lurinikki

fixed html

2009-12-13T00:39:13Z

Why does nobody tell me that I've used platform-specific code on my webpages until years after the fact...?

At any rate, I've fixed the coding on two of my older stories.

Prism: White Day
Boku no Uchuu ni Kimi ga Iru

in case anyone happened to be interested.

patriotism: a rant

2009-12-07T05:10:41Z

I was reading something on the intarwebs (never mind what), when I came across someone commenting "for the longest time, patriotism equalled jingoism to me."

That, right there, is an example of why the rhetorical device of "define our position X by the name of allegedly Good Thing Y" (I forget its actual name, anyone remember?) particularly infuriates me. Not just that it's hard to answer, but that if used endemically enough, it winds up actually shifting the definition, and those of us against X tend to believe that all Y are also suspect until someone finally comes up with a new name for "{Y | ¬X}" -- and even then, the new name may well be less appropriate, less intuitive, or plain old less convenient for everyone. (Seriously, "pedophile" by all logic ought to be an ANTONYM for "pederast," if it hadn't been for a certain set of idiots moving the definition of the latter in the one direction not full of inherently whacked power dynamics.)

Especially when the word in question, such as "patriotic," is something that I have always been pleased to consider myself: it seems as if the definition I grew up with bears as much resemblance to the one certain parties would force on it as "good parenting" does to "holding my child incapable of wrongdoing by virtue of being my kid."

Love of one's country does have rather a lot in common with love of one's children, after all: one holds them precious by virtue of what, if a tie of birth rather than choice, is more a matter of chance than one generally likes to consider; one takes a personal sort of pride in their accomplishments; one feels a deeply personal hurt when they fall short of what one knows they can be; and when they do stupid shit, one darn well CALLS them on it, that they may learn the error of their ways and do better and grow in wisdom and stature with God and all people.

More so, perhaps, even than love of one's parents. Certainly one may consider that everything one's homeland or one's parents do cannot but be right and good -- when one is a small child: but when one grows to adulthood, one learns that they are people, and therefore fallible, and that if they use one for what they can get, or lie and cheat and steal from outsiders, that behavior is not acceptable no matter what blood ties one may have to them. (If they don't: yay, hurray. One is fortunate in one's homeland or one's parents or both, and ideally loves them all the more.) Often enough, one still loves them even while acknowledging their faults: but while it is appropriate for someone to encourage a parent to, say, get help for their alcoholism, the parent is nearly always perceived to be of equal or greater stature than even a grown child, and can be encouraged but not ordered.

A homeland, on the other hand, belongs to its people; it exists because, at one point, its citizens found it more convenient and comfortable for themselves to be part of a greater whole than separate little communities. (As can be readily seen by the fact that of those countries created by people who found it more convenient for OTHERS to be part of a greater whole than separate little communities, the only ones I know of that didn't collapse within a century had developed their own -- albeit ex post facto -- national identity.) Therefore, its citizens have not only a right but a duty to make sure it remains convenient and comfortable for them, that their homeland may be a country they are proud to belong to.

Or, as Paul Fussell suggested in his book BAD: The Dumbing of America (paraphrased, since it's been forever since I last read it): there is one day out of the year, and that is the Fourth of July, when bringing up anything but the best of the U.S.A. (much less challenging it) is just tacky; the rest of the time, it is not only proper but the best kind of patriotism to do so.

(Also: I wish the gentleman at the grocery store wearing the T-shirt with the picture of our flag above the legend "JUST TRY AND BURN THIS" would bother to put the elementary research into learning that firstly, putting such a picture onto a shirt that can get all sweaty and food-stained [as his clearly has] is not particularly respectful and in fact contraindicated, and secondly, that burning is the right and proper thing to do with a flag that wind and weather [and insects, and mustard] have ruined beyond whatever mending the washing machine and sewing kit might be capable of. The same to those people -- and there are many, here in Indiana -- who fly one from their car and leave it up long after the ENTIRE RIGHT HALF has been lost to the elements. You don't see people whose cars proclaim themselves to be former or current members of the armed services pulling the latter stunt, and that would be because they know better [and, presumably, know better than to do the former as well]; but if someone as little concerned with the trappings as myself knows such elementary things about the proper treatment of the United States flag as "take it down [and burn it] when it would otherwise look crummy, better to have none up than a shoddy one" and "don't put an exact replica of it on things that will get dirty, such as napkins, doormats, workout clothes" -- and for that matter "never let it touch the ground" and "don't hang it upside down. No, not even if the shackle's broken. As soon as you notice that it broke, haul it down and do something about it" -- you'd think those people who claim the symbols worthy of veneration because of what they symbolize would have the relevant regulations memorized, and be outright eager to challenge anyone falling short of said regulations to their face.)

I love my country, but dear LORD the people it is made up of have individually and collectively done some stupid shit, over the past few years (to say nothing of the past few centuries). And because of that, I have at times put my mouth or my money where my mind is, but always and annually my vote (whenever applicable): for the ability to use all three and especially the latter as I please is the better part of why, as a grown woman, I still love it even when it makes me want to tear my hair and rend my clothes.

Wow, times have changed.

2009-05-24T23:49:54Z

I'm currently reading Electronic Computers and Management Control, and I'm not sure which makes me feel it a blast from the past more: either that they feel the need to carefully explain why one's business will be improved by using a properly chosen computer, or the fact that the book cost $2.95. ;_;

When I said as much to my mother, she mentioned that she remembered Mr. Kozmetsky, and that it was at his house where she heard her first rock song; his son had a copy of "Rock Around The Clock," so the children put it on and the adults all thought it was terrible. ^_^

Also that his daughter (Nadja?) had passed on some clothes for dress-up, so that when Grandpa told his daughters that they could pick out their own clothes to go to the hospital and see their younger sister when she was born, my mother and older sister chose some of the Nadja(?)-clothes, and my grandmother was pretty much appalled.

With regards to abortion.

2009-05-13T02:50:00Z

I've been reading rather a large number of debates recently, in which a great many points were made, and it seems to me that the question of whether a fetus, quickened or not, is or is not a human being or ensouled is largely peripheral to the actual matter under discussion.

Suppose, say, that a Person In A Suit comes up to Jane and says "If you do not become pregnant and give birth, a meteorite will fall on Ann, here, whom you don't know, and kill her." (Assume for the purposes of this discussion that this makes sense, and that either Jane gives birth to a living baby or the meteorite falls on Ann, no wiggle room). Jane may or may not be married, may or may not have the resources to take care of herself during pregnancy (and/or the eventual baby), whatever.

This conundrum tends to get three sets of responses:

1. Jane should run out, get pregnant, and do her best to carry to term. Granted, it will be inconvenient, and she may or may not want to pregnant at this stage in her life, but if she doesn't, Ann will die. Dead is dead for a very long time. Even if Jane should miscarry, and the meteorite go ahead and fall on Ann, at least she will have tried.

