Thursday, June 30, 2005
Book Review: A Clash of Kings
I mentioned a War of the Worlds review tonight, but since I'm not really feeling that, and am feeling like working on my novel, here's one I wrote a few days ago.
A Clash of Kings is the second book in George R. R. Martin's ongoing fantasy series,
A Song of Ice and Fire. Much like book one (
A Game of Thrones) and book three (
A Storm of Swords) this novel is not self-contained. The three books together tell one epic story, one that is going to occupy six or possibly seven novels, the fourth of which will be published later this year (November 2005) with the fifth following in 2006. No one has any idea when the sixth and seventh will be published, but since there was a five year gap between book 3 and 4, it's probably best if you don't hold your breath.
Book-writing delays aside, this novel is hard to review since, like books 1 and 3 in the series, it's not self-contained. It's part two of a very long story, but since there is no final conclusion to the numerous interwoven story lines, it doesn't really have a beginning or an end. Book two does come to more of a conclusion than book one did, with most of the story lines leading up to a gigantic battle at King's Landing, but there's no way you can read this one and feel satisfied; it will just whet your appetite to move on to book three and more of the adventure.
Nevertheless, on we go to the scores.
A Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Plot: 9
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/9
Characters: 10
Horror: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 7
Re-readability: 10
Overall: 9
This wasn't the most fun I've ever had reading a novel, even a fantasy novel, but it's definitely the best fantasy novel I've ever reviewed, an honor that will likely be removed once I finish rereading book three in the series.
To be fair, I should admit that I'm writing this review in mid-2005, after reading the novel for the second time.
My review of A Game of Thrones was written after reading it for the first time, and would earn substantially higher scores if I were to re-review it at this point. I enjoyed book one the first time, but it was enormously richer the second time through, simply because I knew what was going to happen, and knew more about the plot and characters. It's amazing how well Martin sets up everything, with subtle hints and clever foreshadowing everywhere, and I appreciated the complex plot and character motivations far more knowing enough to follow all of the threads. I don't think it's possibly to fully appreciate any of the novels in this series the first time through, simply because you can't keep all the dozens of characters, and families, and battles, and allegiances, and wars, and so on straight in your head. You'd need a photographic memory, and even then you wouldn't appreciate how well it all weaves together.
The second book was much the same. I enjoyed it far more than book one on my first read, back in 2003, and while I didn't enjoy it as much more this time though, I definitely got more out of it than I did the first time. And the first 100 pages I've (so far) reread of book three are that much better than they were the first time as well. To generalize, I gave book one a 7 the first time, and while I didn't review books 2 and 3 I'd have given them an 8 and an 8.5 or so. This time through, book one was a solid 9, book two was better, and if book three keeps on being even better than it was before, I might need to Spinal Tap my scoring scale to keep up.
It's also sort of pointless to review individual books in this series at this point, since the three novels thus far have all been very similar in flow and pacing and style; they all keep the plot moving on, all have fascinating characters, all tie the plot threads together brilliant, etc. The only differences between them, from a reviewer's point of view, are the actual plot events in the books, and since these all feel completely organic and required by the story they tell, it's hard to quibble about them.
If I have any complaints about book two, and I must or I'd have given it 10s down the entire board, it's that there aren't any chapters from Robb Stark's POV, or from the POV of anyone with him. We hear a little about his war efforts, but only short reports told from a distance, and the only time he appears in the book, aside from very brief reports of his success in battle, is in a couple of early Caitlin chapters. And in those he does nothing but talk to her as she argues against the inevitable war. I'd gladly have exchanged some of the extremely-detailed chapters about the goings on in King's Landing, or a Bran chapter or two, for some more reports of Robb's war efforts, especially given how small a presence he has in book three.
Overall, I enjoyed the first 400 pages, but didn't feel any real urgency to keep reading. As the plot threads began to twist tighter though, and the major war showdown drew nigh, I started to read for longer at a stretch, and by the time everything came together in the explosive and enormously-satisfying concluding battle, I simply could not quit reading. I don't think I was that engrossed the first time through, and for a novel that
I'd already read to suck me in that deeply is quite an accomplishment.
What more is there to say? The characters are more real and full of personality than any I've ever read in any novel, the world is fascinating and incredible detailed, the action is exciting and painfully-gritty, and the writing is excellent. It's truly a masterpiece, and if Martin keeps the series going at anything near the quality of the first three books, he'll have created the best fantasy series ever written. The only thing I'd compare it to is Tolkien, and while Tolkien's world is more epic and inventive (and endlessly ripped off by now), Martin's got him beat on plot, character, writing quality, and since his world grows deeper with each book (as some final, epic struggle is hinted at and slowly developed) even JRR's one advantage may vanish eventually, though he might get points for pulling his off in a fraction of the pages Martin's using.
Needless to say, this book gets my highest recommendation, though it's impossible to read it on its own and get much from it; you've got to read book one first.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Gorilla Denied!
Just back from
War of the Worlds, and my first comment is... where the hell was my promised
King Kong trailer? We saw several trailers before the film, along with like the 17th
Fantastic Four trailer, and the give-away-absolute-the-entire-plot trailer for
The Island, but no
King Kong!
As for Speilberg's latest... eh. The destruction porn was glorious, and probably worth the price of admission (at least at $6.25 matinee prices) but the rest of the film was pretty blah. Good performances, for the most part, but in service of what? A recycled plot with no real surprises, suspense, or characters we cared about. It's basically
Jurassic Park with robots, with the awkward-around-children, responsibility-shunning male dodging death and learning to be a better man/father while saving his brood from destruction at the hands of inhuman monstrosities.
As for the space invaders and their strategy and technology... unplug your brain, because there are so many plot implausibilities and silly things that you can easily ruin the movie for yourself by getting hung up on them (
Ebert mentions a few of the major ones in his spoilery, two-star review.) I managed not to, but it was a near thing. I'll throw up a more complete review tonight, time permitting, but just for now, here's my top of the head scoring chart:
War of the Worlds, 2005
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 9
Humor: 4
Horror: 4
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 3
Overall: 5.5
If you're trying to decide, go see
Batman Begins over this; there's really no contest. I'd even recommend
Mr. & Mrs. Smith over it, unless you're solely motivated by seeing things blow up real good and people overact in every possible disaster situation.
Fun with email
The email load at
the D2 site is nowhere even in the universe of where it once was when the game was new (I used to get literally 500+ emails a day, on busy days.) but the stray tale of woe and triumph still trickles in. I can't say where this one falls in the "best email ever" range, but it's certainly near the top.
kevin-pk, says hes got a duper and dupes alot of mephistos soul stones then he said his friend that works for blizzard made it fir him,i drop my ik behind the bar at act 2 and he took it through thebar table. I should have known better but I thought u should know that your employees are making item duper me and my friends were going 2 buy world of warcraft but u gotta pay 4 it but i could do that but i may be hacked in that now that I know ur employees make duper
The most amazing thing about this mail? He's not on AOL. You should also know that the D2 site is a fansite, not the official site, and that we make that very clear. Also, the chances that any Blizzard employee still give any sort of a damn about D2, or that they would waste their time hacking mid-grade items, is beyond astronomical. It must be true though, since after all, some guy who ripped him off with a very old trick said it was so.
Laughable content aside, the second sentence is my favorite part, as it plows on and on without mercy, traveling a punctuation-less path of the damned, inexorably adding clause after clause without regard for grammatical realities.
Penis Size: It's all in your head?
That appears to be the conclusion
to draw from this article, at least.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Men worried about having a small penis are usually pretty average, but have a false idea of what the normal size is, according to a report in the medical journal Urology.
...Men should know that a normal-sized penis is 1.6 inches or more when flaccid or 2.76 inches when stretched out.
...However, on average, they estimated that the "normal" flaccid length should be to be 5.1 inches.
I clipped the details, and I'm not sure what "should be to be" means, but the gist of the story is that they surveyed nearly 100 hundred men who went to a hospital in Cairo, Egypt, all thinking their penises were way too small. All of them were actually within the average flaccid size range though, and they all felt better about themselves once the doctors showed them that, and then lived happily ever after. Why they were so concerned with their flaccid size is not discussed, and I would have guessed that they spent a lot of time in locker rooms... except that they had absolutely no idea how long the average penis was. It's a mystery, really.
Of course
as I've blogged in the past, the allowed range of lengths for an "average" penis is ridiculously wide. They say that something like 90% of men are between 4-7" when erect, which may be true, but the 4.1" guy and the 6.9" guy are going to have a very different idea of their size. Ninety percent of grown women may be between 4.5" and 6" feet, but that doesn't mean the extremes in both directions don't know they're shorter or taller than everyone else.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
King Kong Trailer Debuts
I should have posted about this last night when I watched it, but the first trailer for Peter Jackson's upcoming King Kong remake is now online. It's also playing on every print of War of the Worlds, which we'll apparently be seeing Thursday, so bully for us. The trailer is hosted by Volkswagon.com, for no discernable tie-in reason, but you'll probably have better luck using
the mirror links on the infinite bandwidth KongisKing.net official fan site. The
King Kong official site is also now online, but it's nearly content free and has annoying pop up windows for the tiny bit of content there, so it's really not worth your click.
