Nothing much to say for yesterday again. Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday . . .

CNN's released responses to the point-by-point responses on Michael Moore's website to Sanjay Gupta's infamous report on Sicko. It's pretty sad, as the best CNN can seem to do is point out that there are very minor differences in numbers between the legitimate sources Moore references and other sources. I loved this bit from the CNN site;

Gupta believes picking and comparing numbers from different places and times to suit an argument is not the best approach to a complicated issue like this one.

Just conveniently ignoring the fact that, in choosing the most recent statistics available, Moore was forced to use what actually exists.

As Moore puts it; "That U.N. report does list American health care spending as only $5,700, but it's a few years old. Since then, the U.S. government has updated its projections for health care spending, to $7,498 in 2007. So we used that number. It's the most recent, and comes right from the Department of Health and Human Services. If the Cuban government gave a figure on 2007 projected health spending, we'd have used it."

I finally saw Sicko a few days ago and it's a good movie. It follows several personal stories of people who've experienced the ridiculousness of the American healthcare industry firsthand, and the stories are put together very well. All the statistics are really there, even if you're looking through CNN glasses, that this industry is fucked, and Sicko does what a documentary ought to; it illustrates statistics evocatively. That Moore spends time focusing on the advantages of foreign systems simply seems constructive to me; he's showing us the ways in which we might fix our system.

It's been hot around here lately. It was overcast yesterday, but still there was inescapable heat. I start to feel like I'm absorbing it during the day, like a rock, and it clouds about me like an aura while I sleep in what ought to be a cooler night, with the fan on at full. Even with an air conditioner blanketing the room with forceful cool, I can feel all matter fighting to be hot. Ass, thighs, and back on the seat in the car become soaked with sweat no matter how cold my front is from the air conditioner.

I've got to stop driving so much. I bet I'd save a lot of money. These days, I pretty much only drive to the grocery store, my parents' house, and Tim's house, except for a couple trips to the mall or Fry's. It's more than necessary when just about everything I need--and more--is in walking distance. But then there's the matter of the heat . . .

Why do all the transformers in the new movie look the same? Why does the trailer for the new Lady Chatterley's Lover seem like a grindhouse trailer? I really have only questions to-night, I'm afraid . . .

"But, sir!" I hear you say, "What have you gotten done?"

A little colouring. Various forms of reading. Almost no writing. I guess I could call this a vacation. Except it feels more like summer camp.

Some Elvis Costello to-day . . .

Pretend I'm MTV. But with music videos.

More mid-90s Tori;

Part of last night's dream can probably be explained by the sight of Victoria staring at me from the living room darkness before I went to bed last night with glimmering green eyes. But the dream began in a complicated three-dimensional white stucco maze of a house, where I lived with a few relatives. Some of those relatives had begun to complain about an infestation of demons in the garden. This garden, which I viewed through one of several large, pane-less, fully open windows in the first storey bedrooms, consisted of miles and miles of flat, red, sandy desert, like a Martian landscape. The demons were clustered in slow moving herds a couple miles away. They looked like hunched, emaciated red clay skinned old hairless men. I knew the only way to kill them was to use bullets made from cat matter.

I couldn't find any dead cats, so I stuffed Victoria alive into a small, transparent shell, like the gelatine case of a pill. She shrank easily, and crouched at the end of the shell to stare warily back at me with the glimmering green eyes. I somehow managed to kill all the demons with the one bullet, but I was afraid to look inside the shell afterwards to see what had become of the cat.

I drove to North County Fair mall yesterday and saw this poster for the upcoming Stardust movie in the form of huge banners all over the mall, and even pasted on the elevator doors. I have this bad feeling Stardust is going to be a very good, but quite unsuccessful movie. I just can't imagine many people wanting to see a movie based on this poster. I like Tristran's overtly phallic sword and Yvaine's expression that seems to say, "I know quite a bit more about important things than you possibly could, but I'm willing to let you join in my fun for a few hours." But I'm not sure I like these things in the right way, and the movie already has to work against a title that might suggest to people a 1970s Ice Capade.

