Caitlin's reactions to a film called What the [Bleep] do We Know?, intrigued me enough that I sought it out and watched it. The movie consists of a series of interviews with physics students, spiritualists, doctors, and, supposedly, the channelled spirit of an Atlantian warrior named Ramtha. At intervals, the movie follows the fictional story of a young woman played by Marlee Matlin. Her life as a divorcee and photographer is used to demonstrate and gloss arguments seemingly made by the interviewees regarding a connexion between quantum mechanics and the idea that we humans are capable of altering physical reality purely by effort of will.

Having read the information Caitlin found showing the film's most important proofs to be false, I knew going in that the film had no real scientific basis for its arguments, despite its pretensions to the contrary. But I was curious, as it seemed a stimulating point of conversation and several very intelligent people seemed to have been taken in by it. What I would have thought of the movie if I'd not known the illegitimacy of its evidences, I can't say. What I did find was a movie that was silly and pathetic.

The first portion is an overwrought justification of the title, What the [Bleep] do We Know?, as it states the old idea that we don't know if our reality is really real, or a sort of dream, or something else. This can be sort of fun to think about, but a surprising lot of people tend to not realise that the concept in itself neither proves nor disproves anything.

Then we segue somehow into quantum mechanics, in which there is a theory that an infinite number of alternate realities exist, one for every alternate possibility. Which is interesting, but hardly is this the first time the concept in art has been explored. I remember it from the seventh season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Parallels", in which Worf was continuously shifting between different quantum realities. Data explained the idea a lot more effectively than What the [Bleep]'s experts ever do.

So from there, the movie reaches its real point, which is to say that somehow we can take control of our lives--have better jobs, relationships, self-esteem--by consciously tapping into alternate realities. "Creating the day", effectively, by visualising what we want and making ourselves believe it until it's true.

What I'd like to know is why it's supposed to be easier to tap into an alternate reality to change things than it is to simply decide to do things differently and doing it. Yeah, we have our habits and they can be hard to break, but is it really harder than shifting to an alternate reality?

You know, these are just the sorts of people that ought to never get their hands on a time machine. "I magicked my ex-wife to death!", "My mental powers got my horse to win!", "I eradicated all pigeons every where, every when!"

But perhaps most heinous of the movie's crimes is that damned wedding scene with those shrill cartoon peptides. Think Son of the Mask, only worse.

And one final, evil thought--did Marlee Matlin ever ask Ramtha to take her to the reality where she's not deaf?

Entries I would have posted if Blogger hadn't been on the fritz;


From 2005-04-11 11:04:00

I went with family to a couple of malls in Orange County yesterday. They gave me some money for my birthday, so I bought some Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes, Jill Thompson's Little Endless Storybook, a Charlie Parker CD, Thelonious Monk's Monks Dream, and I re-purchased The Smiths' Meat is Murder, having lost my previous copy.

I was tipped off about Monks Dream by Peter Straub's wonderful site. Having just begun to cultivate an interest in jazz, it's nice to see what a writer I respect recommends. It's a very sweet album. Many things I've read on Monk seem to describe him as being a sort of creature removed from other pianists, and it's true I've not heard anyone play piano like this. It's restrained, in the good timing way, but very wild, with chords played just out of synch--or the normal conception of in synch, anyway.

We ate at a restaurant called P.F.Chang's yesterday, which I cannot advise against strongly enough. I had spinach and garlic stir-fry, which tasted something like mulched salt licks. Much of my time at the malls was spent in the bathrooms thereafter.


From 2005-04-08 19:13:00

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. With decorated robots.

Has anyone ever noticed that "Migrations" by Jocelyn Pook, off the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack, and "Renholder" by A Perfect Circle, are almost exactly the same song? Does anyone else even have both the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack and the debut A Perfect Circle album? Could I be the only person in the world who's noticed this?

Eyes Wide Shut came out a year before the Perfect Circle album, so if anyone's a crook, it's A Perfect Circle. And now you know.

Lately I've been annoyed by people who seemingly can't relate to anyone of the opposite sex. I've talked to a couple women recently who couldn't get involved with the male characters' story in certain movies. And I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales a few days ago.

I don't think I've seen a movie that is more palpably insensible of its female characters while simultaneously exploiting them. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in 1976, the movie takes place at the end of the American civil war, and follows the exploits of a bushwhacker named Josey (Clint). Early in the film, Josey's family is slaughtered by Union officers led by the nefarious Red Legs, so named for his evil red pant legs.

All the Union soldiers in the movie come off as mindless villains while all the Confederate sympathisers are noble, sometimes conflicted men. No one mentions slavery. Why would they?

When it becomes clear the south has no hope, the leader of Josey's bushwhacker gang, Fletcher, is offered a deal by the Union--his group can go free if they give up their arms and swear allegiance to the Union. The whole group grudgingly agrees, except Josey--which is how come he's the outlaw Josey Wales.

The Union ends up going against their word and tries to slaughter everyone but Fletcher who, for some reason, they have a lot of respect for and are going to employ in the hunt for straggler bushwhackers. They succeed in killing all the other bushwhackers, except for one annoying young guy, who Josey rescues by commandeering a gatling gun.

After this, for reasons that are never explained, Fletcher hates Josey fiercely, vowing to hunt him down at all costs.

Thankfully, the annoying young guy dies pretty soon after this, and we're left to bask in Clint's steeliness as he adventures through the country solo. It couldn't last, though, as an old Indian chief caricature joins his party. Another thing about this movie--rife with the Native American stereotypes it is. This particular fellow was a pretty bad actor, too, always conspicuously conscious of being in a movie.

It's soon after that we meet our first female character, who is also Native American, which I suppose makes two strikes against her. She's irritatingly referred to at all times as "the squaw", and is in fact not very different from the squaw bride in The Searchers--a John Wayne movie which I did not find to be racist, despite having a racist main character. In fact, none of the John Wayne movies I've seen are as racist or as sexist as Josey Wales.

Anyway, the Josey squaw, who is at least credited as being named "Little Moonlight", is not given, by the writers, the ability to speak English, despite the fact that when we meet her, she's working at a white man's general store. The man hits and berates her with familiarity, and while Josey ambles about the place, two men proceed to start raping her. Josey seems disinterested until the would-be rapists recognise him and try to capture him for his bounty.

Josey kills them and now, of course, Little Moonlight considers herself his slave. She doesn't do anything else for the rest of the picture except follow him and have sex with the old guy.

Josey, outlaw loner, or not, starts to collect people. He comes across a wagon being raided by bandits--the wagon carries an old woman and a young pretty blond woman, who they begin to rape while Josey watches in consternation from a hiding spot on a nearby hill. The bandits show the audience the woman's breasts and ass and Josey sorta/maybe starts to go for his gun, before the bandits come up with a vague excuse suddenly about needing the woman unspoiled.

Later, Josey defeats the bandits and seemingly acquires another slave girl, this one blond and English-speaking, even if it's only, most of the time, to say things like "Josey!" and "Wait!"

She eventually makes a watch chain for him out of her hair and they fall madly in love. Or something.

The movie has one or two good moments, most of them involving Clint gunfighting--although the final confrontation with Red Legs is rather lame.

Sin City is an excellent movie.

Film noir dialogue of the sort pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler is something between tough talking and poetry. It has a unique sound and has been mocked and tossed about over the years until it's almost been made to seem phoney and silly. It's a style, and a beautiful one. And in Sin City, it's made relevant again.

An unprepared viewer may go in and find the 40s-ish street talk between Michael Madsen and Bruce Willis to be more off-puttingly artificial than the computer generated backgrounds. But it's when the hard, human reality of ghastly situations set in that we find ourselves clutching desperately at those beautiful words, the pulse that has the brain walk right on through the razor wire and severed limbs and still look up, grin, and say we like this place.

Yes, I liked just about everything about Sin City. Except Jessica Alba. Otherwise, it was great.

What was wrong with Jessica Alba? She's not a very good actress, and she didn't get naked.

Pervert, you cry! Well, look. One thing that was refreshing about the movie was how uncompromising and comfortable it was about nudity. And then we get to Nancy Callahan's story, and we have a stripper who doesn't get naked, not on stage, and not in another, even more unlikely situation. So, Alba, why all the clothes? Why did we have a scene where you said, "Let me put some clothes on" when you were already wearing more clothes than half the other girls in the movie? Alba recently had this to say;

"You know, nudity was an option . . . We could have done it if we wanted to. Obviously, it would have been more authentic. But I felt dancing around with a lasso and chaps was going to be sexy enough. I think being nude would have been distracting and I really couldn't be bottomless. My dad! He would freak out."

Which I translate as, "Initially, I told Rodriguez that I'd be willing and then, after I'd signed the contract, I 'changed my mind', and there was not a damn thing they could do, as it wouldn't exactly look good to fire a girl 'cause she wouldn't get naked."

Although I'm willing to believe Jessica Alba's clueless enough about sexuality to think that a girl with lasso and chaps is as sexy as a girl without clothes.

I don't mean to sell the movie short. Just about everything else is tops. The Marv story, starring Mickey Rourke, being, by far, the best. In fact, if I'd been editing the film, I'd have suggested closing with it. It's the most pure expression of the underlying ideas in all of the stories.

Oh . . . I promised to talk about the Star Wars Holiday Special.

In the mid-1980s, George Lucas vainly attempted to destroy all master copies of this 1978 CBS special. So of course, Tim was quickly able to find a copy on one of his file-sharing programmes.

It stars Mark Hammill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels--everyone but Obi-Wan, really. And it has Art Carney and Bea Arthur. Why not? And, hey, why not have a five minute segment of a Wookiee family having common, domestic discourse, made up of unintelligible growls, in what appears to be a contemporary Earth home (poor matte paintings assure us it's in a tree)? Oh, and throw in Jefferson Starship, only make them tiny.

