This ought to be good.... I can't wait to see what those nutters at the Swedish Academy decide is great literature this time around. One percolating rumor is that the prize will go to an Arab in order to "alleviate the humiliation and anger caused by the US invasion of Iraq" (says this article), which is also known as patronization, so Ali Ahmad Said (a Syrian poet better known for some reason as Adonis) should feel just sparkly about now. Another possibility (whom I've also never heard of) is a New Zealand writer named Janet Frame. The story on her is that she was in an asylum about to be lobotomized when a publisher's acceptance letter arrived (sparing her the knife). Or so I'm told anyway.

But in keeping with the pattern of known - unknown - known (last year it was somebody named Imre Kertesz, while two years ago it was VS Naipaul), the winner may be somebody people have actually read. Such candidates include JM Coetzee (a great choice), Philip Roth (another great choice, but face it: those Swede's ain't giving it to an American), Don DeLillo (still pretty young, so don't get your hopes up; also another American), Margaret Atwood (seems unlikely -- who needs to appease the Canadians? -- but it would make me über-happy), Carlos Fuentes (yawn -- not a great choice), and Mario Vargas Llosa (hmm... he's approaching 70 -- could be). Also some French poet might win, which would suck hard.

Well that worked out. I'm surprised and impressed. In fact this is the first time the Nobel has gone to a writer whom I've read a fair share of, and in fact recommended to others on occasion, since working with his novel Foe in college. I was honestly really expecting the French poet to win. Which would have sucked.

Looks like Siegfried finally ate Roy. I told him how foolish he was playing with tigers like they were calicos but he was full of that hubris common to men who wield whips. And now that the tiger has behaved as nature intended (rather than as Roy intended) it will most certainly be destroyed. What's shocking is that it didn't happen sooner.

Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I guess these games companies need to start hiring admins to secure their servers. A few months ago an Alpha of Doom III was stolen and disseminated; then some source code for Half Life 2 started floating around (supposedly lifted from an email account); now there's a "beta" build of Half Life 2 (haven't seen this news break yet, but the source code story was reported all over). Inside scoop (me = Scoop) is that the amount of source stolen was considerably more than Valve knew or admitted (enough to build the engine), and that an archive containing all the resources was also taken (i.e. sounds, models, textures, maps, etc). Voila: that's the "beta." Valve, understandably, is considerably pissed off about this, even threatening (or allowing it to be rumored) that the game would be delayed several months as a result while they reworked the code to prevent its use in online cheating. Vivendi, the distributor, probably won't go for that (it's already been pushed a quarter from Sept to Dec, and the potential for cheating isn't issue #1 in getting a game released), so they'll end up patching it as issues arise (as is now the typical procedure for most games). My question remains: why was a complete archive of the game ever even created, let alone left sitting unsecured where some crackerjack could grab it? Never underestimate the value of a good Sysadmin (both *hiring* and *heeding* one).

Looks like the new Dr. Who is not only gay but a cross-dresser! Oh Britain what has become of thee? These guys say it's Eddie Izzard (actually it's Tom Baker, Dr. Who #4, who says so -- he's the one everybody thinks of when they think of Dr. Who, the guy with the floppy hat and giant scarf -- in an interview) that will assume the role of the Doctor. Izzard is a great English comedian when he's not too English (that is when I can understand what he's talking about; see his HBO special for his more Americanized material -- I think it's called "Dressed to Kill"), and also, incidentally, a cross-dresser (although he claims he's not gay (even though that seems pretty gay to me)). I don't know if that means the new Doctor will be running around in lipstick and garters, but his flamboyant personality does seem to fit the persona (and I can see why Baker would like this choice, given the operatic Doctor he played).

Incidentally, Neal Stephenson's new book Quicksilver has long sections in which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz is referred to only as The Doctor, causing one to pause in speculation....

HL2 story now being reported (by CNN Money).

This review of Kill Bill is a good one.

The worst part about insomnia is that you can't sleep. On Friday I saw Kill Bill and drank Vanilla Coke. I always see Tarantino's movies when they open. I don't intend it that way; it just happens. I liked Kill Bill -- it had moments of brilliance, which is about the best I can say of most better-than-good movies, and it's the coolest movie since Pulp Fiction. The Vanilla Coke sucked.

Later I drank Transylvanian Vampire wine in the middle of a secret wood. This is indeed the cinematic age of the homage film.

On Saturday I watched baseball (which I don't normally do) and drank chocolate milk. I wished somebody would have beaten the crap out of Pedro Martinez for throwing that 72 year old man to the ground. Sure, the geezer came at him, but a man with honor either turns away or endures it. He doesn't do what Pedro did.

I also wrote down some stuff about Enoch after lengthy discussions about him in the secret wood. It's strange when interests collide, as my own do here: John Dee and Edward Kelley, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver, and Blue Oyster Cult lyrics.

It occurs to me now that a civilization reaches its ultimate state of maturity when it settles on one kind of weapon and ceases production of all others.

