I want to mention a couple stories that are still out there, but which the news media doesn’t want to cover.

The first story is that a top secret memo was leaked during the recent British election (you do know there was an election in Britain recently, right?). This memo said that the Brits met with US officials in 2002 and were told that the Bush administration always planned to invade Iraq, despite their public statements that the military buildup was to force compliance and not a prelude to invasion. In other words: Top secret memo states that the Bush administration and the Blair government lied about the build up to the war.

Now, you’d think that was a big news story, wouldn’t you?

Well, no. Apparently the US media doesn’t think it’s all that important. And that’s the other story I wanted to mention: The US media is lying to us, too.

But if you’ve endured my political entries here, you knew that already. So I guess it isn’t really news after all.

Rented ‘The Arrangement’ and ‘Primer.’ I also rented ‘Badlands,’ but I haven’t watched it yet.

The first time I saw ‘The Arrangement,’ I was going through a profound depression. It was a really dark period. It was on late-night TV, back when local stations would run movies in the middle of the night for the insomniacs. It was before Reagan deregulated the airwaves, opening the door to the infomercial. Yes, kids, there was a time before the infomercial. There once was a time when TV stations were required to offer educational and community service programming. But all that’s gone.

Anyway. I was too young and too depressed to really understand this movie. There’s a lot that I don’t understand now, and I might just watch it again. I stuck with it back then because I could identify with the alienation of the Kirk Douglas character, struggling to understand a nonsensical world. Today, ‘The Arrangement’ has the quality of a long shaggy dog story. Something happens, there’s ensuing chaos, the characters try to tame the chaos and impose some order on it, but in the process only reconfigure the chaos. Repeat. Lots of powerful performances, for values of ‘powerful’ which are currently unfashionable… What modern movie star can touch Kirk Douglas?

Also, Deborah Kerr plays the estranged wife, and every time she opened her mouth, I couldn’t help but hear her character in ‘Night of the Iguana.’ ‘Night of the Iguana’ is one of my favorite movies, because I encountered it during that same period of depression. Richard Burton loses his mind, too, and whereas Deborah Kerr is part of the insanity in ‘The Arrangement,’ she’s the soothing balm for Burton. So it was a little confusing.

Now… As for ‘Primer.’

‘Primer’ is, first of all, for nerds. Nerds will instantly understand. Non-nerds won’t be able to keep up. If you ever thought you might need a slide rule or expressed a desire to learn how to compile a computer program, you’re in.

The premise: Some young engineers figure out how to build a time machine in their garage. Soon, however, things get way out of hand. Not just a little.

The strengths and weaknesses of this movie are the same, which is a paradox, which is just right for the tone of the film, since it’s about paradoxes. The characters are engineers. They can think. They don’t spend a lot of time explaining things so the audience will understand. By the end of the film, the audience is expected to be able to reverse-engineer a time-travel paradox without many clues. If the filmmakers (who happen to also play the lead roles) had spent that time on exposition, the movie wouldn’t work.

It’s a real enigma. The experience of watching it is more like trying to solve a crossword puzzle than being told a story. Good luck solving it, and thanks to the filmmakers for not diluting it.

First bike ride since… Like… I dunno. Maybe last summer.

I’m only a few short blocks from the Burke-Gilman trail, which regular readers of my blog by now know was a rail line that was converted to multi-use paved path. I got on the B-G and rode up to Lake Forest Park, where I returned a couple books at the library. This was my excuse for making the trip.

But rather than just go back home, I went up to Kenmore, because I had seen a place called Swamp Creek Wetlands Park on the city of Kenmore web site, and I wanted to find out what was actually there. As far as I can tell, it’s just a big area that’s been taken over by the city to limit growth in that part of town. I didn’t see any facilities, other than a trail that barely even looked maintained.

There’s also a place called Inglewood Wetlands, but it’s accessible only through a golf course. I didn’t feel like navigating that. It’s near Kenmore Park, where I’ve seen lots of herons and cormorants. It’s kind of funny… On one side of the river is a cement factory and a lumber yard, and on the other is Kenmore’s city-run collection of fine and rare rhododendrons, a boat ramp, a golf course, and, of course, a couple of protected wetlands with herons and cormorants.

