mailto:r@highindustrial.com







raza syed
is twenty-four
he lives in s.f.

previously
june
july
august
september
october

heard
travis
garbage
harvey danger
emiliana torrini
remy zero
nina gordon
archive
the living end
swordfish
j. ralph
clubland
vast
poe
electrasy

read
george orwell
sun tzu
michael cunningham
brian aldiss
eric schlosser
alan lightman
ben bova
sarah vowell
edwin a. abbott
arthur c. clarke
william gibson
gregory benford
alan deutschman
kim masters
jorge luis borges
jane mendelsohn
walter murch
alex garland
joan didion

saw
spy game
heist
the one
smoke
monsters, inc.
training day
scary movie
donnie darko
from hell
traffic
down to you
drive me crazy
bandits
zoolander
the gift
the musketeer
apocalypse now redux
ghosts of mars
rat race
american pie 2
the others
the deep end
america's sweethearts
you can count on me
rush hour 2
original sin
planet of the apes
state and main
best in show
jurassic park 3
the score
the dish
legally blonde
final fantasy
kiss of the dragon
scary movie 2
requiem for a dream
a.i.
swordfish
tomb raider
atlantis
moulin rouge
shrek

moving along
appleturns
awol
bizstone
bluishorange
boboroshi
darkhorizons
evilmaryellen
fidius
gangbang
ghostinthemachine
justinhankins
killoggs
kottke
linesandsplines
metafilter
moby
never
onion
plastic
quantumslip
sixfoot6
slashdot
toastandtea
underachievers
urban75
wholelottanothing
wockerjabby

hack the planet
badastronomy
nologo
smokinggun
snopes
tolerance

     


Something Tom said the other day got me thinking about the various faces highindustrial has presented to the world. Join me on a little stroll down memory lane.

February 2000 was my first layout. It's pretty lame, but I'm fond of it nevertheless, if only because it was my neophyte pass at maintaining a bona fide sovereign domain. I didn't even know anything about CSS. Guh.

March 2000 is all gray. Not much else distinguishes it. I still didn't know jack about CSS.

It appears no one ever really liked my (still CSS-free) April 2000 layout. I thought it had a cheesy Ocean Pacific '88 feel. Fun. Or not fun.

May 2000 got a lot of attention and people seemed to respond really positively to it. It was functional -- and I finally implemented CSS! It's the first layout I was legitimately comfortable with, although it bothered me that it doesn't fill the frame across multiple monitor resolutions.

July 2000 was a breather. The deadly, deadly hand up top was extracted from a Corbis stock photo of a Colombian drug dealer cutting lines of cocaine. I actually considered leaving the marching powder in the design, but it wouldn't really have made much sense, so it was airbrushed out.

September 2000 is my favorite. It just is. It's the one design that makes my visual cortex hum whenever I see it. I don't even know if a lot of people liked it -- I just know I liked it. A lot. It has a storytelling feel. And just to be a bastard, I stripped out all the archiving and linking code.

December 2000 was not long for this world. It was an attempt to evolve from the previous design while working in some new elements around a not-completely-derivative motif. Since I put the site on hiatus about two weeks into this layout, I never did end up giving it much thought.

June 2001 was a quickie comeback design. It's amber. That's about it. It's not ugly, but it's not particularly functional either.

Which brings us to September 2001 onwards. Like methadone to a heroin addict, the periodically updated image at the top feeds my need for change without forcing me to jump through overhaul hoops every several weeks. The layout fills the frame and has room for growth. I've been tooling around with a few changes you probably won't see till January, but nothing front-end majeure. Citius, Altius, Fortius.

11/30/2001 04:59:27 PM 0 comments

CERTAIN GROWN-UPS I KNOW HAVE AN UNFORTUNATE HABIT OF TYPING THEIR EMAILS IN ALL CAPS, LIKE THEY THINK THEY'RE SENDING A TELEGRAM OR SOMETHING. THAT'S MUCH, MUCH WORSE THAN no capitalization AT ALL.
11/29/2001 05:40:26 PM 0 comments

You know, I once did an all-Lego-people* video production for Mr. Mazza's eighth-grade American Government class. We were studying the War Between the States; the class was divided into groups, and each group had to present a short video inspired by our history lessons. The quality and level of interpretation varied wildly: I remember a clutch of desultory girls who cast themselves as desultory Union brides waiting for their menfolk to come home from the Front. It was 90210-1861.

