Tag: Sentential Links

Yeah, I’ve stopped numbering these. No real reason why, I just got tired of having to go back and look it up each time out. Anyway, the linkage:

:: Good evening… come on in. Why don’t you get yourself some popcorn and a Coke from our stunning black-on-silver art-deco refreshment stand? (Be nice to the charming and vivacious young lady manning the counter; you’ll find her attitude very different from the sullen mouth-breathers at the multiplex. She actually likes her job.) Yes, I know our modestly sized bags of corn look puny compared to those MegaTubs you’re accustomed to getting at the other places, but trust me: this is all you need. (Errr…no. I mean, I’m with him all the way, except for the giant megatub of popcorn. When it comes in tubs, anyway. Nowadays, most times you get a bag.)

:: Really? Dreaming of overalls is good luck?? Dreaming of presents means you will always be showered with gifts?!? Is this pop psychology or pop mysticism?? (Yeesh, that’s weird, is what that is. I don’t dream of overalls, to my knowledge…hmmm….)

:: If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Enh, I’m not going to give the new revamped Dick Tracy a chance until it inexplicably includes a panel featuring a villain quoting from Men Without Hats’ 1982 smash hit ‘Safety Dance,’” then you are officially out of excuses, my friend.

:: And 24 makes interesting villains and then just stubbornly refuses to examine them or even allow them to speak. I know it’s supposed to be this Rah Rah Jack Bauer Punches People In the Soul show, but in its first seasons it was often quite deft and interesting–right up until we should actually hear the whyporn, and then the YOU JUST WOULDN’T GET ME scowly crap starts up, every single damn season.

:: In spite of the extreme importance that Dickens places on Marley’s death right away in his story, all the film versions so far have left Marley out of the earliest scenes. Alastair Sim’s is the first to introduce him this soon. (Michael May is surveying all the various versions of A Christmas Carol that are out there. Good stuff, as always!)

:: Okay, this is all going to be heavily theoretical, possibly annoying, and maybe even misguided, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I need to try and verbalize this. And just to get the trigger out of the way, this is going to be some thoughts about racism, intentional and unintentional, in pop culture. (This is a fascinating post about race in Sesame Street and Star Trek. Check it out.)

More next week!

Share This Post

Linkage!!!

:: Isn’t that breathtaking? This image shows a portion of a much larger complex which currently has over a dozen stars forming inside it. Several of the stars you see here are quite young, only a few million years old.

:: Can you blame them? 76 years later, we are still seeking answers when it comes to the question of life on Mars. Curiosity is the latest tool in that scientific quest to see if we are alone in the universe. One can’t help but wonder what our 2011 astronomy textbooks will look like when they’re pulled from a dusty shelf by future generations. (I’m feeling astronomical and science-y lately. I like it when this mood comes!)

:: There are lots of people who consider themselves “old” who yet were born in the age of microwave popcorn. I maintain you can’t really consider yourself old unless you’ve cooked Jiffy Pop on the stove. (I remember Jiffy Pop…and not at all fondly. It’s terrible popcorn.)

:: It it important that you compose, without delay, our Standard Opening Narration for Bill Shatner to record. It should run about 15 seconds in length, as we discussed earlier. (Wow!)

:: These characters haven’t just lost their race, their culture, their home, and their age to this adaptation. They’ve lost what made us love them to begin with. They’ve lost their souls. (I suppose I should watch Akira one of these years….)

:: How is it, for whatever reason, ST:TNG always manages its way into the upper echelons of science fiction lists despite the weight of its first season, an unbalanced second season and a good number of lemons to boot along the way?

:: That’s what I kept thinking about, watching that little flap of flesh. It’s one of those little things in our bodies that we are never really aware of, those small working parts that flick a tiny fraction of an inch, or release a certain chemical just when it’s needed, or do a thousand little things that they do day after day. Until they don’t. Because we are delicate things. We imagine ourselves to be strong or tough or even big, but we are not. We are made up of little, bitty, breakable things, only as strong as the weakest bit, and vulnerable in ways we dare not imagine.

:: My poor kitty was alone and terrified and dying and I wasn’t there…and now he’s gone. (These posts invariably make me terribly sad. I hate when beloved cats die.)

More next week!

Share This Post

Linkage….

