Collateral - Interesting, all in all. Of course, I'm still a hold-out Tom Cruise fan (you heard me - bring it!). I was half expecting it to be a shallow regular-guy-becomes-badass-hero movie, which there was maybe an element thereof, but the movie taken as a whole went quite beyond that. I thought it was especially cool that I found my opinion of the antagonist, while naturally bad, having an arc of its own - kind of from curious respect to odium, I think. I also thought the end of the movie had a nice (though relatively blatant, I suppose) symbolic touch.

      On my way up to Phoenix, it was raining really hard. Which was actually nice, besides the wrestling of the Lego-Safari car's thinking it was a kite to be blown away by the incessant wind. In any case, the wide open vistas by I-10, which I normally readily enjoy in the sun anyway, had grand curtains of rain sweeping across them. Lightning staccato'ed the distance (and a couple times the not-so-distant feel-it-in-your-chest), Picacho Peak had cottony shreds swirling around its peak (yes! triple redundancy withing a sentence!), and the dust storms right near Phoenix were positively intimidating in that they were under the mountains at one moment and smothering the road the next.
      But the real kicker was the rain was coming down so fast in some places that the desert didn't have time to soak it up - so there were huge puddles dotted with little shrub-topped islands every once in a while. The most interesting of these was one that's islands were creosote and white crosses, and one larger island with a big American flag. It was actually a bit difficult to see because the sun was silver'ing the water, and there were diagonal yellow rays coming through the clouds above it. Still pretty cool, though.

-Tuesday Comic - this is the comforting chicken soup of comics

-this is like when we used to jump down the stairs in middle school, times 50