High to the stick side

During one of the intermissions of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup, some lucky fan won $150K for shooting a goal against an NHL goalie. He went high to the stick side. Now if only the Flames had followed his lead. Though they were plagued by stupid penalties--you don't give the opposing team a 2-man advantage five minutes into the first period and expect to walk away unscathed. And that last 5:00 major penalty for elbowing was BAD. Stupid bad. But now we'll have hockey until Game 6 or so, which is good since I'm not totally sure we'll even have a season this fall.

Been a day of sorting and cleaning, mostly. Went through a bunch of filing upstairs, found some books I've been meaning to read, noticed that I'm finally caught up on all the Ultimate Spider-Man trades. And I've got a complete set of the Astro Boy reprints now. Much Osamu Tezuka goodness for a while.

Another Memorial Day come and gone (it is 9:30 as I write this) and I keep thinking about my grandfather. He was in WW II as a cook in the Army. He didn't see combat that I know of, but he was part of the occupation force of Japan. There's a book of photos he took while there that I should get as part of my inheritance, and much of it is the bombed-out cityscape. Now 50 years later they've dedicated a mediocre memorial to all of the soldiers in that war, in the middle of another. There's no memorial to the Spanish-American War, is there? This is the closest analogue I can think of, really. An imperial war fought for the wrong reasons with suspicious press involvement. OK, that's also Vietnam to some extent.

In any case, we're currently making a new generation of soldiers who will gather somewhere years from now and remember their buddies, men and women who not long ago were wearing prom dresses and serving ice cream. Now, in the words of Pat Tillman's brother, they're fucking dead. Somehow I doubt that will look good on a memorial, but I think most everyone would want their loved ones living and breathing again. Instead, we're throwing people into a meat grinder so Bush can have a trophy in the White House. (There's a story going around the blogs that Bush takes great pride in showing visitors a gun that Hussein was carrying when he was captured. How many died for this? We're over 800 dead Americans now, and June 30 means nothing.)

Hrm. I should think of something more cheerful before going to bed. Here was my dream from last night...

The only thing I really remember is having some bugs in the bathroom. These bugs (there were two of them) were beetles, and they had been in stasis for a couple hundred years--I had pulled them out of some sort of pepper grinder, and they had originally looked liked liked dried anise bits.

It turns out the bugs were some sort of doomsday bug, and people were looking for them. The bugs were crawling around the drain of some bathtub, rehydrating and growing in size--soon they were too big to fit down the drain. Oh, and did I mention this was on a movie set? As I was trying to figure out what to do with the doomsday beetles, a director and an actress were trying to work out a scene--something about Portland being the cruelest city of all.

Add to that the dream I had about the David Niven Pavilion, and I'm beginning to wonder what my subconscious is doing these days...