Saturday, June 11, 2005
Technical Difficulties
Thanks almost entirely to Malaya's
eagerness willingness to leap into the quagmire of blogger template editing, we've got BlackChampagne.com working now, in the proper look, through the blogger script. It's still a work in progress (I'll get to the problems in a moment.) but things are smooth enough as of Saturday night that I can now remove the link to the blogger.html page. Please revert your bookmarks to the main page:
http://www.blackchampagne.com.
ChangesBlog entries will continue to be posted every day, roughly as they have been over the past couple of weeks. The schedule will vary, of course, since my main priority is working on the novel. But you'll almost certainly see new stuff more often than the Mon/Wed/Fri schedule I've been running with for the past year or so. As for content, now that I'm back home in my comfort writing zone I will likely start throwing in more long essay-style blog posts, posting photos, posting several related news items in the same entry, and so on. Those are what most of you have grown used to from me, and I enjoy writing them, however I also enjoy the ability to post a quickie little thing whenever I want to, which is why I'm keeping the blog script and not going back to only posting full HTML pages.
You'll notice some other minor appearance changes. I'm still playing around with the top of the page; whether or not I'll have some sort of "recent features" box up there, where the black champagne title image is going to go, etc. I sorta like the new look up there, even though I had to hunt up that van gogh painting and clip out a larger version of it to allow for wider page stretching in some resolutions.
The following nav bar and format changes apply
only to blogger-powered pages --
not to the 3.5 years of daily archives posted before my recent San Diego trip, nor to all of the other site content pages including reviews, articles, mailbags, band names, etc.
That being said... due to the way blogger works, I can no longer post items in the nav bar and have them remain there forever, tied to a given day's or week's worth of blogs. For example, if you go back to any random archive day, say
February 4, 2005, you see the entry for that day, and you also see the Curse of the Day, Quote of the Day, Books Lying Open, Phrase of the Day, etc entries just for that day. Most of those have been changing with every blog entry for the 3.5 years that I've been doing this blog, and I will continue to post new ones all the time, but as blog posts themselves.
Unfortunately, I have to put everything into the nav bar and have it all overwrite every day, so while I could post new curses and quotes and such, you'd only see the newest one, and it would appear on every page fed by the blogger script. I liked sticking them over there in the navbar, but there's just no way to keep doing that now, unfortunately.(The PotD and QotD actual archive pages not withstanding. And by the way, if anyone is ever really bored and wants to click back through hundreds of blogs and paste out every curse of the day, question of the day, soul devouring worry, etc, and stick them on one page, sorted by category, and send them to me, I'll be happy to make up an archive page for those with all of them in one place for easy reading. I'm just not motivated enough to do it myself.)
Reader comments/emails with praise and/or complaints about all of these changes, as well as suggestions for other improvements are entirely welcome, of course. This blog is always a work in progress, especially now with the ongoing format changes.
How do they stay open?
I'm speaking about
Comp USA, of course, better known as "Com-pusa!" Saturday afternoon after sitting through
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Malaya and I headed down the road to
Fry's, and then after a late lunch/early dinner at Claim Jumper we visited a nearby Comp USA.
At Fry's we had to park a quarter mile from the store entrance, walk past hundreds of cars, and then wade through hundreds (literally) of people inside, and we were actually surprised at how uncrowded Fry's was, for a Saturday afternoon. At Comp USA, perhaps two hours later, we saw maybe eight customers in the entire store, and about four employees. They were so dispirited that they didn't even have a security guard at the door to check receipts, since honestly, no one there was buying anything.
This isn't any real surprise; we visited that Compusa months ago, before Fry's opened two miles away, and wondered how long it would remain in business with that sort of competition moving in. It's lasted nearly a year, but I don't think it can go on too much longer with the total lack of customers we witnessed on an otherwise busy shopping day. I won't miss it either, since it's like all Compusas; crappy selection, high prices, and completely indifferent sales people who spend most of their time hiding from public view. Bye bye.
Most Heartwarming Story Ever?
I wasn't going to post any more entries this weekend, with the potetial blogging time instead dedicated to working out some way to insert this blog into the BC main page. That being said, it's morning, I just got up, and we're going to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith in an hour, so I might as well throw up something quick. Given that it's currently the #1 read story on Yahoo News you may not have needed me to tip you to it, but
check out this story about the autistic (or something) kid who loved sports and finally got to play with the basketball team in the last game of the year.
