Five Degrees

It's 5 degrees in Ann Arbor (that's about -14 Celsius.) Lately I have been reading and watching movies to cope with the white skies and the white snow and the bare trees. Last night, I read Cairo, a fun and super entertaining new graphic novel which Russell gave me for my birthday. Afterwards we had a Uganda double header: The Last King of Scotland followed by the documentary Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait by Barbet Schroeder. The documentary is infinitely crazier and cooler-- one of my favorite parts is when Amin claps at a crocodile and takes credit for its moving. Last King... wasn't too bad; Whitaker's spot-on performance was the real cause for celebration. I wasn't crazy about the fact that our guide through that world was a white male protagonist who ends up a christ-figure. But the documentary gives you more of a sense of the dictator's maddening personality: sometimes, his ideas really make sense, and others, he's just plain insane. He talks about the importance of African-Arab unity, then we see his army "training" to take over Israel. Their choppers barely fly off the ground and the soldiers stroll leisurely across the grass. Classic.