Remember "video tape"? I was flipping through my long-neglected videotape collection and started watching some of the stuff I've recorded through the years, horrible quality notwithstanding. You know how it is, that slippery slope of memories. You start digging, and all of a sudden you're in a well, spending hours and hours in the past.

I watched "Bagdad Cafe" which I want to call one of my favorite movies, but my experience with the film is tainted. I first saw it as part of a film syllabus for a religion seminar in college, so now I can only watch it looking for the religious (primarily mystical, not one particular religion) symbolism, like "Rosenheim" (home of the roses), "try our new desert it's called the "Garden of Delight", the boomerang, "too much harmony".

It's easy to view the film as just an early indie film without any religious indicators, but once you see the halo, you know that Percy Adlon intended all of it. Then it's just a domino effect of figuring out what means what. In the seminar, we had no idea. It took the professor to start pointing things out for us to be enlightened. It was a matter of knowing the signs to look for them.

Another film on that syllabus was "Field of Dreams", so that also gets the same treatment. Although I don't think there was anything overt in the film that indicated that the director intended a mystical/magical religious interpretation. Except maybe the, "Is this heaven?", "No, it's Iowa" lines.

On that same tape, after a Letterman segment with Jackie Chan, and then a channel 2 news segment on Jackie Chan, I assume this was recorded the year "Rumble In the Bronx" was released in the U.S., was the remnants of one of my personal favorite "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes. It was a seventh season episode, and I think it was called "Parallels". There are a lot of flaws with the physics, but this is science fiction, folks, and it just looked like the writers were having fun with the quantum theory, and I think anyone with a fascination for the stuff had fun with the episode, too. Worf accidentally rips open a tear in the space-time continuum while returning to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft and finds himself jumping from quantum reality to quantum reality. The quantum theory being that all possible realities that could happen, actually do happen in other quantum realities. So if I come across a crossroads with two decisions, I might decide to do one thing, but in another quantum reality I do the other. Scientifically, this is just silly, but science fictionally, it's fascinating. So there's a scene where the quantum fissure gets ripped open and space starts filling with hundreds of thousands of Enterprises from all the different quantum universes. It's fascinating, if not cute, and Troi's bitchy, "What's that supposed to mean?" at the end is priceless.

Up next, "Home for the Holidays", which definitely is one of my favorite films, I think, and "Trust".