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For the three people on my f-list who might not have seen it yet:

Live webcam of Pete's Pond in Botswana. (RealPlayer video feed) It's just starting in on prime viewing hours there now, and right this second the camera is focused on an elephant submerged in the pond. [Edit: It's moved on to the ostriches and impala right now, but tends to pan around quite a bit.]

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Today is Sweetmorn, day 57 in the season of Bureaucracy, 3271.

I hadn't been to the E St. Cinema before yesterday, it seems pretty nice. (Do you hear the "but" there? Because there certainly is one.)

Here's what I don't like about it: I bought tickets online to "MirrorMask" on Saturday for yesterday's show. Since apparently "matinee" at this theater on the weekends is "the first show of the day", two tickets for the afternoon showing were a bit over $20 when you add in the online service charge. Okay, I can deal with that, no big deal. Thanks to some confusion at the Grosvenor metro over parking, we got there at 4:51 for the 4:50 showing, which should put us in at about the first preview. (When we eventually got into the theater at 4:57, the opening credits were just starting) I went to claim my pre-paid tickets from the kiosk, which told me "This showing has expired, your tickets cannot be claimed." @#$%. I went to the ticket counter and woke up the extremely bored-looking guy sitting behind the desk and explained that I'd bought tickets already but couldn't claim them from the kiosk. After looking put out by having to actually, y'know, do something, he swiped my credit card and parroted back at me exactly what the kiosk had said. The response to "But I already paid for these tickets, how am I supposed to get them?" was "I don't know, do you want to buy another set of tickets here?" No, I don't want to buy a second set of tickets, but since I trekked in from VA on the Metro to get here and people are theoretically meeting us here, I guess I will. I am perfectly willing to accept buying two tickets to "Serenity" on Friday night, because we wouldn't have gotten there anytime close to the 8:40 start time, but in this case we were off by about a minute or two, and they were still selling tickets to the show. Why the hell can you not claim your pre-paid tickets that you bought online if you're still perfectly capable of buying tickets at the box office?? Other than "so we can double-charge you", of course.

Let's just say that this, combined with not really having eaten much before dinner, left me in a less-than-stellar mood for most of the rest of the evening. vvalkyri, I apologize for probably being not terribly pleasant company after the movie.

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Via bookslut:

St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin returns $3 million pledge rather accede to the donor's request to censor Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain". [BugMeNot has a login if you need it.]

"St. Andrew's has a policy not to accept conditional gifts, whether it's $5 or $500,000. When the McNair family looked at their gift in a conditional manner, then the school could not accept it," said Bill Miller, who was asked by St. Andrew's to serve as its spokesman for this story.

(On a far less potentially noble note, I gotta say that any movie that involves me getting to watch Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger make out has already got my $9.25. Heh.)