It was incredible.

In a set that must have been comprised of, at best, pieces of the one used in the first movie, we see Han Solo (indeed, Harrison Ford!) and Chewbacca in the cockpit of the Millienium Falcon, en route to the Wookiee homeworld so that Chewie can celebrate Life Day with his family. Scores of awkward, commercial-like close-ups ensue (this was not directed by George Lucas). Han Solo blushingly tells the ridiculous ball of fur passing as Chewie's wife that the Wookiees feel like family to him. Princess Leia appears to be working as a bank teller when we see her furiously typing at a keyboard behind a plain, plastic desk while C3PO stands awkwardly by.

In the end, all the Wookiees wear red robes and carry glass orbs through space to wind up at a foam cave set where Luke, Han, and Leia await wearing too much makeup. And then Leia sings about the Tree of Life--to the tune of the Star Wars main theme.

And it's all the original actors. You know you want to see this.

Actually, there was one bit of quality stuff--a brief animated segment involving the heroes' first encounter with Boba Fett. A good, decently written story, with intriguing dialogue--Boba Fett, posing at first as a friend, has a disconcerting way of ending sentences in an eerie neutral tone with the word "friend." The alien designs are great and the whole short is enriched by a coherent style and good, expressive animation.

It felt like ambrosia compared to the rest of the special.

The Nar'eth Winter Special is now up. Written by Caitlin and illustrated by yours truly, it's a bit of Farscape fan-fiction, and was a lot of fun to make. I tried a lot of new things, and learned a lot of new things just through the process of working with Caitlin.

In any case, I hope it goes over better than the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, which I watched earlier this evening. I'll post thoughts on it later. I have complicated, astounded, horrified, bemused, outright betwirtled thoughts about it.

Oh, my tongue, my tongue.

A few days ago, I noticed Tim eating a burrito from Tacos Mi Pueblo, a Mexican restaurant near here. My family used to eat there all the time when I was a kid, and I was sort of pleased to find, when I went in two days ago, that it had changed not at all. So much in Santee has transformed, you see.

To-day, I ordered a bean and cheese burrito and tried the very hot sauce. "Would you like something to drink with that, Sir?" asked the fellow. "No," says I. Why douse the flames of heaven?

Soon, the world was eclipsed by scorching hot refried beans mixed with blood red sauce. Sauce you peered closely at to see ingenuity; all the slices of jalapeño, chips of pepper, that you could think of to make soft human tissue shrivel to threat level; ghastly.

It was the taste of a particularly jubilant Dizzy Gillespie. It changed my day.

The Mexican polka on the radio sounded violently spirited in a way I'd never noticed before, and I dwelt in that beautiful pulverizing until I'd dipped my last appetiser tortilla chip in the sauce. I wandered out into the street, savouring the giggling devils circling my tongue with their pitchforks.

Here's another fun thing to try;

Go to a Subway and order a Veggie Delight. Ask for lots of jalapeños, get the meal so you can have some jalapeño chips as well. First bite of the sandwich, half the jalapeños fall out. Open yer chips, dip and enjoy. That's warp zone jalapeño level, folks, and I mean 1+(97x1)=!.

Nothing like this ever happens at my school.

Technically, I have nothing to do to-day. But I'm starting to think I might do some research for the next Boschen and Nesuko chapter. What, you say? Research for a galaxy I completely made up? It's been kind of surprising how often I end up needing to look up something or other. Last time I called Trisa to ask how one would cut off someone's arms without killing the person.

But maybe I'll do something else because it's not very comfortable around here at the moment. The toilet in my bathroom's been removed, so I've kind of been living out of the Barnes and Noble. Sort of reminds me of when my mother kicked me out and the mall felt like the closest thing to home for me. If only every place was open twenty four hours.

You know, now that I think about it, there are all sorts of things I can do out there . . . See a movie, read a book, or simply wander . . .

Accidental Coup.

Cripes, if someone'd told be yesterday that civilian protesters would take down an armed government practically by accident, I'd have said they were crazy. Kind of makes me wonder if the old president didn't simply decide to get while the getting’s good.

Bush should take note--this is what happens when you don't control the news networks and the churches.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up to-day, a day early, again. I've gotta quit doing that. Anyway, I think a lot happens in this one by anyone's standards.

In the bathroom at Barnes and Noble to-day, I noticed someone had written "SATANIC BIBLE" on the side of the baby changing station.

Oh, what hideous truths are so casually revealed! The terrific drama now shows plain in my minds eye--honest, Goodman father making as proper, cleansing his helpless babe, only thinking to bestow bonny health and virtue--but nay! For, as he tasks, the serpent injects with spirit shadows, his unwholesome invisible dictates!

We clearly must needs drown everyone.

Anyway, I had many adventures in La Mesa to-day. Here're a few things I don't like about people;

Why do boys have to spit so much? I was waiting at the trolley station, leaning against the fence, reading Plato. To my left, two fellows were sitting, wearing hoods in the popular Jawa fashion. To my right, another person who, upon coughing, revealed herself to be a girl. Immediately, the boys' conversation ceased, they glanced repeatedly at her and then, at intervals, fired doses of saliva and snot at the concrete. Why? And why does it make me want to kill them?

Another thing--waiting at a stoplight with a number of pedestrians, a woman in front of me decided she could predict the "walk" sign. She boldly stepped out into the street when the left turn light came on in front of us. Of course, she was caught in front of a stream of cars turning left, while someone trying to turn right honked from behind her. She proceeded to lamely wave her hands, as if she'd suddenly been inspired to act as a crossing guard. What do we really lose by waiting for the light to actually change, people? It's not a significant amount of time, I'll tell you that. People seem to feel they'll lose self-respect or something if they can't out-badass the little glowing blue man.

And that's not to mention how many cars have to run the light just after--just after just after--a tinse after just, just after--hell, long after the light’s changed. In the words of Hellboy, "Red means stop!"

It's all probably tied to the spitting instinct, I suppose.

A couple days ago, I got back from my sister my copy of Caitlin R. Kiernan's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers. What a pretty book--a little green hardcover with illustrations by Dame Darcy. I like just having it sit here next to me.

I watched the 1951 version of Show Boat last night. It's the first version I've seen and I gather it's not as good as the 1936 version. Still, I kind of enjoyed it. It starred Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and Ava Gardner. I'm actually starting to like how Keel always seemed like he was doing a Superman impression, with an affected sounding deep voice and eerily good-natured veneer. He's simply impossible to take seriously, which somehow kind of makes me take him seriously.

Kathryn Grayson was a pretty lady with a decent voice and acting ability. And that was good enough. She looks a bit like a huskier version of Claudette Colbert, and I enjoy admiring her rather perfectly shaped nose.

Ava Gardner had a supporting role and didn't appear in 70% of the movie, but she was in practically all the best scenes. The movie shines when it digresses into meditation on the relations between black and white people in 1894. Not to mention 1951--The Breen Censorship office tried to get a scene removed where it's discovered that Ava's character had a black parent and a white parent. This fascinating little scene, where the lady is fired because of her heritage, segues into the song "Old Man River", performed beautifully by a large black workman on the boat, who seems to have almost no interaction with the main characters for the rest of the movie. The scene is easily the most emotionally effective in the movie and you wonder if Oscar Hammerstein wanted badly to take the film in a direction utterly impossible at the time.

I oughta get moving as I need to be out of here pretty soon. I'll probably go eat at Einstein Bagels, although I hope that doesn't turn out like yesterday, where the Veg-Out on Sesame Bagel mysteriously came with bacon and turkey on, a fact I didn't discover until I'd taken a bite. I've been a vegetarian since I was thirteen or fourteen years old, so maybe that's why a single bite of bacon gave me such a monstrous stomach ache that I had to find a bench and just sit down for about an hour.

Or maybe I'll eat somewhere else.

Yesterday I bought a copy of Jedi Knight II: Outcast. Easily the best Star Wars game I've played in a decade.

I'd been playing it at Tim's for some time, so I knew already how lucky I was to find it for just ten dollars. I also knew where to get all the good mods.

The game is basically a Doom style shooter. But its big asset is lightsabre fighting, which is done through third person. You reprise your role as Jedi mercenary (sure it makes sense!) Kyle Katarn, involved once again in a complicated story of . . . running around killing bad guys.

The lightsabre leaves scorch marks in the walls. It burns anyone and anything that touches it, even when you're not swinging it. Add Force powers like pull, push, and grip and the game because one of the most satisfying exercises in slaughter that you could imagine. And then add the extra violence code and you will become a better person.

An illustration:

One of my favourite things to do these days is to grab a Storm Trooper's throat from a distance, raise him high into the air above me, and then simply let him drop on my idle lightsabre blade, whereupon his body falls into pieces that rain down around me.

You can push people of high catwalks; you can cut off their hands, and then execute them while they're kneeling before you, begging for mercy. You can throw your spinning lightsabre and guide it with the Force through the necks of a whole row of foes.

It's really hard to get tired of.

Kyle Katarn gets boring, though, so I downloaded some mods to play as other characters. The Darth Maul mod was decent, but I think I've settled on using Indiana Jones. It's too wonderfully strange. You can change your lightsabre colour with a code, so I've given Indy an orange sabre. Seems to go best with his outfit.

It's a great model too, actually resembling Harrison Ford. The hat's slightly wrong, though--the model maker gave him a stetson instead of a fedora. I don't really blame him, though. There are about twenty different kinds of hats at Disneyland that all claim to be official Indiana Jones hats, and not a one of them, from what I've seen, is an exact replica.

