As expressed to a colleague: always have an ulterior motive.

werkz advice: go see it.

After a bit of a hiatus, the reviews are back. First up is the new movie "Identity" starring several people from John Cusack to Amanda Peet to Ray Liotta. The all star cast has been setup to die, unfortunately, in a slasher flick glossed over as a thriller. The twists of the movie are well done, and by the end you'll admit that the ride was worth it and made sense. One tiny note: don't bring your kids. Easily eclipsing my viewing of Blade II, some idiotic parent decided to bring a year-old kid to this movie. Bad idea.

I bought a new mouse for my computer yesterday. I popped it out of its box a few minutes ago and hooked it up to my computer here in the 'werkz. Instant improvement. The old one's ball had grown too ancient for most tasks, inspiring a schizophrenic seizure across the screen, abusive slapping producing more tears instead of the desired response. Combined with a newly washed 3m mousing surface and life once again seems both smooth and under control.

If only reality operated in the same manner.

The illusion of control sits behind it all. Mixed between a bad Nicole Kidman line, Newtonian physics and too many late night matrix viewings lies the empirical fantasy of perfect prediction, of a clock operating without ever missing a beat, of particules and waves being separate objects, of a guiding hand. The next step always was not merely to submit to the hand, but to control it. Free will may have been a contradiction in this realm, but it reigned nonetheless, for whomever could predict the future could rightly say they controlled it.

The finer grains of sand slip through.

Like the new mouse, I remember being a kid and wanting to be able to draw straight lines as they really were. My lack of fine motor control skills, of rendering depth properly, of failing to sketch what sat in my head silently the way I knew I should gnawed at me. A ruler, a computer, an autocad program. All exist to augment the pitiful lack of control humans have. My letters now reflect a drafting class, each one a sad attempt at the enforced perfection reached so many years ago. Each one a sad relic of a distant past. That's how it starts, of course, with small elements first. Crawl before walking, running before flight. Man could see the birds but only dream. Now the birds look up at lights in the sky they can't comprehend were placed there by the ones below them.

It's a poor substitute, to be sure. Yes, my new mouse has made writing and moving around the computer desktop much easier. But it isn't earning me gold, enhancing my 401k, attracting women or spontaneously generating parties. It simply makes life somewhat easier, much like the music being piped into my subcconscious as I type away. Our souls are not corpses, the notes tell me. Music is a far better substitute. A few notes, a haunting melody, a great bass line, a perfect guitar hook and sunlight penetrates shadows, a traffic jam turns golden and a moonlit night becomes spellbinding.

So what if I haven't found a new housemate yet. In time, everything resolves itself. More tao than empirical belief, yes, but I've done a bit of entropy theory and in the end, things do resolve themselves, even if it is pure chaos. For now, I've got my health, my house and social opportunities for the week. Reality has always been sweet and there's no reason to expect things will go south now. After all, that'd make a poor plot line for the movie, right? I haven't even picked out an appropriate soundtrack yet...though I think it'll be various artists. Few single people have the ability to weave a truly perfect song score. Now I've changed my mind, for the great ones are normally from one mind. You've got to roll the dice to win. Just ask God and Einstein.

Time to get back in control.

One of the problems of living in the dredwerkz is that, overall, it's very cool. So cool, in fact, that one is often tempted to think others who've never seen must realize its inherent coolness. This, sadly, is not the case. And so when I advertised that a room would be opening up in the aforementioned social mecca, I thought naively that there would be a flood of applicants willing to shoulder the rather high costs in order to reside in one of the most interesting places around. To date, this has not been the case. One person so far has expressed interest. She seems like she'd be a great housemate, but for some reason (perhaps I'm not the best salesman) Brad felt she wasn't interested. Go figure. Now I'm back at square one.

Wow. A tough morning, all things considered.

First off, the pitch to replace Helena with a new housemate isn't going so well. Or, more obtusely, there's only been one bright spot and said spot might not be illuminating after all.

Second, this town is too small sometimes.

I'll digress later.

Nice.

My new computer is fast enough to have outlook, a big msc console, six different websites open in phoenix/firebird, outlook newsreader, gaim, windows media player (with a nice new visualization and bjork playing) and still have enough memory to setup my exchange 2000 admin console simultaneously. It's got 250 megs of memory that haven't even been used yet and the cpu is only hitting 50% with all this going on.

Sweet.

Okay, back to "work".

So now, with my new computer, I just setup gaim which allows me to IM people over IRC, AOL & MSN all at the same time. Very cool. Plus, it divides people up by their service so the MSN people look all the same and the AOL people all look the same. It's very cool. So stick it to AOL and MS and go get it!

No, it's not another Santorum piece. Instead, check out this brief piece over at The New Republic. How long until some distinguished Dem statesman (hmm...George Mitchell, anyone?) gets up and blasts the Pentagon for failing to ink in all the important details about a post-Saddam future for Iraq? And hell, unlike Newt, George actually has some prestige and logic to put on the line.

As Atrios notes wryly today, Santorum actually said that ALL consensual sex shouldn't fall under any notion of privacy, gay or otherwise. That's going too far, even for Rick. Because now he's actually saying that even heterosexual people, like y.t., shouldn't be allowed to have consensual sex just because the Supreme Court says so, or it provides a "moral equivalency" to incest, bigamy and adultery.

Step back a second. If I have sex with someone I might as well commit incest, bigamy or adultery? Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's crazy talk. Read the article above, slowly. Then wince when Santorum also claims that this same attitude is responsible for Catholic priest abuse of young men and women. This guy is starting to scare me. Seriously.

I thought I had blogged about this, but I hadn't! If you only read one web news article today, read this one by Dana Milbank. Perhaps Rick "Creepy" Santorum needs to worry less about the slippery slope in the bedroom and more about the slippery slope of government secrecy.

And, yes, if you read the last paragraph of the above article it reveals some rather unsettling facts about the Santorum family. The thought is just too graphic for me to contemplate for any sort of time. I'm always surprised that idiotic parents bring young children to violent movies but despite being at the other end of the spectrum, I can't condone actions like that. No child should have to witness that.

First off, an answer to the earlier post on peeps. The answer is right here. Evidently there's a huge peeps subculture, divided into two sides by those who eat them stale and those who eat them fresh. Go figure.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Senator Santorum is taking some flak from gay groups because of his statement linking homosexuality to adultery and incest. It's a "slippery slope" according to him. Wow. That borders on a Lott transgression. So who among the Dem's calls him out? None other than Howard Dean. Go Dean!

Now if only people would focus on Dean's real assets, namely, his ability to balance the budget without giving huge tax cuts, instead of the overblown attention on his war stance and civil union stance, he'd have a legit shot to win. I guess the peeps divisions echo real divisions as well...although I'm not sure if the Dems or the GOP prefers stale Peeps.