I saw a wonderful movie recently and thought seeing as I liked it, you might like it too. Persepolis is faithfully brought to the screen from Marjane Satrapi's graphic auto biography. Her memories are rendered with the sombre colours and simple line drawings to tell a compelling, heartfelt and illuminating story. Marjane shares her life from when she was 10 years old, a future profit and a fan of Bruce Lee, to an adult woman against the backdrop of Iran's turbulent political landscape. The film begins with the new hope born from the uprising and overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Her family's joy and optimism for the future is short lived when Islamic Fundamentalists win the elections and come into power. Freedoms, especially for women, begin to erode: segregating schools, veiling girls and women, restricting movement of people, goods, activity and beliefs - to get caught breaking the rules is to face arrest and possible execution. Marjane is an intelligent, imaginative and practical girl who, like her close-knit and progressive family, shows almost relentless resilience especially in the face of having to leave everything she knows to ensure she becomes everything she can be. PS: It is wonderful to be reminded in our Pixaresque animated experiences, the simple and the simply beautiful, when tied together with a wonderful narrative, can be so lusciously beamed into the cinema in the traditional 2D animated space.

Today is laundry day for me. Seems the people in the upstairs apartment were doing laundry today too - unfortunately though, their washing machine hose got bored sending the water into the drain and decided take the scenic route instead, visiting the roof space and pouring out the light fittings and smoke alarm in our apartment hallway. After we turned the smoke alarm off (which, it seems, doubles as a flood alarm) and emptied the buckets and pots, mopped up the splashes and puddles, made the appropriate phone calls, Jet and I continued with our own laundry - starting with all the towels we'd used to divert the flood. It seems when it comes to laundry, he's especially good at ironing - is there *anything* this dog can't do?

extra credit Later that same morning: so I'm in class (morning tea time so it's okay that I'm blogging!) at a course filling in my Flash Actionscript knowledge gaps (they're becoming smaller). Pretty much all I've been thinking about for the last few weeks has been this language which adds dimension and functionality to Flash. The last few days that focus has concentrated my brain to the point where, this morning, when my alarm sounded in my half-dream-state I was trying to turn it off with stopAllSounds();