Class In Class

No real time for a blog entry to-day. I need to get to Thursday's long night of classes.

I've yet to do my anthropology assignment, though I'm not really sure if it's mandatory or not--the teacher asked us to write down two "sex questions" we've always been afraid to ask without putting our names on the paper. I've been trying hard to think of questions, and so far the ones I'm coming up with I'm pretty sure aren't of the kind he had in mind, like, "Have you been jerking off to the pictures you took of all of us?" But I think I am genuinely afraid to know the answer.

It really doesn't seem like something for a college class, more like high school sex-ed. It's particularly awkward considering there are a few people in the class who are at least fifteen years older than the teacher. I guess if there are any Cialis related questions I'll know where they're coming from.

Twitter Sonnet #247

The dark bird over Safeway's not a chick.
Torpedoes of wine taint Kraken's liver.
An overdressed sea captain thinks he's sick.
The smug ocean makes fun of the river.
Gin soaked hermit seeks vermouth spellcaster.
A cocoanut pulls the tough shoestring limb.
Heaven's Jacuzzi's reserved for Pasteur.
But Mel Gibson refuses to join him.
Bug eyes wonder under a brunette sky.
Mild milk leaves the lactose paradigm.
Raven nipples heed a hungry skull's cry.
Cocoanut's poisonous when mixed with lime.
Lemon lime eyes are blinded by a Sprite.
Mercury grants citrus the gift of flight.

In Red on Flowers

A correction to yesterday's post; Natalie Portman had a butt double for the upcoming Your Highness, not for Black Swan. She's no fun either way. She oughta take a lesson from these lesbian bugs I saw to-day;



Yes, lesbian bugs--a lot of people don't know lady bugs are all either cisgender or transgender females.


Snow says these plants taste better in bloom.











I drove across town for some mayonnaise after class last night--the only good vegan mayo I can find is at Whole Foods in La Jolla. The next best thing I can find nearby is "Nayonnaise," which is a bit heavy on the soy for me. It smells eggier than mayonnaise with actual egg in it, at least at first. After a few days it just smells like an old shoe.

I was driving towards a great sunset, catching on the clouds to make it look like a nebula. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and "Purple Haze" seemed rather appropriate. I took this picture when I got to the grocery store, though the pinks weren't quite as intense by then;

T.O.P.L.E.S.S.

I've been pretty amused about the controversy that's arisen around the dancing in Black Swan--Natalie Portman's dancing double, ballerina Sarah Lane, has criticised the removal of a short documentary about her from the DVD and feels more of the dancing seen in the film is attributed to Portman than should be. Meanwhile, I can't help thinking about how very infrequently you actually see full frame dancing in the movie. Even the presumably competent dancing is shown in close-ups of fast moving feet that are pretty impossible to judge.

Now Darren Aronofsky has released a statement defending Portman in which he says, "If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe."

Yeah, I remember that prologue. I remember thinking, "Well, Portman's not an especially good ballerina, is she? But oh, well, that's to be expected. Time to suspend disbelief."

I also heard to-day that Portman used a "butt double" for the film. This despite the fact that she apparently feels comfortable going to the beach topless. It's a good thing she wasn't cast in Black Swan as the fun one.

Speaking of artists coming off a bit silly when defending their work against critics, to-day Neil Gaiman linked in his twitter to this literary review blog where an author whose book was reviewed in a post showed up and lost her shit in the comments section and was replied to by several anonymous people who, in typical internet fashion, managed to make themselves look even smaller and pettier in comparison. I kind of felt like it was a bad idea for Gaiman to link to the page, as he further exposed this lady's bad move to his over a million twitter followers, but the one or two comments I see actually expressing some compassion for her probably came from among Gaiman's readers.

I tend to not get so apoplectic when confronted with amateur criticism on the internet (which actually seems to piss off those critics a lot more), though I kind of wonder sometimes if exhibiting anger over something you worked hard on being criticised isn't a more human response. Then I think about those amateur critics desperately trying to suss out a human response in this way, doing so because it's the only way they feel they can connect emotionally with others, and it all seems so sad. Zetsuboshita.

Which is not to say I think the criticism in the original post is not valid. Though I would advise any author or artist to try not to take too hard anything said about them in a blog called "BigAl's Books and Pals."

I was getting kind of emotional yesterday listening to the Top o Nerae 2 soundtrack in my car and thinking about how great it was when Nono showed up in the fourth episode to take out that space monster. And I thought, "If only they had Gunbuster to save the day in Japan now." But then, "Wait, Gunbuster blows shit up. That's the opposite of what they need."

