In a duffel bag at the bottom of the Missouri River, just above Oahe. It's that simple.
I wait for you into the big castle of Loneliness and I want you to break its strong walls.
You sound like a lot of fun. How did you know I liked depressive women?
I am impatient, because I have been waiting for you for many years, for many thousand lonely years.
And you're just now getting impatient?
I am young and pretty, but I am old inside without love and tenderness.
That's cool because I am cheap and shallow, but I am rich inside with mineral deposits.
My heart is crying every minute, every second without your love.
Yes, yes. Tell me more about your wet, thousand-year-old heart.
I can't find it here, and everything I meet is lonely echo of my crying heart.
You really should move out of either North Adams, Massachusetts, or the Ukraine.
I wrote this romantic letter to you, because I think that such romantic person like you will understand my wishes and desires and will get the reply to me very soon http://www.meetlovegirls.net/8120/
Then the joke's on you, because my brain is the size of a philbert.
I hope that you will write to me about your life, that you will share with me your feelings.
Well, I make and eat wax sculptures, I enjoy leaving soaps on people's pillows and mints in their tubs, I believe some dogs and cats are just bad, I know this guy whose breath smells awful and I am afraid to tell him except by way of oblique references on my websites, I once had a crush on Laurette Spang, I think Fritos smell like animal feet, and I feel that people who like Radiohead can't possibly like them as much as they say they do.
All That Jaws is languishing while its music director tours Italy, but today is June 29, a very significant day in Jaws folklore, even if it shouldn't be.
The true test of my USB broadband connection was when I triumphantly returned to my stomping grounds at Zzyzx Road on the way to this week's Consumer Electronics Show, took a picture, and uploaded it live two minutes thereafter.
The only reason the transfer from camera to Internet was not instantaneous was because I had to fight and disembowel an attacking bear. Then I had to look up the correct spelling of tauntaun so I could make up a joke about using its steaming entrails for heat in the high desert cold and not get it confused with the city on the road to Cape Cod. Then I decided not to use the joke.
This technological breakthrough will seem like nothing when, in three to six months, I will be able to hook a GPS and a T3 connection into my spinal column, but it sure was exciting in these pioneer days.
Another country heard from - Inland Empire edition
I got my wife an iPod Touch (the iPhone without the useless phone) for Christmas. She has so far refused to pick it up, look at it, or even sniff it when I thrust it at her (we're still talking about the iPod).
Here, David Lynch talks about watching movies in a manner signifying the depth of feeling people have about technology.
★Do they say God instead of Gods? ★Have you seen them before, but you know it's not the same person?
For Christmas I was given two seasons of Battlestar Galactica on DVD and now am scheduling a month to neglect my family to watch the series. I will have to take a break from my regularly-scheduled family-neglecting time.
Sometimes it is poignant and touching, in a way that makes me want to go off and write an independent screenplay, to see my family's hollow faces and eyes big with hunger and need. Other times it is funny because they look like anime characters.
In time-honored science fiction tradition, BSG's Cylons are human-made machines that have become sentient and spiritually aware and, unlike the show's humans, they are monotheistic. In addition to better hygiene, there is a lot to recommend the Cylons, including their hot-swappable souls.
I traveled 55.2 miles to the wastes of Ventura this evening to see a sneak preview of "Razor", an interstitial Battlestar Galactica episode.
Why did I consume 3.5 gallons of expensive gasoline to see a TV show on a movie screen when I could have watched it on television on November 24? Because I cancelled cable after The Sopranos ended. Most days I don't regret it.
I and about 300 other educated, thoughtful people gathered for this special screening at a movie theatre. None of us was dressed as a Cylon. No one quoted BSG dialogue in line. None of us appeared to be living with our parents. Most of us were drinking.
The two-hour episode, which fills in certain gaps in the story and sets up Season Four of the Sci Fi Network show, dealt with events on the Battlestar Pegasus following the Cylon obliteration of the 12 colonies.
I am pushing my glasses up my nose.
Told with flashbacks and centered around the story of Kiwi colonist Kendra Shaw, "Razor" details the methods of the knife-wielding and ruthless Admiral Cain and how being unlucky in love is a really bad thing in space. We are reunited with the vintage Cylons familiar to people who watched the 80/20 hokey/thought-provoking 70's TV show and are treated to a significant scene featuring a being lying in a lighted tub of goop.
The episode was fantastic. People cheered. But Sci Fi has apparently sold its soul to the Xbox game "Mass Effect", and several commercials placed in and around the movie effectively torpedoed any interest this audience would have had in the game.
More than anything, "Razor" was a "Mists of Avalon" to Battlestar Galactica's Knights of the Round Table story; the actions of the lesbian battlestar commander and the sad fate of herself and the woman who loved her seemed like the producers' commentary on the perils of that lifestyle. At one point, Commander Adama mused that he might have made similarly brutal decisions as his counterpart but he "had a family".
