Author: Gil

Lil Jon and BusinessWeek: perfect together.

Will Eisner died today. He’s a pretty legendary figure in the history of the comics. I would’ve met him a few years ago at a small press comics expo, but he got stuck in Florida, due to bad weather, and had to skip the show.

Also, Kelly Freas died on Sunday. He illustrated a ton of science fiction book and magazine covers, and was best known for the cover of a Queen album (that one with the big robot). I didn’t know Freas’ work that well, but he did paint a cover for my friend Paul’s book Strange Trades.

I would’ve written about some of the celebrity deaths that occurred between Christmas and New Year, but I would’ve made a really tasteless joke. So bad, even I knew it was tasteless.

It seems that Edge (definitely the best online magazine named after a shaving gel) has posted the results of its annual question to scientists and ‘science-minded thinkers’: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

The answers are pretty neat, though sometimes high-falutin’. I’m glad they didn’t pose the question to laymen like me, because I would’ve had to respond, “That the 1997 NBA Slam Dunk Contest was fixed.”

Nice article by Niall Ferguson about the historical precedent to today’s Russia. Check it out.

The site was down for about 12 hours on Monday. Evidently, my web-host was doing some sorta New Year’s updating of the hardware, and it All Went Awry. Sorry if you didn’t get your expected dose of Virtual Memories.

Not that there’s a ton to write about. My girl & I spent New Year’s day down in Princeton, where we met an old friend of mine for lunch. Then it was back home to watch the third installment of that Lord of the Rings.

I enjoyed the heck out of the movies, but it sorta bummed me out that, when you get down to it, evil only loses by accident.

The official VM girlfriend and I spent New Year’s Eve watching the first two Lord of the Rings flicks. No, seriously. She loves those movies, but I’d never seen them before, and after our disastrous attempt at watching all three Matrix flicks back in November on Showtime, we decided to make a New Year’s event out of it.

I did the reverse-tourist thing during the movies: while others watched the LOTR flicks and then went to New Zealand to see the sites, I watched the movies and pointed out likely locales for some of the scenes, from my travels in 2003. “If you can’t do it half-assed, do it ass-backwards.”

My buddy Tina, an Australian I met during that trip, sent me a nice holiday package the day before, which was a nice precursor to our geek-out evening.

At the end of the second movie, it was 11:55, so we clicked over to ABC for Regis Philbin’s fill-in on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. We drank bad champagne and toasted the New Year in private, a pleasant change from past years, which tended to involve a lot of drinking.

As ABC went to a commercial break, and Snoop Dogg gave a videotaped “Get Well Soon” message to Dick Clark, replete with cryptic gang symbols, I raised my glass to my love, and said, “Let these movies be the most drama we deal with in the new year.”

Be well, everybody. I’ll try to write more, and on more varied subjects, in the year ahead. That’s the only resolution you’re getting out of me this time around.

Build your own Lionel Richie head.

My girlfriend thinks we should follow this process to build our own Christopher Hitchens head, but I’m afraid that it’d have its own gravity field and destroy the world.

Amazon makes it easy for you to help out the people who got their lives annihilated by the tsunami. Donate to the American Red Cross’ Disaster Relief efforts right here.

Chris Caldwell at the Weekly Standard wrote about the failures of multiculturalism and free immigration in Holland. Looks like my brief glimpse of the country holds up:

Many discussions of the Netherlands suggest that the country’s multicultural model is “under threat.” Maybe that was true a year ago. Now it would be more accurate to say there is a society-wide consensus that it has failed. Even before he left office in 2002, PvdA premier Wim Kok had begun tightening the country’s asylum laws, and under the conservative premiership of Jan Peter Balkenende, the reforms have picked up pace. One of the top priorities has been marriage laws. Several immigrant groups have an endogamy rate approaching 100 percent: Young, marriageable people return to their homelands to find a bride or groom and bring them back to Holland. Many Dutch believe the marriage laws are being abused simply to confer automatic citizenship and the right to welfare payments on as large a number of foreigners as possible. As a result, foreign spouses marrying Dutch citizens must now be 21 and speak Dutch, and their eligibility for welfare is not immediate. Education in foreign languages has been phased out, so the Dutch can concentrate on teaching their own endangered language.

Read the rest. I gotta get back to work.

Holiday plans got scuttled, after the official VM girlfriend came down with food poisoning Wednesday night. We had to cancel our Thursday flight to visit her family in Louisiana for the holidays, as she was in no shape to board a plane, and the person I spoke to at Continental burst out laughing when I asked if there were any openings on a flight today.

So we’ll stay in NJ instead, and I’ll expose her to the wonders of Jewish Christmas: Chinese food and a movie.

(On the plus side, this means I won’t break my record (set last year) of 25 flights in a calendar year. I’ve boarded 50 planes in the last two years, and I’m really hoping to cut down the number of flights in 2005.)

Holiday gifts have been trickling in. Because I’m a Jew, friends send me gifts throughout December, hoping to catch Hanukkah. If they’re late, they can say it’s an early birthday gift (my birthday’s in January).

I love my friends dearly, and tend to give them gifts throughout the year, when the mood and the opportunity strike, but I’m trying to be more like normal people this year, and concentrate my gift-giving at the end of the year. Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy to mail my stuff out, so some of my friends and loved ones will have to wait a little while. I really did get some neat stuff for them this year. I did a lot of traveling, and picked up some things on the road.

Dad came through kinda early with a Sony video camera, which I still need to sit down and play around with, so I can start posting video to this blog.

My buddy Tom has sent me the wonderful Locas anthology, collecting about 700 pages of comics by the ever-amazing Jaime Hernandez.

My girlfriend has replaced the lucky mug that she accidentally busted, and gave me the 8-part New York documentary by Ric Burns.

My friends Paul & Deb graced me with this calendar of photography by Mick Payton. I’d been procrastinating on getting a 2005 calendar, so it’s quite fortunate that they came through with this sorta thing. Even if it does show black-and-white bondage-ish erotica photography. It’s certainly a change-of-pace from the Edward Hopper calendar I used last year.

I’m going to spend the holidays with my girlfriend’s family in Louisiana. In the process, I’ll be completing my 26th and 27th flights of 2005. Last week, I finally reached Elite status with Continental, which is nice. I mean, I reached Elite status with some of my friends a long time ago, but it’s cool when a major airline tells you you’re special. Even though they did mess up my special meal (I eat kosher on long flights, because you get better food that way) during the trip back from Amsterdam last week (which seems like it was 3 months ago).

The year, I’m trying to say, has hurtled by, whether I mark the months with realist paintings or beautiful women in handcuffs. The days are filled with joy and love, along with a ton of work. Here’s a song I listened to this morning. It’s by Massive Attack, and Sinead O’Connor sings it:

What Your Soul Sings
Don’t be afraid
Open your mouth and say
Say what your soul sings to you
Your mind can never change
Unless you ask it to
Lovingly re-arrange
The thoughts that make you blue
The things that bring you down
Can only do harm to you
So make your choice joy
The joy belongs to you
And when you do
You’ll find the one you love is you
You’ll find you love you

Don’t be ashamed
To open your heart and pray
Say what your soul sings
To you
So no longer pretend
That you can’t feel it near
That tickle in your head
That tingle in your ear
Oh ask it anything
It loves you dear
It’s your most precious king
If only you can hear
And when you do
You’ll find the one you need is you
You’ll find you love you