interesting article on nerve about darrell hamamoto, an asian-american studies professor at uc davis who’s decided to take yellow fever in his own hands, and produce Skin on Skin, possibly the first u.s. porno to feature an asian-american woman paired with an asian-american man.
Although Asian and Asian American porn actresses like Asia Carrera and Annabel Chong have made their mark in the adult-film industry, Hamamoto points out, their male counterparts are nowhere to be seen. His film is a bit of erotic affirmative action for the Asian American man, overrepresented by sexless movie nerds and chopsocky action heroes: the ludicrous Long Duk Dong of Sixteen Candles, the Jet Li or Jackie Chan action hero who never gets the girl, the Internet nerds, Chinese restaurant dishwashers, Triad members who are too busy making an illegal buck to fuck, even the indolent Chinese lover of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. “I’m not trying to present a ‘strong’ image of Asian American men,” says Hamamoto. “That’s what we are. We know how to fuck. Look how many Asian motherfuckers there are around the world. We outnumber everyone.”
…
He even reserves special ire for Asians who have sex with whites. Asian American women form a statistically higher number of this group — they marry outside of their ethnic groups far more than Asian American men do. “You are what you fuck,” says Hamamoto. “And if you’re an Asian American who fucks White people, that’s in essence what you are despite physical appearances … There is no color-blind anything, even at the level of the emotions.”
so what does that make me? a twinkie? hard boiled egg? or no yolk?
well, i think i’m pretty much set.
made the big food run today, getting all of the food to bring not only for our food shift but for our supplemental food run duties as well. it’s nice when you don’t have a set budget and they just say, “go buy it all at trader joe’s”. makes things nice and easy.
also, all the clothes are acquired, packed, and ready to go. i recently had this idea of wearing nothing but linen while i was out there: light, breezy, yet long sleeved to provide for sun protection. i borrowed some of hmc’s old linen digs, and then went out and got a couple of nice cotton/flax sleep shirts that were on sale for cheap which will also do the trick. and then i splurged on an all-cotton red kung fu outfit, which will be nice in case it’s not hot hot hot, but still a comfortable breathable natural fabric.
oh, and the bikes? i had lots of offers to borrow bike racks of various sorts, and i actually ended up with a spare trunk type bike rack that someone was giving up. after all that it turned out that there was spare room on the blyss abyss bike trailer after all, so we just put them on the big caravan to be done with it. sometimes, community rocks!
i think that’s mostly it. already got water, costumes, cameras and film. i just need to pack up the land cruiser, and then see if cheryl needs help cooking hummus and baba ganoush tomorrow.
playa, here we come! (in a couple of days, that is.)
the u.s. women’s basketball team show how it’s done, by winning the gold in a tough match against the australian team, which features new superstar and wnba mvp lauren jackson.
what was pretty touching was watching the players get all emotional about winning the gold medal, like tina thompson and swin cash.
meanwhile, the men mildly redeem themselves by winning the bronze over a favored lithuanian team that had beaten them previously in pool play.
all things considered, their olympic run wasn’t too horrible, was it? they lost in exhibition to italy, which wasn’t considered medal quality yet who ended up with a silver, and then in the olympics lost to fourth place lithuania and the gold-medal winner argentina.
let’s not talk about that loss to puerto rico.
on the bright side, taiwan won their first two gold medals ever, winning two (plus a silver) in taekwondo on thursday.
obviously, not the u.s. men’s basketball team, which unsurprisingly lost to argentina in the olympic semifinal match. it’s not hard to explain: they returned to their poor shooting ways, the finishing just 32-for-77 (42 percent) and 3-for-11 on 3s, and just lost to a better and more fundamentally sound argentinian team.
on the bright side, the fantastic movie hero is opening in theatres today. go see this movie! it’s fantastic. it’s beautiful. i’ve already raved about it, but really, go see it. it’s so worth it.
