Tag: Sentential Links

Linkage, like The Dude, abides….

:: Both books felt like a love letter to Kabul, Afghanistan and to the Afghan people to me and they made the country feel like a place that deserves such a letter. (I’ve never read either one of these books. Maybe I should.)

:: You’re not entitled to absolve yourself of blame for the entitlement mentality you so despise.

:: Me: [long angry rant of frustration] (BAHHH HAHAHAHAHA! Go forth, Interweb, and Bastianich someone today! [The humor of this will be completely lost on people who don’t watch Master Chef.)

:: Last week, I met Droner for coffee at a local Starbucks. (I love her dating stories.)

:: The Law is a blunt instrument. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.

:: As always, best of luck. Someone has to break through. Why not you?

:: Therefore, any writer who takes into account the potential reactions of his audience – which is to say any writer worth a damn – should strongly consider not just whether depicting a rape will create reaction but if that reaction merits the inclusion in the first place. If you don’t address that issue, then what’s the point of talking about rape in fiction in the first place? (Interesting discussion in response to a writer who opined that rape is ‘a f***ing awesome plot element’, which seems to me a pretty cavalier attitude toward the depiction of one of the most traumatic of all crimes.)

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:: When all writing is 144 characters long, there won’t be anymore books written in a generation or two – who would ever have the attention span left to read one?

:: Ray Bradbury made a transit as well. He moved from this world to the next — the Undiscovered Country from whose bourn no traveller returns. Whatever there is in that country — celestial figures with white robes and harps or a surfeit of nothingness — I’m sure he will have no trouble speaking the language.

:: It’s telling that we read Bradbury for his short stories. They are stylish glimpses at possibilities, meant for contemplation. The most important thing about writers is how they exist in our memories. Having read Bradbury is like having seen a striking glimpse out of a car window and then being whisked away.

:: “Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything,” Ray said once, in an interview.

ASIDE: I haven’t said anything about Ray Bradbury because, well, many others have said it better, and I give a small selection of them above. Bradbury is yet another of those writers whose work I have not read enough of but whose work I’m somewhat familiar with; in his case, it’s mostly through his short fiction, which is invariably amazing, no matter what his subject matter at the time may be. Ray Bradbury lived long and he certainly prospered. If there are such things as souls, I hope his is among the stars!

Non-Bradbury links:

:: Here’s a simple rule: if you want to be a musical, you have to write original songs. (Well, let’s be careful here. Many of the most beloved film musicals of all time don’t have any original songs, as they are film adaptations of stage musicals. And two of the musicals most often cited among lists of greatest musicals ever, Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris, almost exclusively feature recycled, existing songs. There are two original numbers in Singin’, and none in American in Paris, which uses the songs of George Gershwin, who had been dead fourteen years when the film came out. The fact is, filmed musicals that recycle songs from earlier works have a very long pedigree.)

:: Batman has the Joker, G.I Joe has COBRA, Sheriff Roscue P. Coltran has the Duke boys and I have a guy that is the spitting image of Wilford Brimley at the county dump.

:: The truth is physical comedy is the most enduring. I LOVE LUCY will be funny 100 years from now. Last night’s hilarious DAILY SHOW will not.

:: The next transit is due on December 10, 2117. I suppose there’s always a chance that someone will develop a longevity serum in the next couple decades… (Nah. Cryogenics, man. That’s the way to go.)

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Links! But first, apparently Kristen Stewart blinks!

Hokey-dokey then….

:: It’s not that I hate the others; not even the prequels. They’re fine for what they are. It’s just that as the Star Wars universe expands, the impact of that first film diminishes. I don’t love them like I love that first movie. In fact, I’ve grown to think of them as non-canonical. I wish I’d known I had that option when I was 13 and rebelling against the idea that Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. I still think that’s a bogus story development. (Interesting take! Personally, Vader being Luke’s father is my favorite story development in the entire saga.)

