Head Trip

Been sick since Saturday night, which mostly sucks but gives me a good reason to putter aimlessly around the interwebs.  I stumbled across Head Trip, and working back from the most recent comic, this strip, which exactly describes how we watch movies nowadays, convinced me to put the series in the google reader, and go back and read it all from the beginning.

As with all good webcomics, I learned about something new today: the Wilhelm Scream.  And by the power of YouTube, I immediately got to see a compilation of Wilhelm Screams and the original scream.

Love and Other Disasters (2006)

This ended up in our queue because Sarah was adding Orlando Bloom movies, and Bloom and Blanchett are listed high in the netflix cast list.  As it turns out, this is terribly misleading and Bloom and Blanchett just have a cameo.  It's a brilliant cameo, but it's also good that they just have a cameo because the film is mostly about more ordinary people.  And it's very funny, and cute, and "true".  It's a total puff piece, but we had a lot of fun watching it and are mildly shocked that

1. Alek Keshishian has only directed 3 films, and
2. Brittany Murphy has not been in more movies we'd actually want to see

Fantasy Coloring Albums

Connor recently discovered my old copy of the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Book, and we've read it every day since.  We even played the "game" inside the coloring book, which I had never played before, since we also had Dungeon! (so why play some crappy pseudo-game inside the coloring book?).  Even though he's not entirely interested in coloring, I went to see whether you could find it at Amazon, and the answer is "yes, but you won't want to buy it at those prices".  Searching wider, it turns out there are other people with fond memories of this book, and the Monster Brains blog had several pretty good scans of uncolored pages, but was incomplete, so I was happy to eventually find a complete book in PDF format -- the real pages are larger than 8.5"x11" (actually the PDF's are 11 2/3" tall?!), so some of the pictures are a little cropped, but good enough for printing out and letting a 6.5-year-old (or 39-year-old) color away if he gets interested.  The backgrounds are a little gray.


Searching more generally for fantasy coloring books turned up nothing I was particularly interested in giving to Connor.  I'll bet there's something good out there, but don't have the time to wade through it all at the moment.

The Beginning of the End is Almost Nigh for Our Beloved '96 Jetta?

The check engine light coming on (this time) simply meant that the catalytic converter is shot.  Expensive, but not a big deal in terms of the car actually running for a while longer.  The doors no longer lock properly from the outside, so we lock them from the inside before shutting the the doors (they unlock just fine).  That's how all cars worked when we were kids, so that's just an annoyance.  Still, it's time to more seriously start assessing candidates for the next family car, so we went to http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ and started poking around.  The big requirement is that I fit in the front (driver and passenger) and back seats**, so, for example, the Altima is right out despite the good things we've heard about it.  It also must be reasonably fuel efficient, have at least as much trunk storage as the Jetta, and a way to plug in an mp3 player (usb or audio line in; we don't actually *own* an mp3 player, but consider that one of the costs of buying a new car).  Desirable features include cruise control (probably generally available on most cars), continuous variable transmission (so far I just see this ), seat memory, and better outside noise reduction (the latter two probably still luxury car features).



So, I'll be going around sometime to sit in a Honda Accord, Honda Civic (hybrid and regular), VW Jetta (diesel, wagon, and regular), VW Golf (diesel and regular), Audi A3 (diesel), Subaru Legacy, Subaru Outback, Toyota Corolla, Toyota Camry (hybrid), and Ford Fusion (probably just for yuks).  Fortunately all the dealers are on a 5-mile stretch of US 7 just south of town.  I was thinking about going and sitting in the Lexus Hybrid sedan, but the closest dealer is 130 miles away in Manchester, NH.



** when I got my first car in '89, the guys at the Honda dealership laughed when I walked through the door and told my mom to put me through the wash and hope I shrank in the dryer.  I ended up in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais, and Phil made fun of me for being the only 17-year-old who'd choose to drive a businessman's car.  :-) The Hondas are bigger now, but I still need to go sit in them first.

The Name of the Wind

There's a good story in here, but unfortunately it doesn't start until Kvothe goes to University**.  Everything prior to that is backstory and setting up the framing device, and unfortunately it's boring and unnecessary. Cut it all out, start with Kvothe arriving at the University (or leaving Tarbean; either would be fine), and then work in the necessary backstory as you go along.  It would be far more interesting as a reader to not know he's in the act of relating his story to Chronicler until he pauses in the telling.


At any rate, Harry, I mean Kvothe, arrives at University some years after his parents were killed by Voldemort and the Death Eaters, I mean Lanre and the Chandrian; and arouses the ire of Professor Snape, I mean Hemme; the enmity of Malfoy, I mean Ambrose; the professional interest of the nutty-seeming headmaster Dumbledore, I mean master of naming Elodin; the romantic interest of Ginny and Cho, I mean Denna and Fela; the friendship of Hermione and Ron, I mean Wil and Simmon...  I'm saying this all a little tongue-in-cheek and stretching the analogies, especially since Rothfuss was writing all this before Harry Potter was even published, but... you get the picture.  It's worth a read, but you'll want to skim until the story really starts, and be warned that it's the first in a trilogy (really the first third of a longer book) and it essentially ends "well, that's enough of the story for today".  Knowing that, I probably would have waited until the entire trilogy was published before reading it.  


** ... around 200 pages in.  If Sarahmac hadn't read it first and recommended it with a warning that it starts slow, I would have dumped the book long before then

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

Sean Bean, noooooooooooo!

Netflix expected me to dislike this film, so I went in with low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised for the first half hour or so.  It moves along briskly, and Percy's journey west has a more quest-like feel because they're looking for pearls at specific locations rather than haphazardly running into monsters.  Uma Thurman has a good cameo.  Dropping Clarisse and merging some of her role into Annabeth seemed like a shaky decision, but hey, sometimes you have to drop characters for the movie and they'd earned a little leeway.  Ares also gets dropped, and so those of us who read the book are in the dark as to the location of the master bolt.  

Then we reach Hades, and Rosario Dawson has a good cameo.  And then... no Kronos.

No Kronos.

NO KRONOS?!

There's a whole series of books predicated on the idea that the titans are trying to return, and that's dropped from the movie?  Were they not planning on making a sequel, even before it tanked at the box office?  The last 30-40 minutes are just catastrophically bad as they try to rewrite the ending from this perspective.