I feel like I’m finally starting to get back into a regular writing groove after about a month of having a various things interfere with my page-a-day rule (illness, family visits, extracurricular activities, etc.). As I’m closing in on page 400, I can see the faint glimmerings of an ending. The current plan, which almost will certainly change, is to have a first draft completed by the end of the year. I’m still not sure if this story will be of interest to anyone besides me, but I’ll worry about that after the last page is written.
By the way, Robot Chicken is one of the funniest things on television. It’s like when you were ten years old and your older, slightly stoned brother got a hold of your He-Man action figures and made you watch as he employed them in some twisted narrative of his own invention. Except I didn’t have an older brother. But you know what I mean.

Holy crap, when did CompactFlash memory become so cheap? I was looking on NewEgg for a larger capacity memory card for my camera and I couldn’t believe it. $12 bucks for 128 MB! When I bought my camera two years ago, I think I paid $50 for a 64 MB card. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to store a gig of images on your camera. I continue to be amazed by how quickly storage has become so inexpensive.
I fear my air conditioner is going to sputter and die before too long. This is the eighth or ninth straight day of temperatures above 90 degrees with humidity levels of, like, 200%. But I’m not going to complain. In a few months, it’s going to be cold and gray and I’ll fondly remember being all hot and sweaty and gross.

Organized sports brings out truly vile behavior in some people. In Pittsburgh, a T-ball coach paid one of the little tykes on his team $25 to bean another teammate in the head with a baseball. Motive: the coach didn’t want this kid, who happens to have a cognitive disability, playing on his team. Mind you, we’re talking about T-ball. Do they even keep score in T-ball? Was the coach worried his team would miss that last wild card spot in the T-ball playoffs? Fucking idiot.
I saw War of the Worlds last weekend. I liked it a lot. Seeing that tripod burst out of the street was one of the more frightening experiences I’ve had at a movie recently. WARNING: Quit reading if you don’t want to see spoilers. I also thought Spielberg’s decision not to show us the entire battle in the field by the farmhouse was brilliant. It could have been a massive CGI spectacle, but limiting our perspective somehow made it feel more authentic. But one thing about this story, in all its incarnations, bugs me. Here you have a supposedly advanced race of aliens with technology that can crush half of America’s military before supper. Before invading, you would think the aliens would have thought to get their shots. I mean, didn’t they do simulations and stuff to prepare? Did the sensors on their tripods fail to detect those pesky microbes? The ending makes the aliens seem more incompetent than menacing.

PostSecret has to be one of the most compelling on-line art experiments I’ve seen. The underlying concept is simple enough. People send in anonymous postcards with secrets written on them. Some of them are funny. Others are sad. And some are disturbing. Scrolling through these postcards has a definite frisson of voyeurism, regardless of whether they’re all genuine. It also makes me think about all the secrets we carry with us on a daily basis. Do we keep these secrets for our own selfish reasons or for the sakes of others? Perhaps the secrets we keep say as much about who we are as the things we choose to reveal.
And yes, I have one or two secrets myself. But there’s no way I’m writing any of them down on a postcard. The only way to pry my secrets out of me is through generous amounts of alcohol combined with explicit promises of carnal pleasures. I’d make a horrible spy. Get me drunk and start nibbling on my earlobe and I’d gladly reveal all kinds of national secrets. And when I ran out of actual secrets, I’d start inventing ones just to ensure the earlobe nibbling continued.

I finally figured out how to display the photos from the lake. Guess I had to upload them through MT. Here they are.:



It was hot that day, as you can probably tell from the hazy quality of the photos. I’ll try to put up some pictures of the Mill Ruins in the next week or so.