Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Dave Nestler I watched the Monday Night game. What a whacky mess.
DeSean Jackson made the most bone head play of the century! He caught a sure touchdown pass, an elegant play, but as he ran towards the end zone he began to celebrate and threw the ball away . . . compounding it was that none of the Cowboys figured it out so they never picked the ball up.
I didn't like DeSean as a player when he played for Cal when he would always bum rap USC. I'm not above maliciously enjoying his faux paux in the NFL.
Watching the game I was, as usual, impressed with Brian Westbrook. It bewilders me why Sean Payton (HC of the New Orleans Saints) doesn't use Reggie Bush in the same way. Maybe with Deuce McAllister back in the line up he'll start to exploit Bush's talents. Maybe not when you consider that horrific score against the bad Redskins team.

There's going to be another dog walk at the big mansion estate. When we look at the pictures of the lat big dog walk there its pretty apparent that our guys had the time of their lives.
My puppy was a bit more reserved. She takes her self anointed jobs too seriously to ever just let go when there are strangers about but even she had fun running up ahead and then running back to make sure I was okay.
I'll miss the little blind dog being with us. His trying to bully the great danes was pretty heart warming. Even he had a great time on that day.
I'm pleased. The Dog Walk will be the Sunday of the weekend we're going to see Alkaline Trio. It should be a splendid weekend.
Some of you have noticed the funny goings on with the footer of this page . . . This worries me; that anyone is looking, I mean.
I have a free traffic counter from Sitemeter. It only counts the unique visitor who come to look at the front page. I like that. If you come to the movie library or something else it lets you be. Then it
Click images for desktop size: "Back By the Full Moon" by Unknown sends me an email once a week telling me a lot of useless stuff but loaded with groovy numbers!
Like this page gets about 100 hits a day. Which to me seems like a lot. In the internet its something less than insignificant.
The official unique visitor count is closer to 800 a day but that includes spammers, robots etc. Which means the number is just goony and has nothing to do with anything.
I like the data. Seventy Five percent from bookmarks, eighteen percent from search engines. That kind of junk.
Its all pretty meaningless. I never intend to "monetize" the site. I don't want to become a "professional blogger". I'm not ever putting up ads and I'm not writing "reviews" for anything I don't care about. So all the numbers are nothing except for my personal amusement.
I also like the way the numbers look down there. They balance the look of the footer which does it job of saying this is the end of the page very nicely.
Anyway Sitemeter ended up doing a revamp that bought it more in line with Google Analytics. That was another service I tried and didn't care about.
That end of stuff didn't bother me very much except they also changed things enough to change the look of the entire counter. I disliked it so I removed it.
I spent about 15 minutes experimenting with other counter, including one provided by the hosting service. I didn't like any of them and decided that the footer looked just fine with no counter in it.
Then Sitemeter sent out a bulk email. I guess I wasn't the only one with complaints, although I suspect they other complaints were more serious than my fashion worries.
So for now the counter is back there . . . for now.

I have to wait for the third day for Sears to come and pick the old washing machines - between 7 a.m.
Click images for desktop size: "City of the Gods" by Unknown and 5 p.m. . . . and we had to pay for the right to wait . . .
I amusing myself trying to figure out what logic the oil companies used to jack up prizes when the price of oil has fallen. Something about future oil production maybe less so we have to pay more now because we will have to pay even more later . . . seriously, why aren't these geeks regulated?
As the stock market continues to crash I note that this is the worst hit the economy has taken since 9/11. I find it fascinating that it took Bush 7 years to equal the terrorists body count of Americans. The terrorists killed one of my best friends. Bush has killed two of my friends, not trying to track down my best friends killer but in a war for his own ego. Its taken Bush 7 years to cripple the country in the same way the terrorists did in 30 horrifying minutes.
And my fellow Americans are going to elect Palin and McCain so that the terrorism and the carnage can continue.

Posted by David at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Ferris Wheel" by Unknown I'm getting worried about healing.
I've got two wounds. A scratch from the cat that is just about healed. It's five weeks old. A gouge in my shin that's over three weeks old that is barely healed.
I used to heal fast. It was one of my greatest talents. I never used to get sick. When I got the measles as a kid I had two spots, chicken pox gave me one lump. And wounds would be gone in two or three days.
Maybe it was that over abundance of healing white blood cells that led to my getting leukemia. Who knows. Everything has a price in the USA, so who knows.
The brand of leukemia I have/had has at least four names. The only one I remember is lympho ballistic. When you depend on medicine being precise it bugs me that my brand has four names.
My friend says its just that I'm getting older. That's scarcely consoling.
I'm feeling as okay as usual. Its just something to worry over.

A few people have noticed that I've shut down comments on a few entries. Now it worries me that people have even noticed.
No great mystery or rewriting my history here. The only deception is against the comment spammers.
This blog and my puppy's blog were getting nearly five hundred spam comments a day. Movable Type's Typepad Spam locker and Askimet kept them from appearing on the sites but it was wearisome cleaning them out. Annoying as I'd get bored quickly and just delete all the comments en mass. That was hardly fair to the few people who took the time to write something to me, to you.
The way spammers work, it seems, is they send out robots that look for Movable Type or WordPress blogs. When they get a hit it launches a script that automatically searches for entries allowing track backs and comments. They like to look for older entries that they assume will be overlooked by the site manager.
Then they inundate it. The idea being that google's robot will scan the site and note all those links. The end result is that the spammer's client will raise up higher in their google page ranking. Stupid google.
Getting to the top ten on a google search is worth serious money. I guess google has to have some criteria for automatically deciding where to put a site so we can find the most useful info.
I'd be more impressed if google and yahoo could at least manage and update their databases correctly. After a year on Movable Type they both still index and show links to the old WordPress php based urls. That's just stupid. Especially since the yahoo and google robots eat up over a gigabyte of bandwidth a month scanning the this site.

Click images for desktop size: "Eiffel Tower" by Albo Anyway, the spammer's are generally lazy. Figures, right? They like to saturate the same post over and over again. Two of my puppy's posts received about 300 spam comments a day.
The easiest solution is just to turn off comments for that post. Crazily that works. The spammer's scripts don't seem to react to the fact that they are doing nothing. I expected better.
I don't very often do more than that. Reporting the spammers is a waste of time. Since our government tacitly approves of spammers there's not a lot going to happen. Everyone knows this. I have reported about 4 spammers. Only because I get angry about bestiality and porn sites spamming my puppy's blog. It infuriates me that their is even a chance that some kid, and my puppy's site is mainly visited by children, might have to deal with something as designed nasty as a bestiality site makes me quietly enraged.
I search the ip (well recorded by Movable Type) through arin's whois service. All the ip's have an email address registered with arin for dealing specifically with abuse. One abuse is perpetuating child porn or pandering porn to children. I've never received any sort of response from any ip. Twice I got auto-responses. They don't care. Why should they? There's no penalty, no redress against them or their clients. They probably just whack the spammers with a surcharge for excessive bandwidth usage and then make a donation to the RAIA.
Evil. So evil. But its business and business isn't about the future and children. Its about money now.
There are some spammer's who are a bit more persistent. When their robot advises that a post has been shut down they search for other posts where comments are allowed and begin to spam them.
The only solution there is to completely block the ip address. This only works if you pay a hosting service for hosting.
I don't much like blocking an ip. Most spammer's use dynamic ip's. (Means they change periodically). It bothers me that some kid who likes to laugh at silly dogs might get a blocked ip and not be able to see a picture of the puppies.
But blocking the persistent ones seems to work. So far I've had no spam for the past 3 days.
I don't know if that is worth worrying about some kid my puppy and I don't know yet.
Have to wait and see.


Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Juan Gimenez This weekend was pretty good. Too hot for me. People labor under this idea that LA is hot. It isn't. Like we get 10 days of rain a year we get about 14 days of hot weather. Most of the time it is monotonously the same: Comfortable.
I do much worse with heat and humidity than I do with cold. Odd that.
We didn't do anything exiting, but it was nice just having my friend and the dogs together for a while. I got pancakes and fried potatoes. I like that. We went and got dog treats . . . made some home made organic flea spray which seems to work about as well as the store bought stuff . . . I think it costs more to make though.
Watched a couple of interesting movies but I have a lot to do today. Mostly including fixing my bike, mowing some lawn and cleaning stuff as well as seeing what minor injuries I can inflict on myself today.

Posted by David at 10:36 AM | Permalink

Click images for desktop size: "My Home Planet" by Macwindows I managed to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2.
It was the easiest Movable Type upgrade I've ever done. The only things it broke were a couple of plug-ins. That was my fault. I always upgrade to a new directory and save the old one for the expected emergencies.
The main joy in the upgrade is the increased speed in generating the html pages. It took it 4 seconds to regenerate all the indexes on this and my puppy's site. It used to take a few minutes.
Other than that I was sort of disappointed in the fact that the interface didn't go through any changes at all. I don't much like the colors, so I was semi-hoping. (Not big time. I don't want to wear out my hoping muscles or use up any luck on the mundane.)
The only other thing to note is an odd tic. Now when the search engines crawl the site it generates an entry in the activity log for every tag as it crawls. Very peculiar.
Its more than a touch aggravating as I note that Yahoo and Google both still heavily reference the old WordPress php url's. Which, of course, now sends people nowhere. The only reason I notice is that, and I'm embarrassed about this, Microsoft's clunky search engine is the only one that's become accurate.
My feeling is that if Microsoft can do it, it must not be that difficult.
The dozens of activity log entries are mildly annoying. I'd expect it to be fixed soon. It could just be the way I've set up my tags.
One of the biggest positives is that Comment Spam has become almost non-existent. It still happens but from 500 to 600 a day to two or three a day is pretty exhilarating. It also means I won't be so aggravated as to accidentally delete the real comments when trying to weed through the enormous list.
I don't use the web interface to post so I can't speak to it.
Nothing else seems to have much changed.

Click images for desktop size: "Death" by UnknownMaybe it was thinking about all my kids competing at NFL camps around the country and the handful of kids in China, but installing the upgrade sent me into a nostalgic mode about an old web app called Coranto.
Coranto was a perl based "news" writer. I installed it on the kids web site (since down, the host that donated the free lifetime service went bankrupt. A sad time for a kind man). The beauty of Coranto was that in the days of CSS 1 I could give the kids a password and they could go in and write a news story, upload a picture with the story and "wham" have it appear on the web page all neat and prettily laid out with their byline! And they could do it all from their browser and never had to learn any html code or layout! A lot of big time news agencies used Coranto for their web sites too so we looked like we were competing.
It seemed pretty miraculous at the time . . .
Of course Coranto and all the other news writers rapidly evolved into blogs, which rapidly evolved into CMS and, now, social networking sites. (Another feature of Movable Type I'm not interested in so I can't say how well it works.)
I liked those old days of excitement. The excitement of seeing something you typed actually show up and for some one else to actually read it! A couple of my kids had the moxie and chutzpah to use their little stories on the web site to promote themselves jobs in the press.
I'm as proud of them as I am of my kids who are struggling with the NFL camps right now.
I've been up since before four. Couldn't sleep. My friend worked another 14 hour day. I hope she's coming to the end of the project, at least that the project ends before her health does.
The dogs have all come in, one at a time to see what's up with me. My puppy came in first, then she left to let the others come in and now she's wrapped around my feet. She doesn't look worried. She just looks happy.

Posted by David at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Knotted" by Joel Faber Not feeling well. Better is the Brit-Speak: I'm feeling unwell.
Nothing I haven't felt before. It has just become more annoying as it goes on.
I keep thinking that I'm near the end of the road. Its been a great trip. More dips and valleys then a sane person could accept as normal, but its been good.
Not ready for it to end.
I can still laugh and I can still enjoy my puppy fighting to get close to me. I still like the sound of the guitars making like a mini-symphony with more grind.
Just tired and unwell. No big deal. Just the unwelcome thoughts going through my mind.
I always worry some. It keeps me cool and unpanicked, I think.
Alkaline Trio are on tour. I think about seeing them. I figure I'll be disappointed but what a nice way to be disappointed.
There's a lot more movies I need to see. There's a mystery that needs solving and the key might be locked inside of one of those frames.
There are stories I haven't heard yet. People, real and fictional I haven't met yet.
When my mother got depressed. (I always remember her smiling and giving me something to eat . . . she couldn't cook, at all, but I remember her handing me food). A divorced mom, barely out of her teens with a rambunctious son had plenty of reasons to be depressed back then. The only solution for an uneducated woman was her own cottage business or to marry well, or at least better.
Anyway, when she'd get depressed she'd tell me the story of somebody, I think it was one of the Eastman's. This fellow woke up one morning. Photography had been his life, not taking pictures but creating the cameras, the tools and the film. That morning he awoke and realized that his art form had progressed as far as it possibly could. There was nothing left to create or to perfect. No one would ever take a better photograph than Stiglitz or Cameron or Weston.
Thinking there was nothing new and exciting in the world, that his art was perfected and that his work was done he calmly shot himself in the head.
Later that day they announced the Polaroid Land Camera. Instant photography . . .
As a kid I never understood why my mother gathered strength thinking about Polaroid cameras. It still baffles me.
It bothers me still that she allowed herself to get so depressed that she had to think about some rich guy blowing his brains out.
I guess what matters is that she gained strength, strength from a story. Strength to carry on from a story.
For me, that's the important part.

Click images for desktop size: "Start-Trafalgar Square" by Unknown And like my buddy Jim used to say, (Jim was the guy who I did that radio show with) "It doesn't matter what we play. There's always somebody out there who will like it."
Morbid thoughts.
My birthday is coming up soon. Too many birthdays for me to care.
I used to use my birthdays to gauge what I'd accomplished, what I'd gained in the past year. I used to spend the day deeply analyzing this.
Since my goal for the past few years have been mainly to stay alive there's not much need for introspection there. Its a pretty binary question: Yes or no.
But I am alive.
I'm pretty happy, happier than I'd thought I'd be in a long time.
I want to stay alive. That also seems pretty binary but, unfortunately it isn't.
I need my own story.
I think I have one. I write it every day.
That sounds trite. It is. I need reminding sometimes.

To distract me I'm updating the website to Movable Type 4.2 Pro today. It will probably break stuff. The updates usually do.
Since Movable Type has spun off a side bar Open Source Project and since 4.2 has been in open beta testing for about 90 days, I have a bit more confidence in this update than I usually do.
The best part about Movable Type is that it generates those stationary html files so even if I break anything you probably won't notice!
Which means I get all the sweaty nerve wracking fun trying to figure out permissions and perl code. Hotcha cha . . .

