On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides was insanely expensive and very lucrative (Wikipedia says it's one of only two films to have grossed over a billion) but it's also rather dull- a blurry carbon copy of the original trilogy- less inventive, less exciting, not very funny. Ian McShane's turn as Blackbeard is the best thing in it, rising above the frenzy of eye-rolling and yo-ho-hoing by the simple expedient of playing it quiet and still.

I haven't seen the fifth film but I love pirates so I'll probably watch it when it comes on TV. It's unlikely to be worse.

An ACausal Connecting Principle

I was reading the story- first told by Plutarch- about the sea captain Thales and how during the reign of Tiberius Caesar he heard a voice calling to him from shore that the Great God Pan was dead.

A couple of hours later Ailz called down to me from our bedroom that she'd broken a statuette of Pan by sweeping it off the window sill.

And a little later I found myself reading (in the book I'd been reading earlier- From Atlantis To the Sphinx by Colin Wilson) a discussion of synchronicity...