Creative Title

The Sister’s been in town this week, which means I’ve been out doing stuff with her essentially all day every day. Thus, I haven’t really been able to relax for my break yet. So I plan to do that this last week before going back to the dorm. Therefore, posting will probably cease for a bit, unless I just happen to get a thought stuck in my head that must be taken care of.

Until then, I leave you with music (really, what else?).

White Room:

…and good ol’ Jimi:

I hold a general disdain for hippies, but I must admit tons of great (perhaps the best) music came out of their generation.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my puzzle–the one with pieces that can pretty succinctly be broken down into sky, eagle, eagle with sky, and miscellaneous background. Nevermind, it’s done now. The internet broke, so I finished it while waiting for it to be fixed (actually, waiting for my mom to call back and tell me how to fix it, but the problem solved itself first).

I have a bone to pick with Hollywood. First off, I love action movies; give me blood spatter and explosions any day of the week and I’ll have fun. Now, this does not necessarily mean that I’ll think anything with such effects is a masterpiece, but it will be enjoyable.

Generally.

However, the assumption that modern writers, producers, and directors make that the public only wants these and no substantial story is… well, come to think of it, probably about dead-on for a large portion of moviegoers (huh… that’s actually a word without hyphens). I get somewhat annoyed by my only choice being girly emotional junk and shallow, pointless fighting.

Yet even that isn’t what’s been bugging me lately. I can live with new stuff being fun crap, so long as I can still find an occasional great story–be it in older (pre-’95 or so) Hollywood ventures, or books or the rare good piece of work by a modern director (they do exist, though the creator’s works often tend to decline within, perhaps, a decade of his hard-earned fame). No, my anger is directed towards reworkings of the truly great stories (not to mention the fact that probably over 80% of new movies are based on someone else’s idea for which copyright has run out). I’m thinking of three particular movies at the moment–and please refrain from reminding me of more–that took the title and basic idea of something great, added CGI, and called the new one genius.

The Time Machine (2002)

Touche, H.G. Wells’s great-grandson. Touche. Now I feel bad about dissing the movie. Now, that won’t completely stop me on the internet, but know that I feel guilty for it. So, this was on TV a few weeks ago, and I watched it–partly because nothing else was on, partly out of curiosity, and partly because I was waiting for Jeremy Irons to finally show up (Shush. Creepy-voiced actors rock). I’ve since been reading the actual book, since I knew the movie was far from strict in its following of the plot. I’m not quite finished (on chapter 7/12), but it was obvious from the first chapter that the deviation was great.

So the point of this movie: you can’t change the past. Well, that’s very nice, but it doesn’t really matter, as no human has ever built or is anywhere near building any form of time machine. The point of the book (and the old movie)? Well, as with everything from about 1880-1980, it was all an allegory for communism. Certainly, I can understand how that can’t be translated into modern thought. The general populace doesn’t care about communism, and would never see a movie about it. But do you have to try to twist and mutilate the story for a modern audience? Every piece of art is a product of its time, can’t you people just leave it where it belongs. If someone’s interested, they’ll enjoy and appreciate it much more than the bunch of idiots seeing it for special effects.

The thing is, it would’ve been pretty enjoyable in its own right.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Ditto. Just leave the communism allegories alone; don’t ruin the story for the people who actually give a damn. Seriously, I’m not even seeing this one.

Star Trek (2009)

Probably won’t see this one either, but I’m torn. See, on the one hand, it looks exciting (to say the least), and I tend to like Simon Pegg, Winona Ryder, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Alias, and… well, apparently Epic Nerd God Leonard Nimoy is in there, too. But it just doesn’t seem right. I can’t trust it to be the same Star Trek that I’ve been watching on cbs.com (and heck, even that doesn’t have all of the really great episodes).

Honestly, I think they’re trying to trick us. They’re hiring the best most famous of each demographic (let’s see… black-haired guy (his eyebrows are pure evil, though. I hate them), guy with any UK accent, black woman, asian… yeah, we got ‘em all), throw in a few more utterly random celebrities, make it look really, really cool, slap on a treasured and sacred title, and hope for the best. I’m sorry, but Admiral Ackbar keeps yelling at me.

Ah, well… at least these do one good thing: convince me to finally watch/read the original so my anger can be fully justified (unfortunately, the need to completely understand references isn’t quite enough of a push on its own). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve only just now been able to find The City on the Edge of Forever.

Overall impression: Sure, it’s for a 5th grade reading level, but it was pretty awesome, actually.

So my mom has recently been looking into writing again lately. To help her decide upon a genre and target audience (and, I suspect, to procrastinate some), she’s bought a number of books of various kinds and been reading them like crazy. One of these was Among the Hidden, a story about a boy, Luke, who is the third child in his family in a time (supposedly in the near future) where it’s illegal to have more than two kids. My mom then went and bought the entire series about his and his friends’ struggle against the government to gain freedom.

