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Dec. 4th, 2012 03:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Netanyahu has promised to dramatically increase illegal settlements in Palestinian areas for "strategic reasons." It means he's pissing on the last chance for a two state solution and thus any sort of lasting peace.
* Turkey is asking for a missile shield similar to the ones the Israeli have. Given Assad's fondness for shooting across the border t Turkish civilians, I can't blame them.
* The ins and outs of why the Republicans are having a hard time of even pretending they care about women:
* "David Bahati-The Man Who Introduced The 'Kill The Gays' Bill:" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2012/12/david-bahati-man-who-introduced-kill.html
* " Palace in imperial tomb at Xi'an now revealed:" http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-12/02/content_15977558.htm
* "Why Did the Children of Samurai Have Lead Poisoning?" http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/09/13/why-did-the-children-of-samurai-have-lead-poisoning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverHumanOrigins+%28Discover+Human+Origins%29#.ULxjbobhdIq
I guessed right, did you?
* "400-year-old playing cards reveal royal secret:" http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/11/30/400-year-old-playing-cards-reveal-royal-secret/
* John Stewart addresses the latest round of FOX "news" whining about the imaginary War on Christmas:
* Stephen Colbert's the Word on lower crime rates and the GOP needing to scare white voters:
* "Man Charged With Aggravated Weirdness" In Oregon! Who knew there was a limit? http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/12/man-charged-with-aggravated-weirdness.html
* "Updated: "Scientists" uncover global league of mythical creatures. Lack of peer review makes findings less credible, more awesome.:" http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/scientists-uncover-global-league-of-mythical-creatures/
* Stephen Colbert and Ian McKellen:
* I was supposed to do beginning of the month errands part two today, but my body forcefully vetoed that in favor of lying still and petting cats. For hours. Sigh. On the up side, when I went to turn off the neighboring tank bank to the tall twenty (which was off to cut stress for the new fish), I spotted my lovely Cleopatra grazing the algae right up front. She was hiding again today when I fed the tank and sat watching the community, but I am pleased with zir boldness and have hopes of more sightings.
* The River:
I loved the whole idea of this when I first heard about it from Alma Alexander and the wonderful Nisi Shawl the Orycon before last. They were handing out the title page as a promotion. The idea is that all rivers are part of the River, so the individual stories lie along a drawing of the River through which they run. It's a beautiful conceit, and there is a mythic quality to nearly all the stories, even those with modern settings. The authors of this book feel like storytellers in the best sense. It's like the stories are part of a storytelling tradition that doesn't happen to exist in the real world, but ought to. This being Alma Alexander's baby, it has a lot of Pacificb Northwest writers, like Jay Lake, Irene Radford, and Nisi Shawl. You also get the wonderful Seanan McGuire who is based further south, writing a story with characters and a world I hope will turn up later in other works. It's small press so your library may not have it, though you can likely order it from local bookstores or Amazon. I did, and it was very much worth it to me.
* Ernie Kovacs Collection (Discs 1-3):
I was raised on stories of Ernie Kovacs. My parents loved him as children and teens. Exposure to his various shows, was formative on their tastes in both music and humor. When I was growing up, it was though everything was lost from his TV appearances except a few tantalizing clips. We watched Bell, Book, and Candle whenever it was on. My Dad's BFF named one of his Siamese cats Pyewacket. My parents struggled to explain why they felt so intensely about Mr. Kovacs. He was sort of a home town boy who made good. (My mom's from Philadelphia, my dad from central New Jersey). He died tragically and much too young. (When Ernie Kovacs was my age, he' been dead a couple months). There was the nostalgia for what he accomplished combined with the untapped potential of an early death. It's hard to convey that sort of thing across generations. It's a bit like if Robin Williams had died during the first run of Mork and Mindy and then two thirds of the tapes got erased and the rest were hidden for 60 years, unavailable for syndication. How would you explain that half remembered experience of watching him to your children?
