Gratuitous Llama Observation: Domestic Entertainment Division
All I can say is that I hope whoever it was who came up with the idea of incorporating a "High School Musical" singalong game into the Wii system finds him- or herself spending eternity forced to play it.
I actually got my llazy llama backside out to snap some pics of the garden this afternoon. I'd have posted one for you, but for reasons known only to itself, Moo Knew is not accepting uploads. Go figure.
Anyhoo, I'll keep at it. Watch this space to see if I succeed.
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Actually, they are uploading. They just don't look like it. I've been fighting this for a few days now. If you go to the folder where you keep images, they'll be there. You just have to code the image into the post by hand, but this is not terribly complicated.
Posted by: Jordana at July 05, 2008 05:17 PM (QeLuW)
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Mongo no know this hand coding. Mongo only pawn in game of life.
Posted by: Robbo the LB at July 06, 2008 11:52 AM (ESIuq)
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Hey Robert - Do you remember the pix I sent you two years ago of the amazing climbing rose that was all over the roof at the front of the house? It even had Robins nesting in it!
We had to cut the thing back big time in order to get the house painted. We have now trained it as a rose "tree" coming up from its inadequate trellis and bushing out in tree form. Well, the stupid Robins decided to nest in it again...
Last week, during a rain/wind storm, the tree part came crashing down. The Robin's nest had little babies in it and the nest was sideways. We did some emergency propping up to bring the nest back to verticle and all is well. Dumb Robins...
AP reports that "Uncle Jesse" threw in the towel on the Fourth of July. He never won by much and the margin of victory was provided by "Jessecrats"-conservative, yellow-dog Democrats who voted for Helms because of his social views and his stands on taxes, national defense, and Commies.
Jonathan Last on the "new and improved" version of Brideshead Revisited set to open in theatres later this summer:
Yes, the new Brideshead features a villain--Lady Marchmain. Instead of a pious, if clumsy, near-saint, Lady Marchmain is now ambitious and manipulative. "I hope you didn't let Julia mislead you," she sternly warns Charles. "Her future is not a question of choice." The future she seems to be alluding to is a marriage of power and wealth to a man of consequence. A moment later, we see Lady Marchmain at a large gala where she announces, "It gives me great pleasure to announce the engagement of my eldest daughter, Lady Julia Flyte, to Mister Rex Mottram." Waugh's Lady Marchmain never has plans for Julia's future--the Marchmains' situation is above either financial or social improvement. And when Julia becomes engaged to the decidedly non-Catholic Rex, Lady Marchmain is given the very opposite of pleasure.
The bizarre reimagining of Lady Marchmain seems to be a result of the excision of Catholicism from the new Brideshead. The screenplay reportedly stays away from matters of the church and the trailer makes but one allusion to it, showing a rosary falling from someone's hand. And, if there is none of that fussy Catholic stuff in the new Brideshead story, then the pious Lady Marchmain might reasonably be seen as a heel. As her younger daughter Cordelia observes in the novel, "When people wanted to hate God, they hated Mummy." Take away God, and Lady Marchmain may be little more than a controlling shrew.
The rest of the movie's marketing is of a piece with the trailer. The squib on the theatrical poster declares, "Privilege. Ambition. Desire. At Brideshead everything comes at a price." Another slogan claims that "Love is not ours to control." The entire affair comes across more like a prequel to Cruel Intentions than an adaptation of Waugh's masterpiece.
Ugh. Safe to say I'm not going near the beastly thing.
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I actually never saw the original, nor read the book. I've actually never read anything by either Evelyn Waugh nor Graham Greene nor any of the great 20th century Catholic novelists.
I'm guessing the excising of any Catholicity in the series is not out of malice against Catholicism per se, but out of recognition that the average viewer simply wouldn't get the references. If as the article notes, Waugh despaired of MGM understanding "the theological implications" back in 1947 when Catholic influence over Hollywood was at something near its a peak (consider the films: The Song of Bernadette in 1943, Going My Way in 1944, The Bells of St. Mary's in 1945), then there's no chance that today's producers or screenwriters would understand it at all. It may not be anti-Catholicism or a disdain for religion at work, but a simple matter of cultural illiteracy. Writers like John Mortimer (who created Rumpole of the Bailey, I discover) who can understand the nuances of a complicated work and successfully adapt it are few and far between, even in times where the culture is not in a trough rather than a peak. Consider the old adage about the English language that every man understands his father, but no man today understands the English of Geoffrey Chaucer -- over time, things change, and something is lost.
Waugh was born in 1903. John Mortimer was born in 1923 -- young enough to be Waugh's son, if you will, but still only one generation away, and therefore able to understand him and the times Waugh lived in. Jeremy Brock of Brideshead 2008 was born in 1959, which means he is of the generation in which Waugh would be his great- grandfather, or at best his grandfather. He would have been raised in a post World War II Britain, in which almost nothing of the old social classes or aristocracy exists. (Granted, the other writer on the project, Andrew Davies, was born in 1936 -- old enough to understand Waugh, maybe, but not old enough to have been an adult in the same world in which Waugh was an adult). In other words, without a great deal of historical and cultural literacy, which is to say, without a very unusual education, these writers are quite likely to get it all wrong.
If someone from the current academy were to, say, write a stage production baed on Tennyson's Idylls of the King, I'm guessing that they might miss a lot about the ideals of chivalry and self-sacrifice -- not out of malice, but out of simple illiteracy. They'd read it all as a cautionary tale about Money! Power! Sex! Suppression of the Other! and miss the Grail entirely.
