V for Vendetta

So, last night lisakit and I went out to see V for Vendetta. It was an okay flick, and yes, the tagline, "People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people," was quite effective. It has a signature Wachowski momement (too signature, in my opinion, it detracted from the whole film). I will say the actor who played V did a fabulous job of communicating emotion strictly with his hands and body language, almost a mime routine. And his introductory patter is nifty, but really, that's about it. Unfortunately, it sags a bit in the middle, which isn't terribly rare for a movie like this.

All in all, a nice time. I was glad to have some time to go to a movie with a friend. I don't have that very often.

A pretty f'ing sad fnord...

So, this morning we're all processing the news that a rental home in the Seattle Capitol Hill neighborhood was the scene of a multiple homicide: a man walked into the house, killed six people and wounded two others and then, confronted by the police, shot himself in the mouth with a shotgun.

If you read the article to which I connected, you'll see a surprising number of ill-deployed fnords. The most obvious is that the victims, while not deserving of homicide, were weird and potentially poltically undesireable. They were young, played loud music, they had a lot of piercings and wore a lot of facial makeup. Oh no! Black lipstick! Goths! The victims were chilling out from an illegal rave party, and of course the older generation is so shocked and horrified by the whole notion. Not to mention that one of the 15-year-old witnesses had an 18-year-old boyfriend! Shocking, shocking of course.

And, as a coup de grâce, the last paragraph mentions that this happened "just a few blocks from where Little League baseball games were underway this morning."

Fnord!