sidle up to the bar, bring a #2 pencil.

X called this morning from the parking lot of the Bar Exam testing location. She’d been parked for a little while and gave me a call before heading inside and the inevitable filling of bubbles on a computer scan sheet. She primarily reported on other arriving drivers – and lawyer nominees – who felt the need to navigate the parking area by slipping between her car and a car two spaces over instead of simply going the additional 15 feet to the end of the row. As much as anything, it seemed an indictment of local drivers more so than law school alums. She said there was also some guy walking in and drinking from a paper bag; turns out it was soda but I wouldn’t be too sure. With that, we finished our call and I wished her luck as she headed into the jaws of the hypotheticals.

L. and I went to see Wall-E last night; my first, her second viewing. For those that have watched Pixar movies develop you can’t help but be amazed at the changes in computer animation since Toy Story. It’s not a knock on Toy Story, but the differences in the entire process are particularly obvious in Wall-E. After the debacle of Cars, Pixar got back to the basics of a good story with Ratatouille and then deliver a pretty tough punch to the solar plexus of the America in Wall-E. It’s nominally a love story that kids will find acceptable – cute robots, computers, funny voices – but the backdrop of the film is more of a haunting hidden behind the usual well-written dialogue and comedic efforts. The real target is consumerism and our faulty logic that everything will continue on forever and there’s no need to worry ourselves about the outcome. The people in the movie are simply soporific beings managed by food, video games, TV, Wal-Mart, and big easy chairs. I found myself quite taken aback at how easily the producers slipped the screwed-up humans right passed us – candidates for laughter instead of pity. I don’t know that a lot of the theater got it the first time through but I suspect that if there’s any spark of light in a person’s mind then it might hit light a fire later this week. Maybe I’m being to optimistic. It reminded me of something Steve Earle said at a show in Reno a few years back. He was playing some of his bluegrass songs from The Mountain and laughed at just “how much socialism you can slip into a bluegrass song and no one seems to notice”; I think Pixar has copied the formula.

We’ve got a bit of a heat wave rolling in over the next three or four days. I’ll try to keep cool and ungrumpy.

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