I heard a lot of good reports for the Whedon/Mutant Enemy horror film the Cabin in the Woods recently, so I went out to catch the matinee.  I'm not normally a horror fan, and have completely avoided the recent trend in sadistic puzzle-torture-box franchises like Saw and Hostel and the like.  I don't even particularly enjoy your run-of-the-mill zombie-apocalypse flick, so perhaps I was being self-deluded in thinking this movie would be my sort of thing, but I've been fond of previous Mutant Enemy productions, and went in smiling.

I am not going to cater to anyone's highly sensitive NO SPOILERS sensibilities, for either the Cabin in the Woods or Tucker & Dale Vs Evil so please don't read further if that's a problem for you.

Anyways, I went in expecting something half-comedic, since that was the sales pitch that everybody was making.  I did *not* find it to be particularly funny, but then, nihilistic slaughter-porn about elder gods, evil bureaucracy, and metafictional commentary about slasher pictures probably shouldn't be funny to anyone with a functioning moral sense.  The Cabin in the Woods has a close didactic relationship with its contemporaneously filmed peer Inglourious Basterds, as both of them are essentially j'accuse diatribes against the target audience, with evil villains who watch satirically nasty filmatic depictions of abomination with sadistic enjoyment, so that when those paper villains are subsequently horribly destroyed by each film's nominal protagonists, the audience is primed to applaud their own condemnation-by-proxy, just punishment, and symbolic demolition.  The proper (and probably intended) response to both films is a combination of sickened revulsion and shame, a feeling that one has participated in something vile and degrading.  Both movies are in effect anti-spectacles, aimed at destroying the audience's emotional connection with the genres they are satirizing, namely, war spectaculars and slasher pictures.

Mind you, both films are spectacularly well-constructed, well-made, and highly polished - marvels of technical competence, especially in their screenwriting and script-doctoring aspects.  This emphasis on the Cabin in the Woods's supposed surprises and secrets is exaggerated, really.  The lack of any strong characters or emotional provision of connection to those characters leaves the audience with plenty of time to take in the fairly broad hints and suggestions which serve in place of explicit explanation of the premise.  It's pretty obvious from about ten-fifteen minutes into the movie that the story is one of ritual sacrifice, the details which are filled in afterwards are just that, details and justifications.  Instead of elder gods, those "downstairs" might as well be the actual viewing audience - it would have only made the movie just a hair more metafictional.

Some people have noted that the film sort of acts like a hard-R long episode of Buffy or Angel, with the nameless corporation running the ritual sacrifice acting as sort of a vicious blend of Buffy's Initiative and Angel's Wolfram & Hart.  The problem here is that the Initiative season was the weakest season of Buffy, unsatisfactory and overpoliticized, and I, at least, had as much of Wolfram & Hart from the Mutant Enemy crew as I ever cared to see.  Furthermore, the Cabin in the Woods acts as so much of a literal Bottle Show that there's no sense of how the events interact with a greater world.  So, when (SPOILER!) the surviving kids destroy the world, the movie almost gets you to celebrate; the script certainly acts like it wants you to buy-in to the conceit that "we've had our turn", so wipe out the world, sure, fine, kill everybody!  It only works because the kids are shown as having no family, no ties, no human life beyond their status as, well, status-seeking college grinds.

That leads into the next problem, which is the writers have built into the film this conceit that society is "sacrificing youth out of envy", that torture-porn slasher films are all about hatred of the young, vital, and beautiful, that somehow the inevitable demolition of Hollywood, music-industry, and other entertainment flash-in-the-pan celebrities are baked into the cake.  Now, this may be some sort of reflection of the creative industries themselves - there's been some ripping horrible stories of systemic child molestation, prostitution, and epic "using" coming out of that sector in the last three-four years or so - but it's a total non sequitur for describing the world in general.  Furthermore, given that the audience for slasher pictures are usually (or at least traditionally, among a segment of "geek culture" the youth-culture genres of their youth end up becoming increasingly creepy and age-inappropriate as they fail to let go of their expiring youth) teenagers and young adults.  Normally, these films don't cater to the middle-aged and elderly, you know?

But basically, my complaint about the movie is that it just made me sad, upset, and depressed.  I don't go to movies to feel bad, and I don't like movies that are trying to get me to agree with the thesis that "people suck and should be allowed to self-destruct".

