Synova

Today was my first day. The classes were fun. Sort of. I sort of dread the one class because it's going to be about arguing effectively and rules of logic, which isn't dreadful at all, but we're going to be making arguments in class and I expect it has the potential to include a fair amount of cringe-worthy college-age passion about "causes." The last thing I want to do is get in an argument with idealists who just graduated from high school. (Does this count as a "don't commit this to the internet" sort of sentiment?) I do want the logic class though. And Algebra. The first Math class I've taken in over 25 years. So far I remember the material once it's shown, but before that the problems are entirely opaque and I couldn't even guess where to start. The on-line homework is new and confusing. On the one hand the way each step is shown is wonderfully helpful. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I exit if the p...

Sword and Sorcery tends to embarrass itself at the movies. The genre is simultaneously deathly serious and silly beyond all reason so it's easy to see how that might all go wrong. It seems less ridiculous if you're reading the story in a book. I don't know why, it just does. So making a new Conan is a risk. It's a risk because any movie in the genre is a risk. It's also a risk because the original Conan movies were pretty darn good and who can top Arnold? Conan IS Arnold and Arnold IS Conan. It's a risk because too many people already know what Conan is and what Conan ought to be. Everyone has preconceptions the new movie has to live up to. Well, I think they did good. No, it's not brilliant. It's not as great a movie as, say, Iron Man, but then nothing is. What it is is solid good fun. The plot is the plot to Conan and nothing particularly new. His village is slaughtered and his father is killed, he advocates ind...

I bought at least some of my books today. I'm starting (returning?) full time at UNM this fall; easing in with a relatively light load of classes. I expect that math will be a struggle as I've not had a math class in 25 years and I can't afford to do "just enough" since I'm going to have to take more for my major. In any case, it's got to be solid. My other classes range from less worrisome to "easy A" even though I'm a bit hesitant to say so. It just sounds sort of bad. I'm looking forward to them all and am actually quite excited about them because it's all interesting stuff. It's much easier to do well in an interesting class for an interesting subject than one that is so easy it's dull. So school is looking good, so far. Once it starts I have some administrative things to do. They gave me a whole bunch of transfer credits, enough so that I'm classed as junior year, but few of them applied to my ...

The Rise of... Saw it this morning. I will say this... it didn't FEEL like I was cheering the end of the human species. Contrary to what PETA said (IIRC) the apes weren't getting their own back, not getting some sort of revenge against humans. What the movie does is establish how the apes got smart and set up the reason they were able to fill a void. The movie used an amazingly light touch in dealing with animal research. None of the villains were among the scientists or researchers. That medical research was dealt with as a complex thing and the motivations of the researchers shown to be anything but evil, made the simplistic treatment of the three individual humans who were villains a disappointment. Important plot points depended on teh stupid. It would not have been hard to do better.

I finally figured out what was wrong with this movie. First, it was a great movie. It was fun. It held my attention every single moment from the beginning of it until the end. But even so I have to admit that some of the less than fabulous reviews have a point. The movie is missing something. Mostly, it seemed to me that it was missing a big payoff at the end. It was great while it was happening, but when it was over it was just over. Some critics said it could have been Cowboys vs. anything... that the aliens were pointless. Anyhow, I figured it out. I figured out where the essential mistake occurred when they made this movie. They failed to identify whose story it was. It was Ella Swenson's story. It was the alien's story. In the trailers they have her explaining that the aliens killed "her people" and you suspect that she's Native American. She's not. Her "people" are an alien race. But because they did not make it her story, the p...

He agrees with me . :-) It's amazing how brilliant someone sounds when they say something that you've said yourself a million times, but with new and different words. The movie Silent Running is a " peaty slab of crap" he says. And I'm all... that's brilliant! "Peaty slab of crap" is exactly the phrase I've been looking for all of those times when I wanted to express just how stoopid that movie is. How often can you use the word "stoopid" without it getting old? Peaty slab of crap! Or it could be that the movie itself is brilliant, if you look at it from the right direction. The proper direction. If you look at it as a skewering of the modern environmental movement it's got every single thing it needs. Lileks mentions the most egregious detail... "Gosh: you’re orbiting a planet beyond Jupiter, and there’s insufficient sunlight to keep trees happy. Who could have seen that coming." Because Silent Running is ...