It turns out the shows weren't all lost, merely mostly lost. The networks were taping them over with game shows or destroying them to save storage costs. Edie Adams; who had been his wife, his co-writer, and a performer on his shows before going on to her own separate career after his death; had used her own money to buy what they hadn't yet destroyed back from the networks. She stored them at her own cost until her death. An heir has made as much as what was salvageable available. (They couldn't include a lot of the musical bits due to clearance costs). What survived is fairly random, and mostly later in his career. The earliest shows from the dawn of television are damaged enough that I very much wish for subtitles. Watching them was frustrating and fascinating by turns. You see real flashes of brilliance here and there. The roughness of the technology and the newness of the live television form mean that so much of what I was seeing was for the first time, though endlessly copied for decades after. They pretty clearly didn't know exactly what they were doing and inventing it as they went. He loved breaking the illusion. There was a wildness about him that was only slightly tamed as the presentation got smoother and the edges got less rough by the mid '50's. It was experimental, which means it doesn't always work. In the early days, it didn't often work, but the hits got closer together as it went on. Some of it is dated, some of it is still pretty fucking funny. You can see how the folks who cut their teeth on Kovacs carried the looseness of style on to Laugh In. You can see various of Ernie's conceits in the styles of David Letterman and Craig Ferguson (particularly Ferguson with his tweaking of the Network, sense of humor, self mockery, and exposure of the mechanics). You can see him doing fake commercials, giving bad Dear Abby type advise, and Ask Mr. Science. I could see how my parents raised on often Dadist children's television gravitated towards the Pythons when they first started showing them on TV over here. At some point it dawned on me that Gomez Addams might be considered an extended Kovacs impression. The hardest thing to get my head around at first was the very period idea that a children's show presenter could chain smoke cigars. Imagine the screaming if they did that nowadays. The second hardest thing was the periodic racist anti-Asian humor that hit me upside the head every time. Like the cigars, it's a thing no one thought twice about in the '50's but makes me wince each time. I suppose I should be glad there was no black face in the shows I watched.
Review wise? It's hard to say exactly. The early ones are mostly only of interest from a history of television perspective. There's a reason the few surviving episodes usually get distilled to a few signature bits. It gets better as it goes, as I learned the language of his style and his humor, as the sound quality and production quality improved. By the time I got to the evening shows from the mid 50's, there was some pretty good sketch television going on. Was he as good as my parents thought he was? Hard to say. So much is missing or damaged. So much has been stolen and elaborated on by other performers that I can't see it the way the first audience did, when the ideas were new and no one had seen anything even vaguely like it. After all, I was raised on Laugh In, SNL, Monty Python, the Muppet Show, Addams Family, and Letterman. I was exposed to Mr. Science and the Goon Show a bit later. I can't see it fresh like my parents did and I don't think he could possibly have lived up to his reputation. I can enjoy him both from an historical perspective all the time and from a humor perspective when he's doing things like "Super clod" or parodies, but not always. Tastes in humor change over time and some things simply can't stand the test of 60 or so years of cultural change. I'm not sorry I've watched them and I plan to watch the rest when they come to me via the library, but I don't think I'd want to own them. If you watch them, do play with the special features as a lot of the good bits ended up there. I'm sad my parents didn't get a chance to see these surviving tapes, as it would have meant so much to them.
* Iron Man 2 Redux: I decided that in light of the Avengers I should probably give Iron Man 2 another try. If you'll remember, I didn't really take to IM2 the way I did to the first Iron Man film. At the time, I suspected the problem was that I had no idea who Agent Romanov was and that it was really a movie for Marvel readers. I was only half right, as it turns out. The movie is indeed more coherent now that I've more information. It still contains a bunch of things I probably needed to know for future movies. On the other hand, I actually like watching it significantly less. It still doesn't much gel and knowing for sure what's going to happen lets me focus more on how fundamentally unpleasant it is. That doesn't mean it's not art or to someone else's taste, it's just not to mine. This despite my fondness for the Cheadle character. Watching most of it is like having my teeth drilled. I don't blame the actors here, but the script, editing, and most especially the direction. My initial instinct that I'm not the audience for this movie was correct, I just focused on the more obvious reasons it wasn't for me and missed the deeper ones.
Side note: Watching all the helmeted head trauma in the movie and knowing what we know about football helmets and long term damage to the brain, I had trouble just shrugging that off and forgetting it. I think it's easier to ignore in a cartoon context where blows to the head don't come with realistic sound effects and body language.
