8:04 p.m. The sun is beginning to set on a very beautiful, languid August day, and we gave in early and joined the throngs wandering the streets in search of fun and high-quality goods. We found both, and I took a lot of pictures while the camera is in rotation at my house. Eventually, it will have to go back to the good folks at UFO Magazine, who bought it in the first place and who let me use it when they aren't photographing and interviewing visiting aliens and errant spacecraft.

I'm going to take a cue from that late, great, wonderful maestro of promotion Andy Warhol, and start carrying around some magazines and business cards so people won't be so nervous when I try to take their picture. I'm also practicing becoming maybe Ms. Surreptitious, or maybe Innocuous Lass, so that I can creep up and get them unawares, before they change pose and charge down the street after me, grab the Olly out of my hands and bend the Smart Card three or more times until it breaks.

Obviously, we saw Mystery Men last night. It was lots of fun.

There was, indeed, a bit of the Star Wars bar crowd on line, some of whom were having trouble with the lids of their hot-drink containers and trying to balance their tickets in their belt buckles and keeping their fanny packs out of trouble -- all at the same time -- but because I have not sufficiently worked on my own super skills, I really didn't feel comfortable taking any pictures while I, too, waited a long time because we got there really really early. Worse, the beginning of the line had already moved into the theater but the middle part just wasn't coordinated enough to follow along, what with some of the good patrons turned the wrong way, talking and eating and reading the movie posters. Picture-taking would have just confused things more.

It was a pretty good movie. The sets were sort of a very low-rent Batman metropolis, more distracting than fun, and there were so many extreme closeups you have to think they made the thing expecting it to be beamed out of small TV sets instead of ever finding its way to the big screen. Plus, the movie suffered from the whirling tornado blow-up-the-world ending that all movie directors of fantasy must promise to provide ever since Ghostbusters overdid itself at the end. There must be swirling greenish-sky-to-the-bowels-of-the-earth effects, mushrooming just ooooooh I'm sooo scared bigger and bigger, and this movie fell into that trap, too.

But it let Janeane be herself, so you can go and be grateful for that. Every minute of screen time with Janeane is worth going out into the night, I think. I'm also a big fan of Greg Kinnear -- I've even been to his house -- but when he starts to yell at her the way guys in powerful costume often do when the little woman hesitates, well, there you have special effects that are strangely and morbidly satisfying.

And yes, just about everyone in the place laughed themselves silly, time and again, so much so that much of the dialogue, which inevitably will end up in millions and millions of email signatures, was obscured. It was also fun to leave the theater beside the people who were coming out of Blair Witch. I had a warm happy feeling -- they had hours of hell ahead, and they knew it.

There was also a trailer for the next Double-Oh Seven James Bond adventure, and I'm still happy for Pierce Brosnan, who now has the role. Everyone probably remembers how he missed out on it the first time around when Timothy Dalton was the big man of the moment. Brosnan honored his contract and stayed until the end of his TV-series commitment, comforted his wife who was dying, and named his son after another great guy, Bill Goyen. Bill's wife is Doris Roberts, who was on the TV show -- whose name I forget -- with Pierce.

And that's the essence of the movie Mystery Men. It's a paean to those who do their job -- no matter how lowly -- and who do it very well. I was thinking of James Bond and William Macy as we got into our dewy car to drive home through the sleeping streets last night. Every time I leave an adventure movie, with whatever male who happens to be driving the car, there is always the residue of the unrealistic levels of testosterone that we've just seen on the screen. The males behind the wheel inevitably feel the urge to careen through the parking lot, maybe even cut somebody off and in general behave as if there are hidden deadly gadgets stashed in the dash.

Last night was different, though, thank you very much. Last night we puttered home. Spleen-like, before the motor was sufficiently warmed up, tucking some of the wires and sockets back into the hole from the last time the radio was yanked out and there were miniature ice cubes of safety glass all over the front seat. One of these days we've got to get another radio. Plus, we've also got to settle on our right and proper super-hero names. You can't really come into and own your superpower until you've identified what it is.

As the Sphinx would say: You must name it to claim it. See it to be it. You can't fear what you can't hear. Maybe I'll be the Daily Mama. The Trying Pun. The One Who Doesn't When How to Quit?