In the aftermath of his failed third-party candidacy of 1912, a furious Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Amos Pinchot

When I spoke of the Progressive Party as having a lunatic fringe, I specifically had you in mind.

Roger Ebert might have been thinking of this letter himself when we wrote to refute Jonathan Rozenbaum's Scenes from an Overrated Career and to defend Ingmar Bergman.

I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader’s film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York Times op-ed attack on Ingmar Bergman (“Scenes from an Overrated Career,” 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity.

Ebert is usually cheerful and unflappable, even when heaping scorn on bad movies. And I can see why: Rozenbaum's piece isn't an argument, it's a pile of mud and stones and snow splattered against the wall. Bergman must be bad because he isn't box-office. Then Bergman is bad because he's too accessible in his handling of actresses. He's too blonde and white. He's like George Cukor and John Ford. Or he's too obscure. Woody Allen liked Bergman, or vice versa. The constraints of an op ed are rigorous, but this seems entirely unfair to Bergman.

There's no point in urging Bergman to use fewer Swedish actors. Not now. What good can it do?

Roger Ebert constructs an interesting debate (technically a Fisking, but constructed as dialog) with Clive Barker on whether games can aspire to art.

Ebert is deeply skeptical of any art form in which the narrative is malleable.

Barker: "I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"?

This is walking right up to the argument I call My Friend, Hamlet: if we let allow a sane, sensible reader a modicum of free will and agency in the tragic universe, everything collapses. Everyone knows what Romeo and Juliet need: someone needs to have an urgent, frank talk with their mothers. Everyone knows what Hamlet needs: he needs to get drunk, he needs to get laid, and he needs to go back to school. He's supposed to be in school, time is on his side, and it will all work out splendidly in a few years. Everyone knows this: no one can say it.

A cautionary note appears, however, when Ebert starts talking about alternative Shakespeare and different endings. It can be done, and it's not necessarily tasteless: Jakob Gordin's Konig Lir is an ornament of the early Yiddish theater and a play of immense influence, and it seems to me that for Arthur Miller and David Mamet and Tony Kushner, you're looking back more to Gordin than to Shakespeare.

There's plenty of range available for wonderful art in which some aspects of narrative and presentation are malleable. Malleability, after all, is what performance offers us. But the particular range of malleability that games offer us seems strangely limited.

A very interesting work in this vein which I haven't yet had time to see properly is the new hypervideo, HBO Voyeur.

The only 21st century film in AFI's list of the top 100 films of all time is, curiously, The Fellowship of the Ring. But I can live with that.

Ebert is in top form with his commentary on the list. He doesn't think highly of lists, but having savaged the idea when the first list appeared in 1998, Ebert argues that perhaps the list will lead some people to watch better movies, and that would be a fine thing indeed. He writes:

During a Google search for "age of average moviegoer," I came across a column by critic T.C. Candler that opened with this quote:

"I have here a heartfelt message from a reader who urges me not to be so hard on stupid films, because they are 'plenty smart enough for the average moviegoer.' Yes, but one hopes being an average moviegoer is not the end of the road: that one starts as a below-average filmgoer, passes through average, and, guided by the labors of America's hardworking film critics, arrives in triumph at above-average."

Candler was quoting me, and I cannot agree more.

Rating movies is silly but it's also good fun. I don’t write much about the movies I see (see left column of the main page), but it's nice to offer a quick opinion.

Weblogs need a different rating scale from that used by newspaper critics. The newspaper is going to review everything that gets released, and so the critic is going to watch a lot of obscure and idiotic movies you’ll never see. When planning your own viewing, you have time to be selective — and you’re not likely to watch nearly as many films as, say, Roger Ebert.

Here's my current thinking:

• Great: one of the best movies ever made
  • Apocalypse Now, Some Like It Hot
• One of the very best movies of its kind ever made, or a nearly great movie
  • Mullholland Drive, Tootsie
• A fine movie, well worth seeing, or an essential movie for people who are interested in this kind of movie.
  • Run Silent, Run Deep; Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Blog categories fall apart because they’re incidental. A post doesn’t exist in order to be categorized.

In the heat of the moment, we forget to put some posts in the right category. We forget to put some posts in any category at all. We can't decide which categories to choose — and so everything ends up turning miscellaneous.

Or, we say, "I'll sort these out later.” We all know how that turns out!

