TPB REVIEW - Empowered Vol. 1

Empowered Volume 1
Adam Warren, writer & artist
Dark Horse Books, 2007
248 pages

So an entire graphic novel based on a character the artist designed specifically as a commission for parties unknown who like girls bound and in very little clothing; what could possibly go wrong here? Of course since it is by Adam Warren, the OG of the OEL, I had to pick it up and see what the fuss was all about. In a nutshell the book is pretty much what you would expect from what I described, except that while the bondage situations and lack of clothes are clearly exploitive, they never cross the line into pornography.

This book chronicles the life and times of Empowered, the central character's admittedly lame nom de hero. She gets her powers from a supersuit which is SKIN tight and for some reason, not very resilient. As the suit gets torn up her powers diminish until she is a mere mortal...and bound and gagged. While the first few stories in this volume seem little more than excuses to put the heroine in such situations, Warren's affection for the character and desire to do something more with the book shows through. This is particularly evident in his characterization of Empowered, who has very low self-esteem and only starts to get a little better when she builds a support structure around her.

As the stories get a little longer Warren introduces a couple of new characters which help pull the stories away from their bound and gagged origin and flesh out Empowered's world. First there is Thugboy who goes from being a generic henchman to Empowered's live-in boy friend, and then Ninjette, a female ninja, comes along and, after tying Empowered up, decided to go ahead and move in with the couple. My favorite addition to the cast is He Whose Name is Too Scary to Be Spoken, a demon lord who ends up trapped in some alien bondage gear. In typically ludicrous Warren fashion Empowered has to hang on to the caged demon lord because of zoning restriction on the Super Homeys' HQ. His dialogue is over the top enough to compete with the likes of Dr. Doom and Darkseid*, however he comes with a voyeuristic streak about a mile wide.

All in all I really enjoyed the book however it is only going to appeal to those who like their super-heroing with a liberal dose of absurdism and bondage.

* As I was reading the book I found myself reading this character's dialogue out loud and cracking myself up. I am not sure if this speaks to how funny the dialogue actually is or how sad my life is, take your pick.

Japanese Advertising

I love the cats over at J-list.com. They use adverts and pages out of magazines for packing material which, being the cheap bastard I am, I turn into "creative" wrapping paper for the items I have ordered as gifts. In this particular installment one page included this ad:


What I find curious is that the two main models featured in this advert are most assuredly NOT ethnically Japanese. I do not know why this strikes me as odd, I suspect it has something to do with how homogeneous Japanese society seems to be. I would be very surprised to find that non-Japanese make up more than 1% of the population. I imagine that the subdivisions within that percent would heavily favor immigrants from other Asian countries. Just something I thought I would share while I have a slow week on the writing front.

Would you like fries with that?

The other day I went to the local "mediterranean grill" for lunch. I, as usual, ordered a gyro plate with an additional gyro on the side. What? I loves me some gyro meat. While I was waiting on my meal I looked at my claim ticket, which is thoughtfully shown to the left for your edification. I know I did a double-take when I saw "Yog Sauce" on the ticket. I immediately thought of this and it took me a moment to figure out what was actually meant by "Yog Sauce." While I pondered I thought, "I bet it goes well with souls."

LOLZ Indy

Some of these were too easy and as I was posting these I thought of a better, alternate saying for Big Pimpin' Indy, "X NEVER marks the spot, bitch." You can view a couple of other pics from the set here.

I *HATE* the Holidays

Actually it is not the holidays that I hate it is the fact that MY CAR THREW A FUCKING ROD ON THE WAY HOME FRIDAY. FUCKITY FUCK FUCK! To add insult to injury I can't really afford to get a new one until sometime in April. Five months without a fucking car. I am going to get piss-drunk and eat pizza. I am sure I'll be back to my usual chipper self in a few days. Till then enjoy this:



Randy Taylor. I love you!

Dispatches from the Abyss - Monday, Nov. 19th

Well kids, I had a really good and busy weekend this week and it all started Friday evening. Scott had Bird, Brian and I over for a night of experimental cooking wherein he tested a few soup recipes on his unwitting victims. I believe the selections were chestnut, mushroom, and butternut squash. Of the three I think the chestnut soup had the most potential however it needed a little work. Regardless all three of them were pretty tasty and the rest of the dinner, coq au vin and some chocolate pie, was excellent! After hanging out for a bit I headed home because I knew on Saturday I was going to have a very full day and boy was I right.

I dragged out of bed around 8:30 on Saturday morning and headed out to Liendo Plantation for their Civil War Weekend. Liendo Plantation is a stone's throw from Prairie View, in fact the Liendo Parkway is the exit I take when going to visit my dad's house in Prairie View. 290 runs right along the edge of the current plantation property and for all the time I was living in College Station I would pass right by the plantation and their giant billboard advertising the Civil War Weekend. Every time I would drive by the sign I would make a mental note to myself that this is something I should check out. Then I would drive by the sign sometime in December or January and cuss because my mental note had failed me yet again! For whatever reason this event was on my mind this year and I finally managed to make it out to Liendo Plantation.

Despite the crap-ass weather on Saturday I had a very good time. I enjoyed wandering around the various encampments and chatting with some of the reenactors. I also chatted with a few other attendees, which is very unusual for me. I ended up spending a good part of the afternoon talking with Thomas Eishen, an accomplished photographer and novelist. Our conversation was very wide-ranging and I really enjoyed meeting him. Now all I have to do is pick up his book and check it out, something I meant to do today so I could read it over the long weekend, alas I was actually busy at work!

The "battle" itself took place on an open field bordered by trees on one end and a curve in 290 along the far side. This is probably the same field where the billboard I used to see every time I drove by lives. Saturday's scenario was a sneak attack on a C.S.A. camp by Federal forces. Interestingly Camp Groce was situation on Liendo Plantation's lands during the Civil War. Camp Groce, or Camp Liendo as it was commonly called, served as a prison camp for Union soldiers as well as a recruiting station and a refugee camp. Even with the home-field advantage the Confederate forces surrendered the camp, thus setting the scene for Sunday's scenario in which the Confederate forces retook the camp using much the same tactics.

As much as I enjoyed the "battle" on Saturday I left rather frustrated. As I said the weather was truly crap. Not crap enough to chase me indoors, but the sky was overcast with very thick clouds which meant when I was photographing the event I was shooting with some ridiculously slow shutter speeds. I ended up tossing about a quarter of the pictures from Saturday as they were so badly under-exposed I do not think I could correct the issues in Photoshop. Sunday the weather was MUCH better in the afternoon with the sun playing peek-a-boo in the clouds during the "battle." Overall I am significantly more pleased with the photos I shot on Sunday with two exceptions. The first is that due to the storms that rolled through on Saturday night, there were significantly fewer reenactors for Sunday's battle. This saddened me because as proud as I am of being a Texan, every time I see a Union regiment advancing with the regimental colors and Stars and Stripes flying in the wind I am almost moved to tears. This strikes me as one of the most beautiful and terrible sights on the battlefield. Here is a picture I took on Saturday which I was hoping to be able to recreate with better lighting on Sunday.



