Weekend.

Visited by daerr and kyroraz to see the newly restored Japanese print of Godzilla at the Brattle. I actually do recommend this film to all locals who haven't caught it yet; it's there through Thursday, I believe.

I found the film fascinating. While I had read that the original version of the movie had a stronger message than the chopped-up, Raymond Burr-ized American release, I didn't expect the monster to be an utterly transparent metaphor for nuclear weapons. The long and genre-establishing scene of his tearing through Tokyo was matched in length by scenes of its aftermath, with slow pans of flattened, smoldering urban ruins, and interior shots of an emergency shelter filled with grieving mothers, and doctors applying geiger counters to weeping children. The last line of of the film is the maudlin scientist saying that if nuclear weapons tests continue, then another "Godzilla" will appear, somewhere in the world. Wow.

(Nukes are also invoked by name, though obliquely. One character says the Japanese are "haunted by the H-bomb", and another offhandedly mentions that she survived Nagasaki. And these are young people -- those terrible bombs had been dropped only a decade ago, for them!)

After tooling around Harvard Square for a while, we witnessed a spectacular car accident. It really was right out of "Vice City", including the meta-principle of all this destruction happening with nobody actually getting hurt, least of all the dude who crawled out from under the flipped car and bolted into the park. (The car didn't explode seconds later, however.) Anyway, the experience of it was all quite interesting... feeling the Brinnian primate-reaction, along with my guests and a small crowd of random locals, to move in towards the sound of horrible crash and crumble. Other people were on cell phones before I even had a chance to soak in whole situation, so we remained mere spectators, and wandered off once the more active members of the crowd determined that everyone was OK (except for the unknown status of Mr. Jackrabbit) and the police started to arrive.

I also note that, just as the pop-pop sound of actual gunfire often sounds fake to anyone who has ever watched TV, car collisions also sound pretty phony in real life. Even super-violent ones sound more like someone stomping on soda cans than the resonant crashes that Foley artists give us.

---

Kerry-oke fundraiser with the Freaks Sunday night. Ho ho, adult contemporary fun for all. But I knew it would be non-lame given the company, and the money raised easily broke four digits. Also, free beer. (And "Freebird", though I don't think more than once. No performances of "Stairway to Freebird" though.) I let other people choose songs for me, and this is why I did "Whip It" and "Rock Lobster". (During the former, someone produced a Cat-5-o-9-tails, which apparently actually works as a patch cable as well as a flogging device, and I thought this was excellent.) (And jhango did the girly backup "oo-wah" parts on the latter song.)

rikchik has said that my singing voice sounds like Weird Al, and I don't know if this is good or not. After Sunday, temvald said that I actually sound like Zappa, and ibid. I think of my own singing style as attack kazoo.

Theo-like typing detected

My brain has been turned to yogurt. Someone dropped some yogurt into my head at 9:27 last night (according to iChat) and now it's yogurt through and through.

The guilty know who they are.

What sort of fruit lay at the bottom? This remains to be seen.