Current Favorite Christmas Song

Baby Its Cold Outside - with Ray Charles and Betty Carter. If you listen to it with headphones, you feel like you are evesdropping on an intimate conversation.

A Christmas Post

It is from a conservative columnist, but these riffs on A Christmas Carol are pretty darn funny!

Bah humbug, indeed.

Movie Trailer Round Up

There are a gaggle of new trailers at the Apple QuickTime site.

1. Batman Begins - Liam Neeson with cool gauntlets and a sword. And Bruce Wayne sharpens his own bat-a-rangs.

2. Bewitched - Nichole Kidman as Samantha and Will Ferrell as Darren. Egads.

3. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - I was curious to see what Johnny Depp looked like as the eponymous Wonka. He looks like Helena Bonham Carter.

4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Earth blows up to Danny Elfman's Planet of the Apes soundtrack. Now that's comedy.

5. Constantine - Keanu Reeves as a blonde, British punk rocker turned wizard. And this time he's armed!

See you at the movies!

Attack of the Killer Meme

This is floating around the blogosphere, so now I've got it (for the record, I got it from X-Ray Spex).

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

So here goes:

The nearest book is the World of Warcraft Game Manual. The fifth sentence of page 123 states: "In addition, many of these places are essential end points for quests and hiding places for unique enemies."

Don't you want to know what those places are? Get the game and find out!

This is pretty sad. If I did more than write and play World of Warcraft on my PC, I'd have quoted from David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper or Robert Massie's Castles of Steel or even O'Connors Annotated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. If they were a few inches closer, I could have quoted from the Chicago Manual of Style. But nope, the meme demands the nearest book.

Well, now the meme passes on to you, dear reader. Follow the meme! I'm looking at you Athens Pie (and, perhaps, FernaBear), Almonetto, Grinding Metal and Eric's Musings.

Con Mucho Gusto

My parents left this morning for Costa Rica for the holiday. They own property down there. It is in the mountains not forty miles from the Pacific Ocean, high in the cloud forest. They recently built two cabinas on a mountain top, where they want to put their feet up, watch the birds and listen to the siren call of the howler monkey. Actually, if I know my dad, they will spend most of their time hip deep in mud performing some arduous task or running around dealing with some crisis or other. It is their way, bless 'em.

They took several footlockers full of tools and blankets and gifts for the local children, which may mean some interesting moments at the security checkpoints at the airport! My parents employ most of the locals to help with construction and with the reforestation project my dad initiated on the property and they make it a point to bring stuff for the kids too, especially around the holidays.

My sister and her family will join them shortly after Christmas. I do not often spend this holiday away from my family, but events conspire to keep us apart this year. I hope they have a safe trip and that they have a merry Christmas!

On an unrelated note, it appears that Ursula K. LeGuin is NOT HAPPY about the SciFi Channel's adaptation of her excellent young adult Earthsea series. I have not watched it but I suspected from the commercials and trailers that it bore little resemblence to the books. Read the article and find out what went wrong.

Congratulations, Eric!

We are taking a break from our regularly scheduled workday to congratulate my friend Eric, who has a short story published in a genuine anthology recently. His name can be found in the table of contents along with other accomplished genre authors like David Brin. I read the piece over lunch and really enjoyed it! Check out his blog (Eric's Musings), the link to which is conveniently located in my links section.

Huzzah!

Tis the Season

We had the first hard freeze of the season last night. Our pets' outside waterdishes were solid ice. A heavy mist rises from the river outside my office and the grass is crusty and white. I type this in an attempt to transistion from thoughts about the weather and personal stuff to the heavy work ahead of me today.

I think that my former administrative assistants (who used to bemoan the fact that I had an office while they languished in cubicles) will enjoy the fact that I am currently working in a cubicle. In order to see the aforementioned misty river, I have to walk to someone else's office. It is a pretty generous cube, for all that, and I am close enough to several members of our admin staff that I can torture them with minimal effort on my part. It hasn't come to spitballs over the walls of the cubicles but I feel that we are mighty close! My former assistants will also note that the admins here have no idea what to do with me either.

I picked up a copy of the extended version of The Return of the King yesterday but I haven't watched it yet. The movie is now four hours long and I don't have the energy right now to give it the attention it deserves. I did watch House last night and I enjoyed it. I still can't get over the fact that the same guy who plays an amiable English buffoon so well can also play an American curmudgeon (some would say "ass"). Those are some acting chops there, kids! I wonder when Stephen Fry will show up.

If you haven't already, by all means pick up a copy of Vince Guraldi's (spelling?) A Charlie Brown Christmas. If that stuff doesn't put you in the proper mood, then you are a stone-cold killah.

My Hot, Stinging Brain!

I am up to my eyeballs in work - hard work. I haven't had to use the ol' bean this much for a long time. My last job made the think muscle all flabby. I am glad of the new challenge but it can be a slog!

Speaking of slogs, I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this past week. It took me nearly two months to get through it. The story is very charming but proceeds at a glacial pace. A plot takes shape only in the last two hundred pages. I recommend this book only to those of you who pine for a novel written in a nineteenth century style and have a lot of spare time on your hands.

In contrast, I blew through The Light in the Forest, a young adult novel about a boy raised by Indians who finds himself back in white society. The prose is simple but evocative, the plot is straight forward. I highly recommend the story to any ten year-old kid.

I have picked up David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper for those spare moments during the holidays. It is a historical novel concerning the nascent stock market in England during the 18th century.

Speaking of kids, I am also chewing up my spare time playing World of Warcraft. My gnome mage wanders a fantasy realm righting wrongs, concocting rough dynamite and developing the skills necessary to build a mechanical squirrel. What fun!