Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

I am a sucker for Internet narcissism and thus I went through “I Write Like” with the first pages of all my NaNo’s:

My brain-destroyingly terrible sci-fi entry from 2009:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My trashy gay noir 2008 NaNoWriMo, Particular People:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2007′s redneck vampire-centric Tooth and Nail:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

In the Fuck Yes department, 2006′s horror fantasy noir The Palanquin Cat:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2005′s sci-fi sequel Root Shell:

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2004′s sci-fi adventure Shell Access:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

2003′s poli-sci-fi Life, Liberty And…:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Given that one’s about a Libertarian governor who completely fucks things up, that’s pretty satisfying.

This (long) weekend I walked 16.5 miles. There are three main routes I take: a 3.5 mile route through the neighborhood that I regularly walk with Pants Wilder; a 7.3 mile route up to the American Tobacco Trail, down a good length of it and then back to The Boyf’s & my place through a series of neighborhoods that includes Zinfab’s; and a 9.5 mile route where I go up to the ATT, down a length of it, then turn around and come back the same way. I did the shortest route twice and the longest once over the course of the weekend and it felt great: beautiful weather, a floppy straw hat that both fits and was bought on clearance at Target. What, me Scottish? Never. In point of fact…

I also ponied up the cash for a fancy pair of headphones because I am sick to death of the default iPhone earbuds. The originals were fine and all for occasional use but once I started wearing them for long periods I realized that whereas the left one fit great the right one couldn’t decide whether it most loved to fall out or to rub my ear bloodily raw. No thanks. I opted for earbuds I thought were crazily expensive but extremely well-reviewed: the Klipsch Image S4i.

Long story short, they stay in without issue, are very comfortable, have bud tips large enough to fit my ears and sound good enough that I can understand a podcast or the lyrics to a song without turning the volume up beyond quite modest levels. Given that my hearing is already iffy in certain circumstances, this is an excellent thing. I do not need to damage my hearing further than marching in front of the drums and years of Legends’ goth nights already did for me. They also don’t completely deafen me to the outside world. I can hear cars and bicycle bells and the clank of chains just fine so I don’t find myself shocked when a car or a dog walker or the like turn up right behind me.

The weather this weekend really was exceptionally good and the walks were incredibly restorative. I get an uncontrolled twitch in my right eyelid when I’m too tired or too stressed and that thing had been going crazy for weeks. Last weekend we consciously took it easy and that helped but this weekend seems to have made it go away. It’s nice to feel a little more in control of my health and it’s nice to spend hours in the big blue room and feel good after.

Local blogger Lisa B. posted this morning about Chubby’s Tacos’ really not-OK uncredited use of a photo she took in their store:

It’s an OK photo, right? Well I thought so, at least. And apparently so did Chubby’s Tacos, because they decided to put it on their web site. Without asking me. Or giving me attribution.

All of my Flickr photos are licensed under a non-commercial, with attribution, share-alike Creative Commons license. This means if you are NOT using the photos for business purposes (such as selling tacos), you can use my picture without permission as long as you grant me attribution and whatever you use it in is also distributed with the same Creative Commons license. But if you’re trying to sell tacos, or if for some reason you want to use the photo without attribution and whatnot, YOU HAVE TO ASK ME! Dangit! Chubby’s didn’t bother with that bit.

As someone who has taken plenty of personal photos in a variety of public and private settings and then made those photos available online, I am somewhat interested in the question of attribution and ownership but I don’t know anything about it and wouldn’t dare make any assumptions based on my own lack of knowledge. However, since Lisa B. goes so far as to license her photos under the Creative Commons, I already know that she knows more about this than I do.

No, what really interests me is (a) the irony that a relationship so geographically intimate as that between a local business and a local blogger can be spoiled by the communications-enabling Internet and (b) that this serves as yet another example of how the commercial/corporate world has become so accustomed to farming out every aspect of widget manufacture that no one can be blamed for anything. I’m not saying that Chubby’s needs to do their own web design; by all means, let them continue to make excellent food, thanks, and taking advantage of someone specialized in the work one’s own business doesn’t do makes perfect sense. I am saying, however, that it’s probably a situation where the website developer used the image thoughtlessly and never asked Chubby’s first and now Chubby’s is tarred by it but isn’t really at fault nor, probably by way of language in their contract, is the web designer since they probably have a clause that they just make the bits fly and aren’t responsible for the contents as long as they conform to certain loose boundaries; or, someone at Chubby’s has all the FTP credentials and uploaded a photo they liked online and the web designer, who would know all about things like CC licensing, is aghast that they might be viewed as having stolen a photograph.

