Gramarye

* 7:35AM: I’m a little behind today, but I’ll be there around 8:30-9:00.
* 7:51AM: Okay, I take it back. This is my life, folks. I get all my stuff together, walk out the door, and find it’s raining. Okay, fine. So I go back inside to get a different hat, and my key is now irretrievably stuck in my front door. Which I find worrisome. So push that estimate back a bit.
* 9:20AM: Okay, it gets even worse. I had to go buy WD-40 (BTW, if you ever have you key stuck in a lock, that’s the thing for it), which I was able to do, and it worked like a charm. However, in the process, I fell on my front steps (why? because it was raining, of course!), and that did something entirely hilarious to my neck. And I had had such high hopes for today.

The iPod Observer - Now Playing - iTMS to Exclusively Sell Beach Boys Album Pet Sounds For Four Weeks

Just in case I needed a reason to dislike Steely Dan (other than the tedious nature of their music)….

Movie & TV News @ IMDb.com - WENN - 25 July 2006

Oh, excellent. Toy Story, here we come. This almost made my day.

OLPC will be powered by pulling a string - Engadget
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I just finished Kage Baker’s “??Life of the World to Come.??”:http://librarything.com/title/The_Life_of_the_World_to_Come I broke my usual rule regarding reading series out of order, but Baker’s books are a bitch to find, and I happened to see a paperback (not trade paperback, actual honest to goodness mass market paperback) at the grungily magical De Laur’s newsstand in Oakland. My reaction was similar to my reaction to “??In the Garden of Iden??”:http://librarything.com/title/In_the_Garden_of_Iden — not a bad book, but a book that could never, ever be one of my favorites. I really like the universe she builds, but I don’t really like the stories she tells within it. (I might do well to snag one of the short fiction anthologies; I may just not like the way she builds novels.)

We saw ??A Scanner Darkly?? today at the Landmark Shattuck. The movie was good — the rotoscoping technique from ??Waking Life?? was _exceedingly_ well-paired with the content, and the performances ranged from pretty good (Reeves) to absolutely perfect (Robert Downey, Jr.). It was near ??Sin City?? levels of authenticity, which is definitely unusual in the realm of film adaptations.

The worst I can say of it is that they didn’t have room for absolutely everything — and, more specifically, that they compressed the last 10-15% of the book to constitute the last 3-5% of the film, leaving out a lot of the significant material regarding both the New-Path practices and the sense that “Bruce” has an internal life that persists throughout, even as a “husk.” What was really fun, though, was that Philip Dick’s two daughters and one of the movie’s producers were there, so I was able to actually raise this issue with them. (The response was that while they shot more footage from that end of the storyline, it wasn’t as interesting as the rest of the film — no action, no character, no snappy dialogue. This suggests to me that they weren’t trying hard enough, especially in the casting of Mike.) I had one other concern, which I didn’t think to mention in time, which is that the movie made Donna a much more sympathetic character, tweaking the dialogue in small but significant ways that I didn’t consider really necessary for anything the creators were trying to accomplish.

However, these are relatively minor objections, and everyone should definitely see the film.

Zwicky at Language Log has posted a great historical overview of anti-passive bigotry that totally makes up for how mean he was to the etymology of the word “passion.”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/passion-and-etymology

Language Log: How long have we been avoiding the passive, and why?