. . . which I'm listening to right now as I review the layout of a book on WWII's Operation Market Garden.

After all, every good WWII story has a Brooklyn character.

But here's the thing: as much as I love the first thirteen tracks, I just can't stand the fourteenth track, the ponderous "Dime Store Mystery."

I can't think of another example where I so love every other song and so dislike just one cut on an album.

I'm sure someone has said this before, but I've just got to say it anyway:

This is the United States of America, dammit . . . the whole friggin' country is a free speech zone, from sea to shining sea.

The idea of some fenced-off area being called a "free speech zone," with no sense of irony, is such Kafkaesque Newspeak (if I may mix and match my nightmarish government references), so catastrophically un-American, that every single reporter who has to use the phrase on air should do a "Bullshit!" sneeze immediately afterward, or spontaneously vomit, preferably both.

I bring this up because right here in St. Paul we are crawling with Republicans ramping up to the RNC. There have been honest attempts, I think, to balance security with freedom of speech, and nothing so heinous yet as the freedom cages of other conventions, but I think there are still problems with unnecessary and unfair restrictions on various protestors.

*shakes fist, cranky old man style* Sons of bitches!

This wasn't my usual hygienist, and, mother of Morgoth, she went at me like Olivier at Hoffman. At one point I considered setting my testicles on fire to distract from the pain in my mouth. Eventually, after crying like a schoolgirl and confessing to being in Al-Qaeda, she let me out of the chair.

I had never considered stopping a cleaning before, but just as I was about to, she got past the worst of it, and I decided to tough it out. But, crap on a carpet, this was supposed to be a simple dental appointment, not extraordinary rendition.

As she was getting ready to schedule my next appointment, I immediately said, "And this will be with my regular hygienist?" It was hard not to add, "You know, the gentle one? That doesn't make me rue the day I was born?"

(Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.)

Just finished the latest posthumous J.R.R. Tolkien book brought to us under the careful editorial eye of his son Christopher (who is now older than J.R.R. was when he died in 1973).

I loved this book. It is a bleak story, a Greek tragedy in the First Age of Middle Earth. It has appeared in various versions and excerpts through the years in other books edited by Christopher, but here he has fairly seamlessly edited it together in as full a version as is possible.

Bleakness aside, I experienced a sense of transportation to Middle Earth that I did not think I would ever have again in book form. I don't know how much is left in J.R.R.'s papers, but I do hope that Christopher, and his own son Adam, acknowledged in Christopher's preface, continue the work they have been doing.

The other night Sandra and I were both having trouble sleeping. She got up and went to the bathroom, and when she came back we started talking, and then I woke up . . . I'd been dreaming. Then she came back from the bathroom and I told her I'd just dreamed that, and that was kind of weird, and then I was startled awake by one of the cats jumping up on the bed . . . I'd still been dreaming. I thought "Wow, that was weird, I had a dream within a dream." I realized Sandra must have left the door open when she came back from the bathroom. So I got up, put the cat out of the room, closed the door and came back to bed, and then I woke up . . . I'd still been dreaming. I was a bit disoriented, but I was awake for real this time.

I'd had a dream within a dream within a dream! All very realistic and entwined with the facts that we really were both having trouble sleeping, and Sandra really had gotten up and gone to the bathroom.

Freaky, man.

So lately I've felt like my internet access had really slowed down. I became suspicious that someone was using my wireless connection. Tonight I changed some passwords and some other security settings on my wireless base station, and suddenly web pages were loading superfast. I guess someone in the apartment building next door just loss their free internet! Sons of bitches!

Ed Peniche served in the 101st Airborne at Normandy, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge, and was wounded twice in battle. He was an important source for a book I'm editing, Hell's Highway: The True Story of the 101st Airborne Division During Operation Market Garden, September 1944. He came to the States from Mexico in 1940 on a student visa; when he came of age he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army. He served his adopted country bravely, and became a citizen after the war.

Here's a recent photo of Ed:



For some reason, after he was wounded for the second time, at the Battle of the Bulge, he didn't receive his Purple Heart. The picture is from the ceremony where he finally got that second Purple Heart, sixty-two years later.