It’s a microcosm of what drove me out of the corporate world in the first place, at least in part: every step in widget manufacture has been so walled off and outsourced that no one is accountable for anything or to anyone. Same as it ever was, probably, at least in terms of what’s involved in making stuff, but the age of conscious branding has created an expectation that companies who want the marketing advantages of a cohesive, coherent identity will also have some basic awareness of what’s being done in their touted name and yet they quite often don’t – and don’t want to. When at least three distinct corporations may bear some or all of the blame for the BP oil spill and no one’s terribly surprised by that, we’re all doing something wrong.

On Saturday I won the NC Japan Center’s speech contest for my level (level 2). I am… honestly, I am extremely thrilled about this. I worked pretty hard to write my speech and then to edit it down to reasonable levels and after mangling the Japanese language in last year’s speech contest I am thrilled to have pulled it off this year. My speech was about books vs. e-books. I’m pretty pleased with myself. Mad snaps to my classmates, too, who both delivered excellent and funny speeches and to the other winners of the other levels.

Now, for the nerds: on Friday my work laptop notified me that the automatic upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 was available. I did a little reading online, found that no one was having major problems with it and then set to downloading it. This took… a long time. I got it done, though, and during our weekly staff meeting my laptop chugged away and turned itself into a 10.04 laptop instead of 9.10. When all was said and done everything seemed to work as expected only faster. Nice! Or so it seemed.

This morning I noticed that what was happening some on Friday was continuing to happen: Outlook 2007 under Crossover Linux was frequently locking up and dying on me. Great. My work is changing over to Exchange and the Outlook calendar is going to be our single calendar as of a few months from now. Some people are already using it, too, so I had no option but to figure out a way to get this working. Nothing I did – downloading and installing the latest build of Crossover Linux, etc. – seemed to make a difference and I was starting to get a little concerned.

Further reading let me in on the fact that the most recent release of the evolution-mapi plugin for Ubuntu’s native Evolution mail client was included in 10.04. I had tried an older version of evolution-mapi a few months ago and found that it choked on the calendaring side. My only hope – after hours of fiddling with Thunderbird and Lightning and all sorts of crap – was to give the newer evolution-mapi a shot.

Initial testing showed that the calendar was working fine – just great, in fact – but Evolution kept croaking when it had to refresh my rather overstuffed inbox (about 6,500 messages, yes, I know). One manual inbox clean-up via webmail later, I had my inbox down to about 1/10th its starting size and now Evolution is having no problem at all. So, I guess the latest version of evolution-mapi works. If you, like me, were finding that Evolution would hang when trying to load your mailbox, try cutting the mailbox down to size first. It doesn’t seem to like large inboxes but it does seem to handle all the Exchange stuff just fine.

Some recent gallery additions:

The Renwick: On March 13 & 14, The Boyf and I were in DC for the going-away party for some friends. We happened to stay a block from the Renwick and went twice in two days.

Wake SPCA 3K Dog Walk: Katastrophes, Mr. Pink Eyes, Pants Wilder, Anna, Busty and I participated in the Wake County SPCA 3K dog walk as Team Awesome. We raised hundreds of dollars, because awesome is what we do. We also got to see hella cute dogs, though none could hold a candle to our own leader, Dante.

This is why elections matter:

President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.

[...]

Hospitals often bar visitors who are not related to an incapacitated patient by blood or marriage, and gay rights activists say many do not respect same-sex couples’ efforts to designate a partner to make medical decisions for them if they are seriously ill or injured.

“Discrimination touches every facet of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including at times of crisis and illness, when we need our loved ones with us more than ever,” Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement praising the president’s decision.

This negates about one third of the paperwork requirements AT&T used to try to pry The Boyf off of my benefits when I worked there. I am extremely happy about this. Neither of us has any reason to think we’re ever going to end up in a hospital any time soon but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it, that we never know when we’re going to need this sort of support and contact?

One might ask where the President got the idea – other than from basic human decency, I mean – and one might be surprised:

Yesterday, President Obama ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that same-sex partners and others are able to visit their loved ones in hospitals across the country. The memo quotes the hospital visitation provision of the North Carolina Hospital Patients’ Bill of Rights which Equality NC proposed and got adopted by the state in 2008.