Has anyone else around here carried a bad Indiana Jones fixation since childhood? I didn't think so . . .

I bid farewell to Trisa this morning. She's moved to San Fransisco. She and I have been good friends for about four years, I think. I don't keep a lot of real live friends, so I was pretty sorry to see her go.

We had breakfast this morning at Einstein Bagels. I recommended the Hummas and Feta on Ciabatta, which she found to be quite messy, which I suppose it is. She's moving into a segment of an old Victorian house, temporarily, until the place closes down later this year. Then she'll get herself another place in Ol'Frisco. She's a success, and a great dresser. I loosely based the design of Nesuko's latest outfit on the one Trisa was wearing last week.

So now I guess I'll be going back to seeing all the strange movies by myself. And the Rasputina concerts, if I can ever manage to get into the gear of the concert scene. Trisa's good for music. My tableau's gonna be very different without her around.

Hmm.

So what else for the blog to-night . . .

This house is being painted. My room isn't. My room, being shut up against paint fumes, is becoming a terrarium, smelling of a boy who spends days curled over the desk drawing things. It doesn't smell good.

The painters seem like white trash, and they listen to a radio station populated by derivative rock and lacklustre talk radio. But they sure get drowned out easily by my Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie CDs. And I think it annoys them--you know, I heard somewhere that the trumpet is the most audible musical instrument. I believe it.

I slept poorly last night. I had a series of nightmares--in one, I dreamt Robyn dropped by carrying a zombie movie DVD. She was telling me how good it is, and I, trying to engage in the conversation, said, "Oh, so is it like Night of the Living Dead?"

Her eyes glazed over and she dryly replied, "Yes. It's like Night of the Living Dead." I felt embarrassed and awkward, which is interesting, as I don't think I would have felt that way awake.

Anyway, I was sleepy to-day. I worked on a Nar'eth page, but didn't finish it. Mostly, to-day, after the concentrated efforts of Thursday and Friday, I just felt like vegetating.

And on that note, I shall now make like a carrot and sleep.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up a day early, because I'm probably going to be busy to-night. I put way too much work into this one.

It's weird being so sleepy at just after 10pm.

One thing I enjoy doing is going into computer stores and putting weird things on their display computers. I went to Tim's RadioShack a while back and quickly made a web page which simply said, in large red letters;

RadioShack(tm) will eat your baby.

Tim complains about the silly job lately, and he seemed to get a good kick out of my gag, until I brought it back up the other day and he overheard a lady customer, upon seeing it, saying, "Oh, my!"

In terror, Tim restarted the computer and locked it from any other miscreant's tampering.

In other news, I've set up for myself several somewhat difficult challenges with the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter. Hopefully they work out. I'm about halfway through it and already it has a slightly different flavour than I thought it would when scripting it.

And this evening I made myself a mozzarella quesadilla. With very hot sauce. Now that's a pizza pie.

At long last, I finally picked up Notorious on DVD last night. I am very happy. I've watched it already and it's gorgeous. I love Criterion DVDs.

I also recently picked up a collection of Cocteau Twins songs that Spooky recommended to me. I'd been looking for a while but any Cocteau Twins album seems to be almost impossible to find around here. I finally spotted this one filed with John Cocker at Borders.

I'm enjoying Stars and Topsoil, but I wished I'd gotten Treasure. However, Trisa picked up a copy and said she'd copy it for me, so it all works out . . . This is the blog of happy endings, you know. Welcome.

Or maybe not all endings are happy. For example, the new Tori Amos album has ended up being a significant disappointment. It pains me to say that because I've been an enormous Tori Amos fan for a long time. But this LP has strayed into vain, banal territory.

Well. I got nothing against pretty, I suppose. Even pretty for pretty's sake--I was able to enjoy Gigi and American in Paris, after all (both of which, incidentally, I got on DVD in a pack for just twenty bucks). But this is Tori Amos! There used to be more to her than that. And--actually, the problems with the album go beyond vanity. It also seems to bespeak a lack of self-awareness on her part.

This point is epitomised in my least favourite track on the album, a song called "Hootchie Woman." Whether or not that title is cheesy, you may decide for yourself. But regardless, Tori sings from the perspective of a financially successful woman who catches her husband cheating on her with what she refers to as a "Hootchie Woman." She goes on to revel in the fact that she is the breadwinner, and the powerful person, in the end. Basically; "Victory!"

Now, compare this with one of her earlier works, a song off Under the Pink called "The Waitress." This was a song about rivalry between waitresses having to do with male attentions. The song was far more effective in conveying the viciousness of the emotions involved, and it also had a thoughtful quality to it. A feeling of regret that these conflicts seem to result from a persistent tragic flaw in the characters of so many people.

And this went with the general premise of Under the Pink--the idea being to cut through the sort of sweet pretence she perceived in women, and show the effects of this emotional atrophy.

So with that in mind, her new album, The Beekeeper, could justifiably be called On the Pink. "Hootchie Woman" is the celebration of one woman's victory over another. It's as though she has effectively become one of the characters in "The Waitress."

All in all, I'd say Tori's basically ended up in the same place, artistically, as she was in the days of Why Kant Tori Read. But . . . Hell, she did have a good run in between. Most artists don't get that much. And we'll always have the recordings.

I hate feeling this way about Tori.

Watching the third season episode of Star Trek: TNG called "Ménage A Troi", the subplot about Wesley Crusher receiving a field promotion to Ensign struck a funny chord in me.

Seeing his gelatinous face warming with boyish blush in response to Picard's fondling gaze, I couldn't help but wonder at the state of Picard/Wesley Crusher slash fic on the net.

My searches first yielded this result. I particularly liked the haiku;

Pert arse through jump-suit
Commander badge of red gold
Long nimble man legs

Or perhaps;

Fuck me senseless, Wes
Beam me with your Star Trek sperm
Kling on to me, boy

I never liked Wesley when I was a kid watching TNG. But now that I'm older, although I do not share in it, I can at last understand somewhat the forbidden man/boy-pupil love that inspired Wesley's character. For truly, the only people who could possibly have an interest in Wesley Crusher are people who are sexually aroused, whether they're aware of it or not, by stupid pretty children. His vague technical genius only conveniently serves to stave off full self-awareness of an attraction to his impenetrable naïveté. The only level on which his character can function is as a player in a wet dream. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, it just makes him boring to any of us who aren't attracted to that.

Well, I suppose that's hardly a revelation.

I'm gonna have a lot more time to-day than I was expecting, so I think I shall work on the Nar'eth winter special. And perhaps I'll watch a movie.

A few days ago I watched 1942's Somewhere I'll Find You. In spite of the fact that I could not find a single positive review for it on the internet, I rather enjoyed it. Sure, it was war propaganda, but in the middle of it Clark Gable and Lana Turner were captivating and the dialogue was decently witty. Not exceptional dialogue for back then, but if it were written to-day I bet it'd be hailed as startlingly ingenious. Certainly it's as good as anything Kevin Smith's ever written.

I woke up two hours ago, after having fallen asleep at around 10:30pm. You see, Sunday began for me 10pm Saturday. So now I find myself suddenly cast into another strange new schedule. Let me explore this wondrous plane.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. Little happens in it. Or maybe a lot happens. Depends on how you look at it.

I say, have I ever expressed a dislike for Thursdays? Well! What a horrid day is Thursday, I mean, really!

Broad ambitions did I have yesterday. I planned to draw from dusk 'til dawn. But in all, I only managed to draw and ink two comic pages and colour three. That's because at about 2am I was feeling wretched and antsy, and generally in need of inspiration.

So I watched 1931's Inspiration, starring Greta Garbo. I was foolishly pleased by this standard, MGM melodrama vehicle. I could go for some quality time with Garbo.

Anyway, that and eating were the only things I stopped for until 6:30am, when I decided it was time to go to bed. And in bed, I read The Amazing Spider-Man Annual number 1, with the Sinister Six. And at around 8am, I decided I wasn't going to get any worthwhile sleep before the maids arrived at 11am. Oh, well. I just hope I'm not too wrecked to-morrow to do the last two pages of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter.

And when I say "to-morrow", don't worry. I don't have any idea what I'm talking about, either.

I've been rather clumsy to-day. I keep bumping into things, tripping on the various bags, CDs, and books stacked about the room. It's becoming distracting.

Looking over hits I've gotten at Boschen Nesuko lately, I saw that yesterday someone submitted it to a web comic site called The Web Comic List. Apparently someone called "zonarius", and I can't find any information about him or her.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I suppose it's a good thing; I've already gotten some hits from it. But I kind of would like to've been told beforehand, so I could attach a graphic to the profile.

I didn't even know about this list page until this incident. Maybe I would've found it eventually . . . The gods know I could go a significant ways further in promoting my site than I have been. I keep meaning to, but I forget. Honestly, my brain is too, too cluttered.

I hope I'm more energetic after I've slept. To-morrow I don't just want to do a Boschen and Nesuko page. I want to do Nar'eth pages. And maybe some of the other projects I've had bouncing around my head lately.

And I want to pick up the new Tori Amos album. It’s true that I haven't been as enthusiastic about her newer stuff. I still haven't finished watching the Welcome to Sunny Florida DVD, and I wasn't very fond of the new mixes on the Tales of a Librarian collection. But I'm a Tori fan, and one can't be a Tori fan without being at least a little zealous.

Well, it's 6am. I think I'll have some cereal and then see if I can actually get to sleep early.

A few days ago I read this article by Hunter S. Thompson. And to-day he's dead, reportedly having shot himself.

Maybe I'm naive, but this didn't seem like him. Of course, I didn't really know him, but great writers live in your brain, and are real there. This feels a damn nasty trap door.

This is simply, plainly awful. That man deserved better. He, after all, was great.