As I was approaching my grandmother's house on my way back from the mall, I found myself behind a white utility truck which pulled over to the left, facing the wrong direction. I didn't think too much about it, parked, put my iPod back into my bag, got out of the car, and heard, from a distance away, "You need to slow down!"

I turned around to see a large man with a big white moustache had gotten out of the truck and was now glowering at me from across the street. I laughed and said, "What the fuck're you talking about?" I think I've been waiting weeks for an opportunity to say that to someone.

"You were driving too fast!" he said, "I was backing up--I could have hit you!"

Now, anyone who's ever ridden with me knows that I'm ridiculous about observing the speed limit. I'm never in a hurry, and I'm annoyed by all the pricks who have to rush by everyone on the freeway so they can buy a new cell phone or whatever. I especially hate people who speed in a residential area, particularly around here where there are often kids playing in the street. I also don't, under any circumstances, tailgate (and I love orange juice. I've patterned my life after Robert Loggia).

I said, "I was behind you, jackass, if you're backing up, it's your responsibility to look out for cars behind you!"

"You were speeding!"

"I was going the speed limit, if not slower!"

"Do you want trouble?" This guy was big--he looked exactly like Paul Teutul, Sr., and I had no doubt he could pound me into the pavement. Even so, all this made me think was that I didn't have to go easy on him;

"What the fuck do you mean, trouble?"

"I'll call the cops."

I laughed, "For what?"

"I'll tell them you were speeding."

"I wasn't speeding, asshole!" How exactly I could have been speeding if I was behind him is an interesting question that sadly wasn't addressed.

"You don't have to cuss."

I laughed again; this was incredibly rich, and I was starting to feel really good, "Ah ha."

"What does that mean?"

"I was saying 'ah ha' like you'd said something threatening, like you'd said something intimidating."

He seemed chastised but still sore, "I was just telling you to slow down . . ."

I grinned, showing him my missing front tooth again. It occurs to me now I must look like a Jack O'Lantern. I said, "Oh, okay," and left him alone.

I think what I learned is that I like fighting. A lot. Sure, only when it's called for, but when it is, I love it, I have to admit. I am from Mars.

From 1997, my favourite era of Tori Amos;

I spent nearly all day yesterday reading about conservative philosophy. I thought I might write a huge journal entry about it, but now it seems hardly worth the time. Mostly what I found, I think, was best summed up by a quote from Benjamin Disraeli I saw in Wikipedia's entry on conservatism; "A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy."

You see, I wanted to defend my statement from a few days ago, that neocons aren't very much different from regular conservatives, which was a bit of a reaction to people like Ron Paul who seem to feel the havoc wrought by Bush and Cheney derives from a secret plan of theirs to create Big Government instead of respecting individuals property rights and states rights that right wingers seem to hold sacred above all else. It's a pretty naïve and self-contradictory system of thought, really; the idea that everyone pursuing their own self interest will somehow work out to the common good. It explains two things about the Bush administration; how the government got bigger under them, and how they didn't seem to plan it. They didn't think about whether or not invading Iraq would be good for the American people--they thought it would be good for their own interests.

Anyway, I may yet post about it. I don't know, I've kind of tired myself out on the subject, but I did reaffirm my fondness for Nietzsche.

So what else have I to talk about? Using the computer is a little uncomfortable right now--I have the monitor set up on a table about two feet from the foot of my bed, which is a slender but oddly tall thing. I sit between it and the table, looking up at the monitor because there's no room for a chair and sitting on the bed is uncomfortable because of the altitude and the tiny font size I prefer. But I'm still enjoying a house to myself. Oddly enough, it's made me want to read more because I feel less of a need to blot out the presence of other people with loud music and movies--reading's just not something I can do with music playing. Music contaminates the mood of a book too much for me.

I'm really not so great at separating music from what I'm doing while listening, and sometimes associations become permanently bound to certain albums or artists. For example, I can't listen to Tori Amos' Boys for Pele or Jane's Addiction without thinking about Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Fortunately, I've managed to start listening to music while writing lately. It's a barrier I broke in myself while doing the Lord of the Rings fanfiction thing. Unfortunately, I haven't been in a good place for writing lately, and even less of a good place for artwork. It'd be nice if things settled down around here soon . . .

