Bright Star (2009)

Campion has beautiful visuals and a knack for capturing intimate moments on film, but the entirety of the movie isn't greater than the sum of its individual scenes.  Something is lacking in the scenes that stitch together the overarching story.  For example, when Keats is miffed that Brown has sent a valentine to Fanny, Fanny and Brown wander after Keats in the rain into the wood and Keats takes Brown to task for this "joke" because it's no laughing matter that Brown has the means to marry and Keats does not, while Brown declares Keats a fool for falling for Fanny, who is notorious for "collecting" suitors.  Fanny is there to... well, not do much more than look confused and hurt.  The scene would be much stronger if played out just between Brown and Keats (and would Fanny's family have allowed her to wander out in the rain *alone* after two men?), but Fanny helped create a beautiful line of Keats, Brown, and Brawne across an open green field prior to the scene in the woods, and so the desire for a beautiful visual won out over solid storytelling.  Too bad.

Something for the entrepreneurs to think about

Professional trash hauling with bicycles (thanks to Dana for pointing me to this).  Awesome. Burlington has private haulers, so it could probably work here, too.  Landfill Rd is less than 7 miles from downtown, and even closer to UVM.  

Oh, the delicious irony!

The Burlington Free Press reported Friday, January 22 on the potential internal conflict in the local Republican party.  Kurt Wright and Kevin Curley, both former mayoral candidates, may be jostling for position against Russ Ellis, and part of the concern is that if both run, they could split the Republican vote and Ellis would win re-election in Ward 4.  Now... if the election of City councilors used instant runoff (IRV), as in the mayoral election, Wright and Curley could both run without unduly harming each other.  They would, in fact, likely help one another because Republicans who would come out to vote for Wright but not Curley, or Curley or not Wright, would all come out to rank "their" candidate first, and then likely prefer the other Republican to Ellis.  Instead, one or the other will likely step down for the good of the party's chances to take the seat, and so instead of letting the voters of Ward 4 directly choose between Ellis, Wright, and Curley, a lack of IRV at the the City councilor level (with a generous dollop of party politics) will remove Curley or Wright, and Ward 4 will lose for not having a wider array of candidates to choose from.


The irony here, of course, is that Wright is an important voice in the effort to repeal IRV in the mayoral election. We get what we ask for: if we repeal IRV, we the voters will have *less* direct say in choosing our representatives, since the "old" system strongly discourages multiple potential candidates from the same party from running simultaneously. I, for one, will be voting to keep IRV.

The Orphan (Stallman, Robert) 1980

Literary Teen Wolf.  This is a depression-era story about a year in the life of an orphan -- a wild animal of no known species -- that is able to metamorphosize into a human.  This is not simply a change of shape; the human form that he takes has its own thoughts and feelings separate from, and yet tied to, the beast, and it's all a metaphor for how we integrate our human selves with our dark subconsciousnesses.  The novel is really two novellas stitched together; one for each family that he lives with during the year, and for two different stages of life: the first at about 5 years of age, and the second on the cusp of puberty, with all the attendant pre-teen angst.  I think my favorite part was reading about the flirting games I hadn't heard of before: Wink 'em and Post Office, though the game of Post Office played in the book had one person go into a dark place and call out to someone from the other room, who would go into the dark place and, a minute or so later, exchange places with the first person and call out to someone else from the other room to come to the Post Office.

Dragon Age Heathers and free text dialogue

[Note: I originally wrote the draft of this on 1/12/10, but never posted it.  I'm posting the edited draft on 6/12/12, but backdating it to 1/12/10.]


So, I got Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas and have played through the game once.  I enjoyed it, but feel like I should have named my character Veronica, so I could have the following conversation:

"Morrigan, why can't you just be a friend? Why do you have to be such a megabitch?" 

"Because I can be."

Unfortunately, even if I did have the foresight to play Veronica, I still couldn't have that conversation because DA:O gives you a very limited set of choices for dialogue.  I cannot begin to count the number of instances in which my character's true response was not listed.  If only we had the technology to allow players to enter free text responses!  Oh, right.  Zork did that in 1980.  Well, if only a traditional RPG allowed you to talk to NPC's with free text!  Oh, right.  The Wizardry series did this in 1988 (though they have since regressed to dialogue trees).  Even though it was clear that Heart of the Maelstrom crudely mapped your responses to an underlying dialogue tree, it was far more satisfying to be able to say what you wanted, rather than be forced to choose a canned response.

Confessions:

• The only computer game I've played with any regularity since Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (in 2007) is Little Green Guys with Guns (which is tons of fun, but not an RPG). 
• The only other computer RPG game I played with any regularity in the 00's was Wizardry 8 (I'd played all previous installments in the series, and still have fond memories of Wiz 5).

