(no subject)

Today (yeseterday, now) I had business at the State House. Upon my emergence I came across a small parade of mostly early-teenage girls wearing white robes with purple sashes, singing "Happy Birthday To You" to some entity which was 2,757 years old. (I knew this because they severally answered their own question of how old it was now.) I didn't catch the entity's name; it was something that sounded like "Roe", and at first I thought maybe they were celebrating Roe v. Wade until they chanted its age. I wanted to think it was some strange religion I couldn't place, except that the kids frankly looked too multicultural to be monocultish, and anyway seemed to be having too much fun to be fanatical.

But then I happened across this LJ post which explained the signifance of the number. I read the first sentence and started to write this post. Only when I went back to fetch its URL did I notice that it went on to talk about the very event I witnessed! Funny stuff.

What happens if it actually works?

I saw the Charlie Chaplain classic Modern Times last night. It's great, though perhaps better with the right crowd (which I had). As happens sometimes with very old movies, surprise at some of the content that doesn't mesh with today's uninformed notions of what 1930s cinema might have been like. A bizarre scene where Chaplain gets coked up (actually), dodges bullets Matrix-style and then beats up some guys. Nipple jokes in the opening scenes, and later on entirely self-contained scene of fart jokes. (Actually internal-gut-noise jokes, which made it even stranger.)

A subtler thing: the female lead seemed surprisingly attractive by modern standards of objective (Hollywood) beauty, which I know were different back then. I wonder why this was... she was supposed to be a wily wharf-rat girl, and perhaps they cast someone leaner-looking than the norm? Then again, she was also made up to look scruffy and disheveled for most of the picture, and I no doubt found her cuter for it.

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Also got my Primer DVD today. daerr has already spoiled it for me by relating a review he heard about the commentary track utterly failing to unwind the plot. Dammit!