To: Landry’s Seafood Manager 5101 Governors House Dr. Huntsville, AL 35805 I was recently at your restaurant and I enjoyed the food and service. Our waitress was attentive and the food was cooked and prepared correctly. I had the Salmon Fillet. One thing would have made the experience better, the availability of Dr. Pepper. Mr. Pibb is not a suitable substitute. I moved to Huntsville from Dallas in August and I’ve been surprised at the lack of Dr. Pepper when dining out. I was glad your staff didn’t serve Mr. Pibb surreptitiously as some less than reputable establishments have done in the past. She made sure I understood it was not available when I ordered. I hope that you will consider adding Dr. Pepper to your beverage selection in the near future. It is a fine, zesty beverage that I am sure your patrons, such as myself, will appreciate.

An Incomplete Education has an essay comparing and contrasting River's Edge and George Washington. Perhaps Donald Holden will become the next Keanu Reeves.

Oh me, nobody should have this much fun with a 1MB application. I downloaded iStopMotion tonight.

Useless, pointless, FUN exercise number one. I call it Haunted Chair. I plan to get Eddie Murphy to star in Haunted Chair II.

That wasn't enough so I stayed up past my bed time doing a documentary on true love in the aquatic kingdom. I call it Fun with Felt.

Somebody's got the giggle-snorts. I can't wait to explain why I'm coming in late to work tomorrow. If I had more time I'd add titles, music, sound effects and dialogue.

Intrigued: Turner Classic Movies is showing four Kurosawa films: The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood, and Gate of Hell (which I haven't seen).

Terrified: Director (Ed Zwick) and star (Tom Cruise) of the new film The Last Samurai are hosting the evening.

Turner hasn't done a mainstream movie tie-in like this that I can remember. I'm hoping this isn't a crass marketing attempt to cash in on Kurosawa's name. Oh well, November 28th I'll find out.

The Guardian seem to be quite prolific and talented at making lists. They have lists of all sorts. The latest list to impress me is the 40 best directors. The list only takes into account working directors so don't get mad that it doesn't have Ford, Welles, Wilder, Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini, etc.

The list is sorted by importance so I'd knock Lynne Ramsay and Gaspar No� down a few notches, and elevate Michael Haneke and Michael Winterbottom. Where's Sofia Coppola and David Gordon Green? If they put Lynne Ramsay and Gaspar No� on the list, who also have only two features to their credit, I don't understand how they can ignore DGG. I have a feeling he's overlooked because he has focused on Southern stories, and grew up in the South. His fellow "two feature" compadres hail from the much trendier Scotland and France. Heck Gaspar doesn't even have a Criterion release under his belt.

Somehow ELP's Tarkus made it onto my ipod and into a playlist I was listening to. My how my music preferences have broadened since my "if it's not prog rock it sucks" days. Listening to Tarkus reminded me how incredibly tight prog is. You can hear engineers and musicians of the 60s/70s reveling in the control that new audio equipment gave them over sound. Nowadays I tend towards the fuzzy noise of acts like the Microphones.

In this brief prog reverie I turned to allmusic to look at two bands from the 90's Swedish prog scene, Anglagard and Anekdoten. I've got to give the researchers at allmusic massive credit for knowing the history of Anglagard this well:

Anglagard got itself noticed in the small international circles of progressive rock fandom, and both of their albums were voted album of the year on internet prog newsgroups.

Okay, here is a real winner in the US patent system. Method to improve peri-anal hygiene after a bowel movement

A source of amusement while reading through the journeys of Lewis and Clark is their fondness for eating dog. While they are staying on the Pacific coast they overhunt the game and resort to eating what they have handy which is usually horses and dogs. One of the Chinook indians makes fun of them for relishing dog meat and it's a funny passage from Lewis' journal.

"While at dinner an indian fellow verry impertinently threw a poor half starved puppy nearly into my plait by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence; I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him, the fellow withdrew apparently much mortifyed and I continued my repast on dog without further molestation." [copied verbatim]

While the greatest movie of all time is debatable, the greatest animated short film of all time is More. In honor of that film you'll soon be able to buy happy product.

I'm really hoping for More action figures. I can't imagine a hotter cubicle commodity to have this winter.

Meriweather Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) wrote the following while staying at the Shoshone camp on his 31st birthday. The Corps of Discovery was about to cross the Continental Divide.

"I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended." [copied verbatim]

Four years later in October of 1809 he would be dead by his own hand in a Tennessee inn. He never publishes the expedition's journals despite early promises to get them out quickly and pleading from President Jefferson and a worldwide audience to see them. Upon returning Jefferson appoints him governor of Louisiana but Lewis doesn't even attend to those duties till the secretary of the territory begs him to attend to them.

Reading the history and excerpts from the journals in Undaunted Courage I was struck by how much I was reminded of myself. Like Lewis I have a great curiosity about the world around me and am happiest with a small group in the middle of nowhere. Once Lewis returns from the expedition he fails again and again to measure up to people's expectations and leaves a wake of unfinished projects behind him. He never married despite courting attempts and this seemed to be a great burden on him. He died alone feeling like he'd let his friends down.

I was reminded of so many of my own 80% finished projects. It's painful at times reading the correspondence to him where someone like Jefferson really needs him to get something done but can't find the right words to motivate him. For his own part, Lewis seems to feel horrible at not finding the energy to finish these things that others need of him.

As I close in on my 30th birthday I have the same thoughts on my mind that Lewis wrote of, and the same inability to deliver on the promises I make. Yet without the great accomplishments Lewis had already made by that same age.

The soldiers, meanwhile, enjoyed the favors of the Arikara women, often encouraged to do so by the husbands, who believed that they would catch some of the power of the white men from such intercourse, transmitted to them through their wives. One warrior invited York to his lodge, offered him his wife, and guarded the entrance during the act. York was said to be "the big Medison." Whether the Indians got white or black power from the intercourse cannot be said, but what they had gotten for sure from their hospitality to previous white traders was venereal disease, which was rampant in the villagers and passed on to the men of the expedition.

The chiefs and captains, warriors and men called on one another, went hunting together, traded extensively, enjoyed sexual relations with the same women on a regular basis, joked, and talked - as best they could through the language barrier - about what they knew.

"we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however, as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaining as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life."

"This day I completed my thirty first year," he began. He figured he was halfway through his life's journey. "I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."

"I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me..." and here he seems to have lost his train of thought. Whatever the cause, he forgot to name those "two primary objects of human existence," and instead ended, "in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."

In his field notes, William Clark scribbled his immortal line, "Ocian in view! O! the joy."

"While at dinner an indian fellow verry impertinently threw a poor half starved puppy nearly into my plait by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence; I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him, the fellow withdrew apparently much mortifyed and I continued my repast on dog without further molestation."