SDB gets sick, and spends a week bringing us up to speed on his intense dislike of all things Gallic. Then he gets some antibiotics (and he’s amazed at how big the pills are), and discovers Harry Potter.

I pretty much agree with his synopsis of the first Potter movie, right down to its odd short-changing of Professor Snape (and if you’ve read the subsequent books in the series, you know how odd a decision that was on the part of the filmmakers, who would have been better served short-changing some of the “Life with the Dursleys” stuff at the beginning). What struck me was that where the first two books really creak in spots (they were, after all, Rowling’s maiden efforts), the first film is a lot more confident. (I haven’t seen the second one yet.) I’m looking forward to the films of Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire, although the latter is going to present some serious problems, from a length standpoint. Goblet is twice as long as any of the preceding novels, and with those books resulting in two-and-a-half hour films, it thus seems that Goblet would require a five-hour movie.

Oh, and SDB’s right about John Hurt. That guy is golden. I especially love his billionaire industrialist in Contact and his Scottish nobleman in Rob Roy.

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TheForce.Net put up a fan-written script for Star Wars Episode III yesterday. You all can check it out, but I’m not so geeky that I’d read such a thing.

Well, OK, I did skim through quite a bit of it. And it’s not bad. Parts of it are quite good, actually. I do think that the author played up Palpatine’s machinations a bit too much, to the exclusion of the idea that it’s our choices that make us good or evil, which is a constant theme in Star Wars. I was also tickled at how the writer tries to square some of the stuff in the original trilogy with the prequels, as well as attempting to ground Obi Wan’s “lie” to Luke (“Vader murdered your father”) in better fashion (“Palpatine has killed you,” Obi Wan tells Anakin). I do think that the script left fewer loose ends than George Lucas is likely to leave. One thing that seems to really vex a lot of fans, but which I find rather nifty, is the sheer amount of stuff that Lucas simply leaves unexplained or unexplored. Lucas actually enhances the epic feel of the story by not showing us everything, which is why I enjoy the likely fact that most of the action of the Clone Wars won’t be shown at all. This script, though, seems overly concerned with tying everything into a neat little package. I really don’t think Episode III is going to do this. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

I also didn’t care for the script’s climax. (SPOILER warning, here.) We have the long-awaited duel between Obi Wan and Anakin on the volcanic planet, but added to this mix is Padme, who ends up dangling from a precipice above the lava whilst the two former friends do battle. I know that the Star Wars movies cite those old serials as one of their primary influences, but this just struck me as too Perils of Pauline-like to really work.

Still, it’s an entertaining read. Check it out, if only to look at one set of possibilities.

(UPDATE: Just another thought that occurred to me. I liked this script because it treats the prequel storyline with respect. It’s not at all like that “Alternate Phantom Menace” script of a few years back, the one that had horrid stuff like Obi Wan telling Padme that Qui Gon is sad because his wife and children were killed, or some such nonsense. This script isn’t about “Let’s squash Jar Jar beneath the foot of an AT-AT” fanboy wish-fulfillment.)

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I got 11 right of 13 on this quiz of literary first lines. (That result isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds — I guessed on three, and missed on one.) One of my mistakes was for an SF novel, that I am now kicking myself for missing. Ach!!

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It just hit me after reading his latest post: I want to be John Scalzi. He’s living the life that I want. So, now to kill him and take his….oh, OK. I’ve just been informed that I don’t have to kill him after all. Whew. I wasn’t relishing the thought of driving to Ohio.

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Can’t we build a big fence around Blogistan or something?

(via TBOGG)

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So now we’re handing out wanted posters in Iraq. Next, we’ll send in Robert Patrick with a LAPD uniform and a polariod to demand of the Iraqis, “Have you seen Saddam Hussein?”

And it certainly seems odd that in the last two years, we’re oh-for-two in actually capturing or at least determining the fate of the baddies on whom we’ve decided to unleash our military might. Our success in this regard strikes me as being pretty similar to that of O.J. and his hunt for the “real killers”.

