Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Cat constipation.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Wasting years of your prime herding around rug rats.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your pantry prove inadequate.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

I'm not pulling any punches; I'd be happy to savage someone as deserving of scorn as Pat Robertson, I just can't make heads or tails of his comment.

Does Pat find it ridiculous that God could be black or what?  It's a very easy comment to make, but since the "out of Africa" theory for homo sapiens spreading around the earth is pretty universally-accepted, and the Bible story says that God made Adam in his own image... I'd leave the hood at home when you die, Pat.

I have no other news today, since nothing of any interest happened anywhere on earth. With that settled, here's a bit of movie news.  Down below there are some new kitty pictures and a Jinx story that demonstrates why I am never having so not ready to have kids.

Kill Bill, Quentin Tarentino's fourth film (as the ads so proudly proclaim) is opening next weekend.  I've been following the progress of this one for years, from reading set reports to hearing people talk about the script to flipping through the inevitably-fluffy magazine and online previews and features.  It's sounded great, it's sounded mediocre and self-indulgent, and I've been torn.  I regard Pulp Fiction as one of the best movies ever made, and it's certainly one of my favorite movies to view.  Yet Reservoir Dogs doesn't do much for me with it's stylized tough guy violence, and Jackie Brown was not bad, but wasn't anything I felt any need to ever see again with its dozens of slow spots. So while I'd love to love Kill Bill, I suppose I've been afraid to really look forward to it, since if it turns out to be lame or misses dozens of opportunities to be more than average (like Underworld did) I'll be disappointed and unhappy.

At last, with it set to open in just 3 days, there are some real reviews (as opposed to the hyperactive geek sneek peeks they post on AICN) online.  And now I'm starting to get excited. There are just 10 reviews up on RottenTomatoes so far, but with 9 of them very positive and several of them absolutely rapturous, my confidence is rising.

To quote from the conclusion to one ridiculously-long (five pages?) but mostly spoiler-free review: 

I bear Kill Bill no ill will for being only half of a completed story. I could scarcely endure another second without getting lost completely in its intoxicating delirium and will be first in line when the follow-up arrives in theatres on February 20, 2004.

Kill Bill is, at long last, the revolution Pulp Fiction fans hoped Jackie Brown was going to be. It is an audacious cinematic adventure that leaves the stomach turning, the tongue lolling and the mind reeling all at once, like a feast you know will make you sick if you finish, but whose cornucopia of delicacies you cannot resist.

Whether the watchful masses will ultimately agree with its deification remains to be seen, but for its long-absent director, Kill Bill is Tarantino’s dish best served cold, a cork in the fount of the director’s naysayers, and a work of defiant creativity which I expect will leave more than a few other viewers without the right words to describe its greatness.

The ultimate arbiter of all movie things geeky, Harry the Knowles, loved it as well.  Of course he loves most everything, and even got to do Kill Bill set visits when they were shooting in China last year, so his impartiality is open to question.  Not that he claims to be objective, he loves Tarentino and wanted to love the movie.

Of course so do I, but if it's suxor I won't hesitate to admit it, even as the hot, bitter tears of betrayal are still drying upon my face.

With the Kill Bill motivation, I've been geeking out all night.  I watched the LotR:RotK trailer a couple of times, and then the Matrix 3 trailer a couple of times as well.  Plus Matrix 2 is coming out on DVD very soon, and I'll have to get that for a refresher course.  Plus with it I can perhaps evaluate M2 again; several months after my initial two viewings.

Back when M2 came out, I blogged a bunch about the plot and the mysteries left to be resolved in the third movie, and solicited viewer input on it.  I meant to go back and do a feedback review with the new ideas some of the reader mails gave me, but that was right around the time I was first visiting Malaya, and if you were reading back the you know how hectic my life got, with the 2 visits up here, working every day I wasn't up here, my sudden trip to my grandmother's funereal, and more.  And those are my excuses for never getting back to the Matrix blog.

I will try to one I see M2 on DVD.  Plus I'm up to June in my long backlog of emails to deal with/mailbag, and a bunch of those early in the month are from readers re: The Matrix 2.  How they taunt me.

I wanted to write about something else, for once.  Honest. But it's like 5am and I was ready for sleep like three hours ago, but since I had a cool idea I spent the last couple of hours writing on my novel (more like re-reading something and editing it to incorporate the new idea) and now it's time to blog before bed and I'm not burning with any major blog discussion topics.

And yes, they are willing to sit side by side and eat side by side now, with no growling or slinking by Dusty.  They still aren't sleeping together or on top of each other, but cats are prickly, not just big dumb mops like dogs; some lifelong feline companions never get all that chummy.

Dusty is licking Jinx more frequently when she's within range, and trying to bite her less.  This is good for them but less entertaining for us, since when he bites her it's damn funny.  I'll post some shots of that on Thursday, probably, since I got a nice sequence of him going from licking to nibbling with her eventually having to retaliate with claws and squeaking.