Although I think Gilbert Gottfried was treated unfairly, I don't feel quite right about people in the U.S. spending more time exonerating him than talking or doing anything about Japan. But this video was pretty good;

Too Soon Gilbert Gottfried - watch more funny videos

Earth Sucks Sometimes

Seeing that he was tweeting last night, I spontaneously decided to tell Brian Posehn I thought he was doing an excellent job as Octus on Sym-Bionic Titan. He replied, thanking me, and saying the show had been fun while it lasted. The show's been cancelled.

I guess I can't say I didn't see it coming. I probably ought to've known just by the fact that Cartoon Network had started moving the show all over the place in the schedule. Well, and the fact that I hardly ever saw anyone talk about it. I guess there's some consolation in knowing Samurai Jack was also one of those "best shows no-one watches." But I honestly think Sym-Bionic Titan was superior, with better crafted characters and a stunning variety in great environments.

Going over the other blog entries I've written on the show, I remember particularly great episodes like the one where Ilana was turning into a monster in a beautifully rendered swamp atmosphere and the episode where Octus and Kimmy are studying together. Wonderful character stuff, and I didn't often enough mention the great action sequences.

Twitter Sonnet #246

Toolbar spirits read over God's shoulder.
Grinning bicycles debunk the dragon.
Lisa Frank terrified Agent Mulder.
Glastonbury Grove consumed Jean Hagen.
Starving pink orcs bemoan melted ice cream.
Ice Warriors wear useless ice slippers.
Even office elementals can dream.
Some pinballs can't be repelled by flippers.
Cold tea can't fight refrigerated hemp.
Confused Kerouac poured pot on a rope.
Through time charged the wrath of Margery Kempe.
Christ's orphans aren't adopted by the pope.
Closed circuits of thorns are dry and brittle.
Breaded rings hide onion in the middle.

There's not much else to say about yesterday. I played chess almost all day. Mostly I lost, but it was a good time.

There's Something Disturbing About Clint Eastwood When He Masturbates

Sometimes my belief in absolute freedom of expression in art is challenged a little when I come across something meant to indulge an id rather unlike mine. High Plains Drifter, which I watched last night, contains rape fantasies I found particularly odious, and of a kind indicative of a particularly loathsome ignorance to me, the misconception that, if a woman has an orgasm, she therefore enjoyed the rape and there's no harm done. On two occasions in the film, we see women magically transformed by the power of Clint Eastwood's prick from people who hate him into his allies.

I have yet to see a movie directed by Clint Eastwood I really like. I think one might need to be more right wing to really enjoy his work--one has to fundamentally subscribe to a philosophy of "My pleasure is the only valid pleasure, and anyone who doesn't agree with me is deviant in some way." Eastwood, star and director, embodies this centre of the universe, his rightness rewarding him with supernatural abilities of invulnerability and aim--no-one so much as gets the unnamed stranger off balance. And I kind of enjoyed seeing just what he was going to do next--I liked how he had the citizens of the town paint all the buildings red and lay out picnic tables for the men they've hired Eastwood to kill. There's ghoulish fun in his omnipotent revenge. In theory, I like the idea of taking a script and replacing all its weaknesses with wish fulfilment, as he apparently did, according to the Wikipedia entry. I guess it's just not my wish fulfilment.

I suppose there's an inherent hypocrisy in enjoying fantasy violence but not fantasy rape. To be honest, it's not so much the fantasy rape that bothers me as the inherent fascist attitude about it. Take a movie like Thriller: A Cruel Picture--the rape is so obviously unreal, I don't feel bad about ogling Christina Lindberg. And that's the point. That's why movie rape scenes often simply don't work--rape we all know on some level is simulated can't really compete with bare flesh we all know on some level is real (silicone not withstanding). So, to me, exploitation can actually be a mark of someone who understands it's kind of puerile to want and expect people to feel horrible about seeing beautiful naked women. High Plains Drifter, which doesn't contain any nudity, merely twice presents a scenario putting forward the idea of justifiable rape. The fantasy here isn't about enjoying a beautiful woman with fetishised danger involved, the fantasy is that it's okay to rape women. An analogy would be, say, the Bride in Kill Bill cutting up the Crazy 88--that is fun violence. Having heroic music play and people patting Jimmy Stewart on the back while he, smiling, describes strangling a child--that would not be fun movie violence (except ironically).

