Day one: part one

Day one is well in advance of the actual festival. Here I am in New York packing my stuff before heading out to LaGuardia airport. I plan to be faithfu l to this thing for the next ten days at least. At least I hope I will. I've been going to what are called "pre-screenings" for a couple of weeks now,and so have pretty much everyone else in the critic business in New York. Up in Toronto, they've been having them since the 21st of last month, at the Canadian Film board screening room down on King street....At least I hope it's on King Street. I'm going to attend the last two days of them and I don't want to get lost.

tomorrow, we stop at the American consulate to get new pages added to my passport, which is supposed to be a free service, unless you're physically in the US and need it quickly,in which case it costs sixty bucks. This was a shock, and it's soooo much easier doing it up there. Five minutes and that's it. Probably a little more as there are lines and such. But sixty bucks for a free service? Sounds like Morocco....Hopefully, the people up here will be nicer and more efficient.

But while we're pondering that, Bushie has decided to promote Justice-designate Roberts to Chief. This is the quickest that someone this has happened to in like...ever. The last two associates who were promoted to Chief, Stone in 1943 and Rehnquist in 1986, had each been on the court more than a decade. Stevens is now the only person left on the court who's either served with or replaced a Roosevelt appointee.

Here's a cute bit of trivia: Since they've started taking pictures of the supreme court in 1865, there have been four-and a half justices who've been in every annual photograph. Steven Field, who was appointed by Lincoln, Harlan, Sr. who was appointed by Hayes, Hughes, who counts as half because he left the court after twelve years (Teddy Roosevelt) to run for president in 1916 and came back in 1930(Hoover), Douglas who was appointed by FDR, and Rehnquist, who was appointed by Nixon. So in those five photographs, you can see the continuity from Jackson to Clinton.

I'll stick to movies from here on out for the next couple of weeks...unless some other calamity happens.