Today, I accidentally happened on the existence of the movie The Darjeeling Limited. I suppose I’m something of a Wes Anderson fan, so I decided to look it up on Cinemaclock and see when it is playing.

Cinemaclock’s ratings come from users. This is a profoundly interesting thing, because the numbers that are attached with the film are granted a different kind of objectivity from the normal work of film critics. For example, it seems that Resident Evil: Extinction is a more highly rated movie than The Darjeeling Limited. In a more general sense, this number reflects the gut response of people who went to see the movie, filtered by the attitudes of the people who are likely to write about it.

The ratings are helpfully broken down by age group and gender, which provides some insight: the best ratings for Resident Evil come from the 13-17 age group, followed by the 18-25, and the reviews sink to a 6.something by the time it reaches the 50+ point. There are also written reviews along with the rating, and more information about the responding demographic can be gleaned from them. The Resident Evil reviews are generally sparsely punctuated and poorly spelled, and glowing for very specific reasons: it has zombies, it’s set in a desert, the lead girl is hot.

Now, Darjeeling has considerably fewer reviewers. The ratings start off in the 8.somethings at 18-25 (no reviews from younger viewers) and fall over the precipice into the 4-5 as soon as we leave the 26-35 range. The reviews here tend to form complete sentences but are still surprisingly short on punctuation. We also see an appearance from that wonderful internet bird, The Consummate Consumer of Culture. This one is unlikely to impress a mate; his word choice is sophomoric and awkward, and demonstrates only an introductory level of connoisseurship. Interestingly, reviews from the older demographic all focussed on issues related to parenting and skimmed over the main plot.

So in terms of what to expect from the Darjeeling Limited, I’m still in the dark (except for the part of the plot revealed by one elderly reviewer talking about parenting; thanks!). Am I more likely to agree with the pretentious 18-25 year old, the Frasier-ish sounding 50+, or the worshipful and agrammatical 26-35? Judging from the nature of the poor reviews from older viewers, it is not a movie for Hermann Hesse fans, nor is it a movie for people who take depictions of bad parenting seriously. The most likely case is that the dramatic shift in reviews is due to a dialectical shift that seems to take place in one’s mid-30s. What I’d be interested in seeing is whether this shift is tied to having children or to some significant generation gap between the boomers and the gen-xers.

Oh, I guess I’m interested in seeing the movie, too.

Well, I finally got around to it. Here’s the new theme for the blog. In the spirit of the design of the main page, which still needs to be updated, it’s primarily typographical. Man, yesterday was productive.

First of all, this isn’t breaking my partial reading fast. It can’t be complete because of the text-based nature of work, and the internet keeps imposing with its important, time-critical emails. But other than these couple of things, I’ve been doing pretty well.

Tonight was thanksgiving dinner for my sister and I and at least 10 friends. We had a big turkey, plenty of mashed potatoes, cabbage rolls, a big pot of borscht, alcohol and more. It was an absolute blast. I haven’t enjoyed myself that much in quite a while.

When Regan and I returned, it didn’t feel like the night was quite over. We were still too wound up to call it quits, so we gathered beverages (water and orange juice) and headed towards the park/schoolyard to the north. We were there the night before as well, but this time we noticed the swings, including two of the kind with just the black rubber band seat that is capable of holding an adult bum.

Kids have it lucky. They have it tremendously lucky. First of all, swings are a surprisingly good form of exercise. After about an hour on the swings, I can fairly say that my abs and quads have not been worked that hard in a while. My biceps are, of course, too macho to complain. I’m sure they’ll do it tomorrow under the guise of bragging about how hard they worked.

Second of all, swings feel great. There’s just enough constant acceleration to keep a mild flow of adrenaline, and just a touch of a speed rush as you pass the ground. It’s tremendous, and almost feels like evidence that, at one point in its not so distant evolutionary past, humanity brachiated.

It also resurrects feelings and memories that you’d swear had died away for good, like that little bit of exhilaration when you get going high enough for the seat to start to fall away under your bum, the stutter in your faith in the integrity of the swings when you first feel the bar jiggle under your mighty arcs…

So why did we all stop? It was the point when we stopped wanting to play physical games and started wanting to be adults, and we made a game of the joyless, grinding workday that our parents lived through while we went on, largely oblivious. This turned into the little primate dramas of junior high school and into the more sophisticated tribal dramas of high school and then modern life. The swings and what they represent were lost, folded in with all of the other puerile, childish things that we left behind when we grew up and accepted subjugation.

I have one; I do not think there is any point in denying it. I check Coolhunting, Boing Boing, Achewood, Penny Arcade, Cat and Girl, Schneier on Security, Securityfocus News and Vulnerabilities, Blunt Object, and several email accounts. Really, this is dead time. Between absorbing information about kind of neat stuff and reading about issues I can have no impact whatsoever on, I probably manage to throw away an impressive amount of my day in activities that, in terms of net effect on my environment, amount to staring into empty space.

There are plenty of excuses: “But it’s interesting!” “I’m keeping my finger on the pulse of the internet!” “I’m learning lots of neat things! About silly looking Japanese toys! And cats with captions!” But really, reading articles about the latest idiotic thing the TSA has done or the latest doublespeak from some political chump does absolutely nothing to better my life.

Posting here is something different: I’m saying something, ideas and thoughts are moving out of my mind and out of my control, and by extension out of my way. This is an underused brain-purge.

To get back to my original topic: I’m announcing an experiment. Except for the email and source files required to do my work, I’m taking a week off of reading. No websites. No books. What happens to a week when I’m forced to keep away from these distractions?

Tune in next week, and see!