kaleidotrope

Knowing is half the battle

Even though I got up pretty early this morning — well, before 9 is early-ish for a Saturday, right? — I didn’t do a whole lot with the day. I thought I might go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but I ended up not. This evening, though, I did watch the live-action G.I. Joe movie, and…well, maybe I should just let the record of my live-tweeting of the movie speak for itself:

  • And now, even though I am almost certain to regret it, I’m going to watch the live-action G.I. Joe.
  • It’s starting with trailers for The Last Airbender and Transformers 2. This can’t end well.
  • “In the not too distant future”? Is this MST3K?
  • You know, with Eccleston’s Scottish accent, it just might be.
  • There is no CGI in Team.
  • Channing Tatum isn’t exactly what I’d call an electrifying screen presence.
  • Is Brendan Fraser legally required to be in every movie with CGI?
  • I didn’t think it was possible, but this may be *more* cartoonish than the original.
  • Oh good. For a minute there I was worried there wouldn’t be any jetpacks.
  • Aw, Lil Storm Shadow vs. Lil Snake Eyes.
  • When the smartest guy in the room is Marlon Wayans, be afraid.
  • This movie has almost as many unearned emotional moments and pointless flashbacks as it does things blowing up real good.
  • Oh, they must be in France. They nearly ran down a mime in a beret.
  • I am sort of wondering when the movie based on G.I. Joe begins.
  • Oh, the Baroness just made a man lose his balloons. She *is* evil.
  • Oh good. More Jim Henson’s Angry Ninja Babies.
  • These flashbacks belong in a movie where we care about the characters.
  • A movie with robot sharks under the polar ice caps should be more fun than this.
  • And shorter.
  • So, Joseph Gordon-Levitt *can* give a bad performance just like everybody else.
  • I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t a terrible movie. But only because I’m not convinced it *is* a movie.
  • It’s more like a computer-generated string of pure ridiculousness.
  • The plane only speaks Celtic. Of course.
  • I wish Storm Shadow had taken a vow of silence too.
  • “My green screen can beat up your green screen.”
  • Christopher Eccleston would make a good Groundskeeper Willie.
  • “Muhahaha! You and what army?” “MY army.” Yeah, that really just happened.
  • And of course it ends with a Black Eyed Peas song.
  • Not with a bang, but with a whimpering will i am.
  • The movie had a production accountant named Gene Strange. That may be my favorite thing about it.
  • I did not hate that movie. It was too far beyond dumb to elicit any kind of emotional response whatsoever.
  • “American Humane Association monitored some of the animal action. No animals were harmed in those scenes.” All the rest, though…
  • How is “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” not on @rifftrax?
  • Who could have guessed, when The Mummy first came out, that it would mark the *high* point in Stephen Sommers’ pursuit of realism?

I can’t claim to have enjoyed the movie, but I did have fun poking at it. I would seriously rent the movie again if it was available on Rifftrax. But otherwise, I don’t think I want to go anywhere near it again.

Otherwise, it was a pretty boring day, hanging around the house, going for a walk, reading some Kaleidotrope slush. Just a typical Saturday.

The sword of self-knowledge

“Sever the ignorant doubt in your heart with the sword of self-knowledge.”

That’s what my fortune cookie said this evening, anyway. A quick search suggests it’s from the Bhagavad Gita, which seems an odd and unexpected source of fortune-cookie wisdom, but it is a nice sentiment nevertheless.

It ties in a little weirdly with a movie I watched this evening, the Korean film Mother, where the title character twice suggests acupuncture to “loosen the knots in your heart and clear all the horrible memories from your mind.” It was a weirder movie overall than I expected…though, having seen Joon-ho Bong’s previous film, The Host, maybe I should have expected that. They’re very different movies — Mother has no giant monsters crawling from the Seoul River and attacking people, for instance — but they’re both a little off-kilter. It’s an interesting movie, about the lengths a mother will go to prove her son’s innocence, but it was ultimately a lot stranger than I bargained for.

Other than that, the day was spent not doing too much. We had a redo of last Saturday‘s attempt to get the car inspected. This morning, my father and I encountered no strange traffic, no police cars blocking roads, nobody else at the garage to get the last of the inspection stickers. It went off without a hitch.

I can’t say the same for my attempt to buy eyeglasses this afternoon. Two weeks ago, I went with my mother to a discount frames warehouse her boss had recommended, and I made an appointment with their optometrist. The appointment itself went well, and my prescription hasn’t really changed. It hasn’t changed at all in the right eye in over a decade, which is where I have the astigmatism. (The left eye changes, mostly, just as it tries to compensate.) The optometrist asked me how long I’ve been wearing glasses, and she wasn’t at all surprised when I told her it’s been since I was about two or three. She said that, usually, when she sees an astigmatism like mine, the person with it has a lazy eye. Which, if my mother hadn’t thought to take me to the eye doctor when I was young — mostly because I was her first child and she worried, not because I had any symptoms — is something I’d probably have.

Something I definitely don’t have — and check out that seamless segue there — are new eyeglasses. Unfortunately, my prescription is beyond their capabilities, too thick or too high or too something to be done by them. So unfortunately I’ll need to have it filled elsewhere. I don’t desperately need new glasses, so I’m going to hold off until I can find somewhere with relatively low prices. The last time I bought new frames was a year or two ago, and both of them snapped in less than a year. Then one of the replacement pairs snapped. So I’m looking to find something that’s a cross between decent quality and decent price.

I’ll just have to keep my eyes open, no pun intended.

