Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Home and a special birthday.
So all went as planned, and I returned to Oakland's lovely Bay-side airport Tuesday, around noonish. Malaya was there to meet me by the baggage claim, and began hopping up and down in eagerness as soon as she caught sight of me walking down the hallway past the security checkpoint area. Yes, it was very cute. We hugged for about a minute, both very glad to see each other after nearly a week apart. Once my luggage rolled around we took off, drove straight home, unpacked, talked some more, and just generally spent some very nice quality alone time.
We'd talked on the phone several times while I was in Death Valley, but I was going to bed early there and we couldn't get too deep into conversation with me in a hotel room with my mom and stepdad. At least not too deep with the lovey-dovey talk; not that my mom or stepdad would have objected or minded. They're therapists, and painfully open about that sort of relationship stuff.
The other inconvenience on our conversations were the phones, since there was cell service in DV, but only just. I got no signal, but was in some sort of extended roaming coverage that was analogue only. So no text messages, and with the average call lasting about 30 seconds before a disconnect, I began to miss the days of the Pony Express. We tried talking the first night I was there, soon realized it wasn't going to happen, and then required 4 more calls until we could stay on long enough for me to give her the damn phone number to the hotel, and our room number.
I'll talk a great deal more about DV tomorrow, hopefully, when I start going through the photos, but it was a great vacation in a great place, and I got along fine with the parental units, and there was good hiking and rock climbing and such, and aside from feeling rather dessicated by the dry desert air, I'm none the worse for wear. Plus I broke in my hiking boots in excellent fashion.
Well... actually my left knee is sore, with ligaments that feel slightly stretched by some heavy exertion and slight hyper-extension on missteps over rocky paths. I can't sit with it straight out in front of me and the heel on the floor, for the patella feeling like it's subluxing, or something equally pop-out-of-place-y. But it's okay for walking and such. My left wrist is pretty sore too, and it hurts to bend it all the way down or up. Oddly, I have no idea why the wrist is sore; I never fell or banged it into anything, or carried anything heavy in that hand, or etc.
Largely for those reasons, I wasn't real aggrieved to miss Kali class on Tuesday night, in preference for spending time with Malaya. It was her birthday on Monday, and while I missed it, the flower arrangement and Happy Birthday teddy bear I ordered for her did arrive. At her work, no less, to give her a nice boost while she toiled, and she loved them, and the thought behind it. It's strange to say, but it's actually very helpful that the vast majority of men (usually including myself) are such horrible people, in terms of being thoughtful about the needs of others. Women actually care about other people, or at least they care about preserving the illusion that they care about other poeple, so they send thank you cards and remember anniversaries and birthdays and such. Men don't care and men forget, and when my gender does manage to remember, the receipent is lucky to get a card with a hastily-scrawled signature and maybe a gift cert to Blockbuster. So compared to that, me ordering 1-800-FLOWERS for Malaya on her birthday was like a fricking lottery win.
I gave her a few other presents on Tuesday; a package of various small souvenirs from DV, including a few nice rocks, a hunk of salt from the "replenished every time it rains" salt flats (collected in direct violation of National Park Rules!), a t-shirt with a lizard on it that's got bones that can only be seen when they're glowing in the dark, a fridge magnet with a cow skull and park logo, a hematite key chain fob, and more. All trinkets basically, but since I had also gotten a ring made while in San Diego some months ago, and I managed to give her that over dinner at Todai (free on your birthday, full price and not even a waiter-mangled song the day after), she was pretty happy with her birthday haul. The ring will be easier to picture than describe, but it's white gold with two stones that look almost exactly like a small sapphire and a small emerald, and it's very shiny and sleek. It's even got our names engraved on it, in tasteful and small letters, and as is usually the case with presents to women, she was much more interested in the meaning behind it and the fact that I thought enough to make it up in advance than the utility or dollar value or the other factors that men usually use to gauge the quality of our (usually undeserved) presents.
And no, we're not married now, or engaged, but we're promised, or something like that, and while nothing has changed in our relationship, she liked the present and the sorta-public declaration of my affections and intentions, and I liked making her happy with those things.
Other events on the birthday fun included a lunch-time dessert at Ghiradelli's (hot fudge brownie sundae!) over in Walnut Creek, window shopping and store-entering to escape the quite wet and chilly weather in laughably bougie and overpriced Walnut Creek, several stops at other stores, and much wandering around the mall while we waited for Todai to open for dinner at 5:30. There was even more quality alone time and TV-viewing, and snack-eating, and cat-tormenting, and back-rub-trading later during the evening, and once I finish typing this in I'm going to dive into bed and snuggle up behind my love.
Malaya proclaimed it the best birthday ever, and while I don't think I really did that much, or as much as she deserved, I had a good time and I'm happy she enjoyed it. And I'm glad to be back home, and after some mindless clicking tonight, while vegging out after Malaya hopped into bed, I'm already 90% caught up on my surfing. Fresh from a vacation and very aware of how much less fiction progress I've made (less than I should/could have) over the last two years, I'm going to try and make some changes in my life. I didn't miss most of my time-wasting activities during the last few days when they weren't available, so I'm going to try and not slide back into them now. That mainly means none or much less pointless online gaming, far less time-wasting surfing, and less mindless TV-watching. After all, it's not like I really care if I get a score in the top 25 driving
Funky Truck 3, or give a damn that Jessica Simpson and her himbo finally admitted
they were divorcing. Right?
Anyway, Wednesday is upon me, but with Malaya off at work all day I am planning to go through the photos from DV and getting at least a good start on some sort of vacation page from that event. I'd also still like to do some photos and a report about BlizCon, a month and a major US holiday late or not, and there's plenty of other blog work and some real life errands to do before Malaya gets home in the evening and we head over to the gym. And in a perfect, or at least above-average world, all of that will get done in the afternoon, freeing up my evening to spend some time with Malaya, and then get back into the fiction. I can't see finishing the fantasy novel(s) this year, as I'd hoped, but I can get at least the rough draft done during January. It would be nice to one day be able to afford more than a promise ring, after all.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Vacation, again?
I'm not quite sure how it's already Thanksgiving, but apparently time waits for no man, and it's been like three weeks since I returned from my BlizCon/SD Halloween trip. I have no idea how. Seriously, it's been like a week and a half, right? I haven't even sorted the goddamned BlizCon photos yet, much less written an article about the experience. And don't ask how much progress I've made on the novel, not with the last 10% of chapter six turning into a mini-novel all by itself. (You don't need to ask, since I'm going to tell you anyway.)
Well, actually it's not that long, it's just required four nearly complete rewrites, and when each one takes a couple of days, and then another day to edit, and then another day for me to realize what's wrong with it, and then two more days to rewrite it... First the battle scene was short with not enough detail. When I reread it I put in a ton of notes for things to elaborate on, both in terms of physical action and background info and exposition and character thoughts and such. The second time through it got way, way too long, as I put in all of my notes and more, and the pacing was ruined. Battle scenes with two page digressions during which the narrating character thinks about the geopolitical situation on another continent that led to the current invasion aren't exactly suspense-builders. So then I edited that and thought about it and noted places to make cuts, but by then I had changed my ideas about how some things should go, and wanted to add other thoughts in. At one point I had a whole 10 page scene written, with the 12 page replacement right above it, completely written from scratch, and had to go over both of them and cut out the good bits from each and combine them, with much reordering, while adding in more new stuff to make it all flow.
It's scary how much longer it can take to rewrite five pages than it took to write those pages in the first place.
Anyway, writing struggles aside, I have no idea where the past three weeks went. Time just flashed by, and now it's T-day, and I'm off to
Death Valley. Yes, the charmingly-named desert vacation spot, home to jagged, inhospitable mountains, countless jagged stones, miles of sand dunes, and the lowest dry point in the Continental United States.
My mom and I used to travel there almost every spring, back when she was single, I was young, and we were into camping. I enjoyed the trips, and the hiking, and the sand dunes, and the desert beauty. I find that I like extremes in nature. Deserts, snowy wastes, and tropical rainforests. I've not been to Death Valley in many years though, and I'd hoped to take Malaya the next time I went. She's been in the deserts of South Africa, but not the US, and you know how it is when you meet someone new; you want to take them to your favorite places.
She couldn't make the trip this time though, not with her busy work schedule, plus her B-day falls just after Thanksgiving, and she didn't want to be out in the desert on that special day. Not that we're sleeping on the salt flats; we're staying in a quite acceptable hotel, and even heading over to the ritzy resort hotel for their big dress up Thanksgiving dinner. But that's neither here nor there.
The trip sneaked up on me even more quickly because my departure date just changed. I'd been planning to drive down on Wednesday, leaving earlyish and arriving at the Furnace Creek Inn in the afternoon. However, the more I plotted the map, the more disatisfied I became. DV is way over on the Nevada border, and it's basically in central California. Look at
this google maps view; DV is the elongated green blotch on the eastern border, NE of LA. It's really not much closer to SD than to SF, if you travel straight there. Unfortunately, that's not possible without wings, since most of eastern California is desert and wilderness, and there aren't any major roads. If I could drive due east from Visalia I'd be there in no time. Unfortunately, I have to drive 100 miles south to Bakersfield, then go east, then go 100 miles back to the north, whereas they've got pretty much a straight shot NNE from SD to DV, plus 50 miles as they jig east through Barstow.
