Replicants are like any other machine; they're either a benefit or a hazard.
Halle Berry as Catwoman. Truthfully, though, I think that damn mask makes her look like Chinchilla Woman but that’s just me. And those open-toed shoes? How do we, the adoring geekboys, expect her to kick ass in those? And the pants? I’m a little unsure about this whole thing.
Angelina Jolie as Wonder Woman is fine with me as long as Gina Gershon gets to play Wonder Girl and there is some pent-up lesbo-amazonian sexual ferver. I’m just saying.
The day just keeps getting better: The entire season (9 episodes) of Patrick Warburton as the The Tick is now available on DVD. It was obvious this show was way too smart and funny for Fox to hold on to.
HBO’s Carnivale is as awesome as I hoped it would be. Just enough melencholy to suit me mixed in with David Lynch-eque weirdness. Of course I’m sure the whole set up of the main character’s missing relationship with his unknown but former carny father who also had the healing gifts he’s now revealing will be a big let down just because these kinds of stories always are, but the ride is nice.
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It’s been so cool watcing NBC’s “Las Vegas” these past two weeks knowing that the casino interiors and exteriors are all filmed at Mandalay Bay where Jeff and I stayed with my brothers and their wives this past June. We were a little put off last night watching the surfing competitions in the wave pool because there was none of that going on while we were there and the waves were pretty pithy but the casino itself is as beautiful as it’ looks on TV.
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As I’m learning through reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, it’s become painfully, anxiously apparent that I am an Expectant Catastrophist. Not the kind of Catastrophist Bill Bryson who wrote the book talks about in regard to the two school of thought regarding the demise of the dinosaurs, but rather, the kind of Catastrophist who, upon reading how in the last 4.53 billion years of life on Earth, humankind has only existed a fraction of a fraction of 1% of that time. It seems to me that whether he’s talking cosmology, quantum physics, biology, geology, meteorology, or evolution, we’re all just basically fucked as a race. From the looming doom of impending, uncharted asteroids hurling into earth without notice to the uncharted, hyper-catastrophic impending eruption of Yellowstone National Park (because I’m sure everyone knew except me that Yellowstone is basically a 40-mile in diameter volcano that’s due to explode in such a way as to bury Manhattan under 500-feet of ash) I’ve simply resigned myself that homo sapiens tenure on Earth is statistically irrelevant in the course of the long history of the Universe. And not sort of statistically irrelevant but MAD CHEDDAR irrelevant. Read Bryson’s excerpt as he explains if you compared the total history of the Earth in terms of a 24-hour clock, life or something like it first appeared somewhere in the late afternoon and human-kind as we know ourselves is like somewhere around 11:59:59. The sky is falling the sky is falling, I say!
Best Book Read in a Long Time: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Accessible, well-written dips into all things science from astronomy, physics, ecology, biology, evolution, and everything in between. But the thing that makes this book SO great is all the great back stories about the scientists making the discoveries. It’s encouraging to know that in most instances, scientists and science in general is all based on assumptions and theories which will ultimately be proved wrong when the next smarter person comes along with new ideas and theories. And the stories about those scientists are hilarious. Really, it’s surprising that a book about such dry stuff can be so engaging. Definitely worth a read.
I hadn’t planned on such a stretch of time away from the Blog but as these things go, that’s what happens. In this case, it’s death, death, death. The sudden death of Jeff’s uncle from a horrific car crash last week in Pittsburg to the death of my DSL modem at home to finding out this morning about the apparent death of one of my Mom’s cat’s.
The stark comparisons between the long-term, lingering death of someone and the sudden, here today-gone tomorrowness death from a car accident have been weighing heavily on my mind. You always wonder which would be better and I can tell you, both are equal in every way. What is good about one is horrific about the other and what is almost inhumane about the first is merciful for the second. But in the end, dead is dead and then we go on with our days, hopefully a little more alive and aware and present.
The death of my DSL and my lack of internet connections at home this weekend is just a plain, brown bagged bitch of a thing. While I could have been looking at porn or blogs or porno blogs, instead, I spent the day yesterday sewing up pillows for Jeff’s mom’s new furniture. This whole “Queer Eye…” thing is making the Gays seem a little bit too zealous for home remodeling and makeovers if you ask me. That being said, I do make a good pillow when I put my nose to the grindstone and my foot to the Singer Sewing Machine peddle.
