Enjoyed a thunderstorm. Read this week's Economist (apparently there's some sort of oil crisis going on... apparently it costs too much... who knew?). Watched some NHL and some Doctor Who (finally a decent episode for season 4 -- thank the gods for Moffat). Played lots of Crysis but I'm still not sure if like it a lot (while very similar, it's somehow not as good as Far Cry; maybe it's too similar?). Ate corn from its cob and liked it a lot. Drank Perrier and liked it a lot. Smoked a Romeo y Julieta and liked the last third a lot. Didn't sleep very well so found myself up at 3am reading Ain't It Cool News talkbacks. Going back to that now....

Watched Walk Hard which was good but might have been better if I had seen any of the films it parodies. Read Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein, which is a novel (Ellis's first) with some twisted ideas inside (my concept of training monkeys to operate robotic sex toys would have been too tame for him to include in there, the freak-o). I also caused virtual explosions to emanate from my graphics card inside of Crysis (as well as a lot of real heat; I had to rig a little external fan to the side of my opened pc case to cool down the processor). Ate chicken, etc. Drank Perrier, etc. Smoked a Gurkha Triple Ligero toro. Plotted various revenge schemes upon those who have disobeyed me.

Went to the supermarket in order to stock up on Perrier and chilled animal slices. They wanted some extra USD for prostate cancer research (which I usually support since that's what killed Zappa); last month it was breast cancer (which I usually support since I love breasts); before that it was Special Olympics (and so now is where I start to have a problem see, since isn't it sort of like asking strangers to help fund your kid's summer camp or boyscout uniform or ballet lessons? Isn't it sort of a scam, sort of preying on people's sympathies, taking advantage of their compassion? I mean these parents of specially-abled offspring aren't saving for college, right? There's no piano no saxamaphone to buy, no football uniform, chemistry set, Toyota compact, robot assembly kit, right? I mean, I don't want to sound insensitive but... well, I probably am.)

Read some tech books and some Third Reich, fell asleep several times, ate spaghetti and meatballs, drank Perrier, howled at the new moon (I'm an anti-werewolf, which is rare), played some Doomsday instead of that overrated Crysis, and generally wished I was slightly different in some vague and abstract way that continues to elude me.

Consumed mojito chicken with mojito salsa. Also had some mojitos. Realized I don't really like mojito that much. Watched Juno, which is sort of 2007's Little Miss Sunshine in the way the Hollywood media kept insisting it was the greatest thing since French bread but which turns out to be mainly mediocre like pita. Mainly I was annoyed by the primarily chick-music soundtrack. Also all the pregnancy stuff, which is just unpleasant. Read some tech books. No cigar, I'm cutting down.

Watched some Seinfeld. (Something's always bothered me about Seinfeld's apartment on that show: if you look at the geometry of the apartment compared to the geometry of the hallway outside, you'll notice that the kitchen extends well into what should be the hallway. Bad kitchen! I find warps in space very distracting.) Also watched NHL Hockey (I hate the Red Wings). Read this long "open letter" by a self-described Jacobite reactionary concerning world peace, Protestant denominations, Whigs, the American Revolution, progressivism, international law, and a bunch of other crap that made my head spin.

D Minus 0

[Removed]

Sat on my couch. Watched some BSG there (Hooray, the resurrection hub is destroyed! Now the self-replicating machines can't self-replicate anymore because all the replication instructions were never replicated hooray! Silly computers! But I did like the scene where Baltar delivers a meme-virus to the Cylon Centurions.) Also watched the new Doctor Who (a clumsy start threatened to drown the premise in unneeded, unwanted exposition (ghost-girl in dream-land), and the end was nearly destroyed by a ridiculous plot point (the self-destruct) -- but overall a decent episode, especially the stuff with the Doctor's future companion). Read this week's Economist and some Third Reich. Drank Guinness. Ate Pizza. Smoked a Gurkha Regent toro.

Another of the old SF pillars falls. Budrys was one of several editors who gave me good critical evaluation and encouragement back when I was submitting stories to markets. He will be missed.

A lot of sleep. Some napping. A quiet snooze.

Test testing this is a test.