“We are thrilled to see that Equality NC’s work at the state level has provided a model which the President is now taking nationwide to ensure that hospital patients get the care and companionship they deserve,” said Ian Palmquist, Executive Director.

The Presidential Memorandum signed yesterday states:

Many States have taken steps to try to put an end to these problems. North Carolina recently amended its Patients’ Bill of Rights to give each patient “the right to designate visitors who shall receive the same visitation privileges as the patient’s immediate family members, regardless of whether the visitors are legally related to the patient” — a right that applies in every hospital in the State.

So, thank you, EqualityNC. I’m not involved with them beyond having made a few small donations here and there, but this is completely freaking awesome.

From MSNBC.com:

A senior cardinal defended Pope Benedict XVI from “petty gossip” on Sunday as the pontiff maintained his silence on mounting sex abuse cover-up accusations during his Easter message.

The ringing tribute by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, at the start of Mass attended by tens of thousands of faithful in St. Peter’s Square, marked an unusual departure from the Vatican’s Easter rituals.

“Holy Father, the people of God are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers,” Sodano said.

So, legal marriages between hets are icky by association but untold thousands of molested and otherwise abused children are “gossip”? It must be so nice to be able to be forgiven for anything, no matter how heinous, by simply asking. Here in consensual reality, actions are supposed to have consequences. Happy fucking Easter.

Last night I had the good fortune to attend a US Senate campaign forum hosted by Durham for Obama. Four candidates – Calvin Cunningham, Ken Lewis, Elaine Marshall and Marcus Williams – were there, and they each took turns making statements, answering pre-screened questions and shaking hands after the fact.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I knew Cal Cunningham before he ran for any public office and I am currently planning to vote for him in the primary due to his positions on my most important issues, not due to personal association. We hadn’t seen each other in a dozen years before I got to speak with him last night after the forum.

Some thoughts on each candidate:

Marcus Williams: just plain not up to the task. He came off as unprepared and possibly a closet conservative. He fumbled answers to questions about more complex issues and returned again and again to deficit reduction as his main issue, even when it didn’t make sense – that is, when he wasn’t stumping for his own website. I haven’t looked at it yet, but his whole performance reeked of Gregarious Troubled Uncle, a cross between class clown and used car salesman.

Elaine Marshall: genuinely surprisingly scrappy. She came off as a much tougher campaigner and more skilled on the stump than I had expected. I’ve been saying for months now that she seems like the most outspokenly liberal candidate and she only wavered briefly from that last night (the stab at Hugo Chavez seemed kind of random to me). Marshall made a very impressive showing. When Calvin’s campaign didn’t seem certain of happening in the first place, Marshall was my candidate of choice. What I hadn’t expected was that she would get interrupted by spontaneous applause and encouraging hoots.

Ken Lewis: Heavily associated with DFO and widely expected to walk off with the DFO straw poll endorsement (which did not happen – he got over 50%, but not the required 70%), he likewise impressed me with his practicality and general air of calm competence… right up until his closing statement. Here’s a tip, counselor: don’t go negative and go over your time in a closing statement to which no one will be allowed a response, even if you are on your home turf. It was exceptionally rude and unprofessional and wrecked what had been growing respect for him over the night. Up to that point, the substance of his answers and his closing statement had really impressed me and like I say he strikes me as someone who would be extremely competent in the Senate even if he came off as also being just as dull as dishwater. He clearly knows what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t make me believe he’s excited about it. Lewis comes off sounding like he’s auditioning for the part of Al Gore Stunt Double. If he wins the seat I’ll be very happy and I’ll have his sign up in my yard but I do not hope that he wins the primary and very little could move me to vote for him over anyone but a Republican.

Cal Cunningham: I love the guy, but he looks like he’s been replaced by SeriousExpressionBot 9000. He was initially slow to take specific positions in my personal opinion but he’s ramped that up, gotten a lot more specific in recent weeks and has said the things I need to hear – pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-public-option – to keep me enthusiastic about him. Last night he came off as surprisingly rehearsed which reflects a very solid knowledge of his position statements but contrasts – sometimes weirdly – with other candidates who had something of an “um” problem when answering questions but sounded more off-the-cuff and relaxed. I would say it was a mixed performance, in part because the hand gestures and “Serious Candidate Is Serious” sharpness of his diction and tone to his voice both made him seem slightly robotic and caused one to wonder with whom he hoped to pick a fight. He sounded like he was itching to argue with Richard Burr, not other Democrats. That’s fantastic, except that campaign doesn’t happen until May. I confess that he also surprised me by receiving multiple interruptions in the form of applause and supportive hoots from the crowd. Cal also displayed a pleasing practicality when he said that he expects healthcare reform to have passed and be old news by the time the winner takes office but that it will have happened in a fashion that will require a “second phase” to incorporate necessities like a public option.

