Done yesterday afternoon, and flagged as a Pratchett-related donation in the comment field.
Serge #591: No offense taken! The LOTR books and films always do bring out strong and diverse opinions, I find.
Tim Walters #613: Nice whistling! And it does indeed sound spaghetti westernish. I hope your band likes it.
Serge #588: Well, the Scouring of the Shire should've been in the film too!
It's never seemed anti-climactic to me. The bit before they return to the Shire, with Aragorn's crowning etc, always felt like it wasn't part of their story. I resented Aragorn horning in on things, when clearly the story was about the hobbits. And the Shire had appeared such a safe, protected place that it really hammered home the extent of Sauron's evilness (through Saruman) that such a place could be destroyed.
We can only ever have our own reactions. Glorious diversity of opinion and all that kind of thing.
Tim Walters #538: It starts with guitar and bass alternating D harmonics an octave apart, which made me think of a clock ineluctably ticking away, which made me want to keep it going as long as I could without boring the pants off the listener.
Or you could treat the D as a pedal note and change the chords over/under/around it without bothering to make them fit. Nothing could be less boring to the ears! (I suggest this because on Friday I spent a few minutes writing out the chord symbols for Bach's Prelude in C major (you know, the one that everyone knows, not the other one) for my guitarist friend, and the pedal G in the second half sounded lovely.)
WRT The Coventy Carol, I've been humming it to myself and I think I can't have been right to say that all the 7ths were flattened. In fact, only the first 7th in the melody works (for my ears) in its unraised state. Maybe I was so taken with that one that I neglected to notice the other 7ths weren't flattened. Hmm.
Serge #570: it has to be Sam, painstakingly replanting the trees in the Shire, for several reasons.
First, that he's been all the way to Mordor and back and there's still work to be done.
Second, that he attends to the whole Shire and not just his home turf (although there's a slight bias towards the Bag End area).
Third, the equitable way he deals with the dusty grains in that box -- adding a grain to each planting, and casting the remainder out to the winds.
Fourth, that the Shire needed fixing in the first place.
Fifth, that the gift he'd carried through most of the story (and that I'd forgotten about until he came to use it) was so very useful.
Sixth, that after having a supporting role (literally, towards the end of his and Frodo's journey) for much of the story, Sam gets his moment of public heroism.
Obviously I think it was a mistake to omit this part of the story from the film.
Rikibeth #406: The Coventry Carol is framed as a lullaby, but might actually be on the grisly side (hush so Herod doesn't KILL you, baby) -- but I can forgive it a lot because it's in Mixolydian mode.
and Tim Walters #408: [nitpick]Actually, it's harmonic minor, with a Picardy third (i.e., raised from minor to major) at the end.[/nitpick]
To nitpick Tim's nitpicking, I've heard the Coventry Carol performed with a flattened 7th, making it a natural minor (or Aeolian mode). The Mixolydian mode also has a flattened 7th (compared to the major scale), which might explain the confusion.
Three herons patrol the shore across the road from my house. Occasionally they squabble over territory, but mostly they just stand very still and loom over the oystercatchers. Of all birds, I think they look the most prehistoric in flight -- something about the hunching, the shape of the head, the spread of the wings, the surprising size.
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Those of you who said that I would start enjoying Deep Space Nine more in the middle of the second series: you were right! Thank you for suggesting I stick with it.
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My crappy laptop is almost dead. Only one USB port works (the other got rammed inside the machine and is presumably lodged somewhere it shouldn't be). The battery only stays fully charged for one minute, then plummets down to 0%. There's something wrong with the little hole that the power cable plugs into -- it's loose and jiggly and this doesn't seem like a good thing. The lid doesn't stay shut when you put it down. And, after a recent falling-on-the-floor incident, the mouse clicky thing is unresponsive half the time.
So I'm thinking of getting this shiny Lenovo laptop as an unnecessary and undeserved gift to myself.
