Rat Race is not a cinematic masterpiece. It doesn’t have any depth of characterization, it has scene after unlikely scene of ridiculous goings-on, it has a cheap, melodramatic happy ending, and it will never be up for an Oscar.

That said, I laughed myself silly watching it. If you’re looking for some escapist comedy-for-comedy’s sake, this is a fine choice. Lots of favorite actors doing the kind of hamming they do best, a funny script, and little sense of taking itself seriously contribute to an enjoyable two hours.

Kathy and I went to the Gaslight Theater again last night to see James Elward’s Best of Friends. The show, which revolves around the relationships within a family spearheaded by a poised, clever woman and her famous philandering husband of 30 years, was one of the best that we’ve caught at this theater. The set was one of the nicest looking we’ve seen, and the ensemble worked together very smoothly, especially for an opening night performance. The play is both very funny and thought-provoking in its dealings with family relationships and the issues of aging. As usual, quite worth a viewing.

I’ve not been doing a good job keeping up with honest-to-goodness family updates of late. I have, however, tossed together another photo album with some recent pictures of the goings-on around our place. You can see them at Photos: February 2002.

I picked up American Movie without really knowing anything about it other than what was on the box. “Sundance Festival Winner? Sounds good to me!” I gave Grant, my neighbor, a call, and convinced him to skip the guitar practice he was supposed to be doing to watch it with me.

After watching the adventures of the hapless Mark Borschardt as he labored with inhuman tenacity to film his project Coven (which centers around an alcoholic who checks into a twelve step program only to find that his group consists of satanists), I was convinced that American Movie was a Spinal Tap-style spoof. I was shocked to discover a few days later than Mark is a real person, and that Coven has actually been released.

In spite of all the obstacles that obstruct Mark’s slightly-demented vision as he’s putting his film together, he gamely keeps at it. The result is alternately funny, sad, and actually pretty touching at times. The people around Mark obviously don’t understand his vision, but they love him and support his efforts.

A wonderful postscript to this movie is available on zero tv, where you can follow the further adventures of Mark and his sidekick Mike as they start filling orders for Coven, enlisting the aid of some passing Mormons to package the movie. Amazing, zany, stuff, from the heart of America.

[RING! RING!]

“Origin Systems; This is Sean.”

“DADDY! I WENT POTTY!”

“Good for you, Liam! I’m proud of you!”

“Yes, you are. Bye!”

Last week, Emily was filmed for a commercial one of our friends at Southwest Texas was doing for her film class. She spent most of the day down at the University studio and “on location” on our front sidewalk.

The commercial was a fun little spot for an imaginary product: Sugar-ee energy bars, which consist of 100% refined table sugar. The industrious film students actually created a Sugar-ee bar out of sugar cubes and some kind of candy coating. After taking a bite, Emily leaps into the air and, with the help of the blue screen, flies around the world, making it home in time for dinner.

Emily almost missed her chance at stardom when, the day before the filming, she had a minor bike accident, which resulted in a black eye. With some judicious use of makeup and choice of camera angles, however, she was still afforded her chance to become a child star.

The commercial is still in editing, but once we get a copy, I’ll see if I can get it up here for everyone to enjoy. Emily’s still doing her best to eat the whole dang sugar bar, which the students gave her when the filming was completed.

My company makes a software package called Oratorio that’s designed for presenting lyrics in a church service. Because we’ve been getting (and paying attention to) lots of really good feedback from its users, we’ve been able to make it progressively better and more feature-complete.

One of the sticking points for some people has been that the program bogs down a bit in some cases. I’ve been devoting a fair bit of thought to how to speed it up, and had a couple epiphanies that have helped significantly. I put the last of those changes into place this morning, and have been delighted and suprised with the performance increase I’ve seen, especially under Mac OS X. (Mac OS X has beautiful font smoothing that makes type looks great, but takes about 5x as long as any other OS to draw a piece of text. Oratorio used to do a lot of text drawing, but now does much less behind the scenes, which results in a very pronounced speed increase.)

Last night we went bowling with Craig & Ginger Corley, some of our good friends in San Marcos. I thought I’d been up on the latest developments in bowling, including “disco turbo lazer bowl” or whatever they called it when they added fluorescent balls, black lights, and seizure-inducing strobe lights to the bowling experience. But nothing prepared me for…the shoes.

Now, back in my day, bowling shoes were ugly, but almost delightfully so. They had the size printed on the back in enormous numbers so there was no way to hide the embarassing hugeness of your feet (10 1/2, thanks), and were made of several different colors of leather. They were very deliberately ugly, but so delightfully chunky and obvious that I always wanted to swipe a pair. My good upbringing got the better of me, though.

Last night’s shoes were a travesty. Not only were they made of some odd synthetic material probably developed originally for the space program to preserve food, but they featured large, velcro straps that went over the top of the shoe to secure it to your foot. Now, I’m all in favor of velcro in the shoes of children, as it saves countless hours of shoe-tying time for their parents, but velcro has no place in the shoe of a God-fearing adult. No self-respecting member of Generation X would be caught wearing these, tongue firmly planted in cheek, delighting in his clever irony. I think if I accidentally walked out of the bowling alley with the shoes on my feet, my children would make me turn right around and take them back as soon as I walked in the door of the house. And rightly so. They are New Coke for your feet. Ick.

Photo coming as soon as Craig sends it to me.

I rarely hawk products here, figuring that’s what their marketing people are for. I have to say, however, that I’ve been very happy with TurboTax for the Web. I’ve been using it for three years now, and it seems to be getting steadily better. This year it’s working fine on my Mac, has remembered all my dependents and lots of other information from last year, and offered to import data from a number of other sources, saving me some significant typing. It also offers helpful tax-saving and audit-avoiding tips, one of which was actually a pleasant surprise to me. Once you’re ready to file, you can do so electronically and get your refund deposited directly to your account.

I think some of the IRS’ budget should go toward just buying up TurboTax and making it available for free to whomever wants to use it. In the meantime, however, I’ll be happy to shell out my $19 this year.

Young Margaret has in the last week suddenly started to grasp what language is all about. Kathy and I have considered ourselves pretty advanced in this area, as we’ve read all about how when your children are preverbal, you can teach them to use sign language for basic concepts like “please,” “all done,” and “gimme.” Our children, of course, have conspired to teach us humility, and have all refused to have anything to do with signing until they’re getting the hang of spoken language anyway. Figures.

Anyway, Margaret has a couple recognizable words now, and is signing away too, thanks mostly to Kathy’s tireless efforts. It’s absolutely heartwarming to hear her giggly “Dada!” coming from the kitchen. Even if she is pointing at the cat when she says it.