September, 25, 2004 archives

hero is an incredible film. jason kottke got it right when he compared it to a ballet. roger ebert questions whether it is better than crouching tiger, hidden dragon, but i don’t think there’s much contest: hero is much better.

writing about the amount of charity solicitations i got seems to have delayed my september charity giving. not any longer, with my donation to acción international just made. they make microloans throughout the world.

i’m thinking of scaling back my giving to just be quarterly (but not in scale). that would mean giving more money to fewer charities. probably: electronic frontier foundation, library foundation of los angeles, harvey mudd college, and something else. but there’s too many to choose from. maybe i’ll go bimonthly.

interesting: del.icio.us “charity” tagged items.

i just mentioned it in passing before, and this is a little late to be calling special attention to it, but the old bank district artwalk is today, from noon to 6pm. some of my more-talented neighbors will be opening their lofts to show off what they do, there will be performances down on the street, and the neighborhood businesses and art galleries will all be open.

a shot down to main street from my window. there's all sorts of ribbon and chalk and other craziness down there. (and bands playing.)

(yes, it’s all very rear window for me at the moment.)

xenocide by orson scott card is a very worthy successor to the first two books in the series, although it wasn’t quite as surprising as i found the first two books to be. the leap from ender’s game to speaker for the dead was much larger than from speaker to xenocide, but it definitely continues the progression into a more ensemble-driven, metaphysically-rooted story. one weakness is a few of the characters that are clearly just along for the ride into the next book in the series.

the hard part of reading the series is the fear that it is going to take a star wars-caliber dive off a cliff. all i can say for sure right now is that xenocide is no return of the jedi.