I turned on CNN to-day just in time to see Michael Moore feasting on a Wolf's lifeless carcass. The video's finally online here, though I wish it included the Sanjay Gupta hit piece that preceded the interview. Moore was right to be as pissed off as he is in the video. Gupta's report, while trying to appear fair-minded and giving points to Moore for bringing to light stories of Americans fucked by this country's healthcare system, also included what seems to be the right-wing counterattack strategy, which is to mention problems in Canadian and French healthcare systems Moore's film doesn't mention, as though that somehow means Moore "fudged the facts" (as Gupta put it in his piece. Moore uses the phrase deliberately in his criticism of CNN's coverage). Moore says he's going to put corrections to the hit piece on his web site to-night, but the bias is already clear; if the problems with Canada's, Britain's, and France's healthcare are so egregious, than why is the U.S. still ranked worse than all three countries? And if universal healthcare means higher taxes, isn't that still better than a country where a large portion of even the employed population doesn't have healthcare coverage?

EDIT; Here's the page where Moore refutes CNN's false information, point by point.

It's just me, two cats, and three large air-purifier things here now. Gods, I love being alone, even under these circumstances.

Lucky the cat has been rather clingy, practically glued to my calf wherever I go in the house and meowing constantly. I was thinking he's like a girl who's chosen a man because he's always been sweet to her and provided for her, only to find in a seemingly threatening situation, she has a primal need to feel protected by him and she's not sure he's up to it--so she tries to find out by constantly demanding attention.

It was an interesting night's sleep. Victoria the cat was perfectly cool, content hanging out next to me while I read before she retired to the closet for the evening. Lucky, meanwhile, was continually pawing at my door to be let in and, when let in, he'd walk around the room for a few moments, meowing, before pawing on the door to be let out. He repeated this sequence of actions several times between 4:30am and 6:30am--and just leaving the door open didn't help, either. He merely jumped on my pillow and began pawing the wall behind my head.

However, I did manage to get to sleep at the incredible time of 1:30am, which I suspect I owe to lack of sleep from the previous night and a glass of whiskey. Surprisingly enough, Catch-22 is a much better book with a glass of whiskey. Suddenly prose that seemed half-hearted and distant became rather amiable and warmly enthusiastic. Suddenly it makes sense that this novel was a bestseller in the 50s.

I was genuinely awed by Sonya Taaffe's "Kaddish for a Dybbuk" in her Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. It's strange to think I converse regularly with someone so brilliant--the poem in question so nicely captures the atmosphere of grieving at a funeral and gives it a supernatural package as keen as anything Neil Gaiman wrote for Sandman--that wonderful feeling of seeing something absolutely fantastic and feeling every detail of the thing resonate with you as it's so human an experience as to be personally yours. She's impossibly good, this Taaffe girl.

I'm tired. I'm not exactly sure what's going on. But yesterday I moved everything out of my room, including the furniture, and I was told we were going to need to be out of the house on Tuesday. Only I awoke this morning to find my grandmother was gone, and my mother, also trying to figure out what's going on, had called my grandmother to find out she'd rejected staying at one aunt's house because it smelled weird, had decided to sleep in her car, but changed her mind and is on the 8 freeway looking for a hotel. I'm still here, meanwhile, having managed to set up the computer in the upstairs guest room, and the two guys working downstairs on my room aren't wearing masks. Looks like the carpet's been torn out and there's a plastic covering over the door with a big pump attached.

The cats are terrified, but at least nothing's being done to my aunt's room, so I don't need to worry about them. I'm mainly just deciding what I can do to-day. I suppose I can catch up on my reading. I'm up to page 25 of Narbonic, which is still so far a pretty good series. I'm almost done with Maggie the Mechanic, and I'm about a third of the way through Catch-22, which is a book I'm afraid I must at this point describe as no more than mildly entertaining. Maybe I just wish it had stronger threads, maybe I'm just sick of the relentless tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes the character peculiarities are genuinely interesting, especially in the context of a commentary on war--like Yossarian's unabashed acts of self-preservation or Dunbar's fondness for people he doesn't like in order to stretch time. But then there are flat, cartoonish characters like Chief Halfoat whom I just find tedious. I do sort of like the references to war as being a business where strangers blow up strangers. War as a dehumanising bureaucracy is a good picture to paint, to be sure . . .

