Three day weekend

I'm taking care of the animals while my parents sort things out at our other house. Our dog has an infected cut on her foot and an ear infection so I have this entire regimen for treating her twice a day. Poor thing hates being left alone; she insists on being wherever I am, even waiting outside the bathroom door while I shower. She takes it hard when my parents are gone. She does wake me up in the middle of the night, however, and that gets old quickly. Then this morning my mother's alarm went off at 5:45. Half-asleep, fumbling with the buttons on that huge-ass thing she calls a clock radio I thought I'd managed to shut it off but it started up again a few minutes later and...well I think I might need to buy her a new one.

Work is tiring and a little bewildering. I still have no idea how much money they're willing to spend on resources. They want databases and journals but anything you buy for institutional use is hellishly expensive. Even a subscription for a once every two months journal from LWW through Ovid costs $1088 for full onsite access. If you pay $288 you can onsite access for one IP address. One! You may as well buy an individual subscription for the print edition if only one person can use it at a time. There are far fewer options for small institutions and I'm going to have to convince my bosses that free resources can be just as good. Make use of everything you can. Many journal sites allow you to view a number of free articles and Medscape and Pubmed are free to use. Netlibrary seems to be reasonably priced but they already have ebrary. I'm in contact with EBSCO about a couple of their databases so we'll see how that pans out. I'm just a little tired of talking to these people when I know we probably don't have the money to afford what they're offering.

I still need a new computer and the IT guys haven't fixed the printer for the students. I can use the printer fine which means I can print out call numbers but I have no tape. I've requested book tape so we'll see if I get that in a timely manner. I am also apparently in charge of faculty development so I've been looking for good books on curriculum and syllabus creation and planning seminars on using internet resources like ERIC. I want to find out more about the student population to judge what would be best useful for them.

Less reading, more movie watching. I finished Tropic of Cancer. It was amusing and I liked the writing though it wasn't always stellar. This was an early book though so maybe it improves. I'll have to read Tropic of Capricorn. The Tao te Ching was excellent; I'll have to read a more literal translation though for comparison purposes. Kismet was entertaining. There were cultural things that I didn't quite get. The Hessian, Frankfurter, Berliner stuff was confusing. Or maybe Frankfurters are Hessians? To Wikipedia! Okay, yes they are. And wouldn't you know it but some of my ancestors were from Hesse, Darmstadt to be exact.. Course they were Jewish. Anyway the tone of the book is noir-ish at times with its barely scrapping by private detective going after the bad guys to settle a personal matter. The writing is wry, sly, and friendly though sometimes the sentences are a little convoluted. The main character, Kemal Kayankaya, goes after a protection racket when he and a buddy end up killing two of its members while helping a local businessman. He wants to know what's going on and why these two people had to die. He gets beat up a lot and blunders around investigating (seriously, I think most of it was less detective work and more being really lucky) until he reaches the conclusion. It was a decent book and Kemal was an interesting character. He was blunt, a little unethical, and grumpy but a decent guy for the most part.

I'm reading The Fire Engine that Disappeared and it's not as good as the first few books in the series but it's still a good read.

I watched District B13, a French action film written by the director of The Fifth Element and wow, this is an awesome movie. It's short and not too complicated; the fight scenes are highly watchable and the two main characters are pretty hot. This is not a movie to spend much time thinking about; it's pure entertainment. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance however, is a movie to think about. Done by the director of Thirst it tells a story about desperation and revenge and ultimately shows how the drive for payback can lead to utter annihilation. The actions of the characters just seem to send everything spiraling into a black void of nothingness. Again, it could have used editing. Long shots of people sitting around eating or staring into space can set the mood or show the mindset of a character but you need to distinguish between the necessary shots and the self-indulgent ones. Anyway, good movie and Oldboy is next.

I also watched a French zombie movie called The Horde because, well, French zombie movie. It was eh. The characters were mostly 2-d and the action was so-so. The plot was only half told. The one thing I found odd was when the African guy was killing the zombie who killed his brother. He started screaming about how he was Nigerian. I wasn't quite sure what his nationality had to do with anything. Maybe Nigerians have a reputation in France of being bad-ass? I don't know.

Remember, if you don't laugh at yourself, somebody else will do it for you

I just finished The Winter Queen. Holy fucking shit on a biscuit hell. So the ending was unexpected. That hard edge I said was running under the surface broke through at the end to rise off the page in an attempt to skewer the reader. It doesn't quite manage it because the romance is woefully underdeveloped but while that lessens the impact it doesn't entirely do away with it. It does make me want to get the next book out of the library to see what happens so well done, Akunin! Your ploy plot worked! It was a fun read, truly.

I finished watching a Korean vampire movie called Thirst. Woo the cinematography was quite stunning and the actors were impressive. A priest is infected with a vampire like virus when he volunteers as a test subject for a new vaccine. He tries to remain good in spite of his body's need for blood but finds it harder and harder as he also falls for and gets involved with an old friend's wife. Like Let the Right One in this movie gets back to vampire basics, showing them as parasites with an uncontrollable need. It could be disgusting at times and it really could have been edited down but there were a number of very intense and captivating scenes. I've got to check out some of this directors other stuff.

I'm also watching Antibodies, a German thriller. It's good although not great. The directing and acting are very nice but the story kind of meanders. Oh it has a specific purpose; the village cop wants to find out if the serial killer recently captured is the murderer of a local girl, but it sort of wanders away at points. It's also about this farmer/cop's own descent into darkness. The only problem I have is I don't understand where his problem is stemming from. Has he always had a dark side that just never came to his attention because there were no opportunities? Is the "big city" a corrupting influence? Is his own naivety working against him, leaving him unprepared to face and deal with real evil? I can understand that his eyes have been opened to new things and that the case has had an adverse effect on him. Plus the real killer is totally his son. I haven't even finished the movie yet and I can already tell you that. It's been obvious since the halfway point if not earlier. Well. I have like the way Michael (the cop) has dealt so far with the serial killer. He doesn't give much ground and only grudgingly. So it's a pretty decent movie.

Okay I just finished watching it. Okay, that was a nice twist. And hooray for the ending. The acting at the end was moving. My impressions would probably less disjointed if I actually watched movies through in one sitting but I get so antsy.

And I just finished watching Christian Bale in The Machinist. It was good at first and then it got really slow, and then it picked up and then it just became sort of disappointing. This guy hasn't slept in a year. Bale lost weight for the role and good God he looks unhealthy. He looks like a walking skeleton. And nobody attributes his abnormal behavior to this. Nor do I really understand the whole thing with the fish. Okay, maybe I do but it was very anticlimactic. The whole thing was. We start out watching him rolling a body into the water and it never delivers on that promise. Anyway, I suppose my response is, eh.