For those of you wondering why the change in my girlfriend's name, JL decided, last year, to pull rather a load of crap. I found out, for one thing, that her supposed rape story was nothing but a pile of warm crap (I've since heard from the guy she accused and he called complete bullshit on the story.) She decided to pull the old "break up" game and then followed that up by starting up about how I was supposedly so intimidating. Now if I was that intimidating, I doubt she'd have done what she did in the first place.

She pulled a couple other things and wanted to get started on a story of how I supposedly raped her too (now wait a minute. Isn't that just what she said about her X?) The entire thing was derailed though and she's pulled a disappearing act on just about everyone she knew. Joy, the lady I'm with now, is everything JL isn't. Honest, caring, kind, in fact, too many adjectives to list comfortably in one entry. I've spent three months with her in person so far, not all together unfortunately, and am looking forward to my next time with her in California. Unfortunately, so far, I haven't found a teleport button on my computer and I don't think they're standard issue, so I'm sort of stuck with buses and airplanes.

Thinking of either December or January as my next time down and hopefully by then everything that needs to be done around here will have been done, making it possible for me to see her without having to worry about what needs doing on the old home front.

Now, on to the reason I'm up so late when I've got a show to do tomorrow. The idiots next door are playing either their radio, their TV, or their computer at rather high volume and the sound is penetrating into this apartment. Seems like every time we lose a noisy idiotic neighbor around here, they immediately get replaced by another one. I guess it's a law around here. I'm hoping they shut up pretty soon so I can actually get a bit of sleep. I mean, being overly tired and Internet broadcasting don't exactly mix well.

Westworld.

Westworld (1973.)

I figured, since I haven't done this in a while, that I'd put up one of my movie reviews.


Okay, so I guess there are three things you can do to a western that will make me like it. To the previous “throw in a vampire” and “throw in some dinosaurs,” add “turn it into a science fiction movie, and make the black-hat gunslinger a killer robot.” What we have here is another Michael Crichton movie from the 70’s, and while Westworld doesn’t offer anything close to the intellectual integrity of The Andromeda Strain, it still serves to illustrate just how far its writer/director has slipped in the intervening 30 years. What is especially remarkable, in the context of Crichton’s career, is how close Westworld comes to looking like the superior demo version of Jurassic Park. In both cases, a bunch of “geniuses” who aren’t quite as smart as they think they are attempt to create the ultimate amusement park by exploiting hyper-advanced technology, only to have the fruits of that technology turn on them and their customers with catastrophic results. Both films are also compromised by a premise that seems brilliant at first glance, but begins crumbling immediately under close examination, but Westworld, unlike Jurassic Park, has more than one card in its hand as a movie of ideas, with the result that the film as a whole still comes across as smart even after its potentially damning central stupidity has been exposed. And of the greatest importance, Westworld has more genuine dramatic kick to it than any other Crichton picture I’ve seen.

Those who saw the trailers were seduced with the line, “Westworld, the ultimate resort. Where nothing, nothing— can possibly go wrong,” but in point of fact, Westworld is but one element of the most ambitious scheme in the history of the modern amusement park. For $1000 per day (adjust that figure upward by a factor of ten or so for the equivalent in today’s dollars), jaded vacationers may lose themselves in a totally immersive and totally authentic historical adventure, in a setting of their choice. Westworld offers the two-fisted ruggedness of an 1880’s frontier town; Medievalworld recreates the romance and danger of 13th-century Europe; and Romanworld promises “a lusty treat for the senses in the decadence of the imperial Roman Empire.” (I still haven’t figured out whether “imperial Roman Empire” is a screw-up or a joke; either way, it’s exactly what you’d expect from an early-70’s promotional copywriter.) The real draw, however, is that in all three venues, the Delos theme park is peopled by androids nearly indistinguishable from real human beings, enabling the customers to act out their most antisocial forbidden fantasies. You want to rob a bank? Break out of prison? Mistreat a slave? Kill a man in a chivalrous duel? Well you can do all that and more at Delos. The resort is located in what appears to be the middle of the great nowhere that is North America’s southwestern desert, far away from the settings of everyday life, and we may assume that as with Las Vegas, what happens at Delos stays at Delos. The three separate zones of this marvel of high-tech hedonism are all coordinated from an underground control station, where a staff led by the guy who used to be the voice of Mighty Mouse (Alan Oppenheimer, who can also be seen as well as heard in Trancers 4: Jack of Swords and Trancers 5: Sudden Deth) keep tabs on the actions of all the robots and repair those that are wrecked during the course of each day’s mayhem.

Among the latest crop of Delos customers, the ones in whose company we’ll be spending the most time are Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin, from The Amityville Horror and The Boston Strangler)— and since these guys have chosen Westworld as their vacation spot, I rather suspect that the phonetic similarity between “John Blane” and “John Wayne” is not accidental. Both men hail from Chicago, where Peter works as a lawyer, and where John must do something equally remunerative if he can afford to blow four or five grand on a long weekend out of town. This is actually Blane’s second trip to Westworld, and his motivation in bringing Martin along seems not unlike that of Lewis in leading his pals on that ill-advised canoeing trip in Deliverance, Martin’s too soft, and is in desperate need of some Manly Man action, especially after his recent divorce. And as it happens, the course of these men’s vacation holds a lot of remarkably close parallels with what happens in Deliverance. It starts off being all fun and games, with our heroes shooting down a menacing gunslinger (Yul Brynner, from The Ultimate Warrior), busting Martin out of jail, and carousing with Miss Carrie the mecha-madame (Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry) and her robot whores, but things turn unexpectedly deadly after some three days at the resort.

The customers don’t know this, but the robots of Delos have been malfunctioning with increasing regularity of late, and the malfunctions seem to be spreading almost like a virus. (Note that I’m pretty sure 1973 was well before the advent of computer viruses as we now know them.) The early malfunctions were minor, but more and more of them have been concerning the androids’ central directives, and the boss downstairs is starting to worry. Some schmuck (Blood Legacy’s Norman Bartold, in a bit-part somewhat more substantial than the one he had in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) staying in Medievalworld attempts to seduce one of the sexbots (Anne Randall, of Hell’s Bloody Devils and The Night Strangler), and gets slapped in the face when he won’t take no for an answer; needless to say, “no” isn’t even supposed to be in a sexbot’s vocabulary. Then Blane gets bitten by a mechanical rattlesnake, which was supposed to be programmed always to miss on its strikes. Finally, the Medievalworld schmuck has a showdown with the Black Knight (Michael Mikler), and winds up with a broadsword through his gut! That signals the onset of a full-scale robot revolt, and the control staff’s efforts to correct the problem result only in their becoming trapped underground behind airtight, electronically operated doors that won’t accept commands from the main computer either. The resort's supervisors, in increasing desperation, try to regain control by shutting down power to the entire park, but this traps them in the control rooms, unable to turn the power back on whilst the robots run amok on stored power (good call there.) Finally, Blane and Martin return from a sojourn in the desert outside of town to find Westworld seemingly empty of everyone save their old friend, the gunslinger. This time, they’re going to find out how robot reflexes really affect the outcome of a quick-draw contest.

When the Gunslinger challenges the two men to a showdown, Blane treats the confrontation as a typical amusement until the robot shoots and kills him (see, I told you something like that was going to happen.) Martin runs for his life as the robot implacably follows him (and if anyone thinks robots get tired, I guess they never learned the difference between a robot and a human being.)

Martin flees to the other areas of the park, but finds only a panicky fleeing technician, dead guests and damaged robots. He climbs down through a manhole to the underground control area, where the resort's technicians have suffocated since the ventilation shut down (now wait a minute. If Martin could get in that way, why couldn't the staff get out the same way?) As the Gunslinger stalks Martin through the corridors, he throws acid into its face and sets fire to it with a torch (now this guy somehow manages to find both acid and a torch whilst he's busting his ass trying to escape from a killer robot?) He also finds a woman chained up in the dungeon, but she turns out to be an android. Finally, the burned hulk of the Gunslinger attacks him one last time before succumbing to its damage. The film ends as Martin, apparently the sole human survivor, sits down on the dungeon steps in a state of near-exhaustion and shock, as the irony of Delos' slogan resonates: "Have we got a vacation for you!"