On Sunday I watched Jeremiah 201 and drank Amstel Light. They've replaced the opening theme of that show with a nauseating ballad that may be worse than the Star Trek Enterprise song. And rather than steering politely away from the cheesy Evil Government plot theme, they've turned the whole carriage right into it. There's even an Evil President of the United States now. Something about that show has always been somewhat off target, like it's pointing in the right general direction but keeps getting lost on the way there.

I also watched football. The Amstel Light was good anyway.

Your master is a monster And gentlemanly too He'll make for us some new germ With pieces of the perfect black The alpha and omega The double peaks of Mars The maze of his infinity The buried city In the stars

Somebody asked me last night who my favorite character is from Frank Herbert's Dune series. Of course it's Alia, the most central and important character in that work (beside -- not after -- Muad'Dib), a beautiful character of Shakespearean proportions. Duncan Idaho is also worth considering, especially in the context of Alia: each unwillingly endowed with generations of knowledge they never would have acquired on their own; each alienated from their time and place because of it, and each in their own way twisted by the weight and corruption of it -- of history, heredity, imperialism, wisdom, simple vice. Their union and diversion is worthy of Tolstoy. (I'm a big Dune fan.)

Ah New York, city of canals! The pneumatic bustling of yachts along the 5th Street waterway, the daily disgorge of passengers from the Grand Central Terminus, the nightly aurora of flame from the torch of Lady Liberty -- harbormaster for the world, New York! New York is in a perpetual state of decay, and its Maintainers must work every hour to keep it standing upright: chthonic repairmen plumb its depths with jackhammers and overlarge sutures, while above them miniscule cranemen hoist scaffolding onto an even percentage of its lower stories. Teams of firefighters and police organize resistance movements upon the constant threats against the city's wellbeing, which come from high and from low.

Wherein the ravages of war had recently settled, and the preamble of defensive postures had taken the form of arms stockpiled at the Battery and by each bridge station, and a new system of alerts devised to be posted on every street corner: Condition Red to indicate imminent attack and a prescription for evasive action; Condition Yellow to indicate cause for elevated vigilance (the current Condition); and Condition Green to indicate all clear of worry. (How the newly vigilant found themselves to yearn for Condition Green -- a thing they had not previously known to desire -- when all about them yellow posters instructed proper procedures for consensual Panopticonism: Each Neighbor his Neighbor's Watchman, Each Society its Society's Sociologist; and so an inward-looking New York had rippled perspectively outward from every corner sign post, as detonations from explosive points send shockwaves to overlap at margins while concentrating at foci -- a city made, in a word, safe).

Let the freshly terminated tourist wander his gaze upward toward the shining Towers that master that horizon and enfold their labyrinth of blocked avenues and cross sections, Towers that the mighty Merlin or the fearful Fray would attach to in awe; for they are they very awe of audacity. While the towers of other cities humbly accept the proportions their architects had devised for them, standing no taller than the lines and blocks their bodies suggest, the Towers of New York are taller by at least a third than they have a right to be; they express the spirit that reaches beyond the expectations the world had ever had for America, of the manifest destiny of its people's potential between two coasts (earth and sky) and two boundaries (now and next). The enemies of this grand mouth of generations might knock teeth from its jaw, but that will never keep it from shouting back, for New York is loud

I've been enjoying HBO's new series Carnivàle, but I think I'm going to stop watching it until it concludes -- weekly hour-long segments isn't the best format for this epic; I'd rather watch them all in one marathon. In you case you're unfamiliar with it, Carnivàle is unusual for an HBO series, which tend toward the realistic (or the cinematic realistic); this one is a dark fantasy set during the Depression centering a traveling carnival (think Something Wicked This Way Comes), painted up in dust-bowl brown (think Grapes of Wrath), textured by some presumably deliberate but certainly overt David Lynch elements (Twin Peaks' "The Man From Another Place" is one of the series' regulars): flash imagery, extended hallucinations, and orbiting religious iconography -- post-Milton clash of good vs. evil with a protagonist (possibly but not yet certainly the good half) some kind of natural healer (seventh son of a seventh son?), a kid cursed with a power only his mother seems to have known about (to her consummate displeasure), and an antagonist some kind of minister shocked by the terrible visions he has and apparently just as terrified by his own new sense of himself. Anyway, it's an usual and interesting series.

Conversely, HBO's other new program, K Street, must be watched when it airs because it typically pertains to the previous week's political news. Sort of a pseudo-reality show about Washington beltway lobbyists, this series weaves fictional characters and plots around real people and events in a political backroom setting (although surprisingly -- and refreshingly -- apolitical so far) shot with a studio-free production quality, and reminiscent of the classic War Room documentary of the Clinton 1992 campaign (which association has as much to do with the presence of James Carville in it). One of the characters is a flamboyant and mysterious new coworker at the lobbyist office brilliantly played by Roger G. Smith, whose performance alone makes the series worth watching. (He seemed familiar to me for a while until I discovered he had played Laertes in a recent television production of Hamlet.) Also in the cast is Mary McCormack, who starred in an ill-fated series that was too good for broadcast television called Murder One.

