Notes to the Wall

This, I like.

Political as hell, but good.

Nearly a year since last post? WTF?

e29design, the light o' my life, has tagged me, so...six random, true facts re: my own self:

1. I can't swim
2. I love music, but I don't listen to it nearly as often as I'd like
3. I've eaten dogfood
4. Showers make me sleepy
5. I hate authority but religously obey goofy traffic laws
6. Were I a kept man, I'd likely still do some programming

So, eh, I'm stuck on Fear's Let's Have a War.

Except I spaced the Fear and thought Black Flag did it.

Deh. Yes, once I was punk poser. Now, I just...pose-t.

Infrequently.

Ish.

I've fallen into a big pile of escapism, thanks to ol' Laurell K. Hamilton and her Anita Baker series.

These books, these books, these dang books. I claim it's their fault that I just suck my thumb on the weekends, but, natch, it ain't. It's more recovery from a "be careful what you wish for, you might get it" sorta job, the commuting blues, and pure sleep deprivation. Burns my sweetie a bit, too, since, well, I'm not that much fun w/ my nose in a book or snoozing the day away.

And then, when I measure (twice) what I get out of it (cut once)...I'm left scratching my head in a tailspin of a ponder. Just the chance to let my mind wander somebody else's roads, not so much forging my own little paths.

Hm...overextended metaphors, I'm thinking. Or is that mastic fumes I've sucked down while laying vinyl tile in the downstairs bath?

The real problem: jumping through a hoop too many, juggling too many expectations, and feeling the twitch to shoot down some dogma...the while knowing the Spad's twin Vickers are better left unchattering. Catch more flies w/ honey than vinegar, and all...

Gak.

Lambda, sure. Wavelengths, right.

Since "there's no there, there," or rather, here, there's no position through which an entry moves, wavelength just don't enter into it.

It's ν I've got to increase. And since λ is a big fat goose egg, well, why ever mention ν?

This is, after all, a time series.

So's...dipdog me thought the highlighted dates on the new style showed posts.

Uh, maroon, those are weekends. You know, where some peeps stop work and start play?

Turns out it's been a post about every 2 weeks.

Must shorten wavelengths.

Hrm...check this silly Star Wars parody video put together by some fellow Knoxvillians, notably featuring a short appearance by a high school friend and written in part by the author of the Men in Black comic. Well, notably to me, since I either know 'em or of 'em.

Oh, dang, relevancy: the freaky quarry lake upon which D & I stumbled appears briefly in this thing.

[That sort of pedantry is nonsense up with which I shall not put.]

Must get in touch w/ Z, who plays Darth Scary. Stupid as hell that I've lost track...

Well, it was back to work today after a tidy, tiny, very sweet mini-vacation w/ my dearest of dears.

We'd sorta planned on catching up w/ pals in mid-pub crawl outta town. No last minute flights, though, so we stayed home.

Highlights of zooming around E TN:

• found a 10 acre lake we never knew existed
  
• took quite a few barn pics in the hollers around Walland
  
• learned about some crazy caverns to check out later
  
• saw some neeter-skeeter cannons emplaced in a park commemorating a Union Civil War fort that defended "loyal" East TN. (I tell ya, it's pretty freaky that 6-8 guns shooting 3-inch projectiles downhill 100 years ago was enough de-motivation to drive off 4500 soldiers out for the blood of 1/3 their number. Can't even imagine today's War.)
  

The salt mines prolly didn't miss me a bit. Certainly, I didn't miss them, nor shoveling, nor pickaxes neither.

10th grade English teech would be so...enthralled with this, I'm sure.

"Journalize, journalize, journalize." Wonder whether the Cush lives, and whether his students journalize to a Baylor blog?

Something to say, 'cause something needs saying.

Am not quite slogging through Anne Rice's Interview with The Vampire, prompted mostly by my Ma-in-law's dropping of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt on us and b/c D just finished it, and I only remember it from when it came out in paperback in...77?

I'm a lot more sympathetic to Louis, and I'd really forgot all about what a beast Lestat is. Grad school memories of reading The Vampire Lestat in a crappy apartment carved out of a Victorian great house crowded all the "Lestat's just a spoiled turd" outta my head. Late night hacking, waking after the sun's gone down, pounding out beautiful code while the U sleeps & the Strip dozes...well, it all fit in w/ romanticizing Lestat. First book really paints him unsympathetically. Hell, I might need to read it all again...

