus humiliation. It was a dog's life on those buses. If you could survive the embittered old drivers, you had to then deal with the assholes who sat in the back. Only a total suck-up would be nice to a bus driver. One dared not sit near the front of the bus for fear of association with him or her. The back was invariably reserved for the ones with the trendy haircuts and nice clothes. The ones who never seemed to carry a book or have homework. The ones who set fire to things with a lighter and an aerosol hairspray can.

Facing the crowded middle of the bus, I was many times forced to hunch down next to one of the lower-el kids, even my safely ensconced friends unable to offer me much more confort than a shrug of the shoulders and a weak grin.

I felt I understood even then why the drivers were so mean. (I came out of my retirement for this?) Every single one of them was humorless and wholely unpleasant, ready to strike unmitigated terror into us with a well-aimed glare or a brief tirade shouted down the aisle. Sometimes I felt I was truly in mortal peril for not sitting down and facing forward. They probably wouldn't threaten to ram the bus into a wall to kill everyone, but ... well, you never know.

Out of a string of drivers from age 6 through 15, I don't remember faces, just attitudes. Except for one driver. Judy.

She was a manish woman with short, tightly curled hair and large, solid features. Her brow heavy and hard, her voice sharp and piercing. She was a highly aggressive driver. She was tough as nails, that woman. And I kind of loved her.

She was the "activity bus" driver. A few hours after the school day's official end, she'd pick up me and my nerd compatriots, who stayed after school for the school newspaper and Students Against Driving Drunk and Spirit Committee and possibly the least active chapter of the National Honor Society in the history of public schools, and deliver us to within blocks of our warm, well-lit houses.

She didn't much like it, I could tell. The kids were ungrateful and often late to the bus, holding everyone up. Sometimes it was just a few of us. It hardly seemed worth her time some nights. With my nascent sense of class, I picked up on some differences between her and most of the kids she transported. I don't think she had much reason to pass down the same streets in her car that she did in a bus every day.

Being an unabashed kiss-ass, I and my friend Kiran befriended her. She didn't trust us right away, and was rather tight-lipped at first. But we'd sit in the front-most seat every time, and eventually she'd ask us what we had been up to after school. She'd tell us about her family. I couldn't imagine her having a husband. Kids. Kids much older than us. She'd tell us stories of misbehaving kids from earlier in the day. She'd openly complain about her job, which was shocking and fascinating to me at the same time, like we were being let in on a great adult secret.

There were times when she'd had a bad day, and we knew enough to stay. The hell. Away. But usually she was quite pleasant to us. I began to look forward to our brief rides. To be friendly with a bus driver seemed to cinched some sort of outsider cachet.

One year, we gave her Christmas presents. My gift was a set of kitchen hand towels my grandmother had crocheted. It seemed like we were breaking down an invisible wall. In my experience, bus drivers just did not get gifts from kids very often. She gave us a couple of those super-fat candy canes that last all winter if you wrap them every time.

When I turned 16, I started driving to school. I never saw Judy again.

Bridge to Paradoxia

Some time ago, I heard that there was a new film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia being made, but I didn't pay much attention. I remembered the book ... mostly. Jeff got me to read it once. I read so few kids' books as a kid, opting instead for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and other Douglas Adams treats and (nerd alert! nerd alert!) Choose Your Own Adventure. I think he thinks I missed out on something vital. So, as an adult, I've read several Newbery Award winners and liked it. He made me a Little House on the Prairie lover (but he won't read Harry Potter!). Ah, such is life.

I was alarmed to see Walden Media, producer of the Narnia movie(s), and Disney named in the full-page, full-color Bridge to Terabithia ad in last week's Arts & Leisure section. I thought it would be a special effects-ridden disaster — like maybe it would literalize Terabithia and trap the poor children playing the two main characters in an emotionless, Lucasian, green-screen hell. The ad featured a giant troll, insect-like soldiers, fantastical humanoids I presumed to be Terabithians, a castle on a hilltop, somone riding an ostrich, and an overgrown beaver with a colander on its head — which I was sure would talk! And the way the children were rendered, it looked like the whole thing was CGI.

But I knew Jeff and I would have to see it anyway.

I am pleased to report that there are no talking beavers. Jess and Leslie are played by real humans. Special effects, at worst mildly intrusive, were kept to a minimum, and the emotional value of the story rings true and clear. There is a central plot turn toward the end that made several people in the audience gasp audibly, but we, knowing how it ended, were getting weepy long before anything bad happened. So, I guess the film succeeds on that front.

The movie, as well as the book, is about being a free thinker, having your head in the clouds while keeping your feet planted on hard ground. It's about making your environment rather than simply reacting to it. It's about seeing the world around you in a new way, imagining something bigger and more real in many ways.

So, upon leaving the theater, I couldn't help but think: Doesn't the very act of making this movie, "revealing" a Terabithia to us that may not be anything like ours, fly in the face of the whole point of the book?

La Linea

	Metta il resto della linea qui! [TV5.org]

Who remembers this guy?

If anyone is looking for a highly effective and entertaining way to waste some time (apart from reading this), I recommend checking out a series of cartoon shorts called La Linea. I guess there were about 100 of them made by an Italian cartoonist named Osvaldo Cavandoli in the early '70s. In each episode, he draws a single white line, of which the ill-tempered main character is a part, and he presents him with various sadistic obstacles and the objects he uses to overcome them. And it's all in jibberish, so there's no need for translation.