As for the trailer itself, it's interesting. I wondered how they'd do it, since King Kong is somewhat similar to LotR in that most people watching the trailer and waiting for the film already know the plot. I often hate movie trailers that give away the entire plot in order to make the movie seem interesting, but in the case of KK and LotR, PJ's sort of doing the trailer backwards; trying to make movies interesting to people who already know their plots.
He succeeds with me and KK, though it's a good trailer, not a great one. Lots of time is spent pre-skull island, setting up Jack Black's movie-maker character and the desperation of people during The Great Depression, and then when they sail off to Skull Island all we get are scattered shots of awesome Aztec-esque architecture, ominous shots of strange natives, and quick flashes of dinosaurs, swamp monsters, giant insects, and finally Kong himself, as he battles a T-Rex for his little blonde hottie. There's no hint of the whole "capture Kong and take him to New York" conclusion, so if you didn't already know the movie's plot, you'd really have no idea what was going on at all. Which might be the whole idea, come to think of it.
It's a good trailer though, if not quite as epic and majestic as the LotR ones were. The special effects look okay, but not spectacular, but it's often hard to judge those on a tiny trailer. Sometimes they look cheesy when blown up on a huge screen, and other times they're much more convincing on the big screen. The effects in both SW3 and Batman looked lame in their online trailers, but were great in the movie.
Update: Regarding the CGI and image quality,
check out this post on AICN with two photos in full quality of the charging T-Rex and Kong's face. (Scroll down and click them for the full size.) They are truly awesome, and as Harry the Knowles babbles on about in his post, it makes you wonder why movie companies with fantastic images in their films post trailers in such tiny size and shitty quality that everyone who watches them thinks the CGI is cheesy.
Malaya and me are likely going to see War of the Worlds Wednesday afternoon, and I'll post something about how good or bad the Kong trailer looks on the bigscreen. Not to mention something about War of the Worlds, which is
doing very well in
early critical returns.
DVD Review: Castle in the Sky
Castle in the Sky, is an animated film by much-acclaimed Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki. The film is a fantasy work, like all of Miyazaki's cartoons. This one is set in a never-time, somewhere near the turn of the 20th century, when the world was largely agrarian, but industry was beginning to take over. There are fantastic propeller-driven flying machines of every kind, trains running on crazy roller coaster-style elevated tracks, steam powered factories that hardly hold together, and a magical floating castle in the sky that may or may not be just a legend. The land is as inventive as the technology and the sky, with steep gorges and ravines everywhere, and clusters of houses built along the sides of them, clinging to the rocks like bird's nests while the vast majority of the land is open and green and unsettled.
The main plot concerns a young girl and her magical pendant, and the dangerous air pirates and destructive army forces chasing after her. She is befriended and aided by a young boy (his and her ages seem to vary, with them looking 8 at times and 15 at others) with great courage and spirit, and as they run from their pursuers they explore their fascinating world, meet numerous interesting people, discover that neither the pirates nor the army are what they seem, and finally investigate the truth about the castle in the sky.
To the scores.
Castle in the Sky, 1986
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 8
Humor: 7
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
I enjoyed this film a lot. Not as much as
Spirited Away, but
Castle is a bit more childish and silly, and I was initially put off by the slapstick humor and over the top characterizations of lots of the supporting characters. Lots of them, the various pirates especially, are screwball caricatures, doing goofy things every chance they get, overreacting, brawling and eating like children, and so on. If not for the fact that most of their jokes are actually pretty funny, and that they're consistently that way throughout the entire film, that element could have ruined it for me. It's largely about expectations; if you come into this expecting a serious, contemplative, adult film, you'll be dismayed. If you expect an exploration-filled adventure comedy, you'll love it.
Also, after a bang bang opening, the first hour is a bit slow, as the two child leads get to know each other and run from their pursuers. Lots of characters are introduced, and the story grinds along, but we started checking the time around 45 minutes in, and kept doing so until around the 70 minute mark, when the cool stuff really starts to happen. We were engrossed by the last hour though, and in retrospect there's nothing really wrong with the opening hour+; we just found it sort of predictable and wanted them to get to the
good better stuff. I've only seen the film once, a couple of days ago, so I can't say if it would improve on a second viewing. I found lots of
Spirited Away pretty slow the first time I saw it, but absolutely loved it on the 2nd and 3rd viewing. (See
my review here.)
While Miyazaki is not yet that well known in the US, he's a superstar worldwide. His films include
Princess Mononoke,
My Neighbor Toroto,
Kiki's Delivery Service, and
Spirited Away, winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Miyazaki is widely-regarded as the greatest living director of animated films, and his work has dominated the Japanese box office for many years. It's only recently that he's come to any notice in the US, and he's still far from a household name in America. His brilliant
Spirited Away earned $265m world wide, but just $10m in the US, despite its Academy Award win. One hopes his work is gaining in popularity on DVD, but it's a sad state of affairs when his masterpieces, films that appear childish but that can be enjoyed by the entire family, are outgrossed by the latest forgettable CG crap from Dreamworks or Disney, or shoddily-inked vomit like Pokemon, DragonBallZ, and Yu-Gi-Oh. His biggest promoters in the US are John Lassiter and some of the other guys at Pixar, and there's definitely a connection there, in quality of work and appeal to all generations.
Disney, Pixar's overlords (for one more film, at least) have signed a deal with Miyazaki to bring his films to the US, and whatever you think of Disney and the way they've destroyed their traditional 2d animation studio in recent years, they have to be given credit for trying to bring Miyazaki's work to a wider US audience. They've done a good job releasing
Spirited Away and the new
Howl's Magic Castle here without long delays (hello Miramax and every Hong Kong film they've delayed and butchered in the process), and they've done good work dubbing English voices into the films. You can watch them in Japanese with subtitles if you like, but as far as dubbing goes it's been done very well on Miyazaki's films. Disney has hired quality actors, they've paid for good translations and script revisions to make the words in English more or less match up with the Japanese lip synch, and unlike most anime and foreign films, it's not at all painful to watch these movies with dialogue you can understand.
I'd talk more about the plot, but you'll enjoy it more if you go in knowing less, and discover the wonders of the film as you watch it. I will mention a few plot points though, below the following spoiler warning.
Minor spoilers below:I can't imagine that anyone over the age of 5 will be surprised that there really is a castle in the sky, or that the main characters all end up there for a final confrontation. The castle, which is more like a city crowned by the largest tree in all creation, is by far the coolest thing in the film, and its there that Miyazaki's trademark melancholy and solitude comes creeping in. Watching the two young leads wander around the castle, which is vast, completely uninhabited, and totally overgrown by plant and animal life, is engrossing, and a bit sad. What fun is paradise if you're there alone? Even the sight of so many robots, all rusted into disuse and overgrown, is depressing.
The final confrontation as well, with paradise shattered by human violence and then abandoned since it can only hope to survive without human interference, is a pretty depressing observation on the human condition. Entirely accurate, I fear, but depressing nevertheless. I don't think it would really register on that level to children, who would just enjoy the action and such, but it's another way that Miyazaki's films work on multiple levels.
I'm curious to see how this one will appeal to me on a second viewing. The slow spots and boring bits in
Spirited Away somehow became brilliant changes of pace and subtle meditations the second time I saw that film, and while I can't imagine that the wacky slapstick in Castle would become anything but that, maybe it wouldn't seem so out of place and redundant on a second viewing?
Bewitching?
Bewitched, a film remake of the cheesy old sitcom, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, opened over the weekend to
mediocre box office and critical lambasting (
28% positive on RT,
34% average on Metacritic. I haven't seen it and have no opinion of it, other than thinking that the trailer made it look dumb and completely unnecessary. That's how I think 90% of comedies look from their trailers though, so maybe you shouldn't put too much weight on my judgment.
No one seemed to think it was very funny though, so I can virtually guarantee that you'll get more laughs from some of the reviews. This
outright hostile one from the Village Voice, for instance:
I have no idea why Hollywood makes movies derived from TV series that the all-important 15- to 25-year-old ticket-buying demographic has absolutely no firsthand knowledge of, or why those same designated audiences do in fact pay to see them with formidable reliability. But I can tell you this about the new Bewitched: It is an affliction. As if the work of an angry god, the movie collects the perspectives of Nora Ephron (director, co-writer), Delia Ephron (co-writer), and Penny Marshall (producer), coalescing into a showbiz self-suck unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension.
It's symptomatic of the recycling-regurgitating Hollywood dynamic that the TV show within the movie doesn't resemble anything a real network would make today -- for all of their navel-gazing insider-ness, Ephron, Ephron, and Marshall are as clueless as farm turkeys.
The film is airy and weightless, not like, say, chiffon, but like the black smoke of burning truck tires. In an ideal world, Marshall and the Ephrons should have to sharecrop, for all the good they've done for the culture.