:: If the United States truly is, as I’ve always been told, the richest country on earth, the best country on earth, how can we in good conscience abandon a human life in this way? The dirty truth behind our for-profit insurance industry is that insurers are more concerned with the dividends of their shareholders than the needs of their policy holders. People carry insurance as a hedge against anything really bad ever happening to us, but if anything really bad does happen, the insurance companies fight like hell to not actually help you, and that is just wrong. No… it’s obscene. (Stuff like this sickens me. Not doing the obvious thing about health care in this country because we’ve been conditioned to have this infantile fear of “the government” will be judged harshly in the light of history.)

:: If you’re flying on an airline that doesn’t have reserved seating never sit next to anyone who is already eating or reading Ann Coulter. (And speaking of Ann Coulter, I wonder what she’s been up to lately….)

:: Note to cable television bookers. This is not humor. This is not commentary. This is eliminationist rhetoric from a career white-supremacist. This is not a fit person to bring into the public discussion of anything. This is a vicious evil woman who would sell her grayhaired granny to the Somali pirates for 15 minutes worth of airtime. This is someone who should be shunned, permanently, by anybody with a sense of human decency. (Well, that answers that, doesn’t it?)

:: One of my long time pet peeves… No wait, this is more than a peeve; it borders on outrage. This really pisses me off, folks. What I’m sputtering about is the lack of different inseam lengths in women’s pants. (I’ve been clothes-shopping enough with The Wife to know that the way womens’ pants are sized is madness.)

:: Now if there’s one employee ID card out there that’s likely to summon less immediate respect from yours truly, or carry less moral weight, it’s one that says I’m a stock broker down on Wall Street. And take that how you will. And this guy was showing this not just as a badge of honor but a means of intimidation. Like “little old drink maker me” should be shaking in his boots.

:: Do I know style or do I know style? (Errrr….)

:: Embrace the change. Go all-star. Produce nothing but brilliant, compelling, gotta-have-a-copy work. Make or develop stars, yes, but do so in an enlightened manner, as fairly, equitably, honestly and intelligently as possible. Go for or real talent, not flavor-du-jour or one-hit-wonder people. Use the small companies as your farm system,or start one of your own. Do not publish anything except the best of the best.

More next week….

Share This Post

Targets acquired. Linkage commencing.

:: In the meantime, I’m thankful to first person shooters, not only for helping me write the novel that put me on the map, but also for giving me a way, at the end of the day, to shut off my brain, run around and shoot the crap out of everything I see. (I love this ongoing series that John Scalzi has going on: a Thanksgiving Advent Calendar, wherein he writes about one thing each day that he’s thankful for. Great stuff!)

:: We’ll see about that — I’ve been hearing my whole life that a manned Mars trip was only a few years off — but after all the melancholy and apparent loss of direction that accompanied the end of the shuttle, it’s good to hear somebody talking seriously about a human presence up there in the black… (You can’t take the sky from me!)

:: Snow Canyon is truly an undiscovered jewel. It’s close to a few national parks and because of this, people just pass right by. If you are ever in southern Utah, it’s a must see.

:: That is why I have decided to call my first draft a ‘discovery’ draft from now on. It is much more encouraging. (Ah yes, I need to do a writing update. I hope to find out how well I relate to this in a month or two, once I have a completed draft of a book to process!)

:: It’s a good strip! And it’s funny! Maybe this is it, guys. Maybe this is where it all turns around, and Funky Winkerbean steps away from the abyss. Maybe things are finally looking up! (Three guesses as to how this turns out, and the first two don’t count.)

:: One hopes that he remains so focused on her that he doesn’t notice Billy making a wholly inept attempt to summon up the Prince of Darkness by reading the hymnal upside down. (Wow, I didn’t even notice that. I confess to reading Family Circus religiously in hopes of seeing what it is that Comics Curmudgeon will mock it for!)

:: Physics! It’s not only cool, it can also save your $100 billion science project.

More next week!

Share This Post

Linkage begins…NOW!

:: It has just been discovered that we are down to our last TWO gummy bears. I have released every creature at the cave from their regular duties until the gummy bear deficit can be rectified. (Sorry, but ewwww! Not a fan of Gummi anything.)

:: This was the moment I knew I was in for something good… that a jack o’lantern, the orange letters, and the ominous piano music alone could make me expectant and apprehensive.

Damn, this is a good flick.

:: It’s hard to vomit gracefully. For one, there’s the noise — the vocal wretching followed by that wet slap. There’s also the undignified sprint to the toilet or sink or unattended fedora. There’s the whole Jackson Pollock-y result of it all. There’s the fact that vomiting serves as both an announcement of both everything you’ve eaten in the recent past (“You should chew your Goldfish crackers more thoroughly!”) as well as how bad your insides smell.