:: This was the first time a private company did what has previously been the sole province of national governments: they designed, built, and successfully demonstrated both a booster rocket and a functioning, useful spacecraft. Yes, NASA provided some seed money and the parameters to follow, but SpaceX, and in particular the company’s founder Elon Musk, essentially did this on their own. And while there are several other private companies aiming for the same goal, SpaceX got there first. A plucky little company comprising fewer than 2,000 employees, mostly enthusiastic young people from what I can see, has brought us into the age of commercial space travel. It’s a great story. (It is a great story, and one I’m glad to see unfolding. I do hope for some caution against reading this development as another Grand Triumph of the Market Where Government Failed, because without a government to do the blunt-force to get there first, the market never would have gone there at all. Still, it’s time for governments to get out of Low-Earth Orbit and start moving out farther, and let the Market follow as it will.)

:: There are what? 7 billion people in the world now? Statistically speaking, there has to be at least one person in the world who hates puppies, Harry Potter, chocolate, AND bacon. *shudders* (This person must be found. And eliminated. The existence of such a person threatens everything that is good about the human species! New blog to me, btw…by Beth Revis, author of a SF book for teens called Across the Universe, which I just started reading. The first 40 pages are pretty good…but I’m keenly interested in the market for which this book is written, because it just might be the target market for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).)

:: Ever wondered how big the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos are compared to the real-life USA and UK? (I was actually planning to figure this out for myself, given that in A Dance with Dragons, GRRM provides a specific 300-mile distance between two points on the Westeros map, but now I see I don’t have to. Huzzah! Basically, while Westeros is significantly skinnier than the continental USA, a journey from the Wall to the southern coast of Dorne would be roughly equivalent to going from San Francisco to Boston.)

:: There’s no magic curtain you get to hide behind on the Internet, people. Think twice about just how public you are if you don’t want to embarrass yourself. And when you do, hey, you have to do what we all did in high school and we embarrassed ourselves: live with it.

:: Instead, as we’ve seen so often before, we recognize that there seem to be no boundaries as to what people seem to have been given permission online. (These last two cover similar ground. I’ll be interested to see what Presidential campaigns are like in, say, fifteen or twenty years, so that candidates have to answer for their blogs and whatnot. It’ll be interesting to see some person who ran a rabid war-blog in 2003 running for office.)

:: So I’m giving us credit for helping out Santana by not having been there. (Heh. Finally getting that first no-hitter…maybe I just don’t get it because I’m a Pirates fan and they’ve got a few no-hitters, but it strikes me as odd that such an event could be as big a monkey on the back of a franchise as the commentary has indicated since Johan Santana threw the first no-hitter in Mets history the other night. I mean, a no-hitter is awesome and all, but…well, would you trade a World Series win for a no-hitter in some regular season? I sure wouldn’t. The Mets have two World Series wins to their credit. Was a no-hitter that big a thing? Or was it just that it became a big thing once the game reached, say, the seventh inning and Mets fans all over realized what might be happening?)

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Linkage, for them what likes clickin’ those links….

:: Here’s some questions answered and my predictions for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe! (Do check this out, if you’re at all interested in how the Marvel-verse of movies may proceed from here. As long as the quality keeps up, this group of inter-related movies may end up weaving together an unprecedentedly amazing story!)

:: Here is a small thing I have started doing. It may be silly, but symbolic. I am wearing my wedding ring on my right hand in hopes that people ask me why. This will give me the opportunity to bring up my opposition to the amendment. It seems superficial, but people notice a wedding ring on the right hand and often ask why you do it.

:: Take a sip every ten times Wolverine calls someone “bub”. (Hey, it’s “dangerous”, not “fatal”.) (A Chris Claremont era X-Men drinking game! Just what the world needs!)

:: I asked you my fellow readers which of the Fantasy tropes you were most tired of and one answer stood out from the crowd: the farm boy saving the world. (Yeah, I’m tired of that, myself. Which is why in the fantasy book I’m writing now, the farm boy does not save the world. I’m not even sure if he saves himself yet. And it doesn’t matter, since he’s not really a farm boy in the first place.)

