Earth Shaiking News

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Read that subject line literally, please. We have more news of the earth shaking. Last Wednesday morning at 4:45 AM we were awakened by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake. It was extremely disorienting to come out of sleep into a world where it sounded like 4,000 tables were being dragged across a hardwood floor. Not to mention all the movement. We lost a couple of plates to gravity. The earthquake during the day was much more fun. We sent a memo to the Pacific plates asking them to confine their headbutting to daylight hours.

In completely unrelated news, we recently finished the mind-bending movie trifecta of Donnie Darko, Memento, and Mulholland Drive. We had actually seen them before but it's been a while and sometimes, OK oftentimes, there's not much else to do in the Oki on a rainy day. Plus, it was nice to use our brains for a while after wading through Meet the Fockers. We analyzed each movie to the best of our abilities, and came up with pretty good interpretations for Mulholland Drive and Memento. Donnie Darko is another matter entirely. The director made it intentionally inscrutable. You can only guess so far before you hit a brick wall. In the past several months, however, he has dropped the veil of secrecy and you can find all the answers here. You have to watch a commercial to get to the article but it is well worth it. The article also links to stories about Memento and Mulholland Drive. Overall, Donnie Darko had the most satisfying story, Mulholland Drive had the most interesting symbolism, and Memento was just cool.

As for the subject line above, it is interesting the way our minds process strings of words. The power of the comma is also quite amazing. We are dying to read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. The book is an assault on poor punctuation, but the title refers to the great joke about a homicidal panda. A panda walks into a bar and orders dinner. He eats his dinner, pulls out a gun, kills the bartender, and heads off into the night. The police investigate and a smart detective finally finds his answer in the dictionary. Under the definition of panda, he finds this: Eats shoots and leaves. Funny, huh?

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