(no subject)

Having watched "The Value of X" this morning, and reflecting on the ultra-conservative sermon jitterbug5bi5 endured over Easter, I'm reminded of a thought I had a while ago:

The same people who would be horrified if their daughter married outside her religion, outside her language group, or outside her race, suddenly change their mind about the value of marital hetereity if their daughter wants to marry within her gender.

Weird.

A hobby nobody else has ever had

A pun on a mailing list recently reminded me that I used to have a bizarrely geeky hobby: calculating and memorizing the cube root of 704. (All that remains familiar to me is "8.895920362...", and I could only have remembered "8.8959" if you asked me this morning.)

This was in the days before I had access to good computers, so I figured out that much by adding the digit 5 to the last known value, then cubing it and seeing if I got more or less than 704. Actually, I got 8.8959 from Anna to the Infinite Power, a movie I saw many times on HBO as a kid. That's also where I got the idea for this hobby, since I suspected that wasn't really the cube root of 704, checked it with a calculator, and was delighted to find that the movie was wrong and I was right.

That movie had a disproportionate effect on me. Although the plot probably seems a bit hokey now, I found it very plausible. (I, too, was a young genius aware that there was something a bit odd about me.)

And I vividly remember the song "Reverie", which seems to have been created for the film. A shame, really -- I wish it had been a longer piece that I could finally have the pleasure of hearing. The theme from Schindler's List is similar, and -- at the risk of spoilers for a rather obscure movie -- that's an interesting coincidence.