"Still giddy from her recent incarceration, Ms. Ryder looks on as Mr. Sandler points out her receding career prospects." + 2

Over the course of 11 years, four television series, and a pair of TV movies, Dustin Diamond played just one character: Samuel "Screech" Powers, the comic relief on Saved By The Bell, as well as its precursor Good Morning, Miss Bliss and its two spin-off series, Saved By The Bell: The College Years and Saved By The Bell: The New Class. Surrounded by sexy troublemaker Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), sexy cheerleader Kelly (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen), sexy brain Jesse (Elizabeth Berkley), sexy jock Slater (Mario López), and sexy princess Lisa (Lark Voorhies), Diamond displayed an awkwardness that provided a welcome counterpoint.

The Onion interviews Dustin Diamond. There's nothing I can think of to add to that. There's so much great stuff in there ("Did you ever bump into Urkel at a party?" "When Showgirls opened ... did you run right out and see it?") ... it's pleasurably painful. + 5

Watching the State of the Union address.... Know what I'd like to see, aside from the usual mix of politicos, token visiting dignitaries, war widows and dudes in various states of traction? Circus animals. I'd like to see a couple of ostriches, maybe a recumbent lion, a grazing zebra or giraffe. They wouldn't even have to take center stage -- they would just be there for texture, arrayed among the assembled luminaries like plush throw pillows. And maybe GWB could wear a toga. And a ten-gallon hat.

Why does Donald Rumsfeld always look like he just sat down on a cream pie? + 11

How cool would it be if it snowed here? I know the reality would probably fall somewhere between Home Alone and Speed along the traffic mayhem spectrum, but it would be such picturesque traffic mayhem!

I miss ya, snow. Whatcha been up to lately? + 14

Here we go: "lame meme" equals 645,540,000,000. (In all fairness, this happens to be the rare cunning meme. Most memes, however, are indeed lame; in fact, they should just be called lames.) + 3

Critics and audiences (at least at the AMC Kabuki last night) really seem to be hating The Mothman Prophecies, but I rather enjoyed it. It's a lugubrious exercise, all atmospheric disorientation, but it works: dread-filled rather than dreadful; nimble despite its emotionally leaden material; positively seething with fatal import. And the pay-off, the Tacoma Narrows-esque climax, is a righteous humdinger, executed about as perfectly as anyone could hope. Plus, with respect to spectral scariness, I'm a stated fan of not seeing the titular menace rendered in broad CG strokes -- and director Mark Pellington and screenwriter Richard Hatem deserve credit for their restraint in this regard. Mothman got under my skin. From now on, whenever things get weird, I'm blaming "Indrid Cold."

At least Owen gets it. + 11

Officers arrived and forced open the door and saw Crisp dead on her couch. Larkins said Crisp was probably preparing her baby for bed when she passed away.

''She was leaned over on her left side with her baby's pajamas in her lap,'' he said.

Her son, Allen Shackleford, was found standing by the door of their apartment, shaking and clutching a bottle of tile cleaner. His soiled diaper was on the floor.

That just breaks my heart. + 1

Damn, I'm so out of it. A couple of early morning phone calls shaved an hour or two off my sleep and I just finished making them up. Now everything feels like goose down feathers and tastes like cane sugar. +

A friend of mine wants to do something special for his parents' twenty-fifth anniversary and is at a loss for ideas. He was thinking of sending them to Australia, but he's done that sort of thing in the past, and it's not like they don't travel around a lot on their own anyway.

My suggestions (matching grave plots; a Vietnamese orphan dipped in silver) have thus far been met with indifference. Any ideas? He wants something "ephemeral" and "not about giving them stuff, because they already have lots of stuff" -- but he also wants it to be apropos of the milestone.

Saturday's conundrum. I frankly don't understand why he didn't pounce on my orphan suggestion, but to each his own, I suppose. + 4

I dunno ... an anime Metropolis? Looks like Maxfield Parrish swallowed H.R. Giger and barfed up Speed Racer. But I guess I'd have to see it in motion before condemning it. +

Once again, I'm glad I use a Mac. + 6

Tonight, the role of John Walker Lindh will be played by Orlando Bloom. + 5

By the way, I love this. + 6

CNN is crap.

