Greetings...I just got back from Sydney Australia. I did some work for an upcoming book (more details TBD) and did other assorted bits of weirdness, like visit Kings Cross and eat a curry tiger. My cab driver actually used the phrase "fair ####um" in conversation, and I don't think he was merely angling for tips from awed Americans.

Recently I was reminded of my first reaction to Star Wars. That is, my reaction circa May 1977, before I had actually seen the movie. I think I finally saw it 2-3 weeks after it actually opened, and up until that point I had assumed it was a "war movie" with soliders in helmets lugging machine guns up sandy beaches. Hey, it had the word "war" in the title...

Then one day my best friend Matt Levy started raving to me about this new movie he had seen. But one scene in particular had really keyed him up, and this is how he kept describing it to me:

"It's this cool movie about space people. And they fly around, and they get stuck in this garbage disposal. And somebody turns it on."

My second-grade brain chewed on this for a while, hitting on the key phrases "fly around," and "garbage disposal." The mental image that resulted was a family of whimsical six-inch tall "space people" with antennae and wings (very similar, in fact, to the Sea Monkeys who taunted me in the Boy's Life classified ads every month...more on that disappointment another day). In the movie, these space people apparently few around somebody's house, landed in the sink, and got shredded by the disposal unit.

To say that Star Wars exceeded my expectations would be putting it very mildly.

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)