and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with quentin tarantino, despite his name being plastered all over as “q.t. presents…”
hell, call me up. i’ll go see it with you.
it always amazes me how much we try to impose some sort of order in our lives out of absolutely random events. the constant desire for meaning leads people to see significance in things that really aren’t, and to read more into things than they should.
there’s a lot of good examples of this in grand life-affecting things, but it seems that we notice this more in little trivialities like the shuffle play features on our mp3 or cd players.
cd changers have had this feature for years and years, but now with mp3 collections on computers and ipods, you have a much larger selection of songs to choose from. when you have it randomly shuffle songs to play, some people suddenly marvel at the brilliant way it picks exactly the right song to follow the first, and think, “there must be something that’s doing that! it can’t be random!”
thus comes this inane article in the nytimes yesterday about how people think their ipod shuffles are almost sentient:
Mr. Greist rides his bike 15 hours a week, often more than three hours at a time. To get him through the tedium of this workout, he created a 40-song mix called “What It Takes,” a name derived from a quotation on a documentary film about Lance Armstrong’s training for the 2000 Tour de France. (After Armstrong defies his team manager’s orders and races up a snowy mountain, his team manager says into the camera, “Now, that’s what it takes to win the Tour de France.”)
The iPod “knows somehow when I am reaching the end of my reserves, when my motivation is flagging,” Mr. Greist insisted. “It hits me up with ‘In Da Club,’ and then all of a sudden I am in da club.”
“It really likes Ruben Studdard,” the winner of “American Idol’s” second season, Mr. Angus said. This, despite the fact that he only has one song of Mr. Studdard’s - the soulful ballad “Sorry 2004” - stored on his 20-gigabyte player. “There’s nothing worse than when you are having an intense workout and Ruben comes on,” he said, “but it seems to always happen to me.”
Lucy Shaw, a social worker in New York, has stopped using Shuffle altogether. “It was totally not reading my moods,” she said. It would play upbeat music when she was feeling low, and dark, somber selections when she was feeling upbeat. Furthermore, she said, her device had a penchant for picking songs containing four minutes of dead air followed by a bonus track - like Brian Ferry’s “More Than This” (the song to which Bill Murray sings karaoke in “Lost in Translation,” a bonus track on the film’s soundtrack album).
At the macslash.org discussion site, one posting said: “I’m pretty sure iTunes is not sorting my songs randomly. It seems to learn. I’d say it’s using some Bayesian logic and/or simple neural networks to vary probabilities of songs to be selected and adjust parameters of selection by the users history of song skipping.”
When confronted with such elaborate theories, Stan Ng, Apple Computer’s director of iPod product marketing, laughed. “The funny thing about it is that it really is random,” he said. “When you turn on Shuffle Songs, it creates a randomized list of all the music on your iPod without repeating a song.”
more than anything, i think that it’s just a case where subconsciously, in seeking order, you notice the good happy musical accidents more, and then write off the ones that normally don’t notably mix together as just, well, random.
on the other hand, maybe ms. shaw should consult her psychic to find out why her ipod is not reading her moods. maybe it’s mad at her.
hell, maybe i’ll start passing myself off as an ipod psychic.
i was all ready to write this post mortem on the usa men’s basketball team, and how they had just been kicked out of the olympics by losing to spain, making it the first time a team full of nba players hadn’t even gotten a medal, must less won the gold medal.
i was also ready to declare that we should have just sent the women’s team instead, since they really are a dream team, featuring the best of the best of the wnba, with players who a: can pass b: can shoot and c: all really want to be there and take pride in playing for their country.
finally, i was going to extoll lisa leslie as the best u.s. basketball player there. she’s the whole package! she can shoot the three, she’s deadly quick, can handle the ball, and is fantastic around the net. she currently holds the u.s. record for most points and rebounds in olympic competition, for both men and women.
but then the men’s team pull it off, winning against previously unbeaten spain! not only that, but they won by hitting 12 three pointers, incredible considering that they had only made 21 in the previous five games combined.
