More Than Once Upon a Time

…are going to end up in Republican Hell when they die, because that’s what they’re vote will effectively be.

Let them play with the 2000 Naderites.

An ecologically sound version of the helicopter toilet. A great idea.

Woke to lights fizzing in the house at 5:30 this morning, even though they were off. Outside the neighbors’ outside lights were flickering, and the streetlights too. (This is a brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood.) I’m going through the fuse box trying to figure out what’s going on (and why it’s snap-crackle-popping at me), when red lights start flashing outside. Five fire trucks in the street. They start going house to house checking for CO levels. Three or four houses get evacuated (it ain’t that cold outside, but it’s cold enough), but we’re lucky. Our CO level is zero.

Turns out the street salt fried the electric lines under the street. It’s back now (otherwise I wouldn’t be on the net.) Kind of spooky for a while there. I’ve lived through all three big NY blackouts (three other stories), and this one was both the weirdest (it took a while to figure out what was going on - at first I hoped aliens were landing in my backyard) and the easiest. No making candles out of jam jars and salad oil.

Nellie the Wonder Dog was scared to death, especially by the big men wearing helmets, raincoats, and carrying sticks who temporarily invaded the house.

I just went back to sleep.

I loved this movie. A wonderful story, beautifully told. The writer in me was happy, the story lover in me was happy, even the movie lover in me was happy.

I don’t know why it is, but the occasional Pixar movie these days seems to do a better job of portraying the human condition than any number of flicks with real actors. Perhaps it’s because they’re unafraid of sentiment. They feel no need for irony or wallowing in misery and despair, while at the same time they manage to find depths of raw sorrow in their narratives that frequently come off as plain painful in other movies. Perhaps it’s because these movies are cartoons, and we know they’re going to have happy endings, but I do know that the five minute sequence early on that summarized Carl’s and Ellie’s sweet, sad marriage affected me about as much as anything I’ve seen in a long time.

And there were talking dogs, too.

Squirrels!

First she took my shoe downstairs, and then she took another shoe. Normally this is a sign of great excitement, though I did have my suspicions. It was only when she stood up on her hind legs to grab her coat out of my hands and take it downstairs as well that I finally understood.

Nellie is having a snow day.

Really. I shall be introducing the incredible, spectacular, momentous, staggering, and just plain jaw-breakingly awesome film, It Came From Outer Space, on Friday, March 5th, at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC. Come one, come all, for 50s American SF at its most 50s and American. (My first choice was that classic of British cinema, The Quatermass Experiment, where my 8th grade English teacher plays the scientist/sidekick, but the musem couldn’t get a copy, so that was that.)

This actually fell right in the middle between Likes-Some-Things and Likes-Nothing. Being such a positive guy, I decided to give Stew the benefit of the doubt. After all, I love his discs.

The last four songs of the show were what I really liked. Stew is a great singer, larger than life personality, and very funny. All this came through in the last four songs. The first two-thirds of the show, however, were a bit too overwrought for my taste. Stew drinking, Stew crawling across the floor into a mini-fridge. And the video show playing on three screens was ho-hum at best. There is a reason I’ve never been part of the art crowd, where the banal can be worshiped every bit as much as Beethoven’s 5th. And the songs seemed overproduced, which is the musical sin I’m least likely to forgive.

Maybe it was because this was the last night of the show and Stew and the band were either trying too hard or not trying hard enough.

But the last four songs were wonderful. Am listening to some of them right now.

An op-ed piece in the NYTimes today about why record companies are a necessary evil. As are publishing companies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opinion/20kulash.html?ref=opinion

Because she’s lazy and fast, just like me. Or at least like I used to be.

Mostly I just ate myself to death. Chinese for lunch Saturday, Afghani food for dinner that night, came back to Brooklyn with good friends Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis (make sure to buy their books when they come out in April from Tor!) for Italian dinner, then dim sum and Chinese New Year on Monday.

Burp.

I think there was a con in there somewhere.