The answer, I think, is simple:

• let the blog do a lot of the categorizing for you
• make it easy to remind yourself what you want to revisit
• avoid premature commitment

Scott Johnson is doing something similar for photography at Ookles. Nobody is as thorough about labeling and tagging their snapshots as they ought to be. But Ookles can deploy some good state-of-the-art face recognition: it can tell that this is a picture of Suzy and that's a picture of Terrence. So, it goes ahead and tags things for you. (And, I'm sure, there will be some handy way to tell it that, 'No, that's not Suzy, it's her long lost twin sister Suw! Who knew?!')

Tinderbox 3.6 introduces sets, which make it really easy to let agents assign things to categories for you. Agents search for notes that meet some criteria, such as "notes that are inside my archives, published in the last three years, and that mention Roger Ebert, David Mamet, or Louis Menand". Now, we can let agents automatically add and remove tags:

Topic=$Topic+"Critics"+"Literature"-"Dull"

Adornments and containers can add and remove tags, too. Put something there, and it automatically gets metadata. Your pile of finished tasks can automatically add Complete and remove ToDo from the note's tags.

All this extends Tinderbox's role as a spreadsheet of ideas, and makes it much easier to keep categories alive and reasonable consistent. There will always be edge cases: this post mentions Mamet but it's not really about the theater, just as Suw isn’t really Suzy but merely looks like her. But getting things roughly right is much better than giving up.

I expect this is especially important for high-volume pro bloggers. Good, focussed categories are good ad targets, so they should be good revenue enhancers. But you don't have a stable of tame indexers categorizing every bit of gossip of about The Valley or the next Apple gizmo! If an occasional post is indexed somewhat fancifully, the readers and advertisers will soon forgive you. But everyone has archives, and we all should use our archives to greater effect.

Roger Ebert's annotated list of Four Star Movies of 2006 is out.

• Akeelah and the Bee
• Army of Shadows
• Bubble
• The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
• 49 Up
• An Inconvenient Truth
• L'Enfant
• Man Push Cart
• Marie Antonette
• Overlord
• A Prairie Home Companion
• The Proposition
• The Queen
• Three Times
• Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
• Tsotsi
• United 93
• Volver

I've seen only one: Bubble. A few more are in my queue, and after reading Ebert I've added some more.

It's a problem, though. I work until 7 or 8 (that's 19:00 or 20:00 for those of you who are following along at home in Europe). Cooking dinner takes an hour or two. Weeknights, there's not much time for a movie.

So far this year (see left), I've seen 40 movies. That's not enough to keep in touch with all the great new art that is appearing, much less make inroads into the lists of films I ought to have seen. This will, I think, require a deliberate effort and some planning.

Ebert didn't much like The Sisters. I see his point. Even watching the film unfold in the setting of the contemporary faculty club, you feel chill wind of the steppes. These are Russians, transplanted to New York.

But never mind that: this is a wonderful workshop piece, a chance for a bunch of superb actors to their stuff. Lots of range, lots of depth, and tons of acting against the grain. It's like coming early to a ballgame to watch batting practice. Some wonderful readings, and fine writing.

What a wonderful dramatic experience! You've got to see Linklater's Before Sunset. But first, of course, you have to see Before Sunrise. And I think you've got to wait a while -- weeks, at least, perhaps a few years -- before you see Before Sunset.

Buffy and Babylon 5 naturally unfold over the course of years. Both get great power from the way the characters age, and even more power from the the gradual unfolding of narrative over a long span of time. But Linklater's doing something else here: resuming a discussion ten years later, a smart discussion among smart, interesting, and plausible people within a sentimental framework that they choose themselves while simultaneously refusing to indulge in sentiment.

Talking about Art with composer Michael Druzinsky a while ago, I was saying nice things about My Dinner with André and he pointed out that the flaw is simply André: it's a great film about a conversation, but the conversation in the film is really not everything you might wish. Julie Delpy's Celine is perfect, not only because she gets the character exactly right through long, long shots, but because she's talking about difficult, everyday things with realistic insight and intelligence.

Ebert: 'Before Sunset' is a remarkable achievement in several ways, most obviously in its technical skill. It is not easy to shoot a take that is six or seven minutes long, not easy for actors to walk through a real city while dealing with dialogue that has been scripted but must sound natural and spontaneous. Yet we accept, almost at once, that this conversation is really happening. There's no sense of contrivance or technical difficulty.

Roger Ebert writes:

In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

A compendium of Roger Ebert's writing on Robert Altman. Cool.

