"Monsoon wedding" rocks

music

I also saw "The girl next door" several times. Awesome coming-of-age movie...high school dreams...it's a treat.
I watched a Margaret Cho stand-up comedy video. If you see "Cho Revolution" on DVD, by all means listen to the commentary in which she is her Notorious MOM.
I saw a lot of movies in the past few weeks:
I finally saw the lovely "De-lovely," a delicious musical about Cole Porter's life, with performances by singers Natalie Cole, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall etc;
I saw "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid," which was an unexpectedly nice movie;
the slow but intruiging drama "Wicker Park";
"Vanity Fair" with Reese Witherspoon;
"Paparazzi," a violent drama about retribution which I really really enjoyed.
It's possible that I saw "Beyond Borders" in September as well. I liked this movie very much. I cried, I think. War is dumb. Maybe I saw it earlier though, in August.

I'm reading Convex Optimization stuff by Stephen Boyd et al. And George Orwell's "1984". And the "Bhagavad Gita" which Dennice very kindly lent to me. And the usual astrology stuff. And a dab of complex analysis. And a dash of Arabic. And a dot of Pablo Parrilo's brand of problem solving. (It's exciting, learning is. And solving problems.) And I just finished a Christian book on "Smart Listening for Couples" that I bought two weeks ago in Pensacola, Florida. Yeah I went to Pensacola. By bus from Atlanta. Long story. A few days before hurricane Frances.

My darling Carlos defended his thesis this afternoon, and it's time to go and party with him. His research is in plasma physics and he essentially took snapshot photos of spheromaks (see Paul Bellan, his advisor, on the web for more info). It's not trivial to take several photos within microseconds (0.000001s) of one another, you have to be smart about it. Plus I guess the plasmas are very hot - millions of degrees. Find his thesis if you want more info.