Classic Pulp Novels

I've been reading some of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs lately. They're certainly not great art or great books or even great writing, but they certainly are great stories. Tarzan and John Carter keep you turning the pages to see what's going to happen next. I'd read some of the Tarzan novels here and there before this, but I'd never tried the Barsoomian novels.

Masters of the Glove

I finished reading Wizardry a few days ago and it's not a D&D manual for aspiring Dungeon Masters. It is, in fact, a book in which a man tries to formulate a system for evaluating the defensive capabilities of baseball players. So it's just as obscure and only of interest to a small and similarly obsessed set of people. I'm not sure how good it is because I really ought to go back and work through the math a bit more, but it seems plausible on the face. He doesn't have too many revolutionary judgements, but that would seem to be a point in his favour. There are a few surprises though; some of the magnitude of differences is interesting as well as some of the judgements he makes about just how costly some of these players are in the field.

Two Movies

I've watched a couple new movies this week. Well, "new" in the sense that I had not seen them before, not that they were recently produced and released. The first one was the third installment of the Mummy series starring Brendan Fraser. The second was Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Talk about your dissimilar movies. Possible spoilers after the jump.

On the TeeVee

So I've stopped posting every time I watched a Star Trek episode. It was getting boring and a lot of the episodes in the first season are much of a piece. The only ones of any note in the last few were probably the one with Khan (and everybody knows about Khan) and the season-ending episode with the time-travel that was written by Harlan Ellison. (About whom a great deal of what I know comes from his minor spat with the boys at Penny Arcade. Caution: vulgarities abound at those links.)

It's A Lady Vanishes and My Fair Lady

But with more nudity!

I kid, I kid. There's no nudity at all in Night Train to Munich. It's not a bad little film, I guess, but the train doesn't figure as largely as the title seems to imply that it will. The original title, Gestapo, would have been better, but considering it was made in 1940 one can see how that might have been a bit touchy. Details after the jump!

Terry Pratchett no longer writes comedic fiction

He now writes mildly amusing morality plays. There is little that is more incongruous than an atheist who insists on telling other people how they ought to live. His latest work, Snuff, is no exception from the general rule that his more recent books contain less humour and more preaching than his early books did. He's spent a lot of time busily rehabilitating all the monsters and villains of his early books and making them tragically misunderstood and this time it's the goblins' turn. Spoileration to follow.

Dystopian Religious Fiction

I finally got around to reading A Canticle for Leibowitz after seeing it mentioned in various places over and over as the seminal dystopian future novel. It's a bit SF and a bit fantasy, I suppose. I was, on balance, surprised with how kindly Walter Miller treated religion in his book; specifically Catholicism.

I come, not to bury censorship, but to praise it.

I've long held that a little censorship now and then is cherished by the wisest men. (With apologies to Roald Dahl.)

Now hear this.

Wesley Smith over at Secondhand Smoke does yeoman service in the cause of life. He makes the excellent point in this post that one is more apt to penetrate the willful ignorance of the fact of human life in the womb by choosing an appealing tack rather than a repulsive one.

Some day, our distant descendants will look back at us and marvel that we could have ever have argued in seriousness that the babies in the womb were not human or alive or any of the other ridiculous notions some people present. It will be much like how we look back and marvel that anyone ever denied a black man's humanity to keep him in bondage.

Mmmmm... forbidden donut....

"You Americans and your due process. This is always so much easier in Mexico."

As long as I'm doing the whole photoblogging thing, I might as well post the reason that it's good to be friends with the clerks at your local French-style patisserie.

What's this, what's this?

 Did someone receive some snazzy new glassware at Yuletide?




















Why, yes. Yes, I did.

My eyes! The goggles! They do nothing!

As much as I deprecate the effort that Peter Jackson made with The Lord of the Rings and as poorly as I expect his version of The Hobbit to turn out, at least it can't be as bad as this.

Cold comfort, indeed.

New blog features

I've added a couple lists to the blog over on the left. The first is a running list of the books I've read this year (only 3 so far) and the other is the movies I've seen this year.

I'd suggest the mysteries only to someone who is quite interested in Edwardian England or, more specifically, mysteries set in that period. Ngaio Marsh's books would probably be of particular interest to folks who are fond of Dorothy Sayers. The early books are a bit weaker, and the lady doth protest too much about not copying Lord Peter Wimsey, but Rory Alleyn develops into his own character eventually.

