I should be writing my novel right now. I'm not, because I'm a filthy, filthy procrastinator. Bad me. I'm up at 16,024 words and I want to be at 18,000 by the end of the day. So I'd better get to it. The lack of posting continues at Weirdwriter.

I have soft spot in my heart for gentle manatees. It's always sad to hear they are dying at increased rates. It doesn't help to be slow moving, gentle creatures in waters infested with humans.

I took one of those obnoxious quizzes everybody takes and then puts a link to on their blog. (You know, like the Kaiju quiz I put on a month or two ago.) This one tries to determine what religion is right for you. I got Mahayana Buddhism, which is weird, I always thought I would be a Theravada Buddhist. You just never know.

This article at Slate is spot on about what was right about "The Matrix" and wrong about the sequels. Meanwhile, Roger Ebert has gone crazy. He likes the film, he hates the film, his sister, his daughter. He thought it was pretty, so he'll forgive all the other details.

Well, I saw The Matrix Revolutions, and I now realize the Wachowski Brothers have never seen a metaphor they didn't want to beat into the ground until it cries for mercy.
Here is what's good about it: It is exciting. Lots of beautiful battles and escapes and visions. And the message is not a bad one, if overly sappy and drawn out and hammered on again and again and again (and if I seem to be hammering that home, well I learned it from the Wachowskis.)
What's bad about it: It's drawn out. It could have been chopped by a half-hour. I don't mind sitting through a long film, I just don't want the same things to flash before my eyes over and over.
Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss still have no chemistry. Nobody liked their "love" scene in "Reloaded" and I never liked the ending to the original "Matrix," though I could (barely) stomach it. But so many scenes between them is absolutely dependent on that chemistry and it's just not there. I blame this on Keanu Reeves, just because I want to.
Oh yeah, and the symbols were WAY TOO OBVIOUS. Not just the ending either. I loved the Merovingian and his wife in the first one, but in this movie, they just spell out what he's supposed to be. You know Trinity goes through hell to meet them, they're both dressed in red, etc etc.
And then there's the Train Man, or whatever they call him. He plays the same role as the Key Master in "Reloaded," a huge walking plot device. Ugh.
Enough, I was disappointed. The action scenes are still good. The message isn't all bad. But the movie disappointed in a major way.

Here's an entertaining account of Lou Reed's Book Party. Apparently, Lou Reed has a small dog and Salman Rushdie likes all of Martin Amis' stuff.

Fascinating post at Forager 23: J.R.R. Tolkien vs. Robert E. Howard. I'm particularly interested in this at the moment because I'm writing fantasy for Nanowrimo, but it has always been an issue I think about. Tolkien and Howard were my introduction to fantasy and my inspiration to be a writer. By necessity, the story I'm writing is more Howard than Tolkien (I didn't spend anytime creating a world; instead, I work episodically, trying to think up the wildest thing possible while I'm writing, a much more Howardian style of writing.) Be sure to read the comments on that post too, they add much to the discussion.

And you can hear the sound a herring makes here: New Scientist.

Scientists say they have figured out what the mysterious sounds herring makes are:
"But a team from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver say the noise matches bubbles coming out of a herring's anus."

FARK.com is running an interesting thread on what part of the body is your state? Of course, this being Fark, people have taken off in all different tangents. Here are my favorites for Connecticut:
Connecticut - We're bigger than Rhode Island
Massachusetts is the alcoholic rich uncle, and Connecticut is his gay boyfriend.
Connecticut -- The state that owns you...so please return to work so we can go back to sipping cocktails by the Sound.

OK, that's it. One man-nipple blog item too many. (That last entry comes from the excellent Twinkle Twinkle Blah Blah Blah by the way.) I have to go to work, my day has been eaten by Nanowrimo. See you.

You must see this gum commercial from Europe. Too bizarre for words. (You will of course need a Quicktime plug in.)

Unfortunately, that's it for me today. It's Election Day, so I have to get into work early and start getting the paper ready. Also, I actually want to vote in the local election, so I need to get out and do that too. This is going to put me a day behind in Nanowrimo, but really what can I do?

Romanian doctors extract living plant from boy's nose. "As the boy didn't cry or tell his mother anything, it sprung to life and had little leaves when we found it."