Ebert's colleague Jim Emerson offers a list of 101 102 films people really should see. Lists are pernicious, but the underlying idea of an informal canon or curriculum makes sense. And it's important to see, as well, that it's a big canon -- big enough that Emerson forgot Apocalypse Now! and had to expand the list. (People seem to be having fun with the 'how many have you seen' meme: my rough count is 77)

People who want to disparage weblogs like to say that they're full of dull trivia. "I ate a cheese sandwich."

Let's take a look at the craft of the weblog, by looking at the craft of that cheese sandwich. How can the cheese sandwich matter? How can it be interesting?

First, it might be an excellent cheese sandwich. I had a very fine bleu cheese the other night at AOC, a mild and creamy bleu from a small farmhouse cheese maker in Minnesota, served with a nicely fresh and crusty baguette. Food blogging has been immensely successful and influential. We're in the midst of a food writing revolution, a new way of thinking about food, and blogs and other forums are leading the way.

Second, eating a cheese sandwich might be a notable accomplishment. After a long convalescence from surgery, I actually ate a cheese sandwich. Or, the cheese sandwich might affirm or reject a longstanding habit or prejudice: though you all know that on moral grounds I have always despised all meat and dairy products, yesterday -- defying my physician, my ancestors, and sneering at hell's bells -- I ate a cheese sandwich.

The cheese sandwich may be the conventional occasion for an extraordinary event. Yesterday, I was eating my usual cheese sandwich and Roger Ebert came into the sandwich shop and sat across from me and we had a long talk about Pauline Kael.

The cheese sandwich may be a symbol or emblem, standing concretely for an abstraction. This need not be a grand or remote literary effect; indeed, much food writing is not precisely about food at all, but rather uses the food and our feelings about it to approach even deeper subjects in ways that, if addressed directly, might seem merely sentimental.

sad thoughts on the love that got away on the plate that time forgot -- Adam Gopnik

The cheese sandwich might identify a place and time, situating a story specifically in order to help us believe. The Sunday bagel and cream cheese in the Bronx, or the elaborately-garnished, thin slices of seven-grain organic bread and imported low-fat Havarti wolfed down at a desk in Hollywood, can matter beyond the bread and cheese.

The summary of Ebert's review of Final Destination 3 - concludes that the film is

Relentless, formulaic, nihilistic, but the filmmakers have an affective visual style....

Odds are, this is just a blunder, but an "affective visual style" is not inconceivable and might be a clever and funny shorthand for what Ebert says in his review.

Robert McLachlan, do an especially good job of evoking a creepy sense of menace on a carnival midway. Has there ever been a carnival midway in a movie that didn't look like a sadomasochistic nightmare? The rides look fatal, the sideshows look like portals to hell...

This is probably just an editorial enormity but it might be a clever coup. It's hard to know.

There are two trucks parked outside the hotel from a company that provides a mobile espresso bar for film, television, and commercial shooting.

Next time someone tells you that computer games are bigger than the movies, think about this. How many people make a living from catering to game designers?

(Another clue: you can probably name 50 or 100 people, off the top of your head, who live off movies. Try it. Lauren Bacall. Alyson Hannigan. Deborah Winger. Stephen Spielberg. Roger Ebert. Leonard Nimoy. Joss Whedon. I don't really know anything about movies; you can do this standing on your head. Now, name 100 people in computer games. Name ten. )

Jason Kottke has an interesting metareview of Syriana, examining Roger Ebert's speculation that Syriana is a "hyperlink movie".

Today's instalment in Ebert's Great Movies is My Fair Lady, and he is in fine form.

It is unnecessary to summarize the plot or list the songs; if you are not familiar with both, you are culturally illiterate, although in six months I could pass you off as a critic at Cannes, or even a clerk in a good video store, which requires better taste.

And, deliciously,

That Hepburn did not do her own singing obscures her triumph, which is that she did her own acting.

My Netflix queue has 45 things in it; last year around this time, it had 49.

The queue is a great idea. I can add movies to the queue whenever I read about a movie and decide I want to see it. Often, I'll read about it before it's released on DVD; the queue will remember.

The problem is, simply, that it would take 18 months for me to exhaust the queue. In practice, movies show up in the mail of which I've never heard. Today, it was Tully. What's this? Ebert liked it; maybe that's how it wound up on the list. Beats me.

A better solution would be to make a note about why I'm adding the movie. "Ebert liked it", or "Jennifer Jason Leigh", or "early Altman". I could put the note in Netflix, if they added the feature. Or I could just write it in my Tinderbox daybook.