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According to this interview, with a “literary author” who is using a pseudonym to write thrillers on the side, the difference between “genre” books and “literary” books is that in the former, stuff happens.

Well, OK then.

(Link via S.L. Viehl.)

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Kevin Drum has an interesting post today about conservatives and their fixations on sex and communism. He argues that these are the bedrock concerns of the conservative movement, and I find it hard to disagree. I’ve certainly always noted that for the conservatives, anti-communism trumps everything. You can set up all manner of Deep Throat/James Bond money-and-gunrunning schemes and then lie to Congress about them, as Ollie North did, but if you can make the case that you did it to fight communism, well, it’s all good. And I’ve certainly noticed a resurgence of the word “pinko” in some of the coarser conservative commentary out there, which strikes me as weird.

I even noticed that, to conservatives, anti-communism even appeared to trump “family values” during the Elian Gonzales affair a few years back. The party that once celebrated Dan Quayle’s famous defense of fatherhood was not prepared to honor the fatherhood rights of a communist. I suppose the real test would be to have sex and communism come into conflict. During the impeachment of President Clinton, I once joked to a friend that if Clinton really wanted to defuse the situation, he should try to mount a defense that his actions with Monica Lewinsky were somehow part of an anti-communism scheme. “Yes, I lied under oath…but the judge was a Communist!!!”

Maybe Communism is still a major threat, but to me it just seems like…oh I don’t know, like maintaining vigilance against witches or zombies. For me, communism pretty much fizzled out as something to be taken seriously when an episode of Seinfeld had Elaine dating a Communist, and Kramer getting fired from his job as a department store Santa because he was spreading communist propaganda to the children who came to sit on his lap.

“He can do whatever he wants, Jerry. He controls the means of production!”

(Oh, and by using a wide-angle lens, Kevin has managed to make his cat indistinguishable from a ferret. Weird….)

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It occurred to me yesterday that I recently removed Tacitus from my blogroll (“Other Journeys”) because I’d fallen off reading him, even though I conceded his general excellence — this while I maintained Rachel Lucas on my blogroll, despite my recent complaining that she’s not as interesting to me as she was when I first discovered her blog. This now seems to me a case of messed-up priorities: removing the blog I consider good and keeping the one I’m increasingly finding annoying (This. Method. Of. Punctuation. Has. Run. Its. Course. For. The. Love. Of. God.), coupled with the fact that it’s my blogroll and I can have on it whoever I want to, leads me to conclude that I should re-link Tacitus and do a better job of reading him.

Or it could just mean I need to eat more fiber and red meat.

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Aaron has an amusing article about the little surprises one finds in the basements of old houses. (Apparently, by linking this article I am in fact voting for him in another “New Blog Contest” on The Truth Laid Bear.) Aaron and his wife discovered a container of an old cleaning chemical, which is unremarkable enough until they read the instructions for use.

My family, thus far, has lived in apartments only, so we haven’t had this pleasure — except for our very first apartment, when my wife and I first got married. This was in a very old and large building that had once been a school. We had a lot of room, hardwood floors that creaked, an ancient gas stove, et cetera. We also had a musty basement that we never used for anything. I never found any amusing cleaning solutions down there, but it was partitioned into a series of small rooms interlinked by old, wooden doors, and light coming only from the bare light bulbs set in old fixtures in the ceiling. No windows at all. The whole place was reminiscent of Buffalo Bill’s basement in The Silence of the Lambs.

“It puts the lotion in the basket….”

(By the way, Aaron, the little conundrum you had with “flammable” and “inflammable” is not unique to you. In fact, it was used in an episode of The Simpsons. If I recall correctly, it was Dr. Nick — “Hi, every-body!” “Hi, Dr. Nick!” — who ran afoul of that bit of linguistic oddity.)

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