Oh well, there is always next year!

The second reason my Sunday pics bug me a bit is that due to where I chose to shoot from and the fact that I actually stood rather than sitting on the ground there are several shots which would be really cool if there wasn't this big fucking freeway in the background. DAMN YOU MODERNITY!* Additionally along the tree line which defined the back of the field of battle there are a couple of power lines. With some of the angles I was shooting the power lines actually come out looking like wires in the fence which bisected the battle field, however in other they are plainly not a fence. Fortunately they are against a busy and usually out of focus background so it will be easy enough to clone stamp them out in Photoshop. There is nothing to be done about 290 though. Argh!

After the reenactment I wandered through the camps a bit more and tried to track down a couple of the reenactors I had talked to on Saturday without any luck whatsoever. Since they were in a fairly primitive camp, which they called a campaign camp, I suspect they were one of the groups that got washed away. It was too bad because I wanted to get some contact information from them. They seemed like a good bunch and this sort of reenacting is something I have been interested in for some time. Oh well, I think I have tracked them down on the web. Time to fire off an email and see. I also picked up a CD from the local group Celtaire. I have seen them at Ren Faire and like this sort of music so I went ahead and bought their From the Heart of Texas album, a collection of twenty-three songs popular in the state during it's first one-hundred years. The album has been submitted for consideration in the Grammy category of best historical album. While the album is a rather hit or miss affair in my mind as I am not a big fan of the vocals, I certainly hope they win!

In addition to all the reenacting fun, Matt decided to crash at my casa after he worked at the UW on Saturday night due to the weather we were going to be hit with. He did not want to get caught out on the road. It was pretty cool to hang out with him for a couple of hours before I had to crash. We talked about joining the novice league over at the Aerodrome so we will see what comes of that!

All in all this was a really good weekend. Spent time with some old friends and made a couple of new friends and I think the photographing at Liendo Plantation was a good learning experience for next year. Who knows, maybe I'll haul my butt out to Bellmeade this next May and check out the reenactment there, as well. Well, it is getting late so I am going to get this posted and then crash. For your entertainment I offer up the following gallery of pictures I shot this weekend:


by james7329

* Oddly enough this is how I felt in Human Sit in college as well. I guess you can't teach an old James new tricks. Sorry ladies!

Watching Star Trek

So no post for you. Go play on YouTube or icanhascheezburger.com or something, I don't really care as long as you damned kids stay of my lawn!

BTW, this picture? Halo armor, are you fucking kidding me?

BOOK REVIEW - The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass
Phillip Pullman
Knopf, 2002
399 pages

As I said in this post, The Golden Compass is just the sort of book a young James would have been interested in therefore on one of my recent forays to the Alabama Bookstop I decided to pick it up and see if I could get through it before the movie came out. As it turns out I might be able to read all three of the books before the movie comes out as I picked this book up last Friday and completed it last night. I found the book to be very readable and, unlike Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I have yet to complete), the somewhat formal language Pullman uses at times to enhance the reading experience rather than distract from it. I think it is already evident that I very much enjoyed reading this book.

The Golden Compass, which is the first book in the his Dark Materials trilogy, chronicles the adventures of Lyra, an 11 or 12 year-old orphan who begins the tale as a ward of the Scholars of Jordan College, Oxford. The book opens with Lord Asriel, Lyra's uncle, visiting Jordan College where he is a fellow, to discuss some of his discoveries while in the north, which is a collection of savage lands populated by witch clans and the panserbjorne, or the armored bears. After Lord Asriel's visit, Lyra's life returns to normal until one day her best friend Roger is taken by a mysterious group known only as the Gobblers. The only thing anyone knows for certain about the Gobblers is that they take kidnap children who are never heard from again. The same day that Roger is taken the glamorous Mrs. Coulter arrives in Oxford with an offer for Lyra. Mrs. Coulter needs an assistant and she would like it very much if Lyra would come to London and fill that role for her. Thus begins Lyra's wild adventures through the confines of British aristocracy to London's streets and the wide world beyond.

Being the sort of geek that I am there are parts of me that find Pullman's world even more interesting than the characters he has created. It is a world not unlike our own however in Pullman's world magic is real and every human is accompanied by a daemon. Daemon's are physical manifestations of the human's soul and while inexorably linked to their human, they are individuals in their own right. Children's daemons' can shift their forms however around the time the human hits puberty the daemon settles on a final form. One other major difference is that in Pullman's world England is dominated by the Magisterium. In this first book the Magisterium is not discussed very much, however it is clear that it is the Christian Church and is not a power to be trifled with. Other differences include the previously mentioned witches and panserbjorne. The panserbjorne are bears who are self-aware and often sell their services as mercenaries.

While I have heard that there was a hue and cry from some Christian groups that this book is anti-religious, and I can see how they are pigeon-holing the book to appear that way, I do not believe this is the truth. Rather than serve as a condemnation of Christianity or Christian ideals, any anti-religious sentiments expressed in this book are anti-establishment sentiments. The only thing I found in the book that bothered me is that there are times where the characters do not get the happy endings you wish they would. While I completely understand why this happens, it might be a little rough for some younger readers to handle as I found myself tearing up more than once while I was reading.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it to anyone!

Dispatches from the Anyss - Monday, Nov. 12th

Happy belated birfday Nikki! Here's hoping you took the man's advice at some point this weekend.

So how was your weekend, world? Mine was pretty damn good. I spent Saturday either in bed, working on a writing project which I am really fucking excited about even if it is not coming along as well as I had hoped, or partying with my own personal dynamic duo Rob and D. (I suspect D is Robin but I am never 100% sure with those kids.) Saturday was D-Unit's birthday and we celebrated with an evening of pizza, drinking, and friends at the casa. It was very enjoyable as I was able to wear a bucket on my head (photo forthcoming) and be funny, opportunities which rarely present themselves. I spent Sunday at the Lone Star Flight Museum's final fly day of the year before they put all the toys in annual maintenance and the like for the winter. Of course I took pictures and managed to escape with out ANY sunburned parts. I am starting to get good at this shit! When I got home I sacked out on the couch for a bit and then read most of The Golden Compass. I might finish that tonight depending on how motivated I am about hitting the office close to on time tomorrow. Today was just another day at the salt mines with the added bonus of being the day I had to complete my self-appraisal. I HATE doing the self-appraisals at my job for two reasons. The first is that we have to really hype ourselves up and contrary to what you may think I do not actually enjoy writing about myself, or at least in the way we are expected to around the office. The second reason is that our self-appraisals have to be written in third person so our supervisor can cut and paste them to make their appraisals of our performance. That just strikes me as being retarded, particularly since these have nothing to do with our raises in that I am certain nothing I write on there will get me any more money. It is just another opportunity to fail. Oh well, it is all done now anyway.

