1. After a lifetime of being a tomboy and a good 20 years avoiding chick flicks at all cost, I think I may have stumbled across their meaning, purpose and validity. hmmmm who knew!?

2. Do you suppose the network gets the irony in airing 'deon & pilar: prime time love' at 1:00 a.m.??

3. I still don't want any of the stupid crap they sell on late night commercials. Yes, that includes the steam mop, the magical makeup foundation made out of real minerals, and the instant weight loss offered in any form or flavor you can imagine.

May 17, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 650.
Words total: 37,300 MS Word.
Reason for stopping: Bed!
Liquid Refreshment: Water and a bit of scotch.
Munchies: Cheese and apricots.

Darling du Jour: Again I am darlingless. This scene has come down to the sloggy bits.
Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: anonymous and ultimatum. Four syllables bad! Two syllables good!
Mean Things: Oh, Evil Asylum, why can't I quit you?
Research Roundup: N/A
Books in progress: Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy, textbooks.
The glamour: Book Mines for most of the afternoon, wherein I had to herd/capture not one but two sparrows who had flown in the door and weren't figuring out that windows are solid thing to get them back outside. Sparrows...can take a frightening amount of blunt force. I winced every time they took a damned header into our nice big glass front window.

Thankfully, I came home to do garden stuff, which was considerably less stressful.

---

Saturnalia is really turning up the heat here. It has a soundtrack and it's going to beat me with it in loving and gentle concern until I leave that book that's being so bad to me and come shack up with it, as it will of course always treat me with affection and respect and never put my bare feet and gravid uterus in the vicinity of any kitchens or bottles of Bud.

Its latest offer is not!Trent Reznor in a frock coat like in The Perfect Drug, hunched over and sexy in that tubercular way, feeding emo kids to the roaring furnaces of the machine at the heart of the city.

All this will be mine, if I will fall down and worship start writing it.

Only half the current book to go. :p

#6. Cold Hearts

Or, Lost Boys II: 90s Vampires of the Jersey Shore (Reality really does bite)

Too much "day in the life of a 90s vampire", not enough roller derby. But some really hilarious Lost Boys homage scenes. And bonus Power Ranger! This movie has two serious flaws: realistic dialogue is not good fictional dialogue, and the David-and-gang analogs were totally lame. Otherwise a noble effort.

Also, if you're going to play a Temple of the Dog song over a vampire suicide, I think the song should really be "Hunger Strike." I'm just saying.

#7. Perfect Creature

Genetically engineered not-quite-steampunk vampires! With dirigibles! And Dougray Scott!

Very pretty, but also very slow.

Argh. Now I have "Hunger Strike" stuck in my head!

Today I went down to Olympia to play with Caitlin. We didn’t get to perform as much recon as we’d hoped, but we tootled around the old brewery property nonetheless and took a few pictures. Later, there was shopping and I found a vintage button-up wool skirt for thirteen dollars. Following this, there was ice cream, and we hung out lazily around her place.

Good times!
Good pictures! Lot’s of ‘em.

Click the link.

Abandoned buildings (exterior shots only, alas); cats; babies that stalk brunettes ...

[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

One of the reasons why I haven't updated as much is that there seems to be a lot of big things changing, and I'm not sure how to deal with them.

For one thing, some people got let off their jobs in my workplace, which is depressing.  It's a new experience to learn that someone you were working with one minute could be gone the next, without warning... and it's a scary thing to think that it could have been me on the chopping block.

For another thing, I've also been moved to the night shift in my place of employment. I get more pay, but my sleeping habits are well and truly screwed up.  I'm still getting used to the differences in atmosphere and whatnot, but the change might be good for me. I just have to survive my first work week, which lasts nine days (I'm on night four) because of a change in my days off.

Anyone got any support or advice for me?

It’s been a productive weekend so far. I don’t know if I will go out tomorrow at the crack of dawn like today. I’m wiped out, have a migraine, and have been so busy packing for the impending move (6 blocks away) that I should probably stay in and get some work done on a few side projects. I really like the weekend ritual of heading out in search of good photos, though. I feel more in touch with nature than I have in years. I sometimes think that giving up on the biology field did some damage to my soul that is taking a very long time to heal.

Even if I don’t go out tomorrow, the coming week is going to have some absolutely great images. This is one of the lesser ones. I try not to post the really good ones on the weekend because a lot fewer people read this site over the weekend. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

Just finished the first draft of Immunity!

Does happy dance on way to shower.

Over the weekend I watched the South Korean movie Oldboy (finally--after three damaged DVDs from Netflix). Pretty harrowing and very effective. A man his kidnapped and kept prisoner for 15 years, with no idea as to who imprisoned him or why. When he gets out he's led through a cat and mouse game by his torturer.

