I'm what you call a fairly big believer in there being no afterlife, no big Kahuna in the sky directing traffic, no natural order of things spinning and intermingling to the tune of forces at large -- basically a generic quiet atheist who has no problem with religion if it's not being used to harm or restrict the happiness of others and typically describes themselves to others as "not religious". My friends state that I'm really agnostic as I'm a bit too open-minded to stand hard on any point dealing with so many unknowable variables, but I tend to think of myself as standing upon a personal belief from what I know and have experienced thus far, being logically ready to accept any new structure should any new knowledge come my to change this -- somewhat like dinosaurs. 

BUT!

Hmmmm....

...

What?! Sorry! Just thinking of Kate Beckinsale for a second there and how in person she...well, never mind about that. 

Anyhoo...But I have a strange fondness and reverence for religious trappings and all things supernatural and at times I can be quite superstitious. My personal life experiences has led me to believe that something odd is occurring around me and I'm at a loss to completely explain it. Comically I often wonder if I'm some sort of self-punishing God who constantly wills people and objects to constantly get in my way. Other times I have to wonder if people at times enter what I call a "zombie state" in which they are easily influenced by the thoughts of others. The latter seems a tad more "realistic" in that way that I don't really think of my insane musings as anything quite close to the reality of most situations, but that perhaps things such as ghosts and spiritual encounters have more to due with how certain parts of the Earth are more conducive to holding electrical residue that the brain generates. These recorded impulses then are occasionally picked up by the messy electrical brains of people, perhaps a certain frequency is needed, and thus strange occurrences...um, occur. I'm sure scientists will suss it out someday but that's just my knee-jerk thought on the matter. 

BUT!

Hmmmmm...latex. 

Sorry I'm um, being distracted by Dita invites. 

This leads me to my current story of an actual odd happening that totally happened and I'm not kidding. It's not really very interesting though so don't get your hopes up. I'm just bored and typing so you might want to go watch a movie or play some games instead. But if you've read my meanderings up to this point....here we go!

Many a year ago when I worked at Borders Books -- who I figure I can talk about since they're now out of business and my "you no talk" contract is thereby null and void -- I would often come in early when I had an opening shift. As most retail business will do unless they have a strong confident leader who knows what he is doing, they start unnecessarily cutting corners which involves removing positions and lowering payroll. Of course when they do this they also raise their productivity expectations as well as your areas of responsibilities meaning of course that everybody kinda, sorta has to work overtime or off the clock...a lot. 

At this particular point they had eliminated the office manager position which meant whomever the opening manager was had to do all the office work as well. Normally this wasn't really too much stuff, just balancing the money from the night before, printing out the daily schedule, getting the drawers ready for the day, all while hoping there isn't anything dramatic occurring such as a minor flood in the cafe, no employees showing up for work,  or some such thing. This particular morning however the payroll needed to be done and since a lot of people need it to be done correctly or they don't get paid, it's really a lot of work and it's fairly stressful. Having woken up early, I decided to truck on in and get an early start on the annoying work at hand as technically none of this office work was actually anything that my management responsibilities were judged by. Gotta get all that impossible stuff done in "magic" time y'know. 

Whilst I was plugging away the outside phone rang. Normally I wouldn't have answered it because it's way too early for anybody to be calling whether they worked for my store or not. But for some reason I did perhaps fearing it was our overreactive security folks getting all in a tizzy over my early arrival. It turned out to be a customer with a simple request of looking for a book. Why at 5 a.m. she felt anybody would be there and that this was a normal thing for a human to do is beyond me, but I was making good headway despite being by myself in the store (itself technically a sorta kinda no no the company long ago stopped caring about) so instead of blowing her off I set out to find her book. 

It turns out her request was for an erotic fiction book, a collection of tales dealing with sexy things happening in water environments entitled 'Wet - Tales of the Erotic'. I was a bit annoyed because young teenage girls beat that section up so bad on a constant basis that it was almost impossible to keep alphabetized. But again, I was ahead of the game so I gave it my best shot and proceeded to check through every damn book in the section looking for this silly thing. While I was eyeing all the fuzzy bits of semi-obscured nudity, a book suddenly fell off the shelf about 20 feet away from me out of the Social Sciences section. I ignored it at first, and I continued trudging my way through the erotic messiness at hand. Having no luck and realizing my phone customer wouldn't wait forever, my curiosity finally got the best of me and I walked over to see what book had fallen down. 

The below spoiler is what I saw!

[spoiler] [/spoiler]

That's right...not the actual book (as it appeared not to exist in our store) but the sequel to the book she was looking for!!! :o

Thus endeth my tale. 