:: Yesterday I spent a few hours finding shelf space for recent acquisitions, and for the seven-hundred-forty-third time in the last decade, I made a promise designed to be broken: I will not buy another book until I have read all that own. (Just reading that gives me a serious case of shivers.)

:: I don’t care for the Monster’s bald look and De Niro’s performance makes me pity the Monster more than relate to him (and relating to the Monster is one of my favorite things to do in a good Frankenstein movie), but he does deliver a chilling interpretation of my favorite line from the novel: “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” (Michael May has been doing “31 Days of Frankenstein” this month; here he discusses Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a movie which I liked more than its general critical reception. Now, I tend to not be terribly squeamish, but the scene where Dr. Frankenstein pays a midwife for a bucket of, well, used amniotic fluid made me go “Oooogg….”)

:: Well, we do have to have standards. I mean, we can’t all be Snooki. (I don’t even know who or what ‘Snooki’ is. A person? A band? A muppet? A secret paramilitary organization? Dunno.)

All for this week!

Share This Post

Linkage commences…now.

:: We have little trouble buying that a young man from Texas who never travelled abroad and had limited formal education could write convincingly about kingdoms and barbarian heroes from the mythical Hyborian Age. We don’t doubt that a mere civil servant could have so convincingly written about a womanizing super spy with a license to kill, not that a high school english teacher from Bangor Maine could write about the supernatural. (Or that a welfare mother could sit down in a coffeeshop and scribble out longhand a series of novels about a young boy’s adventures at Wizarding School…or….)

:: Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans: don’t come here. Not only does our economy suck, but apparently you will be caught and turned into slaves. I know, I know, this country prides itself on being the home of liberties and rights. We say a lot of shit we don’t mean.

:: Do they even have scary carnival attractions like this anymore? Sure, they were a bitter disappointment once you got inside, but that wasn’t the point. The name of the game was (1) conquering your fears and (2) having something to brag about later.

:: Toward the middle of Anonymous the drunken, illiterate imbecile William Shakespeare, taking a curtain call for Henry V, a play he didn’t write, falls off the stage. He’s caught by the groundlings in the front row and—passed hand to hand. You read me right: Shakespeare may not have written Henry V, but he did invent crowdsurfing. Unintentionally.

:: Today has been one of those days where I feel like my body is neither big enough nor strong enough to contain my life.

:: Thanks to Batman: Arkham City, a vast open world, GTA-style video game, I’m getting my first taste of what being the Caped Crusader is all about. And it turns out that – if this game has it right – Batman’s life is a lot more mundane and ridiculous than we ever realized.

:: So even in a mega-size city full of noise, chaos, and competition, all around me there were signs of pie. And that made me feel right at home.

More next week!

Share This Post

Just one this week….

:: We were lucky, my son and I. We didn’t have much awkwardness between us. Spending so much time together, everyone in our family has time to make him- or herself clear. To say what needs to be said. To leave unsaid what is already understood. To sit in companionable silence. (Mrs. M-Mv raised a fine young man…whose story very sadly came to an end last year. Memories like this, freely offered, provide a glimpse into not one soul, but two.)

More next week.

Share This Post

Linkage begins…now.

:: I wish the makers of air fresheners would be more specific about what their products smell like instead of having cutesy names like “Sunny Meadow” and “Early Morning Breeze”. (But how else does one describe these things, other than “Nice-smelling collection of chemicals #5”? I point out in comments over there how a lot of men’s deodorants describe their scents in terms that aren’t aromatically evocative at all, like “Fresh Sport” and “Victory”.)

:: I feel like I’ve lost the connection to some of the deepest parts of my identity: whatever talents I have as a writer, my literary and cinematic interests, my curiosity, hell, my sense of enjoyment. Not being able to do the things I enjoy and by which I’ve always defined myself is generating tremendous anxiety for me. (Ye Gods, I wish I had something wise to say to Jason about this kind of thing….)

:: Seriously, it’s nice that there can suddenly be complete Looney Tunes cartoon physics in a comic defined by someone’s lingering death from cancer. (Ahhhh, ripping on Funky Winkerbean — one of my favorite of all pastimes!)

:: DC is like Lucy and we’re like Charlie Brown. DC keeps yanking the football away and we keep yelling Aaugh! and landing hard. They’re very sure we’ll keep coming back and try to kick the ball again. And, knowing some of the perps fairly well, I can assure you they’re pretty smug about it.

So far, they’re right. (For some reason, I like reading reactions to DC Comics’s reboot, despite the fact that I just don’t read the comics at all. Weird.)

