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6 Bits Before BedTime...
Oct. 6th, 2012 12:04 am1. Being snacked on again by damn mosquito. I might as well adopt it and give it a name. Considering I can't kill it, not because I don't want to, but it eludes capture. I'm torn between the names Angel and Dexter.
2. Amusing and somewhat ironic fandom cross-over news by way of Entertainment Weekly...Danny Strong is has been hired to write the two part film Mockinjay. This is the finale of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series. Yes, Jonathan from Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been hired to write the film version of Katniss Everdeen's arc.
3. Lovely day today. Warm. Sunny. Blue Skies. Took the day off. Have Columbus Day off too.
Decided to give myself a nice four day breather from the old workplace. Getting burned out.
Need the break. So took a walk. Bought some food. A bottle of Avanti, Pinot Noir, Wine from Spain. And chocolate.
( WW and Menopause. If I were a man? I'd skip this. Just saying. )
4. Wet-behind the ears blogger who is getting paid to rant about pop culture (and another media onzine reviewer who gets paid to write reviews...nit-picking on Stephen Moffat's Sherlock) are reminding me of how back in the day many a viewer considered Joss Whedon racist and misogynistic in his writing just as many a viewer today considers Moffat and JJ Abrhams to be. In short, it's all about limited perspective folks or myopic pov's. I think, we often fall into the trap of believing what offends us and how we view something is the only way to view it?
Example: I look at the paint - it is clearly white. My brother looks at it - it is clearly cream. This wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't run out of paint and could not find the same brand. Hence the two and a half hour long fight back in the early 1990s regarding which brand of white/creme paint to use to paint our parent's basement. Fan fights remind me of this argument.
Perhaps a better example: Talked to Aunt K, who really likes the new tv series Revolution. (I still think it is a weak and somewhat cheesy Hunger Games rip-off, but to each their own - and she can't watch or read Hunger Games due to the violent content. She's a school nurse that deals with abused children.) She certainly didn't see the racism or the classism. (It should be noted that my Aunt came from Working Class roots, and has worked with the underprivileged and non-white children her entire life.) I can see these things, although I don't think it's nearly as blatant as people think any more than I thought it was that blatant in Whedon's work or Moffat's or RT Davies. You have to squint a bit. People, I've learned, tend to zero in on things that bug them. Like I zeroed-in on the scientific improbablities of Revolution and Last Resort, which I thought more obvious, even my Aunt saw those but she dismissed them, because hello, television.
( the cult of fandom and how we interpret art )
5. Speaking of JK Rowling (I refer to her above, if you read that whole bit) - I flipped through her new book Casual Vacancy at the book store the other day. Read two reviews of it. One in Entertainment Weekly and one in NY Times. Both were not that complimentary. EW said it starts out well enough, crisp and sharp humor, but derails into preachy doom and gloom. While one of the book store clerks (at the indie book store) loved the book. I looked at it, first page, middle pages, end and noted that JK Rowling has fallen in love with the semi-colon and the coma. She likes to write these long rambling sentences with lots of commas and semi-colons. She also loves to describe things in a sardonic or wryly bizarre manner. (Methinks she's been reading a lot of Ronald Dahl, with a bit of PD Wodehouse thrown in. But unfortunately no EB White.) After glancing through it, I thought the same thing I did when I flipped through Stephanie Meyer's Twilight and Anne Rice and Stephen King's latest, what has happened to the publishing industry? Aren't there copy-editors any longer? Hello? Although...I'm guessing Ernest Hemingway most likely thought the same thing when he read James Joyce's Ulysess. So this may have always been the case? Granted Joyce is a better writer. I also thought...whoa, Rowling's really likes to use semi-colons. Every sentence had them. I had to hunt for paragraphs that didn't. The one's that didn't? Had a lot of commas. People? Don't do this. Rowling's is a name author, she can get away with it. She could write a telephone book and people would buy it.
That said, I do applaud her for continuing to blast the British political system and caste system - which she's been doing since Harry Potter. What? You didn't know that beneath all that magic and wizardry was a wry social critique of Western Culture and class system, not to mention British Politics? Granted she's no Ron Dahl, but it is there. Bit preachy in the latter novels, which may explain why people didn't like them as well.
6. Finally, this link made me laugh my head off this morning:
Mitt Romney Fired Big Bird.
