Month: October 2005

Browser neepery

I am clearly getting old. There was a time when the announcement of a new beta of a new version of Firefox would have had me running to get the latest and greatest and get it installed. These days, however, I seem to be less excited about having the bleeding edge, and more interested in having the functionality I want.… Read more →

Fiscally Conservative?

So I just want to make sure I understand things–is it the received wisdom that the Republicans are fiscally conservative, and the Democrats are the ones who spend money they don’t have? Interesting. Over at Calculated Risk there’s some posting going on about the US National debt: The US Treasury Department reports that the US National Debt increased $553.7 Billion… Read more →

Lovecraft

I had a pleasant surprise on the weekend, when I popped into one of the local independent bookstores to find all three volumes of Arkham House‘s collected Lovecraft, as well as the volume of “stuff Lovecraft ‘doctored’” sitting on the shelf. I don’t think I’ve ever seen these books in stock at a general bookstore–in fact, I think the only… Read more →

It is mine. Oh yes, it is.

Finally, the Complete Calvin and Hobbes is here. Quite pricey, but you can see where the money has gone into production value in the finished books. One thousand, four hundred, and fifty-six pages of pure C&H goodness, in three lovely volumes. (I wonder if I could read through this in one sitting if my family were out of town or… Read more →

Tuesday is poker night

When Mal cashed out at 500% of his buyin, I thought he was surely going to be the champion of the night. Until I cashed out, several hours later, at 1900% of my initial buy in. I believe the phrase here is “Boo-ya-ka!” That is all. (I am going to be so tired tomorrow.) Read more →

Re-hammered!

This almost makes up for the continuing saga of septic system pain–it’s enough to put a smile on my face, anyway! Tom DeLay indicted again; money laundering charged U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, forced to step down as House Republican leader last week after he was indicted on a conspiracy charge, was indicted again Monday. The new charges, brought… Read more →

*Boom*

It’s always good to get your head explody out of the way early. ‘Ten Commandments’ Judge To Run For Ala. Governor GADSDEN, Ala. — Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama’s chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running… Read more →

Right, about the lobsters…

Look, I can’t even begin to explain this. You’ll have to go read about it. It’s a lot weirder to walk into these things everywhere than it is to read about them. I think I have to stop making fun of the Minnesota State Fair: the beauty pagent-slash-butter sculpture and seed art doesn’t seem so unbeatably weird and regional now. Read more →

Meta-blogging

So, since my ISP keeps screwing up the configuration on the machine that hosts this blog, I’m looking into an alternate anti-spam solution. I’ve moved from my hand-rolled captcha system (see previous anti-spam post) to using Spam Karma 2. Let me know via email if you have any problems with commenting over the next couple of days. Read more →

Serenity

Product Image: Firefly on the big screen
My rating: 5 out of 5

So, obviously, I enjoyed this movie.

I’m not going to go all Whedon fanboy on you, or anything, and write one of those “I want his babies” reviews I’ve been seeing around, but I will say that I thought the movie was great, and one of the better SF movies I’ve seen lately.

I don’t know how it would have played to someone who hadn’t seen Firefly, although it seems obvious that some of the moments (especially the deaths) would have had a much smaller impact on people who weren’t emotionally invested in the characters already. For those of us that had already spent quite a few hours with these characters, though, the movie was certainly rewarding.

I do enjoy Whedon’s humour, and there was a lot of that in the movie, both in terms of the directly funny stuff (“I could stand to hear more”, “I am a leaf”, etc.) but also in terms of the way he delighted in faking out the audience by feinting towards a cliche and then completely flipping it. The classic example here would be the “everyone ( but Kaylee) knows it’s a trap” bit.