2. Jane has never met Ann in her life. She didn't ask for Ann's life to be dependent on whether or not she gets pregnant -- for that matter, on whether or not she has SEX -- and this is a violation of her self on a fundamental level. If someone were to claim that "if Jane does not allow access to her body for pregnancy, she will be killing Ann," it would be analoguous to Richard Roe tying John Doe to a bomb and claiming that unless Jane gives him a lot of money -- or, perhaps a better metaphor, allows him to have sex with her -- before the time runs out, John will be blown up and it will be Jane's fault. (Which, no; it would clearly be Richard's fault for being a psychotic dick.) It is a fallacy, and Jane shouldn't endure something that is uncomfortable at best and life-threatening at worst simply because it may save Ann's life (note that if she miscarries or has a stillbirth, Ann dies anyway), or at any rate, shouldn't be FORCED to.

3. The responder may or may not know what they would do if they were Jane, but as they're not, they rather think Jane should make up her own mind as to what to do.

Now, at some point in the future, somebody may invent the uterine replicator, and we can trade our issues in for a new and different set of issues (probably centering around "should we use government funds to keep maintaining replicators containing unwanted embryos/fetuses?"), but until then, it seems that the above is what it would work out to even if people were to unilaterally say "yes, human life begins at conception."

(Which I don't, but as mentioned above, that's not particularly germane to why I'd still pick choice number three.)

Race, Ethnicity, and Andre Norton

2009-04-08T23:18:52Z

I've been reading some of the peripheral matter to the RaceFail debate recently.

I haven't wanted to get into it too much, since, by the time it became known to me, it seemed to have gone downhill to:
Side A: No, seriously, you're DOING IT WRONG. Here is how and why, with examples and a lot of confrontative language aimed at trying to AT LAST GET THE SIMPLE POINT INTO YOUR HEADS, NEVER MIND THROUGH.
Side B: There's no need for that kind of language and anyway we're not actually doing it wrong and besides, you SUCK (and what's more, you're not noticing our points, probably because you suck).

Seriously, I have better things to do with my life than read a great number of people on Side B opening their figurative mouths and proving themselves, if not idiots, either wilfully blind or too stubborn to admit that they took an ultimately untenable position in the first place. (Except in certain works of fiction, where one can usually be certain that the person justifying himself now will eventually learn better, and it won't be an utter trainwreck to read.) I'm sure that the people arguing Side A have many fine things to say that would help make me think and/or hold up a mirror that I may or may not want: however, I can find plenty of books and websites containing writing that similarly challenges me and leads me to a place where I can examine my own unconscious prejudices without being cluttered up by comment threads full of kneejerk entitlement-bitching (clarification: said kneejerk reactions being on the part of people who've just been alerted that they aren't as open-minded as they thought they were and didn't want to hear it), and several of the discussions I have found interesting are ones that weren't started for the sake of me or my in-group and whose table I therefore have no place at, and I expect it would probably be rude of me to barge in and say something on their journal.

Some of the things that have been said, though -- especially the side-debates that keep running into "Well, how should we write foreigners of color then? Or should we therefore wait for people who are that color and live there to write them; and wouldn't leaving them out entirely in favor of people of our own race, however artificial* that construct, be equally as bad if not worse?" got me thinking about Andre Norton.

*"Race as an artificial construct" -- well, race, as in the quasi-ethnic not-particularly-genetically-based categories we divide human beings up into, IS an artificial construct. So is gender, as opposed to physical sex. So are religious denominations, say. Just because they're artificial doesn't mean they're not real, or that people don't identify with them, or that ignoring them doesn't give off an effect of forced homogenization by assimilation with the speaker's paradigm.

(The other day, a diner sold me a Reuben sandwich with swiss cheese in it. Since when do they do that?)

But. Andre Norton.

There was a time when she didn't want to write female characters according to what her editors thought female characters should be like, so she just didn't write any major female characters at all (which, again, is not an unproblematic solution), and when she did start writing them, I think a lot of the time she was concentrating so much on what she didn't want her heroines to be like that the heads they did have wound up being harder for me to get into than those of her male heroes. But not all of them; I loved Loyse and Tanree, for instance, and Maelen and Joisan.

On the other hand, she wrote a significant number (in those days, "more than one") of non-white heroes; and while I suspect that she more likely than not got many of them subtly to wildly wrong, I haven't as yet actually run across any reviews specifically addressing such portrayals.

Moreover, especially in those of Norton's later works whose heroes weren't white, I tended to have the feeling, not that the hero "happened to be a ____," which is rightly annoying in that it treats something that clearly would be a strong aspect of character as if it were as trivial as clothing choices, as that "a ___ happened to be the hero" -- i.e., the only reason for someone to say "well, she could easily have made a white male the hero" would be that they expected that to be the default, in defiance of the common sense that points out that this is a multicultural world and, unless the plot calls for something in particular (such as the story where the heroine was switched with a princess from a parallel world where Pharaonic Egypt was a world power, and therefore it was important that she be the same sort of brown as said Egyptian princess), the hero is just as likely to belong to any ethnicity as any other.

But here again, I don't know how these portrayals may have affected people belonging to the groups who had members thus nominally being written about; I can only say that, to my girlhood self, while her works and those of the writers who followed in her footsteps didn't actually tend to make me more aware of the lack of non-white characters in other books (I was a self-centered little kid), it did ensure that the presence of non-white characters in said books and of the cultures that shaped them wasn't anything worth taking note of; they were there because, you know, they existed.

Just as, in a lot of the science fiction written after she paved the way, there were women, both as heroines and as secondary characters, because women existed and were perfectly capable of doing as much. (Unlike, say, the Lensman series, which I like but have to read with my head figuratively kinked sideways for any number of reasons. I try to keep telling myself that the Arisians deliberately held post-WWIII culture to an artificial functional gender dimorphism in order to ensure that the Eddorians would have a gigantic blind spot, holding the sad stifling of human potential for generations Necessary in order to prevent a much worse stifling forever, but it's still... problematic.)

Which -- on the one hand, I should think that portrayals of other cultures and other sorts of people, even if they get some things wrong, is at least something and it raises interest, the way that I became interested in historical Japan and Ancient Egypt in childhood and have stuck with those interests -- as long as they aren't totally, egregiously, insultingly wrong. Both in children's fiction and in adult fiction, in mainstream fiction and -- perhaps especially -- in genre fiction.

On the other hand -- that's for me and those like me. I have no idea how people who are Native American, or black, or Chinese, or whatever, respond to these characters, whether they find that at least something or outright insulting or nothing to do with them because all too often they aren't really the audience.

I don't know.

But I want to find out.

A backlog of movie reviews.