Last night I saw a commercial where a little girl, obviously reading off a cue card, informed the world that smoking killed her dad, who was her best friend. And then a snappy "act-now-wait-there's-more" man's voice talked about a wondrous and affordable new method for breaking a cigarette habit. From admonishment to enticement in ten seconds. Now that is wondrous.

A couple days ago I saw three cars stop in the middle of the street to form a blockade against a fire truck with its sirens blaring.

That same day I also came across a young man with a Jamaican accent who asked me where he'd get if he kept walking north of Santee. I told him "Nowhere. There's nothing north of here." Which is perfectly true, but he didn't seem satisfied.

My point is no one knows what they're doing. I think that's my point, anyway.

Em, I seem to be quite back to my old schedule. It's about 6:30am and I haven't gone to bed yet. I did make a quesadilla with a crumbled up hard boiled egg in, and hot sauce.

And then I put in a tape.

The RKO logo came up and I thought, "I bet this'll be a Fred and Ginger picture! Please be Fred and Ginger, please be Fred and Ginger, please be Fred and Ginger . . ."

It was Fred and Ginger. Two people who definitely knew what they were doing. The movie was Swing Time, the plot was simultaneously slightly silly, slightly witty, and thoroughly sweet. Fred follows his lucky quarter to a dancing studio, leading to a really great moment where he saves Ginger her job by--what else?--dancing with her. Ginger Rogers looked particularly cute in this movie, with soap suds in her hair or dressed in a translucent cape. When Fred sang he loved her just the way she looks to-night, I agreed with him.

Fred had an amazing solo dance with three shadows of himself projected in the background. His ability was so keen that at first it appeared to be three copies of the same footage--but then slight alterations reveal otherwise. The whole sequence was startlingly good.

The final big dance number is delicate, and lovely. Performed to a song involving Astaire singing about how he won't dance without Rogers, the whole thing travels among just the perfect magnitudes of hints. Oh, it was too sweet. So, yeah, Swing Time's a good movie.

You know, these days I'm noticing what a profound effect great art can have on my entire disposition. Well, I've always been that way, but lately I've been thinking about it. So now I think I'll go read some Spider-Man.

Hiya.

So, let's see . . . I've been working on the Nar'eth winter special, I've been watching movies, I've been reading, and I've been walking. I keep saying, "Oh, it's bloody well time I looked into getting car insurance again," and then I keep not doing it. One thing leads to another, you know . . . I don't even like thinking about the car and what sort of little grand breakdowns I'm likely to experience once I do have it up and running again. But, hey, that's what being part of civilised mutant art farms is all about.

Last night I watched Bela Legosi and Boris Karloff in the 1935 film The Raven. Having little to do with the Poe poem for which it's named, the story involves a mad doctor (Legosi) torturing people with a pit and pendulum, and a room with crushing walls. Yes, it was a perfect movie. Quite unpredictable, really, moving from cool mood moments with an interpretive dance based on the poem while Legosi recites part of it in voice-over, to Karloff having half his face disfigured so he's forced to act as Legosi's henchman, carrying people off in the night to be tortured. It doesn’t get better than that.

Looking at the manga section at Barnes and Noble yesterday, I released that most manga provokes a tingling sensation in my sinuses, making me feel like I might sneeze. There's just such a sweet uniformity to it all, adorable large-eyed androgynous creatures drawn precisely the same way, over and over, with the passion of a mechanic. Don't get me wrong, there's good manga. But looking at that enormous section, I can't help feeling like I'm looking at an army of howitzers in lingerie.

Chevrolet reaches out to a new market:

I've updated Boschen and Nesuko a day early. Boy, this thing goes much better when I'm not sick, and I have a whole day to concentrate on each page.

You know, now that I think about it, it's kind of an anti-Valentine's Day chapter.

Hey, I hate Thursday. And yes, it's because the maids are here. Spoiled brat, am I? Well let's see . . .

Advantages of having maids here; floor gets vacuumed, the little table next to the bed gets dusted, and the sheets might get washed.

Disadvantages; I only get four hours of sleep, I have to somehow get everything off the floor and stuff it into my closet, I have to hide my coffee thermos so it doesn't get washed and all coffee put in it taste like soap for days . . . Okay, the worst part is the sleep thing, not merely for the lack of sleep. But because it bisects my day; I'll spend the time wandering listlessly, until I come back and fall asleep again, often times getting nothing done all day, never actually feeling rested. But, hurrah, the floor's vacuumed.

In better news, I picked up the 1938 Robin Hood DVD a few days ago. Just gorgeous; impressive, lush Technicolor. And Errol Flynn is such a wonderful bastard--I believe he really could waltz in and have a smug little dinner conversation with President Bush--I mean, Prince John--before handily escaping his guards (Marion; "You speak treason!" Robin; "Fluently!").

To think Jimmy Cagney was originally up for the role! I'd have been waiting the whole movie for Sir Guy to get murdered while Robin cackles away into the night. Still, Cagney, who at least was a good actor, would've been better casting than, oh, say, Kevin Costner.

The DVD came with a lot of bonus features, including a wonderful 1938 Movie Experience thing that had a bunch of the shorts and news reels that were typically shown before a movie in 1938. A lot of really sweat swing stuff.

Anyway, I oughtn't even to be pretending wakefulness right now . . . Better start walking . . .

Last night I finally had a dream that didn't end in misfortune somehow--which has been the trend for some time, now. Last night I simply dreamt that Warner Brothers, in the 1930s, was trying to come up with an efficient method of manufacturing magma and using it in movies. I woke up feeling gloriously neutral.

I dunno what sparked the trend. Some of the dreams were fairly innocuous, like the one where I went back in time to try to save Jack Kerouac, and failed. The night before last's was pretty interesting, though. I dreamt I could levitate, which made me safe from the queen alien (from Aliens), who was living in a cave just west of my old neighbourhood. While she was making ready to attack, I visited her to waylay her with a philosophical discussion about the usefulness of having living, happy people around you. I was somewhat dismayed that I couldn't even provide an argument that satisfied myself. So the queen alien, with an army of wolves, managed to devastate the world. I hovered through the empty cities, finding the occasional furtive survivors.

My sister had managed to survive--I noticed her with a group of five other people in front of a church. In fact, I noticed groups of about five people in front of nearly all churches. And all of these people had very tan skin and pale blonde hair. The wolves completely ignored them, and they moved in these odd, meaningless gesticulations, speaking gibberish like Sims characters.

I got a lot done yesterday. And now I want a bagel . . .

I walked from downtown to Hillcrest (that's a long way, up a hill) a couple days ago just to get a Dresden Dolls CD I already had (but my old copy was disintegrating). I'm very glad I got it, but I have to say I think, in some ways, their "A" is for Accident is a better album.

And is the "Girl Anachronism" the very model of a modern Major General? I don't think it's a bad thing, really, if she is.

I seem to be entirely on schedule with Boschen and Nesuko this week. But I'm also working on the Nar'eth winter special, which I was delayed on a bit for one reason, and am now delayed because I'm puzzling out a technique to use on a certain thing . . . Jeez, but I'm sure I'm boring everyone with all the details.

I thinking I'm getting back to my old sleeping schedule, which makes me happy. And I've been looking everywhere for a copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious on DVD, and am about to concede defeat and admit I'll have to order it online.

Have I got anything else to say? Not at the moment but, then, I am very sleepy . . .

This really is good coffee.

Forgot to mention that, a few days ago, Tim simply gave me a set of Japanese weapons; a katana, wakizashi, and tanto. Just gave 'em to me. I mean, they're not Hatori Hanzo blades or anything, but he spent good money on them long ago and the fact that he gave them to me simply because he wanted more room in his closet was just plain extraordinary.

Then again, that boy has built himself quite an arsenal for some reason. He still has another katana with a beautiful snakeskin scabbard and ornate tsuba, a gladius, a used machete from India, an antique kukri, a modern military grade kukri, a modern military grade tanto (yes, they actually make those. Apparently some Navy Seals carry them), a crossbow, and, of course, the perfectly crafted reproduction of Glamdring. And I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

I'm certainly happy with what he gave me. He even gave me the display stand that goes with them. They're quite nifty looking. Next time I need to get the cellophane off something, or break down boxes, or fend off a rabid opossum, I know I can now do so in style.

There's a special election around here for a proposition called "X." I'm not sure what it's about, but by the bank to-day I noticed a sign that read, "Deputy Sheriff's Advise No on X." I wish I could possess a verb that way.

Drinking "aged Sumatra" coffee from Starbucks at the moment. It's something like five dollars an ounce. And it is pretty good. Everything's coming up roses the past coupla days. I got Boschen and Nesuko listed on Online Comics and got three hundred hits in one day. That's the most I've gotten in a day by about two hundred hits. It gives me a strange sweet feeling, overshadowed only slightly by my viewing of the beautiful Citizen Kane DVD Saturday night. I can't help but wonder if there's an omen here about how to receive love.

Anyway, I'm so damn happy I bought that DVD. It's gorgeous. I haven't even looked at the copious special features, among which there is the sordid story of Welles' fight with Hearst and a commentary by Roger Ebert.

I was at Barnes and Noble this morning where I almost bought several DVDs and ended up buying none. The amount of DVDs I've purchased lately weighed too heavily on my infrequently money-conscious conscience. I have the Hellboy Director's Cut, whose two disks of bonus features I have yet to view. I've still not had a chance to finish watching Wild at Heart. And there's still the Fritz Lang movie in the Film Noir collection. What a sweet vista.

And just why've I had so much money lately? Three reasons; Christmas, Boschen and Nesuko, and no car.

