Car's fine. The oil filter was messed up -- hence the leaking of the oil -- so basically they gave me an oil change and replaced the filter and all's well. Hurray for cheap car repairs!

Looks like I'll be going down to USC in Los Angeles on March 3, to take part in the weekend's science and science fiction program: "TransFormations III: Fiction Science: Visions and Voices." I'm going to talk on Saturday (at the very least as part of a roundtable discussion, possibly something more, I'm still waiting for details) and a reading on Sunday. Some details about the event are here. Come along if you're down there. I'm a last minute replacement for the program, hence the short notice, but it sounds fun, and I didn't have anything but housework planned for that weekend anyway...

I had a mildly productive day, actually. I put the living room back together (it was deconstructed rather radically to make our Valentine's day dinner possible, since I had to put the big table in the middle of the living room, etc.). I replaced the rusty loose handle on the kitchen faucet. I wrote reviews of two porno movies (one of which, Ghostlovers, is a paranormal romance! Set in a world where ghosts and other supernatural elements are commonplace and everyone knows somebody who's gotten possessed! It's not a brilliant amazing paranormal romance, but it amused me to see the current vampire-shagger novel subgenre trend make the jump to porn movies). I read a bit of Richard Lupoff's Marblehead, the original (and much longer and more involved) version of his "historical" Lovecraft's Book, all about the secret Nazi/KKK/Italian Fascist conspiracy that Lovecraft was involved with during the 1920s. (Well, not really -- it's a "secret history" in that it doesn't violate known facts, and in fact involves tons of real information about Lovecraft's life, but there's a lot of fiction in here.) It's good stuff, most especially if you're a Lovecraft fan.

Battlestar Galactica: Increasingly sucks. Really bored and annoyed by the latest episode. Whereas, Heroes: Increasingly rocks. Really liked the last episode, though regarding the death of Simone, I can't recall when I've cared less about the death of a love interest. She was a complete non-entity as a character, and never made much of an impression on me. But if she serves as the motivation for crazy behavior on the part of her mourning lovers, hey, so much the better.