Blogatron: October 2004 Archives

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October 30, 2004

Neat and creepy, my favorite.

I'm keeping an eye on this story - I do love me a spooky web-tale, even though of course it is not real...of course, bwahaha. Possibly something new will appear tomorrow, for Halloween and all. Be sure to click on "Updates" when you get to the end, and read through the links there for further plot-thickening.

Posted by hilatron at 06:54 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 28, 2004

Tailor Made

I was searching for a legal form online today, and misread something as "Affidavit of Indignancy." I wish it were true; I could really use this. Think of the catharsis if you could officially file your annoyance about those stupid little things, like the new washers in my building that cost 50 cents more but are smaller than the old ones. Those washers make me a little less sane every week as I grimly try to cram all my sweaters in.

Think of all those people that seem permanently on edge, always ready to pop about expired coupons, slow left turners, and the like - haven't you been one of those people, sometime in your life? Wouldn't it help if there were an agency somewhere funded to pay attention to those slights and bothers? Wouldn't it help just to hear someone say, "My, that is vexing. Please know that your Indignancy Is On Record."

Also, today my workplace is having their Halloween party. They always have all their parties on Fridays, but there is one - just one - person who attends the program whose favorite holiday is Halloween, and since last year he has stopped coming in on Fridays. So someone mentioned that in a meeting, and everyone agreed to change the date of the party, just like that, no resistance, because of course you should make sure that people get to do their favorite things. Maybe this is not very exceptional but I haven't seen much of it lately, and I think more of the world should work like this. Surely it can't be that hard to give some weight to the small travails and the favorite things.

Posted by hilatron at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 26, 2004

Not Above Repurposing

I made this list of Halloween movie suggestions for a co-worker who wanted something contemporary and gory as a counterpoint to the rather innocent The Blob for his Scary Movie Night. I share it with you now, because you crazy kids need to watch some scary movies, and also to get all the ANUS ANUS ANUS off the top of the -- oh, crap.

MOVIES FROM THE HILATRON AND JOSH CATALOG:

Two Thousand Maniacs, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964
Lewis, the pioneer of red-paint-and-animal-organs gore, somehow convinced real people from a backwater town in Florida to be extras in this exploitation-fest about a backwater town in Florida that collectively tortures and kills a group of rich Yankee tourists in various medieval ways. Much screaming, blood, blouse removal and gruesome misuse of carnival games commences.

Re-Animator, dir. Stuart Gordon, 1985
Stuart Gordon takes latex-and-goo style gore to a giddy new level in this classic about a crazed scientist who learns to bring corpses back to life, with predictable results. Jeffrey Combs is exceptional (and hilarious) as the twitchy, bad judgment-prone doctor.

Ginger Snaps, dir. John Fawcett, 2000
Slick angsty-teen-girl-power werewolf movie starts out dark and funny and ends up dark and blood-drenched. Two outcast sisters struggle with the fact that one of them seems to be turning into a mythical beast, until the pressure of her new appetites and keeping the secret from their crazy, in-denial mom causes a rift between the two that ends in lots of people-eating.

Battle Royale, dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 2000
Teenagers on a class trip are drugged and dropped off on an island, where they discover how the Japanese government plans to deal with the juvenile delinquency problem: force the classmates to engage in a no-holds-barred, last-kid-standing fight to the death. Not super gory, but violent. Featuring the world's only all-teenage-girl John Woo-style gun battle.

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, dir. Sam Raimi, 1987
Hands-down, the best slapstick horror movie yet made. Featuring dancing skeletal ex-girlfriends, animatronic zombie parents, revivified body parts, the funniest self-amputation ever, etc.

MOVIES NOT (YET) IN THE HILATRON AND JOSH CATALOG:

28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle, 2002
Old-school movie zombies get upgraded to superfast, extramean, killing machines courtesy of the Rage Virus, which can be transmitted by a single drop of blood, and turns the victim into a mindless, violent throwback. A group of survivors tries to hack and bludgeon their way out of a decimated England, only to discover that what they thought was a safe haven with a military unit might be even more threatening than the Rage victims themselves. Stylish, tense, grim, and smart -- highly recommended.

Deep Red, dir. Dario Argento, 1975
Italy's answer to slasher movies, giallos, reached their peak in the 70s, and this is one of the best, by the best. A musician witnesses a gruesome murder, and then we get to witness a lot more of them as he tries to figure out who the killer is while avoiding suspicion himself. Great cinematography, melodramatic plot devices, sadistic brutality and creepy dolls, all with a throbbing, if dated, soundtrack by 70s rock band Goblin.

