Crown Me

I hate the smell of my own bones burning. It's a shadowed, grey smell ominously full of unfamiliar chemicals. It is the smell of friction and dust thrown about by a dentist's drill as he gets Moria-deep into your jaw, pushing down toward the nerve, stopping only to leave a layer of bone as thin as a mosquito's wing between the outside world and a direct connection to the pain centers of your brain.

Well, my jaw at least. The pain left is familiar, only in that I've been living with it for a few weeks now, but he claims that this is different, the pain of surgical insult as he filled and capped and reinforced what was still clean and pure of poor, tortured tooth #19, following sister tooth #31 into the ignominious future of a crown.

Still, hopefully I'll be able to eat cleanly on the right side of my mouth soon, something I haven't been able to do for weeks. It only hurt when encountering cold or especially high pressure, but it was still enough to discourage me from eating there.

Lunch today was fajitas of onions, green bell peppers, and ham, all sauteéd until very soft, with Monterey jack cheese softened on top in the oven, and an iced latté with no sugar. The caffeine reinforces the effects of the ibuprofen.

By God, Diet & Exercise Does Make Time Flow Backwards!

Last month, 42 senators wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and encouraged him to start more obscenity prosecutions against mainstream pornographers. Orrin Hatch especially said that the Justice Department's focus on bizarre fetish sites like Max Hardcore, material designed to shock and repulse, just allows the continued mainstreaming of the not-quite-so-revolting.

Legal scholars rightfully point out that the sheer popularity of this stuff indicates that it is acceptable by community standards, and prosecuting it would be mindbogglingly difficult.

Over at the Christianist news organization One News Now, Morality in Media spokescreep Pat Trueman bangs the drum louder:

We know from the brain science research that men will start out with adult pornography and move to more deviant and harder material, and many deviate down to child pornography. So by not prosecuting the adult pornographers, we're in essence creating child pornographers.

If that's the case, then my current health kick must be making time go backwards: back in the 1990s I watched and read all manner of seriously fetishy S&M stuff, but these days my porn consumption is both way down and astonishingly tame by previous measure. Either time in my lightcone is mysteriously flowing backwards, or Trueman is as false as they come.

[Wow, the music player is completely psychic again. I swear, I didn't pull that up deliberately.]

"Source Code" [movie]

Omaha and I went to see Source Code, a sci-fi film with a thin cerebral tissue of plot pasted over excellent acting. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Captain Colter Stevens of the USAF, who finds himself bizarrely incorporated into what he believes is a simulated reality. He finds himself in someone else's body and he has eight minutes, over and over, to discover who on a train planted a bomb that will kill everyone on board. Think Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day meets 24.

There are some weaknesses in the film, including one scene where the director clearly didn't know what he was doing, but overall the film is exceptionally satisfying in its effectiveness. Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan (a woman situated across from Stevens when he awakens on the train), and Vera Farmiga (his commander in the Air Force) are all first-rate. Unfortunately, the two secondary characters (both villainous in their own way) are poorly sketched out and their thin, cardboard characters are not well served by the actors who play them. Jeffrey Wright is especially bad as Dr. Rutledge, the biophysicist in charge of "Project Source Code." As Omaha put it, "He seemed nervous, but in the wrong way." The actor seemed unsure of the character.

And the director, for all his skill, seemed unsure of what, exactly, Dr. Rutledge should do when he's not handwaving the science, so we get irrelevant scenes of him hovering over a college workbench-quality microscope.

Also, the soundtrack? Bad. Nervous in the wrong way, too.

( Spoilers )

I liked the film, it was quite good despite it's flaws. Go to watch the actors act. The special effects are clearly done, there's nothing groundbreaking here and the film doesn't pretend there is.