Mt Diablo finally refunded to me the extra money I paid them for the ankle injury I suffered over a year ago. Sallie Mae was also quite slow in mailing a refund for my Stafford Loan. Doesn't really matter, it's just kind of interesting. At least I can use the $300, now that I have a car insurance bill to pay...

I bought the "Duets" soundtrack and I like it. It's a bunch of old songs and I read a couple of reviews and people just trashed the movie and soundtrack. The complaint for the soundtrack seemed to be that the singers butchered the original songs. Strange, I don't have an impression of any of the original versions of the songs, other than "Bette Davis Eyes" and "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)". All the other songs I have no emotional investment in (and normally only "Bette Davis Eyes" brings out positive feelings from me) so I thought these renditions were good.

And that's the whole point (and I've written this before). Songs, especially once they become past memories, have emotions and remembrances and they bring out a certain state of mind for the listener. When you listen to a new version of a beloved song most people tend to hate it. And that's natural. If you liked it it would be some sort of subconscious devalutation of the associated baggage, of your past...

I watched "Any Given Sunday" on cable last night. For one, it's a long movie, over 2-1/2 hours. I liked the football scenes. They were trying to show the frenetic pace of a football game and show how it's like for the players. Lots of camera effects and cuts and sound and noise combining to impart one of the best feelings of a football game that I've seen. And Cameron Diaz playing a different role (or maybe I haven't seen enough of her roles) as the bitchy team-owner of the Miami Sharks. Which reminds me that the movie had some typical sport team names which weren't silly: Los Angeles Knights, Dallas Crusaders, New York Emperors, Chicago Rhinos...

For those of you who like computer history, there's a nice essay about the DECSYSTEM-20 at Columbia University, written at the end of 1989 after the last DEC-20 was shut down at the school. It's only going to interesting if you like computer history and people and institutions. A bit of the history of computing at Columbia and annecdotes about life and programming. A bit before my time. A real sense of history: Kermit was developed here, TCP/IP was implemented on DEC systems before it was implemented on UNIX, Emacs was developed on a DEC PDP-10 system...

I've been trying to finish reading all the stories in the Infinity Series, which are a Xena/Highlander thing with Xena being an immortal and playing in The Game (not that I ever really saw the Highlander tv show so I know I'm missing some references). Redhawk, who originally started it and wrote two great stories (followed by a third which was subpar and reminded me way too much of the last season of Highlander: The Raven where Nick Wolfe (the mortal sidekick) becomes an immortal; actually, didn't they do that in Highlander also?) set up the repository.

I'm almost done, having read all but two of the 15 or so fan fiction stories. A couple are good, many are substandard, a couple are horrible. The common thread is that they almost all focus too much on the Xena-Gabrielle (or in this case Gabrielle's reincarnation, Rickie Gardner) sex fantasies that people have. I have nothing against the relationship and other than the sex scenes there are great little scenes showing their relationship and how much they love each other and all the little things that couples do. My problem is that after the first couple of sex scenes, they all sort of become the same and most importantly **they add nothing to the plot or story**. It's gratuitous, are as some of the rather graphic violence in the stories.

And this brings to mind that some people hate the Xena writers and keep saying how fan fiction writers could write circles around them and write better stories. From my experience, maybe one in ten fan fiction writers are any good, and even the good fan fiction writers have weaknesses. The biggest weakness being that all fan fiction writers have a particular agenda, a specific world-view of the show, that they want to focus on. And that's their main failing: they focus on the elements they like and ignore the rest and the stories, although nice, become repetitive and don't have "mass appeal".