Pepperland

Have I talked about Pepper? I might have.

Pepper is a cat, black with white paws and belly. She belongs to my downstairs neighbor.

With cats it can be hard to tell the difference between skittish and playful. When I enter the stairwell from outside she sometimes runs up or down the stairs away from me, but sometimes lingers. I do pet her when I get the chance, and tonight put my nose right up to hers. So maybe we're building trust.

I won't try to pick her up, though. I'm not suicidal.

Lost in the weeds

Looking at my neighborhood. Well, not so much the street I live on, but the extended area. The streets between here and the supermarket. I notice among the litter, there are these black plastic envelopes. The envelopes originally held medicinal marijuana, as you can tell by reading them.

Now it's true that there are oodles of liquor bottles on the sidewalks and in the streets too. Not like any particular substance has a monopoly on litter. It's just that you think of potheads as being one-with-the-earth types. Let's hear it for busting stereotypes, I guess.

Tackled

Okay, so that happened.

Monday night I noticed myself feeling a little under the weather. Tuesday, Christmas Day, I found myself in the grips of a full-fledged cold. It got old pretty fast. This morning I was feeling kind of nauseous, then after contact with the cold tiles of the bathroom floor I spontaneously got over it.

So that was the worst of it. Still finding my feet. Happy Christmas, all.

Table for two

Dogs Kitchen Dogs from Katelyn Costello on Vimeo.

This is about as expressive as I've ever seen those Wiggly Eyes craft pieces. Which you can apparently get a 120-pack for less than $2 at Target.

Getting dogs to eat sitting at the table is one thing, apparently. Getting them to use utensils? Well...

Behind the mask

There is, it's safe to say, a lot going on with The Phantom of the Paradise. It's a collaboration between Brian De Palma, who as a director had just recently started going in the thriller direction he's best known for, and Paul Williams, who is best remembered for writing songs for Muppets and Karen Carpenter. Williams wrote all the songs for the movie, a musical/horror adaptation of Phantom of the Opera, which hadn't yet gotten the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment. Williams wrote all the songs and also plays the chief villain, an evil reflection of Phil Spector. (The real Spector's murder conviction was quite a ways in the future.)

Things are primed for weirdness and De Palma delivers. The film starts with a voice-over from Rod Serling itself, leading into a doo-wop extravaganza that plays like if Sha Na Na were more death-obsessed. This is an introduction into the world of Swan (Williams), which is even more sordid than you might guess. At this point the antihero/secondary villain, Winslow Leach, is just a songwriter, a very naive songwriter who hands over originals of his work for Swan to critique, and three guesses how that works out. Before his lengthy but quick list of misfortunes and disfigurements, Leach looks like a wimpier Warren Zevon. He's played by frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley, who manages to keep much of his dopey innocence after the character has become a monster and a killer.

Are there flaws in the movie? Oh yes, yes indeedy. For one thing Leach's grand work is a rock opera about the Faust legend, but he doesn't balk at signing a contract in blood. And Swan's scheme unravels at the end due to what seems just a random discovery.

Still, there's fun to be had. De Palma has probably directed better movies, but this one has a go for broke spunk and absolute indifference to realism that keep it lively. He's never seemed to have more fun as a director.

The abyss

Stellar encounters also make occasional fireworks, which are noteworthy because they're superimposed on such a cold and endless night. A pair of white dwarfs can collide or merge to make a supernova explosion if the combined mass exceeds the threshold for violent detonation.This time the math is: ember + ember = firework. An even rarer event sees a pair of neutron stars or a pair of black holes (or a neutron star and a black hole) colliding to emit an intense burst of high-energy radiation, the flash briefly outshining the rest of the universe. When these dense objects merge they also distort space-time and unleash a spasm of gravity waves.

The last fizz of stellar fusion is a slideshow in a circus completely run by gravity. In the era of stars, life was kept interesting by a battle of competing forces—radiation released from the creation of elements versus gravity. By 100 trillion years after the big bang, gravity may have lost some battles but it has won the war and has nobody left to play with but itself. Gravity playing solitaire turns out to be pretty interesting.

Been reading Chris Impey's How It Ends: From You to the Universe. The "you" part is only sporadically interesting, but speculating on how the galaxy and the universe will fizzle out holds a certain fascination. Call it a catastrophe or just the natural order of things, it's kind of galvanizing. Of course this isn't something any of us expect to see in our lifetimes.

Somehow perfect musical accompaniment by Joan as Police Woman playing the Reader's Digest version of David Bowie's song suite, and Bowie with the original.
 

Bar and button

My clock radio has a snooze bar and a sleep button. You know how these things work. Snooze means you get another few minutes of peace. Sleep means you turn the whole thing off until the next day.

So yes, sleep goes with button because it's just a little round thing, and the snooze bar is a long rectangle. Now I've had experiences when I've been woken up by the sounds of the radio and hit the sleep button, meaning that I didn't really wake up until well after I meant to. Anyway, now while I'm going to sleep I repeat to myself "bar, bar, bar," in order to remind morning me which one to press.

Could there be a danger of waking up and having the urge to hit a bar and get blotto? Maybe, but the bars around here aren't open that early. This city isn't that classy.