The return trip was more tunnel-vision-oriented, as these things tend to be. A short stop at Tracy Owen Station Park for a few gulps of water. A lot of cyclists stop here, because it’s nice. But trudging along home… A few random images:

I’m sitting on a bench by the trail, because I’m a total lightweight. The garage door on the house behind me opens up… A beautiful woman, probably 27 or 28 if you asked her, dressed in full-office sexy black, hair still up, is looking into the seat of her brand-freakin’-new jet black convertable two-seater that looks like a speeding ticket standing still. I’ve turned around enough to notice, but I’m consciously trying to not pay attention.

I hear the click-click-click of her stilettos on the pavement. She opens the door to the little alcove where the trash and recycling are kept. I hear her open the recycling bin… I want to look, I dearly want to look, to stare, to gawk, but… Finally I steal a glance, disguised as interest in a crow flying by. She’s dug a cardboard box out of the bin. It’s the size of, say, a pizza box, except 6 inches tall. She’s got this box open, and inside is her day planner. Her day planner was inside the box in the recycling. She’s copying information into another day planner. I hear her close the box and drop it back in. Click click click back into the garage. The door shuts.

Later…

I’m riding through my favorite section of the trail. The houses in this area seem more organic, as if the weren’t always million dollar properties, and they became such through a combination of self-discipline and exhuberant joy. Don’t ask me what I mean by this. I’m not really sure myself. But the point is that you get the feeling everyone around here is on good terms, and they all agree that having the trail run through their yards is a good idea. (Not so in other areas…)

So I’m riding through that area, and I remember that there’s always a cat who comes and investigates whoever stops at the bench the neighbors have built under the apple trees. Just then, I see a poofy gray cat in the trail. Is that the one? I can’t remember… I ring my bell. The cat clues in and scurries away. I turn my head and there’s the bench, with some bikers on it, resplendent in brightly-colored gore-tex, and there’s the cat, a butterscotch tabby, sitting on the corner of the bench, studiously ignoring the one biker who has a long leaf from some nearby plant, and is trying to get the cat to play with it. Turn my head forward, and it’s all gone. Back to tunnel vision.

Something like 6 miles each way, total of 12.

Patriotism.

Looking out my window.

Grey haze and the gradual descent of night. Rain to the east, over the mountains and foothills, which are barely visible. Tiny lights on the far shore of the lake, warm and friendly before the advancing rain. Hurry in from play, hurry in from the edge of the water, from your barbeque, from playing hide and seek in the park, from your dinner on the patio under the big umbrella. Rain’s starting. Carry your wine glass inside, where we’ll continue laughing and telling stories.

The tiny lights of a thousand happy dinner tables.

Update: Rude Pundit takes on this topic, and gets it right.

How much of the American soul has been lost to this war? That is a question for another day. Although it is sad to note that the revelation of the call for Bin Laden’s actual, real head in a box has been met with not much more than a blurp in the mainstream media. But something fascinating, but potentially important, is happening to some Republicans.

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Ok, now…. I can understand wanting to maybe send a special ops team to Afghanistan right after 9/11 and kill Osama Bin Laden and bring back proof. Right? Not my personal call, but certainly within the realm of reason. Perhaps. Right?

Well, according to this report, someone (for very small values of ‘someone’) sent a team of CIA agents to Afghanistan one week after 9/11. They were given $3 million in $100 bills and told to kill Osama Bin Laden, cut off his head, and bring it back, packed in dry ice.

Now, your reaction is likely the same as mine has been for the past 5-6 years… “What the fuck country do I live in?” So get yourself through that for a bit… Take some deep, cleansing breaths…

Now ask yourself: If you’re, say, George W. Bush, what do you do with Osama Bin Laden’s frozen head? Do you hold it aloft in a public spectacle, perhaps biting its nose off while the cameras roll? Do you put it on a pike on the White House lawn? Or do you keep it in a secret room, far, far from the prying eyes of anyone who would know? Do you go to this secret room in the middle of sleepless nights and talk to the head of Osama Bin Laden? Do you unload your burdens into its lifeless, unhearing ears? Do you finally erupt into a rage, yelling, nay, screaming at the lifeless countenance?

