Month: August 2005

And while I’m at it, because these have been accumulating for awhile now — linkpharm:

  • Alan Olifson has issues — I found it amusing.
  • Twisted ToyFare Theatre
  • From Betty, this list of fictional chemical substances and this one of science fiction citations, the latter which might have been useful in answering rollick’s question of “who first came up with the science-fiction trope of recording people’s experiences and plugging them into other people’s heads for entertainment or edification.” (Or maybe not. I don’t know, I haven’t actually checked.)
  • Speaking of rollick, I was amused by this. You never do see the two of them together, now do you…?
  • All your sith are belong to us. From fellow capper, BlakHat, this hillarious example of dubbing gone bad “The backstroke of the west?”
  • From Generik (and his brother) come photographs of an abandoned Chinese amusement park
  • Courtesy of the infrequently updated Angels from Another Pin comes Brookyln Superhero Supplies, which, if I didn’t already have enough trouble finding my way around midtown Manhattan, I might definitely be tempted to visit. In the meantime, Mr. Kilgannon is kind enough to share some links to some wonderful photographs of the shop.
  • From Kim, there’s Nintendo themes a capella and, heaven help us, the official website of Gary, the Willard Preacher
  • Meredith shares this neat piece of flash poetry
  • From the “Don’t They Ever Learn?” department, comes the news of yet another Highlander movie. You know, I’m not ashamed to admit it, there was a brief time when I really enjoyed the television series. And the first film had its moments. But this seems a lot like beating a dead horse. Is it really worth revisiting this material — and, from the sound of it, the worst, most ridiculous aspects of the material — when the last movie took such a beating at the box office? Director Brett Leonard may be right when he says, “Everything I have done has led me to this kind of mythical fantasy.” But you have to keep in mind most everything he’s done is crap. There are worse sequels in which to invest one’s time and money, but can’t we just give it a rest already?
  • From Tom Tomorrow comes Liberality. Because you know any comic book that envisions a future world in which “an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North [must] thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City” has got to be good for a laugh.
  • From Boing Boing, these wonderful bug photos and this one that pretty much puts all the Mirror Project entries to shame
  • From Mumpsimus, this cute idea for a reality television show and a link to this contest for the worst last lines of a novel — sort of an anti-Bulwer-Lytton.
  • Which brings me to the Lyttle Lytton Contest, courtesy of Bookslut, and the end of my links

Now I guess I have to go off and accumulate some more.

Oh, and Blogger? Telling me that my “closing tag has no matching opening tag” doesn’t really help. Now, telling me which closing tag — that would be helpful, especially in a post like this with lots of tags.

A couple of links from the New York Times I’ve been holding on to for some reason. (As always, registration or something like BugMeNot required.)

First, a this article in which A.O. Scott makes the following interesting observation:

Movie stars are glamorous creatures we dream of meeting someday, while superheroes are the people we secretly believe we really are.

And this review of the most recent Harry Potter book, in which Liesl Schillinger writes:

The first four volumes of the series, written before 2000, gave children a thrilling escape into fantasy. But the last two, written after Sept. 11, 2001, provide the opposite release: an escape from a reality that can now seem scarier than the prison of Azkaban.

There’s some validity to that, but I do think it ignores the very real darkness that’s been present since the beginning of the series. It’s a darkness that’s grown and (in some ways) matured along with Rowling’s characters. Certainly, the third and fourth books are tinged with a fair share of both the scary and the bittersweet, and I think it can argued that only the first novel is nothing but stand-alone escapist fantasy. I haven’t yet read more than a chapter of The Half Blood Prince, but I think tossing around September 11th in this context is to simultaneously give Rowling more credit than she probably deserves, while not giving her enough credit for what she’s already done with the books. I think it’s reading these books in a post-September 11th world that makes them seem darker; and, if Schillinger re-read the first four now, I think she’d find they were plenty dark, too.

It’s funny: hear a song you’ve never heard before, and suddenly you’re hearing it all over the place. (Same goes for a new word you’ve just learned, person or thing you’ve just heard of, etc.) It is one of those immutable laws of the universe, I imagine.

For a change of pace, I posted over on my book log. Of course, I haven’t actually written about any of the books I’ve read in recent months. But you can’t have everything.

Or, in this case, much of anything, I guess. It’s not much of a post, to tell the truth. At least now you can see why my movie “reviews” in the sidebar are so damn short. I find it tough writing the same kind of capsule reviews for the books I read. Then again, I also find it tough writing in-depth analysis.

“Me like this book. This book is good.” doesn’t make for much of a book log.