- Roger Ebert on The Green Hornet:
Casting about for something to praise, I recalled that I heard a strange and unique sound for the first time, a high-pitched whooshing scream, but I don’t think Gondry can claim it, because it came from the hand dryers in the nearby men’s room.
- At first I thought it was like that urban legend about the ghost on the set of Three Men and a Baby, but apparently this one’s true: Han Solo does appear in many, if not all, episodes of Firefly.
If you’re wondering, Mal shot first.
- Alex Beam of the Boston Globe wonders — or maybe wondered back in November when I first saw this link — are new translations necessary? It’s an interesting question, but there’s no mention of instances when newer translations get things right, or make necessary corrections, or significantly change our understanding of a text. Proust’s famous novel is better translated as In Search of Lost Time, for instance, and newer translations of Camus’ The Stranger have called into question earlier readings of its famous opening lines.
So, short answer? Yeah, I think they’re still necessary. [via]
- Speaking of translations, the surprisingly intriguing story of why Uncle Scrooge McDuck is called “Dagobert” in Germany. [via]
- And finally….
The Justice League, re-imagined as a 1977 punk rock movie, based on an art challenge posed by Warren Ellis and by the exceptionally talented Annie Wu.
tv
Tuesday various
- Lots of people are pointing out why retroactively censoring Huckleberry Finn is a bad idea, but I think I like what Gerry Canavan says most:
If we’re going to retroactively censor Mark Twain, I’d say “slave†seems significantly more offensive to me than “n*gger†insofar as it accedes to the noxious proposition that some people can be slaves in the first place. People can be enslaved, of course—but no person is a slave. In my own rare writing and teaching on slavery I try to favor “so-called slave†and “enslaved person†in a quiet effort to highlight that slavery is not an essence but a structure of violent domination.
It’s not the fact that we’re still having this conversation that bothers me — we should have continued and open discussions about race — it’s that we’re still faced with people who think not discussing it, pretending the words we don’t like don’t exist, is the right way to go.
- In happier news, Nel Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are married. As Patton Oswalt writes:
Marriage of @amandapalmer and @neilhimself confirmed. Like the Hatfield/Coy War, the Nerd/Goth schism is laid to rest — by love!
- And in other amusing, geeky wedding news, Doctor Who‘s David Tennant is engaged to one-time co-star Georgia Moffett. As Peter David amusingly notes:
The Tenth Doctor is going to be marrying his own daughter who also happens to be the daughter of the Fifth Doctor and Trillian from the TV version of “Hitchhiker.â€
Most meta engagement EV-er.
- Speaking of Doctor Who, these one-of-a-kind nesting dolls may very well be the coolest thing ever. [via]
- And finally, Udo Kier…honestly, in interview, the man comes across like he’s playing an Udo Kier character — erudite, macabre, and often delightfully unhinged:
I cannot answer you, because it’s totally unknown to me what you just asked me, and also very boring.
A whole new year
A brand new year means a brand new “Forgotten English” desk calendar, and the delightfully archaic word for today is “scurryfunge,” which reportedly means:
A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
Overall, today was enough like yesterday, and many of the other days before it, frankly, to make me think this whole “new year” thing is perhaps just some kind of arbitrary social construction. Last night, I had dinner out with my parents, then spent some time watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Final Sacrifice. I don’t know that it actually is, as they claimed, “the worst thing to ever come out of Canada,” but it was a terrible, terrible movie. Yet they were in fine form riffing on it, and it’s easily one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve seen. Canada takes a lot of good-natured ribbing throughout — “Bobo ate a bad can of Canadian bacon and he came down with hockey hair…” — but in the DVD extras, Zap Rowsdower himself, Bruce J. Mitchell, comes across as a really likable guy with no hard feelings towards Mike and the bots.
Today, I spent a little time writing and a little time reading — not as much as I’d have liked to of either, but enough to get hopefully get me back into the swing of things. I did precious little of either — of anything, now that I think about it — over this two-week vacation.
And then this evening, I watched the 1985 horror movie Fright Night, which I guess was okay. I think if I’d seen it in the ’80s or shortly thereafter, when I was younger (and effects were not perhaps significantly better), I might have liked it more. Roddy MacDowall’s quite good in it, though, and it has its moments.
And that was Saturday. Tomorrow’s the last day of my vacation before I head back to work. Yay?
Tuesday? But it feels like Friday!
I’m not entirely sure why, given that I’ve now been off from work for about eleven days, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling all evening that today is, in fact, Friday.