It's like 260 miles from SD to DV. It's well over 500 from the Bay Area to DV, thanks to the lack of roads across the various national and state parks. So at the last minute I decided to fly down to SD and drive up with Mom and Glenn. Since they're leaving early Wednesday morning, I've got to fly down Tuesday evening, and since I'm going at the last minute, and right before a major US holiday, I can't use any free frequent flier mileage, and I'm paying the expensive Southwest Airlines rates. Hey, it's not as if I knew about this trip like six months ago, when I could have bought cheaper tickets. Oh wait.
We're staying in DV Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and driving back on Monday, mostly so we'll miss the horrible "Sunday after Thanksgiving" traffic on our return. I'm then flying back to Oakland on Tuesday afternoon, when I'll help Malaya celebrate a slightly-belated birthday, and return to my life as originally-scheduled. And hopefully really return to writing. I've made unsatisfactory progress in recent weeks, and while I can't really imagine finishing the novel this year (three chapters/150k+ words in December?) I want to get most of it done and finish it in January. Dad's coming up to visit one day in December, but I'm not taking any more trips over the holidays, at least not until we (hopefully) do some sort of snowboarding jaunt over to Lake Tahoe some time in January or February.
And yes, I'll take tons of photos of the gorgeous desert scenery while I'm in Death Valley. And I might even get around to sorting and cropping and posting them sometime before Easter, with any luck. I am taking the laptop along, in case I'm struck by the desire to do some writing in San Diego or in Death Valley, but I doubt I'll be online at all from the desert, so don't expect much/any blogging between tomorrow and next Tuesday. Kthx. Plz.
Late Term Himbo
While we joke about it all the time, largely motivated by Malaya's misguided and overly-kind contention that I'm actually physically attractive, I am not really much of a himbo. Until recent years I never worried much about color coordination, I never owned more than one pair of wearable shoes at a time (well, 2 if you could sandals and 3 if you count hiking boots), I got my hair cut seasonally, if that often, and the vast majority of my wardrobe was black. That all began to change once I moved in with Malaya and started wanting to look, if not good, then at least better. I diversified to two pairs of sneakers and added a pair of dress shoes, I got a few more semi-formal button up shirts to wear on our rare sort of dressed up dates, shaved every day, and so forth.
The real himbosity didn't begin until relatively recently, when I started buying dri-weave athletic clothing. I'd just worn cotton t's for most of my life, not really paying much attention to the discomfort I felt with a sweaty, heavy, clammy cotton t-shirt on my back, post workout. I started to really notice it during Kali class, since we get sweaty, stand around for discussion and teaching, take turns doing exertions, and so on. It's a lot of sweat, stand, sweat, stand, and while sweaty cotton isn't a big deal if you're still sweating, it's not much fun when you're not. Driving home was especially icky, with the icy cold sweat against my back. I took to carrying spare t's in the car just to change after class.
I still do, but after noticing that another student often wore shimmery, polyester-type shirts, and that he didn't seem to be all wet on the back after class, I thought I'd try one of those shirts. So I got a short sleeved one, and wore it to the gym and then to class, and loved it. Nice fit, very light, and since the sweat wicks away and evaporates, I didn't feel all weighed down and gross. So I got another one. And another one. And two more in different colors.
Fast forward a few months, and I'm up to maybe 18 long sleeve shirts that look something
like this.
Or this. (And I'd especially wear
this one, if I were a girl.) All different styles, from plain solid colors to ones with stripes and lines, some are rough textured, others are very thin and light and shiny, and on and on. I've also got a good 8 pairs of workout shorts, all shiny, all varying colors, and another half dozen long pants along the same lines. All very functional, all comfortable, and all worn constantly, either to Kali or the gym.
The himbo aspect comes in now -- since I've got so many of those garments, and since they're in so many different colors, usually with a highlighting stripe of a different color, I can suddenly color coordinate. In fact I not only can, I'm sort of compelled to, since when my shirt's orange with white piping, I'm not going to wear blue pants and black shoes along with it. What, is this a contest to use the most colors in a single outfit? Like the old school Geocities website design aesthetic? Of course I've got to coordinate, and as I engage in even my vestigial efforts at such, I get some insight into what it's like to be a girl. No wonder they've got so many bags, and hair pins, and shoes, and bangly bracelets, and so on. They can only wear a few of them with a few outfits, and they've got to plan it all out in advance, and then see how it looks once it's actually on their bodies.
Like, ohmigod, it so doesn't go with the highlights in my hair!
Anyway, I'm not color matching manpurses yet, and I've only got three pairs of shoes, but those damn two-tone himbo shirts are definitely
forcing allowing me to match up colors and styles in ways I never before done.
Fortunately, for my bursting closet and misplaced self-respect, I've put a moratorium on buying any more himbo shirts. Just now we desperately need to wash clothing, and even with all of my socks dirty and most of my pants, I've still got clean: 4 or 5 long sleeve shiny shirts, 2 very tight Underarmour type shirts, 3 of my 5 sleeveless workout shirts, and about eight old t's that I'm supposed to wear to the gym. And if I can't get all of them dirty, even after going to the gym or Kali about 19 out of the last 21 days, I've got too many of them.
Of course you'll notice that I'm still clinging to outdated clothing concepts; no true himbo would even consider having so few clothes that all of them were dirty at the same time. Plus, I get all of my clothing at TJ Maxx or Ross or other discount places, where the $30-40 MSRP on the himbo shirts is discounted to $14 or $12 or $9. As such I can't get any style I want, I can only pick the best of the factory extras and such that show up there. So I've got one or two of every color, in a variety of mismatched sizes, some with stripes, some plain, some heavy, some light, etc. God help me (and the world!) if I ever get some money and a home with a bigger closet. If I could go to actual department stores and pay the laughable MSRP on these items, I would be as giddy as a kept wife in a shoe store.
Speaking of shoes, I got my second pair of $100 sneakers this weekend, and yes, they're himbotastic. I got an expensive pair of
Nike Shox a few months ago. They're still doing me pretty well, but they're dark blue and silver, and I wanted a lighter-colored pair, perhaps with some dark red on them. Yes, I went shopping for shoes, at least partially motivated by thoughts of what color they would be. Is that a bad sign? Is metrosexuality just around the corner?
As you can see, I pretty much got what I wanted. I was thinking silver and white when we got to the mall, but I couldn't go with just those colors, or plain white, like seemingly everyone else wears. Too plain. This pair fit the bill nicely, and yes, I tried them on first and really liked the feel; they're very springy and fit nicely, besides being pretty.
My other pair of Shox are actually not that great; the spring things are actually very stiff, and while they feel good to run in, they're hard on my feet just standing still, and I feel a bit too high above the ground in them. These new ones are Nike Shox Oz, if you must have a pair of your own, and while I've only worn them to the gym twice thus far, I can't help but recommend them. They were $100, on a special one day 25% off sale, or I probably wouldn't have gotten them, since I wasn't looking to spend that much.
And the fact that I've thus far worn nothing but white, silver, and dark red clothing with those shoes is a complete coincidence, I assure you. As is the fact that I can't pack for my week-long Thanksgiving vacation yet. It has nothing to do with the fact that everything is dirty and I have to wait until we wash things tomorrow so I can coordinate some cute outfits to take with me. *cough*
Monday, November 21, 2005
Weekend Events
There weren't a lot of them, but since I wanted to follow up on a couple of things, here's a post for that purpose.
We didn't see any movies over the weekend, and never even thought about it, despite being out running various errands most of Saturday afternoon. Harry Potter 4 did fine even without us though, notching the 4th biggest opening weekend in US history. It made
$102.4m in the US, with another $85.5m worldwide, setting opening day weekends in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. Reviews are still strong too, so perhaps Malaya and I will see it next week. We can't get out before then, since I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon and won't be home until next Tuesday.
Also over the weekend, there was football. I'm not going to revisit
my whole long "the AFC playoffs are decided already" post, but to no one's surprise, there were surprises.
The 5-4 Chargers and Chiefs are now 6-4, thanks to a pair of dominating performances in games they were supposed to win. The 6-3 Jacksonville Jaguars (or "jag-wires" as they call them down south") are now 7-3, though their game in Tennessee was more competitive than expected. And the 7-2 Bengals/Steelers are now both 7-3, thanks to losses against Indy for Cin, and at Baltimore, for Pittsburgh. So now there are 3 teams at 7-3 and 2 at 6-4, with one division and 2 wildcard spots to divide between them. I'm ruling KC out thanks to their outrageously-difficult schedule, and ruling Jax in thanks to their outrageously-easy schedule. It gets interesting between Pitt, Cin, and SD though. Yes, SD has a somewhat harder schedule than the other two, but Pitt is looking horrible with their QB injured, and they play undefeated Indy next weekend.
If
Pittsburgh can't manage a win over the moribund, formerly 2-7 Baltimore Ravens, how are they going to cope with three straight games @Indy, and then home to Cinn and Chicago? They could easily be 7-6 at that point, though they'll more likely win one to make it to be 8-5, before visiting sporadically-good Minn and Cleveland, and closing with a freebie hosting Detroit. Ten wins seems quite possible there, which would be quite a debacle after opening 7-2. The problem, as far as San Diego is concerned, is that Pittsburgh beat them head to head, and thus gets the first tie-breaker. So even if Pitt slumps to 10-6, SD would have to win 5 out of their last 6 to beat them out. Good luck.
Imagine if SD had beaten Pitt, though? SD would now be 7-3, Pitt would be 6-4, and SD would own the tie-breaker, leaving Pitt in need of a two-game collapse by SD to catch them for the wild card. Of course SD should really be 8-3 or 9-2 at this point, with 5 blowout wins, 1 close win, and 4 very close losses, so they can hardly start blaming others for their troubles.
