This Guy Is Attorney General?

While at a Senate Subcommittee hearing last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that the constitution does not explicitly grant the right of habeus corpus to all (or any) of its citizens, merely that this right can only be taken away in certain extraordinary circumstances. Look, this is him saying that in this very video, right here. Holy crap, the stones of these people! How did someone so willfully ignorant of the law get to be AG??? This is all in the name of fighting the terrorists, as usual.
[another article]

Les Paul Flash Drives

Gibson announced at NAMM today that they'll be selling 1GB flash drives in the form of a Gibson Les Paul. Pretty cool looking.
[link]

Children of Men

A bunch of us went to see Children of Men at Camera 12 downtown. I had heard it was good, but I was still blown away by this movie. Clive Owen plays Theo, a government worker, in a dystopian future UK after a plague renders humanity infertile. The UK in this film is an insular, fascist police state that rounds up refugees from the rest of the world into concentration camps. It seems that things really have gone to shit around the world in the coming decades. Theo winds up getting talked into transporting Kee, a young refugee girl, to someplace safe. It turns out that Kee is with child and is pursued by a number of people. The action in the movie is intense and fairly unrelenting. It really gives one a sense of what it is like to be a non-combatant in a combat zone. It is at times a very sad, but ultimately powerful movie. Highly recommended.

Escher Exhibit Coming to SJ

The San Jose Museum of Art is having an M.C. Escher exhibit, starting January 28. Looks worth a visit, if you like that sort of thing. I'm looking forward to it. [details]

Movie Weekend

I saw two completely original and entertaining (albeit in completely different ways) movies this weekend, which was fairly remarkable. On Friday Noelle and I went out and saw Pan's Labyrinth, a fairy tale story set in Civil War-ish era Spain, where a young girl and her mother are going to a remote mill in the country to meet her new step-father. As it turns out, El Capitan (her step-dad) is the sadistic local army command bent on removing some rebels from the hills nearby. The story turns around his campaign against the rebels and her quest to go into the fairy kingdom revealed to her by the enigmatic Faun (pictured above). It's kind of a strange story in that the two parts are almost complete separate, yet occur at the same time. The graphics in the movie were really cool and story was quite involving. I was a little surprised (though not unpleasantly so) to see that all the dialog is in Spanish. The Civil War story was also more important to the overall story line than I had imagined. All told, this is a really great movie that actually (IMO) lives up to the hype in the ads.




The next night we went to see Perfume: The Story of A Murderer which is also somewhat fantastic in that it revolves around Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with a preternatural sense of smell in 18th century France. Jean-Baptiste can smell (for instance) frog eggs in the stream running past the orphanage where he was raised. He becomes a perfumer with a desire to preserve forever certain smells, which leads to a series of, um, unfortunate events, as the smells he wants to preserve come from beautiful women. This Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run) film really shows the filthiness of European cities of the time, to the point where I was somewhat repulsed. The ending was a bit unconventional, I thought, but I suspect some might not like it. Still I think the movie was really worth watching even if you don't like the last few minutes of it. The cinematography is excellent, there are a lot great actors (Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman), and the story is like nothing I've ever heard before.

Everybody's Working On the Weekend

(Loverboy fans forgive me.) Seems like a lot of people I know are working this weekend. The silly season is upon us all, I guess. Anyway, the birthday dinner I've been organizing for Noelle went off swimmingly, so yesterday was pretty fun at least. I'm still recovering from Christmas, I think. The trip to Maine went pretty well, air travel notwithstanding. It was good seeing my family and intriducing Noelle to them. New Years was mellow, but that's really what I needed, I think. Now 2007 stretches before me, filled with promise. Time to start looking at those things on my whiteboard.