If it isn't one thing ...

[hrj]

Monday lunch - cover for boss at monthly "strategic senior staff" meeting.
Monday afterwork - finish paper and prepare brief Powerpoint presentation for class.
Tuesday lunch - lunch with thread_walker, which hasn't happened since before Thanksgiving due to scheduling.
Tuesday afterwork - drive down to the south bay to go see Happy Feet with scotica for her birthday.
Wednesday lunch - unprogrammed?
Wednesday afterwork - into SF for the biostatistics closing session with paper presentations.
Thursday lunch - pop home to do the flue work that needs daylight (i.e., climbing up on the roof to replace the spark arrester). Added: Arrange for roofer to drop by and attempt to identify source of leak at corner of skylight. He does various bits of re-caulking.
Thursday afterwork - cut down the other cabinet by half an inch or so.
Friday lunch - pop home to oversee the crew moving the woodstove into position and stacking the cabinets.
Friday afterwork - complete the flue modifications, position the woodstove, and reconnect the flue.

Movie review: Happy Feet

Take a mixing bowl. Add in one part generic animated feature-length musical with dancing and singing animals. Mix in one part March of the Penguins and one part An Inconvenient Truth. Stir well. The odd thing is that it works -- quite well. scotica and I had actually been lured on false premises -- having seen the 3D trailer for Happy Feet at the Dublin IMAX (when we went to see Superman Returns), we were under the mistaken impression that the IMAX version of the movie itself would have at least some 3D scenes. This wasn't the case, but we didn't end up feeling cheated.

The movie is almost too packed full of themes and motifs. I won't even touch the plot (wouldn't want to spoil things) except to note that there are several times when you have no bleeping idea where it's going. You've got your standard nature documentary. You've got your basic love story. You've got your misfit makes good. You've got your Campbellian hero-quest. You've got your satirical commentary on various social, religious, and political phenomena. And you've got a heckuva lot of music woven with subtle jokes and references (you have to listen to the actual words they're singing, rather than filling in the "right" words). Normally I'm unfond of animated "musicals" -- the song and dance generally feels gratuitous and forgettable. But in Happy Feet the music is an essential part of the overall symbolic and metaphoric structure of the story, and the way the various themes are braided together move the story along rather than interrupting it.

Another thing I'm normally not all that fond of is celebrity voice-overs in animated features. And I especially dislike Robin Williams doing animated voice-overs because he never does "Robin Williams does [character]", he does "Robin Williams does Robin Williams doing [character]". The director must have really cracked the whip on this one because when the credits started rolling I thought, "Hey, that's right, Robin Williams was doing a couple of voices in this thing." and had managed not to notice which ones up to that point.

So on the whole, I thought the movie was not only a bit of enjoyable fluff, but a very well crafted piece of enjoyable fluff.