Oh yes, I'm still alive, but I come to you a woman nearly broken by tragedy. No. Really. I mean it.

First off, on Friday I took my second stab at Codex Barbecue Pizza, my quest to create the perfect pizza from scratch cooked on a barbecue.

Stab is probably an excellent verb to use here, since the crust was so terrible that the spousal unit asked me if I was trying to kill him or something.

Personally, I'm blaming the whole ugly situation on our local health food store.

I always feel like such a fraud when I walk into a health food store. I mean, I look at all these wonderfully serene, incredibly healthy looking people discussing the benefits of oh, I don't know, a Chinese basil colonic purge or some such esoteric thing and immediately feel out of place.

In my heart I know that these are the people who grind their own grains and store it in pottery they have made themselves. I, on the other hand, have Coca Cola in my fridge. Even worse, I Buy It In Cans! I can feel them judging me. I am convinced they can smell the Coke cans on my hands.

It was necessity that drove me into the health food store Thursday. Our local grocery store was out of whole wheat flour and I needed it for pizza crust tinkering, so I gathered together all my courage and off I went.

Now in a sensible store, they sell but one kind of whole wheat flour, because, well, I think that we can all agree that REAL people eat white food--white sugar, white flour, white rice.

However, when I got to the whole wheat section of the health food store I was appalled to find that there were infinite kinds of whole wheat flour available. There was your organic and your not organic, which Right There was already twice as many kinds of whole wheat flour as I was used to contemplating.

But then it got even worse! Within your worlds of organic and not organic you also had your sub categories of your sifted and your not sifted.

But then it got even worse! There was your sifted for bread and not sifted for bread. There was your sifted for pastry and your not sifted for pastry.

EEEEEEEEEEEK.

It Was A World Gone Mad, I tell you, A World Gone Mad.

Since I was baking a bread like crust, I finally decided to buy the sifted organic whole wheat flour for bread. I only substituted one cup of this whole wheat flour for one of the three cups of white flour that made the pizza dough, but the dough went from being light and airy and tasteless to being, uh, well ... Let's just say that the word "leaden" gives you an overview of the general texture without forcing you to contemplate the full horror.

Back to the drawing board.

I was well on the road to recovery from this crushing blow when I made the mistake of going to see that movie "The Hulk" last night. I'd read the reviews and they were pretty scathing, so we went on the ultra cheap $6 night so we wouldn't feel cheated if the movie was terrifically bad.

Now first off let me say that since childhood I have been a sucker for The Movies About Mutants and/or Freaks Who Are Saved By The Love Of A Good Woman, which in turn is a sub-genre of the whole Women Civilize Men movie theme.

(Any woman who's opened a laundry hamper, managed to survive the experience AND actually launder a week's worth of man-a-rrific socks knows the basic truth that Men Are The Heart of Darkness and Without Women There Would Be NO Civilization. Movies just tend to expand on this by going beyond the hamper.)

Now about the sub-genre which I love ... If said mutants and/or freaks are repressed or unaware of their feelings I find them especially intriguing. (Oooh, Batman, come to Marn; Tarzan, sweetie, Marn LIKE Tarzan.) One of my favourite movies of all time is the RKO classic "Mighty Joe Young" (ignore the Disney re-make, find the original in all its cheesy glory).

Okay, now, for these movies to work, You Have To Love The Freak. I'm serious. If you don't love the freak, then the movie falls apart. Stop looking at me that way. I am NOT weird. Look, you can come to care for emotionally repressed freaks. I mean, look at Batman. The man is a twisted vigilante, and yet you root for him.

In the end that's why "The Hulk" doesn't work, or at least didn't work for me. (We'll completely ignore the last half hour which was so horrifically plotted that the term "suspension of belief" does not begin to cover what Ang Lee was asking of his viewers.)

See, the thing with "The Hulk" was that somehow I just couldn't come to care for Bruce Banner. Even worse, I couldn't buy that there was any Twue Lub between he and Betty and I think we can all agree that without the Twue Lub between the freak and the good woman one of the central conventions of this genre has been violated.

Oh! Oh! Oh! And speaking of plot conventions, in these movies The Good Woman always does something misguided that she feels is in the freak's best interests, but of course turns out to be terribly, terribly wrong. Then she spends the rest of the movie rectifying her mistake. Except in this movie Betty Kept Making The Same Freakin' Mistake And Delivering The Hulk Into The Hands of the U.S. Military Via Her Father!

MARN WANT TO SMASH BETTY.

That said, the movie is visually stunning. And the split screen effect Ang Lee uses to mimic the panels in a comic book? Brilliant. Oh, and I loved it that Lou Ferrigno had a teensy part as a security guard at the beginning of the movie.

But, uh, if you love the genre, this would be a movie to avoid.

So yeah. A pizza crust AND a much anticipated movie that both went terribly, terribly wrong.

Some days it's all I can do to put one foot in front of the other, eh.

--Marn

P.S.--My beloved home on the net, Diaryland, is feeling a financial squeeze. If you live here on the Mothership, too, please consider signing up for a Gold or Supergold membership, even if only for a few months.

I love my Supergold membership. Not only is it very shiny, but it allows me to get comments from my three loyal readers! I can back up all three years plus of my diary! Remember, not only do you get all sorts of snazzy extra features, you help keep this wonderful virtual soapbox open.

The first three of my three loyal Diaryland based readers to sign up for a year's Gold or Supergold and tell Andrew I sent them will get a present from me--I'll write a guest entry in your diary for you and link back to the entry so you can see your magical invisible stats tracker in action!

This could get you threes upon threes of readers!

Just sign up, send me an e-mail to let me know, and I'll write your entry within two weeks. Please, help keep Diaryland alive.

Mileage on the Marnometer: 343.51 miles (552.8 kilometers)
Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers