I'm probably the last person online with a film degree to have found out that Marlon Brando has died; for someone who spends the entire working day with a Web browser open, I feel fairly pathetic for missing that until now. Of course, I also didn't notice till 3:30 that my boss had sent an e-mail at 2:00 saying we could all go home early. (Um, yeah, I'm still in the office now. I'm leaving soon, though, really.)



(I'm afraid I don't have a lot of Marlon-Brando–related things to say; I have, even more pathetically, entirely missed just about every movie he's made. All those film studies classes mostly involved Italian neorealism and Soviet montage and the French nouvelle vague, rather than the great American films [at least the ones after 1950]. So, yeah, I guess I missed some opportunities there. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to rent or buy "The Godfather" than, say, "The End of St. Petersburg" or "Umberto D.," so I can start filling in some of the gaps.)



Yeesh, it's 4 p.m. and I'm still in the office. Time to go home to the parakeet and the ungrateful plants and a freezer full of cosmopolitans and margaritas and rum punch. Oh, it's gonna be a good long weekend...

Now, honestly

I stopped at Essene, the local macrobiotic/vegan/organic food store, to get lunch after doing some errands that took me in that vicinity; I got the only prepared salad I could find that didn't have seaweed or mock-meat or something weird like that in it (it did have "hemp nuts"—which were more like millet seeds than nuts), and a Snapple-sized bottle of iced tea from a company called Honest Tea. (Excerpt from the back-of-the-bottle copy: "We brew our tea in spring water and add just a hint of sugar cane juice." Very much just a hint; I drink my tea black, and I think this stuff isn't sweet enough.) Anyway, like Snapple, it has a snippet of text on the inside of the bottle cap; but instead of a cheesy, not-necessarily-accurate "fact," it's a Chinese proverb that runs thus:

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

Um, yeah. You don't say. Does it even count as a proverb if it's just a boring overstatement of an obvious fact? ("If we keep going where we're going, we'll go where we're going.") It makes me miss the depth and incisiveness of fortune cookies.

How you, too, can make the terrorists already have won

Via J-Walk:

At Fuzrock's, you can contribute a saying in the form of:

If _____________, that means the terrorists have already won.

...



Examples:

• If I can't get a decent sugar-free vanilla soy latte in every podunk town in Ohio, that means the terrorists have already won!
• If reading the words "Sunday! Sunday!! Sunday!!!" doesn't make you think of monster trucks, that means the terrorists have already won!
• If you land on Illinois ave, and the terrorists have a hotel on it, and all you have is 76 dollars and three mortgaged railroads, that means the terrorists have already won!

My contribution: "If I can't buy a gallon of gas from Saudi Arabia for less than a 16-ounce bottle of filtered tap water from Coca-Cola, that means the terrorists have already won!"



I mean, honestly; they pump the oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia, put it on a truck, send it to a port, put it on a ship, sail it across the Atlantic, unload it on a dock, put it in a truck, ship it to a refinery, turn it into gasoline (however they do that), put it on a truck, send it to a gas station, and pump it into an underground tank; and, yes, it sometimes costs over $2 a gallon. Get over it.



(Of course, I take public transportation, and haven't had my own car since early 2000; so I'm less impressed by the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the cost of gas than I could be. There aren't many reasons to feel good about having to rely on city buses and regional rail trains, so I'll take what I can get.)

In the theater

Yesterday was J.'s birthday; I asked what he wanted to do, since his migraine-avoiding diet excludes sodium, caffeine, and alcohol, thus eliminating the usual "go out to dinner" option. He said, "Can we go see 'Fahrenheit 9/11'?" It's been a loooong time since we went to a movie in an actual movie theater (maybe last December, unless it was the December before that); actually, I guess that makes it more of a special occasion than eating out. So I bought the tickets online in the morning for the 7:30 show, and by the time we got to the theater, both the 7:30 and 8:30 shows were sold out, and there was a line not quite around the block, but definitely a good way down it. People with political flyers and stickers and petitions were working the crowd, and the two guys behind us in line were carrying on a conversation about sociology and redistricting and various constitutional articles and hardly pausing for breath. Not, in other words, the same crowd that's gathering for, say, "Dodgeball."



I guess I should write about the movie itself, too, at some point; but I've used up way too much non-work computer time already today, and I'm not sure I can assemble anything really coherent in my head anyway. (I'm not sure Michael Moore can assemble anything really coherent either; his movies aren't so much sustained arguments as burst after burst of argument-fostering vignettes. Which is an entirely valid way to do it; just not an easy one for a viewer to fully assimilate.) I probably have to go see it again, actually, if I'm going to write about it, and take a notebook with me; my film-studies instincts are starting to tick again like an engine heating up in winter, and if I'm going to do it, I want to do it right.



