CopLand And Tornadoes

Darin, Jody, Matthew and I went to see Copland (or Cop Land, or CopLand...we're not really sure) today. It was pretty good -- Sylvester Stallone acts, and all that.

It's pretty silly having the full Scorsese contingent (DeNiro, Keitel, Liotta, Moriarty, and probably like 14 others I'm forgetting, with the sole glaring exception of Joe Pesci) in this film, because all you can think is, "Hey, all these people have acted together before, in Scorsese movies." And they're all typecast, including Stallone as the dumb virtuous guy. When Harvey Keitel talks about Robert DeNiro and says, "He and I go way back," my first reaction was, Yeah, all the way to Mean Streets. (Actually, now that I think about it, were both of them in that?)

An enjoyable movie though. The scene between Sly and Annabella Sciorra was very touching.

Darin, Jody, and I had dinner with Henry and Ilse at their retirement community. On the way over to see them I asked Jody about what she's planning on doing in the future. Not that I am one to say you have to have your whole life planned out, mind you -- I'm just nosy. Jody spent 2 years in Benin in the Peace Corps and 4 months travelling around Belize and this past summer worked at North Cascades National Park. She gets around. She loves doing this stuff and is working on a master's degree in (I'm going to get this wrong, but I'll ask Lil what the exact title is) Environmental and Resource Management. She's off to Leiden in the Netherlands in just over a week to study there for a semester. She's never been to Europe and doesn't know whether she'll like it or not.

I asked what she might end up doing and she mentioned two very different career paths: one is working with the EU on getting their environmental plan together (straightening out and regularizing the permits process, for example) and the other is working on sustainable rain forest reforestation in Ecuador.

The funny thing about Jody is that she doesn't strike me as the gung-ho, get-out-your-machetes-we're-going-in type. She's incredibly sweet and nice (in the Canadian sense) and polite and all the rest of it. You wouldn't think from talking to her that she's seen a hell of a lot more of the world than most people, but she has. She's also happy most all the time, which generally I find annoying in people but in Jody it's actually just the way she is.

Somehow we got on the topic of carbonated beverages, because Jody loves fizzy drinks. She described how hard it was to find carbonated beverages in Benin and when she did it was usually beer. She drank a lot of the Beninese national beer, which is made from corn. She also managed from time to time to find Guinness stout, but it didn't taste the same. "It might have been the water, because it's bottled in Benin and Niger," she said. "Or it might have been the 110-degree heat."

Darin mentioned that usually Guinness isn't served cold, but Jody said it is there.

We had dinner with Henry and Ilse and then went back to their apartment for a long time to chat. We managed to hit Shakespeare, what it is to be a refugee, and clinical depression (theoretical and practical aspects of). Henry lapsed into German more than I remember him doing in the past. Darin thinks that's because we were discussing topics from Austria.

One of the reasons we stayed so long was the severe thunderstorm that passed over us. I looked out the window during dinner and I wondered why I couldn't see anything. It turned out that I was looking at a sheet of water, lit up every so often by incredible flashes of lightning. (Darin and Jody tried to explain to me that this water falling from the sky was not an expression of the gods' anger but instead is a "natural phenomenon" called rain. I said that if it were "natural" California would know about it; therefore, it's not natural.)

After dinner we discovered that there was a tornado warning in the area. Lil called to make sure we didn't leave right in the middle of a twister. We said we were watching the news and keeping abreast of it. The warnings eventually got downgraded to a severe thunderstorm warning.

I had asked Darin about this the previous evening, as we watched TV: the upper left-hand corner of the screen read severe thunderstorm warning, and I asked, "What does that mean?"

He said, "They're warning you about severe thunderstorms."

"Ah," I said. "Why are they doing that?"

Evidently, people who live in the Midwest get warned about this terrible weather that's heading their way. All the local networks put the warning sign on the screen, and they show radar maps and the whole bit. This happens every year, and sometimes multiple times per season. These people stay here. It's weird, I tell you.

No, seriously, Bob was raving about this book. Bob, as you may remember, is the genial owner of the Beggars Banquet restaurant in East Lansing, MI. Go there, eat his food.

So Darin and I are going to read this by Thanksgiving and be ready for the oral as well as the written part of the exam.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

The nail on the middle finger of my right hand is kaput. Back to the drawing board.