June 27, 2003
I'm Sorry...
What planet did you say you're from?
"This is a great chicken, a friendly chicken, a chicken that is ready for a relationship," said Kat Brown, deputy director of the shelter.Gravy and roast potatoes make a good relationship.
Oh yes, here.
(via Fark)
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June 26, 2003
One Day
One day I will write the perfect post. Every word will be both a geek-culture reference and a literary allusion, and also a relevant link to another blog. It will form a perfect bricktext at 72 columns, with acrostics on both the left and the right. The post will be in the form of a sonnet and the entire thing will be a palindrome.
Also, it will make some kind of sense.
June 25, 2003
Title Fit - I Felt It
The first CD we listened to on our trip was Weird Al Yankovic's new release, Poodle Hat. All good Weird stuff (I particularly like Hardware Store and A Complicated Song), until we got to Bob:
I, man, am regal - a German am IWhat?
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I'm AdamOK, I should have caught it by now, but it's a lot easier seeing the words in print than hearing them sung for the first time. Anyway:
Too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Rise to vote, sirI quite like that one, but:
Do geese see God?
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil starThe light dawned, and it was blinding.
As for those readers (or rather Googlers) who were looking to download Poodle Hat: Just buy the darn thing, willya? The CD contains a bonus Quicktime movie with all the songs, extra mixes, the lyrics (yes, he did say automatic circumcisers) and Weird Al's very own home movies.
If you're a nut for a jar of tuna, you need Poodle Hat.
June 24, 2003
Sesquipedalian
The Eskimos are famous - perhaps apocryphally - for having forty words for snow. Cecil Adams once noted:
In my spare time I have been attempting to construct an Eskimo sentence in my basement, such as will be suitable for the season. I have not get it perfected yet, but it is coming along pretty well, and with a little work it might pass for the genuine article. So far I have: kaniktshaq moritlkatsio atsuniartoq.Since English was invented by, well, the English, one wonders whether it in turn has forty words for rain. Perusing a handy thesaurus, I was able to come up with only 12:When completed, this sentence will proclaim: "Look at all this fucking snow." At present it means: "Observe the snow. It fornicates." This is not poetic, but it is serviceable, and I intend to employ it at the next opportunity.
cloudburst, condensation, deluge, downpour, drizzle, monsoon, precipitation, rain, shower, sleet, spit, sprinkleOther than that there are a few dubious ones like mist (not really rain) or sun shower. (They also offered to take me to the 10 most popular sites for "rain", an offer which I have set aside for a fine day.)
Which is just my round-about way of noting that, irrespective of all the nice things I have said about Sydney's weather, it is raining again.
Harry Who?
It would seem that I have been labouring under a misapprehension and Harry Potter is not in fact the colonel who commanded the 4077th in later episodes of M*A*S*H. He is, it would appear, the hero of an absurdly popular series of books by one J. K. Rowling.
I dropped in today on a friend of mine who runs a bookstore here in Sydney. Not a small bookstore, but not a huge one either. He ordered in 600 copies of the hardcover edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - and sold them all in three days.
Now, I don't begrudge Ms. Rowling her squillions... Alright, I do begrudge her her squillions, but not to the extent that I begrudge Microsoft theirs. But I'm at a loss to explain the popularity of these books. They're not bad, but -
I have a collection of Fritz Leiber's short stories; I bought it because it contained some stories that I'd never seen collected elsewhere. Total world-wide print run of this book was 80 copies. Why? There's no question, none at all, that Fritz Leiber was a better writer than J. K. Rowling. Why wasn't he a squillionaire too?
Leiber's work isn't for children, but a large proportion of Harry Potter readers are adults. I don't mind at all that adults read and enjoy Harry Potter, but why aren't they also reading Dunsany? Or in a similar vein, Neil Gaiman's Stardust, a beautiful and wondrous tale almost flawless in its tribute to Dunsany's style. It's good to see that Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books are being kept in print, but where oh where is The Silver Eggheads?
Why, if adults find they enjoy fantasy, are they not reading masters of the weird and wonderful like Tim Powers and Michael Shea? Why not Lois Bujold, who can create characters who sometimes seem more real than my own family, or C. J. Cherryh, who writes so well that a hundred pages can pass with no action and you barely notice and care not at all? When will we see a movie version of The Anubis Gates or Nifft the Lean or The Curse of Chalion or Gate of Ivrel?
Why are they not reading Ursula Le Guin? Why not T.H. White? Why not - well, actually, Terry Pratchett is doing pretty well. And Stephen Donaldson - his novels may not appeal to all, but do try his short stories in Daughter of Regals and Reave the Just.
As for me? Well, since I couldn't buy the latest Harry Potter epic, it may be time for me to finish my own novel and maybe, just maybe, make some squillions of my own.
June 23, 2003
Ex Cathedra
This lovely cathedral with its wooden belltower was in, um... Wangaratta, I think.
Yes, Wangaratta.