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Take a drive… in

Yesterday I was invited by my friend Andrew to go to the local drive-in for his birthday, like last year. Only a few other people went along. Luckily, the owner didn’t get Tasered by the police this time, so there was little to keep us from getting there early. We had some food — Fritos, chicken wings, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, shrimp, Bagel Bites — and then relaxed and watched The Da Vinci Code.

I thought I would bring a small radio to add to the sound of the movie — they broadcast it on the FM band, so you don’t need to hook some box up to your car like the Flintstones did. Anyway, it seemed that the radio, which is small, cheap, and old, couldn’t pick up the station no matter, though I fiddled with the dial quite a bit. I could still hear the movie (the car stereos were tuned in too) but not as well as I would have liked to. Come to think of it, I should have brought my portable CD player (with digital tuning) and headphones. Oh well.

Anyway, I don’t really have much to say about the movie itself. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t compare it to that. The movie was pretty engaging and enjoyable. I don’t think anybody should fuss over the ideas presented in the film. It’s just fiction, after all. In fact, it’s metafiction. If you’re that insecure about your beliefs, you should probably reevaluate them. Also: I didn’t like Tom Hanks’s hair.

Today I’m going to my friend Mark’s house so we can start that band we’ve been meaning to start. It’s about time. I just (as I was writing this) got a call from Mark saying that we’d also be doing the whole pizza/movie thing. It should be cool. If we manage to play some music, it’d be a good opportunity to use my relatively new and now totally working digital recorder.

The Lake Peigneur disaster of 1980 wreaked environmental havoc and drastically changed the ecology of that Louisiana lake. The lesson learned: don’t drill for oil in a lake that sits above a salt mine. For this item, a tip o’ the hat to Damn Interesting, a blog whose name doesn’t seem to lie. This probably won’t be the last link of theirs that I post.

According to these atheist/agnostic statistics, nearly 27,000,000 Americans don’t believe in gods. Similarly, here are a ton of maps showing the prevalence of some major religions by U.S. county.

One year ago: “I hadn’t really known her before, so we sort of met for the first time.”
Two years ago: “The upperclassman said to him, ‘Here at Harvard, we don’t end sentences with prepositions.’”