Scattershot

Once you've posted cute cat pictures on your blog, you can never go back. A boundary has been crossed. So where to go from here?

Weeell.. I recently saw the movie Immortal, directed by respected European comics artist Enki Bilal. It's adapted from his Nikopol Trilogy comics (out of print, and a used copy costs more than a new Chrysler, BTW). The comic is sci-fi nonsense poetry, a sequence of tableaus on the subject of urban decay and disaffected Euro-glam. I hoped the movie would also be a sequence of tableaus, like Peter Greenaway remaking Blade Runner, but for the movie Bilal seems to have plugged into more conventional Tinseltown action vocabulary. The blend of live actors and low-grade CGI has a clumsy Song of the South vibe... the whole thing seems like an exercise in trying to pacify an oddball aesthetic for Hollywood sensibilities, and failing to please fans of either approach.

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One nice thing about Kannapolis: the farmers' Market is packed with organic free-range grass-fed meat. Laurie and I have heard too many horror stories about factory farms and their Cheneyesque approach to animals; we don't object to slaughtering animals for food, but we think the critters should be have good lives right up to the final hour. Best sausage we've ever had.