Morning Musings...
Things on my mind this morning:
1. Certain sign of summer is that the streets of this town are ripped open for some so-called construction work. This year they seem to have some particular vendetta against bike paths --my route to work has been turned into an obstacle course, where I have to make my way through a jungle of orange cones and cement trucks and rope fences, while trying not to get killed by cars whose drivers seem to be at least as confused as I am. Bonus points for not hitting any pedestrian. Super-duper-extra-points for not giving the finger for the said pedestrians when they yell at me for driving at the sidewalk for like 100m.
2. All in all I like the fact that most people in this country have at least about 5 weeks of paid vacation per annum (It gives hope that one day I'll have it too) and I understand that most people want to have the majority of their holidays during July or August, when there's at least a possibility of warm weather. But that makes not having a long holiday all the more annoying. All projects that need other people are pretty much on hold. I haven't done practically anything useful in a month and a half. Thank God, I'm very accomplished in wasting time.
3. In effort to support a friend we watched double bill of crap, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996 version) and Battlefield Earth. The Island... was just bad in a quite dull way, highlights being the incredible Brando and his Mini-Me, and trying to guess what kind of drugs was Val Kilmer on during the shoot, but the Battlefield Earth...wow! I went to see it when it first came out and I remembered it was hilariously bad, but I really thought time had golden the memories but no, it was still insane. And the insanity was constant, there wasn't a scene that had it's sanity intact starting from the camera that was constantly tilted and ending to... I don't even know what. The apparel of Travolta? His acting? The huge canyons of plot holes? The use of word "leverage"? Only L. Ron Hubbard knows...
4. Cat Stevens' song Wild World. It's been in my head since tuesday week ago, when I heard it in the 1. series finale of Skins (I'm liking this show more and more). The next evening I bought the Stevens version from iTunes. Big mistake, obviously. It just won't go away, and I find myself humming and quietly singing it all the time, which makes me look like a crazy person. It was actually weird, when I heard the Skins version I thought the song was sad and quite nice, but in the Stevens version, there's something really unpleasant about it. It's bitter and so condescending. I had to watch the Skins version again from YouTube to see if I had just missed the unpleasantness when I first saw it but no, I still liked it, even if the lyrics are more condescending than I first thought (there's something quite endearing about 17-years old trying to be very mature and fatherly to another 17-year old).
5. Booking a hotel can be a bitch when there's more than 1 person and the Internet involved. When I'll get to the conference in Philadelphia in November, the chances are I'll be sleeping on the streets.