p 43: “Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three feet wide… and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night… and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free.”

I’m still reading Economy, the first section of Walden. This snippet reveals an underlying theme in the book. Thoreau has a very narrow measure of what is necessary, against which he weighs everything he does: He wants to be free to do whatever he wants, and for him that does not overlap well with a paying job. He looks at every new purchase with an eye to how much this will really cost him in terms of freedom. How many hours of working for someone else, doing something he doesn’t care about, will this cost him?

As I expected, I find that Thoreau is a cranky man. Mainly, he complains about his New England neighbors. Apparently, they think life is too hard and that they must work from sun up till sun down just to survive. Thoreau sees it differently; he thinks that they are too consumerist, always wanting a bigger plasma TV, the latest model gas-guzzling SUV, and a McMansion to fill with stuff.

This is one of the things that I like about Walden; this attitude mirrors my own. I certainly have a lot more junk than Thoreau did, but I tend toward being extremely frugal. I often find work as unbearable as Thoreau did, and chafe at the need to make a living when there are so many things that I’d rather be doing (some of them are free, but some of them cost money, necessitating the job, and making me complain like Thoreau’s neighbors did). When I think of buying an item (for example, a GPS system, which tempts me mightily), I consider how much food the money would buy if I were to take on a backpacker’s lifestyle, and how I’ll probably just have to sell it eventually, when and if money gets tight. That kind of thinking puts the temptation in perspective.

I read Walden when I was quite young – I’m guessing around the age of 12 or so. I enjoyed it, and it made a big impression on me, to the extent that Thoreau was one of my heroes for quite some time. I particularly liked his ideas about individualism and his adherence to the spartan lifestyle.

My recent visit to Walden Pond has prompted me to reread the book. With age, my memory of it has faded and my impressions have changed. I have a feeling that I won’t like it very much, and that I’ll think Thoreau is a big complainer, permanently stuck in his adolescent phase. We’ll see.

I’m not into children’s movies, and this is a children’s movie. Still, Wall-E was fun, and funny. And it’s science fiction, which helped make it interesting. Still, it was a little too long.

I was completely satisfied with The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The series was one of my favorites, and the movie was like watching a really good long, fresh, episode.

When I go to movies, I usually stay until the very last credits have scrolled. This time, my patience was fully rewarded! Be sure to stay all the way until the end.

I’ve just finished reading “Mission to Africa,” the first section of Angelina Jolie’s Notes from My Travels.

In the Introduction, she writes “I don’t know how this will be as a book, how readers will find it. I am not a writer.” You can tell that; her writing style is fairly simplistic, and this is not a standard travel journal. But she still does a good job at telling her stories from her unique perspective.

Jolie seems to be much more of a “feeling” person, not so much a “thinking” person. I don’t mean this in a bad way. There’s not a lot of introspection here about how she came to be interested in humanitarian issues. There’s very little historical detail or context provided. She’s telling you what she sees and feels, in a very raw and unprocessed way. She’s really very good at conveying her feelings and her horror at events going on in the world, and her empathy for the people suffering through them. The book seems to reveal as much about her as a person as it does about the situations she observes. So far, it’s an interesting view. I hope the book finds a wide audience.

Alien invaders evicted humanity from the earth, but the human race managed to survive by scattering to form societies on the moon and the other planets. They get a lot of help from highly advanced technological data streaming from the direction of the star 70 Ophiuchi. The advances in biotechnology are most noteworthy. People routinely restructure their body parts, and store the contents of their psyche in memory recordings which can be used to “reconstitute” a person who has died. It is in this universe that we follow our heroine as she becomes an unwilling participant in a mission to free the earth from the invaders.

I must have read The Ophiuchi Hotline the first time in my late teens or early twenties. I’ve read a good deal more science fiction since then, and this story holds up pretty well. The ending is a teensy bit weak because it seems to be setting us up for a sequel.

There aren’t a lot of female perspectives in science fiction, and this book does it so superbly that when I first read it I was convinced that “John Varley” was a pseudonym for a female author. I was wrong! Thanks again for writing this great story, Mr. Varley!

This chocolate is mildly hot. I find it to be hotter than the Red Fire Bar. Nice chocolate too!

Wanted tries to be The Matrix meets Fight Club, but lacks the soul of either. Our hero starts out as a neurotic, pathetic mess with poor judgment. He winds up a psychotic, pathetic mess with poor judgment. There’s lots of killing in between. The message seems to be that if you kill enough people unthinkingly, your life will have meaning.

I like action movies, and I will happily view movies containing tons of gratuitous violence. I don’t like that this movie tried to tack some deep life lesson onto a story that was developed in a very shallow way.

Someone should extract all the great action sequences from this movie and splice them together for viewing. The rest can go in the trash. Unfortunately that means we’d miss seeing Morgan Freeman, but this is not his most significant work.

I read John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline ages ago, and it made a really big impact on me. I decided to give the man some props (and shekels) and revisit this novel.

Hancock is not what I was expecting; I was looking for something much more mature and serious, and this is too goofy. I liked the plot line which briefly explained the hero’s superpowers, and Will Smith is a sweet charmer, so I don’t regret going.