In Orlando at the moment, for the second conscutive year at the Academy of Molecular Imaging meeting at the lovely Gaylord Palms Resort. I haven’t stopped by to gaze at the gators yet, but i’m hoping to catch the feeding on Tuesday night. I flew in on Friday afternoon on a direct United flight, spending the journey finishing the wonderful and sobering Watchmen and managing to catch some elusive sleep on a plane. I got to my hotel around 10pm, after a half hour taxi ride with a talkative Pakistani cabbie who 1) sleeps only three hours a night, 2) dropped out of medical school after one day and smashed up the headmaster’s car on his way out, and 3) was a bowler on a professional cricket team in England before taking a ball in the eye and separating his retina. I chose to stay in my room, get some decent room service, and watch the evening’s college basketball games.

Speaking of March Madness, my bracket was officially wrecked this weekend. I didn’t have high hopes for my ill-informed picks, but was actually in decent position in my pool until Saturday. UConn’s loss today screwed my remaining hopes … the popular favorite looked mediocre at best in all the tourney games i saw them in so i can’t really question the outcome. Florida’s win this evening represents the last points i’ll earn this year, and the only Final Four team I got right. Of course, i’m sure i’m not the only one who failed to pick this year’s underdog crowd. As much as i mourn my failed picks, i have to admit this year’s unpredictable field has made this the most exciting tournament in recent memory.

My Saturday was spent preparing my Sunday morning talk at the meeting, with a brief interlude for lunch by the pool with my friend Fred. While working on my talk in the afternoon, i listened to my iPod using the studio monitor earbud headphones i bought at the airport in SF. They are marvelous at blocking external sounds ... as i found out when the cleaning lady rang the doorbell, came in, and tried to get my attention all while i was blissfully ignorant with work and music. She scared the hell out of me when she finally tapped me on the shoulder.

During another break, a visit to the opening night reception from 6-8pm, I got a pin from Vizen Medical, the company spun off of my old lab in Boston. They’re having a contest where at some random time each day, they’ll look for the first person wearing a pin, and give them an iPod Nano. I’ve got mine in my jacket lapel. I also got a nice notebook case from Biodose and a mini fan that displays a moving logo on its blades from Isotec. Returning to my room at 8:30pm, i spent the next six hours working on my talk, due to be delivered at 8:45am the next morning. I knew i was going to be up late, so i didn’t bother forcing myself to do nothing but work. I solidified and beautified my slides while watching TV, including the heretofore unseen and intriguing 1992 thriller Deep Cover with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum.

Oh my god, this is hilarious. For some reason i stopped changing channels on Nick at Nite and Who’s the Boss, and they’re showing the episode where Tony sees Angela naked coming out of the bath. The one Peter instituted as the Quahog parade theme in that Family Guy episode.

I awoke at 6:45am this morning after grabbing a scant four hours sleep. I loaded my talk on the auditorium computer and grabbed a cup of coffee … everyone was pretty miffed that there was no breakfast spread this morning, especially considering the usual plethora of refreshments. I got to sit at the moderator’s desk and introduce my colleague’s 8-8:45am talk, which actually broached my topic nicely. I gave a review of hypoxia imaging before discussing future directions and my own work. Unfortunately, the problem with this strategy is always that if your review goes too long, you lose time to discuss your work, which is your desired focal point. I had to accelerate through my last ten slides or so and was still about five minutes over, but all in all i was happy with my performance. I attended the rest of the morning sessions before Sam Gambhir took the Stanford MIPS group out to lunch. My lack of sleep forced me into an afternoon nap, but luckily there wasn’t much at the meeting that i was keen on during that time. I feel incredibly relieved now that my talk is over, and can enjoy the rest of the meeting unfettered.

They should rename TNT the Law & Order network. I’ve watched a total of six episodes in the last two days, and have a 66.67% hit rate in predicting the outcome. My crowning achievement was tonight when, after missing the first half of an episode while watching the fantastic new Family Guy episode (Bertram is born!), I figured out the ensuing twists in my first two minutes. Another useless skill to throw on the pile. I was finally able to turn it off as they’re now showing that unsatisfying episode where Briscoe is believed to have fabricated a suspect’s confession.

I’ve always contended that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a pale version of its predecessor, while L & O: Criminal Intent is diluted further still. But there was a really awful episode of SVU on last night that villified a Howard Stern-esque disc jockey. Sometimes they lay the morals and moreover politics on rather thick on these shows.

