wildcat

And thus begins the epic struggle, the quest for a new computer. Well, furtive looking around for a new computer now that I have some money with which to buy one. Bock and I wandered into London Drugs folllowing one our writing sessions (which was only partially successful and as usual surrounded by weird people) to look in their computer department. There was a Compaq Presario I was looking at on sale for about seven hundred bucks, but I need to do a little research and I want to look at two or three other places first.

And it has Vista on it, and you can't really get PCs without Vista on them, and Vista is problemmatic. Which makes me wonder if I should just give in and make the (possibly devonian) leap to Mac, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. If that would be a step up or not. On the one hand, I'm a child of the PC and I'm comfortable using them; on the other hand, I really want to call my children UNIVAC and that might be symptomatic of certain antiquarian tendencies. IE: change is not bad, per se.

Either way, I'm skipping Microsoft Office in favour of Open Office. Cheaper and more flexible. I'll load up all my writing onto my memory stick in preparation for the great migration, along with all the junk on my external hard drive. Like the music.

The other benefit of the Mac would be more flexibility and compatibility with iTunes and my iPod, although I haven't really encountered any problems thus far with the arrangement between my current PC and those things. At least, nothing that can't be attributed to the senility on my laptop's part.

Either way, I'm curious about more tech-savvy people's opinions on the matter; I really just need a machine that can handle music, internet browsing, torrents, word processing, image uploading & editing (not fullscale), videos...

Twelftree's remix of Shirley Bassey singing the Doors' "Light My Fire." Famous arsonists. The life and times of Harry Houdini. The relative merits and detractors of both PC notebooks and MacBooks. Daniel Handler's Adverbs. The fact that my copy of James Stokoe's Wonton Soup has not arrived in the mail from Oni Press yet. The lightbulb man poem I wrote back at UVic. Mother Poem. The last issue of the bloody Invisibles. Penne with Cream & Smoked Salmon. The symbolism of body hair in various transitional states. Nina Simone singing "Little Girl Blues," which sounds like Christmas even when remixed by the goddamn Postal Service. Long dead jazz singers replicated using cybernetic bodies in the Twenty-First Century, their voices recorded off of old media files. The missing body parts story. The sexual possibilities of super-people who can change themselves into sentient gases. Torrents. Hunger. All the little fragments of facial hair on my chin that I missed with the razor half an hour ago. My eyelid. The New Pornographers. Fredric fucking Wertham (and what he'd say about CSI):

We really should know better than to go out on Saturday nights and try to do anything. Deciding to skip the late shows of the couple movies we're moderately interested in seeing, we went to have a drink and dessert at Platinum last night.

Platinum, for the ex-pats' sakes, used to be "Syn" [sic] and before that was Hunter's Lounge. It has been several years since I had anything approaching a positive experience in the building.

Why we bother, I don't know. But: servers, please wait until your customers have said what they want before filling in the blank yourself and walking quickly away. Please have someone attend to new customers shortly after they sit down at the table, rather than waiting up to twenty minutes before you go over to inquire, you know, if they want to order drinks. Don't have us look at outdated dessert menus and then tell us after we order that the menu is outdated, you don't have any of those items. And why is it not mandatory that you bring over napkins with the dessert cutlery? You do not generate a hip and trendy place by making people wipe their filthy mouths on their shirt sleeves.

That said, the drinks were actually pretty good. The desserts were a little blah, though.

Anxiety over upcoming oral surgery on Wednesday certainly does surge on. I wonder if I'll only be half-as-wise (half-wit!) after the fact. Say good-bye, Oh Wisdom of Solomon!

Decent dinner at Sauce with Vicki and Jenny tonight; wasabi pea-encrusted salmon with potato. The beats came a little out of left field, but weren't bad. Had a bottle of Heinie and a dark chocolate brownie for dessert (split three ways).

Now to fire off more weird prose.

When the gauze comes out so you can eat, and you feel around in your mouth with your tongue, and there's this space, and two of your teeth are just not there and you stop and consider the tactile sensation of having teeth, only they aren't there, and there's this space back there, and suddenly you know that under all your meat is just a skull, a skull, a skull that will one day be bleached by the sun and worn away by the sand and wind...

I'm excited! And hoping they introduce Kate Corrigan, two-fisted folklore professor, in this one.

My teeth ache, I can't deal with personal relationships with any sort of rationality today, and I'm really hoping I didn't accidentally drop some medicine in the street on the way to the bus this morning. But at least I get to work with Vicki today, and Sally Potter's adaptation of Orlando came in for me at work.

I'll try to watch it without think about how much I hated that other Potter movie, The Tango Lesson.

In other news, someone stole a painting by Picasso from a São Paulo museum. It's been a while since I've heard about any major art thefts.

1. Christopher Bird talks about the pop cultural wasteland of 2007:
"You know, I’ve never actually seen a movie franchise so vividly jump the shark. I saw that stupid dance and said to myself, 'wow - this is the exact moment that Spider-Man movies started to suck'."
(He also discusses Elizabeth 2: This Time It's Personal The Golden Age)

2. I`m about two episodes into the first season of Heroes and I'm already finding it a little bit ill-conceived; they seem to have set up at least seven or eight separate plot threads with the very first episode and as a result I'm finding the terrible cliché of "shadowy assassins following the main characters" to be a relaxing touchstone. Well, I'm trying to anyway. I'll give it a few more episodes to start gelling.

1. Macintosh product of the future: the iBrain, a module of enhanced brain-matter grown in special vats. Vestigal spinal cord acts as an organic USB cable, allowing the iBrain to plug into your head (possibly via cochlear implant) or into your powerbook. Useful for backing up important memories or music; designed to allow ease-of-storage for inappropriate sexual fantasies that you want to keep out of your main-brain when going through airport telepathy checks. The USB-spine also plugs into your navel pretty easily and can override involuntary nerve impulses being directed to your digestive system by your main-brain; digestion can be hacked and bashed as need to be.

2. Read Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in about three and a half hours last night; now I'm on to his Eastern Standard Tribe. The former is definitely the better of the two, though Tribe is still decent, even if I'm a little bored of haxx0r romanz in Doctorow's stories. I enjoy the transhuman ideas he puts forward, and the extreme flexibility of conscious that is often possible in the futures he imagines.

3. First twelve episodes of the first season of Heroes down. The cheerleader, Claire, is definitely the highpoint of the series for me -- she's actually a present decent actress, her arc is interesting (particularly when everyone around her keeps having their memories erased and she has to deal with that), and the CG visuals associated with her regeneration power are great. She gets all the really creepy body horror and the comedy that results. Claire and Hiro interest me the most, and they're the ones that really own the series for me; both the regeneration and Hiro's time-manipulation are the powers that inspire the strongest visuals and simply use the medium (television) to its full extent; everyone else would work (arguably better) in a comic or a book but those two need to be on television to really have the right effect. I wish Clea Duvall would get more screen-time, while Mohinder's storyline continues to bore me whenever I see it.

4. Joy's supposed to be getting into Victoria today, probably this morning, but I have no idea how to get ahold of her. I expect something magical will happen and all doors will open. I am fairly chill (frozen, you might say) about things at the moment.

5. Work is so unbelievably slow today. Air moves sand-like between my fingers when I wave my hands around.