a day like most days, only moreso, somehow

After eating brunch with Alice at the local Indian buffet, which was simultaneously hosting a large party of Russian-Americans, we came back home and watched Set It Off for the first time in a decade (not bad, but shall we say A Bit Melodramatically Stacked...but it certainly demonstrated that Dana "Queen Latifah" Owens could act), then watched the Libertarian Party nominate Bob Barr on C-SPAN, which might or might not cheer Barack Obama's people (while Mary Ruart got to be the Hillary Clinton of the LP); I mowed the lawn, and came back in to watch the (formerly Discovery) Science Channel's barely augmented simulcast of the NASA Channel's feed of the Phoenix landing, while flipping over to National Geographic Channel for Naked Science repeats on planetary astronomy matters from time to time. Seems an oddly cosmopolitan/wired day, though I haven't yet found out which LP candidate got the Veep nom.

Even without thinking about how my high school friendly acquaintance Jared Sanford's film Viva has been picked up for national distribution a year or so after its completion (it's actually more fully the baby of Jared's usual collaborator over the last decade or so, Anna Biller, mildly famous for very colorful and over the top productions of varying lengths), and wondering if the pickup was sparked by CBS's picking up the dramatic hour Swingtown, set in the same time and with an apparently not altogether different attitude (both about the suburban sexual loosening of the 1970s in the US)...and what, if anything, made these two events likely...the "key party" episode of Journeyman? The imminence of the US version of Life on Mars (an arguable 1970s time-travel drama, at least in its UK original playing on BBC America)? An attempt on following up on the contemporary Little Children and Shortbus with something harkening back to The Ice Storm, or someone noting that That '70s Show was over?

Or maybe I'm just croggled that, for example, my three best friends from my years in New Hampshire can all be traced online...two are varying sorts of engineer, albeit one is more visible through an incidental mention of trying to sell his house in Massachusetts, in a New York Times real estate section article, and through his beer reviews (the other is a partner in engineering firm), and one has had some troubles coping with homosexuality and its implications and is now a counselor trying to help people stop being gay (heavy implications all around). I remember as one of our best times as doing a reading of Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Meteor together (in translation, we weren't quite that impressive at 13), for no particular reason other than I happened to have a copy with me (I also read Gregory Benford's "In Alien Flesh" that morning while waiting for the others to wake up, on that sleepover in August, 1978, since the story was in the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and surely that put an odd spin on the day already). Whereas my next set of friendly acquaintances from those years are utterly invisible on the web. It's an odd old world...in this new world.