Al knows it's hot too!

This week has been hot. Really damned hot, even inside. If that wasn't enough, the power went out Tuesday evening and was out most of the next day.

My intention was to write more about what's been going on since I arrived, but unfortunately, either the power's been out or it's just been too hot to go near the computer.

Last night, in an attempt to hide from the heat a bit, I saw the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It was pretty interesting, but I thought that they could have done better. For one thing it was a bit too long, IMHO. And a lot of that time was spent in some kind of profile shot of Al workin' his Mac assembling the presentation he was giving during the movie. There were also some cut-away portions where Al tried to be more sympathetic to the audience, but I didn't feel that it really worked. He had the material and he was a capable speaker, so I think it took a lot away from his presentation when we're not only offered such obvious "connect with me now, plebs" moments, but forced to sit thought them when we could otherwise be relieving ourselves of the "one sip too many," if you know what I mean.

The other big problem I had with the film was that it was obviously originally a presentation designed to be given to relatively small groups with something in common. Using the scenes in the movie as a guide, it appeared that his audience were generally international student bodies and gala (maybe charity?) events. Because of that, I didn't feel the message really translated as well to the big screen as it could have. Don't get me wrong, the presentation was good and easy to follow, and could even be very informative to some, I'm sure, but in the end, I didn't feel that individual audience members (who don't have an opportunity for Q&A and whose situations may all be very different) were really left with anything they could take away and act on immediately to relieve some of the serious concerns presented in the film.

Other than that, I thought it was pretty good. And I'm glad that somebody told me that it's hot out there, otherwise I may never have known :) Seriously though, it's makes a nice 100 minutes of over-powered air conditioning if you want to escape the mean streets for a bit.

Oh, if you were wondering about the picture of Pam, that was from last year when it was slightly cooler outside and I thought she looked pretty cool herself in the picture. Also, she and her fiancee are away this week so it's so lonely (*pout, pout*), although tomorrow should be relatively busy for me... but that will be mostly running around in the heat. I suppose you could say that it doesn't really have anything to do with this entry (you'd be right, of course), but then I'd just be forced to respond with, "get over it." By the way, it's almost 21:00 and it's still too damned hot!