Witness for the Prosecution (1957), from a story by Agatha Christie, is of course clever; though the byplay of the convalescent barrister and his nurse is a bit tiresome.

South Pacific (1958). I thought I’d enjoy it more. The plot is a bare sketch of a frame on which to hang the songs, which are stale. (Has time treated Michener’s book any better?) Notable use of color filters for effect, sometimes bizarre; the one point where I find it really successful is where reality crashes into a daydream and the filter suddenly goes away.

Vertigo (1958) lives up to its reputation.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958) is amiable fluff.

The Horse’s Mouth (1958) featured Alec Guinness (age 43, playing sixty-some) as an obnoxious painter. Rather predictable.

Peter Gunn (1958), a tv series about a private eye, remembered mainly for Mancini’s theme. Out of curiosity I put it on my Netflix list. The first disc holds eight half-hour episodes; I watched one and that was enough: nothing I haven’t seen a thousand times. My housemate watched one more episode, and then we packed it up to return.

Gigi (1958), a musical with Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier: disappointingly thin. — I wonder how many movies have three French leads (or two and a half: Caron’s mother was American) speaking only English.

For my sins I’m doing data entry at, of all places, the Registrar of Voters for Alameda County — and missing Knuth’s talk on Friday! The software, by the way, is from a subsidiary of Diebold.

I thought you might get a chuckle out of the long list of wannabe parties hoping to sign up enough voters to get provisional ballot status. The list also includes the big seven parties which retain their ballot status by having won at least 2% of the vote for one of their statewide candidates in the last general election.

American Christian; American Independent; American National Socialist; Anarchist; Aztlan; Birthday; Black Panther; Boston Tea; California; California Green; Central; Christian Heritage; Citizens; Community for New Politics; Communist; Conscious American African; Conservative; Constitution; Democratic; Environmentalist; Equal Justice; Equalitarian; Free; Green; Green Future; Human Principles; Humanist; Independent; Independent Progressive; Justice; La Raza Unida; Liberal; Libertarian; Middle Class; National; National Unity; Natural Law; New Alliance; New Economy; Parliament Party; Patriot; Patriotic; Patriotic Veterans; Peace and Freedom; Poor People’s; Populist; Pot; Pragmatic; Prohibition; Puritan; Real American; Reform; Republican; Rock and Roll; Socialist; Socialist Labor; Socialist Worker; Technocracy; US Taxpayers; Unlimitism; United Conscious Builders of the Dream; Vernita Baldwin; Vision; Whig; White Panther; Youth International (Yippie)

Next time my dearest friend asks me to deliver something to a Feral office, I must remember to say no.

I had my state-issued annotated portrait in my pocket, and was resolved not to bother the Marshal at the gate this time with silly questions about the purpose, if any, of asking me to show it.

Halfway there I noticed a knife in my pocket, but no sweat; last time I went to the Federal Building in San Francisco, they simply put my knife aside and gave it back when I left.

But this was Oakland. “You have to leave that in your car.” “My car is twenty miles away!” “You can’t bring a knife onto Federal property.” . . .

I should explain that the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland consists of two towers with a semi-open rotunda between. My objective was in the south tower; the “security” gate is at the entrance to that tower from the rotunda.

Two men were loitering in the rotunda, apparently setting up some Halloween thing. I asked one, “Will you be here for a few minutes?” He consented to hold my knife; but that wasn’t good enough for the security-bot, because the helpful man was still standing on Federal property.

So I went home, mission abandoned.

I wonder why the badge-bot didn’t arrest me for my willful failure to comply. At least then I might have eventually encountered someone human enough to deliver the envelope for me.

Maybe I’d be more comfortable under a more openly corrupt state, where evasion is a way of life.

Saturday I bought yet another historical atlas: Muir’s (1927/52). I learn to my surprise that southern British Columbia was once called New Caledonia, and northern Manitoba (before 1912) was New South Wales. Why isn’t there a New North Wales or, for that matter, a New just plain Wales? (William Penn proposed to name his colony New Wales; the King disapproved, and Sylvania was Penn’s second choice.)

This is intended to be an orthographic projection of a stereographic projection from S5 (the five-dimensional surface of a sphere in six-dimensional space) into E5 (flat five-space) of the cartesian product S2 × S2, a kind of torus. The colors represent the three suppressed dimensions.

I did not expect it to look like this, but then, I did not know what to expect.

“Nominalist Things”

(The site to which Bruce cites is dead, so I’ve no idea whether this is the whole song or not.)

J. Neil Schulman: Why This Libertarian Is Voting to Re-elect George W. Bush

When I became a voter I gave up casting my ballot symbolically in any race in which I believed my ballot stood any chance whatsoever in effecting a preferable outcome. Purists have told me for years that “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” I have learned to counter that argument with one taught to me by libertarian author Brad Linaweaver: “the lesser of two evils is less evil.”

You’d think a guy who has written sf novels would surprise us once in a while. Every cycle it’s the same song: sure, it would be nice to elect a libertarian, but this time it’s vitally important to support the second-worst candidate, so as to defeat the worst. (To his slight credit, he changed his tune late in the campaign of 1996, when Bob Dole went too far in supporting victim disarmament.)
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