The main fault any reasonably thoughtful viewer is likely to find with Westworld is the thoroughgoing implausibility of the mechanics of Delos. Let us be charitable, and chalk the near-perfect simulacra of living human beings up to willing suspension of disbelief. That still leaves the problem of capital overhead, as the robots must cost millions of dollars each to construct, and many if not most of them will be ruined each day in gunfights, duels, and jousts, to say nothing of the inevitable routine breakdowns. The $1000-a-day price tag, meanwhile, places a very low cap on the number of customers which Delos can attract, with the result that a theme-park like this one simply could never be profitable. Then there’s the matter of safety. We are told that the pistols handed out to customers in Westworld are fitted with infrared sensors that disable the trigger mechanism when the gun is pointed at anything warmer than room temperature. That’s all well and good, but bullets do ricochet, and at close range, a .45-caliber shell is easily capable of passing completely through a human (or android) body— and will usually do so on a substantially different trajectory than that on which it entered. There’s no way to control for the surprisingly erratic behavior of a bullet in flight, and I can think of no safety mechanism at all to reduce the danger posed by a broadsword or a morning star whilst preserving their essential functionality. Finally, one might ask why the robots are apparently issued weapons without safety modifications— I mean, Yul Brynner never has trouble drawing down on a 98-degree target! Oh, and speaking of 98 degrees… To all appearances, Delos is located in Arizona or Utah or some such place; for most of the day through much of the year, the ambient air temperature ought to be at least that of the human body, making a mockery of any infrared-based failsafe system. I’d hate to see the resort’s insurance bills.

However, scoff-worthy though Delos may be in its nitty-gritty details, there is one thing about it that is disturbingly believable, and this is half of what makes Westworld work anyway. The appeal of such a resort, where the impulses to sex and violence may be freely indulged without consequences of any kind, is very easy to see, at least for a certain segment of the population. The people who keep paint-ball courses and shooting ranges and sparring gyms in business, the ones who make up the clientele for swingers’ clubs and bondage dungeons and even kinkier operations like Dick Drost’s Naked City— I’m thinking those who could afford to would line up around the block in the event that a resort like Delos became a reality. Westworld breaks down the customer demographics in a rather peculiar way (my guess is that Medievalworld would actually bring in the most women, while Westworld would be an almost exclusively male affair), but Crichton seems to have a pretty solid understanding of the movie’s most important sociological question: what would draw a man to Westworld? Especially when seen through the prism of the early 70’s, Westworld looks like the ultimate fantasy for men who fear that modernity means the end of masculinity, and because of that, it’s interesting that traditional machismo proves so totally unavailing when the robots go berserk.

The other half of Westworld’s salvation is those berserk robots, or more properly one berserk robot in particular. Even when we know he can’t do anything, Yul Brynner’s mechanical gunslinger is a frightening presence. Brynner had made scads of westerns when he was younger (he was almost 60 years old when Westworld was shot, although you’d never guess it from looking at him), and he appears to have been cast for the gunslinger’s part in a conscious effort to capitalize on that history. Even leaving aside the character’s telescopic infrared vision, low-amplitude hearing, and computerized reflexes, Brynner comes across here as quite possibly the baddest motherfucker ever to walk the Earth, and during his final-act pursuit of the last surviving tourist, he’s like a Wild West version of the Terminator. In fact, I’d be very surprised if Westworld had not been lurking somewhere in the back of James Cameron’s brain while The Terminator was shooting. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger eleven years later, Brynner has the implacable, unstoppable killing machine thing down pat, and he seems to do it with nothing more than a slight stiffening of the traditional western-movie bad guy swagger and a little help from a pair of unobtrusively creepy silver contact lenses. I, for one, would forget all about the spilled whiskey, and just find another seat on the other side of the saloon.

So many things to do. The next couple months are going to be, well, interesting, to say the least. Hoping to visit Joy once again around the holidays, probably spend January with her again. This year was the best birthday I've had in a while!

On other fronts, have two broadcasts a week on Internet radio and still looking for more stations. Hopefully I'll actually be gotten back to if I ask the management of one particular station again. That ought to get this idiot on Twitter positively fuming! LOL!

Well, posting on LJ for the first time in a while, and wouldn't you just know it, I had to get into a battle with LJ before I could even begin. Captchas, Captchas, and more Captchas (why the hell do we need Captchas anyway?) I mean, can't we just stop being paranoid about spammers when there are pop-under's out there that try to install malware on your computer so the creaters of said pop-under's can then bilk you out of money selling you programs that not only remove malware but install more so you'll have to keep buying updates for the damn programs?

My girlfriend's roommate had one such pop-under show up not once, but twice, once before a reboot, once immediately after said reboot. I've also had the things show up, but never twice in a row yet. Give it time though.

Onto happier things. I'm in California with my girlfriend and am having the greatest time I've ever had in my life, apart from the Captchas. Lol. Joy's so beautiful, so gentle, so nice, and we have so much in common. Today we visited a friend of hers in the hospital (this year must be goll-bladder removal year, as my roommate had hers removed in November.) I've gotten to meet a few of Joy's friends as well as her roommate, who's a cool person, a great cook, and a great friend too. Hopefully the good times will continue. Smiles.

Well, it appears that stupidity has invaded the Internet! No longer is it confined to Italian zombie movies, movies in which idiotic characters do an endless number of idiotic things while the world is falling apart around their ears, but now it's found a new place on Fundy Wacko Christian websites!

I recently was told about a site linked to a Christian group known as Right Branch Ministry. I took a look at the site to see what they were going on about and found a lot of things to talk about. The first thing I've got to say is, "Learn to spell before you start spouting a bunch of stupid shit on the net, even if it is only a Christian site. If you're wanting to convince people that what you're saying is true, it's a good idea to make sure your potential readers know what the hell you're even talking about.

First of all, the word you're looking for in what passes for the first sentence in the article on occultism is from, not form. I know that's beyond first grade, but seriously, if you're writing something you expect other people to read, you could at least make the attempt.

Now, onto the article itself. The writer of this piece of non-intellect claims that throughout her life, she had gone to fortune tellers and regularly had problems as a result of demonic activity taking place in her life. I thought this idiot was living in South America, not Amityville. From there, she went on to claim that the Harry Potter books were actually based on true accounts, that the spells actually work (if the spells in the harry potter books really work, why is it I never managed to clean up a spill by pointing a little stick at it and saying Skergefy?) that the books mentioned in the Harry Potter stories actually exist (hey, where can I get copies?) that Lord Vuldimort actually was running around together with a bunch of death Eaters, killing people, destroying bridges, wrecking perfectly good neighborhoods, and generally making an enormous pain in the ass of himself. Now come on, if all that shit was actually happening, why is it I never heard anything about it on the news?

It is also said that people are keeping owls as pets (why the hell don't they sell them in pet stores?) and that other various creatures such as Blast-ended Skroots could be real (Hey, give me one of those to give my noisy neighbor!) and that there are literally millions of wizards and witches working behind the scenes to hand us all over to Satan.
Along with playing the doccu-drama card, the author of the Harry Potter books also, according to this modern-day example of caveman-like stupidity, is involved in some sort of vast satanic plot to make sure all our kids sell their souls to Satan before the sun goes down. She also is said to never do interviews (if she doesn't do interviews, how is it that I've seen interview segments with her present on all the Harry Potter DVDs?) and that she is attempting to keep a bunch of secrecy going. Come on, if that's the case, why is it that she has been seen in public?

