I hand an odd mixture of reading this morning while I was lounging in bed. It is Saturday, you know, and I am recovering from the late night of celebrating/mourning my friend's aforementioned new-found freedom. I am not sure if their is a connection between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Icelandic Saga's is. Coupled with a similar eclectic collection of music on my stereo (Vivaldi, Mum, William Schuman, I'm a Robot), I find that rather than un-nerving me, I was somehow settled in the modern and the old; the absurd and the, ahem, surd. Good excuse to be lazy, I suppose.

Then there is this. The revolution will be audio blogged.

For a year and a half now a very good friend of mine has been under the impression that he was the father of his ex-girlfriend's child. He is the very same person I mentioned some time ago who was embroiled in legal problems. Basically she was doing everything in her power to sue the hell out of him for an outrageous amount of child support because she didn't want to work, and wanted him to pay for everything. He was already paying child support, but it wasn't enough to keep her living the way she thought she deserved.

In his counter-suit he demanded a paternity test. This was on the advice of his legal council. Two weeks ago he went in for the test where his ex, as usual, verbally abused him etc. etc. She is, as I said earlier, about the most unpleasant person I have ever met--which she masks quite easily with the persona of a nice, caring individual. She has been nasty to him--to the point of hitting him and then claiming to others that he hit her. Horrible person. Basically she is off-her-rocker-bat-shit crazy.

I got a call this morning and my friend said "You will never guess what happened" and then he proceeded to tell me that he is not the father of the child after all.

I am not sure how I would react if I were him. Joy? Sure. Sadness? Most likely. Anger? Oh yeah. I'd be planning a car bomb, I should think. Imagine--the woman who has been abusing and mistreating you for a year and a half simply because she insists you are the father of her bastard child was cheating on you in the first place. May the amount of guilt she shoveled out on him be returned to her in the form of an everlasting firey enema in Hell.

Goodness me, how biblical yet obscene I am in my anger. Needless to say, my trust of humanity has fallen quite a bit.

I went to see the Coen Brothers The Ladykillers last night. It seems to match up to the Alec Guinness original, perhaps going beyond that movie in visual significance. The original seems simply to be a story of calculated dark comedy--where despite their best efforts to get rid of an innocent old lady, the bank robbers consequently do themselves in. Ultimately the same plot that drives the Coen Brothers' version of the movie seems almost incidental to the simple underlying idea of the value and purpose of human life, the breadth of human ambition (and failure), and something about the best laid plans of mice and men (represented by a finger stealing cat.) That's a lot to hang on a simple plot-/character-driven movie, and perhaps that is why folks didn't seem to like it that much. It is also paced very differently from most contemporary comedies/movies, and glosses over unimportant "events" for the sake of showing how badly the main characters can mess things up.

I liked it. I suppose my favorite scene is the last one with the the always observant cat getting rid of the last of the Ladykillers presence on the garbage barge of life.