Roomba was a major disappointment, as it turned out. The Christmas Day nor'easter kept Maria and me holed up in Jersey for a day longer than we had planned, so we had time to power up and give my mother's tiny new robotic vaccuum cleaner a trial run. iRobot, the manufacturers of Roomba, say that their product works on up to medium-pile rugs, but it was clear that even your garden-variety carpeting was too much for the self-guided automaton. Now I have never considered my parents' carpets to be shag, but as far as Roomba was concerned they might as well have been three feet deep. Although Roomba did exactly what it was supposed to on our linoleum kitchen floor, it noticeably struggled with the berber rug in my brother's room, and was mired as if in quicksand when placed upon the slightly thicker carpets in the rest of the house. Roomba also seemed to have a problem navigating irregularly-sized rooms, especially if they had features like closets with folding doors. Instead of bumping into such doors and registering them as "walls", the A.I. seemed to be baffled by anything in the room that wasn't 100% solid, causing it to spiral helplessly until someone took mercy on it, picked it up, and restarted the cleaning sequence. Bummer. Frankly, I was expecting a lot more from iRobot, who have successfully deployed their robots at the Great Pyramids at Giza and the caves of Tora Bora - you think they could have made Roomba a little more rugged so that it could handle a house with wall-to-wall carpeting. Granted, this is a first-generation product, and perhaps in a year or two Roomba's successors will not only be deep-cleaning our carpets but scrubbing our bathrubs and toilets as well, but if you were thinking about bringing this little robotic helper into your household as a labor-saving device, don't bother unless your floors are mostly hardwood, linoleum, or extremely thin berber-style rugs. The funny thing is that Roomba would probably have worked perfectly in our Lynn apartment. Maybe I'll get Maria one for her upcoming maternity leave. It's fun to watch bump and pirouette around the room, if nothing else.

Saw The Two Towers last night, and again I have to say that Peter Jackson has pulled off what I assumed to be the impossible until I saw Fellowship of the Ring last December - somehow he has managed to do Tolkein's epic justice, at times even more so than Tolkein himself. The beauty of this trilogy of films is that they were filmed back-to-back-to-back, which means that next year's Return of the King will almost certainly kick ass. Mr. Jackson masterfully blends CGI with live-action in a way that makes the new Star Wars trilogy like a Sega Genesis video game, especially with the character of Gollum, whose hauntingly real computer-generated appearance was draped like a costume over Andy Serkis' actual movements and expressions. Contrast this with Episode II's CGI Yoda, who ended up looking more fake than the Muppet that portrayed the 800-year-old Jedi master in the four other films. Another great example of George Lucas' CGI overkill is the digital rendering of the Clone Trooper army, whether in the panoramic long shots or the close-ups. Again, The Two Towers steers clear of doing things digitally simply for the sake of doing things digitally, so that when we see orcs and Uruk-hai up close, they're actual people, with all the millions of tics and twitches and slight imperfections that make something that is real palpably real. By now we all know that Mr. Lucas is a self-proclaimed visionary, for whom the soapbox he's chosen to stand on is more important than the stories he's telling, or even the stories he's already told (as far as I'm concerned, every mediocre Star Wars sequel or prequel he makes from now on is only going to retroactively lower my estimation of his original trilogy, and especially so if he further alters Episodes IV, V, and VI for their eventual DVD release, as has been rumored). Filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, however, or the Wachowski brothers - creators of The Matrix- are more sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the digital revolution, and as a result they use the new technologies much more competently and artistically; whereas all the CGI wizardry in the world will not redeem Star Wars Episode III.