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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Adaptation Consideration

    I had time to kill last night, between finishing “game night” (came in a strong second at “London” and kicked Mike’s ass at “Stone Age”, hah!) and starting on some client work, and didn’t feel like being On The Computer. So I put in the first disc of my recently-acquired set of the BBC/A&E “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

    Now, I’d last watched the show when it first aired back in the late 1990s and remembered (vaguely) that it was a cheesy, breezy little adventure yarn. You know what? It still is, and it hasn’t aged as poorly as I might have expected. Richard E. Grant is still a brilliant lead, playing the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy as well as anyone could ask. Elizabeth McGovern is still pretty, somewhere under all that pancake makeup and somewhat-ratty wig. Buckles are swashed, entendres are doubled, and so forth.

    The Internet, of course, begs to differ. Apparently what I watched last night is “atrocious.” You see, liberties were taken with the source material. Heaven forfend! So-and-so wouldn’t behave like that! They killed whats-his-name! After all, the only good translation of novel to film is a completely and totally literal one, right? I mean, really now. Those “Lord of the Rings” movies clearly suffered from the loss of all that dratted Bombadil-ish and elvish and hobbitish poetry & song every dozen pages, right? Right.

    Now I’ve made the Tolkien nuts mad at me. I can live with that.

    There are some gripes with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” but they’re mostly just quibbles, regardless of how you rate Liz McGovern’s acting talents. (Seriously: The vitriolic posts I’ve seen online almost all mention one or more failings on her part. Does she have a history of drowning kittens and kicking puppies that I didn’t know about? Because, sheesh.) One scene comes to mind involving the sharpening of a guillotine, which is supposed to sound ominous (scrape, scrape) except the stone’s being dragged across the broad side of the blade instead of anywhere near the edge. Weird details like that, where someone just wasn’t paying attention, jar you from time to time.

    But, you know what? The good guys won, the hero rescued the girl, love triumphed over evil, yadda yadda. Some days, that’s all I really want.

    (Yes, there’s a rant coming later about the current state of modern high fantasy novels. Hint: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF GRIMDARK. STOP IT.)

    So I’ll be watching the other discs in my boxed set, even if I have to do it alone. I’m okay with that.

  • Don’t don’t fence fence me me in in

    I took the camera to Advance Camera out in Beaverton for a cleaning a couple weeks ago, and now that it’s back I’ve decided to take some pictures that include some nice blue sky, since I no longer have to worry about “Photoshopping” away the smudges that kept showing up.

    What I want to know is, who looks at a fenced in area and says, “You know what? That needs to be fenced in.”

    (It’s probably because they don’t want horses jumping out and running into the new road alongside the Washington County Fairgrounds. But why should I let a good, practical answer get in the way of a joke?)

  • Ivan With The Head Of A Bear

    How’s this for a bold, principled statement on a controversial topic:

    “Jack Frost” is the best MST3K episode of all time.

    Yes, better than its cousin, “The Day The Earth Froze.” Yes, better than “Manos, Hands of Fate,” largely because (let’s face it) “Manos” is just plain painful for most of its running time. Yes, better than “Gamera vs. Gaos.” Yes, better than “Prince Of Space.” Need I go on?

    Let the evidence speak for itself, then.

    • “I thought Jerry Garcia was Father Mushroom.”
    • ‘No, not a princess. You are a queen!’ “In that you look like Freddy Mercury.”
    • “M is for the many times you beat me. O is for the other times you beat me…”
    • “Jack Frost opened fire on a stand of willows today…”
    • “I’m bacon! Baconbaconbaconbacon…”
    • “Bob Keeshan is Mr. Natural.”
    • “Michael Nelson is Lord of the Dance!”
    • “So I guess instead of vacuuming this house, you Zamboni it.”
    • “Hello, this is the sun. Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line…”

    At any rate, until today I had to make do with an old VHS copy, but no longer. I now own this fine bit of televised hilarity in DVD form!

    You may now bask in the glory of my awesomeness. Thank you.

  • Toys Will Be Toys

    Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

    I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

    Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

  • Dragonsinger

    I wondered what it would take to kick me in the ass enough to bring me back here again.

    When I was thirteen, Mom gave Sis & I to a nice couple from church named Ken and Virginia Savage for the duration of a summer or so. They lived in Soap Lake, WA and made annual road-trip pilgrimages back to Kansas City and to Omaha for the purpose of visiting relatives and important church sites. It was right around the time of that year’s trip when, while we were at the grocery store, I spotted a book cover near the checkout counters and decided that I really wanted that book.

    Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

    That little story, read out-of-sequence from the rest of its series, helped ruin me for lesser books. If it doesn’t involve friendship, wonder, perseverance against the odds and the bad opinion of people who shouldn’t matter, risk, reward, at least one proper brawl, and considerable doses of humor… then what’s the point of your book, I ask. I read the hell out of that book, and it survived up until just a few years ago… so I replaced it with another from the same printing.

    I love quite a few books, but Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger” will always hold a peculiar and special place in my heart. Only a few others share a similar prominence: Raymond E. Feist’s “Magician” volume, for instance, and Julian May’s “Intervention.”

    Folks might look at a guy funny for listing McCaffrey as one of his favorite writers, but I can live with that. And, true, there are things about some of her books (parts of the Pern series in particular) that it doesn’t pay to examine too closely. In later years, I think she lost a bit of her storytelling verve and took to treating bad guys and good guys alike a bit too much with kid gloves; consequences became gentler than one might expect. That was her choice to make, of course, and it’s my choice to leave off the reading of certain novels.

    Today’s a sad one, for today we all learned that Anne McCaffrey is no longer with us. This avid reader, at least, is largely so because of her talent and because of a very nice couple who indulged a spoiled little boy all those years ago in Soap Lake.

  • Monthly Posting?

    I swear to you, my intentions did not include ending up making only one post per month.

    Say! I looked at the lava dome of a volcano a couple of weeks ago! See? I even took Explorer Duck along with! Excitement! Explorer Duck has since gone back home to her owner back in Pennsylvania, as my house was her final stop in the worldwide tour.

    My daughter turns 18 on Monday. I guess I may have to stop calling them my “kids” now, though they’ll always be my “rugrats,” which admittedly makes no sense to anyone but myself. So be it; I’m a known weirdo anyway.

    So far, the new webserver is working beautifully. It’s faster, it’s running a much newer Linux OS than the old one, and most importantly it costs $40 less per month. I should’ve done this years ago.

    The job is… crazy. We just added three new clients and two new Kaseya management add-ons, so I’m never bored. Then again, I’m also never going to get caught up. Sigh.

    My personal life is largely drama-free, and I count that as a very good thing. I get plenty enough excitement from my job and the day-to-day challenges of life without adding interpersonal conflicts, you know?

    Once I get my head a bit more above water, maybe I’ll start looking at ways to spruce things up around here. For now… I’m just hanging in there as best I can.

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