AHHH! I'VE BEEN BUMPED BACK TO 2004! It seems a lame non-story story about the somewhat unusual distribution pattern for Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic The Passion of the Christ has pulled me back to the present. It seems the distributors have decided to open their movie heavily in the Bible Belt and in areas with large Roman Catholic and African-American populations, but to eschew areas "that are considered Jewish, upscale, or liberal." This seems to me a sensible business move. Gibson & Co. have made a movie that they think will appeal to some communities and not to others. So they focus their release in areas where they think they have the largest audience, and avoid areas where they think they won't be able to recoup their investment. Does anyone really think that there was going to be a huge audience on the Upper West Side for a movie that uncritically accepts the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus, that treats them as truth (rather than, say, a Pauline deception designed to cover the real Existentialist truth, or somesuch)? There's no natural right to have a movie open in your neighborhood (and frankly I find the article's suggestion that it's a huge indignity for people on the Upper West Side to have to trudge down to Times Square a little laughable. If I want to see the movie, I have to drive to damn Orange, or Bridgeport.) Maybe I'm just blind to the sinister anti-Semetic conspiracy here, but this just seems like good business sense to me.

OK, well I'm back in the year 2004. Hopefully I don't get thrust back into the past somehow. And I'd have to say that, looking at my material surroundings, I probably didn't teach my past-self how to make crazy-money in the internet stock bubble. Where's my Mazaratti, damnit?!?