Pauline Hanson is pissed off that the Red Cross won’t take her blood because she’s been in jail. Boo frickin’ hoo. In the past five years I’ve been denied on the basis of an ear piercing, a tattoo, and the fact that I ate beef in England. Rules is rules. At least you’re not gay…
Remember Murder by the Dozen? It was an Apple game in the 80’s, sorta like a choose-your-own-adventure, where you had to solve one of twelve mysteries. I used to love playing it at our local library. My favorite part was the revealing of the solution, which you could only read by holding a piece of red plastic up to the book. I don’t think I ever had the patience to play a whole game but I just thought it was so neat and high-tech.
I was reminded of that game tonight while the Snook and I were watching our new favorite show: Crime Team. It’s a reality program from England that features two celebrity sleuths trying to solve an actual historical London murder in only three days. They can only use means that were available to the police at the time. (It’s currently airing in Australia Thursday nights at 9:30 on the ABC.) Tonight’s episode had a radio personality and an investigative journalist trying to uncover the mystery of several dead babies that turned up in the Thames in the 1890’s. It was fascinating, not just the crime solving aspect but also the hidden history of London that I never knew. (Shepherd’s Bush was a thriving center for “baby farming”?) It’s also interesting to see the tenuous leads that police back then were forced to follow (without recourse to DNA testing, modern forensics, etc). Tonight’s killer was convicted and hung on the basis of the way she tied her shoe. I really recommend the show if you can find it.
In a MeFi discussion of whether it’s appropriate to equate American religious fundamentalists with the Taliban*, somebody wrote an excellent parody of “The Candyman” called “The Taliban Can”. Pretty catchy!
* For the record, I don’t think comparisons with the Taliban are that far off. Sure, Bush and his cronies haven’t suggested that we stone adulterous women to death, but are their policies towards the lower classes and minorities really that much more compassionate? Both groups want to enforce their own insane religious beliefs on everybody else and unfortunately have no hesitation about using government to do it.
Harvard has just eliminated tuition fees for students whose parents make less than $40,000 a year. That’s awesome. I hope more schools will follow their lead. (I have to admit though, I can’t really see ND doing it. They’re tightasses.)
Only four shopping days left til my birthday… and if anybody wants to blow my mind, you can pick me up one of these on eBay. Seriously. I love my kitty but cat poop sucks.
Eyesore of the Month. I like architecture. This is a great look at some really bad buildings with hilarious commentary.
What do you call a group of cats? A clowder. That’s so weird.
For the Snook: Squirrel Fishing. There was a squirrel fishing bit on that Japanese betting show Banzai a few years back that Snookums still reminisces about. I’ve never seen him laugh so hard.
When I was 15, I read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. I absolutely loved it. It was a fantasy with a princess and a dragon and magicians and secrets and I wished more than anything that I had written it. So I spent, like, a week plotting my own fantasy and inventing characters. There was a princess… and a dragon… and some magicians… You see where this is going. Eventually I realized that all I was doing was rewriting McKinley with different names. It wasn’t original and it wasn’t interesting. I decided imitation wasn’t the sincerest form of flattery and gave up the effort.
Christopher Paolini didn’t. He’s a weird home-schooled teenager “genius” who’s written this year’s pseudo-Harry Potter book of choice (according to the publishing industry, anyway). It’s called Eragon. It’s been getting a fair bit of hype so I picked up a copy last weekend. I regretted it as soon as I got home. There’s a gushing quote from Anne McCaffrey on the back! (I’ve never been able to get through a single Dragonriders of Pern book so her recommendation doesn’t exactly carry a lot of weight with me.)
It only got worse once I cracked it open. The first problem is the kid’s writing style. You can read some for yourself here. He actually says: “In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.” *snort* In practice, as far as I can tell this involves using lots of adjectives. Mountains are “forbiddingly solemn”, forests are “thickly treacherous”, and the danger is always “intensely palpable”. Once you get past the affected style, the story itself isn’t that bad… as long as you don’t mind rolling your eyes at the obvious influences. It’s like he put the Pern books, a complete set of Lord of the Rings, a dog-eared copy of Beowulf, and the shooting script of Star Wars into a blender and this is what popped out. He even prefaces the book with a map that might as well be Middle Earth. The story is full of elves, monsters, dwarves, men, dragons, men who ride dragons, etc. There’s no humour and no originality, other than in the combining of all these things. I keep waiting for hobbits to show up.
Am I being too harsh? I’m only halfway through, so maybe it gets better towards the end. Right now I’m just plugging along out of curiosity and duty. I dunno, maybe I’m just jealous that nobody ever offered to publish my derivative crap. At any rate, I can’t exactly recommend this one to the Potter fans yet.
Kevin discovered a rumor that Nicole Kidman might be playing the White Witch in Disney’s upcoming adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I actually think she’d be really good for that part. She’s got that whole beautiful-yet-terrible, pale-yet-flashy elfin ice queen thing going on anyway. I wonder if she’d sign on to play Jadis (“Empress of Charn”) if they get around to making The Magician’s Nephew…
Incidentally, when I first read the books I thought that Turkish delight must be the best candy ever. Thus when I arrived in London in ’98, I headed straight for the local grocery store and bought some. It was awful! It was like a chocolate bar with a center of PINK JELLIED ASS. I still shudder at the thought.
My name is Kris. I’ve been blogging since the 90’s. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I spent most of my career in the tech industry.
No AI used in writing this blog, ever. 100% human-generated.
This is one of those ones I just can’t remember (haven’t used it enough). Can do it when I look…
so funny hhh
Really excellent. It’s had a Much extended run here so who knows!
Special thanks to Matt Hinrichs for the site logo!
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