Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ The earth ending within the next 2.5 months, thus making the $6 I just spent on a 2004 Van Gogh calendar a waste.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Coming home ankh-less.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your kitties prove unwilling to wait for you to open the bag of cat chow.

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

Malaya and I are heading out tomorrow, relatively early in the morning, for me anyway.  I've been staying up several hours after she goes to bed lately, writing or blogging until 5 or 6am, and then sleeping several hours after she gets up to go to work around 10am. Since the alarm is set for 10am tomorrow and we need to leave as soon as we get up, in order to have some time at a museum and then at Fry's, and drive back up here before the Friday evening rush hour traffic gets ugly, I need to go to bed soon.  I'm looking at less than 5 hours of sleep as it is.

After the museum and Fry's visit, we're going to eat dinner back home, and then go out to see Kill Bill on opening night.  Reviews are mostly positive, and lots of the positive ones are positively glowing.  Almost everyone objects somewhat to the movie being cut in two, with part two not coming out until February, but many critics say what Miramax and Tarentino have said; that it's just such an incredibly intense and wild movie that 3+ hours of it in a row would be overload.

I find that hard to believe; I mean can you ever remember a movie that was so overpowering that you wanted a four month break mid way through it?  I can not.  However I'm certainly eager to see if that's the case with Kill Bill.  The reviews that like it make it sound exactly like my cup of tea (not that I drink tea, other than occasionally in a Chinese restaurant), and I've never seen reviewers seem to be literally in awe of the accomplishment of a director before.  Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, for instance, in what is by far the longest review I've ever seen from that "one paragraph is plenty" magazine.

No use hammering Tarantino for raiding the lost ark of 1970s pop culture when his movie is killingly funny, wildly inventive, bloody as a gushing artery and heart-stoppingly beautiful.

For Tarantino, who set aside his skill at dialogue to show he can do pure action, the film is a challenge to his ego. Ads trumpet Kill Bill as "the Fourth Film by Quentin Tarantino." Talk about hubris. Fellini didn't even start counting till 8 1/2. But moxie is part of Tarantino's DNA. Who else would make his first film in six years a wet kiss to kung fu and pack it with his fetishes for ultraviolence, Uma Thurman's feet and music from Nancy Sinatra to RZA? And who else could pull it off? Kill Bill is damn near as good as Tarantino thinks it is.

Lots of other reviews are far more enthusiastic than that, even. I'll let you know what I think in Saturdays' blog, and since I'm mostly going to see cool scenes, pretty colors, and great fight scenes, I'm likely to be pretty damn satisfied.  At least I hope to be, since the last few movies I've seen have just been okay.

¤ Excellent and worrisome post by CalPundit about the Texas Republican Party, and their goals. In the post he quotes The Texas Republican Party Platform for 2000, a document that all elected Republicans from Texas sign are signatories or at least not in opposition to.  The speaker of the house and the president of the United States are two of the more prominent Texas Republicans.  Their agenda is strikingly radical, far more so than anything Bush has done, aside from his attempts to dismantle the EPA and other consumer protection and regulatory agencies, plus the whole neo con fantasy of the Iraq Attack somehow creating the first in a series of democratic, American-friendly countries in the Middle East.

The party platform advocates things like the total outlawing of abortion and homosexuality, not allowing homosexuals to ever be anywhere near children, seizing the Panama Canal, overturning all Supreme Court powers to set laws related to abortion or religion or anything else in the Bill of Rights, teaching Creationism in science classes, abolishing Social Security and all forms of welfare and the federal income tax, and much, much more.

The obvious argument about this is that it's no big deal, it's just a bunch of nuts in Texas, etc. And yes, it is a bunch of nuts in Texas, but every movement begins with a small core group and spreads out.  The Texas Republicans weren't all unified on this 10 years ago, and now they are, and two of the top three Republicans in the US are from this group.  Obviously it's powerful, and growing rapidly.  In the typical "I can't defend us so I'll try to make it sound like you're just as bad." argument, some in the comments list wacky liberal organizations and say their goals are just as crazy. Which is true, to a moderate, but those wacky liberal organizations have zero power on a national level.  The Texas Repubs have enormous power and influence and money, and they're growing rapidly.

The other objection is that Bush and Tom Delay aren't acting on all of the principles in the Texas Republican Party.  That's also true, but it's pretty clear why not; they would get slaughtered by the vast majority of other legislators who aren't in on this agenda. So they have to take baby steps towards their eventual goals.  Bush can't just remove the US from the UN, outlaw abortion, dissolve the EPA and all environmental laws, and end Social Security anymore than a hypothetical liberal president could instantly increase the federal tax rates for people with over $1m in income or $10m in assets to to 90%, change all non-violent drug offender prison terms to drug treatment classes, and dissolve the Patriot Act.  The president isn't a king, he has to get agreement from congress to change laws, and congress isn't going to go along with a really radical agenda.