Discussion re: Xtianity w/ dearest led to a pretty sweet realization: perhaps the "you always get a 2nd chance" truism here in the States led directly from the "you're a sinner...but you can be saved." I was always pretty pissed at the "you suck" part of that, but I never really saw the basis it provides to the 2nd chance and the "bad acts can be redeemed" and "you're not what you just did" that are pretty much the foundation of US society and a big chunk of its legal system.

Well, the ideal, as I see it, anyways...

Damn, but I miss working from home.

H'ain't done sweet-f-k-all here for months.

Not that there's much to say, not that there are many to heard it said.

But...busy.

Work intrudes, fun extrudes, and thank the Lord for sweeties and science fiction.

Double features, yup.

Oh, and raptors.

Stumbled onto Kim Harrison, thanks to Books, Inc in Mtn View, CA. Not that you asked, but she's kinda got a Jim Butcher thing going on, that or vice versa. Wonder which of 'em came first, and how well one's known to the other.

Got it via dcaspall, the artist for Disciple, who doesn't know me and has no idea who I am.

Well, crap, guess I'll weigh in.

I've visited New Orleans a couple-three times.

First was on the way to Houston, to check out Rice U. I stayed w/ a high school bud who'd graduated b/4 me & who was attending Tulane. All I can remember of that was bed-spins, some goofball who carried on by drinking cooking oil, another guy who banged away on 'puter program to balance his checkbook, and trying to get into Pat O's using a borrowed NH driver's license. Drunk, I failed to make it past a bouncer when he asked for picture ID (at the time, an NH license had no pic) and I gave him my high school ID. Sure, the school id had my picture, but, um...it was in my name, not the one on the NH D/L. Oopsie: no yummie hurricanes for yours truly.

Second was in the opposite direction, visiting the same Tulane guy en route to Atlanta, picking him up on a run to hang with one our of cohorts on that first trip. A T-giving break from 1st semester in college.

Honestly, I can't quite remember all the times I went there. There was a trip when I got dumped after I graduated from Rice, another just for fun to get breakfast at the Camellia Grill.

A memorable one was Mardi Gras, of course. I can still taste the redbeensnrice and remember the book stores we poked through after we sobered up. Found a couple 1st ed. J.P. Donleavy's—Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule comes to mind, though not sure whether that one was a rarity. Wonder whether I can still put my hands on 'em?

Oh, man, and the off duty cop who was certain he could take one of the two stoopid hulks hassling a member of our crew solo, but who was worried he'd have to shoot 'em both if he didn't get any backup. We were at a bar, some of us playing pool, and we'd left a pal bellied up and slugging 'em down. He started getting shit from 2 gallumphing bruisers, but we—all eyes on the table, the sticks, and the balls—didn't notice. The shit got serious. Up bounds this little guy, slips in right between our man and his tormenters, plops his wallet down on the bar with his badge unobtrusively protuding, embraces our bud and says "hey, man, how ya doin', where ya been?" Situation defused, ass-munches slink off, and C has a new drinking buddy who explains he didn't really want to kill anybody, but he was pretty sure he was gonna need to start shooting if things didn't go well.

Only in the Big Easy.

Yeah, just a tourist, but dang, a way memorable city. I hope D and I can visit someday; pretty sure we will, really.

The Fresh Market is matching funds donated at its stores, up to $50K, and passing it all on to the Red Cross. We'll be plunking our contribution down with them, if it turns out where I work doesn't match.

WTF?

The music to that thing sure sounds like "Drunken Sailor" to me, played a tad ponderously.

What were ad-goobers thinking?

What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Ear-ly in the morning?

Put 'im in the brig until he's sober,
Put 'im in the brig until he's sober,
Put 'im in the brig until he's sober,
Ear-ly in the morning.

's an online comic that got me back into comics.

Well, along with some prodding from my sweetie.

Check it out, it's quite something. I'd write more, but I gotta go fetch a loaner car from the dealer that's fixing our Honda's A/C.

Feh.

Two months after starting it, I finally finish a movie review. Ooh-pah!

Have yet to do a web-based meme.

Check it:

You scored as Yoda. </td> Yoda 56% Mace Windu 56% Chewbacca 56% Darth Vader 50% R2-D2 50% General Grievous 47% Anakin Skywalker 44% Clone Trooper 33% Obi Wan Kenobi 33% C-3PO 22% Padme Amidala 19% Emperor Palpatine 11% Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

A 3-way tie between Mace Windu, Yoda, and Chewie? Don't that just beat all?

I've been swearing I'd do this for years. Belike, it's been in the back of my mind ever since I read somewheres that Penn Jillette would present visitors to his apt with a list of videos he'd recently watched, so that said visitors wouldn't pick one from his massive collection after he'd just watched it. Given that they wanted to watch a flick with him, I mean. And...who wouldn't?

