In another life, I did some structural analysis of stories. For the sake of practicality, some were as simple as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (various publications insist that they’re “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, but, dammit, there were two of them). For the sake of seeing how scalable my analysis was, I also ...
I have this weirdness about sound. I watch television with the sound off; mostly the sound isn’t terribly necessary, often things are more interesting without it. I watch film trailers on-line without any sound, and don’t seem to miss anything. The noise of a telephone ringing makes my head hurt. The volume on ...
I’d like the DVD right now, thanks very much, because until I can watch Were-Rabbit, oh, maybe several hundred times more, I won’t be able to compare it meaningfully with A Close Shave and (especially) The Wrong Trousers. In the meantime, I’ll just mention in passing that I had a great time, and giggled ...
Perviest thing I’ve seen in a long time: a Chinese eBay vendor selling long human hair — specifically long ponytails — and including with each sale a DVD of the hair being cut. I can bend my brain enough to believe that the film is intended to form a record of authenticity, but would I ...
Your homework for today, class, is to identify what you feel are the essential differences between this: and
[A comment posted to Majikthise, which kinda stands on its own. Concerning why more people (elided qualifier here: ‘in the US’) don’t believe in evolution, and considering both its random component and how it might be seen to take meaning away from human life.] All of the above, of course, to some degree. ...
As you drive north on the 110 through downtown LA, a spectacular photo-realistic mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (by Kent Twitchell) looks benignly down from the multi-storey side of a very-LA concrete parking structure. It’s every bit as striking and fresh as it was the first time I came to LA. The ...
Cory Doctorow whines a bit over at BoingBoing about the Lego company’s redirect from legos.com, and the accompanying bit of trademark defence. Might be just me here, but I don’t see a whole lot on the redirect page there which ‘scolds you viciously’, and the BoingBoing whine seems a lot more whiny. I ...
Reminded driving back from USC this morning as I listened to NPR of how dissonant it feels to me when the construction ‘As far as X is concerned’ (or ‘As far as X goes’, or somesuch) is lazily collapsed to ‘As far as X’. It’s a lingustic meme that I’m guessing gets passed on ...
Why didn’t I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I’d had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he’s a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as ...