2008-09-08T04:13:26Z

Also, I finally finished Gakuen Senki Muryou. Everyone should see Gakuen Senki Muryou. It is released here under the title Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars.

This is probably the best thing I've seen in -- eally, a long time, with the possible exception of Fafner. Muryou, however, is ultimately a very heartwarming show, giving the effect of "not much happens but it happens very entertainingly" while actually quite a lot is going on. Rather than have one or two or even three main characters, the story unfolds around one of the all-time great ensembles, drawing on Japanese religion, science fiction tropes, and the director's own nostalgia to create something gently entertaining and often hilarious, in which there are plenty of battles but no real villains and, in the end, no heartbreak. The show develops one romantic relationship over its course and sets up a true triangle that it leaves unresolved and content to be so -- the characters in question, after all, are in middle school -- but both of these quietly take a back seat to friendship and community loyalty. Also, there is an artificial giant beating the crap out of spaceships, galactic policy meetings held in the back of sushi shops, and people who can run fast enough to achieve escape velocity. ^_^

Having finally seen all of Soukyuu no Fafner, I stand by my statement that if Gundam and Princess Tutu had an affair and a kid (with or without RahXephon), it would be Soukyuu no Fafner. Not that many giant robot shows are actually science fiction, but SnF is. After being dropped into the middle of the action (as, to be sure, are most of the heroes), the questions and the plot never let up, even when they seem to. The unfolding is half the fun, the characters -- except for those meant to be villainous -- are likeable, and the worldbuilding involved is fascinating; the show is not afraid to kill off people it made you love (or hate), and the ending is fully satisfying after everything went into it. (And the two main boys, Makabe Kazuki and Minashiro Soushi, are totally in love with each other: their relationship, while possible to interpret as deep friendship for those who aren't into that kind of thing, drives a good half of the plot and the finale.)

Simoun:

konoha really adores this show, and I liked it -- quite a lot -- although I must confess that I thought Soukyuu no Fafner better plotted. While the very beginning of Simoun is somewhat confusing, much of the worldbuilding is treated in a Campbellian "it's there; now let's get on with the story" fashion, and the ending is so subtle that it took me a while to fully understand it, this show is nevertheless made of layered awesome. The translation is usually quite good, although some of the Latin is misspelt and towards the end all nonJapanese dialogue is represented in the subtitles by the word "Foreign" without punctuation. Simoun is set in a world where all humans are born with the default female body type and choose a physical gender when they come of age, and where one country has discovered ancient aircraft that can only be activated by undifferentiated nymphs. It manages to be epic in scale while chronicling one particular band of pilots ("sibyllae") as war comes to them, emotional bonds within and without the group are forged, tested, and reforged, and the sibyllae come of age. Here, too, I was reminded of many of the Gundam series, as the girls are used and used up in the war before they begin to question whether or not their cause is just (as opposed to whether they, personally, are doing the right thing) and the general worldview remains bleak even as the nymphs find their own rays of hope in among the requisite heapings of teenage pathos and angst: even the ending can perhaps be described as cheerful and hopeful rather than happy. My only real problem with the show was the male-dominated nature of the protagonists' nation (you'd think, given a level starting field, they'd have developed something better than the same old bad habits, even if the show is not about insights on gender); also, the use of women to voice even the characters that had been male for years took some getting used to. Those, however, are relatively small matters, compared to Simoun's excellence.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

The show weakened a little in the very last episode -- which, for a 26-episode series, is not a bad record, especially given the complexity of everything that went into it and the quality of the rest: it even made an half-hour of nothing but talking heads fascinating watching. The four main characters especially had a great deal of development while their pasts remained enigmatic. The section head, except for one time (and that involved personal matters) always upheld his sense of justice while thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. The Tachikoma robot tanks were adorable (odd as it is to say about something looking that much like a spider) and I wanted to take one home. Even when I disagreed with the Deep Philosophical Thought of the episode, it was fascinating viewing, and mere words are not enough to express my satisfaction that the final debate of the television show took place in a library full of codices, involving their librarian. The interviews on each disc were also great to watch, especially those talking about the creative process.

Someday's Dreamers, aka Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu Koto (That Which Magicians Prize):

This is a gentle and heartwarming story in which, looked at one way, nothing much happens but it does so entertainingly, and looked at another, people learn to go on growing even at the cost of an unexpected lunar trip or Tokyo Tower being temporarily twisted into the Sideways Corkscrew of Akasaka. The only major irritation is the translation, which routinely translates both "mahoutsukai" and "mahoushi" as "mage" and always uses "Special Power" rather than the more familiar "magic" for "mahou," for unexplained reasons and often to clunky effect. Main character Yume's crisis of faith goes on for perhaps an episode and a half longer than it really needs to, but the rounded character designs help disguise that fact by making her look younger. If this were to be expanded into or followed up by a longer series, I would be delighted.

Loveless, vol. 2:

More and more I begin to suspect that I am just the wrong age group for this show; as Soubi and Ritsuka's relationship develops, I see it not as two wounded people finding someone to stand at their wounded sides but as codependent. Unhealthily codependent. And while I've been known to read/watch unhealthily codependent with fascination, this repels -- especially given that even Ritsuka's therapist seems to be, ah, dancing with the line of professional ethics. It's a shame, because the plot is kicking into high gear, and I really want both to find out what's going on with the mysterious designedly protosociopathic Zero and to see how Yuiko will grow and develop...
... but I really, really don't like Soubi so far. I hope that the third volume will redeem the second.

The Iron Giant:

It took me about half the movie's running time to really get invested in the characters and story of this nostalgia movie. Once I did, though, I was hooked, and found myself eagerly watching to the end (even though my father, who wandered in for the last third, reacted to the penultimate scene by audibly pointing out the high likelihood of nuclear fallout). Still, this was enjoyable and powerful in its simplicity, even when its obvious use of archetypes brought other movies irresistibly to mind. The selection of extras on the disc is wonderful, and I greatly enjoyed the introductions by the director.

Hero:

This is the Rashoumon of wirework martial arts; every time you think you've seen what happened, it turns out that actually, it must have been this other way. I really liked the characters and the choreography, and the story grabbed me and caught me up in it. I didn't like the resolution of the subplot with Flying Snow and Broken Sword; that's a personal issue, as it certainly was resolved, and in a way that left nothing hanging. The wirework made no bones about pretending not to be fantastic. It seems to me that the movie's chief message is that national unity trumps all, which is probably unsurprising. The movie was filmed on some of the grandest locations in China and features stunning music and a use of color to tell the story that reminds me of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It also includes two extras containing interviews with the cast, crew, and (for some reason) Quentin Tarantino, which are fun; many of these people are very likeable in interviews.

DVDs, DVDs, DVDs.

