I missed a stop on the subway today for the first time in like ten years. I don't miss stops on the subway. With the exception of the years i spent in new haven or the odd day when i don't go into manhattan or i walk both ways or something, i've been taking the subway more or less every day of my life since august of 1995 (when we moved from the burbs to the city right before 8th grade) and i know it very, very well. And yet I missed a stop, and looked like an idiot, i am sure, as i tried, and failed, to make it through the doors into the west 4th street station before they closed.

Instead i decided it was fate telling me to try Columbia's Butler library instead of the panopticon, but wound up at my parents' appartment eating tasti-d-lite out of a bucket, pretending to get work done, watching Hellboy II which, without Ron Perelman's lame dialogue (not, I think, the fault of the actor) could have been a halfway decent Guillermo Del Toro film. As it was, the combination of eerie dark faerie tale (good) and stilted cliched superhero film dialogue (bad) didn't work so well. Hellboy's a comic I never read. Indeed, other than Sin City, I don't think i read any of the stuff generated through the Dark Horse Comics Legend imprint - which included Sin City in all its beautifully rendered but narratively unimaginative glory (maybe i'm just taking potshots at frank miller for his recent history of making terrible films and supporting the invasion of iraq as the european front in a world war II analogy if september 11 was pearl harbor, which it wasn't), some John Byrne stuff, Madman (I think), and something bu Art Adams, Paul Chadwick, and Geaoff Darrow if memory and internets serve me correctly. Anyway my point is that i have no idea if the character actually speaks in such a cliched, shallow manner as depicted in the film, but i felt like Del Toro and Mike Mignolo could have benefitted from someone else who wasn't directing the film or responsible for creating the character to help with the script.

Also caught part of the Gilmore Girls episode where they tour Yale and the show's protagonists keep saying insulting and subtly racist things about New Haven. Not only that it's worse than the dump but that it's the left over crap at the bottom of the coffee pot. Yeah. I mean it may be accurate in representing the kinds of claims that suburban Connecticutians make about the deindustrialized belt along the state's southern shore (and throw Hartford and maybe Waterbury and/or Danbury in for good measure, though Waterbury's problems seemd to stem in part from the fact that its former Republican mayor - and the republican opponent to Joe Lieberman in the 2000 senate election - paid a crack addicted prostitute to let him rape her daughters and Danbury's mayor is an anti-immigrant fascist if the same guy's still in office) but also speaks to the kinds of racial and class politics that lay beneath the surface of the palladinos' small town utopia.

Tomorrow back to paper writing and gramsci reading. Coming soon is the requisite year-end post. Also, whatever good reasons some people may have had for bombing universities in the past, what Israel has done in Gaza this weekend is terrorism, pure and simple, attacking captive civilian populations in a brazen attempt to convince them by attrition to reject their democratically elected government. Fuck all government and fuck Hamas, but the fact that american politicans can vociferously support this murderous shit and then claim to be against terrorism is blatant hypocrisy - a fact which seems entirely unimportant at the close of a three day period which has left over 350 people dead, many of them civilians. (The U.N's conservative estimate is that 60 were civilians, other sources have indicated much higher numbers.)