Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Just Came Back from Seeing K-PAX
Fun movie. An intelligent, adult movie. Good story, well-written, well acted.

Spoiler warning. Okay, you’ve been warned. ;-)

Nice thing about it is that first you are convinced that the Prot is in fact an alien (the ultraviolet thing would seem to be the clincher), but then gradually the layers are stripped away and the human inside is revealed. The story is clever in that both the alien and human stories can both be valid at the same time – story as a Schroedinger’s cat whose waveform hasn’t collapsed completely into one state or another (considering the fact that the alien travels by light-beam, the collapsed light-beam analogy was too tempting to avoid. ;-) Thoroughly enjoyable. The message: treasure what you have, which is bound to reach a sympathetic audience given the current state of things. It's not the deepest of movies, but it's not what I would call "fluff" either.

The afternoon performance I saw was packed. Sat through the usual commercials at the beginning of the movie, and unfortunately a large woman who needed a shower ended up sitting beside me. When the crazy man talks about “how everything here smells”, I couldn’t help but think how true it was at that moment. One of her friends also went “uh hunh” knowingly when something about Prot’s character was revealed. Duhhh. Oh well, the movie transported me out of the theatre for the most part. ;-)

Family Having a Blast at Jenny & Hugh’s
When I got back I found that Erika had called. So I called her at Jenny and Hugh’s place. Sounds like everyone there is having a blast. When I called Vanessa was out “putting the chickens to bed” with Jenny, Ariel and Iain. When she went to fetch eggs earlier in the day, she apparently kept asking to see “her egg”. It’s great to have friends who live on a farm. Annie travels well so she’s no problem, and Erika sound very happy to be with her friends.

Books By the Pound
During lunch yesterday seeking some solitude from the office I wandered into the Oakville library. Just as I was heading out from there, I saw a sign mentioning that there was a book sale in the auditorium downstairs. Turns out there’s an organization called “The Friends of the Library”, and a small hall was filled with books, consisting of discards from the library and donations from the “friends”. The books were being sold by the pound, at a cost of a dollar a pound.

I didn’t have a lot of money with me (and I still wanted to get lunch), so I was perhaps more choosy than I otherwise would have been. There was a lot of stuff that were deservedly discards, both from the library and its friends, but I did manage to come away with three-and-a-half pounds worth of books.

Here’s what I picked up:

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words (Vol. 1), by Graham Chapman et al
• Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, by Martin Rees
• The Mahogany Tree: An Informal History of Punch, by Arthur Pragar

The Python book will most likely find a home at the “library” in Deloro. The history of Punch looks interesting. The only library discard from the bunch, it was published in 1979, which was probably soon after I discovered the British humour magazine myself. A friend of my Father’s sent him an annual subscription of the magazine for years, almost up until the time it initially went belly-up in the late-90s. When I was younger, I chuckled at the cartoons, and when I was older I appreciated the articles more. When I was in London earlier in the year, I picked up a copy of the revived Punch, but it lacked something; not as sophisticated and nowhere near as out-and-out funny as I remember it being during its heyday. The book by Martin Rees was a real find. A recent publication (1999) it looks primarily at the major constants of the Universe: gravity, the number of dimensions, the amount of matter in the Universe, the rate at which atomic nuclei bind together, etc. Have already dug about 25 pages into it.

It’s a pretty motley collection of books, isn’t it?

I found the Rees book while looking through a science section of books. I had picked up a book on astronomy when an older fellow with a large wine-glass birthmark covering his left check asked me whether I liked astronomy. I had a brief chat with him, though I was a bit diffident, as I was really not in a mood to chat at the time. He was clearly interested in meeting somebody else with that interest, though my mind somehow wasn’t in the right “gear” to talk about astronomy at that moment. Subsequently I feel a bit bad at ending the conversation peremptorily. If I run into him again I’ll stick around and chat more.

Tree Damage
Turns out I was wrong when I said the other day that the large tree branch that fell down didn’t do any damage. I notice last evening some blue tarpaulin flapping in the steady wind on the roof of the house that got whacked. It doesn’t seem too bad, but it must’ve given the people inside the house at the time a real jolt.

The Book
Last night I did more serious work on the revised CSS book. Yesterday I discovered a more definitive listing online detailing not only Internet Explorer extensions to CSS, but some for Netscape Navigator (based on material from Mozilla builds) as well. I am leaning towards the idea of integrating everything: CSS1, CSS2, CSS extensions and draft CSS3 into one whopping section instead of dividing things up. The idea would be to base individual chapters listing a family of similar properties, and then simply point out which spec individual properties belong to. Am going to re-draft my outline, more to see where everything would fit.