According to this asshole, our children will finish up demon possessed, our houses will finish up just like 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, and parents will themselves finish up with so many demons inn them that they'd make the possessed man who called himself Legion look like a trick or treater! I've read the Harry Potter books, all seven of them, and am not possessed yet. Why isn't my head spinning around? Why am I not shitting my pants uncontrollably? Why am I not speaking in reverse English? Why hasn't anyone been tossed out my apartment window with their heads turned around backwards? Why haven't any neighbors complained about furniture flying around the place, thumping against walls, floors, and ceilings? Why have there been no complaints concerning fowl odors coming from my place of residence? Why haven't I decided to make a few Horkruxes yet? Hmmmm. You think it may have something to do with the fact that this stupid fundy cunt is full of so much shit she squeaks going into a turn?

And that's just where the idiocy gets started! The idiots at Right Branch Ministry claim that everything that isn't of them, not God but them, is of the Devil, including the Roman Catholic church! Hmmmm. My roommate is Catholic and she's not possessed either. And as if that weren't enough, they claim that anything and everything will get you possessed. I didn't know it was that damn easy! If you listen to them, there are demons just waiting around every corner for someone to whistle and say, "Here, demon demon demon demon demon!" And I thought that type of stupidity only existed in the movies!

Now to deal with what these idiots said about the Catholic church. They claim that the Catholics worship Mary and claim that she herself is a god. wait a minute, I thought the female form of God was Goddess. Oh well, what can we expect from a bunch of idiots who made so many grammatical errors throughout the various articles that they would make a first grade English teacher's head explode in disbelief? They claim that the worship of idols always brings a curse on the worshiper (If Catholics are idol worshipers and are, according to these idiots' logic, under a curse, why haven't any of them suffered a sudden and unexpected case of demonic possession, a catastrophic explosion that destroyed their homes, and constant illnesses ending in painful unexplained death?) The Catholics, regardless of what these assholes at Wrong branch Ministry claim, do not worship Mary, they honor her as the Mother of Christ. As to the figures of the various saints, now. They're no more idols than the figures of Mary are. Never ever have I seen a cursed Catholic, but I've seen dozens, no, hundreds, no, thousands of cursed fundy wackos! If you're looking for people who have nothing going right in their lives, look no further. Never have I seen a satisfied fundy. Their lives have gone to shit, their marriages are usually right on the brink of total disintegration, their friendships are non-existent, their health sucks, their life expectancy is shorter than anyone else's, their weight is totally out of control, thanks to everything but eating being a sin, and they're prime candidates for massive heart attacks before they reach the age of 50! Now isn't that a curse?

And their usual response to all these things being pointed out is, "All things work together for good for those who love the Lord." Wait a minute, is it good that they're dying of illnesses that in some cases nobody else ever even heard of? Is it good that they're lives are totally and completely fucked up? Is it good that from among their ranks come child molesters, rapists, murderers, whoremasters, thieves, extortionists, and all manner of criminal filth? Is it good that they're working from a book that has been bastardized and edited so much that nobody apart from gifted linguists even knows what the original texts contained? I don't think so. They also, speaking of the book, work from an incomplete version. Six books from the Old Testament are missing, making the total of books they work from 66. Now let's take a look at a verse from their own bible. "Here is wisdom. Let him who hath understanding count the number of The beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666." Now if they were on the right track, would they allow such a number to define their so-called holy texts? Hmmmmm. Something's wrong here! Something quite definitely stinks!

Let's now take a look at one of the warnings in their own Bible and put that together with what I said about books being missing. In what they call the book of Revelation, there's a warning concerning itself with adding to or taking away from the holy writings. isn't that exactly what King James had done when he made sure that at least 6 books were excised from the Old testament and God alone knows how many from the new? according to research I've done, there are at least 3 letters from Paul that are not included, and there are also a couple Gospels missing. Now there's a hell of a lot of taking away from going on! Looks like someone's gonna do a lot of plague suffering!

Now to the healing's, speaking in tongues, and other assorted junk these idiots call a church service. The speaking in tongues occurs in a lot of Pentecostal churches and is always linked, by them, to a prayer language given by god, as the humans, being wretched sinner sinners, don't have the intellect to know what to pray for, so the spirit (what spirit?) takes over and does the praying. I personally would never give myself over to something that speaks in another language for which I don't have a translation to do my praying for me. Who knows what they're praying for.

The healing by means of the "laying on of hands," now. There's so much fakery going on that it's difficult to say what's real and what isn't, but some have been proven true. My question is, who or what is really responsible? I'm led back to something said in the article concerning the worship of idols. The writer of said article said that the worshipers of idols finish up totally dependant on their idols and that they regularly carry out animal and human sacrifices to them (what animal and human sacrifices?) and that the idols place them under eternal bondage. These people who finish up healed end up totally dependant on their church. some of them even finish up getting rid of their Doctors, believing that all they have to do is go to church on Sunday, have some idiot who doesn't have a job during the week lay his or her hands on them, speak in some other language even they don't know, and pow! they're healed! And I've already pointed out the curse angle in such a situation.

Supernatural activity goes on in such places a lot, and a lot of it is totally not good. levitation, trances, cars being pushed by unseen forces, sound like a horror movie to you? Sure it does. Some of the same stuff happened in Children of the Corn and the Omen. And don't even get me started on horror movies. These idiots claim that the TV is a great way for demons to enter the house (watched any poltergeist, idiots?) and that horror movies will get you possessed (am I the only one who thinks these people should be immediately and permanently institutionalized?) and that anything that doesn't say "Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus" eighty million times in a single second is evil. Insanity alert!

I'm glad I don't have to read too much of this absolute stupidity to draw a conclusion. If I had to subject myself to too much of it, I'd be pounding my head off walls to try to make sense of it all. And the thing that really scares me is that these people could be extremely dangerous if they had a little intelligence informing them and their decisions. It's a good thing they're so stupid nobody but people who are stupider than they are themselves would even think of swallowing this long tub of warm crap!

Things I learned from right Branch Ministry:

1. Harry Potter actually exists and is going around England at this very moment doing magic and hiding his existence from all the Muggles out there.

2. Demons are constantly on the prowl looking for people to possess.

3. TV sets are full of demons.

4. Everyone who doesn't subscribe to Right Branch Ministry's beliefs is automatically demon possessed.

5. Speaking another language is the in thing, just as long as you don't have the slightest fucking clue what you're saying.

6. Having a harry Potter poster in your bedroom is an automatic one-way ticket to possession, the opening of the gates of Hell, and the emerging of the Anti Christ..

7. You can believe any way you want, just as long as you believe the way we want you to.

8. Idiocy is the in thing, especially if you're a member of our church.

9. Catholics carry out animal and human sacrifices.

10. Mary is a god. Not only that, she's a male.

11. Horror movies were invented by Satan thousands of years ago.

12. Bad things will happen to you if you don't believe the way we tell you to. We'll make sure of it!

13. Healing's are a regular part of life. Screw Doctors!

14. Owls are sold as pets.

15. The harry Potter spell books are real and can be bought in any store.

16. Parents can become possessed because of what their children are reading!

17. God punishes whole countries with famine and drout if they don't worship him.

18. September 11, 2001 was God's judgement on America, the nation that worships him the most!

Microsoft's at it again! In an attempt to make sure Windows users finish up with inferior software, they've finally made it so you absolutely have to get the new Windows Live Messenger in order to log into your Msn account. There are several ways in which they've done this.

First off, several months ago, they insured that the old version was screwing up people's machines. Some people called it the "Messenger Virus." When anti virus software was able to lick that particular problem, they started saying that everyone "had to" download and install the new version of Messenger, which is not blind accessible, for reasons I'll get into later, because the older versions would stop working on September 15 of this year. In other words, shortly after I got back from seeing my girlfriend.

Needless to say, September 15 came and went, and the old version of Messenger continued to function. Blind people, in particular, Jaws users, were still able to use Messenger. But the old version of Messenger stopped working in the early morning hours of November 8.