So, I'm sick of buying books I've already read. And tired of forgetting movies I've watched. The oath I made to fix this sick and tired was that I'd write up reviews of books & movies to—mostly—cement in my mind both what I thought about them and the simple fact that I'd previously dropped lucre on 'em and not to do it again just b/c the thing interested me in the throes of Borders or Movie Gallery amnesia/aphasia. And, of course, to have a list I could consult when I inevitably did go all sieve-head.

But, I've never done that.

'Til now.

[Oh, hey, EDIT: if this movie weren't already as rotten as a dead 'coon on an asphalt highway, decaying in full sun, I'd need to put "SPOILERS AHEAD" somewhere below].

D & I watched Dracula 3000 last night. Or, rather, I watched the entire thing and D fell asleep and missed the climactic ending.

Um.

Climax. Sure.

The flick just sucks. And no, that's not a pun.

We were pretty sure it'd suck. But we've had this vampire flick thing going on for years, and it seemed wrong to skip this one since we'd already seen Dracula 2000. We considered Bite Me, but we figured we'd play out the hand, as it were.

Bad idea.

First, D3K isn't a sequel to D2K. That's not at all sucky, that's just fine: I mean 2K was pretty much crap, too. But our rationale for picking this turkey was bust from the get-go, a foreshadowing.

The sucking started almost right away.

OK, I'm getting too cute, here, 'pologies.

Premise: a salvage crew aboard the spaceship Mother III finds an abandoned cargo-liner, the Demeter, adrift in the Carpathian sector. Ooopsie, guess what, it's not really abandoned: 50 years past, a cape-sporting, high-collared, campy-assed alien got all “I vant to suck your b-l-o-o-d” on the Demeter's crew, and he's still there, just aching for more neck to chew. Mother III and her crew oblige him: the former, by mysteriously jetting off to parts unknown once all—yes, all—of the latter board the derelict. Why nobody remained on the only vessel known to be operable within parsecs is anybody's guess.

My guess is that it's because the crew are all dumbasses, and they're stuck in a Gilligan's Island meets Plan 9 from Outer Space meets Alien mashup. There's a nutty Professor in a wheel-chair, an annoying navigator fresh from space college in the Marianne role, sex-kitten Erika Eleniak plays a Ginger-esque 2nd in command, Coolio is Gilligan, and we've got a straight-up, lantern-jawed captain. Odd man out is Tiny Lister as "Humvee," a walking crane cum bad-ass, though you could say he and Coolio play a sort of a gay, ghetto Lovey and Thurston Howell.

"Humvee," oh, goodie. Lessee, more character names: the professor's escapes me, I forget Coolio's, too—ah, wait, it's "187"—the navigator is "Mina" and their captain on this three hour tour is a "van Helsing." And I can't possibly forget the wonderful Udo Kier as "Captain Varna," whose half-century old video log takes a swing at framing the trials and tribulations of our intrepid crew. [Hey, cool, poking @ IMDB's entry for Kier, I see he played Drac in Andy Warhol's Dracula, one of my favorites. No wonder I liked his monologues in this.]

What happens? Well, the cargo is all coffins, Coolio's consuming bent for consuming weed gets him to think the coffins are filled with smuggled herb ("old school" herb, better, even, than the shit they lit up from the planet "Comptonia"), he takes a crowbar to a coffin or two, busts his hand open in his wack eagerness, drips blood on the "sand" in the coffins, and re-animates the Count. Except, dang, if 187's blood got Drac happy and dancing, well, who was it scaring the whizz outta Mina when she first boarded the ship solo?

Nevermind that nit, soonish we've got Coolio-Gilligan transmogrified into Coolio-Renfield, after the which he goes after the rest of the crew. We have a fun-ish scene or two (“anacondas and bazonkas,” null-g masturbation, “nigga can't get a break in tha white man's world”), then he fails and gets the usual vampire-flunky comeuppance: staked by his buddy. Not without some "oh, 187, he was my boy" bathos from Humvee, mind you.

On to more silliness with Erika Eleniak's character where the Count expresses his hots for her (“you're the most beautiful creature I've ever seen” is near-verbatim), engendering some inner-crew tension while they puzzle her re-appearance sans fang-hicky and she spouts Orlock's, a.k.a. Drac's, backstory. Plotwist: she's really an undercover policebot, and w/o blood in her veins Drac can't turn her.