the hero was stephon marbury, who made 6 of those threes, and scored a men’s u.s. olympic record high 31 points in the game!
who holds the overall u.s. olympic record high?
lisa leslie. 35 points versus japan. 7/31/96.
i went over and got allyn and jodi’s bikes from andrew, and they are sweeeeeeet.
i can’t tell you how excited i am to ride this fucking kickass crocodile around. only i think i’m going to call it “crocodillo” all week. and i’ll be the crocodaddy, and whomever’s on the rear seat will be the crocobaby.
i hadn’t anticipated the bike baskets, though. which are definitely useful, but they make the combined duo so bulky that i think strapping these suckers to the top of the land cruiser is not a great idea.
mr. law advised me that i should probably grab a cheap bike rack. and i do everything the law says.
what i want to know is, why don’t they rent bike racks? it seems like a reasonable thing to be able to rent. but i can’t find any anywhere. i think i did find some place in new hampshire that rented them, but that’s a little inconvenient.
i’m leaning towards just throwing down and picking one up at rei. it does seem dumb to buy something else for the land cruiser, since we’re planning on selling it right after burning man. er, right after moving hmc after burning man. er, right after moving hmc’s parents after moving…
but i could always keep it for the jeep. or maybe decide that i changed my mind, right? “huh. it turns out that i only need to move bikes around once every four years. i think i don’t need this, after all.”
plus, i can use that rei gift card from dave & al from our wedding. so this might cost me next to nothing at all! woo-hoo!
what i do need to figure out is if i want one of those trunk racks, or whether i want one of those racks that plugs into the hitch. hell, i guess i could even go roof rack as well. i have no idea.
where’s a bike rack guru when you need one?
i was going to talk about the nytmes article on how taiwan is trying to commoditize the orchid industry, much like it mass produced low-end electronics:
If the Taiwan effort is successful, orchids could lose their image as the high-priced but finicky princes of the floral world and become lesser nobility, almost as inexpensive as poinsettias. The favored flower for debutantes’ corsages a generation ago, orchids are already starting to appear in rows of $15 potted specimens at mass merchandisers like Home Depot, and seem poised to become even cheaper.
…
Large commercial greenhouses have robbed orchids of some of their elite cachet since then. Now, if Taiwan is successful, there could be orchids for the masses. Seeking a cash crop to replace sugar, which is plagued by falling prices, Taiwan is hoping to double its orchid business, and the government plans to bring heavy public spending into the previously private world of growing orchids.
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Nearly a quarter of the world’s orchids now spend at least part of their lives in Taiwanese greenhouses.
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The government of Taiwan is paying $65 million to cover the construction costs of everything except the greenhouses - and is offering government-backed, 10-year loans at 2 percent interest to help farmers build those.
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When finished, the Taiwan Orchid Plantation will have not only an exposition hall and genetics laboratory, but also a quarantine site, shipping and packing areas, a grid of new roads edged by tidy brick sidewalks and water and electrical hookups for more than 200 industrial-size greenhouses. It will create 1,500 jobs.
alas, if it takes so much effort for me to even post about it, do you really want to read about it?
maybe i should instead talk about olympic beach volleyball. and how much more exciting it is to watch women’s beach volleyball than any other sport. i mean, really. do i even need to go into details about this? if nothing else, let me visually reiterate. even if that doubles badminton final was maybe the most exciting thing i’ve seen during the olympics, and the gymnastics trampoline was the craziest, women’s beach volleyball is still the best. it’s not rocket science, people.
ok, so what’s really been on my mind today is the thought that maybe i’m not thinking BIG enough. specifically relating to work, but who knows, maybe in general? something happened at work last week, relating to me starting to move up into this promotion deal, and without going into any detail (zero’s got me all paranoid now about talking about work, even though i’m pretty sure i’m clean and certainly google-anonymous), it really made me question whether i could do this, and if i had the ability to think at a higher level. and so i’ve been wondering, how do you know if you’re thinking big enough? if i was thinking big enough, would i be richer? would i have a better career? would we own a home? or a plantation? or a whole string of firetrap slumlord properties?
