Broke again.

Is it YOU? Are YOU doing it with your eyes?

Okay, still busted....

...but I have faith that it will be fixed eventually, so here I am with some random thoughts: 1) I celebrated the Cardinals' victory in the World Series with a bottle of Veuve-Clicquot. The trick to not becoming a lush is to cultivate sufficiently expensive tastes. 2) I celebrated Halloween at The Aero, a theater here in Santa Monica. It was running an all-night marathon of horror movies. Decent time, though I wasn't able to stay for more than two and a half. I don't like Italian horror movies, and I'm tired of people telling me how freakin' great Dario Argento/Lucio Fulci/etc are. If that's good, that whole area of culture is incredibly impoverished. "Gialli" are like Hammer movies but with horrible dialogue and worse special effects. I've given these guys at least five chances to entertain me, and they've never done it. 3) Same with Brian DePalma. I think he's a retard. Anybody who watches "Sisters" and doesn't figure it out within the first thirty minutes (fifteen if you're a USC film student) should be escorted from the room. And please, don't anybody explain to them how to reproduce. 4) At the same festival, I watched "Re-Animator," a pleasant memory from my teenage years (with a surprising amount of full-frontal; I wonder how I ever got into that theater at 16?). Apart from the nudity--always welcome, even now--I noticed that actor David Galt looked strikingly like Senator John Kerry. Take a look. Here. Here. They're a little dark, but I think you can see what I'm talking about. It's really striking in some scenes. I think this explains 2004. That, and the voter intimidation. And the electronic voting machines run by Republicans. 5) In more conspiracy news, anybody with 42 minutes to burn and an obsession with Robert F. Kennedy (as fitting a description of me as any) might be interested in this talk given by Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan Sirhan's lawyer. Keeping in mind that he WAS Sirhan's lawyer (he died), Teeter's talk is a nicely compressed discussion of the case for conspiracy. 6) Yesterday was not a day to root against me in football. Not only did Yale beat Harvard, USC beat Cal. Yale hadn't won in five years, including a crushing triple-overtime loss last year. But not this time, Cantabs. 7) I am working on several books, including a couple that should be available for this Xmas. Watch this space (assuming I can figure out what's going on with the site...) 8) And finally: "What happens in Vegas..." "...can usually be cured by antibiotics. Usually."