I saw a movie! In a theater! With company! Kelly and I made plans to see a movie, and the plans didn't have to be very complicated, and then we actually did go see the movie as planned. Crazy!

I think maybe I'm becoming a hermit.

Anyway, we saw Bowling for Columbine. Kelly suggested it, and I wasn't super-keen on seeing it but what with my hermetic existence and this being my only free weekend in between horrible working weekends, I thought some social activity might be nice. It was playing at this theater in Bethesda, and it turned out that Secretary was also playing there. Maybe I can catch it after work sometime next weekend. Because Pamie recommends it.

The movie was a little too long and meandering, and because Moore isn't Captain Subtlety, there were times when I wanted to say, "Yes, I understand, I even agree, and actually I agreed before you made that point the first time, much less after the hundredth repetition!" So yeah, a little more editing would have been good. But it had some wonderfully funny parts. Honestly, it's worth seeing just for the cartoon history of America, because that was great. But I'm not a big fan of ambush journalism, and that's Moore's big shtick. This movie didn't feature as much of that, though, which helped.

And early on he made a good point about how fearful Americans are, and how that affects our perceptions, and what causes that, and then he kind of wanders away from that point, probably because it's essentially media-bashing. Which means he's got no real ending, so there's just some more random wandering and Charlton-Heston-abuse (not that I'm opposed to that) and it suddenly just ends. I really think more editing would have helped a lot.

It also makes a nice extended commercial for Canada, if you're into that kind of thing.

I would dearly love to see an obituary for Richard Harris that doesn't mention a freaking children's movie in the first line. That's what killed him, y'know. Sigh.

Yeah, I'm spending the day feeling curmudgeonly. I have to get some of it out of my system between trainings so I don't yell at the client. (Although I just had my review so I guess I could go nuts and still get a raise this year. It's probably not worth the risk, though.)

I read a few books by Glen Baxter over the past couple weeks. He does cartoons. They're hard to describe. Maybe you should just look over here for an idea. Oh wow. There are Glen Baxter dishes! That would be so cool. And, I expect, so expensive. I'd picked up one of his books years ago on a whim, and since then I've got a couple more. Most of them are collections, but he's also done at least one book that I think technically qualifies as a novel. Sort of. It's called The Billiard Table Murders. Gladys Morton travels the world, killing men by feeding them ground-up billiard tables. Meanwhile, a detective pursues her while avoiding his wife's cooking. And there's a robot. And a lot of unexpected objects made of sponge. Did I mention that his stuff was difficult to describe? But I love him.

And I finally got around to God is My Broker, by Christopher Buckley and John Tierney. Buckley is mostly making fun of gurus like Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins. And, to his credit, he realized that the easiest way to make fun of them is just to quote directly from their books. At the end of each chapter there are also questions and exercises which focus on "the 7 1/2 laws of Spiritual and Financial growth," which are things like "As long as God knows the truth, it doesn't matter what you tell your customers." The plot is about a nearly-bankrupt monastery that tries to solve its financial problems with advice from the self-help shelf. It wasn't great, partly because it's such an easy target and partly because the plot was rather predictable. But it was enjoyable enough, and I laughed at the appropriate places, and this was a remaindered copy so I think I got my money's worth out of it.

Now I'm rereading Roy Blount's First Hubby. I'm only about 20 pages in, though, so I'll probably talk about it more later. Yes, I'm reading a lot of silly books just now. I've been too tired for anything deep.

And, because I need Even More Merriment, I've been watching a lot of M*A*S*H this weekend. I got the 2nd season DVDs on sale, and they were cheap enough that I could justify buying something that I could watch 5 times a day on F/X.

Although not uncut, so that part's nice. So far there have been, as expected, a fair number of scenes that I don't remember in episodes I've seen a zillion times. The only real extra is that you have the option of turning off the laugh-track, but that's a nice option. In a few episodes, it's a bit strange without the laugh-track, because you realize how the actors are pausing after every line so that there's space for the riotous laughter. But either I got used to it or they made the laugh-track less invasive later on in the season, because I stopped noticing it after a while.

I was also delighted to discover that this set has some of my favorites, like "Five O'Clock Charlie." And some of my favorite scenes, which weren't always connected to plots. Like the one where Klinger looks like "a big red bird with fuzzy pink feet." I always remember that description, but I never could remember what episode it was in. I remember strange lines, like "They're hunting socks, sir!" "At this hour?" Which isn't really that funny, and has no application to daily life, and yet it sticks with me.

And best of all, the last episode is "A Smattering of Intelligence." With Colonel Flagg! He actually turned up in an episode earlier in the season -- he had a different name then, but that's kind of in-character for him. I suspect that they wrote another episode for the actor after seeing how great he was at maintaining a deadpan expression. I haven't gotten to that episode yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. In fact, I think I'm going to go do laundry and watch it.

I remember! What I wanted to say before. On Saturday I had the always-odd Flix channel on, and Buckaroo Bonzai started. So I thought "Yay!" and then a moment later I thought "I have the DVD, I don't need to watch it," because I'm still not used to that. And then the opening monologue started. Which caught my attention, since in the many times I've seen it over the years, there's never been an opening monologue.

