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sidereajducoeur, ian_gunn,
lorimelton, and mommyathome. Meanwhile,
here are some answers.
( music, interpersonal conduct, Robin Wood, gun control, SCA and synagogue communities )
Neverwhere focuses on Richard Mayhew, a businessman (banker?) in London who gets sucked into the underworld. Not underworld like in mafia -- underworld as in a different world that exists beneath the streets of London and that is populated by some very other-worldly sorts of folks. Gaiman seems to do particularly well with putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations and making good story come out the other end. One of the things I liked about Sandman is that despite the millieu, I felt I was reading about people. Maybe not people who could ever exist on Earth, but people nonetheless. Some of the core characters in Neverwhere share that quality.
There are stock characters, and caricatures, to be sure. The visible bad guys (who I keep wanting to call Guido and Luigi though those aren't their names) are stereotypical but well-done and just the right blend of archtype and creep. The enigmatic Marquis is a mystery until the end. Door, the sweet young thing at the center of the conflict, seems helpless but isn't entirely so.
At the center of this is Richard, who doesn't really fit in either world and is now caught between them. The resolution of his story is nicely done, but I won't say more lest I spoil things.
There is one bit of cinematography (or art design, or something -- not sure where to place the credit) that was very effective. Somewhere in each episode we see this sequence of images -- the first time it's a dream, but not always -- that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's always the same sequence. Over the course of the six episodes, the meanings of the images become clear. Nice.
In general the production values are, um, toward the lower end, but you know what? I don't care. It was well-done within what was apparently a limited budget. I care a lot more about story than about sets and props.
Neverwhere was released on DVD in the US last year. (That's good, because Nth-generation PAL-to-NTSC tapes aren't always so wonderful. :-) ) The show aired in 1996.
Caveat: There is also a book. I read the book before seeing the show. I didn't know it had been made into a TV show when I found the book, actually. When I learned about the TV show I thought it was based on the book. Nope -- other way around. The book is a novelization. I think I might have enjoyed the show more if I had not read the book first.
This has been mostly a quiet weekend, which I'm not complaining about. :-) We did Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday, and we've been puttering around the house the rest of the weekend. (We'll be headed out to dinner with friends tonight.) Friday afternoon I cooked a brisket for Shabbat because, for once, I actually had the 3.5 hours available to tend it. (I'll freeze the rest -- there's no point in making only a little brisket.) It was quite tasty, and very easy. Saturday for lunch we had leftover turkey et al.
Odd Thanksgiving nomenclature: lots of people apparently
call the bread stuff "stuffing" if it's in the bird and
"dressing" if it's in a pan, but I learned it all as
"stuffing". magid refers to them as
endostuffing and exostuffing, which I think sums it up
perfectly.
Services Friday and Saturday had lighter attendance than usual but not as light as I had expected, and Saturday morning the 94-year-old woman who asked if she could chant halftarah brought several family members along. She did a good job (especially considering the challenge) but felt that she had made mistakes. I'm glad she gave it a try, though, and lots of people had kind words for her.
We almost had the opposite end of the spectrum at the same service -- a recent bar mitzvah who wants to keep up his involvement and was going to chant torah -- but family holiday complications kept him away. He'll chant next week instead. The confluence of young and old would have been nifty if it had worked out.
Real Live Preacher (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif){kind=small}
preachermanfeed) recently
published a book collecting some of his blog-published
essays and a few new ones. It's an interesting read.
I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations
of the best blog entries, either from a single author or
in topic-based compilations. While entries like this
present one are just "daily life" stuff not really interesting
to most people, some entries out there are more like essays
and, I imagine, the same writing considerations go into them
whether they're for blogs or print. Compilations of essays
are nothing new; there's just a new venue for building up
a following prior to a collection.
The morning torah-study group reached the part in Numbers where God gives prophecy to the seventy elders so Moshe won't have to do everything himself (this is near the end of chapter 11). The text tells us that in addition to the seventy, there were two men -- Eldad and Medad -- who also got in on this, though they didn't join the others at the tent of meeting. Joshua hears about this and gets upset, apparently because they're encroaching on Moshe's territory or something. But since prophecy is clearly something that is done at God's instigation -- or, at the very least, with God's cooperation -- how could that be? I don't see anything in the text to imply that Eldad and Medad did anything; it's not like they were stow-aways or something. My read is that they were in the camp going about their business and -- blam -- they were prophesying. We didn't get to most of the commentaries today, so we'll return to this next week.