Hmmmmm...tail. Oh Kate. You're incorrigible. 

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure why I watched the E3 coverage as, due to what appears to be a continuing saga of me having extreme money and health issues, I'm not really in the market for buying shiny new frontline games. Yet...because of that very problem I found myself ignoring all the big games being demonstrated and much ballyhooed by their respective presenters, and I found myself becoming more and more fascinated with a lot of the smaller games, many of which are only being released as downloadable titles.

Perhaps because of their budget limitations, I often find these games appealing from an old school aspect in the sense that I can just pick up and play them without too much knowledge of how they work. But also, and mayhaps in a more shallow way,  from an aesthetic sense they appeal more to me as the games often eschew the hyper-realism that big-budget modern games tend to wallow in, opting instead for a markedly stylistic approach. Obviously this approach is often for reasons of budget as well, but it is also an approach that appeals to me more...perhaps I'm just too old school? Who knows? 

Oh sure, there are many a big-budget title that I'm very much looking forward to such as 'inFamous - Second Son', 'Saints Row IV',  The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt', and Lord knows what else as, like I said, knowing I probably won't be able to pony up the big bucks to get it on day 1 of release, I kind of look past what mentally feels fairly unobtainable. Anyhoo...here is a quick rundown on the slightly smaller titles that caught my eye. Not sure if they'll catch my wallet, but they're definitely on my watch list. 

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Happy Easter Y'all! Whether you're a pagan friend of mine (or rebellious youth) who enjoys revelling in (or strongly referencing) the inherent fertility of Easter's symbolic trappings, or a hearty Christian who enjoys celebrating the return of Jesus as he let his followers know that he had truly elevated himself in the spiritual sense and that his suffering on their behalf had been for a very good cause. Either way all are welcome as over the past I have had friends from all extremes and, being something of a chameleon due to my tiny, tiny childhood size combined with moving around a lot, I've learned to accept a lot of folks for who they are and not try to change them in any way. 

Anyhoo...now that I actually have access to a computer and in the near future will be able to purchase one of my very own, I thought I might revisit some old habits such as creating an Easter "fun page" filled with all sorts of (hopefully) comic merriment as I have done in the past. But as I perused through Google pictures looking for an appropriately retro Easter header...oh, which would have looked thusly:

Not too shabby...a tad on the small side but as always I make an attempt to merge my love for old-fashioned pin-ups with whatever is the calendar theme of the day. Anyways whilst I was thumbing through the "retro Easter" pics that it culled up from the vastnessness of the Internet, I began noticing a decent amount of alarming and slightly disturbing pictures associated with the holiday; some intentional and some...not so much. Being still something of an ADD lad I decided to ditch my party blog and just lazily post some of the pics that caught my eye for your edification, amusement, or perhaps much to your regret for clicking on my abode. Enjoy?

I think the expression on the child says it all as, so stricken with apprehension it cannot even summon up the emotion of tears and terrors, stunned...it quietly ponders whether or not the giant expressionless bunny is about to consume it. 

"I swear by my hands some child will die by chocolate this very day"

OK let's face facts. You and I both have seen enough horror films to realize that either the kid is about to look for her last egg, or she is about to serve as a catalyst for some upspeakable horror beyond horror that's about to rip you apart in such a manner that all the police involved in investigating your murder will have nightmares to their dying days. Either way...you know it's not going to end good. 

If there's one picture on this blog that's going to stay with you and haunt you for days upon end until you slowly erase that memory with some very hard liquor, it's this one. 

One of the hardest kinds of retro pictures to find is live model Easter pin-up girls as, other than great pin-up painters like Vargas and Elvgren, it's amusing to think before Playboy, folks back then couldn't quite summon up the sexy when it came to bunny costumes. Hallowe'en...no problem. Christmas...sure, you want to open a present little boy? But girls in bunny costumes? Not a chance. This picture is made all the more frightening as she seems to be presenting the egg in a manner which indicates that it is the result of an unholy union you and her have both been a part of. There is no escape!

OK I'll admit that this one isn't disturbing nor particularly funny. I just find it amusing because back in them thar  pre-Hindenburg days pretty much everyone thought that traveling by Dirigibles was the wave of the future. But soon the tiny chicks will be leaping to their unknown fate surrounded by fiery carnage as their hopes of bringing us a happy Easter celebration is dashed along with the hopes of humanity. Oh the...oh wait, I just did that joke. Ah well...

And you thought when you died that at least your soul was free to rejoice in the afterlife. Think again. The Collectors have come. 

