Sorry, but I must blog about this.

I was watching a few scenes from the VHS of Amateur Quark and Lia gave me yesterday, and really missed the film. Then I decided to look up Hartley online to see what he's been up to (his last film was No Such Thing), and what do I come across but a notice that Amateur is finally coming to DVD in November! Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, the only feature included in the announcement is a 15-minute documentary (I really hope there's a commentary). Henry Fool will follow in December.

Also, yesterday afternoon I was discussing Promethea on a mailing list. That evening Quark & Lia gave me Promethea Book 2.

Links, links...

--

I also love this trailer. Nice to see Maria de Medeiros again, who seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth.

--

from Steven Grant’s August 27 edition of his column Permanent Damage:

“So far there's only one genuine crime that can actually be traced to the Hand Puppet (George W. Bush)'s Administration - ultra-rightwing commentator Bob Novak himself verified that his information that the wife of a diplomat critical of the White House was a CIA agent came from inside the Administration, and revealing that is a Federal crime - but this, if not actually a crime, comes close, and I expect we'll see lots of civil suits if not criminal prosecutions over it once the seriousness of the situation sinks in: it has come out that, for reasons of ‘national security,’ the White House ‘convinced’ the Environmental Protection Agency to bury the information that the air in New York City following the destruction of the World Trade Center was simply not safe to breathe. Instead, at the behest of the White House, they gave it a clean bill of health, even though much of the air in Southern Manhattan and surrounding areas was suffused with a fine dust of glass, concrete, steel, asbestos, carcinogens and other dangerous pollutants. (It's okay to walk on concrete and use glass in windows and Coke bottles; sucking particles of either into your lungs can lead to hemorrhaging, cancer and other ailments.) In other words, it was deemed more politically expedient to ‘put a good face’ on the situation to the rest of the world (not to mention to prevent the prolonged shutdown of the Stock Market) than to protect the health of tens of thousands of Greater New Yorkers.”

Hm. This post turned out longer than I expected.