Everyone wonders why I'm putting off getting car insurance and getting the break lights fixed. Well, maybe it's not having to spend twenty dollars a week on gas and who knows how much money on the crap that the car takes me to. When I've a web comic to do here and am only able to get anywhere on foot, the money tends not to get spent.

But to-day I felt guilty. Almost bought the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. Almost bought the Criterion edition of The Lady Eve. Almost bought the cheepass seven dollar edition of His Girl Friday and Beat the Devil. But didn't.

Am I making anyone sick? I'm truly sorry . . .

Looking at some of the best comics on Online Comics is making me feel competitive. I was particularly impressed by this Reman Mythology. It's cosy pretty manga fun. I don't think I'd ever wanna make something that cosy, but it's nice to read and quite lovely.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. I worked on the damn thing from 10am Friday until . . . Looks like around 12:30am Saturday. I only stopped to eat twice, and I let nothing else distract me. And I had to do this because I was sick earlier in the week and I couldn't work on it. I don't think I'll get sick ever again, I just don't think it's my thing.

Maybe to-day I can finally get to work on the Nar'eth winter manga. Caitlin seems really excited about it and I feel guilty for neglecting it for so long. But I hereby blame all ills on illness.

I think I'd better go eat now.

This explains it.
Ug. I'm sick, in an irritating way. I can't concentrate to do anything and I can't sleep. I can't even seem to watch television. I couldn't even finish reading the article I linked to. I don't even think I can finish this post.

The five-shot grande Americano, Earl Gray tea, and smoothie with energy boost did not prevent me from falling asleep dreadfully early on Friday, thereby fucking up my sleeping schedule for days to come.

I'm having some Earl Gray tea right now and I have to say there's something decidedly rockin' about Earl Gray. In some inexplicable but unmistakable way it definitely rocks.

I've watched three of the four movies on the film noir collection I bought a while back. One movie was decent, one was quite wonderful, and one was wonderfully bad.

Strange Illusion, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1945, was wonderfully bad. Some good visuals from a director more than competent with the camera couldn't save the picture from a laughably written story about a young man named Paul (Jimmy Lydon) who interacts stiffly and inexpressively with his world, occasionally wearing a stupid grin, while trying to convince everyone the man who's wooing his mother and every girl in the neighbourhood is in fact a dangerous serial killer.

My favourite scene was Paul discussing his worries with his girlfriend next to the pool one evening. He complains about how all the girls seem to like the evil man, but Paul's girlfriend casually says she's not as crazy about him as she was earlier. When Paul asks why, she explains that when she and the man were swimming earlier that day, he "swam underwater, got a stranglehold on me and started kissing me. I know it doesn't sound like very much but . . ."

No, no, not much at all. Why're you wasting our time, girl? We all know it's Man's god-given right. Sheesh.

However, the same director was in charge of the astonishing Detour. I learned from Roger Ebert's review that it was filmed in only six days, very, very cheap. It looks it. But there's never a moment not to like. And I don't even mean it was "fun bad". It was plain good. Real good. The story uncoils like a flaming rope from the ceiling. Or like ambrosia Pez from a dispenser. Events occur, each one fascinating, not merely for the fact that they're credible and inventive, but also because the underlying threads of the characters' have that pulse of genuine human souls.

Ugh, I want to feel wakeful. I have so much to do . . . I went to visit Marty on Friday, walked all the way to my old high school, but he wasn't there. I waited in his classroom long enough to write the whole script for the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter, which I really ought to've written two days earlier. And because I dropped off so early on Friday, and Saturday, I was plenty behind by the time I woke at 4am to-day. Yet before I was truly awake, I somehow drew one page and inked two (I drew page 89 on Saturday). I glanced at the clock and saw it'd only taken me three hours. I drew page 91, then broke for lunch to celebrate before coming back to ink it. I got back here at around 11 and not only inked the page but got a good start at colouring the three pages. So I'm just about caught up, meaning I can give languorous attention to page 92 to-morrow. Which is good. It'll be that much more perverted, I think.

Oh, shit man, I just like, totally fucking watched the sweet muthafuckin' Herbie trailer and . . . Holy shit man, what do I say, what I say but, oh hell Yeah!

Yeah! And that's the kinda lowdown muthafucker jammy kickin' "yeah!" that healthily affirms positivity in this kickass world of speed man, speed!

Hey, ya'll, lookie here . . . I done see this Herbie behind the corner, Jack. Past the red bricks built over the slippery fucking sewers of the eyeless assholes who say "no" man, "no"!

'Cause, Baby, they're out there, just ready to say fuckin' "no" to fuckin "yeah!" Speed yeah! But Herbie told us things, man . . . Herbie's got the Lyndsay Lohan now, and he's all right and all yeah!

The new chapter of Boschen and Nesuko is up. Some might call it mildly violent . . .

I'm incredibly sleepy. But it's been too long since I last posted . . .

A couple days ago, I broke with a very decent working pace on Boschen and Nesuko, went to the mall with Tim, and bought a lot of DVDs. Well, five. But two of them have two movies on--'twas a value pack of four film noirs, none of which I've seen, for only eight dollars. Of the four, one's directed by Fritz Lang and stars Edward G. Robinson, which I figured was worth the eight dollars in itself.

I also got another Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes DVD, and Jonathan Miller's 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland.

In spite of numerous flaws, I'd have to say that this is definitely my favourite film adaptation of Alice and Wonderland so far.

Looking at IMDb's page for it, you'll see that there's no shortage of information on the film so there's little I can add.

Filmed in beautiful, gloomy black and white, the film, as Jonathan Miller notes in the commentary, was definitely made more for adults than children (which led to a rather hilarious confusion with the BBC that resulted in Miller being labelled a paedophile). And yet many agree it's also the most faithful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's book--in fact, the cast and crew worked without a script; Miller simply typed up relevant pages from the novel the night before each scene was shot.

Aside from a general reverence for Carroll's words, thereby conveying their meaning significantly better than other adaptations, there are several other very striking features . . .

The movie feels very, very much like a dream. Miller speaks in the commentary with disdain for the standard Hollywood dream sequence with glossy sets and smoke machines. His dream movie goes with the idea that the strange things one experiences in a dream don't necessarily seem strange while you're experiencing them. Several reviewers disliked the way Alice often seemed entirely disengaged with her scenes, often speaking through telepathy, but I found it to be a very cool technique. And, on the subject of the girl herself, Miller made the inspired choice of searching for the antithesis of the usually cast perky, bright Alice, instead finding a serious, almost sullen, perpetually sombre child. Which was, in his view, more evocative of a Victorian little girl.

The rest of the cast is amazing, not only for their ability, but also for their names; John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle, Michael Gough as the March Hare, Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar, Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, and several other brilliant British actors. All of whom worked for scale, a mere five hundred pounds.

This leads to an aspect of the film that I simultaneously liked and disliked; there are no animal costumes. In the end, I think that's the best choice, but I very much rebel against the idea of Alice in Wonderland entirely (with the exception of the Cheshire Cat, who speaks with Alice's voice) without talking animals. I didn't like it at all until I thought about it a moment--in 1966, what would the best in make-up and special effects provide in that department? Awkward prosthetics that would partially obscure an actor's performance while inevitably looking like nothing more than effects.

My main problem with the movie is that it's too short, barely over an hour. One senses all the film Miller was forced by the BBC to cut. But it is more than worth checking out for its great delivery of Carroll's dialogue, dreamy sombre atmosphere, and shear stunning visual beauty.

As a side note, I was made again to reflect on how American McGee, in his attempt to make Alice "darker" for his video game, in fact made the story far more innocent. I have nothing against it, but I'm always bemused by the fans who think that Alice running around with a knife is some seriously fucked up shit. That violence which is the dominate feature of the pastiche is always safely fiction, while the logic and ideas of Carroll's original work are always quite real.

Mainly been full, tired, or drawing the past couple of days. I've been going over to my parents' house to eat, and it always seems like I eat way too much, especially with my sister's chocolate cake. And I come back here feeling like something difficult to roll up a hill. And there's almost nothing I can seriously contemplate doing and yet, somehow, I've managed to stay perfectly on schedule with my comic. Not a bad life at all, I guess.

And I'm glad I've been walking so much lately. That way I don't feel like a complete slug.

I failed to note Sherlock Holmes' birthday last week, but Neil Gaiman didn't. Fail to, that is. He linked to this article, which is basically good, except for the bit, ". . . for the idiot who won and lost the love of Irene Adler, 'the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet' and the only woman Holmes ever loved, referred to ever after as 'the woman.'" Which draws the boorishly simplistic yet sadly typical conclusion that Irene Adler was a sort of love interest for Holmes. Gods, Watson says right at the beginning of the story;

It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer–excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.

Which is far more interesting! Don't we have enough romantic liaisons in the world of fiction? I mean, this is one of those things that reflect what's really interesting and great about Sherlock Holmes to me--his whole-hearted devotion to something that it is not instinctive for a human being to devote himself to.

Anyway, I should be drawing . . .

The cat named Victoria (to begin differently than last time), was persistently, furtively, leaping up onto various high places she could find. Including the kitchen counter, where she drank from my plate that I'd partially filled with water to help dislodge the melted cheese. From this I deduced that she was looking for a high place to drink water.

So I filled a small bowl and put it on the bathroom counter. Even I thought I may've been mistaken about this some time later--but then I saw her, twice, hopping up to drink from that very bowl. You know what I am? Insightful! Wull, I bet I sure am!

I used to be so innocent. No, that doesn't quite describe it. Whatever word is appropriate need also to include a sense of adventurousness. Yes, adventurousness! An openness to the great broad field of things! Open minded to all potential sources of grand stimuli, I was as a naive doe, bounding through the verdant fields of dreamy afternoons!

