Bela Lugosi was more interesting in a supporting role in The Black Camel (Warner Oland’s second Charlie Chan picture) than in Dracula, made the same year.

Also recently watched: the first disc of season 10 of South Park. The first episode (“The Return of Chef!”) has its moments but the next three (“Smug Alert!” and two-part “Cartoon Wars”) are heavy-handed, mostly unfunny and (of course) coarse. Are earlier seasons any better?

Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been enjoying the banter of Gilmore Girls.

The Marx Brothers’ first few movies disappoint me. I wonder whether later ones have more plot.

As for more recent movies, we went to see Death at a Funeral, a stinker. My companion remarked that English comedies of this sort rely on straining a convention of civility at all costs, and American directors don’t know how to milk it. Also it shares a scriptwriter with last year’s Caffeine, which she described as disappointing.

For a while there, nearly all the comments submitted to this blog linked to files in an obscure directory on a minor university’s server, which in turn redirected to a porn site. After I reported it to the webmasters of the two universities affected, I got no comments here at all for two or three days.

This morning, 14 spamments linking to Geocities.

Played poker last night – for the second time in my life, if I haven’t miscounted – with some Stanfordites; I think I was the only one there over thirty. Won $2.50.

I’m watching Dexter. In a flashback, teen Dexter says, “Jesus, Dad, it’s called being on time, did you ever hear of it?”

The actors playing Dexter in the present and in the past were born in 1971 and 1987, so let’s assume the flashback is about 1990, 16 years before the episode was made. Was the sarcastic “it’s called” construction already current then?

Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps. Oh dear, CARE has been taken over by evil selfish libertarians. What else could explain such a conclusion?

What American accent do you have? I got Philadelphia on the first try, and I’ve never even visited Philadelphia. I went back and changed Mary/merry/marry from “marry is different” (a conscious affectation on my part; I value distinctions) to “all alike”, and got Midland, no surprise.

The Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005 forbids protesting in the vicinity of Westminster Palace without a permit. What is a concerned comedian to do? (three parts, about 29 minutes total)

I decided to rearrange my books by broad subject rather than by author. So far I have:

• biology, medicine, psychology
• computing
• mathematics, physics, chemistry
• language
• arts
• those included in this classification
• fiction
• history, geography, ecology, heraldry

Does religion belong with psychology or with history? Does game theory belong with mathematics, psychology or economics? Do The Ancient Engineers, Engines of Creation and The Klutz Book of Knots go together?

A woman volunteered to donate an organ to her mother, but mom’s pee tested positive for marijuana, so no go. I could understand disqualifying the disobedient from receiving an organ from the limited pool of dead strangers, but how does this make sense even by drug war logic?