In front of me at the moment of this writing, lie twelve little brown rectangles. They were molded far off in Pennsylvania, as a block, and I have only recently broken them apart. Each one of them represents from thirty seconds to a minute of bliss, that only a true lover of chocolate can appreciate. Hershey does not make the best chocolate that I know, but for a Monday morning on the way to work, they make the finest available. Over the weekend I contemplated, as I have done for a few weeks, giving up chocolate. I gave up cheese some time ago, and it has been difficult for me. Cheese, in all its wonderful varieties, is my favorite food. I never realized until I gave it up how completely pervasive to American, and for that matter Western culture cheese has become. This was brought home to me most recently yesterday afternoon, as I ordered bean dip to eat with my tortilla shells at El Camino Real #6. My wife orders cheese dip to mix with salsa, and I wanted a non-cheese alternative. [At this point, I’m holding the first of the twelve pieces of chocolate in my mouth, letting it melt while pushing it back and forth over my tongue.] My bean dip arrived at the same time as her cheese dip. They were unfortunately difficult to tell apart, since apparently bean dip is served at El Camino Real with a hardy layer of melted cheese over the beans. I dug through it and ate it anyway. Giving up anything completely is a series of failures, usually. Quitting drinking, quitting smoking, quitting whatever, the long-time addict is bound to occasionally slip up. I’ve probably had seven or eight ounces of cheese at various times since I “completely” gave it up. One time, I slid a whole slice of Monterrey Jack into my mouth, chewed it up, and swallowed it and only remembered as it was going down that I wasn’t supposed to eat it. It isn’t these little failures that define my overall success or failure, however. The important component in giving up anything is what one does after the failure. The thing to do is to begin again. When I ordered my main course at the El Camino Real #6, I was careful to specify, “Please, no cheese on anything.” So, after much contemplation, I’ve decided to give up chocolate and all other candy in all its forms. These last eleven pieces represent the sum total of candy that I can eat with good conscience for at least the next year, and I’ll go beyond that and say until I turn 32. Of course, if giving up any of these things I've been whittiling out of my life has an effect that I find more pleasing than the joy I get out of them, it's possible I will give them up for good.

As Cory and I were departing Brokeback Mountain yesterday, the movie, not the place or the lifestyle, he mentioned that he might be afraid to tell people he didn't like it all that much, for fear of being branded a homophobe. Since my wife, of all people, already attacked me for thinking the movie was a B+ at best, I want to point out a few things about it that I did like and then maybe the things that I think didn't connect for me.

First of all, the makeup was great. I'm not being facetious, I really am serious that the first movie I really ever noticed the makeup in was this one about two gay cowboys. So many characters had to be gradually aged for over a twenty year span, and it comes off very well. Only Lureen was a little weak, and maybe it was because I don't think Anne Hathaway will really look so much like Tammy Faye Baker in twenty years, but that's okay, because it works perfect for one of the other things I liked. There are three facial closeups in this film that are central to the plot, and they're two out of three are important for their stoicism. The first is early in the movie when Ennis is washing himself at an oblique angle from Jack, and Jack is sitting there, wanting to look at Ennis' naked body, but refusing to let himself do so. The second is when Alma finds out the nature of Ennis's and Jack's relationship. She illustrates shock, confusion, and deep hurting very well. She follows that up with a scene where she stands looking at the door, and we see her from behind, and her entire posture re-enforces her performance. The third is near the end when Lureen, with her Tammy Faye makeup, has a phone conversation with Ennis. To prevent a spoiler, I won't reveal the whole nature of that conversation, but she is a portrait of the betrayed, and her lack of expression is a perfect lead-in to the revealing cut scene, and it leaves the viewer wondering if she instigated anything. I also liked the way that the pain in Ennis and Jack's lives, while obviously related to their sexuality, was blamed on the way they dealt with their sexuality, and the pressures they felt from society. I think that is the take-home message.

Now, for what I did not like. Aside from the fact that I can't really identify with the relationship, I also found it strange, and somewhat unbelievable to me, the way that a couple of ostensibly straight guys, especially if one of them was pretty unexperienced at anything, go from, "Okay, there's some attraction between us," to "Why don't I just push this right in there?" within fifteen seconds? I mean, I never knew a straight man to close a deal that fast with a willing woman, and that equipment is made for the job. I also found it odd that Ennis and Jack never have a conversation where they say to each other, "What me and you are is gay." I just seems like after the sudden kissing after five years of not seeing each other, they would have pretty much figured that out. Perhaps this shows that they actually hated themselves for loving each other, but that is not really portrayed in this film. The oft-quoted line, "I wish I could quit you" has nothing to do with not wanting to be gay anymore, but just wanting someone to love who was a bit more convenient.