My group presented Burnside, Hooker, McClelland and Meade: Four Union Generals and the Courage, the Triumph and the LUST of the Civil War. It was a twenty-three-minute Lego epic replete with stirring reenactments of various battles (staged on location on our billiard table) ... and sex scenes. Yes, sex scenes. Lots and lots of Lego bump-and-grind. The drama centered around the aptly named General Hooker's erotic entanglements with one Lola Lambada, the madame of a celebrated whorehouse and a surrogate for the audience. The war was seen through her come-hither eyes. She even had a nude scene. And an S&M dungeon.

We got an A-. The desultory girls got a B-. Poetic license equals poetic justice.

11/28/2001 07:21:00 PM 0 comments

I didn't know Chicago's John Hancock Center contains residential space. That's awesome. Really awesome.
11/26/2001 01:10:24 AM 0 comments

I couldn't have said it better myself. Scooby Doo indeed.
11/25/2001 05:46:30 AM 0 comments

I had a funny dream. I dreamt I was at the Jackson and Hyde convenience store, chatting up its Friendly Old Chinese Proprietor™, attempting to extract some cash from its Somewhat Extortionist ATM™ when I accidentally inserted an Italian hoagie into the appliance's card reader. The Friendly Old Chinese Proprietor™ continued to prattle obliviously while I nodded and smiled, not-so-surreptitiously struggling to extricate my hoagie from the now protesting cash machine. The kiosk hissed, gagged and generally slobbered audibly, in Roger Rabbit fashion, becoming animatronic, like one of those old cartoon phones with the receiver that moves like a mouth. I managed to wrench my sandwich from its awkward embolism just as I woke up....

"Identify yourself, please." Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice, and he wondered why that was. But you could be sure they'd worked it out: probably it kept people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine. But Rydell knew that you didn't want to do that anyway, because the suckers would pepper-spray you. They were plastered with notices to that effect too, although he doubted anyone ever actually read them. What the notices didn't say, and Lucky Dragon wasn't telling, was that if you tried seriously to dick with one, drive a crowbar into the money slot, say, the thing would mist you and itself down with water and then electrify itself. (p.89)

11/23/2001 06:33:41 PM 0 comments

This holiday season, give the gift of Ghetto.
11/21/2001 11:45:28 AM 0 comments

So I've been thinking about this twenty-five million dollar bounty.

I hope an Afghan refugee scores it. And I don't mean some sylvan, absinthe-eyed National Geographic Pulitzer-pictorial pin-up; I mean a proper, stinking, medievally disheveled billygoat-gruff thug, someone who'd make Mahir Cagri look like Joey Fatone (...okay, not really a stretch).

And I hope they (Powell? Rice? Bush? Rumsfeld? Bader Ginsburg?) pay the dude on the White House lawn. I hope they hand him one of those big-ass fake cardboard checks. I hope said big-ass fake cardboard check is flanked by a couple of big-haired fake-breasted bottle-blonde showgirls. (I'd settle for Jenna and Barbara in matching Wonder Woman costumes, Benny Hill-style.)

I want a marching band -- John Philip Sousa! I want poodles jumping through flaming hoops. I want orphans juggling shrinkwrapped copies of antitrust settlement payola. I want a cream-pie fight. I want an a cappella chorus of "American Woman" led by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, two-part harmony courtesy of the Senate and House of Representatives. I want Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon to perform an excerpt from The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man. (I'd settle for The Vagina Monologues.) I want complementary George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machines for all the attendees -- and passes to a taping of Hollywood Squares, preferably on a day none of the Baldwin brothers is available.

And I want Greta Van Susteren and Carson Daly to emcee the whole thing. Just because -- just because it's possible. It's time to kick the tires on this whole freedom-of-expression/good-taste thing. Let's see just how far we can take it. Now that our generation has had its Pearl Harbor, it's time for a little VJ Day action. I'll bring the Smirnoff Ice, you bring the chips.

11/21/2001 01:37:34 AM 0 comments

Gobble gobble!
11/20/2001 10:13:19 AM 0 comments

This page is an eyesore. And do we really need four blinking All New! AOL 7.0! Better than Ever!!! 1000 Hours Free! Broadband Content! Instant Messaging! Improved E-mail! Click Here! banners along the bottom? Yes we do.
11/20/2001 02:16:32 AM 0 comments

I wonder if the early universe played host to any sort of sentient life. Given what (admittedly little) we know about biological and planetary timelines, I would hazard a guess hope that it did. There's something poetic about that, in an Ozymandias way -- entire histories unfurling, fanning out, atomizing across unimaginable distances and prohibitive environmental gradients, obliterated effortlessly by supernovae and dark matter and quantum singularities and the great unknown. A goodly percentage of the observable universe is already dead by the time it reaches us. Or perhaps Wordsworth said it best: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy." He meant something else, of course, but it almost doesn't matter.

