'Bred Crumbs

07:36 PM One more note before departure. I didn't expect to have time for this, and the time is not welcome. I was supposed to be getting a hair hacking and hueing. But my recent ongoing coiff trauma wound up being one last pre-trip aggravation hors d'oeurve. (Voilà! French!) You see, Dottie, my stylist, jumped ship to a shop that doesn't color, leaving me stranded. Finally, I made an appointment with the best remaining colorist at Dottie's old place. But it turns out none of the flakes there recorded my appointment, and no one had time to take me. (Walk-ins not so welcome, turns out.)

So, I strongly recommend that no one who lives in or visits San Francisco ever go to Nice Cuts on 17th in the Castro. And if anyone here knows of someone who can do male hair color at a decent price and is capable of WRITING DOWN THE DAMNED APPOINTMENT IN THE BOOK WHEN SOMEONE MAKES ONE, your info would be much appreciated.

So it looks like I'll have a Bad Hair Vacation. Robbie, and everyone else, please, please forgive me if my follicle frustration gets the best of me and I come back shaven bald.

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It turns out we'll miss the Gay Pride festival in Montréal by a day. That's OK. I'm still exhausted from my last Pride Parade, and it looks like I'll see another later this month, in Reno. Though it would be fascinating to so closely compare Pride Montréal and Pride Reno. But alas.

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A top-of-the-page keyword in the tenth edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is whoredom.

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06:29 PM How likely is this? While editing at work, my French-impaired self (eek! Montreal!) encountered for the first time the word tout. Not 10 minutes later, I heard and noticed the same foreign word in a peppy song on a freshly acquired CD. Makes me wish I had a bon mot for this.

Meanwhile, the Pepsi guy arrived at work, and the cable's back on at home. Bring on vacation!

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12 PM Sometimes, GLAAD makes me sad. Seems the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has branded Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as anti-gay because numerous "gay" jokes in Kevin Smith's satire leave room for ambiguity among the stupid. GLAAD, blithefully ignoring Smith's pro-gay track record and numerous gay associates, is crusading against the movie and apparently is willing to foster a little defamation of its own, at Smith's expense. Read the group's complaint, and Smith's typically thoughtful and humorous response, on News Askew; scroll down to July 31. It's a long read, but it's worth it.

This is not the first time GLAAD has gone overboard in its vigilance against supposed anti-gay slurs (it felt threatened by the Bloodhound Gang's video for "The Bad Touch" because a gay couple was hit with baguettes in what clearly was slapstick), and the GLAAD representatives are not the first people to miss Smith's point entirely (an Entertainment Weekly TV writer blasted phantom homophobia in the Clerks animated series -- which I proudly own on DVD). And granted, I have yet to see the new movie; my assumption that it isn't really gay-bashing is a leap of faith. The thing is that I, a gay man, have far more faith in Kevin Smith than I do in GLAAD.

Happy birthday, Kev.

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Quiz: "At best, the United States must look fairly foolish to the international community." This sentence comes from a column about ...

a. global warming
b. the "missile defense" system
c. the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The answer is c., a law the American government is using to arrest people not just for writing certain kinds of code but merely for talking or writing about it. But isn't it funny (funny scary, not funny ha-ha) that the answer could have been any of the three?

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And AT&T Broadband can't seem to perform the seemingly key task of connecting a customer's cable and keeping it connected, and MTV proved I'm old by turning 20 yesterday, and there's been no Pepsi in my workplace all week.

Argh.

Sounds like somebody needs a vacation. And somebody's getting one. Tomorrow night, I fly out to risk looking foolish to the international community in Toronto and Montréal and to take in the Drums Corps International World Championships in Buffalo, all in the clever company of my friend Dewayne. I hope that there are Internet cafés in Canada that I can bend to my will to update this thing a couple of times while I'm away.

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01:26 PM Watch a reporter (or his editor) betray his ignorance of his subject -- in a rambling, awkwardly cobbled together feature for the New York Times' magazine about Kevin Smith's movie inspirations, we find this odd note:

The short, thick, bearded Mr. Smith is familiar to moviegoers for the small parts he plays in his own films. (In his latest one, he is the wordless Silent Bob to his co-star Jason Mewes's motormouth Jay.)

Yes, in his latest one -- and in the four previous ones, the role of Silent Bob being the "small parts" vaguely mentioned. Cripes. Not to mention this "Mr." nonsense the Times persists with, a style which pretty much shouts out-of-touch.

My already significant excitement about Mr. Smith's latest one, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, has doubled in the past few days, after I saw a commercial for it, IMDb's updated cast-and-character list, and a favorable review by an actual non-critic person. Twenty-four days and counting to release.

The only other movie I was looking forward to this summer* -- Planet of the Apes -- has now arrived, and the verdict: opposable digit up. It's not a must-see, but it's a worth-seeing. And as I read the raft of bad reviews, I want to shake the reviewers -- especially Roger "Anaconda-lover" Ebert -- and ask, What the hell do you want from this? It's interesting, great-looking, exciting, and extremely well-acted (save for the lead). It makes a story that's very familiar to many of us fresh while retaining the spirit of the original novel and movie, right down to a jaw-dropping ending and two key pieces of homage dialogue. Yes, the plot's contrived, but it's Planet of the frelling Apes, for Sima's sake. You just swallow the premise and wallow in the details, to which Tim Burton has paid marvelous attention. Pah. Humans.

PotA 2001 also provides an unexpected, probably unintended bonus for those of us parked in front of the TV on Saturday mornings in the '70s. Helena Bonham Carter's character is named Ari, and near the end of the movie another ape repeats her name desperately -- "Ari, Ari" -- and you'd swear it was Cha-Ka.

* And there is one surprise fantastic movie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which you can and must go see now at a big-city theater near you.

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12:41 AM Maybe your company reorganizes too often if, at a meeting to kick off a new project, a third of the managers present introduce themselves by saying something like, "I'm _________, and I think I'm in charge of ..."

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