Spose I should update.
Have an actual normal weekend, oddly enough. Pick up a load on monday and deliver in Buffalo on tuesday.
My back is sore as all hell. Don't know if it's from work or maybe from having fallen asleep in a bad position on the couch this afternoon.
Presently I'm feeling pretty close to picking up a new digital camera. One with a longer zoom, better macro and shorter shutter lag time than my present one. Kind of tossed up between the canon s3is and a fuji 7mp camera. the fuji is a lot cheaper but the zoom is slightly shorter. The fuji has a filter threaded front so I can use a polarizer and other filters on it. I know that I have way too much material shit but the digital camera I bought a couple summers ago is one of my most used posessions. I've been hoping all year to save for a new camera and I've been really frustrated up to now that trucking has never paid well enough for me to get one.
The Nana dustup made me feel pretty bad. I dislike censorship but Nana herself did not handle the situation gracefully. Albertine handled it much better. I didn't see the set myself or read any of her journals so I can only opine based on what other people have said, which is not a great thing to be doing.
A while ago the Valley Advocate, a local freebie paper here in western mass, changed sex advice columns from Ask Isadora to Savage Love, by columnist Dan Savage. Savage love was a lot more graphic and rougher edged than Ask Isadora. I don't know if I ever loved it but finally one day one of the letters started out "I am a black male who enjoys drinking the urine of other black males." And that was it for me, I did not get pleasure or amusement out of reading such things as that and I never read Savage Love ever again. Eventually savage love was dropped and ask Isadora came back. So I guess it's just the way things are, that not everyone has the same taste. It would be unworkable for SG to try to be to everyone's taste, and they have to have some standards as to what a reasonable number of people are going to like to see, simply so that they can have some membership so that the site can exist. It's not a great position to take from a philosophical standpoint, but philosophical absolutes aren't always viable in the material world.
Earlier this week I rented Gangs of New York. One of my favorite films; first movie I've rented in a long time. I wonder how well it did at the box office. Bill "the Butcher" Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the all time great screen villains, imho. I think it's a pretty important film, actually, it's about the rough time the irish immigrants had in the nineteenth century confronting "native" americans who did not want them here, and about realities of daily life and politics in NYC around the time of the civil war.
Noone ever seems to like movies or books that I recommend, so I don't recommend it. But it's the sort of movie that really changes the way I see the ordinary things around me, and how I see american history.
Well, I hope everybody's doing all right. Take care.
JBL
Have an actual normal weekend, oddly enough. Pick up a load on monday and deliver in Buffalo on tuesday.
My back is sore as all hell. Don't know if it's from work or maybe from having fallen asleep in a bad position on the couch this afternoon.
Presently I'm feeling pretty close to picking up a new digital camera. One with a longer zoom, better macro and shorter shutter lag time than my present one. Kind of tossed up between the canon s3is and a fuji 7mp camera. the fuji is a lot cheaper but the zoom is slightly shorter. The fuji has a filter threaded front so I can use a polarizer and other filters on it. I know that I have way too much material shit but the digital camera I bought a couple summers ago is one of my most used posessions. I've been hoping all year to save for a new camera and I've been really frustrated up to now that trucking has never paid well enough for me to get one.
The Nana dustup made me feel pretty bad. I dislike censorship but Nana herself did not handle the situation gracefully. Albertine handled it much better. I didn't see the set myself or read any of her journals so I can only opine based on what other people have said, which is not a great thing to be doing.
A while ago the Valley Advocate, a local freebie paper here in western mass, changed sex advice columns from Ask Isadora to Savage Love, by columnist Dan Savage. Savage love was a lot more graphic and rougher edged than Ask Isadora. I don't know if I ever loved it but finally one day one of the letters started out "I am a black male who enjoys drinking the urine of other black males." And that was it for me, I did not get pleasure or amusement out of reading such things as that and I never read Savage Love ever again. Eventually savage love was dropped and ask Isadora came back. So I guess it's just the way things are, that not everyone has the same taste. It would be unworkable for SG to try to be to everyone's taste, and they have to have some standards as to what a reasonable number of people are going to like to see, simply so that they can have some membership so that the site can exist. It's not a great position to take from a philosophical standpoint, but philosophical absolutes aren't always viable in the material world.
Earlier this week I rented Gangs of New York. One of my favorite films; first movie I've rented in a long time. I wonder how well it did at the box office. Bill "the Butcher" Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the all time great screen villains, imho. I think it's a pretty important film, actually, it's about the rough time the irish immigrants had in the nineteenth century confronting "native" americans who did not want them here, and about realities of daily life and politics in NYC around the time of the civil war.
Noone ever seems to like movies or books that I recommend, so I don't recommend it. But it's the sort of movie that really changes the way I see the ordinary things around me, and how I see american history.
Well, I hope everybody's doing all right. Take care.
JBL
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
Yeah, nazi child rapists aren't too cool. That was a real WTF moment.
I saw Gangs of New York in the theater. I thought in some ways it was really great. Probably the same things you liked. The showing of history of a place you normally don't ever see.
The history part I liked, other parts though I thought were kind of flawed. Mainly the Leonardo DiCaprio character didn't seem right. Normally I like Leo but in this role it didn't work.
Another movie that had lots of good historical value yet was essentially flawed was Cold Mountain. It did a pretty good job of showing that slice of history, yet was kind of flawed. They had too many british people playing the US southerners! The accents were *almost* entirely good.. but not quite, and that took away from it. I don't understand the casting decision on that.
I think both movies would have greatly benefited losing or minimizing the love story angle too. Using the typical hollywood love story just injects an element of cheese into it all.
Anyway, Gangs of New York got me interested into the history of NY. I got a PBS documentary about it on DVD.