2008-08-06T06:39:02Z

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Where has this film been all my life? Reiniger combines several Arab folktales while remaining faithful to their spirit, spinning her tale with beautiful and elaborate silhouettes set to restored music against freshly tinted backgrounds. The silhouettes' motion is marvelously expressive in the best fantastic tradition. (Some of the elements of the design for the Chinese subvillains are a bit... unfortunate.) Even the screen titles are works of art. The extras on this disc are longer than the feature itself and fascinating, particularly the documentary about Lotte Reiniger herself.

The Legend of Suriyothai

Before watching this sprawling historical, I knew exactly nothing about the period of Thai history in question. Now that I have, I want to find out more; according to the extras, I am hardly alone in this wish, and it was commissioned by the queen of Thailand precisely for that purpose. It therefore does not play fast and loose with historical facts as many such epics do. The extras are fun, particularly the documentary on the making of the movie: there is a real sense of how much everyone loved the project, and revelations such as the fact that it was filmed with hundreds of extras and real elephants because they were cheaper than CGI, or that many scenes were filmed on their historical location.

Unfortunately, there is enough of a resemblance between the two female leads that it sometimes took me a while to realize who was in a given scene; the movie, too, has been cut (by Coppola, no less), quickening the slow-building pace but losing some of the historical and character development. Still, if you like majestically paced historical epics, this is great fun, and I hope to own it or its longer version someday.

Original Patlabor OVA: Disc B

If Episode 4 had been on the first disc as Netflix claimed, I'd have given that disc three stars and this four (if possible). After the silliness of the "supernatural mystery" in #4, the OVAs kick into high gear for the two-parter and then calm down to business as usual in Episode 7 (the only one not directed by Oshii Mamoru). The last three episodes are good, tight storytelling in a near-future setting, albeit one with a split Germany and Communist bloc projected onto it. In addition to (sadly dubbed) trailers, this disc includes as an extra the first episode of Patlabor TV, for ready comparison.

Soukyuu no Fafner: Discs 1-3

1: Could Kazuki and Soushi be any more obviously in love with each other? 2: This show is NOT afraid to kill off important characters. It could almost be a Gundam series. 3: I would dearly, dearly like to know wtf is going on. With luck, the journey will be as much fun as the destination. 4: I have high hopes for this series: it's like a combination of RahXephon and Neoranga-before-it-dissolved-into-suck, with a flavoring of Fantastic Children.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex discs 1-2

The first movie was thoughtful, but left me feeling a little cold. The second movie was beautiful, but not particularly something that appealed to me. This is one part cybernetic philosophy to one part cop show to one part Motoko bouncing vertically and the Tachikoma just bouncing, and so far I adore it. A lot. Even when I disagree with the Deep Philosophical Thought of the episode. The extras on the discs are also fun, and so far there has been a pleasant variety of audio tracks.

Real Ghostbusters: Creatures of the Night

This was always one of the more thoughtfully written cartoons, and these four episodes are up to the standards of the show. The disc, however, is extremely basic, without any frills. Choosing to end it with the episode where the joke is on Janine is also a little annoying, although she's had some great lines in these episodes (but Peter still has the best oneliners). The first episode was a Winston episode, which also made me happy: the one where he plays baseball in a fated game between good and evil for what turns out to be the soul of a friend.

ChunHyang

This movie is not so much a photoplay per se as a recording of a traditional Korean storytelling performance with actors acting out the narrator's words and occasionally parroting them or performing a scene inspired by them. For some reason, the storyteller's initial speech was not subtitled; even if it were traditional nonsense words, a note to that effect would have been nice. That said, if you can get into it, it was fun in an exotic sort of way.

"Sora," and yet more DVD-watching.

2008-08-01T07:21:38Z

When poking around in a Latin dictionary trying to discover what "sora" (Japanese for "sky," let it be known, when with a short o) could be said to mean in that language, I found an actual case of a city Sora (with a long o) that was a Volscian city. (Since I wanted to use the Volscians, this was perfect.) A little more poking around discovered that it was probably related to "serenus" and more distantly to "sol," and therefore a cousin with similar meaning of Sanskrit "svar," meaning --

-- "sky."

Go figure.

As to DVDs, I have finally begun watching again.

Julius Caesar: Handel: English National Opera
I usually don't like dubs, but I fell in love with this English-language version of Handel's opera. There were only a few places where the English lyrics felt awkward, and the performances of the main cast soon overrode them. The DVD offers the choice of 2.0 or 5.1 sound, and hard-codes in English subtitles (which were apparently added for the DVD release to an otherwise unmastered videorecording); there is a scene menu with chapters for every song. While the scenery is clearly stage scenery, the camera is used as if it were being filmed on set. The costumes appear to have been chosen to suit the period of composition. Handel's music is, as always, unmistakeable. I found Dame Janet convincing as Caesar, and Masterson was a wonderful Cleopatra. While Bowman's acting was suitably slimy for Ptolemy, there were several places in his singing where his voice was noticeably forced. This DVD left me wanting to see more English National Opera releases. Five on a scale of one to five.

Patlabor Original OVA: Volume One
To start with, in contradiction to Netflix's blurb, this only contains three episodes. This was the very first Patlabor series: most of the main characters and motivations seem to be the same as in the better-known television series, except for Asuma, who here has been volunteered as a policeman by his father and is a dork about it. This disc also contains the Kaijuu Parody Episode, which makes more sense (and is much funnier) depending on how much kaijuu-film the viewer is familiar with. Three on a scale of one to five

Loveless: Volume One
I keep meaning to pick up the manga of this -- it's by Kouga Yun, lots of people seem to like it -- but so far I haven't yet. This is a romantic-suspense show, and so four episodes in we're only beginning to start finding out what the mystery actually is: sixth-grader Aoyagi Ritsuka has transferred to a new school two years after his elder brother's mysterious murder, has inherited a deeply creepy but charismatic submissive stalker-type, Agatsuma Soubi, who apparently is designed to fight in some sort of magical duels that the elder brother and a mysterious organization know all about; Soubi, it appears, has been sexually active, would have done anything for Ritsuka's brother but doesn't seem to have slept with him, and having been told to love and serve Ritsuka, will do anything for him except leave or tell him what the hell is going on.

Ritsuka also has a love interest at school -- fellow sixth-grader Hawatari Yuiko, who with Ritsuka's standoffish influence starts developing her own self-respect and self-reliance, beginning to make a stand against the female bullies who use her as a doormat, and all in all is a wonderfully friendly and likeable person. There seems to be something going on with Ritsuka's abusive mother, there's definitely something going on with the mysterious organization Septimal Moon (Nanatsu-no-Tsuki) that wants to capture Ritsuka and that Soubi accuses of the elder Aoyagi's murder, and Ritsuka and Soubi both clearly have Issues. Also, it appears that in the Loveless world, virgins possess a tail and (cat-shaped) extra pair of ears that are somehow lost in sexual intercourse.