Sunday out at the LSFM was a very cool day; much more relaxed and informal than the airshow they have in April. Throughout the four hours they were performing flight operations they flew the B-17, B-25, P-47, Corsair, Hellcat, and a couple of other aircraft whose names/designations escape me at the moment multiple times throughout the day. The belle of the ball was their newly painted Hawker Hurricane, which has been in the museum's inventory and under restoration in Colorado since 1990. This was the first public appearance of the Hurricane, which is painted in the colors of L. C. "Wildcat" Wade (who is pictured on the left in the cockpit of his Spitfire), a Texan who joined the RAF in December of 1940 and earned his commission as a Pilot Officer in April of 1941. He flew Hurricanes in Egypt with the No. 33 squadron and then flew Spits in Egypt with the No. 145 squadron. He died in an accident in January 1944 at Foggia, Italy. He was credited with 23 kills and earned both the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Flying Cross. (The museum's Spitfire, which I have yet to see fly, is also painted in his colors.) While it is no Spit, it was very nice to see the Hurricane in the air.

When I first arrived and walked out on to the tarmac I could not quite place the sound that assaulted my ears until a UH-1 Huey came flying out from one of the hangers and did a low pass over the flight line. It reminded me of the scene in We Were Soldiers where Mel Gibson introduces the troops to their new horses and put me in just the right frame of mind for shooting pictures. As soon as I made it to the flight line, they started prepping the Hurricane and soon enough it was in the air and I was able to get my first pictures of the bird. Here is one I selected mostly at random since I have not had time to cull the pictures I took. Enjoy!

A Question RE: Jennifer Aniston

Do you think Jennifer Aniston would rather be remembered as Leprechaun's Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt's ex-wife Jennifer Aniston? Please post your answers in the comments and show work where appropriate.

Dispatches from the Abyss - Wednesday, Oct. 7th

Well it took an extra day for me to get around to writing another Dispatch, but fear not, my intrepid readers, last night I did get some writing done. I have an opportunity to do some real script writing for a change and I do not want to jinx it so I am not going to talk about it too much here on the Opiate until there is actual news to report. Just keep your fingers crossed for me and with any amount of luck and a little skill you may see my name on the silver screen in a couple of years.

Monday, being the 5th of November, was Scott's birthday. We are all able to remember this because of the couplet we learned in V for Vendetta:

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
And Scott's birthday...

Wait a minute, that's not right at all, but it is marginally (VERY marginally) funny. Anyways, several of us got together and went to Truluck's for dinner where I engaged in an orgy of crab consumption that would make mere mortals blanch. While "All you can eat"* and "buffet open" remain some of my favorite phrases in the English language, I do not actively like crab meat. It is not that I dislike crab meat, but it is not something that I actually like. I will eat it without complaint** however the next time I am going to order a steak. The funny thing is that since Scott and I had discussed all you can eat crab night, I have been craving crab, or what I thought was crab. I have the same problem with Big Macs. From time to time I will just CRAVE them and the only way to get over it is to go buy one and eat it. Every time I do this I get about three bites in and wonder what the fuck I am doing because this sure as shit does not taste like the Big Mac I have been dreaming about for the last few weeks; in fact this taste pretty much like shit. Oh well. The second lesson of the night is that when purchasing gifts for Scott, Rob and I need to coordinate our shopping. While I am certain that Scott will find a happy home in his stomach for the two bottles of Macallan 18 he received this year, I am the girly sort that worries about my gift being somewhat original.

When I got home from dinner I pretty much crawled into bed and suffered through food coma until I was able to fall asleep. Tuesday night I spent working on my idea for the afore mentioned writing project and then hit Downing for a round or two with Scott. While I still like drinking at Downing, staff departures over the past year have sucked some of the fun out of the place. Back when John, Emily, Shannon, and Ashley were all there it felt like home. Now it is just another place to drink. With shitty jazz on Tuesday nights. We have got to remember that and stop going then. It is excruciatingly bad and Downing is not a good live music venue. A guy with a piano might work in there, but even a jazz quartet is too much.

Tonight I rushed home from work and then went over to a friend's house to discuss the super secret project. I feel pretty good since she is on board with the idea I sketched out last night, with a couple of modifications. Now I just have to work on breaking the story and then coming up with a treatment. Again, keep your fingers crossed as this might be opportunity knocking.

And now I am home getting my hour of writing pounded out before I retire to the bedroom and finish watching Casino Royale before I sack out. I got in the mood to rewatch the movie because of a post on one of the Star Trek forums I read. With every new announcement about the new Star Trek movie, which began filming today, the Trekkies get up in arms and bemoan how terrible the movie is going to be. The most recent announcement which spurred a paroxysm of fannish rage came from Philippe Dauman, the CEO and President of Viacom, Paramount's parent company, during Viacom's Q3 2007 earnings call. While discussing the upcoming slate of movies he said, "Paramount will close out the year with Star Trek, a completely reconceived version of this franchise by, again, J.J. Abrams." (You can view the whole transcript here if you are really that bored.) The biggest problem people have is with the word "reconceived." A lot of people are reading it as J.J. Abrams is throwing out everything but the names and trying to rebuild everything else about the franchise, including the core concepts. I believe this word really means nothing, particularly in this case. Reconceived is a nice buzzword that people like to throw around. What they want to say is, "This ain't your daddy's Star Trek," however since their audience is made up of high-dollar investors and not the Montrose Beer and Gun Club, they feel the need to use buzz-worthy words. Now I am not saying that the fears about the film are completely unfounded as people with significant access have expressed concerns AND from the sketchy details which have been leaked about the plot there is clearly going to be some reimagining shenanigans going on, but I am personally trying to take a wait and see attitude and think the CEO was talking out of his ass.

I said all that and the next response was some cat going on a tear about how he is sick of things being reimagined and reconceived. He had earlier posted a similar rant in which he singled out Casino Royale for reboot suckiness as they turned Bond into nothing more than a petty thug for hire. I was shocked when I read that but then figured what the poster was really bitching about was that, much like in the books, James Bond was not a nice person in the new movie. Sean Connery played Bond the right way. Once the movies went off-book and they replaced Connery, James Bond became a bit more sentimental. I was so in awe of his comments that I felt the need to go back and watch Casino Royale again. While I really enjoyed Brosnan's work as Bond, except for the last one which was a stinky, stinky poo, watching Casino Royale was almost like watching my first Bond movie all over again.

Well, it is getting on in the evening and I want to hit the sheets before midnight, so I am going to end this a little early so I can get it to the Opiate and into your greedy little hands. I think tomorrow night I have an industry mixer I need to go to for work, however I should be back on Friday when I will discuss the WGA writer's strike. Till then have a good one!


* While I was at the office on Monday my office mate, Brian, and I were discussing the plans for the evening and I told him that "all you can eat" were my three favorite words in the English language. Of course he pointed out that it was four words and after a VERY lame attempt at defending myself by claiming there was a hyphen in there I responded that he was right and now I was going to go be a snarky dick about other people's grammar and spelling on the internet for a while to make myself feel better. It worked.

** Well I will kind of complain about it here, but that's what blogs are for, right?

Eumelia, my daemon

I am very interested in The Golden Compass, which is coming out on December 7th. This is the sort of book that I would have loved as a kid and I so far I have been very impressed with everything in which Chris Weitz, of American Pie fame, has been involved, therefore I am doing my little bit to help their viral marketing campaign. Apparently my daemon is a rabbit. Hrm.

