In between the feedings and the pacings and the desperate attempts to placate, comfort, pacify, console and above all stupefy our daughter last night, I had two dreams which more than made up for months of not having gone to the movies.

The 4 AM show: I joined Sopranos producer David Chase as he scouted locations for the new season in our Brooklyn neighborhood. He wanted to look at a little family-run drugstore up the way -- and I told him, appreciatively, that I thought it would be good way to show the world what a lousy excuse for a pharmacy with which our block was saddled (there is, in fact, no drugstore closer than a subway stop away from us). We entered a tiny, dim, chaotically-ordered establishment staffed by a surly couple, and went promptly back to the storeroom (fame hath its priviliges, I guess), which featured a cockroach the size of a skateboard. That's not meant as a figure of speech -- it was clearly imported into my dream directly from my memory of Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. I killed it in a fit of terror and loathing, only to discover that the walls and corners of the room were crawling with large yellow scorpions and other arachnidally sinister forms. How to get my wife and sleeping daughter out without being stung? Unfortunately shorts-clad, I high-stepped us through the doorway, leaving behind an absorbed and un-freaked-out Chase, whose pure professionalism kept his eye on the location-scouting ball whilst I bailed with the baby, past a particularly malevolent, saffron-colored pest whose tinkertoy tail waved at me in a sardonic combination of threat and dismissal.

On to the 5:30 performance. My wife and I are on the Concorde, which has been turned into a large flying maternity ward. It's also unfortunately host to a kind of ersatz youth gang, made up of kids who are vaguely interested in being delinquents -- or maybe they're actors -- and who want to sort of hang around menacingly, but it's not clear whether they're just goofing or deadly serious, all wearing black. Sort of like the "nihilists" in The Big Lebowski. My response is to try and talk them to death, sort of defuse the situation, but it's meeting with uncertain results. Eventually, we get away from them in the maze of hotel-like hospital rooms, but get separated. Theresa has the baby.

And then it's time to land, in London I think, but because there's a movie being filmed from the plane -- I realize retrospectively -- the pilot is going to be spending a little while making a dizzying series of loops, dives, barrel rolls, and close approaches to landmarks like Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower (yes, I know. Wrong burg.). I then remember reading in People about how all of these actors have been complaining about the time they've had to spend, when making their movies, flying around on these stomach-challenging sojourns in order to capture the right overhead angles for opening credit sequences and such. Problem here being that in my attempt to find refuge from the Van Buren Boys or whatever they're called, I'm not strapped in with the other passengers and whatever celebs are along for the ride. I've instead installed myself in some kind of open-roofed Victorian cupola mounted somewhere near the tail, and while it affords absolutely sensational views of the Thames wheeling overhead, there's nothing except my shaky-grip on an ornamental pipe to keep me hurtling to my death. A surprisingly mild breeze tugs at my hair. Vertiginous horror and goddamn-I-am-so-freaking-stupid vie pettily for first place in a kind of emotional thumb-wrestle.

Baby cries. Cut.

Today's quiz, in honor of Capt. R.C. Tipper, USN (Ret.), who just spent an uncomfortable week on a sofabed in our living room, takes a nautical theme.

The following is the epitaph from a tombstone:

The celebrated Navigator
who first transplanted the Bread Fruit Tree
From Otaheite to the West Indies
bravely fought the battles of his country,
and died beloved respected and lamented

"In caelo quies"

Who is buried in this grave?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a bootleg tape of Russel Crowe's band 30-Odd Foot of Grunts performing their cult-favorite skiffle version of "Blow the Man Down," later used as the love theme in Master and Commander. No Googling. No Froogling. And no canoodling! One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.

I generally enjoy Dahlia Lithwick's rundown of legal issues in Slate, and I think I've discovered another reason to like her -- her recent take on the decision in the John Muhammad trial is a nice example of how close analysis of a situation can suddenly cross over into prognostication of likely future events and then make the short, thrilling leap into pure imagination -- something I do that drives Theresa nuts. Noting that the jury in the case apparently looked beyond the problem of whether or not Muhammad's alleged masterminding of the sniper killings could be proved, and simply took it on faith that he was the "puppet master" of John Lee Malvo, she notes that the prosecution theory in the Muhammad case "maps perfectly" onto Malvo's defense (in his seperate trial) that he was a brainwashing victim.