Is it just me or do you also wonder if, when you pull this colorful napkin out of its holder, that you expect to receive a generous portion of the poor bunny's guttyworks as well? Anyone? Well...I suppose I am something of a morbid lad. 

Just remember...if you make any noise, any noise AT ALL, no matter how small and they open their eyes...you're dead. Tread lightly my friend. 

Did I mention how difficult it was in the pre-Playboy days to make women in bunny outfits look sexy? Lord knows it wasn't as if there weren't some really hot women back in those days as, personally speaking, I'm quite fond of girls from the '20s and '30s. But again...the technology just wasn't there apparently. Oh sad unsexy sexy bunny girls with their very hot had heads. So sad. 

So that wraps up my minor attempt at amusing/terrorizing/boring your Easter day. I hope you all have a happy one whether you're church goin' or family gettin' together folks or even if you're just doing the same thing you did yesterday. For my part I unexpectedly have the day off and so I am resting my weary bones from the worst job I've ever had that's so physically exhausting that is may just kill me. But hey...it's a job even if it's just temp work and it puts a little money in my pocket which is more than I had a month ago. Have a good one everyone!

The other day Studio Ghibli announced the legendary Hayao Miyazaki's newest film project called The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) which is an adaptation of a Miyazaki manga of the same name. It's centers around the life of Iro Horikoshi the man who designed Japan's Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter widely used in the Pacific theatre of WWII. With the fighter pilots being anthromorphic pigs one can't help but think this might have a connection to the underrated Porco Rosso or the much rumoured sequel to that film. Either way it's nice to see Miyazaki doing a film based off of his own material once again and I for one am very excited and it will be a long wait until the Summer of 2013 which it is currently shed-yuled to be released.

I have seen literally thousands upon thousands of films and every day more and more that were once out of reach at last become "mine" through a mixture of good planning and just plain random luck as I stumble around this noisy world. Yet there are always those which I value more highly over others which particularly chaff at my mind that I have yet to see them. Two of my biggest out of reach films for quite some time have been King Vidor's The Crowd and the other one which I finally got to watch yesterday is Victor Sjöström's The Wind from 1928.

A pet project of Lillian Gish's due to her deep desire to work with Victor Sjöström as well as the leading Swedish actor Lars Hanson, the story involves Lillian Gish playing Letty, a sheltered woman from Virgina who moves way out to the deep desert to stay with her cousin. Letty displays an increasingly disturbing psychosis involving the omnipresent wind that envelopes the town as well as the film and soon begins to ascribe all sorts of mental terror to the metaphorical imagery that the locals have used to describe and explain the wind. These metaphors become almost literal to Letty's poor sheltered mind as increasingly she imagines the wind is hellbent on claiming her and as her mind deteriorates and her body beaten by betrayal this becomes literally and symbolically so as the hellish wind-swept sandstorm accepts her self-sacrifice and lovingly envelopes and erases her existence giving her some much longed for peace from the madness.

Well...at least in the original ending.

But that ending did not survive and thus did not happen and so I suppose I'm forced to go with my knee-jerk, mental rearrangement of assuming the wind being more of a literal representation of Letty's fear of the unknown. Not that it wasn't before, but with the happier ending it feels more pronounced. Letty's sheltered life left her unable to cope with any change and difficult for her to accept anything beyond the immediately familiar. This problem is exemplified in her simple inability to accept the love of a truly good man Lige (Lars Hanson) whom she rejects emotionally and physically even after they are married in a particularly excellent scene brilliantly acted by Lars Hanson demonstrating the exuberant joy of a newlywed quickly turned into deeply disappointed heartbreak and quietly respectful but depressed resolve. Only once she symbolically "puts down" her single hope of escape to civilization, which himself is representative of all the unnatural sleaze and corruption that a big city can contain, is Letty able to understand the natural purity of not only Lige as a man but her surroundings as merely a natural state of things in which she can defiantly exist with finally realized strength and conviction.

Though the ending was forced upon the creators and the end result was Sjöström leaving Hollywood forever, at least I felt the happier ending was worked into the film in a manner which I felt made some sense on a multitude of levels so it didn't feel too tacked on, say in the manner which things suddenly got all rosy and awesome at the end of Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road from 1933. Overall I wasn't initially completely blown away by the film, but I really enjoyed it and felt the director did a good job dialing down Gish a bit as opposed to D.W. Griffith who more often than not encourages Gish to go all out as he tends to go in for more emotion and less symbolism. But this was my first viewing and these are just quick impressions and since I taped the hell out of it they may change after a handful more viewings...or not who can say? I'm just happy to have watched it as this point and feel better for having done so.