This film really is good. Please, do not go to see it, however, with the expectation that it will deserve all the praise it's been getting. It doesn't. It's a touching movie, and Michelle Williams really does deserve that Best Supporting Actress nod, but overall it's a B+ effort. There a few holes that could have been covered to make this an A or an A+, but all of them I think would have involved some major re-writing.

Since I'm a distant rleative through the Morton's I don't feel too guilty linking to http://sumnerfamily.blogspot.com. If you like browsing through other people's photo albums the way I do, head on over. It's chock full of Aaron's relatives of course, and quite a few I could lay claim to as well, if I were just a little better at genealogy.

This just in: Apparently there are no smart people left. I'm still not for sure if Sharon ever got better or died or what. Obviously, I probably had no business reading Krista's blog in the first place. It appears as of this morning to be gone from the cyberworld. Come to think of it, I haven't heard from Daxon or from Krista in a very long time. Let us hope that all is well.

I’m a bit grumpy this morning. I don’t know why. The past two nights I’ve slept an unbelievable (for me) number of hours. I just woke up feeling raw. I mostly took this feeling out on my kids (with a grumpy voice and numerous pronouncements about how things were going to have to change), so I’m glad they deserved it. They tend to drag their feet just a bit. Without fail they each begin watching a separate television show at 7:30 when by now they should know that I am going to make them leave exactly five minutes before their conclusions. I’m pumping a little Diet Pepsi and Metallica into my brain to help even my mood. I only notice that I am so grumpy this morning perhaps because I was in a very good mood last night. Ethan’s birthday was yesterday, and even though his party is Saturday, I felt that I should do something for him, so I took him out to eat at the park. His mom was working late, so it was just the three of us. Delaney was just a little bit hyper. We’d already had a small issue before we’d left the house. Though we were only going to be home for a few minutes before going to eat, she decided to take off her shoes, socks, and pants. We got past that, and I swore to the kids and myself on the way up the road we were going to all have a nice meal. It was probably at least twenty minutes into our meal before Delaney knocked over her chair. Of course she’d been leading up to it. The fidgeting with her silverware, the complaining about her food, the interruptions of both her brother and myself while we were already talking. After she knocked it over, I asked her to please set it upright, sit in it, and put her feet in front of her. She isn’t one to use a chair in the conventional fashion, so I have to give her hints as we go along. About thirty seconds after she had gotten the foot placement right, she thought of something she had to say to me. When she talks to me, she is always very emphatic. To be emphatic she has to turn her entire body toward me, and in so doing she spilled her 7Up. Luckily, very little of it got on the table or on the floor, because almost the entire contents soaked into the right leg of my blue jeans. Now this is the point I think where some people would have exploded. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think of grabbing her by the wrist, leading her outside, and giving her a taste of leather. Experience has taught me, however, that corporal punishment rarely cures carelessness. I try to reserve it for more intentional wrongdoings. Thinking objectively about the situation, the main problem was that my daughter had embarrassed me. To correct the immediate problem for me, the embarrassment, I decided that the best thing was to show total calm in the face of adversity. I admonished Delaney to pick up the pieces of ice that had fallen to the floor, and I got a rag from the waitress to blot myself with. I let Delaney sweat for the next hour thinking of what might happen when we got home. I think the fear of corporal punishment works much better sometimes than the thing itself, and since I put her to bed at eight o’clock as an alternative punishment, she wasn’t nearly so hard to roust this morning. Of course she did grab for the remote first thing.

When we are children, there are many things we witness which require the concept of monsters or magic to explain. We are without the years of experience and knowledge that will allow us later in life to spin away the extraordinary into ordinary. As children, we are not yet capable of applying thermal dynamics to the various groans and shutters in our homes, every creak is still evidence of some dark, creeping thing stealing close to the bedroom door. When we grow older, there are no more unidentified flying objects; we can identify them all. The ghost in the edge of the mist is just a stump, after all, and the huge footprint in the dirt road is just the effect of evaporation of moisture from the soil. Still though, there is one thing that still troubles me. There is one observation I made as a child that was never properly explained to me. It happened in a place that was forever a place of magic and mystery to me, and it inspired a legend that has never completely died. Many years later, when our memories of that day had grown dim, we witnessed a dubious second-most intriguing example of the art, and our friend, who doubtless had heard whispers and rumors of the true legend, thought that those words would apply to his example, and we let him apply those words, because we were much older, and perhaps we wanted to let our day of dark magic expire, so that we could perhaps remember the dark name of the legend in our sleep without giving in to the nightmare of being forced to look back in horror at that one unexplained mystery.

