arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge

Well, I just wasted $1.50 of my money and 2 hours of my life watching this 2002 Matrix-wannabe movie "Equilibrium".  I now know that just because a movie has Christian Bale in it, does not ensure its quality.  It follows one of the sci-fi plots:

* in the post-apocalyptic future, the dictatorship-control-freak-government has decided that people would be better off without emotions or art.  So they declare all books and paintings contraband and all people who feel anything "sense-offenders", making everyone automatons, chained to the news announcements from their Paterfamilias and their curfews and authorizations.  The entire world is made of gray skyscrapers.  No one seems to eat.  Everyone wears black and walks around unsmiling.  Someone who was once on the side of the evil government decides to become a revolutionary after hearing classical music and brings down the government through, what else, violence. 

Once you've seen this once, you really have seen it a million times: "V for Vendetta", "1984", "The Matrix", "Minority Report", "Gattaca", Fahrenheit 451.  It's so easy to make stories like this.  The moral of the story is that art is wonderful, and control and the government are evil, and individuality is great, and it's fun to be a revolutionary, you get to kill lots of people.  So people make many stories like this.  I mean, at this point we'll be so concerned about this future that when the future turns out to be an invasion of human-eating bugs, everybody's going to be blindsided.

Here are some futuristic sci-fi movies whose futures do not revolve around the same tired bleak, sterile, "perfect but actually horrifically flawed" metropolis:

* "The Fifth Element" - the movie itself was trash, but at least there were colors, and there was dirt. 
* "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" - a great movie with mindblowing imagery, and here there are still masses of poor people who like to watch things get destroyed.
* "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" - again, a metropolis that doesn't forget that corporations still have to earn money
* "Akira" - see above.  This movie's post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo is very convincing - drugs, neon signs, political coups, tricked out bikes.
* "Tank Girl" - who the fuck understands or takes this movie seriously, but it takes place in a desert and involves tanks.

Because seriously.  A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, given a minute, will reproduce movies like "Equilibrium".  They may be loved by the young and impressionable who think they're being ground-breaking, but they say nothing new.  Dictatorships are bad.  Freedom is good.  Violence to revolt from one and earn the former.  And we wonder why, in spite of us always rooting for freedom fighters in movies like this, we continue to vote in politicians like Bush?  The military-industrial complex that is Hollywood laughs as it churns out these projects.

good weather for airstrikes

Just wanted to report on the history of everybody's favorite "I'll-be-quirky" detective... no, not Adrian Monk, Robert "Bobby" Goren.  Apparently, he "served in the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Germany and South Korea". 

Reminds me a little of Rod, that's all, whose father was in the Army and was stationed in South Korea, so he grows up there and becomes a cop in New Taegu before moving to New York.

Just wanted to say that.  Return to your duties.  And I'll return to my research.

you promised me poems (if you're gonna walk, might as well walk your way)

I. 

The M60 goes from Morningside Heights to LaGuardia Airport, and I took it this evening to meet Lindsey.  It's a much more relaxing and thoughtful experience to ride the bus without having to worry about people tripping over your luggage or making your flight on time.  A nice long bus ride, through Harlem, over the TriBoro bridge, through a little part of Queens.  And the stores are still open, so you can see them - the last time I took this trip it was five in the morning, and Harlem was still mostly asleep.  It's amazing how many stores advertise "human hair" in Harlem.  Riding the bus with me between the hours of seven and eight were a prim coiffed girl who I suspected was going to Harlem to meet her boyfriend or sugar daddy, a man who looked like Bob Marley, laughing and making large gestures that whoever he was talking to on his cellphone couldn't see, an austere Asian guy who looked like he might be a classical musician who took the bus for about three blocks, an entire family and their sleeping baby who took the bus to cross the bridge, and a throng of girls my age carrying stuffed garbage bags going to the same terminal as me, United. 