Has anyone seen this and want to discuss it? I watched it last night and although the movie itself wasn't disturbing, I kept on trying to figure out what they'd done wrong, why it didn't work as well as I thought it ought to have worked. I woke up in the middle of the night with a bug in my head trying to figure it out. To start with just one tiny nit: This was a good example of why you should put your skeptic in the movie instead of on the couch watching the movie. In The Eagle, Marcus and Eska travel northward through the non-Roman parts of Brittan keeping Marcus's Roman identity secret. Both my husband and I were waiting for someone to cry out "Roman!" and point at the tack on the horses as evidence. Neither of us knew that they hadn't changed Roman tack for what would be normal in the area they were traveling but there was nothing in the movie indicating that anyone had worried about it. (My husband thought that the fact that they ...

I finally got my nerve up to watch the three episodes of Combat Hospital that are on Hulu. I dreaded even trying to watch them, knowing that there was no way that either the US military or our presence in Afghanistan could possibly be subject to a television show without the producers making sure they didn't come across as uncritical of either of them. Joy of joys... the show is Canadian. The main characters/doctors are Canadian. One is a civilian Brit. One is American. The head nurse is American and a number of other characters are American but probably the same number are Canadian or British. The "gone native" special ops guy is American. The shadowy unidentified (CIA, undoubtedly) is in the back-ground (I don't care about that as the special ops guy is obviously a hero). What being Canadian does is allow them, in one of the very first episodes, to have a situation where a soldier is shot in a friendly fire incident and the good guys *cover it up*. I d...

The Warrior's Way - I liked this a whole lot. Very stylized. Very Eastern. Thoughtful, too. Still, if you're put off by the thought of mystical ninjas, cowboys and a cast of circus people, you probably shouldn't challenge yourself. Unknown - Good enough. I sort of hate to be so tepid over it, because there wasn't anything wrong with it. About half way through, though, I leaned over to my husband and whispered into his ear (since we were with friends) "Bourne Identity." Sucker Punch - I suppose this was interesting and supposed to be artistic, maybe Sin City-ish or something. I didn't see the problems that the critics complained about. But I can't complain about what bothered me without spoiling the end... Oh, what the heck. I'll spoil the end. Right at the beginning we see the girl getting a lobotomy. We then spend the entire movie in her multi-layered fantasy world hoping that she doesn't get the lobotomy. She gets t...

I watched the first couple episodes of Falling Skies ... three episodes?.. last night, back to back. I have issues. Those issues are likely related to the fact that I read science fiction and I've seen post invasion scenarios done before. Life as we know ends. How do humans survive? How do they organize themselves. It's been done and it's been done well. It's been done and done poorly. The idea is primal. There is a reason it's an idea picked up again and again. So what happened to the other television efforts? The Event? V? My nits from the beginning of this one... Child psych... They have the kids (the kid) seeming the least able to adjust to this terrifying new world. This seems unlikely and unsupported by both anecdote and History. But it does provide a chain-jerking intro to the facts of events. I found it annoying. The hero... a History professor with an interest in military History. Nothing wrong with that. Enter the military which, ...

Back when Sandra Bernhadt was still funny. Couldn't act, but this is still one of my favorite episodes the way it spoofs Romance novels. Way. Too. Funny. And clever, too. His "true" version of the romance novel is hysterical. "But I will... protect... what is left... of the lady's honor."

The alternative is "getting the girl" for doing absolutely nothing.

So maybe you can tell me what happened, or which are the wrong television shows I'm not watching, but whatever happened to romance, whatever happened to sexy? Granted, Highlander is sort of overboard in that department, and I'd actually like to get a male perspective on this, because Duncan Macleod seems so... purposefully beefcake-y... I mention this show to women in a completely neutral way, and if they have a clue what I'm talking about they need no prompt for a near universal response: a fraction of a second of complete stillness followed by an indrawn breath followed by some variation of, "Dang, he's hot." Now I suppose a feminist scold would insist that the guy "getting the girl" in each show is a bad thing and places the woman as a reward and we should avoid that. Are we avoiding that? Common wisdom is that there is more sex on television than ever before. Is there? And if there is, what has changed? Is it simply my imagination that in ...

