So, D and I saw the third Pirates Movie this weekend, which suffered from what I think of as the Iago problem.  Spoilers ahoy!

Let me 'splain.  This is not the Shakespeare Iago problem (where the villian takes over the focus of the play and shifts the audience's interest, and therefore the moral center of the play/movie/book/work of art from the ( Read more... )

Sort of. 
( Read more... )

all my tech support issues appear to be resolved.  Took them all long enough.

I had a busy busy weekend, with my parents visiting and me and my dad attending a choral festival.  It was fun, but I'm realizing I really have no claim to soprano-dom anymore.  It's time to learn how to sing alto.  Mayun.

Encountered some books by Naomi Novik this past ( Read more... )

This is the first book in a series about a dystopian near-future, in which the US has fallen to theocratic political interests, global warming has permanently altered weather patterns and sea levels around the world, and Canada is an ascendant military power in the grips of war profiteers.  It's written by
( Read more... )

I think I grabbed this one at the bookstore because Sars of Tomato Nation recommended the author's short story collection, but short story collections bug the living hell out of me, so I got the memoir.

Unfortunately, that bugged the living hell out of me too.  It's a memoir of the author's unemployment struggles in Chicago after being laid-off ( Read more... )

Finished some books recently for which I hope to do capsule reviews:  Bitter is the New Black, The Thirteenth Tale, Hammered.  Also some re-reads but I won't be reviewing those unless I get really bored.

We went skiing this weekend up in NH.  It was nice to get away, though the skiing was sub-optimal.  Spring skiing in the Northeast is always sub- ( Read more... )

So I read half of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article about US involvement in Iran, and that (combined with the recent Time article about what the Sunni-Shi'ite difference is) has left me with two (probably not terribly insightful) insights:

1. The Sunni-Shi'ite split really maps onto the Catholic-Protestant split nicely, doesn't it?  What with the ( Read more... )