The Firefly episode of Jaynestown, lulzed. It wins the whole interweb!
Archive for: April, 2008
He Thrusts His Fists Against the Posts
Okay, let’s read It by Stephen King. Let’s all read it together starting May 19 (to give everyone time to finish up what they’re reading, and get the book from a library or store or duct tape up the old copy you’ve had since you were 15 like me). Most importantly, let’s all talk about it together, like an internet bookclub. Welcome to the Magic City Interwebs Genre Fiction Fandango and Clambake (BYOB)*.
I’d like to get a consensus on how much to read in what amount of time. Is 200 pages a week too ambitious? It’s a relatively large book, so we should pursue it aggressively, I think. Let me know what you think.
I’ll also volunteer to aggregate reaction posts, or provide space for them, if you wish. What do you all think? I can do a weekly round-up of reactions to the week’s reading every Saturday? For instance, our first week’s reading will be May 19-23 (or thereabouts). So on Saturday, May 31, I would link to reactions/thoughts for the previous week’s reading? Or we could take turns starting posts/threads at various places and each week someone “hosts” the discussion. Or we could start a whole new enterprise. I’ve got subdomains coming out my ears and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Shadowhelm’s got a great forum we might could politely invade.
What do you think? I don’t want to be bossy; I just don’t want to miss anything. So please check in with: declaration of interest, date, pages, reactions, and whether or not you think “Magic City Interwebs Genre Fiction Fandango and Clambake” is trying too hard or not hard enough.
*It goes without saying that this endeavor is absolutely not limited to residents of Birmingham and its environs. The more the merrier, so not kidding.
Ictus
Last night we watched Little Miss Sunshine. I wasn’t sure I’d like it. I loathe Greg Kinnear but I love Toni Collette. In the end, it turned out to be a really enjoyable movie, and mostly for one reason. It dramatizes the idea that we all, at some time or another, have to let go of our dreams, no matter how hard we work for them, how much we desire them, any of it. There comes a time when you just don’t get it, no matter how much you want it or deserve it.
In high school, I wanted more than anything to be drum major. I think I decided about a month into things my freshman year, possibly before the first actual football game I performed at, that I wanted to be the drum major. I wanted to have a fancy salute and stand up on the big podium and conduct and be a sort of point-woman for the pageantry of it all.
I nursed this dream for two years, and when you’re 14, two years is a while. I marched and played the horn. I got really good at drill and tried my hardest to inculcate a mental metronome, something ticking inside me that would always know how fast 120 beats a minute was. I practiced and practiced and practiced. Every day, all the time, I practiced and yearned and prayed.
And finally, at the end of my sophomore year, I tried out. There were five of us, I think, but I don’t remember it all that clearly. The song we had to conduct for that audition was the Overature to Candide. Great song, very fun, very hard to conduct, what with all the mixed meter and solos and extreme dynamics. I conducted the hell out of that thing– 3/2 bars, droped beats, piccolo solos and all.
And I held out hope to the bitter end. There was maybe 20 minutes of consultation after everyone had gone and then the director walked out, said someone else’s name, beckoned her into the office and the rest of us were dismissed. I don’t remember a lot about the rest of the day or probably even the rest of that month. But I do remember having to go home and tell my mom that I hadn’t gotten it, and being horrifically embarrassed that I had to think of something else for my whole life to be about.
I know now, and see very clearly, why I would’ve made a very poor drum major. I’m not a natural leader. I’m fat, and I had a profoundly bad attitude. And last and probably least, I played a brass instrument and marching bands usually don’t ever take one of those off the field.
And at this point, I can say I’m glad. I’m glad I got this hit at age 16. I’m glad people held it over my head for the next two years, rubbing in how I’d failed, and why I’d failed, and what I was missing. It teaches you something, to run up against a wall like that. You can’t change, or argue, or bargain or cajole or anything. You have to accept. You just have to rewrite your whole life, change all your expectations. You have to get over it.
Getting over it is a good skill. As much as we tell ourselves to get over things, both large and small, the real act if often more difficult. It’s a lot like grief, I suppose, though paler shade of it. Getting over it is grieving out the potential of your dreams, so that you’re ready to have new ones. It’s shutting the door on the past so that you can open any number of doors to the future.
It took me a long time to do it, and much of the time I didn’t actually get over anything, just found ways to generate enough noise to cover the residual pain. Took me a long time to be able to enjoy Candide again, but I can do it now.
