The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Suicidal Tendency + Failure to Plan Properly = Mocking from Blogistan.
This one’s kind of gross, folks, but it hit my “black humor” nodes dead-on. I have no trouble imagining the guy’s cry of “Oh, noooooooo!” as he reached the point of impossibility in his plan.
(via Warren Ellis, of course)
One would think that the State has an economic interest in making sure that, as much as possible, only the guilty get imprisoned, since room and board in prisons costs money, and if you’re spending that on locking up an innocent person, well, it’s money wasted. Except that someone’s hit on the idea that the state should be able to recoup that investment and charge those unlucky duckies for that room and board.
At least it’s happening in Britain and not here…but you never know. Good ideas have to wait for their time to come, but bad ones whip around like oversugared five-year-olds at Chuck E. Cheese. I just know that sooner or later, some legislator in this country, full of desire to up his “law and order” and “fiscal responsibility” street cred, is going to propose something like this. You watch, folks.
(via He Who Modulates)
It turns out that today’s snow in Buffalo is a time-delayed gift from His Swankiness. Thanks. Tons.
(BTW, in keeping with his “Swank” theme and his general fascination with Asian stuff, I’ve considered paying homage to The Mikado (my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan operetta) and dubbing Mr. Harris “Swanki-poo”. Somehow, I don’t think he’d totally appreciate that….)
Speaking of Mr. Harris, today he quotes in its entirety one of the great film monologues of all time, Quint’s account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis from Jaws. I’ve long thought that this may be the moment in the film that elevates it into greatness. Also, it was this scene, more than any other in any film, that drove home to me the evils of the “pan-and-scan” formatting for televisions. I saw the film many times on VHS and whenever TBS aired it, and this scene always kept Robert Shaw in tight close-up during the monologue. Little did I know that, in Steven Spielberg’s original framing of the scene, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is off to one side, listening with a haunted expression in his eyes.
Regarding the Indianapolis, I once saw a TV documentary about it — I don’t recall if it was a National Geographic special or what — that interviewed some of the survivors. As Greg notes, it was a far more horrific ordeal than the Jaws monologue conveys. The bit that’s stayed with me is how one of these men described how a friend of his finally succumbed to dementia and announced that he was going to dive down to the fresh water beneath the salt water on top of the ocean and have a drink. Down he went, and that was the last anyone saw of him.
Anyway, they delivered the bomb.
I know I have some Guy Gavriel Kay afficionadoes amongst my highly intelligent readers, so since Last Light of the Sun has been out for a couple of weeks now, have any of you read it yet? If so, weigh in now! And if not, well — you’re all slackers. Heh! (Insulting one’s audience is said to be a great way to bring ’em back, you know.)
As I write this, BlogSpot appears to have suffered some kind of outage. Ugh. Of course, since you’re reading this, it’s back again, which raises the interesting question of why I’m bothering to write this in the first place. The answer is…Hey, what’s that over there behind your shoulder?
It amazes me that these days I can walk through Borders, make note of all the new titles I want to read, and in nearly every case, my thought isn’t “Man, I wish I had enough cash to pick that up”, but rather, “Geez, why did I forget to put a pen in my pocket so I could write down these titles and get ’em from the library?” Ach!
I spotted a number of new books I want to read — Peter Hamilton has a new space opera out; I’ve been meaning to read Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky for quite some time; there’s a nifty looking fantasy called The Anvil of the World. Sometime I need to pick up an official copy of GGK’s Last Light of the Sun (getting the review copy was super cool from the “I get to read it two months before everybody else!” standpoint, but review copies, as books-in-themselves, are kind of crappy: uncorrected typos, incredibly stiff binding, generic cover with no art that’s made of card-stock). And that’s just in the SF department.
I also thumbed through the latest issue of SF Chronicle, which I like to peruse for news and such, and I learned there that Stephen R. Donaldson has signed the contract for The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It will be four books, bringing the total number of volumes in the three Covenant series to ten (not including the “out-take” published separately in a short fiction collection some years ago). This excites me greatly; the Covenant books are longtime favorites of mine, even though it’s been well over a decade since I last read all of them (I did read Lord Foul’s Bane a year ago, but as yet have not moved on to the remainder of the series). I know that Covenant isn’t for everybody, but I sure liked it. In fact, if memory serves, I read the Covenant series before I read The Lord of the Rings. (Donaldson has long maintained that the series was not finished after White Gold Wielder, so I don’t think this constitutes a case of an author returning to the “cash cow”, such as all those additional Foundation books Isaac Asimov penned late in his life.)