Posted by David at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Justice Society Of America" by DC Comics We had fresh spring rolls and sugar free home made coffee cake for dinner last night.
Its hard to feel miserable when your broke when you can still whip up things like that just by burrowing through the fridge.
Being broke doesn't scare me. Being poor isn't that much of a worry either. Being homeless with my puppy - that terrifies me. Governments terrifies me. Corrupt government officials and daffy corrupt incompetent judges terrify me. Being broke, Being poor is just a state to ease through. I don't like it but its not as important as, well, so many other things the list boggles.
I was up late last night.
I got an email from my hosting service. It was pointing out a huge upswing in bandwidth. Nothing to worry about, just an advisory sort of thing.
I went and checked the server logs and was at first shocked, then freaked and finally just annoyed. It seems that there are a couple of shyster sites out there hot linking to the mp3's I post here. Some people don't even know I post them here. I dislike the way links tend to look on a web page. You have to hover over the link to have it appear here.
Anyway there are a lot of unidentified robots crawling the site. It must have come from there. I don't like hot linking. I have to pay for the bandwidth. When I went to look at the sites doing the linking I was really peeved.
They disguise themselves as mp3 search engines or as music repositories. They are heavy with advertising, malware, spyware, pop ups, pop unders etc. They're making a lot of money. One of the sites sells the music for 99 cents. Only problem for me is that they don't sell the song from their server. They link to mine. There's a well designed perl script that disguises the url but you pay them or look at their adverts to download the song and the song downloads directly from my server.
I resent commercialism as much as I resent the out dated copyright laws that the bigger thieves in the RAIA and MPAA hide behind.
Its the world of the internet, I guess.
The reasons behind my site tend to be complex and personal.
Click images for desktop size: "Gothic Spirit" by Unknown It started out as just an easy to access diary and journal, a place I would always b able to find. Then I discovered the social networking aspect of it. I dabbled in that for a tiny while before I quickly got bored with it and discovered that all I was really doing was making myself available to all sorts of hucksters.
Then, quite pleasingly, it became a way to quickly inform all of the people I know and care for about how I was doing. Share jokes and anecdotes.
Then it became something uglier, but even the ugly parts passed. (I can understand people being angry with me, or even hating me. But it soon passes the point of justification and becomes just boring vandalism.)
Like my puppy's site is a better example.
It was started so I would always have a place to remember her for each day of her life. I wanted to keep all of her pictures close to hand so I could look at them. Then I could also tell my friends the url so they could go look at the magnificence that was my puppy.
Because my puppy was timid I ended up deciding to try training her as a therapy dog. She ate up the training. She loved working with kids and was comforting to them and to many other people in hospital.
So her site became a way to extend the relationship with the children she saw every week. The kids, mainly 5 to 11 loved having a place to read about her. I had plans to design games and stuff to entertain. I was just incompetent at Flash and lacked the talent to make some of my dreams real.
Still the kids loved reading about her. They knew her and had a relationship with her that I wasn't ken to. It didn't bother me.
What did bother me was the spam that suddenly started to proliferate her site. Sick stuff. Bestiality sites, porn. No child porn, fortunately but stuff that these ill children didn't really need to know existed.
I had to shut down comments. I set up an email account for my puppy. The kids loved writing to her and liked it when she'd answer them.
Then, as is the way, her email account started to get deluged with spam. Dating sites, credit card phishing schemes, viagra, porn.
Click images for desktop size: "Background" by Lawn Elf Even messages that she'd gotten messages on her Friendster account . . . My kids were always inviting me to join their MySpace, Friendster what have you, so when I received the porn spam from those sites I took it as a matter of course. My puppy does not have a membership to any of them.
Its just the way of it, I guess. People need to make money. It makes me glad being poor doesn't bother me. Being broke bothers me but not in any way that shows.
I've made some temporary fixes to stop the music hot linking. I'll need to come up with a more permanent solution. I'm trying to figure out how to write the robot.txt file so that the rip off sites can't crawl this site. It won't work. The aggro robots just ignore the txt file.
All I wanted was for my friends to know about songs I was liking and listening to. It worked. It should work. Who knew that someone would have the money to figure out how to make more money from it.

Posted by David at 11:31 AM | Permalink

Click images for desktop size: "Electrogoth" by Envy Since I've had access to the AppleTV i haven't even turned on a DVD player . . . odd that.
It makes me realize the importance of senses and the anthropological psychology of our senses.
Like we've all allowed to have rather lousy memories for sounds. We've all had a friend who we thought had died because we kept hearing the same song pour out of his bed room window, over and over again.
When you finally break in you find out there was nothing wrong. He just dug the tune. Couldn't get enough of it.
Or we've gotten into a car with a friend who played the same track over and over again, all the way to wherever you two were going and you were probably glad it wasn't any further.
If we'd evolved with auditory memory that matched our visual memory we wouldn't be able to do that.
Its like you can listen to a live concert of your fave band a few times without even blinking, but you'd be hard pressed to watch a video of the same show more than once or twice. You'd get bored and relate to editing gaffes instead of watching. Most often you'd end up reading and listening, or looking at anything except the image.
Its part of the power of paintings and photographs I guess, the ability to take you someplace, someplace new or the same familiar place, each time you gaze at a painting even though you know every pixel of the painting by heart. There's more than a certain genius to that, or else we'd all live in bare walled holes.
Our sense of smell is pretty terrible and we only seem to recall smells that are bad or great - a cess pool or your mom's cooking. Even though scents have a way of bringing up a bigger and wider range of emotional responses from us that come closer to re-experiencing the reality of a moment, of all moments connected to a scent.
And touch? Unless its connected to pleasure or pain who remembers a touch. Its why we can do all those cool nasty tricks with peeled grapes and things at Halloween.
All of that is why I don't get to stressed about my little blind dog sitting happily two inches from a wall, apparently staring at it happily.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Frank FrazettaWith as much effort as we put into communicating with aliens from outer space we don't put much time into communicating with the aliens we share the planet with. John Lilly, a cool enough guy, is the only one I know of who's tried to talk to dolphins.
Dolphins need talking to. There are legends about dolphins rescuing drowning people at sea. Every surfer has a story about some dolphin harassing or playing with them.
(Mine involved the dolphin with a nasty sense of humor. I was on dawn patrol when I saw a gray fin break the water line and come rushing at me. I pulled my feet up on the board and was getting ready to punch the shark in the nose . . . I read in a comic book or saw on TV about how sharks had real sensitive noses and you could not them out with the right punch! The fin submerged. I looked around fearfully and waited for panic when my board was suddenly capsized from underneath. I thought I was fish meat. When I broke the surface the dolphin was up there laughing at me. Laughing at me . . . he spent the day catching every wave I caught and being a real pain in the neck. He seemed to love it best when he could cut me off and create a wipe out . . .)
There an animal with intelligence, at least as much intelligence as the gorillas who've communicate pretty effectively with sign language.
We don't pay much attention to this except as freak show stuff, like the tic tac toe playing chicken. I think it makes us uncomfortable. We're not a very secure species, still clinging to the worries of survival and junk like it. We relate to animals best when we feel comfortably superior and can easily humanize them, at least to our conscious minds.
It seems easy to love something we are in total control of and can give ambiguous human traits to. Its a bit harder to love something that is alien to us. Like a dog.
When my little blind dog stares at the wall with a happy grin on his snuffling face he might not see the wall but I imagine he's got a world of other things to get so lost in. Smells that I can't guess at but that tell him stories and sing him songs. I'm sure he can hear noises that ell him absorbing dog stories, or else why is he so easy to startle when I call to him.
He likes to stay close to me because the other dogs don't tread on him. I'm the for sure alpha dog around this house anyway.
He knows I'm the source for food and pets. And in some canine way he loves me. That doesn't mean the blind little guy doesn't try and escape at every given opportunity. Not to run away but to go find new smells and to hear new things.
This is all the junk you think about on a rainy Sunday morning. Nasty cold day so that even the dogs don't want to go outside.
I need to heal. I think I've been tearing my body up pretty badly with all the yard work. My hamstrings are singing off key
Click images for desktop size: "Feeling My Age" by Anonymous arias to my calves and my hands are clenching and cramping begging to rest.
So it might be just time to watch a lot of movies. Consider finances.
I going to move the house internet connection from the monster monopoly phone company to an independent ISP . . . I'm nervous about this. The internet is the way I communicate, get information and survive and function, I think. Since were doing that we're also going to dump the land line and go to VOIP. I had Vonage before. The service was a tick better than acceptable. It would have been fine except the customer service department were the biggest jerks ever. Sales people should not be called customer service. It bothers me when I understand a tech better than the paid employees who are supposed to trouble shoot the problem, and keep wanting me to buy more services when I struggling with the existing services, but maybe this time it will be okay.
I have to figure out finances. Its a logistical issue with my credit cards and cash availalbe. Th savings become significant if I pay for a year in advance. I mean like over a grand for the year significant. But its hard to come up with the front money. Got to figure it out. Which isn't that big a deal. I just hope the service works well enough.
Other than that I plan to watch movies and sleep during most of the boring bits. I still haven't ordered or rented a movie through the AppleTV. It looks easy enough and maybe its time to try. The 99 cent movie special this week is "The Usual Suspects", which is entertaining enough and my eyes are bad enough to not remember enough of it so its a thought. Of course when I've got about 100 movies I haven't seen yet renting one just to check out the tech is a bit frivolous, even if it is only a buck . . .