Little Miss Sunshine was about winners and losers, and broken dreams, and how to keep on going, laughing and dancing, when everything is broken and nothing goes right. So really, it was about all of us, all the time.
Another Weekend, Another Bulleted List
How were your weekends? I,
- Redesigned. I’m not sure if I’m sticking with this look long term, but I’m going to live with it for a while. What do you think?
- Absolutely massacred what hedges I could get to before the battery on my trimmer ran out. If you’ve never used one, I recommend you try out an electric hedge trimmer at your first opportunity. It’s incredibly fun. My forearms are still really sore, but it was worth it!
- Also weeded the front flower beds thoroughly. The cheap pansies I bought last fall are still going strong, though a few have merged, so without the tall weeds it looks spottier than it used to. I figure they’ve got about 6 more weeks before it’s too hot. At that point, I guess I’ll switch to lantana, maybe something else. The rose bush has grown a new branch, much bigger than the others, with several buds! Not bad for a sad little tree-in-a-bucket on sale for $8.
- We saw Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. It was very funny. There were lots of naked people. And an accurate Alabama State Trooper car. Before we learned the “Birmingham” scenes were filmed in Louisiana, we were like, “I think I can see our house from here.”
- Have in other places lately been talking a lot about Stephen King, mostly It and The Dark Tower and it makes me want to read them all, all over again.
- Watched the first half of the first season of Weeds. You know, “fuckwad” is sort of an underused insult, at least within my hearing. Funny little show, with lots of good acting. Made me miss Wonderfalls, though I’m not sure why. Mostly cos I think Jaye Tyler would’ve called lots of people fuckwad had she not been on network TV.
- Am about halfway through A Feast for Crows. I plan to talk about this in more depth and with more exclamation points later, but I just want to say that “nuncle” is the most irritating word I have ever seen. More irritating than slather. More irritating than sammich. Every time I see the name Asha Greyjoy, I want to call George R R Martin and holler, “Stop using the word nuncle, fuckwad!”
Lexpionage of Ice and Fire II
Today? The rest of the words from A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been trying to find a theme that ties them together, but other than “really, really old” the best I can do is: If It’s Not Scottish, It’s Crap! Except they’re not all Scottish. But two out of three ain’t bad! And I’m only a couple hundred pages into the next book, A Feast for Crows, but hopefully there will be many new words there and we can keep on keeping on!
First, there’s leal, which is pretty obvious, contextually:
I am doomed. Tyrion sighed. “No need to answer. You’ve been a good squire to me. Better than I deserved. Whatever happens, I thank you for your leal service.”
Poor Tyrion is releasing Podrick Payne from his service as squire, which turns out to be both good and bad. I’ve only just met Payne again in book four, A Feast for Crows and it turns out that his education with Tyrion was better than it might have been but not as good as it should be.
Leal means loyal. There are several different etymologies, but my favorite is the one that notes “leal” as a variant of “leel” or “lele”—Scottish dialect of Middle English “loyal” from about 700 years ago.
Also, OMG TYRION!!! Y’all, the more I read about him, the more desperately I love him. I won’t get to hear from him again until September at the earliest when book five, A Dance with Dragons is supposed to come out. And I can’t help but worry that my love indicates doom, as in Hoban Washburne, Ernst Lodz, Severus Snape, Toshiko Sato doom.
Regardless! Next, byrnie: one of Martin’s inexhaustible supply of words with which to describe outfits. But I’d never seen this one, not anywhere, whereas with the rest of them, chances are I’ve tried to win, earn, or buy it for a character in Diablo II or World of Warcraft. Nevertheless, it went like so:
” – ruled the Seven Kingdoms, but was ruled at home by his lady wife, or so my mother always said.” Prince Oberyn raised his arms, so Lord Dagos Manwoody and the Bastard of Godsgrace could slip a chainmail byrnie down over his head. “At Oldtown we learned of your mother’s death, and the monstrous child she had borne. We might have turned back there, but my mother chose to sail on. I told you of the welcome we found at Casterly Rock.”
Let’s just get it out of the way: LORD DAGOS MANWOODY. Makes me snigger like a 14 year old boy. Okay, I’m done.
The speaker is Prince Oberyn Martell of Dorne, known as The Red Viper. He’s the younger brother of the current rule of Dorne, which was the last of the Seven Kingdoms to swear fealty to the Seven Kingdoms, and so they retain many of their own laws and customs, such as Oberyn still being referred to as Prince when he’s the spare portion of heir-and-a-spare. His older brother, Doran, holds two titles to distinguish him from his siblings: Prince of Dorne and Lord of Sunspear. Oberyn is a flamboyant character and has some of the most dramatic scenes in A Storm of Swords. Every time he showed up, something exciting happened.