I've scarcely ever heard the woman's name, but most of the reviews seem to take special glee in sacking the director, Nora Ephron. Exhibit A is above, Exhibit B is found in this identically 0-star review
from the Dallas Observer:
...But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will Ferrell being hung out to dry by Nora Ephron, who shouldn't be allowed to direct an elementary school Christmas pageant, much less a $100 million feature film. (How Ephron is allowed to keep collecting paychecks, after the unholy trinity of Mixed Nuts and You've Got Mail and Lucky Numbers, remains a mystery worthy of John Le Carre or at least Encyclopedia Brown.) She strands him in the middle of the sitcom frame and begs him to find the laughs in her barren, lazy screenplay, written with sister Delia, making him look not like a clown but a fool.
My favorite though
is this one, from the afore-unknown Flick Filosopher, written from the POV of a righteously outraged/disgusted feminist.
Sisters Nora (who directed) and Delia (who cowrote with Nora) have concocted an evil brew of misogynist tripe, faux-ironic nostalgia, and painfully false romantic comedy that purports to be an "edgy," modern updating of a 1960s sitcom. But the Ephrons seem not to have grasped that TV's Bewitched was a desperate last stand of the 1950s, one final attempt to stifle the power women wield that men find frightening, the power that was finally busting out of its girdle when the sitcom debuted in 1964.
Despite Kidman's best attempts to be charming and lovable, Isabel is one of the most abysmal and discouraging female characters to appear in a Hollywood flick in ages.
But wait! There's more that she wants, more to make a female moviegoer with any kind of self-respect moan in anguish. It's not enough that the Ephrons have given us, as a would-be superadorable romantic-comedy heroine, a powerful woman who would willingly smother her own power. Isabel also wants a man to fall in love with, which is fine on its face, but it's not just any man she's looking for. No, she wants someone special: "I want a man who needs me because he's a complete total mess." She wants to be mommy... but not a magic mommy -- she just wants some screwed-up loser she can "fix."
The "irony," the fake "hipness" comes into play as actor Jack is trying to put together a sitcom remake of, you guessed it, the 60s series Bewitched. And he wants Isabel to be his costar, because she twitches her nose in such perfect imitation of Elizabeth Montgomery, and also because Isabel is such a moron -- she's supposed to be "naive," but she comes across as actually mentally retarded
Banging one's head against the wall eventually becomes requisite. If I didn't know this was written and directed by women I'd never have believed a man wasn't the perpetrator, because Isabel is a portrait of modern femi-ninny-ty at its absolute worst: she's idiotic, wishy-washy, and subject to wild swings of "darling" irrationality.
Taken together, these reviews give further proof, as if any were needed, that what we see in films has far more to do with the viewer than the film being viewed. And on that note, I'll get to finishing a pair of reviews I wrote yesterday, to post later today and tomorrow.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Year of the Shark, Again
I don't often post links to Atrios since his blog is pretty politically polarizing,
This post, however, is damn near brilliant. It's apolitical, too. There have been two shark attacks recently in Florida, one of them fatal, and our ever-fickle media appears to be jumping in with both feet. (Not literally, of course... there are sharks out there!) As Atrios reminds us, the summer of 2001 was declared to be the "Summer of the Shark" with several attacks getting big headlines, sharks on the cover of Time magazine, and so on. Seldom mentioned was the fact that there weren't any more shark attacks than usual that summer; it was just a hysteria created by the media saturation.
All of the silly shark coverage of 2001 came to a crashing end in early Septemberj, of course, and afterwards there was much navel-gazing by the media over their role in the dumbing down of public discourse. Here's a bit of the transcript from an interview between Howard Kurtz and Dan Rather, from late September, 2001.
KURTZ: Do you think now that we are headed into an era of more serious and sober news, as opposed to you know, the devoting lots of air time to sharks and Tom and Nicole and stories of that kind, or, three months from now, six months from now, as this story ebbs and flows, will we slip back into covering mini-scandals and celebrities and some of the lighter fair in the news business?
RATHER: Well, it is a key question. I wish I had the answer to it, Howie. I hope, and I honestly do believe that for a long period now there will be rethink among American journalists, in particular those who have some television, about concentrating more on serious news.
But I've thought that any number of times before, for example, in the wake of the Gulf War, I thought there would be a re-emphasis on foreign coverage. There wasn't. I thought there would be a sort of return to our journalistic base camp of trying to report more about things that are important, perhaps at the expense of things that are interesting, like celebrity news.
Not that I needed to point it out, but the US media has gone completely back into frivilous bullshit coverage mode, with Brad/Jen/Angelina, Cruise/Holmes, the non-epidemic of missing white girls, and now shark attacks dominating the headlines. I'd say that perhaps it's a sign and some massive terror attack was coming to shock them back into doing their jobs... but if they can largely ignore the ongoing civil war in Iraq, it would take the Empire State Building in flames to wake them up.
Besides, it's easy to blame the media, but they're just chasing ratings, and they know that no one watches the serious, hard news coverage of international events. For the average 'Merkin, that stuff's depressing and confusing, and anyway, maybe something happened today involving Michael Jackson, or another lady skipped out before her wedding? Better turn on the teevee, just in case.
Things of the Day: Monday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
--Benjamin Franklin
Soul-Devouring Worry:Dying roots.
Answer of the Day:Because bite-sized is usually a lie.
Curse of the Day:May your girlfriend sport better bruises than you do.
Books Lying Open:Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, now playing (Apparently not.)
War of the Worlds, June 29th (Yes, despite Tom Cruise.)
Fantastic Four, July 8th (Definitely.)
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. SmithPhrase of the Moment -- PotM Archive--
Phrase: "Is this movie ever
not on?
--
Usage: When flipping channels and seeing a movie that always seems to be on.
--
Origin: I'm not sure who started it, but Malaya and me have been saying it for months, whenever one of us is channel surfing and hits one of those low brow action films that seems to be on at least five times a day between USA, AMC, TNT, Spike TV, and various other redundant cable networks.
--
Notes: We've developed this into a science over time, but the best application yet came in late June 2005, when I was cutting up salad in the kitchen and Malaya was channel surfing. She issued the usual, "Is this ever not on?" cry, and I guessed,
Commando? first, and when she said no I tried
Gladiator and she burst into laughter. Other popular choices are
Silence of the Lambs,
Pulp Fiction (pointless when bleeped for TV),
The Godfather I & II,
Predator, etc. The odd part is what a grab bag of films they are, ranging from masterpieces to complete junk along the lines of Swayze's immortal
Road House. I figure it's just what the networks could buy the rights to cheapest, since they know we idiots will watch any damn thing they put on the teevee, but maybe that's why I'm not a genius network program director. -- June 26, 2005
Extra: I added the PotM here since, predictably enough, the minute I started writing this neither Malaya or I could think of half the movies that are never not on. If you've got any suggestions or reminders, stick them into the comments. Malaya just remembered that
The Matrix (just 1, never 2 or 3) is never not on, so there's one.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Misc Kali Bruises, Part 02
The public display of kali injuries continues in this, the second installment of our ongoing feature.
Last time I started off with some pretty uninspiring images of the stick-created bruises on my right bicep, and promised better bruises to come, courtesy of a stick and Malaya's forearm. It hurt, or so she assured me, but unfortunately those bruises did not ripen. Fortunately, there are always more.
The knee belongs to Malaya, and the bruise came from being thrown to the floor during a kicking sparring session on Thursday. Purpling nicely after three days, isn't it? The funny part is that she didn't even know she had it, since her shins were kicked so many times during class that any worry about soreness was concentrated on them.
The shin is my left one, and it's unfortunate that we didn't get a photo Thursday night, when it was all red and raw and bleeding slightly in a couple of places. I thought the bruising would swell and darken though, so I waited. A poor choice, since while you can see large, puddle-shaped yellow blotches on it with the naked eye, they don't show up very well in the photo, due to my skin color and leg hair. Malaya's shin bruises are much the same, and on her darker skin the yellow doesn't show up at all, unfortunately. We'll know to snap photos of our injuries when they're fresher, next time.
The Spotlight Burns
Maybe there's something to experience and veteran guile after all. After 15 year old Michelle Wie made all the headlines the first three days of the Womens' US Open, she went out tied for the lead Sunday and completely blew up, shooting +11 and plummeting from first to last place.
Scoreboard! In fairness to youth and inexperience though, fellow amateur 17 y/o Morgan Pressel played a decent round and finished second, and would probably have won if another woman no one had noticed at all hadn't chipped in a very long birdie from a sandtrap on 18.
Golf might be the hardest sport to win in, given that there are 64 or more players going on the same course every weekend, and any of them can win. Also, there's no way to play defense and win by keeping your opponent from scoring, and you can never coast or take it easy; you've got to make one great shot after another, and you still might lose if someone else plays the best round of their year. It's also such a huge mental strain, with intense concentration required on every shot; you can't just run and keep up with the pack, or let your teammates make a few shots while you rest.
