Cruel DVD masters, why must you mess with me so? V is out on DVD and I watched it on Saturday. It was just as good as I'd remembered it being: frozen arms and annoying teenage girls and aliens who aren't what they seem. And as the end neared, I was hooked. What will happen to these earthlings? Will their Resistance succeed? Why of course the answers are available in the sequel, V the Final Battle, but that's not out on DVD! Argh…how long will I have to wait to see the birth of the twins? And see our great victory over those nefarious slimy aliens?

You know what? This Sigur Rós CD is pretty good. I'd heard good things from folks in the know, but now I'm actually listening to it, and I must concur. It's nice to listen to music with headphones again, it's such a different experience than listening through speakers. It's much more enveloping and the music becomes the focal point when no other sounds distract. This current song (Starálfur) sounds like it could be the soundtrack in some post-apocalyptic futuristic movie, something taking place when we no longer speak English and the world is decimated by wars, yet somehow there's a green field that's survived it all, with a young sapling reaching upwards, and that's where the camera zooms in on our heroes and this song plays in the background. Or something. I don't know. Work with me here.

Today is the 32nd anniversary of the first lunar landing. I know I've been yammering on and on about the moon this week, but it's just so fascinating to me. And today I'm going to imagine what it must have been like to be inside the LM the moment after it landed, after the descent engine has shut down, knowing that whatever happened next, we'd landed on the moon. I'm going to imagine looking out that small window into the Sea of Tranquility, seeing the pockmarked crust and the dusty surface and the view of Earth off in the distance and I'm going to imagine that I've landed on the moon.

In all my messing around on NASA's servers this is my favorite find so far: Press Kit for Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Mission. It's in PDF and it's 3.23 MB so it will take a while to load, but it's filled with great details about the mission and includes terms like "Translunar Injection." Now if that's not a band name waiting to be snagged, I don't know what is.

On a less lunar note, it's back to nearly winter-like weather here in San Francisco. Foggy, cold, and I've got the heat on full-blast. Crikey, I need a trip back east where it's warm.

While poking around the other day, I came across the 2002 Budget for the United States. There are all sorts of goodies contained within its 241 pages (which doesn't seem very long for something you'd imagine to be as big as the US budget). One of the most enlightening tidbits for me was the, "$14.2 billion increase in Department of Defense spending in 2002 to begin to arrest the decline in national security[.]" Decline in national security!? I had no idea we were experiencing a security decline, no wonder I've felt so out of sorts lately.

Here's another laugher, tucked into page 37 beneath the "Solar and Renewable Resources" heading in the Energy section,

Solar and renewable energy will benefit from the Administration's legislative proposal to open a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas leasing and production. This process will generate bidding bonuses for the Federal government estimated at $1.2 billion, to become available in 2004, which will be made available over a series of years to increase the funding for solar and renewable energy technologies.

Available in 2004, eh? So during the Bush-Cheney term no money derived from the infiltration and disruption of this pristine wilderness will be invested in renewable energy sources. Interesting. As long as we're "direct[ing] research toward the most critical barriers to expansion of coal use for power generation in the United States"¹ I guess we won't really need those alternative energy sources much anyway.

And of course, my dream of high-speed rail development didn't make it into the budget [ed note: not sure it was ever proposed]. It looks like the rail budget is only $521 million (see p. 69, Transportation, Passenger Rail) "to support Amtrak capital improvements and equipment maintenance." Wouldn't a high-speed rail system (like Thalys) reduce aircraft and car pollution by reducing the number of trips made by such vehicles? And improve people's travel experience? And reduce all that "air rage" we keep hearing about? Imagine a high-speed train along the west coast, all the way from Seattle to San Diego. And trains from LA and San Francisco to Vegas. How fun would that be? And fast!

It occurs to me that perhaps I should just move to Europe, where they appear to care more about the environment and the trains already exist.

A proposed new banner for the site, compliments of Jason:

More on the Moon today (which prompted a certain someone to remark, "you should rename your site MoonNut.") Apollo 17 was the final mission to the moon, and on December 14, 1972 Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt blasted off from Taurus-Littrow to rendezvous with Ron Evans in the command module and return to earth. Sadly, we've never returned. Apollo 17 is the only mission that occurred after I was born, and for some reason that makes it feel special for me, as if I too experienced our time on the moon eventhough I was too young to be aware of it.

Check out this film of their lift-off (3.6 mb) shot from their Lunar Rover, which remained on the Moon. There is just a slew of cool images to check out from the mission. Here's Jack Schmitt with the American flag and Earth over his shoulder. Looking at them it's hard to fathom that all this really happened, it's hard to believe that men actually walked on the Moon.

Do you think we should return to the Moon for further study and exploration?

Yes
No

You can view the results if you'd like without voting.

So the end of the week is here and the site I'm supposed to have up by today is, well, about 75% there but not ready for debut. The backend is taking longer than I thought, doing a tableless, all CSS layout is proving trickier than I'd anticipated, and well, let's face it: I haven't spent enough time on it. So look for it sometime next week instead.

Need a movie recommendation? Indochine is mmmm mmmmm good. The cinematography is outstanding, Catherine Deneuve is beautiful, and Vietnam prior to Dien Bien Phu is something to behold. It left me with some curious questions about colonization. Deneuve's character has lived her whole life in French Indochina, yet is forced "home" when France finally loses possession. I kept thinking, "How sad to love and lose someplace that was never 'yours' to begin with." And I wonder, what makes a place anybody's anyway? Do you have to be the same race as everyone else? Do you have to be born there? Grown up there? Part of the power? Fighting the power? From the locals throwing beer bottles at the college kids where I grew up to the continued global hotspots Northern Ireland and the Middle East, this insistence on owning place sure causes a lot of pain, bloodshed, and death.

I'm not scared today is Friday the 13th. Are you?

Some days I can't tell if I'm getting sick or if it's just allergies. Today is one of those days.

I finished reading The Wind Done Gone yesterday, "The Unauthorized Parody" of Gone With The Wind. First grievance: this was hardly a parody ("A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.") I'm not sure if that label was some sort of concession to Mitchell's estate which enabled the book's publication or what, but I would not call it parody. It wasn't even a retelling of the same story as much as picking up where the original left off and provided an alternative view of some previous events.

Gone With The Wind is one of my favorite books ever, I even wrote my senior paper (a requirement to graduate from my high school, everyone had to write a 10 page paper on a topic of his/her choosing) on, "Scarlett O'Hara, A Study of Independence," analyzing the character of Scarlett as the anti Southern belle she appeared to be. (A working title for the paper I'm all the sudden recalling was "Rebelle." Ugh.) I was always impressed with Scarlett because she followed her gut, did not conform to the role that was dictated for Southern women, chose to run her own business, and "unsexed herself" by being "good with figures" (she could add!).

Needless to say, I knew I'd be difficult reader to impress simply because, well because. Because I'm difficult and not a huge fan of modern fiction. I loved the concept of revisiting Mitchell's antebellum depiction of the South and making it more realistic, I loved the idea of Scarlett having a half-sister, it was one of those books that in theory should have been great. But it wasn't. Somehow it fell flat for me. Partially it was just the style (it was a journal), partially it was the voice. The writer was just too aware of the story she was telling, as if she knew as much as we do about the failures of Reconstruction and about the events leading up to the Civil Rights movement. It was fun to spot the references to events in the original, but that was about the most pleasure I got out of reading The Wind Done Gone.