There are quite a few comments on the post already (46 as I type this) and as far as I can see, there isn't any disagreement. A few of the right wing posters are in denial about it, and try to make the two arguments I just stated, but when other people in the comments shoot down their arguments, they have nothing left to say.  I don't know if the situation is as scary as some comment says, "This is the Republican Party in 20 years if they aren't stopped." but I certainly don't want people with these beliefs coming to power in the US.

The question is, what to do about it?  I think shining a light under their rock is the only way to go after them; expose them for the radicals they are and force them to defend what they believe in on a national stage.  All Democrats and most Independents and Republicans would be horrified by this agenda, so it's basically a matter of trying to make the ignorant masses aware of just what the people taking power in this country actually want.

¤ The Kobe rape trial began with a preliminary hearing, and there are juicy details galore.

Bryant sat stone-faced during a preliminary hearing Thursday as the woman's story of a flirtatious encounter gone bad came out for the first time with graphic details of Bryant grabbing her by the neck, bending her over a chair and attacking her at the posh mountain resort where she worked.

"You're not going to tell anybody about this, right?" he allegedly asked the woman repeatedly during five minutes of sex. Before being allowed to leave, she told police, Bryant forced her down and made her kiss his penis.

Bryant's attorney, Pamela Mackey, quickly tried to show the woman's story was just that — a story. She used the woman's name six different times, and at one point suggested that her injuries might be "consistent with a person who has had sex with three different men in three days."

The whole, "she said -- he said" thing would probably lead nowhere, without extensive physical evidence to back up her story. Apparently the girl is a bit of a whore, with a long history of sexually conflicts and some light psychiatric issues, which doesn't make her real credible witness.  Plus Kobe isn't Mike Tyson, he doesn't have a criminal record and has a squeaky-clean reputation.  Aside from the whole "cheating on his new bride" thing, that is.

At any rate, he's young and famous and handsome and super rich, and you know at least a few jurors would go for the, "what woman would turn him down?" defense.  However, there may be physical evidence of force being used. After the alleged attack:

She went back to the front desk to finish up her work and finally left the resort with an unidentified bellman, Winters said. She told him what happened and he urged her to report it, later following her home.

Winters testified that the woman's blood was found on the inside of Bryant's T-shirt, based on DNA tests. The woman told him she had bled from the attack, he said.

She bled from the neck, apparently, where she says Kobe grabbed her.  It will be funny if his charmed life is ruined by poorly-groomed fingernails, eh?

As for the larger implications of it all, I don't have a strong opinion. Kobe was clearly a fuckhead to rape her/bang a nutty chick, what with his pick of groupies and a new bride and baby at home, and it would be a damn shame if what's shaping up to be one of the top 5 or 10 basketball careers in history were ruined by this.  On the other hand, being famous doesn't give him the right to rape women and possibly ruin this already-screwed up girl's life, and he should be punished severely for it, if he really did it against her will. There may never be an answer.

Oh, the jury will conclude something, but that doesn't mean it happened as they conclude it. She was admittedly flirting and kissing, but her wanting to stop and him wanting to go is where their stories differ.  Her bleeding doesn't prove anything; maybe she begged for it rough, or had a cut that was easily reopened.  It's entirely possible that in her mind she wanted him to stop and asked him to do so, while in his mind she wanted it and was urging him on with a passive resistance thing.

And if you think about it, saying "no" twice during five minutes of sex isn't exactly a violent resistance.  So did she say anything during the other 4 minutes and 55 seconds?  Was she moaning? Enjoying it?  Feeling guilty? Freaking out?  Silently sobbing?  There's really no way to know; her memories are certainly corrupt by this point with so much emotional baggage riding on it, and Kobe isn't any more reliable.  Absent video tape of the whole thing, there's really no objective answer.

The fact that she's going for criminal prosecution rather than just trying to bilk Kobe for money is one sign in her favor, but if she's just a nutty slut, as the defense will try to portray her, that could explain that.  She might have mental issues and not want money, but want to bring down a powerful man. Or maybe she's planning a civil suit after the criminal trial, win or loose, and planning on scoring about $5m there.

This sort of thing is why lots of famous men now videotape women giving consent before they have sex.  What Kobe, you couldn't afford a video camera?

So we're settling for a Halloween Tree.  What's that, you ask? Well, through the magic of Google I found one that's not far off, and it's on the Barbie site, of all places.  It's pretty low-rent, just a couple of dead branches in a pot, but it's a simple concept.  I haven't seen any that simple in the stores; most are larger, overpriced, and corny. Like this thing, for instance. It's like something your grandmother would think was cool.  All I wanted was something like a small decorative Christmas tree, just all ugly and dead and leafless (needle-less?) and with twisted, gnarled branches suitable for hanging creepy ornaments from. We saw several metal ones that weren't too far off, they were black and made of clothes hanger-like metal pipes, but they were too simple, just little twists of metal.

