I always saw Clarie Dearing’s (Bryce Dalla Howard) heels in Jurassic World as almost an inside joke. They are commented on as being impractical, and when it comes down to it, she outruns the T-Rex while wearing them. She doesn’t need to take them off because she is competent with them on. They’re not a sign of weakness.
Disturbed’s musicianship is well beyond what I expected.
This was enough to make me revisit the band’s other music and see if I just hadn’t been in the right mood when I sampled it before. Nope. Still not my cup of tea, although the fact that I use the phrase “cup of tea” might have served as an indicator for that.
I have long held that there is a fundamental distinction between an explanation and an excuse. In my “back in my day” moments I tend to feel that the distinction has been lost somewhere along the line, and that knowing the explanation for someones actions is now generally considered to excuse those actions. I don’t think it should. As usual, Roger Zelazny can say it better than I can.
There is always a reason. Whenever anything has been mucked up, whenever anything outrageous happens, there is a reason for it. You still have a mucked-up, outrageous situation on your hands, however, and explaining it does not alleviate it one bit. If somebody does something really rotten, there is a reason for it. Learn it, if you care, and you learn why he is a son of a bitch. The fact is the thing that remains, though. [He] had acted. It changed nothing to run a posthumous psychoanalysis. Acts and their consequences are the things by which our fellow judge us. Anything else, and all that you get is a cheap feeling of moral superiority by thinking how you would have done something nicer if it had been you. So as for the rest, leave it to heaven. I’m not qualified.
In episode 165 of The Talkshow John and Guy discuss Balmer’s laughing dismissal of the iPhone and note that he just didn’t get it. Guy noted that Steve Jobs would bash competing products too, but that he seemed to get away with it where Balmer was mocked for his dismissal, and Guy wondered why Jobs got away with it. I think the difference was that Jobs would bash the products, but that he got what they brought to the table, even if he was publicly dismissive of it. I think you can tell the difference in their speech.
There are a number of movies that came out that were generally panned or poorly received. Not unusuall, but I think these were unjustly maligned. They were each based on source material that was largely foreign to the movie audience. They were each, if not great, at least good (and usually faithful) adaptations of their source.
I’m a little confused. Can you help me out? My memory from back in the day (2004-2007) is that the primary fan base for Veronica Mars was geeks. That is geeks in the “I watched Star Trek: Enterprise and I’m excited about these rumors of relaunching Doctor Who” sense. Geeks had not yet really become trendy. I too am a geek (shocking, I know) and I’m a fan of Veronica, but I’m not sure why the fan base seemed to skew that way. Any ideas?
There are several items of head-canon that I had about Star Wars as a child, and which I carry to some extent to this day. Most have been shown demonstrably wrong by various episodes of the movies. I have almost no exposure to the Expanded Universe or even the animated series.
Light Sabers
To me lightsabers are a Jedi weapon and the blade is a focused manifestation of the Force. As such the color is personal to the Jedi weilding the lightsaber. It is their aura color if you will.
This idea was somewhat damaged as early as Empire when Han uses Luke’s to slice open the tauntaun, but I just told myself that the force was strong with Han and he’s just in denial. It would help explain his skill as a pilot and his general luck.
Span of the Empire
From Obi-Wan’s early tales of Anakin and himself fighting in the Clone Wars to Grand Moff Tarkin laughing at Vader’s hokey religion, I always felt that time scale was much more epic. Hundreds of years of Empire rule had passed. Obi-Wan is a Jedi and Yoda is 900 years old, so it’s easy to believe that he is talking about something that happened hundreds of years ago, not just 20. Too much in episodes 4-6 doesn’t make sense if the Republic fell 20 years ago.
I think there’s a common misconception when someone decides to Kickstart a movie. They expect the fact that they had a million backers to mean that a million people will go see the movie. Since the backer rewards usually include access to the movie via digital download or DVD, you have to recognize that your core audience will probably not go to the theater. Sure some hardcore fans will, but not enough to ensure box_office_success.
This came up in a recent TWiT episode where they observed that Veronica Mars raised 5.7 million, but only grossed about 3 million. Of the 90,000 backers, only about 20,000 didn’t get the movie from the Kickstarter campaign. So for 70,000 backers their money was taken on Kickstarter rather than at the box office. Not really shocking.
Yesterday afternoon Daniel and I hit the store and made dinner. He bustled around the kitchen mixing all kinds of things while I chopped veggies and chicken for fajitas. All of this was accompanied by a great soundtrack. I almost flooded my twitter stream with Soundtracker notes, but thought it would be more polite to just post a list here:
The Impression That I Get - The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Beer for My Horses - Toby Keith & Willie Nelson
American Woman - The Guess Who
Redneck Woman - Gretchen Wilson
Sweet New Style - The Tropicals
Black Coffee in Bed (Full Version) - Squeeze
I'm a Believer (Radio) - Smash Mouth
High Lonesome - Jedd Hughes
Son Of A Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
Musicology - Prince
Semi-Charmed Life - Third Eye Blind
Twice As Hard - The Black Crowes
I'm No Angel - Gregg Allman
Daughters - John Mayer
The Boys Are Back in Town - Thin Lizzy
Season Of The Witch - Blues Brothers Band
Can't Find My Way Home - Blind Faith
Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel
Darwin's Children - Edwin McCain
Bitch - Meredith Brooks
Our House - Madness
If I Had a Boat - Lyle Lovett
Rain King - Counting Crows
Walk This Way - Joe Perry, Run-DMC & Steven Tyler
Silver Thunderbird - Marc Cohn
Bizarre Love Triangle - New Order
Aberdeen - Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Deep Blue Something
I Play Chicken With the Train (featuring Big & Rich) - Cowboy Troy
Lonely Boy - Andrew Gold
When the Sun Goes Down - Kenny Chesney
Get the Party Started - Pink
Drops of Jupiter - Train
The River of Dreams - Billy Joel
Out of My Head - Fastball
Red Red Wine - UB40
Take Me To The River - The Commitments
Circle - Sarah McLachlan
Growing Old - The Origin
Cooksferry Queen - Richard Thompson
In a Little While - Uncle Kracker
Why Can't We Be Friends - Smash Mouth
There She Goes - Brother Love
Who Do You Love? - George Thorogood & The Destroyers
Long long ago there existed the penny dreadful. With the advent of The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, Tee Morris and Philippa Ballantine opened the world of The Ministry to other authors and podcast a series of short stories under the banner of Tales from the Archives. Now they've begun publishing these stories for Kindle (and Nook, &c, see Smashwords) as 99-penny dreadfuls. So, for your reading pleasure, here are the dreadfuls:
Tales from the Archives: Collection 1 contains The Evil that Befell Sampson, Dust on the Davenport, The Astonishing Amulet of Amenartas, and A Ruby in Rain.
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contains The Evil that Befell Sampson, Dust on the Davenport, The Astonishing Amulet of Amenartas, and A Ruby in Rain.
contains Darkest before Darkwater, The Shadows of Calcutta, Night's Plutonian Shore, and The Seven.