:: The thing is, young readers and viewers are pretty amazingly good at stitching together a story they love, skipping over the parts they don’t get or making up their own explanations. They like to learn new things, especially when they involve giant herds of living bicycles and stompy red dragon-type things. Nearly every “big” word I used in Fairyland can be found somewhere in the seven books of Harry Potter. Yes, kids will need to look some of them up, or ask their parents what they mean. This is part of the joy of reading as a child. Kids shouldn’t be surrounded by stories that only reflect back to them what they already know–and neither should adults.

:: Be self-centered and stupid. Do it now while you still have the veil of youth and immaturity. I’ve had the most amazing drunken decade, resulting in the kind of life that allows me to tell amazing stories which people sometimes find hard to believe. (Advice for young people.)

:: What matters, really, is that you, the sixty-year-old person, were born into a society where you had it all. You had enormous purchasing power. Yes, computers have gotten cheaper, and that’s great, but the cost of basic shelter has increased and if we’re talking about home ownership it has exploded. At twenty-four, you the sixty-year-old person in 76 (the year I was born!) would be out of university – which cost you much less than it cost me, to say nothing of what it cost a kid today, because university tuition has wildly outpaced inflation over the past thirty-six years. That’s assuming you even decided to go to university, because in 1976 you could get a decent job with a high school diploma – and when we say “decent,” we mean “above the median salary” decent. Depending on what country you lived in, your access to quality healthcare would vary, but generally speaking it was easier for you to get it then than it is for a comparable young person to get it now, be that because a given country’s private system has collapsed or its public system has been chronically underfunded (but not for senior care, which so often manages to escape the knife). And of course you were guaranteed healthy retirements, and anyone my age or younger has been systematically trained to believe that retirement is something we’re never actually going to get to do. (Systematically trained, one would note, by old people. It is convenient how that goes.) (Advice for old people.)

:: The take-away from the Mittens was a prep school bully story shouldn’t be that Mittens was a prep school bully; it should be that Mittens is an idiot.

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:: Driving around Seattle in The Beast to my book events and TV appearances took me right past the restaurants where Marcus and I had eaten, the movie theaters where we’d seen films, the coffee houses where we’d lingered and talked and fallen deeper in love.

:: It wasn’t that long ago when the entire human race couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the tip of its collective nose. Now we can look into the fires of the Universe’s birth, into that forge itself, and tease out the secrets of how we came to be.

That’s why astronomy is cool.

:: Nothing makes me happier than having something to be pissed off at. I think that’s why I continue to enjoy sports so much. Now, I can’t complain too much, as being a Pittsburgh fan of a certain advanced age has allowed me to experience an unfair amount of sports euphoria in my life. (Yeah. I’m from Buffalo. So shut it.)

:: Joel had such an impact on my listening enjoyment particularly within the science fiction genre. His scoring of all three Stargate series left such a mark on me over the years. His music was majestic and beautiful and simply a thrill a minute to enjoy. (I honestly know nothing about Joel Goldsmith’s music. I should explore it one of these days, I suppose. He was the son of Jerry Goldsmith, and he died of cancer last week while in his 50s. Very sad.)

:: Okay, so before the nerd hordes charge with their bat’leths held high (or Mjolnir replicas, or whatever), I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy watching The Avengers. Indeed, I came out of it feeling truly entertained. (So there’s a mildly negative review of The Avengers out there. Oh well, to each his own. But what a poopyhead.)

:: There are a couple of reasons for my ignorance and I’ll start with the most personally damning one: I’m a man in a traditionally patriarchal culture and that means that I’ve been privileged enough not to have to think about these things. I’ve been able to live successfully under the assumption that my culture is not just the dominant one, but really the only one. That men and women share a culture and that their experiences in that culture are more or less the same. I’ve always known that women have it tougher than men, but I never grasped the idea that the way they experience the world is fundamentally different from the way I do.

:: Sex is just a distraction from what was really going on, from what he was really about. (I am in awe of this post.)

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Linkage!