Cincinati has an easier schedule than Pittsburgh, and their QB is not injured, so while it's easy to reflexively assume they'll revert to Bungles fashion, it's far from sure. They've got very winnable home games left against Baltimore, Cleveland, and Buffalo, but even if they sweep those they'll need to win at least one on the road against Pittsburgh, Detroit, or KC to get to 11 wins and a pretty much sure playoff spot. Not all that treacherous a road, but not the cake walk Jacksonville is set to enjoy, at least.
I almost wish the upcoming games were unknown, since it would be more fun to see things unveiled gradually. As it is, with such completely unbalanced schedules the whole thing seems almost preordained. Especially for Jacksonville; they can play like glorified-shit and go 12-4, from this point.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
NFL Weekend.
Yes, it's my weekly post on the subject that no one wants to read... NFL Sunday Football!
As usual, the games on in the Bay Area suck. 10am: Oakland @ Washington, 1pm: Seattle @ SF. While both local teams suck (again) at least they're playing a pair of decent teams. Seattle might be the best team in the NFC, this year, and I've never seen them play yet, so I'll probably tape that one and watch it in the evening, while I work on other things during the afternoon. I got nothing done today (though I'll be working on the novel for the next few hours) since I was at the gym with Malaya and then out running errands and doing some shopping. I did get some cool new shoes though, so I can't really complain. Our errands weren't critical or anything, I just wanted to spend some time with her since she's going to be gone all day tomorrow, and then I'm leaving Wednesday morning to drive to Death Valley, where I'm vacationing over T-day with my mom and stepdad. More on that later.
As for the NFL, I spent numerous posts earlier this year griping about the shitty games on here, and yeah, they're still shitty, but what's to gripe about? There's obviously an NFL TV rule that local teams must be shown, if possible, without any competing games. I think it's an asine rule; why force us to watch the meaningless mismatch of the 49ers getting slaughtered by Seattle when everyone else in the country is enjoying the Indy@Cin game of the week? Hell, there are at least 4 or 5 much better early games than Oak@Wash, for that matter. Is it all some sort of scheme to sell more people on the pay per view NFL Sunday Ticket, where you get to see every game? Why don't both CBS and FOX show games early and late, and if people want to watch the team from their geographical area they can, and if they don't, they've got another option?
That aside, I'm feeling less interested in the NFL since the AFC playoff spots are essentially locked up, even with barely half the season gone. There are now 4 divisions in each conference (
standings here). The four division winners get automatic playoff spots, and the next two best records in each conference get a wildcard. The problem there is that if one or two divisions have a bad year, there are likely going to be division winners with worse records than other teams who don't even make the playoffs. The other problem is that some divisions suck, and since schedules include teams playing all four teams in various other divisions, some teams have absurdly easy schedules this year.
The easiest examples are Indianapolis and Jacksonville, 9-0 and 6-3 at this point, respectively. They each get to play two games against woeful division "rivals" Tennessee and Houston, and then get four games against the NFC West. Jacksonville has actually had a pretty tough schedule thus far, and they've done well to come out of it 6-3. Two wins in overtime didn't hurt there. From here on out though, their schedule is ridiculous. They play 2-7 Tenn twice, 2-7 Arizona, 2-7 SF, 3-6 Cleveland, and 1-8 Houston, with only a game against 9-0 Indy breaking up the absurdity. How can they have 7 games left, with 6 of them against teams with an average record of 2-7? Now sure, some of those teams might improve over the rest of the year, and it's unlikely Jacksonville will win all six games, though they'll certainly be favored to do so. But they could easily win all seven (the Indy game is in Jacksonville), and seem almost sure to win at least 5.
So that's one wildcard spot there (Jacksonville is 3 games behind Indy, so not likely to catch up there), and the other looks to be between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, who are tied at 7-2 in the AFC North. Neither of those teams has a complete cakewalk the rest of the way, but of their remaining 7 games, only 3 are against teams with a winning record. However they play each other, and obviously one of them is going to win that one. Pitt and Cin will both be easy favorites in probably 5 of their remaining games, they're both 7-2 now, and one of them is going to win the division and get an automatic playoff spot. The other just needs to go 4-3 and they're almost certain to make one of the wildcard spots.
So that's it. The AFC playoffs are set, with 44% of the season yet to play. Indy, Denver, the winner of the weak AFC East (New England, most likely), Pitt/Cin with one getting the wildcard, and Jacksonville with the easiest schedule in the league crusing to the other wildcard, or possibly threatening Indy if the Colts completely fall apart with their tough 2nd half schedule. The only other teams with any shot at all are San Diego and Kansas City, both at 5-4 now, but both with far, far tougher schedules than Jacksonville, and Jacksonville is already a game up on both of them. Pitt or Cin might falter, but they'd have to, with 2 game leads to squander. Really, the best hope for KC/SD is to catch Denver and win the AFC West. That goal is complicated by the fact that Denver is also 2 games ahead, and has already beaten KC and SD head to head. Further complications come from their schedules.
SD's is harsh,
KC's is impossible.
KC blew a must-win last week at Buffalo, and after a freebie this week in Houston, they meet the death march. NE, Denver, @Dallas, @NYG, SD, Cincinnati. That's six straight teams, all with winning records and playoff aspirations. Good luck, kids.
SD had about the hardest schedule in the league through their first nine games, and came out of that 5-4, though they'll spend this offseason thinking about what could have been. They gave away a game in Denver they led 14-3 at half, they lost to Philly on a blocked FG and late fumble, and they lost to Dallas and Pittsburgh after leading in the 4th quarter. Four losses by a total of 12 points. Flip 1 or 2 of those and they'd be right there with Jacksonville for the wildcard and Denver for the division. Instead they're on life support with 3 winnable home games (Buffalo, Oakland, Miami), 3 tough road games (Washington, Indy, KC), and a finale at home against Denver. SD's only (faint) hope is to go like 5-1 over their next six, picking up a game on Denver in the process, and then beating them the last game to tie at 11-5 and win the division on a tie-breaker. (First tie-breaker, head to head, 2nd, conference record; SD is now 2-1, Denver is 3-0.)
So no, I suppose the AFC isn't as wrapped up as it appears at a glance, but the only way anything changes from how it is now is for one or two of the leading teams to stumble badly,
and for SD or KC to play almost perfectly the rest of the way. And since KC's schedule is anti-Jacksonville's, and SD's already down a head to head tie-breaker to Pitt, they can only hope to tie and tie-breaker out Cin or Jax for the wildcard, or do the same to Denver for the division.
The NFC, fortunately, has three 6-3 and one 5-4 teams now competing for two wild card spots (and their division titles, of course), so there should be intrigue and crucial games all the way out. And, thanks to the somewhat ill-advised 4 divisions of 4 teams realignment, we'll likely get the awkwardness of an 8-8 or 9-7 Chicago and New England making the playoffs, while teams like San Diego, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and the NY Giants finish with 10 or 11 wins and miss out entirely. Those teams may expect condolence cards from the Phillies, Marlins, and Mets, all of whom
finished with better records than NL West winning San Diego, and were rewarded by getting an early start on their off seasons while the Padres
assumed the fetal position against the Central-winning Cardinals.
Oh, and the Sunday night and Monday night NFL games suck too, this week. Bleh. At least there are a couple of good games on T-day -- not that I'll be anywhere near a TV to enjoy them.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
The Joys of Martin.
I thought some of the
comments from yesterday's post about the George R. R. Martin book signing were interesting, and wanted to reply with more words that would fit neatly into a comment of my own. So here I go.
First of all, I failed to add something to my talk about his roller coaster metaphor. The point is not that he kills off good guy characters. He does, sometimes, but not that often, and not capriciously. It's not, to use another fantasy series as an example, like Frodo and Sam are about to reach Mt. Doom, and then suddenly Sam trips and falls on a rock and breaks his neck. Or strokes out from a blood clot. Martin does do away with some main characters, including ones you really like, but he does it in the flow of the story, and that's what I love about it. It's not about whether that particular character lives or dies, it's about the reader knowing that they might die, and that good might not always triumph. It's about setting an example and a precedent, so that the reader is taken from their nice, safe, well-maintained roller coaster and sent careening down a rickety mine shaft with no brakes and no steering.
So yes, characters might and will die, but not cheaply, not unnecessarily, and not out of the blue. You get the showdowns and payoffs and big money scenes you're anticipating, but you don't know how they're going to turn out in advance, which makes them all the more enjoyable. For me, at least.
Two other points:
I read the first two books, but I guess I couldn't stand the...um... brutal realism, if that's the right phrase for it. I feel so unsophisticated... :(
#: 8:24 AM posted by Kane
This is another objection I see to Martin's series, and I'm not going to argue it. There is definitely an overdose of brutality, much of it largely grounded in realism, and it's not what we're used to seeing in the usual romanticized depictions of life in the Middle Ages. Martin regularly depicts humans at their absolute worst, and when you've got warring men operating without any laws to govern their conduct or behavior, they're going to do horrible things. The massacres and murders and intimidation and scheming that is discussed in morally-neutral tones is definitely strong enough to turn off a lot of readers, regardless of the quality of the overall work, and that's the price he pays for his "brutal realism."
