stAllio!'s way
went to see
matrix revolutions today... it was better than
reloaded, which tended to be a bit slow at times.
reloaded was mostly exposition;
revolutions is mainly fight scenes. again, lots of eye candy, with big armored shrikes like on
blue gender or any anime with killer robot suits. i would almost go so far as to call
revolutions a mindless action movie, except it required two full movies' worth of exposition to build up to that point, so it's not all that mindless. the original is still the best though.
a few days ago kelly sent out an email looking for decoration ideas for the
nov 22 show; i suggested i could do a couple poster-sized collage pieces, since i'd been saving a few big pieces of cardboard i received on the back of posters i'd bought. (i have a big vacant area on the wall above my bed that i've been saving for something special, anyway.) the first collage is almost finished; there are a few more spots where i
could put something else, but no more spots where i'd feel bad if i don't fill them in. it'll probably be done tonight (or, at least, i'll set it aside as "done" & if i find anything that's just perfect for it i'll add it later). then i get to start on the next one; i feel like i need to finish two at least (there just isn't time to make three before the show).
tomorrow i get to go out fliering. i can't really tell if fliering actually helps for our shows; after all we still don't really explain on the flier what kind of show it is. but i think i should at least drop some at the "big" indie record stores (namely the ones i go to): indy cd, missing link, luna... maybe vibes.
wow, aside from the weekend posts, almost all my posts were done while i was at work. that just looks bad. i don't really slack off
that much, do i?
rudy roy "jesus freak" moore has lost his job. the ten commandments judge will be
removed from the bench for refusing to follow a federal court order. but the
ny times points out that he could still come back next election: "The last Alabama judge was ousted in 1999 after he was found guilty of financial fraud. The next year, he was re-elected to the same seat."
rudy & his followers are still somehow unable to understand that you can't serve two masters without coming into a conflict of interest. especially if one of your masters never really communicates with you in an objective sense. so when the court told him to remove his graven image of god's top ten list, he chose the idol over his job, even while he told himself that by breaking the law, he was upholding the law. it reminds me of when bush told us we were starting a war in iraq to protect peace, saying "war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is strength! a triumphant victory over the orgasm!" (wait, was that bush or
orwell?)
of course, with someone like ashcroft still in office as us attorney general, it's not surprising rudy doesn't realize his inherent conflict...
freedom fries forever! the us media, & even many in washington, are finally admitting that
france was right. only a few months ago, the mainstream media was so eager to mock france that it doing everything but burning french flags & putting out the fire by urinating on it. how quickly the tides change. i repeat:
jeez, even ad buyers are
criticizing CBS for cowardly cancelling
the reagans. "If the networks become even more skittish about exploring American society, politics and culture, it's ultimately the viewers that lose," said one.
how pathetic is that, when even your advertisers are worried that you're too eager to cave in to pressure?
last night i went to the
key cinemas on the south side to see
the animation show. i give it my highest recommendation. a bunch of different styles of animated shorts, all consistently excellent.
in particular, i am now a total
don hertzfeldt fan. shame on adult swim for not airing
rejected when they had the chance! i love adult swim, but
rejected is as good as or better than just about anything adult swim has shown (& they've shown some really great stuff). it sure as hell is 20x better than that
baby blues cartoon... *yawn*
few could deny that being a sheriff or sheriff's deputy is a stressful job. i guess a great way to relieve job stress is gettin' it on with a prostitute. especially if it's one woman in particular, so it seems.
a marion county sheriff's deputy was
fired yesterday for protecting & serving up a heapin' helpin' of hotel sex with a hooker. this is the
second sheriff's deputy to get nabbed for hiring the same whore!
it makes me wonder just what kind of magical charms this modern-day mata hari might possess. is she just a woman who shakes her moneymaker at local truck stops & sleeps with cops? or is she a mover & shaker of a more subversive political bent? maybe she's trying to solve the problems of our shoddy legal system, one blowjob at a time. stop police brutality by getting the cops laid! hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea...
or maybe she's just really hot, so desirable that even the purest man of virtue would succumb to her advances. the photo of her run by the indy star isn't particularly flattering, but then it's probably a mug shot. i can see how she might be pretty cute in person. or then again, maybe cops just love to blow off a little "steam" by picking up some of the prostitutes they've met along their beat. after all, who would have a better idea of where to find a prostitute than a cop? check out this quote from the woman herself:
"There are other prostitutes out there, and there are other deputies having sex with them."