When I was little, I'd see one of these little clips every day on an embarrassingly memorable kids' morning show called The Great Space Coaster. These things still crack me up. I could watch them all over and over. I love the très européan hand gestures and the simple expressions of emotion, especially when he turns to cuss out the cartoonist.

One can find them on the French TV5 Web site or, naturally, on YouTube, where there's even a naughty sex-themed episode available. (I didn't see this one as a kid!)

Here's a good one:

Hwy 55 Goes Digital

Waka waka waka. Someone in Minnesota has Pac Man fever.

Being from the Midwest, I've spent a lot of time on highways. Mesmerized by the dots and dashes racing toward me and passing under my car, I have often imagined what Pac-Man might feel like.

Someone with a lot of yellow paint has made this daydream into a two-dimensional reality in Minnesota. The Star Tribune reports that someone has painted a large Pac-Man on Highway 55. Ironically, this act of whimsical vandalism may actually aid the highway patrol in slowing down lead-foot Minnesota drivers — at least for that short stretch of road.

Please, God, Don't Let Me Die Before July 4, 2007

(Actually, please let me live past July 13, when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is released. But, especially don't let me miss this movie.)



Sadly, my childhood heroes look very little like they did when they came packed in styrofoam blocks slipped into cardboard boxes. "Robots in disguise," indeed. What happened to the Megatron I know and love? Where's my Starscream? Where's my Mirage? My Hound? Jazz? Prowl? Red Alert?

For God's sake, where's my Bumblebee?

OK, I know... so Bumblebee sucked.

But what have they done to Optimus Prime's paint job?

I don't need this movie to look like a survey of the futuristic prototypes at the North American International Auto Show! I just want my old boys back!

Still, I can barely wait for this movie.

(Thanks to Justin for the tip.)

God is Dead

Take thy beak from out my heart!

I have lost my faith in everything.

Life Change

Though we often feel like helpless puppets in the manipulative world around us, I think we can often take some small comfort in the ability to make changes in ourselves, however minor, just to prove that we have some control over something.

I don't remember when it was or what prompted it, but I do remember that there was a precise moment when I decided to write my nines like upside-down sixes in one counter-clockwise motion from the top down, my eights as two circles rather than starting them like an S and crossing back to the original point, and my twos as they appear in print, with a sharp point where the arc meets the baseline rather than that loop many people use.

A friend of mine in high school wrote her nines like a lowercase G. I always appreciated her attempt to restore the curve to the descending half of the numeral, but ... well, it looked like a "g." I fancied that my version represented a slight improvement.

Similarly, I didn't care for the sharp point in the northeast corner of the shorthand eight. And, when written quickly, it looked like it had a couple loose threads that could get caught on a passing descendor and unravel the whole thing. The shorthand two looked sloppy and lazy to me, too. So, I sharpened my twos and rounded my eights.

Notably, perhaps, I did not opt to draw dashes through my sevens. That would have just been European and pretentious.

I began practicing my new twos and eights and nines immediately, secretly hoping someone would notice and comment on them. I thought they looked masculine and deliberate. Solid. Strong. Not loopy and soft. I found a new zeal for balancing my checkbook. I copied page numbers during college research assignments with glee.

For a time, I tried to extend this to punctuation. I tried to make apostrophes and quotation marks like little "sixes" and "nines" — out of a sense of correctness and a temporary aversion to hash marks and ditto marks — but that didn't hold for long. Who has time to fill in the little holes?

How does this demonstrate control? I guess it's just something little, a miniature reinvention. If only I could apply the same energy to, say, how much I drink every week — or how often I go to the gym.

Nothing Like Rudolph

	A Cylon centurion, c. 1978, from the original Battlestar Galactica series

When I was a kid, I had recurring dreams that the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica were after me. We'd see them approaching down the street, and my mom would wrap me in an afghan and hide me behind the couch. She'd politely let them in when they knocked at the door (yes, they knocked), and I'd hear them clunking through the house, searching for me. I was sure they'd capture me and kill me or make me into a human slave. No matter what their plans might have been, the worst part was he thought of them taking me away from my house.

After a few minutes of coming dangerously close (but not close enough!), they'd always give up and leave, promising that they would come back again some other time. I'd pop up from behind the couch, pull the blanket off myself, breathe a heavy sigh, wipe my sweaty forehead, and give my mom a big hug.

Last night, in a bizarre throwback to my childhood, I had a dream that a reindeer was trying to get me. I was my present age. It was winter. I was at my grandma's house in suburban Detroit, where reindeer usually glow with electric persistence, are made of plastic and stand in people's front yards from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day.

Looking out the kitchen window, I saw a reindeer trudging across the lawn to the front door. I couldn't tell if he was friendly or not, but he was sort of mangey and dirty, and it looked like his antlers had been sawed off.

A far friendlier-looking reindeer than the one in my dream.

As he approached the door, I opened it to meet him. He looked menacingly at me and demanded, "Let me in."

"No," I said, startled not so much by the reindeer's ability to speak as by his foul mood. "What do you want?"

"Let me in!"

I slammed the door and snapped it locked. He scratched half-heartedly at the storm door and loped away.

It occurred to me that he might try the side door and come in through the kitchen. My heart was racing. What could he want? What would he do if he got inside? I ran to the garage and got to the door just as the reindeer was charging toward me. I locked the door and leaned against it for reinforcement. He stoped short of ramming the door and put his eye up to the window. He was clearly very angry. I wondered if he had some sort of disease. And what did he want with me anyway?

"Open the door!" he demanded. "Let me in!" His breath fogged over the glass.

"No!" I shouted and ran back into the house, hoping he'd get bored and just leave me alone.