2012 — 8 September: Saturday
Well, I have to admit "The Hunger Games" was a surprisingly effective piece of cinema.1 It was a surprise to see Woody Harrelson and Lenny Kravitz, that's for sure. I've not seen the director's "Seabiscuit" but I certainly have good memories of "Pleasantville". And I've also long felt that teen / young adult fiction has been the vehicle for some of the best writing around in the last thirty years or so. Personally, for sheer entertainment, I'd certainly pick that 'genre' — if that's a fair label — over anything that's appeared on the Booker list of late; not that anything on that list generally even approaches the calibre of a Dickens, or an Austen, or a Trollope.
Impossible though I suspect it would be, I'd love to see Neil Gaiman's take on "Sandman" up on the big screen. Anyway, let's just hope I don't have too many nightmares! "Hunger" was every bit as unsettling as Gattaca back in 1997. (I've bought that on both LaserDisc and DVD without ever bothering to watch either as I still have the cinema experience of watching it seared in my memory.)
Resuming...
... a mere five hours later, on a cool and brightly autumnal morning: no nightmares, though still plenty of stuff churning around in my head. I watched the majority of the "extras" on the second Blu-ray before heading for bed. Fascinating. (I also enjoyed the first four episodes of "Big Bang Theory, season #5" — that will make a nice snack from time to time.) One of Chuck Lorre's vanity cards made me chortle more than most...
There's a potential literary spat brewing in the comments now attached to Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia. I had to smile at the idea of an author not being regarded as an authoritative source on his own work. (Link.)
It's been a morning...
... of somewhat mixed blessings. But at least I've now got some locally-sourced reading material to catch up on. It will be interesting to contrast Jenny Diski's view of that now-distant decade with the variant I read by Francis Wheen many moons ago:
However, my chum Jonathan is closing down his Arcade bookshop after 25 years (and his wife tells me she's convinced Boots will simply knock their way through to expand still further). They have already seen off the laundromat that housed the only machines able to tackle large continental quilts. Generally speaking, I've always found more of lasting interest on the well-stocked shelves of an independent bookshop than those of a pharmaceuticals supplier. (Of course, my tune changes if I have a headache.)
Having ordered...
... a replacement patio door and window it behooves me to tidy up and clear a working space in the vicinity (that's at the PC end of the living room). So another tedious exercise in local entropic diminution now beckons, sooner rather than later. I just wonder how clutter accumulates so relentlessly. No matter. Just gotta get on with it. At least it's no longer so hot and sticky.
I love it when...
... people attempt to encapsulate Corporate executive greed into a simple graphic:
I may yet see if I can track down a graphic I remember that showed the human population marching in serried ranks past a given point, sorted by their "wealth", with the rich chaps bringing up the rear. The fun part was that height was shown as proportional to wealth so, for most of the graphic, all you could see was billions of tiny ants scurrying past. Then, at the back of the line came just a few lumbering giants, with their well-groomed heads literally in the clouds.
The chap who produces the...
... fantastic NoScript add-on that helps keep me out of trouble with the Firefox web browser has a blog on which he's currently hosting an amusing quotation from Bill Maher's very entertaining film "Religulous". I find it impossible to disagree with the sentiments expressed, though they did get Mr Maher into more than a wee mite of trouble with our many and varied religiously-inclined brethren. Source and snippet:
The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the
equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn't learn a lot about it. Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag
about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and
destruction...
The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that's what man needs to be,
considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.
"There's n'owt," as they say, "so queer as folk."