That brings me around to a movie I also had heard some good buzz about, but which never made it to theaters in my section of the country, or came and went without me having noticed in time: Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil.  I used the "rental" feature on Amazon on Demand, and watched it yesterday afternoon as a palate-cleanser.  The evil murderous, bigoted hillbillies were presented without any real irony or sympathy in the Cabin in the Woods, they were just vicious, clownish animals used by the evil conspiracy to destroy the victim college kids, they had no moral agency of their own.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, on the other hand, is made from the view-point of a pair of clownish hillbillies, the Tucker and Dale of the title.  They, themselves, have bought their very own Cabin in the Woods, and they've just blown into the woods with a trailer and truckbed full of horribly dangerous sharp implements, planning on renovating that sucker into a nice "vacation house".

I've observed elsewhere that there are two species of TV police procedural, one made by creators who fear chaos and the world, and one made by creators who fear the devil and evil designs.  The latter is filled with wicked conspiracies of the rich and malign, like Castle;  the former features protagonists always struggling against a tide of petty evils and wickedness, marinating in a bubbling cauldron of stupidities, selfishness, and desires gone awry - shows like the Shield and The Closer.  The Cabin in the Woods is very much an exemplar of a conspiracy show, a Manichaean fable of corporatist, bureaucratic demiurges building a wicked world in a bottle within they plan to destroy their children.  Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a chaos story, wherein the innate craziness and emotions of the children are the problem, the threat.  The eventual antagonist of the latter movie is a Knight Templar gone horribly, horribly wrong.  He rants and raves about Evil, with an explicit "E", and his paranoias, stories about old murders, and seething hate for "hillbillies" - born out of his mother's survival of a previous massacre as a Final Girl - spark the second, accidental massacre.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids are manipulated towards their bloody ends by a careful conspiracy of banal evil, a corporatist act of puppeteering.  The college kids of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil are panicky, ignorant, and horribly, horribly careless.  They *are* the children running about in the rye field by the cliff in Salinger's evocative metaphor, bound to go charging blindly out over the abyss without some careful adult to catch them before they fall.  Or, at least, by a pair of dimwitted, amiable country boys just looking to help.

In the Cabin in the Woods, the college kids' stupidity is carefully crafted, created, and pr-ordained by evil intent - the monstrousness is so by corporatist agency.  In Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, their stupidity is innate, the result of kids being kids, addled by adrenaline, fear, paranoia, pot, and massive, comedic carelessness.  The hillbillies have their own faults, aggravated by too much alcohol, stupidity, and their own adrenalized outrage, but the kids are the drivers of the confrontation, and by and large kill themselves or each other.  In the end, the movie's incidents are described by the media as an inexplicable mass suicide, and to a certain extent, that's the truth.  Only one kid is saved from the cliff hidden in the rye, but at least she's saved.  It's the distinction which saves the movie, keeps it from being another sadistic exercise in torture, humanizes it.  As much as Shaun of the Dead, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a comedy in the end, a buddy picture, and something of a romance.  It isn't one-fifth as well-made as the Cabin in the Woods, and is full of plot holes and okay-sure-whatever arbitrary scripting, but at least the core emotion is marginally uplifting.

So, I've been very, very inactive.  Sorry.

Senatorial primaries today.  Rohrer has been getting on my last nerve, Smith just sends glossy mail, but the damnedest thing... Welch called me personally last  night, or at least, someone of about the right age and accent claiming to be Welch, so it must have been him.  I said I was worried if a US Senatorial candidate was calling individual, not especially active voters on Primary Eve, but he was the candidate which most closely matches my personal inclinations.  So...he's basically a Toomey guy, young, successful entrepreneur - runs some sort of med-tech manufacturer down in Chester - and is more than a little defensive about having been a Democrat in 2008.  I told him I agreed that the important part was campaigning for McCain in the General Election, which he did.

So, go out and vote Welch?  The other guys either aren't trying, or are kind of obnoxious.

Doing my due diligence on the convention delegates , I'm thinking Styn, Haas, and Corman for the delegates, and Settle, Flavin and Salmon for the alternates.  Maher for Auditor General, because his opponent seems to be simultaneously a dilettante *and* a banking lobbyist, which isn't what I'm looking for in a glorified Head Accountant for the Commonwealth.

