Sorry about the voice mail. I’ve been drinking.

And you think your roaming charges are bad…

Another one via Boing Boing; Federal agents say 88-year-old Saratoga man’s invention is being used by meth labs.

“These are the same knotheads that make you take your shoes off in the airport.”

For Wallace to comply, the state Department of Justice fingerprinted the couple and told Wallace he needed to show them such things as a solid security system for his product. Wallace sent a photograph of Buddy sitting on the front porch.

“These guys don’t go for my humor,” Wallace said. “Cops are the most humorless knotheads on the planet.”

Lovely phrase that.

Urban Dictionary definition:

(A) A person who has trouble thinking in a logical progression. this is usually caused by a profound amount of circular reasoning tying their brain into a knot.
(B) A dumb ass

From an interview with Robert Sapolsky on Boing Boing, this jumped out at me:

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They’re in big troops, so predators don’t hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day’s calories. Critical implication of this – if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

There isn’t a single thing I don’t love about this.

By Calum Alexander Watt. He of the Mad Maxtallica stuff.

Exeunt Magazine were kind enough to interview me about Howl’s Moving Castle. You can read it here.

Love that photo…

Some lovely artwork coming out of Criterion at the moment:

I’m still running into people who haven’t seen the original GODZILLA. Mind boggling.

And most people think Kurosawa when the subject of Samurai movies come up. Check out the films of Hideo Gosha and Kihachi Okamoto. I recently rewatched THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI and THE SWORD OF DOOM back to back. Almost fifty years old and they’re a breath of fresh air after some of the nonsense I’ve had to sit through recently.

Plus it’s hard to get bored of watching Toshiro Mifune cutting hands off in the snow.

Not long now…

A shot from 2006:

Backdropped by Earth’s horizon and the blackness of space, the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station.

Working on a new draft of RED DRIFT so I’m going through my picture folders. I end up with a lot of mood images when I’m writing. I just about filled my office wall space again, but am thinking about a dedicated digital frame up there just so I can let this stuff cycle through 24/7.