'Bred Crumbs
12.18.04
Entergeekment Tonight
02:26 PMI just took a break from a week of Extended Return of the King viewing to catch up on my sci-fi/fantasy news web-surfing and ... jaw-drop after jaw-drop after jaw-drop.
1. Someone's bought the movie rights for The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant, and started on the screenplay. How unlikely is this? Well, the series stands at seven books with three to go; the books are long, dark, and complex; and the protaganist, a leper translated to a magical land where his senses are restored and he is regarded as a savior, isn't exactly a heroic, sympathetic figure.
True, we all thought the Lord of the Rings was unfilmable, too. But here's a big difference: Frodo never raped anyone.
2. Farscape star Ben Browder is joining the cast of Stargate SG-1 next season. How are you supposed to feel when your favorite actor, who starred in an outstanding TV series, signs on for a much-much-less-good one? (Consolation: at least he's not on Stargate Atlantis.)
3. Farscape co-star Claudia Black, a terrific and funny actor in her own right who has a guest role in an upcoming SG-1 episode, is reportedly doing a five-ep arc for the series in the ninth season, the same one Browder has signed on for. The ante is upped: Ben and Claudia, together again, maybe.
Still ... it's Stargate, the series that, ever since being acquired by the "Sci-Fi" Channel, largely just sits around the conference table. And on the rare occasions it does get out of the office to wander around the forests of Vancouver, it pretty much just plods down the tired old Trek trail of TV sci-fi cliché. If the next thing I hear is that Farscape showrunner David Kemper is joining the Stargate creative team*, then I'll get excited.
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* Update, 12.20.04: Come to think of it, Kemper did write the story for one Stargate episode, back in the first season. So maybe ...
Bureau of Bureaucracy
01:33 PMPosted on the window of my favorite neighborhood Pakistani-Indian restaurant:
When you read the notice, it's not as silly as its title makes it sound; turns out the restaurant is adding outside tables on the sidewalk, requiring city permission. Makes me wonder if the city could have ticketed the guy sitting outside the Pork Store Cafe, with his two ginormous dogs blocking the entrance.
12.15.04
You Can't Say "Blog" Without "Blah"
10:47 PMInevitably, the blogger hits a dry patch, has nothing to write or no energy to write it. Also inevitably, no matter how much he wanted to resist it, he writes about having nothing to write about.
Welcome to here. Enjoy a snack cracker.
The December Blahs are hitting harder than I can ever remember (then again, maybe I think that every December). Makes no sense, really: home life is wonderful, new job's going generally well excepting the occasional rough patch that always comes with new. But it's gray, and chilly, and Xmas, and ... ecchh. I rise, I work, I chill, I sleep, I rinse, I repeat, and enthusiasm never returns my calls.
So that's why I haven't been writing. Here's what I haven't been writing:
— Reshoots were delayed a long while by colliding actor schedules, but we finally finished shooting everything for the work in progress, The Point of Boxes. Robbie's in editing-land with it now. I'm full of conflicted tortured-writer opinions about it that are best not shared.
— I finally got on board the Scissor Sisters bandwagon – two weeks before their SNL appearance, thank you very much.* Dewayne's been singing (ha!) their praises awhile now, and I finally got pulled in when I heard a clip from their infamous "Comfortably Numb" cover. But there's more to them than that. You've got to love a band that makes songs that hinge on chorus lines like "This will be the last time I ever do your hair" and "there ain't no t*ts on the radio." My current favorites from the album are, oddly enough, the two girl-name songs, "Laura" and "Mary."
— Then there was every news story that sparked an ember of outrage: the populist winner of the San Diego mayoral election whose victory was voided because of ridiculous technicalities and bad UI; Governor Beefhead's effort to rob workers of lunch, while his pointy wife sticks up for poor defenseless "arthritis cream" abusers; and a maker of overpriced cables who is suing everyone in the world who happens to use the word "monster," in lieu of making money by producing something that's useful to anyone. And that's without even grazing the high-level atrocities that The Daily Show covers so much better than I could anyway. But each time, the outrage was snuffed by ennui, descending like December clouds.
And yes, as a matter of fact, I do read just one newspaper.
This entry should end better, but who's gonna make the effort? Not me. Not now.
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I started a review of the album, but could never get past the first sentence. It went: No matter how good we have tried to be, no matter how kind we are to other people, every few years we are threatened with a revival of glam rock.
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