Also...apparently Canada's Maple Syrup Reserve Got Stolen. Up until now, I didn't know Canada had a maple syrup reserve let alone that such a thing would be worth 30 million.
2. Amusing and somewhat ironic fandom cross-over news by way of Entertainment Weekly...Danny Strong is has been hired to write the two part film Mockinjay. This is the finale of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series. Yes, Jonathan from Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been hired to write the film version of Katniss Everdeen's arc.
3. Lovely day today. Warm. Sunny. Blue Skies. Took the day off. Have Columbus Day off too.
Decided to give myself a nice four day breather from the old workplace. Getting burned out.
Need the break. So took a walk. Bought some food. A bottle of Avanti, Pinot Noir, Wine from Spain. And chocolate.
( WW and Menopause. If I were a man? I'd skip this. Just saying. )
4. Wet-behind the ears blogger who is getting paid to rant about pop culture (and another media onzine reviewer who gets paid to write reviews...nit-picking on Stephen Moffat's Sherlock) are reminding me of how back in the day many a viewer considered Joss Whedon racist and misogynistic in his writing just as many a viewer today considers Moffat and JJ Abrhams to be. In short, it's all about limited perspective folks or myopic pov's. I think, we often fall into the trap of believing what offends us and how we view something is the only way to view it?
Example: I look at the paint - it is clearly white. My brother looks at it - it is clearly cream. This wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't run out of paint and could not find the same brand. Hence the two and a half hour long fight back in the early 1990s regarding which brand of white/creme paint to use to paint our parent's basement. Fan fights remind me of this argument.
Perhaps a better example: Talked to Aunt K, who really likes the new tv series Revolution. (I still think it is a weak and somewhat cheesy Hunger Games rip-off, but to each their own - and she can't watch or read Hunger Games due to the violent content. She's a school nurse that deals with abused children.) She certainly didn't see the racism or the classism. (It should be noted that my Aunt came from Working Class roots, and has worked with the underprivileged and non-white children her entire life.) I can see these things, although I don't think it's nearly as blatant as people think any more than I thought it was that blatant in Whedon's work or Moffat's or RT Davies. You have to squint a bit. People, I've learned, tend to zero in on things that bug them. Like I zeroed-in on the scientific improbablities of Revolution and Last Resort, which I thought more obvious, even my Aunt saw those but she dismissed them, because hello, television.
( the cult of fandom and how we interpret art )
5. Speaking of JK Rowling (I refer to her above, if you read that whole bit) - I flipped through her new book Casual Vacancy at the book store the other day. Read two reviews of it. One in Entertainment Weekly and one in NY Times. Both were not that complimentary. EW said it starts out well enough, crisp and sharp humor, but derails into preachy doom and gloom. While one of the book store clerks (at the indie book store) loved the book. I looked at it, first page, middle pages, end and noted that JK Rowling has fallen in love with the semi-colon and the coma. She likes to write these long rambling sentences with lots of commas and semi-colons. She also loves to describe things in a sardonic or wryly bizarre manner. (Methinks she's been reading a lot of Ronald Dahl, with a bit of PD Wodehouse thrown in. But unfortunately no EB White.) After glancing through it, I thought the same thing I did when I flipped through Stephanie Meyer's Twilight and Anne Rice and Stephen King's latest, what has happened to the publishing industry? Aren't there copy-editors any longer? Hello? Although...I'm guessing Ernest Hemingway most likely thought the same thing when he read James Joyce's Ulysess. So this may have always been the case? Granted Joyce is a better writer. I also thought...whoa, Rowling's really likes to use semi-colons. Every sentence had them. I had to hunt for paragraphs that didn't. The one's that didn't? Had a lot of commas. People? Don't do this. Rowling's is a name author, she can get away with it. She could write a telephone book and people would buy it.
That said, I do applaud her for continuing to blast the British political system and caste system - which she's been doing since Harry Potter. What? You didn't know that beneath all that magic and wizardry was a wry social critique of Western Culture and class system, not to mention British Politics? Granted she's no Ron Dahl, but it is there. Bit preachy in the latter novels, which may explain why people didn't like them as well.
6. Finally, this link made me laugh my head off this morning:
Mitt Romney Fired Big Bird.
Also...apparently Canada's Maple Syrup Reserve Got Stolen. Up until now, I didn't know Canada had a maple syrup reserve let alone that such a thing would be worth 30 million.