So there are seven books: Among the Hidden, Among the Impostors, Among the Betrayed, Among the Barons, Among the Brave, Among the Enemy, and Among the Free. They’re all relatively short–able to be read 2-3 books in one day, if you have nothing better to do–but they manage to go into great depth (especially for a 5th grader) about government, freedom, and generally what is right, all while keeping the action and the plot moving forward.

There are a couple issues I had with it, though, the first being that even though the protagonist in each book changed sometimes (4 were Luke, and 3 were various friends of his), the personality from which it was told was completely static. They all cared at different levels about different things, sure, but they all also consistently made the same decisions as all the others. It was like the author picked a character at random to be the Luke for that story. She didn’t quite manage to get completely into the mind of someone completely different.

One other minor thing that I considered not so much a flaw as simply annoying. The ending seemed, to me, to be somewhat idealistic. Admittedly, it is a children’s book, so my personal preferences are probably playing into that more than anything, but the anticlimactic nature of the resolution just bugged me a bit.

Besides that, however, I have little or no complaints (well… there was the ending of the third book, but that’s easy to get over). It was extremely well-written to keep the reader’s attention the whole way through, and had a very, very good underlying theme. The story itself is pretty amazing, and the author does not shy away from tragedy just because her audience is children. Granted, she softens it a tad for them, but allows the truth of the world have its effect. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Highly. It’s really quite impressive.

…even though I spend an average of ~1/2 hour a day (including actually taking them, and probably even less) on them and have spend most of my time watching Star Trek. It’s not a waste of time; it’s a good show I hadn’t seen yet.

To commemorate these finals–and perhaps just because I’m a little lazy at the moment–I present to you a short playlist of songs vaguely related in some way or another to each of my subjects (in which I have a final). Now, Abnormal Psych. was pretty straightforward, but the others were a lot harder to try to think up. Any post-posting suggestions are welcome! Oh, and this should be the last time I mention these classes.

Abnormal Psychology - Psycho, Puddle of Mudd. Duh.
Greek Tragedy - I settled for Metallica’s The Unforgiven III, since it vaguely reminded me of The Odyssey while I was half-asleep and trying to think of a song for Greek Tragedy. Again, further suggestions are welcome.
Archaeology - This was a tricky one. I had four songs in the running, going from subject matter to what I hummed during the final (if you’re curious…and you can probably guess why it was on my mind). I finally decided upon simple and topical–Indiana Jones Theme.
Linguistics - I should’ve saved that mention of The Picard Song for this. Oh well, I’ll just go with something in which the lyrics are hard to understand… for whatever reason. That really has nothing to do with the class.
Geology - Yeah, the professor was Canadian, so I’m just going with Rush.

Ah, but that’s not all that’s been happening. I have pictures! The first has no particular significance, but I saw it on a dumpster after my final today:

Like I said, no significance, but it still had meaning for me. One of those “too true” things or something.

The second one comes with a story. Now, my weekend office-cleaning job is typically pretty tame. Once in a while, though, something crazy happens there. I can’t explain it; the rest of my life is sitting on the computer and occasionally an interesting conversation with a human, but this kind of thing never happens anywhere else.

Now, if you’re expecting something as interesting as that last time, it’s not quite that eventful, but still crazy. Now, of course, cleaning entails cleaning the bathroom, where my tale takes place. The time is noonish 2 Saturdays ago. I scrubbed the toilets, got out the all-purpose Windex, and moved the soap off the sink in order to clean it. I then screamed and jumped back 6.3857 feet. Why, you ask? Because of this:

A gigantic beetle sitting on top of the faucet. Let me stress again, this thing is huge. That picture is nowhere near doing its size justice. I calmed down, took a closer look, and determined that it was no longer with us. Thus, I snapped a quick picture (see above) as close as I dared, and sucked the bloody thing into the vacuum, where it now rests. Yet the question remains, how did it get there? There are a couple possibilities, all of which seem fairly improbable. Either it climbed up there and died; died in the ceiling, fell out, and landed on its feet perfectly balanced on the faucet; or my dad–who, I believe, is the boss at the office–found it elsewhere and put it there. Well, surely my father wouldn’t be so immature at work, right?

Right?

So for a while, I was assuming the best of my family and even considered looking up how 10-ft. beetles like that one like to die, just to see if it says anything about preferring open spaces (really, I try unreasonably hard to think the best of people). Then I remembered, my dad can be a jerk. He’d been there the previous week, though all the other employees had as well. However, their daughters aren’t going to be there cleaning, and I don’t know how likely they are to play pranks like this. But my dad has done this kind of thing at home…

Oh well, it made for a nice giggle and story to tell within a blog post of random stuff. Topical posts will resume in a few days; and fret not, for I do have topics.

Watch The Soup–the concept of ridiculous titles gets stuck in your head.

So! Welcome to the first ever edition of Stupid Things I Heard in Liberal Arts This Semester, a soon-to-be-semiannual Creative Title post. As you have probably already reasoned, this is a compilation of idiotic quotes, topics, and general sounds from professors and students in my classes (and one from my dorm) throughout the semester. Let’s just jump right in, shall we?

