Two days ago, I watched one of the DVD extras for A Hard Day's Night that talked about the free style in which the film was shot. A Hard Day's Night was filmed with only "an outline of a script." Director Richard Lester decided what would take place during a day's shooting after they all arrived on the location, and whatever happened in front of the camera went into the film. If someone lost a shoe jumping into a helicopter, it stayed in the film. If George bumped into an amp, it was in the film.

Tonight, I watched a few of the DVD extras for Blanc. They taked about director Krzysztof Kieslowski's legendary attention to detail - dictating the way one character walks, the way another character waves goodbye, the way a strand of hair falls across Dominique's face, and every other little element of every single scene.

Is one style of filmmaking better than the other? I don't know. I kind of don't think so.

Last Wednesday evening, I got an email from Seattle Public Library telling me that the DVDs of Trois Couleurs - Blanc and Trois Couleurs - Rouge, and well as the novel Solaris, had come in. I tried to pick them up on my way home on Thursday, but I didn't make it before closing time. (Like Phillip, I remember when libraries stayed open until ten at night. Maybe someday voters will start caring about communities again.) I got to the library in time yesterday. I am glad that I'm going to get to experience the Three Colors trilogy in order.

Someone left me a free game on the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game. I had one of my best games ever on my favorite pinball game. I scored an astounding (for me) 45,000,000 points on "Q's Challenge" and got two of the three quadrants on "Search The Galaxy." (Come to think of it... why are there only three "quadrants?") I finished the third ball with a possibly personal best score of a little over 286 million points. Lunch was good.

The Nine Billion Names Of God, by Arthur C. Clark (1967), is one of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories.

I'm enjoying Steinbeck's East of Eden a lot, and I have no idea where the story is heading. That's perfectly OK. I had exactly the same experience when I started reading Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises. With The Sun Also Rises, I was about two-thirds of the way through the book when I understood that the story wasn't heading anywhere. That's perfectly OK, too. It was a purely character driven story. Maybe that will be the case with East of Eden, but I doubt it. This book is going somewhere. I can't seem to avoid making comparisons between those two books.

I'm wondering about the best way to record that feeling that happens when I'm suddenly aware that the dream I'm having has blurred into awakeness, and the sound I'm dreaming about is now the alarm clock that has woke me up.

Competition is furious over at Blogstop. I go to check if someone has posted to my recent post, and I find a dozen posts after mine. I made my first fumble this afternoon. I blame Connie, because she's a friend and because she gave me the suggestion. My post contained one misspelling (I'm still not convinced, despite Connie's insistence, that tenastic is an actual word) and one typographical error. The bad thing, though, was that my incorrect post caused fatgiant to lose a post as well.

I'm up to 11 posts now. My favorite one, so far, was post number 9. (In a game where quantity is favored over quality, I've posted some less than inspired anagrams just to establish myself as a serious player.) Post number 9 was an anagram of exclaimed: Exciting xenophobes can lead aliens into medium enclosure detention.

I said to my manager this morning, if I were the IT guy who upgraded the firewall on the front desk computers yesterday, and the software caused the first computer to go into perpetual reboot, I would have waited to find out why before I installed the same software on the other, identical, computer.

But I'm not an IT guy, so I sat all morning, frustrated, with two dead computers, unable to schedule anything, unable to look up any appointments. Then, toward the end of the morning, the IT department loaned us two computers while they rebuilt our harddrives. The loaner computers didn't have the necessary scheduling software installed, so I spent the late morning surfing the web and greeting patients as they arrived.

It's been a heck of a day.

These are highlights from my commute this morning:

Squirrels invaded the tree outside our apartment building.

Crows invaded University Way.

I tried to think up an acronym for telecommunications, but couldn't. (When I got into work, someone had posted one.)

The song stuck in my head for unknown reasons is "The Streets of Laredo," which is a great song. (Unfortunately, I don't know all the words to the song, and being an ancient folk song, there are many, many different sets of lyrics to the songs.)

Today, Yahoo! Cool Picks taught me that communist store fronts from about 20 years ago were actually quite attactive.

This evening confirmed that we both understand sugar gliders better than we understand 12-year-old girls. We're both sure that our niece wasn't as thrilled about the luxurious soaps and bath gels as we thought a birthday girl would be. But we were not surprised to find Gladden waiting next to the food dishes as we got home fourteen minutes late for feeding time.

Where is this weekend going? I can't motivate myself to do much of anything except post to Blogstop. This morning is the first Sunday we haven't been obligated to go to church, and Phillip says he's not into being there. I realized that I'm not, either.