Dispatches from the Abyss - Sunday, Nov. 4th

This week was pretty much a shit week. I did not get ANY writing done and I have no excuse for it. I had trouble getting out of bed in the mornings and trouble pulling myself off the couch in the evenings. Every night I had pretty disturbing dreams which led to me waking up without having gotten any good sleep whatsoever. All of this added up to make things a week in which I managed to accomplish nothing except somehow managing to blow through pretty much my entire paycheck. Having to pay car insurance SUCKS.

On the plus side the end of the week shaped up to be decent. On Thursday night I had Scott, Rob, and D round for dinner. I managed to burn the rice but cooked a pretty decent pot of Spicy Beef and Kimchi Stew as well as making a tasty Korean Cucumber Salad. Since I have so much kimchi left I am thinking about trying the stew again this week. All I have to buy is the meat. I telecommuted on Friday which was great. I worked on a specs paper for work and then took a long lunch to pick up some stuff to make an improvement or two around the casa. Once I was done with work I finally got around to putting the cup hooks in the wall above the sink in my kitchen. This opened up most of one cabinet for me so I could finally get the pile of bowls, small plates, and cup off the counter which means I actually have some workspace in the kitchen that is not on top of the stove. In addition to that I replaced the blinds in my living room. I have one window in my living room which is six feet long and the apartment complex put one set of blinds in there that covered the entire window. Being an apartment complex they used cheap-ass blinds and therefore not to long after I moved in I managed to rip the locking mechanism out of the frame. This meant I could no longer put the blind up. I have been meaning to replace the blinds since then however just never got around to it then a couple of weeks ago I tangled with the blinds again and managed to rip about a foot of the frame off. This made the blinds FAR too gimpy and something had to be done. I hit Home Depot, bought a couple of 35" wide blinds and mounted them in the window on Friday. Now all I have to do is get some drapes and the living room will look like a home. Well that and get the spare TV out of there and get the two piles of paper cleaned up, but I think I have accomplished enough for this month.

After the crap-ass week I had I decided that the best way to spend Saturday would be in bed. I alternated between reading and getting caught up on television. Somehow I managed to slack off and while being a mopey little bitch I managed to not watch any of my weekly television. On Saturday I managed to get all caught up as well as hammering through some of the stack of comics on the night table. I have no idea how I have managed to do it but I am about a week or so behind on the reading of the comics. I need to hammer through them before things get out of control again.

Saturday night was set aside for a wedding. My friends Rex and Julie were getting married. I spent some time on Saturday agonizing over whether to even go or not, having built up some considerable slacking momentum, however I decided to go. The next question was what to wear. It was finally cool enough out to consider the kilt as an option, however I do not have a semi-formal sporran and did not want to go the full-nine for this one. I just had my suit cleaned, however I fiddled around with the kilt idea a bit more and decided to go with the kilt. Since I do not have a tie that goes with the kilt I made sure to wear one of my white shirts with a button-down collar. I wore my formal sporran, which is kind of cheap-looking and may need to be replaced in the near future, my cream hose, ghillie's, belt, and a white button-down shirt. At first I was nervous when I was walking in but the cop who was working the door and the first person to see me complimented me on how I looked. After this the nervousness I had melted away. The wedding was very nice and I am very glad I went. Rex and Julie seemed to be having a wonderful time and I enjoyed chatting with my friends that were there. I got several compliments on the kilt from both complete strangers and my friends. I think this is the first time that many of my friends have seen me in a kilt and this was the first time that the Anderson kilt made an appearance with this crowd. Now the only question is whether to wear it to dinner tomorrow night or not.

While I was at the wedding I had one of those uncomfortable moments of revelation about myself. I learned that I am not very good at weddings. I am always a bit uncomfortable at them, as I am in most social situations but weddings have an added level of discomfort for me. The problem is that I want to be married. I want to fall in love with someone. I want to get married. I have for a long time. Going to weddings and watching people get married just emphasizes my lack. Not while I am at the wedding, but later, in the quiet moments when I am home alone and sitting in front of the laptop and confronted by a blank page. I wimped out last night. I left the wedding earlier than most because I got in to a strange head-space intending to come home and work through my head on paper but when I sat down in front of the laptop and opened a new file I did not like what I started to see. Fortunately my buddy Matt was online so we were able to chat and I did not have to face myself. After Matt bailed I monkeyed around on the TV and found some shitty Skinemax porn to watch for a bit before I just chucked it up and went to bed. (Please note that chucked it up is not a euphemism for anything dirty there and the shite porn I was watching was Girl with the Sex-Ray Eyes which is a real POS as far as soft-core porn goes. The nice thing is that they did not dub over the fake dirty talk with music.)

Today was spent reading even more comics, surfing the internets a little bit, watching football, and returning some extra cup hooks to Home Depot. The Houston Texans won so I consider it a good football day even if we were stuck watching the Texans beat the Raiders rather than the Colts versus the Patriots, in which the Colts managed to find a way to loose. Right now I have The Replacements playing in the background. I really like the movie and not just on its cinematic merits. Brooke Langton, who plays the Washington Generals head cheerleader Annabelle Farrell, is a stone-cold hottie. Apparently a guy that I did some film work with back about seven years ago knew her cousin or something like that. Sadly the bastard never hooked me up.

Oh well, that looks to be about all the time we have for tonight kids. I cannot promise anything about tomorrow night as it is Scott's birthday and I may be out celebrating too late, but we'll see you on Tuesday. Till then have a good one!

Dispatches from the Abyss - Tuesday, Oct. 30th

Well this weekend was QUITE the weekend. I did not write anything on Saturday because I split the day between sleeping in preparation for my evening activities and catching up on my television watching. Well some of it anyways. Lets face it since I did not have any good sex dreams about co-workers, past or present, the sleeping was not worth writing about and I have to watch how much I write about the TV shows or you cats will get BORED with it and head somewhere else for you hit of jackassery. Besides, all I can really say about the TV this weekend is that Reaper still rocks and Bionic Woman has settled into bare mediocrity. There, we're done with that.

I skipped Sunday because I spent the entire day recovering from the party I went to on Saturday night. I am not certain what to say about the party except that I really phoned it in on the costume front. I wore my suit, a black knit shirt, and a luchadore mask. The scenery was mighty nice and the live music was provided by BRC's Mutaytor. It was quite the show and quite the night. I am glad I went. Even if I spent ALL Sunday recovering.

I have to take a moment to give mad props to Scott for dragging me to the party and then putting up with my D-R-U-N-K ass afterwards. The man could be considered for sainthood if he wasn't a filthy protestant. Oh well, no one is perfect. (You know I am kidding, right?)

Yesterday I did some laundry, hit the grocery store, and dropped some stuff off at Scott's and then lost the evening. I was home at a fairly reasonable time but managed to accomplish absolutely nothing of any substance, which is almost the same story for tonight. Plenty of time to get stuff done. All of it wasted. The thing that is SLIGHTLY different about tonight is that my dad came in to town and took me to dinner. We went to the Riverside Terrace Cafe for dinner where we had the Jalapeno Chicken Wraps, which are jalapenos which have been wrapped in chicken which is then wrapped in bacon and fried. It is almost perfect food as far as I am concerned. We followed that with steaks, which were tasty although mine was a bit dry, and then finished the meal with some peach cobbler. Everything was delicious although I have to say that the service, while very friendly and busty, was rather slow.

