this is a land of mystery and wonder
Yeah, I know the trip was in December and I’m posting the final penultimate update in April. Next maybe I’ll finally write about my trip to France in May…of 2006. Family is welcomed to comment with any CR details I’ve forgotten in the interim.
When last we spoke, we had concluded our time in Guanacasta and taken a treacherous(-ish) mountain journey to La Fortuna, around Lake Arenal, which looks (from afar, through the fog) sort of like this:
Reading The Subtle Knife, which is the second book after The Golden Compass in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and enjoying it, but not being “wowed” by it. Climbing at Metro Rock with, among others, Deirdre! Playing the occasional game of Settlers. Trying to understand the cat’s neuroses, including his constant need to stare at the ceiling. Watching the first Battlestar Galactica of the new season, and loving it. Watching the first Doctor Who of the new season and hating it. Skiing at Mount Sunapee with Jer and having an absolute blast.
I could be misinterpreting, but I think the cat’s meowing and purring and licking my hand is him saying, “give your friends a break and stop getting mad at them for silly reasons.” Smart cat.
“Smart Balance really speaks to the essence of being a Brandeisian – a margarine-type oil spread that desperately wants you to believe it is butter,” says 2005 graduate Danny Silverman, now a systems administrator at a rival Massachusetts college. “Now substitute ‘Harvard student.’ ”
— "Brandeis butters up its brand" by Darren Garnick in the Boston Herald
I’m sitting in my office, staring at my monitor, and my eyes hurt. I look up, blank white walls on three sides, nothing to focus on. To the left, past the desk and body of the office-mate, a floor-to-ceiling window looking into a hallway. Through that, another blank white wall, fronted by a printer and a copying machine. Florescent lights cast their florescent glow.
There are those who forsake 9 to 5, refuse the full-time grind. Those who travel the country and the world, couchsurfing and wandering and discovering. There are those who wake up and decide that today is a good day to climb a mountain, or bike to the sea, or kayak down a river. And so they do.
I keep asking myself if I could ever be one of those people. I keep coming up with reasons why not. As my new job ramps up and the work gets more interesting, I will push to the back of my mind the nagging voice that tells me I need to get out and see and do and experience. But it won’t go away. It will fester and taunt me. And maybe one day I’ll finally listen to it.
For April Fools, XKCD is displaying Questionable Content, Questionable Content is displaying Dinosaur Comics, and Dinosaur Comics is displaying XKCD.
The weird part? I didn’t notice, because I read all three, and they all open in tabs…
Without giving away too many details of this stealth project, let’s just say if you’re looking for a decent knish, you’re gonna find a fuckin’ decent knish.
— Teaser copy from a site called Husky Jew. No idea...
The report, to published at www.secure-medicine.org, makes clear that the hundreds of thousands of people in this country with implanted defibrillators or pacemakers to regulate their damaged hearts — they include Vice President Dick Cheney — have no need yet to fear hackers. The experiment required more than $30,000 worth of lab equipment and a sustained effort by a team of specialists[…]
Really? So all it costs for bloodless and undetectable assassination of a sitting US Vice President (or mob boss, or former Russian spy) is thirty thousand bucks and some stolen or recreated research? Sounds like there is something to fear. Sure the attack is only “theoretical.” Until someone does it, then suddenly it is “actual.”
When Joss Whedon adapted _Firefly_ to the big screen in _Serenity_, he walked a delicate line, cramming in tons of exposition, character development, and plot in a very limited amount of time. He knew when to rush, when to slow down for the little moments of humanity, when to tell, when to show. It is a delicate art that very few can pull off, but when trying to translate a rich, pre-established universe in just two hours, it is essential.
_The Golden Compass_, adapted and directed by Chris Weitz from a novel by Philip Pullman, sadly lacks that deft touch, and that makes all the difference. The movie is suitably beautiful and fantastic, given its $180 million budget, but I’d take half of that money away if it could mean a better story and less obsession with effects. To be fair, the book itself is somewhat dry and over-expositive. Lyra is dashed from place to place and coincidentally winds up with the right people, making the right choices, all the time. There is too much exploration of the universe and not enough pay off for the reader’s patience. The business with the witches, the background of the Gyptians, the talk about the folks who put holes in their skulls, where does it all lead? Will there be some great payoff in book three?
But at the same time, Pullman forces the reader to figure out what is going on, what the rules of the universe are, dolling out information only slowly. As we discover more about daemons, about Dust, about the alethiometer, we become Lyra’s co-conspirators. Because the characters in her sphere have unclear motives and backgrounds, we are left to decipher the various shades of gray. And, dare I say, this requisite innocent curiosity plays very neatly into Pullman’s in-novel arguments about the relative goodness of independence and free inquiry over dogma and faith. All of these elements are what make the novel captivating, and they are dispatched of in the first two minutes of the film, with a ridiculous opening narration that sucks all the wonder out of the film. Oh! So *that’s* what Dust is! And the folks in the Magesterian are all uniformly evil!
