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Stopped at home after getting my car serviced, and our creek was in full flood from the huge rains we're having today.

I shudder to think what this will mean for the trees across the street in the park. It's not that they're shallowly rooted, but that floods like this simply heave the topsoil away by the bucketload.

Not directly related, but... it took me three hours to get home last night (major accident with loss of life on the Beltway pretty much shut down most VA to MD car traffic). I need to either get a new job or a new home...

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With thanks to wcg, a link to a quiz based on the Pew Center poll questions on religion.

Without giving away anything in case people want to try their hand, I have to say that I think 15 questions are too few to really get a grasp of what people know about so many different religions. The original survey (a PDF of which can be found here) asked a several more, some substantive and some questions to help characterise response categories on other factors. But, still, the number of questions and the way some of them are only tangentially related to religion make me feel this is a weak poll. For instance, how much does it tell one about the public's knowledge about a religion to know whether it is predominant in a given country or not? TO me that indicates something about how much the respondent knows about the *country*, but not much about what he or she knows of the religion in question.

That said, I am enough of a social science geek to wish I had access to the data files and time to play with them...

film review: Topkapi

My viewing entertainment this evening was the 1964 film Topkapi, a classic jewel-robbery film with a stellar cast, based on a novel by Eric Ambler.

The introduction is rather odd, but the movie drew me in very quickly. It features a very staccato style of dialogue, with some dry wit and irony. The shooting style is also very engaging (to me), with a lot of what I can only describe as small action. In other words, a great deal is shown with quick shots and cuts, but there's some subtlety, some "watch carefully or you may miss something" feel. I wasn't surprised to find that the director, Jules Dassin, was an assistant to Hitchock at one point--it has a Hitchcock flavour to it. Even when you know (you think?) that they have to be able to get away with the heist, the process of the actual theft had me on the edge of my seat, tense lest something slip at a delicate moment.

Characters sometimes convey as much with gestures and facial expressions as with words. There's a lot of local colour (the exterior filming took place, in fact, where the film is set, in Istanbul). Speaking of colour, it's almost more engaging for being late Technicolor--that (along with some rather dated visual effects and camera work) gives it a period feel that's very pleasing in a retro way.

My parents, especially my mum, loved Peter Ustinov, and he does a great job in this film--he reminds me of a John Le Carre character is his shambolic, apologetic, "bastard sons of the late Empire" manner. Maximillian Schell is super as the brains behind the plan; Robert Morley is the tinkerer who comes up with their technical gear. Melina Mercouri is the mercurial motive force behind the heist, vibrant, flirtatious, eccentric.

I enjoyed it tremendously and gave it four stars on Netflix. It made me want to see more films by this director, more films with these actors. And the location shots reinforced my (strong) desire to travel to Turkey some day.