I can't find the exact tree we purchased online, but it looks a bit like the second row on this page. Ours was was far cheaper though, and as you can see, it's just a simple design.  There are 16 of the clothes hanger-thickness metal bars, and four of them peel off into a spiral every six inches or so.  It's actually a pretty good design, since it makes the trunk taper as it ascends, just like a real tree.  There are coils of a smaller metal pipe around the tree just below each set of "branches" to hold the whole thing together, and the base is made up of four much thicker bars.  That's actually sort of a pain, since I wanted to twist them around as well, to simulate old roots, but they're too thick to bend without a bench vise or extensive straining, and I'm afraid I'd just break them off.

The branches, on the other hand, are easy meat.  They are just about identical to clothes hangers (and may have begun life as them, for all I can tell) and can easily be bent by hand, though I wore gloves for some bruise-prevention and used pliers for some of the finer bends.  Most of which proved irrelevant, as I'll discuss below.

I tried to keep the branches spaced somewhat evenly, but not so neat that it would look fake.  The idea is that it's an old, dead tree, ideally one growing over a desecrated graveyard.  Some hanging moss and perching crows wouldn't hurt either.  Such trees invariably have a lot fewer branches than our tree, but real trees also have thick trunks, real bark, weigh several tons, and stand over 50 feet tall, so since we want something to put on our living room shelf, we're making modifications where necessary.

As you can see it's been bent and mangled a lot and looks funky, but it's far from suitable as of now.  It's ugly, but far too golden (mostly due to the flash, it's more of a bronze in person) to pass for more than an avant-garde Xmas tree art sculpture.

This will change.

My idea all along was to bend and distort it, and then glue or fasten bits of actual wood onto it, before painting the whole thing jet black.  To do that I obviously need the metal tree, black paint, a bunch of bits of wood, and something to fasten them on with.

The wood was easily-obtained; they have little decorative wreaths at every crafts store for low prices.  You can see a close up of one below that cost me $3.  It has enough wood to make about 20 of these things, though many of the branches are too slender for my needs, and since they all go in a circle, you have to work to alternate the patterns to avoid a sort of whirlpool pattern to the tree.

A can of flat black spray paint was about $5 at a hardware store, and while I initially planned to use glue to hold the pieces on, I abandoned that when I began to work and realized that I'd be putting wood on top of wood and bending the metal a lot more and didn't want to wait for glue to dry.  So I just grabbed a fistful of paper clips and cut them in half.  They are pretty easy to bend around the wooden sticks and the metal tree, though you need needle nose pliers to get them really tight.

The paperclips are sort of hard to work with though, so on our last trip to a discount crafts store, we got a variety pack of metal wire.  Twelve spools of all different colors for $3.  They aren't sturdy enough to do heavy work with, but they should be more than enough to hold the twigs onto my tree with.

You can see how things looked after day one in the shots below.  The metal frame is still easily-visible, but I'd spent about 45 minutes applying wooden its to the metal frame and it was starting to take shape.  Literally.

My initial work on the metal frame was far too painstaking, I realized as I began to apply the wood. I could have used it just as it was, but I'd have had to tie on pieces of wood less than a finger in length, and that would have been way too much trouble.  Plus it would have looked silly to have so many branches extending such a short distance from the tree while bending around so much.

Therefore, once I began putting on the sticks, I pulled most of the metal limbs out straighter than I had initially intended, and then fit 4 or 6 or 8 inch pieces of actual wood to them, tying most of them in two places for stability.

I had covered a lot less than half of the tree at the time of the photos here, stopping when it was too dark outside to do more detail work.

The next afternoon I spent another 30 or 45 minutes adding on more bits of wooden branch.  You can see a shot from near the end of my work time below on the left, with a shot of my whole work area to the right.  As you can see, the wooden wreath isn't diminished at all by the work to date.  It's actually running out of branches large enough for my purpose; most of the wreath is made of twigs, so I'm probably going to go walk around the grounds and scrounge up some more sticks from the wooded area around our condo.

I mean that literally. As I start to pull out one single branch it proves to be more than six feet long, growing in neat circles around and around inside of the wreath, and as far as I can tell, the whole thing is like that. So they somehow grow these things like this, or else harvest some long, springy vines and wind them around something to get them into this wreath shape, and let them grow for a while in that form, since there are little tendrils and small branches that have grown all through and around the other limbs. It's sort of creepy, really.

I'll post more shots of this project as it continues, and I figure I'll have the rest of the wood on it this weekend, and then we'll paint it and see how it looks black, and if I need to add more wooden bits on then.  Once it's painted and sculpted properly we'll hang our ornaments, and need to buy some more of them as well, I think.  I dunno how cool it will look eventually, but it's fun to play with it now, and fun to make our own thing from cheap ingredients, especially since we like it better than the factory-produced stuff we've seen in the stores.

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