maybe i would have done things by now. maybe i could have helped hmc done things by now. maybe there wouldn’t be the feeling that, who knows, soon you’ll just be old and you might have missed it all?
hell, going back to the orchids, it’s clear that taiwan president chen shui-bian doesn’t have this problem:
i find that i have a fairly low retention period for gloom and guilt and regret. while this tends to keep me sane and less neurotic, maybe this is keeping me from the big-thinking that could lead to success!
then again, what would lao-tzu say?
ok, so just to close the loop: i’m going.
to burning man, that is. cheryl and i are going to camp with elsewhere (thanks!), we have nice bikes loaned from allyn and jodi (thanks!) which are currently being given a little love by agl and pedal revolution (thanks!), and we are eating on the meal plan with blyss abyss (thanks?).
water: check (2.5 gal jugs of water 2/$4 at slaveway!)
sun shower: check
new lenses in indestructible dork glasses: in progress
food: onerous
<bitch>honestly, i don’t know if signing on the meal plan is going to turn out to be worth it or not. it almost seems like we pay as much, come later so we eat less, and then have to do extra work because we’re doing an extra food run on top of our regular meal duty since we signed up late. and also, what makes it harder is that while you only have to bring food for one meal, (or 2/5 of one meal team), it’s one meal for 90 people, instead of, say, 20 meals for two people. we’re just talking about volume, people. and cubic storage space. it’s not like we’re driving a truck out there. the land cruiser’s huge, but not that huge. and really, it’s not like cheryl or i eat that much in the first place. we could have just brought all of our food in a picnic basket.</bitch>
i’m probably missing the whole point right now: being part of community, breaking bread with the people you love.
although sometimes i wish there were less of them.
well, it looks like we’re back up and running.
my domain is now registered with godaddy, and i’m through with that yahoo! nonsense, and everything is pretty once again.
i’ve currently got it using domain masking, which is the same thing as forwarding, only that if you get here using sassyass.net, it still looks like your browser window is looking at sassyass.net. however, this does seem to make it so your window continues to claim that you’re looking at sassyass.net for anything you click on afterwards, so any links that you follow until you actually use a bookmark or type in a new url, are branded as my website. it’s a brilliant new marketing scheme whereby i slowly and virally start taking control of the internet!
(remember when the internet was different than just all the web pages/htmlspace out there? there was usenet newsgroups, ftp sites, gopher, etc. now it’s essentially the same.)
the funny thing is that this causes the same issue that i left yahoo in a snit over, which is that it doesn’t pass through anything after the domain url. i fixed my website to get around this, although some of the old images aren’t showing up.
or i could just turn masking off, but where’s the fun in that? we’ll see.
in the meantime, it looks like i may have missed all the mail that was sent to me for a couple of days. and to be honest, i didn’t miss it at all.
ignorance is bliss! feigned ignorance is blissfuller!
i’m much more of a winter olympics person (almost soley due to that crazy sport of short-track speed skating), but it’s still interesting to take in the summer olympics and see all the competition and drama.
more notably, the televised coverage of the olympics this year has actually been really nice and varied. traditionally, they would only show extended coverage of the things that the united states kicked ass in, such as swimming, track and field, and gymnastics (boring, boring, and boring), and then only have sparse and edited highlight coverage of all the other sports to fill time between heats.
last time they tried this big olympic pay-per-view telecast, which claimed to give you access to all the sports, all the time, was very expensive, and which no one bought.
