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Some great new Lord of the Rings pictures if you’re interested… (I can already tell I’m going to have a major Viggo Mortensen fixation in about six months.)

Hooray! Martina Hingis has suffered a stunning first round defeat at Wimbledon. I really dislike her.

Oh jeez. It’s going to be hell on the Tube tonight. Not only is every train packed full because of various strikes and breakdowns, but our sunny weather is going to raise the temperature down there to over 90. People are going to be dropping like flies. (Thank God I live within walking distance of work.)

Ugh. I finally managed to finish that horrid The Wind Done Gone piece of crap. Since I know at least one person who takes an interest, here’s what I got from the last half:

• I misread the bit about Prissy and Ashley. He didn’t have an affair with her, he had one with her brother. Homosexuality, miscegenation, murder… this book has it all.
• Scarlett was black. Yeah, that one threw me for a loop too. It all came to light in a series of letters between Mrs. O’Hara and her childhood sweetheart/cousin, Philipe. They wanted to get married, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. It turns out that Scarlett’s great-great-grandmother was “a Negresse”, and the family was terrified that if the two of them got together they’d have a dark child. The phrase “pour a little more milk into the coffee” was actually used. Philipe got killed anyway, and Mrs. O’Hara became, uh, Mrs. O’Hara. (I can’t remember her real name.) And she kept the whole thing secret.
• Well, not from Mammy. Apparently Mammy kept the letters and knew what happened. And when little Bonnie was born to Scarlett, I think she either started to get a little dark or else Mammy was worried that she was. Either way, Mammy would come into her room at night and scrub her with a lemon. Seriously. That’s why she was afraid of the dark. How dumb is that?
• Scarlett died. It was very anti-climactic. Do you need more proof that this woman can’t write than the fact that she killed off one of literature’s greatest female characters and I failed to care?

Seriously, here’s the whole book distilled into one paragraph: “My mother always preferred my half-sister to me, and I spent my whole life having huge issues because of it. To make up for it, I stole her husband and her house and her clothes. But wait, I guess I really did love my half-sister and my mom. I’m going to leave her husband and go bear a child for a black Congressman and then die of lupus.”

It adds nothing to the idea of the Old South that the original book perpetuates. I wanted to hear the voices of the people that made Scarlett’s extravagant childhood possible. Instead of telling the real story of slavery, though, this mean-spirited author merely re-wrote the story to make herself win. She ends up with fine clothes, living in a fine house, and sleeping with Rhett Butler. She becomes Scarlett. Big friggin’ deal. If she needed to write that to be able to sleep at night, good for her. It’s like, hate Scarlett if you must, but don’t hate her simply because you envy her. It makes for a very boring book.

Wimbledon has started. Venus Williams has been on the front of every sports page in London for the past week. Quite mannish, that one.

Reason 6,000,004 Why Microsoft Sucks: They’re shutting down ListBot. It was a free service that you could use to manage large e-mail lists and send out newsletters. Now I’ve got to go download the 200+ addresses I’ve collected on my Dahl site and figure out a new solution. Poodoo.

If you haven’t seen the Powers of Ten site yet, take a look. It starts in the Milky Way and then closes in on the Earth by powers of 10, ’til you end up looking at a proton from a leaf on a tree. Very cool.

I’ve wanted to buy a new mobile phone for a while now, but I haven’t been able to justify the expense to myself. My old one works fine; I just want a cooler looking one with ring tones and games. But if I can get one with Atari games on it… Clear a path to Carphone Warehouse, baby.

Reuters asks, “Is Michael Jackson Still Marketable?” As a big former Michael Jackson fan (with the souvenir glove to prove it), even I have to answer with a resounding: No! Even if his new album is the greatest piece of pop ever, the man still looks and acts like a freak show. And not in a good way. Not in a marketable-to-teens way.

On my way out, I stopped at reception to pick up a package that had arrived for me. It turned out to be three! One was a CD from a musician friend, one was a Roald Dahl video, and one was my long-awaited copy of The Wind Done Gone. So I came home, put in a load of laundry, and cracked the book. It’s pretty short and I’m a fast reader, so I’m already about halfway through it. Max, you have no need to worry about this book tarnishing the glorious South. I have no problems admitting that it sucks. Big time. I was honestly interested in reading an alternate version of Gone With the Wind, but this version is seriously on crack. If you’re planning on reading this book (and I wouldn’t advise it), skip the rest of this post. If you’re curious, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Gerald O’Hara’s slave Pork was the real lord of the plantation. He contrived to get himself won by Gerald in a poker game by poisoning his own master with alcohol, and then he used the same trick to help Gerald win Tara. He and Mammy conspired to get Gerald to marry her mistress. Pork designed Tara himself and built it from the ground up.
• Gerald started sleeping with Mammy on his wedding night. Something about Mrs. O’Hara being frigid and frail.
• Mammy killed all three of Mrs. O’Hara’s infant sons so there wouldn’t be any “sober” white men on the plantation to order them around.
• Mrs. O’Hara and Cynara (the mulatto protagonist) would become so jealous after seeing Mammy nurse Scarlett that Mrs. O’Hara would spontaneously lactate and nurse Cynara in her room.
• Belle Watling was a lesbian.
• Rhett Butler was screwing Cynara a full year before he even met Scarlett. He even slept with her the night his daughter died. They have a special couch that they use when Rhett’s in the mood to “visit the honeysuckle garden.”
• I’m pretty sure there was an allusion to an affair between Prissy and Ashley that somehow led to her brother being beaten to death, which is what made her so “silly”, except she’s not really silly, she’s crafty. Oh, and I think Prissy killed Melanie.
• Mammy raised and taught Scarlett to break men’s hearts as a weapon against men. (Miss Havisham, much?)
• Rhett’s getting old and having difficulty getting it up.

Seriously, was the world crying out to have this stuff told? No. This is not a thoughtful re-write of literary history from a politically correct point of view. This is Gone With the Wind on acid. The “parody” label is fully deserved. This isn’t a novel; it’s the kind of thing you imagine as a dirty joke. It isn’t thought-provoking, it isn’t well-written, and it isn’t a fun read.

Of course I’m still going to finish it. I paid $30 for the damn thing. *sigh*