My radiochemist friend Fred is suggesting we get massages at the resort spa, and i must say i’m tempted. We get a 15% discount for being registered at the conference, so it’s actually not too bad. Maybe on Tuesday before i head back on Wednesday.

A wider shot of our new entertainment center, showing its position relative to the fireplace. And the conniving Erika Kane.

"People are smart."

"A person is smart. People are stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."

Our shiny new Room and Board entertainment center arrived yesterday morning. The delivery men carried it in and put it in its final resting place, and were even so kind as to put felt liners on our incredibly heavy TV's legs and move it onto the new piece. All this while Tara was harassing them incessantly. The new "media center", as Room and Board puts it, raises the TV a good foot and a half or so, and i think frames it better than the old stand and makes it seem bigger. The DirecTV, DVD player, and game consoles all fit nicely in the central area, and there are two drawers in which i've hidden the mess of game controllers and cables as well as a few game boxes and DVDs. Here you see a shot of the unit as Veronica puts it through its paces. Poor Dr. Greg Madden.

The night before, Geoff and Naomi came down from Sacramento. We arranged to grab a quick meal at the usual Red Robin, then, despite the collective fatigue of our group, head down to the Redwood City Century Theater for the 10:15pm showing of V for Vendetta. We had our choice of seats in the relatively downtrodden cinema, with only six or so other people arriving for the last showing. I quite liked the film adaptation of the graphic novel. The tendency of the Wachowski brothers to splurge on philosophical dialogue, so apparent in the latter two Matrix films, worked to great effect here, aided by Hugo Weaving's impressive turn as the masked terrorist V. Natalie Portman's English accent was workable, and did well to represent Evey Hammond's struggle to fathom V's message and motives.

The film makes a number of changes to the original story, none of which are too damaging. Perhaps the most interesting is the historical update the screenplay delivers, making references to America's failed war in Iraq. Roger Ebert remarks that one of the strengths of the film is that the viewer is never quite sure whether the story should be taken as a cautionary tale or a commentary on current events.

Of course, such subtlety is completely lost on the conservative bulldogs that pepper our nation's airwaves, who are now beginning to grumble over the "inappropriate" message of the film. Which is, in their estimation, "Revolution good. Terrorism good. Goverment bad.". Debbie Schlussel, a frequent Bill O'Reilly guest and conservative s@#t-spouter along the lines of Ann Coulter, has written a scathing review of the film in which she claims it all but celebrates Osama bin Laden while pissing on our troops in Iraq. The rallying cry of the right ... you're not supporting our troops! Schlussel goes so far as to claim that a "Coalition of the Willing" poster bearing a swastika seen in the film implies our troops are Nazis. No, just the people sending them over there. She also apparently endorses censorship of the Koran because of the violent history of radical Muslims. In her extended tirade of who did what to whom and why our government is definitely fighting the good fight, she completely misses the point of the movie, which is that an omnipresent government is unacceptable and that it is the responsibility of citizens to assign or remove power from regimes as they see fit.

A few final, non-political words on V for Vendetta ... first of all, what a friggin' great soundtrack! V occupies himself in his subterranean lair with a jukebox full of wonderful, now censored music, including Julie London, Cat Power, and many other great pieces of mood music. Secondly, i was very pleased with the parallels that were drawn between V and the Count of Monte Cristo, a comparison i don't recall being made very strongly in the graphic novel. V and Edmond Dantes are united in their obsession with vengeance, and their refusal to lessen their revenge plots at the urging of their loved ones. Something that the recent film version of the Count of Monte Cristo would've done well to remember.

Anyhoo, V and i went to see Belle & Sebastian and the New Pornographers at the SF Concourse Exhibition Center last night. We arrived for the last twenty minutes of the New Pornographers, then took stock of our energy levels and interest and left. We've both seen B&S three or four times and we both hate the layout and acoustics of the Concourse. I thought the NP were great in the short time and from the great distance away that i got to see them ... definitely worth checking out on their own. After leaving, we came home to have a takeout Mexican dinner, soak in the glory of the entertainment center, watch the increasingly formulaic American Idol, and play with our food-hungry and stranger-leery Tara dog.

