Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

2 flavors – 1 bag. That’s the promise.

I opened up a bag of Pizza Cravers / Ranch chips – a Doritos collision medley.

You know what, though? I can’t tell the difference between the Pizza Cravers chips and the Ranch chips.

What a letdown.

What if the Violent Femmes teamed up with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, went acoustic and picked up a banjo?

What if you could dance to it? And what if people did?

The Toughcats sound even better live than on CD.

Sunday night, the first of two parts of a new version of Jane Austen’s classic story Emma was shown on PBS Masterpiece. An informal poll about the new version shows that a majority of people loved the production. As for myself, I’ll have to wait and see.

My quick reactions:

- The actress playing Emma didn’t carry the upper class snobbishness of the main character very well. Everything from her posture to her expressions communicated too much enthusiasm for what other people were doing. She was almost servile in her approach – not what Emma would do.
- Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s father, was the most sympathetic of any version I’ve seen – not just a doddering old idiot, but a person with a reason to be preoccupied with people going away.
- Mr. Knightly didn’t fill his boots. He delivered all the lines, but didn’t seem like much of a grownup.
- The introduction told us too much without showing us as much as it should have.
- Mr. Elton was done very well, and Harriet Smith was believable.
- Miss Bates was the most subtle portrayal of that character that I’ve seen yet, setting up Emma for a particularly hard fall in her snobbish dismissal.
- This Emma focuses more on issues of class injustice than other versions I’ve seen.

This is the first time I’ve ever watched a new production of a Jane Austen movie and fallen asleep in the middle. Nonetheless, I’ll be tuning in again next Sunday night to see if the show can turn it around by the time Emma gets married.

I am staying at a hotel that uses the Timex T610S alarm clock, which purports to be able to use “nature sounds” to wake a person up. Last I checked, nature doesn’t require an alarm clock and an electrical grid to make sounds, but okay, I thought, I’ll try it.

I chose Forest sounds. When it started this morning, I went to the window, because it sounded kind of like a car accident, or maybe a set of old bed springs and a bad techno whistle. I think it was supposed to be crickets and an owl, over and over again in a short loop.

Not the best breath of fresh air for overcrowded city folk who crave camp.

It’s been about 24 hours since we installed the new version of the WordPress blogging software on our main Irregular Times page, and at first, everything was working great. Right now, however, I’ve got steam coming out of my ears trying to work with the software.

There are out-of-memory errors popping up everywhere, making administration of the site, and sometimes even just viewing it, a difficult task. It just took us 30 minutes to get up a simple article, as the new WordPress 2.5 software kept stripping out tags, reassigning categories, giving the name of the wrong author, and even making the title of the article blank.

WordPress 2.5 looks to be full of errors that dramatically cripple the operation of a previously healthy blog.

Avoid this update, bloggers, until WordPress comes out with a fix.

Me Ooma! Ooma car crash in ditch go fire! Ooma sit repair shop watch talky talky.

Ooma stop talky soft computer man! Ooma change channel go Spike TV. Ooma watch World’s Most Amazing Videos.

Ooma like man smash rocks. Spike TV man smash rocks. Spike TV man drive snowmobiles on water in winter. Spike TV man go zoom! Spike TV man burn fuel go fast. Spike TV man punch wimpy man eye pop on floor.

Ooma go home Spike TV eat mastodon blood pudding.

I’ve just finished reading the first 100 pages of The Golden Compass. No spoilers in this review of those pages – you should discover the book for yourself.

I will tell you, however, that if you’re letting some ratty old email church lady email keep you from reading the book, you’re missing one hell of a treat. It’s a great read, with lots of action, really interesting characters, great settings, and rich language.

I have not seen one single “militant atheist” line in the book so far. I am seeing a lot of undercurrents of struggles against social class hierarchies and sexism, as well as xenophobia, however.

If the film is half as good as the book, you’ll really be missing out if you decide to stay home and sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” instead.

That’s your choice to live in an impoverished literary world, all centered around one jealous book, letting other people tell you what to think, I guess.

I’m not trying to tell you what to think. I’m just suggesting that you let the Fox News commentaries take a back seat in your mind for a minute, and read the first hundred pages of the book to see what it’s all about yourself.

Get ready, folks! The Golden Compass is almost here!

The movie, which looks to be an absolutely stunning fantasy, will be released on December 7, 2007 – just a couple of weeks. Of course, I’m just judging that opinion on the trailer and secondary items I’ve read. I have not yet been able to get my hands on the book – stuck in the house with Thanksgiving guests and all that.

So, I’d like to hear from people who have read the book, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. In the United Kingdom, it’s entitled Northern Lights.

What did you think of the book, and what do you think we can expect of the film?

Dattaswami’s latest bout of religious diarrhea gives me pause, since his is a cut-and-paste job, one that bullies space away from other writers without even being especially thoughtful. It says a lot that Dattaswami has chosen to demonstrate such negative character traits in the name of the true religion for which he claims to hold swami status.

There’s a contrast between what Dattaswami has done and what others have done using the diary system. Rather than cede the stage to this fakir’s song and dance, I thought I’d take the opportunity today to express appreciation to some diaries and diarists whose efforts I really appreciate. Perhaps I haven’t taken enough time to express that appreciation before now; now is the perfect time to do so.

The first diarist I’d like to single out for appreciation is Red Dave, whose ongoing Iraq Body Count series is a daily effort to keep count of what many people would like to forget — the toll of dead and injured in Iraq. Thanks, Red Dave, for ringing a reminder out loudly and persistently. His latest post, the Iraq Body count for October 25, 2007, is here.

The TV show The Sopranos is over, and media critics are having a festival of whining about how cheated they are out of a meaningful ending to the series.

I don’t get it. How could there be a meaningful ending to a TV series that had no meaning in the first place?

I can understand if you watched The Sopranos for one season, if you had nothing better to do, but after that first season, what was the point?

Ooh, the main character was a mobster… like in hundreds of other TV shows and movies. Ooh, he does bad things… like thousands of other TV and movie characters.

Okay, the mobster saw a therapist. That had enough interest to carry a single one-hour show – kind of like Analyze This, but without the jokes.

What was left after that? Mob goons battling for control of turf. Miscellaneous, not very remarkable personal issues.

I saw a few of the shows, sure – enough to see that there wasn’t really that much there. The only people who would keep on watching The Sopranos after the first season are the kind of people who get addicted to television, and are just desperate for something to watch because they don’t have anything to do.

The Sopranos is over. Yawn. Turn off the televison now, okay?