Now I understand security issues, if there actually were any, but for a Jaws user, the new Messenger being the only Messenger that works is bad news. why? because Jaws comes with a certain amount of scripts, weather you need them or not. What freedom scientific doesn't tell Jaws users is that the scripts are not automatically updated. With jaws 9 and 10, the two versions I have on my machine, there are no scripts for the new version of Messenger and no chance of getting any either. The only version of jaws scripted for the new Messenger is jaws 11, and unless you have $1500 to update your Jaws so you don't finish up with nothing but a 40 minute demo version, you're basically stuck with no scripts for the new Messenger.

Now there are programs, such as Miranda, that allow you to log onto multiple instant messaging clients, such as msN, but some of the features of Windows Live are not present in the program. in addition, the scripts for Miranda are extremely difficult to find.

It really makes me wonder if Microsoft is in league with Freedom scientific. It sure seems like it. After all, freedom Scientific is already making sure the National federation Of The Blind won't go screaming up their backs for robbing the blind by paying them off, so why not Microsoft too.

A new Messenger means, after all, that all Jaws users will now have to upgrade to a new version of jaws and shell out more money to register their Jaws, unless they've got a handy program crack. And then freedom Scientific wonders why people are cracking jaws! Hmmmm. Ya think it may have something to do with the fact that blind people, as a rule, don't have thousands of dollars just hanging around the house?

Oh, and something else I've discovered. The new Messenger shows emoticons at first, but stops after your first log in. God knows why. Also, a great many of the statuses present in the older versions of Messenger are not present in the new one. There's no more "in a call" status, there's no more "out to lunch" status, and there's no more "be right back" status. I guess Microsoft doesn't think people eat, make phone calls, or go out for a couple minutes. I guess they think every user of Messenger has no phone, starves themselves to death, and evacuates their homes permanently every day.

Hmmmmm. And then people wonder why people hate Microsoft!

I'm just glad they haven't made it necessary to upgrade to an inferior version of Outlook express yet. But even if they did, I've got another e-mail client that Microsoft had nothing to do with making. It's a good thing they haven't decided to make it so Windows systems can't run any e-mail clients other than theirs, kind of like they did in Windows Vista, making it nearly impossible to run any media player other than what I call Windows Cry Baby.

I wonder what they'll try next!

Moving on from Microsoft, now. I'd really like to know what some people think they're doing. Over the last week, the fire alarm in our building has been activated five times, none of which heralded an actual fire. People think now that it's the height of creativity to set off fire alarms for no reason in the middle of the night, not that they've done this on the night before the building manager is supposed to be in. They only do it on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. And I thought some people I knew from the chat lines were bored, but this tops it all!

And as usual, nothing's been done about the person or persons responsible. Just like, in the long run, nothing's going to be done about the idiot who lives up stairs who screams, makes animal noises, pounds the floor, bangs his table and chairs up and down, and plays his music at top gain in the middle of the night.

I tell you, I can't wait to move out of here!

And then there's the little matter of people who shouldn't have had our phone number at all calling and calling and calling and calling again and again and again and again and again. Once I'm moved, the person in question isn't getting the number again. I've got better things to do than deal with them! For example, I have a girlfriend I love very very very very much, and I'd love to be able to talk to her, but when I never know when this other person's going to call, I don't dare pick up the phone. I've even had times when I've picked up the phone to make a call, and this person has called at the same time. The phone hasn't had time to ring, but there they are!

Now onto happier things. Recently, my roommate helped me get an online course called "The ten day screenplay." I've been working on fan scripts for a series of movies for a while now, and that course has helped enormously! What started as a script for a bad Slasher flick has become a pretty good script. I've got a few more tweaks to do, so to speak, before I move on to the next one, but if I can manage it, I'll have the script for a really good fan film done. And then it's on to the sequel!

Also, I've just managed to get the new Stephen king book! I haven't started reading it yet, but I'm going to very very very very soon! I just wish my girlfriend was here to read it with me! she loves Stephen King's writing! But I'm going to see her again next month and I can share it with her then! Yayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyayyay!!!!!!!!!!

Well, that's it for now.

I haven't got the faintest idea why Internet service providers choose to screw around with people's Internet speed. On the other hand, I do, at least in theory.

Some ISps decide they're going to get a bit of extra money, whilst at the same time stepping people down without telling them. It's the modern method of embezzlement. They step you down, pocket the extra money that comes in, and use it for their own ends. Maybe they're planning on getting a new pool in their back yard or something.

This stuff started a few months ago when my roommate and I moved to where we are now. When it first started happening, we called our provider and let them know something was wrong. We were told, as I've written out here before, that it had to be our equipment, that it couldn't possibly be anything wrong on their end.

We had someone come out and look at everything and they told us that our equipment was perfectly fine and that he'd give us the number of someone who could help. We got the number, called it, explained our situation, and our Internet speeded up. Not only that, it stopped its habit of messing up every ten minutes.

That state of affairs lasted a couple weeks, then we slowed right back down. We called again, and were once again told that it was our equipment, and that all our problems would be solved if we paid for a techy to come out and install a router from them, rather than the one we had, the one a techy had already told us was working perfectly.

Sounds to me like they're stepping us down and don't want to admit it. after all, if they did, they'd lose the extra money they're stealing from us.

Just to give an idea of how slow our connection is at times thanks to them, my roommate's computer used to be set up for a dial-up service called No Charge. When the Internet service we're getting through our DSL provider is really slow, her computer tries to open No charge as a faster alternative. Now there's slow DSL for you!

Hopefully, we can change providers before too much more time goes by. I'm hoping to get started in Internet radio and can't do it when the Internet's running more slowly than dial-up. Oh, and there's no way to confront our provider and make them step us back up to where we're supposed to be.

Hmmmmm. Then people wonder why people eventually go postal! Give me a message board on which you can bash your provider. either that, or someone please, please, please set up a site called www.ihateeqwest.net, or .com, or .org!
I mean, why do the Canadians have a site to bash their Internet service provider and we don't? Are Americans bash-free where their providers are concerned? Are people's providers standing behind them with guns to their heads saying, "you will not bash us online?"

Oh, then there's the little matter of Messenger plus scripts not working properly and causing endless problems with the computers they're installed on. i just had to disable all my Messenger Plus scripts in order to use windows Live Messenger without my computer acting like it's got a virus.

I got the scripts several months ago so I could do more with Messenger plus and my machine started acting like it had every virus known to man on it. i ran not one but two anti virus programs, cleaned out the machine, and still had problems. I got the Miranda Messenger client so I could still be on Messenger, but every time Windows live Messenger would start up, I had trouble.

Then, yesterday, messenger committed a serious error, causing the scripts to be disabled. The computer ran fine, till I reenabled the scripts. Then things went wrong again. I redisabled the scripts and now things are fine. So what's up with that?

Then there's the little matter of Microsoft's idiocies with the new Messenger. Over the last several months, nobody has wanted the new Messenger, thanks to its lack of certain features and its inaccessibility for Jaws users. What Freedom scientific doesn't tell you is that there are Jaws scripts that come with the program, weather you want them or not. One set of scripts is for windows Live Messenger. What they also don't tell you is that the scripts don't automatically update themselves. When a new version of Messenger comes out, the scripts you have won't work, causing a massive amount of inaccessibility to suddenly attack you. Their solution, "get Jaws 11," which means going to their page, downloading something you're only going to use for your Messenger sessions, take up more harddrive space, and deal with the same jaws issues you were dealing with with the last 10 versions. Oh, and being forced to spend $1500 more on another product key for the thing, unless you want to be constantly yapped at by jaws while it informs you that you need to activate the thing.

Once the great idiots at Microsoft found out people weren't downloading and installing the new Messenger, they started trouble. First, there was the Messenger virus, which had nothing to do with the messenger Plus scripts, then they started saying, "oh, the new Messenger is the only thing that'll work by September 15," which was a lie, as it's now October and the old version I've got on my machine is working just fine now that I've disabled those troublesome scripts. These people are getting desperate, I tell you desperate!

Well, that's it from me at the moment. I'll probably be out here again soon, though.

I know I put this up here a few months ago, but I've revised it more than a bit.