My post last night omitted my excursion on Thursday morning to take my Jetta to Newark for service, including a 45k mile checkup (a glorified and overpriced oil chaneg, essentially), and replacement of my burnt out right side headlight and the long broken latch on my center armrest. As i was swamped with work and could in no way, shape, or form miss a full day at Stanford, i requested a rental car. Unlike Mini of Mountain View who simply shuttles their customers a mile or so up the El Camino to an Enterprise Rental outlet for a relatively crappy (albeit free) loaner, Bob Lewis Volkswagen provides a shiny new Volkswagen at a price of $30 a day. That meant i got to give a 2006 Jetta a whirl ... one even with the high end climate control and stereo. Very nice. It seemed larger than my Jetta (with the all important back seat space that i feel my car lacks, making me feel guilty about crushing my rear passengers). The climate control was very cool, with independent settings for the driver and passenger sides. And i thought the in-dash six CD changer was swank, although i didn't have any CDs on hand to try it out. I'm not sold on the aesthetic redesign of the new Jettas, but i must say its features had me forgetting its somewhat repugnant appearance.

I imagine i'll stick with my Jetta for another few years, but i'm always on the lookout for future suggestions ...

The work keeps coming ... in addition to completing those two grants last week, i wrote another shorter proposal for inclusion in an upcoming collective molecular imaging submission on Friday, then wrote another two page application on hypoxia and ovarian cancer tonight while drinking copious amounts of coffee and watching Dodgeball for the umpteenth time on cable. Last week i also gave a ten minute talk at a mini-symposium on lung cancer at Stanford, and helped my grad student and our machine shop engineer have a go at installing our collimator in the microCT scanner in the imaging center. It's still not ready to go, but we're inching closer. While Veronica was getting a swank Di Pietro Todd haircut i got a good start on my 45 minute AMI lecture. I looked a bit out of place in the salon waiting area with a laptop and my iPod, working on background slides on tumor hypoxia. On the docket for next week is 1) completing my evolving but still formative AMI talk by 8am Sunday morning (which may cause me to use my free Saturday in Orlando working on it instead of squeezing in a trip to Disneyworld), 2) getting this ovarian cancer grant out by the 2pm deadline Tuesday, 3) starting, finishing, and printing my AMI poster on the as-yet uninstalled small animal radiotherapy system before i fly off to Florida on Friday, and 4) performing experiments with my postdocs essential to the completion of their AMI posters by the same deadline. Work is snowballing, but i feel more content at Stanford than i have in a while.

My social calendar for next week is no less busy, with shows by cockney-flaunting Art Brut and Scottish indie pop giants Belle & Sebastian (supported by the fantastic New Pornographers) coming up. V and i have lost interest in Art Brut since buying the tickets, so i think we'll be flaking on that. V also noticed that my favorite New Zealand indie pop band, the Bats, will be stopping by the Rickshaw on Wednesday, so we snatched tickets to that. Hopefully it will be as brilliant as the godhead show by Aussies the Go-Betweens last June.

Because of my science-related endeavors, i had to forgo seeing V for Vendetta on opening weekend. It's gotten lukewarm reviews, but i'll definitely see it ... it'll have to wait a bit. I'm fairly amused that a non-trivial debate has arisen over whether a terrorist is a suitable hero for the film. Some rather frightening food for thought regarding the current political climate. I'm sure if someone had the audacity to remark that the founding fathers, heroes of the Revolutionary War, could have easily been called terrorists by the British, they would get a serious dressing down from the powers that be. Terrorism bad. Big brother good. We know best. Just fall in line.

I started Alan Moore's Watchmen, and i must say the first 50 or so pages have got me spellbound. The commentary on the evolution of the superhero is intriguing, not to mention Moore's creation of a fully-realized new superhero universe.

After work on Friday, i swung by Whole Foods ("Whole Paycheck" as Becky calls it, and she's not way off) to grab ingredients for a chicken Veracruz dinner for V, Jenz, and myself. It came out quite good, even with my swapping chicken for fish and baking for grilling in the original Rick Bayless recipe. V and Jenz whiled away the time while i prepared the meal by watching a slew of viral videos on the web. After dinner, we introduced Jenz to the majesty of Guitar Hero before driving her back home to SF. Saturday as i mentioned above i took V to SF for her haircut, after which we got a tasty lunch at Brickhouse near her work. V headed down to SJ to attend a Jenz family dinner while i got some more work in. I gave up around 10pm and watched Team America: World Police on a DVD borrowed from Matthew. Even with all the buildup, the puppet sex scene had me rolling on the floor.

Okay, i love the song, but the video for Editors' "Munich" is freakin' retarded. Gymnasts? What the hell is that all about?!

