And pluck till time and times are done

From deadcities_icon. These are awesome New Year's resolutions.

In 2007, Sovay resolves to...

Eat more peter pears.
Be nicer to greyselke.
Drink four glasses of opera every day.
Get back in contact with some old classics.
Admit my true feelings to dgr8bob.
Start a latin fund.

Get your own New Year's Resolutions:

"Eat more peter pears . . ."

The big parade goes on for years

My family went last night to see The Good Shepherd, for which I have seen several lukewarm reviews, but which I liked immensely. The film tracks the formation of the CIA through a loosely fictionalized version of its first head of counterintelligence, from his recruitment as an undergraduate at Yale in 1939 to his wartime service in the OSS to the present day of 1961, where the debacle of the Bay of Pigs forces him to the realization that "there is a stranger in the house," and while it's by no means an uplifting piece of storytelling, I found it fascinating. The cast list is practically a roster of character actors. John Sessions was so good in a supporting role, I didn't recognize him until I looked up the character; and if that falsetto was Matt Damon's, he's jumped octaves in my estimation of him. The movie itself is the kind that wouldn't exist without John le Carré, in which espionage is a matter of late-lit rooms and file folders, the weighing of greater and lesser compromises, stray details that accumulate into layers of secrets, some to be hoarded, some to be handed out, some taken—consciously or inadvertently—to the grave. Spies do wear tuxedos, on the proper occasions, but more of them wear three-piece suits and raincoats and fedoras, spectacles so oversized their faces look glassed-in, like one-way mirrors. Their weapons are less often knives and deserted canals than grainy photographs and whining snippets of tape. Even language becomes a jigsaw, where ordinary words can be taken apart and recombined into significance, and enemies can afford to be more candid than allies. And the paranoia rubs off. Did that exchange mean what it seemed to? Whose motivations can we trust? Is even the viewpoint character reliable? I don't know if this makes The Good Shepherd sound like a chilly intellectual exercise: it's not. But it's also not a film that assumes its audience needs all the dots connected for them, and I like those.

And we arrived home to discover that Saddam Hussein had been hanged, and that fit exactly with what we had seen.

There is no segue here.

My Fortune Cookie told me: You may become more amusing by trimming the edges off your teaspoons. Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

The surrealist fortune-cookie generator. Like the peculiar title generator, it is an addiction unto itself.

A man with no toes will offer you unexpected opportunities.
Chocolate-coated lofts! Dozens of them! All hapless!
You may be infinitely smaller than some things, but you're infinitely larger than others.
Your therapist has you mixed up with another patient. Don't believe a thing she tells you.
You are like an armchair-screaming and full of sieves.
Celebrate National Existential Ennui Awareness Day.
Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.
It is time to bring the bacon in from the cold.
The way to riches lies under the table.
Individuals who make their abode in vitreous edifices would be well advised to refrain from catapulting projectiles.
You have a blossoming future in taxidermy.
Count your books before they hatch.
Why did the curvy girl karate-chop the fatal lime? Because it was stapled to the penguin!
A satirical sheep at sunrise is nobody's friend.
You are dreaming. It is time to wake up now.
Expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Never taunt a mammoth with a fruit pastille.

I feel that Edward Gorey should have illustrated some of these . . .