Monday

Here are two facts loosely related to the newest half-baked video posted to my Flickr account (here). This isn't an interesting back-story to the dull movie. The video shows the Caravelle Hotel lighting up shortly after dark. It's just something I saw happen one night, noted the time, and filmed the following day. These two facts, then, are the things I think about when I watch the video now. The first: I've really been enjoying being outside at six o'clock recently. Over the last few days I've gone out and crossed the park right around at six pm. Since the equinox, the sun really has started going down earlier. It used to set at ten after; now it's pretty much dark, depending on the clouds, by six. But the lights all over the city are still running on bygone schedules. So at seven minutes after six, according to that note, all of the lights in the park, along the streets, atop the Caravelle Hotel, etc., blink on at once. Lately, between six-ish and seven after, things have gotten really dark around here, with a sort of close, exciting feudal quality reminding me of campgrounds or maybe safe neighborhood power outs. The other thing: our internet access has been iffy all weekend. Sure, our occasionally tenuous connection to the web has been even less reliable, but there have also been suspicious cases of seeming restriction: specific sites have ceased to function. What's odd is that we were forewarned. We are sorry for the inconvenience, according to that note, but some websites will not work this weekend. Weird. Blogger domains worked okay, for example; but Yahoo! didn't work at all: no access to email accounts or Flickr. Therefore, the video above, posted under the "Friday Matinee" label, actually appeared today. [Cavin]