One hundred twenty of these posts! That's pretty...ummm...persistent?
Anyway....
:: Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system! (I might have linked this before, when it first ran, but I'm linking it again. He's right, of course -- but I still want spaceships and deep space rockets and all that jazz!)
:: Fact is, at the end of the day, no matter how cool and stylish every Apple product is, I sort of resent that they all drive you to suckle exclusively at Steve Job’s hairy manteat. (Ewwwwww!)
:: I have to admit that I really don’t understand people who don’t get excited about the Internet. (Me too! Oh, and Lynn's got new digs. Check them out.)
:: Some while ago, I was chatting with a youngster who was attending the Self-Checkout lines. A young man of obvious humor and intelligence, he allowed as to how he found Nice Lady's voice kinda sexy. I agreed warmly, and told him to wait just a second so he could hear her say my absolute, all-time favorite robotic Self-Checkout Nice Lady phrase.
:: I'm bringing this, my favorite blog, back from the dead after 13 or so months. (Hooray! Always liked this one, even if he's promising not to blog about his job anymore, which were always, well, intriguing posts of his. Take note, Buffalo readers! Warning, by the way, for people who don't like salty language.)
:: Walt Disney's biggest crime with this film is not being a racist, but being naive in his depictions of a situation that more people want to see as something dangerous and insulting. The film may have its slow points, but racist it is not. And hiding it is frankly dishonest; being open about depictions of stereotypes in the past helps to teach future generations that those kinds of depictions are misguided and wrong. Whitewashing history, even film history, is absolutely the worst kind of revisionism. (Every year at the Erie County Fair there's a booth devoted to selling bootleg copies of this movie. One year I'm going to knuckle under and buy one.)
:: I like the going definition of transhumanism which proclaims that human beings can and should seek biological enhancement, whether it be physical or cognitive traits, and/or the advent of new capacities all together.
:: Nothing I have ever read, not by Heinlein and not by Ayn Rand has been more blatant in dropping the story-telling, and devoting its pages to preaching a message (Huh? Philip Pullman outdoes Ayn Rand in the "preaching" department? Ayn Rand, who brings Atlas Shrugged screeching -- well, that's the wrong word, since to make a screeching sound by applying the brakes, the book would have had to have been maintaining a brisk pace already, and that's certainly not the case -- to a halt so that John Galt can dissemble about stuff for over sixty pages?! Now, I haven't read His Dark Materials past the first book -- I kinda-sorta liked it, but not enough to make a super high priority in finishing the series -- so if Pullman actually manages to outdo John Galt's act of serial blathering (and if you don't believe me in its length, here it is, then I can't believe the book ever got published as a children's book in the first place.)
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
8 comments:
Well, the problem with Mr. Wright's opinion on The Golden Compass is that it comes from a staunch, right-wing, religious, holier-than-thou, Christian perspective, so it is not honest. I spent a few minutes scanning Mr. Wright's blog, and he is, as are most fundamentalists, intellectually dishonest. He's a liar. Somebody should remind him his "God" says that's a sin.
Paul,
For the record, I believe Mr. Wright is Roman Catholic, which means he's not a fundamentalist. Second, he read Pullman's books while he was still an athiest. As for Mr. Wright being a liar, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Are you claiming that he's misrepresenting Pullman's work? If so, how? Or are you saying that because he has a particular point of view he can't possibly say anything worth listening to?
Jaq,
The first book is the best of the three; it's after that that the rot sets in. As Wright points out, in Atlas Shrugged Rand is really telling a story, and though John Galt's massive speech derails it for a moment, the book reads just fine if you omit it altogether. The plot functions as it is supposed to. In The Amber Spyglass, Pullman's plot completely falls apart, and as Wright says it is because he can't make it serve his message, and the message wins.
And, Paul, I'm not just parroting Mr. Wright; I've been saying this for years.
Song of the South - I own a copy. It gets sold in Europe and enterprising sorts buy a Euro copy and burn onto an American DVD.
Will: While I can't speak to the comparison of how Pullman's storytelling works as compared with Rand's, I'll note that if Pullman's storytelling really does come out worse in the course of that comparison, he must be a truly bad writer, because Rand's storytelling is, in my opinion, abysmal, as are her characterization and, frankly, her logic skills as well. Of course, all this is a matter of opinion, and I wouldn't mind hearing the opinions of some atheists as to how Pullman's book holds up, because so far the most strenuous denunciations of either his message or his storytelling as a vehicle for that message come from Christians who aren't sympathetic to his message in the first place.
(Oh, and Galt's speech derails the book for "a moment"? What kind of definition of "a moment" are we using here?)
An exact one. I, personally, have never spent more than a moment on that particular chapter.
Admittedly, there are few neutral readers of Pullman's books. The Christians mostly think they are awful, and the Atheists mostly think they are the cat's pajamas. In both cases, it's because they are reacting to his message. Me, I think his message is flat out wrong...but I'd be willing to forgive that (to some extent anyway) if the second and especially the third books in the trilogy lived up to the first book's promise. I don't object to a worthy opponent. But man! that third book is awful, purely on literary grounds.
I saw Song of the South, probably in its release c. 1960 (those Disney movies used to get re-released every 7 years like clockwork). I'll make the case that it's racist, not in the overt sense, but the institutional sense in that most of the roles blacks got in mainstream (e.g., white) film were of maids, butlers and buffoons.
Google Catholic fundamentalism, and you'll see that there is a school of thought that such a theology exists. I believe it to be so myself.
Will,
Catholics extremists exist. They are those who adhere to their papal dogma with such rigidity they are unable to turn their heads even a little to one side or the other. They wear figurative blinkers through fixity of focus. Protestant extremists, on the other hand, each invent their own personal dogma within their own heads, which allows them to condemn even those within their own congregation as being "not true Christians." So while Catholic fundamentalists exclude all others but thier own, Protestant fundamentalists are even lonlier. But both exist, and are equally as intellectually dishonest in their discourse as the other.
I have not read Pullman's books, although my son has, and I suppose I will so as to see what all the fuss is about. My comments about Wright's blog were not about his opinions on Pullman's work, because I am not an informed reader on that topic. Rather, I choose not to consider his comments because I believe they are obviously religiously motivated, and cannot be trusted for that reason. What he says may be true, but I believe he would still say it, even if it were not. This is the nature of religious fundamentalism. Wright claims to have once been an atheist and a skeptic. So does Michael Prescott. Both of them are liars. They may mostly be lying to themselves, but lying none-the-less.
In my opinion, the internet isn't disappointing at all, but other factors ruin it for me. Cable-based broadband services are overpriced because of the mostly monopolistic nature of cbbs providers. Whenever a new level of hardware technology becomes affordable and potentially able to enhance the experience, the ever-increasing demands of Windows negates most or all of the expected benefit(s). I read or heard that as more people connect to the internet at home (especially to watch videos and/or stream music), the bandwidth simply won't be there anymore beyond what we've come to expect from dial-up speed.
So let anyone who isn't excited about the 'net stay that way. Their loss is our ability to hold onto the bandwidth we have (for now).
-Mark
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