A Salon piece about Sylvia Plath's therapist, Ruth Barnhouse. Devastating and deflating article with insights into psychoanalysis, Plath's relationship with Barnhouse, and the crippling depression that chased Plath to an early grave.

I recently began work on a small project that involves displaying a weekly view of a calendar. I want to use a url like /index.php/weekview/2004/04 where 04 is the week number. There are many standards for calculating which week of the year one is in. Microsoft even has their own ideas about calculating weeks.

The W3 recognizes ISO 8601 as the standard for most date and time formats but not the 8601 Week format specifically. Still 8601 is as good a standard to use as any. It turns out that working with the 8601 week can be quite involved. J R Stockton's page about calendar weeks is hands down the best online resource about the topic I found.

So, how can I work with the YYYY/WW dates and the MySQL database I'm planning on pulling this data from? php and MySQL are both happy to work with unix time, and for my purposes that is fine. This means converting the YYYY/WW dates, but thankfully most of the heavy lifting can be done by php's date command.

or the tighter version

Sadly, this solution wasn't quite so obvious to me before I started this. Also it took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out and test the day adjustment constants.

Amusing date trivia: At some point Alaska lost 11 dates after we purchased it from the Russians and changed them from the Julian to Gregorian calendar and moved the International Date Line. There's gotta be some kind of clever historical thriller in that somewhere.

I wonder what friend's only posts Rachelle Waterman made before she had her mom murdered. Hooray LJ! More details in the AK police press release.

I finally got around to seeing Seed of Chucky. While it's no Bride of Chucky it is a worthy addition to the Chucky series. Seed of Chucky fails at exactly what Bride of Chucky did so well. BoC is an examination of the slasher genre using the conventions of the slasher genre to explain itself, while at the same time advancing the Chucky story a great deal. One can watch BoC as a deconstruction of the very genre that it's part of. Seed of Chucky doesn't have the same coherence of purpose and falls back to the more pedestrian slasher/Hollywood satire of say the Scream trilogy.

I'm sure Billy Boyd and Brad Dourif had some nice LOTR reminiscing between scenes. The Academy Award nominated (Supporting Actress for Bullets Over Broadway) Jennifer Tilly is the proverbial glue around which the movie is built since she plays herself and the Tiffany doll and most of the best jokes involve her or Tiffany making fun of Jennifer Tilly's career. This movie and P.S. also co-exist in a short list of movies this year that address addiction and recovery in the main plot. (Tiffany wants to end her addiction to murder)

It's chock full of movie references. The best one is hands down the Shining moment where Chucky breaks through a door with an axe and with the audience waiting for "Heeere's Chucky" after a pause he says "I can't imagine what I could possibly say right now." The new spawn of Tiffany and Chucky is of indeterminate sex and lives through it's own Glen or Glenda complex in the movie. Glen has a hilarious breakdown and captures James Dean's rebel yell "You're tearing me apart!" so accurately I wonder if it was sampled. The Child's Play franchise also had it's first bit of human nudity which the director insists was done as a reference to the Hammer horror films since he chose a British actress with the "Hammer look" to do it.

I couldn't help but laugh at Glen's belief that his family is Japanese because of the "Made in Japan" label the Chucky family bears. He even speaks in Japanese hoping for a deeper family bond. I was reminded of The Eighth Day where Georges thinks he's Mongolian and fantasizes about riding through the countryside on small horses because people referred to him as a mongoloid baby.

Probably only worth a rental, and even then only if you're a movie buff or Chucky fan. I'm still trying to figure out what those two families with the eight kids were doing at the showing I was at. They stayed through the whole thing.

I spent last Thanksgiving with a friend's family. I came into this Thanksgiving holiday with no plans. This Thanksgiving, in typical Matt fashion, I decided I'd just be alone and go somewhere else till the holiday was over. (I've never liked the seemingly unnecessary interruption in productivity that holidays bring) Camping became a non-option because of most Texas campgrounds being closed due to flooding and freezing temperatures at other nearby spots. I kept thinking about one miserable Thanksgiving that involved eating at McDonalds. But this one won't be like that.

