Blah. To my infinite annoyance (and resigned acceptance), I find that I am unable to attend FanTasia this year in the manner I had hoped. We have a product launch the second week of the festival, and I can neither be out the week before that launch or the week after. I may be able to make a long weekend of it again. I’m a touch dejected just now. We’ll see what the schedule looks like.

One of the annoying things about being a wrestling fan is the difficulty of watching the classics. Wrestling is meant to be entertainment, right? What kind of entertainment makes it so difficult to see the old stuff? (Well, comics, but that’s another rant.) There are just insane amounts of really good footage locked up in Vince McMahon’s vaults, and most of it never emerges. Here and there a Ric Flair match, here and there some old Hogan stuff, but never any classic wrestling for the sake of classic wrestling. ...

Hey, look, A Feast for Crows is done (original). By which we mean that the massively huge tome Martin was writing has been split into two parts, geographically, due to the physical limits of book side. The first part is complete and going into production. Well, hey, I’ll take that.

Announcement: C. E. Murphy Fans (original) is now open for business. C. E. Murphy is a dear, dear friend of mine who has just broken into publishing in a fairly big way, with six books sold over the course of the last year or so. Her first book, Urban Shaman, just hit the shelves. I’m running her unofficial forums.

Closer is the movie that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance wanted to be: it’s a story about the pain humans cause one another. It succeeds where Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance failed, because the characters are people and not caricatures and because Mike Nichols recognizes that pain arises from the cruelties we deal one another. It’s very close to being a great movie. The only flaw in the ointment is Julia Roberts, but let’s leave that for a moment. It’s the best Jude Law performance of the year, edging out his executive in I ♥ Huckabees. He’s still got that surface gloss which detracts a little from his performance, but like his executive, this is a role that fits that gloss. And his body language is a thing of beauty. Particularly during his scenes with Natalie Portman: the pair of them express themselves in exactly the way lovers interact. Not when they’re first meeting — that’s not so hard — but when they’re parting badly, and one of them wants to taste the other’s mouth, and there’s the moment of wanting to give in, to comfort, but no, you can’t — ...

Hopefully nobody actually listens to me about politics. I kinda think McCain’s busy running for President. Frist was too, but now he’s out of it; he needed that religious right support and he failed them. The field’s fairly wide open now. The hard right (original) hates it (original). Tacitus, as is often the case, is fairly sensible.

Note: the cloture vote for the current debate on Priscilla Owens’ judicial nomination is scheduled for Tuesday. Barring a compromise over the weekend, the cloture vote will fail and Senator Frist will begin declaring the Senate rules on filibusters unconstitutional. The compromise is very unlikely. The key religious right lobby wants all the controversial judges confirmed, and a compromise would result in some rejections. We’ll find out, I dunno, Tuesday or Wednesday? One of those. We’ll find out then whether or not 50 Senators will vote to eliminate the judicial filibuster.

Much of my Count Dooku opinion was shaped by Sean Stewart’s Yoda — Dark Rendevous. Sean Stewart is one of the best fantasists working today; his Star Wars novel rises way above the pack. It’s all about the relationship between Dooku and Yoda and Stewart knows how to write about mentor/student relationships. He’s also got a surprisingly good knack for writing lightsaber battles; or maybe not so surprising when you consider the swordplay in Night Watch. The… second to last? I think so. The second to last time I saw Stewart read, he read that portion of Night Watch and it was clear he loved writing it, but he hasn’t returned to any action to speak of since.

A Sundial In A Grave: 1610 is what the Kushiel books wanted to be, but less gilded. Late Renaissance, swordplay, espionage, desperate adventure, and dominance/submission games? Check. It’s possible there’s even a Mary Sue character, depending on how you look at things. And yet A Sundial In A Grave does not over-enthuse about the joys of pain in the bedroom, it does not linger endlessly on the prowess of the hero, and it is not a morass of angst. It swashbuckles, all the while aware of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the protagonist. He is a duellist: he is a man who desires — but that would be telling. ...

This one’s for Jeff. By last count, I had 528 DVDs — this includes TV shows and some wrestling, though. So maybe around 475 if you only count movies. A relatively small number of those are in a sell stack. The last film I bought was The Life Aquatic, in the Criterion 2 disc edition. It looks like another great Criterion production. The last film I watched was Serenity; it’s been an off-month for me. ...