Chapter Five of The Promised King was posted yesterday, so go read it. If you don’t, all your friends will point at you and laugh.
What a beginning!
I started Simon R. Green’s space-opera novel Deathstalker last night, and while I’m only a handful of pages into it, I want to note that I love the first two paragraphs. Really. These two paragraphs are just masterful in the way they set a mood and establish a setting that I hope the rest of the novel lives up to. Don’t believe me? Here are those two paragraphs:
It gets dark out on the Rim. Strange planets and stranger people can be found on the edge of Empire, where habitable worlds are few and civilization grows thin. Beyond the Rim lies uncharted darkness, where no stars shine and few ships go. It’s easy to get lost out there, far away from everything. Starcruisers patrol up to the Rim, but there are never enough ships to cover the vast areas of open space. The Empire is growing too large, too cumbersome, though no one will admit it, or at least, no one who matters. Every year more worlds are brought into the Empire, and the frontiers press hungrily outward. But not on the Rim. The Empire stops cold there, dwarfed by the unplummable depths of Darkvoid.
It gets dark out there. Ships disappear sometimes, and are never seen again. No one knows why. The colonized worlds make themselves as self-sufficient as they can and turn their eyes away from the endless dark. Crime flourishes on the Rim, unthinkable distances from the hub of the Empire’s strict laws; some transgressions as old as Humanity, others newly birthed by the Empire’s ever-growing sciences. For the moment the Empire’s starcruisers still keep a lid on things, dropping unannounced out of hyperspace to enforce the law with brutal efficiency, but they can’t be everywhere. Strange forces are at work on the Rim, patient and terrible, and all it will take to set them off is a simple clash between two starships off the backwater planet of Virimonde.
Now, if that’s not a killer beginning, I don’t know what is. True, the rest of the novel might blow chunks, but it’s been a long time since a book hooked me in the opening paragraphs like this. Bravo. This is the kind of opening that has me thinking, “Damn, where’s my popcorn?”
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Film music: yes, it’s music
I enjoyed this Newsday article on film music, although I have one quibble with it, down toward the end: there seems to be this habit of assigning John Williams to some later generation of film composers, while for some reason Jerry Goldsmith gets assigned to the “Golden Age”, along with guys like Herrmann and Rozsa and all the rest. Williams and Goldsmith were only born three years apart, with only about eight years separating their first credits. Williams belongs to Goldsmith’s generation, not James Horner’s.
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Hmmmmm….
According to Jessa Crispin, the movie being made from Alan Moore’s graphic novel V For Vendetta will suck for the following reasons, in part:
….there’s no way in hell the studio is going to be okay with all aspects of the storyline (fascism sprung up from democracy, not an outside source; the hero is a fucking terrorist; etc.), it has Natalie Portman….
Well, I certainly can’t think of how a movie could possibly be made starring Natalie Portman that involves a hero who does bad things and involves a democracy becoming a fascist regime. I mean, the idea of such a movie is ridiculous!
Now, back to my regularly-scheduled scouring of the Web for rumors about the new Star Wars movie, wherein Natalie Portman will watch her Jedi lover turn to the Dark Side and commit all manner of evil acts in assisting in the conversion of the Galactic Republic into the Galactic Empire….
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Recently, I was at The Store discussing the inevitable onset of dating on the part of our daughters. The guy with whom I was speaking is an avid sportsman, and he indicated that he will make sure he’s cleaning his firearms in plain view on the first instance of A Prospective Boyfriend arriving to escort his Little Princess to the local Soda Fountain for a bit of ice cream before bringing her back promptly by 8:30. (Yes, that’s the way it will be.)
I responded by pointing out that I won’t have guns out, since I will never own a gun — while I have no problems with gun ownership in general, on a personal level guns give me the willies. (I get slightly nervous when the armed truck drivers arrive, sidearms holstered, to pick up our daily deposits.) So, when First Date Night arrives in my household, I’ll be setting up camp on the kitchen table to sharpen my kitchen cutlery. Guns? Not in my home. Beautiful, sharp knives? Oh, you bet. Knives galore. They’re the most important tools in your kitchen after pots and pans, don’t you know. Gotta keep ’em sharp. (In fact, pots and pans may come in second, after knives.)
Why am I babbling about all this? Because apparently TBogg takes the opposite approach.
Maybe the movie they make about TBogg’s family can be a double feature, along with this movie….
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New Stuff Abounds….
I’ve made some shifts to the blogroll, over there in the sidebar. I’m not going to list the newcomers here, because…well, no good reason. Just go click on an unfamiliar-looking blog and go read. They’re all good, because I don’t link blogs that stink. Really. (It’s bad enough that I occasionally suspect myself of writing one.)