Pournelle has an interesting post about Turkey that's worth reading. I've heard before that the Turkish government is checked and balanced by the Turkish army, and that the army is itself checked and balanced by its own sense of honor. Sounds like a powder-keg to me, but I must be jaded by American politics. I suspect that Turkish history would be a fascinating subject to study at some point.

I thought Band of Brothers was pretty much the best war movie ever made, so I'm rather excited about this project. Also, looks like Tarantino is doing that long rumored Dirty Dozen / Inglorious Bastards remake. Movies are good.

Another good Kill Bill review.

I got some .flac Wagner overtures and I'm now listening to them with dBpowerAMP. I feel that old evangelical urge coming on....

And incidentally if you like both Death Cab for Cutie and The Smiths, check out Death Cab's cover of This Charming Man.

In the interest of keeping up on things both technical and entertaining, there's a new audio codec worth being aware of. "Grossly oversimplified," the website says, "FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without throwing away any information."

A similarly lossless codec is Monkey's Audio (.ape files). Like flac it will produce perfect reproduction at the cost of filesize.

This seems a pretty good utility for playing flac and ape files (as well as the usual music formats). I like it better than winamp so far (after about 20 mins with it); it's not a resource hog, sounds great, and has free DSP plugins Also skins if you're into that (personally I think the skin thing has gone too far, and typically look for a skin that comes as close as possible to my windows theme, but that's just cantankerous me -- probably why I don't get along with teenagers). It also lets you do things that Microsoft and even Nullsoft think too mature for you (like deleting a file from disk through the interface).

About 30 mins into using it -- I now think it's pretty much the Zoom Player for audio. Go get it!

An article in this month's Policy Review suggests I may have been too hard on the French. What strikes me most is the sense that retaliatory anti-Europeanism ignores both the nature and reality of anti-Americanism, suggesting (to me anyway) that my reaction to it may be little more than a media-consequence.

And while on the subject of America-bashing (America-slogging?), this article in the same pub casts the subject in terms of global neo-Marxism.

Am I retarded for seriously considering buying this?

Ghosts of Mars: 2of10. This movie is dreadful. Another supermodel proves a terrible actor. Avoids a 1of10 by the grace of an amusing dismemberment joke.

Solaris: 7of10. I dislike G. Clooney, I think he's a swaggering loudmouth, and he always therefore ruins the first 15 minutes of every movie I see him in; but he's a capable actor and I soon mostly forget it's him behind the character. Not much like the original Tarkovsky production of the Lem novel Solyaris, which has a texture like gauze. This one is only an approximation. Nice soundtrack though: it works as a visual surface for the music.

Buffalo Soldiers: 4of10. This is a movie that wasn't clear on what it wanted to be. It has comedy elements reminiscent of Stripes -- except people get killed violently before the slapstick is over. It has dramatic elements reminiscent of Full Metal Jacket -- except none of them are even remotely plausible. It has ironic elements reminiscent of Catch 22 -- except it's impossible to root for the protagonists whose enemy is bureaucratic malaise instead of Nazis, and whose primary motivation is greed. It has pomo novelistic elements reminiscent of Fight Club -- except none of them make any sense or lead anywhere. Wrap all that up in a blindingly cliché structure, add some reasonably good acting (to the extent the parts allow it), and still have little to recommend.

Cabin Fever: 4of10. Yeah that's right, Cabin Fever. Yet another 21st century homage film (I've started a list), this one to horror flicks of the 70s and 80s, with elements from Friday 13th, George Romero, Sam Raimi, Cujo, even a little Deliverance. One difference is that this movie actually has something of a thematic message (in a word, forthrightness). But that doesn't make it especially good. It has a strange sense of humor that tries too hard to match Raimi's Evil Dead sequels but lacks the strange attractor of Bruce Campbell to redeem it. Six or seven times I heard myself say, "what?!"

Intolerable Cruelty: 7of10. Again with the G. Clooney, but supported by the Coen brothers this time. Very funny. Love the Coen brothers. Let's see if I can still do this: Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, um... the Dude Movie..., O Brother Where Art Thou, er... that black and white movie about the barber -- The Barber? Guess not.

Forgot about this, but there's an episode of the Simpsons in which Roy of Siegfried and Roy gets mauled by his tiger and dragged off-stage by the neck. Proving the long held theory that all things in life will come to mirror the Simpsons.

"Inside one of the showrooms, Gunter and Ernst demonstrate their talented albino tiger riding a unicycle. 'A round of applause, please, for Anastasia. She loves show-business. So much nicer than the savagery of the jungle, ja?' In a flashback, we see Anastasia sleeping peacefully in Africa. Behind her two men approach in a jeep. 'Hey, tiger!' one of them calls out, 'Wake up!' He shoots a tranquilizer dart into her, and she slumps over. The memory angers her sufficiently to attack her owners and tear them to shreds."

And go here.

Think you got it bad?