Little Man Tate and Me

When I first saw the movie Little Man Tate, I was fascinated by one scene in the movie---the young boy is away from home at some summer camp for bright kids, and in this scene many of them are gathered in an auditorium, a math puzzle is projected onto a large screen, and the kids are trying to solve the puzzle, calling out various answers...nobody solves the puzzle, there's a moment or two of silence, and Tate comes walking across a vacant row, looks up at the puzzle. He stops to think for a moment, and you can see the components of the puzzle, and the answer swirling around in his head and on the screen. He pauses for moment, and then blurts out the answer, not knowing how he figured it out, not understanding the process of his own thinking, just arriving at the answer. Or at least that's my memory of the scene, which is just as important here. It's the process, the instant discovery, the intuitive movement...and I really should go back and scan through the film.

Yesterday, I took the subway downtown for my final (thank God!!) day of jury duty, spending time correcting mistakes of omission by both the judge and the plaintiff's attorney. Five or six mid 20s got on the subway with me, all clutching sheafs of colored papers, as I looked over the shoulder of the very cute woman who sat down next to me wearing a great black cami , I found that they were on an NYC scavenger hunt, which She later told me is a great team building exercise used by management consulting firms that hire the best and the brightest, or so they hope. They're given tasks all around the city, retrieving items, documents, information, memorabilia, answers to bizarre and difficult questions.

They all puzzled over a word jumble , scambled letters mixed in a 4/3/3/5 pattern, and I looked at it for a few minutes, listening to the group try to figure out the puzzle, and then realizing that they didn't know how to solve it, trying to figure it out by moving the letters around within the groups. As I looked at it yet again, I used the first basic tool, which is to find the repeated letter, and assume that it's a vowel. Coupling that with the placements of that letter, all of a sudden the answer jumped out before my eyes, and I leaned over to her, careful not to disappear into her cleavage, I told her the answer---BITE THE BIG APPLE. She was dumbstruck, to say the least, and asked how I knew the answer so easily.

I had to think about how easily and quickly I had done it, what the process was, and I realized that I intuitively knew how to do it, how to solve the puzzle. And it was an automatic process.

I wish that the rest of life was soooo simple to put together.

Jury Duty-Part II

And as Al Pacino so admirably said in one of the Godfather films, "Just when I think I'm getting out, they drag me back in."
And so it is with jury duty...this morning I received a call from the court clerk, telling me that the judge would like to reconvene the jury to ask us some questions, in order to preserve the verdict. My life goes on hold yet again, both the personal and professional parts of it, as I wait to find out which of the time blocks the judicial system would like to access,

Jury Duty

That's where I've been for the last two weeks, on a case involving a civilian suing the policeman who arrested him and the City of NY...the trial is over, the verdict was reached. Nobody was happy with it, which was just fine. We deliberated for over 6 hours, and reached a consensus. That's how the system works.

And I'm back, with Part II of Playing With Friends and some other ideas...stay tuned, and thanks if you did during the interruption.

MIA Yet Again

I've written about this before, but it still irks me...people who I've emailed with or have blogrolled me, who suddenly either shut down their blogs entirely, or take them private with no warning and no follow up.
I've lost The Story of M, which I enjoyed reading, and Joy, shared, which had blogrolled me and then went private, perhaps over the weekend.
I do understand that nobody has any concrete obligations to anyone here, but common courtesy should prevail.

Just A Few Random Thoughts #2(?)

I finally got to see Sex And The City this past weekend, and I was surprised by lots of things: the theatre was mostly full (meaning the movie has legs and that I didn't miss the boat), there were mostly couples at the screening I saw (absent the two groups of high school-ish girls sitting in front of me in the third row), the movie itself was surprisingly good, and with the exception of one or two lines played for high humor rather than low jokes. For me, the movie was about friends who always have your back, who always tell you the truth (no matter how painful to say or to hear, something I'm really bad at, for the most part), and who will always do for you. The movie for the most part stayed away from low humor, toilet humor, the let's see how abjectly sex driven the conversation can get. I'm a hetero guy, and so for me it wasn't about the clothes for me, but the wedding dress sequence does indeed loom large.

A couple of female bloggers that I read regularly have, in the past few months, posted about their sexual exploits with other women. It's not necessarily lesbian sex, it's just being pleasured by a woman, and accepting the source of pleasuring from wherever it came. Neither of the women is gay, neither is a raging sub, both are sexual adventurers, both write or expressed positive feelings about the experiences, and neither considers herself gay, as far as I know. Great for them, truly. I just wish there were a similar avenue for men that didn't carry such a taint of homosexuality with it...guys with guys means only one thing---gay sex, whereas girls with girls seems to be able to be a girls just wanna have fun situation. Maybe it's a matter of physiology, maybe it's the whole Mars/Venus thing.

I've been trying for almost a year, the entire life of this blog, to write about music, and I've approached it from several different sides, none of them satisfactory to me, and all of the posts were scrapped before posting...but I have a new slant, and will try yet again (this as the opera Rienzi by Wagner thuds away in the background).

And the fact that this blog is drawing close to its one year old birthday holds some significance, and deserves a larger post than here, about changes for me and mine since its inception, the numbers slut thing, "friends and family", what I've learned.

And then there's always the continuation of Playing With Old Friends.....

Earworm-Rienzi by Wagner