1. “Abnormal” as defined by my Abnormal Psychology class. It can’t just be not normal; it has to be maladaptive, since, you know, the term abnormal might be insulting to some.
2. My Archaeology professor says, “There’s a reason we can’t have automatic weapons… and it’s a good reason.
3. Archaeology professor’s rant on how he doesn’t understand people around here (in terms of not recycling, knowing what county we’re in (knowing, not not knowing), etc.)
4. Archaeology professor’s rant on how roads in Raleigh don’t make sense (particularly due to the lack of numbered streets). Frankly, I took offense at this one; my great-grandfather was a civil engineer specializing in highways and had a large hand in the NCSU Civil Engineering curriculum.
5. The large majority of students in my Linguistics class laughing when listening to samples of the Southern Vowel Shift (that is, this area).
6. “I’m just wondering why men hated women so much.” and, of course, all subsequent conversation.
   
7. Any and all of The Technician’s coverage of racist comments on the Free Expression Tunnel (ex: search for “free expression tunnel”). I mean, really? The NAACP?
8. Archaeology professor asks, “What expensive bureaucratic systems do we have? The military?” That is, his first thought is the most useful one. PLUS: there’s a member of the military in the first row. The next three were road-building, extracting materials, and salaries.
9. Frankly, I just found the title of a seminar on the Free Expression Tunnel “incident” offensive. “The Gun, the Flag, and the Noose.” Since, you know, only racists have guns.
10. On election night, I was going to the bathroom and heard the following exchange between a girl in my dorm suite and one of her friends. Note: These are the people being encouraged to vote. Girl: I can’t believe West Virginia went for McCain! Guy: Well, West Virginia’s real southern.
11. Archaeology professor’s rant on how one of the things you see before every society collapses is the rich getting greedy, and how we see that exact thing happening today. (I’m not saying it’s not necessarily true, just that the implications about why is off-base).

• My Geology professor (who, until further notice, is the speaker for all following) gives advice: “Go be a bum in Europe … because if you try to be anything other than a bum, it’ll cost you too much.”
• “If you get a research grant, don’t ever figure out what you’re figuring out, or funding will stop.”
• When talking about earthquakes, referred to the Ring of Fire as the “Ring of Shake n’ Bake”
• When explaining about why we put chlorine in water, “… ’cause the bugs are not expecting the Spanish Inquisition!”
• “… so we tied ropes around grad. students and threw them off the side [of the Grand canyon].”
• In Linguistics (further notice), “Joe Biden is a Republican.” was the primary sentence used to demonstrate truth conditions.
• Also in Linguistics, I just couldn’t help but think of The Picard Song when the professor mentioned diagramming particularly long sentences. You get one guess as to the exact line.
• Some poor guy’s ringtone in Greek Tragedy sings, “… don’t want none unless you got buns, hun.”

Essentially this entire semester, I’ve been reading this book–mostly just before class, thus inhibiting my ability to go through quickly. The review may potentially be brief, since I finished it last week and returned it to its owner yesterday, thereby probably somewhat blocking my ability to remember too many specific details, but we’ll see.

Overall Impression: Generally a very great book, but it could be rather slow-moving.

So, a few months ago, a friend told me about this great book called World War Z. Basically, it’s about a zombie apocalypse, so how could I possibly refuse?

The interesting thing I found out in my reading, though, is that the zombies themselves are not a major staple in the story. It’s more about the people’s and government’s reactions to such a crazy, hopeless-seeming situation, which I actually found to be spot-on, particularly considering today’s world. While I did, of course, miss the plethora of blood and gore and zombies that today’s movies use (not that it wasn’t present; just not the central point of the whole thing), it was a good deal more intelligent, deep, and… well… non-cookie-cutter than those (or even a lot of books written these days. So formulaic!)

It’s told by way of a series of interviews with various people involved in the war–or who simply got caught in the middle of it all. Frankly, that was one of the more ingenious parts, but it also caused a sort of choppiness in the storytelling that made it run far less smoothly and caused more difficulty in wanting to pick it up and read the next chapter. Additionally, it was somewhat rare (though most certainly present–especially in one particular “interview”) for the speech of each interviewee to be as individualized as would more likely be in real life, but I fully understand the complications in both reading and writing anything in a manner even mildly resembling that. Truthfully, I’m rather glad it was as consistent as it was.

Back to the choppiness, though, it was still written about as well as it possibly could have been to get the point across. It reads more like a history book than a novel, but it was meant to. That’s the point. It was meant to be reality, but with zombies; not zombies with… not much else. Overall, I highly recommend it to any intelligent person who happens to also find zombies really cool (just don’t expect them to be all over the place).

Hah! I’m pretty sure I managed to avoid spoilers in this one, even while explaining why it’s so good. Now why couldn’t Watchmen have been that kind of story? Seriously, I loved that one. It’s still on my mind.