I had a revelation recently regarding reality shows, one which everyone else may have had years ago and i'm patting myself on the back for realizing only now. It relates to the age old problem of anthropology, where the accuracy of observations of a cultural practice are called in question because of simply the presence of an outside witness. It's also similar to the quantum mechanical concept that the act of measurement fundamentally alters a system. In the case of reality TV, my beef is that we commonly forget that these events we're supposedly spying on are in fact being videotaped by a swarm of camera and sound men. Do you really think people are acting as they would in ordinary life when they've got cameras and sound booms shoved in their face? This is less of an issue for shows like Fear Factor than for something like the Bachelor that purports to depict actual human interactions. The FX "race experiment" Black.White. is rendered almost completely meaningless because of precisely this problem.

Speaking of reality television, i think i would have to kill myself if a) i somehow found myself at a queen-of-the-has-beens Lisa Loeb concert. But i would have to make it extremely painful if b) cameras for Loeb's dating reality show Number 1 Single recorded evidence of me at said gig and broadcast my shame to the world.

Don't even get me started on Chelsea. Another Premiership loss this morning (2-1 loss to Fulham), more claims of "we would've won but ...". I f@$#ing hated it when United used to bust out that excuse, and i hate it even more when it's my team. I have to say i agree with 90+% of what José Mourinho says, but it's undeniable that he paints a target on our backs, and that pressure is not helping. And our recent spat of red cards and temper tantrums by the squad are bad omens. John and Frank need to start busting heads on the squad and recapture the unity of last year's team.

I tried to play Winning Eleven 9 this morning, but was too damn depressed to put in much of an effort. Oddly, after a horrible performance i still managed to beat Wigan on an injury time Hernan Crespo strike, much like Chelsea's first match this season.

I finished Black last Thursday. A great game, if a bit short. The last level took me roughly three hours, made even more frustrating because you can't save in the middle of a mission, meaning i had to finish the level or do it all again next time. There were at least two or three episodes in that last level where i found myself being swarmed by streams of enemies, with little or no cover with which to organize my attack. The final battle took me an hour and a half by itself, and nearly had me beating my head on my fireplace.

As you can no doubt ascertain as you're reading this, the format of the journal page has changed a bit. I'd grown a bit weary of the month-long stream of posts, and wanted to implement something a bit more navigate-able. I may or may not have succeeded. Let me know. By the way, comment submission was offline for a while due to an unnoticed bug with the new login system, but it should be functional now.

In work news, i just sent out my second grant application of the day, this one requesting $197,024 over two years from the Brain Tumor Society to develop fluorescent imaging agents targeting a hypoxia-regulated protein. Now i have to run off to install our homemade collimator on the microCT scanner in the imaging center, which should last well into the evening. Later this week i need to write my third and fourth grant applications of the week, get started on my poster for the AMI meeting the weekend after next, not to mention the 45 minute lecture i have to put together for the opening session of the meeting. Egad. All of the sudden i am incredibly busy. But busy is good, right? Right?? RIGHT?!?!

I put together my last minute bracket for March Madness after finishing my grant. I have watched the sum total of about three minutes of college basketball this season, and read maybe a quarter of a game report on ESPN.com. So my picks are based solely on online expert projections, flavored by a few inklings of my own. If i win anything, it will be through no prognostic ability of my own.

Who knew that the 1996 Beck song "Jack-Ass" ("when i wake up, someone will sweep up my lazy bones") from Odelay sampled/stole its central riff from the Chocolate Watch Band's 1968 song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which in turn is a cover of a Bob Dylan song from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home? I didn't.

destroy everything you touch, today destroy me, this way anything that may desert you so it cannot hurt you you only have to look behind you at who's undermined you destroy everything you touch, today destroy me, this way everything you touch, you don't feel do not know what you steal shakes your head, takes your gun wants you out of the sun destroy everything you touch, today please destroy me, this way

You didn't think this whole login transition would be seamless, did you? Anyone who might've wandered by yesterday afternoon would've been greeted with the "white screen of death" (internal server error). I intentionally removed my index file because a seemingly simple switch towards using the CGI::Session perl module to keep track of visits turned ugly. I've now implemented it to my satisfaction ... i think ... so everything should be back to normal. This strategy removes the errors inherent in my previous setup, whereby visitors were tracked by their ip address. This failed in the case of multiple connections from a single computer, or users sharing an internet connection through a router. Unfortunately, as a side effect any users that had previously selected the "log me in automatically at this computer" option will have to do so again. Sowwy.

