When I Click Post, I Feel Guilty

I keep thinking of things to post about, then fail to do so or start something and never finish. It's not that I'm lazy (or just that I'm lazy), I also feel genuinely guilty when I'm writing on the blog. I always feel like there's something else I should be doing instead. That's basically true, but after too long without a post I feel guilty about having a blog and never providing any content. That's a truly strange phenomenon that, nonetheless, seems to be quite common.

There's an awful lot of court related stuff going on now that I could be putting down thoughts about; maybe I'll do that soon. Those posts are at least tangentially related to what I'm supposed to be doing (reading, thinking, writing).

In the meantime, I've almost gotten through my first week with Tivo. So far, I can't say it's changed my life, just made me watch a lot more What Not to Wear. That's not wholly accurate. I've been a much more regular viewer of the Daily Show and Colbert Report than I was before, since I can watch it whenever I like now without the trouble of setting my VCR to record it for me. I also asked it to record (I've discovered that I use the word "tape" as a verb to mean "record" and it's starting to bug me now that I have a DVR; it's also starting to bug me that things like that bug me) a couple of horror showings on those great commercial-free basic cable movie channels that are always showing stuff in the middle of the night I want to watch. I caught up with Eye of the Devil, which I've wanted to see for some time, and Diary of a Madman, a curiosity that escaped my attention for some time.

I genuinely liked EotD, even though it was considerably overlong and most of the performances were underwhelming despite a name cast. Oddly enough, the most striking performance comes from Sharon Tate, who is spooky and intense. Damn fine looking woman, too. The movie itself is not bad, but uneven and far too drawn out. The usually-reliable J. Lee Thompson pulls off some effective scenes to create a mood of estranged fatalism in which Deborah Kerr wallows. Overall, the enterprise makes you appreciate how well-down The Wicker Man is, since it delivers much more with a similar basic story. Diary is, as I put it above, something of a curiosity. I never say no to a Vincent Price feature, but this one offers little to distinguish it. Price's character (Simon Cordier) is possessed by a murderous entity called the Horla, with which he converses at some length. In fact, the Horla is so loquacious that its chats with Price start to resemble the telepathic antics of the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. There's an interesting sophistication in the movie's morality. Despite being a calculating murderer, Cordier is still a sympathetic character who takes steps to prevent himself from succumbing to the influence of the evil Horla. They're ineffectual steps, but he does retain some sympathy. Meanwhile, his victim is a beautiful artist's model who leaves her husband for Cordier, primarily for his money. Nevertheless, she's not unsympathetic either. The girl's husband, a poor artist, ends up being falsely convicted of her killing, but in contrast to the typically faultless wrongly convicted man, he's depicted as pretty bitter about his wife dumping him and is kind of a jerk to her. Not unrealistic or unwarranted, but it is kind of interesting.

Now I've gone and done it. I've been writing for about half an hour when I really should've started grading the exams I just gave.