I'm a bit ignorant about computers and programming these days (all very different from learning BBC BASIC at my primary school's computer club, which had the only computer in the village), so I thought going down the Linux route might force me to learn more about the innards. Is this a good idea?
Serge, don't misunderstand me! Having seen it all, I loved the trailer. There were chills running down the back of my neck when the theme music kicked in. But I suspect I wouldn't have loved it quite so much without the last few seconds.
Serge #889: I was watching that trailer, not feeling at all impressed or hopeful -- and then the theme music crept in, and Leonard Nimoy's voice whispered the immortal words, and the old-fashioned sound effects did their tingly chimey thing, and--and--and why isn't it December now?
Thanks for the advice! I knew I could rely on ML.
Donald Delny #188: Yeah, we've been looking for digital print galleries for the last couple of years. I find it hard to believe they don't exist, but they do seem to be very good at hiding.
My husband's tried selling heavyweight paper prints but he's only sold a handful, compared with almost 300 canvas prints. The people have spoken!
Marilee #189: I think they're lovely too. The irony is that we also wouldn't be able to afford them if they weren't -- aside from the printing process -- home-made. He gave me this one for my birthday last year. Whenever I see it, I'm transported to a forest pool.
Clifton Royston #190: Ooh, lots of good ideas! I have had a skeet at BoingBoing before now, without success. Clearly I'll have to search deeper in the archives.
You're right about the language. I think he used OSCommerce's default text for a lot of things. I've convinced him to make sorting that site out a priority. Having explored it a bit more yesterday, I can see that a lot of the links aren't logical, and the front page doesn't work the same way as the main shop pages. And so on.
Right. I'm off to visit BoingBoing...
Leah Miller #185: Not that I won't spend more for the real, visceral thing with a few ounces of oil paint. I used to be an acrylics painter myself, and there's nothing like a real painting. But prints are a 'different' thing than they used to be, in some cases.
Yeah, that's one of the problems my husband's come up against. His main interest is in creating layered, evocative, abstract images using Photoshop, which are then printed onto canvas and stretched over a wooden frame. They're original works of art, in that the design is all his, but multiple copies are available. He hasn't yet found a way of marketing this or explaining it properly. The moment he says "canvas prints" most people assume he's talking about stock photographs, or those massive sunset prints you can buy on Ebay. Traditional art galleries won't touch him because the artwork was created digitally.
In fact, while I'm here complaining I may as well ask: does anyone have any idea how/where he could be selling these pictures? After two years of minimum wage, and one year of sub-minimum wage, he's getting close the point of giving up. [And there were several sentences here, none of which worked, and all of which boiled down to me saying DO NOT WANT.]
abi #57: We have nothing* on our walls but original art. Paintings, letterpress printing, photographs, limited edition lino and woodcuts. No reproductions, no prints of famous works.
and
Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #73: we have a lot of ceramic work, mostly pots, plates, and figures, that we have bought directly from the artist or from a gallery dealing directly with the artist
I'm coming late to this but I just wanted to say "thank you" to the pair of you. My husband has been trying to make it as an artist for the last three years, and it's people like you who've kept him going.
First of all, how stupid am I for spelling my own name wrong? Oops.
Secondly, I've only read one Banks SF novel, and that was the afore-mentioned CP. The pointlessness of the horrible scene, the unexpectedness of the horrible scene, and the horribleness of the horrible scene all combined to put me off ever reading any of his other SF novels. I would've had to read them through half-closed eyes, afraid to be similarly ambushed at every page turn.
But I have read some of his litfic, and can happily recommend The Crow Road, The Wasp Factory (where the horribleness does at least make sense and fit and seem to have something to do with plot and character and not just be there to nauseate the reader), and Walking On Glass.
Serge, there was a pretty good discussion about Banks's writing on this Making Light thread.