A technical exercise:

The dream repeating in every night
Dreaming emptily and lightly of darkness
Deeper and deeper until the waking light
Afloat like embered paper-scraps burning
Over warm and scented gusts of wind
Ends my restless and loveless waiting

Within, the dream-walls echo, waiting
Wherein, breathing, some fragment of night
Drawing the air into lungs this wind
Exhaling heatened, the air to the darkness
Unknowing embraced by that silent burning
Unseen in those long moments without light

Oh, how long are the hours between light and light
How often do I spend those dreaming nights waiting
The candles too dear to waste in burning
Away the looming unseeing walls of night
And the heatened chambers, even in darkness
Stifling without the charity of a chilling wind

And what would I do, in those nights without wind
If in that restless sleep of slender light
Those rustling dreadful legions of darkness
slipped past my opened window and candle, waiting
Tumbled lit into the curtain to bring the night
Into a sudden furious holocaust burning?

That harsh and solitary burning
Flicked into life by some wicked wind
Flame asunder this peaceful night
Kindled blankets combusted under flame-lit light
And burn away the flannel under which lies waiting
My unknown soul hiding in darkness?

Better then to lie alone in that darkness
And forebear this tempting candle's burning
Spend rather these nights in restless waiting
And lock the casement 'gainst a vagrant wind
In timid fear of careless wax-lit light
And dream alone of endless night

Hold, darkness - birth me a passionate wind!
Spark a slumbering ember into burning light!
And fire! Consummate this waiting night!

Reading a set of annotations on Bujold's A Civil Campaign, I found myself reading about sestinas, and decided to write one to understand the form a little better. Back when I was writing bad poetry, someone accused me of being a "formalist", although my actual knowledge of the traditional forms was appallingly slight. I figured I ought to try my hand at this at least once.

I've started reading Caro's [four? - the first volume claims three, but you know how trilogies' waistlines expand once they sit down to the dinner table] volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. These two sentences, wrote about the Texas Hill Country, have to be the saddest things you can possibly say about agricultural land:

It was rich because it was virgin. And it could only be virgin once.

But then, how often can something like that be said of the land the southern smallfarmer encountered on their slow-motion pillage across the continent? They lacked science, and prudence, and made up for it with passion. And I don't like this business about homesteads not being subject to foreclosure or bankruptcy - this chapter is entitled "the Trap", but that little detail about Texas Homestead law just screams "trap" to me. You can't own something if you can't lose it, and you can't learn from your folly if you're protected from its consequences. I guess you can lose the land you bought in the normal course of events, but then, that means in a failure, you're left with forty or a hundred and fifty acres and an operation that requires three hundred or three thousand acres to actually turn a profit - depends on the local conditions, really.

Speaking of conditions, before this, I was reading Pietrusza's book on the 1948 elections, and while talking about farming agitation about prices, and Dewey's failure to answer those concerns, he points out that corn prices had dropped suddenly in 1947-8 from $2.50 a bushel to $1.60, or thereabouts. Current corn futures as of this moment is $6.58 a bushel. Think about that - the inflation-adjusted cost of a 1948 bushel of corn was ~$22. Admittedly they were also averaging 38 bushels to the acre instead of today's 168 or so, but damn, that's an expensive baseline for feedstock.

"Shame, son, is a gateway to grace." I say this as a Penn State grad who still lives up the valley from the university: shaming has educational, social and moral functions. Nothing and no-one ever changes without someone who's capable of it feeling ashamed of the way things are, the way they are, and doing something hard and real that might relieve them of that mortifying sensation of having done something shameful, or have allowed something shameful to continue.

It's not a guarantee, and many's the man who weaseled his way out of that discomfiting inner conversation through sophistry, cheap justification or mere rationalization, but shame, naked shame, is salvation to those willing to listen to that hectoring, mocking, damning sound.

We've all lived in this valley, and known that there was something unnatural about the position of power the football program was allowed. It was a snowball rolling down the slope of our acquiescence, and it was bound to hurt someone downslope, in some way or fashion. It could have been petty corruption, as at Ohio State, or student misbehavior, but for our sins, it was something worse. They're painting over murals downtown and bringing in retired FBI bureaucrats to whitewash the less tangible things, but it's all the same - a twisting away from an ugly set of facts, and a disinclination to see how far the rot has gone.

You don't fix dry-rot by painting it over, it must be dug out, and the planks too far-gone must be torn up, thrown away, and replaced. But before the replacement, listen to that shaming sound and tell me, what was it that allowed this rot to take hold? There must be no unanswerable icons, no secret, sunless gardens of privilege. Consider removing the policing power from the university as a step in the right direction - when the university's toy security detail answered to the administration instead of independently of the power-structure which itself was at fault, that, itself, was an obstruction. The police and the university ought to be, in some non-destructive fashion, at odds with each other, if the watchmen are to be properly watched.

