Some more photographs, each of questionable quality, the last two tricks of the light, the dark and the rain. With my new flash card, I am now able to take an obscene number of pictures before uploading to my computer. And I need to do something with them, so I share them here. Anybody out there looking at them?

So it’s Friday, and I have nothing much better to do with my time, so I’m reading movie reviews. Hey, you amuse yourself your way and I’ll amuse myself mine.

“If you could put the essence of 3 a.m. in a perfume bottle,” writes Stephanie Zacharek, of Salon, “it would smell like ‘Mulholland Drive’ looks.” And, of course, it’s not playing in State College, PA.

“You never know what’s real and what they’re making up in the movies;” writes Roger Ebert in his review of the new film Bandits. “[Billy Bob] Thornton has a real-life phobia about antique furniture, in fact, and almost had a meltdown once during a visit to Johnny Cash’s antiques-filled home.”

This sounded a little too farfetched, but I looked it up online and apparently it’s true. “Anything before 1950 or so,” Thornton told Oprah Winfrey, “I’m not big on…some people say maybe it’s a past life thing and I got beat to death with some old chair. I can’t eat around antiques…like old velvety curtains, anything carved. Like stuff in a castle. Big carved chairs. Those old ornate deals. Can’t do it. Couldn’t do it at all. Couldn’t spend ten minutes there. I get hives, can’t breathe.” This, of course, from the man who also says he is the reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin.

I need to stop reading movie reviews. I need to go to lunch, read my book, work on the crossword puzzle, maybe take some photographs, and stop wondering which celebrities are or are not afraid of antiques.

Fellow capper and all-around good guy Erik Wilson e-mailed me this excellent article from The Nation on patriotism and the media:

Many on the right are hoping to exploit a pregnant political moment to advance a host of antidemocratic policies. Principled dissent is never more necessary than when it is least welcome. American history is replete with examples of red scares, racist hysteria, political censorship and the indefensible curtailment of civil liberties that derive, in part, from excessive and abusive forms of superpatriotism.

In this touching open letter to the civilians of Afghanistan, Paul Ford mulls over his own thoughts on what it now means to be an American:

…we pretended that we live outside history. We pretended to live in a space where economies rose forever and death could not visit us unless we were old or unlucky (or uninsured, which is another issue), and now the illusion has come to an nasty end. We were told – and I believed, somewhere in my heart, without even knowing I believed it – that America was done with all the messy cycles of the past, all the depressions and long, miserable battles, and that we would now be able to lead the rest of the world by our deeds.

And in other news:

In response to the news that the Bert is Evil website has been removed by its creator (see the “life imitates art” link below for the reason why), Metafilter poster Rogers Cadenhead writes:

Can we please stop recasting every decision in our lives as a matter of whether the terrorists win or not? (“I’m going to super-size my Big Mac Extra Value Meal today, because if I don’t, we’re letting them win.”) Al Qaeda has a reputation for thorough planning, but I don’t think they killed 5,600 people to drive humorists off the Net.

An excellent point. One can almost forgive him for publishing the Drudge Report.

Tonight, Whose Line Is it Anyway? was preempted for the President’s press conference on the war in Afghanistan. I think that’s just plain rude. So I’m watching The Color of Money and wandering around online instead, which I guess is just as well.

Anyway, keeping in what is fast becoming something of a tradition, some more photographs of nothing in particular and of questionable quality.