The Folk Singing Pier September 12, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Family is a strange thing. Because I was the youngest, I never really paid attention to who was related to whom, their kids, their parents, and all that. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve paid closer attention to those types of things. And this past weekend, while spending time up in Gloucester, Massachussetts for my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah, I got to see dozens of relatives I had almost forgotten. At one point we went to take a family photo on a pier, but there were so many of us, we had trouble all fitting into the photo. It was an interesting reception too. I’ve never been to one where they played Irish folk songs and had beer and wine sitting inside boats (yes, real boats) filled with ice. It’s a strange kind of comraderie you feel with family, especially an extended one, and one which I had seldom known until now. When you’re in a crowded room and you realize that half the people there have a common ancestor, it’s quite profound. As I said to my father in the crowded photo, our family is quite fertile.

I found this Alien spoof from Solar Flare called Alien 5 Squared. Think action figures from all your favorite science fiction films as puppets in this silly adventure. The sets are very well done. No cheesed sets because it’s a spoof. (Notice the ice on Ripley’s cryo-pod.) It’s thirty minutes long. I haven’t watched the entire film yet, but I can’t wait to.

Strange Horizons has online a list of the Ten Stupidest Utopias, written by Jeremy Adam Smith. While I don’t agree with all of his deconstructions, it’s an interesting read, and just goes to show that the quest for a better society is not something new to our age, nor will it dwindle in the years to come. Let’s just hope that we can keep learning from our mistakes.

And in another one of those weird coincidences, I saw a girl on the subway reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which I had been thinking about just ten minutes before because I had seen the first few minutes of a film called Instinct which was “suggested” by the novel. My theory of why these two events coincided: a) The girl may have seen the film on television, liked it so much she went out and purchased the book (having remembered the title from the opening credits). b) I saw the first ten minutes of the movie, having already read the book. The movie intrigued me and I added it to my Netflix queue. But it arrived damaged and I had been thinking about it on the way to the subway. So the seemingly disconnected events were actually connected by the common factor of the movie playing on TV. Or c) Matt has lost his mind, rambles on aimlessly about pointless things, and cannot connect two dots if you gave him a pencil and a ruler. d) None of the above. e) Skip the g**damn movie, and go read the book.