Month: April 2004

Michael of 2Blowhards links this WIRED interview with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson (which I read when my issue came in the mail). I liked the interview, being a LOTR fan; Michael seems less interested, although he quotes a single exchange:

WIRED: Your early work features some of the bloodiest scenes ever filmed. What do these movies say about you?

Jackson: They all represent the type of film I would be entertained by. That’s why you make movies. Because you’re interested in a genre.

I’m not sure if Michael posts this to agree or disagree (he uncharacteristically says nothing at all!), but I agree with it. First of all, I admire Jackson simply by virtue of his frank admission that he did gory, bloody movies because he likes gory, bloody movies. No goofy auteur-speak, none of that “What I’m trying to do is meditate on the awful degree of violence in contemporary life” folderol — just a guy who admits being entertained by violent movies. Now, I don’t personally enjoy violence that much, but I’m not really turned off by it either (except in some cases — I found the ending of The Matrix a bit troubling when all those security guards get mowed down).

Secondly, though, there’s a “meta” level of meaning here that I like. I write the stories that I write because I want to read them, but nobody else has written them yet, so I gotta do it. I think that’s what Jackson is getting at, and I agree wholehearedly.

(I’m not sure that Jackson doesn’t confuse “genre” with a certain set of tropes or imagery that are not exclusive to a single genre, but that’s a “choice of words” thing, not a “content” thing.)

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My wife took advantage of her vacation to start a new hobby: crocheting. (Looks to me like knitting, but then, what do I know.) After some initial practice runs, she started in on crocheting a pair of booties.

Now why do you think she’d do a pair of booties? Well, I’ll just leave that up to the imagination…and note that she has until sometime in late August to finish them.

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Oh, God, there’s no contest. Not even a hope of one. Not only is this the weirdest thing I saw online during my hiatus, it is one of the most demented things I have ever seen, period.

The mixing, via Photoshop, of animal species.

I can’t stress enough how warped some of these are.

(via By The Way; surprisingly, not via Warren Ellis.)

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The other day, John Scalzi announced his second annual Reader Request Week, in which readers toss out topic suggestions and Scalzi then blogs about them. And, being a guy who never met a blogging meme he didn’t want to steal outright, I figure, hey, I’ll give this a shot. Put your suggestions in comments!

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When last I posted, Scott of the Gamer’s Nook had casually mentioned a plan for his day that I found highly intriguing. He followed up in detail later that day: he and his wife are entering the international adoption arena, and I wish them luck.

Scott says he wants a little girl, and I can’t blame him. Messr. Lerner and Loewe said it best in Gigi:

Each time I see a little girl

of five or six or seven,

I can’t resist the joyous urge

to smile and say…

Thank heaven for little girls,

for little girls get bigger every day!

Thank heaven for little girls;

they grow up in the most delightful way!

Those little eyes, so helpless and appealing,

one day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling!

Thank heaven for little girls;

thank heaven for them all,

no matter where no matter who —

for without them, what would little boys do?

Thank heaven… thank heaven…

Thank heaven for little girls!

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Well, that should about do it for me, as I head into a week of radio silence. I plan to resume posting next Sunday, although I may delay my return to Monday if family plans arise that warrant such a shift. As always, it would be cool if the regulars would load the page a couple times in the interim, just to keep traffic from dropping to nil (aside from goofy search engine hits, like this one). And as always, good reading can be found in the various sections of the blogroll.

And for your amusement, here are a couple of ruminations on supermarket shopping, by George Carlin. I’ve excerpted this from his book Napalm and Silly Putty. The scary thing is, thanks to work I can now relate to this stuff on multiple levels.

“Shopping hungry is great; you just keep loading things into your cart. But then, after several aisles, you realize you may have overdone it: You find yourself pushing a motorcade of three carts, all tied together with long loops of string cheese. Once again, you’ve lost control.

“And so, as you realize you don’t have enough money to pay for everything, you begin to put back some of the more expensive items. Like meat.

“‘Meat? Twenty-seven dollars? Bullshit! I’ll put back these steaks and grab a few more pound cakes. The kids shouldn’t be eating meat anyway.’

“The nicest thing about putting things back in the supermarket is that you can put them anywhere you want. No one cares. You can leave the Robitussin next to the ham hocks and stick the marshmallows in with the Bacon Bits. They don’t care. They have people who come around at midnight to straighten that stuff out, and in the morning everything is back where it belongs.

“By the way, next time you shop at a supermarket in a neighborhood that has a higher than average marijuana use, take a look at the cookie section. Combat zone. Half the packages have been opened, and all the really good cookies are gone.

“‘Where the hell are the Mallomars?’

“‘Oh, we can’t get Mallomars into the store. Folks line up at the loading dock for Mallomars.’

“There are always plenty of crappy cookies. You ever notice that? Shitty, low-priced local cookies? Like ‘Jim’s Home-Style Cookies. Twenty-six varieties.’ I say, ‘Damn, Jim, if you can’t make cookies in twenty-five tries, leave me out.'”

OK, that’s all for that. See you next Sunday!

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Keep an eye on Mike’s Baseball Rants, for the return of Joe Morgan Chat Day.

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It’s been a while since I filched one of NASA’s Astronomy Pictures of the Day, and I missed the Image of the Week due to my now-abating head cold, so here’s a nifty shot of the X-43A experimental jet, which engaged in a test run last week in which it exceeded Mach 7.

I like how we’re starting to design things that look like they belong in “the future”, seeing as how just about everybody I know is disappointed on some level that the twenty-first century doesn’t look the way it was supposed to. And I also like the fact that NASA is still using that blue circular logo of theirs — kind of a “The more things change, the more things stay the same” type of thing.

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Yes it is, according to this guy, who has apparently decreed that the letter ‘C’ is useless and should be eliminated:

“The sheer uselessness of a letter which just mimics the sound of not one but two different consonants is staggering. It only causes confusion and is probably costing companies millions every year.”

Well, I rather like the letter ‘C’, aside from the fact that it’s my middle initial. (No, it doesn’t stand for anything, which gives me something in common with Harry S Truman.)

Link via Phileos, a blog whose viewpoint I don’t entirely share but which also provides quite a bit of nifty linkage and also sports just about the spiffiest blog design I’ve seen. I mean, that is one fine looking blog. Go look.

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Sometimes you find a blog post with a headline that compels you to keep reading. Case in point. Oh, and Sarah takes on the Quiz-That-Ate-Blogistan, too.

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