But this can't be placed entirely at the feet of faceless bureaucracy. The football program was too beloved of the general public, too protected by sentiment, for a proper sense of shame to make any sort of impression upon those with wickedness brewing rot in their hearts. Sports should not occupy such a ritualized , pseudo-religious niche in the folkways of a healthy society. Is it because there's a lack of public religion in this college environment? Honestly, I don't know - I'm such an agnostic, I'm seriously detached from the religious life of the community. The football game pilgrimage was the one thing that united the increasingly-leftwing university/student community and the middle-of-the-road nonpolitical-sort-of-conservative alumni and county communities outside of the Centre Region townships and the borough.

Where do we find the social discipline to make right what men's crooked natures inevitably make wrong? A scourging may be necessary, some sort of bonfire of our vanities. It's easy enough, for one such as I, who never cared for the football program, to propose or endorse notions of a suspension of that program for a period of years. That's *easy*, and this should be hard - for everyone, not just the football people. What other solutions are on offer?

Welcome to the new aristocracy, as the New Class morphs into the second coming of the Whiggish gentry, entitled and arrogant. Except that the Adamses and their ilk put in decades of work in governance and diplomacy to back up their pretensions to the "natural aristocracy", with John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and *his* son Charles Adams between them logging more cross-Atlantic diplomatic travel time than anyone else until the advent of Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy".

It wasn't until the effete fourth generation and Henry Adams' endless self-education that we even *approximate* the self-regarding uselessness of the modern "little princelings". What has Chelsea Clinton done in her life, other than follow in the train of her mother, who herself caught power like an STD from her ex-President husband? This dynastic crap is the reason I voted against Bush in 2000.

h/t

Ah, the joys of root canals. The anesthetic hasn't worn off yet, and I keep trying to answer the phone sounding like a Down's Syndrome kid.

There were scads of new people at last night's Otto's get-together. Two of them turned out to be a couple who had been in New York with the "Occupy Wall Street" mob getting arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. The guy was infuriated that I kept snickering at his righteous difference-making revolutionary status; apparently it makes up for his nowhere non-union job with the university. Funny thing is, he's being forced to work part-time because he won't join the union, and somehow that's the fault of The Man instead of the Teamsters. Real sense of cognitive dissonance there.

He's pissed about Obama too, and kept going on about not wanting "the lesser of two evils", and was yammering about how the Obamabots were trying to take over the Wall Street neo-commie campaign. Towards the end of the night, I said something about how I was a firm believer in the least of presented evils. One of the other new people asked in anticipatory horror who I'd vote for, and I admitted as how I'm still looking at Rick Perry. Apparently the WIC thing is a big to-do in Democratic circles. I got dragged into the discussion, but at the end I pointed out that in conservative new media, people are much more agitated about Green corporate welfare like Solyndra than actual welfare scamming, O'Keefe showboating about ACORN and similar organizations aside.

I should be more sympathetic to Joe Protester, because I had a rough late Nineties stuck in nowhere jobs, and I was pretty pissed and radical (for me, at least) about it. But the sympathy bleeds away when you start rambling starry-eyed about the wonderful "non-profit, non-profit" farming communes in Burlington, VT and how they give food away to the homeless and spend their free time taking care of the elderly and blah, blah, anarcho-commie blah. His wife/girlfriend was pretty quiet, and seemed to have a grad-student job with the Agriculture College with prospects.

The rest of the new people were law-clerk buddies of a friend of a friend. Wasn't able to talk much with them, I hate our usual table at Otto's, it's an echoing, exposed, cramped pen of a booth. You can't hear what somebody's saying three or four people over unless they're yelling across the table like Joe Protester.

Michael Yon has been on the front lines for the better part of a decade, but he still has an eye for truly beautiful, mad photography. I've never heard of kishmesh khana before, nor even that Afghanistan had any vineyards to speak of, let alone beautiful, fertile ones like the one Yon was photographing in the middle of a violent, close-quarters infantry campaign. The vineyards sound like the bocage in miniature.

Holy crap! Documentary evidence that the linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure ("no level of radiation exposure is harmless") was established upon systemic & deliberate suppression of contrary experimental results by a Nobel Prize recipient! That there was contrary evidence is not, today, surprising - actual experimental results have demonstrated otherwise since then - but the initial prestige-established no-threshold rule is enshrined by radiation paranoia and institutional inertia.

And the good people wonder why the rest of us are less and less willing to take the scientifically credentialed at their naked word!

h/t Ace of Spades headlines.

