Trivia that matter
Many people declare that fall is their favorite season. I’ve never understood why. Sure, there are pleasant Indian summer days when you can read Keats and admire fall foliage, but it always ends in cold and desolation. This year winter came very early. The maples never reached full intensity, and other late fall trees were still mostly green when the January weather arrived. Where’s global warming when you need it?
(Illustration from the Brickmuppet. Title ripped off from Aliens in This World.)
I just discovered that Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters was made into a movie. It’s not the Discworld novel I would have chosen — Granny Weatherwax is my least-favorite of Pratchett’s recurring characters, and I’d have preferred a good adaptation of The Light Fantastic ((The title was deliberately chosen to annoy Robbo.)) — but it’s still funnier than most alleged comedies. Chrstopher Lee is a resonant Death, though his voice doesn’t have “all the warmth and colour of an iceberg.” Although Wyrd Sisters is animated, Nanny Ogg’s abundant presence renders it not quite suitable for children. She sings a bit of her hedgehog song, too.
There are some things in the movie that I don’t remember from the book.
Update: It turns out that a lot of Pratchett has been dramatized, and much of it is available and inexpensive — downright cheap, sometimes, if you buy used. I just ordered these:
The Colour of Magic (which also adapts The Light Fantastic ((“You know when we were flying and I was worried we might hit something in the storm and you said that the only thing we could possibly hit at this height was a cloud stuffed with rocks?”
“Well?”
“How did you know?”)) )
There’s also a Discworld calendar, but since I already have four other 2015 calendars ordered, I think I’ll pass.
(From episode six of Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu.)
Good question.
I’ve never been that interested in yachting, but I could change my mind. (Via Steven.)
I’ve never any interest in football, European or American. Perhaps I’ve missed out. (Via the Brickmuppet.)
Perhaps not. (Via the Borderline Boy.)
So the Brickmuppet is suspicious?
Update: Possibly of relevance:
Or perhaps not.
Just as the technological singularity is the point where technological change will happen so rapidly it cannot be seen beyond, the Neuman Singularity is the point where reality becomes ridiculous faster than it can be satirized.
(The “Neuman” referred to is Alfred E., not John von.)
The webmasters of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology know their Aristotle.
If you have Sitemeter on your site, get rid of it. Now.
While going through old pictures, I came across this from a Renaissance Faire a decade ago. As threats go, that’s fairly mild. More frightening are promises to give stray children sugary snacks and free kittens.
In the modern state there now exist only two parties: citizens and bureaucracy.
It’s time to order next year’s calendars. I found a number of possibilites here, notably Girls und Panzer and Hozuki no Reitetsu. Others of note include Cardcaptor Sakura, World Conquest Zvezda Plot, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Natsume Yujincho‘s Nyanko and the third Madoka Magica movie.
There’s plenty else there — lots of cheesecake, hundred of dogs, Mt. Fuji, Naruto and similar franchises, all the usual stuff. There are also curiosities like the Karel Capek calendar, which is about tea, not robots or newts; the lifestyles disease prevention calendar; and, the maritime self-defense force calendars, both male and female.
More curious costumes here.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
*****
Madan no Ou to Vanadis is doing a lot of things right and is probably the best show currently airing. Nevertheless, there are still mistakes, such as the use of swords in an era of plate armor.
Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s easier just to refer you to the short stories that are available online.
Nearly everything Lafferty wrote is long out of print, which is a scandal. If you ever spot one of his collections in a used book store, grab it.
Some websites devoted to the cranky old man from Tulsa:
I want a death and resurrection of the thing
The Ants of God Are Queer Fish
The R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page
Lafferty, incidentally, is partly responsible for the career of Neil Gaiman:
Lafferty was his favorite author in the world, he said. “His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own —a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable,” Gaiman wrote of Lafferty, in an introduction to the story in Martin H. Greenberg’s My Favorite Fantasy Story. “The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice.”
When he was 19, Gaiman dug Lafferty’s address out of the back of a library book and wrote to him, asking for advice on becoming an author. Tulsa, thanks to Lafferty, is for him a place of literary magic. “He told me how to become an author, and his advice was very good advice, and so I did. It left me quite certain that the finest literary advice in the world came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for it did in my case,” Gaiman said.
It’s been a mediocre fall so far here, but there is some color out there if you look for it.
There are all kinds of strange things on YouTube. For instance, this recording of Erik Satie’s notorious “Vexations.” Normally a complete performance runs from 14 to 24 hours. Nicholas Horvath plays the 840 repeats in less than ten hours, which is blazingly fast for a piece marked “très lent.” (No, I’m not counting them, and I don’t expect to listen to the whole thing.) On another occasion, Horvath took 35 hours to play the piece. That performance was probably closer to the proper tempo.
Not every pianist who attempts a solo “Vexations” succeeds. From The New Yorker:
An Australian pianist named Peter Evans abandoned a 1970 solo performance after five hundred and ninety-five repetitions because he claimed he was being overtaken by evil thoughts and noticed strange creatures emerging from the sheet music. “People who play it do so at their own peril,” he said afterward.
… is that only half of the candidates lose.
Update: An interesting footnote to yesterday.
Update II: A footnote to the footnote.
Today it’s Tom Magliozzi, half of the last radio show worth listening to. I don’t have a car, but it didn’t matter.
A few more pictures from this weekend. Click to greatly embiggenify.
I hoped to take a picture of Dracula at the orchid show today, but there weren’t any there this time. However, I did find a black orchid for Basil St. John.
