Diskage:
DVD • Brotherhood of the Wolf
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Bang Tango - Psycho Cafe
• Mindfunk -  Mindfunk
• Guns 'n Roses - Use Your Illusion I
• Faster Pussycat - Wake Me When It's Over
• Rammstein - Mutter

Books Lying Open
• The Books of Blood, Volume Two, Clive Barker

• Tales of Terror and Madness, H. P. Lovecraft

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Sheep that demand counting.

When I Grow Up:
• The walls will have a fresh coat of paint.

Curse of the Day:
• May your accountant recommend you read up on foreign countries with no extradition agreements.

My only real sleep cycle objective is to not be awake in the day, since it's bright and noisy.  And hot lately, 85+ in my living room the past week, due to direct sunshine and zero clouds.  The air isn't that warm; if you get into the shade you almost need to put on a sweater, but it's very dry and hot, for November.  At work Sunday the sunny side of the stadium had people with their shirts off sweating, and the shade side had people in jackets with their hands in their pockets.  The stadium is always pretty cool, since there's so much deep concrete that never gets any sun, and all of the playing field and lower seating areas are below ground level.  Either that or the freezing pit straight to the 9th circle of hell below the owner's box works as a natural air conditioning.

As for the movie, I'm mildly looking forward to Harry Potter 2. I was too analytical for the first Harry Potter film, sort of daring it to not bore me, and expecting it to be cutesy and stupid and Disneyfied.  It wasn't that bad, but it was too long and boring at times, though it looked great and had quality acting.  I'll try to approach HP2 with higher expectations, not expecting it to be a masterpiece like LotR, but not a dopey kid's movie either.

I'll write something about it for tomorrow's update, no doubt.

I hardly ever get any referrals/links here from other sites, or at least I don't get many that anyone clicks upon.  One that popped up recently is a funny one though.  http://forum.fagfiction.net/  Yes, that's the name as it appeared on my site stats readout.  There's no site there as of now, just a link to the forum for the site, which seems to be moderately-busy.

I can't tell, at a glance, if it's actually a gay site, or just a weird name for a site.  The first forum post I clicked on doesn't help me figure it out, though it does have a link worth clicking.  It goes to SexDisney.com, which is about what you'd expect. Porn, but silly cartoon porn. I laughed out loud. The main page has a bunch of sample images from their movies, and it looks hysterical.  South Park porn is not something I'd ever considered the existence of.  Oddly, given the domain name, I didn't notice any Disney porn, but that's probably to do with the lack of hot chicks in their recent movies.  I remember seeing nude pics of The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas and Beauty all over the Internet, 5 or 6 years ago.

The next thread I looked in, from their Hentai forum, had a link to this page of Japanese cat photos, which for some reason made me laugh quite a bit.  There's nothing dirty about it, it's just a bunch of pictures of cats, but they are weird pictures.  Close ups of paws and stuff.

Anyway, someone somewhere on fagfiction posted a link to some page on this site, and to date (over the last 4 days) 43 people have clicked it.  That's not much compared to the thousands that come from Google and other search engines, but the site name is funny enough to make up for that.  I have no idea which forum post has the link here, which is too bad since I'd be curious to see what was said and linked to.  I don't know of any way to get google to target search their forum, so if anyone from there sees this, send me a link to where you saw a link here.

Possibly related to the incoming traffic from fagfiction.net is the following email that I received two days ago:

Hello,

Regarding your article about castration, I think it doesn't adequately examine *why* someone would have a logical reason of being castrated.

You may want to add a link to this site.

It's the website of a man who had his penis and testicles surgically removed on an elective basis, doesn't take testosterone shots, and likes the way he is.

Phillip

I don't think my castration article adequately-examines much of anything, so he's not lying about that.  I also enjoy the opening to use the concept of "inadequate" in relation to castration.  

I have not yet examined this new "happiness is being a Ken doll" link, but at some point I'll look it over and have something to say about that right here, and will then paste that into the castration article.  That's one of the few articles that I haven't added multiple posts to, primarily since I don't have cause to talk about the subject all that often.  Thank god.

I'm assuming the guy must have some huge self-hatred issue.  Most castration is from weird, usually gay, fantasies about having your balls tortured.  Men who have them crushed or cut out (professionally or as part of S&M torture) almost always retain their penis, and with testosterone shots they can still get erections and ejaculate, though not any sperm, obviously.  Sort of a case of not having your cake, but still eating it.  Also, if you don't have testosterone, you lose your male appearance, to some extent. Very old people, men and women, often start to sort of look alike, descending into this stoop-shouldered, toothless, semi-alien appearance, since their gender-reinforcing hormones stop being produced.