Let’s see, what else from Borders today…I thumbed through Sauron Defeated, which is one of the later volumes in the History of Middle Earth series that Christopher Tolkien has produced (using notes and materials left behind by his father). What caught my eye here was an unpublished Epilogue to The Return of the King, which takes place after Sam’s line, “Well, I’m back”. It was interesting from a Tolkien-geek perspective (even one so neophytic as myself), but I can see why it was omitted in the end. It’s basically a kind of “Here’s what happened to the major characters after the story’s end” bit, not really necessary.
And I also discovered that a second collection of shooting scripts from The West Wing has been published, this one from the third and fourth seasons. Interestingly, the book includes Aaron Sorkin’s script for “Isaac and Ishmael”, the “special terrorism” episode that was produced on the double just after the 9-11-01 attacks and was hated by just about everybody, it seems. (I liked it, but it’s definitely “flat” compared to just about any other episode — although I’m not sure how it couldn’t avoid that.)
Lastly, I ended up buying two CDs — Naxos’s latest entry in its “Japanese Classics” series, this one being works of Koscak Yamada; and a CD of Chinese ballads written by Teresa Teng and sung by Huang Hong-ying. I’m not really sure what this one’s all about, and I will report later.
All in all, a pleasant hour spent in Borders today, while the snow flew outside the windows. Three to five inches on the way…March in Buffalo!
….according to the FAQ, often there is no attempt at translation.
It’s Engrish.com, which collects examples of fractured English used in print materials and on products from around the world, and often in Japan. Apparently, the use of English words is something of a design tendency — just because they look cool, which sounds odd at first until I consider that I own a lot of stuff with Japanese or Chinese characters on them, and I have no idea at all what they say, either. This, plus the problems faced by Japanese people attempting to speak English (few opportunities for use in any kind of vernacular setting, different grammatical structures, and entire sounds in English not present in Japanese), combine with often funny results.
(via Libertarian Jackass)
Some folks use their impressive mental powers to better the world; some don’t. Unless, of course, you consider figuring out the amount of time spanned by the interwoven storylines of Pulp Fiction to be “bettering the world”, which is something I’m not sure I’m expert at myself — I mean, just look at some of the geeky stuff I write in this space. Glass houses, eh?
Anyhow, it’s pretty airtight — except for one piece of evidence. Mr. Nefarious uses a line of Mia Wallace’s to demonstrate on which night the boxing match takes place, in relation to the night of her date with Vincent Vega. I’ve just checked, and unfortunately, the line isn’t quite the way Mr. Nefarious remembers. Mia doesn’t say “Thank you for last night”, she says “I never thanked you for dinner” — which doesn’t quite establish the number of days that have transpired between the dinner and the fight. It could have been a couple of nights ago, it could have been last night. You never know. Or do you?
EDIT: Link fixed. And how embarrassing that Neddie was the one discover that I failed to correctly link a reference to him! The shame of it all! Woe, woe, woe….
A couple of old conversation partners from my days of posting on rec.music.movies have, since then, done as I did and entered Blogistan — although the two I mention here seem to be ensconced in Blogistan’s breakaway province, LiveJournalopia. First is Jostein Hakestad, a guy from Norway whose tastes generally follow the formula 80% in total agreement with mine, and 20% in maddening disagreement.
And then there’s Jason Blalock (also known as Jay), of whom I lost total track until I happened to turn him up again over the weekend. He was the force behind a favorite film music review site of mine, ScoreLand, before his interests shifted and he left film music behind. He is no longer updating ScoreLand, but he has made all the old content there available. Just don’t stare for too long at those spinning CDs at the bottom of his reviews.
(And if you mention ScoreLand — the film music site — on your blog or journal, you’ll get lots of search engine hits from folks looking for, well, this. NSFW!)
Lastly, I also note via Aaron the presence online of an old college friend who played double bass in the orchestra and electric bass in the jazz band, Mark Cuthbertson. Mark is one of the most unbelievably unflappable people I’ve ever known, and the closest I ever saw him come to pure anger was when none other than Wynton Marsalis, in a clinic-master class setting, announced that the electric bass isn’t an instrument for real jazz musicians, or some such thing. I think Mark raised both eyebrows at that one….
His Swankiness quotes, and comments on, an editorial that suggests that the blossoming market for Japanese manga and anime in this country are entirely fan-created: it’s not as if some bunch of suits sat down in a board room, conceived a product, and then proceeded to construct a sales strategy around that product. Interesting. I wonder, though, when did anime start to reach its current level of critical mass? Did the rise of manga and anime coincide with the rise of the Web? Just curious, ’cause I don’t know.