Dave Kellam

It was fake journal time this week, it went over pretty well. Some forum feedback: LiveJournal, GW forum. The .pdf of the journal isn’t online yet but should be soon. The wee issue of GW is up now.

Fallout includes: departmental meetings in English and Women’s Studies, email activity in chemisty department, angry TAs, confused Compsa people, Leggett throwing the paper at a secretary, irate student-president elect, and a letter from the fencing club among others. It was a lot of fun putting together and I have to say it was worth staying up until 7am. I don’t want to see the sunrise in EngSoc ever again. Big thanks to the Journal and Omar for letting us use their shit. And everyone else who was there.

Just finished up watching Dog Day Afternoon, an Al Pacino vehicle that chronicles a bank robbery in the 1970’s. Pacino plays Sonny Workzit, who was robbing the bank to finance a sex-change operation for his gay lover. The credits roll and you see that Sonny was serving a 20-year term. That means he’s out now. So, I decided to google it and see what came up, didn’t find much beyond Dog Day Afternoon stuff. I gave Vivisimo a shot, which does this cluster style search. I found an article with comments about the robbery. Not an easy thing to find info on (well, fast info anyway).

His real name is John Wojtowicz and he still appears to be alive (judging from the message board posts). This site has facts about the film and a Life magazine article about the actual robbery. Apparently, there was another movie made (The Third Memory) in which Wojtowicz reenacts the bank robbery and tells the story from his perspective. Here’s an interview with Pierre Huyghe, the artist who directed the film and a Village Voice article. Lastly, here are some newspaper clippings.

Bush backs constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:

“Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society.”

What happened to the separation of church and state? I’m glad that the monkey wants to fuck around with the document at the core of American law, the same one that guarentees freedom of expression and civil liberties.

Update: There are gay penguins living right under our noses at central park.

One of the things I still remember from my creative writing class is rule #5 of Elmore Leonard’s rules: Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

I haven’t been around the computer much today, forgot to activate the Grey Tuesday templates. It’s a simple web protest in favour of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. EMI doesn’t like him remixing Beatles samples so much. I think it’s a pretty solid album, and there’s no way he could have afforded the rights for those songs. Go download it if you didn’t listen to me the first time.

Last week was reading week, I was in Kingston for most of it pretending to read. I managed to get a chunk of reading and work done, but didn’t feel like I accomplished much. I was planning on getting more programming done on my 499 project than I did, but it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a pretty good feel for the game-logic. I needed some relaxation time, these next couple of weeks are probably going to be on the hellish side.

I went down to Missassauga towards the end of the week and stayed with Alanah for a couple of days. Did a detour down to Burlington and visited with most of my relatives, who I hadn’t seen in two or three years. I picked up a couple of cheap cds while I was down there, including: The Darkness – Permission to Land, The Darkness – Christmas Time (Don’t let the Bells End), Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium and Nas – Illmatic. I can also recommend the movie Formula 51 if you want a really oddball mix of comedy, including Samuel L. Jackson wearing a kilt for no reason. I also saw Underworld, which is a shite Matrix rip-off with some vampires and werewolves.

On the newspaper side of things, it was a fun night last night. We took over the journal house to do a parody issue, which should go over well tomorrow. I ended up getting home around 7 in the morning, there was just a bunch of a nitpicky stuff that held us up. That said, it looks a lit more convincing than other years (yea official templates).