It's Alive, dir. Larry Cohen, 1974
The concept of a killer mutant baby may be a bit over-the-top, but I defy you not to be creeped right out by the hospital scene that starts off this ode to (maybe) chemically-induced birth defect paranoia. Plus this is not just any killer mutant baby: it's a killer mutant baby you can really relate to, a killer mutant baby you might even feel sorry for. Fun times and bloodletting abound, along with a surprisingly serious social critique.

The Stuff, dir. Larry Cohen, 1985
Speaking of Cohen, if you want to be thematic, you could show this movie, which is sort of like a reverse Blob: it eats people from the inside out. More funny than it is gory or scary, this is still a great, quirky movie. Definitely worth a viewing.

What are your favorite scary movies? Surprise me. I challenge you!

Posted by hilatron at 11:41 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 25, 2004

Suggestion Box

Dear Walgreen's:

Please immediately develop a secondary line of hydrocortisone cream, one which contains some harmless additional ingredient that makes it inappropriate for treating EXTERNAL ANAL ITCH. Then mark the box "ABSOLUTELY NOT FOR external anal itch." That way when certain people go to the store to buy something for a perfectly respectable skin irritation on their neck, far far away from their ANUS, they will not be forced to walk to the counter and grin sheepishly at the cashier feeling like they are holding a beacon that flashes EXTERNAL ANAL ITCH EXTERNAL ANAL ITCH EXTERNAL ANAL ITCH, and I bet you will sell a lot more hydrocortisone cream.

Posted by hilatron at 03:27 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 21, 2004

That takes care of that.

I just wrote this long thing about the baseball woohaw, which talked a mild amount of smack about you ca-razy Bostonians and your rabid fandom, and the fact that never have I seen so many people wholly dedicated to hating a team in a whole other state. Then, my browser went wonky and it got eaten. So I think that with the record-breaking comeback and now this, we can safely say that the Red Sox curse has been effectively transferred to all the haters and the naysayers. E-mail me for the address to send thank-you cards and small but expensive gifts!

Posted by hilatron at 02:05 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 18, 2004

My overnight trip to NYC was very nice, thank you, and let's all lift a glass to the Captain and Haber* for their kind hospitality. However, I have got to get some portable music going for all these damn bus trips, or there is going to be some "Robot Slays Ten, Ruins Favorite Hoodie" action in the near future. People! In case you didn't hear me the first four million times: CELL PHONES ARE NOT APPROPRIATE BUS ENTERTAINMENT.

While I do not mind so much the "I'll be there in an hour, see you then" calls and have even made some myself, the Boston-to-New York express is not, in fact, the perfect time to catch everyone in your contacts list up on where you're going, where you were, what you were doing, and what the unending banal details of your life up till now have contained, especially when you seem to labor under the misapprehension that your phone represents a long tunnel through which you need to Shout! Your! Unbearable! Minutiae! in order to be heard by the other party. The beeping, tweeting, inane cacophany has got to stop. Where can I donate to the Buy a Moron a Book Fund?

On my trip back home, in addition to the usual contingent of idiots shouting, guffawing, dropping their phones and cursing, or just saying "What? What? WHAT?" every three seconds, there was someone who had set their ring-tone to some kind of WAOOW-WAOOW alarm sound. This was very, well, alarming because it sounded like maybe the bus was about to explode. However, I arrived safely as did my fellow passengers, both deserving and un-. And now I must seriously consider purchasing a discman or maybe an MP3 player, but why spend what is, to me, right now, a lot of money to buy some crap player when there is the iPod, for so much more money, the specter of which will make the purchase of any other player seem tainted, sad and inadequate? So now we're back to the relatively cheap discman idea, except now we've opened up the whole MP3 can of worms and how nice would it be not to have to carry discs around? So nice. Oh dear. Maybe it would be easier to just bring a kitchen knife on the bus with me.

*Nothing like the Captain and Tenille, really, except I'm pretty sure they have a Captain hat.