The other Eastwood movie I've seen from roughly the same period, The Outlaw Josey Wales, I also remember as being strikingly sexist, though it's been so long since I saw it I can't remember why. But I've often been struck by how more frequently sexist movies and television were in the 1970s than in previous decades. Partly I think its artists reacting against the feminist movements occurring at the time, partly I think the relaxed censorship and the general feeling of unprecedented freedom of film in the 70s brought in some bad with the good. But it always amazes me when people talk about how extraordinarily sexist movies of the 50s were.

Logo City? Castrated Vulva?

Currently drinking green tea with lemon, honey, and hemp milk. I think hemp and cocoanut have become my two favourite milk substitutes. The hemp milk seems to go haywire easier, though--it turned into a million little white flakes when I poured it in hot tea. It tastes good, though.



I finished watching "Logopolis" yesterday, the final serial to feature Tom Baker as the Doctor. I can see why a lot of people think of him as the Doctor. Having been watching him on a daily basis for months through several permutations of the show, his face in my mind feels almost like someone I know rather than like someone I watch on television regularly. I see there are fewer episodes of Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy combined than there are Tom Baker episodes.

There were several things I liked about "Logopolis"--I liked how Tegan discovers the TARDIS by trying to use it as a police box, I loved the infinite TARDISes in TARDISes, and I liked the idea of a planet of people holding parts of the universe together with just math. I didn't like the return of the Master. Exactly the way he usually did in the Pertwee era, he lowers the IQ of the show by 30 points just by being there and gnashing his teeth. The one and only time I liked him was when he and Pertwee had a sword fight. But "Logopolis" even adhered to a formula that was repeated several times in the Pertwee era--The Master's scheme unfolds as something even worse than he'd predicted so he and the Doctor grudgingly join forces before, wouldn't you know it, the Master betrays his supposed ally for his own diabolical ends.

I kind of liked the whole Mysterious White Figure thing, though I figured out it was the Doctor almost immediately and that it would have something to do with his regeneration. Though it's never explained how the other characters figured this out, why the figure came into existence in the first place, and why he has claws.



I'm two episodes into "Castrovalva" and so far I like Peter Davison and I'm both amused and impressed by his ability to do random impressions of previous Doctors, particularly the second Doctor. And I like how he kind of looks like Tom Baker--the same recessed chin, large, roundish nose, eyes close together.



I like the new companions--I love having two girls in the TARDIS again, even though Nyssa seems slightly lobotomised. She's hot, though, which counts for a lot. Tegan's a bit better, both irritable and yet, if you think about it, remarkably adaptive given how much information she seems to be assimilating quickly. Now if these girls would just get together and murder Adric . . .

A Night of Academic Excellence

I guess this week's been fairly stressful for me, with a cystoscopy on Monday and midterms yesterday. Though I can't say I was really stressed about midterms. It'll be pretty clear why by the end of this post.

My paper for American History ended up being about how humanity can't overcome its own self-destructive greed and bloodlust, which seemed to me something that would connect pre-contact Native American culture, European colonisation, and the Revolutionary War. I probably should've included more about Christianity as the philosophy of humility Westerners continually failed to adhere to, but I was kind of checked out while I was writing. My concluding paragraph;

A land formerly inhabited by a more modest population of natives, who espoused a cultural and religious embrace of violence and exploitation of nature, was now the stage for a more numerous and confused people. Professing allegiance to a religion that promoted humility and self sacrifice, capitalistic fervour ran passionately through any boundaries of shame at adopting a lifestyle of flagrant hypocrisy. Conquistadors desiring to make themselves lords of a foreign land, impoverished peasants seeking subsistence from a land unlike those largely depleted in Europe, and ambitious traders seeking to secure merchandise all employed or gave in to modes of conduct that required the shedding of blood and the enslaving of people. No philosophy of peace could prevent, and no philosophy accounting for violence could curtail, the rampant and myriad forms of destruction that would take place. Preoccupation with property and its association with survival prompted more violence. The human need to survive by dominating and possessing was therefore the single greatest motivating factor among all people in the New World.



Hopefully I've inspired some despair.

The teacher assigned reading for us from chapter 7 of one of our text books for next week, which was one of the chapters the midterm assignment asked us to cover. I don't know if anyone'll ever notice or say anything. Then we left class after turning in the midterm because, according to the teacher, there was a big basketball game on that day.

I'm not complaining. It's all cool. This world is illusory and transitory. I did kind of wish the class I'd left early from had been my last class of the day, especially knowing that Mr. Blood, my anthropology teacher, never, ever ends his three hour class early. I ended up filling the time between classes wandering campus taking pictures. It was just around sunset, so it wasn't a bad time for pictures.