While I agree entirely with Ace's point about this really irritating anti-Stewart piece, it's hard to take

That's true but that is a rather minor problem compared to the first. And, in the scheme of things, someone might be justified in noting that both are comparatively minor problems to obsess about; that media criticism is, necessarily, a relatively trivial pursuit. Add into that that among the various ways one could engage this relatively minor topic, Stewart's chosen the least important way, and that means that for all his influence, his mission itself concerns the most trivial critique in a field that is already rather trivial.

from a guy who spent two obsessive weeks delivering hub-to-hub, time-on-target saturation shelling on the head of a minority-party congressman for using twitter to send pictures of his junk to female admirers. I can't think of a more trivial display by a major right-wing blogger, at least not this year.

Pennsylvania going Nebraska/Maine in the Electoral College? Stupid idea, and it reeks of cowardice on the part of the state GOP- an admission that they're never going to take the state again in a presidential year.

There's a lot of chatter this week about the post office going bankrupt. By my count, there are as many as twenty-one unnecessary and excess post offices in Centre County. Every little burg in the hills doesn't need its own staffed office, and there are way too many branch offices in State College. Most of those are probably buildings with one to three walls of post office boxes and a bored staffer holding down a desk. I've never even heard about some of the branch offices in State College. They could easily consolidate those PO boxes into existing structures.

Barack Obama is not unaware of this game. He gets to play elbows out while his opposition has to be doubly careful to avoid anything that is remotely seems racist. In the short term, it is a pain in the ass, but in the long run, it forces conservatives to argue facts, logic and reason — and it actually is quite liberating to be unable to attack the person.

- Don Surber

A pretty sentiment, but I don't know how true it is.

Just a place-holder, to let people know I still live, and haven't been washed downhill.

Yet.

I watched the first Eden of the East movie last evening, King of Eden. The Eden of the East TV series was a typical noitaminA show - eleven episodes, no guaranteed ending. The idea was that they'd provide the ending in two theatrical films, of which King of Eden was the first. The TV series was kind of cleverly confusing, a little bit like Total Recall in the sense that the male lead erased his memory just before the first episode starts, and there's the whole mystery behind why he did so, what the savior game is about, and all that. By the end of the series, you can almost forgive them for never really paying off on that mystery, as there's a lot of fun weirdness on the way to that non-ending.

The TV ending is suitably spectacular and has an air of completion about it, even though nothing really is solved in the end. Since the goal of the savior's game is to rescue Japan and its NEETs from economic and demographic damnation, you can see why it's easy to not pay off on the promise. If somebody actually had an answer to Japan's demographic doom which even made narrative sense, let alone real-world sense, people would be all over it like white on rice.

So, the first movie - time to start paying off, right? Not so much.

Instead of picking up where we left, we find ourselves with the heroine, traveling to the irrelevant Americas once again, this time New York City. It's six months after the TV climax, wherein everybody got arrested for... well, I'm not sure what - apparently saving Japan from blowing itself to oblivion? The protagonist disappeared, the Eden of the East kids managed to set up as a real social-media corporation, profiting from the mother of all publicity stunts, and our heroine... goes chasing after the missing protagonist. Her logic for how she's going to find him doesn't even make narrative sense, the Game people are still manipulating things in nonsensical fashion, they're still screwing around with the poor, much-put-upon mayfly prime ministers of Japan, and the writers are still trying to wring humor out of Japanese kids with illegal firearms bumbling around iconic American cityscapes.

The male lead has wiped his memory *again*, and he's still getting chased by various Game people. Rockets rain down on trucks, tedious startup office humor is indulged in, and I damn near fell asleep from the boredom of it all. The whole movie was just an indulgent animation crew chasing its tail on the big screen. It wasn't offensive, but it also wasn't really a worthy use of an hour and a half of my time, or my money. What the hell, Production IG?

I probably won't bother with the final movie. The ending of the TV series, as incomplete as it was, was at least some sort of ending. Bah.

Hmmm.

I've been favoring Perry the last couple of weeks, ever since Gingrich imploded and it suddenly looked like Perry was a probability in the race. Before that? Maybe Daniels, but he turned out to have the opposite of a Midas Touch, just wading into every gopher hole and barbwire tangle he could find between points A and B on any particular topic.

But I fully admit I don't know Perry that well. The fact that he's never lost a race is... a bit troubling. That tends to breed arrogance. The Aggie thing is going to make him a real punching-bag among the culture snobs who up to this point have occupied their time calling Palin and Bachmann "crazy" and other words starting in "c".