If you haven't already noticed, my comments generator seems to be acting kinda funky. For a while, it was reading as if there were zero comments, when there was actually one or two. So I'm not ignoring you if you wrote a comment! Keep writing 'em, I love to see them. I'm going to have to start looking into another comments generator.
And to JCF: Thanks for the info on the Nova episode about JFK, sounds fascinating. What I really want to know is if the angle of the shot is really all that difficult. I remember some study suggesting that most marksman couldn't hit the target from that book depository window. Oswald was reportedly not that good a shot, so I think this is one of the crucial bits of information.

Nanowrimo continues. I'm at 4,000 words or so. And I realize, I really need to plot out some more of my story. I'm running into brick walls everytime I put fingers to keyboard. A farmer in my story is forcing me to come up with answers, he's asking a lot of questions I don't know the answers to yet. Uppity fictional farmers. Once I answer his questions, I'll probably be able to sail along in the story. (God, I hope so.)
The forums at Nanowrimo are abysmally slow. I think they've quadrupled the number of people taking part and it's just bringing their machines to a halt. Oh well, it keeps me from getting distracted.
Some of the other CT wrimos met tonight (Sunday night). I hope they had a good time. I hope to make it to a few more of these events. It seems like we have some interesting people and I'd like to get to know them better. I don't know enough writers in my life.
Anyway, I should be spending this time writing my story. But until I work out some plot points, that's not likely to happen. Alright, time to knuckle down.

So I picked up two of the Continuum - 33 1/3 books, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Forever Changes." If I had known the Velvet Underground book was out, I probably would have looked for that too. I picked these two because I actually own those albums. And to put my biases out front, I really love "Forever Changes" but I find "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" kind of boring (but I love, love, love the song "Astronomy Domine.")
But I really don't think that bias accounts for why I liked the "Forever Changes" book and didn't like the "Piper" book. They're both very different.
"Piper" was about the band. It explored who the band members were, what they were doing and what the engineers thought of them. It goes on and on about new techniques they used in the studio. It talks about how cool the shows at the UFO club were, you know, when everybody took acid, tripped out and danced maaan.
Much time was spent on the the minutiae of studio work. Most of the people interviewed were producers and engineers. There's some talk about lyrics and what the band was trying to say, but very little.
"Forever Changes," on the other hand, was all about the lyrics and the philosophies it pulls from and it offers up. It talked about the societal influences surrounding the album and the psychological influences of Arthur Lee (Love's chief musical "architect," as he's referred to several times in the book.)
The author, Andrew Hultkrans, makes references to prophecy, gnosticism, "Marat/Sade" and the Manson murders. Actually, if the book has a failing, it's that it could have been somebody's graduate class thesis paper.
That's not to say that the book is filled with jargon and deconstructionism and other boring academic crap that means nothing in the real world. Hultkrans never goes too far, he always keeps it grounded.
The main difference between the two is simply this: after reading "Forever Changes" I wanted to listen to the album again. After reading "Piper," I didn't.
There's my review, take it for what you will. I think the format of the books is great and if I see the others in stores (especially the VU, Jimi Hendrix and My Bloody Valentine books) I'll probably pick them up.

Despite the weird things the government did with her story, I don't think Jessica Lynch did anything wrong and she probably deserves the couple million she'll make off her biography. But it's nice to know that people are writing about the other soldiers who did the real fighting during that ambush. This Miller guy doesn't seem like the kind of guy I'd get along with, but he does seem like one brave man. Good to see he's getting some recognition for it.

Smelly grasshoppers have afflicted people with asthma in Sudan. How freakin' weird is this world?

Well, I've gone and done it. The first 2,000 words of my Nanowrimo novel are done. I've given it a title: "A Brother's Duty." I don't know if I'll stick with it, but it focuses on one of the themes I thought about for this story.
I realized, as soon as I started, that I'm going to pay for not having thought out my plot more. I keep coming up short as I realize I don't have a name for this person or that city or this religion or whatever. If you don't have an obvious goal in mind, it gets harder to write towards one. So I'm going to try and think more about where this is going.
At least I managed to get ahead of the game. I need to do at least 1,600 every day to make 50,000 words by Nov. 30. Last year, I got stuck with trying to do 5,000 in one day. It was fun, but it was sort of awful too, trying to pound out that many words when you can't think of anything. I want to keep this at a more even pace.
I'll probably write some more tonight to get further ahead.