In addition to taking me to dinner my dad brought along some belated birthday gifts for me. As a joke I had emailed him and suggested that he buy me this Spitfire. We had a bit of back and forth about whether I would rather have a Mustang in which I told him that I would settle for the Mustang but that the Spit was my first love when it came to warbirds. He told me that were I able to find one for 2 million he would talk to mom. Much to his dismay I then found this Spit on sale for his price. I sent him an email and he has since been teasing me about getting the financing right for my birthday gift. Somehow I knew he was not talking about the 2 million dollar Spit but I suspected that a Spitfire would have something to do with any gift he eventually got me. Well, I was right. He bought me a 1:72 scale pre-assembled model of a Spitfire Mk. V which was the most widely produced version of the plane, a 1:48 scale pre-assembled model of a Spitfire Mk. I, and two Tamiya plastic models in 1:48 scale, a Mk. I and a Mk. Vb. I think I am going to spend some time online looking for instructions needed to make the models more accurate and I am thinking about painting the Mk. Vb in Russian colors. I need to do a little more research to find out if the Spit was ever sent to the Russians. I want to do it as a pure white paint job with the red arrow along the sides. We'll see if I can find something close enough for a match.

Oh well, I have not written for an entire hour tonight but I have managed to screw around for about two and I really need to get to bed. I promise to post more tomorrow.

Really?

I found this result slightly disappointing for some reason.


You are Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)

Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 70% Derrial Book (Shepherd) 70% Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 50% Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 45% Wash (Ship Pilot) 45% Inara Serra (Companion) 40% Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 40% Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 40% Alliance 35% A Reaver (Cannibal) 20% River (Stowaway) 20%

You are good at fixing things. You are usually cheerful. You appreciate being treated with delicacy and specialness.

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test



At least I am hot. I also find it interesting that Nathan Fillion got the same top result and Jewel Staite is Wash. Now with this new found knowledge I am going to spend some time staring at myself in the mirror. Naked.

Dispatches from the Abyss - Friday, Oct. 26th

Well I have been a naughty boy this week and gotten exactly ZERO writing done since my last post. On the plus side I have managed to get more sleep this week than I usually manage to clock AND made it to work early every day this week except for Monday. This week was an excellent week! I slept well every night and despite my lack of posting I do not feel like I wasted too much time. Chatted with Kat for an hour or so on Wednesday night and it was good. I still feel a little weird talking to her and I am unsure what jokes might come off as being passive-aggressive bitchiness and which ones are actually funny, but we're talking and it is nice. I also have had a HUGE weight lifted from my shoulders as the one paralegal whom everyone in the office hates has been reassigned. For close to two years I have been handling her case load and it sucks. She is, to put it nicely, a bitch. She does not know how to treat people with a modicum of professional respect and spends all of her time telling everyone how busy she is. I could go on for days but lets just leave it at I don't have to work on her projects anymore and this change does not reflect poorly on me and move on, shall we? Good.

I spent part of this week reading through the scripts from Star Trek Reborn. Intended to reimagine Star Trek as a occupational drama rather than a straight science fiction piece, Star Trek Reborn was conceived of in 2005 and is a rather interesting take on the Star Trek context.* Rather than being a fan film series or a straight fan fiction series, Star Trek Reborn combines elements of both. There is a reimagined Enterprise courtesy of one Gabriel C. Koerner, who some of you might remember from Trekkies, redesigned uniforms, which actually look pretty tight, and a dream cast of Sean Patrick Flanery (H-town represent!) as Kirk, James Marsters as Spock, and Gary Sinise as Dr. McCoy. The creators of this series then present scripts for our reading pleasure. While I have only completed the first five episodes, so far I am intrigued. I have to say that this certainly feels like Star Trek written for the Smallville set, with more modern and soap opera-esque sensibilities, and it is most assuredly not for those fans who go into spasms over cannon. Other than that it has been a very interesting read and I suggest it to any of you nutjobs out there that need something to do. It is an interesting project and a unique take on the Star Trek mythos.

Since we're on the subject of Star Trek I would like to delve into the Star Trek comics for just a bit. I have been buying all of IDW's recent Star Trek output even though I have yet to really be grabbed by them. Most of them have felt like outlines of Star Trek stories rather than actual Star Trek stories and with the existence of Star Trek New Voyages I find IDW's recent foray into Star Trek Year Four as somewhat giggle-inducing. To being with these books are suffering from the same problems which plagued IDW's previous Star Trek output. To being with the characters are barely recognizable as themselves and this is an art issue rather than a writing issue. If you are going to be telling stories with Kirk et al. then we should be seeing Kirk et al. rather than something that might be them. Artistic license I am willing to let slide, this crap has got to end and fortunately it did in issue #4. On the writing front my only real complaint is that the comics do not feel like complete Star Trek episodes. On the whole episodes issue, I believe this series is intended to be a limited series. From the title one can assume that this is intended to be the fourth season of TOS (The Original Series) and if that is the case then one would think that this series would contain somewhere between twenty and twenty-four "episodes" or issues.

It's funny that I managed to wring a whole paragraph out of that because all of those points, while clearly of some import to me, are peripheral to what I really want to discuss which is that I am tired of metacomentary in my entertainment. We get it already, guys. We can all have a good giggle when Kirk says, "No on threatens my ship - not even the president of the network," as he did in this most recent issue of Star Trek Year Four, but I think in geek centric circles some creators are allowing their desire to inject a little metastory commentary to interfere with delivering interesting stories. This week's episode of Smallville suffered from a bit of the same in that they used the framework of a Warrior Angel movie filming in Smallville to threaten Lana's life and Clark's secret. In the Smallville mythology, the Warrior Angel comic takes the place of our real-world Superman comic and is used as a plot device to provide commentary on Clark's path. The comic has featured prominently in two other episodes and Lex Luthor was a huge fan of the comic during his days of innocence. In the case of Smallville the Warrior Angel metacommentary is generally used fairly well as a device rather than a crutch, but overall I am tired of these sorts of things going on. I think my problem with the Star Trek issue is that the commentary is not even given a somewhat clever veneer and my problem with Smallville is that to a certain extent I am tired of Clark sitting around on his butt in Smallville. It is time to get to work saving the world. I think we are going to see that towards the end of this season as I have a feeling that this is going to be the final season of the show.

And now for something completely different.

I guess it was about two weeks ago that Stephen Colbert announced that he was going to run for President in his home state of South Carolina. The reaction to this has been mixed and I am interested to see what actually comes of his shenanigans, but what made me laugh/cry is this quote in the New York Times poliblog** The Caucus:

However dismissive Mr. Dawson [Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party] may be about Mr. Colbert's plans, he said that he did not believe the Republicans could stop him from seeking both Republican and Democratic delegates.

