January 23, 2003

I've said until now that I didn't blog (my fingers typed "block" and it's indeed a blocky word, ugly and unwieldy). I'm simply not the blogging type, the way I've never been the diary-keeping type. But I feel I ought to; not only to do it, but to be that type. When I was a child I started a diary every time I read something set up as one, and became so embarrassed about it after some days or weeks (and so afraid that my mother would read it and use it against me) that I stopped and destroyed the stuff.

I don't get embarrassed about old e-mail or Usenet posts, though, so perhaps this is ephemeral enough to keep me going. And it's good writing practice: get every thought down in understandable language before it flies away.

This is a non-blog, then. It's going to take time, probably not time stolen from things I ought to be doing, but replacing other replacement activity. Or is that displacement activity?

It's almost but not entirely unlike a blog: it will be erratic (when I feel like ranting, or have to get something off my brain before I can write something substantial) and I don't feel that by doing this I'm part of a "community" of people who do similar things. If you want to comment, send me mail and I'll mention you next time. I may include a links section, but Not Now.

Resolution: I am NOT going to abuse CSS to make the font of this page unreadably small. Emaroket! [1]

Writing

Gack, the outline. Not making much progress, because this is something that's perpetually embarrassing. Shortest possible synopsis: "Woman slowly becomes evil, then suddenly good." Present partial synopsis stands at 1279 words for seven (of 44) chapters, every one of them (the words, not the chapters) pure blecch. The problem is that I think I can probably write, and other people have told me so as well, but I couldn't summarize even in high school and I certainly can't sell myself, which also bodes ill for the cover letter.

Got a complimentary manuscript from an author I admire a lot, with her agent's address on it, and I'm carefully not going to abuse it.

Reading

Writers shouldn't read. After seeing the second Harry Potter film I'm reading the book again, and I keep noticing things I would have done differently. And some things that Rowling, or her editor, should have done differently ("the last remaining ancestor of Salazar Slytherin", emphasis mine).

Random book thought: "... 'shorpbread' and 'shorkcake' ... contain the element 'short'". Probably in Our Language by Simeon Potter (quite a different branch of the Potter family), which should be somewhere on our bookshelves but I'm too lazy to look it up. I like shorpbread better than shorkcake, and I prefer plain bread or cake to both.

The World

The Cat Personality Test is floating around on rec.arts.sf.fandom. I seem to be a moggie, not that I'm surprised. I don't like the site at all (too cluttered, and annoyingly USan and commercial) and some of the questions don't make any kind of sense to me. "If you could only own one video, it would be: A. Blade Runner, B. Love Story, C. Blazing Saddles, D. Chariots of Fire." Well, none of the above, I suppose. From what I've heard of Blade Runner it's too dark-future, I saw a trailer for Love Story something like decades ago that put me off it irrevocably, I don't like Westerns, and I've never heard of D. Give me Lord of the Rings and I'm willing to wait for the three-episode DVD boxed set.

Another one: "Your favorite television program is: A. Mysteries of the Unknown, B. Friends, C. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, D. Sesame Street." I haven't watched television for years now, and the only one of those I've ever seen at all is Sesame Street. I suppose from the titles that my favourite would be Mysteries of the Unknown, but you never know.

And I usually like "what kind of X are you" polls; I've been Merry Brandybuck, Luke Skywalker, some electronic component that I don't remember, and my perfect matches include Aragorn (grr, I wanted Faramir, more about him in the O Tempora section, but he wasn't on the list) and Dr. McCoy.

Real Life

Our archbishop died. Monsignor Serge, archbishop of the Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He was a good man, as far as I have known him, which wasn't very well because he was in Paris and we are in the Netherlands. He did get to consecrate our church in 2000 and complimented my daughter, then six and a half, on her reading of the Trisagion prayers. Memory Eternal!

Kids

Last Wednesday we took five girls aged seven to ten to Naturalis, the national history... er... museum of Leiden University, to see the dinosaur exhibition. It was an early birthday treat for Naomi, who will be nine on Sunday, and she made her two best friends end their quarrel to be able to take both. One of them, nine and a half, had never travelled by train before. Ours were travelling by train when they were weeks old, and going by car is a special treat (they love taxis, except the one who gets car-sick and has to take nasty yellow pills). Afterwards, we took an extra hour changing trains at Schiphol to eat ice-cream and look at the planes.

I wanted it to be a success, I made myself expect it to be a success, I was prepared to work to make it a success. I shouldn't have worried - it was a success. One friend said she'd never been on such a cool outing. They took silly photos with the digital camera, which I'll try to persuade Naomi to put on a page of her own.

There's something strange about Naturalis. The kids loved it, and I found it unaccountably creepy, until Boudewijn put his finger on it and said "this place is like a 22nd century zoo, to show children what animals used to be like". Half of the exhibits weren't real - not virtual, but copies and "visual representations". The target age of the exhibits seems to be nine, and indeed the nine- and ten-year-olds ran around exultantly, playing with the interactive thingies and gushing about everything, but most of the actual information (when you succeed in getting it out of its packaging) is at an adult level. And they teach you. They teach you that it's inefficient to waste solar energy by eating animals that eat plants, you're better off eating the plants directly. Well, yes, but I'm an omnivore unless I happen to be fasting.