A massive star, a small planet, a young universe; maybe even a carbon-based boy and a carbon-based girl. Forgotten stories repeating themselves forever, each iteration in a new language, set in a new space and time, mutually unknown but under the same stars. "Once upon a time" or "now," is there really a difference?

11/20/2001 01:52:46 AM 0 comments

My baby's got the holiday blues: a faulty inverter, apparently; so it's off to the workshop. Hopefully I'll have it back early next week, factoring in the inevitable Thanksgiving crush. Grrr.

In the meantime, thank heaven for IMAP, PocketDrives and back-up 'Books. No disruptions here, no sir.

11/19/2001 03:54:44 PM 0 comments

I'm not particularly afraid of heights, and I've even skydived without incident, but I think this endeavor would scare me senseless. I mean, jesus....
11/19/2001 11:26:45 AM 0 comments

Confession: I watched a little bit, which was about all my pain threshold could accommodate. Mrs. Garrett in a sari: painful. Tootie as a sassy talkshow host: painful. Blair as a brittle Upper Westside socialite: kinda hot, actually -- she's aged well.

But my soul cracked when Mindy Cohn's big ol' Oliver Platt/pot roast face filled the screen. Ten minutes in, I was down for the count, convulsing furiously for the clicker and a rerun of Election on FX. I think I suffer from astigmatism now.

(Incidentally, notice how I referred to all the Facts herd by their character names, save Mindy Cohn. It's that kind of inscrutable subtlety, un certain je ne sais quoi, if you will, that makes this site so special, and keeps you coming back like an abused spouse. You know I love you, don't you? I didn't mean to give you that black eye. I swear. Now where's my dinner, bi-atch?)

11/19/2001 12:08:11 AM 0 comments

From the current Economist: "conscious experience is a continuous retrospective reconstruction of events...." I like that.
11/18/2001 10:42:22 AM 0 comments

It's not raining tonight, but it may as well be, the fog is so thick. Across the bay, Oakland pisses jaundiced light all over the underbelly of the sky, suffusing the moisture with an industrial-furnace hue: "smoke" without fire.
11/16/2001 07:24:15 PM 0 comments

Fire engine lights have a way of looking festive on cold gray days in November. Comma.
11/16/2001 03:30:56 PM 0 comments

You know that song you've been hearing everywhere lately? Well, it really is "Everywhere." Yep.
11/16/2001 01:34:06 PM 0 comments

A thousand words.
11/16/2001 01:38:53 AM 0 comments

While portent of a Narnia film franchise (ple-e-ease give it to Terry Gilliam) is certainly glad tidings (ignoring momentarily the high likelihood of studio botchery), finding out that the Brizzi Brothers have indeed left Disney is fucking depressing. For those not in the know, the Brizzis were responsible for the "Firebird" sequence from Fantasia/2000 -- the single best piece of non-Pixar animation to emerge from the Mousetrap in the last decade. [via ghostinthemachine]
11/15/2001 01:53:04 PM 0 comments

Sometimes you see a picture and think: There. I want to be there. I mean, toys and a charged landscape -- that's almost perfect. I've got the toys thing down, sure, but the charged landscape part -- San Francisco is a great place and all, but New Zealand is another world altogether, simultaneously (semi? sorta?) civilized and spectacular; English-speaking, yet remote. Perfect.
11/15/2001 02:34:33 AM 0 comments

News items like this make me realize just how surreal and Onion-esque things have gotten.
11/15/2001 02:34:07 AM 0 comments

"Excellent! Nine out of ten answers were correct." (I got this one wrong.)
11/14/2001 12:34:17 AM 0 comments

Smallville is too much. Whenever Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk share the frame, with their complementary feline eyes, hyperattenuated cheekbones, rosebud mouths and vinyl complexions, it's like watching a pair of Ming vases or Egyptian idols: an aesthetic exercise, pretty but remote, not particularly romantic or sexy; comical, as if the two are privy to some genetic joke that they're too coy to share with the rest of us. Perverse.

The show itself is your typical WB hokum: supernatural elements lending an air of mock gravitas to otherwise pedestrian adolescent dilemmas, punctuated by the usual overstated corporate-synergy soundtrack — and with enough angst to keep second-string chick singers in the recording studio for years.

