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.