In the meantime, however, in my continuing role as Font of Useless Knowledge, I've figured out that if you interpret Fahrenheit 9/11 as 911°F, it converts to other temperature scales thus:

488.33 Celsius

761.48 Kelvin

1370.67 Rankine

390.66 Reaumur

E-mail of the day

With the names obscured to protect our jobs, my office's e-mail of the week, regarding the projects we're doing with/for our not-very-partner-like partner company (hereinafter P———):



From the boss, to everyone:

In order to do the [billing], I will need your hours on all E———, M———, L———, and other P——— projects work by tomorrow at 11am.

Employee to boss (who then forwarded it to everyone):

Here you go:



E———, ......0

M———, ........0

L———..............0

Other P——— projects.......0

Total........0

Not having to work with P———.........priceless



(I did, however, listen to a lot of bitching during smoke breaks. Does that count towards anything?)

It's French, b!tch

(Before anyone takes offense at the entry title, it's from the Daily Show's fictional spinoff, "The Colbert Report"; the voiceover pronounces it "Colbare Repore," and Stephen Colbert fixes the camera with one of those arched-eyebrow stares and says "It's French, b!tch." We now continue with our regularly-scheduled entry.)



On a Food Channel show, a French-Canadian chef pronounced "jalapeño" as "zhelapenno," accent on the first syllable—I actually only knew what he was saying because he was holding a jalapeño pepper at the time.



Somewhat along the same line, about a month ago on one of the South Philly crosstown buses, I was sitting in front of two women who were speaking a language I absolutely couldn't recognize. I usually have a good ear for languages, even the ones I don't actually understand; I can pinpoint the Romance ones, identify the Slavic ones as Slavic (and narrow them down to "Ukrainian," "Czech," or "not Ukrainian or Czech"), and pick Chinese out from other Asian languages by the rising and falling intonations. Usually, in South Philly, the non-English languages you hear are Spanish, Italian, and Chinese, with some Russian or Polish and Vietnamese every now and then. And these two women weren't speaking any of them. Some of the individual syllables and short words felt like I should know them, but I couldn't put them together. I finally figured out, after the women briefly switched to English, that they were from the Caribbean, and the language they'd been speaking was a Caribbean dialect of French. It just didn't sound like French: none of the intonations or inflections you hear in the European or Quebeçois varieties.



It's odd how much of a language depends, not only on the words and phonetic pronunciation, but the way that pronunciation comes out. I know a flat-affect schizophrenic who has, literally, no intonation when he speaks, and it's surprisingly hard to understand him. And a British actor who does spot-on American English pronunciation will still sound a bit off if they don't get the spaces between and around the words exactly right. (Same with American actors doing British English, but I don't catch that as well as a native Brit would.) Listen, if you don't have anything better to do, to the difference between Gwyneth Paltrow's British-ish accents in 1996's "Emma" and 1998's "Shakespeare in Love"; and, if you can find it, the neglected BBC version of "Emma," with the actually British Kate Beckinsale. (I think Gwyneth's character in 2002's "Possession" is British, too [they did change the main male character from British to American, the bastards], but I plan to watch that movie shortly after the Demi Moore "Scarlet Letter," which will be never.)

Sacred, part II

Ooohhh, I'm so surprised: Britney Spears is having another go at marriage, that sacred institution to which she is already such a credit. Maybe it'll even last longer than 55 hours this time. (A factoid that escaped my apoplexy about her first marriage: the wedding license cost $55, making the marriage a dollar per hour. Cheaper than renting a hooker.)



The highlight of the particular article I've linked to is the part about Mr. Spears #2's most recent relationship, which I'll quote at unusual length, because it's just so good:

The marriage also will be the first for Federline, 26, who, while a stranger to matrimony, is no stranger to other hallowed institutions, such as fatherhood. Federline has a two-year-old daughter with former Moesha star Shar Jackson. The ex-couple is expecting their second child in July.



The gracious Jackson has been quoted as declaring Federline and Spears are "made for each other."



"You both smoke, you both drink and you both cheated on significant others after three years," Jackson told Us Weekly in April, apparently referencing herself and Spears' former beau, Justin Timberlake.



Jackson issued just one ultimatum to the twosome: "There are two little kids—she [Spears] better be prepared to babysit."

I realize the "gracious" is supposed to be sarcastic, but, given the situation, I think she actually is being gracious. More so than I'd be, anyway. For instance, the words "crapweasel" and "no-talent skank" don't appear in her comments; though maybe that's what she was saying before the quoted "made for each other"...