( Full obituary of his amazing life behind the cut. )

Although exceedingly unlikely to the point of verging on the impossible, if anyone reading this drove past the Cleveland and Randolph bus stop in St. Paul this morning at 7:15 and saw a guy walking strangely then stopping, standing on one leg, and awkwardly reaching up the other leg of his pants, that was me getting a dryer sheet out of my jeans.

Discuss, using the incident as a metaphor for the existential search for happiness in a troubled world.

Stayed up way too late last night watching Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, a low budget 1967 film notable as being the first film by special effects legends Dennis Murren and Dave Allen. They got some help from professional matte artist Jim Danforth.

The film itself is a bit of a muddle, a glorified home movie, really, but the makers' love for movies and some impressive stop motion animation for the budget, all of $6,500, helps carry it through the stilted dialogue and amateur performances, including the first appearance of a twenty-five-year-old Frank Bonner, aka Herb Tarlek of WKRP in Cincinnati.

I spun it up on its Criterion Collection DVD, which it earned, I assume, because of its makers' future successes and the nostalgia a lot of movie makers of the right generation have for it. Are there any other Criterion DVDs that are such a guilty pleasure and would have made great episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000?

I have been writing most of the day and it has been fabulous. I took a break to walk up to my neighborhood Half Price Books, mostly to just get a little exercise, and there I scored DVDs of Arsenic and Old Lace and the restored 1925 The Lost World!

Cary Grant is his usual brilliant self, of course, and is surrounded by hilarious performances in this classic farce where almost every character is just a bit nuts.

The Lost World has an unfortunate character portrayed by a white guy in blackface, but otherwise it's great to see this over-eighty-years-old movie looking so good, and the dinosaurs scenes, although tame by today's standards, are astonishing for the time, and undeniably seminal in the presentation of prehistoric life on the silver screen.

On the walk home I was caught in a refreshing downpour, much needed here where we have been quite parched all summer. I was soaked by the time I got back. I took a picture out of our skylight while it was still coming down hard, which you can see ( behind the cut. )

I've never met Jerome Corsi, so I can't speak to the rumors that he keeps puppies in his basement which he kills in order to consume their raw flesh. Of course, I've never seen his basement, so who knows what he's hiding down there? I'm not saying he is hiding anything, I'm just asking questions.

I have not seen any videotape of him fornicating with nonconsenting baby harp seals, but until he proves he's never been to Nova Scotia, I'm not in a position to deny the possibility. And I have never heard him issue a blanket denial regarding intimacies with aquatic mammals.

To my knowledge, he has never released a full itinerary of where he was on 9/11 or the weeks leading up to it. I'm not saying that implies anything, I'm just making a statement that he has not been completely forthcoming or transparent about his whereabouts at that time.

There are those who have intimated he spits on nuns and mocks orphan amputees and sticks his genitalia into the cottage cheese at the Old Country Buffet salad bar, but I have never seen any of those incidents reported in the New York Times. Still, I think it's important to let people decide for themselves whether these claims are true.

Many are commenting that they have never seen Rielle Hunter and Corsi together in the same room; without drawing any inferences, I can honestly state that I also have never seen them at the same time. I really feel that he should address just how much of the eighties he spent cross-dressing and doing blow with Jay McInerney. I think we deserve to know.

It's almost here: the big-ass Led Zeppelin book for which I compiled the discography should start hitting stores in a couple weeks or so.

Are you ready to rock?



No, seriously . . . are you ready?

Dags, it's hard to get work done when email is down. You mean I have to get up and out of my cubicle and go talk to someone? Face to face? That shit ain't right.

Birthday Meme: Look up your birthday in Wikipedia. Pick 4 events, 3 births, 2 deaths, and 1 holiday.

September 1

Events:
1532 - Lady Anne Boleyn is made Marchioness of Pembroke by her fiancé, King Henry VIII of England.
1894 - Great Hinckley Fire: A forest fire in Hinckley, Minnesota, kills more than 400 people.
1902 - A Trip to the Moon, considered one of the first science fiction films, is released in France.
1979 - The American space probe Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000 km.