Yes, she squeaks. Well, mews, but in a ridiculously high pitched voice.  You literally can't hear her from 15 feet away or 5 feet if there is a lot of background noise; her voice is so high that it just vanishes. Squeaky voice or not, she isn't afraid to use it, and is quite a determined and unabashed beggar, especially when Malaya or I am in the kitchen making something that she thinks smells good.  This mostly means turkey or chicken.

She'll give up eventually, but it's hard to ignore her mewing, or her habit of trying to stand right underneath your feet.  Fortunately she can't leap up to the counters yet, or it would really be a pain. Dusty is trained not to, and he never tries it, and we're definitely going to teach Jinx that rule.  We try to keep her off of our desks and keyboards, but she's quick and persistent and doesn't know the meaning of the word "no."  Though we're trying to teach her.

This assumes she survives the next few days, since for some reason she hasn't taken a dump for something like 16 hours.  We notice this sort of thing since we're trying to train her to poo in Dusty's box, which is in a little wooden shed on the back patio, accessed through a swinging door.  She's been painstakingly-persuaded to enter the box, if the door is propped open, but she's never actually crapped in there.  She just looks around and leaves.  It's hard to blame her; it's dark, the carpet remnant-covered floor is drifted with kicked kitty litter, and the whole place smells like the inside of Dusty's colon.  Nevertheless, we want her to do her squatting in there, and to that end we have had a box right by the kitty door, and another one in the bathroom, the place she initially trained herself to poop in.

Yesterday she mostly moved her operations to the one by the kitty door, but on the outside of it.  However that's a step in the right direction (literally) so we're hopeful she'll learn to go in there. I put her preferred box inside there and her back up box by the door on Tuesday afternoon and had hopes she might use her preferred one. Instead, determined to confound, she's not used either since then.

Considering that she has been taking an extremely smelly crap about eight times a day ever since we've had her, any delay of more than a few hours seems suspicious.  Around about 8pm we were watching her every move for sudden squatting episodes, and eventually I just put her in the bathroom with her food and the auxiliary litter box and figured she'd get over it, at which time we would turn on the fan and light some incense and let her back out into the living room.

Nine came, then ten, then midnight, and still no poop. She was let out to romp a bit, and she headed straight for the water bowl and drank up, then ate some more crunchies, then chased Dusty's tail around some, and generally made a nuisance of herself.  Business as usual, in other words. But still no crap, despite a few quick looks through the propped open kitty door.

After an hour of "where is Jinx?" and "What's that smell?" our nerve cracked and we put her back into the bathroom, and she's been there for the last five hours, aside from one quick trip out here, which she marked mostly by being way too hyper and climbing onto my desk constantly to sniff at a plate that held a chicken sandwich many hours ago.  That behavior got her back into the bathroom pretty quickly, but still, no poop.

We're growing somewhat worried, thinking she might have some sort of blockage or that she ate something that's stuck, though she seems pain free and has been very active.  Goddamned cat.

This episode does nothing more than illustrate why Malaya and I are, as we often say, "so not ready" to have kids. Neither of us has anywhere near enough compassion for any other living thing, other then perhaps each other, to be decent parents.  We'd either raise very tough and mature and self reliant kids, or serial killers.

Little Flux: Mommy! Daddy! I fell down and skinned my knee while running where you told me not to run!

Flux and Malaya: Serves you right for not listening.  Go to your room and contemplate your failings as a human being.

However, since we used to reflexively say, when we saw some kid screaming or making a racket or breaking things or being annoying in public, "We are so not having kids." you can note that we've modified that to, "We're not ready yet."  Which is progress, of a sort.  Or perhaps decline, depending on how you measure such things.  Which I think it is depends mostly on how recently I was subjected to the aural assault of a screaming baby.

I bring this up since we're mostly annoyed by Jinxer and her toilet issues, and all we're dealing with here is her not pooping where she should and when we want her too.  Imagine if we had to like, wipe it off of her?  As you do with babies for about their first oh... four years.  With occasional reoccurrences for another 8 or 10 years.

Jesus Christ, I would just let the kid walk around in it until I could get to a shower or garden hose or something to spray them off.  I am so not ready.

Malaya took this photo along with the others of Jinx in my lap a few days ago, and I figure there's got to be someone reading this with a deviant foot fetish, so whatever. I personally can't imagine anyone who could eroticize male feet, but that doesn't mean there is no such person.

I can sort of see how men get turned on for women's feet; they are small and dainty and girl toes are cute li'l nubbins and so unlike male feet, which tend to be large and flat and calloused and hairy as a hobbit's.

Speaking of hobbits, there's probably someone on earth who is so into feet that they found the big plastic fake feet the hobbits wore in LotR sexy on film.  Even knowing they were prosthetic and part of a costume. I just thought I'd share that revelation.

Anyway, it strains my mind to envision someone (male, female, or other) who actually finds the typical male foot sexy.  Yet I'm sure such a person is out there.  Hopefully wearing a straight jacket, but anyway...

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