Dreary January Days...

Dreary, dreary day here. The sky is a nasty underbelly of greyish pond scum, matching by depressive mood exactly. NOT a happy camper, and no reason except just the January gloomy days...as well as my infamous restlessness during this month.

I've done some drastic, crazy things in January due to sheer boredom, to simply break the bleakness of dark days. In fact, I have even been thinking of just getting in my car and driving to some unknown destination, take a room and be totally alone for awhile. I do have cravings for solitude occasionally, and I do mean solitary time -- no one around, no phones, no TVs/Radios, etc. Doubt I will do this right now, but it is a tempting idea.

I finished the Thomas Cook novel, "Red Leaves," last night; as predicted, it was a great, fast-paced mystery. Highly recommended, along with ALL his novels.

Here's an interesting news article about one of last night's film awards:

Globe win for suicide bomber film

Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad was perhaps the most surprised man at the Golden Globes on Monday as his drama of suicide bombers crossing into Israel, "Paradise Now," was named the year's best foreign language film.

Abu-Assad, who works out of Holland but is now looking for a house in Hollywood Hills, had expected to lose as he did earlier this month to martial arts comedy "Kung Fu Hustle" at the Broadcast Film Critics awards.

He said he just assumed that too many people had either not seen his film or simply assumed it was too controversial. After all, Palestinian films are a rarity in the United States, especially ones that try to explain the politics of despair.

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I'm glad this film won an award. We NEED to know more about the mindset of such suicide bombers, otherwise we are NEVER going to succeed in curbing this kind of terrorist violence. Bombing them off the map IS NOT, I repeat IS NOT working! If you have an optimistic idea it is, just look at the latest news from the Iraq war.

And now for news from our mad world:
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Cannibal on murder charge again

FRANKFURT, Germany (Reuters) -- A convicted German cannibal returned to court on Thursday for a retrial to determine if his killing and eating of a willing victim amounted to murder.

Photographers' flashbulbs greeted the arrival in a packed court of a handcuffed Armin Meiwes, a computer repairman who had cut up and consumed a man he had met via the Internet.

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Guess you just never know who you'll meet on the net, huh? Again, ladies and gentlemen, I declare that we are living in a mad, mad world populated by exceedingly mad humans.

And I'll end this post with a little ditty that underscores the above statement, as well as the increasingly insane world of the mass print publishing industry:

Rejected by the Publishers

By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: January 4, 2006

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."