* "Glee: Eroticism and instruction:" http://lettersfromtitan.com/2012/12/03/glee-eroticism-and-instruction/
* Art sale: http://djinni.livejournal.com/462907.html
Art Card Explosion: http://djinni.livejournal.com/462622.html
* Polar Cake: http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2012/12/2/sunday-sweets-polar-opposites.html
* Turkey is asking for a missile shield similar to the ones the Israeli have. Given Assad's fondness for shooting across the border t Turkish civilians, I can't blame them.
* The ins and outs of why the Republicans are having a hard time of even pretending they care about women:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* "David Bahati-The Man Who Introduced The 'Kill The Gays' Bill:" http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2012/12/david-bahati-man-who-introduced-kill.html
* " Palace in imperial tomb at Xi'an now revealed:" http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-12/02/content_15977558.htm
* "Why Did the Children of Samurai Have Lead Poisoning?" http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/09/13/why-did-the-children-of-samurai-have-lead-poisoning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverHumanOrigins+%28Discover+Human+Origins%29#.ULxjbobhdIq
I guessed right, did you?
* "400-year-old playing cards reveal royal secret:" http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/11/30/400-year-old-playing-cards-reveal-royal-secret/
* John Stewart addresses the latest round of FOX "news" whining about the imaginary War on Christmas:
* Stephen Colbert's the Word on lower crime rates and the GOP needing to scare white voters:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
* "Man Charged With Aggravated Weirdness" In Oregon! Who knew there was a limit? http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/12/man-charged-with-aggravated-weirdness.html
* "Updated: "Scientists" uncover global league of mythical creatures. Lack of peer review makes findings less credible, more awesome.:" http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/scientists-uncover-global-league-of-mythical-creatures/
* Stephen Colbert and Ian McKellen:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
* I was supposed to do beginning of the month errands part two today, but my body forcefully vetoed that in favor of lying still and petting cats. For hours. Sigh. On the up side, when I went to turn off the neighboring tank bank to the tall twenty (which was off to cut stress for the new fish), I spotted my lovely Cleopatra grazing the algae right up front. She was hiding again today when I fed the tank and sat watching the community, but I am pleased with zir boldness and have hopes of more sightings.
* The River:
I loved the whole idea of this when I first heard about it from Alma Alexander and the wonderful Nisi Shawl the Orycon before last. They were handing out the title page as a promotion. The idea is that all rivers are part of the River, so the individual stories lie along a drawing of the River through which they run. It's a beautiful conceit, and there is a mythic quality to nearly all the stories, even those with modern settings. The authors of this book feel like storytellers in the best sense. It's like the stories are part of a storytelling tradition that doesn't happen to exist in the real world, but ought to. This being Alma Alexander's baby, it has a lot of Pacificb Northwest writers, like Jay Lake, Irene Radford, and Nisi Shawl. You also get the wonderful Seanan McGuire who is based further south, writing a story with characters and a world I hope will turn up later in other works. It's small press so your library may not have it, though you can likely order it from local bookstores or Amazon. I did, and it was very much worth it to me.
* Ernie Kovacs Collection (Discs 1-3):
I was raised on stories of Ernie Kovacs. My parents loved him as children and teens. Exposure to his various shows, was formative on their tastes in both music and humor. When I was growing up, it was though everything was lost from his TV appearances except a few tantalizing clips. We watched Bell, Book, and Candle whenever it was on. My Dad's BFF named one of his Siamese cats Pyewacket. My parents struggled to explain why they felt so intensely about Mr. Kovacs. He was sort of a home town boy who made good. (My mom's from Philadelphia, my dad from central New Jersey). He died tragically and much too young. (When Ernie Kovacs was my age, he' been dead a couple months). There was the nostalgia for what he accomplished combined with the untapped potential of an early death. It's hard to convey that sort of thing across generations. It's a bit like if Robin Williams had died during the first run of Mork and Mindy and then two thirds of the tapes got erased and the rest were hidden for 60 years, unavailable for syndication. How would you explain that half remembered experience of watching him to your children?
