Ranking the weekend

Fucking awesome: the Wii. Oh god it's so good. A work couple who I'm going to have to find a pseudonym for if I keep liking them as much as I do got one last week and invited us over to play with it. We played until five in the morning and it was only overwhelming physical exhaustion that could persuade me to put down the console . . . I spent hours the next day trying to rationalize buying one for our household (cheaper than a gym membership! More likely to be used than a gym membership!) and did a great job, though I always ran up against the hurdle of knowing it would be the end of my intellectual life, until I got sick of it at least, which just might not happen.

God, Nintendo wins. They get the console out underpricing the new PlayStation and whatever that Microsoft Shitbox is called, and they make it fucking awesome. They make it so that everyone will love it - children, chicks, and people over fifty - it's just so . . . so . . . Well. So evil. For the first time, and obviously this is a sign of advancing age, I understand why Christian types usually think fun things are evil - dancing, gambling, drinking, and the Wii (yes, I'm suggesting it's right up there on the Fun-o-meter, though fornication still leaves it behind). It's so distracting. It precludes doing almost anything else if you have one around . . . and it's also interactive, something you can do in a big screaming hearty group, so you don't get the funny feeling that you're turning into a spotty World of Warcraft island of one - there'd be nothing to stop you just playing that shit forever . . . there'd be nothing to stop everybody from playing that shit forever, and then what would happen to the human race? It'd have a fuckload of fun, that's what.

Anyways. The Wii was a nice thing about the weekend. Another nice thing about the weekend was that the weather was lovely and we spent Sunday sitting around the park in the sun, while the F-word painted and I read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. It's a non-fiction narrative about the author's attempt to travel from Massachusetts to the southernmost tip of South America by train, and so far it's fucking awesome. The opposite of Bruce Chatwin's wide-eyed, stripped-down prose, but very good in its opposition - a touch mean-spirited, but readable with it. I'll write more when I read more.

Also had a go at Enduring Love by Ian McEwan over the last little while and found the first 38 pages to be interminable shit. I think it's defeated me because just thinking about continuing to read it makes me think "awwwwwwww, fuck, let's just buy a Wii". I just get so fucking annoyed with these modern Big Men of Literature who seem to be absolutely incapable of writing a book that isn't a film treatment in disguise. Okay, maybe that's where the money is - fine. Chase the money. But I'll still think you're jerks who history will forget, or else vilify for trying to bastardize one form of art for another. Go get a contract with Time-Warner, you whores.

Also saw Jesus Camp, of which more later.