So, any impressions I have of DA are coming through an Oblivion / Wizardry filter, with a little bit of memory of Wizard's Crown.  No KOTOR***.  No Fallout.  No MMORPGs.

*** This deficiency has since been corrected.  KOTOR is great, aside from the canned dialogue.

G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra (2009)

It's the new G.I. Joe movie, where the bad guys drive a Hummer and the good guys drive a VW van!  Dennis Quaid tries to channel his inner John Wayne!  Training sequences will be set to a low-intensity cover of Bang A Gong (Get It On)! Eccleston talks with a bad Scottish accent!  The U.S. President is played by a Welshman, and then a South African impersonating a Welshman!  Woo...hoo.

Changes, lots of "interesting" changes to the G.I. Joe mythology.  The Baroness is Duke's ex-fiance and Cobra Commander's sister, in addition to Destro's girlfriend, making her the central character in the film.  This goes beyond coinkydink into the realm of the absurd, and yet Sienna Miller, playing the Baroness, is *almost* really good in an otherwise uninspired cast.

The Spots I Used to Hold Love In

This Something Positive comic neatly sums up why I never should have put Star Blazers in my Netflix queue.  I've been smarter about not rewatching the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, but I still have this crazy idea that Thundarr the Barbarian will be awesome after 30 years and the Bionic 6 a forgotten gem.

Books read in 2009

Since a friend posted her list of books read in 2009, I'll do the same.  The ones I enjoyed the most were Regeneration, the Borders of Infinity through A Civil Campaign story arc of the Vorkosigan saga, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with honorable mentions to Lavinia, City on Fire, and Appointment in Samarra.  Listings below show the title, author, publication year, and date finished.

