Man-flesh

First and foremost, of course, the Goblet of Fire site is up with the trailer, which made me all shivery as it's far and away the grimmest looking in the series. Given how dark the book is, it's perfect. I even quite like the poster with Harry in Quidditch gear. Nice.

Second, if you don't know her work already, you should take a look at grrliz_icons, many of the icons I'll be using over the next few days are hers, as well as my new default. Her Pop Art series kicks ass and she's got some fun Kingdom of Heaven ones that I highly recommend.

( Speaking of Kingdom of Heaven... )

I saw "Hitchhiker's Guide" on Sunday with cyranocyrano, and enjoyed it, though I was left at the end wondering, "Wait, did I read this book?" Hey, if LOTR can take liberties, so can this one, and I did enjoy the acting, the overall tone, the effects, the writing, and damn did they have a kickass theme. I'm going to be singing "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" for days. :)

Got in some serious exercise time afterwards, walking a couple of miles between rain storms, doing an abs set and then a lower body routine, so I'm feeling slightly less sluggish today. Went to the World Market and they had no more Chummus (sad) but they did have Tofutti Cream Cheese (no dairy products, just soy), which I had to try. Also got two loads of laundry done, packed away all my winter stuff and pulled out all my summer clothes. Finally finished the mixes I needed to and am sending one out tomorrow, so that's done. Oh and I finished two books. The last DS9 one about the Dominion left me puzzled and uncertain I like the direction they're taking the Founders in, but sadly nobody else seems to have gotten that far in the books so I can't bounce ideas off anyone. :(

Oh gods, they're still planning this?

Back in the day I used to study environmental science in my hometown of Syracuse, NY. After the relative success of the Carousel Mall (hey, it only sunk a few feet into the muck surrounding one of the most polluted lakes in the world, it neither burned down nor fell over...at least not *yet*); people started talking about creating this uber-mall-housing thing on the shores of good old Onondaga Lake. I'd hoped that sanity had prevailed in the years between my graduation and exodus to the Golden State. Apparently not:
via Clusterfuck Nation

"The collective consciousness is amazingly resistant to the fact that things change. Over in Syracuse, New York, a town sinking into the economic sclerosis of a former soviet-style backwater, the locals have approved perhaps the most idiotic project ever conceived by a free and sovereign people -- a hyper-super-giant-mega-mall to be called DestNY USA (sic) that would include 400 stores, 4,000 hotel rooms, a saltwater aquarium, a 65-acre park under a Biosphere-like dome, and a food court based around a miniature Erie Canal.* The idea is that people will flock to Syracuse by car from places with equally sclerotic economies (Worcester, Mass., Scranton, Pa.) in order to go on shopping sprees for new sneakers and cargo pants, which for some reason may be in short supply where they live.

"The near-imbecile governor of New York, George Pataki, showed up to grandstand at the 'groundbreaking' for this dumb-ass boondoggle (which has garnered tons of tax credits and other windfalls), though not a darn thing has been built since that symbolic shovelful of dirt was turned over. The developer behind DestiNY USA, one Robert Congel, was the CEO of a predatory shopping mall company, Pyramid Inc., which raped the local retail economy of many an upstate city since the 1970s. For all of its grandiosity, DestiNY USA is still minor league stuff compared to the plans afoot for Las Vegas, where the Rapture is in its most florid and terminal stage, and aggravated by yet another collective mental disorder: the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing.

"I'd go as far to say that a public as complacent and clueless as America's is these days deserves to be played for fools. It's not pretty, but life is tragic. History doesn't care if we sleepwalk into a clusterfuck. Plenty of other societies have before us. The real sin in the real world is the failure to pay attention to the signals that your environment sends you. The signals aimed at us now tell us the following: the oil age is entering an unstable permanent decline; suburbia and all its usufructs is finished; the blue-light special shopping economy is about to end; easy motoring will shortly be a thing of the past; the middle class will be replaced by a new former middle class; and all bets are off as to how violently American politics will shudder when the fog finally lifts."

I could tell you horror stories about Pyramid, Inc. and Bob Congel, and about just how polluted the land they're planning to build this monumental disaster on is. I mean it used to all be oil refineries and heavy metal waste dumps, for gods' sakes.

This is undoubtedly the truest and most accurate description of my hometown I could ever hope to find, though: "...a town sinking into the economic sclerosis of a former soviet-style backwater". Hell, I had a Russian History professor who once compared the town unfavorably to Siberia. And people wonder why I have no desire to return.