Whatta Fiasco

Clearly I’m going to have to go back and read the previous books in this cycle, although this one stands well on its own. The basic premise here is society adapting to infection by sentient microorganisms. We follow the story through the eyes of an artist who chooses to be a host to a more useful strain of the plague. There are plenty of weaknesses to pick on in the technical details of the story, but the quality of the story telling overcomes those for me.

[amazon]

You know, if Stephen Chow were making his movies in English, I probably wouldn’t be caught dead watching them. I like to think of him as a Chinese Mike Meyers (but with fewer poop jokes); when he’s good, he’s very good, but all too often he goes completely over the top into the land of very bad taste. This film is almost entirely in bad taste land. Poor Gong Li. Luckily for you, the very best scene in the film is right at the beginning. Watch Stephen Chow use his feckless brother as a living ink brush to create a painting to pay off that brother’s gambling debt. Then you can turn it off, except then you’ll miss the one shining light in this film for me: Pei-pei Ching. She plays an older villainess, but she still has strikingly good looks and she kicks butt. If you just want a silly Stephen Chow movie, go watch Shaolin Soccer or God of Cookery again.

[greencine]

Charlie Stross comes from the same semi-hard sf with economics sphere you’ll find Ken MacLeod inhabiting, but he seems more interested in playing with the story than pushing an agenda. In fact, the playing can get a little out of hand as the wild ideas and plot devices go zinging past, but it’s enough fun that I’m looking forward to several other of his books that should be hitting stores any day now.

[amazon]

The latest from Jen-Pierre Jeunet, with an appearance by Audrey Tatou, is another winner. Absurdity and realism rub cheek and jowl, both washed by a carefully selected, painterly palette of color. The careful attention to detail leaves me wondering if the invisible sugar cube was intentional, and why some particular dead soldiers were portrayed by obvious dummies instead of by actors. The weakest thing about the film for me was its strong similarity to Amelie, but it’s done so well that I can forgive Jeunet, this once.

I swear, it really feels as if someone has been feeding stupid pills to a bunch of the people I have to interact with this week. It’s not that I’m horribly, brilliantly smart, but what smarts I have have been of little use this week. It’s driving me a little crazy. Anyone have a few spare clue sticks?

Mind you, I’m the one who left my fencing shoes out a week ago Wednesday and thought I had lost them for good. They weren’t at home. They weren’t in the gym. They weren’t in the lost and found. And then they magically appeared on the floor by one of the kids’ fencing bags last night. Ruby bought a new pair of shoes just like mine but half a size larger. Ruby, who is continually leaving stuff laying around, somehow managed to pick up both her shoes and mine and put them in her fencing bag. She thought for certain I’d stolen her shoes from her when I picked them up, until she remembered that hers have plastic zip ties attached to the lacings that look like bouncy antennae. Maybe I should do something to personalize my shoes a little more.

We also had the excitement of sweeping up broken glass after one of our fencers had to break into his own truck in order to get home. The list of things he’d had to do to manage to lock himself out was nearly as astounding as Ruby picking up her stuff.

But I have my iBook back and life is happier, except for being on only 128Kb of memory. Ow. I started firing up applications this morning the way I normally do and suddenly realized that the poor wee beastie was thrashing itself. Oops. Large java applications trying to display large spreadsheets tend not to like being RAM bound. Doubly so if you’ve got mail open, a couple of browser windows, an instant messenger client, and are downloading some software all at the same time. A memory upgrade will be happening relatively soon I think.

That was a fun weekend. Hubby and I took off to celebrate our tenth anniversary before our eleventh snuck up on us. Our exciting, romantic destination? Wichita, Kansas. Don’t laugh. It turned out to be a very good weekend, in spite of the hotel having no liquor license and the pool and hot tub being outdoors and closed for the season, and the rain that started Friday night and lasted all day Saturday.We were out of the house, away from most phone calls and most email. and together. We had fun.

Friday night we fenced with the River City fencing club. It wasn’t a huge crowd but we had a good time. Afterwards four of us went out to Savute’s, an Italian restaurant and pilot’s hang out. Wow, the food was good. It’s a tiny hole in the wall place by the railroad tracks, but well worth the visit. The fried cheese is divine and I highly recommend the scallopini.

Saturday morning was gray and wet but the weatherman promised it would stop raining and get warmer by the afternoon, so we had a leisurely morning and then went to the Exploratorium. It’s a gorgeous building and someone (lots of someones) had way too much fun designing the interactive exhibits. They even had a sniffable exhibit with a weed that we once found in our hay pasture in Tonganoxie. Its popular name is Fragrance Everlasting, and it’s well named. When dried it’s an unremarkable looking little straw flower with a sweet vanilla scent that lasts for years. The rain didn’t let up, but we did a little walking around downtown anyhow. Got wet. Saw some weird stoned owls. Decided not to go to the zoo. And for dinner we went to another hole in the wall, a Turkish restaurant called Cafe Istanbul. They were swamped and the ice maker was broken, so the service slipped well past spotty, but the food was good enough to get me back again. It was also Saturday night, so they had belly dancers. Nice ladies, but don’t bother going for the belly dancers. They weren’t all that bad, but go for the Iskander donner instead. Take a friend to share because it’s a huge plate. And order the large hummus appetizer so you don’t hurt each other fighting over the buttered lamb in tomato sauce.

