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Daily Blog
Had a nice dinner out, ate with my dad at a decent seafood place.  Their daily special (which probably runs for 3 weeks) was Hawaiian entrees, and I got the Mahi Mahi with coconut seasonings and stir fried snap peas and carrots, and a scoop of white rice. As with all good food, it was tasty, semi-fancy, and not a lot of it.

So now I'm making a pizza.

It's 6 hours after dinner though (dinner time, my brunch time), so I'm allowed.

A few odd news items:

With any luck you've seen or heard about the weird human corpse art work that's been touring Europe to enormous crowds. It's in the UK now and making a lot of news.  I imagine once it's in the US (if it's coming here?) it'll be more controversial, since we've got so many religious types who find a reason to object to just about anything unusual.  The beauty of the Bible; you can use it to excuse, explain, object to, or hate virtually anything, if you just look hard enough.

Anyway, the art is just so weird, human corpses, partially dissected, and in some medical procedure the artist infuses them with some sort of clear plastic solution. So they are embalmed and preserved, while being totally visible.  And it's not just dead naked people, they are all partially dissected, looking like plate 2 or 3 in a transparency series of the human body in an anatomy book.

Some shots of it in the UK can be seen here.  None of the pics are very high quality, alas.  The last one of the pregnant woman is amazing, though the one of the guy and horse is technically more impressive.

Speaking of "technical impressive" how about this shot?  It's of a taxidermy'd fox, poised on one foot as it leaps away from a weasel, a stolen fish in its mouth. I saw the link to the site on Penny Arcade, and was amazed at the size and weirdness of the stuffed animals.  It's sort of sad, but let's be rational, it's not like any of them are endangered species. Just furry and noble and innocent and all that.

As Gabe said on PA about it, who the hell would want those, or have room to display them?  I mean it's a full-size Polar Bear, with 2 wolves, and a caribou skull, on a stand.  That would fill my apartment.  In even uglier fashion than my current "cram in technology until there's no room, and cover the walls with random post impressionist reprints, mostly torn from old calendars", which is saying something.

Don't show this sort of thing to girls.  Even if you send them the URL with a "god what weird things people do" note.  Especially not the page with the stuffed kitties. You might get a reply like this:

That went over well, eh? ;)

BTW, I told her I didn't surf Korean cooking sites much, but I'd keep my eyes open.

Another link from Penny Arcade, this one of a very cool 10 minute short film.  It requires knowledge of the conventions of Internet chat rooms to really appreciate it, but I can't imagine anyone reading this doesn't have at least rudimentary knowledge of such things.  The first few minutes are fascinating as you realize what's going on, then it's slow a bit, but stick with it, the ending is just brilliant.  I almost always see that sort of thing coming, but I'll admit that this one took me fully by surprise.

Proof, at last, that not every possible profanity-filled domain name is actually a porno site!  Rejoice!  I saw this as a sponsor on The Onion; not as another result of my self-destructive tendency to occasional urge to type in random curse word domain names.

I love the Antiques Roadshow on PBS.  I watch it like a mental patient; Rainmanesque, it comes on and I stare hypnotized.  It's on right now at 2-3am, and only because I've seen this particular episode before am I able to concentrate enough to type this update and eat pizza.

I love the show, and it reveals the ultimate truth of antiques: It doesn't matter how ugly something is, it doesn't matter how mangy something is, as long as it's old.  And rare.

So interesting news item on AICN, that Guillermo Del Toro, the director of Blade 2, has optioned Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and will be making a film of it.  He called it his LotR.

I droll in anticipation, since I really enjoy Lovecraft's stories.  But on second though, I'm surprised that one is the one they'd pick.  It's not a real movie-like story, mostly with offscreen terror (which is usually the case in Lovecraft) and it seems like it would be unnecessarily expensive, with enormous sets of lost civilizations, endless massive buildings, glaciers, tons of freezing snow location shots, etc.  And it's not much of a movie, since there aren't any characters in it.  I mean there are people, a narrator, but all they really do is look around, and run at the end.  There aren't any conversations or confrontations or fights.

Of course movies take liberties with the source material, and much wild action takes place in the story, though it's all discovered later by investigators, and reconstructed from evidence.  Obviously that could and probably should be changed around some to have the action take place in the film.

I have the idea now to do a page discussing various Lovecraft stories, and their relative merits/demerits as films. Not that I expect anyone making said movies would see it or care if they did, but it's something of interest to me, so I'll work on that tonight.

Long ago when I was first really into Lovecraft, in probably like 1988 or 1990, I didn't know anyone else who had read anything of his stuff.  There was no internet, there wasn't much knowledge of Lovecraft, and I'd sort of discovered him after seeing Clive Barker and others mention his work as an inspiration, and I was blown away.  They aren't real "readable", not instantly-accessible horror, like say Stephen King, very wordy, overlong in the prose, and not much action.  It's mostly of fscreen, hinting of horrible things, left to the reader's imagination.  As opposite the current trends in fiction and film as anything could be, probably.

Lovecraft is featured on my Horror Novelists review page, and just re-reading it now I think my comments there are pretty reasonable.

My point on my reading Lovecraft over a decade ago was that I started creating a full review/analysis of his every story, just to have something to do.  This was long before the Internet, and I never considered that I might have the work published anyway, nor did I come near finishing it.  It was just an author I liked that most people making Stephen King and Clive Barker and Anne Rice and others best-sellers had never heard of.  Also Lovecraft's stories tend to blur together in the mind, all involving similarly eerie gothic horror, and it was sort of a Cliff's Notes for me to keep them straight.  Though why I needed to keep them straight since it was just in my own head and not being used for anything else is unknown.

Anyway, I haven't read the article I put together on his work in at least 8 or 9 years, but I did copy it over from my old floppy disks a few weeks ago, and I'll go dust it off and add it to this site, if it's of a reasonable quality.  Would perhaps be interesting to people who hadn't read Lovecraft, and it'll refresh my memory on some of his work for the movie-viability page I want to work on tonight.

I'm in the mood for writing tonight, and tired of doing all of the link-tastic and technical features on the D2 site, but not really in the mood for writing fiction, so this is an in-between feature.

Also I'm a bit of a hit-whore, being used to the tens of thousands of daily readers on the D2 site, and features I think might be popular and get me some linkage are attractive. *cough*

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