11/13/2001 11:36:39 PM 0 comments

In Fallen Taliban City, a Busy, Busy Barber

There's something almost, and perhaps intentionally, fable-like about this account of the Taliban's ejection from the Afghan city of Taliqan.

"'I've got nothing against beards, you know, and as you can see I've kept my mustache,' said Mr. Istat, a shopkeeper. 'The problem is when someone tells you that you have to have one. That's why I hated it.'"

I mean, that's almost Chekhov.

11/13/2001 05:30:22 PM 0 comments

More trailer fun: When did Miramax begin trafficking almost exclusively in Green Card-esque romantic dramedies? And why do I get the feeling both Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Aniston wiped their feet on this project before Meg Ryan made the ill-considered decision to dive headlong (or perhaps "head over heels" would be more appropriate romantic parlance) into it? I guess (the also Miramax-produced) Addicted to Love didn't effectively demoralize her.

Meanwhile, I Am Sam serves up a daring cinematic cocktail that's one part hot female attorney, one part precocious tot, and one part scenery-chewing-actor-playing-a-retarded-man. It's a shame they couldn't throw in a talking cat or pie-throwing monkey. For your amusement, I've isolated what I think is the best part of aforesaid trailer: Sean Penn's graceful pratfall. He's charming/bumbling retarded, see? -- not creepy, lock-up-your-toddlers retarded. A Benny Stulwicz in a Lennie Small world.

11/13/2001 12:20:31 PM 0 comments

Mad bad move, Natalie Imbruglia. Your plunder-proof booty is a turn-off.
11/13/2001 02:26:05 AM 0 comments

It's Scream meets Andromeda -- it's Jason X! It's crap! That's two posts in a row I've said "crap"!
11/12/2001 10:30:57 AM 0 comments

Okay. So far it seems like mechanical failure. Interesting world we live in, where we have to cross our fingers and hope for random incidences of crap because the specter of concerted terror looms large.

I hate waking up to bad news. What the world needs now is puppies. Lots of puppies.

11/12/2001 09:26:51 AM 0 comments

It's been raining again -- all weekend. I like rain "in theory" -- i.e., in the idealized province occupied by rolling greenery, babbling brooks, majestic sequoias and assorted other aether-scenery of the mind; but in practice, rain just seems to re-animate the desiccated filth of the city. Everything smears together -- bums, neon, filmy puddles -- like Blade Runner, only tadpole-terrible rather than deco-delightful, and not nearly so cool. And umbrellas -- umbrellas are a pain, an awkward extension of self, a parody of personal space, a black bloom.

I don't have a rain slick. I don't wear galoshes.

11/12/2001 02:34:32 AM 0 comments

We need big science.
11/11/2001 03:49:20 AM 0 comments

What does Smirnoff Ice taste like, anyway? Zima? Hard lemonade? A coconut cream pie? Naked supermodels? "Winter"?
11/10/2001 03:37:56 PM 0 comments

In the wee hours of the morning -- around 3:25 -- I was awakened by the low, insistent peal of church bells. They would ring twice in succession, pause for about thirty seconds, then repeat. This went on for forty minutes. At first I thought it must have been Grace Cathedral, which is situated about three blocks from where I live, but the chimes were emitting from the wrong and opposite direction. Occasionally their intensity seemed to diminish, recalling a grandfather clock marking the hour. At other times they would echo ominously, almost in mimicry of that doppler sound trains only ever seem to make in the middle of the night. Sometimes their frequency would quicken.

Now I'm sure there's some completely pedestrian explanation for the sound, and church bells should probably fill me with pious fuzzies; but I'm telling you, I was creeped out. The whole thing gave off a witching hour/ waking the dead vibe, sort of Disney's Sleepy Hollow, cloud-hands-cupping-the-moon. Know what I mean? I half expected to see the Transamerica Building's Vegas Luxor-light pulsing in time to the chimes. Devilish.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like, in what is now San Francisco, when this region was settled by missionaries over two hundred years ago. The Bay in all its manifest and powerful geography, absent its modern techno-cultural filigree -- foggy, dark, torch-lit, star-scattered, unknown. Powerful and humbling and fascinating and horrifying. I've gotten a sense of that primal context, that Mesopotamian-mud smallness of self, on certain Mediterranean islands, in the deep watches of the night: a faint necklace of electric light adorning the darkest coves and inlets; the blackest ocean, its great volume both mysterious and obvious. Something to believe in, like the sky.