"There is nothing in our filing that would prohibit him from running on both ballots, if he chose to pay the filing fees," Mr. Dawson said.

And what is that fee? A steep $35,000, said Mr. Dawson.

"The great thing about America," Mr. Dawson said, "is if you can meet the constitutional requirements to run for president of the United States, you can do so. In Mr. Colbert's case, we look forward to his paying the filing fee before Nov. 1."

Is it just me or can you just see Mr. Dawson leaning back in his fat-cat suit, twisting his moustache, and smiling in a very self-satisfied way as he delivers the last quote? I think what he means to say is that the opportunity is there for those able and willing to pay for it, and quite frankly I find that disgusting. By comparison the fee to be on the Democratic ballot is $2,500 which can be waived if you can collect 3,000 signatures. I do not want to turn this into a Democrat versus Republican thing because I believe it is a more fundamental issue than that, but holy smokes $35,000 is a lot of money.

Oh well, my hour is the Abyss is just about up. We shall see if I can dig anything up to write about on Saturday besides how not awesome my Halloween costume is going to be and all of the TV watching I did today. Till next time, take care!


* For more on Star Trek as a context see this post.

** Its like a poliwog that has no future as a potential prince.

Dispatches from the Abyss - Monday, Oct. 22nd

Well I ended up being busy and social until I fell asleep on Saturday and due to unforeseen sleeping complications Sunday ended up being a broken day for me, so it looks like I owe myself a couple hours of writing. I have already taken care of part of that with the posting of my review of The Children of Hurin and here I go to knock out another hour of writing. Have we all got our helmets on? Good then, let us begin.

This weekend was alternately really good and kind of bad. We'll discuss the bad parts first so we can end on a high note. The only bad thing about this weekend, besides the fact that I came home with more beer than I started with AND I did not manage to stay drunk the entire weekend, was the sleeping arrangement. I was put on the futon in the living room. The futon was nice and it was nice to be able to stretch out however sleeping in the living room meant that I had to wait for everyone else to sack out before I could crash AND it meant that any time someone went in to the kitchen they would disturb my slumber. This is honestly not a big deal, although the person who felt the need to get ice water could have shown some common courtesy and skipped the whole ice cracking thing, and avoiding sleeping in a smaller than James sized bed was worth the trade-off. The time this trade-off was not worth it was when, on Sunday morning, one of the girls decided she needed to read her Harry Potter book at six in the fucking morning and to do this she had to turn on the kitchen lights. Since the kitchen, living room, and dining area were all one big space this really meant that she was turning on one third of the lights where I was sleeping. Seriously, what the fuck makes you think this is okay? I could buy the excuse that she did not know I was sleeping in there until I woke up and made some noise except for the fact that according to Nikki and others I am not a quiet sleeper. Even so, we will give her the benefit of the doubt and say that I was ninja-like in my sleep that night. Once she knew that she had woken me up she should have packed up her shit and gone back to her room, or outside, or something and let me get back to sleep. She didn't. Her compromise was to turn off the overhead light in the kitchen and take one of the lamps to the other side of the room. This reduced the ambient light in the room by an insignificant amount and at this point she had been rattling around long enough that it did not matter. I was awake and there was no chance of me getting to sleep again before people starting fucking around. At this point I was so fucking pissed off at the girl that I opted to pack the car and leave rather than stick around and be dickish and snappy at people. Too bad because Scott was doing pancakes and they would have gone down much better than the sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits I had on my way home AND I had wanted to stop at the LSFM Sunday before heading out, but since I was on the road by seven in the morning I did not bother to stop by.

The good parts about this weekend? Pretty much everything else. The house was pretty cool and way the hell down Galveston Island. I think this is the furthest I have driven down the island with the exception of one of mine and Nikki's trips to Galveston (for her birthday if I recall correctly.) I got there much later on Friday than I intended too because of this bitch paralegal and her inability to do shit right, but once I got there the fun began and it did not end until sometime on Sunday. I got to hang out with friends that I do not get to see that often plus some of my friends who I see all the time. Saturday was a fairly lazy day with Heidi cooking super spinachy quiche's for breakfast and then people doing their own thing. I got some reading done in The Children of Hurin, I think I might have taken a nap, waded in the ocean, and just hung out until a group of us decided it was time to go into Galveston proper to visit Col. Bubbie's. Now Col. Bubbie's is a place that childhood dreams are made of. It is a jumbled maze of military surplus items from all over the world. Along side the requisite redneck fashion t-shirts you can find Red Army mess kits from WWII, dress jackets made for the British Army, leather jackets from Italian motorcycle police, de-miled hand grenades, helmets of all sorts, entrenching tools, great coats, boots, caps, ammo pouches, Jerry cans, and anything else you can think of all wrapped in a vaguely musty and moth ball ridden smell. All of this material is thrown together in a haphazard maze which I could happily spend hours exploring.

When I was a kid my mom and some of her college friends used to get together and rent a condo for a long weekend on Galveston during the summer. One of the things I insisted we do each year was to check out Col. Bubbie's. I could spend HOURS in there as a child. I remember two of the things I always wanted from there were a decent pair of combat boots and a tankers helmet with the goofy ear pieces. I never got either, although I did spend some time trying on the tanker's helmets this weekend. If I had found one that fit well enough I totally would have bought it and worn it around the house. Maybe even taken it in to work just to mess with people.

Once we got done with Col. Bubbie's and wandering the Strand a bit we then went to the Mosquito Cafe for lunch. I have heard rave reviews about the Mosquito Cafe but I have to say I was a little disappointed. I had the chicken breast sandwich with bacon and the garlic-herb mayonnaise overwhelmed the flavor of the bacon. The sandwich wasn't bad but it was a chicken sandwich not worth writing home about. Rob raved about his back cheese burger and Scott seemed pretty pleased with his steak sandwich, so I may have just chosen poorly. Also for my side I chose potato salad however what I got was the bastard child of potato salad and coleslaw which, seeing as I pretty much hate coleslaw, is not a good thing. Basically it was coleslaw in which the cabbage had been replaced with potatos and while this substitution made it more tolerable than coleslaw, it was still not potato salad. By definition potato salad involves mustard and onions of some type and as far as I could tell this had neither. After that we hit a grocery store in which I found a very obscenely shaped yam, Wal Mart where we failed to find any kites, and then back to the house.

Once back at the house we continued to fuck off for the rest of the day. I walked the beach and took some photos and just generally chilled for the rest of the day until it was time to sack out. As I said, a rather nice weekend all things considered.

As I indicated in my review of The Children of Hurin I have recently begun frequenting a couple of the Star Trek fan film forums around the internet as well are reading the Trek Movie Report for all my Trek news needs. Now that casting is completed for the full crew, the bitching about the movie has started in earnest. I have mixed it up a little on the boards attempting to point out that as sci-fi fans we ALWAYS bitch and moan about stuff when we hear it but most of us are generally pleased with the result. Just look at Battlestar Galactica. I was one of the legions of fans who harumphed when we heard that the new BSG was going to be a reimaging of the series, even though it was not entirely clear what reimaging meant at the time, and my negativity continued through my viewing of the miniseries. It finally took Don and Rob to convince me the show was worth watching, and they were right. I suspect the new Trek is going to be much the same for people. Of course Trek fans suffer a bit from battered spouse syndrome, no matter how big a pile of crap Paramount puts out, as long as it says Star Trek on it an appreciable number of fans will check it out. (Lets face it, I bet more than one of you out there owns Star Trek V in at least one format.)

