Guns and Metal Boxes

Last night's tweets;

A coffee cup sticks inside a black car.
There's an extra half hour across town.
Scientists send porn to a distant star.
Alien mollusc frowns turn upside down.



Apparently Hewlett Packard likes to play a little game with consumers in which USB cables may or may not be included with their printer/scanners. From the manual; "Purchase a USB cable and photo paper separately if it is not included". Apparently I didn't get one of the lucky boxes, so I'm going to have to go back out again to-night after a long day of running errands.

All I wanted was a scanner, but apparently you just can't get those from a store shelf anymore unless there's a printer fused to it. I suppose I could've ordered one online--I thought about just drawing and inking two pages a day and then scanning them at Tim's house on Friday or Saturday. But the fact is, I really prefer to concentrate on one page a day. While I can eat dinner while colouring, I can't very well ink.

Anyway, I do need a printer, and I guess this'll save me money in the long run. I actually need to print something about three times a year, but that's still some printing. This new little black number takes up about a third of the space my old Hewlett Packard printer/scanner took up--as Tim remarked when he was here the other day, you can always spot old computer hardware when it's pale grey, as my keyboard still is. It was my grandfather's keyboard, and though a few keys have totally lost their paint, I have no intention of replacing it any time soon. As my grandfather said at one time, IBM used to make keyboards like tanks, and sure enough this more than decade old keyboard's still in perfect working order.

I watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly last night, which I liked a lot more than the first time I watched it. As years go by, I find myself more satisfied by a movie's visuals alone, and I found myself just soaking in things like shadowed foreground broken walls with sun bleached hills in the background, and glistening, lined faces in extreme foreground with action occurring in the background. But I also found myself digging the story a lot more--I'm enjoying coolness a lot more than I used to, and these three guys almost casually going on about their own violent adventures in the middle of the American Civil War was both funny and exciting. The bridge destruction scene, which I found tedious and pointless the first time through, was a lot of fun this time. The fantasy seeming to be that these guys, who aren't bound by war as a social mechanism, are in a position to bestow a boon. They're almost godlike, which is I guess a lot of the romance of westerns--outsiders who are extraordinarily free, with the added pathos of being lonely for being so cut off, which is what the scene with Tuco's brother bears out. It's why it makes sense Blondie and Tuco are still friends after they've tortured each other. I still wish the movie had a female character.