ST: Evil twins... in space!

Tonight's episode is The Enemy Within. Featuring Kirk's evil twin from a transporter accident. Episode begins on a standard alien planet with a lot of Styrofoam rocks. We also get to see a dog wearing a shag carpet costume. And that's in the first 30 seconds. More fun times after the jump including spoilerz.

ST: Yellow is the new red

Next episode is The Naked Time. A red-shirt (wearing blue) comes back from a planet with Spock where everyone has died mysteriously. No one thinks about a quarantine when they return and the mysterious death of the nameless crewman doesn't seem to spark any suspicion about what happened.  The complete lack of any sensible protocols is laughable. Just like last episode, Kirk refuses to credit the warnings of his crew. More fun times after the jump. Turns out the disease is one that causes all the actors to chew the scenery.

David Mamet is a mensch

David Mamet is another of my favourite writers. Certainly my favourite writer for stage and screen who is yet living. (I confess, I haven't seen one of his plays on stage, but a number of them have been made into movies I have seen, so I think it's fair to include stage.)

He recently wrote a book called The Secret Knowledge about his move from the left end of the political spectrum to the right. It wasn't quite that simple, though. Mamet talks about how he discovered over a period of time that while he thought of himself as a liberal or man of the left, he slowly discovered that he didn't believe or adhere to a lot of the positions that went along with that and discovered that, if he were to be honest about what his beliefs and positions entailed, he was actually a pretty conservative guy.

The book won't be earth-shattering for anyone who is conservative, nor will it be terribly persuasive for someone who is still a liberal, but it does do a good job of explaining one man's journey and there is a bit of red meat for those of us on the right. Mamet has never been one to pull punches and he doesn't start here. His flair for punchy, memorable dialogue comes through loud and clear on every page.

If you enjoy a good conservative polemic, are interested in how one man's political thought can evolve or just are a fan of David Mamet, it's probably worth a read.

Because no one likes you monkey boy.

I breezed through John Miller's Our Oldest Enemy about, obviously, the French. It wasn't a bad read, certainly a quick and easy read. It was published not too long after the whole "Freedom Fries" nonsense and serves as a good primer to the actual history of our relationship with the French. It helps do away with the nonsense that the French assistance during the Revolutionary War was anything more than a temporary matter during a time when our interests ran parallel briefly.

It's not the hit piece that I've seen it made out to be, but it's not more than a quick, popular history of one very limited aspect of American foreign policy and involvement, so don't expect too much if you pick it up.

This also affords me the opportunity to tell my favourite joke about the French. Why are there trees planted along the Champs Élysées? Because Germans prefer to march in the shade.

Wolfe the man

No, not Nero, but that's not a bad guess. I've been reading a lot of books by Gene Wolfe lately and finding them very enjoyable. I'm not sure I can easily state why I find them thus, but I do. The stories all seem to be peopled with real people, not flat characters. That is, the characters act differently, have different motivations and interact with each other in ways that seem and feel realistic to me.

Also, each book seems to have a moral protagonist; at least, insofar as any imperfect being can be called "moral". None of the heroes is perfect, each makes mistakes and often people die, but at heart each is struggling and striving to do right in their quest. More details about the books after the jump.

No, it's not about the hazards of deep sea diving

When one states in such environs as these that one likes a children's television show, one is tempted to try to excuse it, or explain a higher, sophisticated reason for liking it, but I think such a tendency is backwards. I like Avatar: The Last Airbender. I think when someone likes something characterized by graphic violence or "adult themes" (i.e. people sinning), or even a G-rated, defiantly intellectual work, conscientious explanation should be forthcoming. It should be taken for granted that we like innocent adventure as made for children - where there may seem to be danger, but everything is under the control of an omnipotent guide (a team of writers who will not let the main characters die), strange, fantastical places and creatures abound, and the good guys have supernatural power and always win in the end. I chastise myself for feeling the need to explain it, but further explanation follows after the jump.

ST: I sense a theme

Third Star Trek episode and once again our heroes have to battle an enemy from within with unimaginable powers who has been corrupted by them. Which is a lot like the last episode. And it was kinda like the one before, though they're taking it to further extremes each time. Looks like the lesson this time is that love will conquer. Sort of. Fun times after the jump.

ST: Charles, no!

Still Trekking. Charlie X is the next episode up. It's painful to watch. The eponymous character is so completely devoid of any social ability that it's difficult to keep your eyes on the screen. The episode also has the song styles of Uhura to Spock's badly pantomimed playing of some sort of lyre.

As always, I'm gonna spoil things after the jump.

ST: Boldly going

So, I don't know if I mentioned it, but I've got Netflix now. I've got a dual queue going; one for movies and one for television. I've been running the movie queue for a month or so now, but just started the TV queue. First up: Star Trek.

The first episode is The Man Trap. The introduction starts with the familiar split infinitive and talks of the "five year mission". Spoileration to follow!

Shrive

I like the word "shrive". Even better is the past tense "shriven". And there is always "shrove" and "shrift". I like the sound of the "r" after the initial "sh". There aren't so many words that begin that way.

Perhaps that's why I've never liked "shroom". It's an imposter, an interloper, a fraud. The definition of "shrive" after the jump.

