You know what’s odd? I’ve been to … three different bookstores, and all three had only one volume of The Sandman series, and not the same one, either. And most definitely not the first one, either, otherwise I’d have it. >:
Today I finished the new layout for my diary (which you are still not allowed to read, SM00). I think I got tired of the black and darkness of the Tsuda layout, because this one’s PINK, and has white text. Well, it’s kind of a salmon/red pink. Not too bad, I don’t think. I don’t really know, I don’t hate pink, so I can’t tell if it’s bad or not. The only thing I don’t like is that I needed almost 15 images to make the layout, and I used div layers. ^^’ I’ve got a policy for my diary: simple coding, few images, simple layouts. It’s ’cause I use Netscape 4.5 (or is it 4.7?) to update my diary. Ah well. Maybe I’ll get tired of it quickly.
After dinner watched The Last Emperor with Mommy. O_O Umm … Good movie. Very. Asians look kinda cute in 20s/30s styles. ^__^ I want a haircut kinda like that wannabe pilot lady. Not so short in the back, though … I’m talking about the one she had when she first showed up. I didn’t know there was a Manchuria during World War II. Saw some footage … asked Mommy, and she said it’s probably real. *shudders* She asked, “What’s worse? The killing of [I forget the number] by one person or one million killing 200,000?”
Mm. Anyway.
“Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million.’ With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?”
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
You know … that doesn’t make much sense to me. Of course, it can’t help that both times I read it was after midnight. But it’s still worded so nicely …