Maybe it's because 'Troy' has just come to town as well to as a Cannes Film Festival (Fr and Eng), which sounds particularly promising with Tarantino for president -- and a number of his compatriots set to boycott this year's show if one's to believe what much of the press here has been saying.
Maybe it's because my current bedtime reading has had me online refreshing my knowledge of Greek mythology (two superb links for such things: the Encyclopaedia Mythica and in2greece, lovingly launched and superbly maintained by Victoria Sandels).
But I seem to have caught the attention and won the blessing of some onetime inhabitant of Olympus.
You see, I was being slightly economical with the truth yesterday when I said I'd "gone and put the wind up myself".
The Wildcat helped, once I'd mentioned Lady E again.
Knowing me only too well, as soon as the Wildcat heard that I'd felt compelled to e-mail the lass, it took her less than no time to guess the appalling and shameless magnitude of what I'd done.
"You've really blown it now!" she whispered. "How could you still be such an idiot?"
It was only at around three in the morning, as I tossed and turned in the dark and mused on the probable, indeed almost certain, effect of allowing myself to forget every lesson ever learned about women in a few moments of romantic excess, that I was sure the Wildcat was right.
She'd informed me clearly that if any sensible woman gets an inkling of but a fraction of what can go through my head in my moonstruck moments, she'd be running for the hills, etc., never to take the risk of even speaking to me again.
This I really should know for myself, having accumulated an impressive list of "disasters".
Yet still some Grecian or even the White Goddess herself ("essential reading") smiled on me regardless.
Unable to bear the silence this morning, however pitiless the tidings might be, I had to telephone Lady E. and stumble my way on to her answering machine just like the young fool for love I'd become.
And -- "O frabjous day!" -- with infinite mercy, she returned my call and put me out of my misery, prepared still to talk to me, even professing readiness to see me again soon.
 With unspeakable relief and deciding that Lady E. has even more tolerance and strength of character than I'd dared hope, I have to let the true moral of this episode for all stricken men (and some women) go unsaid, in the name of what remains of discretion and a total respect for "milady's" intimacy.
Mais j'en ai échappé belle ... and won't go messing with the stars again for a while. The only imaginable celebration of such survival to die another day is stolen, for the likes of her, from the Honeyguide of the wide-ranging Raphael Carter, who's achieved some thoughtful reconciliation with his 'Sonnets on Science' and wrote 'The Fortunate Fall' (Amazon US for once). Fortuitously, this both looks like my kind of SF reading and also has the right title for my feelings.
Due to a business I shan't go into again, I've appreciated an e-mail from Nathan of E/B/T/B, who occasionally blogs in English as well as French. He's suggested a drink I hope I'll be able to make next week with a couple more of the local bloggers met online of late.
That kind of prospect sounds better, I fear, than 'Troy', now the top IMDb source of some of the most mixed crits I've read there lately.
The arrogant Brit I can sometimes be particularly relished the warnings there and on some other movie megasites of "spoilers"?!
This very lunchtime at the Canteen, I became engrossed in a long and interesting debate with a man of about my own age who was bemoaning the lamentable fact that history, legendary or otherwise, forms only a minimal part of the French national curriculum nowadays.
It happens that the Kid is as interested in certain historical periods as I was at her age and devours pertinent books of her own choosing. Were Marianne to stick strictly to the syllabus I've seen, Rome may not have been built in a day, but any knowledge dispensed about the place at school might be the work of less than a week.
Though 'Gladiator' also played fast and loose with historical "truth", it has won a place on the slowly growing shelf of something I thought I'd never do a year ago: purchased DVDs of some of my own Top 30 films, snapped up whenever the price is right, and a few others besides.
While most are either not to my taste or still cost too much for my "culture" budget, it's worth letting others know that Amazon France is currently running a batch of mainly Cannes-related special offers.
Nevertheless, while Marianne has won me over to DVDs, I remain convinced it's madness to have the luck to be a movie buff living in Paris and steer clear of the big screens as some do out of choice.
Jean-Luc Godard (BFI) got it right in 'Les Inrocks' last week. One of his interviewers challenged him when he said that 'Allemagne 90' has never really been seen here:
"'Uh-uh - it was shown on telly, giving it more of a public than it would have got in the cinema.'
JLG: 'It was seen more than if it had come out in the cinemas, and at least seen at all because it made television. But let's say that people got a notion of it on television...'"
Which is little more than I expect to get when watching DVDs on my Mac ... but then, as my experiences with women amply prove, I can tend to overdo the all-or-nothing bit sometimes.
Here's a fairly similar outlook:
"Quarsan answered it, I heard a rather loud expression of delight and then silence again.
For several hours (...)
Underneath my TV was a huge, ugly speaker and dotted around the floor were 5 more smaller ones. There were thin, black wires everywhere which I'm sure can be sorted eventually but the very word 'eventually' is a rather daunting one that may just as well be translated into 'never'."
"Ebay," concludes Zoë whose 'Boyfriend Is A Twat', "is Evil."
Zoë is one of the funniest women I've read since meeting the Squipper and some of the other boobied bloggers.
On thoughts of where all this home cinema stuff is going, Dave fast-forwards us 10 years in with a foretaste of PTV (How to Save the World). "Who," he asks, "would go to a movie theatre with such a limited selection and no 3D vision?" (a question to which I won't make some snide remark about how the other far, far more than half of us are still likely to be living in 2015...).
As for Cindy herself, she wants to know 'What Contest...' you might win.
That brain-dusting chick also has the distinction of being the first and only woman ever to offer me flowers...
Intelligence, which Godard possesses in ample quantities but in increasingly oddball vein the older he becomes, is not something you can expect much out of me at present. Somebody who got something right last night was Maia "La Coureuse", sneaking a dreamy look close to the right hair colour and length, a full moon and even "milady's" pair of wings into one of the artistic endeavours she should blog more often.
Serendipidity is everywhere I look.
Even Vacuity's perpetrated an overhaul and has now started setting some of her sights on a 'Sexy Saturday'. You have been warned! since I've been finding things there that even I hadn't thought about... yet.
10:34:14 PM link 
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