It took me a moment to realise the reason it looked like this stump was glowing was that the only break in the canopy of leaves and branches above happened to be sending sunlight directly on that stump.







The midterm for my anthropology class was entirely on scantron, fifty multiple choice questions, which the teacher had fed through the grading machine before the class was over. I got a 94%. Though it was marked as 90%. Correct answers were printed in red beside the ones I got wrong. Two of the five questions I got wrong, for which I'd bubbled "C" and "D" had printed beside them "C" and "D". This mystery was promptly solved when the teacher admitted to the class that he'd gotten the answers wrong himself--the first eight questions were based on some assigned reading from a few weeks earlier for which he had upbraided most of the class for not having read. It's amazing how karma keeps getting this guy.

He told everyone to add 4% to whatever score we had. "Even if we got it right?" asked someone.

"Everyone," he repeated.

So I guess if people got the same wrong answers he did, they're going to be rewarded with an extra four percent.

One of the other three I got wrong was something like, "A scientific attempt to predict based on untested data," and the options were "Hypothesis, Law, Theory," and two other choices I can't remember. I chose "Hypothesis," but the marked correct answer was "Theory." Which contradicted what I'd learned in a few science classes and other places. A guy a few seats in front of me flatly pointed out that the correct answer ought to be "hypothesis" and a chorus of people throughout the class agreed with him.

"No, it's 'theory'," he said. "A hypothesis doesn't predict anything. And your book won't save you," he said as he saw several people reaching into their bags for their books. "Instructors know a lot more than the books. Books are written by writers trying to take your money."

He really said this.

He insisted that he'd gone over "the real" meanings of hypothesis and theory several weeks ago. He asked if anyone remembered. One girl raised her hand. That was good enough for him.

So, no. I wasn't stressed about midterms.

Twitter Sonnet #245

Cold air tailgated under a scorched sky.
A grey rabbit watched a religious lawn.
White flecked lips purse on the too lucid guy.
Odysseus wandered Libya at dawn.
Seventeen big babies choked on old maize.
Pocahontas would have Mel Gibson killed.
Frightened colonists wandered woods for days.
Beavers can wait centuries for wergild.
Sexually disturbed hedgehogs court jail.
Small eyes recede back into a cheese head.
Blanks fill randomly with a new female.
Ronald Reagan made a helm of white bread.
Dust flake whistling's a keen synthetic sound.
Hell's big cigarettes protrude from the ground.

EDIT: I should add that I think it's the teacher's wording of the question that's at fault and not his understanding of hypothesis and theory. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation, indeed not a prediction. The problem here is "untested data," which makes it sound like the "data" isn't necessarily data at all. In which case "predict" might be read to mean something like "explain."

Keep On Traken

I rather loved the look of "The Keeper of Traken", the Doctor Who serial I finished watching to-day. It looks very 80s fairy tale, sort of like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. For that matter, I can see very clearly in this serial the influence Doctor Who had on Peter Jackson--I kept thinking of Rivendell.




Not to mention Tom Baker has Hobbit hair. I'm still not digging his new purple outfit--it just doesn't feel like his clothes. It's like he's wearing a uniform. I like how the Wikipedia entry for "The Leisure Hive" says the new outfit was part of a desire for better colour coordination. Making everything one colour isn't colour coordination, it's a failure to coordinate colour.

"The Keeper of Traken" wasn't particularly well written--the rather absurd set of circumstances designed to vilify the Doctor in the eyes of a supposedly totally peaceful civilisation was particularly bad. But gods, the sets. I love how the glass case around the Keeper's throne is like something for a mantelpiece clock.



And look at the detail on the wall of one guy's home;



The designs moulded into the doors, the designs printed on the windows, all of it extraordinarily intricate. It's a bitter shame again that this was all shot on video tape. It's like looking at a Mucha painting through a shower door. Wonderful, 80s fantasy art nouveau in any case.

Eating Balloons

I need to be working on the midterm for my history class to-day. In class yesterday, the teacher spent nearly the whole period going over what it means to summarise, paraphrase, and to quote. I almost cried. It was all I could do not to say, "Really? This is what we're doing? In a college class?" Gods help us, I know most of the students needed it. The teacher explained we didn't need to provide a thesis statement in the paper--I raised my hand and asked if I could have a thesis anyway. This is bad enough without it being also just a regurgitation of the reading material. I could see thought bubbles all over the class going, "What's a thesis?"