So I’m going to go with that, and ride out this long wave of Fridays until the end of the year. Seems like a plan.
Meanwhile, I didn’t do a whole lot more exciting today than help my father set up the new high-def television my sister, my mother, and I bought him for Christmas. More than that, I helped him move the old, faltering TV, which is about twenty times heavier than the new larger one. (At this rate, in ten years, they’ll have a TV the size of a wall that you can easily carry with one hand.)
That reminds me of a funny story I found myself re-telling just this weekend, about the time at Penn State when the university police pulled me over because I was carrying a large TV/VCR across campus. The TV really wasn’t meant to be carried, despite a kind of handle on the back, but I had rented it for the evening in my capacity as Monty Python Society president. I’d done this on several occasions, actually. Sometimes, if we were meeting in the same building as the AV department, I might rent one on a rolling cart, which was easier in some ways, since I could just push it onto the building’s elevator. But it also meant that I had to trust that the unit wouldn’t be stolen or moved overnight, and that I could get into the room where I’d left it before whatever morning class had started so I could return it and not be penalized with a late fee. The more portable unit could sit in my dorm room overnight, although I did always have to carry it from the AV department to my dorm room — something like a half-hour walk — then back to the club meeting, back to my dorm room, and the next morning finally back to the AV department. And don’t think I don’t look back on that now, with my herniated disc and everything, and want to yell at my idiot self, because I do. At the very least, I probably should have tried taking the bus.
But anyway, I was carrying the unit back to my dorm room after this one Society meeting — did I mention my dorm was about twenty minutes away, and uphill? — when the police pulled me over. They were very understanding, I must say, when I told them my story, especially since it turned out that I didn’t have my ID card, much less any proof that I was telling the truth. “If I was going to steal a TV off campus,” I almost wanted to say, “do you really think I would still this heavy piece of crap?” They sent me on my way, maybe with a warning, maybe with a chuckle, and I headed over to the student union — thankfully right across the street — to search for my ID card. Because I’d had it on me earlier, when I’d been making some photocopies in the union building, and because I wouldn’t be able to get back into my dorm room without it.*
So I should thank those officers for pulling me over and filling me momentarily with panic, because I was able to recover my ID card, which until then I hadn’t known was missing. I could have trekked all the way back to my dorm, TV in hand, only to discover then, already late at night, that I was locked out. And then this story of my ridiculousness wouldn’t involve the cops, and would seem significantly more boring because of it.
Nothing even half as exciting happened today. We set up the TV with a minimum of headache, despite some not very clear instructions and a few parts that seemed to have been included just for the heck of it. And earlier in the day, I mailed out some copies of my “Best of 2010” mix, about which I’ll have more to say later. (The mix, not the mailing.)
Looking forward to tomorrow’s Friday.
* Then again, that reminds me of another Monty Python Society story, when I went to the Homecoming Parade dressed as a lumberjack and had no trouble getting back into the dorms, even with my roommate’s axe in hand. (My roommate, it should be said, was a camper, not an axe murderer. I’m fairly sure.)
Thursday various
- “Julie Powell managed to cook/blog her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in a year, learning valuable life lessons along the way. I hope to learn as much, if not more, by watching the film Julie & Julia every day for a year.”
You know, as a joke, it’s pretty funny. I haven’t seen the film or read the original book myself, but my understanding is that only the “Julia” parts are actually worth watching. (In fact, someone out there must have created a cut of the film that excises Julie Powell altogether, right?) But to actually do this? Watch the same movie every day for 365 days in a row? That way lies madness. [via]
- Nathan Rabin on Bill Murray in Larger Than Life:
Like pop music and playing center field, slapstick is a young man’s game. Nobody wants to be a fiftysomething Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working, yet Larger Than Life persists in having Murray flail his way through dispiriting pratfalls and physical comedy. In his early comedies, Murray’s deadpan under-reactions felt like an inveterate anarchist’s passive-aggressive rebellion against corrupt authority. Here, they merely broadcast Murray’s understandable lack of engagement with his material. Murray wears a simultaneously bored and humiliated look throughout the film that says, “I’m getting too old for this shit.â€
- The Case of the Vanishing Blonde [via]:
After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.
- You know, I’m not particularly looking forward to the new Thor movie, but here’s one good thing to come out of it: its casting has outraged hate groups. For that reason alone, I applaud casting Idris Elba as a Norse god.
- And finally, I for one welcome our new Jeopardy-solving robot overlords.