I got my hair cut today, now it's perfectly chin length. I treated myself and went to see my old stylist, Julian, at Van Michael's Salon. I don't generally go see Julian anymore because he's too expensive. However, he's the best stylist I know, and since I'd decided to cut my hair in a short and easy to maintain without appliances style, I figured I should go to someone good. I also had my eyebrows waxed when I was at the salon, eyebrows always look so much better/neater after waxing. The make-up artist admonished me for overplucking though and suggested I "not touch" my brows for a month. That seems like a simple enough request, but brow plucking is like an addiction. I never noticed my eyebrows until I first had them waxed when I was 25 or thereabouts, now I can't leave them alone. Clearly my life is too pampered if this is what I blog about. Oh well, my pampered days are numbered. We leave in exactly 20 days now.

Our entire office has been pushing people down stairs all day. Even though it's just a simulation, I'm not going to walk down the stairs in front of any of my cow orkers for the rest of the week.

OKAY, Here's my concession speech. I may have been a little too shrill/strident in the last post. And yes Mark, I acknowledge that there are some people I know and love, and am very closely related to, that drive SUV's (although honestly, it's an SUV-Lite) and many more who live in the suburbs. Forgive me, I was upset.

As promised, here are pictures from Halloween. I'm in the cheesy mustache, Marjorie has the blue hair. My favorites were our friends Brooke and Toby, who'll you'll find in the lower lefthand corner in all their glorious Royal Tanenbaum-ness.

I'm worried that anyone just wandering in here might get the wrong impression. They're likely to see a lot of liberal pontificating, and notice that we're leaving the country. Maybe from this they might think that we are leaving in protest, or are abandoning the country. That just isn't how it is. If we didn't care about this place, we wouldn't be upset about the way things are going. It will be nice to get some different perspective for a while. But we're not Baldwins.

"And the liberal, with the small L, cries in front of the TV......and wearing badges is not enough in days like these"
I'm utterly depressed. Seems Mark and I picked the right time to leave Georgia. It's so sad, and really Billy (Bragg) says it best "The majority by their silence shall pay for days like these". All the news stations here are shocked. All their polls predicted a solid victory for the democrats, especially Governor Roy Barnes. I guess people just didn't vote, excepting the conservative right-wing, SUV driving, suburb living, anti-choice, neo-fascists that live all around us, they clearly voted. The Republicans here didn't even run on a platform, they just showed a series of negative mudslinging democrat-attacking ads. I'm going to go and cry now.

I'm speechless. I am without speech. How could the people of this country want to give one party unilateral power? Especially that party? I fear for us. I really do. The Dems needed to find a message, one that people can rally behind. They had none. Of course it's too late now anyway. Now they're goners, and it'll be two years before anything can be rectified. Scary times.

Mark and I went to see Bowling for Columbine last night. The film really explores the gun/violence issue in the United States in a very insightful, balanced, and provocative manner. I left the theater with a renewed respect for Michael Moore. I really think it should be on everyone's "must-see" list.
Now I'm off to vote.

A couple of friends of mine are participating in NaNoWriMo, a project centered around inspiring people to write a first novel, by encouraging them to write 50,000 words during the month of November and reporting their progress. It's engrossing to watch, and inspiring. Maybe next year I'll try.

I know what my third book is going to be about. It's an idea too choice, too irresistible to pass up, but it's also too ambitious for a first try.

It's science fiction, like most of my ideas, but also political. The idea is that mankind has sent off a "generation ship" (as has been suggested in sci-fi numerous times as a way to reach the stars -- because it takes so long to get to any other star, you create a large spaceship that's self-supporting, and generations live and die on it before it reaches its destination). Just before it gets where it's going, there is an election on the ship, that's close, and hotly contested (the parallels to recent history should be obvious). When they arrive, they discover two planets orbiting the star that are habitable. So all the liberal supporters of the one candidate go to settle the one planet, and all the conservatives supporters of the other candidate go to settle the other.

That would just be how it starts. There's worlds of interesting and comical possibilities that can grow from that seed, methinks.

For no reason whatsoever, here are five movies that I think are grossly underrated. Are they my five favorites? Quite possibly, but there are some more popular ones that would probably squeak into the list. In no particular order:

Remains of the Day -- IMHO, Anthony Hopkins gives the best acting performance by anyone, ever. A study in repression.

Rushmore -- Certainly my favorite of the last few years. Quote: "I saved Latin. What did you ever do?"

