February 27, 2002
Dear Everyone:
The Saga of the Garbage Can continues. The garbage company has cheerfully refused to take the “risk” of emptying my can if it has a long chain attached to it. So I’m going to have to leave it out, unprotected, on Monday mornings and hope that the Person With the Very Strange Fetish for Garbage Cans chooses to pick on someone else for a while.
Keep a good thought.
In the meantime, I will be so glad when the election is over next week. Not only are all those politicians stuffing our mailboxes with junk, but now they’re invading our homes with recorded messages for the phone machines. My general rule of thumb: If it’s on the phone machine, vote against it. Not particularly scientific, but it works as well as “Yes” on Odd and “No” on Even.
In the last election, I was going to be out of town for one of those frequent business trips, so I applied for an absentee ballot. That worked so well, I have determined that voting by mail is the only way to go. Which, by the way, makes those last-minute messages on the phone machine so out-of-luck. Even if I could remember who I voted for, I couldn’t change it on Election Day no matter how “convincing” the message was.
Things are progressing at work, some progressing quickly, some progressing at a standstill. I now have three regular teleconferences to dial into on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
The Tuesday one is the most hectic since it starts at 8:00 in the morning. I have to be logged onto the computer, with an application up and running and something called “NetMeeting” also up and ready, just in case anyone else in the meeting wants to see how the application does anything. I generally get to work at 7:30, which means I’m probably pulling into the parking lot at around 7:37. This does not leave a lot of time to get ready.
The Thursday meeting starts at the more civilized hour of 9:00. However, that means that for the attendees in the Central Time Zone, it’s 11:00 and, if the meeting goes past half an hour, it cuts into their lunch time. On the other hand, the Wednesday meeting starts at 11:00 our time, so it all comes out in the wash.
Enough about all that. “Jeannie” was so frustrated with her own office last Saturday that she decided we should blow off the afternoon with a movie (instead of working on whatever she should have been working on). We saw Gosford Park.
This is one of those delightful “weekend in the country” escapades. It’s kind of like Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, which we saw in Ashland in 1984. And it’s kind of like the country weekend part of A Little Night Music.
In Gosford Park, director Robert Altman has assembled a fruit bowl brimming over with stereotypes attending a “hunting weekend”. In addition to the usual suspects, he adds an American movie producer who perplexes both the “upstairs” and “downstairs” folk, not because he makes movies (he did, after all, bring a matinee idol with him) but because he’s a vegetarian. Traditionally, on a hunting weekend, dinner consists of the game that was killed that day. They decide to feed him Welsh Rabbit in place of the main course.
There are so many great British actors simmering around in this stew that you may have trouble placing all of them. Maggie Smith shines as the poor relation, snobbish while impoverished. Eventually, someone is murdered. But this is not so much a whodunit as a “who-cares-who-done-it?” The fun is in watching the characters bounce off the walls, and each other.
It’s an “art” film, so it may not be showing in your area. If it is, grab it while you can. If not, be sure to rent it when it comes out on video. In fact, on video may be the best way to watch it. That way, when you don’t quite catch what people are saying (British accents, you know), you can run it back and try again.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |