I saw an extraordinary movie called Floating Weeds. It resembles a woodblock but with moving parts. The Japanese title is Ukigusa Monogatari. This made me think of the word for woodblocks: Ukiyo-e, which means "floating pictures". The "floating" originally meant "transient, impermanent", but later it meant "worldly" and thence "cheerful". The movie itself is about some actors stranded in a village in southern Japan. They're out of money, so their troupe breaks up. One of them, the master, has an unacknowledged son in the village. So they're rootless, or floating, and even their audience doesn't care about them. There is also the Chinese novel called Six Chapters of a Floating Life, which is about some feckless sad guy.

I don't know why I thought that any of this was interesting enough to warrant the tedium of composing another pointless weblog entry. Too late to do anything about it now though.

I suppose if there isn't one already someone will start a weblog called "floatinglife". It will probably have a lot of "OMG" and "WTF" on it and pictures of pets.