Caitlín R. Kiernan

So very not awake. But I will try to do a decent job with this entry regardless. Yesterday, I wrote 1,063 words on an odd little piece which I am currently calling "Untitled 31." It came about from the odd little prompting game that Spooky and I have devised for those times I get stuck. She tosses out a word, or a few words, and I have to make something from them. Yesterday, the words were suspension, tribe, blood, and clay. At first, I rejected all of them, then I decided to use all of them. So, I should be able to finish "Untitled 31" today, and it will be appearing in Sirenia Digest #25 with Part One of "The Crimson Alphabet." I am hoping that the digest will go out to subscribers late tomorrow, but it might not happen until Sunday. And if you are not a subscriber, but have seen the error of your ways, just click here.

And you can see the current eBay auctions here.

I didn't make it out of the house yesterday. Spooky cooked a very spicy Jamaican chicken, rice, and bean dish for dinner. Then, thanks to thingunderthest's Cephalopodmas generosity, we spent much of the evening watching all the extras on the new release of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). It was a little underwhelming, but mostly only by comparison with the 3.5 hour Dangerous Days documentary we'd seen the night before, as the "making of" docs on Dracula (there are four or five) only run about an hour combined. Oh, and we also watched the deleted scenes, some of which were quite wonderful and I wish they'd been included in the theatrical cut. When it was first released, I loved this film enormously. I still am a great admirer of it, but have come to see it as a flawed cinematic gem. Start with the atrociously miscast Keanu Reaves. How much more brilliant this film would have been if only Coppola had bothered casting someone as Harker who was either British or could manage a British accent...and who could actually act. So much of the film hangs on the role of Harker, and it's one of Reeves' worst performances ever (and that's saying something). Ah, but here I am dwelling on the negatives. I'm very much looking forward to watching the film with Coppola's commentary.

Regarding Tatiana, the four-year-old Siberian tiger killed on Tuesday at the San Francisco Zoo, it seems increasingly likely that her escape was aided or instigated by the three humans who were attacked. Ronald Tilson, director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo, has said of the affair, "She was everything that a tiger is supposed to be. She was essentially shot and killed for being a tiger." For me, in the end, it comes down to the fact that there remain only about 25,000-27,000 tigers worldwide, and most of them (about 20,000) are in zoos, sanctuaries, breeding farms, or kept as pets, and represent a population of low genetic diversity. So, if we go with a global tiger population of 27,000, Tatiana's death represented the loss of a far, far more significant percentage of that population than the loss of one human from a worldwide population of (as of 12/28/07 at 17:21 GMT) a whopping 6,640,422,877 individuals. That is, there are almost 250,000 times more humans than tigers, which means humans can stand to lose a few and tigers can't. I don't mind being called callous.

Oh, probably the coolest Cephalopodmas gift I received this year came from robyn_ma, who sent me a copy of the Russian translation of Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel, (plus a cast of a Camarasaurus tooth from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of Utah).

( И узре ослица Ангела Божия )

Oh, and there's this wonderful comment to my entry from day before yesterday, wherein I fretted that sclerotic_rings might compare me to a "Cat Piss Man" for worrying over the missing sixth replicant in Blade Runner:

I'm about as likely to compare you to a Cat Piss Man as I am likely to buy tickets to watch the entire six-film Star Wars series, and you can quote me on that. Actually, I kinda like people picking apart continuity holes in films (as opposed to rabidly rationalizing, say, why the shuttlecraft in Alien couldn't support four people when the Nostromo crew was seven), because this tends to make people pay attention to those sorts of holes in their own work. I just get irritated with the twerps who want to argue the plausibility of lightsabers, the propensity toward sound and visible lasers in space, and other cliches fervently defended by members of the Church of Saint Spock the Pointyeared.

If I wanted to hang out with humorless pedants who go postal because any questions make them worry about the inerrancy of their chosen obsession, I'd rather visit the Institute of Creation Research. Young-earth creationists bathe more often.

Ah! Coffee!