Sentential Links

Time for linkage...but first, check out this execution of a round of Pac Man, in which Our Hero passes straight through a ghost, unharmed, four times! The ghost? It's...Blinky!



(I'm wondering now how long I can keep this increasingly tenuous series of words that kinda-sorta rhyme with 'link' going....)

:: On Thursday night at 6 p.m. I got an email from my landlord telling me there had been a fire in my apartment building but my “cat was okay” and no one was hurt. (If you read only one of the posts I link this week, read this one. I watched all of this unfold over several days, in realtime, via Sheila's updates on Facebook. It's harrowing and scary and deeply emotional...and it has a wonderful coda.)

:: March 9th. What a great day. Not only will I be celebrating the life of the greatest rapper of all time who died way to soon (R.I.P. Biggie!), but I will finally get to see Edgar Rice Burrough's classic Barsoom series on the big screen!!! Given that this is the characters 100 year anniversary and that these stories featuring John Carter are the building blocks for movies like Star Wars, Alien, and Avatar... Well, quite frankly ITS ABOUT TIME!!! (I still find myself wishing they'd have titled this movie anything other than John Carter, which says absolutely nothing about the story. I mean, I hear that title, and I'm like to think it's a feature movie about the Noah Wyle character from ER. Oh well...I'll be seeing the movie, though! Probably not opening night, but sometime...soon....)

:: Everyone worked, everyone helped, and in the end we had brewed give gallons of sweet black beer, bottled another five of a coffee stout porter, and made a plate full of giant brats for folks to ziplock and take home to cook up for dinner. All around me was the human side of industry. People who used their kitchen, hands, stoves, cranks, and cappers to create a viking feast of meat and ale. It felt hardy. It felt primal. It felt good.

:: A 25-years-later sequel would be a bad idea for similar reasons. Part of me would love to catch up with Bender, Claire, Allison, Andy, and Brian in middle-age; maybe at a high school reunion. But most of me realizes that I still don't want to see that. I have my own ideas about where these characters ended up that are uniquely mine. Seeing anything else on the screen is doomed to disappoint.

:: I still can’t believe the events that led to Nola’s promotion! (I love that sentence. Love, love, love it. I'm going to incorporate phrasings like that into my daily lexicon: "I still can't believe the events that led to this equipment's malfunction!")

:: And think of this: unlike other issues, this one has a deadline. Having an actual date on this (imaginary) event makes it seem more solid, more real. I hate to write this, but I expect we’ll be hearing more about people going through with suicide over the next few months because of these doomsday claims. How many of them might have had a chance to seek help, to live longer, if the idea of a 2012 doomsday weren’t so prevalent?

More next week!