CLOVIS, Calif. - The chant began late in the fourth quarter in the basketball gym at Clovis East High. The students started it first, clapping their hands in unison and pounding the bleachers with their feet. It didn't take long for the parents to pick it up, too. The noise grew until the whole gym seemed to shake. "We want Ryno. We want Ryno."
Pacing the sideline, coach Tim Amundsen felt himself getting goose bumps. Less than 4 minutes remained in the game, and Clovis East was winning comfortably over rival Buchanan High. Now Amundsen had a decision to make.
...
The final seconds were ticking off the clock and Clovis East got the ball one last time. This time, Ryan found a spot just beyond the 3-point line to the left of the key. He got a pass, and turned to shoot.
The noisy gym quieted for a split second as the ball seemed to hang in the air forever.
It swished through, the way it did so many times in the driveway in front of his house.
"Nothing but net," he exclaimed.
The buzzer sounded as Ryan ran joyously toward his bench, attempting to chest butt a teammate in celebration.
In the stands, Justin tried to scream, but nothing came out. He wasn't alone. Grown men and women hugged each other and cried.
The kid who wouldn't take no for an answer could now say he was a player, too.
"All the parents were bawling, and the students were too," Amundsen said. "My coaching staff all had tears in their eyes. It was an unbelievable moment."
It wasn't over yet. As the teams shook hands, two football players grabbed Ryan and hoisted him on their shoulders. He held his arms high in celebration, a big grin on his face, as they carried him on a victory lap around the gymnasium.
"I've never seen anything like it before and I probably never will," Amundsen said. "He'll be my example the rest of my life as a coach."
If you didn't tear up at least a little bit while reading that one, you're truly a hardened individual. Come on, it's retarded Rudy! Cry, damnit.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Movie and Game Stuff
As I've been catching up on my surfing and reading today, I've hit a lot of stuff I could have blogged about. I didn't want to post 20 frivilous things though, so I'm just going to mention a couple of them.
Kong is King moviesI enjoyed watching the last three Production Diaries on the glorious
Kong is King website, and had a comment on the most recent one. It's nice to see that the post production is proceeding smoothly, but I almost felt sad when one of the miniature technical guys remarked (paraphrasing), "Sometimes the best model and special effect work is wasted when a director doesn't make a film well enough to showcase it."
I'd never really thought about that before, but when you consider it, it's a good point. Imagine that you're one of the peons in the special effects department, and youv'e spent a year or two of your life working on a film, and then you can hardly see your work in the final picture, or it looks like shit because the director did a crappy job presenting it? You might have done great work, but no one will ever know due to circumstances completely beyond your control.
I suppose that's how most employees feel on a daily basis, as their large corporation churns along and grinds them into no more than a tiny gear in the vast machine, but for a creative artistic type it's got to be torture. I know how angry I'd be if I wrote something I liked and it was ruined in the final presentation by an asshole editor, or errors in type setting. The guy talking in the production diary sounded almost grateful to be working under an auteur like Peter Jackson, and his confidence that King Kong would be done well enough to look good, and to show off his miniature work, was heartwarming.
Pop Cap's poor choiceElsewhere, in gaming news, there is a new helpful addition to the
Pop Cap games, and it's driving me insane. My game of choice there is
Heavy Weapon, one I've meant to post mention of on the blog for months. I'll talk about it another day, but it's basically an old style arcade shooter, in which you control a tank and shoot down hundreds of planes and choppers, dodge their missiles, gather powerups, and so on.
I post about it now because, like all of the Pop Cap games, you play in a pop up window. This works nicely since you can position it wherever you like to be in your eye line, concentrate on it fully without extra background space around it, etc. The problem, one that didn't exist when I last played it two weeks ago, is that all of their games now pop up into a new window, which has a "Start My Game" button you have to click to load the actual game. I have no idea why they added this, since the games load whether you click it or not, after about 10 seconds. The problem is that the actual game is then the second thing you load in that window, and if, while playing, you accidentally click the side button on your mouse, the one that makes your browser go back one in the history... there goes your game.
