Christina Dulude

I went to the shooting range again yesterday. Two things I observed:

1) A father was there, taking his little girl shooting for the first time. She had her very own little multi-colored rifle. This was alarmingly cute. What’ll they think of next — “Barbie DreamRifle”?!

2) In the front area of the range — the store area, not the shooting area — a woman was waiting for her husband or boyfriend, and was playing games on her cell phone to pass the time. After about ten minutes of Bleep! Bloop! Bleep!, the shooting range manager asks, “Ma’am, could you take that phone outside, or at least turn the sound off?”

Apparently, 8-year-olds with guns are welcome, but park your cell phone at the door.

1. Last weekend I went to a shooting range and shot paper targets with a .22 rifle for two hours. I had never shot a gun before. I’ve heard that a lot of women like shooting because it makes them feel powerful. But I didn’t really find this to be the case. Perhaps because I don’t feel particularly un-empowered in my regular life? Or maybe I just need to try a bigger gun? Of course, empowerment (or lack thereof) was not my motivation, and my main impression of shooting was that it felt a little like playing supercharged darts.

The main thing that surprised me, however, was that I didn’t have to sign any sort of waiver. Even at the climbing gym, they make you sign your life away, promising you won’t sue the gym if you fall and crack your head open. So I was very surprised at the wavier-less shooting range. Is this assumed customer responsibility an invitation for trouble, or a relief from the usual bureaucracy? I don’t know.

2. I went to the dentist recently for the first time in eight years (this is in no way related to my first time shooting a gun.) I had a cavity that needed drilling, but other than that, I was in good shape. So now I’m on a “doing responsible things” kick. I also haven’t been to a regular doctor since… I don’t know when, and going in for a baseline physical is the next step in my pursuit of responsible things. Arbitrarily-selected primary care physician, here I come.

3. On a geekier note, I went back to using Bloglines as my news aggregator. Which I suppose is appropriate since I hyped it in Dave!’s blog a while back. The first aggregator I ever tried was Amphetadesk, last summer or fall. It did the trick, but was extremely clunky if you subscribed to more than 6 or 7 RSS feeds. Also, I don’t think it gave the user the ability to control the number of headlines downloaded from the feed, and had very few customizations in general.

After Amphetadesk, I moved on to Bloglines for a few months. Being web-based it was accessible from anywhere, but at that time, it was a little awkward to organize feeds into folders, and to tell the program to scan several feeds at certain intervals. Bloglines has since been updated, and the interfaces for these functions are much smoother.

Anyway, I decided last spring that I wanted a client-based aggregator (the reason why now escapes me), and I downloaded Feedreader, which worked fairly well. My only qualm with this program was that it had some random bugs. Specifically, it would repeatedly download old headlines from certain news feeds as if they were new. And also, the program would occasionally freeze up when automatically checking for new headlines, and I’d need to shut it down and restart. But overall, it was a pretty good program, and in all fairness I think that was an alpha or beta release I was using.

And then recently, I decided that perhaps I really wanted a web-based aggregator after all, and so I made the switch back to Bloglines. I was happily surprised at their new and improved interface and features. Go, Bloglines! It’s good to have you back.

I saw The Village this weekend, and was happily surprised by the film. It dragged a bit in the beginning, but the quirky twists at the end made up for that. Here are a few thoughts:

A review in Salon.com argues: “The picture has an Old Sturbridge Village vibe to it, like a tourist attraction in which college kids dressed in aprons and buckled shoes are paid minimum wage to churn butter and throw feed to chickens.”

I think this claim is interesting from an existentialist point of view. In the beginning of the film, the viewer believes the story takes place in the 1800s. So from that point of view, yes — the actors do appear to be striving a little too hard for quaintness.

However, because the story turns out to be actually set in the present, the characters really are acting in a Sturbridge Village of sorts, whether they realize it or not. The town elders know that the whole thing is fabricated. So their behavior and language reflect how they believe colonial Americans would have appeared, not necessarily now true colonists really behaved.

Because most of the elders in the village were not historians or professional actors before they entered isolation, it is natural that their portrayals of their “characters” would appear a little stilted. Their mannerisms and behavior were probably based on representations of colonial America in movies, television, and other pop culture media.

For the younger generation, their village is the only reality they’ve ever known. It might be assumed, then, that these characters should appear less artificial and play-acty that their older counterparts. This is not the case, however. Nevertheless, I’d argue that it is perfectly natural — the younger villagers only had their parents and other elders for role models. Therefore, it only stands to reason that they’d pick up the stilted language and mannerisms of the older generation.

Incidentally, I think it’s strange that the reviewer specifically cited Old Sturbridge Village in the example above. It’s a regional attraction, while Salon is a national publication. Although every child in the Boston area is practically required to visit Sturbridge Village at least once before they graduate from the sixth grade, I doubt anyone outside of New England would really have caught the reference if the reviewer hadn’t gone on to explain what Sturbridge is.