What the fuck am I doing here. What does it prove really, what does it accomplish? It decently processes me, I know. So I too may be served as a higher end Big Mac.

It's so hard just getting started on this thing. It's only eight pages--I mean, eight pages maximum. Double spaced, and we have to provide author names in the citations, despite the fact that everyone's supposed to quote from the same two damned text books, so realistically I'm writing what amounts to a three and a half page paper on seventeen chapters of material.

Why don't they just give me a fucking colouring book while they're at it.

I forgot to mention a couple weeks ago watching the trailer and gameplay footage for the upcoming sequel to American McGee's Alice--Alice: Madness Returns;



It doesn't look too bad, though I agreed with Tim's observation that the weapons are decidedly less interesting. The first game had such wonderfully unusual weapons--the jacks, the croquet mallet, they all had some unusual physical dynamic to them. This new game looks like it has a version of a machine gun, a version of a grenade launcher, etc. In other words, a standard shooter dressed up as Alice. But the visuals do look kind of nice.

Cats in the Clouds

Twitter Sonnet #244

Werewolves to-night are twice their normal size.
Astronaut footprints are big as a lake.
Lovers are cocooned in large pizza pies.
Hans Pfaall has made a horrible mistake.
Inverted wind stops the air with old cork.
Spongy flecked beige on flesh is inhuman.
Proposed bad restaurant bills are filled with pork.
Whimsy's never safe with Bernard Herrmann.
Surprise compact disks are worth more than discs.
Schrödinger’s croissant swallowed egg and cheese.
Benefits of missions outweigh the risks.
Headlines tangle into news balls of tease.
Fur orbs con an honest conquistador.
Mirrors enlarge any pink corridor.

I watched the end of "Warrior's Gate" yesterday, the final Doctor Who serial to feature Romana and K-9. And their departure seemed rather abrupt until I connected it to the serial's apparent homage to Cocteau's Belle et la Bete. Cocteau's a good choice to inspire the strangeness of a reality outside of regular time and space, though it didn't work out to be as creepy as the first episode of "The Mind Robber".



But the ruined castle and catlike, beast aliens now enslaved as some vague, karmic retribution for their monstrous behaviour was an interesting way to run with the Beauty and the Beast idea. When Romana abruptly decided to stay with them, it it didn't make sense until I remembered she seemed slightly entranced by the aliens, moving in the beasts' realm somewhat stiffly, not so unlike Josette Day as Belle.



I'm in a bit of a hurry, so here are some photos from yesterday;

The Real Unreality

Looks like I don't have bladder cancer, which came kind of as a surprise to me since, despite leaving the house an hour early, I was five minutes late to my appointment as I had to stop twice to pee. Afterwards, when the doctor was out of the room and I was sitting and reading as I waited for him to return, I got to thinking about why the doctor had even wanted to do the cystoscopy in the first place, and I remembered how alarmed he'd seemed when I told him I never sleep through the night. So I asked him about it when he came back in the room.

"It's definitely a dysfunction," he said.

"Could it be psychological?" I asked.

He nodded and smiled in a way that indicated to me he was just about certain this was it.

"Oh, good," I said. When he seemed puzzled I laughed and added, "So long as I'm just crazy, it's fine."

So we can add this to the chest pains and the teeth grinding to the list of wonderful things my mind has started doing to me regularly over the past couple years. Is it any wonder Vertigo's my favourite movie?

Anyway, in case anyone's wondering, having a camera snaked up your penis is in fact uncomfortable. I think I took it pretty well, though. In a weird way, I was even looking forward to it. It was like a challenge. I fare these sorts of things better than ongoing ambiguous pain. Want to pull out my teeth, stab me in tender spots? That's fine. Give me local anaesthetic at most, if even that, and I'm good to go. It's the quiet and the questions that get me. It's a shame I live in a world where people think it's vulgar to be direct about anything serious or embarrassing.

I even had a female nurse applying the anaesthetic to my penis, a nervous middle aged blonde who gave me an obviously rehearsed line about the camera "gliding" through the urethra. I was cool as a cucumber, so to speak. While the doctor was in the act of getting that camera into me, the nurse wanted to know the fax number for another hospital that had my old X-rays.

"It's on a printout, in my jacket hung up on the wall," I said. "Folded up in a copy of Alice In Wonderland."

