A couple of pictures I took this morning:
Jefferson barely fits in that cat bed. Blackjack likes it too. I think they both enjoy trying to fit in tight spaces.
Month: April 2008
De Gustibus non Disputandum Est
Yesterday I received my DVD set of Torchwood from Amazon. Just for yuks I put it on display so people could see it through my office window when they walked down the hall.
A few hours later, C. walks past my door and stops to say that his wife loves the series (and he thinks it’s pretty good, too). I say I haven’t watched it, but that I do like the new Doctor Who (although it’s slowly going downhill). And also that I’m just starting to watch Battlestar Galactica. Then I shock him with the fact that I didn’t like either Firefly or Heroes. And we natter on for a while about all of that and he departs.
Some time later, T. comes by my office and notices the DVDs.
“Why’d you get that?” he asks. “It sucks.”
Okay then.
My main problem right now is that I’m not watching as much BSG as I want to.
Well, and I haven’t mailed my taxes yet.
Okay, maybe I don’t have a “main” problem.
Times Past
During my ongoing project to clean out the front room and closet, I came across this wipe-off calendar from 1999:
(click for larger image)
Back when I was working at Epic in Madison I had an Apple Newton as my PDA, mainly to keep my want list (books, comics, etc.). But it was large and unwieldy for use as a calendar, so eventually I bought this 3-month dry-erase calendar and pinned it to my wall at work to keep track of my appointments.
Once I got offered my job at Apple, I used it to keep track of all the things I needed to do before I moved out: I had to finish up my projects at Epic, meet with people to transfer my responsibilities, pack up my stuff, get the cats prepped for their trip, and then fly out. And as you can see the month of February is planned out on the calendar (and then I wrote about it in more detail over here and here). What a crazy month. It’s still hard to believe it went so smoothly.
Well, at least I remember it went pretty smoothly.
Welcome to WordPress 2.5
I upgraded FP to WordPress 2.5 tonight. I’d been thinking about doing it for a few days, but I was moved to act when I read that Technorati has decided to stop indexing blogs using WP 2.3.2 and earlier. Now, I don’t really care about whether Technorati is indexing my journal, but I figure Technorati at least has their act together enough to know whether the security hole in 2.3.2 is serious. Not conclusive evidence, but enough to make me make the jump.
It’s going to take me a little while to get used to the new admin interface. It’s shiny and flashy, but of course all the pieces have been moved around a bit.
At least the plugins I’m using all seem to work. Indeed, Fold Category List has a new version which works with the WP 2.3 and later database format.
Anyway, it seems to have gone smoothly. Let me know if anything seems screwy. Hopefully this won’t make any difference to you at all!
Speed Reading
Last night I did something that’s very rare for me: I read a whole book in one evening. Specifically, I read Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed for my upcoming book discussion group. As I’ve said before, I’m quite a slow reader, usually plodding along at about 60 pages per hour, which means I can expect to spend about 7 hours going through a 400-page novel, the likes of which are common these days. Wild Seed is only about 280 pages, which means it would usually take me over 4 hours to get through it, but I finished it in about 3.
Okay, I did cheat a little bit, because I’ve read it before. I read the 4 in-print volumes in Butler’s Patternist series some years ago (I own a copy of the long-out-of-print volume, Survivor, but haven’t read it). For some reason I didn’t write reviews of the 4 books back when I read them. My recollection is that I thought they were okay but not terrific.
Which is pretty much what I thought of Wild Seed this time around: Okay but not terrific. The book concerns a pair of long-lived people, and their kin, who are all mutants with superhuman – mostly telepathic – powers. They actually seem very much similar to the comic book X-Men, only in this setting one of the long-lived characters, Doro, can jump between bodies (effectively killing any person whose body he inhabits), and is engaged in a long-term breeding program to create more people like himself. The title character, Anwanyu, is much younger, and is a shapeshifter and healer. The book is primarily about their relationship and the tension between them, as Doro expects everyone to bow to his will, while Anwanyu considers much of what Doro is doing to be abomination. The book has some powerful moments, but peters out at the end as the dramatic conclusion of their struggle is quite anticlimactic. (This is somewhat necessary as the book is a prequel to an already-existing series. But still.)
