Helen pointed out that I’ve turned up in one of the NZ blog ranking lists at #51. How odd.
This news prompted me to do an update of the sidebar for the first time in about two years… lots of changes there, some blogs on hiatus have been pulled down, a bunch of new ones added, a new section for people I know doing business on the net (hmm, there’s more I can add there too but another day), and… um… yeah. It is long overdue. I had planned to add alt text to all the links so on mouseover they’d pop up a short description of the blog but didn’t make time for that. I am however pleased that I am finally giving some linky back to some of my regular blogreads.
That said, very few people seem to use the sidebar, judging by my blog stats – and now that I run everything through Bloglines and RSS, I don’t much use it myself. Is the blogroll a thing of the past, a dead feature in todays blog interface? Answers on back of postcard plzkthx.
#51, eh? I understand Teh Publishorz give automatic book deals to everyone in the top 25, so that’s something to work towards.
Review: I Love You, Man (2009)
You want to know one of the worst feelings in the world? Walking out of the cinema after sitting through the credits gags for Paul Rudd-starrer I Love You, Man and seeing your wife on the floor surrounded by worried people. Yeah, that’s down pretty low in the emotional state rankings.
ILYM is a bromantic (zing!) comedy that carefully hits all the beats of the standard rom-com, but sets them between two guys who may or may not end up being friends (SPOILER: they end up being friends). The cinema was pretty hot, and Cal said she wasn’t feeling well and was going to head for the toilets, so I went to join our other moviegoing buddy, Pearce. He’d had to bail on sitting with us because on his other side was one of those guys you really don’t want to sit next to during a comedy. He laughed a lot at the comedy beats that weren’t really laugh-out-loud funny, and made I-don’t-know-what noises at the comedy beats that were actual LOLers. I don’t blame Pearce for bailing, because this movie was setting the guy off regularly. ILYM delivers some good gags, some real pearlers, but really that’s not the main appeal here. The charm of the movie is, in fact, its charm. Paul Rudd is great, all the more so for wrapping his everyday-guy persona around markers that would normally be signals of deviance in a Hollywood movie – he gets on way better with women than men, he’s not into drinking too much alcohol, and he liked Chocolat. Jason Segel as The Friend is even better, working his trademark overlong bro-hugs and expressive shoulders into a character who is just plain likeable, even when he’s being annoying. (And to its credit, the film knows exactly when he’s being annoying.) So we stayed through the extended gags in the credits, good fun but inessential, and went out of the cinema and I was hoping that Cal would be all right, and then I saw her on the floor, sitting in a bit of a daze, surrounded by people. I tell you what, that’s not a feeling you want. And I still sort of feel that I should have walked her out of the cinema to the toilet when she said she wasn’t feeling well, even though I know that really there was no call to do that, and it wasn’t neglectful of me to sit down and watch the credits and laugh a bit more at Jon Favreau’s minor role as the mean guy, and Andy Samberg as the cool gay younger brother, and to consider how the perfect RomCom ending itself served to highlight the hidden complexities of male friendship.
Cal’s okay – of course she is or this would be a very different blog post – it was just the heat, we figure, she fainted and was still woozy for a while. A nurse and her boyfriend who were also in the cinema had taken charge and called an ambulance so we all waited around until they came, and the officers ran a whole battery of tests and gave her the thumbs up. So that was good. She’s okay. The nurse and her boyfriend, it turned out, were sitting right behind Pearce and the Weird Laughing Guy and when Pearce got up to move they figured he just hated the movie. So did Cal, actually, because he leaned over and said to her “I have to get out of here” or something like that, but he just went and sat up the front. He enjoyed the movie. So did I. It will not rock your world, it isn’t a stunningly clever comedy of manners, but it is some good laughs and good times and it delivers with sincerity, the guy friendship felt genuine and even more surprising the romance between Rudd’s character and his fiancee felt lovely and honest too. It was just a nice film to watch. I recommend it. But if as the credits roll your wife says she isn’t feeling well, go out into the lobby with her, just to make sure she’s okay. The closing gags are good fun but seriously, you don’t want to laugh away and then walk out and realize your wife has been down on the floor without you there to help. That’s a pretty uncool way to end your night watching this three-stars-out-of-five, maybe-three-and-half-stars movie.
Post-Frustration Linky
Because nothing soothes the throat like linky.
Archive of gay-themed paperback covers. I love the cover copy on the eponymous book: “Back when men were men… more or less.”
Did I ever post this? The Bourne Identity was a TV series in the 60s called Coronet Blue. Well, near enough. See also Wikipedia entry for the series. That’s the kind of classic oddity I’d like to see on DVD.
Awkward Family Photos!
Sexist advertisements from when those womenfolk knew their place
From svend via talula: Things you should have seen on the net. Which means I have finally seen this agonizing clip:Boom goes the dynamite. Oh, man.
And finally… the BoHe-Man Rhapsody
Frustration Post (2)
I am pleased to report that after many hours of restarts, installs, uninstalls, variant drivers, permissions settings, IT addresses and cable connections, I have successfully restored my computer to the functionality it had before I tried to make the scanner work.
Hurrah! Who really needs a scanner anyway!