And, to counter abi's recommendation, I'll just say that Consider Phlebas is one of the few books I wish I could unread. There's one particularly horrible scene in it that's going to be in my head for the rest of my life, and oh how I wish it was not.
Greg London #224: But when an author is trying to appeal to a large audience, othering the bad guys by making them either really ugly or really too beautiful, is a way to put uniforms on the different teams and make it easier for readers to tell who they're supposed to root for.
One of the reasons I love Diana Wynne Jones's books so much is that she doesn't tend to do this. Her villains are frequently attractive -- and not in a "too much" way, but just in an "ordinary, charismatic, nice person" way -- or so middle-class and normal that it's a surprise to find that they're the villains, even though there are plot clues that indicate they must be responsible for all the trouble.
She plays the same tricks with her heroes, making them unpleasant, frightening, emotionally scarred, but sympathetic at the same time.
And sometimes a character can be a villain from one point of view and a hero from the other. And sometimes the hero is battling against a villain who later turns out to be himself (which reminds me of the excellent Wodehouse book, Piccadilly Jim, where one character ends up impersonating himself and it's all absolutely logical and confusing and hilarious).
Leah Miller #124: I had a similar(ish) experience with the Narnia books. Like you, I owned an illustrated bible stories book, which I read frequently (especially the Old Testament stories, bloodthirsty little child that I was). I also owned and enjoyed a couple of compendiums of folk stories and myths and legends from around the world -- lots of which were different-but-similar creation stories. It wasn't long before I'd redefined the bible as "just another set of interesting stories", to be shelved alongside the folk tales.
And that's the mindset I had when I started reading the Narnia books. I noticed in Voyage of the Dawntreader that Aslan was supposed to be the God in the bible -- specifically when he appeared in the guise of a lamb -- but it didn't affect my appreciation of the story. It just meant that I mentally filed the Narnia books along with the folk tales and the myths and the bible: interesting and rather wonderful, but that's as far as it goes.
Ledasmom #120: you just made my day! I hope it tasted good, even after the spilling and recovering.
emma #55: Don't be put off by my list of sweetness. We have kippers too...
Xopher #60: bonnag, Eccles cakes, fairy cakes, butterfly cakes
I don't know, or more likely have forgotten, what any of these are. Could you describe them?
Bonnag: to me it's a kind of fruity soda bread, but apparently it started out life as a plain soda bread. We just got all fancy in the intervening years and started adding raisins to it. (recipe here)
Eccles cakes: puff pastry discs stuffed with currants. My husband calls them "squashed fly cakes", for obvious reasons. (recipe here)
Fairy cakes: somewhere between a cupcake and a muffin. (CAUTION: this may be a family definition rather than a Manx definition, like "Hellicky-Jellicky" and "pupe".)
Butterfly cakes: get your fairy cake, slice off the pointy bit on top, scoop out a teaspoonful of spongey goodness from inside the cake, fill the cavity with whipped cream, cut the pointy bit in half and stick both halves into the cream so that they look like wings. Eat.
Serge #84: (Why pomme, which is also apple? It is because, over there, potatoes are called pommes de terre, or apples of the earth.)
I've always thought that was such a lovely, romantic thing to call a potato. It's right up there with calling tomatoes "love apples".
Manx definitions:
Biscuits = sweet, crunchy things that you can dunk in your mug of tea.
Cookies = posh, sweet, crunchy things with chocolate chips in that you can dunk in your mug of tea.
Crackers = salty, crispy, crunchy things that you eat with cheese.
Not included in the above: flapjacks, brownies, crispbakes (like a flattened Rice Krispie cake), shortbread (unless it's shaped like a biscuit, in which case it's a shortbread biscuit), teacakes (both Tunnocks and fruity-bread-dough varieties), buns, bonnag, Eccles cakes, fairy cakes, butterfly cakes, cupcakes, and cakes generally.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 15 |
| 2007 | 51 |
| 2006 | 19 |
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