is a blog by Brendan
Embarrassingly, I only found out via the Checkerboard Nightmare forums that, not too far from here, a cookie dough truck overturned and popped open in Jefferson County.
Good Part: Now, I have fuel for dreams that involve me scooping my way through literally tons of cookie dough.
Bad Part: Alas, the brave souls involved in that cleanup operation will probably never be able to stand licking the bowl again.
The Post has a fairly deep and interesting article about the assembly of a His Dark Materials movie.
HDM and Philip Pullman are a source of great conflict for me. The Golden Compass is a stunningly, impossibly good book, and The Subtle Knife was excellent too. But reading The Amber Spyglass was like a punch in the stomach, or maybe a stab in the back.
I read the books as soon as they came out, so it’s been a few years. Maybe if I started Compass now I’d see it coming, but I didn’t then. It’s one thing to set up an oppressive, evil church in an alternate universe and make your point through metaphor; it’s very much another to have one of your most sympathetic characters, ostensibly from our world, say “the real Catholic Church is a bad thing and here’s why.”
It’s not like I burned the book after that, or even put it down. I finished it, and I was still affected by the story and moved by its ending. I have a difficult time even expressing what I disliked about it.
I guess what it comes down to is that my mom read Compass to the kids in her middle school class, at a Catholic school, on my recommendation. They loved it. I have no doubt that many of them went on to finish the series themselves. And it doesn’t feel right to know that they got to the end of Spyglass to find a brilliant, trustworthy author turning a shared story into a political statement against something in which they probably believed. Against a church that, in my experience, is nothing like the way he portrays it.
I have no problem with the call to question your beliefs–that’s a call it’s been my job to make, and one that I welcome for myself. And of course the reflexive response is that it’s his world, he has the right to do with it what he wants.
That’s not true. But that’s also a subject for another time.
Philip Pullman and Tom Stoppard–I’ll definitely see the HDM movies, when they finally get made. I hope they live up to the books. But it’s going to make me sick to know that there will very likely be people from my church protesting and condemning the third movie, and that there will be other people hating them for it. What does that solve? Who learns anything from that? Why such a waste of a potentially perfect story?
Sumana sent me pretty cool article.
“Louisville Christians are demonstrating that the Church is indeed one. Predominately black Forest Baptist Church has joined predominately white Highland Baptist Church in commemorating those killed by violence in the Louisville area during the past year. Church members drive white crosses into the ground outside their churches equal to the number killed during the past twelve months….”
Times like this, I like to remember my city’s motto.
Louisville: Hey, we’re not Cincinnati.
Apparently there was a wave of layoffs and transfers this morning, but I wasn’t one of them. I feel like I dodged a bullet–it’s kind of a financial crunch right now, and I’m not exactly a crucial resource. Then again, there are people within ten feet of me who make my annual pay in a week, so I guess my value still outweighs my cost.
Yeek.
Update 1246 hrs: Okay, two weeks. Still.
Fever peaked at 102.3 Fahrenheit today. Proteins become denatured–ie brain damage can occur–at 103 (and I very nearly just spelled that “brane damage”).
Bleagh. Don’t really see myself doing the work thing tomorrow. Instead I’ll try to get an appointment with the reputedly horrible University Health Services and obtain antibiotics, as there’s a good chance it’s strep, so I’ll at least be noncontagious at some point on Tuesday. If I’ve touched you recently and you happen to suffer brain damage (“brean damange,” that time, what the fuck) in a few days, I apologize a lot.
“If that sketch was contagious, now I’d be contaged!”
–Ken Troklus
Incidentally, the reason I’m posting at 0230 hrs on a morning when I have no business being up is because I just got back from teching the Project Improv (scripted) show, PI Sketch, available for your viewing ONE NIGHT ONLY in about fourteen hours. Anybody who doesn’t mind a little raunch with their humor should get there between 1830 and 2000 hrs and stay until 2200, as there will be a carnival with a duck pond, and also rock songs and jokes. I’m running sound.
Unrelatedly, I’m sick. And use too many adverbs.
I normally don’t much like shopping the day after Thanksgiving, not so much because I mind crowds as because it’s the day Everybody’s Supposed To Go Shopping and I don’t like being manipulated by faceless corporations to engage in something that really shouldn’t involve faceless corporations so much.
As Maria and I did not previously own apartment-decorating paraphernalia, though, and as it was on sale, we went forth to Target and bought a horrifying amount of stuff, including a five-foot-or-something artificial tree (previous trees in my [non-Richmond] places of residence basically included Jon’s eighteen-inch tree, decorated with a Centre Debate 2000 button) and ordaments. We spent a LOT, just about everything I saved off the food budget this month by feeding my sister ramen noodles.
But we have shiny things now. And it’s snowing!
I’ve got student loans out that I need to have deferred (since I’m in grad school). There’s a six-month grace period, so I knew that November 24th was the Absolute Final Deadline for me to tell my loan provider my situation.
I’ve been freaking out at least once every other day since, oh, July, about these facts, and knowing that I really have to get around to them, but by the time I was in a position to do so that day, I’d forgotten, or there was something more important, or… you know. So today, with the specter of debtor’s prison breathing hot and heavy on my neck, I finally dug out the envelope labelled “LOAN STUFF” and pawed through it frantically. What if my response didn’t get through the mail in time? They’d extract the interest from my knees with a lead baton!
Turns out that the loans I have from Centre are provided by the same people as the loans I have at Louisville. They already know. I don’t have to do anything until 2009.
I’m an idiot, but hey, load off my back.
“I didn’t get close enough to this bicycle tire spider to see what it was wearing (I’m not scared of all spiders, just ones who live life on the edge), but I’m assuming it had a flame-patterned skull cap tied around its head over those eight mean eyes, three of which work. It hadn’t woven a middle finger into its web; I checked.”
I twinned Audrey and Stephen. It only seemed right.
Speaking of friendblogs, I only just noticed that my first-year roommate and my friend Lauren were persuaded by the Centre PR department to keep travel journals when they went abroad. I’m pretty sure they’re both in DC (District, not David) now–Lauren living a sitcom, Ben… Ben doing Ben things. They’re both going to be President, possibly at the same time.