She raises the question "can and should the guilty verdict in Muhammad's trial exonerate Malvo? Doesn't the Muhammad verdict definitively mean that, yes, Malvo was manipulated and used?" She quickly points out that legally, this logical progression is meaningless -- the Muhammad verdict will not be evidence in the Malvo case, and indeed, Malvo's insanity defense is a difficult one.

But she goes on in the timeless manner of deep thinkers everywhere:

Still, the question remains, as a moral, if not legal matter, whether we can justify taking two lives based on two irreconcilable theories of the case. Can Muhammad die for manipulating Malvo, while Malvo dies for being a free agent?

More likely what will happen is that both juries will achieve a single and somewhat just end by accepting both versions of the truth, and neither. Ultimately this will result in a sort of loose legal equilibrium—with the jurors partially nullifying in each case—fudging the law on the margins to hold the elder sniper more responsible, which makes intuitive, if not legal, sense.

She builds her conclusion on a more heightened version of the same theme:

Depending on what happens in the Malvo trial, and at both sentencing hearings, at the end of these two trials we may witness a result that is not precisely legal but nevertheless probably fair: Muhammad will be executed for murders he never quite committed, and Malvo's life may be spared for murders he blatantly committed, because of an intuitive emotional consensus that he was not fully culpable as an adult. It is a cliché that the law is a blunt instrument. What we forget is that juries are quite subtle.

That "depending on what happens" is a very useful qualifier -- I really should employ it more often around the house -- but it doesn't erase the sense that her almost stern brace of sentences at the end, which remind us that those good folks on juries have more on the ball than a Court TV studio-full of well-coiffed commentators, are hanging out there in advance of that jury being so all-fired subtle in the first place. Especially when she's just finished telling us how the Muhammad jury blandly accepted a prosecutorial theory on the basis of very little evidence, this claim rings a little bizarre.

It's one thing to lay out your case for what will happen in the courtroom or at the ballot box. But it's another to go from there to deducing the lesson-for-us-all in the thing which has yet to happen.

Therefore, I predict that, just by taking note of this instance, my own tendency to assuredly predict both what will happen and what it will mean will be appropriately curtailed. It is a cliché that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. What we forget is that...um...let's see...I am a wombat?

This week we have on offer a musical mystery from the tune-trivia tyrant himself, Gavin Edwards. Delivered to Wombat HQ by electric unicycle and decoded only moments ago by the duty cryptographer, the maestro's challenge to you all reads as follows (once all the demonic cackling has been edited out):

What major musical figure was named after the 21st president of the United States, and born in the 20th State?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a rare Paul Wolfowitz bobble-head doll from Mr. Edwards' personal collection. He insists that there be no Googling, no Lexis-ing or Nexis-ry, no frantic emails to the librarians at Eastman, and get your hands off of that Who's Who. One single guess per comment, please; but you may comment as frequently as you like.

From today's Publisher's Lunch deal index email comes word of yet another single-word title material-cultural history:

Pauline Couture's ICE, an exploration of an under-appreciated mineral that is omnipresent in our lives, from varying perspectives (from explorers to vodka-makers!), to Allison McCabe at Berkley, in a quick pre-empt, by Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative Artists (US).

This follows hit one-word-hook hits like Longitude, Salt, and of course, Cod.

Not wanting to miss out on the trend, I'm working up proposals now for the following works:

BROTH: the innovation that comforted Western Civilization

LINT: how the dryer screen built an empire and took a nation to the cleaners

TOTE: the bag that built American shoulders and carried away the world

PROPYLENE GLYCOL METHYL ETHER ACETATE: the solvent that revolutionized high-grade paint and defined a generation

Books into movies: always a fun topic and certainly I was hoping to get something slightly more out of Joseph O’Neill’s essay in the Times, which points out that, taken together Phillip Roth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow – those surprisingly long-living saurians of literature (image stolen from a memorable illustration that accompanied this unforgiving review of Toward the End of Time, penned by D.F. Wallace in 1997) – have seen very little of their work adapted successfully for the movies.

Obviously, much of O’Neill’s case depends on what you think about Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), Seize the Day (TV film, 1976), or Rabbit Run (1970). O’Neill counts all of these movie versions of Great Novels as failures to deliver cinematically at anywhere near the level the book does as literature; the argument, of course, jumps off from the apparent critical consensus that the recent adaptation of Roth’s recent The Human Stain really bites. I must admit that I haven’t seen any of ‘em, so to a certain degree I don’t have much room to comment – although note that the writer sneakily puts the James Caan adaptation of Updike’s most famous novel in the “failed” column without having seen it either; he says that since it was never released in the U.S. it must have stunk. Specious, Mr. O’Neill, specious, but I shall pass over it.

