Tuesday, October 05, 2004

"I've said that many times."

The Movie: Love and Death, 1975 (Woody Allen, screenwriter and director)
Who says it: Woody Allen as Boris, Russian bourgeois-turned-soldier
The context: This is Boris’s response to his beloved Sonia (Diane Keaton), after she’s just spouted off an incomprehensible philosophical argument.
How to use it: To agree with something you don’t understand at all.

Being out at Gary's really is like being in the fairy world. It feels very isolated. Mornings are foggy and gray, and the air smells like citrus, flowers and the ocean. Spiders spin webs all over his yard; the webs keep the other bugs away, but make the dogs sticky when they run through them chasing squirrels.

The dogs want us to understand the serious threat that squirrels represent to life as we know it. Squirrels are wily and dangerous, and you can't take your eyes off them for a second. Not for a second. Unless you've got a cookie.

Like all security forces, though, Pete and Dizzy are challenged by the quality of their intelligence (in their case, their own intelligence). They chased a squirrel up a tree at the park the other morning, and then lost track of it in the branches. They wandered off for a minute until the squirrel chattered at them (it was hard not to see that as taunting), and then dashed back to the tree as if they'd just remembered there was a squirrel up there -- and then they got distracted again -- and then they remembered again: SQUIRREL!

I wish I'd had a video camera, it was as good as anything Laurel and Hardy ever made.

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