Mad Times

Well, the blog has gone dormant here as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’re still paying enough attention (hopefully via RSS!) to notice this post going up. Here’s a retrospective of our year in movies.

What about books? Well, I’ve still been keeping track of my reading, but I’ve been doing it over at goodreads.com. You can see what I’m reading and what I have read over here.

Okay, so movies. There are only 55 here. At that rate it will take us about 18 years to watch everything in our netflix queue assuming we stop adding stuff now. We need to ramp up. Anyway, here’s what we watched and what we thought. In the Notes field, T means we saw it in the theater, B means only Becky watched it, J means only I did, and other letters mean we watched it with other people with those initials. Our star system goes from * for “don’t bother” to **** for “don’t miss” with plus signs indicating half-stars.

Edited to add a few things we forgot to enter

We also watched a bunch of TV on DVD, most notably, the whole run of Gilmore Girls, a couple seasons of The Wire, True Blood, Castle. Becky watched Dexter and Weeds and Desperate Housewives and Mad Men, I watched Criminal Minds and Wire in the Blood and started Farscape. And we’re working our way through Buffy again.

Based on Mark Bittman’s recipe in How to Cook Everything, this was a big hit in this year’s thanksgiving feast.

1-1/2 to 2 pounds sweet potatoes
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp finely ground pepper
4 Tbs butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
3/4 cup brown sugar

Cook the sweet potatoes however you like. I prick them with a knife and bake them in a 400F oven for an hour or so. Scoop the potatoes out of their skins into a bowl and mash them up. Add the spices and butter. Quantities are all to taste. I didn’t measure them. Mash some more. Spread the mash in a gratin pan. Whatever that is. I used a casserole dish. You want them to have a fair amount of surface area, so whatever you’ve got that will result in an inch or two of potatoes when they’re spread out. Sprinkle the nuts across the surface of the potatoes and bake back in that 400F oven until it’s hot and thinking about being golden. Don’t obsess. 15-20 minutes should do it. Finally, sprinkle enough brown sugar to lightly cover the whole dish, then put that about 4 inches under your broiler until it bubbles up and melts. If a few patches singe, that’s okay. Keep an eye on it, it doesn’t take more than a minute to get there. Take it out of the oven, let it cool off a little, and serve it up to accolades.

I got a nice email from a fellow in the UK recently pointing me at his groovy new web store where they’re selling random pairs of found gloves to benefit the non-profit Green Thing. Both the store and the non-profit are pretty neat. Check them out!

Hurst writes about bikes as they fit into mostly US history, and mostly as they pertain to transportation. I don’t really have a head for history, but Hurst brings out those little ironic or amazing details that make history fun and memorable.

The “Manifesto” part of the title comes in when he debunks practically every article of faith on both sides of the car vs. bike debates. And I love him for it. He disses bike lanes and vehicular cyclists. Points out that cycling is a little more life-threatening than driving (per passenger mile) and ridicules the US helmet cult. The myths fall right and left. “The more cyclists there are the safer it gets,” a recent clarion cry of us advocates, looks a lot less plausible after Hurst gets done with it.

You might get mad at someone so aggressively goring your sacred cows (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor), but he also writes with such humility and humor that I, at least, found him more charming than annoying. I had to chuckle out loud every few pages, and I don’t find that very often with books about transportation policy.

Finally, his recipe for fixing what’s wrong with transportation is almost absurdly simple: “Drive less.” But rather than just prescribe the diet, he makes a strong case for why you probably want to drive less anyway.

I read this from my local library, but I’ll be buying a copy to refer back to and to share with my friends.

I mean the title on this post rather more literally than usual. My bike went on an adventure without me when my friend and local bike culture luminary Kent Peterson borrowed it back in July to mark part of the course for the Seattle Century.

Read his account here. And if you have problems with the embedded slide show like I do, you can see Kent’s pictures here.

I started digging through the boxes of paperbacks that have been sadly relegated to the back of our closet for a couple of years since there’s no space in the bookshelves. I’ve been sorting them into “keep”, “to read”, and “pass on” piles and this is the first one I’ve read all the way through from the “to read” pile.

