Last night we sat down to watch Castaway (which Michael has been wanting to show me for awhile and I have strenuously avoided selecting whenever we go to the video rental store, because while I am willing to watch it I don't want to spend money to do so, no matter how good Michael thinks it is - 'I mean, how interesting could it be? A man stranded on a desert island...I read Robinson Crusoe, you know' - so I've been waiting to borrow it from Benjamin and Amanda, so as to have the comforting thought that at least we didn't waste any money on it to fall back on should it turn out to be as boring as I persist in thinking it will be) and I had actually psyched myself up for it pretty well when it was discovered that the DVD was defective. Bother. There went our plans for the evening. It felt profoundly deflating suddenly to have no movie to watch, so we ended up watching The Ghost and the Darkness, which Michael has also been wanting to show me for some time and which I have always found an excuse not to want to watch. But it actually wasn't nearly as bloody as advertised. Very scary and very well done, I thought, though we went online afterwards and read several blistering reviews of it. Humph. Movie critics are such cynics. It was based on true events surrounding the building of a bridge at Tsavo at the turn of the century, when a pair of man-eating lions ravaged the African work camp and brought terror to the countryside. After we were done watching it Michael pulled me to the computer and we looked up all we could about the story. Very cool. While we were at it, researching the truth behind the story, we looked up the historical facts surrounding the voyage of Harbo and Samuelson, two Norwegians who crossed the Atlantic by rowing an 18-foot dory from New York to France. We had a song about them on one of our Celtic CDs and were very gratified to find out that everything sung about them was true.

There was a preview on The Ghost and the Darkness for First Wives Club. I have never seen it. I mentioned that I wanted to see it. Michael informed me that it is dumb. 'I thought it probably would be,' I told him, 'but I still want to see it.' He is puzzled that I'd want to watch a movie for the sake of the stereotypes. Speaking of previews, recently I saw a preview for The Village, a very creepy-looking movie due to come out sometime in the too-distant future, so scary that I had Michael download a preview online and watch it with me, just to verify that it is creepy. I think I will have to watch it just to ascertain that the movie itself is less terrifying than the preview.