Click images for desktop size: "Hi Vista Diner" by Stray Cat With no football I got involved in some of the more usual activities of winter.
Like shoveling snow. Someone needs to write a book on this. I suppose if I'd been raised in snow and ice it would all be second nature to me, but coming to it as an alien I'm amazed how difficult I can make it, and how many different ways I can injure myself.
It seems simple but it's not. Honest. Or else I'm a bigger idiot then I ever imagined . . .
One thing that perplexes me is salt. It melts ice but then the cold freezes the salty ice . . . so I must be doing it wrong. And at 5 bucks for 40 pounds there has to be a more economical way of throwing it around, someway that will give me enough traction to not fall down when I call the dogs in but will still leave me enough for later in the week.
I guess I am an idiot. When I ask people around here about it they just stare at me blankly as if I had asked them how to walk or crawl.

I've been organizing the links page. I'm doing it in a way that will enable me to control the look of it easier later on. Right now its a mess. All the links still work but its no longer alphabetical . . . so you got to look if you want something.
I've added a "thing" to it I'm nervous about: "Snap". It cool. When you hover over a link it pops up a thumbnail of the site! Nifty.
I use Safari and Camino web browsers on my Mac. Both of them have pretty decent ad blockers that I use heavily. The ad blockers work well because I had no idea that Snap generated an "Adsense" style add underneath the thumbnail.
I don't get any money for those ads. I guess its fair payment for their service. I just don't like that.
But I like the thumbnails so I'm going to leave the page with the "Snap" code up until I finish this lynda.com course on AJAX. I'm, probably foolishly, convinced that I can do what snap does on my own and maybe even pretty it up some so that I'll like.
I guess I'm apologizing for the ads . . .
I also got to see a few movies!
I seem to always do that. Have time to see a movie . . .

Click images for desktop size: "Pale Pink" by LC "Hitman" wasn't near as bad as I thought it would be. The guy they picked for the lead is pretty worthless. I can't figure what they thought he's bring to the cardboard character. The girl is cute but not very memorable.
I sort of suffered through Tim Burton's "Sweeny Todd". I know the guy made billions with "Batman" but whatever he had is gone. This was a dreadful thing. I barely watched it but I could HEAR it. Casting a musical with non-singers is the kind of thing even a first year film student would do. But, hey, Johnny Depp wasn't as dreadful as some of the others.
Then, finally, I got to see a film that maybe the best film I've seen in 2007: Johnny To and Ka-Fai Wai's "Mad Detective".
Its an inspired idea, which is what I'd expect from the guys who last made "Running On Karma". A police detective is an ambulatory schizophrenic. He is also a genius at solving crimes. No one quite knows why but he explains it as "I can see the different personalties inside people."
The guy playing the detective, Ching Wan Lau, is never less than excellent and at times rises to superb. In some ways this performance is the best screen acting job I've seen since Marlon Brando in "Last Tango In Paris".
The film has a murder mystery plot. It starts out as just a McGuffin (See Hitchcock). What the film is really about is looking inside ourselves and inside other people. The film is pailful to watch, almost as painful as it is exhilarating and astonishing.
What hurts the most is Ching's embodiment of the schizophrenic. The way he sees the world and how he protects himself from the world. Its soul numbing and far too easily identifiable (meaning its as easy to see ourselves in his performance).
The film works on moments of astonishment. I don't want to give anything away in case you seek this one out. It opens with a panorama of knives, killing knives. Then Ching is circling someone with a knife in his hands. It seems he is circling a dead pig. A bunch of cops are watching him. One whispers, "Detective Bun is working on a case."

Click images for desktop size: "Hold Me" Suddenly Bun attacks the dead pig, savagely stabbing it. It falls to the ground and he hacks at it.
A headline informs us that their was a girl stabbed to death and her body found shoved into a suitcase.
Ching drags out a suitcase and puts himself into it ordering a cop to kick him downstairs. He does, down three flights of stairs, brutally bouncing the bag around until they get to the bottom. The cop unzips the suitcase and Ching gets out battered and dizzy. He gasps out, "The ice cream vendor did it. Arrest the ice cream vendor."
Another headline blares "Detective Bun Solves Another Impossible Case".
Then it is the Chief's retirement party, the other cops have given him a yappy, cute Pekinese. Ching stands in front of the Chief, visibly moved. Without a word he reaches up and cuts off his right ear and hands it to the Chief as a token of his esteem . . . " And all of that is before the final opening credits.
The film astonishes. Sometimes it appears that the characters are getting overwhelmed by the plot mechanisms instead of being exposed more fully by it.
I have to watch it again to decide.
It won't get nominated for an Oscar . . .