Sentential Links

Links…yup…links. Hoo boy. Links. Everybody needs links.

:: So there I was, at the work house, holding a knife. And you know what it’s like when you’re holding something like that. When you pick up a nice baseball bat, you want to swing it around. You pick up a hatchet, you want to cut some wood. Some things yearn toward their purpose. Some things are the embodiment of a purpose. Some objects are practically crystallized verbs.

What I’m getting at, is that I was filled with a powerful urge to stab something.

:: An Italian millionaire sets out to make his version of Star Wars and dang if he didn’t do just that. (Oh yes, folks…Starcrash! One of the absolute worst things I’ve ever seen…I love it so!)

:: What I would really like to have is a camera that needs no more light than my eyes need. (I wish for the same thing. If I can see, why can’t the camera?)

:: On the other hand, extras can sometimes kill you. One idiot will be looking into the camera or not reacting and it distracts from the scene. So if you ever get to be an extra someday DON’T DO THAT. You’ll find your career is a very very short one. Someone else will be hanging out with George Clooney instead of you, and if that isn’t a deterrent I don’t know what one is.

:: Lindelof presented it as a sort of revelatory creative epiphany. I saw it as a case of a grade-A asshole of a father traumatizing a child (something I sadly recognize all too well), who then rationalizes a horrible experience as a positive one (ditto there, too). Of course, your mileage may vary. (Wow. Interesting anecdote over there.

:: Based on all the mean things I say about it, you might think that I don’t really look forward to reading Funky Winkerbean every day. Nothing could be further from the truth! (Oh, I totally look forward to reading Funky every day! Imagine if you learned that each and every day you could drive by a horrible car wreck on your way to work, that you personally would never be in the car wreck, and the car wreck would not slow up traffic too much? That’s what Funky Winkerbean brings to the table! A daily car wreck with no danger at all to me! Huzzah!)

:: It’s a vision that I hope comes true. I can see it so clearly in my imagination: hundreds of passengers lining a futuristic version of a modern-day cruise ship’s promenade railing, pressing against floor-to-ceiling viewports that have been uncovered for just this occasion, straining to catch a glimpse of a historical treasure. The anticipation builds. A couple of people point excitedly at spots that turn out to be nothing at all, false sightings. Then the ship’s officers helpfully announce over the speakers where the crowd should look… and there it is, the legendary Flying Dutchman of space… a tiny, fragile-looking thing, pitted and scoured by centuries of exposure to interstellar dust and micrometeorites, glistening faintly like a dragonfly in the glare of the liner’s external floodlights. Its nuclear powercells are going cold, its transmitter no longer calls home, but somehow, improbably, it’s still going — still voyaging — ever outward… (I told Jason on Facebook that I think he sells himself short and that he wrote the idea better than Lileks, who reminds me of something Christopher Moore once said, I think about PJ O’Rourke: “He’s a guy who reminds you that all the fun that was ever there be had, was had already before you were born.”

More next week!

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