Weekend was goooood, alternating between lazy and industrious. It started off quite busy for me as i had two meetings Friday morning, both to prepare upcoming grant submissions. After a good lunch/meeting/but really lunch with my friend Jianghong, i drove off to Berkeley for a 3pm meeting of the bioengineering alumni committee at a café on northside. It was good to see my old labmate Sue again (now faculty at UCSF), as well as the next generation of bioengineers ... a really good group. The program has evolved so much in the five short years since i graduated, and it's good to play witness to it. I then braved the 5pm traffic into the city (although to be honest, i was going opposite to the commute so it was a non-issue) to meet V at work. The two of us skipped over to Room and Board and ordered our new entertainment center, a very pretty craftsman-style piece with Asian overtones, with beautiful sliding lattice doors covering the bottom storage area. That'll be arriving next week. We had organized a dinner at the ever-scrumptious Betelnut on Union with G and N, but at 7pm we were quoted an hour and a half wait, so we absconded to the equally delicious (if more familiar) Chai Yo, accompanied by G and N's friend Vivian. She may also shortly be their neighbor, as the SF/LA expatriates may be bidding farewell to Sacramento and returning to the city. I look forward to an increase in Geoff and my gaming frequency.

The social event for the evening took place at the Hemlock Tavern on Polk, a show by French Canadians Kiss Me Deadly and We Are Wolves and Texan indie popsters Voxtrot. A great time, particularly the tear it up "shout punk" of WaW, despite the proximity of a collection of extremely inebriated and vocal "guys on the town".

G and N followed us back to Redwood City, where we gave Tara a very overdue dinner. She'd been very good during our extended absence so i gave her a bit extra. We resolved to get breakfast at the Lighthouse Café in Sausalito on Saturday morning. Due to our lethargic readying process, morning turned into afternoon, and at 2:10pm we were driving up a congested 19th Ave. in San Francisco wondering if we would make it before their 3pm closing. We switched to our backup plan of breakfast at the Irving Street Café. We had planned an afternoon of electronics shopping (new entertainment center means new flat panel TV, right? Well, maybe not, but it's certainly an entertaining diversion), but before we arrived at the restaurant Geoff received a fairly shocking phone call that scrapped those plans. No deaths in the family or anything, but the developments forced Geoff and Naomi to head back to Sac after breakfast/lunch. V and i took a late afternoon nap and flirted with the idea of heading to the city again for the evening's Popscene featuring a performance by Canadian (lots of Canadians in town last weekend) post-punk outfit Controller.Controller. A lack of enthusiasm resulted in the two of us simply having dinner at B.J.'s and watching the fairly awful SNL with Matt Dillon and soon-to-be-yesterday's-news Arctic Monkeys.

I regained my diligence Sunday morning and succeeded in cleaning the kitchen, fixing the vent to our crawl space i had removed during our plumbing issues, cleaning up a plethora of Tara poop, and pulling a bunch of weeds out of our front planters. I also retrieved a Stacks breakfast/lunch for Veronica and i, and made a rosemary and rock salt pork chop dinner for the two of us. And as if that's not enough, i wrote a draft of a four page grant application that my friend and former Berkeley bioengineering colleague Bill and i are submitting this week.

I've got two grants going out this week, so i'm fairly swamped at work. And having a simple change to my website cause it to crap out didn't help. Yesterday was also our monthly MIPS seminar. I had requested dinner afterward to be at Tamarine, a Vietnamese place on University in Palo Alto that had wowed me previously. And the second time was even more wonderful. It is now my favorite restaurant in Palo Alto ... the hoisin lamb chops are unbelievable, as are the papaya and beef salad, the salt and pepper calamari with cilantro sauce, and the unbelievably tender shaking beef.

I came home after the seminar and finished the last 70 pages of the Dark Night Returns. I found it a fascinating speculation of the vigilante nature of Batman, particularly his ideological differences to Superman and his underlying vindictive and ultimately violent nature. I'm curious to further explore the sides of Batman i missed as a casual comics enthusiast in my younger years, particularly his interactions with Ra's Al Ghul. I see more graphic novels in my future. Geoff has also recommended the Preacher, which i'll have to investigate. I think the original Sin City novels might also be worthwhile, given my pleasure with Frank Miller's twisted imaginings of Batman.

Geoff and i are also quite pleased with the "shoot everything that moves" Xbox experience of Black. We finished another couple of levels in tandem (taking turns playing, not playing cooperatively as unfortunately this mode is not available in the game) on Friday. The visuals are wonderful, with each of the thousands of bullets you expend having some noticeable effect on the environment. I'm now on the Gulag mission, and have found i need to modify my usual "rush in and go full automatic on everyone's ass" strategy in order to survive. My only complaint is that you can only save at the end of each level, and intra-level checkpoints are few and far between, causing you to replay a lot of the longer episodes which culminate in difficult challenges. When that got to me on Saturday, i switched back to Winning Eleven 9. Apparently through my lull in play over the last few weeks, my skills have improved rather than deteriorated. I seem to have found a workable offensive strategy, one which relies on Frank Lampard in the attacking midfielder spot and the wing play of Arjen Robben and especially Damien Duff.

