7 March 2002

I went over to K.T. and Kevin's last night. The plan was to have pizza and watch my copy of Othello that I'd gotten for Christmas, finally.

Obviously, when I say, "the plan was..." then you know it didn't work out like that.

We did have pizza, and we did start watching Othello. I'd put it on my wishlist without having seen it first because I've really liked all of Kenneth Branagh's other Shakespearean movies that I've seen. Othello is a great story, and both Branagh and Laurence Fishburne are good actors. I was confident it would be a good movie.

I should have looked more closely before I put it on my list, though... Branagh plays Iago, but he's not the director of the movie. I started to get a little uneasy when Desdemona was woodenly defending her marriage to Othello to her father and the duke. In the next scene, when Iago and Roderigo are plotting, K.T. looked at me and asked, "Could it look any more like they're reading from teleprompters?" I actually winced during a feast scene where Desdemona was dancing because the poor girl had no grace at all.

At about the half-hour mark, we came to a love scene between Othello and Desdemona, and the camera zoomed in on Othello dramatically taking off his belt. No, I'm serious. It was definitely the most dramatic belt-removal I've ever witnessed. And between Othello's scowl and Desdemona's slightly worried look, you'd have thought he was going to beat her with the belt instead of make love to her.

By this time, we were laughing too hard to hear the too-quiet dialogue over the too-loud score. We gave up and turned it off. It was terrible. Alas, alack, and alay. They should've let Branagh direct it - it could've been so good, if only the actors had been allowed to rehearse their lines a little, if only the technical production hadn't said, "It doesn't matter if no one can hear the dialogue; no one understands it anyway."

I was upset. I'd been looking forward to watching this movie...

So we watched The Three Musketeers instead, which at least doesn't try to take itself very seriously, and as a bonus has some very nice eye-candy.

I was just about to leave work yesterday when I got a phone message. Assuming it was Karen telling me I had e-mail, I checked the message on my way out the door.

It was from someone named "Drew Randall" and he said, "Gotcha! Found your site while randomly searching the net. Love the spider costume. Chet looks like a stoned pimp in that 70's pic."

I had no idea who Drew Randall was. None at all. Someone who knew my dad, maybe? I had no way of knowing. When I got home, I checked the rather extensive collection of information I get about anyone who uses my contact page to send me a phone message, and discovered that it was someone from within my own company - but since my company employes literally millions of people, and the referal information only indicated a proxy server which is used by some thousands, that didn't really help much.

This morning, I came in to e-mail from my co-worker in the office next to mine. He'd apparently been looking for reviews on a local restaurant and for some reason my site had come up in the top ten listings. He'd recognized my name in the URL and gone to take a look. (Why he used an alias on the name, I'm not sure. Just to be funny, maybe; he's like that.)

Just another random moment of my life...

Finally, I got the webpage up for Dawn and Dusk. I'm not 100% happy with the pictures... Dusk is supposed to be smiling slightly, and instead he looks irritable; and while the pose for Dawn is perfect, the hair is a little too yellow (which I can probably fix) and the face is a little too young (which is more problematic). But I'm not 100% happy with the pictures I have for anyone else, either. Since I can't draw them myself, I just have to live with "close enough."

Session tonight, to pick up where the cliffhanger Tuesday night left off... I'm not sure how it's going to go, but I guess we'll see... And I'm quite certain it will spill over to Friday night, so we can pick up with Karen, too. At least I won't have to complain about being bored!

--Liz