We Tiny Birds Are Unsentimental Because We Can Fly

...That's a line from a McSweeney's Best Of trade paperback I'm finally getting around to reading, sort of. I find it very hard to make time to read short stories, yet I love McSweeneys, so I keep getting them and getting farther behind. Well, you can say that for lots of books I get.

Finally read the first volume of Paul Chadwick's CONCRETE tpb reissue/repackagings, Depths. I'll review that in a bit.

This weekend I:
Did some work-work.

Ate a lot of jalapeno-crusted butterfly shrimp while watching the second disc of Battlestar Galactica 2.0. Just a few words on this...It's a GOOD show. Not a GREAT show, but good. The Cylon stuff is very cool, Starbuck is a good character, and Gaius is a great weasel, but there's not enough of his wit on the show. It's still got a bit too much of the military nobility and corny mythology/philosophy that always kept me away from other space operas. Having the President turn into a prophet is a creative dead-end for a previously interesting character. At least Edward James Olmos dropped a few pounds and ditched the buzz cut, but why dye the hair so black? Apollo is too scrawny and effeminate for his role. That is, if that was a direction they wanted to develop, fine, but it's not--he's just not very convincing in the role they've set for him. Tigh is absolutely repulsive, and I don't even mean in a good love-to-hate-him way. He just sucks. Please no one write me about, "Wait til you get to the part where BLANK happens!" because I don't even want a hint of it.

I took my kitten to the vet for the first time and she's fine. Just needs a second distemper shot and a flea prevention injection, which I've scheduled for two weeks. She has a habit of flopping down at my feet to have her chest scratched, but this weekend she started biting when I did it. I'm just used to dogs, so it really pissed me off, plus I have to think about my kids interacting with her--she took a poke near my son's eye when she was excited--but I learn the biting is just being playful, I guess. I have to get used to that, as I'm used to correcting that in dogs by making them bite their own lips, which I can see just won't work with a cat. I also gave her her first bath, in the sink, and though she complained the whole time it went well.

In addition to Galactica, I watched Takeshi Kitano's ZATOICHI: THE BLIND SWORDSMAN, which is his stab at a character seen in dozens of Japanese films already. It's pretty much a Western plot--mysterious badass wanderer befriends some villagers and takes on the local gang--but with a tender side in its treatment of a young man forced into prostitution dolled up as a geisha. Kitano's pace lags quite a bit in the middle and then the climax comes quite suddenly without a lot of build-up. The action scenes are enjoyably low-key, without any wirework, but Kitano makes a big creative blunder in staging them without real blades and blood packs, instead adding both in post-production with CGI so fake and lurid the blood looks like a Mortal Kombat finishing move. It's funny to run a scene slowly and see a blade appearing in a bad guy's back without ripping his clothes.

Lessee, what else before I go...I heard a sports radio host use the made-up word "typlify" the other day, which I loved. I guess he combined typify with exemplify, and why not?

There's a hilarious video on YouTube if you search "bride cuts off hair." At least, I think that should get you there. Whoever she married probably already knows this is one hysterical, melodramatic nutjob.