Quick Thoughts from the throes of insomnia

Keith's wedding turned out well, on the whole. I was more nervous than he was, as far as I could tell, but I managed to not lose the rings, and I completely failed to trip on my way to and from the front of the church. I could hardly have asked for more. In the end, it was decided that there would be no toasts. I had just about figured out what I was going to say, and I think that the words I had more or less settled on would have been appropriate and even somewhat lovely, even if they weren't particularly profound.

In other news, I heard that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. This is what we in the literary field refer to as "bad news". I've spent the past few months re-reading the Discworld novels, and I've been very pleased at how well they've stood up to second readings. I think it was a critic for the Washington Post who compared Pratchett to Chaucer, and I'm consistently jealous at not having thought of that myself. Pratchett's clearly not in the same pantheon as Chaucer, and I don't believe for a second that the Discworld novels will be held in anywhere near the same esteem as the Canterbury Tales, but there is a common worldview, and although I never studied Chaucer in the same depths as I studied Shakespeare or Donne or Nabokov in school, I feel like the old master would have appreciated Pratchett's sense of humor. It's just possible that the best of Pratchett's works (Small Gods, definitely, Carpe Jugulum, perhaps) might one day be required reading that undergraduates skim through on the night before the test. We can only hope.

I'm a little annoyed that three movies that I actually really want to see are all coming out on Friday: Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War and Walk Hard all look excellent, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to seeing all three in the theater, especially since I still haven't seen "No Country For Old Men".

Thursday night Slick Rick is doing a free show at the Cradle. At the moment, Keith and I are still planning on going. Really, the Little Brother show would have been the more poetic choice for the last show of a fantastic year in live music, but the bastards who control the schedules don't agree.

The Johnny Cash picture is just one I like. I guess since Walk Hard is in part a parody of Walk The Line (which was a pretty good movie that never bothered to flirt with greatness, if you want my opinion), I suppose the picture is somehow thematically appropriate.