It's quite clear that the National Federation of the Blind doesn't have enough real issues on its collective plate. Last year, they were attempting to block the release of the movie Blindness, a film made from a novel in which the population of a major city, possibly the world, was struck suddenly blind.

The novel in question was written by a Hispanic author, and in such literature, especially when the author in question is writing about events in another country than their's and in another language than theirs, they tend to do things differently. For example, in a great many books written by Hispanic authors there are a massive number of characters, none of whom are named. in addition, in such books, things happen, just because. You're left wondering, "how the fuck did this happen?" The answer in such cases is usually something along the lines of, "I-da-know. Next question?" Or possibly, "I-da-know. 900000000 red Chinese don't give a rat's ass." I guess the way they look at it is as follows. "If the reader doesn't have enough imagination to figure out a possible reason on their own, it's not my problem." You've got cases of precognition going on for no reason, or seemingly no reason, you've got things happening seemingly at random, but not quite, hell, you've even got a convenient ending in which everything sorts itself out after the world has gone to 19 different levels of hell without the benefit of a handbasket. In other words, you've got the perfect situation for those with imaginations to take the back-story in any direction they want to, or possibly come up with a sequel.

Immediately upon hearing the news that the novel was to be made into a movie, the nFB drafted a resolution to block the release of the film, claiming that it promoted stereotyping of the blind and reinforced bigoted ideas concerning the blind (how the hell can you compare a book like Blindness to Adolph Hitler's propaganda films?) regardless of the fact that they themselves never did so much as a second's worth of research into the literature of other cultures. I guess if it's not American, it must be bad. Now isn't that bigotry? As a matter of fact, there was even a web site dedicated to bashing the film, although the people maintaining the site and those drafting the aforesaid resolution probably never read the original novel to the end, or even beyond the first or second chapter.

I just finished listening to a DVS version of the film and I have to say that my original opinion hasn't changed one bit from what it was last year when I first heard of the NFB's stupid and ill considered attempt to block the release of the movie. Blindness is, before everything else, a post apocalyptic horror story, no different than Stephen King's The Stand, Night Surf, Trucks, The Mist, The End of the Whole Mess, Home delivery, Cell, or Graduation Afternoon, John Windom's Day of the Triffids, Armageddon and all the countless other "Asteroids Are Going To Hit Earth And Wipe Out All Our Asses" movies, George A. Romero's Dead movies, night of, Dawn of, day of, land of, and diary of, Lucio Fulci's Zombie and its late 80s sequel, Damnation Alley, the mad Max movies, Phase IV, the now infamous V mini series, War of the Worlds in all its forms, John Carpenter's The Thing, to say nothing of Andrea Bianchi’s gut-munching zombie outhouse explosion known as Burial ground. The only difference, in the case of Blindness, is that the plague that levels human civilization is not an invasion of flesh-eating living corpses, lumbering carnivorous plants, an unstoppable organism from deep space with the ability to perfectly imitate other life forms, machines that have finally had enough of mere organic vermin calling the shots and decided to run everyone in the world over or make them slaves, a small army of various monsters ranging from giant lobsters, to gigantic twelve-legged spiders, and including two foot long flies with stingers, tentacled things never actually seen, and unseen things that roar like a cross between lions and elephants, a phenomenon known as The Pulse, which, when heard over a cell phone, renders the hearer mindless and homicidal, a plague of senility, a nuclear strike on New York City, a huge asteroid preparing to hit the Earth and produce human pulp, Marsians intent on eating as many humans as possible after their fighting machines have stomped as many buildings and people flat as possible, lizard-like aliens whose mission on earth is to rob the planet of water and take as many sleeping humans back to their world as possible to use for food, super-intelligent ants that have decided that they could run the earth better than man could, or a hopped up version of the flue.

The story elements are pretty much the same, only with a decidedly Hispanic twist. You've got a sudden onset of an unknown plague that shows itself literally in the first five minutes of the movie. We've also got the medical community at a loss, just as in the dawn of the dead remake, or maybe not,, as I'll point out later. We've also got a desperate military trying to contain the situation, an attempt that ultimately fails miserably. We've got said military shooting people who attempt to break quarantine. hell, we've even got the nutball preacher claiming that the plague is God's punishment on humanity for its sins, although you've got to listen pretty closely to catch it. I'm not only going to give the story as it is told in the movie itself, but point up certain elements from the original novel, elements that the NFB, in its infinite unwisdom, interpreted as slams against the blind, and prove that they hadn't a single leg to stand on.

The basic story runs as follows. A man goes blind behind the wheel of his car, but it is not normal blindness. The condition is characterized by the victim's vision suddenly being replaced by a milky white nothingness. A seemingly philanthropic individual drives the victim home, after which, said individual proceeds to steal the victim's car. Now bare in mind that less than five minutes of the film's running time have elapsed so far, but we learn very quickly that we're not going to have much time for thought, as the majority of the plot moves like an express train. We learn, for example, in the first ten minutes of the film, that the condition is catching, the car thief from the first scene is the second victim of what is referred to in the film as The White Sickness, and in the original novel as The White evil. We learn that cases are multiplying with extreme rapidity. We also learn that the military is, as is usually the case in movies like this, more than willing to get involved, but only after they have donned their protective clothing, which usually consists of white plastic suits and gas masks, although what the fuck they thing gas masks are going to do in a situation in which nobody even has the faintest fucking idea how the shit spreads in the first place is a question nobody thought to ask. Another question that was left unanswered in the movie is how the hell the military knew where the hell all the victims were in the first place. at one point in the novel, a 911, or similar call is made and the caller is told that an ambulance is on the way. Now unless the medical community or the military had some idea as to what was going on from the word go, there's no way in Hell an ambulance could be dispatched to a location that quickly with the entire world falling apart around everyone's ears.

just to give one example of how completely screwed the world is in Blindness, early on, and this is strictly in the novel, a bank executive and one of his employees are taking the elevator to the tenth floor in the bank said executive is in charge of, when the power goes out, stopping the elevator between floors. Since everyone who could have either gotten the power back on or gotten to the two men trapped in the elevator has been struck blind by the White Sickness or the White Evil at the same time as the two unfortunate men in the elevator, it's pretty clear that nobody will be getting them out any time soon. Now there's a scary thought. Two people trapped in an elevator that happens to be stuck between the ninth and tenth floors of a building, either slowly starving to death or preparing to kill and eat each other! Now why didn't they put that in the movie!?

From here, we meet the main characters we'll be concerning ourselves with. There's an unnamed doctor, who is one of the first of the medical people to fall prey to the sickness, and who, in the novel, knew he was going to go blind about a minute before it actually happened, as did Car Thief (there's that precognition kicking in.) Then we have his wife, who like the rest of the characters in the movie is never named, and regardless of what the NFB people claimed, it was not only the blind who were unnamed, as the doctor's wife is perfectly sighted, as are the military thugs who show up at the Doctor's house with guns drawn and give him the choice to either come with them and live or stay where he is and get his brains blown all over his nice clean study wall (there's the military doing what it usually does in these types of movies, and the movie isn't even half an hour old yet!) There's the hooker known as dark Glasses, who falls prey to the White Sickness after turning a trick. We've got the older man known as Eye patch, for obvious reasons. We've got several others who played minor roles, including a receptionist from the hospital where several victims of the White Sickness were examined and who later turns out to be an accomplished firebug, the Japanese man whose car was stolen in the opening scene, the thief who stole the Japanese man's car, and the Japanese man's wife, who fell prey to the White Sickness at about the same time as the Doctor did, and who spent most of the first half of the movie in a withdrawn state, hardly even responding to her husband's attempts at communication, and then we've got Accountant and Barman, one of whom, Accountant, was blind from birth, and who, as is so often the case in these movies, makes a bid for power and wins, at least until he gets his own given back to him later in the movie.