I often find things shocking and cruel, but that doesn't turn me off or make me want to stop reading. I can easily imagine it would, for some people. My mom's reading the series now, and I'll frankly be amazed if she finishes it. She couldn't read even light horror stuff fifteen years ago, but she's gotten more comfortable with her dark side in the years since then, and if she gets through this series, much less enjoys it, I'll be amazed at how far she's come. This isn't a criticism of her or other people either; everyone has different tastes, and while I love gore and suffering and such in fiction, I realize that other people are much more sensitive than I am about it. I can't sit through lots of sappy stuff that other people eat up, and that doesn't make me weak anymore than their choosing not to subject themselves to horror and gore and brutality makes them pussies. There are surgeons and paramedics who enjoy romance fiction to unwind and get away from the ugly reality of life, and goth horror lovers who faint at the sight of their own blood and who capture bugs and release them outside rather than swatting them. Fiction is not an endurance contest.
Here's another comment, this one posted anonymously:
I read the first book, but I just found it, well...uncompelling. There wasn't anything brilliant I noticed or remembered. The writing may be excellent, but I wasn't really interested in that. But I'm planning to read the other books sometime.
As you can see in
my review of the first book (
Game of Thrones), I agree. This is basically how I reacted to that novel on my first read, though I was intrigued enough to continue on to book two, which immediately pulled me in. I liked Martin's writing, though it wasn't brilliant, and I found much of the novel interesting, while being far from blown away. I got bored with the endless court scheming and power struggling, and wanted more adventure, combat, and magic. Plus I couldn't keep the dozens of names straight, and didn't know or care who most of the minor characters were.
I did get one thing 100% correct in my review, though. I said it would be a better book the second time through, and when I read it for the second time this summer, I was amazed at how much more I enjoyed it. Simply knowing who all of the characters were was a huge help, (I'm terrible at remembering character names, even in my own writing.) but it was also great to see how all of the characters and plot lines were introduced, and to revel in the depth and detail Martin worked into his world and society.
So yes, Martin's series is bloody and brutal and all too realistic at times, and the first book is sort of slow and it's heavy lifting to remember all of the names and relationships... but it all starts to pay off incredibly in book 2, and I loved that one the first time I read it. Book 3 is even better, as the plot threads twist and turn, and characters we know so well interact in frequently astonishing ways. And yes, I'm raving like a fan boy, but it's really that good. Check
my reviews section; I never enthuse about anything like this, with the possible exception of the LotR films.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Weekend Movies
We haven't been paying much attention to movies lately, since none of the releases have been of any interest to us. King Kong is coming up in less than a month and we're all over that one (me more than her), and there are probably a few other holiday season films of interest (though I couldn't name them off the top of my head, despite paging through the entire Entertainment Weekly movie season preview last night on the throne) coming up. The only one in my head right now is Harry Potter 4, which opens this weekend. AKA today.
I wasn't going to bother with this one, except that the trailer was better than expected, and as I recall, that book had some pretty cool scenes in it. Scenes that would be fun to see on the big screen. It's getting excellent reviews as well. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire currently stands at
89% on RT, with 104/117 positive reviews, and an average score of 7.5/10. That would be persuasive, except that
a quick search shows me the three previous HP films got 79%, 82%, and 89%. The first two were slavish to the book and boring, and while the third one was more fun, it left a bad taste in my mouth, since the more I thought about it the more I realized it wouldn't have made any narrative sense to anyone who hadn't read the book already. Whether the fact that 90% of the viewers of the film had read the book mitigates things is open to interpretation.
Anyway, we might see HP4, or we might not. Malaya's out until late tonight, but I don't think we've got any big plans for Saturday or Sunday, and with the usual substandard NFL Sunday options in the Bay Area it's not like I'm going to be glued to the couch or anything. Also
opening this weekend is
Walk the Line, a Johnny Cash biopic. Malaya has expressed some interest in seeing that one, and while I have none, perhaps we should check it out and be educated. I know absolutely nothing about Johnny Cash, couldn't name you one song or tell you one thing about his life, and couldn't pick him out of a lineup including Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Frank Sinatra. Well, maybe include out that last guy, what with the fedoras and such. So while I've got no interest in or knowledge of Johnny Cash, (a condition equally embraced by my girlfriend) doesn't that mean we're actually perfect people to see the film? Everything would be a surprise to us, all the music would be new to us, and we wouldn't be upset by any "That's not how it really happened!" reactions. The film's at 83% and 7.5/10 average, so how bad can it be? If not for my reflexive hatred of all things related to country music, I'd probably be quite receptive to its charms.
Feast for Crows book signing.
As mentioned late last night, we did BART over into The City on Thursday morning, arriving at Stacey's Books at 11:30 for the 12:30
George R. R. Martin book signing. It was a good time to get there, since the signing was on the second floor of the large bookstore, and they had about 50 chairs set up. There were maybe 20 people there ahead of us, so I grabbed two seats in the middle while Malaya was downstairs buying
A Feast for Crows and two other older Martin books about which I know nothing. By noon all of the chairs were filled and at least 50 more people were lined up, and by the time he got there around 12:35, there were at least 150-200 people in the area, filling the side aisle, the center aisle, and several rows of books to the side. I couldn't get a good estimate since I was sitting in the middle with high stacks of books beside me, but it was a good sized-crowd.
Here's a pic from my cell phone cam from where we were sitting, in the fourth row, maybe 15 feet from the podium.
The guy on the right there has a Ice and Fire t-shirt on, with the Night Watch's pledge on the back. Fan boy sighting! There was at least one other guy there with a themed t-shirt, but they certainly weren't boys; Malaya and I were among the youngest people there, and she and a few other Asians were the only non-white people.
Martin was very cool. Not old in sound or look; it's the beard that makes him seem aged. He's a tiny little guy though, at least a head shorter than me, and very rotund. The size, coupled with his joking, witty mannerisms really make clear that the character in his series most like him is... Tyrion. Not that Martin's deformed or as vicious and hardened as the Imp, but he's short and he's the jester, a personality likely evolved as a defense mechanism, much as Tyrion's is in the series.
I'd never heard him speak before, and enjoyed it. He's funny, eager to self-deprecate (Tyrion again), witty, tells a good story, and gives thought-out, wordy answers to all sorts of questions. I'd have happily sat through a much longer Q&A session, but they kept it to about 30 minutes, and then the book signing stampede began.
Before we left the condo that morning, I called the bookstore (an impressive achievement, given that I'd gone to bed around 6:30am and gotten up at 10) and asked about their book signing policy. It turned out that, dire warnings on their website to the contrary, they did allow you to bring in your own books. You just had to buy one copy of the new one there to get your own signed, and they said they'd be checking receipts. At it turned out they did not check receipts, but we'd already bought a new hardcover Feast for Crows by then, and we wouldn't have been janky and picked up a new copy, had him sign it along with our other books, and then put the new one back on the shelf.
Martin's personal rule was that he'd sign three books per person per trip in line. So you could get more than three things signed, but you had to go to the back of the line and come through again. I didn't see anyone do that, or anyone with some ridiculous stack of books, but I wasn't watching the line that closely. I was a little disappointed that no one was in cosplay attire, but after all, it was a lunchtime signing in the business district of downtown SF. I imagine his evening signings have a bit more festive flair to them.
We did get three books signed, and he wrote a little personal message on them, along with his huge, looping signature. So we've got a signed US
Feast for Crows, a signed and personalized UK
Feast for Crows (the US version has a much more detailed map on the inside front, while the UK version is about an inch thicker, despite having approximately the same page count), and a signed and personalized (to me) copy of
Fevre Dream, an older novel of his about vampires. At least that's what Malaya said; I know nothing about it, though I'm obviously going to read it at some point.
Here's a shot of me with him. Tragically, Malaya's digicam came up short on this one, leaving it quite blurry, so I had to crop it and sharpen it to make it recognizable. Click the thumbnail if you want to see it full-sized, and apparently taken through a smear of Vaseline. I'd Photoshop in a torch with him passing it to me, but that would be a bit of a stretch, even given my love of sarcasm. Especially considering that he's still got 3 or 4 books to release in a fantasy series that looks likely to be the best ever written.
The niftiest news of the signing was new as of yesterday, and it was the fact that his publisher had called him yesterday to tell him that Feast for Crows was going to debut at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list. He was pretty tickled about it, if too modest to show it obviously. His previous best was #12 for Storm of Swords, the previous book in the series, way back in 2001. If there were any justice in the book buying world, book 4 would stay on top for a few months, while the three previous novels popped up on the list as well. Hell, Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and several of his other pot boilers did that when The DaVinci Code first hit so big, and A&D is blatantly the same book as DaVinci. Martin's are wildly different, even as they continue the same epic saga. He'll never sell a fraction as well as the Harry Potter series; Song of Ice and Fire is way too serious and adult and intelligent and dark, but at least he's having some richly-deserved success.
He didn't talk that much about the books, and most of the questions were general issue ones, rather than anything too detailed about the series, for which I was thankful. I was more interested in the process, and besides, I'm not letting myself read Feast for Crows until I finish my novel, a milestone I'm hoping to reach before 2006, so I really didn't want to hear any big spoilers at the talk. And I didn't.
The most interesting question was something to the effect of, "How are you able to be such an asshole to your characters?" I thought the question was more generally about how Martin created such interesting, alive, and sympathetic characters and then put them through such terrible ordeals, even to the point of killing them off unexpectedly. Martin answered it solely on the "killing them off" angle though, likely because he hears that a lot. (If you've not read the series, it's exceptionally wrenching in that numerous characters die, including major ones, including good guys you can't believe aren't going to triumph. Plenty of horrible characters die too, though, so don't think it's any more unfair than real life.)