It's definitely not a bad thing to fly below the radar in golf, and Birdie Wie, the winner, no doubt benefited by not being interviewed, not being pestered by media or photographers, and not speaking very good English. All the easier to tune out the chatter of the gallery, that way. As for Wie, given the way she folded up like a cheap deck chair, maybe she should go train with Tiger's dad for a few years. He could yell at her and shake the keys in his pocket when she's trying to put, and she'd either break or gain the mental toughness to go with her talent.
Age Before Beauty?
Like most people, I pay next to no attention to women's golf. Hell, I pay no attention to men's golf either, except when Tiger's winning a tournament. That said, I did actually watch half an hour of women's golf on Saturday, and might watch a bit more on Sunday. Why? Because of Michelle Wie, the female Tiger, of course. She's tied for the lead in the US Women's Open with one day to go, and it's interesting because she's all of 15 years old. Adding to the fun, the top female US amateur, Morgan Pressel, is just one stroke back, and she's 17, blonde, and played Saturday in a pink mini-skirt. (This necessitated some careful camera work by the network, since every time she squatted down to eye a putt they had to cut to a camera that was not in front of her, or else focus it high so they wouldn't broadcast a worldwide upskirt.)
We're all used to championship tennis players and gymnasts and track and field and swimming stars, women especially, being in their teens. Even their mid-teens. But golf? That sport is supposed to be all about precision, control, and experience. It's not a young man's or young woman's sport, since it's not a sport where you need to be especially strong, or tall, or fast. In fact, most of the top men's golfers are pudgy white guys in their 30s or 40s, which is part of the reason Tiger made such a splash when he won several tournaments at a very young age.
Michelle Wie is similar to him in that she's big and strong and tall, and hits it farther than anyone else. In fact, during the last few holes of Saturday's TV coverage, the announcers were slobbering over her potential and basicaly saying that she might end up competing on the men's tour, even winning there due to her inredible physical gifts and golf skill. The fact that she's moving from cute kid to beautiful woman certainly doesn't hurt her media attention, though there's no point in getting too excited since the fact that she'll almost certainly be earning about $10m a year by the time she turns 18 substantially cuts into the chances of her ever needing the money and career boost an appearance in Playboy, or the publication of a sexy calendar would bring. And no, you can't think about that yet, not while she's still complete jail bait.
Speaking of interesting photos, while looking at Devilfinder's offerings on Wie, I saw this huge one (5meg!) that contains roughly infintely more information than this entire post. It's from the Daily Press, which appears to be a local paper in Virginia, and it's got info about Wie, a short bio, a list of other young sports phenomens and how they're doing, her upcoming schedule, a detailed comparison of Wie vs. Tiger, and more. All on a poster-sized image. And for good measure, here's a scan of an article on her from a 2003 issue of Business Week.
Kali and Flexibility
Two thoughts about Kali and a rhetorical question about something else. The something else first.
Flexibility. I'm often sore in the morning, when I first get out of bed. My low back usually, but quite often my arms, neck, legs, hips, shoulders, and other parts are sore instead/as well. It's not arthritis, fortunately, and it's seldom in my joints; it's muscular. It eases when I get up and get moving or stretch out some, which makes me wonder -- if I were more flexible to begin with, would I still get sore like this? I'm not very flexible now, and I never have been, even though I work at it all the time. Not enough, obviously, and I always mean to go to some of the yoga classes at the gym to improve my stretchiness, but it never seems to happen. I might actually be going backwards now, since while I try to stretch, I do work out and lift weights regularly, and that's building muscle and probably making me tighter in the process.
So if I really got more flexible, would I not have the morning aches and soreness? Or would I still have them just as I do now, from overwork in Kali or the gym; just in different places? I'd really like to work on my flexibility too, since I kick pretty well in Kali, but low and medium only; I don't have the flexibility to kick quickly while aiming high. I can get my foot up there, but I have to lean back in a weird angle, or stretch sideways a lot, and that makes my move so slow and lacking in power that it's pointless to even try it.
A question that leads me to my next topic...
Kicking in Kali. We don't work on kicking that often, but we've done it once every other month or so during the 8 months I've been at it. It's not a real thrust of the style; we do more with weapons and open hand, and when we do kick it's usually as a support to open hand or knife. It's very sneaky kicking too, almost all aimed at the opponent's feet or knees, meant to trip or cripple or distract them in order to open them up to other killing blows. Higher kicks are allowed, since you can basically do any sort of move in Kali, but our style is designed for anyone to do, not just super athletic young men (who lose all ability to keep doing the leaping kicks once they get older and their knees start to give out) so we don't spend much time learning moves that are real high impact on our bodies. (Most of what we do is very high impact on the opponent's body, but that's different.)
I enjoy kicking in Kali though, and it feels very natural and easy to me, now that I've learned the basic forms and techniques. I've got the reflexes to do it well, hitting and countering other kicks (which is what opens them up for my shots to land), and I have very quick feet, at least as compared to the others in class. The odd part is that I'm either very good, or everyone else is very slow, since I can best far more advanced students in kicking, students who easily beat me in open hand, or stick, or knife, or just about anything else we do.
It was actually surprising this week, since we hadn't done any kicking in a couple of months, and we hadn't really sparred any last time; just worked on form and drills and such. This time it was all kicking, toe to toe, so to speak, and while I was much faster than the first guy I went against, we were basically just warming up and working on some forms, so I figured he wasn't trying very hard yet. I found out differently when we rotated partners after ten minutes, and I was paired with the most senior student there. He's very good and very quick with his hands, and I expected him to be better than me kicking. It was therefore a great surprise when I pretty much ate him alive for the first five minutes. I could land just about any kick I wanted, I could easily dodge or parry or counter his kicks, and he seemed to be wearing cement boots, compared to the snap and speed my kicks had.
He improved greatly as we went though, and he soon started getting in some hits, and I was dancing around and working much harder so I started to tire and slow down. After ten minutes things were more even, but when you consider how much faster and more skilled he is at open hand and stick, it was damn near unsettling to be better than him anything in Kali. It was fun too, though honestly I wished he and the others I went against that night had been better, and that I could have gone some against the Gura.
I hadn't really thought about it in the past, but reflecting on the kicking stuff I realized that I actually prefer going against someone who is better than me (as long as they're not so far ahead that I'm just helpless). I like the challenge, I like being pressed and having to raise my game, and I enjoy getting my shots in more when I have to really try to land them. Most of the time Thursday I was in control and landing hits at will, and soon found myself experimenting, trying odd angles, trying to do double kicks and parries rather than just dodging and taking sure hits, etc. It made it more fun and more of a challenge for me that way, and allowed them to get in some hits as well.
The reason for my skill in this, oddly enough, seems to be the soccer I played all through my youth. I haven't kicked a ball in years, and haven't played any organized soccer since I was about 14 (when I got sick of practices and of always being the one good player on bad teams) but somehow the foot awareness and speed and agility persist. I do different style kicks than most of the others too, ones no one else does, and as Malaya and me analyzed them, we realized that they were all soccer kicks. Passing the ball across my body with my instep, shooting a kick sideways with the side of my foot, being able to kick backwards and hit things with my heel, etc.
More than just specific kicks though, I've got more awareness of where my feet are than other people. I'd never thought of it that way, but that's what the Gura said when I asked her, and she said that most people require a lot more practice to kick accurately and with control, and that most have a lot of trouble doing it left footed and right footed. I'm better right footed, I've realized, but that's mostly because my left leg doesn't have the fine motor skills to kick exactly where and as hard as I want it to. I suppose that's what the others feel like with both of their legs though, so I can hardly complain.
The funny part is that my footwork for other things in Kali is awful. Well, it's improved a great deal and I'm far better than I was at the start, but I've still got a long way to go, and it took me six months to gain any ability at sliding when I walk, keeping level and not bobbing up and down, keeping on my toes and curving around people as I move backwards, etc. My alleged foot location awareness didn't help a bit there, and my bouncy, fast strides (that might have been developed in soccer?) have actually held me back, since I'm constantly having to force myself to take smaller steps in Kali, to lift my feet up less, to keep my weight more on my heels instead of moving forwards so quickly on my toes, etc. I've mentioned it before, but the people with a background in dance are the ones who can move in the Kali-style right away, and they have far better footwork and body posture than the rest of us. It doesn't seem to help them much with kicking though, except that they can keep their balance centered and spin to do heel kicks and sweeps pretty well.
Moving very slowly. One final thing about Kali, that applies to other athletic endeavors. In another class last week we worked on basic stick fighting techniques. We stressed the fundamentals, since most of us have been getting very lazy about those and instead of doing the full blocks and counters, we're doing sliding hits, backhand strikes, and other shortcuts. Gura wanted us to get back to the basics though, so back we went, and in addition to those she had us move very slowly. It was hard, oddly enough.
You'd think that swinging a stick across your body forehand and backhand wouldn't be hard, but when you do it at about 1/10th full speed, you realize how much you usually use momentum to cheat on form and balance. Try it with a golf swing, or tennis, or baseball, or whatever sport you've got handy; do your normal swing, then try it again at about half that speed, then again even slower, and so on, until you are barely moving. Feel how your balance is off to one side or the other, how you lean, how your posture goes to shit in one direction or the other, etc.