I saw a forum post on AICN discussing the LotR:TTT score, and there were links posted to six of the tracks.  I grabbed them all and the sound quality is just okay, a couple are very low volume, but it's nice to have a listen now; get you into the mood for the movie.  Or something.  They sound pretty much like everything off of the Lotr:FotR score, in my opinion, but then I think most classical music sounds alike so I'm not the best judge.

• Evenstar
• The White Rider
• Isengard Unleashed
• Hornburg
• The Riders of Rohan
• Forth Eorlingas

I've never bothered to own any movie scores. I enjoy the instrumental stuff during the film, but never enough to listen to just on it's own.  Lots of the music in LotR:FotR was very good with the images, but I think I'd find it a lot less engrossing solo.  Good background music for when I'm writing and want some sound, but nothing that's really going to claim my attention, but nothing I'd listen to on purpose the rest of the time.  I feel the same way about classical music; great background noise to talk to someone over, or while working, but not engrossing enough to really entertain me, other than the rare violin-heavy number.

Some news.

• Amusing Ten Commandments news of late.  A born-again judge, Chief Justice Roy Moore, in Alabama has worked to impose his view of Christianity upon US law for his entire career. His latest efforts have been trying to get the Ten Commandments on display in his courtrooms.  He's been blocked from doing so, since it's quite obviously a violation of various separation of church and state edits in the US Constitution.  Not content to obey the laws (an odd state of affairs for an elected judge) he had a big Ten Commandments statue made at his own expense, and then had workers drag it into the federal courthouse where he worked, and bolt it to the floor in the middle of the night.  Since then he's been doing all he can to block efforts to have it removed.

A federal judge ruled that it must be removed, but Roy Moore and his attorney are vowing to fight on, saying they'll probably appeal to the Supreme Court.  I really have no idea what legal precedent they think they can appeal to, other than the, "We're religious and we really really want everyone else to live under our religion." plan.  Which, while compelling to them, isn't exactly legally binding in the United States in 2002.

There are a couple of pictures of the statue here, with the highly-paraphrased Ten Commandments legible in the stone.  The larger question, in my mind, is why people are trying to include the Ten Commandments in US courts or laws anyway.  Hardly any of them are actually illegal, nor should they be.  I wrote about this months ago, so I'll just link to that rather than belaboring it anew.

• Interesting article about Al Gore, and what he's been doing for the past two years since he won the election, but did not become the president.  It's based on extensive one on one interviews with the man, and you'll gain more insight into his personality than you've ever had before.  And yes, he does have a personality.  Or at least his programming has been upgraded to include a much better facsimile of one.

One interesting tidbit is that the head of the FOX "news" division was sending over memos full of advice on how to keep the American people supportive of the war effort.

Roger E. Ailes, a media coach for Bush's father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a confidential communication to the White House in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the president. "His back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible," Woodward wrote. He added that Ailes, who has angrily challenged reports that his news channel has a conservative bias, added a warning: "Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly."

I'm actually surprised to hear that Ailes bothers to deny that FOX has a right wing bias; I thought that was their whole raison d'étre, to present a right wing/pro-republican perspective on the news to counter what they and most conservatives like to say is the liberal bias of the mainstream news.  And the apparent fact that Ailes is sending Bush memos on how to craft the news coverage of things to keep support up is pretty instructive.  Perhaps he was absent the day his journalism class professor explained the essential journalistic principles of objectivity and impartiality?

There are also three book excerpts, all of which are damn interesting.  This one discusses the CIA money men who were dropped into Afghanistan with literally millions of dollars in US cash money, up to $3million in a single briefcase, in one example.  They spent around $70m total in bribes and payoffs to get Taliban to defect, to get local warlords to fight on the US side, or at least to not shoot at US troops.  The mission was actually quite a success, ethical squishiness about paying off the supposedly terrorism-sponsoring enemies aside.  It was much cheaper to buy people off than what it would have cost to import tens of thousands of US troops, fly thousands more bombing missions, etc.  Not to mention the lesser loss of life.

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in 10 stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say: We're here, we're serious, here's money, we know you need it.

"What we want you to do is use it," he said. "Buy food, weapons, whatever you need to build your forces up." It was also for intelligence operations and to pay sources and agents. There was more money available -- much more. Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

The problem is that we've now abandoned Afghanistan and with the CIA no longer there throwing money around, the warlords are no longer keeping people off the US' troops, and there are daily attacks and bombs set on the roads.  The Russians poured everything they had into Afghanistan, occupying the entire country for over a decade, and finally had to give up and withdraw in failure.  That would seem to be a pretty simple lesson to learn from, but it seems that the US policy-makers didn't.

Tom Tomorrow has good coverage of this unfortunate turn of events, with links to supporting articles about it in USA Today, Time, and the LA Times.

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