Cleaning out the mental closet

First off, some recommendations: I just finished reading Stephen King's latest novel, "Cell." It's great. It's sort of a modern take on zombies -- a signal transmitted through cell phones turns humans into ... well, not the undead, but something close and, eventually, even more disturbing. So if you like zombies or a good thriller, check it out. (For more zombie action, head on over to Gig Matrix.)

There are also several movies out that I would recommend: "Paradise Now" is a great movie, though it makes you feel like you just got hit in the gut by the end of it. But it's a powerful and compelling film about two childhood friends recruited to become suicide bombers. Definitely a thinker movie. "Munich" is similar in feeling, and it's also good. Other good, powerful, make-you-think movies that I've seen in the past few months that you MUST see if you haven't yet: "Crash," "Hotel Rwanda" and "The Constant Gardener."

I also saw "Night Watch" last night. While I wouldn't give it an "F" like Entertainment Weekly did, I can't decide if I should recommend it or not. It was very much like a Russian "The Matrix," which is kind of cool. But there wasn't much in the way of cool action; the similarities are mostly in trippy plot. And a lot of it is kind of weird. So ... umm ... I'm still not quite sure what to think.

If you like CGI storms, the Discovery Channel has a Sunday night show called "Perfect Disaster." It's cool if you like CGI storms, but bad if you worry about the end of the world happening. So far I've seen one on a supertornado hitting downtown Dallas in the middle of rush hour and a massive solar storm taking the entire planet back to the Dark Ages for anywhere from a couple of weeks to years. (That could happen in 2011, so if you have anything to do that involves electricity, you might want to do it before then.)

If you haven't already heard it, I strongly suggest listening to the "This American Life" program "Habeas Schmabeas" that aired recently. Even by the government's own admission, many of the people in Guantanamo aren't a threat at all, but they're still there because we've basically done away with habeas corpus. You can listen to it on streaming audio by looking in the archives at the site linked above.

After my earlier shopping experience, I did venture back to the mall to get some shirts, this time taking a female friend with me for protection. Now I have several nice shirts. The problem is that she gave me strict instructions about how to wash/dry them so they wouldn't shrink. Certainly this is advice I should pay attention to, and it's opened up this whole new world of doing laundry that I never paid attention to before. I've begun looking at the labels on ALL of my clothes. I had no idea so many should be washed cold and dried on a low setting or turned inside out before washing or have one arm in and one arm out while the dryer spins them all about. Of course, I haven't ever done anything more than wash and dry on the normal setting, so I wonder if it really makes all that much of a difference (though there are some shirts over the years that have shrunk a bit, but I always thought that was natural and unavoidable). Nonetheless, my laundry is now a lot more complicated. Such is the price of nicer clothing that you want to keep fitting, I guess.

Humph.