Eccentric Flower:199812/sunshine yams and snowy scams

one twelve thirteen

sunshine, yams, and snowy scams

I went out in the sunshine today. It was the first time in nearly a week that I'd seen the outdoors without looking through some sort of window. It was a nice morning, marred by the fact that I haven't yet bought a subway pass for December (hey, I've been inside for nearly a week) and I didn't realize this until I was already in the station.

I feel absolutely rotten. I'm in that in-between state now; I can no longer reasonably call myself incapacitated, but I'm still too muddled to accomplish any real concentration.

I got a little mail about my experiment yesterday with the turkey entry. Anita liked it, although she noted that even in a laundry-list entry I can't avoid introspective digressions. Guilty. Sally, on the other hand, said (more or less) "Since you bored me with the list of what you had for dinner, I'm going to bore you with mine." I can't tell if she was teasing me, but if she wasn't, it backfired - I actually thought her list made interesting reading. Except that she won't give me her sweet-potato recipe. I adore sweet potatoes.

Days like this are dangerous. I'm even more random than usual; no telling what I could think of next. On the way to work this morning, for example, I was thinking about the movie Fargo. (This was spurred by some email about it from Sally the night before.)

The comments below are oblique enough that they don't really count as spoilers. On the other hand, if you haven't seen the movie, they won't make much sense.

Sally wanted my ideas on what happens to the barely-buried money Steve Buscemi's character stashes. I'm not so concerned with that; I am more interested in some explanation of Lundegaard's (William Macy's) motives. I've seen two schools of thought on this. One says he's running all these various cons at the same time - cheating the auto lender, trying to get his father-in-law to give him money for the real estate thing, and the kidnapping.

I prefer a more conservative approach. I think he cheated GMAC, taking out loans to buy cars which never existed; that the real estate money was meant as a scheme to pay back the GMAC money, and that he cooked up the kidnapping when his father-in-law didn't seem likely to go for the idea. (You'll recall that when his father-in-law actually seems likely to go for the real estate deal, Jerry tries to call off the kidnapping, without success.)

The problem is that the dollar amounts don't seem to match; if the real estate amount is higher than the GMAC amount, Jerry's just trying to add on a little extra margin for himself, but if it's the other way 'round ... ah, shucks, I dunno. And it still doesn't explain why he scammed GMAC in the first place.

I refuse to see the film again just so my brain can speculate more on something which is insoluble, because the Coens haven't bothered to explain it and would probably be amused that it's distracting anyone this much. And I wouldn't be this distracted, if my head weren't idle and full of snot. It's really a dumb thing to think about.

I could wish, though, that they had cut the movie's only really useless sequence - the section with McDormand's psychotic ex-schoolmate - and used that time instead to explain Macy's character a little better. He's a heel, but we don't know why he's a heel.

I guess speculating idly about unimportant things is better than speculating idly about real things. Everytime I think about AOL and Netscape I just get a little more annoyed. I have to clamp down on this. I refuse to let AOL shorten my lifespan.

I'm not staying at work a full day. Forget it.

previous
next
this month

© columbine