Listen up, everyone! Here's the trailer to a new movie called Somebody to Love shot in Hong Kong by a friend of mine who directed it. It looks awesome! I will do a bit of bragging here and say that I was privy to the script in the early stages of the project. Hopefully it will be picked up by somebody and turned into a full-length feature.

THE MENTALIST.

Some new show on CBS. WATCH IT.

Who is this Simon Baker guy and where has he been all my life???

I'm now in my fifth year of trying - unsuccessfully - to understand this House/Cuddy business.

Fine, the ship irritates me almost as much as Sheyla used to, so the last two episodes haven't exactly been music to my ears or candy to my eyes. But okay, that's just my personal opinion/preference. I don't want to make some lame-ass emotional argument about why the ship sucks. Instead, my point is this: House and Cuddy seem completely incapable of interacting with one another without berating, belittling and otherwise making insulting and often humiliating sexual comments about one another. Why is this considered "chemistry" given that the two characters aren't grade schoolers? Why is this appealing to people?
 
Seriously, why does this ship have so many proponents? Female proponents? Would any of these women like to have a boyfriend who treated them like House, i.e. like shit? I'm not a huge fan of Cuddy's, but she deserves someone who will at the very least respect her and her accomplishments. To me this is a feminist issue.

Good luck to us all.

Watching The O'Reilly Factor on Faux News for some midnight lolz. I am cracking up here.

O'Reilly: "There's this huge big country in Europe, Germany, that isn't providing any real military support in Afghanistan that we can, YOU KNOW, RELY ON."

He slays me. Unintentionally. ;)

Has anybody watched the two-hour premiere of Heroes S3?

Tags. Never used them for some reason - until now. They're a handy little feature, I think. You know the way sometimes you're reading someone's latest entry and everybody seems to know what the person is talking about apart from you? I usually then click on the tag and trace it back to its origin. So yeah, I went back and tagged all my entries from 2008. I plan to tag the rest of my journal, but it'll take some time since entries go way back to 2005.

Astonishingly, upgrading XP to Vista in a way that preserved my documents and settings seems to have taken up nearly the entire HD. The operating system's background processes alone take up 43% of the working memory, which means that the computer is working at a snail's pace even when nothing is open. This is simply extraordinary. My laptop is less than a year old and it has the recommended 2GB of RAM and a Core Duo Intel processor. I mean, what kind of monsterous hardware is actually required to run Vista properly? I don't think Microsoft have released a more vile piece of software since the first edition of Windows 98. The damn thing took 5 hours to install, another 2-3 to update and this morning it wasn't even loading; I got the black screen of doom at which point I had to hold the power button down to shut down the computer manually, then load Vista in safe mode. I have seen frakking safe mode since the 1990s when my old folks used pirate copies which crashed irreparably every six months to the dot. I won't even bother here mentioning all the exasperating "features" they threw in there as if to annoy the user because I'm sure anyone involved in the blogosphere or in fact planet Earth has heard about them.
 
I think I'll stick with the novelty for now, but when the shiny cool features wear off, I'll probably wipe the piece of shit off my HD.

I. Just in case anyone thought the days of Catholic chokehold on Ireland were a thing of the past, let me quote the Constitution's preamble where it is reaffirmed in no uncertain terms that Ireland is not a secular state, but in fact a Christian theocracy whose citizens are subjects of the Christian god and his out-of-wedlock son.

Ugh. Been reading this book for the last few days, Pure Madness: How Fear Drives the Mental Health System. An okay book overall, that is until I got to page 85 where out of the blue the author describes an occasional mental health patient as "strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and long blonde hair". I blinked, several times, unable to believe that was actually written on the page. This flippant sentence stood out like a beacon in an otherwise objective, serious book which suddenly stooped to tabloid-style reporting when it came to talking about an attractive woman.

1. In what way is the patient's physical appearance relevant to the subject-matter of the book, namely the mental health legislation in the UK?
2. Why is it that a woman's physical appearance is highlighted in this crass way while a man's appearance is not once described in such terms in the entire book? Could it be because the (male) author is apparently unable to keep his erection to himself?
3. Why do we as a society (in this case editors and publisher) accept such blatant objectification of women?