Daily
Blog
I had the almost-overpowering
urge yesterday evening to shut down email, ICQ, browser, and all other
distracting software, and just write. Work on the damn fantasy
novel I have almost all plotted out in my head, do a new short story,
something. Fortunately I was able to resist it and just dick
around with browsing and playing some D2 and dozing off in my chair. I
want to see a movie sometime. I've been meaning to see Minority
Report since it got good enough reviews that I could overlook Tom
Cruise's participation, but haven't been bothered to do so yet. My
dad wanted to see it with me, but since he had his back surgery a few
weeks ago, he still can't sit down in most chairs for that long.
Has to get up and shift around or stretch or pick a chair with less
lower back support. And being as movies pretty much invariably
involve quite a while sitting, he's not wanted to go yet. Besides
the horribly-named Minority Report (it just invariably brings to mind
some sort of uncomfortable-to-watch, humorless, depressing, racial
tension-filled drama), Reign of Fire opened this weekend, and though I'm
sure I'll find it utterly stupid and suck, I want to see the k3wl
dragoonz flying around and cooking people. A friend of mine saw it
and thought it was okay, but said she'd be fine not seeing it again or
buying the DVD. Which is a mixed review at best. Critical mass on
it is quite mixed also, with most reviewers not liking it, but overall
it's doing better on reviews than most dumb action movies. Better
than MiB2, for comparison's sake. Plus the veins of Reign of Fire
doesn't flow with cutesy/campy pastel-colored blood, as every review
reports MiB2 drowning in. I'm
off Wednesday and Thursday, so maybe I'll get a king size peanut
M&Ms and smuggle in a Dr. Pepper and catch Reign of Fire then on the
matinee discount. As
usual, it's past dawn and I'm past bedtime, so on to the news stuff.
Vandals attack a synagogue in the UK, part of a rising amount of fascist
right wing activity across Europe. One
funny thing in the article:
A burnt torah scroll,
a swastika scrawled on a wall and virulent anti-Semitic graffiti
greeted the elderly members of Wales's oldest Jewish community
yesterday as they opened the door to their synagogue.
"T4 Jewish C**ts
from Hitler," was daubed on the wall an apparent reference to
the Nazis' T-4 euthanasia programme, which was responsible for the
deaths of thousands of disabled people during the Second World War.
Yes, "an apparent
reference". They're not sure though. And maybe they
didn't mean "Hitler", the WW2 Nazi guy, but this other guy's
dog, who he named Hitler.
This
is weird.
The corpse of a woman
who died more than 2,000 years ago has been found well preserved in a
mystery fluid in eastern China, state media reported today.
The body of the woman, who was believed to have lived during the
Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 24 AD), still had some of her skin,
muscle tissue and veins, according to the Xinhua news agency.
They don't know what
the fluid is/was yet. I suspect it's the blood of newborns, whose
hearty souls have sustained her through the eons of her undead
slumber. Or maybe rain water.
A man who called a woman a "Nigger" in Lancaster Pennsylvania was
sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $200 fine. Perhaps he
deserved to be punched out, but is this really illegal? I mean we
do have a variety of constitutional provisions in this country that
address this sort of freedom of speech type issue. The article
gutlessly doesn't mention the race of anyone involved, though the
implication is the guy was white and the women were black. Which
I'd think would factor in legally; if he could have said the exact same
thing to another person (who wasn't black) and not had it be a
crime. Offensive language is entirely in the ear of the beholder,
after all.
If you are lucky enough to have escaped a fascist-style country, it's
probably best
if you don't return for a funereal.
After learning that
his mother had died, Mr Khordadian returned to Iran and spent a couple
of months visiting relatives and friends. He was arrested at the
airport when he tried to leave.
His horrible sin?
Making Iranian folk dance videos while living in California for the last
22 years. He's was able to get out of Iranian prison after a few
months, but they have revoked his passport, and he's now stuck in Iran
and unable to leave for 10 years.
What I'm wondering is
how did he live in the US for 22 years, and he's not a citizen?
Dual citizenship? Illegal alien? I would think that if he
had switched to US citizenship, this would be an international incident
by now. It occurs to me that there probably is not a US
embassy in Iran, given what happened to the last one there in the
revolution in the 70's, but obviously the US government would be making
noise about our citizen being held hostage there; if he were a US
citizen.
I wrote a couple of days ago about the "authorities" wild
goose chasing around after every single terrorist threat. The
media isn't any better, though at least they'll write insulting
articles about being hoaxed after the fact.
A rather distasteful story, with an absolutely
hideous photo of a grotesquely fat man's naked stomach. In
fact I'm not sure why I'm even posting about it. I guess to share
my pain.
PORKY
Shaun Reaney was saved by his beer gut when thugs slashed open his
belly with a circular saw. The 22-stone builder suffered a gaping
18-inch wound that would have killed a normal weight man. But docs
were able to sew up the wound without complications because the
blade did not get through his blubber.
Lest you wonder,
a "stone" is an archaic UK term of weight, corresponding to
about 15 pounds, or just under 7kg, if you prefer metric. So the
butterball weighs 330lbs, and it looks like maybe half of that's in his
gut.
His wife Theresa, 36,
said: The docs told me if he had been ten stone lighter he would
have died. The saw would have sliced into his internal organs. When
Shaun came round he reminded me that his years of boozing had saved
his life.
She's awfully
forgiving, considering she has to see him naked and be trapped beneath
him once or twice a month when his grease-clogged arteries supply
sufficient blood to his penis for it to become functional. Also
nice of her and the police (and the article) to avoiding pointing out
that if he'd weighed 10 stone less he might have been able to move
quickly enough to not get nearly killed in the first place.
The whole story seems a
bit suspect, what with mystery assailants attacking him with his own
masonry tool, and then stealing his truck. If you were the
suspicious type you might think he'd had an accident and invented this
to cover it up, or that he'd gone to buy drugs and it turned bad.
Hard to see why four guys trespassing on a soccer field would have
turned so quickly to attempted murder. Though there are a bunch of
articles
lately about violent mobs of drunken English, usually involving
footie.
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