this time they seem to have come to their senses. sure, there’s still the heavy coverage of the main sports on nbc during prime time, but they’re making extended use of their cable affiliates to give you a pretty impressive range of stuff, all being broadcast on msnbc and cnbc. i’ve been able to watch basketball (for what it’s worth to see the u.s. continue to disappoint), volleyball, soccer, tennis, table tennis, handball, field hockey etc.! they even put the really esoteric stuff on bravo, like judo, sailing, shooting, and equestrian, while they’ve put some of the latin american teams on telemundo, showing soccer, boxing, and basketball.
due to the time difference to athens it’s almost all on in the middle of the night and into the morning, but that’s what tivo is for, right?
plus, i found this nifty website that explains most of the crazy sports. like handball, which sort of looks like field hockey, except that they lost their sticks and get beat up a lot.
the land cruiser’s back in action, ready to roll.
no thanks to me.
well, thanks to me and hmc and koji, but it was partly my fault in the first place so i cancel myself out.
somehow hmc was driving it around all last week with no problem, until she had to run out to the berkeley apartment to try to show it to a subletter. and then it wouldn’t start.
well, so we’ve been having this thing where the red connector keeps popping off the battery, so you just have to pop the trunk and put it back on. annoying, but not fatal. but that didn’t seem to be the problem this time, as it was on solid, but no juice. not even pulp.
i even tried to jump the sucker with my little miata monday, to no avail, so we figured something must be really wrong with the car. maybe alternator, maybe some cable somewhere?
so we had it towed to that very nice man koji at joy auto on 12th street, who looked at it and said that the battery was seriously dead. not only dead, but a bad battery.
only thing was, i had just bought that battery two months ago.
he says this sort of thing happens all the time, and we should just take it back, and meanwhile, he charged it up but warned us that it wouldn’t hold.
so i try and take it back to kragen today, and they test the battery, and they say it’s fine. because it’s charged. doh.
thankfully, hmc brings up the fact that it seems to be the wrong size battery. which it does seem to be. much smaller, that is. he checks the computer, and finds that the battery does have enough cranking power, but the other larger one is actually recommended. he asks us why we ended up with the dinky one instead?
i reply, “well, that’s what the girl here told me to get.”
uh, which, well, isn’t technically true at all. it’s the one that the kragen website told me to get, and the website didn’t give me any other options. in fact, when i bought the battery, the other girl asked me if i was sure that this was the right battery, in effect dissuading me from doing what i did.
anyway, he ended up taking back the bum battery and let us pay the difference to buy the new properly sized battery.
hooray! battery fits, land cruiser starts, everything is happy.
in retrospect, i see how silly and wrong everything was: trying to fit that dinky battery in the large compartment, forcing me to remove the coolant fill tube to tighten the connecting leads, and that whole thing about the lead popping off all the time. when you actually use the right part, things really do work better!
the moral of the story: the internet is smarter than you are. no, maybe it’s: people are smarter than the internet. or maybe: you can’t trust the internet for everything. some people are smarter. on some specific things.
then again, you’re reading this parable on the internet, aren’t you?
yahoo just implemented “enhancements” to their domain name service.
basically, now when you forward a domain name, say, sassyass.net, every url underneath that domain name is still directed to the main forward.
i.e. sassyass.net goes to www.speakeasy.org/~giantrobot.
but sassyass.net/images/title.jpg, still goes to www.speakeasy.org/~giantrobot, instead of www.speakeasy.org/~giantrobot/images/title.jpg.
thus, everything breaks. thus, the beautiful page you see now.
fucking a. good thing i already started the switch of my domain name hosting over to godaddy last week. let’s see if yahoo sets me free or not.
until then, enjoy the ugly.
despite all the warnings during the warm-up tour, and the wake-up loss to italy, team usa dropped its first olympic game ever since nba players started participating, in a humiliating thrashing by non-powerhouse puerto rico:
It was by far the worst defeat for a U.S. men’s team, coming in the Americans’ first game of the Athens Olympics. Having it happen against a team they had dominated in the past 13 months only made it hurt worse.
