Late night tv

1) I don't care if it's 12:53 am - no Harvey Keitel movie should ever be on HBO Family.
2) Eric Roberts in "Stiletto Dance" - "Two Buffalo, NY, policemen work undercover as members of a Russian gang trying to negotiate a nuclear weapons transaction" -- Hello? sign me up!

Junkie love

I was watching a bit of "Wonderland" this evening. (Not "This is Wonderland" the Canadian legal drama, but "Wonderland"- the movie about porn star John Holmes's involvement in the Wonderland Murders in Los Angeles in 1981 or whenever the hell it was.) It stars Val Kilmer as junkie John Holmes and Kate Bosworth as Holmes's junkie girlfriend (I didn't catch her name).

Aaaanyway ... I didn't watch that much of it, but I did watch enough to envy Val and Kate's junkie love. There's something kind of neat about junkie love. It's like ... it doesn't matter what sort of person you are, what you look like, what you do for a living, how often you bathe ... none of that. It just comes down to whether you have dope or not. It's black and white and nothing in between (extra for experts: "gray" would be in between black and white).

It's springtime

My t-shirt shows everyhing

So after a year of having Ebay email me every time "nation of ulysses" came up in an item description, I've finally hit paydirt. The guy in the UK who seemingly prints his own NOU shirts has started selling them again, and this time he's using the "Buy it now" option (which means you can just "buy" the shirt for 10 pounds instead of having to bid upwards of 30 pounds). So yeah, I got two - medium and large - and I'm pleased with that. Admittedly, 20 pounds for t-shirts is steep, but they were charging more for uglier, less meaningful shirts at the Lollapalooza I went to. (The Lushapalooza shirts were pretty cool, but man is that band boring.) What was I saying? Oh yeah, I was using the word "meaningful" to describe a t-shirt.Urgh.

Now I just need someone to put up a Might Magazine #6, and I can stop Ebay-ing forever.

Michelle, my bell, Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday day, Wednesday day.

It was briefly sunny around noon, so I went and sunbathed for a while. That's pretty decadent and ridiculous, I know. Maybe instead of "sunbathed" I should say, "napped in the sun", but that sounds dermatologically irresponsible.

Having the house to myself today, I took the opportunity to re-enact Kenny G's graveyard photo (minus the graveyard).
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/webcasts/goldsmith.html
While looking for that photo I found
http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/works/
head_citations.html
Oh, that Kenny G.

And now it occurs to me that by linking to pages about him, I've spread him around even more and he'd love it.

In theory I should be getting to bed earlier than 3:30 a.m., but on Thursday the Alan Smithee version of David Lynch's "Dune" was on tv, and then on Friday I was having a nice chat where I proceeded to put my foot in mouth regarding at least five topics, and I think maybe I was going for a personal record and couldn't stop. Also, the chat was nice, so there's that.

Rocket man, burning up like cheese and pheromones.

Gangs of New York

I found my old copy of "Gangs of New York" (book, not movie). Oh, it's wonderful. There are mugshots of the Whyos, a post-Civil War gang, and boy are these guys scary motherfuckers. The best is that they've got ridiculous names (which makes 'em even scarier, I guess): Googy Corcoran, Clops Connelly, Baboon Connolly, Piker Ryan ...

"The last haunts of these eminent thugs were an Italian dive at Worth and Mulberry streets, and a Bowery drinking place called the Morgue, the owner of which boasted that his product was equally efficient as a beverage or an embalming fluid. It was in the Morgue that the Whyos had their last great fight, which began when English Charley and Denver Hop quarrelled over the division of loot and starting shooting at each other. Soon a score of men were blazing away with revolvers, but all were drunk and no one was injured. The proprietor of the Morgue said they were very silly to expect to hit anyone after drinking his liquor."

"Piker Ryan ... appears to have been a thug of exceptional enterprise. When he was at length brought to book for one of his many crimes, the police found this list in his pocket:

• Punching ... $2
• Both eyes blacked ... 4
• Nose and jaw broke ... 10
• Jacked out (knocked out with a blackjack) ... 15
• Ear chawed off ... 15
• Leg or arm broke ... 19
• Shot in leg ... 25
• Stab ... 25
• Doing the big job ... 100 and up

Ryan made good use of his opportunities, as was apparent from a notebook which was also in his possession. One page was headed 'Jobs,' and below the heading were half a dozen names. Some had check marks after them, which Ryan explained meant that the tasks had been completed to the satisfaction of his clients."