I have seen The Witches of Eastwick and, indeed, between the spectacle of Nicholson and Susan Sarandon making like a pair of Smithfield hams, and the fact that its unthoughtfully goofball approach to witches more or less paved the way for the wince factory that is Charmed, there’s much to regret. That said, Witches isn’t by any means lacking in watch-it-while-you-fold-the-laundry entertainment value. But that doesn’t necessarily belie O’Neill’s point: I don’t think many people count the original as among the Updike’s best work.

Anyway, O’Neill blames the failure more or less on the fact that the authors all do their big work using unlovely male protagonists, who face middle age rather than the possibilities of youth, and whose complexities, which become involving when embodied in the writers’ skillful language, flatten into mere dysfunction on the screen. (He also notes that Woody Allen’s success mining the terrain of hyperverbal, neurotic male self-regard made adapting novels suited to that perspective, particularly many of Roth’s, superfluous). He makes the more cynical point that we’d prefer to watch films that have more young, good-looking people in them than one is likely to run across in a film of, say, The Poorhouse Fair or The Counterlife. (Though it would be nice to see somebody like Charlie Kaufman work up Roth’s “The Ghost Writer.” OK, maybe not Kaufman, but somebody interesting…)

It’s an interesting theory, and one which helpfully extends the “good book”/”bad movie” adage. But I’m not sure that it’s all quite right – take the Neil LaBute treatment of Possession was almost entirely devoted to ensuring that we the viewers got lots of time looking at pretty young people, and the result was an hour and a half of amazing stupidity -- on par with the last couple of Star Wars crapsteroids -- one of those movies whose badness consists in there being simply no discernable reason for its having been made, or for the characters in it to have spent a nanosecond of screen time, and this DESPITE the presence of Jennifer Ehle (Note that Byatt’s perfectly adaptable -- “Morpho Eugenia” became the satisfying Angels & Insects.)

I have a hard time thinking of examples of totally satisfying examples of adaptations of contemporary literary fiction. A few things spring to mind: The Virgin Suicides, The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys. Decent movies from good novels. But none of these are examples of books that felt important to me. Only adaptations of older fiction seems to work consistently well for me – I saw The Wings of the Dove not long ago, and liked it tremendously. But, then, I haven’t been getting to the movies much these days.

Today's quiz leaves behind our ephemeral concerns with history, literature, and other such passing phenomena, in favor of the confrontation with the primordial drama of Man vs.Nature.

In a 1981 study, biologist Walter Auffenberg described an animal attack on a 14-year old boy, which resulted in a fatality. Suprised while in the forest cutting wood, the victim fled from the beastie, but unfortunately ran into an obstacle and tripped up momentarily, leaving the animal enough time to bite him a single time on the posterior.

The bite was so severe that the boy died of blood loss half an hour later. The teeth of the attacking animal have been described as well-adapted for a life of "heedless, violent mastication."

What kind of animal delivered the fatal chomp?

The first correct answer posted to comments wins a stale Chocofreta bar. No Googling or using necromancy to summon the spirit of Marlin Perkins. One single, solitary guess per comment, please -- speculation upon multiple possibilities within the comment may confuse the judges. But you may comment as often as you like.

And if you get help from your life-partner, elderly parent, cellmate, ascended angelic-consciousness mentor, or travel agent, please keep that fact to yourself. It just stirs up trouble.

I know that the notion of treating the postal service as a truly public service, of a kind different than a muffler dealership or a tanning salon, has become so utterly behind the times that to utter a wish for the dignity of the institution to be restored is like wondering aloud about when the American automotive industry is going to roll up its sleeves and give us an affordable electric car.

However...something truly rankles when I'm standing in the Chelsea post office, waiting to do a bit of good-old-fashioned pay-for-it-at-the-counter first class mailing and, casting my eyes idly over the banners which inform me about various mailing and shipping options, I see...Mike Myers? In a costume already irritatingly familiar due to a blitz of subway ads? Telling me how Priority Mail can save me time and money? Joined on another panel by "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" carrying boxes? All hovering over a Seuss-style logo that chirps "SEE THE MOVIE!"

The delightful details behind the "partnership" that brought this about are here