It took me a little while, but I finally read Illuminatus! Yeah, I know. Weirdly (maybe) enough, I read Cosmic Trigger, and then Schrodinger's Cat, and then Masks of the Illuminati, and only got around to the original mess a couple of weeks ago. I think the key factor was: copies of all the other books turned up at used book stores when I happened to be shopping. Well, okay, Cosmic Trigger I got at some crazy little Wiccan new-agey store that existed across the street from my dorm at college for about a year. They had some nice-smelling incense.

Oh, I guess I should say something about it. Er. It was fun. Considerably less surprising than it might have been if I'd read it first, of course. I thought it was odd that I didn't think it was odd. I mean, I had borrowed a copy from my brother a few years back, and at the time I really couldn't get into it at all, whereas this time I had no problem. And it wasn't that long ago, so I guess maybe I was just in the mood for it this time. Possibly because of all the election fun going on. I do need to reread it at some point since a lot of pieces don't fit together until the end, but since I more or less knew where things were headed, I didn't feel obliged to follow every one of the five thousand subplots.

I saw Shaun of the Dead. Twice, actually. Because I ducked out of work early to catch a matinee the Friday it opened, and then I'd made plans with my friend Lisa to see, um, Captain Shiny and the... no. Captain Future and the Future of the Future? Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow! Yeah, that's the one. Anyway. Then I called Lisa to make plans for when we were seeing A Movie With Giant Robots and it turned out she was sad about not getting to see Shaun of the Dead. And I said I wouldn't mind seeing it again, so that's what we did. I liked it, anyway, if you didn't guess. Both times, I seemed to be the only one in the theater who got the Sinn Fein joke, although it could just be that people didn't understand what Ed was saying, since I barely heard it the first time. I think I actually enjoyed the first, um, third? or so the most, before the real zombie madness starts. The opening at the bar, and then all the set-up we hear and see in the background. Because dramatic irony is funny.

So maybe I'll see Future Boy at some point. I think Team America: World Police has become my new priority.

Because CleaPet rocks, and I guess because I whined about wanting the two disks I was missing, she sold me her used copy of Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. Yay! And it comes with a book containing a great big interview with Merritt by Daniel Handler, which is highly entertaining. It's also amusing because it's a transcript of a conversation at a restaurant, and at one point they discuss whether the batteries are getting low in the tape recorder, and then Merritt goes to get more batteries. And the waitress interrupts at one point, and Merritt gets distracted by some stains on his clothes. It's possible that I'm easily entertained. They also talk about each of the songs a bit. It's not all fun and batteries. I also like this little reading suggestion from Merritt: "I find reading H.P. Lovecraft very calming. When I'm upset I read H.P. Lovecraft and remember that my problems may be difficult, thorny, but they're not cosmic." Oh, and I also this:

Merritt: That's the problem with quoting things.

Handler: What is the problem with quoting things?

Merritt: Once you start quoting yourself, you can't remember when you first did it.

Er, the songs are nice, too, incidentally. I like "Washington, D.C." since I have to, really. And "No One Will Ever Love You," which Merritt says is meant to sound like a Fleetwood Mac song, and I never would have thought of that because I'm often clueless, but it totally does. And "Long Forgotten Fairytale," which is another 80s-ish sounding song. And more that I can't think of at the moment.

I've mostly been rereading things lately. Which I've started feeling vaguely guilty about, because there are so many books out there that I want to read, and since my time is limited, it seems silly to reread something when I could be trying something new. On the other hand, when it's 11 PM and you just want something to read for half an hour until you fall asleep, it's easier to reach for the familiar.

So. I reread a couple of Fletch books. Notably Fletch and the Man Who, in which Fletch works for a presidential campaign. It's timely! I don't think I've really gone into the Fletch series before, so let's do that now. Firstly, wipe the image of Chevy Chase out of your head. I liked the first movie, okay, but I saw it before reading the books, which are so much more fun. The plots make sense, for one thing. They're good mysteries, but you don't need to be a mystery fan to enjoy them; they are all full of tons of witty dialogue, and the thing I find most interesting about them is the portrayal of reporters, how they work, how they find sources, and all that kind of stuff. I suppose it's a bit dated in that regard because now either you have a byline because of your slant, or you're nobody. In the books, there's some actual respect for investigative reporting. Which is one thing the media, and I think particularly newspapers, used to be better at. Sigh. Anyway. Fletch and the Man Who is a bit of an education about campaign coverage -- one of the running gags is that the reporters often turn in stories about what the candidate said about such-and-such before he's actually said it, because they know what he's going to say.

Also reread The Prodigal Woman, though I did skim the parts about Betsy's crazy boyfriend because once with that was enough. The second time through what stood out to me most is 1) how completely horrible Leda is to her parents for no apparent reason, and 2) that the message of the book really does seem to be "needing other people sucks." People get trampled on in direct proportion to how much they need other people to feel happy. It's like a sociopath's manifesto.

