Author: Simone

WETA is conspiring against me, professionally.
Normally they are a tremendous help. More often than not, they get me through the workday.
But twice already this afternoon they have played pieces that are so beautiful/stirring/heartstring-catching that I can’t work with them in the background. Have to stop working and only listen for a bit.
Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor (from the Concertos a Cinque, Opus 9), and now Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
Lalala! (Or more accurately, “La, lalalala, lalalalala-la-la-laaaaaa, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dee-deedledy-diddledy-diddledum, dum-dum-duuuum…”)
It’s good, though, really. Because of joy.

Netflix thinks I’ll enjoy Strong Bad’s Emails. Apparently the Netflix recommendations algorithm (or possibly “group of recommendations elves”) has created a correlation between “people who like Strong Bad”, “people who like Eddie Izzard” (okay, with you so far), and … “people who like Rivers and Tides.”

I mean to say: “Quoi?”

Now, as you likely know (if you know me), I like Strong Bad’s Emails very much indeed. Overall I’d give ’em a 5-star rating on the Netflix scale. Same goes for most of the Izzard oeuvre (well, Circle gets a 4 because the audience was dense, and I kinda hated the film Circus, but that had nothing to do with Eddie). Andy Goldsworthy is off-the-charts my favorite artist. I know that many of my friends like all three works/artists/oevres very much as well. I’m not disputing that there could be some significant Venn Diagram overlap between fans. It just seems like a spurious leap for the Netflix algorelves to say that since I liked Rivers and Tides, I’ll like Strong Bad.

Sorta like saying “We know you loved The Terminator; why not try A Room With A View?” Or “Hey, you like foie gras, right? Try this rhubarb!” It’s true, I love them both, but I certainly wouldn’t use one as a basis for recommending the other.

I’m feeling oversensitive today about people not adequately announcing spoilers. And being as I’m hideously over-caffeinated and thus not qualified to do any important work, I’m going to rant for a bit.

For cryin’ out loud, people! Not everyone has seen everything you have seen! Thanks to DVD, I might be watching something tonight for the first time that you saw three years ago and think everyone already knows about. And some of us like to keep our suspense, well, suspenseful! It’s gotten to the point where I’m afraid to look at the cover of Entertainment Weekly in case I accidentally find out something about Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica (which btw Netflix still has listed with an “unknown” release date, the slackers).

Here’s an example of how I want to see content about a show/movie/novel/amusement park ride/other artform/experience where suspense is important:

*****SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *****

This post contains a spoiler about Season 2 of the HBO series Rome.

Honest. If you haven’t seen Season 2 of Rome but you think you might one day, don’t read any further.

Keep scrolling. There’s a spoiler down there somewhere.

Seriously. I’m pissed off about the increasing lack of spoiler alerts. It’s not like it’s a new idea. On Usenet you’d have been flamed eyebrowless for stuff people feel free to post now, spoiler-wise. (You kids today, and your fancy browsers. Get off my lawn.)

*****SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *****

There’s a spoiler right below this.

Okay: Season 2 has been less enjoyable for me to watch so far not just because of the overall more somber/desperate nature of the circumstances the characters and the republic find themselves in, but because I accidentally found out a couple of months ago (while looking for some pretty general information about Indira Varma) that [here’s the spoiler!] Vorenus’ children didn’t die at the hands of Erastes Fulmen in the first episode [that was it. The spoiler, I mean.]

So I was completely deprived of the major suspense-driver for the first few episodes of the season.

Boo.

P.S. Someone ought to cast Simon Woods and Paul Bettany as brothers.