In short, while some aspects of the show are highly unsettling, I really want to know what in the world is going to happen next. Four on a scale of one to five.

Dungeons and Dragons: Volume One
Nostalgia ahoy; I used to watch this when I was little, although not with any great regularity. Rewatching it now... I'm not sure whether the first two episodes weren't as good as the other five on the disc or whether it just took me a while to get into '80s-cartoon-mode, but for the rest of the disc it was incredibly fun sailing. Which isn't that surprising, noticing that the show shares a lot of the creative staff with Muppet Babies, which I watched religiously when I was younger. Most of the little extras (information about specific episodes) on the disc are only apparent when using the scene selection menu and its submenus. Annoyingly, the teaser-introduction, which is the same in every episode and takes the place of an opening theme, is not a chapter stop of its own and cannot be easily skipped.

This is not, of course, a show to watch for any but the most general similarities to the role-playing game (honestly, you'd be better off reading Quag Keep). Only some of the main characters' roles are character types for D&D, and of those, most of them do not work at all the way they do in the game. Forget everything you may know about the game when watching the show; you'll be happier that way. (Also, forget everything you may remember about the proper pronunciation of "Tiamat," as an underpowered dragon of that name is a semi-regular guest star.)

While the characters' personalities are drawn with broad strokes (as befits a children's show, especially one from the 1980s), their interactions onscreen are most of what make the show worth watching; they're fun, the heroes act like real kids, and you'll only find yourself wondering now and then why the thief girl (who never steals anything) has a costume with thigh-high boots and a miniskirt. The character presented as the Force of Evil, while he has magical force enough, is more than a little lacking in the Evil department (which is probably just as well, given that he's fighting teenagers and preteens) and has a habit of keeping his word in a way that's either very dumb or very clever. Four on a scale of one to five.

Movie thoughts and reviews, once more.

2008-06-10T10:27:31Z

Last week we went to see Prince Caspian. I knew pretty quickly that I didn't like it as much as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, although I wasn't sure whether it was because they did a worse job of adapting it or a consequence of my liking the book Prince Caspian better than its predecessor. Come to think of it, I'm still not sure, although I think they did make more (or at least more noticeable) changes in this movie.

I understand that they changed the timelines around so that the Pevensie siblings would have more to do over the course of the movie -- and perhaps to avoid starting off in medias res, although the technique works perfectly well in a movie (cf. The Thief of Bagdad). As a consequence of this, the reasoning behind the location of Trumpkin's foiled execution makes less sense, and because of the method they chose for it, Caspian starts out with the appearance of decidedly less-than-stellar tactical sense.

I love the fact that the Telmarines have clear Iberian Peninsula influence. That makes perfect sense with their origins, and I think it will now go into my mental deuterocanon. I also like that Miraz's wife was more than a plot device in the movie, and that she (and her even-more-plot-device infant son) was the second to volunteer to return to the South Seas. (After all, what in the world would Caspian have done with them?) I also like the way that we get a sense of the flaws in Peter and Susan's characters that will be more evident by the time of The Last Battle, although I could have done without Peter's endangering the heroes more than they did in the book.

I do not love the decision to replace some of my favorite scenes (Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi!) with more battle scenes, although I must admit that the battle scenes were well done, and that I did like Susan getting more to do in them and the alternative use of Edmund's torch(flashlight). Also, what was the reasoning behind the decision not to keep the distinction between the Talking Beasts and ordinary animals? After all, the Talking predators have to eat something...

Also, I've had a ginormous crush on Reepicheep since I was seven years old, and was very happy that the movie got him absolutely right. (And played by Eddie Izzard, yet.)

I was rather taken aback by the kiss at the end -- I remember reading once that a major source of confusion for American GIs in Britain during and after WWII was that, if one thinks of a relationship as containing thirty or so steps to complete physical intimacy, the American perspective at the time would have had a kiss as #5 or so, while the British would have thought of it as more like number twenty-five. Granted that Susan and the others have been returning to being very Narnian over their few days there, I still feel that -- especially on the morning of her return to England -- she would have been more conscious of her birth mores.

I still liked the movie, and Edmund and Lucy were still my favorite other two characters -- I just wish that they had included the part where Aslan, once finally invited in, goes running through the streets of Telmarine Narnia calling those who will listen to come and join the gladsome throng, because that bit was important.

I've also been doing more Netflixing.

My history with Fullmetal Alchemist is complicated -- I saw the first three episodes at my local anime club, and thought they were interesting but that I didn't feel the need to run out and see more. Then over the years fanwriters I like have written for it, and people have spoken highly of it, and several of my friends have said "Ysabeth, you should see this, you'll absolutely love it -- won't she love it, [other friend in room]?" Then there was the time I wandered in in time to catch the end of the movie.

So I decided to watch the series from the beginning, and. Well.

It's a good thing that Animania showed the third episode, and that this disc had 1-4, because based solely on the first two episodes, I wouldn't have liked the show. Part of it was the treatment of the subject matter in that two-parter -- but also, so far, I... don't like Edward Elric.

I'm not quite sure why I don't like him; he's arrogant, yes, and I usually like characters who are almost as good as they think they are, even if their social skills fall in the raised-by-robot-wolves category... but not Ed. Maybe it's that he's arrogant and thinks he isn't?

Also, the first, in medias res episodes? It's not that I dislike the idea of the exposure of a religious fraud (in fact, it generally falls under my definition of a Good Thing). Nor is it the fact that the guy doing the exposing pretty clearly claims not to believe in any organized religion (although the rationale he gives for not doing so is rather brain-breaking, that falls under the aegis of character development).

The thing is, that the people of Liore's reasoning for believing in their bishop and his faith? He performs miracles. Very little mention of whether the sect had been active before or not, some mention of part of why they've been buying into it, in a world where it isn't impossible for someone else to do as much -- but when the authenticity of the miracles is called into question, the people turn on the bishop demanding answers, and when another one is performed, they go back to believing him. After he's been trying to build a cult for five or six years. THIS IS NOT PLAUSIBLE.

The people are either being treated as overly stupid or as not docile enough. If he'd been cultifying for long enough, the mob mentality should have gone after the Elric Brothers from the first. If he'd been setting up something that focused more on the trappings than on him personally (and, given his stated objectives, that'd have been foolish), the crowd should have split into angry groups, one of which still defended him and another of which tried to elect an episcopal successor on the spot.

Also, I can understand that Ed thinks they're stupid for wanting to believe in a higher power in the first place, but the anime doesn't do too great a job of disassociating his views from its views.

Now, the backstory I like. The backstory is great. I also like the episode with the mannequins. I really like Al. I like Winry(sp?). I like Pinako. I rather think I'd like Mustang if I got to see more of him. I get the feeling that the Elric Brothers are going to be the equivalent of the Lovely Angels when it comes to success rates and collateral damage and responsibility for that last, and I look forward to it.