I hate nature. And the power company, who can't seem to find a solution to the vexing problem of falling tree branches. So another night spent warm and muggy, staring stupidly from the chairs on my porch drinking cranberry and vodka cocktails as the rest of the electrified world stares dazedly into various types of magical boxes presently unavailable to us. (I still haven't found a manly drink that doesn't upset the old gulliver, clearly, but something has to change. I mean, when you're drinking cranberry and vodka you're just a lifestyle choice away from cosmopolitans.) And every now and then my neighbor (I call him the Chinaman but he doesn't seem to mind; at least not in English) arrives on his balcony to light up a cigarette. I haven't missed cigarettes very often since our parting company, but it is relatively extreme circumstances that make me desire a reunion: long drives, traffic jams, and somber serious drinking sessions in which mortality and duty figure as primary conversation topics are several others. I have cigars but they're not the same sport as cigarettes; for all their greater purity, craftsmanship, and complexity, cigars are for lighter moods, for celebration, for self-satisfaction, for the position of royal ease. Cigarettes, while typically abused by sallow faced housefraus, convenience store loiterers, and ominous government men in dark suits, are serious. When we smoke cigarettes we show the world that our current circumstances weigh so heavily upon us that health and old age are but trivial and distant concerns. Cigarettes are for nights when nothing much seems to matter anymore. When we struggle to steady frayed nerves, to focus wild eyes, to maintain sangfroid, we need a cigarette (at last my hand is complete again!). But I didn't smoke any. The Chinaman said no (he doesn't seem to like me for some reason). And then in the morning: a cold shower, store-bought coffee, and a lingering odor of third-world deprivation. Ah humanity!

Here are my answers (this is all the rage in the bloggo, dudes):

• 12 gauge shotgun (got to go with the classic)
• Fauré's Requiem in D (has an edgy goth quality largely missing in e.g. Mozart's)
• Superman (I mean come on, why work if you don't have to?)

These long exposure shots of public places are mind blowing. I've often tried to imagine how space would appear if people left a tint behind them, coloring their world with the memory of their presence; how full our space would become below a height of six feet, with airplane streaks through the sky, thick ship trails stretching across the oceans, tiny tendrils crawling their way up mountain trails. But these photos give the opposite impression: rather than permanence, one sees ghosts in fading light, smoke and ashes, a fragile cloud more like memory than imagery.

Ate Canton Duck (ye gods I love chewing on that fatty greasy bird). Drank Perrier. Earlier I was traveling in my SUV to the supermarket in order to get the Perrier, and on the other side of the street fifty yards ahead a man and his little kid stood on the curb. Another car approached from the opposite direction. The little kid stepped off the curb into the street! The man was talking on his mobile phone and didn't notice! The oncoming car didn't slow down as the kid walked right out in front of it! I punched my car horn several times, the man looked around, the car slowed down, the man dashed into the street and swept the kid up into his arms! The other car went away. The man put the kid down and returned to his mobile phone. I went to the supermarket. I am Batman. But nobody, not the man nor the driver of the car nor the dopey little kid, none of them, bothered to thank me. It sure is lonely in Gotham.

These past several weeks I've been stuck with some unexpected free time due to a contract limbo, so I've been venturing into the Windows partition to check out some of the video games I've missed over the past several years. Suck! I played Valve's first-person puzzle game Portal, which was a fun little waste of time but nothing to dance around about (except when the cute closing credits song is playing). But otherwise: suck! I played Crysis, which is sort of the sequel to what I once considered the best FPS ever produced, Far Cry (I say sequel despite the recent announcement of an actual Far Cry 2 in development), but despite some spectacular graphics, suck! Boring! I looked at other games that also sucked. I tried to play Civ 3 (which I used to love) and Civ 4 (which I never quite got into), but never reloaded a saved game. I found myself playing Doom 2 instead. And I figured, hell, I can play Doom 2 in Ubuntu, so I left the Windows partition, and now I think it will be forever. I believe I will reclaim that disk for file storage (in addition to my existing 2 terabytes of external storage -- I'm a digital pack-rat). And I think I'm done with games now. I think I'm maybe too old for them. Sigh.

The song of the year so far is Moorestown from Sun Kil Moon's new release. This is one of several new songs Kozelek has been playing live for some time, and usually when I get used to a live version I'm not a fan of the studio release (as with Void and Cruiser), but this one is really just perfect. Unfortunately, it makes me weep like a baby. Just like old times!

