• 15:14 Today is a good day :) Please PLEASE don't go awry!
• 15:49 2009 Movies: The Road, 2012 - bit.ly/8qO3Uq

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The Road: I had read The Road, so knew what to expect and the movie was pretty much a perfect adaptation of the book. There were lots of good things about it, but it seemed to be missing a heart. There are a few scenes that are so dark and tense they leave you breathless but there were no scenes that were so tender or warm they made you smile. And you need at least some high to appreciate the desperate lows. There were solid performances all around, and the look and feel was, again, perfect for the source material. But, I don't know, maybe not everything NEEDS to be made into a movie.
Rating: Good

2012: If you read me a cast list and brief character description for all involved at the start of the movie, I could tell who was going to live and who was going to die (all except Oliver Platt). Same goes for all 50 narrow escapes. And I'm sure by now I don't have to mention the absurdity of outrunning earthquakes. But... BUT! The fucking scenes are gorgeous. Take out the "characters" and "drama" and you have yourself some BEAUTIFUL destruction porn. Just these large epic cataclysms that make you wish you were playing them yourself in a video game, rather than watching John Cusak's atypically expert navigation. Like most movies nowadays it could have been trimmed down a good 20 minutes. And even though I was able to check my critical brain for most of the film and enjoy it on the entertainment level which it was produced, but I watched the last third in a near coma, my soul having escaped my body like an abuse victim. I mean, SERIOUSLY you don't build crafts that are supposed to withstand the apocalypse with the ability to, oh, I don't know, WITHSTAND APOCALYPSE?
Rating: Good

• 06:11 Thundercats, HO!

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Much as I'm normally one to make fun, this article about people attributing their own beliefs to God hardly seems worth it. For one thing, you need only look at the arguments put forth by Christian groups against abortion or gay marriage to note that there's a confirmation bias at work when people try to give God's opinion (for example, citing Leviticus as proof of the sinfulness of homosexuality while ignoring the many other rules of Leviticus pertaining to things modern Christianity no longer views as sinful -- wearing clothing of mixed materials, body piercing, or eating shellfish, to name but three.)
I'd go further than this and extend it past the religious context. I'd hypothesise that most people, if asked to speculate on the opinions of people they profess to admire or respect, would ascribe to them beliefs close to their own. (This would work less well with topics the subject was well-known to hold a specific opinion on, though that in itself would be interesting to test.) Conversely, I'd speculate that people disliked or reviled by the test subject would have the opposing viewpoint ascribed to them.
A good test case would be to ask people what they thought Adolf Hitler's opinion was on the subject of abortion. I'd expect pro-lifers to point to the Nazi regime's eugenics programmes to support a claim that he'd hold the opposing viewpoint from them, while pro-choice people would be more likely to argue that he would eliminate the right to choose by forcibly aborting foetuses from other races while denying abortions to his own people in the interests of growing the native German population.

Really, the more interesting part of the original study would be to ask atheists the same questions, with the caveat 'Imagine a Judeo-Christian God existed as described by the Torah/the Bible. What would his opinion be?'

• 22:18 at Portage Theater seeing mini horrorfest. Night of the Creeps.
• 22:19 Black Christmas & Blair Witch Project... Very random fest.
• 00:06 Awesome, this is the Sundance cut of Blair Witch. Edwardo Sanchez is here speaking.
• 02:00 Damn, had to miss Black Christmas, was running too late.

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• 17:41 Whatever Happened to N'AIDS-y Rylch: bit.ly/5yvbQH @bloatedlesbian @cherylprolapse

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Well, I for one enjoyed President Bush's speech tonight.

Ten bucks says President Obama uses the words 'the great, silent majority' tonight.

I'm e-mailing back-and-forth with a fiscal analyst regarding an outstanding balance, and every way that I try to explain things is met with dull incomprehension or left-field non-sequiturs about long-answered questions. It feels a bit like a translation error problem, like they're running my e-mails through Babelfish five or six times before reading them.
In fact, given the gulf of understanding and rapid speed of response I'd suspect this to be an elaborate Turing test, except that I know artificial intelligence is smarter than this.

• 14:55 I just generated my #TweetCloud out of a year of my tweets. Top three words: fucking, love, people - w33.us/279h
• 14:56 My tweet cloud makes me feel so poetic: bit.ly/6q8dV4
• 19:16 Anyone wanna buy me a color laser printer for Xmas? I'll be your best friend!!!
• 23:23 Just saw Tom Friendly's penis in Sideways. Lots of Lost penis lately!!! Here's hoping for some Jack Shepherd somewhere.
• 23:45 Precious / Porky's #unlikelydoublefeatures

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The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 - Words Anthology (and one comic), 340 Pages

Notes: A pretty good collection. I get tired of the Darfur, Iraq, It's Over There And Dusty So It Must Be Important stuff that finds its way into all these anthologies. But I'm a fat American, so what do you want? As usual, the fiction narrative stuff was my favorite, especially the back-to-back "How to Tell Stories to Children" and "Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine." Also "So Long, Anyway" is a very well told and structured. There were a couple unbearables, namely the edge foundation's "What's Your Dangerous Idea" and the closer "Literature Unnatured" I just found them both pretentious and condescending and deathly boring. It was also nice to see something from the graphic novel "Fun Home"

Renee French: The Ticking - Graphic Novel, 216 Pages

Notes: From what I had heard and the images I had browsed, I was expecting this to be a surreal flight of fancy (like so much graphic fiction I see nowadays). But, a few elements aside, it's a very real and quite blunt story. Even though it's over 200 pages, it's not set up like a typical graphic novel with many panels per page, instead each page is only one (occasionally two) panels long, so it's a quick read, but the story accomplishes much emotionally in this short span. On a second pass, it was nice to notice things that tie in from the end that you may have overlooked before.

House of the Devil - I really enjoyed this movie. There was a lot of quiet tension and not a lot of gore like you'd imagine for something with this title. The movie is supposed to take place in the 80s, but to me it looked and felt more like a 1970's movie. In fact I overheard Rusty Nails (local underground film guru) say it was very December '76. In any case, the look and feel and especially the casting were spot on for anything pre 1984. I could imagine some people being disappointed by the low-key ending, because we've become accustomed to everything having 10 twist endings and bad guys who are stabbed 20 times but still come back for one more scare, but to me it was refreshing.
Rating: Very Very Good