Certainly not an original observation, and it's a theme I've visited before -- but since I don't watch the network very often I was assaulted anew by this realization today during a bout of afternoon passivity. And I'm not even talking about the insidious editorializing, the sensationalism, the frequent factual errata -- those are yesterday's umbrages. I'm referring to the knock-off sitcom-patois anchor banter, the strangely bored reportage, the lame ad-libbing. Especially the lame ad-libbing.

There was this segment: about how McDonald's French subsidiary has replaced homicidal harlequin Ronald with Asterix the Gaul in an attempt to pander to the culturally hypersensitive locals; about how the locals predictably have their cravates in a knot over this; and the anchor kept inserting "le burger" into her monologue, to dubious grammatical effect, and it just wasn't necessary or funny or even sane. Lame.

Later, a rather Steve Carell-looking Jason Schwartzman was on, live, to plug the foreseeably execrable Slackers; and toward the end of a very disjointed interview he leaned toward his interrogator and began massaging her left shoulder. "You have a lot of tension," he intoned duskily. (Earlier, she had blurted out that he had a lot of chest hair.) The CNN liaison just looked really, really uncomfortable. A witty retort was not hers.

There was also a piece about the recent addition of Connie Chung to the CNN family, following her protracted and inglorious stints at all three major television networks. During a press conference she professed that it had always been her dream to work for an all-news channel, as if she used to keep a calendar of CNN on her wall during her primetime news magazine days, like Pablo the Penguin sitting in his little igloo, pining for sunnier climes.

(Actually, the way Chung confessed her "dream," all craven gravitas, reminded me of that scene from Welcome To the Dollhouse where the little girl comes to Heather Matarazzo's school to give a cautionary speech about talking to to strangers, as if engaging in such illicit conduct is akin to a drug addiction that will land you on Skid Row leashed to a pimp. "I am here to talk to you today about the dangers of talking to strangers, for I, Mary Ellen Moriarty, once talked to strangers, and that is how I became the innocent victim of a brutal kidnapping." You get the idea.)

In an act of devious misdirection, CNN sidebarred a few other additions to its roster. My peripheral vision just barely caught the names of MTV's Serena Altschul and The Mole's Anderson Cooper scrolling by as Connie crossed and uncrossed her legs on the dais. And let's not forget the harvesting of NYPD Blue's Andrea Thompson last year. I think these facts speak for themselves.

Pretty soon even the supposedly venerable likes of 60 Minutes and 20/20 will have run out of respectable senior citizens to prop up in front of the cameras, at which point they'll begin plundering the ranks of beauty pageant contestants, music VJs and television gameshow hosts in earnest. Bank on it. And here's a tip: I hear the huskies from Snow Dogs are looking to branch out. And isn't Matt LeBlanc out of a job this fall? + 6

In a parallel universe, everyone's talking about Monica Lewinsky's sleek new look when she stepped out with Camryn Manheim and Roseanne at a Jaclyn Smith Collection show. + 8

Black Hawk Down is so viscerally potent that its narrative sophistication comes almost as a surprise. Co-screenwriter Steve Zaillian's facility for depicting complex events lucidly is amply in evidence here -- particularly during the film's intense second act, which plays out as an extended action sequence. And while early attempts to distinguish the various soldier-protagonists from one another are (perhaps unavoidably) unsuccessful, rendering the miscellaneous carnage and privations that follow somewhat anonymous, the overall pointillistic impact of the film is unimpaired -- and even enhanced in some respects.

Working from a thematic structure that establishes the story in terms of jarring contrasts -- an enemy both hostile and pitiful; heroes cunning yet naive -- director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Slavomir Idziak present Mogadishu and its environs (actually Morocco, substituted for obvious reasons) as an alien landscape at once exotic and familiar -- unfurled in a series of images along the beautiful/terrible axis, all dust and deliquescence. And they don't miss a trick: the aerial photography is some of the best I've ever seen, full of parallax and depth of field, augmented by seamless digital effects and camera angles that call attention to the plane of the earth and the line of the horizon -- visuals as handsome as they are brutal.

