Okay, so we went to see the Harry Potter movie Friday. Overall, it was not bad; I was surprised by the level of sophistication and the creativity in the storyline, given that it was based on a children’s book.

And yet…

This is a minor point, and not really a plot spoiler, but if you haven’t seen it, you might want to skip the next paragraph or two.

Students at the magical school in the Harry Potter books are divided into something like fraternities. Every year, they have a competition. Whenever someone does something right, his fraternity gets awarded points; whenever someone does something wrong, his fraternity loses points. At the end of the year, the fraternity with the most points gets a prize. Good system, in a military boot camp kind of way; screw up, and your entire unit will turn on you.

So. The story goes along, adventures happen, the school year progresses, Harry & friends save the world. But: The last scene, the big award night, and Harry’s fraternity has lost. They didn’t have enough points to win–due in no small part to Harry’s adventures while saving the world. Hard to concentrate on winning points when you’re trying to save the world, you know?

So the leader of the school announces, mid-ceremony, that he’s changinf the rules for the year, and awarding the prize to Harry’s fraternity anyway.

What the hell kind of blind, stupid thing is that??! Not only is it highly unlikely–by doing so, he publically humiliated the leader of the winning fraternity (a key ally)–but it also teaches exactly the wrong lesson. The RIGHT lesson is: You can’t always win at everything. Sometimes, doing right (saving the world) means sacrificing things of lower priority (winning an award). The WRONG lesson is: Kids, the whole system is a sham. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you win honestly, fair and square. Some adult can come along and yank the prize right out from under you, simply because he feels like it. Don’t worry about winning points; the points don’t mean shit. It’s all about whether or not authority figures like you.

So anyway…

The “other” girlfriend came over Saturday. Sunday, my wife went out to lunch with friends, so the girlfriend and I got to spend some alone time together, which was very, very nice. I took advantage of the opportunity to do some delightfully wicked and evil things to her (Her: “How deep did you have your hand?” Me: “All the way…”), and we both ended up tired and happy.

My wife’s friends dropped a bombshell on her at lunch…”We’ve been experimenting with this new thing, see, it’s called S&M.” My wife: “Oh, really? Come on over. I’ll have Franklin give you a seminar.”

Imagine my surprise.

So afterward, we all went out to the club. My wife’s friends were fascinated. I received a delightful flogging from the girlfriend, and still have the lash marks to prove it. *sigh*

Today, on my way to the office, my car dies abruptly. No warning, just up and quits.

Imagine my surprise. Clearly, fate is exacting its payment for the totally delightful weekend.

I should be home right now. I should be packing for our Thanksgiving trip to my primary girlfriend’s place. Am I? No. I’m still at the office. Fickle thing, fate.

Was it worth it? Oh, yes.

My wife bought me a pair of black leather gloves today, totally out of the blue. I put them on and said they make me look like a villain out of a James Bond movie. Yeah, she replied, that’s why I got them for you.

My snake has decided that she’s unhappy with her current living arrangements; she’s escaped from her cage twice in the last three days.

And she’s getting a fercious appetite. She ate yesterday, then immediately started looking for another rat. So now I have to get her another one, and a new cage, this evening.

My wife is insisting we see the “Harry Potter” movie this evening. I’d rather see “Mulholland Drive,” in part because David Lynch is usally a pretty safe bet (“Dune” aside) and in part because it has a lot of hot lesbian sex. Somehow, I am skeptical about the amount of hot lesbian sex I’ll see in “Harry Potter.”

…how you can’t get a decent McDonald’s hamburger any more?

I mean, I know that the word “decent” is relative when you’re talking about McDonald’s food, but still: The quality of McDonald’s has slid steadily for the last five years or so, and the service has tailed off as well. Nowadays, if I’m the only one at the register I still expect to wait ten or fifteen minutes to get my burger,a nd it’s always a pleasant surprise when they get it right.

I have a weird relationship with McDonald’s. Even on a good day, their food sucks, and yet…and yet…I’ve met no fewer than three lovers at McDonald’s, and I still eat there at least four times a week. McDonald’s has played a very weird role in my romantic life as well as in my culinary life.

The decline of McDonald’s over the past few years might have something to do with the fact that the unemployment rate is so low that a blind, one-legged ex-con can get a job as a security guard, so it’s virtually impossible for McDonald’s to hire anyone. (Why work for McDonald’s when with the same experience you can get venture capital for a dot-com startup and be driving a Ferrari by next Tuesday?) So perhaps the economic downturn will set things right under the Golden Arches.

