Both I and the sweetie-wife have been sick. Started pretty much on Wednesday with a sore through for me, by the end of my work day I was feeling pretty low. Thursday we both stayed home from our job, I spent like 13 hours in bed in one stretch.
This morning sweetie-wife still felt too ill to go to work and I am going to, but Barbosa her pet lovebird died suddenly this morning.
This is the part of pet ownership I have the hardest time dealing with.
So I am nearly 17 chapters into Love and Loyalty , out of a total of 30 chapters, so I can seen the end of the project. I am spending a lot more time writing and less blogging and gaming as I speed toward the finish.
I have also finished with the correction to Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. Now I need to format it, copyright it, and submit and I will have self-published my first anthology.
No Sunday Night Movie this week as I was way too tired after spending the day at JPL to watch a film past 10 in the evening. No complaints from me on this score, the JPL open houses are always fun affairs for a geek like me.
I’m pretty busy tonight. The work on Love & Loyalty is going quite well and I hope to have a beat read copy of this version produced soon. Also my sweetie-wife finished the copyedits to my anthology Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, so I am working on that as well.
All in all, I am busy.
We’re at the JPL open house 2011. Very cool
05/14/2011
Suffered headache onset early evening on the 14th. Took a single dose of the Treximet and the headache was relieved.
Well, today is my birthday. We aren’t making anything special of it. My sweetie-wife got me the William Patterson Heinlein biography and I am enjoying that. We’ll have cake, but after that I shall run my D&D game as usual.
Tomorrow we’ll make a trip up to JPL for their yearly open house.
It’s now been two years since I launched this blog and overall I am pretty happy with this experiment,
Courtesy of Tor.com I came across this interesting article about Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The author, Evan Pokroy, posits the thesis that BTVS is at heart a conservative show, quite at odds with the normal fare produced by Hollywood and that people of a conservative political persuasion should celebrate this series.
The article is well written and nothing in it is factually in error or untrue. It is certainly possible to view this series as one the reaffirms a number of conservative values,. However it is also possible to come away with a quite opposite conclusion, that BTVS reaffirms liberal values and morality.
Let me lay out just a brief outline of some of the liberal values celebrated, promoted, and central to the truly wonderful series.
“A Slayer with family and Friends, that sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.” Spike in the episode –“School Hard”
Historically Slayers have operated in secret and alone. Granted there was support from the Watchers’ Council, but in the field, battling the demons night after night the Slayer stood alone until the coming of Buffy Summers. Through the coordinated actions of the Scooby Gang, Buffy defeated threats that lay beyond her abilities alone. Time and again in the series we are reminded that together as a team, as a collective, are victorious.
“I’m so out I’ve got my Grandmother fixing me up with guys.” Larry in the episode — “Earshot”
Diversity is a good in BTVS, characters are fully accepted for who they are as a person, gay, straight, or werewolf. Buffy does more than just fight and defeat demons set upon their evil plans, she also fights for people and accepts people as who they are without thought to clique or acceptance, such as her quick willingness to accept Willow Rosenberg.
“New Watcher? Is he evil?” Buffy in the episode Bad Girls
Buffy questions authority, the wisdom of the ages is forever being tested, challenged, and overthrown. Mothers, fathers, step-fathers-to-be, father figures and mother figures are mocked and usurped. The Old Guard is always suspect and not always right. Parents in the show do not, in general, fare well . While Joyce Summers, Buffy’s mother, eventually comes to supporter her daughter as the Slayer, her initial reaction was to throw her daughter into the street. Willow’s mothers is a hopeless academic, clueless to her daughters reality, and Xander’s unseen parents a warning sign that not all parents are to be honored. Beyond the parental figures, nearly all authority figures are distrusted, evil, or foolish. Giles, Buffy’s watcher and mentor, starts the series more at odds than respected, and become respected the more like Buffy he becomes until he too is challenging the accepted wisdom of authority in the episode Helpless.
“Anyone who’s not having fun here, follow me.” Buffy in the episode–Anne.
Buffy protects and defends the weak from abuse and exploitation. She clearly sees it as part of her duties to use her strength to protect and defend those who cannot. This goes beyond fighting demons, to protecting those who are bullied and threatened. The liberal aspect is best observed in the episode Anne, there Buffy, temporarily in Los Angeles, finds runaways are being used as slave labor by a demon. Armed with a Hunga Munga and a hammer she frees the workers from their exploiters. The Hunga Munga, a sickle-like weapon, helps create an impression of a hammer and sickle used in a beauty-shot for the rest of third season’s credit sequence.
The point of my essay is not to say that Mr. Pokroy is wrong, because he is not. Buffy The Vampire Slyer is truly a work of art, and the best works of arts are multidimensional. They possess many facets just as a well cut diamond does. BTVS is a well of truly exceptional art, and as such people of all philosophical beliefs can find something in the show that speaks to them.
I think we should celebrate well-crafted art for its own sake, and not try to fit it into the tight, restricted left/right paradigm of political discourse. Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a wonderful show, with well-scripted characters, interesting deep thoughts, and exciting action. When you watch it you think about what it might mean, lets keep that a personal journey and not one where we impose a philosophy.
Technically this is a Sunday Evening Movie that I watched with my sweetie-wife. I had suffered a migraine attack on Sunday night, and while the wonder medication takes care of the pain, I was left too tired to stay up very late.
It! Is a British film from 1967, so this is not the film with Tim Curry as a terrifying clown.
Roddy McDowall stars as Arthur Pimm a deeply disturbed assistant museum curator. After a devastating fire ruins the artifacts stored at the museum’s warehouse, the curator and Pimm discover a medieval statue undamaged in the rubble. Well, the curator ends up dead and we the audience knows that something is very amiss with that statute.
What made this film so very interesting to me is that the central character, Arthur Pimm, is such a deeply flawed and mentally ill character. Many films will start out with a weak character, and under the pressure and temptation of power, glory, and sex or love, they crack and give in, performing vile deeds until poetic justice at long last catches up with them in the film’s climax. Within very few minutes with It!, we know that this is not the case for Pimm. Pimm’s train derailed long before we met him. Pimm’s introduction very quickly puts him into Norman Bates territory.
Pimm is frustrated professionally, he’s considered too young for the Curator position and is passed over, frustrated sexually, infatuated with a woman who seems unaware of his crush, and unable to cut the apron string from his mother, when a handsom confident American enters the scene, making eyes at Pimm’s crush it is too much for the young man. Discovering the power of the statue, Pimm goes beyond mad into barking at the moon, bat-shit crazy.
While I enjoyed this film, it can be a bit slow. that said any film that ends with a tactical nuke is not all bad.
If you netflix this one it will come on a dis with a second movie, The Shuttered Room. Do Not Watch. I warned you.
I got a lot done on Love and Loyalty tonight. New scenes edited, a fill chapter edited and corrected. really without the headaches plaguing me I can get back into my old groove. However I lost track of time and I will have to wait until tomorrow for my Sunday Night Movie post. The novel must come first.
05/10/2011
Third headache in as many days. Starting to suspect eye strain may be a trigger. Took 1 dose of Treximet, headache subsided.