Without going into specifics, he was clearly proud of his willingness to make his characters pay the ultimate price, and his metaphor was of a roller coaster. We all (well most) enjoy riding them, and they're thrilling and fun, but you know you're going to live. (I thought the punchline here was going to be an aside about how that wasn't always the case at smaller local fairs, but he did not go there.) He compared that sort of tame thrill to the fear people feel during war, or being held at gun point, or mugged, or whatever, and said that he tried to write the equivalent of real fear. You could pop him for being bold enough to compare his stories to the terror war veterans feel when they're actually being shot at, but I thought the metaphor was apt, and it's something I've long gripped about, if not in quite those terms.
After all, Hollywood films are the worst offenders, but lots of novels (and movies, and TV shows, and etc) do the rollercoaster thing, where there are some ups and downs, but you never really fear for the lives of the main characters, or the triumph of the good guys. They follow the formula religiously, with minor adventures leading up to a showdown, an apparent defeat for good, a stunning recovery, and the ultimate triumph. There may be a casualty or two on the good guys' side, but it's virtually never a main character, and you never doubt that good will win, in the end, no matter how bleak things look. It's far from original, but lots of readers and viewers enjoy that, and want the safety of knowing nothing too scary is going to happen, and that the story will tuck them comfortably back into bed in the end. Martin strives for just the opposite effect, and it's one of the things I really enjoy about his series and admire about his writing. And I just wish I had more main characters in my nearing-completion fantasy novel, so I could bump a few more of them off when the reader least expects it. Next time I'll write one with a bigger cast, to give me more leeway!
Seriously though, (I was being serious...) it's quite a challenge for the writer to do that, simply because you've got to make the characters interesting and you've got to have enough of them to keep the story going despite the death of principle actors. You almost have to do a series, to have time to introduce numerous characters, have them do things to make the reader interested in them, and then dispose of them anywhere before some huge grand finale.
One thing I did miss about the signing was internal. I didn't feel any huge boost of writing energy this time around, and I was kind of hoping I would. I did write some decent stuff tonight though, putting off this blog entry until very late/the last thing, which is at least partially why it's so disjointed and all over the place. I'll perhaps add another post about the signing later on Friday, when I'm more awake and my thoughts are organized. At this point I'm just hoping to see this publish without red X's for images, so I can get into bed. Three point five hours of sleep last night and an hour nap before Thursday evening kali class shouldn't have kept me going until 6am, and with Malaya out all day and evening tomorrow I'll have no excuse not to get substantial writing done. I'm even hoping to bang out my much-delayed BlizzCon-themed Decahedron, tomorrow in the day before I get going on the fiction.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
To meet the greatest living fantasy author...
Excitement is building here in Casa Malalux with
George R. R. Martin's SF book signing coming up later today. The signing is downtown at
Stacey's Books, at noon. There's one in the evening too, but we figured that one would be even more crowded, and since I'd have had to miss Kali class to attend, noon time it is. The bad news is that they say books to be signed
MUST be bought in the store and that they'll be checking receipts. I would have liked to get Martin's ink in some of my old
Wildcards paperbacks (he edited them), and of course in the
Song of Ice and Fire books as well, but apparently that's not possible. Not even in the new hardcover UK edition of Feast of Crows that I haven't even had a chance to read yet. Why can't we get that one signed? It's not as if they'll even be selling that edition there!
Oh yeah, because they want to move several hundred copies at $26.99 each, and they could give a shit if you got a foreign edition two weeks before the US version went on sale. We're more interested in going early to hear Martin talk, but I'm not sure that'll even be possible, as crowded as the event is likely to be. I've walked past the bookstore but never been inside, and while they've had numerous very famous people sign there, I can't believe they've got enough space for hundreds of fans to cram in, even if we fill every aisle. Or that the fire marshall would allow that if we could.
Honestly, I don't really care about the signed copies, though I would have liked to get some while I was there. I think collecting autographs is ridiculous, even ones that are real, unlike 95% of the ones they sell on sports memorabilia. What do you do with an autograph though? It's someone's name on a piece of paper. I can sort of see the point in a photo of you with someone, and having them sign it is sort of cool if they're famous, but just their name by itself is of what use, exactly?
I don't really care about the price, since the money is going to an author who deserves it, but I don't need another copy of the book, and since I don't put any real value on it as a collectible, what's the point? If I were smart I'd probably buy like ten copies and have him sign them all to celebrities, and then try to ebay those as authentic books owned by Madonna, or Lindsey Lohan, or Aragorn, or whoever. Or at least get them signed and give them out as Xmas presents... though I'm not sure how good a present the 4th book in a series would be, unless I included the first three, or just wanted to confuse people.
Signature issues aside, it should be fun to see and sort of meet one of the very few authors I really admire. I got to see Clive Barker when he was signing
Imajica back in the 90s, and was supercharged to write and succeed for a good month after that meeting. He was my favorite author, at the time. Today I'd like to meet Stephen King, more for the work he did 20 years ago than anything more recent, and I'd be curious to see if t3h insipid oozes through the pores of famous
hacks authors like Saul and Salvatore and the son of McCaffrey, but that's about it. I sometimes wish I had more of a celebrity lust, just so I could get excited about potentially meeting famous people. I only feel interest in meeting ones I admire, and since that's a very, very short list... eh.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Living Space Changes
Yah for us. On Tuesday we at last completed the long-planned and long-delayed reorganization of our condo. Gone (into storage in the corner) is the never-used kitchen table, out of the storage shed and onto the far corner of the back patio are our seldom-used bikes, moved are the back patio furniture, slid was the enormous bookshelf from the bedroom to the living room, and so on. I'd detail all the changes and include photos, but since none of you know (or care) what the rooms looked like before, I doubt you'd give much of a damn about how we rearranged the deck chairs on this particular Titanic.
We like the changes though, and it makes the bedroom and living room seem larger, even though we didn't actually remove any furniture yet, and it will likely still seem larger even after we add another dresser in the bedroom after our next Ikea visit. My favorite part is the added space in the TV area of the living room. We used to sit perhaps four feet from the TV. We're now more like six feet back, and while this has intensified our desire for a larger TV, it's also given us enough space to do something on the floor. Something. Something... if you know what I mean? Nudge, nudge.
We got started doing it Tuesday evening when I returned from Kali, ran over to the gym for an intense 30 minute workout (Kali class was largely sweat-free, for a change, and I had energy), and returned home to show Malaya the stick technique we worked on in class. And I had enough space to do that without banging my length of wood into the couch, the TV, or her. Not that we ever bang it into things by accident; one of the key things we learn is to control our weapons and to know just how far they're swinging out behind us, and what we might hit back there if we're not careful. And yes, there are lots of hits that target things behind you.
After that brief demonstration (I was tired and my left elbow hurt from banging into the stick so many times during class.) we ate and relaxed for a while, and next used the floor after watching
UFC on tape from Monday night, and seeing Matt Hughes submit a guy in like two seconds by skillful application of an arm bar. I couldn't quite understand just how he'd rotated around the guy so quickly and manipulated his arm into the "bent to the breaking point" posture, but with Malaya's help I soon found out. I've never done any Gracie Jujitsu, or other ground-based martial arts, or wrestled, but that stuff looks more and more useful and impressive, the more we see it used in UFC fights.
Stand up fighting is great in theory, and it's tons of fun to practice and it looks flashy, especially if your opponent is willing to stand there and trade punches/kicks with you, but with 99% of real life fights instantly turning into mutual headlock brawls, your ability to land a spinning heel kick or how well you can disguise your hooks and crosses with jabs is pretty much irrelevant, outside of class. Tragically, ground skills aren't much use either, since any serious real life fight is going to revolve more around biting, eye-gouging, choking, and the bashing of heads into brick walls, but at least you'll be somewhat more prepared to inflict or suffer those types of assaults if you've spent a few hours on the mat. And hell, at least that ground stuff is great exercise.
History's most underrated inventions.
Nice article that does just what it sounds like. It lists and ranks nine inventions throughout human history that made the biggest difference in life, often in surprising ways. They're even written up with enough info to let you know why they were special. I liked the one about longbows, of course, and I bet you will too.
Longbow. When people think of major military inventions, they usually think of the gun, which did enable the European conquest and colonization of Africa and the Americas. But if you want to talk about a weapon that triggered the greatest historic change in the least amount of time, the longbow gets my vote. The longbow changed history on three specific days in 1346, 1356, and 1415. On those days, English and French armies clashed at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. Why was the longbow so important? Because it enabled leather-clad English commoners to defeat ironclad French knights.
Throughout medieval times, a European army consisted fundamentally of armored noblemen on armored horses. These living tanks personally won or lost battles, and that's what made nobles noble. At Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, the French army had roughly three times as many knights as the English, but the English army had archers armed with a new kind of bow. It differed from the old kind of bow only in length. But that extra length gave it just enough power to shoot some hundred feet further and pierce armor. Just like that, the armored knight was finished as a significant element in war. From this time forward, power began shifting from the armored class to the moneyed class--which soon came to include merchants, manufacturers, and bankers.
The list is entirely Eurocentric and technology based (new ideas are inventions too, after all), and I wonder where practical things like the can and soap and non-wood burning stoves and refrigerators are, but it's a good read.
Better yet, the long bow entry had a link
to this page, which turned out to be something Malaya and I have long been after; a good summary of numerous historical weapons, with info about their design, use, and significance. It's far briefer than I'd like it to be, but there are pictures of the weapons, for bonus points.