From there it is just a frantic jump from scene to scene, trying to follow the novel faithfully here, veering wildly off course there, and now back, and now away, and now things are happening oddly out of order, changed after filming, but with some nice and creative editing covering the gaps. There are a lot of people to introduce and then perhaps dispatch of, but no one we really get to have much in the way of feelings for, not even Lyra.
I’m not one of those people who goes into a film adaptation with images of the characters already in my head. I liked seeing everyone on screen. What I didn’t like was seeing cardboard cut-outs of the original characters, so clearly good and evil, really comically so, and I also didn’t like at all the cavalier way in which dozens of red shirts (and their poor daemons) are killed off bloodlessly in various battles that were needlessly scaled up for the screen from the smaller, in many ways more powerful confrontations of the book. There was only one scary bit in the film, taken directly from the novel, where it was terrifying, and even that wasn’t really done properly.
If you haven’t read _Northern Lights_, you’re going to find the movie confusing and not much fun. If you have read it, you’re going to find it disappointing in various ways, but still interesting as an adaptation. If they make the sequels, maybe they’ll do better. If they don’t, I guess its not a huge loss.
The opening of their new T5 airport terminal at Heathrow, Europe’s biggest airport, has been a huge disaster. It seems obvious that when creating a new logistical system of such scale and complexity you must start slow, with only a few flights, and gradually scale up operations and capacity, working out problems and kinks along the way. So of course BA launched with a bang and the software and training problems resulted in a huge black eye for the operators and tenants of the £4.3 billion terminal.
I “rented” a movie. I was waiting for the right sad, rainy day on which to watch it. A day like today. Today would be a great day to watch it. Unfortunately, today happens to be exactly 30 days after I rented the movie, and so it has “expired.” iTunes was kind enough to delete the movie for me, and then to tell me it did so. Good job iTunes, here’s a doggie treat.
Now the movie is downloading from BitTorrent. Some other sad, rainy day, I’ll watch it. Maybe tomorrow. I can’t imagine ever again having the inclination to rent a movie from iTunes.
Thanks to the kindness of a blogger who “broke the paywall” if you will, we now have *both* sets of published transcripts from this utterly hilarious and amazing trial.
Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler, perhaps you will describe what reason you had to steal 40,000 coat hangers?
Chrysler: Is that a question?
Counsel: Yes.
Chrysler: It doesn’t sound like one. It sounds like a proposition which doesn’t believe in itself. You know – “Perhaps I will describe the reason I had to steal 40,000 coat hangers… Perhaps I won’t… Perhaps I’ll sing a little song instead…”
Judge: In fairness to Mr Lovelace, Mr Chrysler, I should remind you that barristers have an innate reluctance to frame a question as a question. Where you and I would say, “Where were you on Tuesday?”, they are more likely to say, “Perhaps you could now inform the court of your precise whereabouts on the day after that Monday?”. It isn’t, strictly, a question, and it is not graceful English but you must pretend that it is a question and then answer it, otherwise we will be here for ever. Do you understand?
Chrysler: Yes, m’lud.
Judge: Carry on, Mr Lovelace.
Counsel: Mr Chrysler, why did you steal 40,000 hotel coat hangers, knowing as you must have that hotel coat hangers are designed to be useless outside hotel wardrobes?
Chrysler: Because I build and sell wardrobes which are specially designed to take nothing but hotel coat hangers.
Sorry Aaron.
He seems like the kind of guy who could pull it off, assuming it is a *real* TV show of legitimate production values and length, the only difference being that it is distributed online (and perhaps on DVD) instead of on television. I’d pay for it sight-unseen, and I’ll bet another quarter-million people would as well. At iTunes prices, that is half a mil per episode right out of the gate, which doesn’t seem like a bad way to start…
From 1776 to present day, only five African Americans have ever served in the United States Senate. Hiram Revels (R – Mississippi) was appointed in 1870 to fill a vacant seat for one year. He was followed in 1874 by Blanche Bruce (R – Mississippi); no other black Senator has been elected to the Senate from the South to this day, over 100 years later. The first black Senator elected by popular vote was Edward Brooke (R – Massachusetts) in 1966, followed by Carol Moseley Braun (D – Illinois) in 1992. The fifth, of course, is Barack Obama (D – Illinois), elected in 2004 and currently running for the United States Presidency.
This is what happens when George Clooney googles himself. The joke mid-page two makes the whole thing worth it.
From America’s finest news source
Shaina’s new food blog. So far, cookies and artichokes.
House-swapping looks fun, although I’m not sure what their policy is on cats.
At a recent social gathering a couple of MoHos were talking about two of their former Holyoke classmates with the pronoun “he.” Apparently “transmales” attending women’s colleges is a growing trend that presents unique challenges. If any group is equipped to handle them, though, it’s gotta be the Seven Sisters.