Um, yeah, forgot some titillation: Humvee guards her, tying her up, while the rest of the crew tries to...oh, fuck, I can't remember...save the day or something. She tries to convince Humvee to let her go—“no, honest, I got no bites, untie me and you can check every inch of my body”—and, eventually, it takes, though all clothing stays on all actors.

So. What's left? Blowing up the ship near a double star, for the sunlight yielding an ex-vamp. Let's just skip to that scene, shall we? We'll miss the whiny prof being offed, crosses planted all over the ship by the crew Drac ate 5 decades ago, van Helsing's discovery of ol' Captain Varna's cabin and log viewing, and EE's severing of Drac's forearm in a door.

At the end? We tensely await the countdown to ka-boom. Tense for us, tense for the crew, so much so that out comes the final revelation: before she was a policebot, EE was a pleasurebot, and to burn off those pre-death jitters, she & Humvee affirm life through sexual congress. Well, kinda: a 'bot has no life to affirm, and the congress is all alluded to: the credits show Humvee with EE slung over his shoulder, smacking her ass and saying “now that's what I'm talkin' bout.”

Ka-boom and finis.

Which should be the end of this entry, but, as The Beat said, I Just Can't Stop It.

Things that drove me nuts:

• tiny references to the novel that got me all hot 'n' bothered without getting me off
  
• pointless, disconnected, pro forma backstories
  
• total irrelevance of the villain
  
• abandoned plotlines
  
• timid, dainty ass-smacks
  

Ugh. And yet, for all its wretchedness, I write 1100 words about it.

Wellaway.

Just completed my 2nd week of part time employment at a company that shall remain nameless, at least for now.

What a change from consulting.

Well, heart of my heart e29design has asked for it, so here 'tis:

1. The number of books I've owned must be in the tens of thousands, at least. No idea even how many I could put my hands on right this mo', but hundreds, surely.
2. The last book I bought was not one, but four, 'cause I get more than one at a time. From memory: Michael Moorcock's Gloriana; one or two of David Weber's Honor Harrington novels; Zandru's Forge, the 2nd in The Clingfire Trilogy, a collaboration between Marion Zimmer Bradley & some amanuensis author; and Book 2 in the Conclave of Shadows series by Raymond E. Feist, King of Foxes.
3. The last book I read, cover to cover, is one of the afore-mentioned Honor Harrington books. I'm reading Zandru's Forge.
4. I'm gonna cheat listing five books that mean a lot to me, 'cause some are really a series:
   1. Illuminatus! and Schroedinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson (& Bob Shea)
   2. Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
   3. Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
   4. The Alligator Case by William Pène DuBois
   5. The Proud Highway, a collection of letters written by Hunter S. Thompson
   6. The Practice of Programming, by Rob Pike
   Hey, that's six; more cheatin'.
5. As for tagging 5 more folk to answer these questions, I don't even know 5 people who use LJ. So, forget that.

Oy.

Haven't written a damned thing in 2 months, here. Got things to say, perhaps, perhaps, but I'm pretty sure there's little audience. And the audience there might be has already seen the topics that've crossed the cranium, so it seems like...I dunno...poaching or at least "re-gifting" to visit them thoughts again in these pages.

Hoom hrm. Such troubles.

Traveling for work sux, that's for damned sure. It gets old, when a big part of what you do is managing anxieties, your own or somebody else's. A manager's worry that you're "just a hired gun," say, or an engineer's fear you're gonna make 'em look bad. Wasn't much of that kinda thing, if any of it, this trip, but even its absence reminded me of times when it pervaded the work. Sweet when you connect w/ somebody at a remote gig, sure, but rare that you can pursue that kinda connection. We'll see.

Work travel blows, yup, but spring in E TN, that's a grand, grand thing. Verdant everything, popping up everywhere. Kinda cool, kinda moist, kinda hot, too.

And being home? With the light of my life? Can't beat it with a stick, I tell you what.

Not speaking for the couple arguing outside in the night, though, who figure they're all alone. How many folk admit to themselves that there's no privacy, really? That "wherever you go, there you are." I'm tempted to try to follow their conversation and post it as it unfolds. More work than I want, though, I'm mostly up for finishing this here Highland Brewing Company Gaelic Ale & hanging with the dearest of dears.

Them peeps sure are loud, though, and they seem to have some friends out there with 'em, now. Wonder what they must've thought about me as I screamed and cursed at the PS2 while playing Devil May Cry two nights ago.

Ah, suburban neighbors. You don't go telling somebody's grandkids about their granddad's shadiness, do you? No, of course not. The kiddos don't deserve to have their respect for their elder crushed. That'd be meanness disguised as truth, I'm thinking.

Well, in another 60 days...