This hardly matters on puzzle games like Bejeweled or Zuma or Alchemy or whatever, but in action games, such as Heavy Weapon or Insaneaquarium, where you've moving the mouse and clicking the mouse buttons furiously for minutes on end, the odds that your thumb will stray up the side of the mouse at some point are pretty good. So far I've played 4 games of Heavy Weapon since I returned, and ended two of them at around the 8 minute mark, just when they were getting good, by clicking "back" accidentally. (The other two weren't any good either, with me dying before I even had all 9 of my special powerups -- I'm clearly rusty from disuse.)
Yes, I could simply disable the mouse button, but since I use it constantly while surfing, I'm not going to. I am going to continue cursing when I instantly cancel a game by clicking back while playing, though.
Catching Up
I'm not sure what sort of schedule this blog is on anymore, but I can't see returning to the old Mon/Wed/Fri updating schedule. I've grown too accustomed to throwing up quick posts whenever I wish and it's just a matter of doing the technical work to transform the current format to a blog format. Here's where I'd like to just give some instruction to my technical guru and conclude by saying, "Make it so." Since I tragically lack a technical (or any other kind of) guru, you'll have to wait for me to get around to it, and with any luck it will occur before Monday.
Friday has been a busy day, full of catching up to the homelife activities. I didn't sleep that well, despite having a nice dark bedroom in which to do it. Perhaps I grew accustomed to waking up half a dozen times while sleeping in a light room in San Diego, but I woke up at least that often last night, and not just because Dusty and Jinx seemed to be taking turns occupying as much of my legroom as they possibly could.
I got up eventually, and scratched together some breakfast while surveying the entirely empty refrigerator. Malaya ate something while I was in San Diego, but not very much of it, since she lost weight and there was virtually nothing left in the house to eat. She'll follow recipes and cook excellent food when motivated, but only for both of us. When she's eating on her own, if there's not something left over she just makes due with whatever quick crap we've got lying around. Formerly that was ramen noodles or other junk, but with the healthier eating and diet kick she's been on lately she's doing a lot of low calorie frozen dinners and 100 calorie snacks of chips and such.
So apparently she survived on that stuff while I was out of town, since anything she bought and prepared was certainly gone when I got home. For breakfast today I fried the last egg in the house, one left over from two weeks previous, and had two slices of toast, those also left from before my trip. There was no margarine to put on the toast, and only a bit of "jumbleberry" preserves one of her colleagues made and gifted us with, and with some water and a few slices of the orange bell pepper I'd brought along as an airplane snack, it made for quite a mediocre breakfast.
I didn't get to dwell on it for long though, since we were soon off to the gym for a hearty workout. I enjoyed it, and it felt good to sweat and strain, after doing some of the former and lots of the later while out of town. I did 400 calories in 25 minutes on the elliptical machine, then did mostly upper body weight machines for 10 minutes before joining Malaya on her last lap through the circuit training express workout machines. We then stumbled home and into the shower just in time to head out shopping. Stops on that trip included CostCo, the produce market, Smart & Final, Trader Joe's, and finally the regular grocery store, and yes, we're pretty well stocked on food now.
She had a frozen dinner and I had a can of chicken chili with corn chips while we watched some trash TV, and then Malaya had to dash off to Kali class. I'd hoped to get a bunch of writing done tonight, but I was feeling very tired and somewhat out of sorts being back here after 10 days of being elsewhere, so I just caught up on my surfing and puttered around on the back patio with my dying houseplants and such for a couple of hours, before I got to cooking.
I did some cooking in San Diego, but not that much. I seem to be making up for it here though, since on the stove right now is a huge refried bean cassarole, a dish of baked chicken, and a pan of baked vegetables. I also cut up enough raw ingredients (everything but lettuce and tomatoes) for several days worth of salad, hardboiled a bunch of eggs, and so on. Nothing gourmet, and nothing I've even taken a bite of yet, but it's all stuff we'll eat this weekend and into next week. It's actually quite a bit more than we'll eat, I suspect, but it gave me something to do when my mind was far too adrift to get any work done, and it beat wasting hours on video games or something like that.