But something changed me, made me hard inside, and forget the simpler things, relegating my pursuits to seedy, cynical, dimly lit venues populated by bounty hunters, pimps, and the most disreputable of smugglers. All the while looking over my glass of Romulan ale and scoffing at the pretension, the papier-mache, if you will, of vice. While falling deeper and deeper into spirally nonsense.

Actually, it wasn't so dramatic as that. I merely watched a bad movie. Well, first I taped it, then I sat down with my coffee, got comfortable and watched. Watched all of it, even. In spite of the fact that it was sucking already a few minutes into it, I stayed open-minded. On many occasions, the first few minutes of a film gave me a completely false impression of the movie entire. So what if this one opened with a song performed by Barry Mannilow? Angel liked Barry Mannilow. Maybe things would still be okay.

But they weren't.

The movie was called Foul Play, and it starred Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn, and Dudley Moore. It was made in 1978, a year before I was born, and made me decide that the period between 1975 and 1992 was a terrible period for comedy. Or maybe it's still ongoing, I dunno. But I detect an infatuation with a lazy-ass, Blake Edwards-ish, not-funny-comedy. Comedy that aims for only one level and is content to hit it only 20% of the time. Caddyshack was like that. And so was Foul Play.

But why go on? I never sleep comfortably without some food first, so I think I'll do that instead.

Victoria the Cat's in a rather tight ball of sleep on my bed at the moment. Nothing seems to be getting through to her.

I decided I'd spend to-day goofing off. I sense somehow that I need to do that now and then; set aside a day where I do nothing constructive, and merely have fun or something like it. I have a vague idea that it'll help me stay focused on other days.

So I walked to Starbucks and finished reading the astonishingly long translator's introduction for the Penguin edition of Plato's The Republic. The fellow felt it important for the reader to understand the environment in which Plato wrote this work. An idea I can readily appreciate, and I enjoyed the information about Greece from around 500 to 400 BC. It's rather terrible that Socrates was executed for heresy, and the fact that he was so killed in a society more purely democratic than our own reminded me of the rancorous religious folks in the United States. No wonder Plato had such a low view of democracy.

The coffee I got at Starbucks was terrible, so I walked to Barnes and Noble and got there a slightly better mocha. Lotta walking. The one thing my car was definitely useful for was for goofing off. In that respect I sorta regretted not having the use of it. It also sucks that I wasn't able to go to the Dresden Dolls concert on New Years Eve. That makes three Dresden Dolls concerts I've missed now for unforeseeable circumstances.

After I came back, I tried playing video games, but somehow my heart just wasn't in it. There wasn't much to do in Fallout 2 and I'm hideously sick of Morrowind. I tried to get back into Neverwinter Nights but that didn't even slightly work out.

I watched a bit of Return of the King, and just kind of gazed at it like it was in a museum, thinking about how, really, it's just perfectly beautiful. I wanna live in Minas Tirith.

I went over Boschen and Nesuko a bit, as I sometimes do, trying fruitlessly to read it as someone who didn't write it, and figure out which elements are working and which aren't. All I can really say is that I think I'm happy with some of the concepts and characterisations, but that I'm rather disappointed in my dialogue.

Let's see . . . I also watched bit of the Tori Amos DVD Welcome to Sunny Florida and read some of V for Vendetta. Alan Moore just never disappoints. It's like a hybrid of the Joker and Batman in 1984, only better.

I'm gonna go read some more of it now . . .

Get a load of this.

It's like Cass Timberlane incarnate. Ug.

Tried to watch my new copy of Wild At Heart this evening, but it turns out to be one of those DVDs that I have to watch with the volume up very high, or I can't hear any of the dialogue. Unfortunately, this meant Lula's screams were loud enough to probably wake all the neighbours.

SO I watched another episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation instead. I was pleasantly surprised the night before to find that the episode "The Enemy" was co-written by Farscape's David Kemper. And it felt David Kemper-ish, too. One of his lucid, complex, satisfyingly clockwork-like pieces.

I hope you enjoyed the new Boschen and Nesuko. I put three times as much work into it as the previous chapter, although it doesn't really show. I spent far too long on little details of the buildings in the first panel of page 73. I started that on Tuesday when the cat fell asleep on my lap. I didn't wanna wake her so I just kept working on it and working on it . . .

The weapon Nesuko's using, by the way, is a very deadly thing called a kukri. Tim has a couple of them, an antique one and a modern military one. Apparently the antique one is actually better weighted, but in any case, it's a very well weighted weapon so that it's possible for a child to wield it effectively. Tim collects a lot of swords and bladed weapons, but none of them give me a more hazardous feeling than the kukri when I hold, as its balance just seems to want to pull it straight into whatever object is nearby. Nesuko chopping off the fellow's arm isn't such a great a accomplishment. There's info on it here.

My nose is very cold. I was at my mother's house to-day and she keeps that place like a refrigerator . . .

Gods, this was a really bad time of day for me to post. There’re probably typos here I’m flatly blind to.

The new chapter of Boschen and Nesuko is up and it's only 12:30! Hah! That's so much better than I thought I'd do.

And that's what I did for New Years Eve.

Now I think I'll do some crazy shiznit like . . . watch a movie.

Eating some oranges, I watched a bit of VH1's 100 greatest rock bands and saw them rank Soundgarden better than Pink Floyd. Maybe it has something to do with the really nasty weather last night, thunder and lightning like doesn't happen around here.

A few days ago, I finished reading Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Such a sweet book.

"It's not me," I said, wondering why I was saying it but somehow enjoying it, "It's you. Every time I mention killing, you jump on me. You're a woman. You think if nothing's said about it, maybe none of the God only knows how many people in town who might want to will kill you. That's silly. Nothing we say or don't say is going to make Whisper, for instance--"

I love that long twisty sentence in the middle surrounded by the plain and simple ones. Just a component of the funny poetry in Hammett's language that slows you down enough to show you the chasm before shoving you down in it.

I've had the complete novels of Dashiell Hammett in a single volume for a couple years now, but am only now getting a chance to read one of them. Shows you something of my reading pile.

I remembered reading in William Gibson's blog some time ago about how some people were calling Raymond Chandler a huge influence on Gibson. "I’ve never read much Chandler either," said Gibson "another frequently supposed influence. The real deal, in that particular rainslick modality, for me, is Dashiell Hammett. Invented the vehicle, as far as I know, though Chandler brought a classier chassis to it."

And it was interesting to me how very much more like Gibson Hammett seemed than Chandler. I've only read two Chandler novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, but I found Chandler's style, while lovely, could occasionally overwhelm the story. I was very happy to start reading a Chandler novel but, on both occasions, when I'd finished, I didn't feel like reading another Chandler for a long time. There was something less innocent about Red Harvest, something that gnawed a bit more on ideas of human nature.

While I'm on the subject of noir, I should mention that I watched the 1947 Postman Always Rings Twice last night. Loved Lana Turner and John Garfield. Hated the obvious alterations made to please the censors. Sometimes Frank and Cora were two people caught in a plausible, hellish situation of decisions, other times they were reduced to being simplistic hooligans.

You know, I'm beginning to realise how much I always enjoy not having a car. Just knowing that I can't drive anywhere makes me feel more productive.

Well, Robyn has listed what she considers to be the ten best and ten worst movies of 2004, and she ended her post by suggesting others do the same. So I went through my blog archives and discovered that I've only actually seen 22 movies from 2004. It's hard to find a reason to go to the cinema when I've so many great movies on tape that I haven't seen yet . . .

Anyway, here's a ranking of what I've seen;

Best of 2004

1 Kill Bill vol. 2
2 A Very Long Engagement
3 The Blind Swordsman, Zatoichi
4 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5 Hellboy
6 Fahrenheit 9/11
7 Before Sunset
8 Finding Neverland
9 Coffee and Cigarettes
10 Maria Full of Grace

Honourable mentions; Spider-Man 2, Sky Captain and the World of To-morrow, The Machinist.

Worst of 2004

1 The Stepford Wives
2 The Triplets of Bellville
3 Alfie
4 Van Helsing
5 The Terminal
6 The Passion of Christ

Yeah, only six worst movies. I felt ambivalent about the remaining four. Those are; Hero, I Heart Huckabees, Secret Window, Meet the Fockers.

I know some people may feel violent, terrifying fury towards me for including The Triplets of Bellville in the worst movies. Or those people may coolly feel I'm an idiot. To either reaction I respond; I'm sorry, the main character was expressionless, speechless, and, really, hardly a character at all. A bowling pin with arms and legs would've been more interesting.

To those convulsing in disease fostering spasms at the sight of Hero in my Ambivalence Pile, I say that movie was very pretty, and I'm glad it was so enamoured with itself. That the movie was happier with itself than I was made by it is no reason not to encourage it, smile at it, and nod in vague approval. But it really deserves no more than that.

So, happy Christmas, Kwanza, Chanukah, Sandwich, Patrick Swayze, Great Cola Spirit, etc. I'm celebrating Christmas because there's more to it than any of the others. I go in for complexity and moral ambiguity.

I'm very sleepy and I have been ever since I got up early on Christmas Eve morning. I'm not sure how I'm gonna make the Christmas rounds to-day without using my car but I suppose I'll figure it out something out.

I've gotten some gifts. The biggest I got so far were the entire third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the final season of the Jeremy Brett series.

I was made to remember how innocent Star Trek is, occasionally to an annoying degree. But the third season is definitely when TNG started getting good. And The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is kind of sad because, not only was the season cut short due to Jeremy Brett's death, but many of the episodes that were filmed showed the accommodations the people were forced to make for Brett's failing health, even all but writing Holmes out of one episode. It's really too bad.

I wish I wasn't so sleepy. I need to work on my slacking off skills so I don't feel so guilty about being sleepy on Christmas morning . . .