actually, the most scandalous aspect of this story is that it's rather tame compared to the
other big police scandal in central indiana right now. i don't really care how many prostitutes the cops hire... hell, the cops could all be issued their own prostitute to go on patrol with them, just like they're issued guns & cruisers... as long as they don't go around shooting & killing unarmed college students.
muncie/ball state police are saying that the murdered kid had "growled and charged at the officer" like some kind of rabid bull... it must've all happened in what matrix fans call "bullet time" because the kid was apparently only "2 feet away", & the cop still had time to pull off four shots, including one to the head. i don't know about these people, but my right arm alone is about 2 feet; unless the cop is a midget, at that range he could've just as easily bitch-slapped the kid. using actual bullets at that range is impractical.
or maybe the cops are just lying; even the kid's police dispatcher friend doesn't believe the police's version of events...
hot damn: cnn is now
planting questions in presidential debates! way to go cnn! you're doing a better job of blurring the line between fact & fiction than
k street (which is interesting enough for me to watch but has gotten a little too bogged down in its fictional "government probe" storyline)
les moonves tells "
an absolute lie" about the
reagans miniseries, by insisting that the reason he cancelled it has nothing to do with political pressure (how could anyone who turned on a tv in the last few weeks could believe that?). instead he claims it was "a moral decision", as though suddenly fictionalized biopics are suddenly supposed to be "accurate". (never mind that the movie was probably more accurate than anyone would admit; for example, while it's true that the gipper never said the much-cooed-about line in the script about AIDS patients ["they who live in sin die in sin"], as
eric alterman and
others point out, 'what Reagan really said was "maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."' yeah, that's not homophobic or unsympathetic to AIDS patients at all.)
of course, when you're right you're not always right... alterman still has some
irrational seething grudge against ralph nader for allegedly ruining the 2000 election. as
nader points out himself himself, the republicans were the ones who stole the election & the democrats made plenty mistakes there themselves; they didn't need nader's help to lose. sure, nader has his share of flaws but the facts remain that his crusade against corporate power was dead-on. i think michael moore said it best on the ill-fated donahue show, when donahue mentioned the allegation that nader ruined everything. to paraphrase: "everyone i talk to says 'man, you guys were right!'" (this was at the height of the enron story; nowadays the media has mostly forgotten about corporate scandals except for small stories in the business section about mutual funds.) gore would've been a better president than bush, sure, but "better" does not equal "good".
in other news (to follow up on another of my earlier rants), as usual
pr watch has all the latest dirt on the
jessica lynch story. just go to the
spin of the day for november (specifically nov 10, 8, & 7) for a much better collection of lynch links than i could ever muster. god damn pr watch is a good site; i still need to finish their latest book,
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq...
one last political bit, since it's veterans day. if you pause for a moment to think about our war veterans, don't forget that nobody else in recent memory
more to fuck over our veterans than our current president, who sends our troops to be maimed & killed, while simultaneously
slashing & mutilating military benefits.
anyway, that's enough political ranting for now... it's always possible i'll have more to rant about this afternoon. i do have a personal update in mind but this entry is so long i think i should just post it & maybe come back later. is this a political blog or a personal "boring minutia from my life" blog? i guess it's a bit of both, which means it won't be very good at either.
there was a lunar eclipse last night. turns out i had a great view from the attic so i set up the time lapse camera to film it. due to the earth's rotation the moon would creep up & to the right until it left the frame every 5-10 minutes; sometimes the camera would compensate by automatically zooming out. other times i would check on the shot & it would be solid black. i also got some interesting auto-focus effects from the camera trying to focus on a single, distant light source in the middle of a dark sky. with 1/4sec footage taken every minute i got at most a couple minutes footage overall, but it was a worthwhile experiment, an opportunity that doesn't come all that often.
i also watched both harry potter movies yesterday. i turned on the tv around 11 in the morning; it just happened to be tuned to HBOW & the first movie was coincidentally starting... so i watched for a few minutes & pretty soon i was drawn in. after the 1st movie ended i realized why they were showing it: because the 2nd movie was scheduled for its pay-cable premiere later in the evening. i went ahead & watched that too, though it was on during the eclipse, so i missed a few scenes while adjusting the camera. but the movies were pretty good, at least as far as "family" movies go. i wouldn't go out of my way to see them, but the stories were decent, the fx were great, and so on. hardly compares to the lord of the rings trilogy, but then again what does?