Because I CAN! Bwa ha ha ha! Anyhow... I'm into season two, dreading each reappearance of Ritchie... and starting to feel guilty about that. And I generally cringe whenever they have Charlie (Charlie? DeSalva? Whatever.) try to "act like a former SEAL." And I'm probably the only person who doesn't adore Amanda. (Reminds me of Q on Star Trek.) Because I remember a great deal of most episodes I'm finding myself being a little more analytical than usual. Today I was thinking about the changes between season one and season two and happened to think of another of my favorite televisions shows... the first season of Human Target . Just the first season. In the first season of Highlander Duncan was passionately in love with a mortal woman. I don't know if someone decided to make him single, or if the actress decided to leave the show so they had to do without her, but in about episode 3 of season 2, she dies. Duncan moves away from the antique store t...

I have a pet peeve. This pet peeve is "Historical" romances with "modern" women who are too stupid to live. Arabella Blydon in Julia Quinn's novel _Dancing at Midnight_ is truly too stupid to live. It's an older book and I've read a number of romances by Quinn that I enjoyed but this is just painful. Utterly painful. It's a rather common thing, gives me a rash, but Quinn is certainly not alone. A "strong" woman is not an idiot. A "strong" woman trusts her man to be competent. Please repeat these two sentences after me all you romance writers! A "strong" woman is not an idiot. A "strong" woman trusts her man to be competent. Now tattoo it on your forehead. Thank you.

So... Hulu had some trailers for new fall shows so I watched the endless 4-5 minute trailer for the EVENT. On one level it looks sort of like fun... aliens, I suppose, and lots of fast paced action and I think it had 'sploding stuff, too. So I'm probably the target audience. I have no desire to even watch the pilot of this show. The interminable trailer was nearly 5 minutes of "neener-neener, not gonna tell you, neener-neener-neener." "Each week you'll get more clues. Each week you'll be more invested." That's what the web-site says. So. Essentially. The "teaser" has come out of the closet. The unrevealed pay-off, the mystery, is not at all mysterious but standing naked in the public square with a bag over it's head while a guy with a megaphone and top-hat bellows, "Be amazed! Be astounded! Watch as the weather and sun slowly degrade the bag making it thinner and thinner until... you find out what could be revealed by me ...

So I took the kids to Airbender today. It had some weaknesses in the script but it really wasn't as bad as all that. I hope it does better over time. There were almost exclusively "kid" shows at the theater so there is a lot of competition. (And the not-kid shows were PG-13 offerings.) I think that Shyamalan had to make a choice. If he didn't follow the television show people would have been up in arms, but following the show is what was wrong with the movie. Truly a no-win situation. Zuko (I'm just going to guess on spellings here) was brilliant and his story told incredibly well. His conflict was the most clearly told. Also, I suppose it's likely that a double could have done his martial arts parts where he is wearing a mask, but it's also possible the actor playing the character did them. If so, he's brilliant. (The actress who plays his sister only appeared for the briefest moment, twice, and in that short time proved brilliant as well.) ...

Olivia Munn does Twilight.

I'm one of those people who experienced that moment of sharp disappointment when they learned that the movie AVATAR had nothing to do with the Last Airbender. Now the movie that we really wanted is coming out and it looks fabulous. It's directed by M. Night Shyamalan. And right on time the racebenders show up. (I'm absolutely stealing that term from one of the commentators on that post. ) In the world of the Last Airbender there are nations divided by what element certain people in them can manipulate. The Fire Nation uses fire. Benders in the Earth Nation can throw gigantic boulders and make pillars of rock rise from the ground. Water benders can throw water around. The airbenders, of whom only a single individual remains, can make whirlwinds to use as weapons. Racebenders use race and racism and accusations of racism as weapons. They can manipulate and use and abuse race and are more than willing to do so. It's a brilliant term.

This is my Plumberry Glow "York". I had to go back to 2005 to get a picture, but it's still hanging on to the threads of life and pushing out a couple of red flowers on a regular basis. It's fragrant only at 1pm. Orchids are so funny. The second picture is a Paph that I bought at the grocery store. Itmanages to bloom every year and has for about four years in a row now. This year it bloomed from Thanksgiving to after Christmas. The picture is pretty bad and doesn't show the plant. I should have set it in the sun for a better photo.