Oh, good. I wondered where I'd left that temple

Leave it to CNN.com to come up with those news headlines that really make you think. Take this one, for example, which appeared today:

Ancient synagogue found in Israel

Amazing. I wonder where they had been looking for it originally. I'd probably have started in Israel and worked my way out.

Anyway, I'm glad that came up in today's news because it reminds me of one of my favorite passages of motion picture screenplay, which is from the quirky - and vastly underappreciated* - 1998 movie Zero Effect (trailer here).

Bill Pullman plays a crafty but socially inept P.I. named Daryl Zero, who has a unique way of looking at his job. As Daryl put it:

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you look for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad, because of all things in the world, you only want one of them.

When you look for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good, because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.

I've tried to incorporate that logic into my everyday life, but it seems to work better in the movies.

* Either that or it was mediocre but I was in a great mood when I saw it and it just seemed really funny at the time. Which is possible.