So all of the whinging and moaning about the cast and the fact that J.J. Abrams has been going on in full-force for a week or so when I stumble across this gem from an interview with Garfield Reeves-Stevens*:

Remember Star Wars is one long epic story, whereas Star Trek is a context for storytelling. So you have your bubble universe of Deep Space Nine where things are not quite as perfect or you have your pocket universe of Voyager where instead of exploring you are going home. And you can have the rough and ready approach of The Original Series and have the more mature and corporate approach of The Next Generation.

(The full interview can be found here. The emphasis is mine.)

It is really nice to hear someone out there talking sense about Star Trek in this manner, almost as though Star Trek could be considered a sub-genre of science fiction rather than just a science fiction milieu. I wish more fans would take this to heart and stop saying things along the lines of, "JJ's new movie is not going to be real Trek," and the like. Quite frankly it makes them sound like they are religious fanatics of the worst stripe. Can you imagine it? The TOS Crusade followed soon thereafter by the TNG Jihad and DS9 Intifada?

Oh well, that just about does it for this installment. I wish I had something funny to say here, but I don't really. Except to point out that I have done this in the past. Until next time may the Force be with you. Peace out!

SOUNDTRACK
No soundtrack tonight. I found as I was listening to Breaking Benjamin's Phobia I was thinking thoughts about my half-formed Shadowrun fan film series. Perhaps I will dedicate some time this weekend to seeing if I can get some more of the bible written for the series.


* Garfield Reeves-Stevens and his wife Judith are well-respected authors who have a long connection with the Trek franchise, their first novel, Memory Prime coming out in 1988. Their work with Trek continued through assignments as story editors and co-producers for the final season of Enterprise and their latest novel Academy - Collision Course which was co-authored with none other than William Shatner himself. They have a lot of street cred with Trekkies.

BOOK REVIEW - The Children of Hurin

The Children of Hurin
J.R.R. Tolkien
Christopher Tolkein, Editor
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007
313 pages

I did not even know this book existed until I read a blurb about it on one of the Star Trek forums in which I participate. I cannot remember exactly what was said about the novel except that someone was opining on how good of a movie it would make and how sad the story was. I picked this book up the evening of my birthday as I was looking for Glenn Smith's The Call of Duty, which, much to my chagrin, I have yet to find in any of my local bookstores. I was a bit leery of the book as it is another Tolkien tome which has been edited by Chris Tolkien and while Chris does an admirable job as his father's literary executor, some of the prose to come out of his hands has been less than stellar. I went with my gut on this one and bought the hard cover as the people on the board seemed pretty enthusiastic about the book and besides, if nothing else it had illustrations and color plates by Alan Lee, which are almost worth the price of admission on their own.

As the title implies The Children of Hurin, or Narn I Chin Hurin, tells the tale of Hurin's offspring, Turin and Nienor, during the First Age of Middle Earth. After the disaterous defeat of the elves and men at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Hurin is captured by Morgoth and tortured. Morgoth is seeking the hidden city of Gondolin however Hurin defies Morgoth and even mocks him. In his rage Morgoth curses Hurin and his family and this is the tale of how the curse plays out over the next several years.

Ultimately I was a little disappointed in this novel for two reasons. The first is that the prose felt kind of dead almost like I was reading a poor translation of Beowulf. There was no real umph to the descriptions and rather than the surfeit of detail found in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings I found myself having to struggle to figure out what things and people looked like. The second issue I had is with the story itself. Throughout the story Turin is a bit of a whiny prick and I have trouble being compassionate to characters who behave in this manner. Also along this vein the character of Nienor, Turin's sister, was only dealt with sporadically until it came time for her destiny to become entwined with Turin's and then she became a real character.

The book was a challenging read because of the pace, which was very slow at times, and the penchant Turin developed for changing his name to hide from the curse of Morgoth. In fact this book was so challenging to get through that I began Charlie Wilson's War in the midst of reading this book and plowed through the latter without even pausing. I would not recommend this book to anyone except the Tolkien-o-phile or someone who has a strange fetish for the Eddas or other ancient poetry.

Dispatches from the Abyss - Friday, Oct. 19th

Well kids, sorry about missing last night. I came home from work, cranked one out, and almost immediately fell asleep. That lasted until around 8 PM when I realized I still needed to go to the comic shop and get dinner. For some reason these two tasks seemed to take longer than they should have and it ended up I only had time to write the review of Charlie Wilson's War, although writing that review took almost my whole hour. Of course in that case I was editing and rewriting just a little bit since the review is at least in form more formal than these dispatches.

As I type this it is about 2:30 AM on Saturday and I am sitting on the deck of the beach house some friends and I have rented for the weekend. There will be no soundtrack tonight as I am sitting here listening to the crickets, waves, and wind. Until I turned my laptop on I could see millions of stars. Orion is still visible, slowly swinging through the sky as morning creeps up on the world. This being the Gulf coast there are several blinking lights on the horizon which indubitably are drilling rigs of one sort or another. While I can see about four from the deck of the house, I can remember when we used to come to Galveston when I was a child and there would be dozens of them along the horizon. As the near shore reserves get consumed they are taking down the rigs. On the one hand it is nice because we are moving towards a more natural horizon, but on the other hand it was kind of neat to see them. With them gone from the horizon it feels as though another piece of my childhood is gone.

I mentioned Orion however the star that I keep looking at is a bit lower in the sky than Orion and almost in line with his belt. If I did not know better I would think it is a police chopper as it seems to flash blue and red. I imagine it is one of the planets, not Venus as that is known as the Morning Star, however either Jupiter or Mars would not be too surprising. Tonight we have been graced with a small meteor shower with Nyla having seen six or seven before she called it a night. I saw two myself, one of them a very good one which covered about a quarter of the sky. Sadly I had no wishes ready.

So what did I get up to on Thursday and Friday? Well Thursday was another typical day at the office. I was marginally busy because of one bitch paralegal making mistakes and I having to show her the error of her ways or correct her mistakes. To a certain extent that carried over to today where I spent all of my day working on correcting her errors and reloading one of the databases to account for her errors. It would not bother me however I have it on fairly good authority that this cunt bitches about me to management. Of course it was all made better by the fact that I was telecommuting today, something she complained about, and spent most of the day working in my britches. Scott and I got together for lunch today, and that was a very nice break.

Today I also learned that the only way to do laundry in the laundry room at my apartment complex is to wash everything on warm. The hot water will not run and the cold water will not run. Somehow this seems really retarded to me and frustrated the every living monkey out of me today as I tried to get laundry done so I would have clothes to wear this weekend.