Two different people called me out of the blue to eat with their families on Thanksgiving. I'm genuinely stunned, the kind of stunned that maybe includes a few tears, by their spontaneous offers.

Sweet sweet nectar! I've reintroduced my body to the White Rock YMCA, and conveniently all my workouts were still in the system. I picked up right where I left off. Sadly my body wasn't right were I left off.

I can't hold the cell phone to my head too long without my arm really hurting. Rock on! I gave up World of Warcraft for this tonight.

Oh happy memories, the Fitlinxx website still measures my workout in VW Beetles lifted, gummy bears burned and FitPoints.

I think I will be very, very sore at work tomorrow. I'm trying to find a campsite in Texas that isn't flooded for the Thanksgiving holiday.

It costs about $5k to get from Baghdad airport to city center. This includes four well armed Western ex-military bodyguards and two cars. The passenger travels at an average of 100 mph with a "gun car" nearby to deal with hostiles. If you're caught then Islamist militant groups will pay up to $300k for you.

I saw a trailer for The Take before P.S.. It's Naomi Klein so I expected a movie with a radical new take on globalization and megacorps. This seems like the latest escalation in leftist documentaries.

I've never seen a trailer beseech action of the audience in such strong terms. Phrases like "Stop Asking", "Take on the System", "Take Over the Machines", "Take Out the Boss" and "Take Back Your Country" filled the screen. The next to last shot is a scene of the Argentinian police shooting into a crowd of protestors.

I wonder what effect these documentaries have on our country. Most of them only play in blue areas (large urban areas) and will never play in red strongholds. They tend to be a powerful call to action for the converted. It's one thing to watch them alone at home on DVD, and something entirely different to sit in a theater of like-minded people and realize you're not alone.

Just got back from seeing TV on the Radio (TV's blog) open up for The Faint. TV was solid, but not great. I hope the Young Liars EP doesn't end up being their peak. On their opener they were channeling Mogwai with this distorted guitar that slowly built over the course of a few minutes. I was really surprised when they sampled themselves playing and started looping it. I've never heard anyone else use that technique for their kind of music.

The Faint brought down the house. I had always relegated them to the upper echelon of B-List indie acts. I was wrong. Their live show is second to none. I've seen Modest Mouse, Yume Bitsu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Death Cab for Cutie, Dismemberment Plan and a few others perform in the same venue and none have sounded as good as The Faint did tonight. I had thought it was a limitation of the venue, but apparently not. They also had the best visual and light show of any of the bands I've seen play there. A number of video sequences were synchronized to the music and didn't slip at all. They were tight. Todd Baechle, the lead singer, had a really strong presence on stage that I didn't expect him to have.

The highlights of the show for me were "Agenda Suicide", "Paranoiattack", "Birth", "Phone Call", "Worked up so Sexual", "Call Call" and "Your Retro Career Melted". The live performances had all the energy of the studio cuts and more. The video and light presentation with each looked far beyond what any indie band should be able to afford.

For me The Faint has nicely filled the void left by the Dismemberment Plan when they disbanded. The Plan never really excelled on their studio albums, but their live shows were excellent. I'm looking forward to more Faint shows.

On another note, it's been about a year since I last experienced live music from a band. The last show I'd seen was Mogwai in Atlanta, which was excellent in that cerebral, sit-down and melt into the music kinda way. It's good to have opportunities like this again, and at $17 total you'll hear no complaints from me. I was surprised to see some folks in DC paying $30 to $60 for the same show.

This is a house in eastern Montana on a dirt road on the way between Pompey's Pillar and the Little Bighorn battleground. One of the reasons that I travel is because I want to find a place that is home. I take lots of pictures of empty homes when I'm traveling. I'd never really thought about why. I think I take those pictures because I wonder if this home might be the one.

Just who is worried about indecency on television, and what has brought on the FCC's latest chilling effect on TV programming? A FOIA request about Fox's $1.2 million fine uncovered three righteously indignant people with a Xerox.

It took me about a week to get my bearings once I landed in Dallas. The near constant excitement of the previous month had settled in and given me a different way of being. I felt really lost and confused during my first week in Dallas.

Oddly, I finally felt normal again when I jumped in the car and took off for Austin to see 20x2 v4.5. Amanda was a great traveling companion down and back up.

