Tuesday 26 December 2000

Pic of the day: Another day is breaking, where we can laugh or cry. (Of course, we didn't do that.)

Gladiator day

You can easily get used to days like this. No work and all play. All the food you want (and then some) plus snacks. Good friends, snow outside and a pleasantly warm big living room with lots of huge glass windows. Smart, cute girls and plenty of them. Sounds pretty close to paradise to me.

And so the sense of time sort of slips away, as is good and proper for a winter paradise. The defining events of the day, it seems, was the movie "Gladiator" and the return of my Old Friend, the fertile turtle and her hairy husband. Let's take them in order, as they are somewhat different.

***

Being moderately familiar with Roman history, I was surprised by the ending of the movie "Gladiator", set in the reign of emperor Commodus. In fact, I was surprised even by the beginning. Despite the movie being obviously set in a slightly alternate time stream, there were lots of nice authentic touches. The reconstruction work was quite nice, and I'd like to see some backstage documentary some day to find out how much of it was computer graphics and how much was conventional. This was clearly not a low-budget movie.

Of course, a low-budget movie would hardly sport Russell Crowe (sp?) as the main character. I think they earned a pretty return on that investment. Now in his better part of life, Mr Crowe seems to appeal strongly to the female audience. Though the claims that he can induce spontaneous ovulation may be somewhat overstated.

A solid action film that would appeal not just to students of ancient history. (For what it is worth, in ancient history Commodus was made co-regent at the age of 16 or so, and reigned as emperor for about 13 years. He was a big spender and did in fact finance some of his expenditure by confiscating the property of the aristocracy.)

***

Apart from the "spender" thing, there is no connection to the coming of the oldest daughter in the Super family, my old Friend, who is married and has two children in almost record time. The two are full of energy. They cried very little and their arms and legs were flailing relentlessly for most of their stay in the house. In the case of the baby, this flailing had little effect, but in the senior brother did propel him back and forth in the rooms, tirelessly.

Old Friend was a great support for me when I was younger and still in doubt as to my humanity. She was treating me like a human even though I tried to not act like one. We had a lot of innocent fun (she is like 10 years younger than I) and she taught me much of what I know about shopping clothes. She's somewhat in the shadow of her younger sister now, of course, but there's no reason to weep for her. Her husband is youngish, smart and funny, and a Capricorn too. (Not that he believes in astrology, of course. None of us Capricorns do.)