The apparent death of my Mom’s cat, Queenie is sort of weighing heavy with me. She went off to live with my Aunt Pam after my Mom’s death and I can’t think of a more perfect place for cats. A nice rolling farm with lots of love and caring but for Queenie who was a old ragamuffin kind of thing, it wasn’t too be, I suppose. Despite her name, she was a real doll of a cat. We spent lots of time together, her sitting on my lap, licking my fingers as I took care of Mom in those last weeks and I began to appreciate how deeply I equated her with my Mom. I can’t help but believe Queenie’s life just became a blur of strangeness after my Mom died and eventually, she started following the breeze that carries my Mom’s memories that’s been blowing around us since she’s been gone. Queenie just went for that long walk to find my Mom again and that’s quite a journey. I will tend not to think of Queenie as dead so much as just moving on with the wind as cats tend to do, on some quiet business of their own. It’s weird to be so sentimental about a cat but Queenie and her brood were so much a part of my Mom’s life that with one being gone, I can’t help but sort of just be sad about my Mom all over again. Damn.
I have my MusicMatch on Demand set to mixing Pink Floyd, Coldplay, and Radiohead all day and they just announced Christian Bale is playing the new, younger Bruce Wayne/Batman in the new movie adaptation directed by Memento’s Christopher Nolan. It’s all good today.
Our friends just over the hill from us invited us to hike their new plot of land them closed on a few days ago. It’s situated way back along a private lake and from the lake, the land holds a run off stream that, as it starts approaching the river, takes several severe, sheer drop offs causing the most spectacular waterfalls. As the land around here is more than just really rocky with bluestone, the course of hike was mostly over these amazing, huge boulders of tumbled and shattered bluestone with the water cascading in and among the rock. Then we[d come to a sheer cliff about 30 feet tall and have to navigate ourselves down and around until the land leveled out a bit for further walking. In all, there were three major waterfalls, each over 30-40 feet high with smaller pools and dams of water or more modest waterfalls in between. We hiked the afternoon away, finding abandoned bear-dens and while we didn’t see any, I was sure we tumbled over several suspicious timber rattler dens. All this was just a few miles from our house and it makes the amazing quality of the land and why we’re so crazy about being here all the more evident to us.
The short of this story is, however, that over every waterfall, through every stream, over every slippery moss-covered rock and down every sheer cliff, I was snapping photos left and right, traipsing through water and under falls, just snap, snap, snapping away and then Jeff, standing firmly on flat ground next to one of the streams, wants to take a picture so I hand the digital camera to him…and he fires off one picture before suddenly dropping it into a pool of water. A POOL OF WATER! I swear you could see the little puff of smoke when the memory stick and inner-circuitry fried as it sank to the bottom. So, alas, no pictures and no more camera. I do have to say though, that for the blubbering idiot I am when something like that usually happens, I was so into the groove of the area, it just rolled off my back. “Shit happens,” I said and meant. Of course, the idea that a new digital camera in my hot little hands helps, but overall, it’s still all good.
Last weekend up in our neck of the woods was the annual “Day To Be Gay” festival for Sullivan County. Sort of the Gay Pride for up that way. This was our first year going as, lets face it, Jeff and I are just about gay everyday, but we’d heard good things about the get together from last year so we thought we’d give it a go this time around. It was a fun day in the sun with good people, no drama, and some good entertainment. I mean, we’re still trying to figure out how much they paid to get Lypsinka up there, but it made the festival pretty cool. It was all laid back, sitting on blankets and lawn-chairs around the stage and eating picnic food off paper plates. The poor teenage, skater bois who’d set up their jumping ramps on the basketball court next to us didn’t know what to make of the performing drag queens and all the homo hand holding and queer talk but they pretty much left us alone so it didn’t matter. So then the local paper does a story in this week’s edition and not only did they incorrectly identify Yolanda as Lypsinka (I mean, really!), but apparently we’re still living in 1973 when it was OK to call drag queens, transvestites. I can’t WAIT for the editorial backlash in next week’s paper from all the shocked, conservative locals who had no idea not only were there gays living in and among them, but a shitload (as the day’s festival goers were numbered somewhere between 400-500 people) of gays in a very rural, very unpopulated county.