Looking out the window, I was briefly alarmed by what looked like baby clothes moving by themselves - they were really being pulled off their rack by a hook and pole - and listened to my new playlist, Walk the Line, occasionally "dreaming in digital" but finding myself more often thinking about my own life.  AC.  Next semester.  The future.  Airports I would go to in the future, and why, and where I would call home then.   I also happened to see a beggar in a wheelchair peddling down the middle of a street, parallel to the parked cars waiting at a stop light, stopping at their windows.  Begging at the windows, his eyes milky and bulging from his head.  I've never seen beggars moving car-to-car in the United States before.  It reminded me of Jakarta, where the beggars don't have wheelchairs - if they don't have legs, they fashion crutches from branches and hop from car to car.  Some of them cradle babies.  Some of them sell newspapers, but most don't have such goods.  The only economy they participate in is the economy of charity.  I was shocked to see car-to-car begging in New York.  But on the other hand, my mother knew someone who once described New York City as America's third world.

II.

Since I got there a whole hour early, I went through the airport - most of the shops, like Brookstone, and the Body Shop, closed - in search of something to occupy me.  I pondered coffee for a while, then decided I didn't really want to stay up till 4 again, and went to the Borders, where I meandered toward the fiction section and wondered where my name would go if I were a published author.  I scanned the names until I found my proper alphabetical place... in between Jimmy Buffett's A Salty Piece of Land, described as "an entertaining Caribbean romp", and John Burdett's Bangkok 8, described as "a thriller as exotic as it is enthralling".  Both are old white men writing about exotic locales, sometimes from the point of the view of the exotic itself.  While I didn't know what to make of Jimmy Buffett's seemingly conflict-less little paradise book, I should have been able to relate to Bangkok 8.  It was crime fiction, set in Bangkok, full of Thai idiosyncrasies, both linguistic and cultural, and practically reeks of seedy underworld that the West has made Bangkok famous for.  But there was just something about the romance between the Thai cop, half-G.I. and half-bar girl, and the "beautiful FBI Agent" from America that put me off.  I think from reading the last chapter that they end up together, but I can't be sure.  I have a sort of similar set-up in Here There Be Monsters, between Detective Siu Liang, one of the last honest God-fearing cops in Haikou City, and Nike, the smartmouth female journalist.  Of course, it doesn't work, because it never could, and Nike goes home to America with Rod at the end of the book.

So I wandered then to the Science Fiction section, bypassing Romance completely, and looked for where my name would be there.  Stuck in between Robert Buetner's Orphanage, a military sf about teenaged orphans with nothing to lose having to go conduct a counterstrike against the attacking aliens of Ganymede, and Rachel Caine's Windfall, an urban fantasy about a woman who's a Warden and has a djinn boyfriend, and has to prevent supernatural civil war, and all taking place in our modern world, or something.  I love how even in sf/f women still have to write something resembling chick lit.  Taking a step back, I wondered about the state of science fiction in general.  There's the manly military stuff, featuring ugly green aliens and Aryan soldiers facing off amid the stars, and there's the female witches in bondage, demons-and-vampires stuff, featuring, mainly, rippable bodices.  Even Anne Rice is getting into it with her latest book, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.  Then of course there's the standard stuff: warriors lunging, swords in air, poised on snarling predators; beneath the cover, ye olde English, unpronounceable names, and a lack of description or introspection abound.  R. A. Salvatore, who I know is at least moderately acclaimed, was found guilty in my eye of horrific name construction in his Promise of the Witch-King (a title I don't use, though I admit its resonance, because I feel it belongs to Tolkien):  Entreri and Jarlaxle.  God help me... where do I belong?  Am I marketable at all?

On the other hand, I do find a book, while perusing the Bestsellers in Paperback shelf, that intrigued me much and that I would have bought if it wasn't $17.  It's not fiction.  It's called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and is written by Jared Diamond, who also wrote the supposedly brilliant Guns, Germs, and Steel.  It explores "how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses".  Reminds me of the path I decide humans and Earth will take in the next 500 years, culminating in the events of Ilium Agonistes.  Now that one, I'd read.