Now, as for one of the NFB claims of slamming the blind. In the novel, the doctor's wife says something along the lines of "There's no need to give our names, as the blind have no identity," or something similar. Bare in mind, and I say this mainly to those who have common sense here, that the world has just begun a rather unique process of ending, people are either dying by the thousands, being shot by the military, being herded into trucks and taken away to be isolated, or being left to starve, the Doctor's wife is living with the possibility that she may lose her sight at any moment, just like her husband did, and as she was very close to him physically before he contracted the white Sickness, that's a pretty reasonable fear, and she is extremely depressed (wouldn't you be if a bunch of thugs in uniform just battered down your door and threatened to kill your significant other if he or she didn't accompany you to Christ alone knows where and when you go with him or her you discover that you're being locked up somewhere with assholes with guns outside who are more than willing to fill you full of so much lead someone could use you to write a letter home to your Aunt Alicia?) Taking that situation into account, I don't see a slam against the blind there in any way, shape, or form.

The military begins gathering up the infected and locks them in a hospital (how the hell did they find a hospital that was completely empty during an outbreak of some sort of unknown plague?) and proceed to inform their prisoners that if they attempt to get out, they will be shot dead, demonstrating that fact three times over in less than five seconds at one point. Other than that, their only job seems to be dropping food and other goods over the wall surrounding the hospital (how the hell were they getting hold of enough food for hundreds of people once a week while the majority of the worlds population is fucking blind and all production facilities have ground to a halt?) and shooting the odd attempted escape artist, and for escape artist, read Car Thief. They shoot him when he attempts to escape the ward, at least that's what the military assholes in residence claim, but they apparently can't shoot for shit. It takes several shots to finally bring him down, and that's after he finished up with an infection that was rotting one of his legs off.

That brings me back to the author of the book being Hispanic. Such questions as the ones I've asked here aren't really important. The important thing in such cases is capturing the readers' imagination and prompting those readers with a bit of writing ability to come up with a sequel, though the "where'd they get a hospital?" question is answered in the original novel. There was this abandoned mental hospital that wasn't working too hard and it seemed as good a place as any to house the infected.

In the hospital itself, things don't go much better. With nobody to maintain the place, particularly the plumbing, as the military thugs stationed outside could give a shit less as to weather or not said plumbing worked (they probably had chemical toilets they were using to do their business in,) the hospitals unwilling residents are soon faced with the usual result of disused pipes being asked to do what they are no longer capable of doing, IE taking down a huge amount of waste, over two hundred and forty people's worth, resulting in the terminal clog from Hell, causing those imprisoned in said hospital to seek other facilities in which to evacuate themselves.

That brings me to another thing the NFB said was a slam against the blind. Regardless of what there spokesperson clamed in the resolution to block the release of the movie, these people weren't pissing and shitting in the corridors because they were blind and had been supposedly reduced to the level of animals, they were doing it because there was nowhere else they could do it. I mean, does anyone think the military thugs outside had a handy pipe snake just sitting around waiting for the plumbing in a clearly abandoned building to fuck up? And even if they had actually had one, they had already made it clear that they weren't going to enter the hospital, so once again, no handy solution to the clog problem.

I hate to burst the NFB's bubble in this situation, but it does require a bit of sight to accurately unclog a toilet pipe. unless you can see what you're doing, you could just be moving the pipe snake, assuming there was one, back and forth in the pipe and getting nowhere other than hitting what is usually referred to as the trap, weather or not you've actually found the clog. And even if a totally blind person was fortunate enough to locate said clog and remove it, I doubt anyone wants to touch anything brought out of a shit pipe, and that's the only way a blind person could possibly know what non-treasures they've brought out of such a place. And as for where the prisoners trapped in the hospital were doing their business, it was either do your business on the floor or die of septic poisoning or ruptured guts. No slam against the blind there either. I'm sure if perfectly sighted people were faced with a similar situation, they'd do pretty much the same thing, with a couple added antics, such as mooning the soldiers when they saw them, waving their private parts at them, throwing cans and bottles at them, and generally making a royal pain in the ass of themselves and deriving an endless amount of amusement at the military thugs' expense.

Also, speaking of the plumbing, there is the little matter of the entire water system in the building being fucked nine different ways, resulting in obtaining fresh water, washing one's clothes, and bathing being an impossibility. once again, the people imprisoned in the hospital weren't filthy because they were blind and acting like animals, they were filthy because the showers that worked spat out filthy water when they worked at all and those that didn't work were totally detached from the main pipes.

The military dropped off sanitary products such as bleach and soap, products you can't use when you turn on the faucet and get hot and cold running crud. Sure, the water from the sinks would turn clear after about a minute, but who's to say the stuff wasn't full of every type of virus and bacteria known to man and a few new types besides, as evidence the attempt to clean car Thief's original wound and said wound eventually rotting his leg. And that leads me to another question. What the fuck were those people drinking. I doubt like hell they had a generous supply of bottled water, not after the military packed them all into a place in which every condition was substandard at best, totally unlivable at worst. With that kind of "don't give a shit" attitude, bottled water was probably the last thing on their minds. They were provided with drinks, although not really enough, probably various types of canned juice, but you can't wash yourself or your clothing in that unless you want to attract every fruit fly in town.

Now, as to the other things the inmates in the hospital turned prison get up to. As is so often the case in movies in which civilization ends, people turn on each other, steal from each other, rape each other, and in some cases, even kill each other. There's even a bit of extortion, a regular activity in such movies. At one point, during the extortion play, the self-proclaimed King of Ward 3 demands money, watches, rings, and necklaces (what the fuck would anyone do with such things when civilization is clearly fucked seven different ways and the shit is practically worthless?) I was reminded at that point of the, in the long run, unsuccessful defense of the shopping mall in both versions of Dawn of the Dead, and then the extortion gets even uglier. After everyone in the other two wards have been cleaned out of material possessions, Accountant, A.K.A. the personal assistant and chief thug to King of Ward Three and King of Ward Three A.K.A. Barman, demand that the women in the other two wards give themselves to Ward Three's men in return for food, the demands being enforced by a loaded gun (how the hell did Barman keep a loaded gun when the military had supposedly searched everyone on there way into the hospital?) Oh, I forgot, that's just another sign of the books country of origin and the habit Hispanic authors have of Just Becausing us when we least expect it. And here's where things get interesting. The first "Give us your women or starve" Extortion Night starts out with nine women in ward One, but ends with only eight, causing the doctor's wife, who retains her sight throughout the entire movie for reasons nobody even bothered to question, to plan a little revenge. Utilizing the distraction provided by the men of ward Three being busy humiliating the women from ward Two, she enters Ward Three and plants a pair of Scissors in the neck of the man, it was barman himself, by the way, responsible for the death of the unnamed woman from Ward one.

The next day, the vengeance continues, as another woman from Ward one, the receptionist, enters Ward Three and sets the mattress on which Accountant is sitting on fire, resulting in the deaths of the majority of the ward 3 asshole brigade, as well as the destruction of the entire building (what the hell was that building made of anyway?) The thing looked like it was made of stone, but burned like wood.

It is at this point that we discover that the plastic suits and gas masks worn by the military did about as much good as windshield wipers on a billy goat's ass. The doctor's wife leads the Ward one survivors to safety, only to discover that the guard posts are empty and the gates are unlocked.

The survivors return to the city, which looks like a tornado has swept through it, where their course leads them past a dog eating human corpses by the side of the road (either the author of the novel or the writer of the movie script must have read War of the Worlds at some point,) to and through a grocery store where a couple of them, including the doctor's wife, are nearly killed by desperate and hungry people (Stephen King's The Mist, anyone?) to and through a church in which all the statuary has been blindfolded, and where our obligatory "This is God's punishment for the sins of man" preacher is holding court (there's Stephen King's The mist again,) and eventually to her own home, where they remain, till the sickness begins to reverse itself, with the first victim in the movie regaining his sight for no remotely understandable reason.

