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PVC, meet mortar Monday, October 5 2009
Today I started a two week gig working remotely for a company down in the city. I'll be developing some administrative tools in the context of Drupal. Unlike my usual remote gigs, these guys keep me on a pretty short leash. When I work for Michæl in Los Angeles, he pretty much leaves me alone for weeks at a time and I'm free to alternate in my usual way between procrastination and obsessive focus on the task at hand. But these guys, they call me every three hours, and that can be hard when all you've done since the last call is fill a PVC pipe with mortar and read three articles at the HuffingtonPost.
In addition to trying to get oriented to the new work regime, I inserted that three inch PVC pipe into a hole I'd prepared in the roof ridge of the outhouse, where it will rise to impale the disklike layers of the Purple Martin house. To ensure that the pipe was both completely plumb and rigid, I ran a bolt up into its center from the board upon which it rested and then gradually tightened another board with a crescent cutout into place from the pipe's least-plumb direction it plumb. Then I mixed up some mortar and filled the pipe nearly to the top. The combination of PVC and mortar (along with a bolt and a short piece of rebar) should make the pipe into a formidable structure.
Tonight Penny and David picked up Gretchen and me and we all went to the Hudson Valley Mall cinema to see The Invention of Lying. I actually had my doubts about the premise, which presupposes an alternate reality where human society is exactly as we know it but nobody tells or has ever told a falsehood. Into this mix, our hero (played by Ricky Gervais) figures out how to tell a lie, and this proves to be a ticket to not only fame and fortune, but the a theological monopoly. You see, as part of a world without lies, there is no fiction or religion, and not dramatizations or re=enactments. Cinematic productions consist of dull lectures about historical periods.
The problem with a movie peopled with characters living in such a world is that their dialogue is stilted, humorless, overly-serious, and devoid of metaphor, flattery, exaggeration, or jest. Their brutal honesty came across as comic at first, but (as Penny pointed out), that can only sustain something the length of a skit. This was a feature presentation.
On top of this was our hero's inane love interest, whose repeated failure to finesse her reasons for not wanting to mix her genes with the "fat snub-nosed" genes of our hero became extremely irritating. What sane person would ever want to be with a woman like that?
If this movie had anything clever to say, it was its message about religion (which reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut had written in Cat's Cradle). The biggest incidental message of the movie was that religion is an elaborate lie we tell ourselves so we can happily face the bleakness of our eventual erasure. This seemed like an unusually bold statement for an otherwise dreary mainstream movie, the kind that ends with our hero happily married to his love interest, whose uterus is swollen with his second offspring as she serves him and his first offspring badly-cooked vegetables, the latter two thrilling to the fact that they are the only ones on Earth who know how to lie, telling mom that the vegetables are delicious. Oops, I forgot to say "spoiler alert."
Here's another thing I hated about The Invention of Lying (as well as its ilk of mainstream movies weighed-down with product tie-ins): in what alternative universe do people drink only one brand of beer, always holding it label-side out? I don't think I'll ever be able to drink Budweiser again.
Later the four of us went to Rolling Rock for drinks and food (particularly french fries), all of us shaking our heads and moaning at how dreadful the movie had been.
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