Welcome to the new and improved particleman.org. Yes, it looks basically the same. Yes, all the old stuff is still here. But what you don’t see is what makes all that work worth the brief hiatus. Many thanks to John for helping me with the importation process. He found a way to import my old tables into the standard Moveable Type tables while retaining all the fields, the time stamps, the categories, and of course the comments. For those of you who don’t know what that means, just keep reading.

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. Busy doing – you guessed it – not much of anything. I did have a fun father-and-son day last Saturday. My dad managed to fix my laptop and then we went to the car show. Did I tell you about the broken laptop? Oh, it’s an awesome story.

I get home one night and turn on my laptop. Nothing happens. No false start, no blue screen, no nothing. I take out the power cord and notice it looks different. It seems part of the inside of the power jack broke off in the computer. I plug it in again and notice little sparks fly out of the jack. Interesting. I press the power button. Still nothing. I unplug the jack and plug it in again. More sparks. I call the manufacturer and they want $550 to fix it. I say Thanks But No Thanks. I take it the store where I bought it and they say the laptop is worth less than it would cost to fix it because the motherboard is toast. Turns out the power receptacle broke, and the power receptacle is attached to the motherboard, and they’re not about to go hunting around Houston for that power receptacle. I say Thanks Anyway (jackass).

I take the laptop to my dad. He decides to do exactly what the store would not do – he hunts around Houston for the power receptacle. He goes to his favorite parts outlet and, lo and behold, finds the power receptacle. For two dollars. He spends three hours carefully dismantling the laptop, soldering the new power receptacle on to the motherboard, and putting it all back together. He presses the button. It works. I love my dad. God bless dads who are engineers.

After that, we went to the car show and ogled all the cool new cars. Did you know that Hondas, some of the most efficient cars out there, produce more smog than many other cars out there? More than Volvos, which are probably less efficient on the average. Did you know BMW’s M6, a $102,000 behemoth of a coupe, has 400 horsepower V10? It looks like a rocket ship with 20” rims. Chevy has a new Camaro coming out that does what the Mustang, the Charger, and the PT Cruiser do – that is, relies on nostalgia to bring buyers back to American cars. I think it’s kind of lame.

That’s more or less what’s been happening. Oh yeah, and I completely embarrassed myself in class last week. So nothing has really changed.

I finally saw Donnie Darko. Yes, I know it came out in 2001. I never got around to it. Now that I have, I must say it’s one hell of a movie. The version I saw was the extended director’s cut with deleted scenes. The extra material helped clarify what was going on, sort of. It was still confusing. And I still had to do some research on the web to figure out what everything meant. If you haven’t seen this movie, see it. And try to find a version with the extra scenes. I borrowed the DVD from a friend and the more I watch it, the more I notice that helps things make sense.

The soundtrack was also good. Plenty of 80s. One of my favorite scenes played Head over Heels by Tears for Fears while Donnie and his friends cruised down their high school hallway in slo-mo.

Addendum

[Seth is holding a knife to Donnie's throat as a car approaches along the road]
Seth Devlin: Did you call the fucking cops?
Donnie: Deus ex machina...
Seth Devlin: What did you say? What the fuck did you just say?
Donnie: Our saviour.

I never knew what Donnie said there because he was whispering. Now that I know, it makes more sense. Read about "deus ex machina" here.

I had dinner with a buddy last night and we decided to see Breach, the spy movie that just came out. Without checking on movie times, we go to the theater and hope one is starting soon after we get there. Just our luck, we are 30 minutes late for one and two hours away from the next one. So we buy tickets for the late one and figure we’ll hop into another movie in the meantime. You might call it theater-hopping. I call it making my $8 stretch as far as possible. Hey, I’m broke. Eight dollars for one movie is too much, but eight dollars for two is doable.

We catch Factory Girl, the Andy Warhol movie, just as it’s starting. My friend has no idea who Andy Warhol is. I give him the quick rundown: 60’s-era artist, eccentric, quirky, famous. It’s not a bad movie. Not great though, either. It drags in places, but I guess some bio-pics do that. And it turns out that the movie is less about Andy Warhol than it is about Edie Sedgwick, his short-term project. And, judging from the Wiki, I’m not even sure it’s that accurate. The ‘look’ of the film was interesting, though – filters and camera angles and whatnot.

Then we see Breach. Wow. What a trippy movie. And to think the basic facts of the story are true. A 27-year old rookie at the FBI gets assigned to take down the worst spy in American history. The government isn’t even sure how much damage he did by leaking information to Russia. His treason work supposedly led to the deaths of 50 Americans. Go see this movie. You'll leave with a "damn, that's f-ed up" feeling.

It’s cool when you get called on in class and your surly answer to a question makes the teacher say, “Ah, clever evasion.”

I saw Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah, I don’t wanna hear it. This movie came out a long time ago, I know.

Anyway, as I was watching, I rename the movie, “Can They Pile Any More Terrible Shit Onto the Stack of Horrible Things That Happen To These People.” It was like watching a train wreck, a really funny train wreck that I’m glad didn’t happen to me and my family. Not that having the grandfather die was funny, but come on, you know what I mean. You laughed at that movie, admit it.

The best scene, without a doubt, was when the grandfather lectured Dwayne about women, and particularly, how many of them he should sleep with.