:: If Bull Durham is the Casablanca of baseball movies – filled with a love triangle, passion, battle (on the baseball field) and countless quotable lines – Annie is this movie’s Rick, the local legend who everyone knows and who has seen everything and who walks to the beat of her own drum. (Wonderful post on Bull Durham. Here’s an old post of mine on the movie, which I love dearly!)

:: I had to stop, turn off the music, and take a second to appreciate everything and everyone that has been thrown my way. After a minute, I kept going, and nearly stumbled over a baseball, lost in the grass. Picked it up, and it was heavy with rain. So I threw it into the trees surrounding the field. (My friend Kerry is going to write a heckuva book someday. And when she does, she’ll write it so well that it won’t bother me one bit that it won’t have a single space princess in it.)

:: Today’s comics remind me of Chuck Klosterman’s comment about how my generation is “The Cool Generation,” because that’s all this generation aspires to or is capable of. This is the Cool Era of comics, and I pretty much hate it. (I read Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night Green Lantern epic a while back, and it’s supposed to be a neoclassic of some sort…and yet, I didn’t like it. It was endless violence, art that crammed so much into the panel that it was impossible to make sense of what was going on, and no sense of any characters at all. Not a fan.)

:: For her, the only shuttle that never flew in space, it was a sort of homecoming, one last day in the sun, one last chance to stretch her wings. I almost expected her to cast free of the jet and glide into JFK on her own, just as she did during the approach and landing tests she performed over Edwards Air Force Base back in the late ’70s. How cool would that have been? Impractical fancy, of course. Her systems were long ago frozen in place, I’m sure. But I enjoyed imagining it.

:: I know there’s a marketing blitz behind this, but I can’t help but enjoy the idea of a tool that survives without major functional changes for most of a century. Think about it: Since 1937, mankind went from early aviation to jet flight to the moon. Certainly the Model 77 has seen a bit of innovation over the years in terms of motor and material technology, but it remains essentially the same in shape and function — and it’s still a pretty popular model, despite lots of heavy competition. (My circular saw is a Ryobi one, just a cheap model, that I bought at Home Depot (for work, so they footed the bill). It’s a nice enough saw, not awesome, but it gets my cuts done when I need them. I ditched the original blade, though. I have a 24-tooth blade for rough work and a 60-tooth blade for finish cuts.)

:: I only started with three little goats when we moved here…to the farm. It was supposed to be two, but then I got to thinking…what if something happened to one?

:: One of the things I learned in my first year in library school was that information disappears over time for a number of reasons, but that three are foremost: war, when the other side wins; commerce, when there is not enough of a perceived market for the cost; and technology, when the newer methodology renders a previous iteration obsolete. (I have a couple of books around here that deal with precisely these kinds of issues. I should re-read them….)

More next week! (Unless there aren’t. Duh!)

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These links are culled from the list of blogs participating in the A-to-Z Challenge. I haven’t done enough surfing of the other participants, so herein I shall try to partly atone for that.

:: In the end, I ended up with some prince-ling guy in a toga being lazy, speaking of which, I couldn’t be bothered to draw whatever it was he was sitting on. But then again, I’m doing these really quickly. (Cool — he chose the same ‘R’ word that I did!)

:: These days, a night out at the movie theater seems to be a luxury for teenagers with excess cash, single people who are employed, unemployed people who have nothing else to do and childless couples. If a family of four went to see the Hunger Games in IMAX at the same theater I went to, that’s a total of $72 in movie tickets — before they even think about getting something to snack on or drink. Looking at entertainment options from a parents’ or family’s’ perspective — especially those who are on a budget, movie theaters don’t seem to be very family-friendly. (Isn’t that the truth. I get to a movie in a theater maybe two or three times a year these days. My last one was to take The Daughter to The Secret World of Arietty.)

:: Questionable intentions were brought by he,
Quartet gently playing in the corner.
Qualifying his earnest pedigree,
Quick to satisfy his plea for her honor.