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Puerto Rico, which had lost to the Americans five times since last July, led for more than 33 minutes of the 40-minute game, was ahead by 22 at halftime and gamely held off a fourth-quarter comeback for one of the greatest sports achievements in the territory’s history.
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The Americans shot only 35 percent, finished 3-for-24 from 3-point range and had nearly as many turnovers (22) as field goals (26).
“We couldn’t hit anything. I shot two off the side of the backboard. Never in my life have I done that,” Richard Jefferson said. “This was a worst-case scenario.”
Puerto Rico was 8-for-16 from long range and 31-55 (56 percent) overall to help negate the Americans’ 46-27 edge in rebounding.
…
“They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” Iverson said. “It’s not about athletics. That’s the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It’s good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played.”
…
As Carlos Arroyo left the court with just over a minute left, he defiantly pulled at the words “Puerto Rico” on his jersey. He led his team with 24 points.
“That was him telling his island of 4 million people he was very proud to beat the big colossal from the north,” Puerto Rico coach Julio Toro said.
so people ask me, “we know that you got hmc crazy shit like philosophy and economics for your anniversary, but what did she get you?”
ok, no one really asked. maybe no one cares about me. but she does, and so she got me this kick ass book: Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987
The lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive, Where’d You Get Those?, is an insider’s account that traces New York City sneaker culture back to its earliest days. Describing how a small and dedicated group of sneaker consumers in the 70s and early 80s proved instrumental in establishing current corporate giants like Nike and Adidas, aficionado Bobbito Garcia writes with the exactitude and affection that only a true believer could bring. While chronicling the rise of sneakers through the lean years of the 60s, the bulk of the book examines sneakers released between the golden years of 1970-1987. Information-packed entries for each model include all of the color combinations available, nicknames of particular models, any relevant athlete endorsement, and (often hilarious) running commentary and stories from a rogues’ gallery of fanatics who weigh in on the pros and cons of each sneaker.there’s also sections on customizing kicks, whether it was wrapping a sock around your foot to give it that fat “dope-fiend jelly roll” look, or special laces, to even painting them to recreate an impossible-to-get shoe:
Johnny Snakeback Fever: Clown shoes.
i’ve gone all digital.
phone-wise, that is. vonage finally got the ability to let me keep my main telephone number, so i put in the big switch last week, and it cut over today. now we’re using voice over ip for our phone, which basically feeds it through our dsl line and makes telephone calls over the internet.
our phone works just as normal with all the same features as before (except privacy manager). call waiting, caller id, call waiting id all work great. and free long distance, voice mail, etc.
and then you can also do wonky things like check your voice mail online, and forward your home phone to another phone, like your cell when you’re not around. and the cool thing is that if you do that, caller id still works properly, passing through the id of the actual original caller, not your home phone. which is of course how it should work, but you can see how it stupidly might not. but it does!
the quality seems to be fine, although a couple of people claimed that it sounded like i was really far off. but they sounded fine on my end.
all that for $25/month. which beats the hell out of the $70/month i was paying sbc for a similar flat rate unlimited calling package.
hm, it looks like i did miss out on a free month of service for me and someone else by not having someone refer me. sorry, burnin’ steph! i should refer someone and save everyone money! everyone sign up now!
meanwhile, vonage actually had a big outage today. hooray for the bleeding edge!
my mind is possessed with burning man possibilities. everyone says to go, and everyone is making it easy to go: places to camp with elsewhere or blyss abyss, playa bikes offered from allyn & jodi, maybe even meal options! not that i actually eat anyway. but it’s nice to have the option. plus, it’ll be fun, and there will be a lot of naked people there. and who doesn’t love naked people? everyone is telling me to go, and no one’s saying no. so, what then?
of course, we will talk about basketball instead.
team usa just finished their pre-olympic run of games, where they trounced puerto rico, and then embarrassingly lost to italy, barely beat germany, and had to fight hard to win two games over turkey. there’s been lots and lots of talk about how usa basketball still can’t assemble the right team for international play, namely getting people who play as a team, and specifically, players who can just out and out shoot, which is the key to the international game. where’s michael redd? where’s rip hamilton?
