- On WNYC, the Leonard Lopate Show has recently started posting picks and suggestions from any given week’s guests, asking them questions about what books they’re reading, what music they’re listening to, etc. They also ask, “What’s one thing you’re a fan of that people might not expect?” Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller, answered, “Novel forms of pancakes and waffles.” I love that I have almost no idea what he means.
- All this time, I had been avoiding the Huffington Post mostly just because it’s a time-sink. Like io9, Metafilter, or Boing Boing, I was only visiting occasionally, and even then only when another blog redirected me there. But, it turns out, there’s a whole bevy of other reasons to avoid it, namely that, although it earns millions of dollars — and even more in its recent merger with AOL — it still doesn’t pay its writers, nor did it even pay for the blogging platform that runs it. Plus, it seems less like an interesting time-sink and more one that just re-purposes what other news blogs have written, with occasional liberal celebrity cameos, for the purpose of aggrandizing the Huffington Post. Maybe that’s unfair. As I said, I don’t spend much time with it, except when others occasionally direct it there. But it would be nice if some of that AOL money went to the people who day by day create the product AOL bought.
- A teenage burglar killed three goldfish because he didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind. In his defense, he may just have been reading The Cat in the Hat one too many times. Then again, reading might not be too high on this brainiac’s agenda. [via]
- I don’t think it will surprise anyone that Donald Rumsfeld is full of shit. This is what I think he himself would call “a known known.”
- And finally, Wolverine or two Bat Men? [via]
personal
All the President’s Days
It snowed sometime overnight, which I have to say, I find wholly unacceptable, having only just become accustomed to having things like grass and roads and such back. But there wasn’t too much, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. Our dog certainly seemed to love it.
In other news, I spent the day reading again, interspersed with a little television here and there. Since Friday, I’ve read about seven different graphic novels, of varying quality and subject matter, culminating today with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2 and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds. I think the former was a lot better, and having read it means I can now safely watch the movie version of Persepolis without threat of spoiler.
Last night, I watched The Town, the Ben Affleck-directed (and starring) crime thriller. It was very good. Stars Affleck and Jeremy Renner turn in good performances; Jon Hamm is really quite good; and Blake Lively, though she’s not in the film a whole lot, steals the show whenever she is. (I’m never seen an episode of Gossip Girl, so I wasn’t familiar with her before this.) It’s not a great movie, though it occasionally reaches towards greatness, and it’s quite an entertaining picture. And, if nothing else, it’s a better showcase for the late Pete Postlethwaite than the dreck that was Clash of the Titans.
Today was a holiday, but it’s back to work with me tomorrow.
Sunday part 1
Today was, for all intents and purposes, a Sunday. I can’t say, with all sincerity, that it always felt like a Sunday, but I have it on reasonably good authority that a Sunday is what is was, nevertheless.
Anyway, here’s something that I wrote today:
[sorry, done been deleted]
Satursomething
I spent most of the day reading, albeit mostly graphic novels, and now I think I’m going to settle in and watch a movie…if these endless previews ever, you know, end.
Meanwhile, it’s my mom’s birthday. She’s still not 100%, but she’s feeling much better, and has been up and about for the past couple of days. She wasn’t able to enjoy a lot of her birthday cake, but family have been calling to wish her well all day, and my father and I gave her presents after dinner.
Oh, and would you look at that? I think those previews (which I couldn’t skip) have finally ended.
Zombies, office, but not a zombie office
Today was an awful lot like yesterday, except that it was, of course, a Friday. And not just any Friday, but the Friday before a three-day weekend. Which is always nice.
I stayed up much too late last night finishing the first book of The Walking Dead comic. I liked the television series quite a bit, even if I had some minor issues with it and thought the middle episodes — can such a short season even be said to have middle episodes? — were perhaps not anywhere as strong as the beginning and end. But I genuinely liked it.
I can’t say the same for the comic. It’s received accolades and even an Eisner, but by the end of twelve issues I had grown to actively dislike it. I’d decided not to continue on with the subsequent books. I found the characters potentially compelling, but ultimately one-dimensional (or less), and oh my lord was there a lot of dialogue: endless speech balloons of heavy exposition, sometimes even obscuring the artwork — which, I have to say, is the one thing I really did like, especially in the original six-issue run. Characters talking about what they were going to do, what they had done, who they’d been (in great, unnecessary detail) before the zombie outbreak, etc., and not very surprising, often repetitive action handled fairly perfunctorily. Lots of readers seem to like the series because it deals with the characters and their interactions, the zombies being almost incidental. It’s not a story about zombies, they’ll tell you, but about human survival. Which is great; stories about things or plots are never as interesting as stories about people, for the simple fact that it’s we, as people, who are reading them. But there’s a big difference between telling a story about characters and telling that story well.
And in its meandering, talky, unconvincing way, The Walking Dead just doesn’t do that.
It also diverges pretty wildly, pretty early, from the television series, which I think rightly borrowed what worked, improved upon what was suggested, and dropped what didn’t work. The show wasn’t perfect, but I’ll be returning to that. I won’t be returning to the comic.
Other than that? We had a meeting/presentation this afternoon to discuss the plans for our office move in April. Things are still uncomfortably vague — how much space will we have? how open will this open plan be? — but we got some concrete details and can expect more in the next couple of weeks. I’m nervous about some of what I’m hearing, but there’s little I can do about it at this point.
Of course, the office move is definitely going to screw with my commute, and almost certainly necessitate my moving.