Divergent topics

HUGO
M and I called ahead to reserve a couch at the Campus Theater (I can't stress enough how much I enjoy having a small local independent and well-run, not to mention beautiful, theater in our town, and how much I like being a member there). It was, as our friend Brett had warned us, a little drawn out. It was a smidge over 2 hours and could have easily been done in 90 minutes. And the guy from Borat as the guard was distracting to me because I kept imagining him in his horrible yellow onesie-swimsuit-thing, and I never even saw Borat! But the movie was fun for 2 reasons; the old film clips, and the automaton. It made me realize how little I know about old cinema, and how strange some of those earliest movies must have been, or at least must have seemed, to their first audiences. And the intricacies and delicacies of the programmed man, the design effort and mechanical precision it must have taken to build a machine that could draw (and I realize that the movie version was fantastical but they did exist in real life) sort of smote me with wonder. Once again it made me wish I could have been an engineer, if not for the math.

A PRACTICAL WEDDING by Meg Keene
I felt a little guilty counting this as one of my books, but maybe I'll get to 51. We'll see. This book is a recently published guide to wedding planning by a blogger that I really like (apracticalwedding.com) and since I'm planning a wedding and I am and want to be practical about it, I've really liked her stuff (as well as her Team Practical). I'm further along in the planning than her typical reader probably is intended to be, but her tips and ideas for ceremonies and mental health are timed just right. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone planning a wedding. Good stuff.


SECRETARIAT
When I have a cold (as I do this weekend) I like feel-good movies. So as I was curled up on the couch with Mabelle last night, her farm fuzzy puppiness going a long way to make me feel better, I figured I would watch this. I knew nothing about the real horse, and know nothing about horse racing. I think it came up in one of my Netflix lists, maybe because I like Wallace and Gromit or something. Anyways, it was just the thing when I wanted a low-brain-power-happy-ending film. It did get pretty exciting at the Belmont when the other owner conspired against our hero horse. He was a beautiful animal, and the feminism subplot was kind of a nice surprise. It wasn't an amazing film or anything but I liked it.