The thing I liked best was a simulation of continental drift; very impressive and with a user interface that worked for non-visual me. Oh, and the real dinosaur fossils, especially the one that belonged to the main collection instead of to the exhibition, standing so tall that its head went up past two stories.

And it's a maze. I'm uncomfortable in mazes. So many stairs that my knees started to protest when I went down to the toilets in the basement (only in the basement) yet another time with yet another child. I wanted to go back to the fourth floor (fifth floor for you Murricans) by elevator, but the guard pointed me to the stairs and said that the elevator was only for the disabled and people with baby carriages. Well, I don't look disabled, and the child with me was at least six years too old for a baby carriage, and I didn't have the gumption (whether that means "courage", "shrewdness" or "initiative", I had none of those) to say that I felt disabled all right and that I always have trouble climbing lots of stairs.

Necessary Luxuries

The bread is in the oven, starting to smell delicious. Even when I'm having a Completely Incompetent Day, I can still bake bread.

Later, in the oven: bell peppers stuffed with minced lamb. The Turkish butcher has taken to selling lamb mixed half-and-half with beef, but you can get all-lamb when you ask for it. I was so early that he was still grinding it, so it was easy, but I'd hate to do that on a Friday afternoon when there are twenty people waiting for the butcher to grind a pound of lamb for me.

O Tempora

On Tuesday, we finally went to see The Two Towers. When we go to see a movie without the kids it's usually on a Tuesday, because that's not somebody's sports or folk-dancing or choir night and it's a quiet movie night, and our trusty babysitter (she's going away to medical school in September, worse luck) is usually available.

Boudewijn said it all, really, in his book log, but I'll quote and comment on the relevant part.

I feared the rape of Faramir with a bitter, cold fear.
And I was right. While there are many places in the movie adaption of 'The Two Towers' that are bad, ill-conceived or ludicrious, I feel that Faramir would stand a pretty good chance if he tried to mulct Jackson for substantial damages because of defamation of character.

I had to look up "mulct" (splendid word) and yes, he would. The Faramir in the book is a good guy, though perhaps a little too strict and stilted at the beginning. He doesn't really know what to do - he's faced with a situation he couldn't prepare for - but never lets on until he does the right thing by instinct or extrapolated training or both.

Faramir - the perfect British Officer. The gentle, intelligent, underrated little brother of Boromir. Whose name alone promises that the bearer will play cricket.

"Faramir hits for six!"

He never tried to take the bloody ring to Denethor. Never.

And when he did that in the movie, he became irrevocably a bad guy.

It's as if Peter Jackson, in making Boromir more of a good guy than he was in the book, had to compensate by making Faramir the evil brother. I was ready to strangle Faramir when he talked about sending his father a (forgot the epithet, it probably wasn't "valuable" but with similar meaning) gift, but I think I'd have to strangle some script-writer instead.

And he didn't wear that ugly little pencil-stripe moustache either. Nor did he look like a particularly mousy weasel.

I took slightly less issue with his looks; not so much effeminate, as Boudewijn said, but cultured eighteenth-century. Wrong, but not necessarily bad (Éomer, on the other hand, was exactly right with the sensitive face under the barbarian hair).

The Osgiliath episode is a filthy lie, and when I buy the DVD, I won't watch it.

I'll probably watch it for the magnificent flying dinosaur. The movie Faramir did one thing right: he hit it.

What bothered me most about Osgiliath (apart from the whole episode being there) was that it looked as if it had been burned and sacked twenty years ago, not yesterday.

Good points, points where the movie is better than the book: especially the depiction of the women and children of Rohan. I admit that I freely cried when the small boys were armed and helmeted, and that I cried again during the shot of the women and babies when the orcs cracked open the doors of Helm's Deep.

Yes, me too. And Haleth son of Háma. Aragorn, again, showed that he was a real king. Though in the book there's a stronger sense that Aragorn and Théoden are equivalent kings, and in the movie Aragorn comes and shakes Théoden up as his superior, not as his more agile and enterprising equal. The movie Théoden is too indecisive.

(Sedom, the main protagonist in the fantasy novel I should be writing instead of this review, was indignantly shouting at me that the silly Rohirrim had a thousand fine, young, strong, trained women at their disposal, and should use them. I think he was right.)

In Valdyas, too, every able-bodied woman between fourteen and sixty who wasn't pregnant or nursing would be drafted in this kind of emergency. And the younger girls and slightly pregnant women and elderly women who could wield a sword would stand as the last defence.

Much to my surprise I liked Gollum very much. His facial expressions were so strong, so surprisingly strong. His externalized inner battle between Smeagol and Gollum was better on screen than in the book.

Concedo. But I hated him. Not "love to hate" like Wormtongue, but really hate, loathe, abhor. Perhaps because he was so well done. I admit that that's what he's for, but that doesn't change it.

Before they fly away

The difference between doing something because you like it and doing the same thing because you belong to a culture or subculture that does it. The mere fact that you do it makes people think that you belong to that (sub)culture, whether or not that's true. Case in point: wearing a headscarf, whether in the street (people would think I'm a Muslim) or in church (people would think I'm trying to be Russian). I'd like to be able to wear a headscarf out of simple preference, without making it into a statement.

Finally found out what a hogshead is. And once you know, the site logo becomes obvious.

[1] This means "not now or ever" in the obscure language of Thunder Rock, which I mean to post somewhere on these pages in the future. Disclaimer: I can't actually foresee the future.