If I were in charge of holidays...

...then I would definitely designate today as Happy England-Not-Being-Overrun-By-Vikings Day.

For those of you scratching your heads in confusion: on this day in 1066, Harold Godwinson of England defeated Harald (Sigurdsson) Hardrada of Norway at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. He didn't get to enjoy the victory very long as, about three weeks later, he too was defeated and killed by William the Conqueror, kicking off the Norman conquest of England.

But if that first battle had gone the other way, it's possible (likely, really) that the world as we know it would be very different.

Sho'nuff!

Today was the first Movie Day at Dojo Chattanooga. The film in question was The Last Dragon, starring Taimak (as "Bruce" Leroy Green) and Julius Carry (as Sho'nuff, the Shogun Of Harlem)*. It's a classic, of course, and I enjoyed every cheesy moment of it.

"Who is the master!"
"Sho'nuff!"

*(Yeah, I have no idea who they are either.)

New York City?!

Yes, I was really there
Originally uploaded by Blackwyr.

Last week was spent up north, in New Jersey and New York City. It strikes me that, this time around, I don't have much to say about it.

The weather was overcast most of the time, which was a blessed relief from the heat we've had down here, and especially welcome with the amount of walking I did. In dress shoes. I was concerned for a while that I might aggravate my fasciitis (I didn't; it just hurt.).

I didn't really do anything I wanted, other than visit the Empire State Building. The line to get up there was amazingly long; I doubt I'll do it again unless I can find a way to avoid the crowds. But I got some decent pictures, the best of which can be found on my Flickr page. And I'm still trying to assemble a panorama of the city, taken across the Hudson in Hoboken.

I was wandering around Times Square, footsore and cranky about not getting much accomplished, when I saw that MTV was filming their TRL show. This made me irrationally angry, especially when I looked at the crowd assembled to lap up such a contrived spectacle. Then it occurred to me that I was actually looking forward to seeing Snakes On A Plane, and I decided that I didn't have much room to be angry after all.

The most useful thing I learned on my trip was how to navigate the Byzantine structures of public transit in place up there (not that I'm expert or anything, but simply knowing your options counts for a lot). Between trains, buses, cabs, and subways, there's really nothing out of reach given sufficient willingness to plot a course. But good luck if you make a wrong turn or get on the wrong train. You're done.

Little Discoveries

I've been a fan of Dan Simmons' writing for a long time, but it never occurred to me to go look for a website, or blog, or whatever. I happened to follow a link, though, off of Colleen Doran's blog, to that of Simmons', and I'm glad I did.

His message for September is about houses, the homes of writers, and of architecture in general. And one part toward the end really caught me:

The World’s Fair Futurama of 1939 is a brilliant view of a brilliant future – all 30-lane highways and 100-story apartment buildings – that will never arrive. Our monkey brains . . . which, to be honest, are the only brains we have worth using . . . reject that.

We love textures and human scale and color and sheltering places. We may disdain clutter, but we love our things and want to see them. We delight in sudden vistas and open views even while we like to be inside and warm with our family when it rains and snows outside. As much as we like our big views in the daylight, we don’t always want darkness pressing against glass panes trying to get in at night. Our deep brains tell us that there are things out there in the night that will eat us given half a chance. We are peaceful tree dwellers and murderous savannah runner-hunters who became cave dwellers out of necessity and we haven’t worked out all the hardwired paradoxes of that yet.

The full post can be found here.

Finally!

Well, I finally got around to seeing that new Samuel L. Jackson movie. You know, Reptiles On An Aircraft, or something like that.

Oh yeah...!


That's the one.

Let us be clear here: this is not a good movie. This is a SciFi Channel movie with a bigger budget. This is a movie plotted and written by Internet consensus.

But it's got snakes. And a plane. And people saying "fuck" rather a lot. It's not like you should be surprised by what you get.

You've got your tough, no-nonsense FBI agent (Jackson), a witness under his protection, a plane full of airline passenger stereotypes, and a few racist and sexist stereotypes as well (But that's okay, because the movie isn't about them, it's about the snakes. And the plane.). You've got the viciously sadistic and dangerous criminal mastermind who, stymied by the mighty airline security measures, is forced to resort to what is possibly the single most retarded assassination concept in cinema history*.

Fans of the roleplaying game will be able to clearly distinguish between the BGS (Before Goddamned Snakes) and AGS (After Goddamned Snake) stages. Regrettably, no snakes challenge passengers with Rubik's Cubes or sudoku puzzles.

There is a scene with boobies. There are many scenes where snakes jump out and scare people. The snakebite gross-out factor is turned up to eleven. The science is extra-bad. There are some vague attempts at pathos. Samuel L. Jackson swears a lot, and fights snakes with improvised weapons.

All of which is, of course, precisely what you should expect. We, the Internet audience, asked for it, and we damn well got it.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I enjoyed it. No, I don't really feel the need to see it again.

*(Ok, there are many other stupid assassination concepts in cinema; pretty much anything from early James Bond movies, for instance, or anything from the Austin Powers films taking the piss out of the old James Bond movies, but none of them were made into the central theme. They did not make a movie called Ill-Tempered Sea Bass In Dr. Evil's Secret Hideout.**)

**(But if they made a movie called Sharks With Frickin' Lasers, I would go see it.)