An archive of my old LiveJournal
What do you think of the recently-announced title, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith?
The challenge: A piece of any genre, 200-350 words or thereabouts, in incomplete sentences. Also questions under six words.
Without further ado:
This morning alenxa asked me if I’d posted anything on comic book time (the effect by which Superman and Lois Lane are roughly the same age now as they were in 1938). I’d actually started writing about it a while back, but never finished it.
Around lunchtime I took a look at the Drafts folder on my keychain drive, and I found it — a lot shorter than I remembered, and a lot more recent. I also found an epic I had written ages ago based on another of our conversations — one wondering about the dearth of sci-fi art films. This thing is several pages long, deals with defining sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres, and doesn’t even get to the art film issue, and predates our group blog by several months. In fact, it’s old enough that the first line starts off, “My girlfriend and I were having a conversation about movies….”
There was a footnote about popular derision of science fiction vs. popular consumption of it that I thought was worth posting on its own, although since it dealt with top movie grosses, it needed a bit of updating. This piece of weblog history can now be seen at Viewing the Impossible.
I dashed off some thoughts on several other half-finished pieces (including the time issue), as well as a new one I’d been thinking about while drifting off to sleep last night (or maybe drifting off to consciousness this morning). I figure on finishing and posting them over the next few days. Maybe I’ll start breaking up the epic and post that too. With a new opening line, of course!
A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.
We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!
I was just looking through web traffic statistics for K-Squared Ramblings, had just finished reading the top 20 search terms people were finding us with, and started on the list of individual pages linking to the site. I muttered “Ah, direct hits,” and then, at the same time, alenxa and I both started saying “Krakow! Krakow!” (old “Calvin and Hobbes” joke).
alenxa and I were driving back from lunch when something reminded me of David Bowie’s “A Space Oddity.” This in turn reminded me of a previous conversation — with somebody — about a story or story idea I had read or thought of. The key issue here was the repeated “Major Tom” theme. There are at least the two songs, and I recall hearing that there is at least one more somewhere.
Anyway, the story idea was this: suppose there was some seriously traumatic event – maybe not 9/11 level, maybe more like Challenger, or any of several celebrities who died before their time – that everyone knew about, and everyone was affected by. Now suppose that all memories and records of this event disappeared. But it’s still sitting there, in the back of people’s minds, and every once in a while there’s a song, or a TV movie, or something about this event that no one remembers really happened.
Imagine “Candle in the Wind” without Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Or imagine that an early astronaut really did drift off into space to be lost, and no one remembers Major Tom except a few songwriters, and even they don’t realize they’re remembering his story and not making it up.
Has anyone read a story like this? If not, would anyone like to?
Here’s an interesting theory: What if it didn’t take months of impact-caused “nuclear” winter to kill off all the dinosaurs? A new report suggests that the impact itself would have released so much heat, it would have flash-burned all life on land within hours. Only those animals protected by, say, the ocean (fish), or rivers (crocodiles), or underground burrows (small mammals) would have survived.
It doesn’t explain the death of aquatic dinosaurs, or (to my mind) the survival of birds, but it’s at least interesting. (As with all fly-in-the-face-of-accepted-theory theories, some skepticism is required. But hey, people used to think that the idea of asteroid-impact extinction was far-fetched.)
It’s a scary idea. Most disaster epics are at least in part about what comes after the disaster. Who lives, what they have to face, how they go on. From Noah to the Day After Tomorrow. Human beings can survive a nuclear winter. Not in as large numbers, not necessarily with civilization intact, but it’s at least possible. If you’ve got only minutes to hours, you’d better have Jor-el and a rocket – or a hell of a lot of bomb shelters – because the world is going bye-bye.
Oh, if you have a chance (and can turn on the sound), check out the DAT link: NPR did a review, but they decided it would be more fun to send their science correspondent than a movie critic!
I picked up the PowerBook! It took me most of my lunch break to get up to the UPS center to pick it up and get back home to drop it off, so all I’ve done is open the box. It looks like I’ll be eating at my desk today.
LiveJournal back up? Check.
Phone line back up? Check.
DSL connection stable? Check.
Fixed Ticketmaster order? Mostly.
Pick up PowerBook? ….
Well, I figured UPS would drop by in the early afternoon, so my original plan was to come home for lunch and hope they showed up while I was here. When the phone crapped out and I needed to schedule an SBC tech to come out, I figured 1-5 was a good idea for the same reason. Of course, UPS got here at 11:30, long before I did. So now I’m trying to arrange to pick it up, but because it’s still in the truck, I have to wait until 8:00 before I can get it.
I’m beginning to think I should have just signed for it, only I didn’t want to leave a $1600 computer sitting outside the front door. I suppose I could still just go in at lunch tomorrow.
Back to Ticketmaster: Aimee Mann concert in Anaheim on June 12. Somehow ended up with tickets to her concert in Atlanta on June 16. Last night they told me my order had gotten switched with someone else’s, but today they said I had confirmed it that way on the website. I suppose it’s possible, since I was rushing through the order the night before the wedding, but still… Atlanta? Anyway, even though they say no refunds or exchanges, they will make exceptions in extreme circumstances (like tickets to the right show on the wrong side of the country!), so I have 10 days to send the wrong tickets back.
Anyway, now that the phone line’s working again, it’s time to head back to work.
In the past several years, I’ve gotten mosquito bites in exactly two places:
1. The Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu. The first day we were in Hawaii, it seemed like I was bitten by every mosquito in the park. The rest of the bugs on the island must have decided I’d been tapped out, because no new bites appeared all week. Of course, the ones I had stayed with me for about a month.
2. Outside alenxa’s parents’ house. Repeatedly.
Maybe it’s just that I don’t spend a lot of time standing around in shorts outside at night. (With three cats in the house, I basically can’t stay inside for more than a few minutes without breaking out the Benadryl.) Or maybe they really do have more mosquitoes there than we do. But lately it seems that every time we go over there, I come back with bug bites. That. Won’t. Stop. Itching.
You know, this might actually be a use for emergency pants. Or just bug repellent.