Curse of the Day:
¤ May your art purchases involve supermarket sidewalks.

Word of the Moment:
¤ Word: Janky (adj)
¤ Usage: "That movie sucked.  It was hella-janky."
¤ Synonyms: Crappy, inadequate, lame, or to a lesser degree, just different than how you want something.
¤ Deviations: Jankalicious, jankitude. Frequently paired with "hella".
¤ Origin: Unknown/pop culture.  Malaya was using it regularly when I moved up here in mid-July and I'd heard it before, but hadn't really incorporated it into my vocabulary until hearing her use it frequently.
¤ Notes: Currently in heavy rotation, frequently used for comedic effect. Can be made to fit virtually all situations. -- August 5, 2003

We're beginning to see news about Mel Gibson's "Death of Jesus" movie on a more regular basis, as it's finished and is being screened by various groups.  What sort of groups?

In recent weeks, the actor-director has been building support with invitation-only screenings for film industry insiders, conservative commentators, evangelical Christians and sympathetic Jews.

He's really taking on his critics full force, eh?

An article from the Guardian UK has a lot more detail.

On the face of it Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion, appears to be little more than a work of celluloid self-indulgence by a Hollywood veteran. Portraying the final 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ, it has no distributor, features no stars and the dialogue is in Latin and Aramaic. It is not even certain whether the final product will have subtitles.

Yet the film, co-directed by Gibson, who has spent $25m (£15.6m) of his own money on the project, has already attracted lavish praise from evangelicals and stern criticism from Jewish and Catholic scholars, with one academic warning that it could provoke within the US "one of the great crisis in Christian-Jewish relations".

The star has claimed the "Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just directing traffic. I hope the film has the power to evangelise". But a panel of three Jewish and six Catholic scholars, who have studied a draft script, say the film is anti-semitic and theologically inaccurate, portraying Jews as bloodthirsty and vengeful and reviving the worst traditions of the passion plays which contributed to deadly attacks against Jews over the centuries.

"When we read the screenplay our sense was this wasn't really something you could fix. All the way through, the Jews are portrayed as bloodthirsty," said Sister Mary C Boys, a professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary. "We're really concerned that this could be one of the great crises in Christian-Jewish relations."

It's interesting that Mel cares enough about this to spend all of the time and money (another article recently said it was over $30m of his own coin thus far), and given the whole history of "indulgences" in Catholicism, you might be tempted to wonder what the hell sins he perpetrated that he's working so hard to buy his way out of.

It also sounds like Mel is mainstreaming it, since early reports (which were perhaps in error) said it was like eight hours long.  It is still entirely in Latin and Aramic, and they are still debating if there will be subtitles or not, which is obviously going to limit the commercial appeal quite a bit.  I'm also wondering how the various people who have seen it thus far understood anything, if it's in two languages no one speaks and doesn't have any subtitles.

Of course if you feel like I do about the whole Jesus myth (general disinterest and a lack of superstition, tinged with a healthy amount of disbelief that any of it actually occurred) then you probably enjoy quotes like this one from the Guardian article.  Some people are saying it's very accurate to the Bible, but um...

But one problem, pointed out by Paula Fredriksen, a professor of scripture at Boston University and one of the panel that criticised the script, is that the gospels themselves are not consistent. "In Mark, Jesus's last meal is a Passover seder [ceremonial meal]; in John, Jesus is dead before the seder begins. The release of Barabbas is a 'Roman custom' in Mark, a 'Jewish custom' in John. Between the four evangelists, Jesus speaks three different last lines from the cross."

That would be the infallible, eternal, Holy-Word-of-God bible they're talking about there, right? Of course it is.

Amusingly-weird article about a sex-crusader in Thailand.  The gist of the story is that he runs a bunch of sex parlors in town, and has been greasing the palms of cops for years with money, drugs, free services, the whole thing.  However he was being sniped at the whole time, and when he got into some trouble for hiring some underage girls, the cops gave him no breaks.  So rather than continue as he was, he's gone on the attack, and is holding regular press conferences at which he's been threatening to name names and details of the high-ranking cops he's paid bribes to over the years.

Chuwit, 42, became a crusader for civic virtue, a celebrity avenger, holding daily news conferences to reveal charges of police greed, threatening to name the high-ranking policemen he says were beneficiaries of his generosity.

Chuwit has not provided a shred of evidence to back his claims. But in a country where police corruption is legendary, the credibility of Bangkok's officers is much the same of its massage parlor owners. No surprise then that the Thai public are enjoying watching the brown-uniformed force squirm under Chuwit's torrential allegations on national television.