Bush the younger sort of turned himself into a Texan, a play-acting, theatrical version of a Texan. It was mostly real, at least as real as Reagan's cowboy act, but it was sort of an act - he was a Yale man, from a family of Yale men. Perry is, apparently, the son of hard-scrabble dryland cotton farmers. I'm not sure whether the "tenant farmer" label means that they were actual impoverished sharecropper types, or that they operated an agribusiness which rented land on an industrial scale. Given that a bit of googling shows that Perry's father was a county commissioner suggests the latter, I think.

The article sells the idea that Perry's a hardass. Look around the news this month, and I ask you - do we want a hard man in 2012, or another softly-softly "crusty but lovable" type like McCain?

Oh, well, we'll see how he operates once he's all the way into the race. He's still only toe-deep into the campaign muck.

h/t

Marshall MacLuhan was a devout Catholic his entire life? My mind is officially blown.

Combine that with Jack Kerouac's reported Catholicism and I have this bizarre mental image of

The twinkling lights of stubborn faith
Swimming serenely between the organic flakes of
Plankton, diatoms and
The dying oceanic masses
The algeaic snow that float slowly
Falling from those teeming sun-lit shallows
Into the godless depths of the deep

I don't disagree with the writer's assessment of MacLuhan, I read one of MacLuhan's books about ten years back, or at least the first third or so. It was interesting, but so very muddle-headed and arbitrary and riddled with intrinsic contradictions that I dropped him as a charlatan part-way through. I suppose you could classify him as a writer whose manifest and extensive errors are challenging to the intelligent reader, sort of like Karl Marx. Although likewise, he's a serious danger to the hard-charging would-be believer looking for a doctrine and a faith.

(h/t

“For his own good, they ought to take him into the woodshed and say, ‘if you want to survive in this work environment, you’ve got to keep your word, you’ve got to be cordial and congenial and civil even when you’re disagreeing,” said Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) “It makes for a very hard career otherwise.”

You know, talking about taking an adult black male - Allen West, an army colonel & freshman US Representative from Florida - "into the woodshed" - isn't just play-act political-kabuki-pretense fake-racism, I kind of think it may be actual working-definition racism. And seeing as how the email Rep. Moore is having kittens over was in response to an intemperate speech in the well of the House, I can't say as how I can see why the Dems have any grounds for crying "congeniality" or "civility".

h/t, although for a change, Insty's actually down-playing the offensiveness behind his link.

My parents were in town this weekend on their yearly northern progession, visiting friends and relatives in four states. I took them to Arts Fest in State College on Saturday, and a Spikes game on Sunday. Arts Fest was crowded, and hot. We did a quick circuit of the booths, and marveled at the amazingly high-priced art. I ran into a couple co-workers and out-of-town friends while we were walking around the festival. It's the week for running into people, everyone comes into town!

It was the first time I went to a Spikes game. The field was beautiful - perfectly manicured, everything new and shiny. The team was... not very good. They got three runners on base in both the eighth and ninth innings and just couldn't get anyone home. The other team wasn't much better, but they were good enough. The field's staff ran around like maniacs entertaining the crowd with frat-boy-type games & distractions, doing their best to keep the crowd from paying too much attention to how bad the team was playing. It ended with a really nice fireworks display. I have to wonder how much my company pays for the season tickets I used - there was a cranky season-ticket holder sitting next to my dad complaining about the team & talking about how much season tickets cost; it isn't cheap.

Ugh, I managed to get rootkitted by a stubborn set of trojans early this morning, and it took seven hours to clean up the mess. I *think* I'm in the clear, but it took three additional malware programs on top of my installed McAfee, and I managed to burke my relationship with the various Google/gmail/blogger interlocking web-applications. I'm mostly posting this to see if I can get it to work.

There some sections of the internet which just aren't safe, no matter what prophylactics you keep on hand. Firewall, paid-up & up-to-date paid antivirals, using a low-trust dummy account, and it *still* slipped on through as if it was strolling in the front door. Manga scanslation sites are the modern-day equivalent of a 19th century San Francisco coolie whorehouse - you'll catch a virtual STD just walking the sidewalk outside it.

Update: and just as I start making jokes about STDs, I lay eyes on this. I dunno that this untreatable gonorrhea business is particularly new, though. We've had untreatable STDs - from the ugly-embarrassing (herpes) to the lethal (AIDS) for decades. But we really, really need new antibiotics, and the morons in charge are too busy harassing the drug companies to be bothered with things like public hygiene.