I spent way too much money today. It was fun. I tried to raise my sister's rent to pay for it all. She just snorted at me.

Also saw "Cowboy Bebop." First time I've been to Madstone Theater, and I am in love with the place. I'm going to see all the movies there, even the ones I don't want to see. Madstone used to be a regular theater: too bright, too much neon, too much packaging, all the same boring movies playing in all the other copycat theaters. And it went out of business, became Madstone, and now shows all the foreign flicks and art films. In the foyer, instead of video games, there's a continuous bench along the walls with lots of lights for reading, and shelves above the benches with board games: chess and checkers and even HuggerMugger, the best game in the world! Instead of canned music, there was jazz and blues. They served beer at the concession stand and lots of gourmet coffee, but no movie candy, and there was a little deli with fancy pastries and Odwalla juice.

Since I love the place, obviously it will go out of business in a month or two.

At the bookstore, I saw a Harry Potter Gryffindor scarf with a matching beanie. No, I didn't buy it. I was sorted into Slytherin. But I want to see if anyone will squee.

I should not go to the bookstore hungry. Got in all sorts of trouble with the credit card. So many pretty leather journals and small-press cards. I just won't be eating until, oh, July. Which is how all this trouble started.

Adds: Gawd, but the redheaded boys on "Oz" are beautiful. I want some Irish, now.

Just be grateful you don't have the flu.

"An unfortunate pig that happens to be infected with both a bird and human virus at the same time can become a mixing bowl, with the genes from the two types of flu viruses combining in its cells to form a new hybrid virus that can infect humans but has some genes from the bird flu, genes that make the newly emerging virus more dangerous than any that had been around before. Thus the stage can be set for a worldwide pandemic."

Pass the Nyquil!

I liked this list. Mostly because it surprised me how many people love Rosenstern and Guildencrantz.

Five movies I will always stop and watch on TV.

1. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Has this ever actually appeared on television? It has to be too highbrow for the general population. If newspapers are dumbed down to an eighth-grade reading level, television must be preschool.

And I fell asleep the first time I watched it. Couch was way too comfortable.

When Gary Oldman was picked for Sirius, I wanted Tim Roth to be Remus.

2. The City of Lost Children
I don't know the French title. Dark noir fairy tale. Love Ron Perlman, love the urchins, love the evil carnival music.

3. Raising Arizona
Whozit, actor, argh, brain!!!! Whatever his name. He's just gone downhill since Raising Arizona. Cage man.

4. Dark City

5. Any Jane Austin, except the poorly made ones.

It's hard to pick just five.

Muses: Sirius, Remus, Albus, Severus, Lucius, Rebeus, Argus. Am I missing any of the Us boys?

Willa Cather was right. We have the best skies here. I was stuck in my truck for two hours today, reading and editing (not driving, luckily), and I watched the sky change. Over to the SW, the sun was just sitting there in a big blue patch of sky. You do a 180, and these huge, black clouds that look like they've been drawn with a few strokes of charcoal were crashing over the mountains like a tidal wave. The clouds in between were disintegrating over the valley, they looked like long strands of cotton candy. It was breathtaking to watch from my higher vantage point, to look down and see the sun light up one wisp of near-transparent cloud while the tails right next to it were still dark and opaque.

After a while, I couldn't even see the mountains anymore, just the unfurling clouds washing down the face of the mtns, a big wall of dark gray static, but turn around, and there was the sun, still shining like July, with fluffy little white clouds rolling along the mesas.

I had a holiday-appropriate dream. I was a whore at one of Madam Millie's whorehouses in Silver City in the 1920s. *fans chest* I love those flapper styles and old Chryslers.

Who would want to buy the story rights to Heidi Fleiss's life (other than Charlie Sheen, so he could burn it)? Why does Hollywood think anyone would be interested in a sorority sister reject who couldn't hack university and set herself up as a pimp to the uber-rich and sleazy? So we can see how crass we already know our politicians, athletes, movie stars, etc., to be? Straight to video! Ick. It doesn't even rate a Monday night TV movie of the week.

Now Millie, that's a story. Orphaned at 6, running away from abusive foster homes with her sister, working 12-hour days at a market where her boss eventually molested her, and finally ending up in Silver City at age 14, working as a waitress and turning tricks to keep her sister in a sanitarium for those with tuberculosis. By the time she was 25, she owned whorehouses throughout N.M. and Texas, as well as beauty salons and some of the first parking lots and taxi hacks in downtown El Paso. Then her sister died of tuberculosis, and after the funeral, Millie's husband and the love of her life suffered the same fate at his piano, dead within two hours.

That would be worth watching. Hard to believe that prostitution was still legal in New Mexico until the late 1960s.

I have never cared for Max Evans' fiction (bought Bluefeather for my birthday one year, and sold it to the used bookstore the next day, couldn't get past chapter five). I like the Millie biography, tho, save when he forgets to introduce new faces. Oh well, it is UNM Press.

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!"

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

I so wanted to be a Catholic after reading this book.

And, btw, 57 degrees today. Crisp blue skies. Points and laughs at igloo-dwellers.

hikikomori

detritus

Terra Firma, in Nob Hill

a Bale of turtles. a Band of gorillas. a Brace of grouse. a Brood of hens. a Cast of hawks. a Cete of badgers. a Charm of finches. a Cloud of gnats. a Clutter of cats. a Clutch of chicks. a Colony of ants. a Congregation of plovers. a Covey of quail. a Crash of rhinos. a Cry of hounds. a Deceit of lapwings. a Down of hares. a Dray of squirrels. a Drove of cattle. an Exhalation of larks. a Flight of swallows. a Flock of sheep. a Gaggle of geese. a Gang of elk. a Grist of bees. a Herd of elephants. a Host of sparrows. a Hover of trout. a Kindle of kittens. a Knot of toads. a Leap of leopards. a Leash of foxes. a Litter of pigs. a Mob of kangaroos. a Murder of crows. a Muster of peacocks. a Paddling of ducks. a Pair of horses. a Parliament of owls. a Plague of locusts. a Pod of seals. a Pride of lions. a Rafter of turkeys. a Sludge of cranes. a Shoal of bass. a Shrewdness of apes. a Siege of heron. a Sloth of bears. a Sounder of swine. a Spring of teals. a String of ponies. a Trip of goats. a Volery of birds. a Watch of nightingales. a Yoke of ox.

I quite like the owls. Can't see elk in a gang, tho.

"Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them ... with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind." --John Locke

Perverse and brutal!

My whinstone house my castle is;
I have my own four walls.
--Thomas Carlyle

For my little matchbox.