Internet Wanderings

Tonight I watched "Stranger Than Fiction" again, for the first time since I saw it in the theater. After several hours of film-related googling, I'm aware that many Christians have used the movie as a springboard for a discussion of divine predestination, but personally I saw it as an existential manifesto. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. The film has a rich cultural heritage in movies, literature, and philosophy, and it's hard for me to imagine a more satisfying 113 minutes.

The DVD includes a terrific featurette on the creation of the "GUI" that Harold uses to measure, understand, and interact with his world. (The conceit is that we can see illustrations of Harold's thought process as he compulsively counts brush strokes, notes angles and quantities, and visualizes spatial relationships.) The GUI is an inspired part of the movie that helps us get into Harold's head and understand both the comfort and the overwhelming detail that we find there. The fellas who designed it thought about it...a lot. In one scene, they make the point that a lot of geeks are compulsive truth-tellers, which, let's face it, is funny 'cos it's true.

Harold's wristwatch, by contrast, makes broad, qualitative observations (it sees the pretty girl Harold ought to be looking at, and it thinks the way he knots his tie makes his neck look fat--it nicely represents all the things that Harold has repressed under his sea of calculated observations). The story has to do with how the watch transcends its purpose and becomes the hero of its little life, and how Harold manages to stop compulsively measuring things for ten seconds and have a life before he dies (how Garp of him). Harold and his wristwatch are my heroes.

Don't even ask me what I googled to get here, but my fascination with the GUI led me to this site, which is fascinated with visual representations of information. There were dozens of wacky and interesting things here, but one that I think is my new home page is the Newsmap. Granted, no graphical representation is going to make the "news" that we spend money when we're feeling blue any more earth-shattering, but I still really like it.