Lisa and I watched Life is Beautiful tonight, and I can say simply that I’ve never seen a film that has had such a powerful effect on me. Benigni has a combination of comedic genius and emotional depth that just wiped me out. I’ve never cried like that at the end of a film before, and it still is getting to me hours later. That’s a lot to say for a couple hours of sitting (or lying, as the case may be) in front of the TV.
Come to think of it, I’ve cried very little since I was probably twelve or so. In those first years of my life, I cried about everything (and usually over really small, spilled milk sort of things). Just ask my mother. Maybe I’m starting to catch up now, get my level of tears up to normal after a dry spell to balance out the floods of my formative years.
There have been many instances lately where I’ll be reading the news, and I’ll start thinking about what’s going on around us, and I start to feel it coming. That’s good, because it’s an indication that maybe I’m believing it’s real; but it’s also bad because—well, because it is real. I’m not one of these people who thinks that a life without pain is a life unlived; I wouldn’t mind seeing a lot less of it. Here’s to that hope.
Another good, but rather unrelated, thing from today. The wonderful people at Hostbaby have been treating me (and their other customers) right. This site is now hosted on a more secure, faster OpenBSD server with some nifty admin tools in the backend. They moved my site to it with few hitches. Those hitches that did come up (like missing the Berkeley DB that is required to generate this journal entries) were resolved in a courteous and timely fashion. I couldn’t be happier. My site is apparently the most cgi-heavy they serve, giving them the most trouble during the move, and they still are nice to me. It just doesn’t get much better than that.
Today was a pretty good day. I did some work for a client, ate some tasty food, hung out with Lisa, and saw some music. I was hoping I could ride my bike to the concert…
Oh, did I mention that I finally replaced my stolen bike? Yes, I did. Ross was gracious enough to lend me his bike (an expensive-looking, but cheap and difficult, but a bike nonetheless, Huffy) which he used at Burning Man and nowhere else. While I am indebted to him for it, I’m also a bike snob and couldn’t stand riding it. I finally found something by searching on the venerable Craig’s List, which led me to a guy who lives not two blocks from here, and sold me a good bike at a very good price. Whoopee! Now I just have to find some trails and things and start really riding again. If this bike is going to get stolen, I at least want to put some miles on it first. barf
Anyway, I wanted to ride to the show, but was too nervous about leaving it outside from 8pm – 12am (which is about the time frame in which my last bike got stolen), so I bailed on that and drove. The show was great. Ben and I went separately but got the chance to talk a bit before and after the show, which is always a pleasure. I’m enjoying Dave Weckl more every time I see him, either because he’s mellowing out over the years, or I’m just getting more capable of grasping what he’s doing (probably both).
Lisa is going to kill me for posting this, because she wants a doggy and we can’t have one (yet). I can’t help it, because this puppy is ridiculously cute, and owned by a gentleman named Dean Allen, who has a great web site.
We have a new car. Okay, an old car. It’s an ‘88 Taurus with a whole lot of miles on it (over 200,000), but it’s in excellent shape. We bought it from someone who calls himself a “car crazy”—he loves cars, and it shows. The Salvation Army came today and took the old rig away. Goodbye, Chevy, you have served us well.
Now all we have to do is complete all the paperwork. Buying a used car requires a lot of paperwork. It had vanity plates, which requires a special form to be filled out by the seller either giving up the plates, signing them over to someone else, or keeping them but removing them from previous vehicle. The woman at the DMV who helped me do most of the paperwork acted as if it were the worst sin of the automobile industry for the owner not to remove the plates before giving us the car. Amazing.
I’ve been reading some more about the anthrax scare, and while I agree that getting it would be awful, there’s something even worse. There are people pleading with drug companies to give them Cipro and other anthrax antibiotics, presumbly so they’ll be ready if they get a power-filled envelope. Never mind how unlikely that is; using these drugs unless you’re actually infected is dangerous. If they’re used too widely, the bugs develop immunities to the treatments. I have friends who complain when people buy anti-bacterial soap for the same reason: yes, you kill some of them now, but there will be those that survive, and resistant strains develop. It’s a cycle. We need to be very careful about this.
Lisa is launching another site: Literary Conquests. I’m planning on contributing to this one as well, but she’s pretty much in charge. Lisa is a writer and a voracious reader. She’s been talking about having a site for book recommendations and reviews, and now it’s finally here. If you want to participate, let her know and we’ll add you to the list. Exciting!
That site, and this one, are both being driven by a new piece of software called Movable Type. I like Greymatter a lot, but Movable Type is more what I’m looking for.
Nobody wants my blood, apparently. I tried to donate blood today and failed. Who fails donating blood? Me.
They interviewed me, checked my blood pressure and everything, and it was all cool. Then they stuck the needle in me, and things weren’t cool anymore.
“It’s in there, but it’s not working.”
Oh great.
Eventually someone came over to “adjust it” for me, which involves apparently jiggling the needle around while it’s in my arm. It did nothing but hurt, so I told them to please stop. It turns out my skin plugged up the end of the needle when they stuck it in, so it was all nice and in the vein, but not doing anything. Yay.
So I’m left with a feeling of soreness in my arm and weakness in my heart, having all the bad parts of blood donation, none of the good. I’ll try again in a week or so once my arm is healed. Despite my experience, I hope those of you who can do it are going out there and donating blood. Regardless of what you think about the attacks, there are still people who really need the help. It’s only been a month.
There are now some links relevant to 9/11, and more I guess, here on the home page. It will help me remember how much there is that I need to keep up with and continue learning. The internet is a true blessing when it comes to finding independent information. There’s too much to take in at any one time, and I’m grateful to people like Rebecca Blood for helping me find some of the important things. With any luck, you’ll find some of these links helpful too.
I’ve also moved some things around the site. I’ve been realizing how much stuff is starting to pile up here, so I’ve been going on a cleaning frenzy. Autumn cleaning, I guess. No more images at all on this page, except for the scaled down logo at the top. All the rest is CSS—why excluding all those old browsers if I’m not going to use the standards more, I ask? Some pages and directories have moved around, but I’ve set up the error page on the site to help you find things that have moved (which is something more sites should do, I think). If you find pages or links that are broken, please let me know.
This interview was never broadcast because our government didn’t want taxpayer money funding a speaking outlet for the Taliban. I had heard of this on the radio a few days ago, and now you and I can at least read the interview, which is quite short. There’s so much to learn.
One thing is, and has been, abundantly clear: these guys are completely, frighteningly, out of their minds.