Of the movies, the second movie was decidedly less good than the first. A Canterbury Tale is too maudlin generally and specifically suffers from a very weak ending. In the Mood for Love is a very good romance film set in Hong Kong in the 1960's. The main characters live next door to each other and discover independently that their respective spouses (I hate that word) are having an affair together. After they both realize that the other knows of the infidelity, they strike up a friendship and find a mutual attraction, but are determined not to betray as they have been betrayed.

On the whole, they are successful, but it's not a picture-perfect platonic, courtly romance from some medieval French poem. They're not perfect people and things don't turn out perfectly for anyone, really. I strongly suggest not watching the DVD deleted scenes. They were deleted for a reason and they would spoiled the film for me entirely if they had been left in.

Christmas is about family, not going to church!

Wait, what?

No, seriously, apparently that's where we are now. My mind boggles that people would decided that because Christmas falls on a Sunday, they shouldn't go to church. If that's where we are, not just as a culture, but as Christians, then we've really lost touch with the whole point. Even worse to me is the startling number of churches that cancelled services pre-emptively. I mean to say, really.

A certain subset of my in-laws even said this to me earlier today. Surprise was expressed that church where I attend was not cancelled and they commented that it makes sense to cancel church so you can spend time with your family. Not only is this misguided in a general way about what the meaning of Christmas is, but I think this also bespeaks a distance and lack of closeness between people who are supposed to be our family. The Bible speaks over and over about how our fellow Christians are our brothers, and to shun them because we're going to be with family in the strictly biological and legal sense seems short-sighted to me.

Link from FT.

The naïveté of libertarians

Some interesting thoughts on Ron Paul over at First Things, but the part that struck me particularly was the pointing out that libertarians take a remarkably Panglossian view of the individual outside of government and a rather Hobbesian view of the individual in government.

Non-pseudo-Nietzschean libertarians  have always struck me as somewhat Pollyannaish in their assumptions regarding the power—more precisely, the lack of power—of human sinfulness.  They see sinfulness in government, but somehow assume that the rest of us will be “good enough” with only the most minimal restraints.  What’s more, they seem to assume that a “merely individualist” public philosophy won’t have untoward consequences for our common lives together.

Slow December

I apologize for the dearth of content, but Christmas preparations have occupied my time and I've come down with a cold on top of it all. I hope everyone has gotten everything done on time.

In honour of the season, I have a link to a long article, but one that repays your attention, I think. John C. Wright considers the reason for the season, and I'm willing to bet that regardless of what you think that means, he doesn't exactly mean the same thing.

Peter Jackson strikes again!

Not content to ruin the story of The Lord of the Rings with his monstrous film adaptation, he has now set his sights on another cherished portion of my childhood and prepares to mangle Tintin almost out of all recognition.

Jackson, is there no depth you will not plumb, fiend?

ST: Halloween episode

Tonight's episode is The Return of the Archons, and, judging from the teaser appended to the end of the previous episode, it looks like the Halloween episode. More mysticism than science and investigations of strange doings on a weird planet. Okay, to start, Sulu and "O'Neill" are being chased through an old town set by Grim Reaper lookalikes. Sulu is touched and his mind altered and the extra runs off. So we're already off to a good mysterious start.

ST: Law and Order

Next up, Court Martial. It's like Law and Order and NCIS, but in space! I guess. I'm not sure about this episode either. Nifty, we open with several starships orbiting Earth? But they're on Starbase 11. Turns out the captain is going to have a court martial because one of his crewmen died. Spock turns up with the computer log and seems concerned. The dead man's kid then comes in and accuses him of hating her dad and murdering him and *shock* the computer log shows that Kirk jettisoned a pod (?) before the red alert. I was right, it will be Law and Order/NCIS... but in space!

ST: I have no concept of time

This episode is Tomorrow is Yesterday, and in fact I have no concept of time. No, what I mean to say is I have no idea what this one is about. So off we go, into the unknown together then. Ah, we open with a "modern" US Air Force plan taxiing for take-off. I've seen clips of this before in special features. Apparently our heroes have gone back in time somehow and have to deal with us backward 20th century folk. Just to start with, the Enterprise is about the most unconvincing model ever when they put it in the "blue sky".