Monday

September eleventh again. Sunshine spent a good deal of today talking about 2001 and giving remembrance speeches. Last year, what with Katrina, I barely noticed the date come and go; but there has been a resurgence of the memory this year. Over in Mexican news: it seems that president-elect Felipe Calderón was met with protest in his home town of Morelia* when he attempted to place flowers on the grave of a celebrated hero of the revolution there yesterday. I don't know if this is an annual tradition or not. He returned to pay his respects later in the evening, after the protestors had returned home. The recent killing of Marcelo Garza y Garza is focusing the beam outrage on narco violence in the northern states.* We're not going to take it anymore! Wait a minute, does that mean that we were being relaxed about narco violence before? At long last, tensions in Monterrey are starting to rise. In brighter news, Serpientes a Bordo opened in San Pedro this weekend, and we managed to see it tonight, finally. I was concerned that a movie so knowingly contrived as camp and B ballyhoo would never be able to raise to the watermark of the real, innocently accidental likes of Anaconda, or better, Shakma. (This is why Lake Placid, with all its smirking, failed to hold a candle to Deep Blue Sea or any Bigfoot movie ever.) Turns out I was right, for a full twenty minutes before pandemonium hit and the rest was pure B cheese extraordinaire. Tongue-in-cheeky self-consciousness has been righted in this case by under-funded ineptitude (I lost count of shot axis breaches and shots shuffled into spatially illogical order), the blue-collar class of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, and intrinsic charms of growling, lightening-fast animated snakes. [Cavin]