The Accidental Weblog

What’s that you say? Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children is coming out at TIFF in four days time now?

(Starts chewing fingernails…)

I felt a little like this—tho’ not even as much so—when they said they were making The Road…

Yeah, actually. This is way, way worse.

I loved that book. Love, present tense, more, even, I guess, as I’ve a copy around here, somewhere, still, and have been through it relatively recently…

And Mehta has this way of blowing my mind. And her 1947: Earth especially. Which, again, if I haven’t mentioned lately, you really do have to see. And I always kinda saw that work as the natural cinematic blood sister to Rushdie’s book even prior to her announcing this thing…

So I’m askeered, mostly, honestly. Just hoping this project really does turn out as the hydrogen-bomb-scale detonation of a film which, by all rights, it really should be. And thinking also it seems a bit greedy to hope as much. And agonizing a mite, thinking again, as I’d also thought well before they announced this thing that that book was decidedly not on a list of literary works I’d have ever considered ‘easily filmable’.

(Stops chewing nails, if only to cross fingers properly.)

This is just another of those keepalive things.

It’s the usual deal. Very busy. Kids. Work. Home.

Brief notes:

1) ATSC terrestrial signals are something to behold when you get them working. Over-the-air line-of-sight transmissions have come a long way since your father’s TV set.

The occasion of my mentioning: I set up an antenna for the local signals a week or so back.

How that happened: we’d ditched our cable TV package several months back now. Got to thinking—like I think a lot of people are now noticing—that paying the kinda money it now costs to have a 24-hour tap with a hundred channels of junk you mostly don’t watch when you can get pretty much anything you might really want to see and have time for on a pay-per-program basis via the net is just kinda silly. It was my lovely wife’s idea—I’m not really much a TV guy at all anyway. I might veg for an hour in front of Colbert or a Simpsons rerun maybe for an hour like every eight months at most, these days, I’m not kidding.

(Not that I’m saying I don’t veg—it’s just now that I do it reading the web.)

Anyway, having ditched the cable, and the per-program thing working pretty okay apparently, my lovely wife got to thinking it would still be nice to have the local channels around, especially given that one of ‘em would be carrying the Olympics pretty much wall to wall. So I looked into it.

It turned out to be non-trivial in our case. The standard interior antennae available, amplified or no, however much I was willing to spend on top-of-the-line just weren’t cutting it. Tried a few variations, and got, generally, one or two channels at once, from various locations in and around the ground floor. And much fiddling was necessary if you wanted to get some of ‘em to tune versus others. Too much artificial relief (read: buildings) I’d guess.

So my eventual solution turned out to be: a big ole’ directional Channel Master (current descendant of the big spindly aluminum things you may well remember from forty foot towers, in the day) in the attic pointed carefully at the local tower, a fair bit of coax dragged neatly through walls and ceilings on the fish tape, and a signal preamp in the wiring closet.

But all that together does, as I mentioned above, make for one hell of a picture. I managed to arrange for 13 local channels, 12 of those steady as a rock, which is pretty much the best you’re going to do in Ottawa without far more extreme measures still. (And slightly less of half of those don’t even come from the tower I was pointing at, which was just nice.) And surveying those: ATSC is generally hi-def and gorgeous: 720p or 1080i, and generally, apparently, less compressed than you’re likely to get per-channel via cable. So it looks pretty damned amazing on a nice big flatscreen, actually. Once I’d got it working, I spent some time watching the summer Olympics, and I’m not really a sports watcher, and especially not for summer sports. But it was just so durned pretty, y’know?

2) Stieg Larsson’s stuff is pretty much as good as you may have heard. Just FYI if, y’know, you are, like I was until yesterday, one of the last six people in the world who haven’t got ‘round to reading any of it yet.

Occasion of my mentioning this: I’d been packing e-texts onto my Nexus in anticipation of upcoming travel. The first Larsson, however, will not be helping me kill time on planes or departure lounges, as, it turns out, I’ve already read it. In hours I probably should have been sleeping. It’s that kinda stuff, I’m afraid.

… and that’ll have to do for now. As, apparently, I should be working. Later, I guess.

… via McSweeeny’s:


Words to live by, absolutely.

You know the drill. Work’s been busy/life’s been busy.

I was some weeks at Tremblant, but wound up working close to half of it anyway—work stuff that arose—burned a lot of 4G through the tethered phone. And the second week—the one I wasn’t so much working—was honestly kinda sad. Crazy warm for March. Tried to make myself go out each day anyway, but each day there was more melt. Would do a run, come back the next day, and it would be half grass and rock.

Bright side: boarding in shorts. Less bright side: having to, because I was absolutely dripping with sweat. And less still: all this happening in March.

