Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity

I've always had a bad snooze alarm habit. Recently, I've been shaking free of it pretty well--alarm rings, I get out of bed. Someone give me a medal, I know.

So this "morning" my alarm goes off, like it does. As testimony to how well I'm doing with the anti-snooze regime, I get right up. I piece together a few moments afterward that a) I'd somehow slept in such a position that my leg had fallen totally asleep, b) therefore instantly buckled when I put weight on it, causing c) my knee (on the awake leg, mind you, the one that wasn't numb dead weight) to slam right into the bed. D) Not the mattress, but the metal frame bit it all sits on. E) whereupon I woke fully up with speed that probably would have served me better just a little bit earlier.

Stupid body.

The '53 flick is, of course, a classic of B films, with all the earnest cheesy heavy-handedness of the times. You've gotta love how all the Martian war machines fall out of the sky en masse the very instant one of them tries to heat-ray a church. Subtlety was not on the menu.

Spielberg of course has another "modern day" version coming out, in which Tom Cruise defeats the Martians by using his high-level Operating Thetan powers. I'm not very interested in it, beyond the "throw it into my netflix queue when it's out on dvd then forget about it until it shows up in my mail, forgotten, months later" sense. I don't expect subtlety to be any more on the menu here than it was back then--though the explosions are likely to be prettier.

I'm hopeful in the "man, I hope it doesn't suck too badly" sense about this period-piece attempt at actually filming the novel in its own period--which is the only way for it to really make any sense whatsoever--because the Martians in the book weren't particularly high-tech. Sure, they had heat rays and nerve gas, but no magical forcefields or the like. They basically shot themselves to Earth via a great big interplanetary cannon--which happens to, goddammit, rock. They didn't really carve up humanity so well by dint of being an unstoppable force with god mode cheat enabled--they simply had a sufficient technological edge, and immediately fubared what passed for logistics networks at the time.

Part of the tragedy as shown in the book is the sense that the fight would have been much more close even if the Martians had arrived even a couple decades later. A few tripods get taken out by lucky cannon fire, after all, and an ironclad warship, the Thunder Child, manages to take down three of the bastards before being melted into slag--which latter chapter I'll personally consider to be one of the litmus tests of the allegedly-faithful film version linked above. It's a scene that really deserves a proper big screen airing.

The relative closeness of the technologies also makes the whole "succumbing to germs" ending much more sensible, of course. Which is a plus, as the tone of the book's take is much more "phew, that was lucky" than the fifties take of "they tampered in God's domain! And were probably Commies, too!" subtle nuancing.

All I ask for is some eagles with frickin' cameras on their heads.

A bit earlier today, I watch "Mulholland Drive."  Pretty much what I expected:  oddly creepy delivery of even innocuous lines, a sort of combination of not-quite-right delays between words and reactions, between affect and reaction that suggests that every character is pretty much a localized little bit of schizotypal thought given skeleton and flesh; a plot and characters that fold over onto each other, exchanging roles and identities; general surrealness.

I log in and check email.  One automated little ecommerce "your order has shipped" message.

Five minutes later, UPS knocks on my door.  With the order mentioned in aforementioned email.

If life truly imitates art, I figure that after I next go to sleep, I'll wake up, stumble disconnectedly around, get in my UPS truck, and deliver the same package to the dude who delivered it to me, and he'll sign my name.  Then credits will roll.

I spent a good chunk of a molasses-slow period of "work" the other night (being part of the lucky skeleton crew covering the holiday stretch) running searches for information and reviews and such on various makes and manufacture of machetes. I wonder if that sort of thing goes into my permanent file.

So I'm at the airport the other morning. It's not the busiest I've ever seen, but respectable--assuming for the sake of argument that people managing to make large numbers inheres respect in any way.

There's the rhubarb-rhubarb of any large number of hairless apes clustered together in neutral territory. Blaring from several hanging televisions is what passes for news these days. Blaring from speakers not a dozen paces away from any given television is a default selection of muzak. Muzak is broken into at intervals for security loops reminding passengers not to allow strangers to put plastic explosives into their luggage, and that if they leave their bombs unattended, security's going to take their bombs away, and requests to please help security by reporting any suspicious behavior such as anyone being truculently swarthy or adding to the rhubarbrhubarb in the language of a different ape tribe. Security loops are in turn repeatedly broken into by frequently simultaneous gate announcements, final boarding announcements, final-final boarding announcements, pagings to various people, etc. Frequently, these announcements are for gates that are simply nowhere even close to the speakers they're emerging from.

I found myself thinking again that the world might be a little bit better of a place if homo sapiens sapiens, as a species trait, was more suited to just shutting the fuck up more often. The air doesn't refuse to enter into lungs if we stop screeching at it, people.

I've been grandfathered into Netflix for (holy crap!) just about five years now, and now and then give thanks they not only survived, but thrived past the fabled time of the dotcoms blithely hurling themselves one after the other, like lemmings in the lemming-hell ruled by Disney, off of cliffs into the mouths of flaming bankruptcy lawyers.  ("Oh, your company's folding?  That's thuper!")

They just sent me an email informing me that my subscription cost was dropping by a few bucks.  And well they should have!

I found this speech on the inherent problems of social groups on these newfangled electronic networks that Al Gore took the initiative in creating (yes, I know that isn't what is means, and I forgot Poland as well), with soft focus on software design, via ambar's journal.

It dovetails (thanks to "Bob", the inside my head contains many non-euclidean angles that support this kind of dovetailing) with the scientific essay about the Law of Monkey: Inside the Monkeysphere ("Ayn Rand might have put it that way, had she not been such a hateful bitch" is one of my favorite quotes) over on PWOT (which is fast becoming one of my newer favorite sites that I've actually known about for quite awhile but only recently started digging into more heavily). It's got something bubbling in one of those quasi-conscious back corners of the mind. More later. Maybe.

I heard shortly after making it into work this morning that Christopher Reeve had died. Since then, I waited somewhat hopefully to see if maybe the whole deal would turn out to be someone jumping the gun on one of those pre-written obituaries, like Robert Anton Wilson or Kurt Vonnegut (I forget which one, but I'm pretty sure it was one or the other) a few years back. No such luck, apparently.

Dammit.

John Dies at the End is a pretty good read, I've concluded.  (John's still alive as of the extant parts, so it's not concluded yet.)  Sort of Kult meets Buffy.