I found this product for the first time at a Sheetz (which was sorta odd; I associate Sheetz more with Combos and Diet Mountain Dew than with strangely up-market flavored water).
I liked it. Makes a nice mid-road-trip beverage. Pick-me-up-ish without the hissy caffeine vibration, the sugar rush/crash, or the red dye dementia.
And then I went camping for two weeks. When it was hot, I drank this, and became less cranky. When it was muddy, I wished for a case of it so I could use it to wash my muddy little feet, in part to make life more pleasant for my grovelling minions, but mostly because I’m a sybarite.
I’ve added it to the list of must-have supplies for next year: 3 jars of pickles, 24 little cans of V8, a case of Gerolsteiner Sprudel, string cheese, and minty, minty water.

[1] Defensive footnote about the appropriateness of my supply choices: No, Iron Age Celts didn’t have all that. (Pickles, probably; string cheese, maybe; bubbly water, only if they lived near a bubbly-water spring). But they did have houses with actual roofs, and trackways through the sucking mud, and didn’t live somewhere the heat index gets over 100 degrees, ever. Plus, they had water, and mint. I’m unrepentant.

These merit badges for science professionals don’t line up with the Geek Badges I have earned myself, but I find them highly inspirational, particularly from a design perspective.

“[I]n America, it almost seems like ‘family’ has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas.”

Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon in one geekalicious interview.

We’ve been a language-using species for, what, at least 40,000 years, and we still don’t know how to talk to our kids. About anything, apparently.

Couple of clips (both videos with sound), c/o Matthew my brother-out-law: Surface computing and single-handed Stonehenge.

Dang, yo.

Okay if I call you Horatio?
I will probably tell you all this in a big rush on Monday, but thank you so much for pestering me to buy the DVDs of Planet Earth, or I wouldn’t have, because I have a giant queue of David Attenborough productions I don’t own yet and I would have stuck it in there. And then I would have been deprived.
Swimming elephants!! Golden snub-nosed monkeys! Cranes riding thermals over the Himalayas!
So far, it’s all amazing. With the crying, as predicted. When I was very young, maybe 3, we had a mobile of cranes in our bedroom, and they looked just like the footage of the migration over the Himalayas–in that riding-thermals, kite-sail-winged, dangly-gangly-legged way. I couldn’t find any images online that capture that odd elegance. And *why* is it so delightful to watch elephants swimming? Is it just the incongruity of the largest land animal floating weightless, or is it that their knees all bend forward, plus the snorkely trunks and the evident pleasure? Ridiculously pleasing. I watched that bit four times.
Also, so I don’t forget: Pester me to write a fan letter to David Attenborough. I started one ages ago but didn’t finish, plus never found out where best (or at all) to send it. (“Sir David Attenborough, c/o The BBC” probably wouldn’t work very well, alas.)
I just realized (reading about his career) that I have clear memories (clear–full audio-visual and emotion and everything) of a show of his that aired in 1975, which means I was 4 years old. It was called “Fabulous Animals” and was mostly about mythical beasts (including those weird pictures of people with faces in their chests) but also touched on real ones like Komodo dragons, and I remember Sir David (just David, then) sticking together broken pieces of a huge bird’s egg with masking tape. Bigger than an ostrich egg. More like a really big honeydew melon. And the people who found the pieces used them to carry water. Madagascar comes to mind. (I thought it was “Madacasca” because I heard him say it before I could read.) Maybe an elephant bird? So he’s been a huge piece of my life since I was four. Very much a part of the fabric of my world. That deserves some mad fan mail.
Also I have a theory about why Sigourney Weaver did the U.S. voiceover: Sir David’s voice has lost a tiny bit of its crispness. He has a very, very faint slur on some words now (he is 80 years old, after all), and I’m guessing the American viewer isn’t prepared to deal with even faintly impaired speech, even if it’s coming from someone with 60 years of solid gold credentials. Boo on that. I’m glad I got the UK version.
I owe you one.
P.S. I couldn’t find that trailer you tried to show me (remember, I made you stop, “Crying, crying!”). And the clips I could find on the Discovery website have some random American dude doing the voiceover–neither Sigourney Weaver nor Sir David. Grumblecakes.

My bees are pleased. (And apparently plotting.)