I watched Mystic River. Liked it a lot. Wasn't astonishing -- I'd give it a B, though I believe I've noted that I'm a tough grader. Johanna hated it, hated hated hated it, and so I've been meaning to see it for a while just because of that. She thinks that part of the problem was she'd heard it talked up so much, which I can see. But. Yeah, I liked it. Except for the really loud stings on the soundtrack at a couple of points, because those just seemed cheesy. I've been looking at various comments online about it, and as always, I'm amused by them. I can understand being irritated at the amount of coincidences in the movie, but I read a lot of Auster's stuff, so that doesn't bother me. More amusing to me were the complaints about how it turned out that the kids who -- oh, this'll have spoilers, by the way. The movie came out a year ago. Cope. -- so, anyway, I saw complaints about the fact that the kids just accidentally shot the girl. Dear world -- They were lying. I think almost everyone in the movie was lying at some point. The fact that this lie flies with the other characters doesn't mean the audience is supposed to believe it. We saw what happened, we saw the reactions. We know more than the characters. So if one character says, "It was an accident" at the end, that doesn't mean you're supposed to take it as gospel. Okay?

And then I watched Barry Lyndon. Which was kind of similar in some ways. I did not like it as much as Kubrick's later movies, but it certainly was gorgeous, and quietly funny. And of course it's slow. It was interesting to watch both movies in a weekend, because they're both very removed. Kubrick is more so, of course, but I was talking to my mom about how Eastwood gets inside characters' heads a bit more, but his movies are still very nonjudgmental. With Kubrick, you don't even get much of what inside the character, you just see what they do. Kind of like life.

Finally, I watched Lost. I sort of half-watched the first two, because honestly? All of the characters are extremely irritating, so mostly I feel like it's good that they're lost on an island somewhere, far away from me. And the eternal close-ups were driving me batshit. But then I remembered to watch it tonight, and, yes, I really don't like it. At all. It's like the Angel episode "Dad" every week. The whole show goes through giant contortions so that we know less than the characters about everything. The last bit was the final straw: someone offers information to the main character, and he refuses. He doesn't care about the backstory? It's swell that he's all Zen and everything, but I just spent an hour being teased with it, okay? The writers sure want me to care. You can do shows with mysteries and slow reveals, but that requires that at least one character is going on the audience's journey with them. If the show was cheesier, I could enjoy it. But it's cheesy and thinks it isn't. Johanna really enjoyed the black comedy of some parts this week, and I would too if I thought they were intentional. But I don't, so it just grates on me.

Sweet Christ. Insert a joke here about waiters and flies if you must, but: The Soup sucks. So much. Talk Soup was never genius, but it was a reasonable enough way to waste half an hour on the weekend if I stumbled upon it. I've channel-surfed may way to the latest incarnation a couple of times now and haven't been able to stand it for more than five minutes.

The Venture Brothers, on the other hand, is awesome. Adore it. I tend to love or hate Adult Swim on a more or less random basis -- some weeks I love everything, some weeks I mute it for most of the night. But Venture Brothers is fabulous.

I finished up season 2 of The Shield a week or two ago, after getting through the first two disks while packing up things last month. There's are fewer amazing/shocking moments than in the first season, and actually I feel like the last few episodes are a bit of a letdown. The first problem isn't that much of a problem, because if you do shocker moments all the time they get old. The other one is a little more serious, just because there are a lot of promising ideas that sort of drop sooner than I'd wanted (Aceveda's partnership with Mick, in particular -- I loved that episode and wanted at least another week or two of Aceveda being horrified by the deal he'd made, because that's comedy). To his credit, Shawn Ryan does mention in one of the commentaries that he feels as if they let some ideas fall by the wayside. Danny's problems with the widow of the man she shot does sort of fade away, I guess because they quickly started torturing her in new ways. I almost feel like they had so many ideas that they were too quick to drop one and move on the next. Granted, the show always moves faster than I expect, but in the first season it's more a "Wow, I thought there'd be more build-up to this," and in the second season it's more, "Wow, I thought there'd be more consequences from this."

So yeah, I'm less blown away than I was by the first season. Still a very strong show, totally enjoyed watching it, but the first season has episodes like "Cherry Poppers" that are just burned into my head, and there's no single episode that stands out in my memory quite as much in the second year. Basically, I'd give it a B after the first season's A, but as sophomore slumps go that's not too bad.

And now, the links. This has been sitting in my bookmarks since July, now, but it's worth the read if you've missed it. Katherine's final Obsidian Wings entry sums up a few problems with homeland security:

Yes, I would rather my relatives disappear into a prison, be deported, even be abused, than disappear from the earth. I don't know how many prisoners have been tortured, but it's almost certainly fewer than the 3000 innocents bin Laden has murdered, let alone the 4 million more of us he has promised to murder. Yes, it is better to hurt people in an attempt at self defense or democracy building, however misguided, than to kill them for the sake of killing them.

But "better than Al Qaeda" may be the faintest, most damning praise I have heard in my life. This is our government; we have more control over it than we will ever have over a band of fanatical murderers in the caves of Waziristan.

Emogame's Anti-Bush game starts out stupid and loud, and turns out to be sort of Sesame Street-ish endearing infotainment. Starring Voltron! Text-heavy scenes explaining issues like tax cuts and the deficit in great detail alternate with scenes where you're Mr. T battling a robeast version of Dick Cheney. It's fairly terrible as a game, but I just sort of admire it as a propaganda technique. You can play online or download it here.

In other news, Michael Dirda is funny. Every once in a while I remember to go read his online chats, and this one is particularly amusing. I like his quick, "Nobody's read all of Wodehouse," and the response he gets. And then there's this:

Michael Dirda: I don't have a reading chair, don't even have a proper desk. I have children instead. I am tempted, at times, to add: Alas.

[...]

Washington, D.C.: Aren't children better than having your own reading chair?

Michael Dirda: I find that you can sit on them just so long, then they begin to squirm.