Posted by David at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "New York City" by Paulo Barcellos Jr Been a bit of zombie today. Everything acting up. Figure it due to lack of sleep.
My little blind dog had a terribly bad night. I tried to sleep on the floor with him. Me being there gave him some comfort but he still pushed around and kept me awake.
Don't really mind. Its easy to remember that no matter how bugged or tired I get its a lot worse for him.
The day was shot because my puppy becomes my canine nurse. She knows I don't sleep during the day so if I passed out she'd lick my face.
She was never more than 6 inches away from me all day. Again, it would drive me crazy except she felt so assured because she was doing her job.
But I need sleep.

I did get one hobby chore completed. I updated the Movie catalogs.
There are now 3,000 movies there. The number sort of staggers me. Three thousand stories rattling around in my head.
There's a whole lot of gunfights at the OK corral, a whole lot of Chinese students avenging the deaths of their teachers, young men and women falling desperately in love being torn apart and then bought back together again. So many wars and so many times a man had to do what a man had to do. The good guys always wear white and the really bad guys laughed insanely at the pain and torment they caused.
Of course I've seen a heck of a lot more movies than that but 3,000 is a number I can now prove. When you add in all the people I know and all of their stories its small wonder I walk around always a tiny bit confused. (It feels like only a tiny bit to me. I can't control your perceptions!)
Movies mean a lot to me. They have a power. The Nazi's and other governments figured this out. Propaganda films are usually pretty dull, even great directors made dull propaganda. When governments
Click images for desktop size: "Sworn To Fun" by Robert Williams figured that out they just started banning or censoring anything that they couldn't find an argument against.
Before movies the ultimate art was considered Opera. Opera combined theater, drama, music, acting and song. A pretty potent stew. And it gave all this art the transient air of heaven because after that one performance the scenes would play over and over again in your mind, the beauty of it constantly re-exploding. There was never anything to contradict you memory.
You could study the score, dissect the libretto but you could never overtake the memory.
That's a power movies didn't have. Whatever you remembered could always be confirmed, alway re-remembered for you. Remembered in plastic which compliments, if not replaces, the spontaneity of a live performance.
Movies influenced me a lot. The movies I liked the most are the same as the stories I like most in people. I like movies where people change. When there's an epiphany or a moment of frisson that says look back at all you've done and realize it bought you to this point so that you can now go here, is for me the best of times
Movies taught me a lot. Like an old friend I hadn't heard from in years wrote to me recently and told me his divorce was just about finalized.
I was around for the romance that led to his marriage. I saw all the drama the two of them went through, all the grief, all the pain and the passions.
I've never been divorced. I've never ended a relationship where there was that much commitment, love and passion. At least not since high school, and that's not the same thing.
When books write about these things prose gets too analytical, it takes the heart out. Poetry gets too ephemeral. The translation of the music of words to the heart gives me a prosaic self knowledge that doesn't seem to extend to the comprehension of others. But movies, ah, movies.
Even dullard films like "Kramer vs Kramer" or "An Unmarried Woman" give a light that exposes and comprehends. Its like one man's vision shattered through a prism of the hundreds of others, the writers, the actors, the crew. All those beams of colored lights shining through celluloid create an image of humanness and gives us the power to understand our fellows.
See, as much as I like seeing fantastic planets, fantastic worlds, crawling terrors, vampires and werewolves, dusty streets where two men face each other over hand guns and a spit of tobacco, as much as I love to see new and old worlds
Click images for desktop size: "The Androids Workshop" by Pleasures what I love best about movies is when they show us ourselves in a way we can understand and love. They do that all the time and they don't preach, they entertain. For me, like most of us, I learn the most when I'm enjoying what I'm learning. When I don't even know what I've learned until the time I need it. ("Wax on, wax off.)
I like movies in theaters with giant screens where faces are as big as the wing span of an angel. Theaters have changed now. The way we watch movies has changed.
It used to be that once they got your money and got you into the seat they could tell you the story at their pace. They could lead you along into their dream.
Now DVD's, cable etc make up most of the money most films are ever going to see, so they have to work fast, they have to grab you and hold you there so you don't flip the channel, don't change the disc.
Some producers don't care if that's what you do, so long as they got the money, but almost all the filmmakers do care. They want you to hear the story they have to tell. They're people too and we all want you to listen to the stories we're telling each other.
New technologies, new times, new ways of telling the story.
I don't have a preference for the old or the new. As long as there's a story to tell and so long as most of the time the good guys win.
So 3,000 movies. I now some like to look through the lists and have that kind of nostalgia, that reverse deja vu where a title or a poster takes you back to a place you'd forgotten for a while. Some people remember being kids and wearing their pajamas while they watched some movie on TV alone or with their family and the warmth and feelings they had there and then. Lots of power from just a movie's name, I think and I think it gladly.
Some people look at the lists with a collector's eye, looking to fill in a gap in their collection. ("I need ALL the Shaw Brothers titles!")
Some look for ideas of what to watch tonight or what to put in their NetFlix queue. Its all fun. Its all good.
I want to print up some stats about the movies. I'll do it later.
I have to say that none of these movies are for sale. For trade foe sure.
In the lists click on stuff, it will pop things around and open up pictures and details.
I have to go. I have stuff I want to watch and the puppies want to see a kung fu fighting movie so they can steal some ideas for their next big dog fight.

Posted by David at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Water Lilies" by Claude Monet Don't much feel like saying anything today.
Good things are I couldn't feel much worse and still be alive. I'm still alive.
My little blind dog is still alive too. He kept me up all night. Or maybe I kept him up. I slept when he did. We're both okay.
We both agree that sometimes it doesn't feel right to be so miserable and so happy at the same time. We've decided to deal with that issue by stay restlessly crabby.
His ailing gave me an excuse to ignore mine.
Even more snow today.
I've been in snow before. But it was usually snow at someplace where I could leave it when I wanted to.
In Europe I was staggered when they had a blizzard. They called it a blizzard anyway. It snowed almost 3 inches . . . then it all melted before nightfall.
Those are my kind of snow storms.
These 5 inches overnight things are the stuff of science fiction novels. People could not survive in this. Yet, here we are.
I walked to the store yesterday. My friend was home sick and I had a little cash. It seemed like a good idea.
By the time I managed to slog back home it felt like I'd accomplished something major.
I got frijoles and chips and some stuff for pad thai . . . health food, comfort food.
Good stuff.
Spent the rest of the time finishing up my monthly back-ups. Yeah, I've lost enough stuff over the years that I know computers can't be trusted anymore.
I also contemplated all the site stats.
We used 140 gigs of bandwidth! Mainly because of all my puppies movies.
I'm happier than ever with the new host. No one complained about not being able to get on. I had just over 4,000 "unique" visitors. I like unique. Its a cool adjective. I don't know what it really means when used in this way.
82.4% of the visitors came here via bookmarks or direct. 12% came via search engines. Probably looking for Captain America . . . and the rest via referrals from links I guess.
I thought those were pretty smug inducing numbers.