Regeneration (Barker, Pat) 1991  1/9/2009  I really liked this.
Making Money (Pratchett, Terry) 2007  1/11/2009  It's not Going Postal, but there's really nowhere to go but down from that great height.  The second Moist von Lipwig novel is as entertaining as anything else Pratchett has written in the post-Hogfather era.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin, James) 1953  DNF.  1/11/2009
Water for elephants : a novel  (Gruen, Sara)  2006  1/12/2009
Chalice (McKinley, Robin)  2008  1/18/2009  Not one of McKinley's better novels.  She still writes beautifully, and the sections she writes about the bees are good reading, but the plot never rises above juvenalia.  Yes, I know, nearly all of her best stuff is technically juvenalia, but somehow Aeryn and Hari (and many of the others), even when they're full of worry about whether they're doing the right thing and blundering about trying to figure out their relationships and how they can make a difference in the grand scheme of things, don't seem to dither as annoyingly as Mirasol.  Yes, we know you're untrained and you think nobody likes you and you'll do anything to keep the demesne intact, so could we just get on with it?
Greasy Lake and Other Stories (Boyle, T. Coraghessan)  1985  1/25/09  I liked "Ike and Nina" because he does a nice job of writing his story into historical context.  The other stories don't do anything for me.
The Memory of Old Jack (Berry, Wendell)  1974  2/1/9
A Month in the Country (Carr, J.L.)  1980  2/3/9
The Eye in the Door (Barker, Pat)  1993  2/8/9  Billy Prior, already disagreeable in Regeneration, becomes nearly unreadable in the Eye in the Door, so that it rather ruins it for me that he gets half the novel to tell "his" story, when what I really want is to read Barker's brilliant realization of Rivers.
Hell (Davis, Kathryn) 1998  2/14/9
The Ghost Road (Barker, Pat) 1995  2/20/9  Good lord, we've had an awful lot of bad sex scenes since the suppressed undercurrents of Regeneration!  The Rivers chapters are still brilliant; Prior is still very disagreeable.
Shards of Honor (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1986  2/24/9  I read Barrayar a while back and wasn't particularly impressed; then read Curse of Chalion and decided to go back and give the Miles Vorkosigan saga another try.  Now I see the seeds of what will eventually flower in the Chalion books.
The Warrior's Apprentice (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1986  2/27/9
The Vor Game (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1990  3/1/9
I Am Legend (Matheson, Richard)  1954  3/4/9  
Cetaganda (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1996  3/8/9
Fledgling: a novel (Butler, Octavia)  2005  3/18/9
Paddy Clark Ha, Ha, Ha  (Doyle, Roddy) 1993  3/20/9  DNF  50 pages in and no overarching story in sight; it's a series of snippets from the boy's life -- they're well written snippets, but I don't need another 200 pages of it.  Maybe I'm come back around to it when I have more free time.
Silence (Endo, Shusaku) 1966  3/25/9
Starting Out in the Evening (Morton, Brian) 1998  3/29/9
The Last Witchfinder (Morrow, James)  2006  4/12/2009
A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines, Ernest J.)  1993  4/17/2009
Spies: A Novel (Frayn, Michael) 2002  4/18/9
Anansi Boys (Gaiman, Neil)  2005  4/20/9
Everything Asian (Woo, Sung Joon)  2009  4/26/9
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Gilchrist, Ellen) 1981  5/2/9  
Sights Unseen (Gibbons, Kaye) 1995  5/9/2009  
The Late Bourgeois World (Gordimer, Nadine)  1966  5/12/9
Ethan of Athos (Bujold, Lois McMaster) 1986 5/14/9  
"Labyrinths" (Bujold, Lois McMaster) 1988  5/16/9
Tea With The Black Dragon (MacAvoy, R.A.)  1983  5/19/9
Riddley Walker (Hoban, Russell)  1980  6/14/9
Helliconia Winter (Aldiss, Brian)  1985  6/26/9  
You Know Me Al (Lardner, Ring)  1914  6/28/9  I liked this.
Borders of Infinity (Bujold, Lois McMaster) 2002  7/8/9
Brothers in Arms (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1989  7/10/9
Mirror Dance (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1995  7/15/9
Native Speaker (Lee, Chang-rae)  1995  7/20/9
Memory (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1996  7/23/9
Komarr (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1998  7/25/9
A Civil Campaign (Bujold, Lois McMaster)  1999  7/27/9
Diplomatic Immunity (Bujold, Lois McMaster) 2002  8/3/9  Finished off the Vorkosigan saga and am now sad it's over.  The arc from Borders of Infinity to A Civil Campaign is particularly strong, but it helps to have read all of the earlier (in story chronologically) stuff, because little references are constantly being made to those earlier stories.  Miles' time at "Camp Permafrost" in the Vor Game seems to come up more often that the others, at least once per book, which is a little weird because it's one of the weaker stories, writing-wise, so to have it mentioned and think, "oh, yeah, that's from the book I didn't really like" is distracting from the current book.
Glitz (Leonard, Elmore) 1985 8/8/9  
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos, Anita) 1925 8/11/9
Island (MacLeod, Alistair)  8/20/9
The Einstein Intersection  (Delany, Samuel R.)  1967  8/25/9
Embers (Márai, Sándor)  1942  translated by Carol Brown Janeway, 2001  8/27/9  
Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (Zelazny, Roger and Sheckley, Robert) 1991  9/1/9
Dragonhaven (McKinley, Robin)  2007  9/5/9
Lavinia (LeGuin, Ursula)  2008  9/7/9
The Vampire Tapestry (Charnas, Suzy McKee)  1980  9/13/9
All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy, Cormac)  1992  9/21/9
The Groves of Academe (McCarthy, Mary)  1952  9/28/9  DNF.
Good News from Outer Space (Kessel, John)  1989  10/11/9  There are two great scenes in the book: the one where the Rev. Gilray is confronted by the Alien posing as Dr. Vance to test his faith (Chapter 10, pg 104-112), and the one where Wes Purcell is confronted by the Alien (Chapter 17, pg 166-182).  Maybe the rest was better/more relevant in 1989.
The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (Naylor, Gloria) 1980  10/18/9
A Personal Matter (Oe, Kenzaburo) translated by John Nathan  1969  10/24/9
City on Fire (Williams, Walter Jon)  1997  11/5/9
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (Willis, Connie)  2007  11/15/9
Appointment in Samarra (O'Hara, John) 1934  11/22/9
BUtterfield 8  (O'Hara, John)  1935  11/28/9
Straight Man (David Russo)  1997 12/7/9
My Father's Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances (Charnas, Suzy McKee)  2002  12/22/9

Ah... "Calcoku" = KenKen

A little while ago, the local indie rag started carrying a puzzle called "Calcoku", in addition to the usual crossword puzzle and Sudoku.  Googling calcoku returns nothing useful, but my aunt identified it as KenKen (or Calcudoku or Mathdoku).  Just in case your newspaper carries "Calcoku" and you can't find more.

Returns and Gift Cards

My brother-in-law went to Kohl's the day after Christmas to return/exchange a shirt.  There was an incredibly long line for new purchases, but he was able to walk right up to the Returns register.  This seems like a reversal from the years when Return lines were nightmarish, and if this is now the common state of things, it seems likely that the proliferation of gift cards has brought it about.