Kept telling myself: hey, it’s all good… I’m at a mountain… yes, a kinda sadly, soppy, drippy, melting mountain, but still: a mountain.

Guess I’m going to have to get used to heat*, I guess. Winters are rapidly becoming extinct.

In other news: I was able to use a bit of the ‘too depressing and soppy to ride’ time actually to get back to work on some fiction… somethin’ been on hiatus too long. Took one of those books that’s been sitting complete plot- and story-wise but sub-par editing-wise, took another crack at it. Made myself a list of to dos for it… Trying to make myself commit to get through ‘em, get something in the mail again…

I dunno. Seems to me maybe I have too many lives already. But what can ya do. The book, she is there. And maybe has a bit of potential. Has an ending, of all things, after all… and a beginning… it’s just some of the bits in the middle don’t, to my mind, so much hold together. Anyway, be a bit of a waste, now, just to let it moulder.

(*/Or die out myself, too, I guess.)

Malki’s Wondermark is often pretty durn awesome too.

… that Ryan North is awesome.

Yeah, sure, his Dinosaur Comics thing is very often beautifully, weirdly funny. Yeah, sure, he (along with Matthew Bennardo and David Malki) has just done this rather innovative anthology thing, and yeah, he and his co-conspirators, in a typically clever display of net meme savviness managed to put it at the top of Amazon’s sales list for a short while by getting everyone interested to buy it on its first day out, creating a nice little sales spike…

Ah, but then there’s the best part. The part he presumably didn’t intend*…

Yeah, the part where some late-night infomercial product huckster realized his own recently released masterpiece** was not at number one (shock, horror, and, of course tears)…

… and therefore proceeded to whine his fat ass off about it on the air.

… Oh. Right. And as if we needed more evidence Glenn Beck is the original WATB.

(/Via Science After Sunclipse.)

*I mean, I assume. But this is North, after all. And hey, he is, apparently, the evil mastermind behind (makes spooky wiggly fingers) The Culture of Death! So mebbe he did plan all this, and he’s just not letting on. Ya just never know.

**No, I don’t know what it’s about. Presumably, considering the source, it’s sixty breathless ‘n breathtaking pages on why you should buy the Ronco Salad Shooter™ or some damned thing. But then, who the fuck cares?

Just saw Guy X….

Much liked. But then, I’ve always had this thing about stuff that just doesn’t feel like being any particular genre all the way through. Honestly, I can read or hear a critic or viewer whining about that about a work, how it just can’t be that one thing, how this apparently made things so terribly confusing for them, and I say aloud ‘dumbass’, and then go off to watch it with great expectations…

‘Course, it had an in. Got this thing about drama in the arctic, too. Always gets me right there.

Come to think of it, my life has fit no particular genre, so far, either. Nor will it do so merely to make things easy on the reviewers.

(/Well, okay, as to that life, some parts, mebbe farce. Or, at least the second time for each bit, anyway.)

If you haven’t already seen the 2009 film Moon, do, absolutely.

Yeah, I finally caught up to it. And now can say: Moon is everything filmed science fiction too rarely seems to be of late. Which is to say: thoughtful, elegantly paced, understated, and incredibly powerful.

Oh, right… and also: insanely gorgeous. It’s one of these rare films that has such qualities you could probably see it on a thirty-year old 12 inch portable black and white cathode ray tube set and it would still make one hell of an impression, but the landscapes in the thing—the bleak, forbidding, remote face of the far side of the moon—generally seen here with no sun in the sky—are also a thing to behold. Beyond being a perfect complement to the story. It is highly recommended if you do see this thing, you find something with some pixels on it to do the job of rendering those.

That’s all. The IMDB page linked above has a bit more. Watch out for spoilers—none I saw there, and they generally label those, but I’d suggest you do want to see this thing without reading too much first, if you haven’t already. It is built like a suspense—so I’d suggest you do want to go through certain revelations as does the protagonist, at least once, if you can arrange this; let it come upon you as it does Sam Rockwell’s Sam Bell.

… and for the most part, no one much gives a rat’s ass.

Tipping you to Eamon today…

Because it’s a true thing, and it’s a good thing. The wanks who really make an issue are increasingly in the minority… here, at least, and watching from here, anyway. And yes, we do have to keep making them squirm, at least. But let’s not overstate their importance, now, either…

(/And yes, the fewer the better, really… But me, I see that as a work in progress.)

I’m not so much doing stuff in this form anymore. Honestly, it’s partly not trying much, partly that when I do try, things just aren’t lighting up.

That said, I thought this one (PDF) came out basically okay.