But wow, I hope Ed learns either the meaning of humility or how to be enjoyable without it.

A while back, I picked up the 1924 The Thief of Bagdad cheaply, not realizing that there were two of them, and fell in love with it.

Then I was made aware that there was a second (and far more famous version), and got around to renting it.

Aside from the title, the idea of someone falling in love with the princess at first sight and sneaking in to visit her, and the use of a flying carpet as ending deus ex machina, this movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1924 one, although they are both fun mindless action fantasy.

This is the sort of movie that the phrase "in glorious Technicolor" was coined to describe. Much of the photography in this is really amazing (although the special effects are clearly of their time, and one -- the six-armed lady -- is filmed such that in several instances it is clear that the other arms are coming from the wall behind her and are not attached to her torso; even in 1940, it should have been possible to change the angle a little, especially considering the technical excellence of the shots of Abu and the genie.)

It begins in medias res and then uses a lengthy flashback, which works well in the context of the movie. The characters, while simple archetypes and prone to acting without thinking whenever called to by the script, function well in the sort of fairy tale this is.

And yet I still prefer the 1924 movie; go figure.

I also saw a 1981 Canadian production of Anna Bolena, with Dame Joan Sutherland in the title role. It was an exceedingly no-frills disc -- it had the opera divided into chapters with the ability to play the whole thing, with a simple white-text-on-blue menu, and that was it.

The sound of the opera was very well recorded, although the camera work was sometimes (perhaps unavoidably) dark, and some of the close-ups of Dame Joan seemed to catch her least flattering angles and stay there for too long.

The opera is a rather modified version of the downfall and execution of Anne Boleyn. Donizetti is known for including emotionally satisfying scenes whether or not history was so kind as to cooperate: here he adds Anne lamenting the bitterness of the queenship she so wanted and innocently advising Jane Seymour (Judith Forst) never to have a king for a lover, a tender reunion with Lord Percy (Michael Myers) (amalgamated with Weston/Brereton/Norris and rather puzzlingly renamed "Riccardo"; presumably two "Henry/Enrico"s might have been confusing, but since he now includes a perfectly good "Francis" and "William", one of them should have an Italian version that fits the meter) before she goes in to her trial, and a gorgeous duet where Anne nobly forgives a repentant Jane on learning that the latter is the Other Woman who has roused her wrath. He also adds a mad scene on the eve of Anne's execution, presumably just in case the audience wasn't sympathizing with her enough. After seeing this, I thought it was a real pity that he never found anyone to write him a libretto for the Maria Tudor opera he had in mind, because I'd have loved to see what he did with it.

movies, again

2008-05-27T05:17:47Z

Today we went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I don't know what the reviewers who complain it lacks energy are thinking; as far as I was concerned, it had plenty of energy, plenty of everything, at least two moments that had me wishing for a sofa to hide behind (although the first was sort of delayed behind "oh holy shit they are not actually going there" and "holy shit, refrigerator"), and in short was very nearly everything I could possibly have hoped for out of a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Although I still wish they'd had a Short Round cameo at the end; maybe he was there and I didn't see him?

(Although I dearly hope the Grail did bestow something extra in the way of healing on him back in Last Crusade, because he probably burned through it all with the refrigerator thing.)

The Snow Queen: This is more of an oratorio with spoken parts than a movie itself, and should be judged as such. The music was beautiful. The filmography was very pretty but highly stylized; nothing really looked real. Unusually, the adaptation took the tack of keeping all of the middle bits and changing the beginning and end; some of the changes were to make the Snow Queen and the flower-witch clearly evil or at least menacing, as opposed to Andersen's more ambiguous portrayal, another was to move the explanation of the mirror to the middle of the story, and a third was to alter the beginning so that Gerda saved Kay then, too, rather than simply having them grow up friends. Also, there were a few puzzling changes to the princess's bridegroom.

Somehow it failed to completely entrance me, and I'm not sure why. I would recommend it to anyone who likes oratorios, though.

more movie mini-reviews

2008-05-21T03:10:49Z

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is just as fun as I remembered it. The suspense plotline doesn't suffer from a second viewing, the characters are pretty clear given that it's a collection of music videos and nobody has any dialogue, and all five of the main characters plus the villain get stuff to do. There are also all sorts of Matsumoto tropes quietly here and there.

One of them, however, still being "If it looks cool, it works." Seriously. Don't think too hard about this.

The DVD had a bunch of extras. However, the "special features" menu items were, literally, a series of blue boxes. You have to select one to see what it is; sometimes this starts a music video or other track playing. This is just bad design.

You do find out from the extras that the heroic fan's name is apparently "Shep."

Despite all its problems, I do still really like this; where else will you have alien rock bands and the day saved by your Capitalist Boss turning out to be a good guy after all?

O ye gods, I LOVE YELLOW SUBMARINE.

I first saw it when my mother taped it off of Channel Eleven, back when we lived in Seattle. I then proceeded to wear out the tape with multiple viewings. I saw this remastered version with the added "Bull Dog" scene in the theater, and eagerly bought the disc.

To be fair, this is not a movie you watch for its stunning sense. It runs on Dream Logic. Within that context, it sort of feels right for hard-to-articulate reasons; the plot, thin as it is, has resonated with me for years, and there's something very funny about an extended ending sequence beyond the actual "story end" to "It's All Too Much."

The film also includes the original theatrical bonus video of the Beatles in person reprising "All Together Now," which I still find it hard not to sing along to.

In short, this is an excellent movie for children with expanding vocabularies, and it remains entertaining (and often funny on a different level) for adults.

Adopted Sons-in-law

2008-05-18T01:23:19Z

The other day, someone was reading a Rurouni Kenshin story of mine and wanted to know "Was it usual in the Meiji era to refer to a husband by the wife's family name?"

I suppose it's not as well known that it was, if not usual, not outlandish -- not in Meiji, not in the Tokugawa Era and before, not even these days.

From medieval times up through modern times, husbands have on occasion been taken into the bride's family, although the reverse was always more common. Often a family with no sons would either adopt one or take one of their sons-in-law into the household to carry on the family name. In many cases not involving the question of carrying on a name, the couple took on the family name of the party who brought more to the marriage.

As Kenshin is bringing in one somewhat shopworn rurouni and a new sakabatou, and Kaoru is bringing in a rundown doujou in good standing, a name as an instructor, an inherited name and style, one apprentice and the occasional student, several kimono, a few bokken, probably her dad's sword around somewhere, and some actual money, I have always assumed that he would take HER name. ^_^

baseball and movies

2008-05-17T19:51:07Z

Yesterday I went to a baseball game as part of my church group. I'd never been to one before.

I enjoyed it. It was fun. I will have to go again sometime. Preferably with more layers -- I only had my t-shirt and a jacket lined with polar fleece, and I wound up lending the latter to the lady from Nicaragua who was freezing the whole time, poor thing.

