“You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

And…

“I look at those people and I say, ‘Bring it. I’m a Scientologist, man. What do you want to know?’ I don’t mind answering questions.” –Both courtesy of TomCruiseIsNuts.com

But no one can make Tom Cruise look any crazier than Tom Cruise himself, and Cruise has really outdone himself this time, with the opening of his official website. Go to it, stay for a moment and don’t pause the music or the video. You’re in for minutes of self-indulgent footage. I’m even sure Tom Cruise is fapping off to himself at any given moment.

Upgraded Spam Controls

Some of your comments have been getting caught by my spam controls. I’ve upgraded things, so hopefully that will fix this over-sensitivity. Sorry about this! Hopefully I’ve manually included all real comments that were previously blocked. If you find your comments are not showing up soon after you have posted them, please take a moment to contact me.

Terms of Use

I have released my visual portfolio under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative license. Basically, this means if you see a visual art piece on this website that you like, you are free to download, share and publish the image. The only caveat is that I request you give me attribution and/or leave my website address in the image from my portfolio. Here is a the terms of use text currently in use:

NAMEOFWORK is by Lelia Katherine Thomas and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may republish the above image on your website, provided that you either (a) acknowledge Lelia as the creator of the work and/or (b) use the image above, keeping intact the website address in the bottom right corner. If you would like to use a larger version of this image in an online or print publication, contact Lelia with further details.

Conversion of Daily Photo into Latest Work

As some of you may have noticed, life has already gotten in my way, preventing me from doing the daily photo section in any remotely reasonable way. Therefore, I have changed the daily photo to be my latest work. The small thumbnails will remain the same, showing the next seven pieces in chronological order.

Cleaned Out Portfolio

A number of photographs have been removed from the photography section, as I didn’t feel they were as of high quality as some of my other work. I have also gone through and updated sale information on pieces in the digital artwork gallery; I will update the information in other galleries in time. Soon, I will have more of my pieces available through The Untapped Source, which I currently offer only a few of my works through.

To make matters worse, there is no textbook for the subject, just lecture notes that are divided up into sound technology and visual technology. The equations that I’ll actually use on the exam are buried deep in these terribly unorganized notes that average at about 13 pages of utter bullshit a piece. They’re dry, they’re boring, they’re unpractical, and I want to drive a pen through my eyeball.

I like my lecturer. He’s a good guy, and I’ve had him for another class in the past, but I sort of get the feeling that he finds this crap boring as well. The lectures are a joke. It’s 45 minutes of his reading the lectures notes to us. I gave up on that and stopped going in the third week. I can read by myself, thank you very much. I’m such a big girl!

Then there are the tutorials, where we go and receive answers on question sheets that apply this knowledge that few of us will ever find useful. Please understand, I’m not just whinging here. This is a class made up of graphic designers and writers for the most part, and few of us are clear as to why we’re there; few of us are good at math. But apparently we need to know how sound waves refract, reflect and diffract in different rooms, settings and through various speakers; this takes logarithmic equations.

In today’s tutorial, someone asked for further information on logarithms, as he didn’t remember how to do them from high school. (Imagine that, a few of us have forgotten how to use something we hardly understood 6+ years ago!) The tutor, who isn’t all that grand, essentially told us that we should remember from previous years. The last time I used these things was when I was 15 and was trying to get good marks under my extremely butch lesbian teacher. I remember more about my lesbian teacher than I do logarithms. And no, I don’t know what that says about me.

I’ve emailed the course coordinator, asking if I can meet with him and get some help with this subject, but it’s frustrating that it’s come to this. I’m not stupid by a long shot, I know, and this wouldn’t be happening if I had more control over what I have to take to complete my degree. I’d never put myself in a class like this, because I know it’s not something I am very good at, and I know it’s something that I find really, REALLY boring. All this expensive class is going to be for me is something where I temporarily learn something, spit it out for the exam, then blissfully forget it–never to use it again. So much for an education in the things that interest you, but then, it’s never really been about that, has it?

Oh well. I’ll stop my ranting. A ham sandwich calls.

Until I attended my own, I never quite understood why the word “funeral” started with “fun”. People don’t even wear all black to these things anymore. A rainbow of colors meets me as I walk among the throng of three hundred or so. My wife is in her finest, slinky red dress, and it hugs her curves as she leans close to my best friend. It’s not friendly support she’s craving, and the sun makes her golden strands shine. She still blinds me.

I am forgotten, as I lie stiff and cold in a cheaply-made box. They’re laughing, and it’s not even about me, not even at me. Carol has a toddler that’s said something funny, which obviously means he’s a genius in the making. Apparently my teenage son and his friend think it’s funny to barely escape the law with a kilo. Even the minister has funny stories, prude that he is. They’re having fun, and their eyes shine brilliantly–bright golden browns, topaz greens and cornflower-periwinkle blues. Happy. Not a single tear.

This is my punishment, and I am told it is just. How worrying it is to see no one crying in your wake. It is painful to hear bad words, but it is worse to hear no words at all. My name is not uttered outside of the poorly-written eulogy, and I come to understand that this is a party that only my bloodless body has been invited to.

They hold a lunch afterward at our house, and it is not anything like the post-funeral lunches I attended in life. There is dancing. But it’s quiet, secretly devious. They don’t want the media to know of their joy, perhaps. Perhaps the media does not care.

For a long while, I sit on the black leather couch, where I am sitting now. People sit beside me and through me; it tingles a little when they do that. My wife gets drunk on champagne at my left, and my best friend kisses her while sitting on my lap, through my lap. It hurts, but I met her under similar circumstances, and I understand. It was to be expected.