Sunday started gray but dry so we decided it might be time for the zoo. Excellent choice. After a lazy start to the day and an extended search for bagels, it was too hot for carrying around jackets and most of the animals were out napping in the sun. And once again we were pleasantly surprised. The zoo is very good and much larger than I had expected. Baby rhino! Baby rhino! Vampire bats, giant tortoises, a sun bathing giant anteater, river otters, sleepy wolves, and more fat koi than you can shake a swan’s wing at.

Yesterday, by contrast, I spent too much time and too much money getting four new tires on my car. But it drives a zillion times better now, so I can’t complain too much. I also got to watch a drive-up ATM machine being cleaned and overheard copious quantities of information about how not to manage a fiber optics utilities company. Then Hunter S. Thompson died but Stanislaw Lem made the short list for the Booker prize. And I found out that Iskander donner was not named after Alexander the Great after all. It was named after the Turkish chef who invented the vertical grill. And my iBook should be back in my hands by the end of the week. (Knock on wood.)

Oh, but how can I resist such a well-written, well-integrated, metafictional joke. The overly mannered language may throw you off, but don’t let it. It’s part of the joke and part of the art. And the story itself works apart from the cleverness. Well done.

[amazon]

Why did I rent this again? Amitabh Bachchan as an evil genius reading comic books wasn’t sufficient. This is Bollywood gone bad. Very very bad. The title character, Shankar Boom, is almost cheesy enough to carry this one. But no. Not even. This film is so bad in its badness that I bailed half way through. The brainless super models, the finger severed by an industrial sewing machine, the girl paid to sit under the desk? No, life is too short to waste on this film.

[greencine]

So here I am on my old iBook blueberry clamshell. The backspace is still persnickerty and the battery is now but a battery shaped object that holds no charge at all. Dead brick. And I’m on OS9. Good heavens but I’d forgotten what a nice step up OSX was. Gah. And it’s even an older version of 9. The good news is that tomorrow my regular iBook takes a trip to Houston, Texas to get a new motherboard and maybe visit the space center. Two weeks. It feels as if someone has stolen my high-tech prosthesis and replaced it with a wooden peg-leg. My cell phone I can happily live without (right up until the point where I need it) but my laptop holds too much of my life. I miss it already.

In the meantime I’ve been distracted by bouncing servers, file permission problems, and today’s nonsense was a cleverly persistent hacker attempting social engineering on me. Hooray for security procedures. Dear Not-A-Friend in [city name deleted] , Don’t count on getting away with it. I’m hoping that tomorrow will have few enough interruptions that I can get some actual work done.

Other than that, life is peachy. I got some more of the trash out of the kids’ old bedroom this week and I’m nearly done with knitting another sock. I also figured out why, when I’m reading, I always imagine east as being to my left. I’m blaming it on the architecture. No, really. In the northern hemisphere it makes the most sense to have the major expanse of glass facing south. And in western architecture, it is most common to have the major expanse of glass at the front of the house. It so happens that I managed to live in several houses while growing up that faced south. If you walk out the front door of a south facing house and try to figure out your cardinal directions, east is on your left. Naturally. It all makes sense.Of course, i f my parents had bought houses on the other side of the road, it would be a completely different story, but not as much fun.

For those of you who celebrate it, a happy belated Valentine’s Day. Work has been more than a bit distracting of late, and the laptop has been a royal pain in the patoot. The good news is that the laptop is scheduled to take a trip to the mother ship for refurbishment. The bad news is that it will likely take more than a week to get done, but with any luck I won’t be attempting the Vulcan death pinch on the poor beast anymore. It’s amazingly difficult to type while applying a Vulcan death pinch.

In other good news/bad news scenarios, Max is still alive and having fun, although he’s sounding a bit stressed based on his last email. The money the ATM machine had stolen at last report has magically reappeared in his account. The problem seems to have been that, after the fiscal fiasco there a few years back, foreigners are no longer allowed to withdraw US dollars from ATMs. So he has his money back, but after converting the US funds to pesos and paying the exchange fee, he no longer has the money to get the apartment they were looking at. They’re down to scraping the barrel in terms of bad neighborhoods and looking forward to not having deposits returned. He seems to be under some misapprehension that the US consulate will help in dealing with shady landlords, but the species is pretty much the same all over. If you don’t have enough money to deal with a reputable landlord, don’t expect to get your deposit back. Welcome to the life of the insufficiently capitalized.

And what, you ask, is he going to do about getting a work permit so he can pay the rent on even a seedy apartment given the shortness of his funds? Well, he’s let slip that his current plan is to get around this by getting married. Aiyee. At least he’s researching first to make sure that getting married will actually help his problems instead of just making them worse. Does he really think it doesn’t cost any money to get married? And if that doesn’t do the trick, he’s already let us know that he’ll be hitting the parental money bucket. But he’s still dealing with his situation and hasn’t asked for a plane ticket yet. Success in small steps.