Click images for desktop size: "Double Monitor" by Azarakis My puppy's site had 27,341 "unique" visitors. For her site the term unique makes sense.
91% were bookmarks or direct. 8% were via search engine. Her search terms are cute: big black dog who don't speak good, is my fave this month. I think she prefers Shelby the greatest dog in the world. She also thinks rich people should pay her.
I'm also startled that "The Long Goodbye" still gets over 2,000 hits a month. It hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years.
Its the product of wanting to write something good and "unique" about things and people I love in movies, art, you know all that pretentious stuff I try to pretend isn't inside of me.
I was thinking of EXPANDING that wordy stuff I wrote about Argento and putting it up there.
That might just be another of my projects that never quite comes to pass. But it may and it will please me.
I'm also working on a little surprise that I hope turns out well. Mainly I hope it doesn't come off as merely selfish. We can only try and see. Its hard to be too surprising when you have no money to speak of, but we try.
And that's enough about nothing.
I have snow to shovel and inches to go before I sleep.
My little blind dog is sleeping in the chair next to me, while my puppy rests her head in my lap and suddenly it feels like everything really will be alright.

Posted by David at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Steam Insect" by Conte I am often overwhelmed with a desire to make stuff. Unfortunately my handiwork invariably looks like . . . pretty bad.
I'm good with electronics. I can solder and wire fine, sometimes better than fine. Most of my electronics, even today, I've messed with and "improved".
When we sold the recording studio we were able to pay off all our debts by selling my customized Neve analog board. The board was superb. I'd spent a few years customizing it . . . actually repairing it. The only way we could afford a Neve back then was to buy a pretty trashed out one from the Record Plant and gut it.
The buyer was stoked until he opened it up and realized that the board had nothing but Hi Q components but we had reconfigured it and added in my own fillips that his tech couldn't grasp what we had done. Fortunately for me he hired a new tech who loved the board. (Including the fact that I'd built my pirate radio station from Army Surplus walkie talkies and stashed it inside the board so I could be in the car and listen to what was happening in the studio . . . or play the outboard CD changer. Back then I knew about shielding for RF interference . . . )
I got away with it on the Neve because I already had that beautiful Neve case. All my other projects; my homemade cases and boxes looked like . . . pretty poor.
I once built an Signal tracker and stuffed it into a tomato paste can . . . That was the best of my cases . . .
I once made some bookcases for my home office. They looked . . . acceptable. They held up for almost a year! Which is far better than some of my old home built recorders, amps and PA's. I'd be pleased if those cases lasted through 2 gigs. But the tone! Ah, the tone . . . while watching a speaker cabinet disintegrate while ripping through a power chord gallup can be used as entertainment, its daunting to have to put the whole thing back together again.
My eyes are bad now. So bad I can't pour over circuits and copper wrappings with my old sense of elegance and hot solder burning style. I can't even be sure now if they'll work until I plug them in.

Click images for desktop size: "Celtic Princess" by Unknown I can't even get my busted iRobot to work again.
I remain fascinated with Steam punk. Mainly because the cases are what make them punk. And the cases are so graceful and bordering on the right side of campy tacky.
I feel confident that if I even attempted one it would somehow melt into a glob of foil and brass in a month. But what a glorious month it would be!
So when I get these creative urges, these handicraft flings I work on this site.
I spent an inordinate amount of time making a movie of some pictures of my puppy. They were pictures I had thought I had lost in the great hard drive crash of '06, they move me a lot so it was time well spent in my opinion.
I also have been grappling with my movie catalog. A lot of collectors have been griping that a straight alphabetical listing is too difficult to search. I also don't have a search engine easily attached to the movie listing.
I'm working on it.
As a stop gap I've added another link to the little bar up top. This will take you to the catalog broken down by genre.
Its not as pretty as the straight alphabetical listing but it is serviceable.
Clicking on a title will open up the listing to give you pertinent details and, in most cases, a picture/poster from the movie.
People click through so fast I need to explain this. Since no one is probably going to read these detailed instructions I'll probably have to explain them again and then again.
Macintosh now seems to natively support SQLite databases. I'm working on setting up the queries in my movie database so it will spit things out in a more friendly fashion. The idea of transferring the database to the server is appealing . . . and difficult. I'm still working on that too.
Right now the genres are arranged pretty creepily. Like the "A"s list as _ Adult Animation etc. And the pages like "D" are stupid long and take a bit of time to download (D for Drama, see?"
But now you can go to "K" and see all the Kung Fu movies or "Z" to see all the Zombie flics.
Feel free to send me corrections.

On the other front there was a big police stand off about 50 yards from my home! It was on the local news and made to sound terribly dramatic.
A two hour car chase, armed man, SWAT teams YOW!
I found out about it when I took out the garbage and was wondering why the cops were blocking the street. My puppy barked at the cops. I told her good girl. I still don't trust any cop until I can see they are worth it.

Click images for desktop size: "Butterflies And Love" by Anonymous The standoff seems to have gone on for hours and in the end NO ONE WAS HURT!
LAPD would have blown the place up with too many tear gas shells that would eventually burned the place down (see how the handled the SLA back in the 70's, that's still their approach).
There's something to be said for small town living. No one was hurt. No one was shot. No one was a hero and no one was a villain.
I like that.

In my quest for World Champion Snow fighter; I seem to have been beaten.
I feel generally unwell. My body is sore and feels like I've been in a fight or an overtime game.
Its the kind of unwell where I'd seriously consider taking off work for the day. So you know its semi-serious!
I'll be fine. I have a new doctor now! I hope I like him.

My little blind puppy is hanging on. He's still eating and when he's not feeling miserable he perky and ready for fun!
I pray I'm reading him right and that he's enjoying life and not suffering. I would despise myself if I was letting him suffer.

Posted by David at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Click images for desktop size: "Rust & Dirt" I walked myself to the hospital yesterday. Emergency room.
About a 3.5 mile walk. Funny thing, I felt better the more I was moving. Would have been great if I'd had a dog with me.
I was bleeding and it was embarrassing bleeding. Not blood gushing stuff.
It was from eating a jalapeno pepper for dinner the night before. I remember thinking how odd that I hadn't eaten a pepper in such a long time . . . It wasn't until I was sitting in emergency that I remembered.
I got scoped out. I re-opened my ulcer, which was caused by too many pills that I have to take to stay alive.
Sometimes this life is tedious.
They looked at other stuff. I strained my shoulder. It still hurts. Seems it was a mild separation. I can accept that. I remember having to pop it back into place but I'm surprised that it still causes me pain. I used to heal so well.
And I strained my right hip flexor. That was from shoveling snow and slipping on ice.
I am working on Zen Master status on snow shoveling. I need to hurry that up. Its snowing now.
That was a joke . . . hurrying up Zen . . . they're seldom as funny when you have to explain them . . . especially when they're not that funny to start with.

I've gotten a couple of emails chastising me for my opinions about Tobe Hooper. No one defending him but trying to convince me that Wes Craven was then the new Romero.
Well, I thought "Last House On The Left" had a great ad campaign, "Keep repeating to yourself its only a movie! Its only a movie!" but I thought it was only mildly interesting. Better was the speculation about all the different versions in there that had even better gore and splatter.

