Hunter S. Thompson has...

I've only read one Hunter S. Thompson book (Fear and Loathing, natch) and I'm not nearly as big a fan of his or Tom Wolfe's work as I am of P.J. O'Rourke, but as I was paying attention today I noticed a broad distinction between the two different memes of reportage.

In one set of reports, Hunter is said to have shot himself in the head. In the other set, epitomized by NPR, Hunter "has died." A little later, the report includes the phrase "of a self-inflicted gunshot wound" or "by his own hand."

I'm kinda curious why some editors preferred the phrase "has died," as if it were just something that happened to Hunter, and others chose to be explicit about his self-destruction. Part of me supposes that it might have been his age; Hunter was 67, a bit young but still within the margin of error for an "average" lifespan, and so saying "he has died" has little surprise value behind it. Usually when a young celebrity dies we want to know why, but 67... people do "just die" at that age. Hunter just chose to immanentize it. And maybe Hunter was always expected to go out with a gun. Goddess knows he owned a lot of them.

Sublime Pleasure

jatg, in a recent post, points out after some studios make a serious misstep with their animation that, "they fail to realize that animation is NOT a genre. It is a medium and it always, ALWAYS comes down to story, story, story."

She also talks about how insanely easy it is to make a movie these days. In that vein, I offer the following six minute short by "Imperial Boy": Rain, the Little Girl, and My Letter. (Yah, that's a torrent. And the container is Matroska. Get used to the new weirdness already.) The character designs are a little rough but they are hand-drawn. The backgrounds are computer graphics over hand-drawn frames, and the whole work is quite beautiful. And the story is the centerpiece, which is what makes it fun.

You have to go through it a second time and pause it, just to appreciate the amount of work he puts into his mechanical design: the clock, the teakettle, the bridge, are all beautiful in their own right. His website is a mix of rough studies, all of which show a very creative mind at work. I was reasonably impressed that one man could put this all together so effectively.

The cast of characters was...

The guy in the white, stained t-shirt that barely covers his beer belly. The bulky one in the flannel shirt and jeans. The thin one with greasy hair and bad teeth. The scrawny one who looks like he might have a knife.

Last night I was awakened at 3:00am by an allergy fit, and when I went back to bed, I had a dream that Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I went to a nice restaurant, and after we had gotten into the car but before I started it some jackass in a stolen car-- I think it was a Ferarri-- hit us in the parking lot while he was trying to park. He got out of the car, sat on one of those cement barriers, and put his head in his hands, and when I went out to check on the damage, the four from Bad Dreams Central Casting came out and assaulted me.

It wasn't really an attack. It was more like a hazing gone real, real bad. It went on long enough, and surreally enough, for Omaha to dial 911. I could hear her arguing with the cell phone redirection people, who sent her to the police, who eventually sent a car. The first cop on the scene looked a lot like the new Starbuck in a riot helmet.

I woke up then, feeling completely unrested. I wonder how I'm going to make it through today. Coffee and thumpy music.