Drank Guinness and Perrier (not together). Ate something, I forget what. Smoked a fantastic Gurkha Titan toro. Just fantastic! Goofed off for a while. Watched BSG (oh it was the tensest, it was! Damn you Adama, if you don't send me your blombeebles I will kill all your friends! But Xena, I don't know what blombeebles are! You have 15 mintons or it's too bad she won't live! What the frak are blombeeb-- 14 mintons! Blaaagharrrrgh...! Oh the tension I tell you! Bill, I'm a Cylon. Blaaagharrrrgh...! With all the running around! And not pressing big red buttons! There's something about that space-viper, I think. Oh pshaw! No really. Well... Why, it's an intergalactic compass it is! That's pretty thin, I think. But let's join up with the genocidal robots and convey the entire human race there anyway! For about five minutes here as the two fleets jump toward Earth my fondest, most sparkly hope in all the universe is that they arrive at present-day Earth and the Cylons start nuking the shit out of it... alas for missed opportunities. Gosh darn, they blewed it all up without us! Now what do you make of that? I blame you, Starbuck, you were here last -- can't you keep anything nice? "So... you're a Cylon now, huh?" "Well, it's not like I'm gay or anything!") Phttft.

Mostly watched US Open. Also squeezed in the new Doctor Who: (which started out drenched in cheese (the Doctor on a sight-seeing excursion? In the far future on a distant planet with a bunch of human tourists who dress and behave exactly like people do now?) but soon grew into a tense story with very good performances by many of the actors involved. It sort of went from Nightmare at 20,000 Feet to Hitchcock's Lifeboat; certainly an unusual kind of Who episode).

Also watched the pilot for JJ Abrams new series Fringe (which despite the producer's insistence that the series is not X-Files Too, is kind of X-Files Too. That's not a bad thing, it's just a thing. It also has similarities to Alias, which is also fine. One slight annoyance is with Joshua Jackson (best known as one of the Dawson's Creek kids) who seems to have made an intensive study of George Clooney in order to adopt his mannerisms. He's like a mini-Clooney in Fridge-- er, Fringe, and who really needs a mini-Clooney all that much?).

Watched the pilot for Alan Ball's new series True Blood. It's about vampires joining mainstream society as a hip new minority group after the invention of synthetic blood allows them to reveal themselves to humanity (nope, I'm not kidding). The setting for this brilliant backstory is muggy Louisiana (bayou backwoods in the pilot, not New Orleans), where a bunch of unpleasant people do unpleasant things with one another for ~50 minutes. The audience (as represented by yours truly) is forced to wonder if Ball has lost his mind or if he had been overrated all along.

Also, this being leaked-pilot season and all, watched the first episode of the new Showtime series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. This one stars Billie Piper (best known in the US as Rose Tyler in the revamped Doctor Who; I think she was some sort of pop star in the UK before that) as a -- yes, you guessed it -- whore. Which is pretty much the main selling point for the program since it boasts little else of interest. (The Who fanboys are scratching holes in their jeans over this one.) (Which reminds me I need to order some new jeans.)

And I watched some of this year's AFI program America's 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres which treated me to remarks by such cinematic luminaries as Jennifer Love Hewitt and Brad Garrett about such things as the camera technique employed in Beauty and the Beast or the use of color in Finding Nemo (or some such shit, I forget what all). Eventually I realized that tuning Firefox to the AFI website the next day would save me about three hours of my life.

And so anyway.

Golf dudes and other sporting types have called Tiger Woods the greatest athlete ever. They said he plays golf better than anyone else does anything else. They described for me -- there in the lecture hall after I had assembled all the experts for an explanation -- that his ability to put his body through those same and similar motions with such perfection and with such consistency makes him some kind of miracle. And so! At the US Open last weekend, what a wonder, how could it be, who could now doubt it? How could Tiger have won that tournament with a ruptured ACL a-and a double stress fracture for all 91 holes (four rounds + one overtime round + one sudden death hole)? Surely the second coming is at hand!

