Day: June 8, 2011

What day is it again?

Today was pretty typical for a Thursday. Too bad it was actually a Wednesday.

Workers spent the entire day outside our windows, mostly one floor up or one floor down. For the longest time, I was convinced they were window washers, but by the end of the day, when I actually got glimpse of their very shaky-looking scaffolding, I saw bricks and broken-up concrete, so they may have been doing some kind of refacing or demolition for all I know. All I do know is, they were very noisy, and it felt like we were working on top of a jackhammer all day. Or, as a coworker suggested, like we were Doozers in Fraggle Rock. (I never saw the show growing up — we didn’t have cable until only fairly recently — but I got the reference. And felt immediately old when a younger coworker of ours didn’t, at all.) Hopefully, they’ll be done — or higher up where we can’t hear them — by tomorrow.

Which is, what, Friday, right? No? Rats.

Wednesday various

  • Human Centipede II already banned in the UK for sexual depravity. The description of the film sounds pretty horrific to me, even beyond the pale — and I’m someone who, amazingly enough, found some things to…well, not enjoy, exactly, about the first film, although I was less immediately repulsed by it than I would have expected. (Watching it over Twitter with friends may have softened the blow.)

    But the idea of censoring it, of banning it from the country, doesn’t sit entirely well with me. I tend to agree with Sarah Ditum of The Guardian on this:

    You get extremes of intelligence and stupidity as well as extremes of unpleasantness in horror, and if we’re happy to start banning stuff because of the latter, we might be losing a lot of stuff that falls into the former camp.

  • Meanwhile, the fact that there will be a G.I. Joe sequel — and that it may very well star The Rock — fills me with a weird manic delight. The original was one of the most gloriously dumb movies I have ever seen. I am so renting any sequel, as terrible as it is likely to be.
  • A lot of really interesting thoughts on X-Men: First Class. Though I liked it well enough — more than I expected to, less than I might have hoped — I’m not sure it deserves all this deep thought. But it’s all very interesting nonetheless. Spoiler warnings, of course.
  • Any story that starts with “the night a drunk John Lennon and Harry Nilsson heckled the Smothers Brothers and got in a fight with Pam Grier” has got to be good.
  • And finally, Paul Simon is simply a true class act. [via