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Time is an asterisk
This weekend did not get away from me; it's just that going to Backbar on Saturday was a lot more fun than going to the Burlington Mall on Sunday. The one has flaming absinthe and ice cream sandwiches that come in pumpkin and ginger. The other has corduroys that do not fit me despite being numerically identical to the pair I came into the store wearing. I do not understand fashion.
1. I owe![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
selidor at least a short post on the ways in which Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard (1983) and its two sequels hold up, especially since I had sort of an epiphany about High Wizardry (1990) on the 73 bus this afternoon. In the meantime, can anyone tell me anything about The Big Meow (2011)? I know it's right there online, but I think my internal bar for cat-wizards and Damon Runyon is set very high.
2. Matthew Timmins on the sameness of Hollywood disaster movies, this afternoon at the Diesel: "And there's always some guy trying to get home to his kids. Why do you need a disaster for that? It could be anything, it could be a snowstorm. That's the plot of every Christmas movie. You don't need to kill 4.8 million people for it!" (Then we started quoting Dr. Strangelove.)
3. Courtesy ofmadwriter: Fibber McGee and Molly Jim and Marian Jordan in Suspense's "Backseat Driver" (3 February 1949). The same Facebook thread produced the belated revelation that like Derek Jacobi in The Secret of NIMH (1982) or Kenneth Mars in The Little Mermaid (1989), I first heard Bob Newhart in The Rescuers (1977). I should just give up on being surprised at voice acting. It just encourages derspatchel to look ironically at me.
4. Courtesy ofnihilistic_kid: OF COURSE THIS IS HAPPENING. "Based on a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the famed British occultist Aleister Crowley, the ritual later became part of Los Angeles history in 1946 when Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket scientist and Crowley protégé Jack Parsons conducted his own version of this rite, with the intention of placing a martial curse on a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard." AND WE ALL REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO JACK PARSONS, DON'T WE.
5. I had never heard of Otis Ferguson, but Self-Styled Siren is right: his writing on Cagney means I need to read him.
There will be content here again.
1. I owe
selidor at least a short post on the ways in which Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard (1983) and its two sequels hold up, especially since I had sort of an epiphany about High Wizardry (1990) on the 73 bus this afternoon. In the meantime, can anyone tell me anything about The Big Meow (2011)? I know it's right there online, but I think my internal bar for cat-wizards and Damon Runyon is set very high.2. Matthew Timmins on the sameness of Hollywood disaster movies, this afternoon at the Diesel: "And there's always some guy trying to get home to his kids. Why do you need a disaster for that? It could be anything, it could be a snowstorm. That's the plot of every Christmas movie. You don't need to kill 4.8 million people for it!" (Then we started quoting Dr. Strangelove.)
3. Courtesy of
madwriter: derspatchel to look ironically at me.4. Courtesy of
nihilistic_kid: OF COURSE THIS IS HAPPENING. "Based on a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the famed British occultist Aleister Crowley, the ritual later became part of Los Angeles history in 1946 when Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket scientist and Crowley protégé Jack Parsons conducted his own version of this rite, with the intention of placing a martial curse on a pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard." AND WE ALL REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO JACK PARSONS, DON'T WE.5. I had never heard of Otis Ferguson, but Self-Styled Siren is right: his writing on Cagney means I need to read him.
There will be content here again.
no subject
I'll try to write it before we leave for Orlando! I make no promises!
(I enjoy the sequels, even the later ones which are less good, but I read them as an adult so they didn't have the punch of the original, which I read at Just The Right Age.)
I cannot remember how old I was when I read So You Want to Be a Wizard for the first time, but I was younger than Nita and I was reading in bed. "And indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard . . ."
I always liked Deep Wizardry because of the sea; I used to be much less impressed with High Wizardry, but I think it clicked on this latest re-read, even if it will never be my favorite of the three. I enjoyed A Wizard Abroad because of the Irish mythology, but it felt superfluous and everything after that even more so. I wasn't even sure how many novels there were at this point, and the answer was at least two more than I'd thought.