:: A shibboleth sounds like it could be an Outer God from the Cthulhu mythos (“Iä! Shibboleth! The Black Goat with a Thousand Young!”) or a mystical stone in an Indiana Jones movie (“Behold! The Shibboleth of Akran!”) or maybe, I don’t know, a fizzy, boiled sweet (“A bag of lemon shibboleths please, mister!”)

:: Satie wrote music to dream by.

:: Everybody has some manuscripts languishing in a comatose state, don’t they? I’m talking about full drafts, or at least mostly-done, that suddenly manifested some deep flaw that drained out the spark of life. So you wrapped it up for long-term storage in your mental non-intensive care unit and figured you’d get back to it at some point.

:: The name ‘Nyota Uhura’ once translated means ‘Star of Freedom’ in Swahili. One of Star Trek’s greatest mysteries is why Uhuras christian name was never even uttered in the classic series or movies until recently in Star Trek 2009. (A Star Trek blog! How cool is that!)

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Time for links…but first, minx! Or rather, the soundtrack to an adult film called The Minx. Now there’s something I never knew about film music. (No, the link is not safe for work. Ye Gods!)

:: So I decided that he was going to have to pay what I call “Get-A-Clue Tax”. So I took his three dollars to the local bookstore and put it towards getting Nalini Singh’s latest book because, well, her Guild Hunter series is my guilty pleasure. Not to mention that taking a clueless white dude’s money and using it to buy a book by an awesome woman of color writer was the sweetest possible justice I could think of. (The older I get, the more I see that no matter how obviously bad a given idea is, there’s someone out there who thinks it’s a great idea. The guy in this story deserved a lot worse than he got.)

:: Long time readers of this blog understand my hate and mistrust of the cephalopod – your octopus, your squids, your cuttlefish, your assorted tentacled beasties that inhabit the cold and dark of our oceans. I welcome any opportunity to inform new readers of the true danger these boneless freaks pose to our civilization. (Pagh. They’re cute and harmless. I, for one, welcome our new cephalopod overlords!)

:: So April is going to be a time for me to write about who I know I am to help me figure out where to go next. (A fellow A-to-Z challenge blogger.)

:: “It was a pleasure and a hell of an evening, surely was our night to win”. I think of these lines every time I’ve had a great night doing anything especially gambling. The American and African became friends for a night and who knows, maybe always. (Another A-to-Z Challenger, who is focusing on Jimmy Buffett songs. I’m already liking this challenge.)

:: April Fool’s Day seems ideal for Daffy Duck as the swashbuckling Scarlet Pumpernickel, something of a cross between Zorro and Percy Blakeney. Familiar characters and zany ending aside, it’s not a bad little genre tale. (Yet another!)

:: I am not sure if I will ever kill that afterhours woman within me. Maybe my soul has always been a night owl. Maybe I will be able to one day train myself into a daytime person and put these afterhours writing party aside. Until then I will write as much as I can at night and pray that Jose (the hubby to be) will continue to be understanding, as he has been to date. (Still another. Challenges like this really give the lie to the notion that blogging is dying!)

:: “Dickensian” names is a bit of a slippery category — something to do with meter, with allusions to King James or Victorian English, and with a delightful mix of concrete nouns and sheer whimsy. The standard I’m using here is extremely subjective — can I imagine a character in a Dickens story having that name?

:: But again, not one of these details can actually explain the success of the film. It’s just one of those times when magic happened. Lightning is captured in a bottle. You can’t set out to make such a film, although, of course, everyone tries. But sometimes it happens when you are looking the other way. (A wonderful post by Sheila O’Malley about Casablanca, which compelled me to comment thusly:

I can never get over Casablanca for the sheer accidental nature of its greatness. So much art is meticulously crafted, labored over with exquisite care, pored over by its creator until he or she feels that every note, or word, or brushstroke, or frame is in its perfect place…and then along comes Casablanca, with its script still being written while shot, with its ending determined by sudden epiphany, and then that ending not even working until someone figures out how to edit it together…I just can’t get over that. A movie about the making of Casablanca couldn’t possibly seem anything other than contrived — “Those two producers, suddenly looking at each other and shouting, ‘Round up the usual suspects’! Give me a break, like that would ever happen!!!” And yet, it did. Wow.

