New Hampshire exists! That's 23 confirmed states!

Yesterday Natasha and I drove to Dartmouth, though technically she did all the driving. It took five and a half hours and I received my usual rate of $0/hr for it, totaling roughly $0. We got in around eight, unpacked Natasha's entire house worth of stuff from her car-sized car and by midnight we were sitting in the cozy kitchen devouring her mom's more edible gifts.

Then we watched Leatherheads. Now this is a movie which has absolutely no idea what it's about. Most movies are pretty transparent and straightforward, even the bad ones: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about proving to you that there are things in the world that make even a well-balanced ridiculously good-looking individual like myself contemplate suicide from boredom, namely watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Last Orders is about British people doing absolutely nothing in realtime. For two hours. 27 Dresses is about the estrogen injection you forgot to take before you watched it. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is about a two-hour long kick in the balls, not my favorite thing to experience even vicariously.

Leatherheads puts these all to shame. After all, why go for one topic, when you can go for all of them? Football, mud wrestling, unrequited love, male bonding, fat people, the Great Depression, the Prohibition, betrayal, lies, Renee Zellwegger's oily face that's so slippery your eyeballs can't hang on, George Clooney's loony O Brother Where Art Thou character, broken telephone and World War I are just some of the broad range of topics which would take almost as long for me to list as for you to just watch the movie yourself. Anyway, each topic from this veritable zoo of plot devices gets about two minutes of play. As a result it feels like you're watching two-minute-long episodes of some show where the characters stay the same, but each new episode has only minor relevance to the previous 17. I give this movie an "eh." (with an audible 'h')

Today we went to have lunch with one of Natasha's friends here at Dartmouth, Seth, whose buoyant gregarious personality belies his terminal case of astronomy/physics dorkiness. We chatted for a while on some innocuous subjects that leave no memory imprint while munching on veggie pseudo-Mexican burritos. After lunch Seth felt sick (I sometimes have that effect), and had to depart in a hurry, looking over his shoulder every so often with that look Sam Neil gives the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Another good first impression by me.

We attemped a language experiment today. Natasha and I agreed not to speak Russian or English for what ended up being about an hour and a half. We had at our disposal a combined total of a couple of years of Spanish, French, and a semester of Chinese, the last of which unfortunately lying entirely on one side of the conversation. The first couple of minutes were full of inauspicious silence, Hitchcock style. Then awkward first words were breathed, mostly "..." and "uh..." But then, breakthrough, after fifteen minutes or so, we were chatting in a language I would hesitate to call Spanish, but which definitely was neither English nor Russian. A success by any standards, as long as they're really really low.

Lastly, I was thinking about blindfolds earlier today because Natasha was crocheting something that had the potential to become one, and I was wondering, does anyone purposely make a blindfold? Seems like blindfolds are usually items that have an alternate intrinsic purposes, like scarves or shirts or hands. There are precious few people in the world who (when you catch them crocheting) reply to "whatcha makin?" with "oh, it's a blindfold, can't you tell?" Let's just acknowledge that there's a demand for blindfolds and start making them and calling them what they are eh?