Is it safe?

All around the country today both little children and adults are carving pumpkins and dressing up in costumes in honor of my last day of work. It's quite the heady experience. To celebrate, I went to the dentist and had a cavity filled.

"Fish, plankton, sea greens... protein from the sea!"

The DVD of the original Rollerball includes a memory game in which you have to correctly sequence 16 thumbnail scenes from the movie. Only the brave will manage to slog through and receive the ultimate reward - a 10 second clip from the flick you've just finished watching.

Still, Rollerball certainly represents a more well-heeled version of the 1970's future.

Circadian Syncopation

And now I get up at 8am to ensure a good jump on my second to last day of work.

Gotta get up to get down

It's either the after-effects of gluttonous Zachary's pizza consumption, or the fact that there's no more sun ... but either way I'm lagging. Incidentally, there's a whole mess of folk, some of them Czech jews, opposed to Daylight Saving Time.

Everybody do the Michigan Rag

Apparently all varieties of animals have been found sealed in stone, iron ore and even chalk. Mostly frogs are found but every once in a while you stumble upon a live pterodactyl. The common explanation for these occurances is similar to the way Winnie the Pooh ended up stuck in Rabbit's hole ... so to speak. But then again they may be reincarnations of those stuck in one of the outer circles of Buddhist hell.

Do you ever get the feeling you're being cheated

The current SF Weekly cover story is about getting to the bottom of the "Monkey Knife Fight" streetmeme currently plaguing the Mission. They basically pull their version of Salon's non Un-Masking of Deep Throat - altho' you don't have to buy the eBook. The weak conclusion - "It's with this realization that we come up with a theory. 'Monkey Knife Fight' means NOTHING."

Sweet. So will it stop now?

And pull the trigger until it goes 'click'

"It takes prodding from a colleague for Mr. Heston, 79, to raise a flintlock over his head in his signature pose and challenge his critics to pry the rifle 'from my cold dead hands.'"

In other news, the NRA also runs an ISP.

The well water black of a digital clock

"Although the remark has the ring of memoirs written after the event, it may well have been spoken. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French."

Guns don't kill people. The beliefs of a person or social group in which they have an emotional investment kill people.

Ari Fleischer was asked why the President doesn't support a national ballistic fingerprinting system given, you know, certain media-hyped gun violence in the DC region. His response:

"And certainly, in the case of the sniper, the real issue is values. And that's what is at stake here. The real issue is values. These are the acts of a depraved killer, who has broken and will continue to break laws. And so the question is not new laws; the question is the actions here represent the values in our society."

See, it's that whole culture of death we've got going on that's to blame. If only we didn't have abortion and violent video games this never would have happened (NB: the death penality is not, despite appearances, part of the culture of death).

We defy augury

And numerology, too, for that matter. I'll find you a pattern in the abstraction and leave you convinced the Pope is the Devil. Maybe that's not too hard. But if I tell you that the 6th, 7th and 8th primorials are 30030, 510510 and 9699690 ... don't you shiver a little bit.