I’ve always liked Roger Ebert’s view that Casablanca doesn’t have its greatest impact until you watch it the second time. I can attest to that…I enjoyed it well enough the first time, but when I watched it again, six months later, the thing just shattered me. I then watched it every single Sunday afternoon for six weeks. Movies like Casablanca are one of the only reasons I find death fearsome: I don’t want to enter a state where I can never see Casablanca again.

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Linkage…but first, Inkage!

How cool is that? The squid darts by the like Enterprise in the old Star Trek credits.

:: Seriously, you’re sitting in a theater wearing a pair of 3D glasses with a box of Jujubes in your hand watching a movie based on a pulp scifi novel written in 1912 about a guy in a loincloth sword fighting four-armed green-skinned Martians in order to save a half-naked red-skinned princess who’s also the chief scientist of the Ninth-Ray, and you’re all pissy that there isn’t some fancy dialog about the nihilistic pessimism of fate and circumstance described in narrative ellipses and playful points of view that explores the similarities and differences between Gods and Men, East and West, sin and virtue, good and evil?

Seriously?

I think you might have wandered into the wrong theater by accident. (I’ve got my own post about John Carter on the way, but until then, here’s a placeholder.)

:: Instead I sit, and mumble, and grumble, and wonder whether I am the only one annoyed that winter never really came to the northeastern United States this year. (No, you’re not the only one. I hated this winter. What a steaming bowl of FAILy suck it was!)

:: I promise I didn’t realize this ahead of time, but I’m thrilled that it came down to these two. Looking back at the list of contestants, it always had to. (Michael May has been doing a “March Madness” involving cinematic bad-asses. Check it out, and read back into his series! Fun stuff, even if I do think he sold Det. Martin Riggs a bit short.)

:: We need an It Gets Better campaign for America–except I’m not sure it actually will.

:: But overall I’m happy with my purchase and figure that this will get me through the next couple of years just fine, by which time I’m sure phones will have gained intelligence and launched our own nuclear missiles at us. Whatever, man. As long as I can read the Internet on the phone until the very last second, I’m good. (Geez. I can’t even do that. I’m still a couple of years from even entering the smart-phone arena!)

:: I’m so tired of Paul Ryan I could scream. Every year we get a slightly different version of the same old thing, and every year we have to waste entire man-years of analysis in order to make the same exact points about it. And the biggest point is that his budget would force enormous, swinging cuts in virtually every domestic program, especially those for the poor. If this bothers Ryan, he’s had plenty of time to revise his budget roadmap to address it.

But he hasn’t. He knows perfectly well that his budget concentrates its cuts on the poorest Americans. It’s been pointed out hundreds of times, after all. If he found that troublesome he’d change it. Since he hasn’t, the only reasonable conclusion is that this is exactly what he intends. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. (All I need to know about Paul Ryan is that he requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. One can’t hold up a brighter billboard for moral inadequacy than that.)

:: For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Princess [A Princess of Mars – Ed.] out loud to The Girlfriend, one chapter per night, just before bed, and she observed very early on that the story is essentially a Western with giant, four-armed green men standing in for Native Americans. But of course that’s what it is. Consider the book’s history. It was originally published in serial form in 1912. Wyatt Earp was still alive in 1912, and I’m pretty Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was still touring then. The Old West occupied a tremendous amount of real estate in the popular imagination, Western stories dominated the pulp magazines that Burroughs was trying to break into, and science fiction as we now understand it did not really exist. (Indeed, Burroughs practically invented the sci-fi genre, or at least a certain subset of it.) Plot-wise, Princess actually starts off as a Western, with Carter fighting Apaches in the Arizona Territory just after the Civil War, before Burroughs unleashes his imagination. To complain that a movie based on this seminal, century-old story doesn’t fit so neatly into our modern generic pigeonholes indicates to me that you’re missing the point. (OK, one last John Carter link.)

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