Births:
1875 - Edgar Rice Burroughs, American writer (d. 1950)
1920 - Richard Farnsworth, American actor (d. 2000)
1939 - Lily Tomlin, American actress and comedian

Deaths:
1969 - Drew Pearson, American newspaper columnist (b. 1897) [not related, that I know of]
1986 - Murray Hamilton, American actor (b. 1923) ["Fellows, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish... And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock." "Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, 'Huh? What?' You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."]

Holiday:
First day of Spring in Australia and New Zealand.

Had a very enjoyable musical weekend courtesy of friends' bands . . . ( pictures behind the cut. )

I spun up my just-purchased DVD of the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) last night. I've seen this movie many times, of course, but this was the first time on DVD in letterbox.

This movie just kicks ass, despite some flaws. The characters make some pretty big inferences in rather expositional dialogue, but the performances, for the most part, are so good that it's easy to forgive.

And there is the rather infamous gaffe near the end, when a major character becomes a pod person, although there appears to be no pod around for the change. It's easy to retcon, since it's established there's a big greenhouse of pods not that far away, and there could have been some stray pods about (and the pod person would have ditched the real body somewhere). But it really does seem like the entire production forgot that people just don't fall asleep and wake up changed, there has to be a pod person there to physically take the place of the deceased.

Nevertheless, classic creepy 1950s paranoia.

So at my bus stop this morning, on the bench, was a jar of creamy peanut butter and a can of Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup, both unopened.

I don't know. Someone's lunch, maybe?

Perhaps a MacGyver thing, you mix the two together and it's an explosive?

Bait set for humans by extraterrestrials?

But whatever you do, don't mix it up and get chunky peanut butter and creamy chicken noodle soup. That shit just ain't right.

Popped into my neighborhood Half Price Books and there was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) on DVD, which I've been meaning to get for a long time, and also a remainder of Tolkien's The Children of Hurin in hardcover, which I've needed since it came out.

Cool. And inexpensive.

Plus which . . . I've been enjoying the fruits of my newly plugged in wine fridge. Instead of drinking red wine so cold it has no flavor, or so warm it's cloying and sticky, or trying to wait until it warms up and the glass gets covered in condensation, I get to pour a glass at just the right temp without any rigmarole.

Cool. And tasty.

We saw The Dark Knight today. I was drawn in by the complex (perhaps a bit too complex) plot, entertained by Heath Ledger's stunning performance, savored the brief but fabulous turns by Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. I missed, however, the amount of screen time that Christian Bale had in the first one. Developing a large cast of characters ate up time, even in a long movie.

But a couple things really bugged me. ( Spoilers behind the cut . . . )

I spent much of yesterday cutting a small hole in the wall of my kitchen, drilling holes through floor joists in the basement, digging around in a junction box that already had too many wires in it, and drilling several holes up from the basement through the floor and into the aforementioned wall until I got one in just the right place, then feeding thirty feet of power cable through said holes until, lo and behold, I had a nice new outlet in my kitchen running off a circuit that only has one other outlet and some track lighting on it. (And none of the holes through the floor came up outside the wall, thankfully!)

All this so that I can aspire to new levels of wine geekitude. ( Pictures behind the cut. )

Yes, I finally have my little wine fridge up and running. I was pissing and moaning to infinitydog about my wine fridge at Shore Leave. I bought the thing last summer (or was it the summer before?), and it's been sitting around unused all this time because there was no convenient place to plug it in. Our house was built in 1912, and as various owners have updated the wiring over the years it became a muddled mess of some overloaded circuits, some underloaded, and a general lack of outlets where you need them.

All complicated by the instructions for the wine fridge specifically stating that it shouldn't share an outlet with a dishwasher, microwave, or refrigerator, pretty much ruling out every feasible outlet in our kitchen. Obviously, the kitchen needed another outlet. Which it now has.

The wine fridge holds six bottles lying down and a seventh upright. I have it set at 59 degrees, a commonly recommended serving temperature for zinfandel. I'm a red wine nut, so the fridge will always be stocked with zin, cab, shiraz, and various red blends.

Now I have to do something about that crappy shelf above the wine fridge, and the crappy paneling behind it. We are slowly tackling various projects in the kitchen to make it more pleasant. I also installed some new track lighting yesterday morning before digging into the outlet chore.