A cold and rainy Monday, with not a lot more to say about it than that. More rain, possibly even snow, predicted for later in the week.
I did book my plane tickets for my trip to Banff in September, so there’s that. I’m looking forward to it!
canada
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?
Don’t look now, but I think that was a Saturday
I think the four-day weekend is starting to catch up with me a little. Today very much felt like a Saturday, and not just another in the string of Fridays I’ve been having. Which means that it’s fast approaching Sunday, and the upcoming work week. It’s a shortened work week, of course, because of the Thanksgiving holiday. (This, incidentally, is probably the one thing the holiday has over Canadian Thanksgiving, from which I believe it is otherwise indistinguishable: because the holiday’s on a Thursday, most of the time we get the Friday rolled in.) But it’s a week in which I need to get a fair amount of work done.
I didn’t get a whole lot done today. The most exciting thing that happened was I went for a walk, and along the way I startled a hawk trying to make off with a dead pigeon near my old elementary school. I took some photos, of the living bird only, when it flew up into the trees. It swooped back down and away with its meal when I turned to go. Then I saw two other dead birds before I finally arrived back home. (A superstitious man might look upon that as ominous.)
I didn’t do much reading today, and only the barest hint of any writing, but I did watch Winter’s Bone, which I’ve had sitting around for several weeks. It’s really quite good, but also kind of bleak and unflinching. I like what Roger Ebert wrote about it:
There is a hazard of caricature here. Granik avoids it. Her film doesn’t live above these people, but among them. Ree herself has lived as one of them and doesn’t see them as inferior, only ungiving and disappointing. In her father’s world, everyone is a criminal, depends on a criminal or sells to criminals. That they are engaging in illegal activities makes them vulnerable to informers and plea-bargainers, so they are understandably suspicious. The cliche would be that they suspect outsiders. These characters suspect insiders, even family members.
As Ree’s journey takes her to one character after another, Granik is able to focus on each one’s humanity, usually damaged. They aren’t attractions in a sideshow, but survivors in a shared reality. Do they look at Ree and see a girl in need and a family threatened with eviction? I think they see the danger of their own need and eviction; it’s safer to keep quiet and close off.
It’s no The Human Centipede, but then, what is?
But you know who one of the stars of the movie is? John Hawkes. So it all ties together.
Monday various
- J. Michael Straczynski quits writing monthly comics, declares future is in original graphic novels. Warren Ellis discusses some of the figures, the actual dollar amounts that might be driving Straczynski’s decision. Financially, it may be a smart decision. But Ellis also adds, not unkindly, the following question:
What I’m wondering is what happens the first time Joe writes an OGN that isn’t a new iteration of the biggest heritage brand in comics [Superman] with the concomitant press coverage and bookstore push.
It’s an interesting move on Straczynski’s part, and it will bear watching — both in reader reception of his future projects, and whether or not other monthly comics writers join him. But I think it’s too soon to call this a harbinger of things to come, no matter how troubled the monthly comic book might be as a format.
- A Canadian Jersey Shore? Can I nominate Red Green to play the role of Snooki?
- Attention, writers: whatever you do, do not sign a contract with this man. No, not John Scalzi, but that “prevaricating hustler” and “master of bullshit” James Frey, who Scalzi talks about further here. Seriously, there are some pretty terrible publishing contracts out there, vanity presses dressed up like real publishers or outright scams from which no book emerges, but this is still pretty egregious — and exactly the sort of thing MFA programs should be teaching their students how to avoid, not facilitating by offering those students up as Frey’s misguided recruits. [via]
- A typographic anatomy lesson [via]
- And finally, a haunting tour of the abandoned — and soon to be demolished — Six Flags New Orleans [via]
I guess that was Tuesday
I overslept this morning and somehow didn’t wake up until 8 o’clock on the nose. Even more remarkable, though, is the fact that I still managed to be on the 8:15 train. I even managed to shower and brush my teeth. (Well, okay, I did those two simultaneously.) And while I had to rush like mad, I didn’t have to run for the train or anything.
Sometimes it pays to live only a couple of minutes from the train station.
The rest of the day was pretty much business as usual. I spent most of it weeding through stock photo sites, which I’m still doing, looking for replacements for figures that appeared in the first edition. This is proving a little tougher than finding regular stock photos, since these others are more medical and scientific in nature. I know I’m just asking for trouble plugging keywords like “glands” into my image searches, but that’s sort of what it’s come to. The previous edition was published by a competitor, and I think they had an illustrator or two on hand, which seems just wholly unfair.
Other than that, I scheduled a follow-up appointment with my spine doctor for next Tuesday. It was probably asking too much that I be able to get a Friday appointment, and thereby use a day I was already taking off for vacation. But I rescheduled my day off, for next Tuesday, and it’s not too shabby getting the initial visit, MRI, and follow-up all taken care of it less than two weeks. Hopefully the MRI — bright and early this Saturday — will suggest a plan of action.
And this evening, when I came home, there was a helicopter circling this and the surrounding blocks for twenty or thirty minutes. Also, maybe unconnected, a police car pulling into the parking lot at the train station a few minutes before that. I wonder if they were chasing a fugitive or something. I’ve seen nothing about it on the news, or online, but that helicopter seemed to be making quite a few passes overhead.
Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t enjoin you all to vote for Heather in the Canadian Blog Awards. Hers is my favorite Canadian blog, which I’m sure you’re all reading anyway, but I thought I’d pass the word along.
Tomorrow, they tell me, is Wednesday.