Coffee

My coffee-drinking age is pretty young; I've really only been imbibing for a about a year and a half, which isn't long. It amazes me, though, how much I enojy coffee these days. I can be having a horrible day and then sit down with a cup of quality coffee and feel lovely.

My dad always praised my non-coffee-drinking, telling me "Don't start any bad habits you don't already have." It's good advice, and it's probably part of why I never started smoking. The problem in my mind is that drinking coffee isn't a bad habit in any way.

In fact, before I embarked on my quest to begin liking coffee (I started with the mocha and worked my way to plain coffee), I researched it to make sure it wouldn't be a bad habit. I'm in school, sometimes I need to stay up realy late, and really, I wanted to get my caffiene in the healthiest way possible. Now, because Wikipedia is the end all of internet sources, I checked out their page on coffee and found that while it has a couple minor negative effects, it has many more good ones. You can look at it all right here.

To me, the greatest danger in coffee drinking seems to be this:

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.

The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.

She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.

Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.

Coffee? Generally safe, but sometimes with some extra protein and a side of rabies.

Tresspassing.

Anyone who has been to visit me at my apartment has read the note taped to my front door: "Please do not leave flyers or coupons on my door. Thank you!" It's on a pink background with flowers, an entirely polite way to ask people to stop wasting paper (and their business's resources) on me and my front door. For the most part, being polite has worked and people have respected my wishes. However, compliance has certainly not been uniform.

One local restaurant, who just opened a location a little ways away (it's not quite in my neighborhood, it's in Allandale and not Hyde Park), left me a menu. "Well," I thought. "This isn't a flyer OR a coupon. It's a menu. And I don't have anything about menus on my door!" I gave the restaurant the benefit of the doubt, dropped the menu in my recycle bin, and taped an addendum to my door: "OR MENUS."

Now, I know that this warning is completely comprehendable, because one morning (okay, it was a really afternoon) Corey and I had a pizza delivered. The driver scoffed at my door, "Did someone really leave you menus after you put that first part of the note up?" he shook his head.

I've lived on in relative peace since then, my door generally unmolested (someone did leave a voter registration form on my door, and although I'm registered, it wasn't a commercial endeavor so I didn't really mind). But yesterday, returning from 8 hours on campus, disgruntled and tired, I came home to find a brochure for a chicken wings "restaurant" on my door.

That was it. I was mad. MAD. I am a VEGETARIAN and I don't eat chicken, and even when I did eat meat, I didn't eat CHICKEN WINGS. I find it incredibly disrepectful for someone to ignore the explicit desire that I've spelled out on my door, as if it's either a joke, or as if their chicken wing product is above all the other products I receive flyers for.

This set me off on a vicious Googling binge for information about whether or not it was legal for companies to place flyers where they were expressly asked not to. While I discovered that lots and lots of people have the same problem as I do (a number of people with mail slots reported a much more intrustive problem of opening their front doors to find their foyers filled with this swill), I found out that there really isn't much you can do about it.

Leaving flyers isn't considered a form of solicitation, so you can't actually prosecute people who flyer you even with a sign up. A Google search of the terms "door" and "flyer" on the City of Austin website (http://www.ci.austin.tx.us) gave me nothing relevant, but brought up some examples where the city had even sponsored door flyers. This was lame.

The only thing I found that you can get people in trouble for is tresspassing. This is different for me than most people, because they have some type of front yard or the like that a flyer-person has to cross in order to leave flyers on the front door. Additionally, the outside of the door where I live isn't really "mine" since I live in a condo complex, and the outside of the doors are all, techinically I believe, the cohesive property of all the unit owners (and I am not a unit owner, by any stretch of the imagination). So I'm in a sort of legal quandry in regards to the flyering of my door. I'm thinking about putting up a sign that says something along the lines of, "This door is private property, and leaving flyers of any type on it will be considered trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." Unfortunately, I don't own the door, and, if I did, there seems to be very little I could actually get out of prosecuting someone. It'd'be a scare tactic, really.

My mom proposed a much simpler solution that could have more of an effect: posting my sign in Spanish.