I’ve written here before about ‘Babylon 5,’ the sci-fi TV show from the mid ’90s. In one section of the story arc, someone’s insane cousin has ascended to the throne of emperor of Centauri. He has a little room full of the heads of his enemies. No one knows but him. There are rumors throughout the court, of course, but no one knows for sure. But we know…

Bookshelves.

Shelves for books you’ve already read, or will never actually get around to reading.

If you store anything on them besides books, do they become simply ‘shelves?’ Why does the presence of a book hold such magic over the naming of shelves?

Filoskofy aside, here’s a story:

A couple days ago, I measured all my stuff, and went down to Ikea to get some shelves. Attracted to the name ‘Journalist’ (as opposed to Aflabnaggreenu, or similarly nonsensical pseudo-Swedish/Star Wars character names), and also the relatively cheap price-point-per-nice-looks-and-solid-build factor, I started measuring.

The original plan was to put the big ugly low metal shelves underneath, and just have brand-new Ikea cheapness overhead, like a consumer paradise rainbow over the trashed convenience store shelves below. That’s where I got them: They were in a giant free pile outside a convenience store that had gone out of business. I was walking by at the time, so I couldn’t really carry them home, and by the time I got back with the car, most of the good stuff was gone.

But! My ugly metal shelves to which I have an emotional attachment would not fit under the Ikea rainbow. Durn that Ikea rainbow! So this required some re-thinking… I’m using the metal shelves to hold the stereo equipment because the shelving is deep enough. This is a big deal for those of us iconoclastic enough to have LPs and LaserDiscs: You need at least 19 inches of shelf depth, and you won’t find it anywhere.

But! I have a stereo cabinet that’s been in storage, because it’s kinda big, and also because it’s buried under other stuff, and I dread having to dig it out. It might not even fit in to my car. The problem, however, is that I’m at Ikea and I don’t know how big that cabinet is, so I can’t know what to buy.

Go back to my side of town. Measure the freakin’ stereo cabinet (by reaching in and trying to get approximate measurements of the hulking thing that’s buried under a pile of junk that I need to get rid of…).

Night passes. Day breaks.

Back to Ikea. It’s raining, or I’d have gone hiking instead. Final calculations… X number of vertical support thingies, Y number of shelves of this size, Z number of smaller shelves…. I go on a hike of a different kind, through the labyrinth of the Ikea retail seven levels of hell. At Ikea, you pull your own stock. They give you a cart, and you go get your own vertical supports and shelves.

Except they didn’t have the shelves. Not the larger ones, anyway. The small ones they had. I ask the guy at the computer terminal; he tells me two or three days and the next shipment arrives. I tell him: “That’s a long time to wait around this store, don’t you think?” He laughs politely.

So I get half the thing. That’s what’s great about modular furniture: Buy half now, the rest when it’s in stock. Just now, however, trying to put it together, I find that the crossbrace has the wrong size screws.

W00t.

“You have more lenses than a fly.” –A friend of mine on the phone last night.

It hasn’t been updated lately, but here’s Dennison Bertram’s DigiHack page, which has ‘hacks’ for your digital camera. Stuff like pinhole body caps and this very cool homebrew ring flash. But what got me to the page was a link to this article about how to make a tilt/shift lens from a ‘leftover’ medium format lens and a toilet plunger.

Regional Trails in King County. It’s a King County official publication. There’s some other useful stuff on that page, too.

Also: A Mac OS X build of hugin. The new version is G4-only, which leaves me out, but there’s an old G3 distro laying about, as well. hugin is a graphical front-end to Dr. Dersch’s PanoTools software. Previously, there were non-trivial barriers to getting it compiled on OS X, but now someone took on the task. Yay open source!