My recent boring life and movies.

It is surprising how fast my checking account starts regaining substance now that I finally have a regular job. I got in trouble at work because I didn't see the small print, very small print, I was supposed to work a special event. Someone else did the same thing that week. I have been working on garden stuff and tax stuff.

Rome - The Complete First Season DVD

Maybe current politics mimicking the beginning of the end of the Republic and the rise of Empire partially explains my enthusiasm for this series.

I finally finished my Amazon Gift certificates. I purchased 4 paperbacks to get free shipping (over $25 and SuperSaver Shipping) then one paperback was free with the Amazon buy 4 get 1 free sale going on now on regular priced items. This made the total under $25 but still with free shipping. With the remainder of the GC I debited $2.

Is anyone outside of the very well off and libraries and corporations paying Amazon the $79 a year for free faster shipping?

I wonder if my brother has ever used his Borders GC at Amazon or in Houston? I had earlier used the rest of my Amazon GC's on collections of stories and a fantastic Eisner graphic novel on The Hoax of the Protocols of Zion and a couple other paperbacks.

Pat has GCs for Otto's and a Thai place we need to get together and use with Jim and Amy or someone who lives within Houston.

Other DVD's I want - Bones and House. I can't download much off the net because my hard drive is almost full. I either need to buy an additional new HD or fill up a couple of DVD's with stuff I don't use much. I have nearly all of Firefly waiting to offload onto DVD's and gave my nephew an advanced DVD player that can play DIVX. Clif is loaning out the Full Metal Alchemist series which I am waiting for and I need to see the movie.

Ghost in the Shell and GITS 2nd will become must haves for me as my bank balance recovers. Solid State Society will also be released this summer.

Alan Moore's criticism of V For Vendetta the movie, I like the movie even if it is not Moore's vision. I don't see how the government in the movie is not Fascist.

When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

George Clooney's being attacked for making ["Good Night, and Good Luck"], but he still had the nerve to make it. Presumably it's not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere. It could have worked.