I watched the WWE Royal Rumble on Sunday night. For those unfamiliar with it, World Wrestling Entertainment televises slapstick-ish choreographed fighting matches between large men in spandex costumes with silly theme names like "The Undertaker" and "Nature Boy". The Royal Rumble is an endurance match where 30 wrestlers enter the ring, one every 2 minutes or so, and the last person left inside the ring at the end wins. Wrestler No. 13's theme was "Arab power", his name was Muhammed Hussan (or something close to that) and he wore a kafyieh. The roughly eight wrestlers that were still in ring when he entered all immediately ganged up and kicked the living hell out him in a tight neo-Nazi like circle bash.

Also, check out this editorial from Maureen Dowd (NY Times - registration required) about the use of sex and menstrual blood to toture prisoners at the Guantanamo detention center.

Sometimes I could just cry.

I woke up this morning to find the city (well, OK at least Del Mar and La Jolla) buried under a coating of yellow pollen. My car, normally white, has golden filligree all over, and certain bits of sidewalk and corners of entryways are buried under the sulfur-colored mess. Around work there are some rough slate-like paving stones, and they've come out looking like they were dry-brushed with sandstone. Somebody told me that this is from the pine trees, and I assume that they mean the Torrey pines, since I've lived around large concentrations of other sorts of pine most of my life and never experienced anything like this.

Cleaned my apartment yesterday, first time in about six or seven weeks. It took about five hours, and included activites such as repotting a plant that needed it and finding the source of that odor that's been bothering me (it was the trash can, not the contents of the bag; something must have leaked ages ago). Whopee.

I celebrated by going to see the film Kinsey. I can't believe it took me so long to get around to it, but I'm very glad I did. I laughed out loud and cried a little -- signs of a good film. The story is very interesting and the main characters' performances good to very good. At first the film seems to be promoting the swinger ethic, but then a well done scene where the reprecussions show up brings you up short. However, I thought the bit at the end where Kinsey "affirms" his attachment to his wife in spite of the sexual shennanigans was heavy handed and bothersome. Worth the price of admission just to see how they create a family resemblance between John Lithgow and Liam Neeson.

I hadn't meant this blog to be a review rag, but that's the only really interesting stuff to write about in my life, unless you'd rather hear how the skin on my forehead is dry and flaky again, a sure sign that I'm overstressed.

So on that note, let me say that last night I went to a concert at NSI, which happens to be my place of employment. They periodically give us free tickets for employees when they haven't sold out, which is a Good Thing since since I might not have overcome the inertia to go otherwise, and I'd have been culturally poorer for not having seen Gustavo Romero and Massimo Somenzi playing these amazing Mozart Sonatas while sharing the same piano. While I am not a classical music geek (IANACMG?), I do have a fairly broad exposure, but somehow I've never been to a four hand recital before, and there is something beautiful and contemplative about that kind of performance, especially in such an intimate setting as our small concert hall, with two such accomplished performers. Two men sharing such a narrow space and perform an act as much as a piece of music is more fun than classical music is generally acknowledged to be. After receiving a standing ovation at the end of the program, they played an extra two Sonata fragments, and things relaxed considerably so that even proper old ladies were slouching in their chairs and tapping their feet.

If anyone reads this in the next 10 days and is in the San Diego area (yeah right) they are performing another concert on Jan 31st with a different set of 4-hand sonatas.

See Hotel Rwanda. Although watching a film about a hotel manager at a four star resort who manages to save more than 1000 people from the genocide that the West allowed to happen through shameful inaction, may sound like a "good for me, but tastes bad" experience, it is actually a beautiful drama with many high points and a warm humor that startles you out of some otherwise dreadful moments. It belongs to the class of films that you think about and revisit in your head for hours and even days afterwards. Just see it.

It occurs to me that I'd been meaning to keep a blog for a while now, but I can't really be asked to set up a proper one.

This space will do --- my needs are pretty modest and I don't care too much about bells and whistles.

Today's time wasting uncovered a utility called Patchburn which may come in handy for me later, so I'm just noting it down here to remind myself. My iBook is the last model that shipped with a CD rather than a DVD, something I didn't realize when I bought it (dumb dumb dumb not reading properly dumb). There's an extra external DVD burner around work that I can borrow, but iDVD in OS X refuses to recognize it. This bit of software is supposed to remedy the problem.