I read a little more slush for Kaleidotrope, though stories keep coming in. I was really glad to re-open to submissions in January, but I’m just as happy to be closing to them again tomorrow. I’ll re-open again in January of 2011, and I think I’ll keep the same reading period, more or less, going forward.

And I’ve been using the kneeling chair a little more. The padding on this one isn’t all that great — I guess you get what you pay for — so it’s a little unforgiving on my shins. I don’t know that my back feels any better for it overall, but sitting in it does seem to cause less discomfort than sitting in a regular chair. At least in my lower back. My shins, as I said, are kind of taking a beating.

And that’s it, really, for Saturday.

Friday is the new…okay, just Friday

Last night, just before I went to bed, I learned that a recent story from Kaleidotrope (Will Kaufman’s “Eris Sinks Pluto,” April 2010) had been named to the editor’s shortlist for the next Best American Fantasy volume. This isn’t the same thing as it being included in the volume, or even necessarily among the honorable mentions, but it was one of several stories selected by series editor Larry Nolen and passed on to the volume editor, Minister Faust. I thought it was exciting news.

Of course, in the same breath, it was announced that the series, sadly, won’t be continuing. The volume, with or without Will’s intriguing story, won’t be printed.

Oh well. C’est la vie.

Today, on the other hand, was just a regular Friday around here. Went to work, came home around 2 o’clock, did some light grocery shopping, and put together my new kneeling chair. I’ve sat in it a little, but I think it’s still going to take some getting used to. My back has actually improved quite a bit in the weeks since I bought the chair, but we’ll see.

And that, such as it was, was my Friday.

“Oh, this Twinkie thing, it ain’t over yet.”

I woke up pretty early this morning, even if you discount the weird dream that woke me up around 4 a.m. half convinced a pizza delivery was at the door. In my dream, I was searching for cash I didn’t have, and I think my own shout of “I’ll be right there!” may be what woke me up. I can’t say with any degree of confidence that I didn’t actually shout it in real life, too.

But no, it wasn’t just imaginary pizza delivery that got me out of bed early on a Saturday. My father wanted to take the car in for its annual inspection, and right before 8 a.m. on a Saturday is the best time to bring it to our local mechanic, just as he’s opening up shop. There used to a very convenient Saturday morning train between the station a block from his garage and the station a block from our house, but about a year ago the Long Island Railroad discontinued that train. (Which I found out the hard way when a five-minute train ride became a five-minute train, ride plus a twenty-minute walk, one early weekend maybe two years back.) So I drove over in the other car so I could offer him a ride back.

Only, they didn’t have any inspection stickers today. This is not an infrequent problem, but it’s really the only one we’ve ever had with this mechanic, so I guess we can’t complain. This morning we were delayed getting to the garage, first by a car in front of us that seemed convinced green meant stop, then by a car blocking our turn because he was pulled alongside a taxi cab and was chatting to the driver, and then finally by police cruisers blocking the railroad crossing that runs near the shop. We got there just before the owner did…but there was already somebody else waiting…and he got the last of the remaining inspection stickers.

So I guess we’ll try again next weekend.

Beyond that, I spent a lot of the day reading. I finished No Dominion, the second of Charlie Huston‘s “Joe Pitt Casebooks,” which I guess you could describe as hard-edged, vicious vampire noir. I liked it, same as the first book, Already Dead, and it was definitely a quick read. With it (and a novella or two that may or not really count), I’m only up to 25 books for the year so far, out of my hoped-for annual 50. So maybe it’s a good thing that this morning I bought a copy of the third Joe Pitt book, Half the Blood in Brooklyn. Like I said, they’re quick but entertaining reads.

I also read a few stories still kicking around in my slush pile for Kaleidotrope. I’m closing the zine to submissions in a week, for the rest of the year, so I’m trying to get through what’s still sitting in my in box not yet read.

I went for a walk, did a tiny bit of writing, and then had an idea completely out of the blue that makes perfect sense for the story I’m writing…but of course does mean I need to re-write and re-think pretty much everything I’ve put down so far.

I watched a couple episodes of Breaking Bad — which I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to discover — and then this evening Zombieland –which, if not remarkable, was a whole lot of fun.

And that was pretty much my Saturday.

A quiet Sunday

A quiet Sunday, mostly, spent hanging around the house with the dog and doing the Times crossword. (He’s more into the jumble, actually.) I joined a couple of friends (and a new member, an acquaintance of a friend) for our weekly free-writing group, and I had a couple of photos accepted for inclusion in Small Beer Press’ A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2011. I quite liked this year’s planner, and Gavin Grant recently put out a call for photos, so… And then finally, Kaleidotrope #9 got its first official review. (An unofficial one came in the other day.) It’s always nice to get feedback on an issue, good or bad, but especially when it’s good.

I went for another short walk, had pizza for dinner with my mother, and tried some homemade ice cream from a new local creamery. And that’s about it as far as Sunday goes.

Oh! But that blood drive that I thought was yesterday but wasn’t? It was actually today. Which I knew, because I’d written in my calendar that it was August 1. But I spent a lot of yesterday morning thinking Saturday was the first. But I was quickly disabused of that notion and was at multiple times reminded throughout the day that Sunday was actually the first. But I never made the connection in my brain between the corrected dates and the blood drive. I just happened to be walking past the church where it was being held earlier this evening. Had I eaten anything recently — I skipped lunch — and had it not been winding down anyway, I might have gone in to donate. Maybe next time.