(No I haven’t given up on the scanner. I have given up on the manufacturer’s standard driver software, which seems to be clashing with some other setting somewhere. Pondering next step.)
Man, I’m really blogging like it’s hot this week. Ooh yeah.
Frustration Post
8pm: “Hmm. That’s interesting. The scanner gives me an error message and doesn’t operate. I wonder why?”
10pm: “What do you mean my printer/scanner model number doesn’t exist? I’m reading it right off the plastic casing!”
1am: “What do you mean you can’t see the printer any more? It’s right there in the other window!”
3am: “What do you mean you can’t shut down? How can a computer forget how to shut down?”
*deep breaths*
Battle will be resumed this evening.
Man on Wire (2008)
This post is to encourage you: do not hesitate. When the chance arises, watch this film.
This film is about a dude who walked on a high wire between the Twin Towers in NYC back in the 70s. It’s one a lot of people have been talking about, and it has been universally praised. I’m joining in that chorus of good words. And I say this knowing that the overwhelming thumbs-up completely failed to motivate me to watch this film. It was Cal who brought it home to watch when she wasn’t feeling well, and only then did I realize how true the positive word had been.
I was talking about it afterwards (the thing about this film is that you have to talk about it afterwards, it’s hard not to) and the person I was talking too wondered how such a thing could be done; how you could move from the roof of the tallest building in the world, to shift your weight on to a wire above empty space. How could you possibly take that first step?
The first step is talked about vividly in the film – the wire-walker remembers it very clearly. But the bigger question of how he could take that step, he doesn’t address, in fact none of those involved do, not outright. But this question animates the film. Everything you see and hear contributes to a comprehensive answer. By the end, you understand exactly how he could take that step; in fact, you realize that there’s no way he could not.
So: seek this fillum out and give it a good, solid watch. It’s hilarious and hair-raising and it will hook you. It’s great. And afterwards you’ll want to talk about it.
Writing Update – April into May
Plan to write twelve short stories this year is, predictably, falling behind the curve, but not fatally so.
Two stories completed to a point I can send them places without significant shame.
One completed to a point that I think it is unsalvageable and probably need to pretend it never happened.
One completed to a good draft stage, need to type it up and fire it out to helpful volunteer readers.
One in progress.
Comic meetings are still happening. That is taking a very long time though.
(In fact, major writing project at present = thank-you cards…)
[Last writing update]
Doomed Linky
Trek: photos from 70s Trek conventions. The audio commentary for each photo is worth listening to.
Trek: make customized paper stand-ups of Star Trek characters, Intended for roleplayers but just fun to play with!
Print ads for classic computers. Great! (Trek: Shatner with grinning endorsement in several ads.)
Boys know that girls like puppies. But what breed of puppy has the most pulling power? Here is a handy graph. Full details of the experiment are here but I can’t bring myself to watch the videos because I think this is likely to be creepier than I want it to be.
Helen R linkied this a while back: the baby name wizard, which tracks the use of names in the U.S. since 1880, by gender. My name, Morgan, runs at a relatively constant frequency for boys – but it doesn’t show up as a girl’s name until the ’70s, then explodes to massively outnumber the boy Morgans. This is why.
And finally… how the heck have I never seen the demented genius that is the DOOM comic? Encyc Dramatica is, of course, all over it, featuring a mind-blowing/mind-numbing dramatic reading of the comic. RIP AND TEAR! RIP AND TEAR!
[edited – last minute update linky:] Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: the Board Game!
You might as well know
I’ve been sprung as an operative for the Illuminati.
I’ll have to wait for my Bavarian masters to get back to me about how to handle things from here. Perhaps, since I think the war is won, we can shed our outer skins and walk around as proud reptiles at last?
And following up my previous claim (in comments) that scientists who don’t accept the AGW hypothesis are outliers: this survey of over 10,000 geoscientists showed over 80% support for AGW. More nuance in the article:
climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 and 64 percent respectively believing in human involvement. Doran compared their responses to a recent poll showing only 58 percent of the public thinks human activity contributes to global warming.
Filament – the thinking woman’s crumpet
[I’m advertising at you again – what can I say, except that friends are doing cool stuff.]
My friend Suraya is launching a print magazine. This, in itself, is a sign of madness in today’s world, but thankfully hers is a beautiful madness, and a clever one too.
Filament magazine is “72 quarterly pages of intelligent thought and beautiful men”. It offers smart articles and sexy pictures aimed at straight women. Here’s the website, which is worksafe provided your work doesn’t mind topless men and the word “erotic”.
It’s likely not gonna be available in shops (unless some enterprising indie mag shops chase Suraya down and ask to carry it, I guess) – but you can grab it easily using Paypal. Looksee. And if you act fast you can pick it up cheap! Reduced prices until the end of Wednesday (U.K. time?)!
It sounds like a great idea for a mag to me (speaking as someone who thinks an awful lot about the magazine as medium but is profoundly disappointed whenever he stands in front of a magazine sales rack). I’ve put my money where my mouth is and signed up for a copy, even though (as the alert among you may have noticed) i’d be a pretty poor excuse for a straight woman. But don’t take my word for it: terrifying internet prophet Warren Ellis has also lent his support.
If it sounds like your flavour of crumpet, you know what to do.