The Life Experience ~ Summer '13

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• It was totally the gallbladder, y'all.


• Doctors are totally just making up estimated recovery times for surgeries.


• The worst part about recovering from surgery is how it fucks up your brain.


• When your iPod breaks down and forces you to back up its entire library, it may be foreshadowing.


• Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't just write about Mars; he also wrote about all the other planets. Guy was MANIC.


• The ghost in Mama, who gets a bad rap for its unconvincing CG, is in fact for the most part played by Javier Botet, an actual guy with a terrible debilitating congenital disease called Marfan Syndrome. I have to hand it to Botet for making a miserable situation work for him. "Disease," he says, "It is not you who owns me; it is I who own you."


• Paul Verhoeven's entire commentary track for Starship Troopers consists of him and Edward Neumeier exasperatedly pointing out that the message of the film is "Nazis are bad"--something Verhoeven, growing up in the Netherlands during WWII, was personally aware of. But apparently the only part of that thesis critics heard was "NAZIS!" * At least it made for an entertaining commentary.


• Boötes is supposed to represent a herdsman. It always looked like a kite to me.


• My name, "Amelia," was the #1 name for baby girls in the UK in 2011. I strongly suspect that this fresh crop of little Amelias is a direct result of Doctor Who.


• You can collect tokens at national parks and historic sites and things! HOLY SHIT Y'ALL ROAD TRIP VIDEO GAME.


• Ebay purchases can be supremely entertaining.


• Too much enthusiasm for CrossFit can make your muscles melt and your kidneys explode and then you die. The irony is palpable.


• Before Super Mario Bros. 2 was famously not a Super Mario title, it was actually being developed as ... a Super Mario Bros. title. I guess it didn't pan out. And then it did.


• That baffling -ject morpheme that shows up in so many words and that I've always meant to look up is from the Latin word iaciō, meaning "throw" or "cast."


• "Augie's Great Municipal Band," that fun song during the parade at the end of The Phantom Menace, is a bouncy, upbeat version of the Emperor's terrifying theme song. Which is actually kind of awesome.


• Anesthesia, man. It's WHACK.


• French cliticizes its pronouns, which is both far less dirty and far more interesting to me than it might sound.


• For weird legal reasons, Idaho owns the top 39 feet of Jackson Lake, which is apparently a thing you can do.


• Fishing vests are the way to go, man.


• Book lice are not actually lice, nor do they feed exclusively on books, which I found out when a few of them showed up to chew on a secretly moldy basket in my bathroom. Little creeps.


• The main character in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy is a bit more Sam Elliott than his reboot counterpart, and that is also pretty awesome.


• There is an actual linguistic term for Talking Like Donald Duck.  It is called buccal speech, on account of the air is in your cheeks, not your larynx, when you do it.**


• I now know how to identify a barn swallow!


• Bookstores categorically hate self-published writers.


• Colorful umbrellas are apparently an intolerable challenge to the masculinity of male pheasants. Female pheasants, of course, could not care less about the umbrellas.


• Those individual servings of cake-inna-mug you can make with standard cake mix and a microwave are DELICIOUS.


• Breaded fish is better than battered when you are making fish and chips.

*Which is ridiculous. Well, the whole movie is ridiculous, but I can't believe anyone would miss the sarcasm dripping off its propaganda reels.

**Assuming you can do it.  I sure as hell can't get any phonemes out except for some kind of lateral fricative.  Clarence Nash was a goddamn genius.

Comments

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

A non-insignificant number of viewers heard "And Heinlein was a Nazi!" in Verhooven's movie - it didn't help that he chose to make his "Nazi's are bad!" movie be about fighting literally inhuman, faceless monsters.

Glad you came through the gall bladder problems intact! :)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True--there's a lot that could be criticized about the movie and its philosophy and the way it treated Heinlein's philosophy (and, you know, the fact that Verhoeven admitted that he never actually finished READING the book). But I was surprised at how many people thought that it was a Neo-Nazi movie, when of all the things you could say about it, that seems like the criticism least likely to stick.

[marag.livejournal.com]

Little Fuzzy! ::hearts and flowers:: My love for those books cannot be textually rendered.

I haven't read the reboot yet, because I've been told that as a diehard fan of the original, I've got a 50/50 chance of hating it and wanting to throw the book across the room.

I mean, I understand the concept of a reboot, so I would probably be okay. (For example, I'm not one of those folks who thinks a reboot should be exactly the same, but different.) But I'm not sure I'm ready to read the reboot.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Speaking as one who read the Scalzification first, I have to say I think I like the original better. When I read the original I found I retroactively missed Pappy Jack in the new version--the main character is named Jack Holloway, but he's somewhat younger and a cynical, inscrutable former lawyer. Likable, but in a different way. In my head Reboot Jack is played by James Spader as seen on Boston Legal.

... Come to think of it, Boston Legal is a pretty good comparison, as Fuzzy Nation focuses on the courtroom drama. The dialogue is snappy and in some cases laugh-out-loud funny, and there's a lot of wheeling and dealing and legal strategy that is surprisingly entertaining. It ends in a wonderfully crazy courtroom showdown.

I think overall the comparison is like the Star Trek reboot: the new version is a bit sleeker and shinier, and it's made by someone who obviously loves the original, but nothing can beat the charm and cleverness of the original itself. And its something you can see even if you got introduced to it backwards.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Bootes is a *herdsman*?!?!?! I could swear that I've seen it on constellation maps- those ones that draw the pictures around the stars so you know what you're supposed to be seeing- as just what you said: a kite.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I was *taught* that Bootes is a kite. It's on my list of Imaginary Constellations, the ones that no one can actually see (vs Scorpio, which I not only picked out as a constellation but correctly identified with *no knowledge of what it looked like*). Not as bad as the time my father pointed up and said, "Now, you see those three stars that make a triangle?" but close.

[piccolo-pirate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read one of the recent articles about Crossfit and rhabdomyolysis and now I keep freaking out when I wake up with sore muscles. I mean, I'm not doing anything remotely stupid enough to send myself into kidney failure, but - holy shit, the pictures that accompanied that article, holy shit.

[deathling.livejournal.com]

Barn Swallows, now migrating.