Staying Put

After we arrived we went to Fuddruckers in downtown Burbank for lunch--best time to go to downtown Burbank: right before 11, because there's plenty of parking--and then came home, to check mail, to surf the web, to turn on the air conditioning.

At 1, Darin asked me if I was going to take a nap, and I said, Okay. I hadn't thought about much, despite

1. not sleeping last night--not only could I not fall asleep, but the fire alarm in our room started malfunctioning and beeped at 2, at 3, at 3:30...at which point we had security come up and fix it. (The hotel gave us $50 off the bill for the inconvenience.)
2. not sleeping on the plane, which has recently turned out to be a guaranteed method of getting me to sleep.

I went downstairs and Darin and I got into bed and I closed my eyes...and the next thing I knew it was 6pm.

Whoa. Color my day gone.

I see Ceej mentioned in her journal watching the George Wallace biopic whilst we were sitting in the restaurant. Since I was facing the same direction, I watched it with her, and the TV conveniently had closed-captioning so we could follow what was going on on-screen.

Gary Sinise...now there's a guy I'd like to have coffee with, but I'd be terrified of being trapped in an elevator with. Why? Because he's such a chameleon I'm afraid he has no personality. When I watched Truman I thought, Wow, this guy looks exactly like Harry Truman. I'm watching Wallace and I'm thinking, Wow, this guy looks exactly like George Wallace.

In case you haven't noticed, Harry Truman and George Wallace look nothing alike, other than being white guys.

Of course, he's also the same guy who directed Of Mice And Men, the first movie I've ever cried at, so what do I know.

And he's from Highland Park, just like Darin. (How scary is that?) And everyone knows how I feel about guys from Highland Park.

In the current Entertainment Weekly (with Guilty Pleasures on the cover), there's a cartoon:

Coming Soon to TNT: Gary Sinise re-creates ALL of American History!

• As Benjamin Franklin in The Founding Fathers
• As Kennedy and Nixon in The Kennedy-Nixon Debates
• As Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin in Apollo 11
• As Lincoln, Sherman, Grant, Lee, and Bragg in The Civil War
• As the 106th Congress in The Republican Revolution

I really hope I'm not going to have to subject Darin to a Gary Sinise film festival any time soon. Of course, in looking over his biography, I've already seen most of his movies. I just keep forgetting that it's him.

I refuse to comment on Di's death, other than death is bad and I don't wish it on anyone and I wish to God people would stop rending their garments over this. Oops, I guess that was a comment.

I would like to say that both Darin and I were stunned by one image this weekend: the wrecked Mercedes. We own a Mercedes, although not an S-class one. One of the best features of driving around in a Mercedes is that you feel incredibly safe. It's such a heavy car, and the S-class cars are twice as heavy or something. It's a tank.

It was like during the '89 earthquake one of the news crews showing the collapsed 880 structure focused on one of the crushed cars: a black Acura Integra, the car I happen to drive. My only thought (because to think about what happened to the people inside was too difficult): I guess it is just a tin can. There's nothing like a reference point that hits home.

No statistics today. Tomorrow.