Does Netflix have an API? It might be handy if we could write a Tinderbox macro that would let you request a movie from Tinderbox.

Connecting to web services is one of the things we've been learning to do better as part of Flint -- the new Tinderbox weblog assistant. Flint is currently in thrill-seeker's release; one user just wrote to say that 'Flint is absolutely brilliant! I didn't actually get much sleep last night, as I was plugging away and experimenting with it 'til the sun came up.'

Has anyone mentioned that Me and You and Everyone We Know is perhaps the first feature film to be about the digital art world? (Ebert)

It's about a lot of things -- movies about art always are -- but you can read this complex (and fine) film as an extended discussion of digital media and its discontents. We've got a curator, of course, and a video artist. The video artist, Christine, is played by Miranda July, the film's writer and director. We've got chat rooms (done much better here than in Closer) where people describe what they want, although it turns out that the 7-year-old isn't the only participant in the chat who has no idea what he's talking about. We've got disintermediation, including hamburger wrappers in art installation. We've got re-mediation in spades, ranging from lewd suggestions pasted in the window to a framed bird portrait hidden in a tree to a portrait of me and you and everyone we know, executed in periods and semi-colons.

I find that Roger Ebert usually dashes straight to the crucial point of a film, but I think perhaps he's slightly astray with Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love. It's a very good movie -- I think everyone agrees with that. And Ebert is exactly right about the pacing:

The movie is sweet and languid when the girls are together... Pawel Pawlikowski, the director and co-writer (with Michael Wynne), wisely allows then time to seem to flow, instead of pushing it.

And he's right that, despite appearances, this is not about anyone's discovery of sexual identity.

The title of 'My Summer of Love' gives away two games at once: That she will fall in love, and that autumn will come.

This is not the story of two girls in love, and it's not Fucking Amål, and it seems incidental that the two girls are two girls.

But it's not: you couldn't remake it as boy meets girl, the way you could make a straight It Happened On Night, or a gay Some Like It Hot. This is a story that only works the way it's told; what seems incidental is unexpectedly essential.

Ebert's review sets up the expectation that it's all about the ending. It is, yes, and yet it isn't: there isn't a real twist. Not only has everything in the denoument has been established, it's been so well established that the surprise isn't surprising until the story over and you realize how that wasn't what you expected but it's what you should have expected.

Lazy managers (and the consultants who abet them) would like to believe that information overload creates a dire threat -- that too much information leads to bad decisions. Even in casual decision-making, abundant information leads to so much improvement that it's going to transform the way we all spend time and think about art.

When I started, almost five years ago, to jot down the movies I've seen in the margins of this page, I thought it might be nice to distinguish the movies I liked from those I didn't. At the time, I expected a simple scale would work:

A "really good" movie might be Apocalypse Now or Casablanca or Buffy Season 3 -- a movie that you're likely to want to see many times, a movie that obviously changes the way you look at movies. In some years, no new movie is "really good" -- but because we've got many years of backlog, it's still a useful category. A "good" movie would then be one of the best movies that appear in a year. A bad movie eats time; a movie that is worse is pernicious.

This scale worked then; it doesn't work now. I've seen seven consecutive "good" movies. How can this be?

In 2000, I patronized a pokey neighborhood rental store and asked the clerk with the purple hair what she liked. I browsed the shelves and read the ad copy. Friends sometimes mentioned a movie.

In 2005, I've got a Netflix list a mile long, I've got IMDB and Ebert on the Web, and I've got plenty of weblogs (and readers of this page) to advise me. I see roughly the same number of movies -- this is a down year, but that's just a side-effect of Tinderbox for Windows -- but I'm much less likely to see a movie that's going to be really bad. The result is that there's almost no useful information in the ratings.

The Guide Michelin started out as tech doc for motorists, including whether the food at various roadside places was worth a stop, or even worth going a little further down the road if you could spare the time. All the 'good' movies are worth an hour or two, and if I've got a lot of 'good' movies in a row, well, it makes the long Fall evenings a little warmer.

Does having Ebert on tap -- even though he writes in Chicago and I live in Boston -- make my decisions worse? Of course not. Does it hurt to have a complete run of The New Yorker film reviews on DVD? Nope. Does IMDB make me more, or less, likely to add a good movie to the list? Sure, I can waste time trying to choose a movie to watch; we can always find ways to complain about opportunities to waste time.

