Blink and you Miss It

Debbi and I had a terrific weekend - "One of the best in recent memory", I said to her, then quickly pointing out that this was a good reflection on this weekend, not a belittling of any of our other weekends together!

Friday night we caught up on some taped TV (we're almost to the end of November!), then Saturday we ran some errands (I'm finally getting some pictures framed, ones that have been sitting around my place for some time) and went to see The Two Towers, which Debbi hadn't yet seen. She agrees with me that the first one was better, and my conviction in that way deepened. The film just has too many little implausibilities which weaken its impact: Aragorn's miraculous survivals, the inability of the Orcs to shoot arrows with any accuracy... annoying things that could have been shored up. There's still a lot to like, but it's a film that's got some problems.

Sunday we loaded our bikes onto my car and drove to Campbell to ride the Los Gatos Creek Trail. This is one of the few things I miss about living in Campbell. I like the Stevens Creek Trail well enough, but the Los Gatos trail is prettier and longer, and the creek runs for more of the year. It's also better-populated, which is nice sometimes. We biked for nearly two hours, almost all the way to downtown Los Gatos and back again. (Vasona reservoir is very low, by the way. I wonder what's up with that?) Debbi's getting into our weekend bike rides, so I see a bunch of them in our future.

Then we came home to hang out, and I made ice cream and an Indian dish for dinner. Mmmm.

The weekend just flew by.

I also never did mention that last week I watched my taped copy of the film Bullitt (1968). Steve McQueen plays Frank Bullitt, San Francisco police detective, assigned to protect a witness against the mob. When the witness is killed, Frank pursues every clue to find out who did it, despite interference from politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn). Jacqueline Bissett and Robert Duvall also appear.

My reaction to the film was basically, "Wow, this must have been really cool in 1968!" It features a high-speed chase through the streets of San Francisco, and a manhunt at the San Francisco airport (which looked very different back then!). It also makes extensive use of a lack of incidental music, which lends the film a sparse, lonely feel.

But it doesn't hold up well at all. The plot is simplistic, and Bullitt's character is very aloof and unengaging. This is, to some degree, intentional, but he's so unmoved by what he experiences one wonders why a more complex character wasn't developed. One might glean a few character points from him obliquely, but it's not very satisfying.

More thoughts on the Space Shuttle Columbia:

CJ's comments about the risks of space travel I think are very well made. I think one thing that bothers me about the Space Shuttle program is the implied hypocrisy of making space travel seem routine and safe without putting in proper resources and effort to make it actually safe. These are people heading into the second-most-hostile environment in the universe using 1970s technology!

Also, Weekend Edition Sunday had a provocative interview (RealAudio file) with a Duke University professor who thinks the Space Shuttle program is a bad idea, in that it failed in its basic purpose (to provide a cheaper method of getting people into space) and that NASA has largely done a bad job over the last 20 years of applying it funds. His comments all match my own observations and opinions about the space program, although he doesn't address my problems with the current lack of ambition in the manned space program.