Under Scott's eye, the eponymous helicopter is itself a character, an active participant in the proceedings -- animated, alive, furious, flailing. As mentioned earlier, the soldiers don't fare quite so well, however -- although I suppose the depersonalized nature of the armed forces doesn't leave much room for maneuverability in a story that's constrained by historical accuracy and frenetic pacing. Accordingly, most of the leads settle into traditional combat-movie archetypes: the Ruthlessly Efficient Mercenary; the Doomed Naif; the Young Father; the Goofball; the Stoic Cipher; and variations thereof, and in between. Also par for the course: Scott's occasional reliance on his brother's familiar "subtitle syntax" to move certain scenes along; and a depiction of "the skinnies" sometimes bordering on exploitation; but given my unfamiliarity with the facts behind the movie, and its overall and unqualified effectiveness, these are minor quibbles.

Black Hawk Down isn't for the faint of heart: it doesn't shy away from gore, although the violence feels essential rather than gratuitous (thanks in no small part to Scott's ability to temper the immediacy of the action with his remote aesthetic sensibility); and the fatalistic progression of the plot may seem relentless at times, but it makes for a worthwhile moviegoing experience, by turns energizing and exhausting -- and ultimately satisfying.

(Incidentally, I couldn't help but notice that Simon West got a producing credit on this movie. What this probably means is that Jerry Bruckheimer originally pimped the project out to him before bumping it up to "prestige" status and slipping it under Scott's door. Disaster averted. The mind reels.)

(Completely unrelated: waiting in line before the movie, I accidentally elbowed a Little Old Lady™ in the face. I just turned around suddenly and SMACK! I felt really bad about it because no one, especially Little Old Ladies™, should ever get elbowed in the face. For her part, the Little Old Lady™ was rather sweet about it -- and uninjured, to my relief -- insisting that it was her fault for not watching where she was going ... although I noticed she steered clear of me as we were herded into the theater. Raza: 1, Little Old Lady™: 0.) + 6

I've been stuck in the past today, reading old emails, remembering old thought-places. Words and people, Christmas lights and picture windows, everything reticulates through a fisheye lens, the margins of memory annotated with new smells and strange songs. It all begins to feel like someone else's story, a misplaced dream.

On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Raza Syed wrote:

Night falls early these days -- what, with the tricks white men, long dead, have played with clocks and diurnal variation.

I was walking back to my apartment and I looked up at the sky. The moon, half formed, was shrouded in a cold veil, and I wondered if that's what lured ancient explorers across uncharted waters -- that vision of some celestial enchantment, silver and remote, soft and inviolable. I know now why Diana was the lunar deity. No one writes about the moon like that anymore. What we see in it is a flash of white teeth, like a Cheshire cat's grin, thin and sharp.

R.
--
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

-Shakespeare

And much later:

10/13/2000 1:27:46 AM There are nights when the moon is just out of view, and I can wander the darkened house gleaning its pale glint off terrestrial objects: here, scattered by tree branches; there, refracted through window glass; and I can never quite find its center.

And so on. +

Reading this item via Slashdot about possible black-hole alternatives (cool term of the day: "unreal spacetime") got me thinking about supernovae. I have a question: now while our own sun is too small ever to become anything but a red giant, would it be possible by some artificial means to make it go supernova anyway? This is obviously sci-fi speculation, but I'm curious. Any ideas? + 7

"'Spider silk is a material science wonder,' Turner said. 'A self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 mph without breaking.'"

Well, when you put it that way, it doesn't seem so gross anymore. + 3

I love this article because it takes a triviality compounded by an inanity and treats it as a newsworthy item ... which it sort of is. Or as the author puts it: "It demands an explanation because this is America." + 1

I should keep better track of my favorite musicians. I was a fan of Davíd Garza's This Euphoria my sophomore year of college (courtesy the inclusion of "Slave" on the Great Expectations soundtrack), and just now I was wondering what had become of him. Turns out he released two albums in the interim. My bad.