{"id":10205,"date":"2013-03-11T23:15:41","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T03:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10205"},"modified":"2013-03-11T23:15:41","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T03:15:41","slug":"a-different-class-of-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10205","title":{"rendered":"A different class of Monday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/8547058882\/in\/photostream\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8111\/8547058882_dc10717546.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I met my parents in the city for dinner this evening. Which is good, because my work computer decided to install nine updates right when I was shutting down for the evening, and if I hadn&#8217;t stayed in Manhattan, I would have missed my train anyway. <\/p>\n<p>We just met for a quick bite at a diner not too far from my office. My mother is taking a course for a few weeks, so it&#8217;s altogether possible I&#8217;ll meet up with her for dinner regularly while that&#8217;s going on. <\/p>\n<p>My father and I thought we&#8217;d maybe spend the hour-plus at the nearby <a href=\"http:\/\/www.discoverytsx.com\/exhibitions\/harry-potter\">Harry Potter Exhibit<\/a> in Times Square, but it seemed <i>really<\/i> over-priced for what it is &#8212; a very crowded, not terribly informative, tour past a bunch of replicas. I&#8217;m a fan of the books and the movies, for the most part, but even if every single one was a real, honest-to-goodness, held-by-Daniel-Radcliffe prop, that&#8217;s not really the sort of thing that&#8217;s every really much interested me. I just caught a slightly later train home.<\/p>\n<p>I wish I could say I spent the evening much more productively, but I mostly just stumbled into re-watching <i>Seven<\/i> (or <i>Se7en<\/i>, I suppose) on cable. It&#8217;s not a perfect movie, but it&#8217;s elevated so far above what it probably ought to have been by some very good acting, direction, and cinematography. I&#8217;m not suggesting that Andrew Kevin Walker&#8217;s doesn&#8217;t deserve some of the credit&#8230;even if the rest of his short resume so far isn&#8217;t <i>hugely<\/i> impressive. But it&#8217;s so easy to see how this movie could have gone differently if it hadn&#8217;t been so well cast and so well shot. Again, it&#8217;s not perfect, and sometimes I think it&#8217;s grisly just for the sake of being shocking. (But, then again, it&#8217;s maybe also a little more visceral and alive than some of David Fincher&#8217;s more recent work. Maybe.) But it does so much so well, and none of it should really work, that you just realize that some movies are just a weird kind of alchemy.<\/p>\n<p>So that plus work, lots and lots of work, was pretty much my Monday. I also finally finished reading <i>The Anubis Gates<\/i> by Tim Powers, which was a lot of fun. Yep, that was a Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I met my parents in the city for dinner this evening. Which is good, because my work computer decided to install nine updates right when I was shutting down for the evening, and if I hadn&#8217;t stayed in Manhattan, I would have missed my train anyway. We just met for a quick bite at a &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10205\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,14,28],"class_list":["post-10205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-movies","tag-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10207,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10205\/revisions\/10207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}