Books: About a Boy by Nick Hornby. Saw the movie, stumbled across the book in the stacks at the library and decided to try it. Also liked High Fidelity (the movie) so will track down that book if this one proves any good. I have a lot of travel coming up (6 trips in the next 6 weeks) and will need a stockpile of reading material for those flights on which it's physically impossible to open my laptop when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

Movies: Velvet Goldmine. If you stirred together David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and Mick Jagger, you'd get something like the characters in this movie. A disjointed story that contains cryptic flashbacks and references to events that may or may not have actually taken place. The musical performances were convincing enough, but there just wasn't enough meat to the story to make you care about any of the characters. Vague references to Citizen Kane, although I have't seen that movie recently enough to be sure I'm not just making that up.

Dreams: At work I just went through the process of selecting a person to fill the role I had been in up until a few months ago. We interviewed four internal candidates and chose one, whose name we announced publicly last week. This process was interesting because we talked to the candidates about topics that would not ordinarily come up in the day-to-day business of running projects and such. It was a difficult choice because they each had excellent qualities and any one of them could succeed in the role. Anyway, last night's dream was about getting all the candidates into a room (there were hundreds of candidates in the dream), feeding them, and then stepping into a room with a one-way mirror (like in a police line-up) and winnowing the crowd down to a manageable number. The dream me didn't realize there would be so many people show up and I was worried we wouldn't have enough food, or that we'd be able to make good choices. My old boss was there and passed along some pearls of wisdom, which I promptly forgot. There was also something about a guy in a hammock outside the building where this was all taking place, although I think he was a refugee from the Velvet Goldmine movie. No resolution by the end of the dream, although I did have the sense I was concerned about hurting a lot of feelings as we made the selection. The dream me needs to toughen up some.