It also gave me motivation to get some damn work done on my novel, since as I always tell myself, "Everything I want in life is predicated on making some money from my writing." I need to have some income before I can (in good faith) ask Malaya to marry me, and we'll need an income to buy a house, upgrade our automobiles, buy a larger TV and other fun toys, and so on. I'd settle for just a larger kitchen now, since after spending the past week+ in my dad's big house, I'm really missing room to do more than just turn around in the kitchen. And his kitchen is old and nothing like those huge ones they put into houses now, with the central island for food preparation and so on. I'd be so happy cooking in one of those, where I didn't have to clean up after every dish in order to have room to prepare the next one.
I was up until 3am last night, and got about 7 hours of sleep, so hopefully I'll be up late enough to do at least a couple of hours of work before I sleep. It's odd to be moving back towards my night owl schedule already, and it feels sort of like jet lag, even though I'm still in the same time zone. After all, what other explanation could there be for the fact that I'm just about to have dinner and am planning on being up and working for hours yet, when I spent the last week+ going to sleep at about this time?
Home Again
I'll spare you the whole, "why I'm glad to be home" post, being as I elucidated most of it in anticipatory fashion yesterday. That and I was up early this morning, I sat for hours in an airport and on an aeroplane, and I went to Kali class tonight, so I'm tired. No, it's not a very original excuse, is it?
Home is good though, even if the food selection took a turn for a worse when I left dad's well-stocked fridge and pantry and came home to the bare larder and empty fridge Malaya has been suffering for the past week. Food shopping is definitely on the list for tomorrow, and I'm sort of glad that I was (due to dad's "sitting or lying down most of the time" post back surgery needs) doing most of the food preparation in San Diego, since it won't be a shock to get back into that here. I can remember past years when I'd spend a week or two visiting my grandparents, were we ate out or granny made 90% of the food, and back then I always had a few days of culture shock when I came home to my own apartment and had to relearn the art of providing for myself.
I suppose I could be Cro-Magnon and insist that Malaya make food, but given that she's the one with a real income, and that it's her condo I'm living in, that might not be very wise.
Glad though I am to be home, I miss my parents already, and I didn't dislike my trip. I wouldn't quite call it a vacation, not with as much work and house keeping as I did while there, but it wasn't bad. Malaya even remarked upon it, after we'd talked the second night I was there, and she said, "You know, you don't sound all that miserable." Not the most ringing endorsement for a vacation you've ever heard, but not the worst either. Having so much to do to help out dad was a blessing of a sort, just since it kept me busy and I didn't end up sitting around for hours feeling bored or out of place. Not when there was always something else that needed doing.
Home is good though; I enjoyed Kali, I'm enjoying petting my own kitties, and I'm overjoyed to be back with Malaya. I actually enjoyed kali a bit less than I would have, since my flight was late, I didn't get home until late afternoon, and with spending some quality time with Malaya at the top of my to-do list, the next two hours vanished in a blink and by the time I thought about eating something to get some energy for martial arts class (those two bags of peanuts on the flight up here didn't exactly fill me up) I didn't have time for more than an orange bell pepper and some nuts on the drive over.
I'm merging subjects grossly here, a habit I should try to curtail while I'm doing actual blog posts, but Kali was fun as well. We kept it pretty low impact since several people were very sore from their Wednesday night Kali, but we worked on nothing but flowing movements in a sort of sparring form. I did a fair amount of Kali while in San Diego, but almost all of it was just stick stuff, gliding around and hitting a wooden post in my dad's backyard and such. That's useful to keep sharp in some ways, and you can even improve your stick work doing it solo like that, but it's not at all like real sparring or martial arts, since there's no interaction with another person. The stuff we did Thursday night simply can not be worked on solo, since it's all about pushing at them, letting them push at you, trying to catch them off balance, flowing away from their force and then returning it to them, and so on. Hard to describe, impossible to simulate alone, though I suppose you could sort of work on some aspects of it if you had something heavy and hanging on a chain to push and be pushed by.
Lastly, I'm pretty sure I liked the blog style technology I've been using for the past week and a half, so I'm going to look into some blog script that will let me keep doing it, while integrating the style into my current BC main page format. I imagine you guys like it more too, with updates appearing much more often than thrice a week? The content hasn't been that great for the past week since I've had very little time to write and didn't have the ability/time to stick in photos, but now that I'm home I will get back to more of my usual style and content – you'll just see it updated more frequently.