It was strange. Especially since there's already an expositional crawl at the start. And the monologue was different up to the last paragraph, so I don't think anyone could really pay attention to both. I suspect that the narration was added at some point in an effort to make things more comprehensible, but I can't see that working out too well. Because if you aren't the sort of person who can pick it up from what happens in the movie, having it all spelled out isn't really going to help. I mean, it's not like it makes sense. That's the charm! Basically, the narrator said it had been a busy year for Bonzai what with his wife getting killed and the Jet-Car exploding and so on, but now he was doing brain surgery and preparing to test the Jet-Car again. I'm stunned that I've never run across this version before, since it seems as if they must have added that in for syndication. Weird.

I told Johanna about it, and she speculated that it might turn up on some new-ultra-super-special edition DVD. They could call it "The Bastardized Version," and it could have random parts taken out to make room for commercials, too. Oh, and they could loop in more cursing for modern audiences. So instead of "The deuce you say," Bonzai could say, "Holy shit."'

In other news... so you know how at any moment I might be shot and killed, right? It's exciting. Like living in one of those episodes of Homicide in the later years, when Baltimore became a mecca for serial killers of all stripes. Turns out maybe I shouldn't have criticized that as being a tad unrealistic. Anyway, I watched the news this morning, and caught the press conference where Police Chief Moose (heh) flipped out about leaks and bitched at the press and at retired cops & amateur sleuths who were appearing on news shows and second-guessing the cops, and informing the killer about what the cops were likely to do, and all that. My favorite part was when he said that if the local citizens wanted the press to conduct the investigation, just call and let him know, and he'd put his staff back on their regular beat and let The Post and Channel Nine take care of this case. I'm mostly on his side, although he did start to sound crazy after a while. But I imagine he's pretty tired, and I sympathize with that. Although I got a good night's sleep last night and had some highly amusing dreams, including one where I was menaced by a puppet that screamed "By the Power of Greyskull!" I woke up giggling. Several times, I think. Anyway.

The interesting thing is that I saw the actual press conference that was broadcast live, then a few minutes of clips on the morning news shows, and then on the way to work I flipped through the radio stations to see what they were saying. The TV coverage basically said, "Moose blasted retired cops for speculating about a case when they didn't know all the details." The radio coverage barely mentioned that part, and instead spent time discussing journalistic ethics, and how maybe public didn't need to know every detail of an ongoing investigation, and perhaps responsibility should get more consideration than ratings. So obviously, none of the big sources for leaks are talking to the radio stations. Not that I'm cynical. I am interested in seeing which side the newspaper coverage emphasizes tomorrow. The Post is one of the main culprits in the latest brouhaha (you can read their story for the details), and they tend to play both sides, so I expect a big editorial explaining that they thought long and hard about it and they've had arguments in the newsroom about ethics and they think they made the right decision blee inform the public blah. There are times I'd go along with that, but I don't think this is one of them. I just can't see where they can honestly claim that they had any motivation except getting a scoop. It's not like Tarot cards are hard to come by; that's not a detail that some citizen will hear about and think "Oh my god! I know who it is!" So it's just publicizing something that the cops could have used to distinguish people who know something from wannabe freaks.

The other odd thing about it all is that I pass the Montgomery County Police Station on the way to work, so every day for a week I've seen more and more satellite dishes and vans from TV stations set up in their parking lot. And now Katie Couric's in town. That's all I need.

Oh, and Andrew Vachss is coming to town next week. I don't think I can go. I'm sad. His only local appearance is at a store that's like an hour's drive from me. And two hours of driving around the Beltway on a weeknight would be unpleasant enough at the best of times; the next day I have to be bright and perky for a training. Okay, I probably don't have to be perky, but I have to be conscious. So that sucks.

Bob Geldof was on The Early Show this morning! I just happened to see it while I was getting ready for work. Yay. But they didn't let him perform, they just played a video clip in the background while they chatted. Because, of course, CBS cannot let half an hour go by without mentioning Survivor. Geldof is one of the owners of the concept. Which is probably the only reason they had him on, so I guess it's fair, and at least he got to pimp the album a little. Anyway, it was neat to see him on TV. He's all grizzled, but I love him anyway.

I swear I had something else to talk about, but I don't know what it was. I've got a frightening amount of work looming over me for the next month or two, and of course Angel's new season started up last Sunday, so updates may be a little rarer around here for a little while. Although I'm about two-thirds of the way through the recap already, so I think the Sunday night timeslot will improve my timeliness. Go me.

And a moment of silence for the Warren Ellis Forum, which closed last Sunday. Now I won't know about nearly so many cool things. Plus, I was inspired by his moderating style. I admit, I've never quite had the nerve to say "NERD SCUM I WILL HAMMER FORKS INTO YOUR FUCKHOLES."

But I've certainly thought it.

This evening, I was listening to a lot of CDs. One of which was The Juliet Letters, by Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet. I hadn't listened to it in a while. And looking at the insert, I see that Costello wrote his little "intro" in October, 1992. That's ten years ago. This album is ten years old. How can that be?

It's good. Especially if you like strings, and frankly, I'm a complete sucker for them. The songs were inspired by a little news item from the time, about how people apparently sent letters to Juliet Capulet in Verona. So they thought of different kinds of letters: "love letter, begging letter, chain letter, suicide note, etc." and each of the songs is a letter. The chain letter is actually my favorite, but I like all of them. Listening to it tonight I've been saying "I love this song! Oh, I love this one, too! Why haven't I listened to this more often?" Each letter is a little self-contained story, it's got a Broadway musical feel to it. In a good, Sondheim-y, way.