More than for just something to do while waiting, I always like to have a paperback book with me as I tend to shove receipts, business cards, et cetera, into them. Since the book I ended up starting was Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South on my Kindle (where it was free), I reverted to my more than decade old little paperback of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. That little book's kept me company on many experiences.

Speaking of cancer, I couldn't help being amused yesterday when I read that Ann Coulter was trying to put a positive spin on radiation levels in Japan by saying that, "excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine." More and more I get the feeling the Right thinks they can make things true just by saying them.

Everyone In the Blue Box

I love when Doctor Who does medieval, or even alien medieval, as in the case of "State of Decay", the serial I finished watching yesterday. This one and its predecessor, "Full Circle", have been vastly superior to the first two serials of the season, maybe because "Full Circle" was written by a seventeen year-old whose greatest ambition was to write for the show and "State of Decay" is from a script originally written for the show several seasons earlier.



It's another particularly nice looking serial, like "The Ribos Operation" and "The Creature from the Pit" using a lot of greys, dark reds, blacks, and shiny golds and coppers. I loved the makeup and costumes on the King and Queen.



Though his curly beard makes him look like a model for a playing card. These two and their adviser also deliver some of the hammiest performances in Doctor Who history, and that's saying something.

The Doctor and Romana are adorable in this serial.



He's definitely sleeping with this one. That's the vibe I get--maybe also because the actors were sleeping together in real life. And I loved the call back to the Doctor's story about the wise hermit from "The Time Monster", which I think was definitely one of the best third Doctor serials.

As for the new companion, Adric . . . He's okay, I guess. It's nice to finally see a non-white companion, but he feels sort of like a Johnny Quest character.



In modern pulp animated series, I've been meaning to mention how fantastic Sym-Bionic Titan's been. These past two episodes were a terrific demonstration of the show's greatness--"Escape from Galaluna", in less than thirty minutes, presented an absolutely breathtaking story of an alien fleet attacking and taking a city, even featuring an amazing sword fight between Lance and a Basil Rathbone-ish guy, complete with nightmarishly growing shadows of the fencers.



This was followed by one of the more John Hughes-ish episodes, and done so well that the by now rather well tread territory of tension caused by a superhero unable to tell his human lover what his Big Secret is was quite effective.

Well, looks like to-day's going to be pretty short. I got up late and I have to go to bed early to-night because my cystoscopy's to-morrow morning. So I guess my next blog entry will probably either mention I have a cancer I can't afford or I wasted some money on a rather uncomfortable procedure. I keep thinking about how Gary Dell'Abate on The Howard Stern Show underwent the procedure a couple years ago. Hopefully I'm as lucky as Bababooey.

Orange Nature

(wink)

Twitter Sonnet #243

Small birds invade running spider groundspace.
Asthmatic flowers have trouble singing.
Ink mixed with saliva at rapid pace.
More than grey ones, black mice conceal meaning.
I do want notepad to open when clicked.
Smiling suckass giants drink from barrels.
There's more beauty than print hoodies depict.
The right fiscal plan was Perry Ferrell's.
Admiralty confers no useful hat.
Overripe apples devalue a tree.
Innovations for sleep come from a cat.
I can't win a Deep Space Nine shopping spree.
Temper in space is too cold to foment.
Mallards may appear at any moment.



I poured myself some Jameson and settled in with The Trouble with Harry last night. I enjoyed it a lot more than the last time I watched it, maybe because of the Jameson--it was hard to imagine achieving greater tranquility than I did by mixing whiskey and Hitchcock's location shots of Vermont in autumn.



For a director who preferred shooting in studio, Hitchcock didn't seem to mind giving us some gorgeous outdoor footage. The film's also helped by Edmund Gwenn's wonderfully understated but extremely expressive performance, perfect for a man who's mildly put out for having accidentally committed murder. And Shirley MacLaine's adorable in the movie too.



Though I think the movie could've been ten times better with Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart as the male romantic lead.



A couple ducks I saw at the grocery store to-day. I'm starting to see ducks absolutely everywhere around town or flying across the sky. It's a real phenomenon going on here.

I love how often I see them in couples, and it's interesting to see how clearly the sexes have roles, as evidenced by the picture; the males keep lookout while the females eat. The females generally seem more laid back--they're the only ones who actually take bread from my hand. War is for the green hooded ones.

I was carrying a huge bag of dinner rolls that made me feel guilty, not being able to give them some. Reading Laura's first-hand account to-day of bread scarcity in Osaka made me feel even guiltier. I wonder why no one's dropping bread with parachutes from the air.

Here are some pictures of Snow I took to-day;