11/9/2001 11:17:24 AM 0 comments

Sometimes people are too animated and I just want to say: chill the fuck out, you're giving-me-the-creeps. Just. Like. That. The kind of statement that ends with one person taking a drag off a cigarette and blowing smoke in the other person's face. Except I don't smoke.

Occasionally, people are thick and slow, and I just skip off them like a shiny penny.

Deadpan, dudgeon, yin, yang.

11/9/2001 01:49:40 AM 0 comments

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great show.
11/8/2001 10:44:02 PM 0 comments

There's something poetic -- or at least rhetorical -- about being "slapped" with a flower by an anonymous red-haired woman in a crowd. Would that everyone lodged their protests thus.
11/8/2001 05:19:15 AM 0 comments

Earlier tonight, a friend made me* sit through an entire episode of Temptation Island 2 (or Ti2, as it was lamely abbreviated at one point). Having never witnessed the first iteration, I can say one thing: I was definitely unprepared for this level of temptation awfulness. I mean, the unsavory whiff of emotional porn, the generally tawdry proceedings -- those I expected. What took me by surprise was how poorly constructed this show is. Its television promos, set to the Karl Orff-ish strains of "O Verona" from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, hint at sexy betrayal of practically Biblical proportions -- opera, burlesque -- graven images, bestial orgies, defiled beach-front property. The reality: a clearly suicidal host who was sweating so profusely that he kept changing his shirt; contestants who apparently didn't get that call-back from Blind Date; tempters and temptresses (please don't make me explain the mechanics of the show) who did not so much look "hot" as they did diseased; and high school video club production values that make Survivor look like Requiem for a Dream by comparison -- we're talking really slack camerawork, horribly awkward pauses in narration, all sorts of rookie transgressions. I don't think I have the stamina for another helping.
11/8/2001 01:09:09 AM 0 comments

Listening to Mazzy Star always leaves me with phantom memories of summers that never were -- daydream déjà vu.
11/7/2001 03:50:32 AM 0 comments

P.J. O'Rourke is a dude? I think I inadvertently had him confused with P.J. Harvey. My (very) bad. And I have no idea who P.J. Soles is, save that she is neither Harvey nor O'Rourke.
11/7/2001 01:29:25 AM 0 comments

"Acoustic kitty" is definitely the coolest phrase I've heard today. Those government spooks are total cut-ups. And speaking of cut-up spooks, check this out. Scary, scary.

I'm not even sure what to make of these. I bet Condoleezza Rice never thought she'd have her own trading card.

11/6/2001 11:56:29 AM 0 comments

"If you start warning [the public] about everything you hear, you become part of the terror, as opposed to part of the solution."
11/5/2001 05:26:15 PM 0 comments

The One is Mortal Kombat meets Timecop meets Soldier -- and if that sounds like multiplying fractions, you're right, because Jet Li's latest and worst is all about diminishing returns, the nadir of several unfortunate trends: Revolution Studios' increasingly sophomoric output; our desperate consumption of cheap Matrix knock-offs pending the next installment of the real deal; Carla Gugino's inexorable crawl toward B-moviedom. The plot is impoverished, the acting is perfunctory, and even the receding appeal of Li's chop-sockey schtick is absent, or at least obscured by a glaucomatous array of bluescreening and pixilation. Trevor Rabin's score is the coup de grâce, however -- a torturous blend of stabbing syncopation and Eighties hair-band references so completely intrusive and oppressive as to make one pine for the relative charms of Limp Bizkit's noise pollution of contribution to Mission: Impossible 2.

I'm almost inclined to grade this turd on a curve simply because no one from the cast of American Pie was involved in it ... but not quite: it's so bad that I have no choice but to slap it with an F. Slap.

11/5/2001 01:01:56 AM 0 comments

At the grocery store earlier tonight, I accidentally knocked a two-liter bottle of Citrus Cooler Gatorade to the floor, whereupon it blew its top in canon-esque fashion, gushing electrolytes. It looked like someone had taken a big piss in the middle of the beverage aisle.

Also, Monsters, Inc. is great, so fucking great. (I'll arm wrestle -- or at least verbally spar with -- anyone who begs to differ.) See it in a packed theater -- see it twice. That's all. G'night.

11/4/2001 03:25:38 AM 0 comments

The caption on this photo should read "Three dudes who will never again be allowed to come within a fifty-foot radius of Gwyneth Paltrow, by court order." And nice Velvet Elvis thing ya got goin' there, Tony Robbins.
11/3/2001 02:09:11 PM 0 comments

Heading out this morning I forgot to wear my wristwatch.