It was a day like many others. We were young kids, perhaps the age my son is now. We were always looking to scare each other just a little bit. We would have grand adventures all over our little corner of the world. I cannot now imagine letting my son go as far from home and get into the kinds of situations that I found myself in every single summer day. On this particular day, we decided to head down the road a short piece to where the old light plant was. It was our new favorite place, and remained a favorite place for years to come. My father had purchased this building some years before to store various pieces of equipment. He was growing a bit of tobacco in an adjacent field at the time, but the light plant was more than just a barn. It had originally been the first electrical generating plant in the county. It was actually located in a stream. Part of the building actually sat in the edge of the water. Dark stone walls filled with mud that had once served some unknown purpose were located across the stream. Origainlly they had been like pits, undoubtably filled with water. Now they were filled with sixty years of accumulated gunk, so that they were full almost to the top with nastiness. As a matter of fact, all the exterior walls of the light plant were also of this same grey stone, which could have been poured concrete. The floor of the building was definitely concrete. It was anything but an even floor. There were various protusions and pits. The protusions were mostly broken off, as if there had once been huge statues standing around the inner sanctum of the building, but it's previous owners in a Herculean effort, had decided to just shear them off at the base. One of these in particular was nearly as large as an inverted bath tub, and was often a factor in the outcome of a pickup basketball game there in the building. More mysterious than the protrusions were the pits. The pits were large holes in the floor, not so much holes, as just places where the floor did not exist. Some were shallow and some were not. All of them were filled with straw, the various-sized remains of tobacco sticks, dust, and the skeletal remains of rodents. These places of non-floor took up most of one end of the building, and there were places where hollows existed, so that an ankle, or a leg, or perhaps maybe a small sibling could be lost. As fascinating as these holes were, we never fully investigated them. We never tried to excavate to the bottom of the holes. I think it was because there were only two interesting places that these holes could possibly lead to. One was the stream outside, or at least some dark, wet extension of the stream. No one relished the idea of drowning amongst long dead mice and broken tobacco sticks. The other place that the holes could have led, a place where direct access already beckoned us, was the basement. The basement represents our great failure of nerve. It was, to say the least, the scariest place we knew of. The stairs to the basement, and there was far from a whole set, were in the front of the light plant, actually near the front door. It was a dark hole in the ground, which for some reason the light from any given window refused to illuminate. I saw my father climb down into that hole one time when I was much younger, to retrieve a dropped tool, and I could tell that he was visibly shaken by the nastiness of the experience. I knew that he did not have time to properly explore the entire thing, but as soon as he climbed back out of that hole, he admonished me to never, ever go into that place. I promised, and I kept that promise. What lay in that basement remains a mystery to this day to me and my friends. I like to think that if I'd had the nerve then that I have now, I would have gone without hesitation, but I doubt it. I would at least have to consider, before going into that fetid lair, the evidence that we eventually found elsewhere in the building. As I was saying, the building was a favorite place. That particular day, I happened to make it there first. I had with me my kid brother and several strings of firecrackers. We decided that we would take a cannon-like object that we found in the attic some time before, point it out the window at our approaching friends, and simulate some cannon fire by place firecrackers inside the barrel. Our surprise worked out rather well, and we properly shocked our friends with our wonderful cannon. They rushed up the rickety stairs to try it for themselves. Brian Wade was there, and he was always one to move on from one activity to the next without warning. He began looking around the room to find some other object that might have some value in our imaginary world. What he found though, affected our imaginations mroe than he could possibly have forseen. It left Brian quite speechless. He turned around toward us, and with a guttural sound beckoned to come see what he had found. He was in such obvious shock so we all hurried over to see. There, lying on the floor, on a yellowed sheet of newspaper, fully four inches through the middle, and at least thirty inches long, and exuding all of the most perfect qualities (other than size) of it's order, was the largest single turd that I have ever seen. Thus was the true legend of the Moby Shit born, and it is without proper scientific explanation to this day.