I also quite enjoyed the way Whedon worked with the theme that people need something to believe in, and how he wove that into the idea of Mal’s personal moral/ethical vaccuum and his finding a bit of a compass versus the Operative going from a moral/ethical GPS to a non-entity. And, of course, the subtle hints that Book had been an Operative, lost his faith in the system and replaced it with Christianity…

When characters started dying, all of a sudden the stakes got turned up a notch–unlike a weekly TV series, there isn’t as much of a guarantee that characters will have to keep coming back in a feature, even one that people want to start a franchise. This was perfectly crafted in the final act, when the shocking death at the start of the scene means that we spend the entire final segement of the movie on the end of our seats, as it looks like EVERYONE is going to die… Extra bravo to Whedon for that.

(I keep saying Whedon, but the cast also deserves props. No one really gets a lot of screen time, but everyone was great within the space they had. Fillion, of course, stands out for his multi-layered portrayal of Mal, but both Baldwin and Glau should also get nods for their excellent comic ability. Summer’s “don’t be an idiot” face was perfect, and Jayne’s comments were always delivered optimally.)

I think there were a couple of failings, though. The invincible River scene is one–it would make it very hard for us to ever feel that River (or the crew, while they’re with her) is actually in jeopardy going forward. (I think the arrival of the guys with guns was meant to counteract that, to almost say “sure she can kill everyone if they are crazed hand-to-handers, but organized people with weapons that work at a distance could stop her”, but if that actually was the intention, it could have been executed a lot better.)

Also, as someone who watched the series, the failure to wrap up the “guys with blue hands” stuff, or the “Blue sun” stuff while theoretically doing the River story was a bit of a disappointment. I am told that this is addressed in the comic series that bridges Firefly to Serenity, so I guess I should reserve judgement until I see that.

Finally, two things I keep wondering about, that bother me a little:

1) While the Operative was unconscious from Inara’s flashbomb, why didn’t Mal just shoot him in the face?

2) When the Operative lost faith and had the guards stand down, and even helped with the rebuilding of Serenity, what the hell was the Parliament doing? Even if the Op said River had done her damage, why would they believe him–surely there are more than one possible dirty secret River could have picked up from the “key members” of Parliament?

So, the summary: Go see it.

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Tom Wilson & Bob Lanois

Product Image: Concert At The Seahorse
My rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve been really enjoying Tom Wilson’s latest album, The Shack Recordings, and I’ve been a fan of Tom’s stuff back through all the Blackie and the Rodeo Kings stuff, through a couple of solo albums, and back into the Junkhouse days, so when I heard the tour for the new album was coming to Halifax, I knew I was going to go check it out.

If I were giving out stars just for the performance, this would be a 5 of 5 situation. Tom was great, Bob added some fun, and Russell (from Junkhouse) brought some more to the show. The songs were good, Tom’s stage persona was perfect, the stories were excellent (especially the bit about the guys in Oasis thinking they were better than Dylan).

However, there were two things really working against my ability to enjoy the show.

One was the venue. The Seahorse is actually a decent place to drink and have some basic bar-style fun, but… well, let me put it this way–the sound guy was also tending bar, and he was a better bartender than a sound guy. (And he wasn’t that good of a bartender–his Guinness pour was for shit). I moved around the room and the quality of the sound varied wildly. Ironically it was muddiest and shittiest right near the sound board. Made me think of Rob Szabo‘s old line about keeping the sound guy happy since he had his hand on the SUCK knob. You know things are bad when the band is cracking jokes–from the stage–about the fact that they can’t get the monitor levels changed, but they could probably get a drink.

The other was the audience. This is a standing complaint of mine in Halifax–people just won’t shut the hell up. I don’t think it’s malicious, it’s just that Maritimers are so friendly that they need to talk to their friends and be a part of things, and sometimes that means drinking a lot of beers and yelling over the band at each other. I don’t expect concert hall silence in a bar show, but I also don’t expect the band to have to have the PA cranked up several times so that they can’t hear the audience talking…

So, good album, with a good stage show, but ruined by a poor sound tech and my inability to enjoy shows when the audience is too damn loud.

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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.