While there were many exciting conversations here at Casa McLaren tonight about things that are not yet blog-announcement-ready, as far as actual action goes things were pretty sedate. Mostly it was me assembling some hardware store purchases, and then spending a few hours doing some sorting and organizing of the library. So, since I spent all my time doing that,… Read more →
Month: July 2009
Now Magazine vs The Adapters
I’ve been following the video posts from the shooting of Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the movie that’s being adapted from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s series of Scott Pilgrim comics. Partly this is because I dig the comics, and it seems like the filmmakers are having a wonderful time adapting them, and partly it’s because Mal used to live here in… Read more →
Aside
Yes, I am aware that the asides are not currently rendering as asides. The upgrade to WordPress 2.8 broke the plugin I use to manage that, and I’m giving the author a little time to get it sorted before I toss out the plugin and do it myself. At some point these will look correct again, one way or another.
Aside
If you’re a fan of The Wire (and really, you should be) then prepare for some cognitive dissonance, as you watch and listen to Jimmy McNulty, or rather Dominic West the actor that portrays him, read from one of the few dirty books that snuck into the canon of classical literature. In his actual accent.
Aside
Go and see what Chip Zdarsky (in his alter-alter-ego as Steve Murray) has wrought by bringing a George Perez sensibility to The Muppets. Apparently I am seriously behind in my Muppet continuity.
I would not have believed it.
If I were playing Balderdash, or something similarI have this very vague memory of an old game show called Liar’s Club–I must have seen repeats of it or something, since it only ran until I was 5 or 6 years old. The premise of the show was that people would make up a set of incredibly unlikely explanations for something,… Read more →
Serious Ireland WTF?
Like many North Americans of Irish descent I quite often like to play up that aspect of my heritage–although in my case it runs more to quoting Yeats, listening to songs about killing the EnglishFace it, the rebels had better music., and drinking Guinness than to wearing KISS ME I’M IRISH shirts or drinking blechh green beers. From time to… Read more →
Yes, that explains it.
You may recall that we’ve discussed the Drake Equation here before, and also Nick Bostrom’s efforts to amend it with what I called a Doom Constant. Well it turns out that a very plausible answer to the Fermi Paradox that doesn’t involve either post has been suggested by a cartoon over at Abstruse Goose. I don’t know that the cartoonist… Read more →
Disappointment
Please, allow me to share with you a graphical representation of the most disappointing thing about my recent business trip to Australia. It occurred during my return trip through Heathrow, Terminal 3. This is the current map of Terminal 3: This is slightly different than my mental picture of what Terminal 3 looks like, which is apparently a good half… Read more →
There is no more speaking to the nation
I recommend that if you haven’t already you head over to this month’s issue of the Internet Review Of Science Fiction and read Kristine Kathryn Rusch‘s essay “What’s Louder Than Noise“, in which she puts forth her argument for why the Great American Novel is no longer something that it’s possible to write. The essay isn’t terribly long, but it… Read more →
Female Music
It’s been a little while since I did a music post, so let’s do a bigger than usual one, with nine tunes instead of my normal five. Tonight’s theme is pretty broad: music from some awesome female artists. I’m not going to try to narrow it more than that–it’s some good stuff, and hopefully there’ll be something that works for… Read more →
Aside
“Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.” That’s one of many entertaining quotes from AC Grayling‘s appearance in the Guardian’s “This much I know” series.
Saturday Night Shotgun Post
While I’m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let’s do the tab closing dance: Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual… Read more →
SF Writers Say Smart Things: Jonathan Carroll
Better to have a good story than a good time. Bad life experiences often end up great material for stories. Good times are often forgotten. —Jonathan Carroll Read more →
Marco Polo, Nativity, Divine Fire, and blindspots in the mind
So I spent some time today–when I probably should have been doing something else–reading some of the Travels Of Marco Polo. Oddly, I don’t have a print copy of this in my library–an omission I shall have to correct at some point–but that wasn’t a problem since Project Gutenberg has a decent translation. I wasn’t reading for any particular purpose,… Read more →
