I was sitting in the living room watching Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) on TCM when 2005 faded away and 2006 began. If you can get past the anti-scientific, pro-military subtext, it's really one of the better sf films of its time.

A decent enough writing day yesterday. Apparently, what I wrote on Friday was better than I'd thought, because I read through it and made hardly any changes. Then I wrote the eleventh section of "Bainbridge," which is called "The Dirty Work of Angels." It came in at 1,005 words. THE END is close now, though it may be Tuesday instead of Monday, since I'm getting such a late start today. Perhaps tomorrow I can pull one of those rare days when I write more than two thousand words in a single afternoon and reach THE END. That would be nice.

Except for the new vignettes for Sirenia Digest, January is to be a month of editing. I can edit anywhere. A bloody shame I can't pack up the laptop, my thesaurus, and the iPod and spend the month editing in Jacksonville or Neptune Beach or St. Augustine. What's the point, I'd like to know, of all this mobile technology if one cannot be mobile with it? Perhaps a long-lost aunt in Jacksonville will call today and offer me her beach house for the entire month of January (but I'm not holding my breath).

Monster Doodle Sculpture #5 is finished. Today I'll find out who gets it. I'm particularly fond of this one. It's a 1/2-scale model of a Nebari ice skipper. Actually, this is the crenelated ice skipper, which is more restricted in its range than the common ice skipper. You can tell the two apart by the morphology of the dorsal ridge which is distinctly notched in the crenelated ice skipper, but forms a single blade-like structure in the common ice skipper. I have this on the best authority. Both species are delicious, once they've been roasted and extracted from their thick exoskeletons. This is the first time I've attempted to model a Nebari species, and I'm quite happy with it. Anyway...




(left dorsolateral view)

(dorsal view)

(right dorsolateral view)



Yesterday, I forgot to mention this week's Kid Night movies. We started off with some peculiar little collection of shorts by three different filmmakers based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Edgar Allen Poe Collection: Volume 1, Annabel Lee and Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Lurker Films). George Higham's stop-motion/puppetry version of "Annabel Lee" was visually so-so, but the narration was hamfisted and rendered the whole thing almost unwatchable. There was an adaptation of "The Raven" by Peter Bradley, and it was marginally better than Higham's "Annabel Lee." The raven puppet was interesting, but, again, the narration was terrible and the woman playing Lenore looked like a cheap hooker. Finally, there was an adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart" that was so dull I can't even remember much about it, except that it was in Spanish with English subtitles. Blegh. Fortunately, we also rented Dark Water, Walter Salles' 2005 remake of Hideo Nakata's Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002), which was actually a pretty decent little thriller. Good performances by Jennifer Connelly, Tim Roth, and Pete Postlethwaite. The script wisely relied more on dread and disquiet than jack-in-the-box shocks. Nicely atmospheric. Now I will never move to Roosevelt Island (not that I would have anyway). This film probably deserves more attention than it got.

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