I wouldn't have believed it, but it took me probably an hour of leading and throwing very slow attacks until I managed to completely correct my balance problems completely. And as I fixed those, the Gura told me to work on my posture, to stand up straighter, to keep my head up, to not lean sideways while doing this or that, and so on. So I spent probably 75% of the class swinging at my partner, compared to 25% receiving, and even though we were moving at less than a walking speed, and I was moving my arms and stick as if I was underwater, I was simply dripping sweat the whole time. Going slow and trying to keep good form was far more tiring than taking half speed swings with my usual posture, and I was constantly having to adjust my balance, lean back, stand up taller, think about where my left hand was to balance me better, and on and on.
I've got no idea if that would work the same way doing it with a tennis racket, but it would be interesting to find out. Not that I play tennis, but I think a lot of players would be shocked at how much they found out about their poor form if they moved super slowly and learned how their speed and momentum were keeping them in line, while disguising their structural flaws. We've not done stick stuff at normal speed since then, but I'm curious to see how I'll do, and if the slow motion stuff will carry over and help my form and balance.
Mad Cow Disease in the US
I've already blogged on this topic
at ridiculous length, so just a comment and a link today. They've found another case of Mad Cow Disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in a cow in the US, and
much ado is being made while much incompetence is revealed at the USDA.
New tests have confirmed that a Texas animal federal officials earlier declared to be free of mad cow disease did have the brain-wasting ailment, the U.S. Agriculture Department announced yesterday.
The definitive testing, done in England over the past two weeks, showed that the ailing animal, first flagged as suspicious in November, was infected with mad cow disease. The animal was retested after the USDA's inspector general requested the additional check because of continuing concerns about the sample dismissed by the agency...
[USDA Chief] Johanns sought yesterday to assure consumers that U.S. beef is safe, and that any suspect beef would have been kept off supermarket shelves. But he acknowledged a number of embarrassing mistakes and oversights by the agency. In addition to misdiagnosing the diseased sample, officials apparently mislabeled the sample that tested positive, officials said. According to USDA's chief veterinarian, John Clifford, a tag describing the breed of the infected animal was apparently mislabeled, an error that has slowed the process of determining where the diseased animal came from.
Countries that care about their public food safety, Japan, Taiwan, and others in Europe, have immediately
blocked imports of US beef, but I doubt we'll see any real reaction in the US to this. Not until there are dozens of positive BSE tests a year will people take notice, and I can't see that happening unless the USDA actually starts trying to protect the public health, rather than covering up and boosting beef industry profits. In other words, it's not going to happen until Bush is out of office, at the very soonest.
In any event, Americans like their beef. Consumers here will avoid particular restaurants (I.E. Wendy's, when the finger chili story was active) but there's no way they're giving up their cow, short of certain death, and I'm not sure even that would deter people. America is truly the land of people who don't believe anything bad could ever happen to them, and besides, it's not as if your average hamburger-scarfing guy is all that concerned about his health. If he were he wouldn't be stuffing that sort of saturated fat and calories down his pie hole in the first place, now would he? If the guarantee of near-term obesity and long term heart disease isn't dissuading him, what are the odds that possibly developing some fatal brain-eating disease in twenty years will?
Saturday, June 25, 2005
The Justice of Nudity
New Attourney General Alberto Gonzales might be pro-torture and fanatically right wing about virtually everything, but at least he's not as wacky a prude as his predecessor, John Ashcroft, was. As a result, the
statuesque boobies are back in Washington's halls of justice.
After more than three years of being blocked by large blue drapes, two Art Deco aluminum statues of semi-nude figures in the building's Great Hall can be seen again.
The "Spirit of Justice" and the "Majesty of Justice," which loom over the stage in the Great Hall, were blocked from view by curtains installed by the department in January 2002, when former Attorney General John Ashcroft was in office.
When they were covered up, officials working for Ashcroft -- a devout Christian -- said the move to spend about $8,000 for curtains to cover the figures were made for "TV aesthetics."
The decision to install the curtains sparked a myriad of jokes and Ashcroft became fodder for late-night comedians.
Not to mention snarky bloggers. I'll miss him, if only for that.
Things of the Day, Saturday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
--Henry David Thoreau
Soul-Devouring Worry:Leaking ceilings.
Answer of the Day:Because these feet were not made solely for walking.
Curse of the Day:May your envy and admiration battle for supremacy.
Books Lying Open:Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
Movies to-see list:Howl's Magic Castle, now playing (Waiting for the DVD.)
Land of the Dead, June 24th (Possibly.)
War of the Worlds, June 29th (Definitely.)
Fantastic Four, July 8th (Definitely.)
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Book Review: The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
My
unnecessary book review series concludes with another title picked up from a library giveaway.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith, is a modern day novel of tomb raiding and adventure, set in Egypt and the rugged Ethiopian mountains where the Nile river begins. The titular scroll is an ancient manuscript, written by the eunuch slave of a Egyptian pharaoh, that contains coded directions to his four thousand year old tomb, purportedly hidden somewhere in a great stone gorge near the headwaters of the Nile, and unspoiled all these millennia.
Seeking the tomb is a young, beautiful (aren't they always?) female Egyptian archeologist, left alone after unknown attackers murdered her husband and stole all of their work. Desperate, she seeks out the aid of a male, Lara Croft-esque English adventurer, and together they work to travel to the dangerous land and unravel the mystery of the scroll, while evil forces conspire against them and monitor their every move.
It's basically Indiana Jones 4, or discount Clive Cussler, when you get right down to it. To the scores.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Plot: 4
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 4
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 5.5
The Seventh Scroll isn't a bad novel, but at nearly 500 pages it's considerably longer than it needs to be, and it's not anything special. The characters aren't bad but they're not very memorable (one bad guy with some weird fetishes is the only one I remember anything about now, a week after reading it), the plot isn't bad but it's very straight-forward and lacking in twists or complications, and the writing is okay but never sparkling. As the scores indicate, it's a passable action adventure, but not one you'll stay up all night tearing through, nor one you'll remember long after you put it down.
I'd never heard of the author before snagging this novel, but apparently Wilbur Smith is actually pretty successful. I would have thought him a new novelist from this book, an amateur walking in the well-worn footsteps of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton; an amateur who needs to learn how to compress his plots and needs to think up a lot more twists and turns on the way to the ultimate showdown next time. I would have been wrong, since Wilbur Smith is in his 70s, has nearly 30 published novels on his resume, and had more than 65 million novels in print, as of 1995, according to the dust jacket on The Seventh Scroll. None of which makes this book any good, but now you know.
The most interesting thing about The Seventh Scroll is something I did not know until after I read it and ventured to view the
Amazon.com reviews. The surprisingly, overwhelmingly-positive Amazon.com reviews.
Scroll is actually a sequel to one of his earlier novels,
The River God, and an unusual sequel, with the action set 4000 years later.
The River God was written from the POV of a brilliant eunuch who serves an Etyptian Pharoah, and eventually carries his master's body to the headwaters of the Nile and buries it there, in a hidden tomb. The very Pharaoh and the very tomb the heroes of
The Seventh Scroll are trying to find in that novel.
Many of the Amazon.com reviewers recommend reading
The River God first, and while I obviously didn't, I'm not even sure if that would be a good idea. I got some suspense from
Scroll just because I had no idea if the tomb even existed, and if it was where the heroes of the novel thought it was. I'd think that if you'd read
River already you'd lose a lot of the suspense of
Scroll, since you'd already know there was a tomb, where it was hidden, how it had been built, and what was in it. I may check out
The River God if I ever see it though, just out of curiosity.
As for
Scroll, as I've been saying, it's just okay. The characters aren't as cardboard as those in most action adventure novels, and the setting and background plot stuff (crazy jealous safari guide husbands, civil war and guerillas in Ethiopia, crazed private collectors willing to murder for an untouched Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb, fanatical Coptic Christian orders, etc) is interesting. The main thing that held back the novel was the plot, and its lack of complications. The hunt for the tomb and the details of it are fine, it's just that there's nothing else going on in the book, and the tomb hunt and then excavation are so straight forward that I kept expecting some wild twists and seemingly-insurmountable setbacks... I'm still waiting.
As it is this novel has an amazing amount of description about river valleys, dam-building techniques, Egyptian sculpture and statuary, and the geography of mountainous Ethiopia, but it's about three major plot twists short of being a page turner. That's why I say the length is too great; it's not so much the number of pages, it's the content of those pages. Most action adventure novelists are worse writers than Wilbur, and craft less interesting characters… but they're generally far better at cranking out involving, twisty plots, and those are what keep you reading. I suppose that Wilbur wanted to keep the novel somewhat realistic, and didn't want there to be half a dozen false tombs with ancient clues hidden in each one to lead on to the next, but there was plenty more unbelievable stuff in the story, and at least those sorts of plot twists would have made it more interesting to read. With a bit better plot this could have been quite an interesting novel. Pity it wasn't.
