Would you say that a listening session during which I go from Duran Duran to Daft Punk to NIN to Peter Gabriel to Limp Bizkit to Spiritfall to Yuki Kajiura back to Duran Duran on the way to Jethro Tull and then Garbage and Rammstein and The Space Brothers and finally landing at a track from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack counts as moderately eclectic?
No? Damn. I’ll have to try harder next time.
Memo To The Universe At Large:
Twice more since Sunday have I dealt with crazy people at bus stops. This is not a trend I’m happy about in the least, especially now that my wonderful Neuros seems to be giving up the ghost. If I don’t have music, the appropriate replacement is peace and quiet, not insane ramblings from complete strangers.
Sure, they’ve been harmless in general, but they’re annoying. I don’t want a dissertation on how different Tri-Met lines have different standards for how long a driver gets a particular route. I don’t want to hear about some creepy old guy’s medicinal needs, or his escapades at the strip club. And I don’t want to converse with people who think ducks aren’t birds.
That will be all. Thank you for listening.
The scene: Bus stop near Union Station. I’ve just seen Kyla homeward and I’m waiting for the #9 that’ll take me home. It’s at least fifteen minutes away, being a Sunday and all. There’s an older woman with a variety of small traveling bags already at the stop, which is unusual as I’ve never had company for my bus wait there before. (Suffice to say I’ve done this a few times.)
After a few conversational forays I discover that the older woman is, indeed, not the sharpest marble in the bag. I settle in for a few rounds of Solitaire on my phone as a way to pass the time.
“Oooh, look at all those birds.”
I turn around and see a vaguely W-shaped formation of about thirty waterfowl flying south. “Yep,” I reply in as uninterested a tone as I can manage without being rude.
“Geese, you think?”
I look again. The flyers aren’t big enough or quite the right shape for geese, at least not the Canadian variety we get so many of around here. “Actually, I’m pretty sure those are ducks.”
“Oh, so not birds then.”
I freeze completely still for a few moments, processing what I’d heard and deciding whether I should say anything. I decide against it.
Luckily for my fragile sanity, the bus arrives a few minutes later.
On Tuesday night the kids and I went to see the Wallace and Gromit feature, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” It was funny, and particularly punny, not to mention incredibly well made as a piece of top-notch stop-motion animation. Nick Park and his crew clearly went all-out, even to the point of doing a fine job on the fur effects.
This afternoon Kyla and I saw “Serenity.” (Not being die-hard Firefly fans, neither of us had a burning need to do so before this point.) It was about what I expected, and even a bit better than, truth be told. I wouldn’t say it was a great movie through-and-through, but it was wholly serviceable and generally transcended the genre trappings through a mixture of snappy dialogue and clever visuals.
I wholeheartedly recommend catching either or both of these movies while they’re still in theaters. ‘Nuff said.
I cleaned, today. Laundry, vacuuming, garbage, tidying. That’s why I didn’t get any work done on the anime site.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Rumors that computer gaming and anime viewing had anything to do with my lack of website work are wholly unsubstantiated, I assure you.
Ahem.
We’re gathering at Backspace, downtown, this Friday evening. Right? Right.
C’mon, you know you wanna. How can you pass up cool company like the PortlandBloggers gang?