For example:
The Halberd
Also referred to as the halbard and the halbert. Used across Europe from the 13th century forward, the halberd is probably the most famous and recognizable weapon of the polearm group. The halberd was used most extensively in the 15th and 16th centuries and was the most versatile polearm ever developed. It incorporated an axe blade, a spear point, and a pick/hammer beak. It could be used to hook an enemy to the ground, even off horseback. It could be thrust or used for chopping as well. Combat training in the use of halberds was fairly extensive as they could be used lethally or non-lethally (to trip, knock down, or otherwise subdue an opponent). While halberds were uncommon as combat weapons after the 17th century, they were carried as symbols of authority and rank well into the 19th century. The Swiss developed the halberd and were the most famous employers of halberdsmen in their ranks. Even today, the Swiss guards at the Vatican carry halberds (for appearances only; they keep automatic weapons in the armory); the Tower of London Beefeaters are also famous wielders of halberds today.
You'll gain a second level of enjoyment if you played Diablo II, since there must be 40 or 50 weapons listed that were used in D2. And you probably thought names like spetum, voulge, glaive, shamshir, falchion, flamberge, crowbill, tulwar were invented by Blizzard North, huh?
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Welcome to the pantheon, Donovan.
The result was expected, the process was not, but in the end Dallas beat Philly and all but
ended their season, even with seven games to go. Surprisingly, it all came down to one play, an ill-advised pass when Philly should have just been trying to run out the clock, and when Donovan McNabb hurled the ball right into the chest of a Dallas safety, while trying to throw to a receiver who never would have caught it anyway, he joined the pantheon.
Welcome home, Donovan. You get a statue, with "Worst pass in MNF history" carved on the base. Enjoy your hernia surgery and this rare opportunity to take January off and watch some NFL playoffs on TV.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
ESPN and Sports Coverage.
I was going to shoehorn this into the previous post, but that one was way too long already, so I'm doing it here. Over the weekend I traded a few mails with a site reader and fellow football fan, who first turned me on to Football Outsiders a couple of years ago. We started talking about the endless Atlanta-madness forum thread there, (discussed at the bottom of the previous post) then digressed to sports coverage in general. A quote from his mail:
It's not just Atlanta fans, though. Colin Cowherd of ESPN radio was gushing about Michael Vick and his win/loss record, and how it's not fair to penalize him for his subpar passing stats. How did he justify this? He pulled out some numbers for Joe Namath. Which is like me saying that Roger Clemens isn't a very good pitcher since he doesn't have nearly as many wins as Cy Young. (Hello, Colin...different eras? Different rules. Anybody in there?) So I'm done listening to him-it's not the first completely stupid thing he's said.
Vick is exciting so people seem to line up to promote him. Like you have pointed out before, though, he is very difficult to analyze with statistics because of how different he is from other QBs. My question, which you have alluded to, is how good could Atlanta be if they scrapped the stupid West Coast Offense and went more to a boom-or-bust long passing game that showcases Vick's arm? Oh, for full disclosure I've mostly rooted against Vick since ESPN hyped him so much when he was in college and took away attention from my favorite Purdue player at the time, Drew Brees. (Heck, Brees had nearly as many rushing yards as Vick did in 2000. Something like 630 to 510.)
Maybe it's just the rise of the Internet, but I am getting to the point where just ignore ANYthing in the mainstream media. How can you trust it? ESPN might as well launch ESPN TO -- all Terrell Owens, all the time. Just go ahead and pander to the lowest common denominator. Bartolo Colon wins the Cy Young Award? Really? How is that possible?
I agreed, except for the Bartolo Colon part, since I had no idea who that was, or even that this year's Cy Young Award had already been announced. Fortunately, a quick look at ESPN.com found me
some relevant info, and shockingly enough, it was even free to look at, on that increasingly-Insider™ only bastion of sports writing. (Nutshell; Colon had more wins, but another pitcher, Johan Santana, was much better in everything else, but didn't have as many wins because his team scored far fewer runs. Sportswriters are old school and stupid and vote based on stats that aren't very useful, like wins rather than ERA, K/BB ratio, etc.)
As for espn and sports radio... yeah. I'm lucky enough to say I've never listened to sports talk radio, aside from a few callers on various post-game Padres broadcasts in the old days, and they were uniformly uninforming. I don't watch sportscenter very often, and when I do it's almost always on weekends, when I want to see college and pro football highlights. Even those are largely unwatchable, especially the college ones, as they spend 50% of the show "debating" and postmortuming whatever their lead game was. Last weekend they showed Miami@Virginia Tech, a game I didn't see and one that was apparently completely boring and one-sided, but that didn't stop them from cutting back to Lee Corso and the other idiots sitting outside, in the dark, with an empty parking lot backdrop, as they endlessly "analyzed" the game with a thimble-deep level of insight. Simply unwatchable, IMHO.
The Sunday highlights are better since while Chris Berman and the other guy are equally-unlistenable, they're very skippable, when taped. Since the highlights always start right after a commercial, end a minute later, and lead into 4 or 5 minutes of "analysis," it's easy FF through the truck and beer commercials, watch the highlights, and then click FF again for the useless talking and more truck and beer commercials. Someday we'll have a digital VCR, or Tivo or whatever surplants it, and such manipulations will be meaningless. But for now, using our old VCR that lacks the ability to FF or RW less than 30 seconds at a time, I give thanks for ESPN's format.
Their programming though, is another issue. Highlights usually take a back seat to unenlightened "analysis," they show, at most, 1/10 of the good plays from a given game, and they focus far too much on individual heroics while giving virtually no insight into the actual flow of the game or the key, non-scoring plays. Sports, at least on ESPN, has become tabloid journalism, with nothing but controversy (a large percentage of which they start and flame themselves) and discord, and they've become convinced that no one just wants to watch the plays; they've got to spice up the highlights with bad music, chattering voice overs, or painful editing. And if there's a worse innovation (other than the unwatchable "ultimate highlight" sequences) than zooming in on the screen to cut off the logo off the other networks from the corners, I can't imagine what it might be. It's like some sort of glaucoma-simulation, where suddenly the center of the screen is twice its normal size, and the edges are blurry and pixelated. All just to avoid showing the FOX or CBS or whoever's logo? As if viewers are somehow unaware that those channels broadcast the game in question in the first place?
I desperately wish Fox Sports or some other cable channel would start running their own version of SportsCenter. An hour a night, just a ton of highlights, and no idiot anchors or ex-jocks babbling over them. Everyone has to watch SportsCenter now, no matter how much it sucks since there's nothing competing against it. What's the option; three minutes of highlights at the end of your local news with maybe 30 seconds of actual highlights?
The highlights are bad enough, but sadder yet is the person who actually watches ESPN for sporting info. I remember back before the Internet, when all we had were games on weekends, highlights on the local channels and ESPN, and some homer-centric articles in the paper, with a few charts showing the NFL teams ranked by total yards allowed or gained, or other basically-useless stats like that. Nowadays, with vastly-superior sources of info all over the Internet, including all over their own website, it's odd how steadfastly ESPN clings to conventional wisdom and old school "attitude, heart, guts, team chemistry, and swagger" bullshit from their talking heads. Given how dumb and useless I find those guys, I'm probably quite happy not listening to any of the sports radio the emailer mentioned. I'd put my ears out.
Football and nasty comment threads.
After complaining about Sunday's football offerings, I ended up partaking in a few anyway. Damn you, free TV!
The early game here was as advertised,
SF@Chi. The Bears won, 17-9, and the game was even worse than expected, with a Chicago special; a howling, gusting wind that made forward passes and accurate field goals semi-impossible. And when you've got Kyle Orton (8-13, 67 yards, 1 INT) facing off with punt team specialist/emergency starter Cody Pickett (1-13, 28 yards, 1 INT), adding a high wind is just cruel and unusual punishment.
Seriously, when's the non-old school Nebraska football game you heard of with combined passing stats of 9-26, 95 yards, and 2 INTs? Good lord, those are like Payton Manning @ New England in the playoffs type stats. At least the SF QB had an excuse, what with him being the 4th stringer and not having played QB since college, going against one of the best defenses in the league. What's Orton's excuse, besides the wind? SF's defense is woeful, their offense can't sustain a drive so they give the other team plenty of opportunities, and Chicago was playing at home, albeit in a wind tunnel.
Anyway, I set that game to tape, though I couldn't imagine watching it. I didn't, at least not after I got up at noon and saw the score in the 4th quarter. Besides, the only good play, an NFL-record 108 yard missed field goal return, was on all the highlight shows. Chicago executed that play, after SF's suspect decision to try that FG into the incredible wind, as the first half was ending with them amazingly ahead, 3-0. The amazing thing is that SF still easily could have won, thanks to Chicago's horrible offense and special teams. Their punt returner fumbled twice and dropped another punt that SF recovered on the 2 yard line. Sure, TD there, right? Not for SF: 1 yard run, 0 yard run, 5 yard penalty illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty delay of game, incomplete pass, 4th and 10 and FG time. If you can't score from the 2 yard line after a fumbled punt, you really don't deserve to win. And happily enough, they didn't.
The best thing about that game was that it ended early, and CBS switched to the
Minn@NYG game then. That game had another NFL record, with Minn returning a kick off, punt, and interception for TDs. All of that was long over with by the late 4th quarter though, and when the game came on here NYG had the ball at the Minn 20, trailing 13-21. Eli Manning promptly forced a pass into heavy traffic over the middle, threw it behind his receiver, and it was deflected up for the 4th interception of the day. Minn capitalized on that by promptly losing yards three straight plays and punting with more than 3 minutes remaining, and at last the Giants weren't fooling around. They marched effortlessly down the field, throwing wide open 10 yard passes several plays in a row, rushing for easy gains, and soon found themselves with a firts down at the 4 yard line, and about 1:50 to play.