So, overall? I think Marcus Williams should call it a day. I think the other three candidates would each be extremely stiff competition for Burr in the fall. I have to assume he had some people there last night, somewhere, and if he has a lick of sense – always a controversial question – he’s worried. They all knew their stuff, they all had very different approaches to delivering it and while all three looked like they could clean Burr’s intellectual clock it was Cunningham and Marshall who looked most amped up – by far – to get in Burr’s Kool-Aid. That closing statement of Ken Lewis’ really did jettison my support for him as a candidate, but I think there’s a case to be made for either Cunningham or Marshall in May that a lot of people could find compelling.

Here is, word for word, an email I sent to KJ asking her advice this morning after an incident on the way to work. Any thoughts are appreciated.

(I should note that, on re-reading, I think I failed to communicate the amount of moxie the young woman showed in her responses to him. She had a do-not-give-me-shit shield that she put up from the first moments of their interaction.)

So, this morning I was standing at the bus stop with a very pretty
young blonde woman when a much older guy wearing nice but strikingly
mismatched clothes dashed through traffic to join us. As he ran up he
said to her, “How much is the bus,” indicating that he’s new around
here. He then looked abruptly at me like I had said something, then
turned back to her for her answer. She told him that all the buses
are free and he immediately started “joking” about “Hey, why don’t we
run away together, then, let’s just get on the next bus and see where
it takes us,” etc. She laughed it off with obvious nervousness and
then he got on the bus with us – I got between them when we got on, but
the bus was empty (spring break) and so he had plenty of ways to sit
near her – and started pointing out cop cars in sight. “Are they
looking for *you*?” she asked him, which got a chuckle out of me. He
said no, the only reason they would be looking for him is if he
*didn’t* talk to her because that would be a crime, hardy har.

There were a lot of things about him that sent up red flags: a
generally manic air, the fact that he was wearing two watches and
carrying a third, that he was carrying a pair of glasses he never
seemed to need (a classic of social engineering, as someone carrying
glasses is strongly associated in most minds with professionalism,
doctors, lawyers, scientists, people assumed to have their shit
together). She pointedly asked about the watches and he said “Well,
you know, the recession.” He then launched into a sob story about his
sister and how she died of brain cancer and lung cancer and he had to
decide to pull the plug, and way, WAY before she needed to, she pulled
the cord to ask the driver to stop at the next bus stop so that she
could get off the bus.

Her body language told me – and him – that she wanted to get OUT OF
THERE, to the point that he said, “So, if I got off at the next stop,
with you, and walked with you, would that bother you?” She didn’t
hesitate to say that yes, that would bother her, and she’d appreciate
it if he did not do that. He tried another limp round of boohooing to
try to sway her but she ignored it and when the bus (finally!) stopped
she got off in a hurry with a backwards, “Thanks for an interesting
morning.” He said something inexplicable (“Thanks for an interesting
life,” I think) and then looked at me and I looked back at him the
rest of the way to *my* stop. He got twitchy in a big way and kept
producing this dry sniffle that I’ve always associated with major coke
heads and that would explain a lot of his mania and talkativeness and
generally sketchy vibe. My goal throughout – as I was paying obvious
attention to him throughout his monologues to her – was to make it
clear to him that there was someone else around who was noticing him.
I wanted him to be sure that he couldn’t do anything without someone
having a good look at him first.

My quandary is, should I have asked her if she wanted/needed help
getting rid of the guy? I consciously chose, when she from the get-go
seemed to be onto his antics, to take the stance we’re trained to use
at elections: when someone wants help, they will ask for it. Should
I have intervened, though? More than once I opened my mouth to say to
the guy, look, lay the fuck off, OK? I didn’t want to step in where I
might not be wanted, though, and I didn’t want to suggest that she was
somehow incapable of ditching him and, happily, it turned out that she
was (capable). I honestly don’t know, though, if I drew the correct line on
when to intervene in what seemed like it had the potential to get
weird in a bad way.

