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vampire ecology
Friday, June 2 2000
At work, I've been going to occasional SQL classes taught by Microsoft consultants. Frequently, when the consultants give examples, they give them in the context of long spans of time. Instead of talking about milliseconds and seconds, they talk about hours and weeks. The examples go something like:
"Suppose Henry wishes to update row number 4 in table B and he locks it for a week while going off to do things that take a couple of days each in tables C, D and F. Imagine that on day two, Billy decides he needs to access that same record in table B before he can give up access to table F. But Henry has that record locked while trying to get to Billy's table. We call this a deadlock."
Perhaps this sort mentality explains why NT takes so long to, say, pop-up my options when I'm right-clicking in an Explorer window attempting to create a new folder.
At around going home time, my boss Linda went out and got some orange and cranberry juice and then opened a big bottle of Absolut vodka she's been hiding in the back of her cubicle. A small group of us gathered around her desk and she mixed us drinks without any regard for our existing sobriety. We were celebrating the coming of Friday, but we were also celebrating her decision not to quit her job. We talked about all kinds of things, and despite the stiff drinks I managed to avoid becoming excessively intoxicated and saying foolish things to these people who don't know what my deal really is.
In the evening, Kim and I found ourselves watching Interview With a Vampire (1995) on HBO. Watching all that blood sucking made us thirst for red wine. Fortunately, we've risen to the point in our affluent adulthood where we keep a case of wine on hand at all times.
I don't ask for much in a movie. All I want is consistent internal logic (some sort of ecology or biology is best), well-roundedness in the characters (both good sides and bad sides to each) and the full, disturbing reality of the world being portrayed. Interview With a Vampire delivered in all these departments. What intrigued me most was the yin-yang zero-sum nature of the bargain vampires have made with reality to have the powers they have. While a Vampire has eternal life and eternal youth, he is also banished to the night and the companionship of the other dark dead things residing there. While cursed with normal human interests and longings, a vampire's appetite makes forming conventional relations with mortal humans impossible. And despite vampire immortality, there don't end up being very many of them in the world. Judging from this adaptation of the book by Anne Rice, vampires mostly live out a lonely eternity punctuated by absolutely wicked (but necessary) mayhem. Perhaps they should use the power of the internet more to help them work out their many issues.
The movie's credits rolled while Axl Rose sang a cover of Sympathy for the Devil, and I found myself thinking about how unique Axl's voice really is. It sounded like a scrawny little alley cat being squeezed and molested in just the right way and making it sing like a priceless Stratovarius.
To tell the truth, I didn't even watch the end of the movie. I got what I needed out of the first half. I didn't interest myself in the drama or the particulars of the story being told. Once I knew the ecology of vampires, I was happy. So, drunk on red wine, Kim and I did it on the red velvet couch.
We found ourselves playing various pieces of music and commenting about each, mostly with positive things to say. Stevie Nicks, she was cool. Courtney Love actually sounds sort of like Stevie Nicks, doesn't she?
[REDACTED]
link farm
Trailerpark HTML - sent to me by Nancy Firedrake.
Women in Uniform - another slice of harmless web perversion.
Creation Science text book - I figured such books must exist somewhere, and here we are!
A poorly-written review of Interview With a Vampire - never form a sentence by beginning with an assertion and then ending with the phrase "is all."
A better-written review of Interview With a Vampire - lots of pictures too.
Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love in the same interview.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?000602 feedback
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