For some time now, Stanley Goodspeed and I have had a strange working relationship. In case you’re not getting the reference, he’s one of two protagonists in the movie The Rock starring Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery. Cage plays Goodspeed and Connery plays John Mason, a British secret agent incarcerated without trial by the FBI for doing what secret agents and spies do – spying and skulking and stealing.

Anyway, this movie is one of those videos that I can watch over and over and over without coming to dispise it. It has fabulous chemistry, excellent music, good action, relatively little gore compared to more recent movies, and a villan who is more interesting than your average criminal mastermind. It was produced by the same fellow who did Pirates of the Caribbean (Gerry Bruckheimer) and the music was done by the same musical director, Hans Zimmer (who also did the music for Batman Begins and King Arthur, the former of which I loved and the latter of which was a bit fo a disappointment in some ways). The energy level is tremendous.

Now the reason I watch this over and over and over is not an addiction to television. We actually don’t watch all that much TV. No, I tend to watch Stan save the day during the afternoon, when somnolence hits me across the head like a brick and I can hardly keep my eyes open, let alone work. Having a flexible schedule to some degree means that I can avoid complicated work during this period, but since Katherine naps in the afternoon, I can’t generally justify snoring away hours of kid-free time. No amount of coffee seems to help, although its absence definitely makes the head grow foggier.

So Stan and I work together many afternoons. He saves San Francisco from chemical and biological weapons and I cut fabric up and sew it back together again. It’s a fair deal.