Are today's gangs as enterprising? (I don't know; I'm genuinely wondering) I mean, I could think of lots of people whose ears I'd like to see "chawed off" for 15 bucks.

Wow, what an unabashedly uneventful day

It rained again today, but not all day -- just enough to make it really annoying. But rain's not annoying; it's just rain. I didn't do anything today, and I blamed the rain. I should blame myself. I am the cause of my misfortunes.

Take the season finale of "Lost", for example. That was fucking disappointing like only a tv show can be, and I have no one to blame but myself for hoping it'd be good. Good Lord, I'm not even really a fan of that show.

I did watch a rerun of the episode of "Celebrity Poker Showdown" featuring "Arrested Development" cast members. See, that's a good show. (Both of 'em, actually -- "Celebrity Poker Showdown" and "Arrested Development". Moreso the latter than the former, but the former keeps Dave Foley employed and boozed up, so that's nice.)

I took pictures of deer today. I also got some decent-ish pictures of the mountain. As could be expected, my camera is all the way over there [points over there], so I can't upload them.

Maybe if I didn't smell so badly I'd be in higher spirits. Winning shit on Ebay puts me in good spirits, though. I won one copy of Ade Edmonson's "How to Be a Bastard" game, and I'm winning another one. You know, as a gift. I'm still waiting for delivery of the Bushnell sunglasses. God, I'm so gay for anything with my last name on it.

It's raining today ...

and I didn't think to have any Scott Walker on my laptop.

It's not even a real rain, you know, the kind that washes away the scum, the filth. Nah, this is just misty drizzle ... drizzle drizzle drizzle, world without end Amen.

I'm making jambalaya, but the weather is a greater influence on my musical mindset than the food, so it's Scott Walker instead of zydeco. Also, I don't even own any zydeco.

I'm [watching] the first couple of discs of the first season of Magnum PI because they just arrived via the Netflix. It's not the best show, but it is what it is, and it's pretty awesome, and it's fun to see the guest stars and trying to place their performances in chronological relation to other things they did around that time. Ian McShane was in an episode, and he also guest-villained on the pilot movie of Codename: Diamondhead, which was also filmed in Hawaii. Was it filmed at the same time and he just squeezed both in? When exactly did they come up with the idea for Codename: Diamondhead -- before or after the success of Magnum PI? And really, what the hell were they thinking? It's a terrible name for a show and the lead was not a leading man.

Ooo, timer's going. Let's cheack that jambalaya.

Let me try this again

I'm watching The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel right now. He's kind of a dink. [edit: tonight on Craig Ferguson: Ann Coulter and Rob and Amber -- oh, that would be agonizing to watch]

I'm watching too much tv in general. I can't help it -- there's so much good tv here! Good Lord, I've still got things tivoed from this weekend that I have to get to. And my first couple of NetFlix flicks are arriving in the middle of this week. What's astounding is that I still have time to read before I go to bed. What's not astounding is that, with the exception of going through the papers in the morning, that's the only time I read. What will be truly impressive is if I can finish the programming books I brought along.

But come on, it' still May, and I've got a Zatoichi movie, a documentary on Frank Frazetta, a David Mamet flick, and an episode of HBO's Real Sex waiting for me.

That's all pretty boy-geeky, isn't it? I mean, it's not quite a "Lord of the Rings" marathon or "The Science of Star Wars" (I don't know how they manage to stretch "It's all made up" into an hour-long slot, but they do!), but still ... boy-geeky.

I cut down a tree this weekend. At various points in the venture, I could hear my inner voice (which sounded a lot like Colleen) saying, "This is not a good idea. Please be careful. Why don't you just go inside and have a nice beverage instead?" But climbing a tree with a bow-saw slung over my shoulder is so much fun! My only injury came when I was stomping dead branches after the excitement was over: a broken branch attempted revenge by flying up into my face and cutting my nose. I don't like to think about what would have happened if I hadn't been wearing my protective goggles. I imagine it would have been one of these: http://www.osha.gov/OshDoc/toc_FatalFacts.html#