Speaking of Chelsea, they triumphed over Tottenham in the match i would've gotten to attend had i won the Fox Sports World sweepstakes. In most breathtaking manner possible, through an injury time 25 yard screamer by defender (?!) William Gallas. I'm sure Catherine of Collyerville, Tennessee enjoyed it ... grrr. A positive note on which the club ended a not-so-positive week. The arrival of German midfield kingpin Michael Ballack from Bayern Munich seems to be in full swing, as Mourinho has announced he wants him and Ballack and his agent have stated they are negotiating with Chelsea and no one else. Again, i'm not quite sure how he will coexist with Frank Lampard ... it's not like the Gerrard/Lampard combination in the England midfield has produced awe-inspiring results. To state the obvious, the club has a serious image problem, and continued overspending is not going to fix it. Nor is lip service about cleaning up our act by club executives. It definitely does take a bit of the shine off the trophies our superb squad is winning, and that's a total disservice to stand-up guys like Lampard and John Terry.

I'm juiced to see V for Vendetta this weekend, perhaps with N and G as i know he's equally stoked. The weekend after i'm off to Orlando for my second visit to the Gaylord Palms Resort and the annual meeting of the Academy of Molecular Imaging. That may or may not include a visit to Disneyworld, depending on whether i skip the few meager Saturday conference sessions and whether i'm feeling energetic enough to explore the Magic Kingdom.

Just the thing to lift me out of my Chelsea doldrums ... Liverpool are out of the Champions League after losing to Benfica 2-nil at Anfield, 3-nil on aggregate. All is right in the world. True, Chelsea are not good enough to win Europe, but then neither were Liverpool last year. Let alone this year's title defense. Arsenal are the lone English club remaining, as they seem to have found a way to succeed on the continent following failure after failure in the Champions League in recent years. I'm still behind Barcelona to dazzle their way to the cup.

Of course, that means for the two English rivals the focus shifts to domestic competitions. Liverpool are 17 points behind us in the Premiership, meaning with ten games left to play we need just four wins to ensure they can't catch us. Then there's the matter of the FA Cup, where Chelsea and Liverpool are the two favorites. Wouldn't that be great to deliver the final disappointment to a trophyless season for the scousers. Bitter? Me?

I finished reading the superb graphic novel V for Vendetta last night. I can sit and nitpick, but overall i have to say i was quite taken with Alan Moore and David Lloyd's vision of the future as well as their creation of an enigmatic protagonist who we never fully understand. For starters, the idea to have the hero dressed in Guy Fawkes mask and garb is brilliant. Obviously it asserts his role as a revolutionary, but it also creates the perfect sense of mystery and uncertainty about the hero, his agenda, and his motives. Some of the ideas in the comic do come off a bit dated 20 years later, such as their attitude toward computer hacking, but the whole reads as a superhero-oriented retelling of 1984, a call to arms to citizens living under authoritarian rule and a warning to societies flirting with assigning their governments too much power. The action and suspense elements of the story don't really take your breath away, but the tone and message of the work are rock solid and are delivered with enough panache and visual mastery to keep you enthralled.

This morning i caught a few minutes of the Morning Music Co-op with Woody, Tony, and Ravy on Live 105. In general i find this show devoid of any redeeming qualities, however interestingly today they had a guest who was a proponent of the Patriot Act, specifically its proposals to monitor citizens' phone communications to screen for terrorist activity. I heard one caller support the idea, saying law-abiding people have nothing to worry about. It's almost as if the "England Prevails" fascism of V for Vendetta is serving as a blueprint for the Bush administration. They try to sugarcoat it with various arguments, each of which fall back to the basic "trust us, we know what you need". Scary.

I mentioned yesterday that i had a dream while 50 pages away from the end of the novel. I dreamt that i had indeed finished V for Vendetta, and the ending was so shocking and disturbing that when i woke up i began to wonder if i dreamt it or if i had really read the whole thing. My imagined ending involved V turning Evey into some sort of prostitute/sex slave. For those familiar with the book, you know that V never fully revealed his agenda to Evey while indoctrinating her into his revolutionary ideal. So there was always that suspicion, both on the part of the reader but moreover in Evey, that V would force her to do something shocking and unanticipated. I guess my brain took that suspense to one bizarre conclusion.