but anyway, quick impressions:
solid:
so cheryl just asked me if i would go to burning man with her.
i don’t know.
hmc swore that we would finally go this year, after missing it for several years. we were super determined, and i even bought cheap tickets online as soon as they went on sale. alas, the film business drags on, and she’s of course booked on this other film, monster house (no, not the tv show, dummy) through october. so i really haven’t given it much thought at all. i’ve sort of thought about it here and there, but i figured that if i really wanted to go, i would have put some effort into it before now, and i hadn’t. so i was resigned to just not going and selling my ticket, since i already sold our other ticket to joy.
but now cheryl, who’s been on the same fence as i have, is now tempted to go. and asks me. which may just be the thing that i wanted/needed, someone to go with.
but all the problems: last minute planning. how to get there? where to camp? food! water! bicycles!
it’s all overwhelming and daunting.
can i really do this? do i really want to?
this just in: w says, “i think you should go to burningman with cheryl. it’ll be totally different— don’t prepare much at all. get some fabulous clothes (or non-clothes) & sign up for blyss abyss meals. get out, have fun.”
hmmm.
hmc and i went up to sea ranch to get away for the weekend, in (early) celebration of our one year wedding anniversary.
according to the history of sea ranch,
in any case, a couple of friends of mine have been up there, and they really loved it and raved about it as a nice place to go and get away. perfect escape from lawsuits, computers, jobs, bandwidth, rent control, etc. you can rent vacation homes up there, and we ended up renting a nice little unit close to the beach.
it was really quite lovely. a nice little house with a hot tub, with really more room than we needed, but it was nice and quiet, and the beach was in view just a short walk away. we could see the fog rolling in and out, and the best part was all the wildlife wandering around. there were lots of deer loitering about the houses, and lots of different birds, rabbits, spiders, bugs.
very nice, very relaxing.
we really didn’t do much. just sort of slept around, and sat around the house and read in the sunshine, listening to random songs on the ipod, which i plugged into the house stereo.
i read through mcsweeney’s quarterly #13, which only kept my interest because it was the issue dedicated to comics, and comes in a lovely fold-out large comic sheet, with two small comic books and a bonus 264-page hardcover book. along with all the stuff that i love already (c.ware, j.&g.hernandez, l.barry, a.tomine, d.clowes, c.burns, etc.), i made two discoveries:
i ended up getting her a philosophy book and a subscription to the economist. because that’s what she wants.
and that’s what it’s all about.
whoa. they just traded gary payton to the celtics.
while that might work for those damned celtics, it throws away the last part of the “dream team” from last season. now it’s the kobe show, starring kobe bryant and a bunch of scrubs.
as Governor Tarkin said, “The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away.
while hmc’s in town, one of the things i need to get around to is to change her phone plan to something more reasonable. right now she’s on some $70 plan which was really the cheapest at the time given that she was using a lot of daytime minutes for work, but for the past year+ she’s really only using night time and weekends, and plus, all the plans have gotten much cheaper.
i figure while we’re at it, we might as well get her a new phone as well, since she’s grown tired and weary of those good old nokia 8260’s. i think we’re looking at something where she can upload her contacts into the phone, because yet another round of trying to type in all those numbers will drive her mad. lord knows she’s still carrying around two old phones just for the numbers contained within.
oddly enough, she’s all hopped up on bluetooth as well, because she likes the idea of being able to have a wireless headset. she likes this because, uh, this would make her look more like a cyborg. or that’s what she claims.
also, no wires means no wires for certain hungry little white cats to bite through.
i think she’s wanting the motorola v600 phone, mostly because she thinks the sony-ericsson phones are fugly.
now the big challenge is to find this sucker cheap or for free. because att is asking $300 for this sucker.
someone’s compiled an excellent list of the mysterious correlation between any bad news or approval ratings decline for the gwbush administration and issued terror alerts:
March 16, 2004 — Dems call for probe on Medicare cost cover-up.