That trip marked the first time I'd stayed at Thon's place just me and him. It's also the first time I didn't feel apprehensive around him. That apprehension came from feeling that I'd never delivered on the promise I showed when he hired me to work at BroadbandNow five years ago. This time it was gone and I found it really easy to talk with him.

The rest of my time in Dallas has marked a renewal of friendships and routines. I'm staying with my friend Dave. I'm back into the Angelika movie roundtable. I've seen a number of the dfw bloggers.

I need to find a good job, and buy a house to finish phase two of this project. I know more than ever before what I want to do. I just don't know how to make money at it.

Dallas has joined civilization. We now have a 24 hour Krystal. No news on the first five folks who won a year's supply of the stuff.

Abortions up under Bush after a decade of decline.

I'm dubious about the authenticity but it's one more way to slice up the electorate. A list of state IQ / electoral vote correlation.

Despite the grim picture for progressive politics across the country my new home in Dallas County bucked the trend. Three new Democrat judges, and a new lesbian, Latina, Democrat sheriff. The trend seems to be based on demographics rather than thoughtful Democrat strategies. Apparently Dallas County's hispanic population has doubled recently and they go 2-to-1 Democrat.

Electing to Leave has some funny and frustrating advice for those looking to renounce their US citizenship in light of the recent election.

Marry an American is a site where Canadians can pledge to marry a non-Bush voter and rescue them from four more years of Bush.

This was one of the last pictures I took before moving out of Dallas and back to Huntsville a little over a year ago. It's overlooking Mockingbird station at the Angelika theater. While I was in Huntsville I sought refuge at the theater there and came to refer to my weekly visits as going to church. Well, I am happy to be back where I can really dig into "church" with both feet. I never found the movie community that I'd hoped to find in Huntsville and for whatever reason a solid movie community seems to bring me the peace, understanding and enlightenment that church brings others.

I'm surprised that the country turned out for Bush. I really thought his failures would be clear to the majority of Americans. I'm not clear what's next.

When I talk to my mother, who voted for Bush, we see the same things from opposite sides. She talks about voter's rejecting "legislating morality" and I counter with the fact that 11 states added new legislation to ban gay marriage and civil unions.

My step-father, who voted for Bush, complains about "activist judges" and I ask him what that means and I get this buzz phrase "Judges shouldn't legislate from the bench." Should Plessy vs. Ferguson have never been overturned by Brown ending separate but equal facilities? Isn't the whole concept of judicial review anathema to "activist judges."

My mother talks about voter's rejecting "big government" and I point out that Bush has presided over one of the largest increases in a decade and that government shrunk under Clinton much more.

I hear other Republicans complain about cuts in military spending and I retort with "How would the military have stopped guys with box cutters?"

Republicans defend Bush's excesses, even by their standards, with the idea that everything changed on 9/11 and I remind them that Clinton presided over not one, but two, homeland terrorists attacks and captured and tried all people involved in those. He didn't resort to the wrong-headed approach Bush has decided on which have not resulted in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Republicans call Kerry a "tax and spend liberal" and don't blink at the Bush "tax cut and spend conservative" missing the obvious fiscal problems that creates.

My mother is the same person who used the tortured phrase of cognitive dissonance "It's okay, but it's not right" to describe gay marriage. How do these people hold this doublethink in their head?

I love my parents and I do not mean to pick on them exclusively. They are just the few Republican voters I encounter and I take their stance to be emblematic of the larger Republican base. I genuinely believe that Republican or Democrat everyone wants to make America greater. I just don't understand how Republican voters, by even their own measurements of success, fail to see improvements but continue voting the same way.

So the presidential election was just one more battle lost in the war. What's the next battle? How do I go about untwisting the mental contortions and buzzword heavy rhetoric of the Republican voters? I'm a lot more optimistic about 2008 than I was about 2004. I think Democrats are really just now building the infrastructure needed after the Democrat/Republican realignment where the parties seemed to swap sides on major issues. (Remember when the South used to only vote for racist Democrats?) I think the failure of the DLC and moderate Democrats to deliver this election will hopefully mark the end of the Republican-lite agenda that Clinton and crew have been pushing.