And so I finally went to see Gloomy Sunday after a local cinema insisted on playing it continuously for about five years just so I could go and see it at my leisure.

It seems to me it's a film about living with dignity. The two main male characters (László, a restauranteur and András, his pianist) share the love of a single woman. They struggle with it, but they conduct their irregular affair because they'd rather have half of Ilona than none at all. And they manage even so to retain their dignity.

But as Nazism sweeps through their country, they face a greater force. What can they do in the face of ultimate power but submit? The brutality of Nazism is embodied in the character of Hans, a third contender for Ilona's affections. A vulgar character who refers to the restaurant's roulade as a beef roll (and, later, as a meat roll) he takes Ilona by force and betrays his own oath to László. László is aware of his own imminent death and chooses to take his own life rather than have it taken from him.

The Iberian lynx is the most endangered big cat in the world and could be the first to become extinct since the sabre-toothed tiger. It has a population of just 100 confined to Spain and Portugal. Environmental destruction has fragmented the lynx poulations, resulting in inbreeding and making them more vulnerable, while myxomatosis is reducing rabbit numbers, the lynxes' natural prey.

However, in the black column here's a story (thanks Grace) about a business entrepreneur who it attempting to breathe life into a white elephant sports stadium and help save the lynx as well.

Finally, I finished this book. I first started reading it when I withdrew it from the school library in 1982. I was 11. It was too old for me. I'm thrice eleven now and it turns out to be still too old for me. It's filled with rape and brutality and slaughter.It's strange too. The writing is oddly clipped as if every second thought has been left out. Long dialogue sections where you can't figure out who is talking. A final page that is written in code, which gives clues to the meaning of it all, but leaves it unclear. The entire book hints at a meaning but the oblique prose doesn't give it up so easily.

The story is three stories set in three different times but set in the same locations. Two characters meet and love each other in these different settings. Perhaps they're the same characters over again. The boy's a bit crazy and the girl loves him anyway. And apparently it's all based on a myth:

The novel gives us three expressions of the Tam Lin myth; but we should not forget that their combination in a single text, Red Shift itself, constitutes a fourth expression, one in which the themes of change, of uncertainty, of identity are given new and complex forms.  An illustration of this principle is provided in the scene at the center of the book in which John Fowler argues with Thomas Rowley on the church tower.  This scene is written three times, implicitly from the perspectives of John, Thomas and Margery....  They are all clearly the "same" scene, but in each case the tone, the characters’ intentions, and even the words spoken, vary significantly.  Is John reassuring and comforting Thomas, or is he cruelly taunting him? With its careful avoidance of an omniscient narrative voice, Red Shift refuses to give any of the three versions primacy. The same applies to the book’s larger narratives. They vary just as three performances of a play might vary - or three versions of a ballad.

I finally released something. I have a list of things that have been hanging around, half-finished, for months, and this wasn't on the list. It jumped the queue, gazumping the other more languorous contenders.

I need to get back into that routine and get some work done. I have another silly little product or two just waiting to be tidied up and released before I get onto Serious Winter Project I and Serious Winter Project II. 

And so I was listening to Joan Osborne singing Bob Dylan's "To make you feel my love" this evening, and she really nails it. It's a rendition filled with sad resignation: "No, there's nothing that I wouldn't do..." but you know that there's nothing she could possibly do. Unrequited, unanswered, unreflected.

I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn't do
Go to the ends of the earth for you
To make you feel my love

And then I was listening by complete coincidence to Luka Bloom's rendition from his live album, Amsterdam. It's a simpler, straightforward spin. I don't know though. I guess it's a classic carpe diem song, but I think inherent in any kind of lyric like this is a certain futility or hopelessness. Without that, the words would be unnecessary.

The winds of change are blowing wild and free.
You've seen nothing like me yet.