That's the theory anyway. More to come on Friday, when I have time to get organized and settled in and such.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Home Sweet Home
Yes that's a lame post title. No I couldn't help it.
As the title suggests, I'm going home tomorrow. My suitcase(s) are on the bed, my clothing is in the dryer, and my airport ride (mom) is lined up. Malaya's even set to pick me up from the airport when I arrive, so pretty much all I've got to do is sit back and enjoy the ride(s). Getting some sleep tonight would be a nice start on that too.
Coming down here a week+ ago, I had just one suitcase, a big one Malaya lent me, and I loaded it up with everything I thought I'd need. Unfortunately, all I thought I'd need weighed 11 pounds too much, and I got dinged for a $25 "it's our job to lift heavy things but that doesn't mean we like it" fee, since there was no way I could bleed off 5 kilograms of weight from my suitcase into my already over-loaded carry on bag. The saddest part was that I couldn't even try to bribe the baggage handler guy with $10 or $15 to overlook the weight since I had literally $2 in cash after spending so much on the Chicago trip, and having no time to hit the ATM on the day between flights. I had to pay the $25 with my credit card at the main check in terminal, FFS.
Apparently you're now only allowed to carry 50 pounds of goodness to and fro anymore, at least 50 pounds per bag, and I basically ended up paying $25 to bring 3 pairs of shoes I never put on and a jacket and a sweatshirt and a long-sleeved shirt I never wore to San Diego with me. Meanwhile I washed clothing three times in 9 days since I was getting sweaty every day working in the yard and I only brought 5 t-shirts and wore 2-3 of them a day. This is why mommy used to pack my luggage for me, I think.
Sadly, for the return trip I've been further laden with additional clothing, new shoes, new kali sticks, a huge bag of peanut butter-filled pretzel bites, and so on, items that add at least 8-10 pounds of weight. Since I'm not eager to get gouged for another $25 on the return flight, I've claimed an old duffle bag from dad and crammed all of my shoes and other weight-intensive items into it. I even weighed it, and was disappointed to find that it only tipped the scales at 17 pounds. My big suitcase is up to 41 pounds already, and with a full load of clothing in the dryer, it's going to be close.
As for homecoming plans, I'm eager to see Malaya. We're going to do a date night and see a movie and have dinner or something like that, just to catch up on what we've each been doing. We've talked on the phone almost every day since I've been here, but 20 or 30 minutes not face to face is a far cry from actual one on one communcation, though I'm sure plenty of phone sex operators would dispute that.
I'm also missing the cats, my computer with the glorious 21" monitor, a good office chair, a dark room in which to sleep, and computer time. I had hoped to get a lot of writing done here, but with all the time I spent in dad's hospital room, and then all the work I've done around the house in the days since then, I've hardly been on the computer at all. To get any significant work done on my novel I need hours a day, most of them continuous and uninterrupted, and grabbing 15 minutes here to surf and 20 minutes there to write a blog post in San Diego is not getting the job done. Plus I'm tired all the time here from the physical work, and the sunburn, but also from a lack of sleep. I've been going to bed early, midnight or sooner most of the time, but my room here gets very light by 6am, which means I wake up then, toss and turn and doze for 20 minutes, wake up again, doze some more, etc, until I finally give up around 8am and get up for the day. Yes, this is all how real people live their entire lives. That's why I've never had any desire to be a real person.
I'll update something from home on Thursday, but I'll be busy spending time with Malaya, petting the cats, unpacking, obtaining provisions, and hopefully going to Kali class Thursday night, so if you're expecting some huge discourse, you'll likely be disappointed. I've got a ton of stuff to catch up on though, blog and otherwise. Hell, I never even talked about any of the stuff we did in Chicago, other than lamenting the damn toll roads and praising the dessert spread at my friend's wedding. I've also got numerous amusing hospital stories from dad's stay, cute (lonely) girls in bikinis stories from the San Diego beach, tales about driving dad's sports car which may soon be my sports car thanks to his back surgery pain and the deep bucket seats, and so on. I'd get into it now, but my clothing just finished and the suitcase and the scale await. I've enjoyed my time here a great deal more than I thought I would, but it's good to be going home.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Movie Critic Fun
I did not see Million Dollar Baby and I will not see Cinderella Man, but that didn't stop me from appreciating the analysis in
this blog post by James Walcott. He is writing not so much about the films themselves, but more about the critical reaction from the self-professed family values crowd to those films. Apparently two of the conservative National Review Online writers have been relentlessly plugging Russell Crowe’s new boxing film, and of course it’s nothing about boxing itself that they like, since they hated Eastwood's Oscar winning Million Dollar Baby. What's the difference?
