Month: April 2009

Happy thoughts

So I stumbled upon this meme a few days ago that I kind of liked:

Post about something that made you happy today, even if it’s just a small thing.

I’m dropping the “tag eight of your friends” business, although obviously you can post this to your blog or respond with happy thoughts of your own in the comments. Here’s a couple of things that made me happy today:

  • A chapter that I’ve been waiting for, for more than half a year now, finally coming in

  • Listening to Robert Krulwich talk about biblical stories (and their terrible silence) on Radio Lab

  • Listening to the DVD commentary on Rachel Getting Married

Supposedly, I’m to do this for eight days. We’ll see. I may do more, I may do less, depending on how the week goes.

Monday various

  • Hmm, now here’s an interesting writing prompt from Neil Gaiman: a story “from the point of view of the invisible cow.”

  • Speaking of stories, apparently there’s a collection of it occurs to me now that I’ve only read about half of his novels — but this is exciting news nonetheless.

  • 97.3% of e-mail is spam. And that’s down from last year’s 98.4%! The question remains, however: how much of that non-spam 2.7% is e-mail you actually want to receive? [via]

  • TV Squad shares the trailer for the new Doctor Who “semi-spin-off,” K9. It’s funny, but to me, the thing that looks least interesting about this trailer is K9 himself. It’s been suggested that not everything in that trailer is final, but I’m not desperately impressed. (Planet of the Dead, on the other hand, wasn’t half bad.)

  • Speaking of Doctor Who, Betty posts that the interview she conducted with Marc Schuster and Tom Powers, the authors of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who for issue #4 of Kaleidotrope is now available online. I was really happy with the results of the interview, and I’m glad to see it live on. The color photos — which I couldn’t provide — are a nice touch.

“I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening.”

First of all, I loved Rachel Getting Married.

It’s actually a fairly pedestrian story, about a troubled addict returning home from rehab for her sister’s wedding, and all the stress and painful revelations that the weekend entails. And yet it’s buoyed by a warmth and grace and the sheer joy of that occasion, as well as by an almost flawless direction from Jonathan Demme, and some truly remarkable performances. (Anne Hathaway, as Rachel’s sister Kym, is the obvious standout, but there’s not a bad performance in this thing.) It’s equal parts rapturous and heartbreaking, and I was sorry to leave its world when it was done. As Roger Ebert notes, “A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.”

I can’t recommend it enough.

Happy Easter

We had a quiet afternoon meal here (fillet mignon, instead of the more traditional ham), before my sister and her fiance headed back home to Maryland. The weather was gorgeous, the food was good; it was a really nice day. I’m now wishing I’d taken tomorrow off, if only to recover from the insane amount of Easter candy my father (the diabetic) bought for us. Right now, though, I’d just planned on watching Rachel Getting Married.

Hope you had a lovely Easter (or Passover, or Sunday, as the case may be) too.

That’s one way of putting it

Keith Phipps on The Island:

That said, putting aside the not-really-my-views political undertones, the dull characters, the feeble attempts at humor, the incoherent action, the didn’t-need-to-be-this-epic-in-length approach to storytelling, and a climax that involves McGregor essentially finding and flipping a giant off-switch, this is my favorite Michael Bay movie. If that’s the film equivalent of having a favorite dental procedure, so be it.