…when there’s legal gay marriage happening RIGHT NOW in the District of Columbia!

WOO-HOO!

I’m not actually mad about this at all, it’s just that my car is red.

On Saturday I stopped in at Parker & Otis for something to eat before hitting the Carolina Theatre of Durham for the Oscar-nominated animated shorts program (also playing tomorrow, Thursday 4 March, and well worth it). I parked in a kind of isolated spot adjacent to their building, between a wall and a huge SUV, so I was kind of invisible. After I’d eaten, I came outside to find two of my car magnets – magnetic bumper stickers – were missing. They were one of the old red and blue “Vote for Change – Obama ’08″ circles and a highly stylized Cthulhu fish that parodies the Jesus fish that adorn so many cars.

At first, I assumed someone had been making an editorial comment. I didn’t see them, like, thrown down and stomped upon by indignant feet, though. The person also left behind my gay equality magnet, though since that’s just a yellow equals sign on a blue background, maybe it was too abstract for them to assign it any meaning? The other weird thing is that they left the other Obama magnet and the other Cthulhu fish on the other side of the car. (Their leaving the Cleveland Browns magnet is entirely understandable.)

So, did they just not see those? Were they afraid of getting caught? Or, is it that they wanted them for themselves? How strange to be left unsure whether I should feel annoyed or flattered by the sight of a blank red fender.

Either way, lame. They could have just left a note if they liked them or if they hated them. I’d find that a much more interesting experience.

Features:

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: A classic and with good reason. I laughed aloud in this movie, something modern comedies don’t often get me to do. Seeing this on the big screen with a willing and affable crowd was a genuine treat, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is why we have places like the Carolina.

Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula: A really interesting idea for a movie with some genuinely great moments and some inspired scenes. It does suffer from some low points and there isn’t nearly enough of the “vs. Dracula” part – and what there is doesn’t really make much sense – but when it hits, it hits. The leads portraying Bonnie & Clyde give really genuinely magnificent performances and the movie strikes a lot of its best notes when it emphasizes that those two characters are psychopaths in their own right. It also features the single best vampire-bites-victim scene I’ve ever seen in any movie. It has problems, make no mistake, but its peaks are some of the highest I’ve ever seen in a vampire movie. I would genuinely love to see the same people make a straight-up Bonnie & Clyde story because all of those parts are seriously fine work.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator: For decades this was the single best Lovecraft adaptation on film and even though it takes broad, broad liberties with Lovecraft’s original short story it still focuses on the same themes. Jeffrey Combs delivers what’s probably his finest performance in a Lovecraft adaptation – he’s been in a million of them – and the whole movie is basically non-stop awesome. I hadn’t seen it since, I don’t know, 8th or 9th grade, something like that, and I loved it. I noted afterwards, when talking about it with The Boyf and Mr. Pink Eyes, that I’ve never seen Re-Animator 2. I looked it up online out of curiosity only to find that a third movie, House of Re-Animator, has been announced for production this year and again it stars… Jeffrey Combs. How freaking rad is that?

Shorts program They’re Coming To Get You Barbara!:

Shapes: A nicely thematic little short that was well-made but didn’t necessarily break any new ground.

The Ugly File: Quite frankly, lousy. I liked the idea behind it but the execution lacked energy and resources to the point of distraction. I kept finding myself studying the decorating choices of the houses where it was shot and not the movie itself.

Monstrous Nature: Extremely well-executed and genuinely scary, even though I stayed ahead of it by a couple of minutes at any given point. The effects were particularly startling given that it tries to be more of a psychological story for the first 90% of the film.

Pigeon: Impossible: A very clever and genuinely funny animated short, well worth watching. I don’t really get how it wound up at a horror festival, but I’m glad I saw it.

Hector Corp.: A genuinely funny and slightly freaky short. Imagine the love-child of Office Space and Gremlins and I think you’re probably on the right track. Well made and gleefully delivered.

Snuggle Time: Another animated selection that is genuinely warm and funny in its delivery of a pretty straight-forward story. Any child could watch this and love it.

Dead Walkers: A really ambitious attempt at a wild west zombie story that suffers from never being quite sure what kind of movie it wants to be and a “twist” ending that is so ham fisted, by the book and yet simultaneously out of left field that it soured the whole experience. A box of good ideas that’s been shaken too hard. Great production values, though, and a net-positive experience in terms of pure entertainment.

