Staci is home again, having escaped the horror of Florida with only a gruesome suntan the record of the terrors she encountered deep down south. I picked her up Monday night from the Richmond airport. I don’t do that much flying myself, so I’m always struck by the strange compression of space and time that occurs therein. Most notably: the choice of stores inside your typical airport. The sheer randomness of commerce — even the presence of commerce sometimes — is peculiar. Magazines, sodas, candy bars, and novels I can understand. It’s all the other random crap that gets me.

I flew into Dulles some time in the fall of 2004. The presidential election was still a few months off, but the name-calling and mockery was in full force. Eager to capitalize on the 5 guys who needed to own a tee shirt with a picture of John Kerry that looked a bit like the mask in the movie Scream some enterprising sorts had set up a kiosk precisely to meet that demand. I’ll bet it works though. In the weird alternate universe of airports worthless crap, shit you’d normally never give a second thought to, probably looks a whole lot more interesting.

Since Staci is away temporarily in Florida studying how to rehabilitate dogs I took advantage of our shared Netflix subscription to add a few movies she either refused to watch for one reason or another or just wouldn’t much care to see. Tonight it was the 2005 edition of War of the Worlds that I too had my hesitation toward thanks to batshit crazy “Tomkat.” I still don’t respect nor like the man, but I did rather like the movie.

Steven Spielberg, you really acted kind of like a douchebag at the Oscars when Ben Stiller joked that he was blowing your mind, and I’m real glad you didn’t win any major awards this year for Munich even though it might be an excellent film, but you sure can turn out an enjoyable sci-fi/horror spectacle when you put your mind into it. Kudos, I say. I’m pleased you didn’t pull back from the gruesomeness. Despite the PG-13 rating there were parts of War of the Worlds that were as cringeworthy as half of the true horror films of the past decade. Oh, and we didn’t see a single attack on the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Mount Rushmore, the Taj Mahal, nor any number of familiar invasion scenarios. I appreciated that.

As a microbiologist I’m almost contractually obligated to have a soft spot for any interpretation of H.G. Wells’s novel. We all know the story: aliens aim to conquer the Earth but make a fatal miscalculation regarding our normal bacterial, fungal, and/or viral flora and keel over halfway through destroying everything we hold dear. I haven’t done exhaustive research, but I’ll wager it’s probably the first exploration of the dangers of the immunocompromised in popular fiction. To be clever the filmmakers should have donated a portion of the profits to AIDS research.

Staci has gone off to West Palm Beach, FL which is apparently where good things go to die as far as I can tell from her description of the place. Until she returns on the 20th it’s just me and the boys in the house. We’ll try not to wreck the place too much and we all sure do miss you.

My PowerBook done went and crapped out again. Inexplicably she worked like a charm for a week and then back to shitty no video land. Realizing that arranging for shipment to the Apple repair center would be troublesome with my work schedule, I went ahead and left her in the care of the fellows at my local Apple Store. I trust she’ll be just fine.

In Staci’s absence I have turned intermittently to Dragon Warrior VII to pass the time. I’ve become strangely obsessed with it. When I’m playing it I tend to get bored because it’s a Dragon Warrior/Quest game and those tend to be proudly obtuse. But when I turn it off and start to do something else my mind keeps drifting back to it. I really can’t explain it. I haven’t even made it to the class changing system — I expect it will cause me no end obsessive consternation.

The weather has been nice lately. I think I might take Leroy down to the river tomorrow.