The dog ate the cat, the cat ate the rat, and the rat ate the cheese.

a couple evenings ago i was reading from a technical book and had a sudden excursion into a nearly waking dream. it took barely a moment, i felt as though my eyes stopped in mid-sentence, the dream surged through me, and i picked up again where i left off on the page. couldn't have been more than a second or two, but what i remembered seemed to last much longer. i've been meaning to write it down, because it caused such sudden and powerful feelings.

i was some entity not fully in the material world, like an angel or a valkyrie. i was not alone, there was at least one other beside me. we descended to a place where people were dying in violent circumstances. we scooped up souls at the very moment their life ended and carried them in our arms like crying babies to a safer place. it seemed they were really crying, a profoundly distressed wailing that made music. the music was loud, surging and operatic, a soundtrack of the sudden loss of every connection to friends, families and loved ones that they had ever known. i could feel in this music the shock and fear of being severed forever from an entire life's work of connections, love, desire and want. i cried with them, but took them quickly away and brought them to an astral place of comfort so they would not feel this loss for very long. then i returned immediately to retrieve the next disconnected spirit. for me, the sad music never ended.

right after i was offered a contract extension through october of 2006, i just yesterday was told that i'm being put on hold here and i should go home and sit on my thumbs until further notice. how convenient! i don't have to actually *quit*. then after a month or more, they'll call me back over there, and if i'm desperate, or things have significantly improved here, i can come back.

hm. tidy.

i'm going to lunch, then i'm going home!

Although he's not as charismatic or popular in his locution as Dr Martin Luther King, "Weird Al" Gore had some direct things to say in criticism of the current admininstrations relentless expansion of executive branch powers. (In his introduction, almost as an aside, he basically implies that the FBI had MLK assassinated.)

Complete but less-than-riveting text of his MLK day speech, is here

This kind of speech will be ignored in mainstream journalism, for sure. I'm not a default Al Gore lover, but what impresses me with this speech is the way he itemizes in a historical context how American presidents since good ol' honest Abe Licoln have arrogated powers that were intentially proscribed from the executive branch by the Founding Fathers. He also makes it clear that the current executive is framing his usurpation of unilateral powers in a "this is how it's gonna be from now on" manner. Plus he gets in a couple digs at VP Cheney...

In other news; I got all choked up listening to MLK and his daughter on NPR yesterday. How completely pedestrian of me...

I need to get me some satellite radio so I can just listen to Howard Stern from now on.

was tricked into watching Cabin Fever.

god-forbid that a reckless opinion of mine spark a debate with someone who actually *likes* this movie (hint hint), but i have to say it sucked.

so, a rich kid gets small jobs in indie film circuit through family connections, then gets family money and makes wannabe homage (pronounce to rhyme with fromage) to horror films, plural, but really only succeeds at making conspicuously self-aware barf that rips heavily and primarily from *one* horror film- Evil Dead. dad knows someone at lion's gate distribution, who pick it up instantaneously at toronto film fest. voila wunderkind!

ok, ok. there are a couple funny things about it. not least of which is that in a horror film cliche about 5 college kids who head out to a cabin in the woods, there are zillions of other people around, a highway within short-walking distance, running water with enough pressure to run a spray-nozzle hose, and a local sheriff's deputy shows up *on a bicycle* to investigate neighborhood complaints about noise. this is as clever as the hip, self-aware campiness gets. there's funny stuff aplenty, but mostly high-school wit level funny. i really wanted the film to give me something to redeem the shallowness of the concept and the "scary movie" script. instead all i got was winks and arched-eyebrows, inviting me to be in on a joke that wasn't terribly original or funny. teens and some backwards gen-Y'ers will love it.

that said, i'll still probably see Hostel while its in the cinemas. i rented Cabin Fever along with 3 other "bad horror films" - Ginger Snaps 2, Wild Zero, and Undead. so, poor readers, maybe i'll have more stuff to trash in these pages soon.

thank you and good night. wink.

when i hear the idiomatic saying "so-and-so was born to fight" i think, nah, if one were born to fight, there would be claws and sharp teeth at birth, and probably a tough skin or fur. instead, just take a look at newborn people. we are apparently born to need and want the protection and security of other human company. thanks to the complexities of our social order, it is within a basic framework of nurturing and security that we find opportunities to learn to fight. from day one the framework starts to collapse and the child is faced with gaps in the blanket of security. that's when the learning begins. the greater the quantity and harsher the quality of the gaps, tougher and meaner fighters result.

violence can be sexy, but i find love to be profoundly mysterious.

my beloved firebug is airborn at this very moment. probably somewhere over canada. fly safe, creature of mine. in the meanwhile i will keep the kitten well loved, and give myself guff while making my own damned fires. i miss you.

lone ranger's real name = john reid.

tanto = no known translation in amerindian lang. but does mean "fool" in spanish.

kemosabe = probably from a word in the Ojibwe language, spoken by the Ottawa, that might mean something comparable to "scout". according to the source i read, it might also be translated as "one who peeks", which sounds like a pervert to me.

i love Cecil Adams. i read The Straight Dope in highschool when it was just ink printed on paper. now it's a cool, expanding website ranking up there with wikipedia.