Visible Light is a collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories by Ms. Cherryh. They are surrounded by bits of a framing tale that has the author accompanying a reader on a routine commercial space flight whose long periods of boredom allow the two to discuss the stories in a sort of Platonic dialogue.

In “Cassandra”, afflicted by visions of destruction who thinks herself crazy finds to her dismay that she is not.

“The Threads of Time” explores what happens when time travel causes history to unravel.

“Companions” shows a mission to a planet rich in vegetation, but lacking any sort of motile or intelligent life. An unknown and mysterious plague takes the lives of all but one of the crew and he carries on with only the ship’s AI for company. Unless they were wrong about the lack of intelligent life.

“A Thief in Corianth” is a fairly standard swashbuckling fantasy only the thief is a woman, but one who operates mostly within the limitations of women in the standard pseudo-middle ages fantasy setting.

“The Last Tower” is a short short about the end of a war.

“The Brothers” is a Campbellian hero’s journey with some satisfying twists and appropriately tricksy fae.

The stories shared in my mind a distant and melancholy tone, but all of them have rich metaphorical grounds that echo off real life in interesting ways.

For those lost glove fans who’ve stayed with me since I gave up the addiction, point your browser over to http://bobbymatchbox.wordpress.com/ where a fellow is posting some lovely glove pictures along with little snippets of their stories written from the gloves’ point of view. Wonderful stuff. Go look.

When preeminent SF/Fantasy publisher Tor Books was rolling out their dangerously addicting new community at tor.com, they offered a truly ridiculous number of free ebooks as enticements to come check it out. I dutifully ferreted them all away and loaded a stack of them onto my Palm LifeDrive. This is the first one I’ve read.

It’s the first book of the “Long Price Quartet” (nobody ever said the folks at Tor weren’t savvy). The first section is set in an orphanage/school for the unwanted younger sons of noble families. But the school’s workings are just odd enough to distinguish them from those of every other such setting in the history of fantasy literature. The school section turns out to be mostly a prologue as the second section leaps ahead by many years and initially follows an unexpected character from the opening.

While the setting of the later sections of the book is reminiscent of many other such fantasy worlds in its broad strokes (I kept being reminded of Delany’s Nevèrÿon in particular), again, the details distinguish it. And I am loath to be more specific because much of the pleasure of the book is in having your expectations repeatedly tweaked. I’ll just say that the overall story is one of court intrigue and coming of age all set in a world of ubiquitous and varied human (and inhuman) (and inhumane) bondage (and not the fun sexy kind).

While I enjoyed the book, I was a little frustrated with the plot and pacing. It felt like not quite enough events stretched across a little too much book. Still, the rotating point of view characters were all interesting enough to keep me paging along. I’ll probably give the second book a try next time there’s a gap in the queue.

I posted a batch of photos today that includes a bunch of different kitties, so hie thee to my Kitties set on Flickr for all the feline goodness.

In 2008 I read about 52 books which is pretty good compared to the last few years. There are a couple of reviews I haven’t posted yet. I’ll try to get those up soon.

We also watched a bunch of movies (about 80). Here’s a list of what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater (only 3 for me plus 1 more for Becky). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it.

That doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before (a few repeats are included as noted). We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this.

Seeing them sorted by rating like this always causes us to rethink some of our decisions, but what’s here is what we thought of them shortly after seeing them.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 113 disks to Netflix this year. In July we bought a set-top box that lets us watch Netflix stuff on demand over the internet. Looks like we’ve used that for 160 items since then which seems like a lot until you know that it counts individual tv show episodes. Here’s a summary of the TV shows we watched (we still don’t do cable or anything, so these were all on dvd or on-demand):

• That 70’s Show (season 5)
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• The Wire (still working on season 1)
• Pushing Daisies (season 1) Love this show!
• Criminal Minds (still working on season 1)
• Heroes (season 2)
• Coupling (season 1, 2, 3, & 4) LOVE this show!
• 30 Rock (season 1 & 2)