It was a busy weekend with the tireless Harald that left me tired enough to sleep for 12 hours. I had a lot of interesting dreams, and when I woke up, the front panel of the CD tray on my stereo had been ripped off.

After seeing Kill Bill Vol. 1 as the final element of a day full of media that as well as movies included museums and live music, I of course immediately wanted to be a deadly viper assassin and master the Japanese steel. I'm very susceptible to these feelings and they usually fade within a day or so, but I realized this time that movies like this can be useful for a more general inspiration. Whether or not the film shows it, becoming as skilled and versatile as someone like the Bride or pretty much every other character in Kill Bill requires a huge amount of disciplined training. A lot of my interests require similar discipline, like the rare word dictionary or my own study of Japanese, and some other ones. Now 'discipline' has gotten some negative connotations of submitting to the man and all that, so perhaps I should find a different word, because this is not motivated by a desire to please superiors or measure up to the masses, the whole challenge is that I must motivate myself so that, perhaps in the distant future, I'll be prepared for whatever comes up. In other words, as my boss likes to say, I'll be dangerous.

For me certain movies are very inspiring toward this end; even if they don't explicitly show the preparation the characters have gone through, they do a good job of showing it implicitly. Some other movies have the opposite effect, showing that spending so much of life in preparation for something that may never come isn't worthwhile, and instead one should just have fun and let things happen, and one might even be better off unprepared in some cases, having an open mind going into it. I agree with this side of it to some extent, in that I'm not going to spend my whole life focusing on just one area, or even on one profession, I don't think. But since I generally enjoy my projects, I don't think I'm sacrificing much. Since I don't know how to have fun the way most people do anyway, the alternative for me would likely be doing nothing much at all (which some might argue has its own virtues, but I think I would tire of).

Going through my currently pitiable DVD and VHS collections, some of the movies that inspire focus in me are: "Ronin", "Grosse Pointe Blank", "Rushmore" and "Zero Effect." Curiously, I just realized that all four of these also contain the theme of love overcoming focus and objectivity in the end. Some movies that are more detrimental are "The Big Lebowski," "The Matrix" (who needs discipline when you can instantaneously beam knowledge into your brain, and it's all about destiny?), "Pi" (showing it only leads to madness), and "The Cruise." So I think I'll from now on watch the inspiring movies more frequently (something which itself doesn't require much discipline, since I enjoy them so much), and acquire more DVDs on this pretense.

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It appears even when the first episode of the season is in November, the writers of the Simpsons can no longer do any better than to steal ideas from "Family Guy." The first third of this year's Halloween episode was a pretty good double of episode 13 of Family Guy, in which Death (hilariously voiced by Norm McDonald) gets injured while trying to take Peter, and after showng the world that no one can die and causing chaos, Peter has to fill in for Death. The ending differed, but that's about it. Since the rest of the Halloween show was somewhat amusing, I suppose I can forgive, but be aware Simpsons makers, there are actually other animated shows!