Click images for desktop size: "Anime Wallpaper" by Mota I saw it first in downtown LA. One of the other films on the triple bill was, "They Call Her One Eye" (originally "Thriller-A Grim Film"). "One Eye" was definitely more disturbing.
It wasn't until Craven did "The Hills Have Eyes" that I thought he might be a serious talent. But he sold out to Hollywood too quickly for me.
"The Hills Have Eyes" was staggering. While "Last House" was just a more explicit retelling of Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" "Hills" was an Adlerian exploration of a Freudian psychic nightmare. And it had dogs!
But then came the dreck. The Freddie Krueger movies and that almost entertaining piece of B tripe, "Swamp Thing". Craven was never a prophet. He worked for the money until he became bankrupt. (as in bereft of talent and ideas, not short of cash.)
When you start making art for the money instead of wanting to tell a story you become something that I can respect but I can never love.
George Romero has been quirky but he never sold out. He went to Dario Argento for financing and turned his back on Hollywood cash and what he perceived as the compromises he'd be unwilling to make.
Its sad that even Jim Jarmusch finally gave in to Hollywood bucks, so only George, standing out there in Pennsylvania, all alone is the only guy with nothing to be ashamed of in his career. He always stayed true to his vision, even when we didn't know what the heck he was talking about.

My friend sent me a link showing that this web site is slanted towards males . . . I can't figure out what that means.
This site also points out that I have no advertisement. I appreciate that. Further my domain name is worth between 800 and 1200 bucks!
The basis for this seems sketchy to me. I figure the domain name is worth the 10 bucks a year it costs to keep it.
But I have been toying with the idea of trying to do some web site design, maybe to earn a few bucks.
I don't know if that infringes on my no-ad policy. I have to think about that.
Its just that through stubbornness and without any desire to learn anything I've gotten pretty good with media and the basics of web design. I don't know. It sounds desperate to me but maybe I am desperate.
You might not know about this, unless you have kids or work for an uptight company, but there is an entire industry built around filtering the internet. For schools I think this is a decent idea.
I remember when you could do a search for lemon pie and get 2 recipes and 45 porn sites.
My puppies site still gets heavy spam for bestiality sites.
But the nice thing is that more and school systems are opening up their filters so that the kids can see her page and photos and little movies. Becasue her site is powered by Movable Type it is automatically blacklisted as a "BLOG". I wonder why they restrict blogs out of hand. Laziness? Or do they all have "ADULT CONTENT" like this one?

Click images for desktop size: "Rhino Bliss" by Lawn Elf That pleases me. I always like it when a hospital or school lets the kids see my puppy. Its pretty humbling and scary.
A ten year old girl wrote me a while ago and explained to me how she had found a way to circumvent her schools filters! It was very detailed and made a great tutorial. Even I could follow it!
Ten years old! That's why I don't worry too much about the future. Although I did vaguely worry about what other sites she was checking out. I liked that she didn't write to me but that she wrote to my puppy.
Although I still have not changed my policy of ever eating an unwrapped, unsealed food given to me by a child, no matter how much love is in their heart.

Posted by David at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "New York City Madness" by Tim Melideo I think the main reason I hate grocery shopping isn't just the money. Its the enforced reminder that I'm no longer perfect.

Finished watching "Valley Of Elah". I still tend to watch movies in chapters, putting them down to resume later. Only the really great movies can hold my attention for a full 90 minutes. They have to be unworldly to keep me interested for two whole hours. Longer than that and I figure the filmmakers don't know how to go about telling their story. (Their are a few exceptions, just a few).
"Valley Of Elah": It was a pretty turgid mess. Obvious, pretentious and meandering.
Susan Sarandon gave one of the most vapid empty performances I've ever seen. It was staggering in the way she conveyed nothing and gave no depth to any part of her character. It wasn't so much that like all these characters were made of card board but hers she played like it was a stiff pice of saran wrap.
They were giving Charlize Therzon plenty of face time and all she could do was be boring, obvious and a anti-illustration of of everything the heavy handed direction was preaching about (as regards women). It was an unrestrained performance that paid no dividends.
In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, Tommy Lee Jones gave one of the most memorable performances in movie history. He was brilliant. The only talent Paul Haggis (director/writer - "Crash") showed was in not getting in his way.
Jones has always been good, sometimes remarkable, but he's never had a showcase where he could keep such a high level going. The character, as written, was pretty much a stupid mess with no foundation or real sense. Jones forgot about it and gave the character an inner monologue that never falters. He doesn't burn or smolder he simply exists and lives.
The genius of his performance is in keeping himself shuttered but still letting us, the audience, know that the thoughts dreams and anguish burn inside of him. The character lies to his friends, but with no tools other than his face and voice he lies convincingly and lets us know exactly why he is lying. It is always human and always true to the person he is.

Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Mota Jones takes a hunk of creepy cardboard and creates a human being out of it. I've seen the other performances nominated. I expect Jones won't win the Oscar which would be a shame, but not a sin.
At least he'll get more work.

For some reason Jones performance got me to drifting thoughts about great movies that had no acting ability, where the filmmakers had told there story so well and convincingly that lesser talented actors contributed instead of distracting from the story.
Probably the best horror film ever made was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". It had everything. Bright sunlight and dripping oozing cadavers. It shocked and it horrified and still does today. Every minus became a plus. Bad acting somehow made the characters seem more real. It made them not laughable but identifiable.
Even Marilyn Burns high pitched screaming throughout (normally an aggravating feature of grind house horror) seemed to be a keening note in a drum and bass line of depravity.
The cheap Fuji stock and daedo lighting kit that were so unimpressive in other grind house flics added the surreal quality of a home movie to the story. It was such an impressive connotation of reality that it became a cliche, an effect strived for less effectively in "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield".
In Texas Chainsaw the blazing sunshine and the unexpected dances in light and darkness made the arcane rooms of savage sculpture and cannibal art seem too close and easy to touch. Like you'd accepted an invitation to that creepy kids house because he had some cool comics to trade and you walked into the ultimate joke and were more stunned that he didn't mind the sense of savage filth than you were by the filth itself.
In that one movie Tobe Hooper took over from George Romero as the new clear eyed sober voice of unspeakable nightmares. Or so it seemed.
And then what happened
The only people still working are Director Tobe Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl.
Kim Henkel, the writer, has his name attached to things, but its only as an attachment. Like he keeps taking co-producer credit and money for all those Chainsaw remakes and sequels.
Marilyn Burns who seemed ready to rear her bloody laughing head into the same B Movie status as Lianna Quigley does cameos.
Ed Neal, the wine stained hitchhiker with a straight razor has gotten work doing Japanese TV shows and other sorts of day player bits.

Click images for desktop size: "Purple Rain" Daniel Pearl found Chainsaw was nothing more than an intro to Hollywood. A note from your mom to a successful producer she dated in High School.
He worked hard. I met him when he was DP on a Pia Zadora music video. He wouldn't even talk about Chainsaw except with heavy anger. He shot "Alien vs Predator 2: Requiem".
Hooper followed up Chainsaw with a Hollywood movie, "Eaten Alive".
It proved that Neville Brand could act as creepy as he looked. It also managed to forever my long standing crush and desire for the once beautiful Carolyn Jones (Morticia, come back to me!!).
It looked like almost any other cheapo horror film, but it could also be read as a talent looking to learn the Hollywood system, the crews, and the actors. If you had a kind heart and great hopes.
Next up for Hooper was "Poltergeist". Big money, big cast, Steven Speilberg producing. It could have been something and then it wasn't. It was just another ghost story with glitzy production values and the start of CGI.
Plenty of sequels and then the TV series. People made a lot of money but the audience looking for something more were jilted.
After that Hooper spent his time making the worst kind of slumming fodder, "Funhouse", a remake of Abel Ferrara's "The Toolbox Murders", all weak and watery stuff that wouldn't wake up a patron in any grind house theater.
Its sad and only proves that sometimes inspiration and madness only strike once.

