’Ot & Sweaty

Back when I worked in an office, I usually had to spend the hotter parts of a day like today, near 100 F, in air conditioning. Now that I work at home, I get to spend the hotter parts of a day like this in air conditioning that I’m paying for. An essential difference, and I don’t turn it on till it reaches 80 F inside, and then only to cool it down to 77 F or so. ComEd gets enough of my money.

But that’s just an average inside temp. The coldest part of the house (in summer) is downstairs in the multimedia entertainment center room (the TV’s there). For an enhanced viewing experience last Saturday afternoon when I was watching The Bridge on the River Kwai, I should have turned off the a/c and let myself sweat just a little, at least during the Col. Nicholson in a hotbox scenes, but the rest of the family in other parts of the house would have been annoyed, so I sat there under a blanket while tropical heat was simulated on screen, and while tropical-like heat actually happened outside the house.

When I was a kid, Bridge was shown on TV a number of times, and I remember the long wait till the best part: the bridge blowing up and the train tumbling into the Kwai. These days, of course, I’m a grown man who appreciates the subtleties of dramatic pacing and the arc of a narrative, and who understands the greatness of the movie as a whole. So as soon as I got the DVD last week, I used the select scene feature to go right to the end, and I watched the bridge blowing up and the train tumbling into the Kwai. Wow!