So now i'm ready for the theatrical release of V for Vendetta in a few weeks. Natalie Portman looks like a workable Evey, while Hugo Weaving as V should be wonderful ... i'm just hoping the producers don't pull a Count of Monte Cristo and try to give some kind of infantile conscience to V, lessening the extent and purpose of his vendetta. Alan Moore has pulled his support for the film, claiming the script is "imbecilic". That's fairly troubling, although co-writer David Lloyd supports it and claims Moore would only be happy with an exact book-to-screen conversion. We'll see who's right on March 17.

I then pulled out Frank Miller's the Dark Night Returns from my recent purchases and dived into that. I'm only about a third of the way through it, so i can't make any comments quite yet. I've said before that i prefer the idea of a brooding, violent Batman to a conscientious one, and Miller seems to have gone in the former vein. I have high hopes for the remaining two thirds. Then it's on to another Alan Moore creation, this one the highly esteemed Watchmen.

The site improvements don't stop. Try clicking on the number of users online (assuming there's one or more), and you get a little panel showing you their icons, logins, and last seen dates and times. That was particularly fun to code. Seriously.

I woke up this morning (after having a bizarre dream in which my brain filled in the remaining 50 unread pages of V for Vendetta ... more on that in a bit), and put on my Lampard Chelsea kit under my sweater and came to work. When 11:45am rolled around and the climactic second leg of the Chelsea/Barcelona Champions League round of 16 encounter began, i steered clear of Soccernet and Sporting Life. I didn't want to know what was happening until it was over.

Matthew sent me a one word email around 12:30, reading simply "nervous?". I responded in the negative. I was content that Barcelona deserved to progress to the Champions League quarterfinals. We missed our chance to put them in a hole at Stamford Bridge two weeks ago, and i'm not convinced that this year's squad has the resilience to orchestrate a stunning comeback on hostile turf. For the first time ever, i admitted that should my team lose, i hope that the team that beat them goes on to win the championship.

1:45pm finally arrived, and i went to Chelseafc.com and found that the Blues had failed to overturn their first leg deficit, drawing 1-1 in Barcelona and losing 3-2 on aggregate. Various excuses could be trotted out to explain our failure (and i'm sure Mourinho and others with expound on them at length), but i prefer to dwell on a few truths:

1. Our performances in Europe this campaign, unlike last season, were not terribly inspiring. A loss to Real Betis and two mind-numbing nil-nil draws with domestic rivals Liverpool did not convey the impression of a world-conquering squad.
2. Finishing second in our qualifying group was fatal. It doomed us to being paired with a tough opponent in the round of 16, and in my opinion we got the toughest of the lot in Barcelona.
3. The cold, hard fact is Barcelona are simply a better side than us at the moment.

Once those sobering realities sink in, the question becomes "where does Chelsea go from here?" As has already been suggested by a Soccernet columnist, the Stamford Bridge checkbook will almost certainly open again this summer to attract more top-tier players. Eto'o and Ronaldinho (if you can't beat 'em, sign 'em?)? Shevchenko? We definitely need a striker, but my impression is that Europe's top clubs will again refuse to cash in their assets to Roman Abramovich. Bayern Munich defector Michael Ballack appears to be a viable possibility, but you have to wonder why we would sign him when we've already got Frank Lampard. The whole state of affairs raises a paradox in my mind. We need some missing pieces to really exert our will in the Champions League, but we also need a cohesive squad. And i feel that the two might be mutually exclusive at this point ... more signings means more tinkering and less solidity.

I suppose that the silver lining is now our squad can wrap up the Premiership and FA Cup without distraction.

blue is the colour football is the game we're all together and winning is our aim so cheer us on through the sun and rain 'cause Chelsea, Chelsea is our name

V came up with the cheeky but undeniably appropriate idea to put a flashing neon sign reading "Asian corner" above this end of our dining room to denote its decorative inspiration. She's worried about it becoming too specific of a look, but i kinda like the imperial Chinese china cabinet and the old painted wooden box. Also note, that will not be the final resting place of the punch bowl.

A long while ago i did a personal photo essay entitled my descent into madness. I thought another was in order as i recently noticed my cell phone was full of pictures of Ana from her Christmas visit last December. You may notice a pattern.

First things first. You probably have noticed there are a few new odds and ends scattered around fac13. And you might be asking yourself ... "Login? What the hell for?". Well, let me respond to that in a few ways. First, it streamlines comment submission and allows for a few new features. Second, it adds an extra layer of security for the site. And third, it was another programming challenge, the kind i just can't resist. Oh yes, and fourth, if i ever am hard up for money, i can sell all your emails for a quick buck. Just kidding. But not really. But seriously, as always, an upgrade could just as easily be called a bug in disguise so if anything looks awry to you, please let me know.

