Watching TV

Recently, I saw two bears as I was driving along.  It's my best natural sighting since I've come up here.

Have you ever noticed that the acronym for Lair of the Gryphon is LotG, and the acronym for Lord of the Rings is LotR?  Almost the same.

With driving, I have more difficulty doing the regular, straight parking, than I do with parallel parking.  Kind of weird, since parallel parking seems to be what most people complain about, and regular parking has got to be one of the easiest.  I can do it, but apparently I keep going on sort of an angle.  Maybe it's because I'm on one side of the vehicle, instead of the middle, and it throws my perception.  That was a bit difficult for me when I was just learning how to turn, but I got it down.  I think I've been at this for longer than a standard set of driving lessons.  I wonder if this is something that I don't have an aptitude for, or if I'm just more prepared than most beginners.

Recently, I watched a film adaptation of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.  It was pretty good.  My idea of the book was that it was really conceptual, that each character represented a component necessary to tell the story, and it didn't bother to flush out unnecessary individuality.  The movie was really literal in it's translation to film, quoting the book word-for-word and it didn't seem to leave anything out, somehow.  I felt like I got to know the characters better through the film, and for me it was almost an explanation of the book.  I guess the filmmaker had a better understanding of the book than I did, if it came out that way.

Apparently the film was more popular in India than in the States, even though it was made primarily for an American audience.  That's kind of neat, since the story was written by an American, and the adaptation was done by an American.  If you can write about another culture and be more popular with the people of that culture than of you own, it shows that you really managed to capture their way of thinking, which is good.  I felt that the book used India because it made a good place for it's story, but it wasn't really about India.  The film seemed very much to be about India.

I've watched a number of films since I've been up here.  I've never really been much of a movie-goer.  Even having basic TV up here is a novelty for me.