My condolences to fans of the Chicago Cubs. I saw that play in game 6 which turned the tide, and spun the team to face their accursed fate. I was convinced - it's a curse. That fan who forgot to consider that the ball may have been playable was the goat. He should hereby go under the nickname "Goat". As for the other cursed team, I'm no fan of the Yankees, but I hope they take the Red Sox out.

I rented a movie from Netflix by Shohei Imamura called, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge because I thought I missed it at this year's S.F. International Film Festival, but I was mistaken. The film never showed at the festival. But it was a great film, in certain ways it reminded me of another one of my favorite films, Bagdad Cafe, in that it was quirky (the quirky feel is almost exactly the same to me), with a host of characters who seem to mean something to some central thesis, but it's ambiguous what that is.

I first saw "Bagdad Cafe" as part of a film syllabus for a religion class, and like most of the films (and most of the students), when I watched the film, I was perfectly strained to figure out what the film had anything to do with the class material. It became clearer when we discussed it in class with the professor's guidance, but we were convinced, in part, because we wanted to be convinced (isn't that how belief goes?). It wasn't a discussion for skeptics. Relevant themes included "calling", Rosenheim (home of the roses, i.e. the Garden of Eden), magic, boomerangs, watching from a distance, and "too much harmony", among others.

I've been trying similar "observational skills" with "Warm Water Under a Red Bridge", and I have the African marathon runner, fishermen, tasteless food, sex/orgasms/water/neutrinos/the universe, the non-existent but real golden Buddha, waiting, and others, I'm sure. I have a feeling Imamura meant to connect these disparate elements in a non-obvious way.