Except that the day job has caught up with my brain again.

Seen this morning in the news:
–The Great Bank Robbery (in French): er, it would seem one of our most prestigious banks, a Paris branch of the Credit Lyonnais, was robbed movie-style by a bunch of thiefs who dug into the vault from one of the neighbouring cellars, tied up the security guard, and calmly proceeded to empty 200 safes–before leaving with their loot, setting fire to the whole building so they couldn’t be traced. The friend who pointed this out to me was reminded of Sherlock Holmes’ “The Red-Headed League”. Not entirely inaccurate…
-(via Charles Tan) “Falling from Grace”, a romantic comedy that apparently couldn’t sell in the mainstream–because the main character is Asian, and they’d have had to pigeonhole it under “Asian-American movies”. I have watched the trailer, and cannot for the life of me fathom why the Asian thing would be a problem. It doesn’t even seem like her private life is particularly and spectacularly “Asian” (whatever that would mean) in a way that might possibly disturb the faint of heart–sure, there’s a few specific quirks, but all in all you could imagine the same kind of movie with any colour for the main character, adapting the various sub-episodes. But, because the actress is not White, it becomes a special interest movie.
*headdesk* I think Hal Duncan is right when he calls the whole phenomenon “segregation”: it fits the definition pretty much bang to rights (not the “Black/White” issues, but the larger meaning of separation). It seems to me like a side-effect of quotas: you fit people into little boxes (like “please check the appropriate box: which race are you?”), and then you carry this over into, well, pretty much every aspect of daily life: “if you fit into such and such a box, then you’ll like this–we’ll put it into a special section so you can head right over and be among like-minded people”. And the über-box is for people who don’t check any of those boxes, who don’t have quotas, and who become (or rather remain) the mainstream. It’s scary as heck, from where I stand (admittedly not in the US, and in a country where intolerance has a whole different slew of expressions).

Ok, end of rant, I swear. Back to my Miles Vorkosigan reading (God, those books are so funny it hurts. Poor Miles).