There I was, tapping out a post for today (The gist of which was, Holy crap, Casino Royale is unbelievably great, so for God's sake, go see it!), when a window abruptly popped up telling me that Firefox had detected a bug in the system, and was shutting down.
(By the way, although Firefox is my server of my choice, and I'm pretty happy with it, every time I see the name, I visualize Clint Eastwood stealing a Soviet plane. I'm not the only one that does this, am I?)
So they system shut down so fast, I didn't even have time to save my post as a draft. Perhaps this is a good thing. After all, I just went on and on at great length about James Bond movies yesterday, so perhaps it was fate saving all of you reading this from a second day of the same thing. Hey, at least it spares you two days of Star Wars references!
I was tempted to use this as an excuse to write another anti-technology screed, to point out that when the world is wired, we are all hanging by a wire, and that sort of thing. But I've sung that song before, and like poor Del Shannon being forced to sing Runaway for the umpteenth time, I'm frankly bored with it.
(Another totally off-topic parenthetical aside here: It's long been my opinion that Del Shannon possessed the greatest voice in rock and roll history, and knowing that his life would end with a never explained suicide makes much of his material unbelievably poignant. If you can find a copy of his Tom Petty-produced album Drop Down And Get Me, by all means buy it.)
Instead, I'll just observe how, in modern movies, technology is always benign. Computers never crash, cellphones never drop, everything always works perfectly. Presumably this is a combination of lazy screenwriting and the fact that product placement would never allow the sponsor's handiwork to be shown in a negative light.
(Oh look, more parentheses! Just thought now seemed like a good time to point out that, for a James Bond picture, Casino Royale remarkably light on product placement, and in at least one case, technology gets Bond in trouble. This almost seems progressive.)
By now, it's pretty obvious that this post is just a placeholder, a grab-bag of jumbled ideas that don't really add up to a lot, desperately spiced up with the gimmick of interrupting the main flow of the thing with whole paragraphs of random observations set off by parentheses. Seems kind of lazy, I know, but what do you want on a Saturday morning?