In the meantime, I've been progressing (in tiny, tiny steps taken very, very slowly) on my thesis. What I think I really want to write about right now is the San Antonio heavy metal scene and why it has been largely ignored, and how this is because it clashes with the image that the city wants to maintain for itself, which is largely one of iconic Texas history (the Alamo) and authentic Hispanic culture. In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne got drunk, put on one of Sharon's green gowns, and peed on the Alamo. Urban legend states that a faint 666 is visible where his urine came in contact with the wall, the mark of the devil left by the Prince of Darkness. The way he tells the story, he needed to take a piss, found a wall, and found out it was the Alamo when he got arrested; not a story of rebellion, but a story of drunken and accidental confusion. To sum up the story, he was banned from the city of San Antonio (by the governor!) for ten years, until he donated $10,000 to the Alamo in 1991. This is more or less a metaphor for what I want to write about.

Now, I'm no Ozzy expert, but like most people, I knew he'd bitten the head off of a live bat at one of his shows. As I watched youtube interview footage yesterday (the Letterman/Ozzy interview from 1982 was priceless), I learned the whole story. Ozzy had habitually bitten the heads off of bats at his concerts in the past--rubber bats. When a bat appeared on-stage that fateful night, he rationally assumed it was of the rubber variety. Unfortunately, it was a live, stunned bat, but Ozzy didn't realize that until too late. The best part about this story is that Ozzy had to receive a series of rabies shots, and even the Price of Darkness bitches about how much they hurt.



But what I didn't know--and I think, what most people don't actually know, if that Ozzy Osbourne did intentionally bite the head off of a dove, and he did it in a way that was a million times more bad ass than if he was onstage performing. After being kicked out of Black Sabbath and after a period of depression and self-destructive behavior (more so than usual), Sharon got Ozzy back on his feet, getting him signed with Epic to release a solo album and restart his musical career. As a part off this, she arranged a meeting with the Epic bigwigs, so that they could all see each other and Ozzy could reassure them, perhaps of his reliability, perhaps of his normality. I'm not sure. As a part of this meeting, however, Sharon and Ozzy decided to bring doves and rlease them in the meeting, both as a symbol of peacefulness and to get the executives to notice him. However, as with many things Ozzy, this didn't go quite according to plan.

Forgiving the fact that releasing doves in a meeting room has to be a horrible idea no matter who you are (bird shit, come on), things went horribly wrong. No one seemed to be noticing Ozzy, and he found this unacceptable. He sat down on the lap of one of the women there, I believe she was an advertising executive. In no terms did she want Ozzy on her lap, and this is plainly obvious in photos taken of the moment where she is leaning as far away from Mr. Osbourne as possible. As he was perched there, one of the doves landed in his lap. Wanting even more attention, he casually picked up the dove... and bit its head off.

While he talked about how awesome he thought the moment was in the interviews, talking about the blood and puke and feathers that the room quickly was covered in, Sharon was less enthusiastic and admitted she peed herself when he did it. But the point is this: They didn't drop his record, they didn't decide not to release it, they didn't penalize him. They banned him from the building.


It all comes back to tresspassing.

retail.1

Yesterday:

"Oh, yeah, well I'm from Beaumont, I evacuated because of Ike. My two kids go to school up here, so I got to see them. What about you? Are you in school?"

"Yep, sure am."

"Where do you go to school at?"

"I'm at UT."

"What are you studying?"

"Oh, I'm an American Studies and Plan II major."

"What'd you say? Plan what? What's that?"

"It's a sort of honors major."

"Oh, so you're brilliant. I never would have known, you're so cute."

"... Thank you."

"Usually the smart girls aren't as cute. You can usually tell."

"Mmm."

"My daughter's pretty sharp."



.... Did she just tell me her daughter was ugly?

Complaint #753:

I hate when the guy who lives above me gets high and drops cans of food on the floor. The THUD....roooooooooooll noise always catches me by surprise.

Losses.

In the last couple weeks, I have now lost a shoe, an earring, and my cell phone while riding my bicycle.

Palin's email

The point of this whole "scandal" is nothing political. 4chan and such don't really care that much about politics. The point of the whole debacle (because it's a debacle and not any sort of scandal) is that YOU SHOULDN'T USE FUCKING YAHOO EMAIL FOR IMPORTANT SHIT because it's not an issue of if it will be hacked, but when it will be hacked.

