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forty minute record Sunday night PBS aired the mountain climbing disaster movie Touching the Void and it hasn't lost any of its power over me. It still has the same emotional effect that it did on me when I saw it the first time. What Joe endured is beyond description and I'm amazed that he seems as well adjusted as he does today. I doubt that I could have done what he did to survive. Then again I've never climbed a mountain so I'm merely guessing at what I would do in that situation. Since I suspect that I will never meet him in person to ask him how he copes with what happened to him, I'll have to add some of his books to my reading list. Not only did he write Touching the Void, Amazon also has at least three other books that he has written. ... I have a slight interest in Russian history and a soft spot for period dramas so I rented the movie Catherine the Great with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the title role. Various reviews that I had read said that the plot moved very quickly and now that I've seen the movie, I have to agree. From what I have read online originally it was a hundred and eighty minute mini series that aired in three parts. The DVD version that I saw was about ninety minutes in length and I have no idea what was left on the cutting room floor. After seeing the movie what I walked away with was the knowledge that Catherine was of German descent and that she had to defeat both the Turks and Cossacks during her reign. I am guessing that those pieces of information are historically true, but I'm not really sure if they were depicted accurately in the movie. History has a way of getting distorted by the teller of the tale. Speaking of distorting history, the movie Goodbye, Lenin was a great way to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. Shortly before the wall comes down, a woman living in East Berlin with strong communist feelings falls into a coma. When she recovers, the doctor tells her grown son and daughter that any sudden shock would cause her to die. The son thinks that the fall of the wall might be too much for her and decides to pretend as though it never happened. Obviously the movie is meant to be a comedy, but at the same time it must have been a shock to a number of people living in East Berlin. A way of life that they had known for decades was suddenly over and the change didn't improve the lives of everyone. Some people genuinely missed the old way of life. They liked being taken care of by the state. These feelings also come through in the movie. Reunification could not have been easy and I suspect that Germany is still dealing with that issue today. ... With my birthday a little over a week away, I had to have my drivers license renewed. What this meant was a trip to the local Department of Motor Vehicles which is not something that I enjoy doing. Before I even got into my car, I had planned on being there for at least an hour. The lines never seem to move that quickly and there is nothing that I can do about it. As far as I know there is only one location per county so it isn't as though I have multiple options. About the only variable that I can control is what time of the day that I decide to go there. Since I had mentally prepared myself, I wasn't shocked to see that the parking lot was full when I got there. Nor was I surprised to see about fifteen people in line in front of me. So I took my place in line behind two young women. Standing in line I tried not to focus on the time and was grateful that the clock on the wall was behind me. Instead of counting the minutes I distracted myself by casually watching the people around me. There wasn't much else to do and I am guessing that everyone else there was doing the same thing as me. I didn't have to look that far to be entertained, because the two young women in front of me were more than enough to keep my attention. At one point the brunette starting picking off pieces of fuzz from the sweater that the blonde was wearing. Both of them said that it was silly, but they did it for about five minutes. Forty minutes later I walked out the door with a new license that is good for another eight years. |