Netflix

This charming documentary has it all: Richard Feynman, a blind polymath blues genius, Tuvian throat-singers, and a tree-trimmer/rock musician/film producer. What's not to like?

Heat Miser

Everything that I touch,
Starts to melt in my clutch.

I'm too much!

My toofuses

Awww, my poor jaw. Tomorrow I get three wisdom teeth yanked--at the ripe old age of 36.5. The one on the bottom right has finally started coming in, and is pushing other teeth aside. The top right grew in years ago, but sideways, and the top left, which grew in fine, has broken and hurts like a motherfucker from time to time. The bottom left was pulled five years back.

So I go under the chisel tomorrow at 1pm; I'm actually excited because I'm so bored at work that 3 days off at any price is a great thing. Also exciting--painkillers. Typically I throw that shit in the toilet--I don't even like Tylenol--but there's a black market for Percodan here amongst the Aunties. $10 a pill!

Just Great

Exactly how I like my classic comedies: hapless male leads (Henry Fonda), exquisitely hot dames (Barbara Stanwyck), and tons of sexual innuendo. My first Preston Sturges (thanks to Seth for the recommendation), and I had a blast. See it ASAP.

Any film with Uncle Charlie from My Three Sons has to be good.

Diviner's Sage II

I'm in the rocker again, and this time everything is wrong. The flute raga has become insane clown music, and somewhere beneath my chair is a mighty axle upon which the house rotates forward. I've got no bearings, no identity, and no idea what the fuck is happening. Everything in the room is blooming brightly colored triangles which displace forward and cascade like a cubist rendition of puke, and an immense force is grinding me to the front and down. I sense that the room behind me is soon to replace this one.

Somehow I manage not to jump out of my chair or scream. Those inhibitions were strongly ingrained during a 30-minute insight meditation session before smoking a tiny dose, but in this state I have no language. Still, I'm holding on to the handrails and making gutteral noises of resistance--I know I'm not supposed to move or yell, but don't understand what these things mean.

Then I notice some of the triangles are in fact a lamp, and as I focus on this familiar appliance everything settles quickly. The music is again sedate and relaxing, the force is gone, the room tidy.

And again I slept a full night through. I'll take temporary insanity as a cure for insomnia, which produces longer bouts of same.

Irony of the Day

Bill O'Reilly and other conservatives are in a lather about liberals trying to Grinch their favorite holiday--you know, the one celebrating Mammon...er, I mean the birth of baby Jesus.

Now it's Dennis Hastert, firmly resolving to re-name the Capital Holiday Tree the Capital Christmas Tree.

Personally, though I'm a practitioner of the only faith it's legal to discriminate against in the US (namely, atheism), I feel a bit of distaste for PC euphemisms for Xmas trees, just as I feel distaste for all euphemisms and their political uses. So, you go Denny with your executive decision.

But can someone explain to me the furor over "holiday tree" vs. "Christmas tree"? I mean, a "Christmas tree" has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH XMAS after all. It's a Yule tradition, a remnant of a pagan practice adopted by Christians after they killed off or converted all those pesky folk who didn't see things the same way. In fact, the Puritans our right wing routinely hold up as the true founders of America condemned the heathen practice of chopping down an evergreen and hauling it into the house for holiday ornamentation.

It's ironic that members of the largest religious group in the world, with unprecedented financial and global reach, are claiming discrimination at all, let alone over something so trebly ironic. "Uh, we wanna make sure that this symbol we adopted from a tradition whose practitioners we oppressed and wiped out by burning them at the stake is not deprived of its uh traditional association with our faith in an effort to do to us what we did to them..."

"The speaker believes a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree, and it is as simple as that," said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for the Illinois Republican.

It's nice that Mr. Hastert believes thusly, but trees were chopped, brought home and decorated by the Egyptians, Romans, and Celts long before Mary's womb was impregnated by God's breath moving over her private waters. I doubt the first Christians were decorating conifers in the fucking desert, shit-for-brains! The practice was actually condemned before Christ's birth by the Prophet Jeremiah in Chapter Ten of his book, but since old J.'s not condeming gays or pushing the death penalty in that chapter, no chucklehead Christer is liable to pull out his dictumanary and try 'n read that part.


I think Darwin's Theory of Evolution should be renamed The Christmas Theory of Evolution. Then the right would fight for its inclusion in every classroom.

Brain Candy from Netflix

Like most Ridley Scott pictures, Kingdom of Heaven serves up a sumptuous buffet of gorgeous visuals and stirring imagery. Like some Ridley Scott pictures, it's also painfully adolescent, riddled (ridley-ed?) with overly convenient cinematic clichés. Everything happens at just the right moment, and every person encountered is (not-so-) surprisingly encountered later at just the right moment, and every peasant blacksmith given a 10-minute fighting lesson at just the right moment is able to slaughter 5 of the Bishop's best men and any fully armed veteran Saracen immediately...You get the point. Turn off your brain during this film, because that pruned organ stewing in its intellectual pretentions will only get in the way.

It's still worth seeing, and was precisely the sort of mind-candy I needed to kick Bergman and Kurosawa and Fellini for a bit. Plus, Kingdom of Heaven features actors I adore (Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons), which is a plus, though the star (Orlando Bloom), while convincing as an Elf, fails to register as a valiant Crusader knight who can kick anyone's ass. He's too puny, too obviously puffing out his chest, too obviously trying to deepen his voice.

Watch it for the fight scenes, and try to ignore the pithy dialogue, where everybody happens to utter the exact pseudo-profundity needed at just the right moment.

Arrivederci, travel plans

When I was offered this Liberry gig I was told I could only take vacation in January and August because I work M-Th 1-10pm shifts and Sundays, and covering those hours would be problematic for other staff. Outside of the academic calendar the Liberry typically closes Sundays and stays open 8-5 only, freeing me to leave.

I've just been informed however that the Liberry will now be open nights and Sundays through January, and one of my vacation windows has closed. Now I'm depressed. Since this is a State position, I earn a good deal of vacation, and suddenly I have only a three-week period in August where I'm allowed to use it, which confines any international travel options to the most expensive time of the year. Ok, I'm not only depressed, but pissed.

Fortunately there are staff here who've already volunteered to cover for me if I decide to take a January trip anyway, and I just might. If I don't get away for a while I'm going to start throwing my cataloging into the recycling bin instead of processing it. Plus, the traveling jones is hitting hard. I've got a lot of globe to cover before I die.