A few notes about yesterday's entry:

Note number one. I probably should wait until I'm awake before writing an entry. (On the other hand, if I did that it might be a week between entries sometimes.)

Note number two. "Muskrat Ramble" is the song our Finnish bus driver sang in Swedish. Not "Muskrat Love." Just so that's clear. Same rodent, different musical genre.

Note number three. I forgot to mention the trauma caused on the bus by the fact that we were missing the big football game between the two local teams. It was the last time the 49ers and Raiders will play each other until 2006, and there is considerable passion on both sides of the Bay.

After we left the theater and got back on the bus, some people wanted to know how the game had come out. Immediately a large group of passengers in the front of the bus shouted, "No!" I guess they didn't want to know the score, not because it would offend them but because they were taping the game and wanted to watch it semi-live after they got home.

So our driver came to the back of the bus and whispered the result to those of us who are a little less obsessed by these things. (Now, if it had been a baseball game it would have been a different story.)

Also, on a side note, there was a man in the theater who whipped out his hand-held TV set at intermission and spent the whole time standing in the aisle watching the game. He was older, more distinguished and better dressed than I was, but I was the one talking with three lovely ladies and he was the one off by himself. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

He had better hair, too.

Note number, uh, four I think. Champagne was served (and consumed) at our brunch at the Top of the Mark. (The service, by the way, was excellent, which considering it was a buffet where we served ourselves is really saying something.) I could have had three or four glasses of champagne, and my table mates seemed to think that this would have been a good idea, because they kept pushing their glasses in my direction.

I drank half a glass, which was plenty. More than plenty, in fact. It probably contributed to the feeling I had afterward that my head was full of wadded up newspapers. The Charlotte Observer, it felt like.

I think I know why Luminous Motion isn't considered one of the great films of the 1990s. For one thing, it was released in 2000 (although filmed a couple of years earlier). Aside from that technical matter there's the fact that the main character is a psychopathic ten-year-old obsessed with his mother. Not exactly a conventional love story, but a very quirky black comedy, if you can look at it that way. Some people will probably just say it's creepy, but I liked it a lot.

With polls showing that several key races are tightening at the last minute, it's not too late to realize that every vote counts. If we didn't learn that lesson in 2000, we have a good chance of getting hammered over the head with it this year. South Dakota, New Hampshire, Missouri, Colorado — all these states have Senate seats that could go either way and determine the future of this country (and the world, if our president has his way). Even Texas is still in play, and nobody knows what the hell's going on in Minnesota. If things go bad in the next few years, I'll blame the non-voters just as much as those who vote for the Dark Side.