Speaking of my apartment complex the bastards are keeping me from adopting a couple of kittens with their draconian policies. They require a $250 deposit PER KITTEN and require the entire deposit to be paid before I can bring them in to the house. This is the first time I have been asked for more than $300 as a pet deposit and the first time a management company has been unwilling to work with me and allow me to pay the pet deposit in installments. I am kind of pissed about this and will bring it up when my lease comes up for renewal, although I will probably re-up where I am right now. There are too many advantages to where I am currently living.

I was at the office when I figured out the whole not getting a cat thing, which I had been thinking about for a couple of months. To a certain degree I am tired of living completely alone and I think some animal companionship would help alleviate this. It would certainly do better than the occasional phone sex calls I have been making. The cat issue became a little more urgent to me when I found out that my friend Greg rescued a litter of kittens from his neighbors yard during a recent downpour. The kittens are taking solid food and have all been checked for Feline Lukemia and been given a clean bill of health. He needs to get rid of the kittens, which are in the five week old range, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to adopt. All I would have to pay for is the eventual spaying or neutering, so I started pursuing this with the company that manages my apartment complex.

As I said I was at the office on Thursday when I figured I was not going to be able to get a kitten and for some reason I started to tear up and cry a little bit. I really don't know why but the fact that I could not get one filled me with equal parts anger at my management company for being so unreasonable and just sadness. I felt very alone all of the sudden and I really missed Gurion.

I cannot remember if I have ever talked about Gurion here on the Opiate before. Gurion was my cat which I found when I was in Houston and I had for a couple of years in College Station before he escaped the house as some friends were cleaning after a party. Gurion was a very good cat and my first pet that was not a family pet or a fish.

Gurion came into my life when I was living alone in the garage apartment on Dallas street. I did not have a phone in this apartment and so in order to talk to Kat I would walk down to the payphone on the corner. I had been kicking around the idea of getting a pet but had been putting it off since at the time I was thinking about getting a dog but had a fairly busy social life. I did not want to start resenting the dog for cutting into my social life. I had tossed around the idea of getting a cat, however not very seriously. Anyways, I was there talking on the payphone with Kat when this tiny little kitten comes walking across the street. I thought that if he let me pick him up then I would take him home because he was far too small to be wandering alone. I picked him up and he immediately curled up in the crook of my arm. Right then I knew I had found the pet I had been looking for.

Gurion was a great cat except for his disturbing habit of wanting to play while I was on the toilet. He would always be in the same room with me and when he was a kitten he would sit in my lap while we watched TV. During my super short hair phase if he caught me laying on the floor he would spend quite a bit of time cleaning and grooming my hair for me. When I would get home from work he would want to spend ten to fifteen minutes getting stroked and talked to about my day. He was the best stress relief ever!

My favorite Gurion story happened while I was living in the trailer in College Station. Ever since he was a kitten his favorite toys were those little plastic mice with the rabbit-fur coverings. I would buy a package of those a month as he would play with them and they would inevitably end up under a piece of furniture. I would watch him stalk and pounce on these things all them time and became pretty familiar with his routine. One day I had been in the computer room, which was the bedroom off the living room and headed into the kitchen to get a drink. As I walked out of the computer room I saw Gurion hunched down beneath the futon staring at something very intently. As I followed his eye-line I saw that there was a field mouse right in front of the TV. I stopped and decided to watch how this turned out. Gurion crouched even lower and shook his butt, a sign he was about to attack the mouse. Then he shook his butt again and exploded from his spot, making a beeline for the mouse which was across the living room. It should go without saying that the mouse took off like a rocket, but the moment it moved Gurion slammed on the brakes and headed back under the sofa to reassess the situation. I can just imagine what was going through his head. "That fucker moved before I even got there! This never happens. Clearly my powers have grown and I will soon be able to face Darth Vader again."

My second favorite Gurion tale takes place at my garage apartment on Dallas. When Gurion was younger he was prone to freak out from time to time. These episodes usually took the form of running laps around the room and his favorite was my bedroom. On this particular night I was working at my desk, which was just outside the door to the bedroom, when I hear Gurion get spun up and start doing laps. I just shake my head and continue working on whatever project consumed me at the time when out of the corner of my eye I see Gurion go sailing across the doorway and down the stairwell. It turns out that Gurion had decided to stop on top of the pile of papers on my bedside table however he had enough momentum and the papers were loose enough that stopping there was not an option. Gurion was fine, if a bit embarrassed by the whole episode. I think I consoled him with a new mouse toy after that.

God Gurion was a good cat. We had a fun couple of years together and I hope deep down in my heart of hearts that some deserving family who needed him found him and that he is living out his years in a loving home. Where ever you are I love you and miss you, Gurion.

Well, I tear up when thinking about Gurion so I am going to go ahead and cut tonight's writing short by about ten minutes. I hope you'll pardon me.

BOOK REVIEW - Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson's War
George Crile
Grove Press, 2003
550 pages

Charlie Wilson's War is the tale of how one man managed to work around and within the American government to bring unprecedented assistance to the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980's and in turn remake the world. In the summer of 1980 Charlie Wilson was early in his second term representing Texas' 2nd congressional district when he read an AP dispatch describing the waves of refugees fleeing Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion which began on December 25th of the previous year. After reading this release he called the staffer responsible for "black operations" appropriations and instructed him to double the five-million dollar appropriation the CIA requested for Afghan operations. This phone call was the opening salvo in Charlie Wilson's war which pitted Charlie Wilson and an unlikely band of allies, including Israeli generals, Texas socialites, Congressman and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Pakistani generals, Swiss arms manufacturers, the Saudi Royal family, the Egyptian Minister of Defense, and an outcast CIA agent against first the CIA itself and then the Soviet's 40th Army in Afghanistan.

We all know how the Afghan conflicted ended for the Soviet Union. After close to a decade of pyrrhic victories and untold billions of dollars spent, the Soviet's began withdrawing troops from Afghanistan on May 15th, 1988 and completed their withdrawal nine months later when Lieutenant General Boris Gromov walked across the Friendship Bridge which stretches across the Amu Darya River and links present-day Uzbekistan with Afghanistan. Less than three years after General Gromov crossed that bridge the Soviet Union would collapse. Many believe this is as a direct result of the blood and money the Soviets were forced to spend fighting the mujahideen. While several characters in the book refer to the war in Afghanistan as Charlie Wilson's war, this is not what the book is really about.

Charlie Wilson's War is about the war behind the war. It is about Charlie Wilson and his allies fighting on several fronts to provide the mujahideen with the weapons and training they needed to take on the might of the Red Army. For Charlie Wilson himself this war would encompass the floor of the House of Representatives, closed-door sessions of appropriations and oversight committees, meetings with the CIA bureaucracy, and even long dark moments where he had to fight himself. Charlie Wilson had a reputation as being a ladies man and a bit of a party boy a reputation and lifestyle that would both open doors for him as well as cause trouble.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and cannot be effusive enough in my praise. I found it to be compulsively readable and considering the current state of affairs in the world incredibly enlightening. I suggest you read the book before the movie comes out in December. Much like Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind and the subsequent adaptation by Akiva Goldsman the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin-penned movie will not hold a candle to the book. The events in this book are too crazy not to be true.