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Lovely day today. After having a leisurely brunch cooked by yours truly, Thom and I went to his friends Joy and Margaret’s housewarming party. They have a beautiful, historic home–full of character and details, especially compared to the newer construction in their neighborhood–in Purcellville, Va., about 50 miles west of where we are in Arlington. Good times. It’s a nice drive out there and back; some places just a few miles from the city feel like they’re way out in the country.

Before heading back home, since the weather was so nice I suggested we stop somewhere along the river and have a walk around. We went to Gravelly Point, a park just north of National Airport. There were lots of people out enjoying the warm evening, and in a far corner of the park a flock of Canadian geese seemed to be taking it easy as well. Since the place is directly under a flight path, the main attraction (or diversion, at least) is watching planes zoom excitingly close, directly overhead in their approach to the airport. Reminds me of when my parents and I used to go on short driving trips and would sometimes stop at SFO to watch planes.

Now Thom and I are back home, thankfully not caught in the rain (I heard thunder a few minutes ago), and while Thom plays his computer game, I’ll probably curl up in front of the TV either to watch a DVD or catch up on TiVo.

P.S. A couple of interesting things we heard on public radio during today’s drive: an amusing segment called “Marriage as Rerun” (introduced thusly: “Many couples eventually encounter this problem: one person in the couple trots out the same story over and over, and the other person has to just listen…”) from a This American Life episode entitled “Reruns,” itself a rerun, appropriately enough (originally broadcast in 2002); and a segment about Robert and Clara Schumann on Studio 360, whose theme today was the creative lives of couples. There was something about the story of the Schumanns–how music was so much a part of their lives, for better and for worse–that got me a little misty-eyed by the end.

Thanks to a perusal of Synaptic Discharge last night, I was reminded that Varekai is coming to town later this year. So Thom and I got tickets. Front row, baby! I’m excited. I’ve never been to a Cirque du Soleil show.

Varekai, currently on tour in Phoenix, plays Washington Sept. 16-Oct. 24 on the grounds of RFK Stadium.

[Updates: (20 May) According to a Cirque Club e-mail I just received, the Washington run has been extended two weeks. Dates above have been corrected. (2 June) Yay, our tickets arrived in the mail yesterday! From Montréal via Postes Canada!]

Today’s Times has a short article on cartoonist Roz Chast, whose work Thom and I look forward to seeing each week in The New Yorker (“Another Cartoon Canvas of Neurotic New York“). Her newest collection of cartoons was published last month.

For 25 years, […] Ms. Chast has made her bread and butter by casting a fine eye on the extremely elaborate neuroses of New Yorkers.

Some of the best of those cartoons, complete with their often HIGH STRUNG! captions and HYSTERICAL PUNCTUATION!, have recently been published in “The Party, After You Left” (Bloomsbury), her eighth collection and the first, she says, that she has not instantly regretted.

“There’s usually a point within the first minute when I decide I hate it,” Ms. Chast said of her books. “I look at it and say: ‘Oh, the order’s wrong. That isn’t funny. I should give this all up.’ But this time I haven’t decided I completely hate it. Yet.”

Earlier this week Sonal sent me a couple of links. One is Badmash, “the weekly South Asian comic strip.” Funny stuff. And they have a spoof of the Simpsons intro, called “The Singhsons” (Flash required). You have to watch it. It is hilarious and very well-made.

And the other link, switching gears completely, Sonal sent with the disclaimer “This is my new obsession. I think you are the only person who will appreciate it.” That may be true: the crown prince of Denmark is getting married. Tomorrow! What am I going to wear?! I love this kind of stuff. All that pomp and protocol. Yeah, I know it’s silly. (Of course my first question was, is he cute? He’s okay, though in some portraits he’s positively Napoleonic. He has charm for a prince, I guess. I don’t meet a wide range.) Yikes, I’ve spent an definitely inordinate amount of time perusing that site. “And now to our senior Danish royal affairs correspondent…”

I was tipped off to interior-design cutie Nate Berkus’ appearance on Oprah the other day by an entry on Zionide (thanks, Nick). Apparently an appearance on the show correlates to a spike in Nate-related search-engine referrals to our sites, where he gets mentioned now and then. So yes, Nate was on the other day to do a room makeover. (Thank goodness we get late-night reruns. TiVo to the rescue.) Though, honestly I think the room looked just fine before. Right? Usually they pick rooms in such dire shape to begin with. That said, I do like some of Nate’s additions, like the little, room-dividing wall and the large ottoman-coffee table.

Side note: I swear, the studio audience is always so hyper when Oprah does topics like this. It’s like an infomercial or a game show. Have you seen her periodic “Favorite Things” show, in which she gives away tons of free gifts? It’s crazy.

Anyway, further expanding her media brand empire, she has a new home-and-living magazine called O at Home, whose website introduces the room makeover with “Knock, Knock, It’s Nate! What would you do if TV’s hottest designer Nate Berkus showed up at your front door?”

Oh, honey. I think you know.

