...from Joshua Tree National Park...& instant language

As I said in yesterday's posting, here are a few photos from this past weekend's drive through Joshua Tree National Park:

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...Joshua trees framing Mt. San Gorgonio (11503 ft.), highest pt. in southern CA.

...driving through...

--view over the Coachella valley and the mountains behind Palm Springs,CA, looking SW from Keys View overlook in the National Park. The superimposed arrows show the movement of the San Andreas fault, which is visible in the middle of the photo as a couple of darker low ridges between the arrows. The peak on the right is 10834' Mt. San Jacinto.

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Have any of you seen Avatar, the recent 3-D blockbuster? I was a bit reluctant, but then I saw it during the school-break. (I went to a 9:30 a.m. matinee to avoid seeing any of my students at the mall...) Not since Jurassic Park first came out in the early 1990's have I seen a film's special effects be so visually engrossing.

Incidentally, a linguist from USC was hired to invent a new, linguistically-sound 'authentic' language for the 10-ft-tall blue humanoid dwellers of the moon Pandora. (Remember 'Klingon?')

This L.A. Times article was fascinating.
My wife's not yet seen the film, so we plan to go tonight.