All in all, Blindness is just like a few hundred other Plague Levels Human civilization stories, only written by a Hispanic author, with the cause of the plague and its reversal leading back to one enormous "What the fuck?" just as the doctor's wife's immunity from the White Sickness is never explained, or for that matter, never even questioned, unlike john Windom's Day of the Triffids, in which the population of the world was struck blind by a shower of man-made green meteors, and the immunity some had from their effects stemmed from the fact that their eyes were covered, or they were somewhere where outside light couldn't get to them. Other than that, it was run of the mill and wouldn't have gotten even one one hundredth of the publicity it got if not for the NFB sitting on its collective ass and bitching about it.

Seriously, the NFB needs to find some worthy causes to fight for and stay the fuck out of Hollywood's business. every time they involve themselves in something like this, the movie isn't really that good and would have died under the weight of its own inconsistencies, but Blindness will probably be remembered for the next thirty years or so as the movie the NFB said was such a slam against the blind community.

Being blind myself, I kept my ears open for the supposed slams against the blind and found absolutely none. What the NFB didn't keep in mind when they decided to embark on their fool's cause to get the movie blocked was that people who are not blind from birth are not, and I repeat, are not going to suddenly be able to cope with the loss of their site, especially when they're doing what they normally do one second and are suddenly and unexpectedly blind the next, or in the case of the novel, warned a bare minute before everything went white. The NFB seems to think that just because the majority of their members were blind from birth and can cope that someone who has been sighted all their lives who suddenly went blind is going to instinctively know how to do the same. Now how the fuck does that work? I don't think there's a blindness center of the brain that automatically kicks in when someone loses their fucking sight!

So rather than doing something to actually benefit the blind, they're wasting valuable time and money protesting movies. Now am I the only one who sees something completely wrong with that?

Things I learned from the NFB.

1. although we're supposed to be trying to make life easier for the blind, we're not going to target Freedom Scientific and force them to lower the price of their screen reading software and Note takers, we're going to prostitute ourselves to the very companies responsible for state-funded robbing of the blind and publicly make assholes of ourselves by fighting a losing battle by protesting a movie that not only costs millions of dollars to make, but has the backing of the entire film making industry behind it.
2. Rather than actually doing something to improve the quality of life for the blind, we're only going to show ourselves at times when doing that will make us look incredibly stupid.
3. Even sighted people have a blindness center of the brain that causes them to know how to cope with a sudden loss of vision.
4. certain books like Day of the Triffids that concern themselves with the majority of the world's population going suddenly blind are immune from nFB protests because they're classics, whilst others, such as Blindness are excellent fodder for protests as the authors are virtual unknowns.
5. Protesting movies is fun, especially when you look like an asshole doing it.
6. Hey, we've found the perfect method of swelling theater audiences! Protesting movies!
7. Protesting movies better fills our time than finding actual employment for the blind with actual companies rather than allowing them to rot away in sheltered workshops.
8. Although the Fundy Christian protests of the movie The last Temptation of Christ failed miserably and made it the most popular movie of the late 80s/
early 90s, we're going to take our lead from the fundies and try what has already been tried and hope for a different result, regardless of the fact that that is a sign of insanity.
9. If we hear about a book written by an author from another country, we're not going to take that into account. Instead, we're going to attempt to force our own American ideas onto a book that was written by someone who doesn't share them and call him or her a bigot, whilst showing that the only bigots around here are us.
10. Even though the world is ending, we don't accept that the worst is brought out in humanity with the absence of the laws that usually keep it in check.
11. We don't need sighted people, although there are plenty of things we, as blind people, just can't do.

I've decided that my browser has gone totally insane, completely gaga, irreversibly coocoo! Here I am on Live Journal, trying to read something, and my browser insists on refreshing the page at least five times before it will let me read all the way through the entry I'm trying to read. Does anyone know a good browser psycho ward?

apart from that, everything's going alright, except for a couple things, one not so big, the other pretty damn big. Let me start out with the continuing quest Internet connection problems. I swear, whenever I move out of the area I'm currently living in, I'll make absolutely certain that Quest doesn't exist in any way, shape, or form in the area I move into! It's been at least two months, and my roommate and I are still having Internet connection issues, regardless of the fact that we have tried reconnecting the cables to our router in a different configuration, one that, incidentally, made certain that we had no connectivity at all rather than limited connectivity, called Quest and were told that since the router in question, regardless of the fact that said router is less than three months old, was the source of the issue and could we please blow an unnecessary amount of money on a Quest router that probably wouldn't work any better than the one we've got now anyway and that the issue wasn't on their end regardless of our having no such issues before we moved, connecting the telephone filter directly into the phone jack and running the modem through it, having sighted assistance in discovering weather or not all the lights on the modem and router were on continuously or just flashing, and just about everything else people usually do whilst trying to figure out just why the fucking hell their Internet connection is so screwed up that it has to be repaired every ten minutes or you can't go online with your browsers (that's right, we've got two each, Internet Explorer and Firefox, and both of them do the same fucking thing,) or start Messenger up after having had it shut down for a while, or send e-mail through a client such as Outlook Express after not having sent e-mail for hours. It seems the only way to insure that everything works is to keep every application you're going to be using throughout the course of your day open and active, although that's not the way you're supposed to do things.

Then we have the second load of bullshit we've had going on since our move. We've had someone taking us places, saving us cab money in the process, going to the store for us, etc. But this guy has started doing something I don't like one little bit. Before we moved, we were in a shared housing situation, which meant, quite simply, that we had someone sighted living right in the same place with us. Bonnie didn't get into our business, but she was interested enough in how we were doing that she'd check to see how we were, weather or not we needed anything, how we were doing where food was concerned, and just about everything else someone does when they really care. Since we moved, though, our food stamps haven't been going anywhere near as far as they used to, and it has nothing what so ever to do with the economy.

Before we moved, we could buy a month's worth of food with them. Now we've moved, however, we're suddenly having food issues, and we're not buying any more than we used to. As a matter of fact, we're being told that we can't get as much, and it shows. By the third week of the month, we're usually almost out of food and being forced to overdraw our bank accounts in order to eat. Now I could see bills having an effect on how much food someone could buy, but only if the person in question doesn't have food stamps. We do, though, and we're having problems? It looks to me as if our food stamps are being used, alright, but not to buy food for us. When my roommate goes with him, we don't have any problems. It's only when he goes himself that the food seems to not be there.

So, here we are, with a fucked up Internet connection, an asshole who figures that since we're no longer living with a sighted person that he can just take some off our food stamp cards whenever he's a little low on food, not enough food in the fucking place, and having to use money we were going to use for other things to feed ourselves!

Unfortunately, what this guy is doing isn't, technically speaking, illegal, so he figures he's not going to suffer any consequences for what he's doing. He figures he's got us right where he wants us, and in a way he does, as we don't have money to go running all over town in taxies to get what we need. It really makes me wish he'd go blind for a while and have someone take advantage of him!

Oh, and then there's his new inability to keep his hands off other people's things. He gets into just about everything, including things that are extremely breakable, knocks them onto the floor, and then wonders why he gets yelled at! Then on top of that, he handles things even after people tell him to keep his fucking hands off them! I wonder how he'd feel if someone did that to his precious stuff.

Apart from those problems, I guess everything's going alright, except for the fire we had in our building that forced us all out into the parking lot in the middle of the night. And the cause of the fire? Someone was burning incense in their bathroom (who the hell ever heard of a magical ritual that required the burning of incense in a bathroom?) threw it into their trash can without wetting it first, and set their bathroom wall on fire. some of these people are geniuses I tell you, fucking geniuses! I'm glad I have Live Journal. If I didn't, I'd probably be ready for a padded room by now!
and then we've got our up stairs neighbor, who thinks that just because he likes Boston, Bette Middler, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and crappy 80s rap music, that everyone else does too and that he's going to treat us all to the same four songs off one of his CDs again and again and again and again and again throughout the day! Our former building manager talked to him four or five times and the idiot hasn't stopped yet. We can't call the cops either, as he's doing this during the day.