The dead do feel anguish, actually, and I feel anguished now. I have gotten all that I deserve, and I will be walking among them as they have their fun, as my son runs his life into the ground because I paid him no mind. My best friend will likely marry my wife, the poor grieving widow. She may or may not get a pre-nup, and he may or may not get half of everything when their sham of a relationship falls through, too.

Time passes, and people come and go. Ashes and potato chips are on the floor. Someone has fallen asleep at my feet. I wish I’d been a better man.

I’ve been in a writing mood lately (see here, if you like creative writing), but I feel like doing something a bit different from the norm. So, my guys and gals, if you would be so kind, give me opening sentences to begin stories with!

In your replies, please include your name and a website address if you have one. I’ll attribute you for the opening bit on my website.

No guarantees of superb quality, but I’ll give it a go. If you hate what I create with your opening sentence, feel free to curse me. My writing is not genre-specific, so expect anything. I do, however, have a bit of a passion for science fiction and drama.

Thanks to anyone who takes part. :)

So yes, if anyone here wants to contribute a starting sentence, feel free!

The strangest things can make you nostalgic when you live far away from the place you were born in, even if you don’t even love that place. I can go weeks, perhaps months, without feeling “homesick,” if that’s even what you can call this; about the only thing I constantly miss is my mother. But then, every so often, there’s a food I want, a place I want to see, an accent I want to hear, a custom I want to be graced by. Today was one of those days.

The storms reminded me of all the times I’ve watched rain patter down outside my window–for hours, for days. Sometimes it was welcome, and other times I just wanted it to go away. As we all know, though, nature has a mind of its own. I forget that a little, living in Melbourne, where the weather is mostly temperate, even if I do still get cold in the winter. I was reminded of how amazing nature is, how its a wild bull that no one can control. We merely react to what it does.

It made me think of the many times in school that there were tornado drills, where the sirens would scream and we’d file none-too-neatly into our supposedly-safe places. It also makes me think of the numerous times the sirens weren’t a test, and the time some less than competent teacher placed children of my overcrowded middle school in front of glass doors as we hunkered down, head between knees. Prize educator, indeed.

I think it’s odd that I feel nostalgic about that which could potentially kill others and myself, but then maybe that’s my morbid side coming out. Or maybe it’s not the storms I’m missing. Maybe I just associate the storms with other things that I miss. Maybe it’s the rainbows and occasionally being away from the city that I long for.

Sometimes I miss the times where I just walked down the road to a lake. Sometimes I miss really green grass that’s so green because it rains a little more often. (With so few rainstorms here, we usually only get grass of a green-brown color.) Sometimes I miss roads that have farms on the left and right of them. In a country that is dry and highly urbanized, you’re not likely to see much of what I miss, and parks don’t cut it.

We always want what we can’t easily have, don’t we? I’m glad to be away from small town politics, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss some things about living in smaller, less-populated areas. Maybe I’m just made for the ‘burbs.

And yes, that is “Guitar Hero” he’s playing. And would you believe our luck? He’s a computer engineer. Side job? Internet vigilantism, apparently. This news video is brilliant for so many reasons.

If you’re humored by this guy, here’s his website. Seems like a likable dude.

Reason.tv has a couple of interesting and fairly informative videos about eminent domain that Drew Carey hosts in; they’re about 20 minutes, all total. (Thumbs up for Carey.) Take a look:

As one can see from those videos, and learn from most articles regarding eminent domain, government initiatives to take land are not appropriate, even when there is compensation given to the original owners. Firstly, the government rarely performs as well as the people. It is a lethargic, money-guzzling behemoth that is given to corruption and, quite often, mistakes. Secondly, the government shouldn’t decide things for the market. If someone wants to buy or sell property, it should be their right to do so, but it should be a transaction held between the buyer and the seller, according to their terms. The government should not come into it as much as it does.

For the bar owner in the second video, he had to give up something that he was not ready to give up. For him, not only was his bar something he had put a lot of effort into and still wanted, it was also a source of major, if not all, income. Because a bigger corporation had more money to persuade the government, which in turn could help hike up the taxes in the area, they were given a right to land ownership before he was. When someone takes something that you’ve bought and paid for, worked diligently to build up and see as a source of your income, one-time government compensation just doesn’t cut it.

A search for eminent domain articles on Google News shows how restless such legislation makes people. The articles are a constant ebb and flow of information regarding abuse of governing power and the struggle of the people to own what is rightfully theirs.

While I personally struggle with eminent domain on the whole, if the government were taking property for development of public use buildings, roads or parks, it would be a different matter, as pointed out by the youth center owner in the National City video. Instead, more and more the government is using its power to take whatever it wants and boss whoever it wants in the process. Surprise, surprise that it isn’t the big corporations that are lobbying and lining the pockets of supposed representatives that are struggling.

This is not how capitalism works. This is controlling power, such as that found in Communist or dictatorial regimes, giving way to corruption and corporatism, something quite different from free market capitalism.

While the government continues to take your income through taxation, control information available to you through traditional media, humiliate you and strike fear at security checkpoints, and, of course, take your property through measures like eminent domain, it also has the audacity to try to suggest it knows what’s best for the people. This is perhaps true when you live in a smaller country where your government is made up of fairly normal, everyday people, but few and far between do those places exist, if they even exist at all. I question that, personally.

So, the next time you read about your local criminal who’s stolen a sign and done community service or read about a case of embezzlement, think about your government. Not even Enron could top our governments for corruption and injustice.