The Straight Dope

there's something very strange about this short little car commercial. watch closely with sound on. be warned though, it's a little spooky and not for weak hearts.


spooky ad, watch carefully or you might miss it

watching this will only be effective with audio.

when i came home today, my house was very comfortably warm. not eyeball-drying, parched and dehumidified, but god-fearing, wood-burning, the-way-man-was-meant-conquer-nature warm. real fire. not gas, but a god-damned druid-loving tree. chopped into warmth-shaped pieces by an axe, a tool that is very capable in times of both war and peace. chunks of dead tree pitched into a cast iron belly and coaxed into a small inferno by judicious application of matches, newspaper and oxygen. could i have made this fire myself? yes, of course, you fucknut. did i? no. i have a firetending slave. that is my concession to a society structured around class division. i have a fire slave. for better or worse, my fireslave is a freak of nature who likes interior spaces to be heated like a motherfucking kiln. a fucking gecko, i tell ya. a lizard that revels in overly warm climates. ok then, i admit my house was actually hot as hell when i got home. i took a bath and hours later it's still pretty fucking toasty in here. i am not complaining or whining, by the way: i am hellbent on ecstasy and knowledge. i don't even know if that means anything to you. not sure i care, either. nyah.

i'm at home and my house is less than warm. i wish my firetender were here right now.

from The Devil's Rejects:

Captain J.T. Spaulding: I'm gonna have to be taking your car today. See I have some top secret clown business that supersedes any plans that you might have for this here vehicle.
[mutual laughter]
Susan: What's that about clown business?
[laughs nervously]
Captain J.T. Spaulding: [pause] Do I stutter, bitch?

( i had an interesting dream this morning: )

much less stabbery today. yesterday came into focus. the vexation and embarrassment of my shortcomings is well worth the reward of patience and sincere introspection.

stablust. the desire to stab something. self? other? no fun to be so disappointed in the self. stab. make it stop. stab.

i forgot my wallet in yesterday's trousers. today's pockets contained only a sharpie marker. so i had to call security to get an escort to my office. they are friggin' uptight about their security out here. i was interrogated at length and asked to log in and demonstrate knowledge of my work before the guard would leave me alone.

then i performed a sex-change operation in adobe illustator. now i'm ready to go home. (really, it was just a head transplant, and i took out the necktie.)

recently saw king kong in theatre. rented the night porter with rosephase a couple nights ago.

short versions:
king kong sucked, but we entertained ourselves for hours talking about it. plus the hero shots (expressive close-ups and key action sequences) of the big guy were AMAZING. the rest of the cgi fx were pretty awful, like all the really talented people were too busy on the really important shots, so less experience and care went into the other 90% of the fx shots.

the night porter ruled. max (dirk bogarde) is the night porter of a l'hotel opera, and had been a nazi officer at a concentration camp where lucia (charlotte rampling)was a teenage inmate. he'd been her torturer/lover and they have run into one another by accident many years later. this could be a real sleazy set-up, especially with the cabal of ex-nazis meeting clandestinely to protect themselves against discovery, and the hot & heavy sexual sm tone. i found it mesmerizing, and bogarde's performance is incredible. there's an enormous amount of depth, i think, in the tension and conflict of the two main characters. i could feel that they simultaneously wanted to see each other dead, yet had not really lived outside of their horrific affair, and thus could not escape being drawn back to it, full of lust, love and shame. color me sick, but i was aroused by the wrongness.

( ok, here's the longer part! )

i don't know why. i'm bored! (these are real scientific names genus+species. for some crazy reason i found them while reading about binomial nomenclature. there were more obtuse ones, these were some of my favorites and most accessible to laypeople...)

Pieza deresistans (mythicomyiid fly)

Vini vidivici (a recently extinct parrot from the Marquesas Islands) The genus Vini has been in use since 1831.

Ytu brutus (water beetle) "Ytu" comes from the local (in Brazil) word for waterfall.

Lepidotrigla jimjoebob (fish)

whoa, this is the closest i've come to getting sick in a couple years, i think. i must've picked something up from my sibrats* in columbus last week. my brother tells me they both went down with scratchy throat and feverishness right after xmas. i started feeling it on the plane, at first thought it was just the horrible recirculated air in the cabin that was making my throat feel abraded. by monday morning i realized that i was dealing with a virus. either this mutherfucker is from a potent strain, or my immune system is in low gear from travel, stress and stuff, since my defenses usually brush aside whatever bug is going around.

well, i pulled out the old powerhouse remedies, primarily a concoction of garlic, lemon, ginger, cayenne and maple syrup made into a tea. i also drank about 2 litres of grapefruit juice. this morning, for good measure, i hastily chomped on a full clove of garlic and rinsed it down with several deep glugs of grapefruit juice. seems to be working, i'm feeling pretty good! we'll see how i hold up. i also plan on a hot bath when i get home to induce some sweating.

*sibrat = sibling + brat; "my sibling's brats", a term i use to refer to my neice & nephew collectively

with this post, i am probably going to make fast enemies of a couple people who are in a position to punish me severely if i offend them. i also should not be so unwise as to publicly criticize a highly regarded writer after reading roughly 200 pages of essays, but i don't think i can help myself. anyway, there is much commonly held belief in the practice of learning through one's mistakes.

( here's to my imminent self-education! )