What I Did With My Weekend pt 2

(the not-computer related stuff)

1) “John Tucker Must Die” Watched this last night after computer drama. I really needed a laugh and this movie delivered. Very funny with several laugh out loud moments. The title character was portrayed interestingly. He was a very effective combination of charming and ridiculous. I mean, while his treatment of the three girls was horrible, you could see exactly why they were all so taken with him. Definitely an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes. However, it was jarring to watch Jenny McCarthy play the mother of a sixteen year old.

2) Read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "WE" over the weekend. Apparently, this book was an inspiration for Orwell in writing 1984. You can see some plot similarities but the presentation of "WE" is very different. It’s written as a diary of an engineer in a communist future, which makes for disjointed, rambling and thought-provoking reading. What’s really interesting is that the author took great pains to show how this man viewed, intepreted and interacted with the world in mathematical and scientific terms. The fact that the greatest literary work of this society is a Time Chart gave me flashbacks to Harlan Ellision’s "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man". It makes for stimulating and horrifying reading. There’s one passage in particular that made me just stop for a moment:

“But in the thirty-fifth year before the founding on the One State, our modern petroleum-based food was invented. True, only 0.2 percent of the population of the earthly sphere survived. But in exchange for all that - the cleansing of thousand-year filth - how glistening the face of the earth has become!“

Yikes.

3) Ok, this is a bit old but I had to share. When I saw this in the grocery store:

My first thought was, when did Yoda start a chocolate company? (Yes, I know it’s not spelled right.)