"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Oh man, this might be saddest, sweetest, and sort of creepiest story I’ve read in a long time:
A pet dog missed the family’s dead cat so much that he dug up his grave and brought the body back into the house.
When Oscar’s owners woke up the next morning they discovered the dog curled up beside Arthur, the late cat, in his basket.
His owners, Robert Bell, 73, and his wife, Mavis, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, believe that the dog had licked the cat clean before falling asleep.
Via Cynical-C.
I’m headed off to Miami, FL, this evening for a couple of days in the fun and sun. Which, given the recent turn back to the cold and rainy here, couldn’t have come at a better time. My parents and I will be visiting my sister, who’s down there all of January for work, and with luck I should be back Monday evening. In the meantime, I leave you with this, the Friday Random Guess 10:
It works the same as always, the same way it worked last week, and, as always, no prizes will be awarded. But you’re not really in just for prizes — are you?
As always, good luck! Have fun while I’m gone!
I got some spam today that asked, “Who is Vanilla Ice? Would you like to Party with Vanilla Ice?”
Those, my friend, are two of the age-old mysteries of the universe. I believe Socrates himself puzzled over those very same questions — although, sadly, he died several centuries too early to put those questions to the test.
Admittedly, it’s just one website and an anonymous source, but a Neuromancer movie? Hasn’t that boat sort of sailed? Gibson’s novel is still important for the quality of its writing and the depth of its characters — neither of which, I imagine, is exactly what would draw big-budget Hollywood to the project — but its vision of “cyberspace” is a little out-dated. It’s difficult to see how they would get around that — and thus provide the special effects I’m sure Hollywood is interested in — without seriously messing with the story.
Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before. I’m just saying, how do you film Neuromancer without its cyberspace looking like something out of the ’80s?
I’m sure in the radio version, when it ends, rather than starts, with a poem, it’s not quite so depressing or jarring, but here’s how today’s Writer’s Almanac ends in the e-mail version:
Although for a time [Zora Neale Hurston] was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years, writing a few magazine articles every now and again. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed and she was buried in an unmarked grave.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Yes, you too can die penniless, unnoticed and unremarked, even if you’ve had great early success! Yea, go writers!
I think I still have a copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that I think I was supposed to have read for a class but never did. I really need to remedy that.