Mad Times

Sorry no picture last week. Computer problems.

This is our friend Karen’s cat Zindzi who died last week. She had him since he was a kitten, 20 years ago! He was a sweet boy and will be sorely missed.

I suspect we’re going to start hearing a lot about people who have died in a blogging accident.

Just saying.

Hope all the kitties’ fans in CA made it through the big storm okay.

Oh, and Gillian, see, it’s not just you.

Think I need to clean off my desk.

David Longdon of the Seattle cycling blog Velocity has run a contest for the last two months for the “Most Visible Night Cyclist”, and I won for December! I’m sure it’s the star Christmas lights that pushed me over the top.

Thanks, David!

In 2007 I read a whopping 40 books (actually a few more than that since I’m counting reviews and a few of the year’s reviews encompassed multiple books) which is up about 20% from last year’s total. Not that it matters.

We also watched a bunch of movies (105 compared to 75 last year). The increase may be due to our each watching quite a few flicks solo that the other wouldn’t have cared about. 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 7). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc. I realize that all of this nonsense is really only of interest to Becky and me, but whose blog is it anyway?

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. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll expand.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 126 disks to Netflix this year after switching to the three-disk plan in February. That includes most of the TV we watched this year:

• The Book of Daniel (complete series (cancelled in first season))
• Heroes (season 1)
• Joan of Arcadia (season 2 (last))
• Once and Again (season 2 (just Becky))
• Scrubs (first season)
• That 70′s Show (season 1, 2, 3, 4)
• Veronica Mars (season 3 (last))
• Weeds (both of us watched season 1 and Becky toughed it out through season 2)
• Wonderfalls (complete series (cancelled in first season) ended up buying our own copy)

Plus the series we sampled and didn’t continue past the first disk:

• Babylon 5
• Big Love
• Commander in Chief
• Dead Like Me
• Eureka
• How I Met Your Mother
• Star Trek: Enterprise (just Jeff)

I’d heard from a number of quarters that this was good, and hey look, everyone was right! Set in a future where Earth has managed to colonize some other star systems, the colonial defense forces recruit 75-year-old folks from Earth with the promise to return them to fighting shape so they can put in ten years of service in the war against the nasty human-eating aliens. If they manage to survive their ten years they can become colonists themselves and have a whole new life.

I’m not usually a huge fan of military SF, but Scalzi’s army populated with people who have lived a whole life already allows him to sidestep most of the obnoxious cliches that result from putting kids with no experience into military situations. Not that there aren’t any blowhard jerks, but the few who make it through basic training find their arrogance resulting in unfortunate mishaps on the battlefield that are disturbingly enjoyable to read.

Lest you think the book is all guns and gadgets (there are plenty of those. I want a BrainPal.), it’s also got some sex and romance. The romance is mostly in the main character’s love for his dead wife, but it is no less touching for its confinement to the past tense. The other romance would be a big fat spoiler (also a mind-boggling coincidence, but I let it pass).

Great fun, and there’s a sequel (plus a short and a novella if I’m interpreting the internets correctly).

After seeing this picture on local photographer Mark Griffith’s Flickr stream, I followed his link to the Jumping Project Flickr Pool looking for tips on taking jump shots and discovered that the pool was formed in response to the work of Philippe Halsman. I remembered seeing something about a book of jumping portraits by him on BoingBoing or somewhere so I went looking for the book. It’s not in my library, alas, but three other books of his work were: Halsman: a Retrospective (pictured at left), Halsman: Sight and Insight, and Halsman at Work co-authored with his wife Yvonne.

I didn’t know his name, but I knew many of the pictures. For example the classic head shot of Einstein is one of his. Google image search turns up a quick overview. Halsman had over 100 photos on the cover of LIFE magazine.

Retrospective is a collection of photos with only a little bit of commentary and all of the commentary in that book is also present in Sight and Insight which has extensive remembrances about the pictures and their subjects from Halsman. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the personalities of some near-mythical figures. Halsman at Work has not just Philippe’s recollections, but also wife and assistant Yvonne’s and includes some of Yvonne’s photographs, many showing the set up used to produce the portraits which is extreme photographer eye candy.

Each of the books has a few of his jumping portraits and they are uniformly delightful, cracking the veneer of subjects from Richard Nixon to Audrey Hepburn (who if you weren’t in love with her before, seeing her jump should do the trick), Edward Steichen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marilyn Monroe.

Halsman’s commentary highlights the fact that a photographer’s most important tool is between his ears. And for a portrait photographer that goes double since not only does he have to be an absolute master of the mechanics of taking the photograph he also has to engage with his subject on a level that will distract them from the fact that they’re having their picture taken at all. That Halsman was able to do this with the likes of Churchill and Dali and Einstein implies the brain he was carrying around was pretty amazing.

Third book in Stross’s series about Miriam Beckstein, a woman who discovers that she is part of a family who can step between different alternate versions of the Earth. This volume is thick with intrigue, some of it nearly incomprehensible in its complexity. And yet despite all the plotting and scheming and maneuvering, there is essentially no change in the characters’ conditions in the entire course of the book until its closing pages. It’s a middle book that I think could have been reduced to a couple of chapters with no loss. Disappointing.