Also, I watched the second disc of "Advent Children."

This was a fun second disc. It had a collection of interviews, a collection of trailers (for the movie and for other games), and the short part of the film presented at the Venice Film Festival. If I had only seen the twenty-minute version, full of action scenes, I would have eagerly anticipated the full version, expecting that it would patch up the apparent holes (as opposed to the actual film, which patched maybe two of the holes and filled the rest up with more action).

The interviews also did help explain that it was everyone's first time making a full-length movie; most of the movie's defects can probably be ascribed to that. It was very interesting hearing what everyone had been trying to do and realizing how well they had succeeded (or hadn't.)

However, I was hoping from the description of the interviews as "The Making of Advent Children" that it would involve a lot more of the actual description of making it. Only composer Uematsu Nobuo and the scene designer (whose name slips my mind) actually talked about how they went about creating their parts of the movie, and Uematsu didn't actually talk that much about it.

netflix

2008-05-10T06:22:04Z

So, given that gas prices have gone past disgusting and soared all the way into obscenity, my sister convinced me that it would be cheaper to just get a Netflix account.

So I did. Day before yesterday.

Today, my first three discs arrived.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
I first saw this on my friend's laptop when I was zonking in and out every two minutes. This does not help any good movie, especially not a murder mystery, and certainly not one as trippy as this (there's one scene, for example, where the main characters get trapped in a repeating loop).

Seeing it when I'm awake, it's a worthy successor to the first movie (unsurprising; they were both directed by Oshii). It's rather selfconsciously intellectual (not to mention, all these 'borged up people and they STILL SMOKE? What the heck, people) and very stylized, and the CGI doesn't always mesh well with the animation. I like it very much; however, I have one problem with the DVD -- the decision to make the English subtitles identical with the English closed captions. I was watching it at some volume, did not need the "[helicopter noise]," and certainly did not need the "[Singing in Japanese]" rather than, oh, the actual lyrics of the song. Sheesh.

Also, I think I agree with the people who said that no matter how much you love particularly clever bits of quotation/philosophy/images, you need to sit down and ask yourself "does this further the story?" (whether by plot, by characterization, or by thematics) -- and if it doesn't, to cut it out or rewrite it so that it does, no matter how neat it is. Save it for the music videos and so forth.

Ghost in the Shell 2 Music Videos
Because of the way I was opening the packages, I actually watched these before the movie they're from. They did not spoil me for the movie. They did not, that I recall, contain new content, but were rather the music-video sequences of the movie, removed and with any dialogue bits excised.

Also, the subtitles for these offered both the Japanese transliteration and the English translation.

This being so, they actually worked better here than in the movie; while in the movie some of these scenes went on and on and delayed the plot, here you can fully appreciate the visual feast that is the matsuri parade, for example, without trying to figure out what if anything is furthering the exposition of the mystery. These are beautiful music videos, to two instrumentals and to several takes of two songs. One of the songs is very traditionally Japanese, so your enjoyment will probably depend on whether you like that sort of quavering chorus. The other is English-language jazz, written by someone who appears to be Spanish; while the lyrics are perfectly correct grammatically, the musical values outright contradict the natural stresses of the word, so that the song seems to be nothing but syncopation.

I'd almost suggest skipping the second movie, renting the music videos, and reading the manga. ^_^

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
This movie seems to have fulfilled one of its functions, in that I don't think it would have made any more sense to me if I had played the game. ^_^

It is very stylish but rather empty of substance; the worldbuilding that appears from all accounts to have been so much of the game is here left out, skipped over, or lightly hinted at (and not in the way that seems meant to have been icing on a preexisting cake, either). On the other hand, it is VERY pretty, the fight scenes are spectacular, and the voices are good. On the gripping hand, it suffers from "be sure to include every character the fans liked whether there's really room for them or not" syndrome, although the bit an hour in that feels exactly like the moment when all the girls combine their power with Ohgami's in a Sakura Taisen franchise is fun.

The extras include a quick synopsis (consisting of game cutscenes and recordings of gameplay, shown as flashbacks while the main character is driving his motorcycle along a tropical road) of the game Final Fantasy VII, which you can watch beforehand in case you haven't been hanging out with the online crowd that diffuses the FF7 plot and characters into general osmosis, or if it's been a while; you can also watch it afterwards if you were disappointed by the movie and want to remember how cool the game was. (They seem to have had the same director; what gives?)

Overall, I liked it a lot, but I also loved Ultraviolet, which tells you something about my kinks in movies.

Also, from the credits, it appears that the Promised Land is in Hawai`i. This makes sense in a weird sort of way. If I were a member of a planet-traveling ancient race, I would totally want to go to Hawai`i when I die. ^_^

book meme thing

2008-04-30T06:36:43Z

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote/i>
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid*
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

* = things I read on my own before I had to reread them for school.

Chattering about Movies: Labyrinth

2008-02-07T18:52:35Z

I was reading through a movie review page, trying to determine how closely the reviewer's taste paralleled mine, and noticed that his (2.5 star) review of Labyrinth began by stating that there appears to be such a thing as "male" and "female" movies.

Which I would agree with -- for whatever reason, very possibly cultural, men and women tend to have different buttons and look on things with somewhat different worldviews, and one can definitely make a movie intending it to appeal to a certain worldview. (Whether it does or not depends largely on the movie-making process. Whether or not the movie also/instead looks good to people who look at the world differently depends on a whole host of things, in which luck plays a large part.)

And LabyrinthLabyrinth depends on whether or not the trappings and dialogue grab them.

Also, there are quite a number of women who remember Labyrinth fondly at least partly because David Bowie's Jareth helped define/awaken their sexuality. (I missed it when I was growing up; for me it was Sting as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, especially in the just-out-of-the-shower-scene. Damn.) Even when the movie's making it clear just how bad he is for her, the tension between him and Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is intense.

But in the end, this is a movie about responsibility, and about self-responsibility, and about self-respect: where unwanted duties nevertheless remain duties, where users have no power save for what those they use give them, where cleverness goes farther than stubbornness, both farther than despair, and friends are where you find them; and where, in the end, defeat comes not from the heroine's memory but from her own moment of self-insight.

(Also the goblins/creatures of Faerie, as realized by Muppets, are extremely cool, but Henson's Muppets usually are.)

(Not the) All-Time Greatest Movie Songs

2007-10-10T01:02:20Z

Today I checked a CD called The All-Time Greatest Movie Songs out of the library.

This CD was a rampant case of false advertising.

