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So thanks to the little daughter, instead of the usual slightly-harried miscellany of things that I usually do in the evening, I sat around with her and the little boy for a couple of hours, watching Spirited Away.
I could rave about it for many paragraphs (the serene beauty of the train trip, the subtle hilarity of the fly and the hamster and the echos of Totoro, the ferocity of the dragon's face, the wonderful everything in general), or I could just say that it's marvelous, and you should see it at once if you're one of my three readers who didn't already see it long ago.
Since I seem to be being (is are was were being been) rather terse this week, I'll do the latter.
It's marvelous, and you should see it at once if you're one of my three readers who didn't already see it long ago.
*8)
We watched it in English. If I ever have two consecutive hours free again, maybe I'll watch it in Japanese with the English subtitles (or heck, without the English subtitles; I know what they're saying now). See if it has a different flavor that way.
Here are some other things that you can do: Buy a soldier a book, elect a better President next time, and learn all about MTU discovery and ICMP blocking ([link], [link], [link], [link]).
Just one nice story from the vacation week.
We were all sitting around, friends and family and friends of friends and family of family, telling random stories like people do, and for no reason the talk came around to sleeping habits, and then sleeping habits of sleeping partners, and one guy started to tell his story, and then stopped himself briefly and smiled and said "oh, do you all know that I'm gay?", and we all smiled or chuckled or nodded or whatever, and he went on with his story about some former boyfriend who had some noteworthy sleeping habit, and the stories continued after that.
And I thought that was the nicest possible outing (an outing only in the strictest sense that some of the people in the group didn't know his polarity beforehand and did know afterhand). Would that they were all like that.
Now of course this may say as much about my good taste (and good luck) in people to hang out with on vacation as it does about the degree of enlightenment in the world in general.
But still.
Whew, we're back!
What it was, was: we were out in California (a U.S. province on the west coast of North America (should that be "West Coast"?)), having a vacation in general and in particular being at a wedding involving (in a leading role) a cousin of M's. Due to various bits of good timing and coincidences, all sorts of cousins and things of M's who hadn't seen each other in like years or decades or whatever all came, and we all had a good time and took lots of pictures.
Also the little boy got to be Ring Bearer and wear a tux and walk down the aisle carrying the rings on (and securely tied to) a little pillow. He did an exemplary job, as did his even littler cousin who was being Flower Girl. We took lots of pictures.
We also went to Disneyland, and I was reminded how much I luuurve Disneyland. It may be entirely artificial and in deeply questionable taste, but it's such perfectly executed tasteless artifice that I can only gaze at it in wonder. I could spend weeks there.
The day after Disneyland everyone but the little daughter and I (who wanted to laze around the hotel room) went to Universal Studios Hollywood, which I gather was also fun, but not as perfect.
All sorts of reader input and stuff queued up that I probably won't get to tonight. Thanks to all who suggested (quite rightly, as it turned out) that the psychiatric terms I was looking for the other day were actually "Axis One" and "Axis Two", not "Arc One" and "Arc Two". Under those names, they're much easier to find.
(I don't actually have a good technical excuse for not having posted here for so long; the hotel as it turned out was completely fitted (can't say "wired"!) for wireless, and the laptop worked with just a few clicks. Entirely free; just had to agree to an "I won't sue you if I see some porn using your network connection" agreement, and then decide the utter lack of encryption on the wireless link didn't worry me enough to not use it. So, except for the last day or so when the hotel's DHCP server was down (if you think help desks are clueless about technical things, you should see front desks), my only excuse to the eagles is that I was like busy at Disneyland and stuff.)
A few brief pending links:
- And you thought the RIAA was bad: the MPAA wants to tie you up even tighter.
- Some philosophy games (some of them annoyingly silly and/or patronizing, but still thought provoking and stuff).
- And some very memorably paintings; in the way that certain nightmares are all too memorable.
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