Things're gettin' ominous around here.

I walked to a nearby shopping centre to finish off my Christmas shopping Tuesday. I walked because the night before I’d gotten pulled over on the way to Tim's. I was inexplicably angry all day yesterday, so maybe I was a little shorter than I meant to be as I talked to the copper. I got the impression he thought I was a dangerous delinquent, or at least someone who was trying to pull something over on him.

Oh, yeah--why did he pull me over? My frelling break lights are out again. I told him I'd just gotten 'em fixed, saying something like, "Yeah, the guy at the place told me they're out 'cause the bulbs are out but the genius didn't think to wonder why the bulbs on a fairly new car'd gone out."

The Man didn't like my tone, I don't think. That's my theory as to why he wanted to see my license and registration so badly, made a big point in telling me he wasn't gonna give me a ticket this time, only a warning. Gee, I guess I ought've thanked him for not being a complete, bottom-feeding asshole.

Anyway, to-day I wasn't so much angry as having a bit of difficulty concentrating. It was a dim day, I guess. But ominous.

I got lunch at Quizno's where, I discovered, the price of a small Veggie sandwich and a bottle of lemon Snapple is exactly $6.66.

"I feel lucky!" I said to the cashier, whose weak smile suggested that she was either unfamiliar with the sign of the beast or loathed my flippant reaction to irrefutable evidence of my sin coated soul.

After that, I went to Target and bought the very last Christmas present I needed to buy. As I was waiting in line with it, a man behind me, who looked like a large, more weathered version of Peter Straub, suddenly said to me, "No rest for the wicked, eh?"

It took me a moment to realise he was talking to me and I could tell from the subtle reactions of everyone nearby in the crowded store that his statement had puzzled everyone. The man's wife gave him a quick, angry look.

It was a mysterious, slightly inexplicable incident. And like most slightly inexplicable incidents, the mind took it and feverishly attempted to decode it for hours. From concluding it was a feeble result of his observing my black clothes and hat and needing somehow to comment on them, to thinking perhaps he was a vessel meant to convey to me some Jacob Marley-ish revelation.

All I know is that Christmas, and this Christmas season in particular, is starting to take on this vast, overbearing, bruise-fleshy shape of chilling, and unknowable significance. It's like a big ghost of a genetic experiment, its mottle skin sagging grey through the sharp metal restraints until it resembles nothing so much as an overcast sky . . . And let's not forget all the red painted on everything.

A couple nights ago, I dreamt there was some kind of disease on my scalp that made daisies grow out of it. I didn't realise it until I'd gotten back from being out for awhile. I guessed no one had noticed because I was wearing my hat, and I tried to think of any instances when I'd removed my hat during the day. I couldn't think of any, and as I leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting the flowers that were mostly on the left side of my head, I noticed the one nearest my forehead had Glenn Close's face in the centre. She was grinning and wouldn't say anything.

I dropped by Tim's house last night. He gave me a rather nice Christmas present--two pairs of jade chopsticks direct from China. He gets that kind of thing because he put together this web site for a friend of his who seems to have some crazy connexions in China. Tim tells me his friend often receives ancient little statues and things fresh from the tombs.

The chopsticks are nice, and very cold. I'm wondering if I ought to actually eat with them. I'd feel sort of like an emperor, except I'd probably only use them for cheap ramen.

I saw The Male Animal a few days ago, a 1942 film starring Henry Fonda and Olivia De Havilland. There was more subtext in the movie than I think was intended.

The story is that Fonda's character is an English teacher who gets in a bit of trouble for wanting to read a statement to his class by Bartolomeo Vanzetti--of Sacco and Vanzetti--as an example of good writing by someone who isn't a writer. When the trustees of the university catch wind of what Fonda intends to do, they attempt many forms of intimidation, including threats of dismissal.

This is a domestic comedy.

A head representative of the trustees, played wonderfully by Eugene Pallette, is a friend of Fonda’s family, as is a football hero played by Jack Carson. The information above is revealed at a dinner party as is the fact that Fonda's wife, De Havilland, is still very attracted to her old boyfriend, the football hero. Maybe more now than her husband, who's frightening and confusing her with his obstinate desire to read the Vanzetti statement, despite Eugene Pallette's baritone derision for Reds.

What follows is a fascinating scene of Pallette, Carson, and De Havilland joining a night time mob of college football fans as they march to a rally being held next to an enormous bonfire. In the light of the flames, Pallette goes onto the stage and, in his peculiar, booming voice, gives an angry speech about how decent people are American kinds of people. Fonda, who glumly followed along to watch his wife being handled by Carson, is fiercely berated by random people in the mob for not cheering at the appropriate moments.

Oh, yes, this is a domestic comedy. And not a bad one at that.

You see, the real story--for which the above striking scene is but window dressing--is De Havilland seeing Carson, the dumb football hero, as being the real male animal. Her husband, who seems weak for adhering to mysterious principles that run counter to the mainstream, is suddenly terrible to be saddled with.

Most of the movie concentrates on physical and verbal comedy about matrimony and the difference between men and women. But the end of the movie is very rewarding, as Fonda--who is, let us not forget, Henry fucking Fonda, after all--goes in front of his assembled English class and a load of "guests" drawn by the publicity, and not only reads the Vanzetti statement, but makes a statement of his own about free speech.

I dunno but, personally, in this day of attempts an enforcing Christianity in schools and repression of literature, I found Fonda's scene rather stirring. It occurred to me that such a movie would never come out of mainstream Hollywood to-day, and I found it a little distressing to realise that, in some ways, America is now more conservative than it was in 1942.

I can hardly believe I pulled it off, but the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up.

I'm pretty sure it's done. I'm so damn tired right now, I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me if there're any real huge, sloppy mistakes . . .

Got the Return of the King Extended Edition yesterday. It's very good, although the extended scenes don't have as dramatic an effect on the overall piece, as was the case with The Two Towers. The extended Two Towers is, to me, a profoundly different and better movie than the theatrical release. The bulk of the added scenes alter the pacing and mood significantly as they have to do with quieter, less "Middle-Earth on the march!" moments. It's a richer, fuller movie.

Return of the King, however, even though there's actually more extended stuff, feels pretty much the same. Still, I'm very glad I waited for this edition to come out instead of buying the theatrical release. I do love the extra footage, and the appendices alone would be worth a good price.

Some of my favourite bits . . .

The scene of Frodo and Sam marching with the orcs. This was something I very much felt the absence of in the theatre--it felt like a scene was cut. Suddenly Frodo and Sam were dressed differently and across a vast portion of Mordor. Having the scene in is a particularly sweet bit of spackle. The inspection scene was nicely tense.

I also liked that there was a lot more of Eowyn's story. Although I'm not sure if I didn't feel Eomer barking at her something like, "Battle is the province of men!" wasn't a little too broad.

Merry's vowing of service to Theoden was good, so now there's not merely an awkward "Look, Merry's coming, too!" shot of him riding with everyone as they leave Edoras.

I've already watched most of the appendices, and they're just as fascinating as in the previous volumes. A wide range of things that get you surprisingly involved in a very human perspective of the films' makings. There's the eerie moment where Christopher Lee explains to Peter Jackson what it actually sounds like when someone gets stabbed in the back, and Jackson remembering that Lee served in a somewhat shadowy way in World War II. There's Miranda Otto starting to cry as she's remembering how hard it was to part with everyone. There's the bit about many New Zealand army personnel being employed as extras during the battle scenes and fighting just a little too real. There's the neat documentary on how the horses were trained and used--rumours that Viggo Mortensen slept with his, and the wonderful little interview with Jane, the stunt rider, who wanted desperately to buy Shadowfax, with whom she'd become quite close, but couldn't afford him. And then turning on her answering machine to hear Viggo telling her he'd purchased the animal for her.

And there was Billy Boyd and Viggo Mortensen's deep, long, passionate kiss.

Anyway . . . I recommend you all go out and buy a copy for yourselves . . .

I also picked up Tom Waits' new album, Real Gone, a few days ago. It's very nice, at times kind of making me think of David Lynch.

It occurred to me to-day that Sorsha from Willow was a very sexist character. She starts off evil, and then converts because . . . Madmartigan says there are no stars or moon without her. Or something like that. At the beginning of the movie she has evil, leering facial expressions, then, when she crosses over, she has wise, nurturing facial expressions. It's just sad.

Yesterday I was drawing page 66 of Boschen and Nesuko when a cat fell asleep on top of my paper. Funny how cats like to be asleep at exactly the coordinates of your focused attention. So to-day I was a little behind, so sayeth the cat.

The entire course of events was altered to-day when I discovered there were no coffee filters. I'd originally planned on getting to work right away after a breakfast of cereal, oranges, and a hard boiled egg but, not being able to make coffee meant I had to go to the Starbucks in La Mesa, by the trolley station, get a triple latte from the old (better and spontaneously combustible) machine and a scone. And, while out, one might as well visit Tim at his workplace, buy minutes for one's phone, and discover that Radioshack is selling a "Super Brave Action Hero!" named Brum.

Visiting Tim at work meant I felt like visiting Tim after work, and I got little done to-day. I plan on getting lots done to-morrow and Tuesday, hopefully not in the same way I planned on getting lots done to-day.

So far to-day I've been to the new Starbucks at Hazard Centre, written there the script for the next Boschen and Nesuko chapter, and while doing so enjoying a fresh, very, very good cup of coffee. It was one of those moments where my head kind of hurt, the brain inside was somewhere between figuring what to write and eavesdropping on the two office workers next to me talking about Frank Sinatra . . . And then with just the smallest sip of the very hot coffee, there suddenly was in the world only the coffee. It's a hard thing to analyse--did it really taste that good, so good that I suddenly felt like a different person entirely? It seems impossible, yet that's exactly what happened.

