A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Via Chizumatic I found this 7 minute 45 second mind blowing piece of Machinima:

The Hi-Def version (which I’d recommend over the YouTube one, but I figure more of you will click on the embed than go to this link) is here. The quality is much better:
The Craft Of War

I’m not gonna lie, it makes my palms sweat wanting to start playing again.

Anyway I found the soundtrack awesome (despite one little lead in block of about 5 seconds.) So I went digging in the credits and found the real music video for this delicious little piece of J-Pop.

The song is “Hide & Seek” by Namie Amuro, of whom I’d never heard. Here’s the video:

Of course Pandora.com has no IDEA who the hell Namie Amuro might be so my standard “generate recommendations based on” engine is for shyte here.

Amazon reveals a truly daunting catalog of work from her.

AAARRGGHHHH!!

Phew.  About time.  Frankly I wasn’t sure they were gonna ever get around to getting this done.

House votes to impeach Blagojevich

SPRINGFIELD—In a historic vote, the Illinois House has impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich, directing the Senate to put the state’s 40th chief executive on trial with the goal of removing him from office.

The vote by the House was 114-1 and marks the first time in the state’s 190-year history that a governor has been impeached, despite Illinois’ longstanding reputation for political corruption.

Well thank god SOMEthing still works.

And, for the liberal bonus round we have the lone dissenter who… well, best read it:

Rep. Milt Patterson (D-Chicago) was the lone vote against impeaching the governor. Patterson, from Chicago’s Southwest Side, said after the roll call that he didn’t feel it was his job to vote to impeach the governor. He declined comment on whether he approved of the job Blagojevich is doing.

Not his job? Hmm…

SECTION 14. IMPEACHMENT
The House of Representatives has the sole power to conduct legislative investigations to determine the existence of cause for impeachment and, by the vote of a majority of the members elected, to impeach Executive and Judicial officers. Impeachments shall be tried by the Senate. When sitting for that purpose, Senators shall be upon oath, or affirmation, to do justice according to law. If the Governor is tried, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall preside. No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senators elected. Judgment shall not extend beyond removal from office and disqualification to hold any public office of this State. An impeached officer, whether convicted or acquitted, shall be liable to prosecution, trial, judgment and punishment according to law.
(Source: Illinois Constitution.)

Yes monkey, your fucking job.

Liberal: Too open minded to take one’s own side in a fight.

When I’m on a solid reading jag, I go through a couple/few books a week.  Without event I’ll read works of lesser word count in a single sitting (The Road fell in to this category a couple nights ago.) And while I feel (and hopefully always will) that I have an infinite amount of catching-up to do, I’ve got some solid reading under my belt.

Well, one of a few uncharacteristically delightful conversations I had last night was with a voracious reader who said she read histories, biographys and such.  Inclined as I was to do so, I cast about in my head for something to recommend and came up completely blank.

It was the strangest thing.  For about a half hour I was sure it was the gin masking what I was looking for from my consciousness (as gin is wont to do.)  But I woke up this morning(ish) with it on my mind and I started going through book cases.

Nothing.

Not One Book.

I’ve got books on programming, computer science, buddhism, baking, volumes of sutras, self help, politics (less than you’d think), psychology, do-it-yourselfness, science fiction and fantasy, philosophy (east and west), logic, physics, math, writing, business, classic fiction, poetry, trading and short stories.

But not a single biography or history.

How very odd.

How very odd indeed.

Over the better part of the last year I’ve been increasingly (starting from very) frustrated with my near total lack of writing. I spent a fair amount of time thinking about that and digging around for things I’d penned or typed that I recall having been most satisfied with in an attempt to divine what it is that evoked them.

I came to an inescapable parallel that makes me feel cheated and angry.

I write well when I’m depressed.

The problem is that while bad moods and anger produce delightful descriptions of bad moods and anger, they have very strong supporting effects. They create and invoke recursively that which they express. THIS I realized some years ago and as a result I’ve quite successfully weaned myself off of the obsessive whining I was doing in journals, web sites, IMs and wherever else I was doing it.