It's amusingly obvious why NRO has thrown its nonexistent critical weight behind Cinderella Man. It's everything Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby quietly, subversively wasn't. Eastwood's allegorical chamber drama violated the pious strictures of family-value entertainment as chiseled on stone tablets and brought down from the mountain top by Michael Medved. The fighter's family in MDB is a gimme-gimme pack of trailer-trash Snopeses; Braddock's family in Cinderella man is a warm, movable hearth. Million Dollar Baby enters a dark tunnel and travels the length of it to accept death as a personal choice and deliberate destination. For all its somber coloration, Cinderella Man is as life-affirming as a Frank Capra movie without all the corny humor of contrived eccentricity. Million Dollar Baby took a girl-power story and existentialized it. Cinderella Man enshrines masculinity in a humble wooden frame.
"Cinderella Man is not really a movie about boxing, it's a movie about what it means to be a man. In the character of Jim Braddock, we can read what today's audiences are wistful for: a man who works hard to support his wife and kids, who teaches his kids to be honest, who communicates his delight in his wife with every glance." It isn't audiences that are wistful, but politically motivated critics who want to turn back the clock to that character-building time before the New Deal wove a safety net so that men didn't have to bash each other senseless to keep their families decently clothed and fed.
This quote comes from the end of a long blog entry about critics in general and the private jihad one of the NRO writers has been carrying on against fans of Star Wars 3. Which is my way of saying that you should follow the link and read the whole thing.
Speaking of movies and box office, since I've been out of town and out of touch the last couple of weekends, I've paid far less than my usual attention to box office figures. Looking now, I see that Cinderella Man flopped over
its opening weekend, coming in a weak 4th, and Star Wars 3 is continuing to make very good money, completely confounding my opening weekend prediction that it would fade quickly after that huge opening. (By the way, I don't recommend following that link if you're using Safari, since it instantly crashed my browser, making me glad that last night's fiasco at least taught me to stop writing blog posts right in the browser window.)
I also haven't seen a film since SW3 on its opening weekend, but with
Mr. and Mrs. Smith opening this weekend, and Malaya as eager to see it as she is for us to swap with the titular couple, I suspect we'll be there, if my Thursday return goes as planned.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Rotten Apple
I was just about to post a long blog entry covering what I did Monday, with shopping, new shoes, new Kali staff, yard work, lunch out with mom, and all sorts of other crap, with links and all that fun stuff. Unfortunately just as I went to search out some links to kali sticks to illustrate the topic of my new staff, the Safari browser I'm using on Malaya's Mac laptop did one of its rather frequent instant crashes, and I lost the entire post, since I was an idiot and was typing it directly into the browser window instead of writing it in a text document which I would have then pasted into the blogger window.
It's late and I'm not about to retype all that, so suffice to say that Monday was very busy and this is the first time I've had online all day, aside from some brief email to Malaya just before dinner. I got some cool new sneakers as an early b-day present (I hadn't given a thought to that occasion, despite it being less than two weeks away, and had no idea why she was buying me shoes until she mentioned it) from my mom, I got a cool six foot staff that I'm going to slice into two new 31" Kali sticks, and so on.
Also, my return has been delayed from Tuesday until Thursday, since dad wanted me here longer and Malaya is holding up admirably without me. Yes, this is the most boring post ever. Good night.
Thank Martin for Sansa Chapters
That's all I have to say as I move closer to the end of
Game of Thrones. If not for those, I might never get any sleep, since all the rest of the characters are so interesting, and the action is getting so good that it's just about impossible to stop reading, even though I'm now maybe two hours past my bedtime.
If you haven't read the novel it gets my highest possible recommendation, but just for the sake of this blog post you need to know that the fantasy tale is told a chapter at a time, with each chapter presented from the POV of a different character. I've not counted them, but the fifty+ chapters in the first book are probably told from a dozen different POVs. Thus the overall story is related in piecemeal fashion, as seen by these different narrators and since they do not proceed in any order, and you never know whose chapter will be up next, there's always a small surprise waiting as you finish a chapter and turn the page.