Next up, Glengarry Glen Ross with a terrific ensemble cast: Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, and Jonathan Pryce. The lives of cutthroat real estate guys in Chicago selling investments in Arizona and Florida land and not caring who they destroy to get on top. I saw the 2005 revival on Broadway with Liev Schreiber, who won a Tony. Not a great play or movie but it's made by its cast every time.

The Seventh Victim produced by Val Lewton and directed by Mark Robson. Someone recommended it and it was pretty lame. Young woman leaves school when her only living relative (who is supporting her)--her older sister-disappears. Satanic cult, blah blah blah. Very choppy the last fifteen minutes. There was a short about Lewton afterwards (maybe that's why the whole thing was recommended) but I just didn't care.

First two hours of the first season of Deadwood. Initially, the cursing put me off (surprising since I my self curse quite a bit in everyday life) but I found it off-putting at first. Got used to it though and enjoyed the episodes.

Presented for your consideration ...

The oil painting at right of the Green Lantern by pop artist Mel Ramos, just one of his many superhero images, was sold at auction on May 13, 2008 for $600,000.

You can find further details of the transaction here.

Meanwhile, the drawing at left, by Martin Nodell, the man who actually created the Green Lantern in 1940 and who died two years ago at age 91, was sold at auction on September 16, 2007 for ... (pause for dramatic effect) ...$77.68.

Which means the world would have us believe that the Ramos has a value 7,723 times that of the Nodell.

Don't believe the world.

I don't know about you, but as for me—

I know which one of these two is the better drawing, which has more inherent meaning, and which one, given the chance, I'd rather own, even if price were no object.

And, as you might guess, I've never been a fan of the superhero swipes of Roy Lichtenstein either.

1704 words on Seven for a Secret tonight. We have found the plot, and it is progressing. I'm still not sure exactly how it plays out, but Sebastien is the Scarlet Pimpernel.

17,000 / 30,000 (56.7%)

If there weren't this damned convention mucking up my week, I could have this done by next Monday.

*falls over in front of the television*

Hmm. The chapters in DaS appear to be a lot longer on average than Barnaby Rudge. The chapter I'm currently reading is twenty pages long.

Saving Horses, one Thoroughbred at a time

The line that killed me: "On occasion, Condurso-Lane said, a pair of horses standing in the field together will appear to nudge one another, then dart off together in a straight line, as if reliving their past."

*sniffle*
-----------------------

In other news, I fled the computer to have a Day Out, which included the Superheroes costume exhibit at the Met (interesting but not, IMO, amazingly well-done unless, like me, you adore certain designers and can have fun mocking academic copy-writers), kamikazi shoe-shopping, post-theater dissection of the current staging of Macbeth over a carafe of wine and damn good Italian food, and one of the top ten phrases you never want to hear a tourist in Times Square say: "is that a real gun, Maureen?"

(it wasn't)

[also? I should not be allowed anywhere near Times Square/the Theater District on Wedesday afternoons or Saturdays. The urge to kill is nigh overwhelming. Farking tourists, learn how to walk!]

EtA: best street theater sight: a guy waving a variety of bumper stickers on a theme of "Cheney/Satan in 2008: The worst possible President"

Tomorrow, back to work. For now -- falling over and making like a sleeping thing.

I was in my local Wal Mart, walking around and browsing when I saw a display of various digital cameras. I was rather astonished to see that a 3 megapixel camera went for forty bucks. My Kodak 3 megapixel that got stolen last summer cost me about $125, if I remember right. It might have been even more than that. You can get 8 megapixel or even higher for around $150. This might be a good time to replace my camera.

I'm currently sorting the photos for 1989, which was the year that I got my beautiful cat. Smokey was such a cute little kitten. When Smokey was a kitten she had adult-sized ears and a long tail, both of which the rest of her body hadn't caught up with yet.

It dawned on me that as of today it's been one month since Smokey died. I'm still not exactly doing that great. I lost somebody very close to me who was a huge part of my life for almost twenty years. I cried two times this week when I would suddenly start thinking of her and how much I missed her.

I would love to adopt two kittens in the future. I really miss not having a cat in my life. Smokey had such a unique personality, so it would be unfair to compare a new cat(s) against her. However, if I could find a couple of cats who were  affectionate, intelligent. and playful as my silly little girl was, then I would be happy. I'm sure that I would end up appreciating my new cats for them, rather than being disappointed that they didn't act exactly like Smokey. However, Smokey will always hold a special place in my heart and in my memory. I would love for her to know I would have did anything to have had her longer, even though I had her four years longer than most cats of her breed tend to live. However, on an emotional level, this knowledge really doesn't matter since I wanted her to live forever.

Because my brain is totally inundated with Hammer films, and because it got good reviews, today the boy and I went to Austin's Romanian restaurant, Drakula. I am now very full of the blood of innocents good goulash and apple strudel.