Also, if you've explored a bit you may have noticed i added a concert review section to the music page. Just a few minutes ago i added my thoughts on last Wednesday's Yeah Yeah Yeahs show. I've trolled my journal and copied all show comments, large and small, to this new area. You'll notice that while browsing my mp3 library and listening statistics, any band that i have a concert review for will be appropriately linked.

I've spent way too much time implementing these changes (and unfortunately, my riddled brain just keeps coming up with more). In other news ...

Saturday Night Live this week, with host Natalie Portman, was actually pretty funny. Breaking the string of garbage that show had been putting out lately. However, in their two performances punk pop flavor of the month Fall Out Boy sounded like four guys who'd just met ten minutes earlier. Did they sound check? Do they care about playing the song or just jumping off the drum stage? Can the rhythm section keep time?

I won a bet against Veronica last week. While i didn't call Crystal's exact abductor on All My Children, i was only one person removed. And a hell of a lot closer than V's guess of Janet, and the bet was that she was correct. So i won $100, $43 of which went towards Black, the latest first person shooter and carnage-fest for the Xbox. Geoff and Naomi were over on Friday night, and us guys gave it a whirl. More than a whirl, it kept us up until 3:30am. No multiplayer, but we alternated tackling single player levels. A wonderfully-executed visual game, with solid FPS mechanics. I loaned it to Geoff as he and Naomi headed back to Sac on Saturday, he's reportedly plowing right through it. I'll give it more time asap.

I used the remainder of my winnings to buy a smattering of graphic novels at Borders after dinner with my parents on Saturday night. I've been meaning to check out V for Vendetta prior to seeing the film version later this month. So i grabbed that, but was then enticed to finally pick up Frank Miller's reinvention of Batman in the classic the Dark Night Returns. Alan Moore's often-referenced Watchmen brought my book and game spending to an even $100.

Dinner with my parents was scrumptious. My dad grilled a whole chicken using a magazine recipe, one that involved opening a can of beer and stuffing the bird with it while cooking. It resulted in a wonderfully juicy and flavorful main course. My mom also made some very tasty cheddar and jalapeno drop biscuits, and a tomato and artichoke side.

V and i cruised the bay area hunting for a new entertainment center all weekend. We drove to the Bay Street shopping area in Emeryville Saturday afternoon, having a quick lunch at Fuddrucker's before inspecting a candidate piece at Hold Everything. We agreed it looked too plain and mass-produced, so we passed. Forays into Harvest Home Store, Pottery Barn, and Bombay (Mumbai?) were no more successful. Today we went to San Francisco to look at an interesting unit with intricate lattice doors at Room and Board. V is waffling over the final decision, so we may or may not return to buy that one soon. We did come away with a very nice 200 year-old Chinese painted wooden box, which looks particularly at home atop our imperial Chinese china cabinet.

They just showed a one second clip from Blade Runner on the Oscars. That movie is so damn brilliant. So brilliant that even a one second clip sucked me in more than the ten second montage of Titanic. I didn't see any of the Best Picture clips this year, although i am adamant that i will catch Munich and Capote eventually. Maybe even Brokeback Mountain.

Unfortunately, i left my cell phone at home all day Saturday and missed Jenz's invitation to that evening's Stereolab show. After getting Veronica to pester her to see if she had any extra tickets. I'm a butthead. Apparently the show was great, impressing Stereolab-newbie Jenz.

I'm open to the possibility that Robert Altman may be brilliant. But the movies of his that i've seen, Prêt-à-Porter, Gosford Park, and Popeye, have all left me going ".......... annnnnnnd?".

After talking to old friend Greg after the YYY show, i discovered that i am by no stretch of the imagination on top of the concert calendar anymore. I had no idea (although i can't rule out the possibility that V told me and i just zoned out) that Stereolab were playing, nor was i aware of upcoming shows by We Are Wolves, Animal Collective, Oneida, +/- and Her Space Holiday at the Noise Pop Festival, and Wilderness. I'm not as much of a showgoer as i used to be, but this is unacceptable. I don't need to go to them all, but i need to know they're happening!

Allow me to be the 10,000th person to make this joke ... is there some little-known clause in the Academy bylaws that requires nominating Judi Dench whenever she appears in a film? Pretty soon she'll be nominated for playing M in the James Bond movies.