At that point the Giants' coaching went to hell. They spiked the ball then, even though they obviously should have been trying to run more time off the clock, even to the point of taking a knee or just calling a plunge into the line. Instead they stopped the clock, and then easily ran it in against the exhausted and demoralized Minn defense on the next play. They ran in the two point conversion too, tying the game, but with way, way too much time left. I smelled disaster, and the Giants made sure my nose was working by going into a rather insane blitz defense, allowing Minn to throw three straight short passes to uncovered receivers, who quickly dashed for 8 or 10 yards before diving out of bounds to stop the clock. It was really quite amazing, given that Minn had done nothing on offense all game, gaining just over 100 yards. They immediately rolled up 42 on
their last minute-and-a-half possession, almost all of it coming due to loose man-to-man coverage created by the Giants' insane defensive play calling. And when Minn's last second field goal sailed through and sent the Giants to a very painful home loss, I clapped and cheered, though I had no real rooting interest in the game. I just enjoyed seeing their stupid coaching appropriately rewarded.
The late game here was a surprise, with Denver@Oakland on TV, despite the TV listings promising Carolina's sure humiliation of the Jets. I didn't have much hope the Raiders would do any better, and they didn't. Malaya and I were working on home improvement, and moving things all around on the back deck, putting together a bike rack, rehabilitating plants, and so on. So though the game was on, we weren't paying much attention, and I don't know quite how
Denver manhandled them 31-17. It appeared to be classic Raiders football though, with lots of penalties, dropped passes, poor play calling, and a total lack of discipline, all set to the lusty boos of thousands of
fat, drunk, blue-collar guys wearing Kiss makeup and second hand hockey shoulder pads with tin cans glued to them. Denver was up 23-0 by the time we had the bikes covered by a tarp and the lawn furniture back outside, and with that much of a lead the requisite Broncos' 4th quarter collapse wasn't enough to do anything more than make the stats and final score a bit more respectible.
The night game was a sure fug-fest, so much so that even when we flicked it on and saw that Cleveland had scored early, I wasn't seduced into wasting VCR time taping it. Sure enough, the next time I looked Pittsburgh was up 27-7, (
they won 34-21), even with Charlie Batch at QB, and life's too short to spend much of it watching that sort of NFL action.
The best thing about the weekend? Atlanta losing at home to the previously 1-7 Packers, and the NYGs losing thanks to Eli's amazingly-inaccurate passes finally starting to find the other team, instead of just the astroturf. I mention those two things because of this:
DVOA Rankings, Week 10. I speak more specifically of the comments on that post, which number more than 650, largely thanks to disgruntled Atlanta Falcons fans objecting to the low placement of their formerly 6-2 football team. (See
the rankings here if the above link doesn't load. It's not for me now, probably because the sheer number of comments have broken their jerry-rigged comments script.)
It's amusing because the endless posts by Atlanta fans who chose to take the output of a computerized and completely objective ranking system as a personal insult. (Well, it's not actually objective; it's objective for each team, but the system as a whole was designed by humans who set the weighting for things like converting 3rd downs, scoring in the red zone, etc, and tweaking those values would change the results, though not in easily-predicted ways.) The Atlanta fans argued long and hard (and frequently incoherently) that the system was broken because Atlanta was ranked so low, even though 75% of that was due to the strength of schedule adjustment. And then Atlanta went out Sunday and lost, at home, to a 1-7 Green Bay team. And for once it wasn't entirely Vick's fault for putting up a 12-26, 3 INT type effort. Though you might blame him for being a thorougly mediocre passer (an improvement over his usual Sunday's work) and not doing a damn thing running the football, where he's usually colossal.
The other argument I saw made in the long, long, and now unviewable comments thread, and in another article last week on FO, was about Eli Manning. The Giants are winning and Eli the QB is getting a lot of the credit, despite the fact that his stats aren't actually very good. They were very odd though, since he's throwing an historically high percentage of incomplete passes, and yet had thrown very few interceptions. Some Giants fans were formulating explanations along the lines of, "He has a special skill for throwing the ball away when there's no one open, or throwing it where only the receiver can catch it if he dives for it." Needless to say, Eli's luck ran out Sunday, and he threw 4 INTs against the Minnesota defense, while putting up his usual sub-50% completion ratio.
It's possible to use advanced computerized ranking systems to predict future events in all fields. It's never a sure bet, but it's possible. For a surer bet, find examples of things that are greatly deviating from the mean, with no real sound reason to do so, and bet on them regressing. You'd have won money going against Atlanta and Eli's over/under INT stats this time, at least.
And yes, this sort of thing is always very obvious with hindsight.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Daredevil?
We just saw the last half hour of
Daredevil on some cable network, and I'm kind of at a loss for words. It was astonishingly bad. Painfully, terribly, horribly bad. Jaw-droppingly bad. It played like a parody of an action film, and I'm not even thinking about the acting, since we all know BaF can't act. I'm talking about the story, the direction, and especially the CG action scenes.
I guess
Robocop 3 is still the worst movie I've ever seen, a reaction also based on an accidental viewing of the last half hour of it on commercial television. But that's not really a fair comparison, since
Daredevil probably spent more on Jennifer Garner's leather costumes than they had for the entire
Robocop 3 budget. I've definitely never seen a less-exciting final battle scene in any film than I just saw in
Daredevil, and the CG leaping around Daredevil and Bullseye did was astonishingly fake. Rubbery, weightless, and basically just Jar Jar-esque. I'm honestly amazed that it could have been as bad as it was, with literally every shot of action either obviously bad CGI, or else obviously fake wire fu. How was that an actual theatrical production? Did they have no one to supervise the stunt work and notice how terrible it was?
And yeah, I'm pretty harsh and getting harsher on fight scenes in films, as I get more experience and a better eye at judging fight scenes in real life, but the ones in Daredevil were just awful. No grasp of physics, no ability in the actors to throw a real punch or kick, horrible blender-style editing with every move shown from five different angles, etc. The saddest thing about how bad movie fight scenes are is that I know how exciting and cool they can be in real life. I'm serious, any good thirty second sparring session in any of the kali classes I attend is more exciting to watch than 90% of the multi-million dollar battle sequences in big budget Hollywood movies. How films are so seldom able to capture even a fraction of the excitement of real combat is becoming more and more of a mystery to me, as I get better at seeing just how woefully fake they are.
Friday, November 11, 2005
NFL Weekend Woes
Malaya and I keep meaning to get some housework done, and we keep not finding the time. We've got plans to rearrange the living room, to move a big bookshelf out of the bedroom, and to build a bike rack on the back patio to hold the bikes there and make space in the storage shed. And thanks to this weekend's NFL programming schedule, I should have plenty of free time Sunday to work on those projects.
It seems like the NFL on TV sucks every weekend in the Bay Area, and this one is... no exception. SF@Chicago early, NYJ@Carolina late. A pair of almost sure blowouts, with both visiting teams sucking, and worse yet, sucking on offense. Which means they'll lose, and they'll lose boring. SF has by far the worst offense in the league and Chi has the best defense, so the early game is one of those "resistible forces meets immovable object" mismatches. That being said, SF will probably get weird luck and lose like 21-23, when you'd expect them to lose like 3-17, after rolling up about 83 yards of total offense. Out of curiosity, I checked the odds and the Bears are 13 point favorites with a 31 point over/under. There are a number of
teams that average nearly 31 points per game! And while you wouldn't expect a NYG/Indy game to yield 57 points, it would certainly beat the #23 Chicago 17.4ppg offense hosting the #29, 14.6ppg SF juggernaut.
As for the late game, Oakland is hosting Denver, in about the first Oakland game I've wanted to see all year. So of course it's blacked out locally, your average Raiders fan being far more interested in slapping on a Raider Nation bumpersticker than in actually attending a game. Even the night game is suck, with punchless Cleveland visiting boring Pittsburgh. Gotta hope Big Ben's able to play, or that will be another field goal special.
Monday night's game caps off the weekend, when Dallas visits the inexplicably-favored Eagles, now minus their one interesting (and insane) player. I guess Philly is still trying this year, even in their harsh division and even with McNabb's steadily-worsening injury. I don't see it happening; they're 4-4 with fluke/luck wins over SD and Oakland, they've lost 3 out of 4, 2 of those were blowouts, and their one-dimensional offense was going downhill even when T.O. was playing. Without a freak FG block and fumble against SD they'd be 3-5 and thinking 6-10 and decent draft pick, and I won't be surprised if they crater now and end up around there anyway.
The question for Philly is, what if they'd ordered McNabb to get surgery after week 3 when the nature of his sports hernia injury became clear and everyone began to realize he could neither run nor step into his passes. McNabb would have required 2 or 3 months to come back, but in theory T.O. would (probably) have kept it together if he were the only star left, the offense would have grown more conservative, the defense would have clamped down, and I suspect Philly would have managed to be 7-5 or something like that, when McNabb returned to lead them on a late season run for a wildcard spot and playoff momentum. Instead he decided to play through a debilitating injury and postpone surgery until the off season, the rest of the team got a year older, and they pretty much threw away their season. That being said, I suspect I'll tape MNF this week and watch it afterwards, but I won't be at all surprised if Dallas tramples Philly nearly
as badly as they did last month in Texas. After all, how hard can it be to scheme a defense against a one-dimensional short passing offense when the only guy worthy of a double-team is a running back who never actually runs?
