Two Excerpts from The King by Donald Barthelme

"Lobsters," said Arthur.
"What?" said Sir Kay.
"Lobsters are the only thing most people kill with their own hands," said Arthur. "In the modern world."
"Not we," said Sir Kay. "We smite the enemy."
"We are different," said Arthur. "we are professional soldiers. Most people don't even kill chickens. They buy them at the market, neatly wrapped. The encounter between man and lobster remains, in this civilization, the last direct experience of killing something."

and also,

"In former times bombing had some military purpose or other--taking out a railroad, smashing an enemy's factories, closing down the clocks, that sort of thing. Today, not so. Today, bombing is meant to be a learning experience. For the bombed. Bombing is pedagogy. A citizen with a stick of white phosphorous on his roof begins to think quite seriously about how much longer he wants to continue the war."

That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do is Missing From Its Wall

Lists of Movies Jessica & I Have Watched This Year
-Tsotsi (Hood, 2005)
-Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (Morris, 1999)
-The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)
-Water (Mehta, 2005)
-Fire (Mehta, 1996)
-Caché (Hanecke, 2005)--begun, but not finished on account of being a real snooze. We'll struggle with it later
-Goodbye, Lenin (Becker, 2003)
-Scoop (Allen, 2006) Scarlett Johannsen is an awful actress.
-The Pink Panther (Edwards 1963)
-The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel, 2006) Anne Hathaway is an awful actress.
-O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coen, 2000)
-Wordplay (Creadon, 2006)
-A Prairie Home Companion (Altman, 2006) Lindsay Lohan is an awful actress.
(We've also rented numerous discs of House, M.D. and watched episodes from Errol Morris's First Person Series)

Incomplete List of Books I Own & Have Not Read
-Wandering by Hermann Hesse
-Zero by Charles Seife
-Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese
-The Human Country by Harry Mathews
-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
-The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (begun but not finished)
-V by Thomas Pynchon (begun, but not finished)
-Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (begun, but not finished)
-The King by Donald Bartholome (begun, but not finished)
-Exiled in Paris: by James Campbell (begun, but not finished)
-Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (begun, but not finished)

In other news, Jessica and I went out for a special Valentine's Day dinner that didn't occur on Valentine's Day.
Really, it was just an opportunity to eat outside of our budget. And it was good. Timpone's is always good.

The Lord said so.

Jessica ordered sole à la meunière with a white macadamia crust and lobster sauce, mixed vegetables, and a pinot grigio.
I ordered an arugula and endive salad with warm goat cheese and toast, a kalamata olive pizza, and a soave.
We had crème brûlée (with all of the accent marks) and espresso for dessert.

And it was good.

Then we came home and watched Tsotsi and that was really good too.

It was all very well and good.

Also, I worked at the museum yesterday morning; as part of a new exhibit (called 'New Ideas' or something like that), there is a Macintosh 128 (circa 1984) set up. I drew a picture in MacPaint 2.0 and then printed it out on a dot matrix printer.

What a novelty.

Jim Traficant's Magic Brush

I have discovered, or at the very least, UNCOVERED, the greatest thing on Earth. Your favorite imprisoned congressman and mine, James Traficant, is now an artist--and not the worst in the world. I mean, not the best either, but I would totally hang one of his pieces in the living room, kitchen, or bathroom.

Not the bedroom, though, because some of it is really creepy.

http://www.beammeupart.com/

Also, I have lots of good books to read, I (still) hate snow, and the manager at Bar Giuliani gave me another free drink.

Huzzah!

The True Story of How Erin Lost Her Face and Jessica Went Blind

The skies have opened and there has been a terrible plague. Cold, white, dirt-that-becomes-water lies in mountains all over the place, transforming an otherwise friendly landscape into a blinding colorless hell that wets my pants. It wets my goddamned pants and alls I can do is put them atop the radiator and pull on another pair of pants. I hate wet pants. I love empanadas. Last night, Erin, Jessica, and I made some poor decisions. We decided to try to get the car out and drive to That's Rentertainment to rent another disc (or two) of House,(M.D). With a wee red plastic shovel, an ice scraper, and my feet, we scraped and hacked at the horrible drifts--to no avail. We lacked avail and we couldn't even take the car out to get any because we couldn't move the car. Then we made a tough decision. We decided to walk the mile or so to That's Rentertainment.

On the way, we stopped at a recently opened pizzaria for a warming and delicious snack. Erin and Jessica partook of the pizza, but I, seized by the gentle spirit of mild adventure, ordered the empanadas. They were, for the uninitiated, little tiny pastry pouches full of...fillings. I ordered the 1 Roasted Chicken and 2 of the San Telmo Chicken and they were really quite good. To tell the different varieties of empanadas apart, they brand them with little letters. Very cute.

So we walked the rest of the mile or so through the Lappish tundra and rented our movies. Erin stopped at a convenience store and purchased some treats and, for me, thirty-two ounces of delicious DogN'Suds Root Beer. Then, we started back. At my urging, we swung by Manolo's Pizza and Empanadas on Oregon... again. This time, I got 2 Roasted Chicken empanadas and only 1 San Telmo Chicken. It was different and exciting.

Upon arriving home, Erin realized that her face had dropped off from cold somewhere back on Lincoln Ave., and Jessica found that she was snowblind. I was all right, though.