About as high as a building ought to go Posting will probably be light here over the holiday weekend, since Teresa and I are in Kansas City where I’m one of the guests at a science fiction convention.

Of course, traditionally, announcements of reduced posting are followed by frenzied outbursts of unexpected blogging productivity, so you never know.

We were supposed to go to a Royals game with other con attendees last night, but it was rained out, so we went with Connie Willis to see the new Star Wars movie instead. Let me just say that Attack of the Clones is an intelligent, well-considered, complex, and artful piece of work that keeps being mysteriously interrupted by actual human actors wandering into the screen and speaking terrible lines of dialogue. No, really. David Edelstein remarked in his Slate review that Lucas’s emotional life is in the sets and backdrops and effects. This is in fact an admirable and rather grand thing, if you can keep from gnawing a paw off during the love scenes. (We were good. When the going got tough, Teresa just let her black Stetson drift down over her face; whereas my only lapse was when young Annakin Skywalker bitterly demanded of his crush-object Padme Amidala “Are you suffering, too?” “We are! We are!” I audibly replied…)

But anyway. Those planetary panoramas! Those Paul Lehr starships! Those overwhelming cities! Those impossible, twilit romantic crags! And who knew that Blade Runner was stashed away in the lower levels of Trantor? (Or that Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” was a coffee-table decoration a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?) [10:55 AM]