That the treacherous Caprica Six enters the series as a network administrator also shines a light on where the producers' prejudices lie.
Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.
My education in fantasy stories has been limited by my dislike of most people who like fantasy stories. It is an ancient prejudice. But I've been lucky; I've enjoyed the "Harry Potter" books, think "The Lord of the Rings" is a masterpiece, and am very impressed with "His Dark Materials", which takes its title from this area of "Paradise Lost":
Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross.
My brief exposure to fantasy stories has revealed that they all have things in common:
1. Children with dead or compromised parents 2. Guys in robes 3. A weapon to be used for good or evil 4. Betrayal
Based on this, I have written my own short fantasy story. It is called The Wondrous Bathrobe Tool by Marty Barrett
Hugh Hefner approached Gary.
"It's a shame your parents are dead," he said, "but these witches want you to be their leader."
"May I take my magic toothbrush?" asked Gary.
"That's not any toothbrush," replied Hef.
"His Dark Materials" is ambitious and uncondescending to young readers. It also has some bold things to say about organized religion and God, something I think "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" deal with obliquely, but Pullman puts right out there.
"But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one; you can never see any concrete proof that it exists but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of thibngs that couldn't be imagined without it."
If the movie trailer is any indication, "The Golden Compass" gets dumbed down in the adaptation, but I'll still see it; it still looks fun. Gandalf plays a bear, for example.
You'd think that the Geek Squad wouldn't have to resort to stealing porn since they already get to keep those cool Beetles.
The comments on Consumerist's story about how the Gawker Media website used a program like Remote Desktop or Timbuktu to catch a Geek Squad employee downloading a client's personal photos - that included porn - onto his own hard drive were less about how interesting this story was than they were about how computer technicians stealing or at least snooping on personal files isn't news.
The Geek Squad tech was supposed to be installing iTunes, which he did, in addition to poking around a folder invitingly titled "Honey Pot". His invoice recommended a memory upgrade (to increase porn transfer speed) and mentioned that the computer needed "protection". You think?
Since I am a Profiler and an Empath, I know that the Geek Squad employee was confident that a person who couldn't even install iTunes would never be able to figure out that his porn was copied.
It's a sad world.
Full disclosure: In 2002 I was thisclose to being one of the first ten people the Geek Squad hired in Los Angeles. I really wanted the free car. Their official arrival was delayed and I got another job instead. Among the things I learned in the interview was that Geek Squadders had to drive their VWs away from the rest of traffic so that the vehicle would be more distinctive.
H.P. Lovecraft: Still rocking eldritch non-Euclidean geometries from beyond Time
The writer H.P. Lovecraft died 70 years ago last Thursday (the Ides of March), becoming more famous posthumously than he was in life. This is tragic, because I know a lot of people who would have given him their spare bedroom and taken him out to lunch every day of the week, were he still alive, because that is the way Hollywood is.
His native Providence, by contrast, is cold and heartless; just look at its strip clubs.
Lovecraft, like his contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, created an immense body of work about a vividly-realized world, using language removed from the time their books were written. Tolkien lived to see his fame, whereas Lovecraft's fans saved up to buy him a headstone 40 years after his death (the epitaph reads "I am Providence.")
Among my prized possessions is a memento from my friend Paul's wedding. For services rendered (it wasn't Prima Nocta, sadly) he gave me a Swiss Army Knife from Miskatonic University.
One of America's greatest art forms is the Jack Chick tract parody. Here is one detailing what to do when Cthulhu comes back:
In the cold grey wastes of madness In the putrid depths of time I will study evil Beings Until I go insane
Behold the sentient rhombus Behold the lum’nous gas Of all that is unwholesome Until I go insane
I'm in Love with an Incomprehensibly Evil Being It's allright It's allright I'm in Love with an Incomprehensibly Evil Being It's all I need tonight, yeah
When the fires scorch the chimneys When the maggots eat my brain In the realm of undead children Until I go insane
Behold the crumbling altars Of elder gods and cruel I will quaff the nasty goblet Until I go insane
I'm in Love with an Incomprehensibly Evil Being It's allright It's allright I'm in Love with an Incomprehensibly Evil Being It's all I need tonight, yeah
We do our best to remember H.P. Lovecraft around our house. Our daughter keeps Cthulhu as a pet, and her favorite doll is named Brown Jenkin (read about Brown Jenkin and "The Rats in the Walls" here thanks to public domain-loving Australia).
I wonder if I will ever hate Los Angeles; I know a lot of people who came here for one thing, didn't get to do it, and had no affection for the city to fall back on. I came here to be a jockey but my dreams were crushed. Luckily, six years in, I still get random opportunities to be reminded what a great place this is, despite its lack of snow, worthwhile public transportation, and Puerto Ricans.
Here is Highland Avenue just after midnight this morning. I took the picture while I was driving.
It would be cruel to not acknowledge even one of the hundreds of spams I receive daily, especially since this one appears particularly poignant.