It turns out the shows weren't all lost, merely mostly lost. The networks were taping them over with game shows or destroying them to save storage costs. Edie Adams; who had been his wife, his co-writer, and a performer on his shows before going on to her own separate career after his death; had used her own money to buy what they hadn't yet destroyed back from the networks. She stored them at her own cost until her death. An heir has made as much as what was salvageable available. (They couldn't include a lot of the musical bits due to clearance costs). What survived is fairly random, and mostly later in his career. The earliest shows from the dawn of television are damaged enough that I very much wish for subtitles. Watching them was frustrating and fascinating by turns. You see real flashes of brilliance here and there. The roughness of the technology and the newness of the live television form mean that so much of what I was seeing was for the first time, though endlessly copied for decades after. They pretty clearly didn't know exactly what they were doing and inventing it as they went. He loved breaking the illusion. There was a wildness about him that was only slightly tamed as the presentation got smoother and the edges got less rough by the mid '50's. It was experimental, which means it doesn't always work. In the early days, it didn't often work, but the hits got closer together as it went on. Some of it is dated, some of it is still pretty fucking funny. You can see how the folks who cut their teeth on Kovacs carried the looseness of style on to Laugh In. You can see various of Ernie's conceits in the styles of David Letterman and Craig Ferguson (particularly Ferguson with his tweaking of the Network, sense of humor, self mockery, and exposure of the mechanics). You can see him doing fake commercials, giving bad Dear Abby type advise, and Ask Mr. Science. I could see how my parents raised on often Dadist children's television gravitated towards the Pythons when they first started showing them on TV over here. At some point it dawned on me that Gomez Addams might be considered an extended Kovacs impression. The hardest thing to get my head around at first was the very period idea that a children's show presenter could chain smoke cigars. Imagine the screaming if they did that nowadays. The second hardest thing was the periodic racist anti-Asian humor that hit me upside the head every time. Like the cigars, it's a thing no one thought twice about in the '50's but makes me wince each time. I suppose I should be glad there was no black face in the shows I watched.
Review wise? It's hard to say exactly. The early ones are mostly only of interest from a history of television perspective. There's a reason the few surviving episodes usually get distilled to a few signature bits. It gets better as it goes, as I learned the language of his style and his humor, as the sound quality and production quality improved. By the time I got to the evening shows from the mid 50's, there was some pretty good sketch television going on. Was he as good as my parents thought he was? Hard to say. So much is missing or damaged. So much has been stolen and elaborated on by other performers that I can't see it the way the first audience did, when the ideas were new and no one had seen anything even vaguely like it. After all, I was raised on Laugh In, SNL, Monty Python, the Muppet Show, Addams Family, and Letterman. I was exposed to Mr. Science and the Goon Show a bit later. I can't see it fresh like my parents did and I don't think he could possibly have lived up to his reputation. I can enjoy him both from an historical perspective all the time and from a humor perspective when he's doing things like "Super clod" or parodies, but not always. Tastes in humor change over time and some things simply can't stand the test of 60 or so years of cultural change. I'm not sorry I've watched them and I plan to watch the rest when they come to me via the library, but I don't think I'd want to own them. If you watch them, do play with the special features as a lot of the good bits ended up there. I'm sad my parents didn't get a chance to see these surviving tapes, as it would have meant so much to them.
* Iron Man 2 Redux: I decided that in light of the Avengers I should probably give Iron Man 2 another try. If you'll remember, I didn't really take to IM2 the way I did to the first Iron Man film. At the time, I suspected the problem was that I had no idea who Agent Romanov was and that it was really a movie for Marvel readers. I was only half right, as it turns out. The movie is indeed more coherent now that I've more information. It still contains a bunch of things I probably needed to know for future movies. On the other hand, I actually like watching it significantly less. It still doesn't much gel and knowing for sure what's going to happen lets me focus more on how fundamentally unpleasant it is. That doesn't mean it's not art or to someone else's taste, it's just not to mine. This despite my fondness for the Cheadle character. Watching most of it is like having my teeth drilled. I don't blame the actors here, but the script, editing, and most especially the direction. My initial instinct that I'm not the audience for this movie was correct, I just focused on the more obvious reasons it wasn't for me and missed the deeper ones.
Side note: Watching all the helmeted head trauma in the movie and knowing what we know about football helmets and long term damage to the brain, I had trouble just shrugging that off and forgetting it. I think it's easier to ignore in a cartoon context where blows to the head don't come with realistic sound effects and body language.
* "Glee: Eroticism and instruction:" http://lettersfromtitan.com/2012/12/03/glee-eroticism-and-instruction/
* Art sale: http://djinni.livejournal.com/462907.html
Art Card Explosion: http://djinni.livejournal.com/462622.html
* Polar Cake: http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2012/12/2/sunday-sweets-polar-opposites.html