Saw two movies today, 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Return to the 36th Chamber... Lau Kar-leung directed, starring Gordon Lau, the former a serious version of the Kung fu chestnut, the rebel on the run from evil warlords, taking cover with Monks or mad hermits, being tortured into competence and sent back into the world to seek and attain vengeance, the latter a comic variation on the same. 36th Chamber of Shaolin is quite marvellous, a classic of the breed, but Return to the 36th Chamber is something quite different. Gordon Lau is back, playing a faker this time - he impersonates the character he played in the first one - then after being humiliated, goes to Shaolin Temple seeking guidance. What follows is a comic variation on the usual plot line... Scaffold Kung Fu! Gordon Lau is surprising here - he's a great martial artist, but he also plays the comic role energetically and well - he's funny, acting in a completely different style from the first film. It's quite impressive...

It was an interesting ride in. The T wants to raise fares? They're busing down Huntington Ave with the E-street tracks torn up. That's bad enough but some idiot had managed to get a bus wedged across Huntington perfecly blocking the street. All the buses running out along Huntington were backed up in the tunnel that runs under Mass Ave. Traffic backed up. The driver on a cel phone looking at his handiwork. A charter coming to the red sox game. I gave it up and walked since I was almost there. I could have taken the D train and walked and gotten there faster.

I left behind an old black man who was the spitting image of Grover from Sandford and Son the beard the greying hair who had walked into the plexiglass side of a new bus kiosk at Copley while he was waiting for the shuttle buses. Blood on a paper napkin. A thin cut over his right eye. Andgry and a little disoriented less hurt than irritated I think he muttered and griped and I nodded and yepped all the way to the standstill on Huntington. I gave him my seat. Poor old man but it's a thing that could happen to anyone. It's happened to me less publically and with lesss harm being done, walking into glass walls and doors. More than once. Maddening isn't it? To him who is not that old not so old as to need help in anything but made to look foolish and weak in a public place. The bus driver asking what happened? did you fall? Looking for sympathy, having to settle for a seat. And held up again from going wherever he was going somewhere he said he had to be he didn't have time to go to the doctor's fro copley not that he was hurt alll that badly, by some moron trying to fit a bus around a tight corner.

Bloody bug crawling up the side of the computer screen. Perches on the top. What's he want? How'd he get in here? well? Answer, villain! He shan't answer again. Man has once more triumphed, however fleetingly, over the insect world.