"Once he may have been a 'bad boy' ready to cut corners and grease palms ... but when he decided to go for broke against corrupt police, Chuwit overnight became the darling of the urban middle class, who saw him as the outlet for their entrenched frustrations against 'crooks in uniform,"' Suthichai wrote.

High ranking officials have been forced to admit that they are investment partners in various massage parlors around the country, and others are saying they'll transfer the entire police force from some of the biggest sex shop areas, if the guy's evidence turns out.  Whether they really care or are just in damage control remains to be seen, but it's an amusingly juicy scandal in a country none of us have any personal stake in.

It was quite good, as it turned out.

Sweet Tomatoes exist in San Diego, but there they are called Souplantations.  The decor and menus are almost identical, but there were a few things at the one here that were different.  The one we went to in Pleasant Hill didn't look that large from the outside, but it was huge inside, and had a lot more room than any of the ones in San Diego (I've been to 3 or 4 there).  And they put the additional room to good use, with the various serve yourself areas spread out in a long line, with soups in one place, muffins in the next one, yogurt/fruit in the next, pasta next, etc.

The one I usually go went to in San Diego was a lot smaller, and while there was plenty of room for the salad bar section, they had the soups and muffins right across from each other, with the dessert fruit/yogurt area on the corner, and then the pastas and such just across a walkway.  Basically it's a traffic jam the whole time, and when everyone has trays of salad and soup and handfuls of muffins, and most people just walk around without a care in their heads for getting out of the way of other people (I.E. looking behind themselves before they start to back up), it can be damn elbow-bumping.

It's a minor thing, but it was nicer to have room to get in and out of the food areas without crashing into anyone.

As for the food, the only differences I noted were a few more things here.  They had chopped green olives in the salad bar, for instance, had a couple more types of muffins and garlic foccacio bread, and also had this Rice 'a Roni type stuff by the pasta bar, which I got a plate of, and unfortunately ate about half of before giving up searching for any taste in it.  It had none. Malaya loved the food and we both pretty well gorged ourselves there, so we'll be going back again, I think.  It's cheap eats too, with our $1.50 off coupon we paid $7 each for all we could eat, and we were both groaning at any sort of bending or bumping for about an hour afterwards, so yes, we did live up to the "all you can eat" portion of the slogan.

From there it was a short drive to a big Border's Books, and since Malaya and I both love book stores, that's a fun stop off.  I finally bought the 2nd and 3rd books in the Game of Thrones series, by George R. R. Martin.  I read book one months ago, per a reader recommendation, and thought it was pretty good (and sort of reviewed it), and getting better at the end, so I have hopes for book 2 and 3.  And since I paid $7 each for them, I'll find out soon enough.

I had been writing about fantasy novelists one day, basically talking about all of the problems with ones I've read, and a reader mailed in to ask who were some fantasy writers that I thougth were "great".  I didn't have any, but another reader recommended Martin's series, and I've been after it ever since.  They were published in the late 90's, and they're all still print, so obviously someone likes them.  I'll post more of my thoughts about them once I've read #2 and #3.

Our last purchase was a classical music CD.  Malaya has long had a particular famous opera composition stuck in her head, and from humming a few bars I realized that I knew it also, and eventually I remembered the name, and asked another friend (one who loves Classical music) about it.  With the name and composer clarified I looked for it online for a bit without success. Well, there was some success, you can find thousands of mentions and offers to buy it, but we couldn't find a good mp3 of the whole thing, for free.

It's Carmen Burana, by Orff, and the one track we like best is the one everyone likes best, O Fortuna.

However they had about six recordings of it, so we got one conducted by Andre Previn, and yeah, it's pretty blasting.  The big money portion is O Fortuna, and like everyone else, Malaya and I enjoy the slow and quiet vocals and instruments before they build to the huge smashing crescendo.  Hard to not hear it and love it, even as you feel sort of manipulated by the simple but effective techniques of the composer.

We listened to the whole thing through a couple of times and I like a few of the other tracks, but nothing else sounds remotely like the uplifting joy that is O Fortuna.  So Orff's composition is pretty much the same as every Nu Metal album ever released; one great single and then a bunch of filler.

Remember, the new blog schedule takes Sundays and Wednesdays off, so no new blog tomorrow.  I'll see about getting something clever written up in advance for Monday, since I spent a couple of hours Friday evening working on fiction, and this whole blog entry was rushed up just before bedtime.  Try and forgive me; you're probably not in a hurry right now, but then again, you don't have Malaya waiting for you to come to bed either, now do you?

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