An excellent passage about how unwavering personal convictions overwhelms reason, common sense, and being decent to other human beings.

"Once self-supported by conscience, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, the true [insert religious fanatic here] never yields. Neither public nor private influences produce the slightest effect on us, when we have once got our mission. Taxation may be the consequence of a mission ; riots may be the consequence of a mission ; wars may be the consequence of a mission : we go on with our work, irrespective of every human consideration which moves the world outside us. We are above reason; we are above ridicule ; we see with nobody's eyes, we hear with nobody's ears, we feel with nobody's hearts, but our own. Glorious, glorious privilege ! And how is it earned ? Ah, my friends, you may spare yourselves the useless inquiry ! We are the only people who can earn it -- for we are the only people who are always right."

-- Miss Drusilla Clack, from The Moonstone.

In other news, The Moonstone is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

The hot chocolate made by Starbucks and other haute cafe establishments is way too sweet. The chocolate is by no means not bitter enough to offset the amount of sugar used.

However, eating a fresh mulberry and then sipping the hot chocolate immediately afterwards is a tasty tasty way to correct that.

I wonder if the Home Shopping Network will have a Billie Mays retrospective marathon of every informercial he's ever made. I mean, the man is the heavy weight of infomercialdom.

That would last, what, an hour? Less?

...to be sick

Three people have called off today due to stomach ailments. Personally, I would have chosen a better day to play hooky -- expected to be 90 degrees here -- but when the spirit (or stomach bug) moves you.

I was snared by my "Will Watch Almost Anything Tim Roth Stars In" mantra for 125 minutes, and was pleasantly entertained this afternoon.

IFC showed The Legend of 1900, a "fable" about an orphan who spends his entire life aboard an ocean liner. He's found by one of the boiler room crew after the latest boatload of Old World immigrants disembark. His adopted father names the boy 1900 after the year he was born. 1900 turns out to have a natural, prodigious talent for the piano and provides entertainment for the upper and lower decks. The point the film delights in dancing around is whether or not 1900 will ever get off the boat and live on land like everyone else.

Of all the scenes from the movie, the best one (for me) was how the narrator (a jazz trumpeteer who befriends 1900) first meets him. While the ship pitches back and forth on a stormy sea, 1900 walks straight across the deck like it's dead calm, because he's spent his entire life mastering his sea legs. There's more to the scene than that, but I'll leave the spoilerage to that.

A good movie that I would highly recommend if A) you'd like to see Tim Roth play a pleasant natured character for once; B) you like period movies about the early 20th century; 3) you like comic drama with a sense of pleasant unreality; 4) you enjoyed Cinema Paradiso, also by the same director. If you're looking for Roth to be his normal sardonic self, for deep insight into human nature, or for more than a light touch in dealing with the social issues of the time periods depicted, move along.

I set off a firestorm at work. I may get a US distributor of German scanning equipment into a lot of hot water.

Probably not, but the rush of outraged emails gives me something to be happy about. Our overhead color production scanner broke down for the third time in six weeks. Output = zero. Bosses = not happy. Business Office = not happy. Formal letter of pissiness being drafted by someone high up enough that the companies in question might pay attention.

A busy day.

And to think, all I really wanted to do today was not work on gathering statistics.

Take no more than 15 minutes to produce a list of 15 books that have influenced you in style, ideas, relationships, language, or other ways that you find important, and/or books that have really stayed with you -- you keep thinking of that quote, you are always remembering that character, you are frequently reminded of that moment.... that kind of thing. This is not a favorites list.

1) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
2) If Upon a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
3) Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
4) The Summerfolk by Doris Burn
5) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6) The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
7) Amphigorey by Edward Gorey
8) Don Quixote by Cervantes
9) The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien
10) A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
11) Pogo by Walt Kelly
12) Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
13) And Now We Are Six by AA Milne
14) Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman
15) Ringworld by Larry Niven

It's kinda cool to have a workplace where a train rumbles by every so often.

Of course, if I were actually trying to take digital photos in the back rooms, I might find it less enjoyable, considering how much the entire building is vibrating.

10:30 PM Wednesday. Want to log in to Facebook to clear up rampant stupidity over recent status. Can't log in. Error message: "Account Unavailable. Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience."

12:30 AM Thursday. Still can't log in. Emails from friends still flying. Site maintenance, my ass. Go to bed, hoping stupidity dies overnight from lack of attention.

12:30 PM Thursday. Still can't log in. Now it's getting personal. Try to find contact helpdesk email for Facebook. Might as well be searching for the Holy Grail. Find Holy Grail in my desk drawer beside the tea packets. Manage to find helpdesk (bug report? This isn't a bug. This is your site not doing what it could before). Send 'bug report'. Am asked to confirm email address. At least they got that part right. Respond.

Consider declaration of never using Facebook again. Think again; might be overreacting.

5:30 PM Thursday. Still can't log in. No longer receiving emails rife with stupidity from friends. Time has moved on for them. I'm trapped in some time-space continuum amber at 10:30 PM Wednesday.

Facebook?
Pft!
Whatever.
It's dead to me, DEAD I SAY!

5:39 PM Thursday: ARGHHHHHHHH. Decide to spam them with updates of how I can't login, but without the amusing commentary.

5:50 PM Thursday: Decide I should get a life. By going home and collapsing.

I used to pride myself on my ability to remember commercials. I consider it an essential part of pop-culture.

But my brain has failed me today.

There was a commercial that aired within past 2-3 years. A pretty auburn-haired woman in a towel lies down on a spa chair and talks about using [blah] to remove the lines around her eyes, [blah] to tighten her pores, [blah] to increase her skin tone, etc. She finishes the list of absurd things she's using to take care of herself with: "and rationalizations to distract myself from realizing that none of this really matters."

Help? Can anyone tell me who was in the commercial? Point me to a link on youtube?

Current Mood: hopeful