The city has felt timeless today -- platinum blond sunlight, asphalt convection, a cool breeze. It could be late spring for all I know.

Zoning and dozing in the back of a cab a couple of hours ago, I retrograded to Dr. Zinn's eighth grade Physical Science class, circa 1992; to that anxious forty-five minute interval just before lunch, staring out at the soccer fields, listening to the ordinating pitch pitch pitch of the sprinklers, the drone of the groundskeeper's tractor mower; breathing in the green scent of grass clippings through a window screen. Being acutely aware of Sarah Van Bergen sitting at the next lab table. In memory she still looks like a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Mariel Hemingway, and nothing like a little girl, which is what she was.

It's been an easy, breezy day, the kind of day where everything smells a little bit like soap for no particular reason, and you don't question it. In a way, it's all familiar but middle-distant, recalling something I did a few years back. I find myself lingering, pausing to take it all in, wanting to remember everything as it is -- just so: as it should be.

11/2/2001 02:32:58 PM 0 comments

Kid Actor Reportedly To Be Paid $300,000 To Dub Potter Actor's Voice:
A 13-year-old London schoolboy is to receive $300,000 for dubbing the voice of Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor playing the title role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in two scenes of the movie, the London Sun reported today (Thursday). According to the newspaper, Joe Sowerbutts (sic!) got the job when Radcliffe's voice began to crack before the end of filming. The report indicated Sowerbutts' classmates heard about the vocal problem and suggested their friend because he sounded like Radcliffe.
Ah, the joys of puberty. In related news, while Chris Columbus' stewardship all but guarantees a plenitude of cinematic crap, the latest Harry Potter trailer at least looks "okay" -- obviously accomplished digital effects, if not much else. Regardless, I have zero expectations.

While I'm at it, would someone like to explain the popularity of J.K. Rowling's novels to me? I mean, when I was little -- not so long ago -- I was all about C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and I guess I can grasp the appeal of this more recent franchise to today's tots; but I keep seeing adults devouring them -- during lunch breaks, at the library and (this may be a key to the puzzle) on airplanes. Huh? I read a chapter of one, once, somewhere, at some point ... it wasn't amateurish or inferior, but it wasn't all that fresh either. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not enthusiastically averse enough to H. Potter, Inc., to even knock it much; it just doesn't register with me at all -- so what am I missing?

(PS. Dear foreign and/or domestic militia terrorists: please don't knock anything down in the morning. Or ever. Thanks. Oreos and porn for everyone!)

11/2/2001 01:57:46 AM 0 comments

Rats. [Update: nicked this link offa Loren -- "Justice Department officials told NBC the threat wasn't 'credible'" -- seems more reasonable. I think somebody's just messing with us. Well, I hope so anyway. Ever since this whole business started I haven't been able to give Mariah Carey's psychological recovery its proper due. She's people too.]
11/1/2001 03:51:36 PM 0 comments

Jimmy Neutron looks dreadful -- like the animated Max Keeble America isn't clamoring for. Ice Age, on the other hand, looks promising ... assuming it doesn't turn out to be another Dinosaur.
11/1/2001 02:38:38 AM 0 comments

A thought that reticulates.

From time to time I get the distinct impression that my friends and I are still children. People in their early twenties, mid-twenties, are big kids as far as I'm concerned, considering this is the twenty-first century and people don't die in their forties anymore. Well not here, not much, anyway.

I get this impression most of all when there's a group of us, out in the world somewhere, doing something. I sometimes think, We're all somebody's children. Of course, everyone is somebody's child, but what I'm really thinking about is how our nuclear orbits haven't degraded so much yet, how our parents are still active participants in our lives. It makes me feel like a little sailboat -- a toy sailboat -- a phalanx of toy sailboats -- negotiating a pond on a blustery day, set adrift in the world, but only just a little, and always under a protective gaze.

We play our games, laugh and tell stories; and even the rudiments of adult conduct -- bills, errands, bedtimes -- feel like a lark. It never quite feels real -- the night sky is still tinsel stars affixed to a dark blanket; the moon is still a flashlight. It's all make-believe. Or perhaps I-can't-quite-believe.

I was thinking about that yesterday, for no particular reason, or maybe because Halloween and children and costumes and parents sparked some memory cascade.

In any case, it's November. Novembris. Novem.

11/1/2001 12:17:21 AM 0 comments


© 2001 raza syed, s.f. style; blah blah blah blogger™, while it lasts.