The managerial fantasy that hard work and thorough study are inferior to intuition and innate character is silly.

Roger Ebert is right when we reports that the atmosphere and language of David Auburn's Proof is exactly right, that when a professor delivers a eulogy he speaks precisely as professors on such occasions do, and that when a theoretical physicist flirts at a mathematician's wake, he speaks and drinks the way theoretical physicists do.

What's odd, though, and what seems not to have been much discussed, is that Proof can't really be about the discovery of a great proof. The proof is obviously a stand-in for a play, or perhaps a novel: we're not talking about mathematicians here, but writers.

We know this because, in this play (and now in this very fine movie), people care deeply about who created the proof but aren't much exercised about the proof itself. They care about the trappings -- publications, conferences, interviews -- that the proof could bring, but nobody seems to mention that an important new proof must open new avenues for research, new horizons for investigation. Even if the conclusion has been anticipated, the novel methods used to achieve the proof must provide many new opportunities. We should, in short, be in a terrible rush to find out what the proof lets us do today that nobody could do before.

We also have a worrisome and false note when Catherine, who claims to have written the proof and might not be deluded, expects her new lover to accept her authorship because she asserts it -- to believe her, to have faith. They're both mathematicians and they're both grownups, and faith has nothing to do with it. What evidence can we adduce? How can we prove it? A subtext here, running against a tacked-on theme of the play, is that the beautiful, emotionally-fragile, lovable and very female Catherine is really not fit to be a real mathematician: women, after all, want to be believed for their own sake, and if this unfits them for the brutal world of math and science, vive la differénce.

That said, it's pitch-perfect and place-perfect, and the film is wonderfully acted.

In the next few months, some of us may have some extra time on our hands, waiting to go home. There's lots of work to be done, but not everybody can work, and nobody can work all the time. No doubt, a lot of movies will be watched. (Are they showing movies in the Astrodome?)

Roger Ebert's second volume of great movies is a wonderful idea. This isn't a compendium of old reviews or a silly list of the best movies. Instead, we have a chance to sit with a great and experienced critic as he revisits another 100 fine movies.

That doesn't mean 100 perfect movies: simply, 100 movies he'd hate not to see at least one more time. Ebert's got fascinating taste and broad interests, so we have a mix of eras and styles. He's willing to see a flawed movie (Birth of a Nation, West Side Story) and to enjoy its virtues without overlooking -- or having the experience ruined by -- the shortcomings. From Fellini to Saturday Night Fever (which was Gene Siskel's favorite movie -- who would have thought it?) to My Neighbor Totori, Ebert finds unexpected delights everywhere. He's interested in acting here, in direction there, in cinematography, in influence.

It's a wonderful mix.

Books like this are important, too, because they help us think about how we choose to spend our time. (A few years ago, Ebert came down with salivary cancer; perhaps these volumes, in part, are a response to the way that experience made him think about spending his own time) It's easy to say, "I really ought to see the 100 greatest movies." It's actually not too hard to do, now that movies are so easy to rent. But you've got to think about it, and you've got to set aside the time, and you've got to decide to do it.

Yes, it's visually wild. Yes, it's beautiful and violent and very, very strange. And yes, I agree with Ebert when he writes that Sin City "uses nudity as if the 1970s had survived."

He captions the opening shot, "There are a million stories in Sin City, and this is several of them." That's even better than it looks, because the opening and closing scenes don't obviously cohere with the rest of the (tangled, braided, convoluted) plot.

A very interesting aspect of this fine little movie is that it's inherently a film. It's hard to see it working in any other medium, but not for the usual reasons. (Ebert } Netflix)| rotten tomatoes)

It wouldn't be hard to stage: almost all the action takes place in Vera's (Neve Campbell) New York loft apartment. But, though the story is classic Mamet territory, the dialogue isn't where things happen here. Vera is wonderful but wonderfully opaque. She doesn't say much, and nobody knows what she's thinking. Campbell's performance needs closeups, and also needs James Toback's knack of composing a shot at greater distance than you'd normally expect, isolating the character in the environment. Plus, you need the Bach. You couldn't do this onstage.

Vera's sympathetic, lovable opacity would be hard to do in prose, too. Not impossible, perhaps, but very difficult. Nobody in this story has an interior life. Well, perhaps the 69-year-old Italian media mogul whose indecent proposal is the dramatic hinge has an interior life, but nobody wants to know about it, least of all him.