Busy packing things away to-night. But it's always a good time for Morrissey;

I'm losing a wall in here on Saturday, so once again me and my things're tossed in the air like confetti and I don't know exactly where all of it's going to land yet. It seems like things and people around here are getting crazier by the day. I expect I'll spend the next couple of days packing things up again, but for now I intend to goof off for a bit. Who knows when I'll get the chance again?

Here are some especially cool Oblivion videos I found on YouTube;

The opening from Fallout 2, the best computer RPG ever made;



Bethesda's in charge of Fallout 3, and I'm fervently hoping that they don't fuck up the dialogue and speech interface, the best part of Fallout 2. I really hope they don't use the tedious colour wheel thing from Oblivion.

Things from Fallout 2 that I'm afraid won't be in Fallout 3;

The ability to hire prostitutes.
The ability to hire prostitutes for your NPCs.
Drugs.
Drugs that temporarily improve character stats.
The potential to become chemically addicted to a certain drug, taking a hit to your stats when you can't get a fix.
Hubology, a rather harsh, and very funny, parody of Scientology.
The ability to become a porn star.
The potential to fail an audition for a porno in an embarrassing manner based on your stats.
Children.
The ability to kill children.

These kinds of things are getting to be pretty rare in video games these days. What we need is a return to traditional video game values.

I saw 1408 last night, and it was exactly what I expected it to be, which was fine, since it was exactly what I was in the mood for. It was a nice little haunted house story with several effective little scares, and when they weren't effective, they were at least fun--they even rather unabashedly borrowed something from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The movie did a good job of creating a consistent, interesting mood, and Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager proved to be far more essential than I thought he'd be. I especially loved when Cusack challenged him to name the haunt a "phantom" or a "spirit" and Jackson just says, "It's an evil fucking room." When Samuel L. Jackson says something, especially a fucking something, you know he means it.

There was decent character development, and the scenes addressing the repressed emotional baggage of Cusack's character served as excellent breaks between freaky bits, and it kept things feeling fresh. A good way to spend an evening.

I had a big pretzel with salt and cheese. Normally, if I ever get a pretzel, I get just the core, unadorned bread thing, but I felt like being conventional last night, since I was seeing a relatively normal movie in a decidedly normal theatre. I didn't even mind the people talking during the movie, not even the girl behind me who saw to heralding much of the movie's plain visual statements ("He's still in the room!", "It's her!", "A thermostat."). I guess I just wanted to enjoy the sort of night of entertainment modern humanity and commercialism had prescribed for the average citizen. Well, I guess I just wanted to give my brain a rest, since I'd been working on three different projects yesterday and I am simply not built for multitasking. I know it's a stereotype that girls are better at multitasking than guys, and I'm afraid I fit the bill. Multitasking gives me a feeling of dizzy panic, like a neanderthal piloting a spitfire. I guess I did get some things done, but such days never feel very productive.

In what was probably a malevolent moment of serendipity, I saw an article this morning on msn about working as a comic book artist that mentioned how artists are typically paid between 100 and 300 dollars a page. This immediately filled my head with stupid fantasies--like, if my 23 page comic is accepted, I could expect at least 2,300 dollars? That probably sounds like small potatoes to most people, but I never dreamed of earning that much money. I have got to get my hopes down . . .

The new Sirenia Digest came out a couple days ago, Sonya recommended a web comic to me called Narbonic, and I realised I hadn't been reading much of Catch-22, so I decided to devote as much of yesterday as possible to reading. I finally broke down at 1am and watched Charlie Chaplin's The Circus again, but mostly yesterday was a pleasant reading day.

I'm really bad at reading web comics, something I'm quite ashamed of, especially in light of the support my own web comic's received from nice web comic makers like RMG and the folks at Yamara--both examples of web comics I've read some of but not all of, in fact I've yet to read any entire web comic, except Scott McCloud's very short pieces. Oh, and I think I've read all of Return to Sender, but that one's short and unfinished, so it doesn't count.