I always find myself hoping for more from Daenerys, or Arya, or Jon, but I'll happily read a chapter about anyone... anyone save Sansa, whose name just appeared atop page 618 and set me free.
I'll read it eventualy, of course, and it's a measure of Martin's skill that he can move readers to so loathe a major character in his series when she never does anything really bad. She's just this innocent girl who wants everyone to get along and her prince to love her and so on and so forth, and it's not really her fault that she's such an idiot... but I feel no guilt at all about hating her anyway.
Also,
Game of Thrones is the only novel in the series that
I have thus far reviewed, and my review was written after I first read it, when I hadn't gotten that involved in the series. I'm not going to re-review it after this second read is finished, but I might at least throw in new (higher) scores for it, since I'm enjoying it enormously; far more than I did the first time, and the change is almost entirely due to me having read books 2 and 3, and now knowing enough to keep all of the characters and vast plot intrigues straight.
My initial review scores were as follows:
Game of Thrones, by George R R Martin
Plot: 6
Concept: 4
Writing Quality: 8
Characters: 7
Humor: 7
Page Turner: 5
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 7
I'm tempted to throw up a bunch of 9s and 10s, (especially for plot and characters and rereadability) since it's really that good, but I'm going to wait and get through books 2 and 3 before I write a review for either of them or adjust this first one.
Game of Thrones certainly deserves 9s and above compared to every other fantasy novel out there, but I suppose I've got to review it with some implied comparison to the other novels in the series, and since I haven't read them in two years, and haven't reviewed them ever, I need to refresh my memory. Plus, with books 4 and 5 coming out later this year, I wanted to reread them anyway, just for my own enjoyment.
I also brought book 2 along with me, and if dad had lain unconscious in the hospital a few days longer, I might be halfway through it by now, rather than still 300 pages from the end of book 1. Curse his speedy recovery!
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Cracker of the Month
Not that I have a "Cracker of the Month" (CotM?) award or anything, but I couldn't resist posting something
from this news item about racism in Lindey, an "asshole of nowhere" Texas town.
As the story goes, some mentally retarded black man, 43 years of age, was picked up by a bunch of redneck white teens and taken off to amuse them as they got drunk. They had him dancing in a field, racial slurs were flying, and eventually they beat him unconscious and then threw his body out onto a fireant hill by the town dump. By the time one of the rednecks called paramedics a few hours later the guy was covered in poisonous bites, and as a result he had a brain hemmorage, was in a coma for a week, and suffered permanent disability that's going to keep him confined to a shitty little nursing home for the rest of his life.
You'd like to think that the people who did that, drunken idiots or not, would get some serious jail time. And you'd be wrong. There would have been no justice at all if some of the crackers hadn't talked. They did though, and two of the guys at the party rolled over and testified against their friends. Their friends were smart though, and rather than pleading guilty they asked for a jury trial. Unsurprisingly, the mostly white jury found them innocent of all serious charges and recommended no jail time at all. The judge gave them some anyway, 30 and 60 days, but that would obviously need a huge upgrade to even qualify for "slap on the wrist."
What's the mood of the town? Here's the former mayor, who can wear his CotM badge proudly:
"It was a very unfortunate and senseless thing," said Wilford Penny, 73, who last month completed a 6-year term as Linden's mayor. "But I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there."
How about that logic? At least Wilford there knew enough not to say "nigger" to the big city reporters, though he couldn't resist a "boy" in reference to a 43 year old man, and he couldn't resist blaming the guy for the assault perpetrated upon him. Is this ex-mayor representative of the mood of the town? That would be a yes:
There was the case in 1994 when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found dead from a gunshot to the groin. And another in 2001, when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found hanging from a tree. Local officials ruled the first case a hunting accident and the second a suicide, despite the persistent doubts of family members and civil rights officials.
So, it's a horrible place to visit and you wouldn't want to live there.
Plant Planting
"It hasn't killed one yet."
Dad's explanation when I questioned one of his recommended techniques (pounding a long nail right through the center of the plant) for repotting a huge staghorn fern yesterday.
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