Anyway, although I did skim some of the more tedious bits (Butler often goes into a little discourse about the beckground of whatever new setting the characters are moving to, and then pretty much shoves all the background into, well, the background; there are also some less-than-illuminations digressions into the backstories of the two main characters), the book really was quite a quick read. I’m not really moved to re-read the rest of the series, although maybe I’ll tackle Survivor sometime soon to finish the arc.
Next up is Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. I’ve read a couple of stories recently in Asimov’s by Swanwick which I’ve enjoyed – especially “A Small Room in Koboldtown” – and I learned that they’re excerpts of his latest novel, The Dragons of Babel, which is a sequel to Daughter. So it seems like a good choice. What appealed to me about the stories is the setting: Traditional fantasy creatures (elves, goblins, trolls) whose world apparently continued developing beyond the medieval era and is now in an industrial age much like ours. A nifty idea.
I find Swanwick’s books to vary widely in quality. I liked The The Drift and Vacuum Flowers (both of which I reviewed here), but didn’t care much for either Stations of the Tide or Jack Faust. I’m hoping that these next books will be more like the former than the latter, even if I’m not generally a big fantasy fan.
Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series
Talk about late to the party: Last night we finally watched the DVD of the Battlestar Galactica mini-series that’s been sitting on my shelf since my Dad gave it to me a couple of Christmases ago. It’s one of the few TV series that I’m sorry I missed out on; the reason I did is that Comcast in my city doesn’t include Sci Fi among its stations unless you pay extra for digital cable, which I’ve refused to do just to get one station. So, no BSG on television for me.
I have heard the many good things people have said about the series, but it was hard to get up the motivation to start watching several seasons of television on DVD. And the last two well-regarded SF shows I watched – Heroes and Firefly – were both pretty bad. (Heroes was a decent idea weighed down by boring writing. Firefly was just drek.) So my enthusiasm for BSG was muted. Plus one of the creators of BSG is Ronald D. Moore, who was a writer and producer on the 90s Star Trek series, which were also drek.
Despite all of this, we thoroughly enjoyed the mini-series, finding it well-written, well-acted and well-produced. Which makes me even sorrier that I’ve been missing out on it after all this time!
I was impressed that the creators were able to take the original series’ premise and trappings (character names, planet names, visual appearance of the Cylons) and craft a completely series – even grim – story out of it so that some of the silliness of the names actually seem like artifacts of humanity’s golden age which we’re watching come to an end over just a couple of days.
The construction of the characters is downright scientific: I think all of the major characters either tells a big lie during the story, or is hiding one from before the beginning. All of them are deeply flawed in some critical ways. I think the perfect example of character construction is Gaius Boltar: The “traitor” in the original series, in this series he’s used by a Cylon agent to help bring down humanity. We also know he’s going to be the Cylon’s link to humanity if he manages to escape, yet he does the honest thing when he has a chance to get away by letting someone else go in his place – and then is able to go anyway through the selflessness of another character. The series unflinchingly forces characters to confront their flaws, and different characters have different degrees of success in doing so.
It took me a while to decide whether I liked the acting on the show, and eventually I decided it was actually very good acting. I think I found it difficult to judge because the writing is very subtle and there are few emotional outbursts, and thus few opportunities for actors to really chew the scenery. I think Education Secretary Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) was the litmus test for me: I kept wondering, “Is she doing a good job, or is she just sort of sleepwalking through the role?” Roslin is a very even-tempered character placed in a very difficult position, but I think McDonnell does a fine job of holding the character steady but having her inner turmoil show itself in small ways at key moments. The rest of the cast is equally good, and Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama is excellent in anchoring the series as the man at the center of the firestorm.
