On a positive note

I have two pieces of important dog news!

The first is that we have decided to keep Lulu (because it's always good to make Important Life Decisions when you're depressed, right?). Some lovely people came to see her on Friday, but decided that she wasn't quite the right dog for them, even though they did think she was fabulous. In all of that, though, we realised that the upset we go through every time a dog leaves this house into someone else's care is just too much for our fragile spirits to bear. So we decided to keep her. The rescue was unsurprised to learn of our decision, especially since we had already rejected two perfectly good homes for her on the grounds that they would want her to sleep (gasp!) outdoors. No dog of mine sleeps outdoors. Unless it is a malamute or some similar breed that would bake if left in a kitchen overnight.

In other good news, the labrador we rescued off the beach last Sunday, with no collar and no microchip, was reclaimed from Meath pound on Monday. The dog went missing early last Sunday morning, so the next day the owners rang around the pounds and the warden said "yes, I've had a call about a dog like that, I'm collecting him this morning, you can pick him up this afternoon." Hilariously, however, the dog turns out to live in this very estate. Hopefully the owners have had enough of a fright that they will put a fecking collar on the thing. But see, sometimes it's okay if you have to send a dog to the pound, even if it goes against everything you believe in.

I have entered a period of depression

Not the personal, unable-to-get-out-of-bed depression (which is a relief), but the more broad what-is-the-fucking-point-of-people depression. This tends to be easier to live around, but worse overall, because I can't magic it away with tablets.

It is brought on by reading things like The Economist, or watching things like Darwin's Dangerous Idea on the telly, in which Andrew Marr gives a potted history of humans fucking up the earth in the name of profit, left right and centre, from the Industrial Revolution right up to the present day. You just look at it and wonder what the point is? What is the point of me recycling anything, or not driving my car, or cutting back on air travel? It's too little and it's too late and me and all the people who work even harder than me to actually live some kind of green existence are up against too many forces that just don't give a shit about anything at all other than making money for anything we do to ever make the blindest bit of difference at all.

People say that important movements are built from the grassroots up. Anti-slavery movements, feminism, children's rights, and so forth. But these movements took hundreds of years to develop and very few of them have actually achieved their final ends yet. And environmentalism doesn't have the luxury of time. The world in this picture is not womankind as a whole, or children as a whole, or black people as a whole, but an individual person who is going to die unless someone does something really drastic really right now. But nothing's being done. Or rather, not enough is being done.

On a more focused level, there's all this business about Jade and Dunblane and so on. Normally I get to ignore this kind of thing by not reading the papers, ever, but now here it is, and it's all part of the same cycle, and it makes me, well, very depressed.

I have watched this three times

And it is still funny.

I am so mature!

Yes, 39 years old yesterday, and still happy to laugh at this line from The Economist:

President Obama spent much of his first week trying to push his gargantuan stimulus package through Congress.

Why I may not be watching Watchmen

First off, I never read the book.

Having got that out of the way, let's proceed.

Well, you don't get to see Billy Crudup much.
And ever since I saw Little Children and its incredibly disturbing masturbation scene, I can't ever look at this guy again.
Also, one of the lady Watchmen highlighted one of my problems with superhero comics and movies when she pointed out that high heels, corsets, and latex are very uncomfortable, and that if she was an actual superhero she would wear running shoes and sweat pants.
Oh, and I hated 300.

(Also, while I'm watching Film 2009, why can't Sarah Ferguson open her mouth when she talks? It would make her ever so much easier to understand.)