In the meantime, I’ll just eat my overcooked burger on its stale bun and dream…

Just got back from watching a violent, moody movie whose main characters were a drug addict and a prostitute, and no, it wasn’t a Quentin Tarantino flick.

From Hell. Excellent flick, and I particularly liked the sidekick police investigator who quotes Shakespeare.

In other news, my wife and I are going to Atlanta to spend Thanksgiving with my girlfriend in a couple weeks. I’m looking forward to the trip; it’s been a long month, and I’ll really enjoy the time off.

Got my plane tickets, got my hotel reservation, I’m headin’ to MacWorld San Francisco in January! Neener neener!

Heading out a few days early; going to spend a couple extra days running around SF doing some photography. I’ll be meeting my girlfriend out there as well; it should be a lot of fun, seeing the new crop of Macs and eating in Japantown.

Saw Training Day this evening. Kick-ass movie–the kind that really sticks with you.

Just uploaded a new version of Onyx, the game of sexual exploration, to my Web site.

It’s a computer-mediated board game. The players move around the board, buying properties; land on someone else’s property, and you have to pay rent or–er, work off the debt…

Anyway, the new version is here.

Goddamn Bill Gates anyway.

I’ve just spent the entire night trying to install Windows 98 on a HP Pentium 4 machine that shipped with Windows 2000 installed.

Think it’d be easy? Oh, no, no, no. See, the Windows 98 installer doesn’t support the P4 chipset directly; you need the Intel chipset drivers for that.

And first, of course, you have to get them on the computer. Which you can’t do–not directly, because the machine ships with a “wipe your hard drive and restore it to factory original state” Restore in Place CD, not a driver and Windows installer CD.

Plus, of course, without the IDE drivers, the machine won’t even see the CD-ROM drive.

So:

Put in a second hard drive. Boot Win2K. Install Win98 on the second hard drive. Go on the Web. Download the chipset, IDE, graphics, LAN, and sound drivers. Swap hard drives. Boot Win98. Remove the BIOS system devices from the device manager. Run the chipset driver installer.

Reboot. Run the IDE driver installer. Reboot. “Windows has detected new hardware. Intel chipset to IO controller bridge. Please locate the driver…”

You already have the goddamn driver!

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel Firmware Hub.”

*&%#.

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. Reinstall IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. Install LAN drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel real-time clock.”

This is getting goddamn old. Swap hard drives. Reboot Win2k. Start from scratch. Reinstall Win98 on second hard drive. Swap drives. Reboot. Install chipset drivers. Reboot. Install IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate driver for IRQ Steering. Windows has detected a device conflict with DMA controller. Windows has detected a device conflict with Intel PCI-to-PCI bridge controller.”

And so on. And on and on and on…

It amazes me that, as poorly designed as Microsoft software is, people will put up with it. The Office “suite”–a bunch of programs with the same menus, but the same commands are in different places in each program! Bad design. IIS–so buggy and riddled with serious security flaws, you have to budget a full-time employee just to administer it. Bad design.

Yeah, Microsoft products work. But badly, and barely. Apparently, that’s good enough.

“Psychic litter” is a term used to describe an act of immorality so small, it falls below the conscious threshold. As, for example, wasting small amounts of time of a large number of people. As, what Microsoft is doing when it isn’t committing large acts of immorality.

Spent part of the evening last night in the darkroom, making contact sheets of the photo shoot I did Wednesday.

You know, even as jaded as I am, there’s something about the girl-on-girl thing that just gets me where I live. Which puts me, I think, pretty solidly in the majority; I don’t think you can ask for a more typical “guy thing” than that.

Yeah, I know, I hate to be cheesy and cliched, and I am at least a reasonably enlightened guy, but, I mean, damn!

So what is it about the “hot lesbian action” thing, anyway? It’s a cliche that guys are into this sort of thing because…well, we are into this sort of thing. It’s depressing, really; there’s nothing rational about it. It just grabs us by the back part of the brain–the part that knows nothing of reason–and says “Hey! Hot girl on girl action! Gimmee some of that!”

I had a cognitive science professor back in my college days who swore it was biological. Said it crosses all cultural and educational lines, and theorized about how humans are the only primate whose females don’t have an obvious outward sign that they’re sexually receptive, but that guy-on-girl action is more likely to raise a territorial/competitive reaction, whereas girl-on-girl behavior is clear and unambiguous evidence that the females are sexually receptive and there’s no male there to represent a challenge…

I dunno. I think that’s a difficult theory to support.

But still. Damn!

So there I was, in the shower this morning, stretching, trying to wake up and face the day…

…and I discovered a few bruises left over from the weekend’s activities, put there by the other girlfriend while she was flogging me.

Mmmm. Love when that happens.