This probably means we`'re going to also talk about the people gorging on heaven-sent quail next week, because that's next in the text. My rabbi pointed out the coincidental timing with Halloween. :-)
Someone said that the Christian denomination whose members sometimes "speak in tongues" are basing that on this. Apparently (and I welcome correction here!), the idea is that when God talks to you it transcends language, and you say things that sound like coherent text to you but gibberish to everyone else. I'd heard of speaking in tongues before, of course, but didn't know it was tied to the idea of prophecy. (I wasn't sure what it was.) I always thought the point of prophecy was to convey God's words to everyone else (the prophet is just a vehicle), which would require doing so in a language your listeners understand. If this description of speaking in tongues is correct, that seems to be something that's about the speaker personally (and God), not about a message to the community.
Tonight after Shabbat we went to Hunan Kitchen, the successor (or reincarnation, or something) of Zen Garden in Squirrel Hill. It's no longer a purely vegetarian restaurant, but there are still plenty of vegetarian dishes on the menu. The meal was good except for the sizzling-beef incident. Someone at another table ordered something that comes sizzling in a skillet; apparently something went wrong and the dish emitted a great deal of smoke only after it got to the table. Everyone in the place was coughing. It was actually kind of funny, as the cough migrated outward from ground zero. (We weren't affected for the first minute or so, but then we were a little.) I didn't notice what happened to the dish in all this.
So, wave hi to dragontdc; sorry I visited your fair
city without actually making contact.
My flights today are on AirTran, whose web site would not allow me to print a boarding pass from home. Fooey on them. The first kiosk I tried was broken (the "E" key was broken and was a required component of my confirmation number). But the lines were short, so no biggie.
In Pittsburgh I was the lucky winner of detailed security scrutiny. That hand scanner sure is sensitive. I wasn't all that surprised that it beeped on my belt buckle -- just a minimal buckle, mind, without big ornaments or the like -- but was surprised that it beeped on the (metal) button on my pants and on my (small, thin) necklace. Oh, and there was something in my wallet that it didn't like, though I still don't know what. (No, my wallet does not have a zippered or snapped compartment. It's really just a billfold with some pockets for credit cards.)
There's a new (to me) addition to the takeoff/landing spiel. Seatbelts, blah blah... tray tables, blah, blah... window blinds? They care that the blinds be up? I wonder why. By the time someone standing in the aisle can look out the side windows and see an oncoming plane, it's too late.
Ah, there's no wireless because they sell network access (via a data port) for 50 cents per minute. Ok, that's fair. (Added later: but it's a phone jack, not a network plug.)
Apropos of nothing, I've been reading (over Shabbat and on the plane) Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice by Rabbi Mark Washofsky. Very interesting read, emphasizing many of the same points I do about Reform being a serious movement, and giving reasons behind some of the decisions where reform has deviated from the norm (such as the so-called "patrilineal descent" and getting rid of the second day of yom tov). I haven't finished it yet, but so far I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know what Reform is really about.
I had previously been under the impression that one of the pivotal characters was a child (of perhaps nine or ten), not an eighteen-year-old. I found that this affected my enjoyment of the story; the character makes a mistake with consequences (not following directions, in a really big way), and when I thought those mistakes were being made by a child I had more sympathy. As it is, it's hard for me to really appreciate this character's angst. The story is also somewhat a product of its time (the 50s); the other main character makes a point of saying he would have handled things differently if it had been a "man". (Aside: she's a "girl".) It's still a good story, but I liked it better with my mistaken impressions. :-)
There was a Twilight Zone episode based on the story (the series from about a decade ago, which I mostly missed due to not having the right cable channels available). I'd kind of like to see that.
ralphmelton, mrpeck,
Dani, and Maggie). It's very reminiscent of
New
Eleusis, but with icehouse pieces instead of cards
and a Zen facade (which isn't important).