The reason I love Aimee Mann is that she sings the way I think. To me, "Little Bombs" is a perfect song on a perfect album:

Life just kind of empties out
Less a deluge than a drought
Less a giant mushroom cloud
Than an unexploded shell

Or "Beautiful":

And we drove to the ferry
Like the cat and canary
I said, "Baby, it's scary
When it's so beautiful.

Why does it hurt me
To feel so much tenderness?
Beautiful
You little wonder, you."

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have recently released a collection of B-sides which includes a cover of Neil Young's "Helpless". It doesn't grab me the way the Junkies' version does but still it's a good song. I'm impressed by the austerity of the lyrics. I always marvel that the imagery is so vivid while the text is so spare:

Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.

There's a good version of "Rainy Night in Soho" there too.

Now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there's a light I hold before me
You're the measure of my dreams
The measure of my dreams

As the proud owner of a sheltered life, I have no idea what the etiquette is related to supplying friends' details to the police. But I'm sure there must be a book out there with red covers and gold lettering telling me how wrong I am.

Just when you feel you're mostly doing the right thing at the right time, things get harder and you do ten things wrong simultaneously. It's much like Tetris when you've let a few blocks settle into place just any old way, but you can't then recover. Like today. I think I should have stayed in bed. Or possibly under the bed. Perhaps I should have tried eating the duvet. I'm sure I'd feel better after doing that than I do now, like somebody has sucked all my blood out and replaced it with vinegar.

Just when you think you've got enough to feel uneasy about, the Universe throws you a curveball. The police come around and demand that you supply details on one of your site's visitors despite your protests about privacy and despite the fact that they've completely got the wrong person and are being morons.

Sorry visitor. This really sucks.

There's something about the police that makes me quite nauseous. I think they remind me of school bullies. That's not meant to be a criticism of the police — just the way fundamentally that they represent power you can't argue with. You can't not do what they say.

I dunno. Maybe I'm too spineless. Maybe if I were a more decent person I would have told them I didn't know what they were talking about. But I'm not a more decent person. I'm just me, who gets the shakes whenever I have to deal with the police for whatever reason.

If you've been wondering about the "Currently listening to..." box in the margin, that's powered by Brandon Fuller's Now Playing tool for iTunes. It uploads an XML document containing recent track data to the server via FTP. I use an XSL stylesheet to transform that document into HTML and then I include it. XSL seems to be a mixture of fun and bloody annoying, somewhat like pot scourers dipped in chocolate. The HTML gets cached for a few minutes too, so it's what I was listening to five minutes ago. Still pretty voyeuristic though eh?

Incidentally, I've been experimenting here with a new caching tag that I wrote a few days ago. Instead of caching to server memory as I usually do, this tag generates a folder full of files. In fact it was doing so too enthusiastically for a while there, storing well over 15MB of files in just a day or two. I had to make some tweaks, but I can see I'm going to have to get it to spring clean more promptly.

I've been busy with another application I want to release soon too. Nothing terribly exciting, but just another item to cross off my list of things to do.

Yesterday was Mother's Day and so I baked banana chocolate chip muffins. It was a recipe I hadn't made before and so I was surprised but not overly concerned when the mixture was doughy and solid. As I was pulling the first batch out of the oven I noticed the 2L milk bottle sitting there untouched. I'd forgotten to put it in. They came out OK, but rather buttery and a bit heavy. Next time I'll try to rush a little less.

Oh yes and I watched Cube 2 too. And what a disappointment that was: written by people who obviously didn't take the time to learn anything more than the most superficial dross about what a hypercube actually is, and didn't spend that time they'd saved on thinking of a good plot either. Watch it just to see how bad it is.

Nothing goes right. I feel a knot in my stomach that reminds me of all the things I've done wrong, and I feel my face burning with the heat that reminds me that whatever happens it won't get better. I am the cause of all my problems: that's cold comfort. It's a shame to waste one's life being a neurotic basketcase. Oh well, at least it's mine to waste. I wish I was one of those people who knew what it all meant.