I've also got to reluctantly single out Wilber's writing when it comes to action or sex scenes, because he's amazingly bad at them. I'm not quite sure why, but even during the numerous life and death struggles and the occasional kinky and somewhat explicit sexual interlude, his writing seemed so stiff and cold that I never felt any excitement. Of either kind. He's not boring in all of the writing, and he's not academic and dry in his descriptions, but for whatever reason the fight scenes and sex scenes always felt very remote and passionless.
I didn't glance at the author info until after I read the whole book, but my impression from reading it was that Wilbur Smith was an older gentleman, retired from some real career, and that while he knew a great deal about history and geography and everything else, and was technically proficient as a novelist, that he just didn't have the skill to make characters come to life. Especially not when they were doing dangerous or sexy things. And when I looked at the back of the book and saw the picture of the elderly white guy, and learned from his bio that he worked as a tax collector into his 30s before becoming a writer, I was sad to see my stereotype come true. He actually looks pretty spry in
the bio photo on his website, with a definite twinkle in his eye, and I'm judging him by just one book, but at least in the
The Seventh Scroll he seems to be a decent writer, but one without a lot of imagination or ability to incite emotion in his readers.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Congrats to Ebert
Maybe I should do a semi-daily links post, with quick pointers to all of the interesting articles I've seen, rather than not posting anything about most of them, and posting too much about the few I do post about?
Anyway, congrats to the best film critic in America, Roger Ebert,
who just got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I made fun of it recently when they gave one to DJ and variety show host Ryan Seacrest, but having one is still a mark of distinction, and Ebert certainly deserves his. And given that there are 2287 other stars there, it's pretty clear that quite a few people do not.
HOLLYWOOD -- For four decades, Roger Ebert's reviews have turned countless actors and filmmakers into stars. On Thursday, Hollywood returned the favor -- dedicating the 2,288th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to the Chicago Sun-Times' legendary film critic.
The occasion also marked another "first'' for Ebert, the nation's first Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic. According to the event's major-domo, Johnny Grant (known as the honorary "mayor of Hollywood"), Ebert's star is the first ever given to a critic.
"There are plenty of others out here with stars who have been criticized, but Roger's our first official critic," quipped Grant, joking that in the future, movie fans will now have the chance "to walk all over Roger" if they disagree with one of his reviews.
...
"When we are born, we are placed into a specific box, in a certain space and time," Ebert said. In his opinion, film is the one art form that most easily enables people to escape their own reality, "imagining what it is to live somebody else's life -- to be a different gender, live in a different time, to live in a different economic class.
"It is a truly liberalizing experience and makes people broader-minded as film makes it possible for them not to be just stuck being [themselves] day after day."
That being said, what's up with giving, like,
every single movie a 3-star score lately? Okay, not every movie, but it seems like he's getting more generous by the year, and being too understanding by scoring every film as it would be received by its target audience. It's okay, Roger, condemn some stuff for sucking. I loved his 1-star review of The Perfect Man, and didn't even bother to read several of his recent 3-star reviews of films I had no interest in. His The Longest Yard review, 3-star of course, was an interesting read though, just for the way he talked himself out of, and then back into, giving it that score. Even though, with reflection, he realized said rating was wildly too high for the latest piece of shit someone scraped off of Adam Sandler's poseur boot.
Weirdest Katie Holmes Story Yet
Unless you've literally been living in a cave you can't help but have heard about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, especially now that they're engaged. Is she just a "beard" for Tom's dubious heterosexuality? Is the entire thing a contractual sham? Is Scientology pulling their strings from afar? There have been a ton of amusing and scandalous articles published so far, but the
best one yet is here, courtesy of the ever-dubious Fox News.
The newly engaged Katie Holmes still has some explaining to do to her friends and family. There were 16 days in April during which no one seems to know where she was.
Holmes made a public appearance on April 4 at the premiere of "Steel Magnolias" on Broadway. She came with her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnick, and a couple of other friends. They were there to support Rebecca Gayheart, who was making her Broadway debut. I know this because I spoke to Holmes at length during the play's intermission. She said she had just moved into her New York apartment and was looking forward to seeing the city.
Holmes was busy during that first week in April. On April 7, she was photographed at the Fragrance Foundation's FiFi event. Four days later, Holmes was still in New York and was photographed at VH1's "Save the Music" concert. She still had not met Cruise. Sometime that week, her friends say, she flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Cruise about a role in "Mission: Impossible 3." The meeting took place after April 11. The next time anyone heard from Holmes was on April 27, when she appeared in public as Cruise's girlfriend and love of his life.
Where was she during those 16 days?
Somewhere during that time, she decided to fire both her manager and agent, each of whom she had been with for years and who were devoted to her.
The
article gossip piece also covers Katie's Rasputin-like new best friend and advisor, a prominent Scientologist from an allegedly corrupt and nutty family of Scientologists. It even gives a list of the other young, aspiring Hollywood starlets Cruise allegedly approached, and was turned down by, before finally latching onto Katie Holmes; a list that includs Jennifer Garner, Kate Bosworth, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, and Scarlett Johansson. It closes with some other amusing info I hadn't heard before; that Katie's long listed her favorite actor as Tom. Tom Hanks. Not Cruise, as she's often said since their "relationship" began.
I have no idea how much, if any of this is true, or if it's all just what we want to believe, knowing how fishy all of Tom Cruise's relationships have been, and how wacky
The Church of Scientology is. It's fun to poke at other people's lives though, isn't it? Especially when they're much more famous and rich than we'll ever be.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Bella and Fella Photo Page
Yes,
another page with pictures of cats. These are different cats though! My mom's cats, to be specific. She got the brother and sister kittens last Christmas, and I was lucky enough to be there while they were young and impossibly frisky. They're juveniles now, and still pretty frisky, and after getting two new pics of them last week, I spent a couple of hours putting together a photo page for them. Here are the earliest and latest photos of them; click to their photo page to see what came between.
Here they are lounging around, something you hardly ever see a kitten doing. Bella is orange while her brother is gray. He was larger as a kitten too, and he still is, though less noticeably now that they're both nearly full grown.
We now jump forward to June 2005, when the kittens have grown to adolescence. They're about nine months old here, and still sleeping together, though they chase and fight and wrestle now as well. There's absolutely no way they can fit into this little furry bed, it's the same one you see above in their earliest photo, but they don't seem to know that.
This is about how Dusty and Jinx play too; one attacks the toy while the other watches, waiting for his/her turn. We do not have a cool climbing thing like this for our cats, though we keep meaning to get one. It's about six feet tall, with multiple levels. The pipe-length at the bottom of this photo hangs from a rope, but apparently isn't really their favorite place to sleep. The top portion is a box, with about four inch sides; all the better to keep sleeping kitties from rolling out and crashing down on top of fragile decorations, I guess.
Click here to see more.
A Feast For Crows
Courtesy of Malaya's obsessive monitoring of
his site, word comes that George R. R. Martin's long-awaited book four in the Song of Fire and Ice series is finally complete, and has an official publication date. Mark your calendars and start rereading the first three, all in preparation for...
November 1, 2005.
As
I mentioned previously and as
Martin explains here, the fourth book, as written, is like 2000 pages long. So rather than publishing that behemoth, or simply cutting it in half, they've re-edited it and split it into two books that will cover the same time frame in the narrative. In the fourth book the action will continue in the six kingdoms of the south, and in the second book, the fifth in the series,
A Dance with Dragons we'll see what's going on in the north and the east. Given that my favorite characters are in the north (Jon Snow) and the east (Daenerys), I should be annoyed at having to wait an entire additional book to see what they're up to, but I'm just happy that Martin's still plugging away, and that we may yet see the saga conclude before his death leaves us with nothing but partial notes and a hack of a failed-writer son to extrapolate them into some godawful bastardization of the original great work.
I don't think that would happen; hell I don't even know if Martin has a son. But
it's not as if that sort of abomination
has no precedent.
Birthday Festivities: Day Three
The birthday week festivities wrapped up Wednesday afternoon, with one last surprise meal and a short shopping expedition.
Tuesday night Malaya cooked dinner, but she clearly had something else in the works for the next day, since there was a big Trader Joe's bag on the counter and two more in the fridge that I was forbidden to look inside. I resisted the temptation since I knew the surprise would be more fun (I never hunt for my Xmas presents in advance or try to guess what's in the wrapped ones either, for that reason.) and when I got up and showered Wednesday, and it was lunchtime and Malaya said we were going out, I was a bit grumpy. I'd been up very late working, I hadn't slept that long, and I was tired of going out, after doing it two days in a row.
Fortunately for me, my love knows me pretty well, and rather than leading me to a restaurant or some other shopping experience where I would have been annoyed, she'd prepared a ginormous picnic lunch. Meeting her at the door, I was confronted by a heavy cooler and a large picnic basket, neither of which divulged their contents to my curious gaze. Considerably happier to be heading for a picnic than someplace that I would have to tolerate other people, I hefted the tonnage that was cooled liquids, followed Malaya who had the basket in hand, and off we went. She drove, and soon enough we were parking at the local reservoir, and walking up into a grove of pine trees, and sitting down at a nicely-shaded picnic table. Once there we pitched a tablecloth, set the cooler and basket on the table, and Malaya started unpacking. And unpacking. And unpacking. She unearthed a truly impressive spread.
