QOTD: "Method acting? There are quite a few methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass and some cracked ice." - John Barrymore
Reading: Andrew Garve, The Riddle of Samson
Listening to: nothing
Decluttering accomplishments: sold 52 books to used book stores
I've been clearing out various odds and ends of clippings, so this will be a rather random entry. First off, I was quite pleased with the health news this week. It seems that both red wine and dark chocolate are good for you. The latter, in particular, lowers blood pressure. Now there's dietary advice I can really get behind. All you have to do is throw in fresh tuna and lots of berries and life would be perfect. (And I had both of those this week. A bunch of us went to lunch at the Village Bistro on Tuesday and their chef has a fine touch with fish. The fish specials are pricy for lunch, but the tuna was worth it. As for berries, blackberries were on sale. A blackberry bought is a blackberry eaten. They were good, albeit not as good as the wild ones of my youth.)
In the "things that have changed in the past couple of years" category, did you know that Office Depot used to label express shipments with the code "BOMB-XXX"? That triggered a bomb scare at my company a few years ago. It's pretty much unimaginable now that somebody wouldn't even think of that.
Hmmm, I guess there weren't that many clippings after all. I'm at the bottom of the pile and that's about the probable closing of Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida. Oh, sure, it was horribly tacky, but it's sad to contemplate no more local girls putting on mermaid tails and eating picnics underwater. I never did quite grasp how they did the underwater picnic trick. For the rest, it's not like they made a secret of periodically going over to the air hoses, but how do you actually eat or drink without drowning?
As for what I've been doing, this was a quiet week. I had a bunch of errands to do and discovered a remarkable talent for timing them so that I got caught by thunderstorms. For example, I took my car in for inspection and, while the station was inside, it was raining too heavily afterwards to drive home. So I took refuge at the bookstore at the shopping center until it let up. A couple of days later, another storm hit just as I got home from picking up my dry cleaning. The storms were really quite intense. Tuesday's even caused a brief power outage here - and more severe outages elsewhere. The storms are great when I'm home and can watch the lightning through the window, though. And they do cool things down quite a bit.
The highlight of the work week was a meeting with a man who I'll refer to as The Godfather. He's extremely powerful and has a reputation as a kingmaker. That is, if you work for him and survive the pace he puts you through, your future is assured. He also keeps copies of Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War in prominent places on his conference table. One of our group came in slightly late and didn't want to sit at the table, but he made her move next to him on the grounds that he's Italian and doesn't like people sitting where he can't see them. The meeting went fine and, fortunately, I was well prepared to answer the one question that got thrown at me. I was also amused by several digressions. One was a good point about how we fund programs and was actually a vindication of how we funded ours. He moved on to discuss the Big Dig and its positive impacts on northbound traffic from Logan Airport in Boston. Somewhere in there, he complained about having to take a trip to Dubai in the near future. And then he mentioned his recent meetings with "Ross, Junior and Senior." It turned out that the Ross in question was Perot!
I also used a free movie coupon that was expiring this month to see Seabiscuit. It was about what I expected. The good part is that it's all wholesome and family friendly and there are nice comic bits with the sportscaster. The downside is that the pacing is glacial and it's more than a little preachy. The message is that you should never give up on someone because he's a little bit broken. Just to make sure you get it, that phrase is worked into the dialogue about every twenty minutes. All in all, mainstream Hollywood fare that's a tad more syrupy than I like.
Copyright 2003 Miriam H. Nadel