Waves Crash In

So something rather dreadful happened recently. My mom and Doug were riding their motorcycle and someone ran into them with a car. When John called me to tell me, my heart skipped a beat or two, I am sure of it. They are okay, they are alive and I am happy about that, VERY happy. In fact the very strange thing was that I was so happy that I really didn't get too worried about anything. But, so many questions! What happened to the guy that hit them? Are they insured? What was broken? What operations will they need? Was the bike covered? What will they do to the guy that hit them? Will Doug be able to work construction anymore? Well as quickly as I could manage I drove down to Paso Robles to see them and had all of my questions answered, that was very nice.

What I came away from the experience with is a sort of strange culmination of thoughts. As I and my parents grow older, these type of events will surely become more frequent. This put an extra layer of mortality on my life that until then I was able to ignore. Thinking on that though, I resign myself to knowing that I cannot change these things and I must move foreword, one foot in front of the other.

In other news I saw the Da Vinci Code. I liked it, I thought everyone was great in the movie. Later I heard people with negative reviews of the movie. On nearly all of these negative reviews, the writers were citing differences between the book and the movie or dislike for the casting of the characters. Here's the problem I have with these reviews. If you want the movie to be exactly like the book, maybe you should just go re-read the book. I'd much rather have an experience that is modified a little, edited a bit here and there. Understand that most of these differences are done for reasons that the screenwriter thought very hard about. Douglas Adams is a good example of this. He wrote three different scripts for his Hitchhikers Guide story; one for radio, one for book and one for movie. Why did he do this? He said he did it because some of the jokes work in some forms of media, and some don't. Brilliant! And it all becomes clear. A sequence in a book that worked fine might be time costly or difficult to produce coherently in a movie. For the Da Vinci Code, some of the puzzles were simplified. I am sure they did this because I remember spending a lot of time while reading the book trying in vain to decipher the puzzles myself before moving on. If the puzzles remained at their complexity in the movie, they would have to be solved far sooner than a person could dwell on them and the viewer would be left behind. The second complaint they had was about the casting. I heard the same thing about one of my favorite movies, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the Seas: The characters were not like they were in the book. Now what I find insane about this argument is half the details about a character in a book are created by the reader's imagination. What the author might call "rotund" might be a completely different thing than what the reader sees in their imagination. So everyone dwelling on things like, "I think they should have picked someone that looked older." Well the fact is, that is only because you created an image of an older man in your mind when you read the book. So, I hereby declare all movie reviews where someone says, "It was different than the book," or, "The actor didn't fit the character," are deemed null and void.

-Aaron