Seriously, look at all of that. We had a sliced baguette, four kinds of spreadable cheese, cut veggies, spicy hummus, watermelon, three types of grapes, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, Ritz crackers, cream cheese, bottled water, a bottle of sparkling Martinelli's apple cider, and a box of yogurt-covered raisins for dessert snacking. She'd even brought along the books we have lying open, for some after meal lounging and reading. It was unquestionably the best picnic breakfast/lunch I've ever had, it was even light and healthy, or at least it would have been if I'd taken it easier on the spreadable cheese.
After eating and lying around talking for a while, we left the reservoir and headed off for some errands. The birthday fun wasn't over yet either, since on the way to CostCo we stopped at Fry's, where she turned me loose in the DVD section with instructions to pick out a couple of movies or a game or whatever I wanted. I'd love some new computer games, but we just never have time to play them; hell, the
Warcraft III Battlechest is still sitting under her desk, never yet installed on either computer more than a year after it was purchased.
So movies it was. I picked
Enter the Dragon,
Kiki's Delivery Service, and
Castle in the Sky. The first one is a classic Bruce Lee movie we've always meant to get on DVD, and the last two are older masterpieces by Miyazaki, best known for his Academy Award winning film,
Spirited Away. My reason for picking them is mentioned in the Things of the Day post, below.
As always at Fry's, with their enormous selection and iffy organization, the titles were virtually impossible to find, and when an employee couldn't find either one on the shelf, they had to check on the computer to see that they existed, and go look again. The first girl I asked couldn't find either, but she was apparently just going on break and enlisted the guy working to look. He found
Kiki's, but neither of us could see
Castle, so we headed back over to the computer to run it again and see if they really had it in stock. While he was typing in the name, a lady who had been doing some serious browsing (she was taking notes) in the Anime section since my arrival walked over, a DVD in hand, and yes, it was Castle. God knows where they had it stocked; we certainly didn't see it despite looking through the entire "C" section.
We even watched Castle in the Sky Wednesday night, forgetting all about our supposed trip over to the dance class for about the 4th Wednesday in a row. No review yet; perhaps tomorrow, but it was interesting. Much more slapstick and wacky than Spirited Away, but similar in the "amazing secret world" aspect of Miyazaki's imagination. It had an odd ending too; despite the good guys making it out happy and successful, it was actually very melancholy, with a strong "The only way to preserve paradise is to keep humans away from it, since they'll just destroy it." message. I'll see how I feel when I write up the full review, and it's definitely a good movie, among the best anime you'll ever see, but it's certainly not anything you're used to seeing from mainstream Hollywood films.
Overall, I hardly know what to say about the three days of birthday fun. Malaya did an amazing job planning and executing them, and just for that she deserves credit. It's not easy to find stuff I want to do three days in a row, being as I'm happiest just sitting home and working on my computer or interacting with her on an one to one basis. If you've read my blog for more than the past couple of years, you'll probably remember that this attitude was precisely why I didn't make any effort to date or find a girlfriend before Malaya. I didn't imagine I'd ever meet a woman I liked (much less loved, being as I didn't entirely believe in that concept back then) who could put up with my hermit tendencies -- and I didn't want a girlfriend enough to put up with doing all the things I didn't want to do just to make her happy.
My best case scenario was a hot, intelligent, self-confident woman who had her own life and interests, enough of which overlapped mine that we could spend 2 or 3 days or nights together, per week. I figured I could put up with doing stuff I didn't really enjoy that often, that those things (going out to clubs, shopping, hanging with her friends, etc) wouldn't be that horrible with a woman I liked, that we'd do some stuff together I enjoyed, and that I'd still have 4 or 5 days a week to do my own hermity thing. And no, I didn't seriously think I'd meet a woman who would be cool with that, which is why I hadn't made any effort to do so.
Miraculously, as detailed extensively on this blog about 2.5 years ago, I met Malaya, we shared a ridiculous amount of overlapping interests, she was also hermity by nature, and was quite willing to spend most of her time at home, working on her computer beside me. I did not anticipate that I'd fall in love, and had no idea how much that would improve everything, and how much more fun doing things would be with someone I loved. Nor did I envision all of the new things I'd come to enjoy once Malaya introduced me to them, or how things I didn't like to do would become tolerable, or even fun, once I had her to do them with.
That all said, she knows me very well, and was able to pick activities she knew I would enjoy, she made food she knew I would like, and she left me enough free time that I could do some blogging and get some work done, without feeling like birthday stuff was consuming every bit of my time. In short, it was just about a perfect birthday, and if I could just switch off my unavoidable thoughts about how "she's spending too much money on me/doing too much for me" there wouldn't have been a worry in my head over the past three days. I'm even doing pretty well at not thinking about what I want to give her on her birthday in November, since that would just put pressure on me and take away from my happy funtime glow.
Thanks for the best birthday ever, Honey. Love you.
The Technology is 99.9% Accurate
Well, I don't know if it's that accurate, but here's some news I've been meaning to blog about. It concerns the mechanical detection of that largely-mythical creature; the female orgasm.
Here's the article, and you should just go read it if you haven't already, it's pretty short and most of the excerpts I'm about to snip are props for cheap attempts at humor.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark Jun 21, 2005 -- New research indicates parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking.
In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated.
"The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain," said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
This article is simply full of potentially hilarious material, but I think my favorite part is found in three little words in the previous paragraph, when the doctor says, "as we know."
Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men's climaxes didn't last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women.
Holstege said his results on women were more clear.
When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during a genuine orgasm. Even the body movements made during a real orgasm were unconscious, Holstege said.
The most striking results were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated. Deactivation was visible in the amygdala, a part of the brain thought to be involved in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.
Runner up for best line? It didn't work well to test on men because, "the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes." Wanna just kick every man on earth right in the balls while you're down there, Doc?
Seriously though, it's an interesting article and appears to demonstrate that for women it really is all about letting go and surrendering to the moment; just like every sex advice book says. I also liked the bit about the man's reward center lighting up, while there was no similar reaction in women.
The article doesn't mention it, but I'd be curious to see a study where each partner was tested while they were the ones giving the pleasure, rather than receiving it. What do women think when their partner reaches orgasm? I mean besides the obligatory, "Already?" On the other hand, I'd think that giving his partner an orgasm would light up the male reward center like a Christmas tree, since women generally require more time and effort to achieve one, and since (seemingly) every woman has a history of past boyfriends who couldn't or didn't give them that. It would be interesting to see if that varied by the technique used, too. It's much easier to get a woman off with cunnilingus than intercourse, for instance -- how an orgasm each way register for both participants?
I'd also like to see comparisons to homosexual partners. I'd assume that there's a vast difference between ease of giving a woman an orgasm and giving one to a man, though I can't say I've actually done any field testing on one side of that equation. But just going by anecdotal evidence and reports from women, none of whom ever seem to have had any problem bringing their male partners to orgasm, I'd think there might be a difference. Try the same bi-sexual man with his girlfriend and boyfriend, perhaps? As always, I have more questions than the research can answer.
Things of the Day, Thursday Edition
Quote of the Day: (
QotD Archives)
"Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it."
--Anatole France
Soul-Devouring Worry:Too few things, too many days.
Answer of the Day:Because they're never available used at Blockbuster.
Curse of the Day:May you be all ready to go, and have two days to wait.
Books Lying Open: Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Movies to-see list:Land of the Dead, June 24th
War of the Worlds, June 29th
Fantastic Four, July 8th
Batman BeginsMr. & Mrs. Smith
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Birthday Festivities: Day Two, Continued
Malaya's surprise of the day was a trip to
The Bone Room. I first heard of it years and years ago, I was on their mailing list more than a decade ago down south in San Diego, but until yesterday, I'd never been there. As you'll see if you browse around their site a bit, they basically sell dead animal parts. All sorts of parts, including bones, skulls, claws, teeth, horns, and so on. They've also got lots of huge tropical insects mounted in glass cases or just in plastic bags, a few stuffed animal carcasses, weird jewelry and baubles, feathers, animal pelts, and much, much more. We spent a good hour+ browsing and hadn't gone through half the stuff there, and it's not a very large store. Just crammed, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with cool stuff.
Malaya said I could have whatever I wanted, though that's obviously got to be kept within reason in a store filled with $500+ skulls and articulated animal skeletons. We got some jewelry, some cool pewter pendants, a rabbit hide that the cats went crazy over, skull key chains, a 10" brown and white striped African porcupine quill, and lots of other small items. Our one larger purchase was my birthday present, and you saw a glimpse of it in the earlier update. The cats went crazy sniffing it too.
It's some kind of sheep skull, but what type we do not know. The tag in the store said simply "fancy sheep," and it's obviously a male, with those horns, but that's about all I can tell you. I'd like to know more about the provenance, so I'll probably try to identify it by the horns at some point. It's going to be just one of many in my eventual bone/skull collection, after all.