The IMDB page has lots of comments, almost all idiotic. The tendency of open, electronic media to make intelligent people sound like pretentious preteens is a phenomenon that demands serious study.

On Christmas, we go with friends to the movies. For three years, we saw Lord of the Rings. This year, we saw Sideways. It's a good little movie; don't let the reviews fool you into expecting a big movie.

This year, I've seen about 29 movies. I'll probably add two more on New Years Eve. Only three seem to have been in theaters; that surprises me.

Last year, I saw 32 movies, 6 of them in theaters. In 2002, I saw 37 -- about ten of them in theaters.

• I'm going to the theater less. Partly, it's an effect of more live theater. Partly, it's probably a mix of more travel and Linda's coursework. Perhaps the kitchen renovation has something to do with it. Whatever the cause, though, if I didn't have the list, I wouldn't know I'd changed.
• I'm probably not really seeing fewer movies. The mean for three years is about 33 movies a year; as a rule of thumb, you wouldn't be surprised to see a random fluctuation from year to year of sqrt(33)=5.75.
• My Netflix Queue currently holds 49 movies. That's an 18 month backlog.

But the big question is: how many movies should I watch in a year?

On the one hand, I don't have to watch a lot of movies. I'm not a film critic, many industries affect new media at least as significantly as Hollywood. Watching film takes time.

On the other hand, there's lots of great film, and it's good to know what's going on in the world. Take Ebert's 100 Great Films: I bet I've seen fewer than half. And some of those I saw many years ago.

How many films did you see this year? How many should you want to see next year?

Response: Susan Mernit.

Today, I watched "I Capture The Castle" (Ebert), which is probably the worst movie I've seen in months.

It's a very good movie.

I think that's interesting. I was looking at my recent movie notes (bottom of the left column), and said to myself, "Mark, you're getting very generous!" But, when you come right down to it, these are good movies.

It seems I've seen about 24 movies this year -- I'm counting TV serial seasons as a single movie here. Some, I think, have been memorably great. Some have merely been very, very good. And when the worst movies you can point to all year are Auto Focus and Harry Potter, well, that's not so bad.

The impact of videos, of course, makes a big difference. Netflix, too, has mattered by reducing the impact of not having a good rental place. The Netflix queue is a valuable way to plan and prioritize your viewing intelligently; I watch fewer action-films-of-the-moment these days, because there are so many interesting films waiting in the queue.

At current rates, I've got over a year of film viewing already in my queue. Oh dear.

The first page of the Globe today has a story about a huge puzzle that Google posted in the Harvard Square subway station.

{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com

Also puzzling me yesterday was email, telling me that Netflix had just dispatched Laurel Canyon to me. "What," I wondered, "is Laurel Canyon? " I checked IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and read Ebert's review, but I couldn't qujite fathom why I wanted to see it. Then, serendipitiously, I found the answer on Flickwerk.

What a sweet little movie by Lisa Cholodenko. It is a movie about living your life, not allowing yourself to be tied down by the rules of family-expectation, career-requirements, childhood-wrongs etc. etc.... Laurel Canyon is slow and heavy and giggly like a late summer afternoon spent smoking pot by the pool, listening to guitar-pop with semi-deep lyrics.

When I decide to act on a movie suggestion, I put the movie right onto my Netflix list. It's another case of write it down: get the idea and the intention in concrete form, immediately. But I also need to write down the reason and context, or I won't understand why I'm doing what I'm doing.

For example, someone told me to get Terry Pratchett's Mort during Hypertext '04, but David Millard insists it was someone else entirely.

I've received six or more spam or quasi-spam ads for Mel Gibson's Passion, or tie-ins trying to leverage it. Including ads from Amazon and PalmGear .

One reason I noticed is that it's so rare to see spam that has any chance of succeeding. Almost all spam seems to advertise offers that only a fool would accept; why wouldn't spammers occasionally advertise something that you might possibly want to buy?

That's one reason the Passion spam is surprising: I probably won't see Passion, but it's not as impossible as half the spam suggestions I receive. Passion sounds too violent for me. Ebert, who liked it, writes:

The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus. This is the most violent film I have ever seen.

The experience of watching this movie sounds so unpleasant that I don't think I shall -- even though I'd like to judge for myself on the subject of the film's anti-semitism.

Still, it's not inconceivable that I'd see this movie, so it's surprising to get spam about it. Conversely, it's quite possible that people will be offended to receive ads suggesting they see it, which makes one wonder what Palm and Amazon were thinking.