More so than other comics to film conversions, Spider-Man feels to me like a modern day fairy tale. Though as a properly modern tale it tempers its open moralizing with a healthy dose of moral ambiguity, and there’s no shortage of action. At least he finally worked things out with Mary Jane, to have Spidey suffer sexlessly in the name of the greater good would be downright un-American.

This would be a fine samurai flick even if it didn’t include various absolutely brilliant Stomp meets Tap meets wadaiko scenes. I bore a reluctantance to see Takeshi Kitano’s earlier films, but it has evaporated in a whirling crowd of tap dancing villagers.

An older Ghibli film, not Miyazaki, but very much with his sense of nostalgia. Having just returned from Tokyo, seeing the city on film helps ease the separation anxiety.

Through some deeply fortunate happenstance of international shipping, the avocados at my local supermarket arrive daily with a ripeness so sublime as to bring a tear to your eye. My relationship to avocados in their native California was one of frustration. Invariably, I would bring home an inedibly firm specimen and resolve to remember to make use of it during the short window one or two days hence when it would achieve peak deliciosity, only to suffer a bout of culinary neglect that left me scraping the oxidized brown chunks from the edible remains and resolving to strengthen my resolve the next time. To experience the satisfaction of bringing home a ripe, tender avocado and incorporating into a delicious meal right then and there is a luxury I will sorely miss.

Somehow the bleak inhumanity of it all resonated more deeply with me during my angst-ridden teen years. Now I’m of the opinion that if you haven’t found a reason to live by 25 then perhaps you should be trying a little harder. None the less, the incessant rationalizing seems to give way to some good clean action by about page 250 and things stay interesting from there through to the finish.

What kind of error message is this?

[11:20pm] baltic:~ > java -jar foo.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.util.zip.ZipException: No such file or directory
        at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
        at java.util.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:112)
        at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:127)
        at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:65)

It doesn’t even tell me what file or directory is missing. You might think it’s obvious because I just ran the command, but frequently java is run from a shell script and all I see is this baffling crap about zip files.

I was about to suggest that it be more like the error message one gets when specifying a class that doesn’t exist:

[11:24pm] baltic:~ > java nonexistent.Class
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: nonexistent/Class

However, that largely sucks as well. At least its not six calls deep into classloader code, which would be on par with the zip business, and it does tell me which class it couldn’t find, but it’s still a sorry excuse for an error message. Is it that difficult to catch the most common exceptions and report something sensible?