I don't know what his issue is, but he's got a few. While he's up there blasting his, uh, music, he's also stomping around, thumping over our heads, hollering "woo!" at the top of his lungs, imitating dirt-bikes, and making just about every other noise known to man! Really, can someone please, please, please, eliminate him from the human race?

It's quite clear that the National Federation of the Blind doesn't have enough real issues on its collective plate. Last year, they were attempting to block the release of the movie Blindness, a film made from a novel in which the population of a major city, possibly the world, was struck suddenly blind. Immediately upon hearing the news that the novel was to be made into a movie, the nFB drafted a resolution to block the release of the film, claiming that it promoted stereotyping of the blind. As a matter of fact, there was even a web site dedicated to bashing the film, although the people maintaining the site and those drafting the aforesaid resolution probably never read the original novel to the end.

I just finished listening to a DVS version of the film and I have to say that my original opinion hasn't changed one bit from what it was last year when I first heard of the NFB's stupid and ill considered attempt to block the release of the movie. Blindness is, before everything else, a post apocalyptic horror story, no different than Stephen King's The Stand, John Windom's Day of the Triffids, Stephen King's The mist, George A. Romero's Dead movies, night of, Dawn of, day of, land of, and diary of. The only difference, in the case of Blindness, is that the plague that levels human civilization is not an invasion of flesh-eating living corpses, a small army of various monsters ranging from giant lobsters, to gigantic twelve-legged spiders, and including two foot long flies with stingers, tentacled things never actually seen, and unseen things that roar like a cross between lions and elephants, or a hopped up version of the flue.

The story elements are pretty much the same. You've got a sudden onset of an unknown plague that shows itself literally in the first five minutes of the movie. We've also got the medical community at a loss, just as in the dawn of the dead remake. We've also got a desperate military trying to contain the situation, an attempt that ultimately fails miserably. We've got said military shooting people who attempt to break quarantine. hell, we've even got the nutball preacher claiming that the plague is God's punishment on humanity for its sins, although you've got to listen pretty closely to catch it.

The basic story runs as follows. A man goes blind behind the wheel of his car, but it is not normal blindness. The condition is characterized by the victim's vision suddenly being replaced by a milky white nothingness. A seemingly philanthropic individual drives the victim home, after which, said individual proceeds to steal the victim's car. Now bare in mind that less than five minutes of the film's running time have elapsed so far, but we learn very quickly that we're not going to have much time for thought, as the majority of the plot moves like an express train. We learn, for example, in the first ten minutes of the film, that the condition is catching, the car thief from the first scene is the second victim of what is referred to in the film as The White Sickness, and in the original novel as The White evil. We learn that cases are multiplying with extreme rapidity. We also learn that the military is, as is usually the case in movies like this, more than willing to get involved, but only after they have donned their protective clothing, which usually consists of white plastic suits and gas masks, although what the fuck they thing gas masks are going to do in a situation in which nobody even has the faintest fucking idea how the shit spreads in the first place is a question nobody thought to ask.

From here, we meet the main characters we'll be concerning ourselves with. There's an unnamed doctor, who is one of the first of the medical people to fall prey to the sickness. Then we have his wife, who like the majority of the characters in the movie is never named, and regardless of what the NFB people claimed, it was not only the blind who were unnamed, as the doctor's wife is perfectly sighted. There's the hooker known as dark Glasses, who falls prey to the White Sickness after turning a trick. We've got the older man known as Eye patch, for obvious reasons. We've got several others who played minor roles, and then we've got Accountant and Barman, one of whom, Accountant, was blind from birth, and who, as is so often the case in these movies, made a bid for power and won, at least until he gets his own given back to him later in the movie.

The military begins gathering up the infected and locks them in a hospital (how the hell did they find a hospital that was completely empty during an outbreak of some sort of unknown plague?) and proceed to inform their prisoners that if they attempt to get out, they will be shot dead, demonstrating that fact three times over in less than five seconds at one point. Other than that, their only job seems to be dropping food and other goods (how the hell were they getting hold of enough food for hundreds of people once a week while the majority of the worlds population is fucking blind and all production facilities have ground to a halt?) and shooting the odd attempted escape artist.

In the hospital itself, things don't go much better. As is so often the case in movies in which civilization ends, people turn on each other, steal from each other, rape each other, and in some cases, even kill each other. At one point, during the extortion play, Accountant, A.K.A. the personal assistant and chief thug to King of Ward Three and King of Ward Three A.K.A. Barman, demand that the women in the other two wards give themselves to Ward Three's men in return for food. And here's where things get interesting. The first Extortion Night starts out with nine women in ward One, but ends with only eight, causing the doctor's wife, who retains her sight throughout the entire movie for reasons nobody even bothered to question, to plan a little revenge. Utilizing the distraction provided by the men of ward Three being busy humiliating the women from ward Two, she enters Ward Three and plants a pair of Scissors in the neck of the man responsible for the death of the unnamed woman from Ward one.

The next day, the vengeance continues, as another woman from Ward one enters Ward Three and sets the mattress on which Accountant is sitting on fire, resulting in the destruction of the entire building.

It is at this point that we discover that the plastic suits and gas masks worn by the military did about as much good as windshield wipers on a billy goat's ass. The doctor's wife leads the Ward one survivors to safety, only to discover that the guard posts are empty and the gates are unlocked.

The survivors return to the city, which looks like a tornado has swept through it, and eventually to her own home, where they remain, till the sickness begins to reverse itself, with the first victim in the movie regaining his sight for no remotely understandable reason.

All in all, Blindness is just like a few hundred other Plague Levels Human civilization stories, with the cause of the plague and its reversal leading back to one enormous "What the fuck?" just as the doctor's wife's immunity from the White Sickness is never explained, or for that matter, never even questioned. Other than that, it was run of the mill and wouldn't have gotten even one one hundredth of the publicity it got if not for the NFB sitting on its collective ass and bitching about it.

Seriously, the NFB needs to find some worthy causes to fight for and stay the fuck out of Hollywood's business. every time they involve themselves in something like this, the movie isn't really that good and would have died under the weight of its own inconsistencies, but Blindness will probably be remembered for the next thirty years or so as the movie the NFB said was such a slam against the blind community.

Being blind myself, I kept my ears open for the supposed slams against the blind and found absolutely none. What the NFB didn't keep in mind when they decided to embark on their fool's cause to get the movie blocked was that people who are not blind from birth are not, and I repeat, are not going to suddenly be able to cope with the loss of their site, especially when they're doing what they normally do one second and are suddenly and unexpectedly blind the next. The NFB seems to think that just because the majority of their members were blind from birth and can cope that if someone who has been sighted all their lives is going to instinctively know how to do the same. Now how the fuck does that work? I don't think there's a blindness center of the brain that automatically kicks in when someone loses their fucking sight!

Things I learned from the NFB.

1. although we're supposed to be trying to make life easier for the blind, we're not going to target Freedom Scientific and force them to lower the price of their screen reading software, we're going to publicly make assholes of ourselves by fighting a losing battle by protesting a movie that not only costs millions of dollars to make, but has the backing of the entire film making industry behind it.
2. Rather than actually doing something to improve the quality of life for the blind, we're only going to show ourselves at times when doing that will make us look incredibly stupid.
3. Even sighted people have a blindness center of the brain that causes them to know how to cope with a sudden loss of vision.
4. certain books like Day of the Triffids that concern themselves with the majority of the world's population going suddenly blind are immune from nFB protests because they're classics, whilst others, such as Blindness are excellent fodder for protests as the authors are virtual unknowns.
5. Protesting movies is fun, especially when you look like an asshole doing it.
6. Hey, we've found the perfect method of swelling theater audiences! Protesting movies!
7. Protesting movies better fills our time than finding actual employment for the blind with actual companies rather than allowing them to rot away in sheltered workshops.
8. Although the Fundy Christian protests of the movie The last Temptation of Christ failed miserably and made it the most popular movie of the late 80s/
early 90s, we're going to take our lead from the fundies and try what has already been tried and hope for a different result, regardless of the fact that that is a sign of insanity.