But what I hadn’t banked on was the notion that it was my primary source of inspiration, twisted a use of the word as that is.

Last night on the four train home from my biweekly night out I was ripping myself apart.  I whipped out my little moleskine and starting on the Union Square platform until we pulled in to Borough Hall, blasted out a bit over five pages of flagellation worth being proud of but for what it was. And but for a couple pangs that will stay with me a little while, it’s over and done with.

I’m not going to type that in and post it here for obvious reasons.

In the last several years my level of happiness and the degree to which I enjoy the joys of life have only gotten stronger. The needle has been moving, staggeringly but consistently deeper in to the plus column. So why is it that those things seem undeserving of treatment by the written word?

Well last night my thought was that Joy was to be experienced and pain was to be expunged and that the easiest way to do that was by externalizing and examining it. But 22 hours later that’s a bunch of crap. Neither is more or less to be experienced than the other.

Could it be simple force of habit? At least somewhat.

The ‘tortured’ artist is a hackneyed cliche’.  But why does it appear that it must be that way?

There are some as yet wordless answers kicking around in my head.  But nothing well formed enough to put down.

The Hubris is outstanding. Look, Blagoyavitch (sp?) appointing ANYone instead of having a special election is, well, it’s Illinois politics but it’s legal.

But Reid has absolutely no LEGAL authority to deny Burris entry. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t say no.

Last I checked we at least still pretended we were a country of laws.

So I took the book ‘The Road’ with me to bed last night. Read it in one sitting. McCarthy sure can write but holy SHIT was it gruesome.

Not really much else to say about it.

Charity homes built by hollywood start to crumble

RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.

Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity

*hurl*

So they’ve now explicitly tipped their hand:

In a letter addressed to President-elect Obama and his wife, Michelle, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, makes an appeal for a carbon tax, ostensibly as a means for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that’s allegedly causing a dangerous greenhouse effect and warming trend.

Some environmentalists are actually environmentalists. But not this guy and not his bloodthirsty horde of undead socialist class-envy shitbags.

Green Comes Clean

Acting either out of boldness or desperation, Hansen goes on to reveal the environmentalist left’s deeper ambition: a collectivist redistribution of wealth. He recommends that the carbon tax be returned to the public in “equal shares on a per capita basis.”

Keep

Your

Filthy

Hands

Off

My

Money.

NOT YOURS!

Just a great line I read from a commenter over at Volokh Conspiracy

Someone commented that the Jews were very lucky to have arrived in New York City just as the garment industry was about to develop, and he responded: “Yes, and Henry Aaron was lucky to come to the plate so often just as a home run was about to be hit.”

I don’t post links to Caturday unless something really grabs me.

Yeah… I loled

I read Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book” a couple nights ago. It had that wonderful, increasingly rare quality of leaving me wanting. It’s about a boy who’s raised in a graveyard by ghosts and… well… stuff ;).

It’s cute, short, and written for young readers.

Something neat happens to Gaiman’s imagination when he writes for children or young adults. The result is usually pared down to the bare essentials, a bit dreamier and more like something you’d find in a collection of 300 year old fables.

I highly recommend it.

1 shot of Mikey’s Egg Nog
3 shots of Vodka w/ Casis (sp? some currant thing)
double shot of Canton (ginger infused congac)
2 double shots of Jameson 12 year.
3 shots of Grey Goose.

Before noon.

Then went to Balthazar for brunch. Had Fois Gras and Steak Tartare. Two of my favorite things.

No I didn’t drink last night.

But I sure as hell made up for it.

Happy New Year

*hic*

UPDATE: Whups, forgot. Had 2 shots of some bizarre concoction of a couple different rums and watermelon liquor, plus god knows what else. (Yes, also before noon.)

Happy New Year Intertoobz!