The production work was interesting, too. The space battles have a visual look similar to those in Babylon 5 (not really a surprise since B5 blazed the trail for special effects in space opera used today), but the low-key music (often no more than a simple rhythm) and frenetic editing make the battles seem less like a ballet (a style pioneered by Star Wars and rarely deviated from in SF film since) and more like a period of complete chaos in which everyone feels happy to get out alive. The sets and lighting are dark and foreboding. The music is portentious – what there is of it. I would have appreciated some slightly more melodic music, but I can see what they’re going for here; it’s so sparse that many scenes occur without any musical support, which is unusual in adventure television.
So overall, good stuff. Naturally I promptly went out and bought the first season on DVD. This series seems to be further support for the notion that there are no bad ideas, only bad writers. What the world (or at least television) really needs are more good writers.
Kicked My Ass
Frisbee kicked my ass last night.
We always end up with fewer people at the end of the season for various reasons: People move away, or get busy, or whatever, and pretty soon we have only 7-9 people showing up (or less!) to field a team of 7. Which means lots of playing and not a lot of time subbing out to catch my aged breath.
Last night I realized pretty quickly that I was having a Bad Endurance Night, and I was dogging it on the field quite a bit. Moreover, I was also Mr. Butterfingers and dropped a bunch of astoundingly easy throws. (I also just missed catching a score which was just an inch out of my reach, which was no less frustrating.) Moreover, our opponents were executing some perfect throws to elude my defense; since my endurance is Teh Suck, I play a very positional game, and to some extent that relies on blocking the guy I’m covering out or standing in the line of the throw. But if they manage to throw it just over me – or more likely, curve it around me – then there’s not a lot I can do. And that was happening a lot last night. (On the other hand, the skill level of SBUL is such that my strategy is usually pretty effective.)
I took it all with fairly good grace, though; I just tried to play the best I could, even if it wasn’t very well.
It was kind of sad, since we’ve been short-handed the last two weeks and I’ve actually been playing really well. But sometimes you just have an off week, I guess.
Anyway, the net result of all of this is stiff legs and tight thigh muscles today. Sheesh.
This Week’s Haul
Comic books I bought the week of 2 April 2008.
- Action Comics #863, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
- Countdown to Final Crisis #4 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen, Jamal Ingle & Keith Champagne (DC)
- Metal Men #7 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
- Clandestine #3 of 5, by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)
- The Twelve #4 of 12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Weston & Garry Leach (Marvel)
- The Boys #17, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
- Project Superpowers #2 of 6, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Carlos Paul (Dynamite)
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Action Comics this week wraps up “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes”. It’s been a strange nostalgia trip for us 70s Legion fans, starting with “The Lightning Saga” and now this one.
To summarize, as a boy Superman was recruited by the Legion – a group of teenaged heroes who live in the 30th century – to become a member, and to give him a sense of belonging to a group of his peers. However, this isn’t the Legion of his 30th century, since that’s presumably the group currently being published in Legion of Super-Heroes. Rather, this is the Legion whose adventures were published in the 1950s through the late 80s. Only in this world Karate Kid never died (instead he gets to die in Countdown to Final Crisis, but that’s another matter), and the Magic Wars never brought the 30th century to its knees, and thus the Five Years Later stories never happened. Rather, Superman grew up and stopped going to the 30th century. And the Legion grew up, too, without him. In “The Lightning Saga” a few Legionnaires came back to the 20th century to bring the Flash back to his time. Karate Kid and Starman stayed behind. And then Brainiac 5 contacts Superman and brings him into the future to help overthrow the future Justice League, a group of former Legion rejects led by Earth-Man, who can absorb the powers of other heroes. The rejects have convinced Earth that Superman was a human like them who fought for human rights and that they should kick all the aliens off of Earth – a bummer for the Legion since they’re mostly aliens. When Superman arrives he finds that the sun has been turned red, so he loses his powers, and that other