Thanks to those fine folks at MediaBlasters. Invader Zim will be coming out on DVD in spring of 2004. Damn, now I REALLY need a job soon.

Mo Kin.

This is a truly amazing amazing music video of Mo Kin, a cute , three-year-old North Korean girl performing a very complicated and interesting song on the xylophone. Translation by Rob Pongi.

I like Lost Highway, but I don’t think I ever considered it being an opera…

How to Make an Opera a Riddle: Adapt David Lynch

Ever since she was 13, when she first saw “The Elephant Man,” Olga Neuwirth, a 35-year-old Austrian composer, has felt an affinity with the filmmaker David Lynch. “In his films, you are put into a vortex without actually knowing what is going on,” Ms. Neuwirth said recently from Venice, where she lives. “So this has always been a part of my thinking.”

The appeal of the vortex — not to mention the labyrinth, which partly explains her move from Vienna to the mazelike Venice 10 years ago — has been an essential part of Ms. Neuwirth’s compositional process.

“How can you draw people in, making it impossible for them to escape from listening?” she asked. “It’s so hard in our times to listen. But I never want to make music very clear. It must always be a riddle. There is never a theme you can easily latch onto. A different kind of psychology is happening, one of not knowing what is going on. That’s why I’m so close to Lynch.”

And that is why Ms. Neuwirth (pronounced NOY-veert) has dared to turn Mr. Lynch’s most enigmatic film, “Lost Highway,” into an opera. Ms. Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway,” which just had its premiere in Graz, her hometown (and much to her horror, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s), runs through Nov. 8 at the Helmut List Hall. [NYTimes]

This time right now is 10:36PM. When I just looked at UPSs web site to track a package, the last line was this:

Date: Nov 5, 2003
Time: 7:31 A.M.
Location: SOMERVILLE, MA, US
Activity: OUT FOR DELIVERY

Out for Delivery? At 10:38? Maybe, but I doubt it. I did call and was informed that if a driver is running late they will try and delivery till midnight. But come on, this is ridiculous. I’m kind of annoyed because I can’t hang around all day waiting for a package to arrive, but I could today. Bastards.

Scorpio (October 23-November 21)

Warning and congratulations! Wake-up calls are on tap. Here are examples of the kinds of benevolent shocks you may be treated to. 1. You reverently approach a cherished idol. As you bow down, you spy a dirty sock on the floor. 2. You dream of hiking through green hills in springtime. As you loop around a huge boulder, you come upon a mare giving birth to a colt. 3. You receive a Hallmark card in an envelope with no return address. The corny cartoon on the front turns you off. But when you open it up you find a slip of paper on which is handwritten a brilliant poem that fills you with catalytic emotions. [Free Will Astrology]

I miss my laptop. I brought it in for service yesterday and already I find myself itching to use it. I think the big reason is that I really have started to use my laptop as an organizer. I take notes on it, I keep my calendar on it, I’ve customized how things work on it. And now using my desktop machine I’m going through that whole initial user configuration thing again. Bleh. Hopefully I’ll have my laptop back by the weekend.

This morning I found two cool applications for OS X that I thought I’d share. The first is the oddly named Logorrhea.

Your one-stop iChat log-viewing solution
Logorrhea is your one-stop solution for iChat log browsing and searching. iChat can be configured to log all messages sent and received, which is all fine and good – until you need to actually find a specific conversation, at which point you’re stucker than a bleeding pig. Enter Logorrhea. It pulps, it purees, it locates incriminating past conversations with incredible speed!

Until Apple gets off their asses and makes that part of iChat a little better, this product will be very handy. You can search through your old chat logs and view them without even having to open up iChat.

Next up is an application called Comictastic. It is kind of like an RSS reader for comics. But it is more a screen scraping app (though it would be cool if it understood RSS too). It comes with around 18 web comics defined, including classics like Red Meat and Penny Arcade. One thing I like the most is that you can point it at just about any web comic and it will figure out what the comic is (or give you a choice of what the comic is on the page). I just started using it this morning, but dig it so far. Both these apps are from the cool people over at Spiny Software.

Eight or nine years back when I was first getting majorly into anime, I made an attempt to write some nutshell reviews of series I was watching. Being an eternal packrat, I’ve kept them lying around on disk, so I thought it would be amusing every now and then to peer into the wayback machine and see a snapshot of what I was thinking at the time.

Herewith:

Kiki’s Delivery Service
Kiki has just turned 13, and it is time for her to try her hand at making a living in the city. But what business opportunities are there for a young witch?

Another beautiful film by Hayao Miyazaki, I thoroughly enjoyed this story, which is sweet without becoming saccharine. I would recommend it to children of all ages.