The basic idea of both games is that one person
decides on a rule and everyone else makes plays, attempting
to determine the rule by induction. For each play the
rule-maker calls valid or invalid under the rule, until
someone correctly determines what the rule is. I kind
of like the twist in New Eleusis of a player being a
"prophet", but I like the more visual nature of Zendo. I mean, it's hard to go wrong when you get
to play with plastic bits. :-)
I had a lot of fun playing. I also learned a valuable lesson about rule construction: that the rule-maker thinks it might be too easy does not make it so. Ok, next time I will not construct a rule based on primary versus non-primary colors... oops. :-) (At one point Ralph guessed a rule that could have been correct, but for one counter-example on the table. It was, ironically, the one counter-example that had been vexing everyone throughout the game. Before I noticed it I was strongly considering declaring his rule to be correct even though it wasn't my rule, but I couldn't.)
Short takes:
Real Live Preacher's epic struggle with a raccoon: part 1, part 2, part 3.
Quote from tonight's D&D game: "does the 'mirror image' spell pass by value or by reference?" (The question, put another way, was: are the extra images of the caster sym links or copies? By reference, or sym links, as it turns out.)
"[Introverts] tend to think before talking,
whereas extroverts tend to think by
talking, which is why their meetings never last
less than six hours." -- Caring
for your Introvert, link courtesy of
metahacker. I'm not sure I agree with
a lot of the article, but I do like this quote
-- and I've definitely been in meetings like that.
I haven't read the last couple hundred issues of Cerebus, but Dani brought home the final issue, #300, so I read it. Um, I think even if I had had the context from the current story line I would have felt that it was kind of pointless. Also a quick read, not counting the essays from the author, so nothing really lost. But it was weird.
lyev came by to drop off some "Dragon" magazines (he's cleaning out his house and I expressed interest). We chatted for a while about music, dancing, gaming, and assorted other stuff. He's a neat person; I should spend more time talking with him.
It's a collection of pseudo-science essays (hey
browngirl, this might be something you'd
like), some very good and some only so-so. The title
essay is quite amusing; I'll have to share it with
Johan the civil engineer. Anyway, as I was reading
through it, I came to "Digging the Weans" by
Robert Nathan.
Aha. That is why I bought this book. Now I remember.
When I was a sophomore in high school I had a fantastic history teacher. Dr. Wasilack (possibly misspelled) was the first history teacher I ever had who wasn't fixated on names and dates; he wanted to teach us how to think and analyze, and he did it against a backdrop of world history. I was already that sort of person, but he still maanged to teach me a lot. He was one of a very small number of outstanding teachers I had in the public schools.
At one point, he was trying to teach us how to think critically about evidence. We were studying some analysis or other of some archeological find, and most of us were buying what we were reading, and we shouldn't have been. And then he read us an analysis of artifacts from the point of view of archeologists thousands of years hence, and that opened a lot of eyes in that class.
I've carried that memory around since then, but had been unable to remember many details. I did remember that the archeologists concluded that this nation was called the "Weins" (actually "Weans", but I never saw it written back then) because the country was called "US". And I remembered that there was some analysis of an important document that contained the phrase "nor[th] rain nor hail nor snow", and that the Wean city-states were ruled by Queens like "queen of the may" and "the raisin queen".
Eventually, I googled my way to the title "Digging the Weans", and that led me to this anthology. So today, after almost 25 years, I finally read this story.
This is exactly the kind of story that I want everyone in the SCA who does any research to read. It's artfully done and demonstrates just how important a healthy dose of skepticism is when looking at sources.
Sadly, I did not get all of the references. I do not know what the giant metal (sometimes stone) praying-mantis figures in southern California are, for example. I'll probably feel really stupid when someone points it out to me.
I thought the discussion went ok but that I didn't have a good-enough handle on how to run such a thing, nor did I have a good-enough handle on the material. That is, I think I did a decent job of absorbing and summarizing the material in the book, but there are issues that the book didn't get into that are important, and I hadn't done any supplementary reading. (For example, the book talks about the Protestant reformation, but I know there was a lot more to it than what is described in the book, but I don't personally have a good understanding of some of those issues.)
The other people there seemed to think it went very well, and I've gotten some nice compliments since then. One person pointed out that it people weren't enjoying themselves they wouldn't have stayed for two hours. :-)
chite:( You were warned. )
( I warned you. )
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