Because Clark Energy can’t seem to go more than three weeks between momentary losses of service, I depend heavily on my wall clock in the bathroom as the gauge of how I’m doing for time each morning. It runs on an AA battery, and I’m sure you can get one just like it for under ten dollars at WalMart. It works really well until the battery starts to go. Unfortunately when the battery does go, it doesn’t go all at once. That isn’t an issue if I notice in the evening, because most times I don’t care that much what time it is in the evening anyway, give or take an hour or so. In the morning it can be critical. When I look at the clock and it says fifteen until eight, and it’s really already on the hour… let’s just say I may have to pay a truancy fine. Of course, I am a big believe in parental rights to a point, so if I do have to pay a fine, I’ll look at as good karma toward society that I have in my karma bank.

Cory has the schedule for the film festival up at his site. It’s very, very good. He also conveniently linked each title to its imdb page. Using that convenience, I calculated that the average imdb user score for the mainstream room is 7.84. For the other room, it’s 7.38. The average overall is 7.6. The best score for the whole festival is, in my mind surprisingly, an 8.6 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Bringing in the low score, perhaps unsurprisingly, though it was one of my picks, is Heavy Metal with a 6.1. All my readers are invited, and a date is being set probably today. I’ll keep you posted.

I find myself getting up early enough this morning to watch the new Weezer video. I remember when I liked a lot of music videos. Now they’re almost all essentially the same. This one is pretty good though, even if it is reminiscent of a lot of other ones, at least there is a story line, which is better than the all too common theme, “I’m black and I got gunz, and bitchez, and carz, and you better not talk no shit, cause I’ll take your bitchez from yo’ dead-azz body.”

It’s been a trying couple days. Issues between friends. I had a couple of things at work that I had to prepare quite a bit for, too. It all leaves me feeling a little frayed around the edges. My back trouble is finally gone. I managed to re-injure myself multiple times each time I thought I was almost recovered. No more though, if it’s heavy and it’s not sitting on my foot, I’m not lifting it. Back trouble is more annoying than anything else. You quickly learn that you can make it not hurt if you avoid certain positions and certain movements, but then constantly avoiding those positions and movements is quite troublesome, and can give others the impression that you are a full-time cripple.

Planning for the 2006 Millard L. Webb Film Festival is essentially done. The movie lineup is complete. Cody is going to host again this year, since we decided to limit ourselves to two rooms, with a total of twenty-six films. Now we’re really only to set a date. As soon as we do, and as soon as I get a copy of the schedule, I’ll post it all here. I’m very excited about it.

I've taken reasonable pains to make sure this pic isn't a repeat. Every time I put it up, it seems like I already did. Idon't see it in the archives, however, and it isn't on my list. It's been slow lately. Work has been busy, and honestly my free time has been absorbed with other activities. I'm planning on taking some pictures tomorrow though. I miss the summer. I'm sure tht I'll miss it even more tomorrow when the snow comes. Snow can be beautiful though. I may go ahead and clean out my folders of anything else worth putting up that I haven't yet, just so I can get all this cross-referencing out of the way. That's if there's anythig left. I'm not completely sure.

I’ve lost touch with friends over the years. There are people that are completely lost to me living their lives out there. They’re just as alive and well as they have always been, but the link between them and me is inexplicably cut. How does this happen, I wonder. What kind of grand adventures must they be having to just completely disappear from my field of view? I guess what makes it so strange to me, is when I am riding down the road and thinking of them I know they somewhere out there they are probably thinking something to themselves too, and I wonder how often they think of me.

This line is here to fix a format problem.

http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/1658610/

Go there now.

It's Friday. I've been fighting with various ways to file my taxes electronically. Thanks to bad information I received from at least three different people, I am beginning to wonder if I will ever get a refund ever again. I know my return has been kicked back at least once, and maybe the maximum three times. If I have to file on paper, it will be a long wait for my money. Needless to say, my feelings are hurt.

Since Poker Notes is (maybe temporarily) down, I will make an entry here regarding poker. I won a substantial amount of money last night. I was at a game which has an interesting dynamic. The majority of the players are not very good, though there are a couple of pretty decent players, but recently two of the worst players quit. These guys loved to bet and bet big. There was no hand where they didn't consider bluffing. Normally these guys would have been ideal opponents, because sooner or later they're going to make a mistake and have it cost them bigtime. The other bad players in the game, however, are so sheepish, that between the two types, they actually developed a synergy that gave a pretty solid player a hard time, mostly because to beat one group, one playing style had to be adopted, and to beat the other, a different playing style had to be used. It made life complicated. Even though these players were pretty bad, their departure helped ease the pressure from the game considerably. I love it.