There’s an interesting article in the June issue of The Atlantic about the increasing globalization (now there’s a loaded word) of American movie-making, not just financially, but artistically (“Offshoring the Audience“). We all know that the juggernaut that is the American movie industry reaches far and wide, and has done so for decades, but in a market dominated by studios trying to sell to a global audience, what does that leave us here at home? An excerpt:

Inevitably, the pervasive Hollywood question “Is there an international end to this?” has consequences for what sorts of pictures get made in America. Many countries, France most loudly, have condemned incursions by American culture, lamenting all the film and TV bookings lost by indigenous creations. Probably they’re right. Every bit as alarming, though, is what this tendency is doing to Hollywood films. If France makes movies for the French, and America makes movies for the world, who’s left to make movies for America? Would masterpieces like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, played against a background of Washington senatorial skulduggery, and His Girl Friday, with its muzzle-loading, too-fast-to-translate comic dialogue, even get produced nowadays?

Here, alas, is the virus laying waste to modern Hollywood movies. What do, say, the Batman and Matrix pictures have in common, besides banality? Just for openers, insipid, infrequent dialogue. Why take the trouble to bang out good lines–supposing one can–if they’ll only be mistranslated for their real target markets, abroad? Both these movies could have been silents if they weren’t so loud. They’re overbearing, carelessly told, and gang-written into incomprehensibility. Small wonder they were tepidly welcomed in the United States. Americans at the movies are guilty of the same mistake in the early twenty-first century that grown-ups made at the movies in the 1980s: supposing that the pictures are made for them.

It’s graduation season again, and The Chronicle of Higher Education muses on the “commencement communications gap,” offering some advice to this year’s speakers in “Not My Generation” (link via Arts & Letters Daily).

Somewhere on an American campus this month, commencement speaker I. B. Antiquated will warn fledglings about to flap their wings into the brave blue yonder that Fallujah “is not Khe Sanh, Basra is not Long Binh, and Tikrit is not Hue.”

The students, uncomfortably sweating in their caps and gowns, will yawn and think, “Whatever,” and “It’s like, what is he talking about?”

If I settle back in the Bay Area, I think I’d like to make a regular thing of attending commencement at Stanford. Sure, there is sometimes an interesting luminary to give the commencement address, but true entertainment comes in the form of the Wacky Walk. For the degree candidates, there’s no stuffy procession; that’s usually left to the faculty. At the main ceremony in the stadium, the graduating class struts onto the field wearing caps and gowns, yes, but also any assortment of costumes, signs, balloons, you name it–the bolder the better, partly just to be identifiable to one’s family sitting high up in the stands. My friends and I all wore bright orange lifevests over our gowns. (We told people “we’re all in the same boat.” Given more time and resources, we might’ve been able to create some kind of tangible boat out of cardboard. It’s all very Bay to Breakers.) The departmental ceremonies, which take place afterwards, are smaller, usually more decorous affairs; I took off my lifevest and placed it under my seat.

But back to speeches, our speaker that year was former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (MA, PhD, 1966). In an address I remember fondly, he basically took on the task of deconstructing the ceremony we call commencement, asking the very blunt question, “What are we doing here?” When you have a few minutes, check it out. It’s a good read. An excerpt:

On some deeper level, I think that what we see today is the celebration here of the two great obligations or standards, the two great tests that apply to every tribe and culture on earth, the two values by which any human society must be judged. These two measures of any people, of any nation, challenge us Americans at the end of what has been called “the American century” in special ways. These secular rituals and extraordinary gowns and processions invoke those two monumental standards and propose that on this splendid campus in the midst of a prosperous, technologically sophisticated society, which this is in some ways the center, in a richly burgeoning mass culture, we do continue, so these exercises are meant to assert, to fulfill the ancient fundamental purposes of community.

I mean the two great requirements of the human animal, without which human community is corrupt or useless, namely, caring for the young ones and honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdom of the dead. The tribe or community or nation that fails at either of these missions brings woe and destruction on itself. Today the graduates pass symbolically from being the objects of the first concern, young ones who have been nurtured, to bearing the responsibilities of the second, those who are supposed to care for the young and who will preserve and extend the wisdom of the dead.

Wow. Sure gives a sense of purpose to sitting out there in a silly get-up surrounded by thousands of people for a couple of hours on a hot Sunday morning.

Last night I caught an episode of Airline UK (Mondays, 10:30 p.m.), the original British series on which A&E’s Airline is based. (Not to be confused with BBC’s Airport, a different series entirely.) A&E rebranded the series “UK” and re-recorded the narrative soundtrack, but to me what makes it marginally more watchable than its American counterpart is the foreign setting itself. Sure, it’s basically the same formula, following often frustrated passengers and the airline employees (here, easyJet) who have to deal with them. But whereas Airline was tedious because of its familiarity (LAX and Midway, ho-hum), Airline UK is interesting because everything’s just a little bit different, like the European destinations. In the episode I watched, a traffic accident on the M1 caused a few passengers, including one especially irate woman, to miss their Nice-bound flight, which was eventually diverted to Lyon; weather conditions kept it from approaching their destination, and the plane was running out of fuel. Meanwhile one woman headed for Amsterdam realized her passport had been forgotten at home in a locked file box, and only she had the key, so she called her brother to bring the whole box to the airport. Once upon a time, I wanted to work for an airline–I even applied for a ticket-counter job at SFO several years ago, and I still like to think I’d be excellent in any kind of customer-service position–but as these programs show, there are good days, and then there are days from hell.

In other travel TV news, one of my favorite shows, The Amazing Race, is back for a fifth season, starting Tue., July 6 at 9:30 p.m. (CBS). Yay, finally! Teams will be introduced on the official website on Fri., June 4.