Crossing genres
I saw a woman on the bus tonight reading Aprenda Inglés con la Ayuda de Dios [Learn English With God’s Help]. It makes sense that someone would come out with such a book; after all, los hispanohablantes should learn to read the Bible in its original language.
An incisor-lickin’ good movie, with a message for our times
Recently, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, encouraged “fellow-seekers for peace and healing of the earth” to see Avatar, James Cameron’s film about native resistance to a resource-extraction conglomerate, and to connect that film with the upcoming Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat.
In the same vein, I encourage my environmentally conscious readers to go out and see Daybreakers, this year’s big-budget movie about vampires who combust rather than sparkle.
Daybreakers is set in a future where nearly every human being on earth has become a vampire, but now a blood shortage is putting their eternal lives at stake. Just like overfishing has ruined the stock of North Atlantic cod, ten years of growth in the vampire population has reduced the human population to a minute fraction of its former glory, and even with advanced technology sustaining humans in blood-farms, there is not enough left to slake the planet’s thirst. The main character, a hematologist for a sinister vampiric megacorporation, is trying to synthesize artificial blood that can mitigate the need for human stock, but as his experiments result in failure after failure, bloodlust-driven civil unrest becomes more and more of a threat.
One might ask: how on earth did these vampires let the situation get so far out of hand? Couldn’t they have, for example, ensured that a healthy breeding population of humans was kept alive in some kind of nature reserve? But of course, future generations will probably ask similar questions about our own environmental catastrophes, in which our own short-term hunger is blinding us to the long-term needs of our planet. The vampires of Daybreakers, thus, reflect our own selfish desires back to us, and the movie teaches us a valuable ecological lesson: manage your stocks of edible wildlife, or they will manage you.
PS: Speaking of blood-sucking: eleven dollars for a movie ticket?!
Robes in the ’hood
The Harry Potter series was partly inspired by a peculiarly British literary genre: stories of boys’ adventures in public1 school. If J. K. Rowling had been American, perhaps she would have been inspired by a peculiarly American sort of educational drama, and come up with this.
1 George Bernard Shaw once remarked that the US and Britain are two nations separated by a common language. A British “public” school is an American “elite private” school. Also, a British “boot” of a car is an American “trunk”, British “trainers” are American “sneakers”, and a British “hat” is American “underpants”. OK, I made that last one up.
via a comment in slacktivist
I’ve got bad news and good news
The bad news is, if a certain industry rag can be trusted, jobs in the information technology sector suck.
The good news is, if a certain job-search site can be trusted, jobs in just about every other sector suck worse.
via Crooked Timber and Hacker News
“I never drink... soda.”
According to the NYT, Scholastic is reissuing its Baby-Sitters Club series, a line of novels for tween girls that ran for 213 titles and sold 176 million copies. Girls who devoured these books during the 1980s and 1990s now have children of their own and, as one bookseller put it, the rebooted series would sell “really well to the girls who aren’t quite ready for vampires and particularly to the parents of the girls who aren’t quite ready.”
I see some great potential for crossover fanfic here.
Annals of cultural transmission
Scene: The dinner table.
Father: What did you do in school today?
Five-year-old: It was too cold to go out for recess, so we saw a movie.
Father: What was it about?
Five-year-old: It was about a snowman who came to life.
Father: So you saw Frosty the Snowman?
Seven-year-old: How did it work? And how did he die?
Dubious taxonomical choice of the day
My wife and I just got back from a romantic date at Brookline Booksmith, and I noticed that their staff has shelved Cecilia Tan’s anthology Women of the Bite: Lesbian Vampire Erotica, not under “Fantasy” or “Gay & Lesbian”, but under “Love & Relationships”.
I can’t quite figure that one out. I’m not quite sure if I want to.
Sit! Stay! Do your homework!
According to the New York Times, my indispensible source of yuppie trends, some parents have adapted the techniques of Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Milan to train their own children to obey them.
Why is this news? People adapt training techniques from one species to another all the time. Of course it’s possible to take this kind of thing too far.
All of this has been sung before and it all will be sung again
After I first heard the Philadelphia Chickens CD, I went around telling friends and acquaintances, “There’s this Sandra Boynton CD with a song called ‘Belly Button’, and it’s a round! Get it? Belly button? Round? Isn’t that great?”
More recently, we got a They Might Be Giants CD, Here Comes Science, which contains this delightful song about meteors, and is also a round:
If I thought there was the slightest hope of seeing the Leonids in this neck of the woods, I would suggest getting a whole bunch of people to sing this on a hilltop as we watch.
I guess I just like rounds. Who else composes rounds, these days? Is it a moribund art, like plays where all the characters speak blank verse?
We are of mediocre screenwriting. Always.
I have certain warm fuzzy feelings—in my reptilian hindbrain, you might say—for the original V miniseries, and I figured it would be a refreshing change to watch a new TV show when it is broadcast instead of waiting a few years for the DVDs to arrive. So I saw the first episode of the remake.
Micro-mini-review: Meh.
Slightly longer review with spoilers: If a bunch of hawt alien refugees from Obama’s Presidential campaign show up with their Cunning Plan to Take Over The World, I would subcontract out the Resistance Movement to Al-Qaeda before trusting the fifth-columnists who reveal themselves in the fifth act. Why on earth did Ryan gather a dozen potential resistance fighters, including at least two whom nobody could vouch for, in one place, where they could hear his infodump and then conveniently be slaughtered? If this guy really cares about saving the planet, why didn’t he spend a few minutes in the library and learn how to set up a proper cell structure for passing along the same information? And did that FBI agent really let a member of a suspected terrorist cell inject her with an alleged anaesthetic and cut open her skin? And doesn’t Mr. Ambitious Newscaster know how to grease a source? And WTF did Reverend Young and Skeptical mean when he declared he didn’t understand how “God and aliens could live in the same universe”?
I think this show is set in a universe where the Visitors really are the only form of intelligent life.
Also, the Visitors don’t do that cool reverb thing with their voices that they did in the original series. My reptilian hindbrain is so disappointed.
