Citation Needed

Hey yo.

So, I haven't been up to a lot in the last week or so. I've been re-reading James Elroy's novel American Tabloid, which is a lot easier to keep straight on the second run through. The book is one of those historical novels that mixes real people with fictional characters (like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, or the Harry Potter books). The book is the first installment of a trilogy, and I read on the Wikipedia that the third book is supposed to come out this year.

I've watched a few movies- The Good Shepherd, which desperately wants to be The Godfather of spy movies, and eventually fails at that ambition. I watched Million Dollar Baby, which is very good, and I'm not sure why I didn't see back when it came out. And I watched The Age Of Innocence, which is a Scorsese film that is rated PG, which is weird at an existential level. Whenever I see a Scorsese film without excessive violence or vulgarity, I feel slightly confused, even when the movie is very good (i.e. After Hours or The Aviator or his Bob Dylan documentary). So now I have The Departed playing in the background, just to bring order back to the universe, violent-Scorsese-movie wise.

I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen (still) and trying to decide if he's my second or third favorite Canadian songwriter of all time (He's behind Neil Young and maybe Joni Mitchell.) I have a list of favorite Canadians, and only one person on the list is fictional. That has to be considered a compliment to the Maple Leaf State, right.

I've been meaning to write more, but keep forgetting that I'm meaning to, and then I spend time regretting when I should be using it to try and write more. It's a vicious cycle, really.

I've been thinking about how weird the internet really is. Last week, on the Deadspin sports blog, there was a link to a website called Garfield minus Garfield. I found it to be really funny, and quite possibly brilliant, so I broke my own rule about forwarding internet memes to friends of mine. Then, a few days later, a completely different website I was reading had a link to the Garfield site. And then, in the issue of Entertainment Weekly that came today (I subscribed because I like the magazine, but I really like only paying ten bucks a year for the magazine. The looming death of the printed word is something of a bummer, but you can't beat the bargains that it entails.) there was another reference to the website. There are probably already websites and/or blogs mocking the Garfield minus Garfield, or doing the same thing with other comic strips that aren't funny. The internet is really weird.

If you don't hear from me in the next few months, it'll mean either a)my enemies have caught up with me and it us up to any poor souls who accidentally click on this blog to avenge my deaths (unlikely) or b) I'm picking up a copy of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl tomorrow, and I won't be able to extricate myself from its clutches for a while. I actually went to Circuit City to pre-order the game, which is something I hadn't done since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 about 15 years ago. I pre-ordered it mainly because Circuit City said they would give me a ten dollar gift card if I paid them in advance, which struck me as a reasonable offer, and because it's entirely possible that this game will be as hard to come across as Wiis for a week or two, and I've been waiting for this game for a long time, because I'm a nerd and I get enjoyment from beating up Pokemons with Link that I would rather not examine closely.