Internet (and) Journeys

If anyone reading this is experienced with blogger.com, here's a question: my sitetracker records referring links, but those pages often don't have any mention of my URL on them. How so? Bizarre...

I've seen Pulp Fiction about thrice this past week. (Twice on the computer - didn't really figure the film out the first time.) The third viewing was most gripping/irritating/anticipated, as teevee was the medium. With the benefit of hindsight, I must say that Star should be held responsible for undermining the movie experience of millions of intensely creative young people. What was broadcasted was a heavily censored and completely mutilated version of the original! Not too many would mind the blanking out of the various renditions of the f-word... But to do this in a manner that results in compromising the entirety of the film? For example, remember that part where Jules demands his wallet back? On being asked which one it is, he replies "it's the one that says bad mother fucker on it." The nonchalance and finality leaves the viewer wondering whose trip Tarantino is taking, the robbers' or ours...

Now, if you've seen Pulp Fiction, you'll know how incredibly this sequence fits with the rest of the film. Guess what Star did. They deleted the entire exchange! "Ooof, kids these days... can't having them learning these words, absorbing these things," the editing room flunkeys must've thought, before going chompy-chomp. Sigh.

If I were to try to summarize (hear me out before you shout "Ha! Fool! Fool of a fool! ") Pulp Fiction's *entire* message in a single phrase, I'd say it would lie somewhere in the region of "life can get really shitty sometimes." Why? Think about the monologue Walken's character ("this uncomfortable hunk of metal... for two years") launches into, and the predicament Rhames' character's finds himself with ("No man, I'm pretty fucking far from OK.")

I don't intend to creep you out by expressing such profanities, but, be patient... trying to string together a story here... So, where are we at right now? With 'shit happens'. Since its inevitability has already been established, I propose to you (been doing a lot of that lately, haven't I?) something different... something special. Love Happens. dotcom, that too.

['Shit happens' versus 'Love happens'.. that's the connection]

For those who might not be too bothered to follow this bait, here's the quickie. This site pitches itself with a slogan of "where friends help friends find love." It sounds really sweet, until they ask you to confirm your listing (or maybe that's just for a 'premium' version) by paying (a whopping) $20/month (for 6 months, at the end of which, the service is "free!!") Yes, I went, but it was only out of curiousity. Promise.

Curiousity curiousity... One of my favourite PJ's: "don't ever believe the person who tells you 'curiousity kills the cat'. They're lying. When the message actually began, it was 'curiousity skills the cat'."

But, hell, "where friends help friends find love"? 'Web 2.0' and cussing (about) it is all the rage these days. So much so, that I think one of my previous posts might just have provided the impetus for the imagining of a(nother) hot new 'web 2.0' app: Shitlistr. Glad to know I'm helping others (to take another take on Bill & Steve's Bogus Adventures and their XP-centric publicity campaign) 'start something new.'

While this wave of innovative new apps and services might have a definite touchy touchy feely feely sense, most of it largely seems like a rehash of 'why can't we all just rediscover our love for one another?' (if it's possible to extricate a philosophical/political message from the larger context of race tension this sentence/quote alludes to.) 'Rediscover', since, apparently, it was always there, just ('non-marxially') withered away, due to work, time and apathy.

I was at an older social networking site today, and added a cousin to my list. Browsing her friends, (re)discovered G, someone I'd met more than ten years ago, who wrote the following about her:

"...is one of the best friends I've ever had. She's the kind of person who I'll call after not talking to her for months and we'll pick up right where we left off...[snip][snip] She has always been full of laughter and brightness, full of creative ideas and dreams, and a loving, kind heart. She is the best kind of person and I miss her." (sic)

It's strange to have come across this paragraph... Apart from the essentially accidental nature of the encounter (with the paragraph and the person), there's the fact that, while like almost everyone else, I too have friends with whom I can reconnect in such a manner, most of everyone I've known since school, college, university and elsewhere, are almost non-entities in my almost dysfunctional, nearly dystopian universe now. One of them was in the general area, and she came home the other day, for lunch and a lazy-afternoon movie. We were and have been quite close almost five years now. But the gang is down to two, and almost all of its gangness has... dematerialized.

Some times, these days, I don't know what I'd give, for smiles and laughs...