When I first decided to keep a personal web site it was to force me to spend some time each day to reconsider and think about what I was doing and where I'd gone and why.
It was intended to force me to become human again.
There were the other perks I've mentioned previously. It still serves that purpose. It makes me reflect instead of hurtling head on. (Hurtling is what I think I'm best at.)
For a guy who finds it hard to read emails longer than 4 mails and is a master of writing one line responses all these words perplex. I like it broken up with the pictures. I spend more time choosing, editing the pictures than the words.

Click images for desktop size: "Aladdin" by Maxfield Parrish ecto, the tool I use for laying out and posting to this site, is up to Beta 33! This one has seemed a huge step backwards. Its addressing some of those crazy things for other people but forgetting about guys like me.
It does odd things with images. So that I have to re-upload them via ftp. Which is just annoying and not that big a deal.
What is a big deal is that its not being true WYSIWYG at present. MarsEdit, a competitor, has taken the clue from some of the innovations in ecto and now does some of the tasks better! Regrettably it doesn't do everything that ecto does and does somethings important to me far worse.

My friend has gone on a job interview today. I'm pleased. Its a lot easier to suffer and complain at a job that stresses you than endure the grief of being judged by someone you might dislike.
People can get used to anything. Its hard to ignore inertia and get moving. I'm proud that she's trying.

Posted by David at 10:18 AM | Permalink

Click images for desktop size: "Sans Titre" by Love 1008 I used to have a friend named Chris. Chris published a fanzine. It wasn't like most of the fanzines I read or played around with, his was angry. It took itself seriously but had enough of a sense of humor to get away with being angry and serious.
What drew m to Chris and his magazine was his interest in the "Cinema Of Transgression". Nick Zedd used the little zine to promote a lot of his more political rhetoric and personal hype and propaganda. Zedd and Chris parted acrimoniously. It was more than sort of inevitable.
Chris was sincere and not blind to his idol's clay feet.
My interest, at that time, was more in a fringe member of the "Transgression" clique, Richard Kern.
I liked Kern's movies. I liked the politics of them. I liked the politics of his shooting style and his use of film and his excitement over film as opposed to video.
I liked how the punk movement tied into his own vision and how he melded his own edgy world view with the nihilistic values and charged sexuality and promoted celibacy of the punk thing.
I wasn't blind to the fetish element in some of his work but it wasn't what interested me. I was surprised that Kern is now making more off of heavy coffee table books of his fetish photography than he ever made from his movies.
While it was Zedd who was getting Time Square openings with Scorsesee and glitterati attention Kern kept making films that got shown on a sheet at the punk clubs in New York while the next band set up. It was cool and sometimes Kern's little movies even got billing over the bands. (At least on the fly sheet hand outs.)
Kern was involved with East Coast Punk Diva Lydia Lunch, who ended up involved with Black Flag frontman, Henry Rollins. They did poetry readings together . . . actually Lydia would yell at people in the crowd. If any of them yelled back Henry would jump off stage and beat them up.
In a time when the Kipper Kids, two grown men, would appear at clubs naked, wearing bathing caps and throw paint and blood on the audience I guess that yelling at people and then beating them up qualifies as a poetry reading.
One of the Kipper Kids married Bette Midler. Henry Rollins is now doing direct to video horror films and MC'ing some whack reality game show.

Click images for desktop size: "Shy" by Any Mouse Time does ruin everything.
Anyway, back to Chris.
Eventually Chris moved to LA and got some other crazy to finance his little zine as a semi-serious, nasty and cynical FILM MAGAZINE! With full color covers and national distribution. Rah!
Now the main thing that reminded me of Chris this week is that he LOVED to get abusive phone calls and letters. He loved hate mail to the point that he would not pay bills so that he'd get collection letters and phone calls.
He enjoyed fighting with people. He liked the little battles.
Maybe it kept him in shape for the big wars ahead, I don't know. It was the overwhelming thing I remember of him.
Even though I remember him fondly and warmly, I don't share his enjoyment of hate mail. Notes and letters from people I don't know or barely know, especially notes that I think are intended to hurt me don't faze me at all. I hope I don't anger anyone by saying I look at them with detached id sometimes wry amusement. I'd like to get a clever one.
People whom I know and like on the other hand, their displeasure doesn't stress me but I don't disregard it.
Well except for the one berating me for not posting my brilliant analysis of the Pro Bowl . . . Have they played that yet? Does anyone know the score? Does anyone remember who won last years Pro Bowl?
Most of the, I guess, justifiable flack comes from the "Comments" thing.
I recently turned on comments here, more as an experiment to see how well they are working so I could consider turning them on for my puppy's blog.
Movable Type now uses a thing called Askimet to filter out spam comments. For my puppy's site it works well enough and mixing it with other tools lets me selectively allow certain ips and identifiers comments through with no problem.
Here I get about 50 spam comments an hour. To prohibit them going through to either being published or moderated I've had to set the security so high that it seems ALL comments get reported as spam . . .

Click images for desktop size: "Mortality 2" by Akjareshe This really doesn't bother me that much.
I've been trying to scan through the comments and glean out any real things. Like casinos and sex sites are pretty easy to discern. Some of them are more clever, at least clever enough for me to have to look at them more closely and find them annoying.
I did pull a couple of comments out of the spam, all from strangers as I recall. One I actually wasn't sure was genuine . . . it might have been spam, I just wasn't sure and on that day I decided to let it through.
On most days I find myself looking at a about half, getting bored and annoyed and just dumping them all. Recently I'm down to looking at the first page of 50 and then just dumping them all . . .
So if you're mad a t me because your carefully worded retort isn't published I'm sorry, blame me for being lazy but not for being uncaring.
Better yet blame the spammers. Or "Blame Canada".
Better yet email me and ask me to publish your comment. I do like reading what you have to say.
I always have.

Posted by David at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Vertigo" by Isil Metriel I like fashion.
I like trying to make your outside look like what's going on inside.
I like that fashion always changes. The new pushing out the old until we realize some of the old was pretty cool and then we bring it back.
Its not considered uber-hip to like clothes. It implies that you judge a person by what he or she looks like . . .
Is there any one who doesn't do that? Maybe not judge, judge carries a harsh connotation, but you certainly form an opinion about someone based on the way they present themselves, the way they look.
I've only known one instance where that's time proven untrue. I know a lot of people and I've only met one guy who didn't just see a surface. He did at the start but he was able to look beyond that. Not lip service see beyond that but with a full and open heart see beyond that. Another guy named David was super good looking. He ran track and when he was out in the field the women's hearts were all fluttering. I heard more women make licentious remarks about David then I ever heard guys make, even in a locker room.
David was married. When he first introduced me to his wife I was taken back. She was most likely the homeliest woman I had ever seen.
When I got to know her I discovered she was also one of the most intelligent, aware, kind people I'd ever known. Blindly loyal, discerningly loving. She was a total package of all you could ever dream of in a person, on the inside . . . when you were around her it was easy to forget what she looked like.
David and she have three kids. They are deeply and fiercely in love with each other. They are good for each other.
Everyone else I've known or met doesn't have enough in them to look past the surface. It takes a lot of prodding, a lot of heart searching to see inside and ignore the outside. I'd say its rare.
For the rest of us we're attracted by what we see first. When you see someone in clothes, those clothes make a statement. Seeing someone out of their clothes makes a different statement, for sure. Between those two states of dress the first one is the way you're dressed.
Its not rules. Its not even common sense. Its just appreciating that people view you with either the same, wider or narrower perspective than you view others. Some mad geniuses can pull it off, not caring about their appearances. How many mad geniuses do you know? I know a couple. After they've had their talents acknowledged they still dressed the same way except on big nights, gallery openings or the like.

