Down in Palm Desert

I arrived in to Palm Desert early this afternoon, and now I'm waiting for Andrea's flight to get in. She's not getting here for another couple of hours at least, and fingers are crossed that her flight from Vegas isn't redirected to Los Angeles or Togo. As far as Flight Aware is concerned, it looks good.

I'm thinking that this is going to be a good trip. It's not brutally warm here (about 20 C) unlike last time, when every breeze that blew felt as though a thousand hairdryers were blowing mere inches from your skin. When the sun is out, it makes for good pool-lounging, cigar-smoking weather.

Much of my time these days is being spent on MLS, where I'm trying to find something nice, in a good neighbourhood, and that is in my price range. At this point, I can usually find something with 2 of the 3 attributes. I'm going to keep looking, and hope that something comes up when I'm in Ottawa in early January.

I watched The Last Samurai earlier this evening. It's a movie that, despite starring Crazy McCrazerson (ie. Tom Cruise), really speaks to me in a number of ways. On perhaps the most superficial level, it is ostensibly a war movie. Lots of people fight lots of other people, in some pretty decent cinematic scenes. Good soundtrack, too.

Stripping that away, you have the story of the samurai. While it's a pretty Hollywood-perspective look at the samurai, it does delve into several of the samurai concepts. Concepts like honour, duty, respect, charity, and obligation. Some other good movies on the subject of samurai are Ghost Dog and Ronin. Ronin also has some particularly fine car chases.

In spite of - or perhaps because of - the fact that the tenets of samurai culture (or "Bushido") are at odds with modern culture, I find it a fascinating dogma to be drawn from in relating to situations in the modern world. More so with the honour and duty, less so with the ritual suicide.

The Last Samurai touches on many other issues, including rebirth and forgiveness, and the conflict between old ways and new. I won't go much further into details, but allow me to pass on my recommendation that, should any of this interest you remotely, you should see this movie. And we'll leave it at that.

I think I'm going to go for a walk in the night air, and listen to a little Franz Ferdiand. My sister picked me up a few CDs when I was home for Christmas and they are goooooooood.

More information on Togo can be found here.