Archive for Uncategorized
Hypochondria is a confusing word
I was going to go into this in the last post, but I realised it would be too long and distracting, so for all you etymology lovers out there, here it is.
I watched the Watchmen
Finally! And it was… Ok.
I didn’t hate it. Some of the dialogue was great (although a lot of it was poorly delivered) and the art direction was amazing, but these are attributable to the comic.
The movie was certainly the most faithful adaptation of Moore’s work I’ve seen, but is that enough? You can trace over the Mona Lisa and produce something almost as good as the original, but will it have that je ne sais quoi that keeps the staff of the Louvre in new shoes and crème patisseries?
I felt that instead of adding to a great book (or taking a story and creating something new but enjoyable), the movie lost a lot of the grittiness that leaves first-time Watchmen readers reeling. The cold war, post-‘Nam anger and 80s yuppie bleakness are reduced to freeze-frame images and an artfully choreographed riot.
I enjoyed seeing frames from the comics writ large in technicoloured, dolbied glory. However, the fact that Snyder reproduced them with such fetish but still changed the ending made me a little fidgety (plus I’m bad with long movies, attention span measured in diehards (SI unit)).
On top of that, the soundtrack was jarringly eclectic, and a lot of the performances were dialed in, especially Malin Ackermen and Mathew Goode, although Jackie Earle Haley redressed the balance.
Come to think of it, lacklustre omigod-I’m-so-bored-we’ve-been-green-screening-for-12-frigging-weeks acting was my main complaint with 300. Maybe Snyder is just really bad with people.
So yeah, not a bad effort, but not the film to make Alan Moore accept that screenplays from books are a valid medium.
Quick update
Singapore has:
• Sex shops
• Hookers (lots of)
• Durex vibrating cock rings for sale in Carrefour (trust the French)
I now feel much better about bringing the big purple dildo into the country.
Incidentally, Durex modestly calls its vibrating cock rings Play Vibrations and markets ‘em without mentioning the word cock, or even penis, once.
This is a bit silly, but is presumably necessary if you want to get stocked in supermarkets. A lazy web search hasn’t thrown up any evidence that they are reaching their target audience (slightly embarrassed 16 to 24-year-olds apparently), but the company was, and still is, growing.
If this equates to better, braver sex lives for more people, it can only be a good thing.
(Viva la revolución)
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck
Just had my second panic attack. The first was on Thursday. They were both really, really horrible.
Proper fight or flight stuff; shaking, sweating, stomach-churning. I haven’t yet figured out how best to deal with them.
It reminds me of the waves of nausea I used to get when I was coming up on a pill. The only thing you can do is breathe through it and wait for it to pass.
This is loads less fun than pilling.
:sadface:
All the mail I never sent
A plug for some friends: All the mail I never sent.
It’s a Post Secret styled stone, we’re gonna see if it gathers moss.
The idea – check your email draft folder for mail you’re really glad you never sent, or get something off your chest by penning a mail you’d never write in real life.
Then post it anonymously online for the delectation and delight of others. Simple!
Weddingness
I’ve added our wedding ceremony to the pages on the right. I’m interested to hear what people think, as writing it from scratch was surprisingly difficult.
There was a bit of a tendency to slip into pompous, VIth form essay language, but that wasn’t the feel we wanted, plus we didn’t want to sound like we were taking the piss out of regular ceremonies. I think we pulled it back though, and the tone on the day worked well.
Sam is mostly to thank for this – he was our unofficial officiant, and his delivery was perfect. He has the added helpful traits of being an excellent writer, ridiculously well read and an opera director, so he contributed lots of the content, kept a critical eye on the rest, and knew how it would work as a piece of performance art.
Although we did resist his suggestion to read the crazy Dylan Thomas letter where he talks about albatrosses and being naked.
All aboard the hell-bus
I went to church yesterday. I’m surprised I didn’t burst into flames when I walked through the door, but there you go.
I like going to church. There’s something comforting about it, I think because it reminds me of my childhood. It also makes me feel intellectually superior, sitting in my atheist tower watching the superstitious rituals of the noble savages.
Apparently being atheist could mean I actually am smarter, rather than just feeling smarter: clicky yon. I learned this from Dawkins in the God Delusion, but he rather naughtily doesn’t mention that this study (I think there is a Danish one too) was self-published and non-peer-reviewed, so make of it what you will.
The service yesterday was long – nearly two hours – because Jonty’s family are evangelist-flavoured so there’s a lot of singing. I got a bit bored, although one of the kids in the band looked something between Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood, so I entertained myself for the last half hour contemplating the ways one might initiate a young and pious boy into a life beyond the lord.
Blasphemy makes me horny as hell.
Coinkydinky
After I wrote the post below, I sat down with my cup of tea and my comic book and read this
Beyond Bou Chougga is a dreadful place, beside the yellow waters of the sluggish Zaire, where acre after acre of the ground is choked with sickly lilies and the clouds hang fixed within the dismal sky, and do not move. The region is called Silence, and in the days it took us to pass through it we were all of us far too dispirited to speak.
It’s from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman’s New Traveller’s Almanac. God bless you Mr Moore.
Best-selling books
I am utterly fascinated by this list. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been poring over it for hours.
I’m quite surprised that Don Quixote is the best selling work of fiction in the world, although it is considered to be one of the first novels so it has had a lot of time to get to the top. (I’m graciously allowing religious tracts a category outside of fiction, the Bible and the Koran are both quasi-historical, quasi-fictional in my mind.)
The Pilgrim’s Progress is the second fictional work, and again a very early one so perhaps it has simply had more time to be printed and sold. Not so The Count of Monte Cristo, which takes third place despite being a relative upstart from the 19th century.
The Harry Potter entries are quite interesting as they don’t correlate with the order in which they were published. I would expect, especially given the Cervantes argument, that the Philosopher’s Stone would come highest, followed by the Chamber of Secrets – so far, so good.
But then it falls apart. Instead of coming third, the Prisoner of Azkaban is only fifth best-selling of the series, while the Half-blood Prince jumps from sixth published to fourth best-selling.
Does this mean, assuming numbers sold correlate with numbers read, that some people read the first two then thought ‘oh screw it, I don’t really care what happens’ until having a change of heart four books later? Strange, indeed.