Posted by hilatron at 01:56 PM | Comments (3)

October 12, 2004

Reasonable People

I missed the second debate and only caught up last night. It was disappointing to see that Bush pulled himself together for this one - I've read commentary that he seemed shrill and angry, but I think this posturing was quite deliberate and will play well with his base, where it's going to be read as Bush taking charge and rebounding from his dithering in Round 1. He went a little too far during that bizarre exchange with Charlie Gibson, but on the whole, I think he did just what he set out to do, stylewise, and that it'll work just like Rove undoubtedly planned it. The good thing is that he went into this debate on the defensive, needing to shore up confidence within his base rather than gaining new supporters, and there's only one chance left for him to do the outreach he could have accomplished here had he not been focused on damage control.

Mostly it was just more talking points ("Changed his mind! Wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time! We've gained jobs!" "90% of troops! I have a plan! They've lost jobs!"). Kerry had some good moments: hammering the deficit and the disintegrating coalition, picking apart Bush's ludicrous "I'm a good steward of the environment" claim, and, as has been discussed ad infinitum, his elegant response to the abortion question (look here for the transcript, almost at the bottom of the page).

There was something in that discussion that jumped out at me, something I found very telling. Bush, in responding to Kerry's careful discussion about the difference between his personal beliefs and the rights he would uphold as a leader, about the importance of education and funding for family planning around the globe, had this to say:

BUSH: I'm trying to decipher that.
My answer is, we're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion.

This is an issue that divides America, but certainly reasonable people can agree on how to reduce abortions in America. [Emphasis mine.]

That, to me, is the whole deal right there, that "reasonable people can agree." That's what sends this administration over the line from "I don't like their policies" to "They scare and infuriate me." Kerry gives a long, nuanced explanation which explicitly addresses how he thinks you can reduce abortions while still protecting the right to have one, and Bush responds with his "reasonable people can agree" and goes on to talk about banning partial-birth abortion, promoting parental consent, and the like. Bush might talk the talk about trying to understand where Kerry's coming from, but really he doesn't need to: as far as he's concerned, bans and restrictions are the one and only way that "reasonable people can agree" to reduce abortion statistics.

Bush doesn't need to decipher a damn thing, because he already has his answers and he goes backwards from there for the whys and the hows, and it's not just The Abortion Question but the whole shebang, don't you think? Isn't that what we've been told all along, in words and attitudes and deeds? "Reasonable people can agree" that there are WsMD in Iraq, and "reasonable people can agree" that when it turns out there aren't it doesn't matter because the world is better off, and "reasonable people can agree" that the US can go it alone if the whole world turns its back in disgust, and "reasonable people can agree" that the economy is getting better and the jobs that are slowly replacing our lost jobs are just fine even if they do pay less, and "reasonable people can agree" that marriage needs to be protected from activist judges, and so on and so forth. This little piece of linguistics is brilliant, because it takes all other opinions right off the table: express dissent, and you find yourself fighting not to be portrayed as an "unreasonable person" before you even get to make your case.

Bush wants us all to start from the same set of answers, and he lives in a world where we don't, and it scares me that he hasn't managed to accept or adapt to that somewhere in the last four years. I don't want a leader for whom the decisions come first and the reasoning second, because that leader will never, ever be able to grasp that there's validity to the opinions of someone who disagrees with him. He will assume that, just like him, these naysayers made their reasoning up to match their conclusions, so nothing they have to say by way of explaining themselves will really matter. And that will make the people who disagree with him a little - maybe a lot - less real. And one thing a leader needs is the ability to see the humanity, and the reality, of his opponents as well as his supporters, because like him or not we are all depending on him to a certain extent for our continued well-being.

When I was a kid my mom refused to ever use that "because I said so" crap when I challenged her authority - she always gave me a reason and, much to her dismay, occasionally discovered that she couldn't come up with a good one and had to change her parental rulings accordingly. She did this because she wanted me to respect rather than fear or resent her authority, and because by walking through the reasoning with me she could help me learn to make good decisions for myself. Should I expect less from my president? Surely reasonable people can agree that I should not.

Posted by hilatron at 02:41 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 07, 2004

Back

Well, here I am! We have transferred to a shiny new host and, thanks to the technical mojo of Josh, everything seems to be working better than before. So I can write entries now! Yeah!

...

Yeah. Work's busy, I am at the fur trim stage of a new batch of stockings and so my house looks like a poorly cleaned Muppet mass-murder site, and this weekend and the next are all about traveling all over the damn place. So maybe not so much with the entries.

I've been reading this site, Devoter.com, a political (and for now, left-leaning) community weblog. That's where I discovered how Bush likes to deal with that pesky "getting his ass handed to him in the debates" issue. A class act all the way.

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