Some folks riding a Segway across America at 10mph.

How is it that they got from Seattle to Michigan before I heard about it?

Hey! I’m a grand-uncle, or something!

My brother’s stepdaughter just had a son! Woo!

i wholeheartedly endorse Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold.

I’m Mr. Sinus Infection. My face feels like it’s about to explode off the front of my head, as if in a horror movie.

I spent most of the last 24 hours asleep. I’ve only eaten chicken broth, fruit juice, and chewable vitamin C tablets.

Non-sleep time was spent watching TV and movies. CSI:Miami, Simpsons, Fear Factor (though I gave up on that when they had to eat cow brains).. Charlie Rose interviewing Garry Trudeau for an hour (in stark contrast to Fear Factor), about a third of an outrageous info-mercial, and finally, by process of random selection from the big box-o-videotapes… ‘A Clockwork Orange.’

‘Clockwork’ reminded me of another movie, the parallels of which are striking when when you compare them: ‘Britannia Hospital.’ Both are about tinkering with the social fabric, the invasion of technology into society, strict social norms and rebellion against them. Both of them even end with the image of Malcom McDowell on a hospital bed (sort of). And they both star McDowell, who always seems to be having a total blast being in the movies.

‘Clockwork’ is the better movie on many counts, but I love the ambiguous end of ‘Britannia Hospital,’ where Graeme Crowden talks about putting the whole of human knowledge into a.. match… box.

I’m thinking that social criticism in the movies used to take the form of allegorical science fiction, or outlandish genre pictures. Think of all the cynical ’70s movies like ‘Soylent Green,’ ‘Westworld,’ ‘Dirty Harry,’ and lest we forget, ‘Omega Man.’ Nowadays we don’t criticize society in movies, unless they’re directly labeled as documentaries, like ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ Our outrageous genre pics are just ridiculous escapism.

I suppose I have some kind of point. I guess it’s about the poignancy of movies like ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Britannia Hospital,’ and how Hollywood won’t give us anything like that ever again, and how independent producers just don’t have the money for it. Farewell, ‘Omega Man!’

LA Times:

“When this election’s over, you’ll see us move very vigorously,” said one senior administration official involved in strategic planning, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Once you’re past the election, it changes the political ramifications” of a large-scale offensive, the official said. “We’re not on hold right now. We’re just not as aggressive.”

Update: I’d just like to point out that, after some consideration, I think this leak is an attempt to poison the well. They have no such plan, but they know that they’re going to have to get profoundly aggressive sometime after the election anyway. By leaking this statement, they can make critics look like sore losers and/or conspiracy theorists when they complain about the post-election violence.

I should read Making Light more frequently. She’s talking about a bill in Congress set to make ‘extraordinary rendition’ legal. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ is the practice of sending terrorist suspects to foreign countries that allow torture.

What she has to say about it is pretty impressive, but she links to another ‘blog that’s covering this topic in much greater depth, called ObsidianWings.

It’s a complicated issue to understand, but an easy issue to reach a conclusion about: It’s wrong, bad, and contrary to the principles of human dignity and the rule of law. Torturing prisoners only works to intimidate other prisoners, and torturing for intimidation is.. well.. WRONG. Extraditing prisoners to another country so you can do it legally is also.. well.. WRONG.

Really amazing documentary of the NYC anti-war protests on Sept. 28th, 2003, called ‘Sixty Cameras Against The War.’ It uses footage from 60 cameras that were rolling that day, assembling them into complicated split-screens, often of the same action from different angles.

From Wired News, about the computer game ‘Sims 2:’

You can make your Sims straight or gay, bi or transgender. Sims of any sex can live together and make woohoo and become parents — through DNA transmission for hetero couples and through adoption for same-sex couples. Gay Sims are not confined to expansion packs and add-ons. They’re simply part of the game.

If you’re wondering why that’s news, good for you.

I was thinking to myself, wishing I had a text editor that would fill the whole screen with a big black window, so all I would see is what I’m writing.

I was ready to try and hack one together from the source code for TextEdit, but then I found this:

Ulysses. It’s a project-oriented text editor, meaning you can use it to group multiple files together, assign them to categories, keep notes independent of the files, and so on and so forth. It’s ostensibly designed for creative writers, who want to manage all these things in one big window, rather than having to organize files in the Finder. And, most importantly, if you hit shift-command-F, you’re looking at a black screen with yellow text and nothing else.

It’s a slick piece of software, once you get used to the fact that it’s not a one window per document kind of user interface.

I’d buy it, but it costs 100 euros. I can hack TextEdit for 100 euros.

The question on everybody’s lips:

Is it finally OK to say that Bush lied about the reasons for war?

And isn’t it about time the warbloggers apologized for all the nasty things they said about critics of the war?