And while we were in there, we heard three different remixes of the Numa Numa song. Seriously, how fabulous is that?

I guess this makes sense...sorta.

Link: The Which Shakespeare Play Are You? Test written by macbee on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(macbee)

Cleaning my office, packing, I came across an invitation to the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Lynn-Henley Building of the Birmingham Public Library (which, at the time, was the Birmingham Public Library). This is the same building I visited on Tuesday and spoke of in my first entry on Thursday, the reading room with the Ezra Winter murals. Anyway, so I found an invitation to the 70th anniversary, April 7th, 2002. The building was opened to the public in 1932. My Grandmother Ramey was 17 years old. The US President was Herbert Hoover. Amelia Earhart flew from the US to Ireland in 14 hours and 54 minutes. Anyway, here's a contemporary illustration of the library, the one from the invitation:



Also, there was a somewhat odd list on Yahoo today, "The Good, the Bad, and the Slimy: 20 Great Movie Creatures." Some of these truly are iconic movie creatures — Kong, Giger's Alien, Jabba the Hutt, Godzilla, Oz's flying monkeys, Harryhausen's skeletons, Gollum, and heck, maybe even the magnificently erotic Davey Jones. A couple may, in time, prove to be iconic — the "Pale Man" from Pan's Labyrinth and the creature from The Host. But the list, as a whole, shows too much of what paleontologists call "the pull of the recent." That is, it's top-loaded with creatures from very recent films. In a list of 20 films spanning 1933-2008, 75 years, fully 50% of the list is derived from films released in the last six years! Even admitting that advances in CGI and SFX make-up are giving us many marvelous new monsters these days, this is baloney. Where's Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's incarnation of Frankenstein's creature, Gort, or the "gill man" from the Black Lagoon? All of these are clearly more iconic, and far more deserving than some of those who made the list. The "ultra-cute baby Loch Ness monster" from The Water Horse? Not. Kraecher from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? Wrong. The gelflings from The Dark Crystal. Nope (though you might make a case for the Skeksis). Saphria from the godsawful Eragon? That's a joke, right? You want a dragon, then choose Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer or Maleficent's draconic incarnation from Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. Sheesh, people. Someone needs to look up the word "icon" in a dictionary and try again.

I thought this would be an easy job, but it actually takes a lot of time and effort. Firstly, I sorted my family photos by year. Then within each year, I had to sort them in the order they appeared to have been taken. Then after I have the set of photos for each year sorted as correctly as I can determine, then I put them into some new albums I have to house them in.

However, I did run into some problems. Sorting the photos taken up to the mid-Eighties by year was pretty easy since, well, it was a common practice for photo companies to print the year and even the month the photos were developed on the edge of the front of the photos or on the back. Then in 1985 the photo companies stopped doing this. So it took some real effort and comparison to determine what year a photo belonged to. However, despite my best efforts, I found that I still had some photos out of order and my only choice was to put them in the photo album as close to the year as possible. I really didn't have the patience to take a ton of photos out so I could put them in the proper order.

Another problem I ran into was that there was a few times when I accidentally skipped a page while putting them in these albums, so I would have to go back and take all these photos out and slide them back into the right slots. This is so incredibly tedious.

I'm also planning on scanning all these photos so we have digital copies instead of just hard copies and negatives. Although I'm dreading the effort it will take to do this, it will make it easier to put all of them into the correct order in those cases that I didn't.

Big Brown again.

Well, I watched it.  Swore I wouldn't.  Tried, actually, not to be home, but post time was later than I thought, and this is one of my failings: I have to know.  I'd rather watch, whatever happens, than wait for the reports.

And no taking that away from him: helluva race.  Helluva horse.  I'm not sure he's beating much of anything?  But he's got a lovely big stride (but I like Gayego's action at least as much) and runs like a professional.

On to Belmont, then.  Hope those feet hold up.

Ha!  The month's half over and I'd forgotten to let y'all know what's new.

We have a great story by Mary SanGiovanni that you absolutely must check out.

Steve Wedel interviews Nate Kenyon who reveals some very interesting history.  If you haven't picked up Bloodstone yet, I don't know what you're waiting for.  This Stoker Nominated novel is well worth the price of admission.

Will Ludwigsen gives us a terrific column this month: Get Lost: Delivering Mystery and Meaning to the Starving

There are a ton of new reviews!  We have reviews for THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, COFFIN COUNTY, SELDOM SEEN IN AUGUST, THE BITCHFIGHT, QUEEN OF BLOOD, INTO THE CRUEL SEA and whole bunch more!!

There are a half dozen new author boards and The Cellar is hopping!  There's also a brand new Pod of Horror to fill your listening time.

Stop by, enter our BLOODSTONE contest, see if you won the QUEEN OF BLOOD or BITING DOG PRESS contests!