But Sonya exerted intense feminine wiles, overwhelming me with the beautiful mystery that is woman, so that I was powerless to refuse on the grounds of not merely my hormones but also due to the shear awesome panoply of sensuality and sexuality as it may be transmitted though the internet tubes (her exact words were "Start here and read"). So far I've managed to read the first ten, which leaves, oh, just six hundred forty five to go. But it is good so far. There's a clear Futurama influence (the show's already even been explicitly mentioned), and it's got nice mad scientist and doomsday device humour.

So many of the things I've been reading lately make me wish I could slow time down. The pace of Narbonic makes me feel like I can be satisfied with one or two pages a day, and Catch-22 is like a more laconic and inert Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I can appreciate the sort of exquisitely crafted humour in just a couple paragraphs, but then it's a little obliterated by the exquisitely crafted humour of the next couple paragraphs. It almost feels like reading good poetry--I'm also currently reading Sonya's Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, and I find I'm deeply satisfied by just a single poem, so I've been going through the book pretty slowly. It gives me something of the feeling I had when reading books as a kid, when a single novel would seem to fill up months, making a consistent alternate reality for me to jump to. Yes, friends, density is good.

I didn't get very much done yesterday--I mainly did a lot of character sketches. But I'm very happy with several of them.

And I'd like to say happy birthday to Robyn, though I think she's still sore at me because I completely pwned her in an argument we had about censorship a few months back. But I don't hold it against her . . .

I've slacked off quite a bit so far to-day, choosing to watch the 1939 Alfred Hitchcock movie Jamaica Inn at three on TCM--I can't tape movies anymore because the cable's gotten weird in this room.
Jamaica Inn's not bad at all. It has beautiful, expressionistic sets that look half Disney and half Murnau. Hitchcock's pitch perfect talent for editing and pacing was fully there, and Maureen O'Hara, in her first role, has never looked better. The best part of the movie, though, is Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey, who comes off as a sort of corrupt and finally insane caricature of Oscar Wilde--or, perhaps, for the covetous yet cruel way he approaches Maureen O'Hara's character, a dark avatar for Hitchcock himself. The movie's based on a book by Daphne Du Maurier, and the story has the broad strokes favouring the female character, having her making rebellious decisions that often end up saving the day where no-one thinks it can be saved. But a lot of these decisions seem to come from only barely logical motives, while Laughton emerges as a charming and intriguingly complicated and corrupt nobleman.

I watched Keith Olbermann after that, who I think has accurately predicted the end of the Harry Potter books.

Well, I supposed I'd better go and do some grocery shopping before getting some writing done. But before I do, is anyone else irritated and perplexed by all the love a xenophobic, capitalist homophobe named Ron Paul has been getting?

GwaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH! AAAUH! PIRATES!! GET AWAY!! FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE!!



And my favourite of the numerous parodies;

A much better day for writing to-day. I felt pretty solidly wrapped up in the characters, and their motives and communication techniques felt like they were nicely weaving. So at around 5pm, I got some food at Del Taco and went to Tim's, where the computer I normally play Oblivion on is cracking up in interesting, often amusing ways.

For a while, the whole computer'd randomly been rebooting. That doesn't happen anymore, but oddly enough, things have started to get weird within the game. I loaded one game that I'd saved during a clear day only to find it was suddenly night time during a heavy rainstorm. My character was still in a vineyard south of Skingrad where I'd left her, only she'd completely lost her body, and all the people were gone except for a lone guard by the town gate, and all of his clothes were missing.

So I started a new game--the game starts off in a dungeon where you join the Emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart) and his small retinue of guards as they're trying to escape some mysterious assassins called the Mythic Dawn. Everything was going fine until the Emperor fell through the floor. The guards and myself soon followed and soon the four of us were freefalling through empty space before automatically teleporting back to the dungeon where of course we immediately fell through the floor again. All the while, the Mythic Dawn were scrambling around madly still trying to fight us.

So now I'm back here and maybe I'll work on some character sketches.

By the way, happy birthday Spooky.