Alas, my doubts have outpaced my admiration. For how indeed could this man, even this Tiger, play 91 holes of PGA golf -- in the biggest tournament of the year against other perfectly fit experts of the same game -- and win the tournament with such injuries, how could it be? Either Tiger Woods is some sort of superman robot god (a miracle, a wonder indeed!) or the game, this game of professional golf isn't all that tough after all. For could a mere human man play a full game of hockey with such injuries? A game of basketball or football (or indeed futball) or even baseball? I maintain they could not! Not! And so it is bleak for me today. Bleak! I am betrayed by golf.

Watched The Ruins (a mediocre, jungle-excursion-goes-wrong sort of flick; the moral of this kind of movie seems to be to not trust your vacation plans to Europeans, especially when they're from east of the Maginot Line). Me also watched the new Doctor Who (a mediocre sort of filler episode, and a prologue for next week's finale and the return of Davros, Jerry, Davros!). Watched the pilot for Life on Mars (mediocre, but I'm struck once again by the apparent fact that, aside from Patrick Stewart, the most successful post-Star Trek: TNG actor has been Colm Meaney -- how weird is that?). Watched Rush Hour 3 (eeegh, not even mediocre). Did some other mediocre stuff but why dwell on it?

Supreme Court Gov upholds the 2nd Amendment and shows how ridiculous some of the gun-controller-robot readings of the Constitution really are (read the pdf opinion here or some outtakes from the majority here). I would be happier but it's sort of like patching up one hole in the dam while a thousand others spill brown smelly flood water all over my new shoes. Still, at least now I can shoot at whomever comes to take away my beloved tobacco, SUV, and transfats.

Neal Stephenson's new novel, Anathem is due Sept. 9. Now this here dude says the book comes with a music CD. (I would have preferred pancakes.)

I don't post too many YouTube vids (or links to anything really) but this one is quite good. Reminds me of those old BOFH doodads.

This weekend I had the misfortune to watch some of the EURO 2008 futball final (slept through most of it actually, what a yawn-inducing sport), and while there were about twenty annoying things about it, the most annoying was the flaky Euro audience that just would not shut up with the flaky Euro songs all the time. How incredibly tedious they are! In the arena, outside the arena, in the streets, in the bars, everywhere, like a flood of obnoxious Euro noise made by obnoxious Euro Euros, all flaking out together to a self-produced soundtrack of flakery, eeeegh.

And then -- then! -- the kick in the ass, when Spain -- Spain! -- is made to feel proud of its rotten self. I hate Spain. Compared to its European neighbors it has contributed nothing to the world or to humanity. Aside from Cervantes, there is no great Spanish literature; there are no great Spanish composers; there is no great Spanish art aside from Goya (and I am not forgetting about overrated Picasso, that wacko Dali, or that blight-builder Gaudi); there are no great Spanish philosophers (I don't count Santayana as Spanish); there have been no great Spanish scientists, technologists, or physicians. In fact, so wait, what is Spain best known for after all? For the genocide and enslavement of millions of indigenous peoples in Central and South America; for the Spanish Inquisition; and for that barbaric sport bull-fighting. Screw Spain. Spain sucks. No more Spain.

So Spain sucks, but so does Wargames: The Dead Code, a straight-to-DVD 2008 sequel to Wargames that is so completely devoid of logic that one imagines the writer must have been addicted to banging his head onto a cinder block for most of his adult life.

Also sucking is the 2008 indie flick Suspension, which was a strong attractor for me since it's about this dude who is able to stop time, and that's my favorite super-power. Problem is it's mostly about this dude whose family is suddenly dead, and also about this woman whose fiance is also suddenly dead, and they're both real sad about all that as you can imagine, but none of it -- as you can also imagine -- is very entertaining. Topping it off, every time the dude stops time it causes the woman to fugue out and then collapse and get all bloody and weird, so it takes a lot of the fun out of stopping time. Which is supposed to fun, damn it! So I didn't watch much of that one.

Also watched this week's Doctor Who, the penultimate episode of the season, and the last new Who until 2010 or something ridiculous. This episode was all over the place and muddled with too much going on, but hopefully the conclusion on Saturday will repair it. There was one event of rather great (potential) significance that the Who-nerds have been busily chattering about. We are all quite concerned, I assure you.

So the weekend was weak on entertainment, but tonight, it's concert in the park with Yo-Yo Ma, who is always great, and then tomorrow: Puccini, Jerry, Puccini! I have to go get my opera hat out of the closet now.