March 17, 2004 — Condoleeza opts of 9/11 Commission hearings. She repeats her refusal several times during the week, and later on appears on “60 Minutes” to explain her position.
March 18, 2004 - News report that a “high target” Al Qaeda leader has been “sorrouded” in the border with Pakistan. Cnn suggests it may be Bin Laden or al-Zawahri. Reports of fierce fighting continue. After the fighting ends, it is reported that it wasn’t any “high value” target in the battle after all.
March 21, 2004 The State Department issues a terror alert.
hurm. so the mp3blog that we just started, monkeySARS, is maybe a little too successful already. so far, we’ve used up 1.8GB of our 5GB monthly bandwidth allocation.
and it’s only the 4th of the month.
so don’t go there and listen to the great music. no, do. no, don’t.
crackers.
where’s that benevolent patron with the free server and the fat bandwidth again?
and no, not like a party.
or maybe yes, like a party. only the party’s the blog and it’s in your head.
no actually, the party is the blog, but the issue is the venue. it’s the fact that when you look up to the url at the top of your browser right now (go ahead, i’ll wait. ok? good.), you see the address of my speakeasy home directory. which is fine and functional, but aesthetically inelegant.
what you should see is the url of my domain name, sassyass.net, which is actually currently redirected to my home directory. because when i started this way back when this was the easiest and cheapest way to put this sucker in motion. but now everyone who has links to my blog has links to the home directory, not the domain name. which is not as it should be.
i’ve looked into cheap hosting solutions, but with the lack of shell access, i’m not sure how i would set up MT. i could just try and move my existing installation en masse, but what would i do if i needed to change something?
i did sign up for (ilove)thefreewebhosting.com, which is pretty cool in that it’s, uh, web hosting. for free. i guess i can try that, but aren’t we suspicious of anything free?
on the other hand, i did start a mp3blog there, monkeySARS with a spare domain name i had hanging around, and that seems to work pretty well so far.
i guess at some point i just need to throw down and pay for something. a high price for vanity, indeed. or maybe i need to find someone with a spare linux box who’ll kindly host me for free…
last week i did the artyfilm double feature with cc, taking in napoleon dynamite and the new beat takeshi film, his remake of the classic the blind swordsman: zatoichi.
to be honest, i don’t know what the hell napoleon dynamite was about. cc adores it, but i really can’t see it.
zatoichi was pretty cool, and the fight scenes were pretty fantastic. the interesting thing was that all the blood was digitally put in with cg, giving you big fat splatter effects. however, to me it ended up looking like videogame blood, like those ridiculous spurts when you’re playing bushido blade, or (worse off) mortal kombat. somehow it looks even more fake, and maybe that’s just because they don’t yet quite know how to accurately depict blood using cg?
cc says that she heard it was intentional to make it more cartoonish to lessen the impact, but i haven’t been able to find that anywhere. kitano does say, however, “‘Zatoichi’ essentially has too much action, and too many killings and bloody scenes to be seen by a general audience. I thought comical scenes would work well to weaken the sense of too much violence and give this film dynamics and balance.”
then it occurs to me: what realism are we actually comparing it to? it’s not like anyone gets to see people getting sliced open in swordfights anymore, so who knows what realistic blood looks like? all we have to compare it to is what we’ve seen in the movies, so we’re defining realism as movie realism. power of media. propaganda is reality.
on the other hand, i saw lady snowblood this weekend, and it was fucking great. it’s based on a manga by kazuo koike (of lone wolf and cub), and is also the main inspiration for o-ren iishi in kill bill. the funny thing is that there are a lot of fight scenes and bloody killing in this film, and none of it looks real. well, there’s great splattering, but the blood is classic camp ketchup colored. but the movie still kicks ass.
apparently, realism is overrated.