Overall it's another crappy NFL weekend, with only one game featuring two winning teams, and even that game is just inconsistent 5-3 Washington at 5-3 and collapsing Tampa Bay. It could be an interesting weekend for blowouts though, with 8 games featuring a road team with at least 2 fewer wins than the home team, highlighted by 1-7 Houston at 8-0 Indy. Next weekend should be better though, with 3 good (going by their records, at least) matchups: Tampa@Atlanta, Carolina@Chicago, and Indy@Cincinnati. It might also feature the single worst MNF game of the season too, with Minn@GB in one of those, "Well, somebody's got to win, right?" games. More than likely those two teams will be a combined 4-14 by then. Hoofah.
(Then again, check out MNF for
week 15; GB@Baltimore and a combined 3 wins between them at this point. Quite the early Xmas prezzie there, eh? When the hell does that new TV package start, where they'll have the option to switch out awful MNF games for better ones, late in the season?)
Book Reviews and so forth...
Wow, no posts since Tuesday, and here it is, Friday morning. Sadly, this one isn't going to take any steps towards making up for that, since I've been working and I'm now so tired that I'm typing with my eyes more closed than open. I've got a list of stuff I want to blog about, I've been meaning to talk about Kali some, I've still not written anything useful about BlizzCon, and I'm way, way behind on reviews.
I can't say when anything is going to change though, since priorities are elsewhere. I read three books over the past few days, and I'd love to read a fourth, since it would be Feast of Crows. I'm going to wait on that one though, since I'm trying to get some substantial writing done, since I still really want to finish my novel by Xmas. During Sept and Oct I was ambitiously hoping for Thanksgiving as a possible finish date, knowing I'd be out of town for 5 days over that time and then likely distracted by other travel and vacation stuff in December. That dream died when I had to rewrite the last 20 pages of chapter six several times, then was out of town for nearly a week, then failed to get right back into writing when I returned.
And reading Harry Potter 5 and 6, and the last Jeffery Deaver book this week didn't help either. I did get back to writing my own thing tonight though, and can hopefully finish up this chapter over the weekend and get some/most/all of chapter seven done before my Thanksgiving vacation. I can't see finishing all of 8 and 9 (which should take me through the end of the book, though chapter breaks are pretty relative) between Dec 1 and Dec 25, especially not with likely holidays and other distractions, but I always work better with concrete goals and deadlines, even if they're self-imposed.
As for the recent reading... All the titles were pretty good. I read
Harry Potter 5 last year, and if I wrote another review it wouldn't change much. I only reread it because I finally started HP6 last week, and found myself unable to remember most of the details. So I buzzed through HP5, enjoying it for the most part, and then read HP6 yesterday and enjoyed it as well. Even the shocking ending, and the very, very dark turn the series took. Honestly, I was stunned at how dark and nasty things got, considering how bright and happy and "good guys always win" it was for the first 3 or 4 books. Well, the good guys still always win at Quidditch, apparently, though perhaps they don't win the house trophy, since I don't recall Rowling even bothering to mention which house won it the last 3 years. She still throws in all of those "10 points to Griffindor" references when Hermoine eagerly answers another question no one else knows, and all of those blatantly-unfair times Snape takes off 20, but since the end of the year tallies aren't listed anymore... what's the point?
Late night digression aside, book six really gets nasty and scary and depressing, and while I didn't mind, I'd imagine lots of little kids were pretty heart-broken by it, for spoilery reasons I'm not going into here. I'm now very curious to see how Rowling wraps it all up in seven, since unless the last book is like 1300 pages, (or perhaps more like 2000, given how breezy her pace is) I can't see how she'll follow through all of the plot threads that were developed in book six. Harry's got so much to do before he can possibly defeat Voldemort, (I'm assuming that's the only possible conclusion, though I could be wrong.) that I can't see how one book could cover it all, at least not if there's all the usual "a new year at Hogwart's" stuff packed in there as well. It's perfectly possible that book seven won't be set in Hogwart's at all (which I could live with), and it's also possible that loose ends will be left dangling (which I would be upset by), I am hoping for more than one of those, "and the evil bad guy was defeated... for now..." endings.
Anyway, just to put in some numbers:
Harry Potter 6, The Half-Blood Prince
Plot: 6
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/9
Characters: 7
Suspense: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 8
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 7
I gave this one slightly lower scores than book 5, but there's really no reason to rate them differently other than me wanting to justify the time it took to do so. I'd be open to arguments that book six was actually better, and it's certainly more mature and a much bigger risk to take for the author, as much as things changed for Harry and his world at large.
As for the Deaver book, it was pretty good too, but also not quite as good as the previous (and best to date) novel
in its series.
The Twelfth Card, by Jeffrey Deaver (2005)
Plot: 6
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Suspense: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5
Well actually, now that I've put in numbers, I have to conclude that this one was a lot less good than the last one. It wasn't bad, and I enjoyed reading it, but it lost points by not being very suspenseful, and for not being a mystery. There's a mystery the characters have to unravel, as they try to keep a girl alive as a clever hitman tries to kill her, but it's not a mystery the reader can follow along with, since the ultimate solution is nothing that's even been hinted at or mentioned during the course of the novel. It makes sense and is believable, but if you're reading this one and trying to guess ahead, don't bother. The plot is pretty preposterous too, with little mystery to it, and a lot of cheating by the author.
SPOILERFor instance, we're in the POV of the hitman for a lot of the book, seeing virtually everything he sees and his thoughts, but they're not very interesting, and the author cheats by never having the killer think of stuff he obviously would have thought about. The fact that the hitman is working with someone else and coordinating hits with them, for instance. So we're supposed to be surprised near the end of the book when he's caught and then people are still trying to kill the girl, and when it turns out the hitman had a partner. But all I felt was tricked by the author, as he unrealistically had the hitman never think about things he obviously would have been thinking about constantly, simply to preserve some cheap, momentary suspense. The same goes for a couple of other supporting characters who aren't what they appear either. We are in their POV and we learn everything about them, with a few key and very deliberate ommissions just to try and surprise us with the eventual shocking reveals.
END SPOILERThe characters weren't very good in this one either, with the girl-in-danger not stirring any real interest or sympathy in my heart, the hitman not being nearly as interesting as the villains in previous Deaver novels, and the personal travails of the usual cast of characters lacking. The mandatory "Rhyme might be considering suicide because of his paralysis" subplot was particularly half-hearted, there was nothing new with his relationship with Amelia, nothing new about her life, and the crisis that came about for one of the other cops was not compelling.
This one is worth reading if you've enjoyed other books in the series, and I don't regret reading it, but it's not one of the best, and I'm glad all I paid for it were four months waiting for my turn to come up on the list at the library.
Lastly, I read The Eight while on my San Diego/BlizzCon trip a couple of weeks ago, and I might as well throw in a quick, someday-to-be-elaborated-on review in as well. It's another DaVinci Code style of novel, except that unlike The Historian, it was written years ago, back in 1990. The plot involves an ancient and magical/mystical chess set, one that will supposedly give the possessor incredible power, courtesty of the alchemical instructions found carved into the pieces and the playing board. The set and the pieces were hidden in and around France, during the late 1700s, and the novel follows a woman in the 1970s through her efforts to find them, and parallels her travels with those of a clever nun who was involved in the dispersal and attempted recovery of the pieces during the revolutionary period in France.
It's a good premise, and could have been a great novel, if it had just been written better:
The Eight, by Katherine Neville (1990)
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/4
Characters: 7
Suspense: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 5
It's not awful but it's at least 200 pages too long, and the pace is very slow. This book is very much the opposite of the Harry Potter novels, in terms of reading enjoyability. With those books I constantly find myself reading for a few minutes, and looking down in surprise to find myself 80 pages further along. The HP novels pull you in quickly, and go down very smoothly. The Eight is a slog, both due to the quality of the writing and the pacing. I kept thinking I'd been reading for an hour, only to realize it had been 10 minutes and I'd covered maybe a dozen pages.
The other major issue I had with the story was the too-superstar cast. Pretty much every famous person alive during the late 1700s makes a featured appearance in the novel, and most of them star for a chapter or more. At first it's sort of cool seeing all the famous historical names being dropped, but it quickly becomes silly, when every single person the nun meets in those days is someone still famous 200 years later. By the time she runs into a guy on a horse in the anarchy of Paris during the revolution and the purge, and it's teenaged Napoleon, and he just happens to be heading the exact same direction she is and ends up letting her stay in his mother's house, I was openly snorting.
There's a shipwreck later on and the one guy named in the entire village near the shoals where the survivors wash up? Benedict Arnold. It's partially understandable since the chess set is known to the rich and powerful (and the Masons -- yes, them again, just like in every other historical novel with a conspiracy theory) and therefore every other character is a nobleman or a queen or someone like that, but when every visit to a bar or chance encounter on a busy highway is William Wordsworth, or William Blake, or Catherine the Great, or Robespierre, and so on, it gets a little ridiculous.
It would definitely have helped if I'd recently read a book on European and World History during the 1790s, since then I would have had more than a faint idea who everyone was and what they were actually doing during that time. A better author would have given some introduction to them all to though, rather than just assuming the reader knew them well already, but if I started a list of improvements this novel could use, that would hardly make the top ten.
It's not a bad novel, but it's long and often boring, and I would not have finished it without downtime while on vacation and in airports/planes. I am unable to explain
the four-star rating it's got on Amazon.com; but the few reviews I've glancd at certainly seem more forgiving of the pacing issues, name-dropping, and excessive length than I was.
And with that, I'm off to bed. Hopefully I'll find some time tomorrow to cobble together some sort of BlizzCon report. It will likely to be Decahedron top ten format, with 5 good and 5 bad things about the convention, with a buncha photos. Yes, it certainly sounds fascinating, doesn't it? Did I mention that I shan't even mention any of the games shown there, since I didn't care enough to play a second of any of them?
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