They always land on cars

On tonight’s episode of Heroes (which you should be watching because it’s still a great show no matter what the self-consciously jaded masses say), a character commits suicide by jumping off a tall building. (Nathan Petrelli. And this time, he’s really dead.) (Oh! Spoiler warning!) (Oops! Too late!)

He falls in rather overdone slow motion and lands … on a car. Even though the alley below is almost deserted and there seem to be only two cars parked anywhere nearby, he manages nonetheless to hit one of them squarely and smash its roof in.

Why don’t onscreen deaths-by-falling-from-high-buildings never, nowadays, end with the character landing on the concrete with a splatsplash? It’s almost always a car. More dramatic, I suppose, but still it’s one of those silly clichés that very much interfere with my willing suspension of disbelief.

On the positive side, the car landing in this TV episode wasn’t followed by the car alarm going off.

Black Friday Boycott

I hope this proposed boycott has failed miserably. No doubt it’s nice to have the luxury to wax high minded about crass commercialism, but those of us who are out of work need an orgy of buying by those who have jobs so that hiring will pick up in January.

Zombie dreams

I've been dreaming of zombies, probably because I recently sent a zombie story out. I wake up in the middle of the night and pick holes in the dream's plot, but that doesn't help me go back to sleep.

The story was a bit unsettling, but the dreams are more so. There’s something about being in the action, in full color in the most recent case, that makes it much more disturbing than any prose can be.

I hope tonight’s better. So long as it’s not vampires …

David’s Definitions for January 2010

Peregrination

A journey, especially a journey on foot to a foreign country. The root is a Latin word that means foreigner. The word pilgrim comes from the same root. Peregrination is not a word you run into normally in modern English, but we do still speak of a peregrine falcon, which is called that because at one time it was standard practice to capture those birds on their first flight, or pilgrimage, from their nest.

(Will be published in the January 2010 issue of Denver's Community News.)

I'm collecting all of these at:
http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

The system of male and female reverse!

I posted a while ago about Japanese advertisements for porno and/or dating sites showing up frequently in the comments section of an earlier blog post.

For a change, I decided to enter the latest comment into the Google translation site and see what English resulted. Here it is:

dating back to topic now! Do you have experience already? This site has a choice about adopting the system of male and female reverse Supporters hope. More financially successful woman is hungry for love that is rich. Now from the page of interest

Oh, those hopeful supporters!