Dreams, movies, shopping.

When you wake up in the middle of the night, go ahead and blog about the anxiety dream that woke you up. Jeremy did. His had a colleague who told him "the emerging helix of opinion is that your talk sucked." And Elliott Gould was there. What that means depends on which Elliott Gould movies Jeremy has seen.

Elliott Gould movies were once quite the thing. Especially "Getting Straight" (1970). "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969), "MASH" (1970), "Little Murders" (1971), "The Long Goodbye"(1973), "California Split" (1973) -- we baby boomers got really excited about the new Elliott Gould movie for a while there, and then people completely stopped caring about him. He's been in a lot of films since then though, many of them very obscure. In others his role is small. The last movie I remember seeing him in was "American History X" (1998), where he has a small role, but it's absolutely key in one of the great family dinner table scenes in all of movies. I've been meaning to put together a list of great family dinner table scenes. You know the kind where it starts out as a regular family meal and then things go terribly wrong. I like the one in "Welcome to the Dollhouse," where Dawn is denied her dessert, and the one in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," where Richard Dreyfuss gets all "This is important, this means something" about his mashed potatoes.

Anyway, I'm guessing Jeremy saw "Ocean's Twelve," because he used it in a post recently -- this one, which is about blogs turning one year old -- as mine does on Friday -- and commemorates the birthday of Nina's blog.

Nina, by the way, is blogging about Virginia Postrel's book "The Substance of Style," which I used more than once during our Sunday shopping trip to justify buying things, to the point where it justified buying the book. Nina memorializes the shopping trip here, and my take is here.

UPDATE: I'm getting some good email suggesting items for my dinner scene list: "American Beauty" (think: asparagus), "Beetlejuice" (think: Banana Boat Song), "Annie Hall" (think: Grammy Hall), "Five Easy Pieces" (think: dead kitten). Here are three I can't vouch for because I haven't seen them: "Pollock," "The Incredibles," "The Aviator."