It’s probably an Urban Legend, but who cares. My LA-based friend swears he overheard the following conversation between a screenwriter and a producer.

Writer: “OK, then we’ll have her hunched naked over the dismembered corpse eating parts of it and drinking his blood from the cup.”

Producer: “You can’t do that. It’s obscene! She has to be wearing clothes.”

If it’s not true, it should be.

I’ve been doing a lot of people watching recently. I’m becoming convinced that men and women see the world differently at a fundamental level. Women view situations and information in terms of how they should to react to them rather than how they think things should be. As such, women tend to be more flexible, but less decisive.

Men seem to view situations and information in terms of how closely it corresponds to the model of the world they carry in their minds. More often then not, men react to the model in their heads rather than actual situation. When reality differs too much from their model, frustration and anger is often the result.

Men are from Mars. Women are just out there.

I’ve had to turn the comments off for this Blog. I was getting about 50 comment-spams a day, and while my content filter was preventing about 98% of them from being posted, deleting them all has become to much of a pain.

I think the punishment for spammers should be simple and appropriate. They should be required to receive 10,000 paper-cuts for each offence. After all, one little cut doesn’t hurt much.

Somehow I ended up at a Goth party in the early hours of New Years day. The party was pretty cool, and although I was dressed in normal street clothes, no one really cared. Most of the bullshit attitude you find in San Francisco is thankfully absent in Japan. People are just people.

No matter how long I stay here, girls’ fashions still amuse me. A few Japanese goth girls with heavy back eye shadow and lipstick, dressed in black leather and fishnet stockings, and wearing jewelry with spiky bits pointing out every which way, were walking around cuddling white, push stuffed animals.

Ah, now that takes the edge off.

Japanese girls just never put aside the whole cute thing. The picture I took turned out lousy because my cell phone does not have a flash, Yeah, I know, I’m way behind the technology curve.

Over the past few years I’ve become quite a fan of BBC World News, and I get much of my news from their websites. As an American, I find it somewhat frustrating that I have to get my US news from foreign sources, and every once in a while I’ll go back to reading US news sites. Within a day or two, I’m back to my regular sources. It just gets worse and worse.

I went to Fox News for info on Iraq and found this headline.

Iraqis Train to Be Elite Security Fighters
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are working together to protect their homeland. And they’re trained by American soldiers to do it.

That’s not Journalism. It reads like something straight out of Pravda. Peoples putting aside their differences to join together to proudly protect the homeland. All that’s missing is the starry-eyed vacuous quote. Ah here we go.

“I feel good because we are fighting the terrorists”, said one Iraqi commando.

I think it’s important that Iraq has begun developing its own security forces, but the article contained no information about the actual program its successes, or its significant difficulties.

American news these days seems to be more about conveying a feeling or an impression rather than information.