I put it above my monitor, of course, and yes, it's staring down at me even as I write this. I love it, and it seems like a "write more fiction" guardian to me, but then again I've always loved skulls, so I would think that.
Lastly, this has nothing to do with my birthday, but I found the staff of the Bone Room curious. The owner is just what we expected; old white guy, looks sort of professorial, seems slightly-cranky while being absurdly-knowledegable in his field. The store was much busier than I'd have expected though, and his staff, three women in their early twenties were very busy selling things, answering questions, and doing a lot of phone orders. One looked average; brown hair, okay face, slightly pudgy, etc. Just like 90% of the women her age I see in a given year. The other two were amusing though, in that they were super-goth girls. Like above and beyond the
Suicide Girls minimum requirement. All black clothing, huge tattoos on their arms, neck, back, etc, jet black dyed hair; one in dreads and the other straight and perfect like Morticia Addams, much facial jewelry, etc.
They were sort of "lipstick goths," to coin (?) a phrase, in that they were slim and feminine in looks, and very normal in their mannerisms. Entering that store for the first time has to be a strange experience for anyone who has done business with the Bone Room over the phone, since while we were there I heard both the goth girls taking and making orders, and they both had perfect phone voices and manners. They were friendly and helpful, so I'm certainly not complaining about their look or style; I've just got to wonder what they look like when they go out clubbing if that's how they dress for work. Also, I'd be interested to hear how they decided to go that far goth, and how they ended up working in such a strangely-appropriate place of business. Not that I'm ever likely to gain answers to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud.
After exhausting ourselves and our budget in the Bone Room, we picked up some sandwiches at
a tiny Greek sandwich place in the area, and drove down to the Berkeley Marina, where we braved gale-force winds to eat our sandwiches and fruit salads in the open air looking out over the bay, towards the distant Golden Gate bridge. Next stop, Japan. I might be exaggerating a bit when I saw "gale-force" but I've never before had pieces of lettuce actually blow off of my sandwich.
From there we headed home, and while I did some computer work Malaya was off to the gym. She returned around 6, and I left shortly thereafter for Kali class. The Birthday stuff was not over yet though, and when I got back at 9:30 she'd made salad, cooked a big crustless quiche-like thing, baked catfish and veggies, and even scored fat slices of my two favorite types of pie: pecan and cheesecake. It was quite the feast, and made all the more delicious by the fact that I did not have to prepare it, clean up after it, or think about it anyway.
I'm feeling a bit guilty about the all the birthday stuff at this point, since I've never done this much for Malaya on her birthdays past, and I honestly don't know that I ever will, much though I'd like to. She doesn't expect me to though; she's doing all these nice things because she really loves me and wants to do nice things for me, and while that's an odd concept to wrap my brain around, I'm working at it.
Hers is really the best attitude to take towards someone else's fun, though. Don't do it because you expect recompense, or equivalence. Give someone a present or a card or whatever because you care about them and because you want them to have it. Don't tie your own hoped-for card or present or whatever to that, since that turns it from a gift into an obligation, and it will make you unhappy if you don't get as good as you gave. Besides, if you follow that math you probably owe your parents a car, a down payment on a house, and about four new wardrobes, and that's just getting started on what you owe them for raising you.
This is rationalizing, a bit, since I've gone in on the card and gift and such for three of our mutual friends in the past year, and none of them remembered me in any way this week. I could get angry about that and feel ripped off, or castigate them for being thoughtless or ungrateful or whatever, but what would be the point in that? They're all very busy in their real lives, and they're all friends of Malaya's that I just know through her, so really, what did I expect? About what I got, to be honest. They've done lots of small things I've benefited from in the past anyway, and who am I, the one who usually ignores it almost entirely, to complain about other people not paying enough attention to my birthday?
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Birthday Festivities: Day Two
Today's destination was...
the Bone Room! At last, my precious.
More tonight.
Birthday Stuff, Day One
Yes, Day One. I'm as surprised as anyone by this development, but Malaya's got three days of stuff planned this year, and two presents. I'm not sure how that math works, but today was day one, and it began with a wake up backrub that turned into a full body rub, and then became a mall shopping expedition. Todai, our choice for dinner, is at the mall, but rather than heading straight for the food Malaya dragged me off into the depths of the tween-infested pits.
Ordinarily I dread such a journey with all the might my blackened heart can muster (to mangle a metaphor) but I was more curious today, since I didn't know where we were going. I was happy to see that our first stop was Wilson's Leather though, since it's hard to go wrong there. Malaya said I could have anything I wanted, so long as it was leather, or even fur. I don't want anything fur, but while I usually enjoy leather I didn't feel the need for any today. I've got a relatively new leather jacket that's the style I want it to be, at least until they make one in a style I like more, I have an old pair of leather pants that I haven't worn in years, I have a sturdy and nicely-battered leather bag that I've had since about 1988, and I have a leather wallet that doesn't need replacement. I also have a new leather belt that was $9 at TJ Maxx (vs. $30 at Wilsons for the exact same thing) and I'm not going to buy a leather hat or gloves or anything like that, at least not in June. Or not until I get my Lamborghini and can wear racing gloves while driving without becoming the laughingstock of every single other vehicle on the road.
I was given no advance warning about the leather-based present requirement, but thinking on my feet, literally, it occurred to me that my only dress shoes are uncomfortable, clunky things that I spent $22 on at a Payless Shoe Source some years ago. Plus they're only still black and acceptable for public exhibition through the grace of lots of black shoe polish, so with Malaya delighted by my suggestion, off we headed to Macy's. As it turns out they have quite a few leather dress shoes, so long as you like them black, or possibly dark brown, and shiny and traditional in design.
We browsed for a bit, saw none I liked that could still pass for formal, compromised, and eventually settled on ones that looked okay, and felt pretty good on my feet. They've actually got some padding in them, unlike my current cheap ones. Behold!
These are
Rockport Warringtons, and yes, they were expensive. I certainly wouldn't have spent the money on them, and would have settled for some near-look alikes that were $80 (or more likely have gone back to Payless and tried my luck again), but Malaya was buying, she insisted that I not even consider the price, and since I couldn't think of anything else I much wanted/needed for my birthday... this be them. I'll try to wear them a bit more often than I have my current dress shoes to get something approaching her money's worth, but it's not like I move beyond jeans and cargo pants very often, when I can even be bothered to not wear shorts.
I've got a wedding to attend in October, at the very least.
Also, as I said above, this was just day one of the birthday stuff. Malaya's got plans for us to do something tomorrow, and apparently I'll get another present then too, though I've got no idea what it is. Strangest of all, we're doing some more birthday stuff on Wednesday, and that stuff does not include a present; at least not one of a tangible, wrap-able nature.
The most unusual present of the day arrived in the mail Monday morning, and it was from my mom, with some collaboration from Malaya. It's a "shadowbox" they tell me, the craft project-impaired man. The concept is that
women people buy a box that's a few inches deep and covered by a glass front, and then they fill it up with scrapbook type stuff and other decorative elements. In this case mom put one together that could be entitled "Flux, as of June 2005." It's got pictures of me, Malaya, Dusty and Jinx, me doing Kali, and lists of my favorite authors, my favorite things/people, and more. You get the idea.
It's got quite a nice design as well, with silver and black the predominant theme, and there are even some little kali sticks inside, along with books, cool picture frames around tiny images that could represent characters from my ongoing fantasy novel. Take a look, and yes it's small so you can't read it, and yes I pixeled out Malaya's face and a few other bits of personal info that I don't want online.
It's certainly not anything I would have ever asked for or thought of, but I like it now that it's here and it's taken up a position of prominence on the shelf immediately above our TV. Here's to hoping the cats manage not to knock it down in a shattering disaster within the first week.
As for the birthday lunch/dinner... urf. I had one fried egg on toast for breakfast at around 1pm, we ate from like 6 til 7, it's 2am now, and I'm still full. We're eating a couple of small peaches now, but that's mostly just to chew on something sweet before bed, since our mouths are bored from doing nothing for the past half day. Nothing at Todai was great (Malaya might disagree when discussing their
saba), but everything was pretty good and as it's a buffet, there was a lot of it. My meal was free, a $23 dollar value, and that's a decent birthday present right there.
You'd think they would discontinue that birthday free meal thing, as many people use it, (When they seat you they ask if there are any birthdays, and I heard at least half a dozen from the maybe fifteen tables near us while we were eating.) but since most people there go in parties of 4 or more, and there's since never more than one birthday per group, I guess they make up for it in quantity. Free or not, Todai is an amazing value just for the sushi. Most restaurants you're paying $5 or so for two pieces, much more for expensive fish or in an expensive restaurant, and at Todai they've got 20 different types of sushi and it's all included. Just eat eight pieces and a few bites of dessert and you've broken even, and needless to say, but no one there just eats eight bites. Hell, most people eat $22.95 worth of just the giant crab legs, it seems like, much less the sushi.
More on the birthday stuff tomorrow, assuming I survive the festivities, and then the Kali class in the evening. Also, thanks to everyone who posted their birthday wishes. It's almost like you guys care, or something?
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