Well, the website is being worked on, despite the fact that I am so tired I feel as if I am going to fall face down on the keyboard. I am back at school for the last semester before (I hope) obtaining the long-sought-after AA, then on to some university somewhere...

I realize I don't have much to say at this point but I told myself I was going to get my website started, dammit, and so I have hauled my butt over to my "desk." (Anyone want a cheap, KMart writing desk, for, say, ten bucks? Or free? I was going to order a fancy modular computer cart from Anthro, but the one I want is beyond my means right now. But Office Depot has a nice under-forty dollars cart that looks as if it will do. All I need is to get rid of this one I have right now, this narrow little thing that I picked up at KMart. My computer barely fits on it.)

When I came home from the overwhelming load of two whole classes, instead of doing anything useful I plunked myself down and watched X-Files reruns that I had taped over the new year. (The FX cable channel was having a first-year episode fest.) Seeing the episodes from the first year reminded me of just how far the show has slumped in the so-called "new" season. I've been attempting to work on a review-rant-indepth analysis as to why the X-Files now sucks, and one day I'll have it up on the site somewhere. But even in the first year, when the plots actually existed, and there was some actual acting going on, there were indications that the lazy hand of Hollywood had drifted. For example: in the "Eve 6" episode (the one with the evil children - whatever happened to evil children?) there is a major plot device of digitalis poison, which is spoken of as "eight ounces of foxglove, taken from a digitalis plant" that earlier in the episode is said to "come from South America" where the "Indians used it on the ends of their arrows." Now, I'm no botanist, but I have read a great many mystery novels and watched a lot of murder-mystery TV, and digitalis is one of the more commonly-used poisons in such tales. As far as I thought I had always known, digitalis is the drug distilled from the foxglove plant, not the other way around, and the plant, I thought, was native to Europe and Asia. Witches were thought to use it in their ceremonies, along with belladonna and other plants, to get high. The scriptwriters may have confused the drug with curare, which is the South American poison used by the natives there to paralyze game. I don't expect actors (even ones with Master's Degrees in English Literature from Ivy League universities like a certain Mr. Duchovny) to know or care about the accuracy of the lines they utter, but I would think that they could have spared a fraction of their budget to hire a fact checker to insure information that I have known since I was a teenager.

For your pleasure - some links on digitalis:

From the American Heart Association's website - Digitalis
On Botanical.com - the Foxglove plant (note that the plant is indigenous to Great Britain and Europe)
From the same website - digitalis poison, description of symptoms and treatment