It’s just too painful.  I’m going out for ice cream instead.

As you might guess, this week everybody’s pretty much all about the Final Four around here—both of them.  It promises to be an interesting weekend here in BR.

More posting on non-basketball topics shortly.  But, in the meantime, Geaux Tigers!

A philosophical question that, at the moment, seems worthy of Berkeley:  would they be my Tigers without the palpitations?

Not only have I spent the week watching Brideshead Revisited (but on VHS; you remember VHS tapes, don’t you?  I’d nearly forgotten that you have to rewind them, a real bother if you ask me), but I also just this week joined Netflix and got my first shipment from them.

My, the things that are about in the world today.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten hundreds of hits off of a pack of googlers looking for spoilers for the current season of The Sopranos.  Which is odd.  Here I was trying to be all scrupulous about not giving away the big thing that happened at the end of episode 1, and everybody else in the world seems to be looking for the scoop on the rest of the season.

This is a phenomenon that kinda baffles me.  Do you guys read the end of a novel first?  I know there are folks who do; I know people who can’t bear the suspense, and so have to know how it turns out before they begin.  But the suspense is the majority of the pleasure for me—wondering if I can work out the puzzle before it’s solved, and, in fact, really hating it when I can.  Finding out from an outside source how something turns out can entirely destroy the pleasure in the text for me.

That said, I do love to speculate about a text-in-progress; speculation below the fold.

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And yes, we need a SPOILER ALERT already…

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From Katrenema, a short documentary on the state of New Orleans, over six months later.  It’s devastating, partially due to the filmmaker’s sense that the images he can give us can’t fully convey the city’s desperation, but also partially because of the desperation he evidences in his continuing belief in a happy ending.

Does it strike anybody else that all this “there’s no place else to really see a movie other than the big screen” stuff smacks just a teeny bit of desperation?

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks.

And man, did I need that.

If you haven’t seen it, go watch.