Misc.

A few of us took a van tour of Baltimore this morning with Bob Seidel, who's a lifelong resident and used to be involved with IPS. He had given a presentation on the city as part of our orientation and nicely offered to give a tour. Since he's done policy work, including urban planning-type stuff, over the years, he had lots of useful info and insights about the physical and social layout of the city -- it wasn't exactly a tourist's tour.


I've seen a couple movies in the past week, both of which were excellent. Broken Flowers, the new film with Bill Murray, was great. In many ways it reminded me of an Alexander Payne (my favorite director) film: The appreciation of absurdities, dark comedy, avoidance of putting a film gloss on the details of American life, and very good (but understated) cinematography. I'll need to see some more Jim Jarmusch films soon.

The other movie was Hotel Rwanda, which Jason had gotten via Netflix. Very good, and of course very disturbing (mostly morally disturbing, since they actually went pretty easy on showing violence). You should see it if you haven't, and then wonder why we're not doing anything about Darfur.