:: If you watched TV in the 1970s and 80s, you know it was wall to wall babes. Sure, the ladies had their Tom Selleck and David Soul; but, the guys had eye candy from the minute you powered that boob tube on. There were simply tons of actresses finding work in bit parts on sitcoms and one-time roles on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island or Love, American Style. Some got recurring parts, but mostly, you blinked and you missed them.

:: Look at it this way: Should the government tell the overalls factory to pay its employees a decent wage and to avoid using toxic chemicals in its fabric? Absolutely. Should the government tell people that they’d better wear shirts under their overalls and cinch up those straps tight? Of course not! (This blog mixes semi-serious political writing with photos of women clad in overalls, and nothing else. I swear I am not making this up. Believe me, this one is NSFW!)

:: When you come right down to it, Scooby Doo wouldn’t have been a bad replacement for Fox Mulder given his credentials in solving mysteries and dealing with monsters.

:: If we can break the launch-price bottleneck, this century can be the time when humankind spreads across the inner solar system out to the asteroid belt. Twentieth Century science-fiction dreamed of the power of such a civilization, and those dreams may still be the truest prophecy of our time: At the end of the Twenty-First Century, with asteroid-based industries supporting GDPs a million times what we have now, interstellar flight will be a doable adventure!

The stars are not too far. (So writes Vernor Vinge, highly-regarded SF writer, whose sequel to his twenty-year-old novel A Fire Upon the Deep — which I plan to re-read soon — is imminent. I don’t know if he’s right or not, but it’s so nice to find an SF writer who is willing to be optimistic, and who is not willing to give up on humanity going to the stars. Lots of other authors may write fun space operas with FTL travel and star-spanning cultures, but in interviews, they all seem to say, “Yeah, we’re never leaving the Solar System, that’s it.” Vinge clearly believes otherwise, and thank God for that.)

More next week!

Share This Post

Time for linkage!

:: Now I did not live there. It was only four days. But there was a point, walking by the Royal Ontario Museum on our second day there, when I said to my wife: “I think I could live here,” assuming that we had employment, etc. Good mass transit, bikes, educational capital, intellectual stimulation, massive multiculturalism; there were plenty of places we DIDN’T get a chance to see. And there are angrier people in lots of US cities I’ve been to, starting with Albany, NY. (Toronto really is a fantastic place…and it increasingly irritates me that I haven’t been there in five years. WTF, self?!)

:: There are not too many things I am good at but RILING UP my father is something I EXCEL at! (Knowing Andy personally…I’ll bet this is totally accurate.)

:: If we can’t make you look good, you’re ugly! (Well, sheesh….)

:: Nope, for DC Comics, their greatest strength, that enormous back catalog and mind-numbingly rich cache of characters available to them isn’t a strength. They see it as a weakness, something that will drive readers away.

:: Putting in 18-hour writing days for the past week has made me curious about how other writers write. A lot has changed through the centuries. From painting on cave walls to uploading eBooks, we’ve been through a lot of writing evolution, but a basic truth remains the same: writers need their own space.

:: Elvis Presley never did talk shows, he never appeared on Johnny Carson, he never “made the rounds” of promotion like other entertainers did. He was completely elusive to the press, which of course added to the mystique (but also, conversely, isolated him). The isolation did work in his favor, as it kept Presley sightings to a bare minimum, upping his worth even more. (Sheila has been posting a lot about Elvis Presley, in typically amazing fashion. It occurred to me, at some point whilst reading her series of posts, that I don’t currently own any Elvis in my music collection. None, at all. It’s weird how our music collections “morph” over time, isn’t it? As we embrace one format and then the next and then the next? I used to have some Elvis…on cassette. I may have owned a CD or two — in fact, I may still own a CD or two, in some box somewhere. But as I more and more see “my music” as “what’s taking up huge amounts of GB on my external drive”, owning something on CD somehow becomes “not really owning it”…despite the fact that owning something physical, like a CD, seems more intuitively real than owning a digital storage device that currently happens to contain somewhere within a sequence of ones and zeroes that, when processed by a computer program, constitute the thing in question. If that makes any sense at all.)

:: Kerosene needed to be cheaper than whale oil to force a global change. In other words, no one would switch until we had killed all the whales. (This is what depresses me about the state of things today: we know the problems we face, and to a large extent we know what we need to do to fix them. But we do none of the things we’re going to have to do someday anyway, because…hell, I don’t know. But we don’t.)

More next week!

Share This Post