Click images for desktop size: "Yosemite" by Matt Mosher Most often they dress to the max and develop an affectation. Tuxedo's with electric spinning bow ties come to mind. (seriously)
I always put a lot of thought into how I looked.
I don't much anymore. Mirrors aren't the friends they used to be.
I went through stages along with the rest of the youth of SoCal. I never went in for disco, but I did own a sparkly jacket from Fiorrucci's . . . it was on sale . . .
For punk I wore a denim jacket safety pinned with symmetrical patterns. If I was on stage I wore a cowboy tuxedo with a lot of pins and a Boris Badenov T-Shirt (from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Store).
Then it degraded to leather jeans and manga T-Shirts. Then in an up life jeans with black polished cotton shirts and burgundy chamois dangling from my wrists (which, contrary to opinion weren't a fashion statement. I sweat a lot and I kept getting shocks from mikes and guitar pick ups. They hurt. The chamois stopped most of them.)
And now I wear what I got. Supplemented by 10 minute raids to the department stores.
I still look and think about how this will make me look and then I don't think about it much anymore.

I've run all the experiments with Light Box. It is nifty and does almost everything I want.
It has some drawbacks. Its a javascript. Almost ll the people who still follow Microsoft turn off javascript . . . While Light Box does a totally cool job of displaying the full size pictures you can't just drag them off to your desk top. It takes a "right click and save link" to do that. And you have to leave the nifty Light Box interface to do that.
I have to give them some thought. I do like that its pretty simple to make the Light Box interface look how I want it and even beyond. Maybe I can change some of of the script.

Posted by David at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by H.R. Pepnx II I really believe that, except the Super Bowl is the last game. Last game of the season.
There's still the Pro Bowl. I seldom watch it. They actually broadcast it in Europe! Didn't watch it then either.
They started the hype pretty late for this game. Sports Illustrated is saying that if the Patriots don't win they'll go down in history as the greatest disappointment ever . . . which seems more than a little bit harsh.
The only real stories are about Plaxico Buress running his mouth about an easy Giants victory then not practicing except for a 50 minute walk through. Maybe he thinks that way he'll be rested and his new found "chemistry" with Eli Manning will take over and win it for them.
There's been a little bit of sniping, not much, about Tom Brady's ankle. I wouldn't put too much into that. The only thing it will do is that every time Brady goes down or walks with a limp the announcers will get to talk about "the boot" and wonder if Brady will be able to continue.
Pete Carroll, USC head coach and former Patriot HC, said he can't see much of a chance for the Patriots to lose. "The Giants will have to hit him often and hard to have a chance." He predicts a two touchdown victory for New England.
Personally, I can see a rout, but not by the Giants.
Assuming that the Giants front four can step their game up and reek havoc on Brady there's still a decent running game.
The Giants line backers are going to have to account for Wes Welker out of the slot, Maroney and Faulk on the screens and the scary thought of Moss on the end around. They'll offer little support except on blitzes and blitzing Brady is a dangerous proposition. He picks up the blitz well and does a quick check down.
It will have to be line backer blitzes and they had best work because bringing a safety or CB on a blitz will mean that Stallworth, Gaffney and Moss will be virtually uncovered. They're studs and they can read the blitz too and will know to cut off their routes and give Brady a target.
Going the other way, the biggest joker is Buress. Its really hard to say how well he can play. Not practicing for nearly 2 weeks is not comforting. If Buress can go he can create some points for the Giants.
Click images for desktop size: "Biomechanical Arm" by Chris ConteIf he's not fit I'd expect some close calls and near catches and an occasional brilliant play, but the game will then go to screens and the TE.
The short passing game and the running game will chew up the clock and eat up chunks of yardage. Having seen this team before, and given Billichek's history on facing opponents with two weeks prep, I wouldn't expect that sort of offense to rack up a whole lot of points.
The Patriots will bring a lot of pressure. They think they can still rattle Manning. Maybe, but I think not. The biggest threat will still be the running game.
Casting aside the fact that I want to see history made. I want to see the winning team that still looks like outsiders make history. I want to see a 19-o team with this group of stars, misfits and cast offs do the impossible.
Putting that aside this could be the biggest rout in Super Bowl history with the Patriots leaving the field ready to do it all over again next year. And remembering the last time an AFC came in heavily favored against an NFC team with nothing but a stout defense and a ball control offense I still feel the same way. (That was Buc's v Raiders where the Buc's blew them out.)
Patriots 49 Giants 27

I've gotten the link page semi-organized. It looks better (but is far from complete) and should be more useful.
At least you should be able to find things a bit easier.
There are still things to add especially for tools. I want to try and use more cross platform tools but find that most of the ones that will work on Macintosh and Windows to be rather poor.
Of course I'm thinking about some of the colors (getting the look unified, but distinct, easy to read but sooting) and getting my AJAX code re-written to do the nifty little previews. I still feel I need to apologize for the advertising. At least Snap let me choose non-profti adverts that benefit Save A Child.

Posted by David at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "The Promise" by Michael Parkes Sometimes there's a lot of beauty to be found in the bland.
Most of the time its the way this small creation is handled that moves a movie from mediocre to at least good. I watched a thing called "The Great World Of Sound".
Its a bout this scam. The scam relies on exploiting peoples dreams. Not much original there. In the 30'2 WC Fields explained, "You can't cheat an honest man, so never smarten up a sucker or wise up a chump."
This scam is a bit nastier than most. These two guys, a white one who is as exciting as mayonnaise and a chunky black guy who is desperate for money and has a natural enthusiasm for everything he sees.
They get jobs as record producers. But the real job is to go into medium sized cities and listen to people play their music and then, no matter what their opinion, to sign them to a record contract, a contract that tests their commitment to their music by demanding that they contribute financially.
Their big selling point is that they're asking the musicians for only 30% of the total expenses. They use a cruel line, I'm asking you, in dollars in cents, how much you believe in yourself. How much do you want that dream."
They salesmen justify signing worthless talent to themselves with some scattered logic, "Not everyone who graduates from college is going to win the Noble Prize, but you need to build classrooms and hire professors so the kids who aren't going to do anything with their lives, they're paying all that money so that the kid who can go out and strike gold gets his fair chance."
The film is set in North Carolina and the south, so I thought that there'd be some great scenes of unknown local talent sounding good mixed in with some clunkers for humorous effect. All the music is pretty poor. Including the music written for the soundtrack.
The acting is all pretty good and for a while the movie bounces from boring to amusing. The biggest thing is that I kept hoping to hear something decent instead of sound bites of mediocrity. No performer ever knocked me out or even impressed me. They were all strictly amateurs.
The black guy had a lot of energy and carried it along and it was semi-educational watching him rope in the chumps and get them to hand over their hard earned cash. That wasn't enough to make this seem like a horrendous time waster. I went and fed the dogs and played with them while this was on and knew I hadn't missed anything.
Then it came to a moment.
It was awesome.
Click images for desktop size: "I Hate To Get My Feet Wet" by S4W The set up was predictable. The two guys are both getting sick of being scammers. They're not crooks and they feel their being used. The black guy figures that's just life. He wants the money to feed his kids. The white guy has an artistic girlfriend but no real commitment to her.
They audition a girl, rather plain but with a bit of talent. Not great but better than anything else we've heard in the movie.
The white guy refuses to sign the girl. His partner is shocked and keeps trying to get her money. They start to fall out.
Later that evening they find out that they have no money and no tickets back home. When they call their boss they get some weird scammy flim flam excuse so the result is that they are stranded 900 miles from home, no money, no hope.
They split up.
Unable to reach anyone, the white guy gets desperate. He goes to contact the girl singer he turned away. She works in a bar. They have a few drinks get to talking and she ends up taking him to her home.