‘I drank what???’

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It’s been a while since I did this, but two DVDs have come out recently that I knew I had to get, so I went ahead and splurged a bit before heading off to work. My most recent additions to my movie library are….

Legend: the last of the ‘three ‘L”s’ of fantasy from my childhood (the other two being Labyrinth and Ladyhawke) that I needed to pick up. While it doesn’t seem to be for everyone (I think that, like Star Wars, you need to have grown up with it to be as obsessed about it as I am, and seeing it for the first time as an adult doesn’t work as well), it has always ranked as one of my favorite films. Tom Cruise before he got mega-superstar-cocky, the gorgeous Mia Sara, and my all-time favorite Tim Curry role as Darkness, together with the visual splendor that Ridley Scott is so well known for (assisted by what must be a record for “most amount of glitter used in a motion picture”). Too cool.

Real Genius: one of my all-time favorite comedies of all-time — quite possibly my single all-time favorite comedy, in fact. A script that seems to be almost entirely a series of one-liners, all strung together with just enough plot to make it work. I really don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie — and I’m always willing to watch it again. In the words of Chris Knight: “It’s a moral imperative.”

Incidentally, each of these movies has the distinction of having one of my first “movie star crushes” — Mia Sara in Legend, especially in the black dress given to her by Darkness, and Michelle Meyrink as Jordan in Real Genius. No real point to that fact — it just popped in my head.

It is so hot out!

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I’ve been absolutely sweltering for the past two days — and loving every last minute of it! Where a week ago Seattle was setting record low temperatures, this week things have done a complete 180, and from what I hear we’re pushing record highs for this time of year. I just checked the local listing on Weather.com, and as of 10:20pm, it’s coming up as 80 degrees! One of the people I work with told me that the forecast for today in the Seattle area was in the high 90’s…yikes!

Whatever it ended up being, it sure felt good! I took off from the apartment a bit early to run some errands, and got to spend a couple hours basking in the heat wave. Not bad…not bad at all. If this keeps up, I just might lose that fish-belly white grade-A Alaska tan!

(Quick update — according to the 6/14 Seattle P-I, Seattle set a record high of 94 degrees yesterday.)

This is where it starts

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Constitution? Rights? What are you talking about? Those don’t exist in the USA anymore — we think you’re a bad guy (or have the potential to be a bad guy, or maybe you just look like a bad guy), therefore, we’re going to do whatever we want. We can detain you at will, only admit it to the public when it serves our best interest (by distracting from political issues we don’t like with the scare of a “dirty bomb”), with no due process, even though you’re a US citizen.

How long before this starts happening to people for reasons that aren’t linked in some way to this nebulous “War on Terror” that seems to be doing an amazingly effective job of brainwashing the American public? After all, for the most part, we seem to be accepting this instance easily enough — after all, he might be a terrorist! But what about the next person? Or the next? We did it to this guy, so now we can do it to others.

Grumble grumble grumble…. I’m a little too steamed (and tired) to go any further with this and stay coherent — but the direction things are going really does scare me.

Naked over your clothes

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The basic idea has been around for a while, but I’ve never seen something quite like this German company’s line of ‘nude’ clothing. It does make me wonder what kind of trouble that might stir up over here — it’d definitely be an eye-catcher! I’d almost love to see a group of 10 to 20 people walking down the street wearing this stuff, just to see how much confusion and consternation it would cause!

(via Boing Boing)

ClearChannel sucks

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Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.

(via DayPop)

Emperor of the US

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I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.

(via MeFi)

Music industry wakes up

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It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….