Everyone who knows anything about computers and the internet (which definitely isn't Senator McCain and apparently not Governor Palin) should be standing up and pointing out that using a Yahoo account--with a published address (she DID use it as a press contact)--is asking to get it hacked.

I have no sympathy for her, and I'm indifferent to those who hacked. You can't complain when you get what you're asking for.

Camila.

I love when class assignments allow me to write informally and self absorbedly about films. Like for Camila.

I think, as a whole, I liked this film, but at the same time, there were a number of points about it that I didn’t like.
The film begins sort-of in medias res in that Camila’s grandmother is arriving at their home, and it is not immediately apparent that she has been sexually involved with a member of the clergy—although it is vaguely implied, and it’s definitely spelled out on the back of the box. In medias res is actually fine with me, but I think the film fails to do it smoothly, and I find this grating.
Additionally, I’m not sure how good the production values are. I understand that this was filmed in the 1980’s, but to be honest, the harshness of the lighting, contrast, and colors, combined with the quality of the footage itself, make it look like a BBC TV series. Or maybe PBS. This is a shame. Although I do not know if the costumes, hair, and make up are appropriate to the time period and location, they are exquisitely and excellently done. I wish that the characters looked as good on the screen as I think they probably did in real life.
The script was well done, but certainly not perfect. A good amount of the dialogue between Ladislao and Camila was overdramatic swill. This is particularly aggravating in that this is certainly a stereotype afforded to Latin American screen productions—being excellently exhibited in Mexican soap operas (thank God Americans don’t all talk like the recently reborn 90210). Additionally, the passionate scenes—although there aren’t an abundance of them—are a little over the top, and rather sloppy. This, however, I found to be an endearing quality of the film, as it made the characters seem much more human. I do not believe in the existence of the overly glamorized sleekness of Hollywood sex.
I did feel like Camila’s brother, however, was a shill character, which is a shame. The religious brother of the philandering sister has a lot of potential for fantastic character development, and yet throughout the film he is a completely flat character. The father, as well, is very one dimensional—perhaps this is supposedly how people were in the mid 1800’s in Argentina, but I doubt it. If the film makers were really trying to highlight the difference between Ladislao and Camila with the rest of the characters as individual and independent, thinking characters versus the flat puppet like depictions of their counterparts, adamant and unthinking in their social roles, it could have been done much more artfully (or artfully at all), so that it resembled a story telling technique rather than a bleak omission.

The story itself was interesting to watch; it was particularly interesting for me because, although I began watching the film blindly, I happened to watch the first hour of the film the day before Dr. Burnett discussed it in class. This means that I had the perfect context in which to watch it—a discussion of the culture and history that were defining the time period and the area. Unfortunately, this also meant that she spoiled the ending for me, although I’d probably read it on the back on the box anyways, and then just forgotten. However, I think that, were the film not based on true events, it would have been an incredibly lame story—very trite. Instead, it was almost shocking, and I think this is probably what made the film worthwhile.
I think that the film did an okay job showing the context of the setting, but I think this could have been done better as well. I certainly got a feel for what life in Argentina was like in the mid 1800’s, but I’d hardly say I understood it. The film makes it clear that Camila is in the upper class, as she donates her old clothing, etc., but it never shows the other classes and what their life is like, or why, as Ladislao says, they would have no use for the clothing of a rich woman. At the very least, it seems they could be made into blankets or rags.
Additionally, there is one scene where Camila and her brother hear gun shots and run to the door to watch men ride past on horses shooting their guns into the air. This scene could contribute to the description of the period, but it lacks any type of explanation—leaving the watcher confused and uncertain what had just happened. Had we not discussed it in class, I would not have known what had happened, and it would have simply been an incongruous and out of place event in the film.
The tone was interesting; it was very open and nonjudgmental. It seemed to have little to say about what was happening within the film. Although Camila’s family (besides her father) seemed upset about what was happening, and although the men who executed the lovers seemed unwilling to do so, the script itself, as well as the making of the film, seemed to lack any real sort of commentary on the issue and the situation, portraying the whole situation very simply and straightforwardly. Once again, if this was done (in my opinion) more masterfully, it could have been a much more affecting film, but once again, I felt that it fell short of this.
Camila was a decent little film, but altogether seems to lack any sort of strong statement, either about the time period, the story, or the art of film.