Dead Creek: Extremely well-shot and with a genuinely compelling question at its core of whether it’s going to be a revenge movie or a monster movie, but one of the leads is so teeth-grindingly bad in her role that she drags the rest of it down with her. When the character finally turned up dead I honestly thought, well, at least something good happens in this movie.

I’ve seen one full-length movie and one collection of three shorts. Here are my thoughts so far:

Strigoi: Easily one of the most creative vampire films I’ve seen in years. Everyone is comparing it to Let The Right One In and for good reason: what that film achieves by mixing winter, loneliness and childhood together with vampirism, Strigoi does by mixing the end of Romanian Communism, small town life, the humor of practical matters in the face of fear and the annoyance of family ties with that same supernatural element. Beautifully shot and full of great performances, the only problem is that the sound is marginal in places. It’s filmed in English, but the accents are thick and the dialogue tramples itself sometimes. Subtitles would be most welcome.

AM1200 & Other Shorts:

Sinkhole: A great little short that does its thing and then calls it quits to good effect. The real estate agent is portrayed all too believably, perfect for bringing the real world into the movie with us, and the crazy old coot whose land he’s trying to buy has one of the better monologues I’ve seen in a horror movie. Lovely, big round of applause by the audience at the end.

Shrove Tuesday: “Very artistic” was the best I could do afterward. Interestingly filmed in places and interestingly animated in others, it never could quite figure out whether it wanted to be a cautionary tale, a dream sequence or a splatter flick. I could get behind a lot of individual parts of this movie but not the movie as a whole.

As always, the balcony had assholes in it and they seemed to find this movie hilarious at all the wrong times. For real, would it be too much to ask to have a house manager stop in upstairs once in a while? I can only move so many times in one movie. Ah, well, they shut up for the important bit, AM1200.

AM1200: An exquisite film with lush production, beautiful photography, sharply minimalist writing and incredible performances that focuses on creepy rather than jump-out-and-go-boo. This is a movie to which the term horror most definitely applies. Lovecraft could easily have written this and I mean that in the very best way. A guilty conscience leads the main character from one bad choice to another until everything spirals out of control and the entire time the audience sits there silently pleading with him to turn around, go back, look over his shoulder, lock the doors, anything but what he’s doing at the moment. When three or four hundred people simultaneously cry out in protest or shock and then stifle themselves, it’s like a low moan doing the wave across the theatre and it happened several times. Otherwise, almost utter silence throughout the cinema as everyone was captivated. Worth canceling other plans to go see this 40-minute film. It was the last thing I thought about last night and the first thing I thought about this morning.

You do know that the 2010 Nevermore Film Festival is this weekend, right? Lord, but it’s snuck up on me. I am not at all ready, but I am going to get ready tonight when Pants Wilder and I sit down with a schedule and talk interesting movies.

And let me assure you, there are a lot of interesting movies.

On my extended short list:

• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
• AM1200, which has Ray Wise (aka Leland Fucking Palmer)
• Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula, which would be on the bubble were it not for Drac
• Dawning, which looks fantastic
• Evil Angel, though I’m not really sure what it has to say about gender
• The shorts collection Four Minutes ‘Til Sunrise is required.
• Re-Animator, which is honest to (old) gods one of the best Lovecraft adaptations on film.
• Strigoi, for that Soviet Bloc vampire flavor.
• The shorts collection They’re Coming To Get You, Barbara!, which remains one of my favorite shorts titles evar.
• Witchboard, which is also kind of on the bubble but does remind me of some great times in junior high so, y’know, yeah. I’m there.

Like I said, that’s the extended list. I’m going to watch most of those, though, so if you’re in the area and see something on the list that you’d like to watch with someone virtually guaranteed to be more nelly than you, give me a shout.

Last night we got a little snow and a lot of sleet and when I couldn’t sleep I had to go out in it and take pictures. At one point I freaking huge black Mercedes made its way up our street, both unsteadily and quickly, shocking me into realizing that some people really will drive out in weather like this to get their drink on.

Around 3:00am a truck drove through and then back again, presumably dropping someone off. When they saw me they stopped and stared and even talked to one another about me before moving on. I said to The Boyf that I found this perfectly understandable since it’s not likely that someone standing in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, wrapped up like a Russian soldier and taking photos during a snow storm was high on their list of expectations.

Pictures I took at night and pictures I took when we went for a walk this afternoon are both up in my gallery installation.