30 June 1999: Swelter

Wednesday, 30 June 1999:

Swelter

The heat has continued these last few days. It's not quite as brutal as it was on Sunday - I think it was slightly more humid then - but still quite hot. I was rather worried about my cats weathering it, though Mom said that as long as they have water, they'll probably be okay. And I think there are plenty of slightly-cooler places in my apartment where they can sack out during the day.

Even Monday night it was on the warm side - I slept on top of my covers the whole night, with the fan on me. But, I woke up around 4 am and saw the cats on their blanket at the end of the bed: Newton was curled up against Jefferson's tummy. So I guess the temperature was fine for them after all.

I gave them some good brushing yesterday, anyway, figuring they were overdue, and they might feel a little better. Plus, Newton loves being brushed!

The newspaper says relief is due by Friday or Saturday, in the form of highs around 80. We'll see how right they are.

I'm sort of looking forward to the Wild, Wild West film, having enjoyed watching the TV show as a kid and teenager - although I was never a nut about it like I was about the SF shows. I enjoy Will Smith, and I like Kevin Kline sometimes (loved him in Silverado, but detested him in A Fish Called Wanda, which I think is a hugely overrated film). But I've been a little annoyed with the commercials with Smith's rap song as the soundtrack - the TV show had such a wonderful theme song! I hope the TV music dominates in the movie itself.

(The movies already getting pretty bad reviews, by the way.)

So, we're getting all these movie remakes of TV series from the 60s and early 70s: The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, The Avengers, Wild, Wild West, and the rumored Gilligan's Island. A few more years from now and we'll be getting remakes of late 70s and early 80s shows: The Six Million Dollar Man? Battlestar: Galactica? Mork and Mindy? (Gah!) How about Happy Days or even M*A*S*H? That last one would be ironic, since the thing was a movie before it was a TV show (and a book before that).

How many TV shows are there that are crying out to be made as movies? Any at all?

Gaming night tonight. I brought over yet another new game: Titan: The Arena, which is basically a betting game where you put down "ducats" (i.e., quatloos)¹ on a creature in an arena and maneuver to make sure your creatures win over several rounds of combat. It's a more-complex-than-it-at-first-seems game, and people seemed to like it. (I'd never played it before, myself.) We played two games while I was there (I won the second one), and I left the game with Subrata so they could play some more.

11 people showed up to gaming (including Mr. Zink), so we had three games going simultaneously. I don't think we've had so many at once since I started going.

Oh, and incidentally, one of Ben's roommates mentioned at the party on Sunday that she might be in the market for a cheap car, and I used my usual line, "I can get you a used Honda Civic, cheap", which got the usual subdued chuckles. Well, tonight she said, "You said you have a car you might want to sell?" Hmm. Of course, I hadn't really planned on it on Sunday, but things have changed since then. I told her that it will probably need some work, and she seemed interested, but neither of us pursued it much. But, it could happen.

Mom says that buying a new car is easy, and I could just go out and do it if I wanted to. Hmm.

¹ A "quatloo" is a unit of betting from an old Star Trek episode, as I recall. Many geeks use it humorously to refer to fake money.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)