planets are preparing to stage an all-out war against the xenophobic Earth. All of this is pretty silly, and it gets sillier in this issue, which features such elements as a complete disregard for the speed of light, and Superman gaining and losing his powers instantly depending on the sun’s color (I thought Superman acted more like a solar battery rather than the sun acting like a magic on/off switch like it did in the 1950s, but admittedly I don’t follow too closely). From a structural standpoint, it’s never clear why Superman needed to be involved in this story at all, as he has only a marginal effect on the outcome (besides throwing the final punch). Thematically he witnesses what happens when his name is used to evil purposes, but a thousand years down the line there’s not a whole lot he can do about that. I sound like a sourpuss, but despite the continuity confusion and story silliness, I actually enjoyed the story and it was consistently near the top of my reading stack each month. Johns may have written a very loose story, but I was genuinely interested in what the heck was going on, and it features plenty of rah-rah heroism to make it actually feel good. Plus as a fan of the Legion from the 1970s, I enjoyed seeing “my” Legion back again; their backstory may not make any sense, but by-and-large they acted like the Legion I loved, and in a way that’s more important. So as self-indulgent, ultimately-meaningless stories go, it was a fun read. I’m conflicted about penciller Gary Frank’s art. His style has evolved over the last 10 years from a clean-lined cartoonist to a strict realist, rendering his figures in careful detail. However, he’s another artist who rarely draws backgrounds, which means his panels are often missing a sense of place. The cover of this issue (at left) is a good overview of his style in all these regards, actually. Still, he does have a strong feel for facial expressions and draws some nice action scenes which keeps the story moving along. (He also draws a terrific Dawnstar.) Overall it’s a net win, although I think if he fleshed out his panels a bit more then he could move up into Dave Gibbons territory as an artist. I guess this Legion will next pop up later this year in something called Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, which might explain why there are all these Legions running around. Or not. Still it’ll be drawn by George Pérez, and that’s enough to get me to check it out. (There’s an interview with Geoff Johns about it here.) |
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As I feared after last week, Countdown to Final Crisis undoes all of the ballsy moves they put in place in the last few weeks by revealing that it all happened on an alternate Earth. So Karate Kid and Una die for nothing (not that their presence in the book ever made the least sense at all), we we’re not back to the silly Dark Mary Marvel stuff, which also makes no sense.
Who thought all this was a good idea? |
I Knew Know Knew Books…
Last weekend we dropped into Know Knew Books, one of the notable used bookstores in the area. Last fall they’d been having a “Going out FOR business” sale, which confused the heck out of everyone, but the bottom line was that they were selling a bunch of their inventory to clear space to do some remodeling and then bring in some new stock. Or, at least, that’s what they told me, and apparently that was the plan as of last summer.
Well, they didn’t do any remodeling that I can tell. Maybe they replaced a bunch of the bookcases, but whatever they did it wasn’t evident to me. What they did do was repurpose a bunch of the shelf space to display…
…toys and action figures.
I’ve never seen so many Star Trek action figures before. And superhero action figures. And various other action figures.
The selection of books seemed to be basically the same. When I first moved here, Know Knew Books seemed to have a really good selection of collectible books and hard-to-find paperbacks, especially in the science fiction and mystery sections. In recent years their stock has made the (perhaps inevitable) slide towards a collection of random and fairly uninteresting (and presumably hard-to-sell) paperbacks, as I found fewer and fewer gems there. And they had basically the same stock, only less of it.
After Debbi and I stepped out of the store we looked at each other and said, “That was really weird.”
I’m not sure what happened. Did a new owner buy them and decide to take them in a different direction? Did they decide they needed media tie-ins in order to bring in more sales and browsers? I have no idea, but it sets a completely different tone for the bookstore – that it’s not truly a bookstore anymore – and its makes me less enthusiastic about making my periodic pass through the store in the future, since I have no interest in such toys.
(For what it’s worth, I find that Recycle Book Store in San Jose is much like what Know Knew Books was when I first moved here.)
