"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Uh oh. Betty‘s not going to like this: Sky One to revive ‘Blake’s Seven’.
I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes myself (on…um…YouTube), but I’ve genuinely enjoyed them. The show was definitely a product of its time and budget limitations, but I’m looking forward to watching the rest.
This is very cool. Small Beer Press has announced that what was easily one of my favorite short story collections of recent years, Maureen F. McHugh‘s Mothers & Other Monsters, is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license. So if you’ve never read any of McHugh’s stories — Ursula K. Le Guin rightly calls her “one of our best and bravest imaginative writers” — now is your chance. As SBP notes, “The paper edition is much nicer, although not free.”
They have also made available Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link’s wonderful first collection and John Kessel‘s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which I regret I’ve not yet read.
And now, because I apparently have well over fifty items in my “shared” newsreader folder (and countless hundreds in my “to read” folder), here’s a random assortment of links:
In theater, Hamlet is traditionally played by an actor in his early thirties. It’s a hefty role, one that requires a great deal of talent, so I understand the desire to cast someone who has experience in the role. However, the more I think about Hamlet – his angsting, his family issues, his identity issues, the questions he has about life and his role in society, the more he seems like a teenager.
My aunt is getting ready to sell her house, and she recently came across a number of old photographs, including this one of me at around two or three:
My parents and I were both amused to note that, even at that young age, I’m wearing a t-shirt from my future alma mater. I have absolutely no memory of this, or in fact much of anything before my sister was born when I was four, but there I am all the same.
Jack Webb’s version of “Try a Little Tenderness” is just sublime. Although, Telly Savalas’ “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” certainly gives it a run for its money.
Both via TV Squad.