2013 — 28 November: Thursday
An email from a chum proves that if you only wait long enough1 even William Goldman's 1973 fantasy novel "The Princess Bride" eventually re-surfaces (like a comet) as an Amazon Kindle ebook 99p Daily Deal.
I bought the Rob Reiner "major movie" of it on LaserDisc in January 1989 for £22, too. That displaced my VHS tape, and was displaced in turn by the DVD I imported in 2000. And although one naturally doesn't wish to be thought even slightly obsessive about such things, I still adore the film. The fact that it was Robin Wright's first — she was 21 — has no bearing on the matter, obviously, though it certainly didn't prejudice me against it.
I was tickled pink 22 years later by the reversible font used for its title on the cover artwork in its latest (Blu-ray) incarnation. That was my birthday treat three years ago. I must be getting old, Christa! :-)
There's an...
... amusing juxtaposition here:
I don't know about you but I rarely find passages of sexual description "redundant" in otherwise bloodless books. In fact, a surprising number of the modern novels in my possession happen to fall open at redundant passages of sexual description, almost as if those pages have been read and reread just to check how perfunctory they are — especially the volumes I owned as a randy, bookish teenager. So, I'd like to thank all of those novelists and sleazy science-fiction writers who braved a turn in the critical stocks to share their visions with me and my fellow lonely nerds.
I want to say that I have never met anyone before who was quite so obviously away inside their own head, seeing the bodies around them as shadows, as source material. That's not true. I have met others, but they have mostly been lonely adolescents, brilliant academics, psychiatric patients, or a combination of the three.
I resent that "sleazy". Although a case could be made against Heinlein, I suppose.
Meanwhile...
... this excellent piece brings to mind some combination of Clarke's much-anthologised SF story "The 9 Billion Names of God" and Ben Ross Schneider's 1974 tales of "Travels in Computerland".
The most irritating thing about watching "Friends" nearly two decades after it was made, by the way, is the string of tantalisingly-familiar but very young-looking guests who pop up. Last night, for random example, Chrissie Hynde showed up for a guitar gig as a "paid professional" at Central Perk (displacing Phoebe), Harry Shearer showed up as a sleazebag who wanted to arm Marcel the monkey and promote his fights, and Arye Gross (medical examiner Perlmutter from "Castle") showed up as a date for Monica. Why irritating? I resent having to resort to IMDB.
Meanwhile, I'm torn between not commenting on BoJo's stupid comments (as reported) on UK IQs, versus not commenting on the National Audit Office's belated realisation that the student loans originally introduced under John Major are difficult to track, versus not commenting on some chap who claims to have discarded a digital wallet stuffed with Bitcoins (or was that "Bitcons"?), versus not commenting on a fatuous bit of "Science/Explainer" on how we can nudge aside asteroids 30 years before they strike the planet. All this and more on the Grauniad's website.
It's always a faint shock...
... when Windows actually does something quite clever, and without any great fuss. I realise I'm very likely the last chap on the planet to discover this but, if you right-click on an empty bit of the desktop (Win8.1 Pro, at least), the bottom option under "New" is "Compressed (zipped) Folder". You can create one of these, and then simply copy files into it by drag and drop. This makes it trivially easy to stuff some separate bits of binary into an email2 as a single attachment. [Pause] No howl: it worked.