Real, Live Baseball
So a month or so ago I bought some tickets to some baseball games, including to today’s Red Sox vs. A’s game, which was supposed to start at 7:35. But, uh, a few weeks later I received a phone call and a postcard informing me that the game had been moved to a 12:35 start time. You’ll notice that today is a Wednesday. Gah. To be fair, the time was moved so the Sox could fly back to the east coast before midnight. Fair enough. Fortunately, both Debbi and I were able to take the day off to go to the game. Whew! I only went to one ballgame all last year, and I want to make a better showing this year.
Debbi pointed out that we might have better luck parking at the Millbrae BART station with its huge parking garage than in the east bay, plus afterwards we could go to the excellent Brother’s Deli for dinner. Sold! So we drove up and caught BART to the Coliseum. Along the way we met a fellow who was in from Boston and was going to catch the game himself. Nice guy, we chatted about the Sox and gave him some advice on getting a ticket (which mostly consisted of “where the good seats are” and “where the ticket office is”).
We got there in plenty of time and found our seats in the second deck basically right behind home plate. In fact, we had a view like this:
It was a light and cloudy morning…
I do enjoy my ballpark food, but along with rising ticket prices, park food is getting more expensive, too. The Coliseum features Round Table Pizza, which I enjoy pretty well for chain pizza, but their pizzas seem to be getting smaller even as they get more expensive. So I may be switching to sausages soon.
The A’s are in a rebuilding period now, having traded Dan Haren and Nick Swisher in the off-season, so they’re not going to be very good (although not as bad as the Giants). Consequently, the stadium attendance resembled 1999, when I first moved here, when Red Sox fans seemed to outnumber A’s fans. Here’s a sample. Keep in mind that the Sox’ colors are red and dark blue, while the A’s colors are green and gold:
Sox fans are red, Sox fans are blue…
The game got under way just a couple of minutes late, and it was a pretty exciting game! Jon Lester – cancer survivor and World Series hero – pitched for the Sox, while the great but oft-injured Rich Harden pitched for the A’s. The Sox kept collecting baserunners, but just couldn’t bring them across the plate, and at the end of the 6th inning the game was still scoreless. (The ump’s strike zone seemed to be ridiculously wide, which had something to do with it.)
But Harden had been pulled at the start of the 6th, and the top of the 7th began with Kevin Youkilis rapping out a double (quite a heads-up play as he was running all the way and just barely beat the throw), and David Ortiz followed with a home run to right field. The Sox added 2 more in the 8th off 5 consecutive singles (4 to shallow left field), and Jason Varitek capped the scoring with a home run in the 9th. Meanwhile Lester cruised through 6-2/3 innings, and two relievers closed out the game, as the Red Sox held the A’s to 4 hits and shut them out 5-0.
The forecast was for rain today, but we never got more than a light drizzle – hardly even noticeable – and it was cool and pleasant. It also turned out to be “foul ball day” as dozens of the things peppered the infield stands, including this one which came right back at us as I was taking this photo, landing a few rows in front of us:
Low bridge!
We were also amused that whenever the A’s brought in a reliever, the infielders and outfielders would each gather and stand around chatting. I guess they were just killing some dead time like anyone does, but I rarely see it happen so regularly.
“Do you think that curveball makes his butt look big?”
That photo’s also great because of the Sox baserunner in the background working out a problem with his laces during the dead time.
All-in-all a great day at the park, and the Sox are now 3-1 on the season. We headed out to BART and took the train back to our car, looking forward to our dinner plans… only to find that Brother’s Deli closed sometime late last year! What a bummer! They’d moved from Burlingame a few years ago and although their new digs were nicer, they seemed to have a lot of trouble attracting customers, and I guess it caught up to them. Parking around downtown Millbrae could be a challenge sometimes, too. Alas, I’ll need to find somewhere new to order meat blintzes. I’m going to miss them.
Hard to believe that our bonus day off is over already! Back to work tomorrow. Fortunately it’s only for a 2-day week…!