Friday we went to the Chinese buffet for our periodic over-eating experience, then we returned home to watch Clint Eastwood’s latest movie Hereafter, starring Matt Damon. We seem to be on a Matt Damon film festival lately, since he has been in the last three movies we’ve seen, the others being True Grit and The Adjustment Bureau. Considering how good those two were, the fact that a Clint Eastwood-directed movie is rarely bad, and the fact that Hereafter got a very strong recommendation from Roger Ebert, I had fairly high expectations for it. In a way, the movie seemed a bit like wishful thinking, since Clint Eastwood is now 80 years old and staring death in the face. It was interesting though, although definitely not for the special effects and thriller crowd, and Matt Damon was as good as usual.

I rarely go back and read books which impressed me when I was in high school or college, because as I have changed over the decades, so has my reading taste. In 1967 I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and as a bonus for doing so I received the 1000+ pages Treasury of Great Science Fiction, which contained tons of short fiction and 4 novels, three of which I still have very fond memories of. So I decided to finally reread Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave, which has a fascinating premise: Earth passes out of an inhibiting wave which has suppressed the intelligence of every creature on Earth for millions of years. Anderson explores the aftereffects of every creature suddenly tripling in intelligence very well, while also telling a very absorbing story. I liked it so much that I am continuing to read the rest of the anthology.