It contained:
1 - My Heart Will Go On (Titanic)
2 - Men in Black (eponymous)
3 - The Sweetest Thing (Love Jones)
4 - I Say A Little Prayer (My Best Friend's Wedding) -- Diana King version
5 - Streets of Philadelphia (Philadelphia)
6 - As I Lay Me Down (Now and Then)
7 - Go The Distance (Hercules)
8 - Heaven's What I Feel (Dance With Me)
9 - A Whole New World (Aladdin)
10 - For The First Time (One Fine Day)
11 - I Want To Spend My Lifetime Loving You (The Mask of Zorro)
12 - I Finally Found Someone (The Mirror Has Two Faces)
13 - Modern Woman (Ruthless People)
14 - You Were There (Simon Birch)
15 - Will You Be There (Free Willy)
16 - I'm Kissing You (Romeo and Juliet)
17 - Heart of a Hero (Hero)

What's wrong with this picture?

Seriously, if they'd wanted to call it The Greatest Recent Movie Songs, or The Greatest Movie Songs of the '90s (plus one by Billy Joel), I wouldn't be quibbling: taste is individual. No matter how individual it is, though, any compilation claiming to be the all-time (English-language) movie songs ought to at least find room somewhere for "High Noon," "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," and "As Time Goes By." For the influence, if nothing else.

O Internet, I love you.

2007-05-18T04:32:54Z

How else could you find from the comfort of your own home that the Palace in The Prisoner of Zenda was very probably called Tetschen Castle?

Oh. My. Ghod.

2007-04-20T03:49:35Z

The Monsters of Sesame Street, parts one, two, three.

I think I may need to propose marriage.

Yet Another Useful Rule of Thumb

2007-04-11T22:51:25Z

The recent bitter arguments in Stargate: Atlantis fandom have convinced me of the following simple dictum.

You can divide the world's people into two parts: those who feel that there is always room to discuss valid exceptions to any given rule, and those who feel that in n>0 cases it will be inappropriate for at least one reason.

I have SUCH a love-on for Sector General right now.

2007-03-20T03:51:57Z

I want to kiss it and hug it and squeeze it and make it into a syndicated television show.

Where have these books been all my life?

Lamb Curry Pepperoni Vegetable Soup

2007-01-07T06:16:48Z

large pot
frying pan
1 carton Jenny Craig Garden Vegetable Soup
5 strips turkey bacon
1 pkg ground lamb
1/4 pkg turkey pepperoni
2 kale leaves
2 bok choy leaves/stalks
1 small can sliced water chestnuts
2/3 can artichoke hearts
1/4 can sauerkraut
1 can coconut milk
2 fennel stalks (w/bulbous part)
most of a head of celery hearts
1/3 bunch cilantro
1 pkg thai red curry flavor seasoning mix
garlic powder
A1 Steak Sauce Hot and Spicy version
PAM cooking spray
(water)
(paper towel)

Spray frying pan with water and begin frying bacon. Turn over several times while frying.
Start washing the vegetables and slicing them up. This will take a while. Do it in the order listed.
When the bacon is done, transfer it to a paper towel on a cutting board. Set the frying pan aside.
Put about five cups of water into the large pot and set it boiling.
While it boils, cut the bacon into slices no more than half a centimeter wide (the very crispy bacon will tend to fragment under pressure).
Carefully remove the paper towel full of bacon bits and set it aside.
Slice the vegetables as thinly as practicable.
When the water boils, turn the burner down to simmer, dump the garden vegetable soup and then the chopped kale into it, stir, and let sit for a while.
As it becomes ready, add the bok choy; stir in the water chestnuts, the artichoke hearts, the sauerkraut, and a liberal dash of garlic powder.
Start stir-frying the lamb in the frying pan. The bacon will have left a lot of oil; pour in a little water if it seems needed. Tease the lamb apart with a fork if necessary.
Stir in the coconut milk and the pepperoni. Slosh in some of the spicy A1. Stir some more.
When the ground lamb's just about done cooking, pour it into the soup. Add the celery and the fennel. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it looks nearly done.
Stir in the cilantro and the curry flavor mix.
Cook for three more minutes, and then call in people to eat.
Makes about seven bowls of soup.

library -- What. The. HFL?

2006-11-30T00:00:29Z

Today, while at the library with my mother, I discovered (while at the checkout desk, after my mother had wandered off) that I had accrued a disgustingly large fine. Not as big as some I've had, but enough to be bothersome.

I wasn't particularly happy, although I made sure to renew everything so as not to accrue MORE.

Later this day, when my mother came home (we went to her house separately), she came to tell me that the clerk who had assisted me had felt compelled to tell my mother the amount of my library fines.

W. T. F?

I'm old enough to vote and drink. There was no reason not to assume (as is, in fact, the case) that I could pay the amount of fine myself without needing to throw myself on my mother's charity. My mother was not present for the conversation about the fines.

Where does this clerk person get off REVEALING MY RECORD to my mother? It's none of her business! You don't do that! You don't reveal patron data not already a matter of public record without a warrant unless somebody's dead or about to be (and even there the morality's iffy -- we debated that in library school, several times)!

I called the library from my parents' house and made a formal complaint. My mother said that the clerk had only been trying to help, and that she (my mother) had debated telling me about the conversation but decided to in order to offer to lend me money -- "and now she'll get in trouble."

Excuse me? If my mother, worried about one of her clients, told somebody who wasn't there the details of said client's conversation with her, the bar association would have her neck. She'd never dream of telling even us what isn't already public; is it too much to expect my profession to have similar ethics?

I just -- I don't -- it wasn't any of her business, and I'm a librarian, and you don't do that at a library.

o.O

2006-10-23T04:43:53Z

...one of my latest pieces of spam has the subject line You cumm(sic) right after penetration!

Isn't that an undesirable occurrence? The sort one would wish to, oh, avoid?
Methinks the spammers need a new marketing strategy.

I just remembered that Gilbert and Sullivan are full of plot holes.

2006-10-09T01:48:32Z

To be fair, they generally skate over them so well that you only notice them a few hours after the show's over.

After all (liberally paraphrased):

EVERYONE: Dick Deadeye, why are you such a git?
DEADEYE: Because I SUCK.
EVERYONE: Yeah, you DO.

and:

RALPH-né-CORCORAN: Nobody seems to be looking askance at me for marrying a woman young enough to be my daughter.
SIR JOSEPH: Oh, they think you've done very well for yourself, even if you are lifting her out of the gutter. (RALPH glowers; SIR JOSEPH continues, blithely unconscious) Now, the ridiculous part in this is that Mrs... er... Buttercup is marrying a man nearly young enough to be her son.
COUSIN HEBE: Nobody seems to be looking at them askance for that either, any more than they're looking at you for marrying your cousin.
SIR JOSEPH: Why, what problem could anyone have with cousins marrying? It keeps the property in the family and ensures the quality of one's connubial partner, after all.
RALPH: (whispering) He doesn't know anything about farming either, does he?
COUSIN HEBE: (whispering) I've finally persuaded him into offering his hand; for heaven's sake, don't tell him!