Welcome to the Dollhouse -- If you were raised outside the US and are curious to see what it's like to be an adolescent here, there is no more accurate depiction. I know a lot of people who can't watch it because it's too accurate and brings up painful memories.

The Thin Red Line -- A deeply psychological and philosophical war movie. This one leaves me in a fog for days after viewing it.

Fearless -- A disturbed and disturbing tour de force. Jeff Bridges' best work. Rosie Perez is even tolerable.

While on the subject of movies, a pox on TBS for always hooking me in by showing those movies that you can watch over and over. The Shawschank Redemption, As Good As It Gets, The American President -- do they ever show anything else? And yet they hook me every time. If they were to add Groundhog Day and The Princess Bride I'd never be able to flip past that station. Not my favorite movies, but they suck you in...

And while on the subject of TV, I'm giddy that The Larry Sanders Show is now on nightly on Bravo. I find that show just fascinating to watch.

Some Halloween pictures, for your bemusement. Unfortunately, Marjorie was still getting ready while we were futzing with the digital camera. We'll take more pics tonight. But, here's a shot of me and one of me with my friends Mike and Matt. Listen all y'all this is sabotage!

Had dinner last night with friends Brooke and Toby at the always-amazing Fritti. I'm sad that with only 26 days left until we leave, we'll only get to eat there, like, 26 more times.

I kid. But as foodies, we have been keeping a list of places where we have to dine on our last week here. These include:

Sotto Sotto (Fritti's sister restaurant)

Fritti (of course)

Tortillas (for Marjorie)

Ma Li (for me, love the Pik King Pork)

Neuvo Laredo (there's always an hour wait, but for good reason)

Yacht Club (me again, love the beef brisket)

We never made it in to see Hot August Knights at the Clermont last night -- we were having too much fun across the street at the Local doing karaoke. Marjorie and I butchered a version of Wouldn't It Be Nice. It was a hoot though. My friend Matt took second in the costume contest, mostly because we shouted ourselves hoarse for him.

Non-sequitur of the night: "Paintball guns are an underused form of social commentary."

WORD OF THE DAY
The Merriam-Webster word of the day is
sanguineous • \san-GWIH-nee-uss\ • (adjective)
1 : bloodred
*2 : of, relating to, or involving bloodshed : bloodthirsty
3 : of, relating to, or containing blood

I'm glad to see they're getting into the Halloween spirit.

I'm working on a theory that the stages of human development can be mapped directly to how we dress for Halloween. To wit:

Infancy -- Your parents dress you up for Halloween.

Childhood -- You dress up. Halloween rules! Can I be Batman?

Adolescence -- You are too cool to dress up.

Early adulthood -- Hey, dressing up is fun. Why did I stop?

Adulthood -- Who has the time? Maybe if a friend is throwing a party.

Parenthood -- The kids are dressing up. Why not me?

Old age -- Get off my lawn, you mischievous little brats!

Okay, it's not a perfect theory.

Somewhere in America, a woman is sexually assaulted every 2 minutes
I learned yesterday that a friend of mine was recently drugged (GBH or rohypnol) and raped while on vacation in San Francisco. This is the third person close to me, that I know of, who has been raped. I spent last night tossing and turning filled with rage and impotence to do anything about this problem. Women are simply not safe in this country. Today I donated money to RAINN, The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. You too can donate at www.rainn.org.

My favorite new conspiracy theory, now that Mondale is leading in the polls: the Democrats killed Wellstone, so they could win the Senate seat with the sympathy vote. Maybe it was Clinton!

Moooooon river..... Had my first physical in four years this morning. Got a clean bill of health. If there's one thing this adventure is doing for us, it's getting us to take care of a lot of little things we should have been doing all along.

CHECKING OUT the Blogdex site Mark referred to, I came across this article that ponders "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" A question that has probably occurred to every cynical liberal in the country at this point. The article then remembers another recent liberal politician who died in a small plane crash "Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft, despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush." Kinda scary to think about kids, isn't it?

I would really love to make a website like Blogdex -- that is, a news/interesting link website based on polling hundreds of blogs -- that would have the following improvements:

It would be human-edited, so advertisers couldn't phony their way onto the list like often happens on Blogdex.

Each entry would have a paragraph of description, not just a few confusing words.

Separate links which point to essentially the same story would be collapsed into one place on the countdown.

A homespun graphic to accompany each entry would be nifty.

So would a comment feature/discussion board for each.

Sort of a cross between SlashDot and Blogdex. With all my current plans, though, this will probably fall into the bit bucket of conceived-but-never-realized projects. On the road to big money and internet fame, there's a lot of wreckage in the ravine...