To quote Mr. Plant

...it's been a long time. I feel a little overwhelmed by my brother's relentless pace of new posts (well, technically, it relents for a day or two here and there, but always comes back with a vengeance). As our reader(s) may have noticed, my mien is more the obsessive lingering on a single subject until it has long since lost its interest to everyone else.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly I've been doing with the bulk of my time, since I don't watch as many movies as K, or read as many books (though that difference alone is probably entirely or very nearly in the pace at which I read, not in the number of hours dedicated to it), nor do I work as many hours at traditional salaried work. In fact, I'm pretty sure I do only one thing significantly more hours than K (if we lump all web browsing together instead of demarcating discrete topics), and that is writing fiction.

As I've linked my writing to my secret identity, but my anonymity on this blog is important to me, I cannot really link to it from here or promote it. In fact, I don't know that I have much interesting to say on this blog at all, though perhaps I'll link to something strange I stumble upon (in the original figurative sense) on the web.

These are some big grapes

Tasty as well, which is not always the case with out-sized produce.

British cinema

If I recall correctly, using England technically only refers to that part of the British Isles which is the historical country of England, though it is used (and has been used in the past) to refer to the entire collections of unified countries in a casual way. Great Britain is England, Wales and Scotland and the United Kingdom is the aforementioned along with Northern Ireland. Or maybe I have those two backwards? Hum.

At least it's not May Day

Welcome to a holiday celebrating the trade and labour unions. I'm not sorry to have a day off work, but the day of unions has come and gone in the US, at the least, and the sooner they disappear the better off we'll all be.

New Blogger Interface

I'm giving it another try now that it's out of beta. I didn't like it before and I'm not terribly keen on it again at the moment. The interface is a bit cleaner and more streamlined, but it's a bit too 30's-art-deco clean for my taste. It feels like they dumped a lot of decorative detail in order to get rid of them rather than because it actually helped in any way. The functionality all seems to be there and they've added a couple new touches to the dashboard, so I'll see how long I can stand it.

Compare and contrast

The other feature film I watched in the recent past was Shizukanaru ketto. Or, in English, The Quiet Duel. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a comedy. But I couldn't help but compare it to Stranger Than Fiction. Mostly because of the different ways in which the movies resolved themselves; this one followed through in a better manner consistent with the plot and characters even though that meant a film that was probably not as commercially appealing. Jump into the details. (Minor spoilers ahead.)

Is Will Ferrell a comedic genius?

I'm not convinced. Sure, he has his moments where's very funny, but he misses with regularity as well. I'll just say that I think he's quite talented. Part of my difficulty probably stems from the fact that a lot of his movies are not really geared towards me as an audience. That is to say, his humour seems directed (in large part) at audience that is one step up from the Jackass audience. He does, however, have his moments where he takes a step or two up from that and Stranger Than Fiction was one of those moments. More thoughts after the jump.

Thanks for the memories

I won't spend a lot of time describing the plot since I don't want to give too much away and since I've already done it once, but I do have to note that I finished reading Latro in the Mist and it was spectacular.

Part of my enjoyment may derive from the fact that I have a bit of knowledge about Greeks from the time of Herodotus. I'm no expert, by any means, but having read Herodotus and Thucydides (in translation, of course) and a couple books about the wars of that time much that I read was familiar including some of the characters that Latro runs across in the course of his adventures.

Even without any familiarity with the time and place, I can't recommend the book highly enough. I don't think I've enjoyed a story this much since I read the Aubry-Maturin series for the first time. The book ends without a great deal of plot resolution, but in a manner consistent with the tale. Not to fear, however, since there is another book that was written later that picks up our hero's tale again. I'm reading Soldier of Sidon now and, while it doesn't grip quite as much as the first book, I'm enjoying it; I'll post a brief review of it when I finish in another day or two.

Go get and read Latro in the Mist. Do it now. You won't regret it.

In other words

I started thinking about how nice it would be to have one's writing cited in the OED. So, at a whim, I decided to see how many words used Raymond Chandler quotations to illustrate. Turns out there's a lot; 435 citations in fact. So I also checked to see how many words for which Raymond Chandler was the first quotation. Not so many, but still a respectable figure: eight. Of course, this doesn't mean these are the absolute earliest usages or that he coined them, merely that it was the earliest found when looking for examples.

hot rod
itty-bitty
ju-ju
mesc
prettied
private eye
stooge
torcher

After the jump are the first page of words from the OED. It was 100, but apparently there was another R. Chandler in the 18th century who wrote travel books.

Happy word fun times

I've been reading several Gene Wolfe novels lately and he's not a man to mince words. He used one that was new to me throughout The Book of the New Sun: lictor. An excellent word. A noun,

Etymology:  Latin; perhaps agent-n. < lig-, root of ligāre to bind.

Roman Hist.

 a. An officer whose functions were to attend upon a magistrate, bearing the fasces before him, and to execute sentence of judgement upon offenders. A dictator had twenty-four lictors, a consul twelve.

1382—1843

 

 b. transf.

1638—1883

 

Derivatives

† licˈtorian adj. Obs. pertaining to a lictor.

1656—1656

And that got me thinking about other words I like.