Aha! When this blog was young and innocent, I asked how the heck Madison came to be a favorite name for girls.

Rick Heller cites a NYT article with the answer: a movie that I never saw.

Angie Schultz calls my attention to James Lileks on Star Trek. I have to disagree with him on this point:

[The Borg] were joyless cyborgs intent on crushing all cultural differences. They were the Republicans!

The Borg are utterly egalitarian, and utterly conformist in the name of diversity (“We will add your uniqueness to our own”); seems to me there’s another gang of thieves who fit the metaphor slightly better.

I watched the above-entitled movie last night, and am scratching my head as to what other film had contaminated my memory of it. The wacky rich family in the other film had a bookish son with a morbid imagination, and mama’s pet ‘artist’ resembled Cesar Romero.

Too darn warm today. So what else is new?

Very interesting thoughts on the Matrix series: Steven Chapman

2004 Oct 25: Strange: that item is dated 6/28/2003, but the same blog’s current page is dated April 30, 2002. Blogspot acting up again?

At dinner last night, whom should I espy but loyal reader Mysterious Mike Linksvayer. (After that, it is fitting that Mike’s page leads me to a guide to spices.)

Afterward my party went to a cinema for Lawrence of Arabia, which none of us had seen before. Unfortunately the sound was muddy enough to obscure some of the dialogue. We left at intermission (how many movies have an intermission?); it was already ten p.m.

In one scene where Lawrence sits meditating on a dune, my eye was caught by aeolian (wind-made) ripples in the sand, with a period of about half a foot; I’ve seen orbital pictures of dunes that looked just like those ripples. Can’t recall whether they were on Earth or on Mars. If on Earth, then: hey, fractal self-similarity! If not, perhaps the sizes of the grains or the differences in gravity and atmosphere make the difference in scale.

One of the Bedouins says of a particularly nasty patch of land, “This is the Sun’s Anvil.” I wonder: would nomads know about anvils? Where did their knives come from?

I once heard someone on television refer to Lawrence‘s director David Lean as “David Lynch” – director of another film that had something to do with sand.

Has it occurred to Christine Kochanski that she is Dave Lister’s mother?

In the Spiderman movie that appeared a year ago, one striking departure from canon was to have a bio-engineered spider, rather than a radioactive one, bite Peter Parker. (Makes more sense anyway.) I wondered at the time, would Daredevil make a similar change?

Well, I never saw Daredevil. Did you?