Good news all over the place. For one thing, San Francisco has dropped to number four slot for pedestrian fatalities in cities with populations over 100,000. So it is no longer number one. Kudos, though I have a near miss just about every time I cross the street. I have noticed quite a few altercations where people yell at drivers, though so far I have yet to see someone actually get hit.

Having taken virtually all of yesterday to rearrange the furniture was irritating, but at least things are fully unpacked and stored. Somehow that is really exhausting. I'm not really sure why, I think it is a result of seeing all your life laid out or something. At night, it was time for Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Kind of a funny movie, but not funny in the sense that there is a nose slashing. Funny in a sense that it is too long and slow to be enjoyable, and is generally racist in its very essence, in its presupposition that Chinese people are inscrutable and lawless. I think that the whole mystification of Chinatown, which is the movie title and underlying premise, andthat Jack has seen it all because he used to work Chinatown, and that the Chese people say "glass " when they mean "grass" and talk in chop suey accents is an obnoxious point of origin for a movie. Also kind of funny that the script is about a fairly obscure issue, that of water use by a public utitility. You wouldn't think that would make for a good movie. And following the plot requires a little grounding in geography, since there are a lot of casual references to the valley, and its hard to know what that means except by inference. Supposedly Roman Polansky was directing to get over his wife's murder during the shooting, which I guess is true, but I do think it is odd that his cameo in the movie is sticking a knife up Jack Nicholson's nose and slicing his nostril up, in light of the fact that his wife, Sharon Tate, had been sliced up by Manson's family.

Soon it will be time to go offline for a week or so but more updates will be recorded using pen and paper and will be faithfully posted post triumphant return. So hold your horses.