is a blog by Brendan
There’s a decent article on MSNBC / Newsweek–an interview with Miranda Rivers, who cast the Lord of the Rings. My favorite part is where she describes her on-sight classification system:
“We would walk down the street, and people were not people, they were types: I’d be going, ‘Hobbit!’ ‘Elf!’ ‘Uruk-hai!’ ‘Rohan!’ I got a lot of elves off the street.”
I find it interesting how similar that is to the typing system (man, hobbit, dwarf, elf) Randy Waterhouse defines in Cryptonomicon.
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 people have wondered. Haven’t you heard them? It started as a murmur, an uneasy question that rippled and spread and grew to a titanic, subvocal collective cry.
“Where?” they asked. “Whenceforth? Whither our hero?”
Yesterday afternoon, they got their answer.
Pounding pavement like a Clydesdale, breathing like a crippled bellows, shaking an MP3-CD player that apparently meant its “40-second ESP” label as a cruel joke: could it be he? There was no graceful form, no cracked bike helmet. But yes–as he came closer, so did certainty: It had to be! Nobody else could have the temerity to wear those tights! Captain Spacedork lives!
Anyway. Yeah, I finally broke out the spandex and inaugurated my winter running season, after what must have been a month of sluglike inactivity. It showed: I stupidly forgot to warm up, so I started feeling shooting pains in the back of my right knee and had to baby that leg to Old Louisville and back. I forgot to hydrate afterwards, too, so I woke up this morning with probably the closest thing I’ll ever have to a hangover. I did manage to do my whole route without turning around early, but it took waaay too long. Maria thought I’d been kidnapped.
I’ve also gotten spoiled, and forgotten what a difference being able to listen to music makes. My standard CD player broke, so I’ve reverted to my slower MP3-CD device, which is evidently not at all suitable for jogging.
But, as I’ve said before and will say again: at least I’m running. I figure if I want to get in shape for next summer, it’s probably best if I start now.
As Sumana inadvertently pointed out to me the other day, because I run NewsBruiser, my use of the verb “to blog” to mean “to publish in my interweb journal” is actually deprecated. “To bruise” is just more specific, not to mention way more not-bleeding-yet-edge. I need to start using that instead.
Tangentially, how far do you think the logical extension of “cutting edge”-style slang can actually go? “Virgin material, untouched by an edge?” “Substance unaware of the edge’s existence?” “Prehistoric stuff existing in a world where edges have not yet been invented?” It kind of loops eventually, I guess. “So far beyond the cutting edge that it’s actually on the other edge, the one not doing the cutting.” I wonder what Anthony Burgess would say.
LiveJournal has gotten rid of their invite code system. What does that mean? It means my few remaining holdout friends (or those friends who initially gave in but quickly regressed) without blogs need to get one. Right now.
I know LJ carries a sort of stigma–just as Geocities is the source and font of crappy web pages about one’s cat, LJ is the source and font of angsty emo drama. And bad spelling. And typing in all lower case.
But let’s face it: as far as free solutions go, it’s the best all-in-one publishing / aggregation tool out there. Of course NewsBruiser is better blogging software, and of course Feed on Feeds is a better RSS reader. But they need server space to run on, and many people just don’t have that, or don’t want to pay for it. LJ provides that free space, along with grained access control, easy (but deep) configuration, and good documentation. Plus it’s open-source.
It’d be easy to go over there and snap up a bunch of free journals to compartmentalize things, but of course I don’t need to do that–I can create more NewsBruiser notebooks any time I want, and I’ve always got Zomziepie, Spam As Folk Art and Ruse You Can Bruise to write in.
What I did do, though, is create a new community. Hey, road trip people! I know almost all of you already have LJs, and if you don’t, there’s no reason not to get one now. And then when you do, it is hereby required that you roll on up and post at Calicomicon!
All three of my entries today have had the word “interesting” in their first sentences, so if I write anything else tonight, I have to oh wait.
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?
If something is “interesting chiefly as an x,” it’s not interesting.
Interesting theory over at Achewood: is telemarketing really just the phone calls of the damned?