Hi,
Welcome to my blog–the place where I put all the stuff I like to write about but no one else is interested in (or wants to pay me for).  I have a very diverse set of interests including all areas of science, especially ecology (not environmentalism, that’s something else), reptiles (keeping and breeding them), new urbanism, home and community design, interior design, modern architecture, gardening, science fiction, dark humor….and almost every thing else.  I am incurably curious. I think the world is full of wonders without count (I’m stealing that from someone else but can’t remember who, Carl Sagan?), and I’m going to write about some of them here.

To start out with, I also like to make lists of strange things and here is one of my favorites:

The Top 10 Good Movies with Unhappy Endings

Sick of all those Hollywood happy endings?  Want characters in movies to just die? These movies will satisfy your inner misanthrope.

1.  Miracle Mile. 1988. Gatta love a movie that starts as a cheesy romance, ends with nuclear holocaust and the main lovebird characters drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits.

2. Beneath the Planet of the Apes. 1970. Intelligent apes plus not so intelligent, but telepathic, underground mutants who worship an atomic bomb.  Ends, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” Black Screen.  No one in Hollywood would have the balls to end a movie like that nowadays.

3. Brazil. 1985. Yeah! you defeated your bureaucratic enemy and escaped with your dream girl, naw you are just hallucinating from torture.

4. The Thing. 1982. Save all humanity from alien that will kill and copy everyone, but burn down your Antarctic lab in the process.  It could have been worse, you could have been turned into something with oozy, dripping psuedopods instead of freezing to death.

5. 12 Monkeys. 1995.  What’s more depressing than watching yourself get shot while wearing a bad wig? Terry Gilliam has made this list twice.  He’s a genius but might need some Prozac.

6. Being John Malkovitch 1999. You get to spend the rest of your life trapped in a body you can’t control watching your wife and the girl you wanted live happily ever after, together.

7. Jacob’s Ladder.  1990. Your life is in your head, you are actually in the last minutes before death, psyche.

8. Donnie Darko. 2001. Want to save the world?  You have to choose death by sloughed jet engine.

9. The Ring.  2002. The spirit just wanted to be heard, no wait, she’s pissed off and just wants to kill people.

10. Memento. 2000. You can’t remember things from five minutes ago, like the fact that you’ve killed a bunch of people who weren’t your wife’s killer.