Oh, and I’ve got a bunch of new eBay auctions running right now — I’ve embarked on a project to weed out the CD collection a bit. It’s hard picking stuff to go, but the fact is that I have accumulated a lot of stuff I honestly doubt I’ll ever really listen to again. It’s not that I’m auctioning off the bad music in my collection (well, the Mission to Mars filmscore comes awfully close), but the stuff that is either not to my liking any more or never really was to begin with. This project is undertaken, of course, with the ultimate goal in mind of…making room for more stuff.
And so it goes.
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Ballad of the Fighting Keyboarders?
Mr. Sun posits what a movie about the world of blogging might be like. I just hope that Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter”, updated to feature a computer keyboard (with maybe the double-clicking of a mouse standing in for the chiming of the carriage-return bell), would be on the soundtrack.
I’d also hope for a scene in which the guy who played Paul Pfeiffer on The Wonder Years is shown banging away at his keyboard in his basement, screaming, “Why can’t I get an Instalanche…oh why won’t Glenn link me….”
(And no, the guy who played Paul on The Wonder Years is not Marilyn Manson. Cut it out.)
(UPDATE: Hmmm. I wonder what the TRON universe would look like, if adopted to reflect the existence of blogs?)
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
I wonder if either Agassi or Federer lunged after the ball:
That’s an actual tennis game, being played on a refitted helipad atop a rather high-rise hotel in Dubai. Wild. I looked at this and had two thoughts, pretty much at the same time:
1. I wonder if the platform tilts and if sharp spikes pop out, at the behest of a remote control in the hands of Prince Vultan. (Ten geek points if you get the reference here.)
2. That would be a great way of settling all of John McEnroe’s heated arguments with line judges about whether the ball was in or out. “The ball is currently plummeting past the twentieth story, Mr. McEnroe. I think it’s safe to say that it was out.”
(via David Sucher)
EDIT and UPDATE: Well, that’s what I get for lazily hotlinking a photo on someone else’s server; it’s not showing as of this writing, so I’m actually putting a copy of the photo on my own server. You know, “doing the right thing”. I hate it when I have to do that!
But it’s all right, actually, because I found something even better: a photo gallery devoted to this very “tennis in the sky” thing. Here’s one that I found particularly striking:
I love that Mosque in the background; it gives this picture a kind of “blending secular and sacred” thing that I enjoy when it’s done well, and it still conveys the idea of tremendous height.
And if you’re wondering just how much height is really involved, there’s this:
According to the news item linked above, the helipad is over 700 feet up, or 320 meters. (It’s that little green circular thing sticking off into space, way up on the side.) If you want to see how a 320m building compares to a building in your neck of the woods, check Skyscrapers.com (warning — this site’s user interface is, shall we say, less than intuitive). If their figures are accurate, that building would dwarf the entire Buffalo skyline if suddenly plopped down here, since our tallest building — 40-story One HSBC Center — is only 161m tall. Wow.
(Personal note: I long for the day when there’s another tall building in Buffalo to draw attention away from One HSBC Center, which has to be the most “vanilla” skyscraper I have ever seen. I don’t think a more boring building could have been constructed by anyone.)
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When last we left our heroine….
Attentive readers — both of them, at any rate — will remember that Chapter Four of The Promised King left Gwynwhyfar, the heroine, and her abductor-turned-companion, Brother Llyad, in a bit of a pickle. Well, at last you can see how they extricate themselves from said pickle, in the thrill-packed continuation of the epic saga which has thrilled single digits of readers all across Blogistan. So get thee to Chapter Five and read on in The Promised King!
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Steenking Badges
According to Our Girl in Chicago, we’re supposed to list the five movie quotes that leap to mind first. That seems slightly odd, but let’s see….hmmm….OK:
1. “They’re shitty.” (actually a subtitled line, from Major League)
2. “Did you try the plain cake?” (spoken in an inadvertent Cockney accent, from My Fair Lady)
3. “Nice to smell you again…(aside) Wouldn’t peg him as a Polo man.” (from Contact)
4. “Back, and to the left…back, and to the left…back, and to the left…back, and to the left…” (from JFK)
5. “Louis, are you pro-Vichy or Free French?” (from Casablanca)
(And as long as I’m pilfering blog memes, it’s been quite a while since the “Ask Five Questions” one went around, so far as I can tell. Anyone feel like asking me five questions, or being asked five questions? My previous installments in “Ask Five Questions” are here and here. Either e-mail or leave questions in comments.)