It was a sort of split in my personality. An emotional reaction to something that I didn't necessarily agree with. Which is not to say I disagreed, simply that it was not what I was doing at the moment. And yet it was. How could this be? How could I be different than my own feelings? Does that make the part of me that's different from my feelings just wrong? Or does that make my feelings wrong? It's eerie, slightly disturbing, and yet, at the same time, I'm kind of proud it.

I watched Caddyshack last night. A movie that really doesn't deserve to have much said about it. There were maybe five or six things I found funny in it, and all of them involved Bill Murray. I was brought to the conclusion that the movies that Murray's making now aren't "come back" movies. He's just starting to make really good movies. Aside from perhaps Ghostbusters, nothing he did in the supposed height of his career really rivals Rushmore or Lost in Translation. Which is kinda neat.

I was such a slug yesterday. It was a bad kind of day. A day when nearly every moment I'm thinking about something I ought/want to be doing, and consistently not doing it. To-day will be different, oh, yes. I woke up angry, but I think the coffee's fixed that. I'm gonna pretend it's only now a question of what I want to do first . . .

Just figured the secret of my pop-top coffee cup . . . I had only to press harder . . .

Good afternoon.

I woke up thinking about "The Yellow Face" because, on the table by the bed, there sits my DVD copy of the Jeremy Brett Sign of Four. With the hunched, savage faced black man on its cover, I thought it might lead some to think that Conan Doyle was mildly racist. I hoped there was an episode for "The Yellow Face", because it proves rather decidedly to the contrary, but, unfortunately, there's not . . . I wish Jeremy Brett hadn't died.

You know, though, as much as I love the Brett series, they're still not as good as reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories. In fact, I often reflect on the fact that I have yet to see a single film or video version of a Holmes story that is the equal of the source material. And yet I don't think such a thing is impossible. Maybe one day . . .

Last night I watched Pat and Mike, and was very surprised to see Katharine Hepburn kicking young Charles Bronson's ass. I imagine Hepburn watching Bronson's movies later in life, and remarking to a companion, "My, the lad sure looks tough, doesn't he? Really, I was disappointed he went down so quickly--you do know I kicked his ass, don't you?"

What else to say . . . Caitlin has uploaded the latest Nar'eth manga chapter I did to Nebari.net.

And I'm too excited that Moi is writing a Dana Scully/Clarice Starling slash fic.

All the doorknobs in this house're cold. And it's so fucking dry around here . . . I'm pretty sure this winter's much colder than last year's. And, yes, all yous in the cold north are looking at this entry and shaking your heads. Well, I ain't complaining about the cold. I like the cold. Believe me, it's a nice break. What bugs me is the dryness. I could definitely do without it. And so could the cats.

A few nights ago I watched Les Carabiniers, the first Jean-Luc Godard movie I'd ever seen. As far as I can tell, it's an overrated movie. According to Rober Ebert's review, the humour is appreciable only if you're caught up with the sort of exclusive comedic language of Godard's films. Ebert says, ". . . walking in at the beginning of a new Godard movie is like walking in at the middle of someone else's: You ask yourself what happened before you got there." A number of perspectives on the movie point out that Godard was forcing the audience to look at movies in a new way. And I can appreciate that. But I'm not sure the movie has much more than groundbreaking moviemaking techniques. Which, of course, aren't groundbreaking any more (the movie was made in 1963), so what's left?

The story is that, in a fictional country, ruled by a king, two farmers are duped by a couple of carabiniers into fighting the king's war for promises of looting, pillaging, and . . . lifting girl's skirts. And, no, that's not a euphemism for rape, apparently. These uncouth, amoral soldiers apparently get adequate jollies from peeping at a lady's panties. And all of these ladies don't seem particularly to care. I don't think that was intentional. I think we were meant to be shocked by the actions of these soldiers and take pity on the young women. Now, I've not witnessed such a situation myself, so maybe women do tend to take it as they would a slow line at Disneyland. But somehow I doubt it.

But, you know, maybe it was meant to be funny. Or something other than realistic, because most of the movie was unrealistic. On the other hand, TCM's Robert Osbourne, before the movie, explained that Godard was committed to making more realistic films than what people were used to from Hollywood. And, in terms of the almost totally absent musical score, realistic locations, and often static or erratically moved camera, I suppose it was that, for the time.

Osbourne also explained that Godard expressed an intention to enrage audiences with his technique. I wonder if, then, the annoyance I felt was meant to be felt--my annoyance at the fact that scenes supposedly of our characters trudging through battle-torn landscape just look like a couple of guys romping about in a field. My annoyance that not a single scene is believable, except for the extremely graphic stock footage of people terribly wounded or killed in war.

And that added up to another annoyance--that such brutal reality was juxtaposed with podgy, grinning actors playing army-men, most of the time for no apparent reason.

On the couple of occasions where reason was apparent, I did see how some of the humour could be pretty good, if the rest of the movie hadn't put me in a bad mood. The farmer-soldier trying to get at the bathing woman on the movie screen was pretty good. The execution of the rebel woman reciting poetry would have been good if her clothing looked like she'd been living desperately and the soldiers killing her had looked like they'd been fighting in a war for some time.

One thing I did like was that, throughout the film, letters were shown on title cards and read by the narrator. These letters were actual letters from soldiers all throughout different wars in different countries, from the time of Napoleon up to 1963.

But otherwise . . . it mostly just seems shoddy. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something.

Blogger was broken last night, so I couldn't post that the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. Stuff happens in it. Just so you know, this is a series where things shall indeed happen, from time to time.

I dreamt last night I knew a woman who wanted breast reduction surgery. I really didn't blame her because her breasts were ridiculously large and misshapen. So I went to the place with her and stood by as the doctor outlined the process. Surprisingly, it seemed the surgery would involve an incision all the way to her hip and her lips would have to be removed and replaced with green synthetics.

The woman agreed to this, figuring, I guess, there'd be plenty of anaesthetic. So she went through with the surgery only to find, afterwards, that she had to apply the fake lips herself and that they would take several hours to adhere properly. This woman had a personality trait that made her prefer to pawn as many difficult jobs off on her male friends as she could, so she talked me into switching bodies with her.

For some reason, I decided to apply the lips while driving. The things looked remarkably like sticks of spearmint gum and I was forced to wonder just how natural they could look when applied.

I was turning off Mission Gorge while applying the upper lip and it kept slipping. I worried that I might be wearing out the adhesive, so I decided to park in front of Cosco and do the thing properly. Looking in the mirror, I was surprised to see that the lower lip was actually looking very lip-like, with only a faint line of scab to show anything strange had taken place.

Unfortunately, I was woken before I could see how things were going to go with the upper lip. My grandmother was outside my door fiddling with the heater, which apparently had stopped working. Meanwhile, I was marvelling that this was the first night all year that I hadn't had to sleep with the fan on. I was also contemplating turning it on.

I didn't manage to fall asleep again until my aunt and grandmother left. And then I dreamt that, while walking through a very creepy, mist shrouded forest, I told my sister that the scariest thing I'd ever seen on video was a Ranma 1/2 OVA about terrible things happening to Ranma and Akane in a haunted house.

...

In other news, yesterday I discovered a new addiction. A few days ago I'd gotten a grande earl grey tea from Starbucks. I'd observed to Tim that it tasted like soap and I didn't understand how Captain Picard could drink the stuff. But yesterday, I found myself not only desperate for earl grey, but encouraged by subtle signs from the gods to drink some. I went to Starbucks, bought some, sipped, noted the soapiness, burned my thumb on some that spilled, and compulsively kept drinking until it was gone.

There's that . . .

Speaking of Starbucks, earlier in the day I'd been at my aunt's Starbucks in a large, insanely comfortable green chair drinking a regular coffee, when I glanced to my right and noticed a small note behind the fake plant on the table. It read, "To love a person is to see the face of God."

I thought about various snarky replies I could make to that, but in the end kind of liked the idea of notes being hidden in random places. It'd be better if they had more intriguing messages, though.

I have a lot to do to-day.

Kiernan made a great entry yesterday that I rather liked, it being in a similer vein to the delusions of real life entry I made a while ago. Further good argument that more people need to keep their heads out of their asses.

I love Robert Blake's voice. It's one of those tin cool voices like Lou Reed's or Charles Bronson's.

I watched Bobby Blake in In Cold Blood some days ago and I pretty much enjoyed it. I thought Blake was really good in it.

The movie, made in 1969 is based on the actual slaughtering of an innocent, God-fearing family in 1959. Director Richard Brooks was so keen on being as true as possible to the events that he filmed the murder scene in the actual house where they took place. Photos of the family throughout the house were actual photos of the family, not the actors playing them. Just a nice touch--added a special pinch of atmosphere when watching.

I think the idea at the end of the movie was to present an anti-death penalty argument. I don't really think the movie succeeds at that, but what it does do is paint a couple of believable and fascinating characters.

And I was really happy to've seen The Treasure of Sierra Madre earlier because Blake's character refers to it several times, comparing himself and his doomed companion to the desperate treasure hunters in that movie. Actually, it made me look back at Treasure of Sierra Madre a little more fondly. And, it turns out, little Bobby Blake had a small role in it, playing the little boy who sold Bogart the lottery ticket. Eeriness abounds!

And speaking of . . . I saw The Machinist a couple nights ago with Trisa. We both liked it, even while agreeing that it was inspired almost entirely by a number of current trends in filmmaking. Although I quite appreciated the Bernard Herrmann-esque score--a robust, symphonic thing that's getting to be rather rare in this heyday of ambient and/or electronic soundtracks for thrillers.