This image was apparently made by a pro-Trumper with a poor sense of geography — I guess they thought you could look out from the Canadian Rockies (or Newfoundland, who knows what goes through the brain of MAGA) and see the Matterhorn.
Someone else later added the Canadian goose preparing to launch a devastating rear assault. Don’t ever mess with the gooses.
I’ve been deprived for so long. Our local movie theater has been showing the usual profit-making superhero movies and kids’ shows, so when I saw the announcement that they were showing something outside the norm — a norm I’ve become tired of — I had to go. I had a great time.
Cool. What a surprise! It’s a weirdly beautiful movie. The premise is that a hideously scarred Willem Dafoe fishes up a pregnant suicide (Emma Stone), and he transplants the fetus’s brain into the skull of the woman using fantasy 19th century Frankenstein technology. It’s then about this baby/child growing up in an adult body, and encountering a dream-world version of Europe. She has a super-power, though: as an innocent in an adult body, she discovers she has a button she can press to make herself very, very happy. There’s a lot of sex in the movie. But mainly it’s about discombobulating perspectives and a mind changing and becoming more aware over time against an exotic background. Stone took a lot of risks with this movie, but she pulled it off.
As I was leaving the theater, I was asked what I thought of it. My answer was “Peculiar!” That was high praise.
It was a relief to see a challenging movie in town. Morris residents better see it fast, though: it looks like next week we’re getting Madame Web, a confusing superhero movie tangentially spider-related, and Ordinary Angels, some uplifting dreck made by a Christian production company. I’ll be staying home next weekend.
I have a terrible confession to make, one that may drive away many readers: I am tired of Star Trek. I was a kid when the original series aired, I watched them religiously, I still have nothing but fond memories of it all. By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation rolled around, though, I was at the point where I was watching reruns to mainly groan at the bad science and the cheesy special effects, and ST:TNG didn’t help — more bad acting, more terrible writing, more ludicrous plots written by people who seemed to have more of a background in soap operas than in science fiction. All those other series that were subsequently shat out? I didn’t even watch them.
I know. I should be drummed out of the old SF nerd club. I feel terrible for not being able to share in the pleasure so many people still get out of the series, but you all go right ahead. Have a good time, while I roll my eyes at all the Trek worship.
I would rather see something with a fresh take. Something that is genuinely about ideas, rather than milking a comfortable old story to death.
But still, here’s something I did enjoy: a site that catalogs all the reused props from Star Trek. You need a strange futuristic device on a desk? Add some odd lighting to a CD rack. Glue random geometric shapes together, spray paint them silver, and done–we’ll find a use for it. Rearrange the shapes, you’ve got something new.
Nothing goes to waste. You can use them same props in different series!
Kudos to the props department for their creativity and economy. This I could enjoy reading, even as I’ve lost all interest in the plots of the stories they support.
Alaric was going to take me out to a concert, but I was unable to go. But he got me a nice t-shirt anyway.
That takes me right back to the 1970s.
Since FDotM mentioned how social media can cut into your book-reading time, I thought I’d say that for me, it isn’t true. I can read a book any time I want, and I do. It is my custom to read for an hour before bed, or sometimes over lunch, and I chew through books pretty fast.
Sometimes I pick up trash reads. The latest was one called Pistols: A Deep Sea Thriller (hint: you know it’s going to be a throw-away when they need to include the genre in the title; sometimes you can just look at the cover). It’s totally ridiculous. It’s about stomatopods that are exposed to toxic waste and swim around, snipping people in half and cooking them with high intensity sonic bursts. My favorite part was when the scientist character has to explain why they also have toxic slime, and starts babbling about ubiquitination, before he has done any kind of analysis of tissue, or even seen one of the monsters. Cheesy, but sometimes you need something silly.
I’ve also been on a Madeline Miller kick lately, and that’s definitely not cheesy trash. I recently re-read The Song of Achilles, which was magnificent and nearly made me cry. Circe is also really, really good and well worth your while. I’m going on a collecting trip in the old Lake Agassiz lands up north this weekend, and picked up her short story, Galatea for those moments when I’m not chasing spiders.
See? Being an internet nerd is not incompatible with actively reading for entertainment.
Go ahead. Prove your bookworm cred by telling me all the stuff you read for fun. Don’t be shy, and admit to your popcorn reading as well as your high-brow stuff.
I wonder which one I should present to the students in the wrap-up of my classes next week?
Trudy and Doug (of Oglaf fame) post amusing sketches on their Patreon sometimes. This one is high art, it made me laugh and cry at the same time.