A byrnie is a mail coat or hauberk. I’m used to seeing the word hauberk, so what really is the difference? Turns that the different names refer to the length of the mail shirt. A knee length coat of mail is a hauberk; mid-thigh length is a haubergon; a byrnie is waist length. So Oberyn Martell is being outfitted for battle against the largest, fiercest man in the seven kingdoms in a waist length coat. The etymology here is really interesting. Again, it’s Scottish circa 1300: byrny. Which is derived from the Old Norse brynja and before that, Old High German brunnia. That’s just cool all over the place—a word that doesn’t end back in Rome or Greece.
And if you need some chain mail? ThinkGeek will totally sell you some. If you’re on the tall side, it might actually qualify as a byrnie.
And finally, gibbet:
Outside the inn on a weathered gibbet, a woman’s bones were twisting and rattling at every gust of wind.
That’s Arya Stark thinking that. And of all the Starks (and there are quite a few) I’d rather hear from her than just about any of them. So far in A Feast for Crows I haven’t heard from her, only her older sister Sansa, who keeps referencing her “tummy” and all the ways it flutters and floops and whatnot in fear and stress and every other thing and she’s just so twee and delicate. Screw that, get me back to Arya! Who is fierce and brave and most importantly, willing to learn and do what it takes to make her way in the world.
The word gibbet is one of those interesting words that’s both a noun and a verb without any machinations. It’s a gallows, or a structure used to hang someone until death and then possibly used to display that dead body as a warning to others. If you are hanged to death on a gibbet, you are gibbeted. Its meaning as a noun dates back to 1100-1250 sometime, derived from Middle English or Old French. Its use as a verb is dated quite a bit later, to the 17th century. I so much wanted this one to be Scottish as well, but it’s not. Dang.
Hey, if you buy some chainmail, let me know! Also, y’all start reading this series please, so Doc and I have others to yammer about it with!
By My Calculations, it’s $34 of Hot Vocab
I’ve been keeping up with politics a little more, lately. For the most part, I like to read blogs that put an interesting, funny spin on how liberals are carting western civilization to hell in a handbasket. Until today, I wouldn’t have said I was seriously interested in any specific candidate, regardless of party affiliation. But as of this morning, I think I may be in actual love with Paul Burns. Paul Burns’s vocabulary–which is stonkingly presidential–makes me want to express my feelings by, say, throwing my panties at him.
But since I don’t want to run afoul of his security or, say, make him think I’m a crazy person, I’ve compressed my crazy passion into something that benefits us all. I’ve looked up all the words from his latest post that I didn’t already know. And now I’m sharing them with you, so that you too, can work them into conversation, or a blog entry, and attract brainy women like a magnet of rare-earth-verbosity. The words:
- filipendulous – suspended by a string
- absquatulate – to flee
- fistiana – boxing
- tropophobia – fear of moving or making changes
- anacoluthons – an abrupt change of construction within a sentence used for rhetorical effect; a way to make inconsistency sound good
- hebdomadally – weekly
- nikhedonia – pleasure derived from anticipating success
- luculent – clear
- agnogenic – idiopathic
- refulgence – radiant shining
- facinorous – atrociously wicked
- jejune – dull and/or childish
- jactancy – boasting
- fimicolous – living in excrement
- obolary – poor; specifically possessing only small coins
- vagient – crying like a child
- calvous – bald
It’s been a long time since I saw that many words I didn’t know in one place. As they say, I’ll be in my bunk.
SxDS
I’d like to attend SxDS: South by Deep South! The conference is being held September 24 – 26, coinciding with The 10th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival. Big weekend for independent media! And it looks like it could be a lot of fun.
Is anybody else planning on going? I think I’ll offer my services and see what happens. Joined the WordCamp Birmingham group to start listening in.
Spring in Climate Zone 7b
This spring’s trip to the Botanic Gardens was nice. I climbed way up to the top of the place, through the bog and wildflower gardens and felt like a champ. My favorite plants were in the desert hothouse– the jades and other small succulents. I miss having a jade plant around. I should go get one.
eta: “dessert” hothouse? Dammit! Y’all, somebody please point out when I’m being an idiot.