Posted by: The Abbot at July 03, 2008 09:20 PM (9LdJI)
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Ya know, kids at summer camp is why the Good Lord made throw-away box cameras. And this is speaking as both a dad and a former scoutmaster.
Posted by: Mike at July 03, 2008 09:47 AM (cqZXM)
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This is a perfect opportunity to buy that new 21 megapixel digital SLR. I mean be fair, do you really expect a digital camera to survive summer camp? Have you been to summer camp? Were you ever 6 years old?
Posted by: Zendo Deb at July 03, 2008 07:48 PM (U4DhF)
I see that in my absence, the LMC has been jerking my chain about my abject fear of flying.
Ahem. Let me just illustrate here why just because you're phobic, that doesn't mean you don't have anything to be afraid of:
Regular readers will recall that for the last couple weeks I've been ranting about a particularly nasty landing I had at National Airport recently. In my last post about it, I blamed a Continental pilot named Max, a Frenchman.
Well, we've been back and forth on our particular route so often lately that we've taken to recognizing some of the stewardesses on the flight. As it happens, this week we had the same one who was on that bad flight and my colleague got the low-down on what really happened.
As it turns out, Frenchman Max was not at the helm when the plane landed. Instead, it was his co-pilot, a kid just out of training. As I reported back then, the Kid made a complete cock-up of the landing, hitting hard on one wheel and almost scraping the runway with his wingtip. Our stewardess friend recalled the flight vividly, stating quite candidly that she thought we were gonners herself.
Apparently as a result of this little mishap, Max got in trouble for improper supervision and the Kid got sent back to remedial training.
So, there. You see? I'm a-gonna go right on clutching the armrests with claws of death and muttering repeated "Hail, Mary"'s under my breath.
Yes, nothing says "Welcome Home!" after a week on the road like having your cab break down about 300 yards short of your house, causing you to have to hoof it the rest of the way, hauling a large suitcase, a briefcase and a laptop. Up hill. Barefoot. In the snow. After having milked 100 cows.
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Barefoot. Oh what I would have given to have had feet back in the day. We didn't have feet, if we wanted to go anywhere all we had were two bloody stumps. And we always had to walk on broken glass.
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Among Jefferson's final points there is one that is perhaps uniquely American, referring to the British people "...we hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, and in peace, friends".
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Thank God her father married a supermodel, otherwise...
Don't care too much for her as an actress, though. Just saw her play pretty much the SAME role she always plays in "The Incredible Hulk" - the loyal, yet put-upon/dumped/pining girlfriend/wife/elf princess who sits around crying a lot.
Went to High Mass today for Sts. Peter & Paul. Bach and Palestrina and all the fixins'.
Now some of you will probably pelt me with rocks and garbage for saying so, but whenever I go to HM, I can't help thinking of a passage from the Fellowship of the Ring:
As soon as [Frodo] set foot upon the far bank of the Silverlode, a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was memory of ancient things; in Lorien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world. Evil had been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: wolves were howling on the wood's borders: but on the land of Lorien no shadow lay.
I've also noticed that, as with Tolkien's Lorien, time seems to change at HM. Today's service was a solid two hours, and yet seemed to last only about ten minutes.
Now I haven't the time to really elaborate on the idea here, and I am sure that there are all kinds of problems with this literary parallell if one susses it out far enough. I'm also pretty sure it is not something Tolkien had specifically in mind. But I know that it nicely captures the feeling I get, and I also know that every time I attend High Mass I come out wondering why on earth anyone would prefer a watered down, simplified or "updated" version of it.
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If I recall correctly, Joseph Campbell referred to it as keeping the "Thou" rather than "You" in your spiritual life. When approached with love and reverence, high mass is a very moving experience that provides a connection.
I'm glad it's back.
Posted by: CJ at June 29, 2008 06:17 PM (WUEY0)
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Well, in a sense, Tolkien had nothing else to compare it to as he "only" had the Tridentine mass. But I get that same feeling, of timelessness.
Theologically, one is in different time in Mass; in that the Church believes that there was only one sacrifice, in participating in Mass one is participating in Christ's sacrifice, extended through time and space so that we might experience it. In the new mass, I get the feel of that clearly from time to time. In a high mass, it's much more intensely focused.
Part of it is the Latin, too -- the liturgical language, like Hebrew, outside of time.
I recently attended a Bar Mitzvah, and I had a similar experience as the Tabernacle was opened (containing, of course, the five scrolls of the Pentateuch). The sense that this was the same law that was contained in the Ark, the sense of the holy and ancient.
To Him, outside of time, it probably looks like one act, where all of us are present. He need do nothing more than once; we are privileged to participate in that act He decided upon at the beginning of time.
We're brought into his space and time.
Posted by: The Abbot at June 29, 2008 07:58 PM (9LdJI)
Today is the birthday of violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, born this day in 1963 in Rheinfelden, Germany.
A-SM gets a fair bit of air time on our local classickal station and I must say - frankly - that I've never really thought her to be any great shakes. Is it possible that she has achieved rock-star status at least in part due to the fact that she's a fabulous babe?
As Bugs Bunny used to say, "Mmmmmm.....Could be!"
What's all this I'm hearing about some new alternative home thingy for the Moo-Gnu Collective? Steve-O, are we supposed to be doing something about this? Am I going to stroll in here one morning and find that the utilities have been cut and a large lock placed on the doors?
UPDATE: For those of you like GroovyVic scratching your collective heads, I was prompted to post this question by this post over at Ace O' Spades HQ, where the gang appears to be in a doo-dah. We're neither dooing nor dahing, which is why I ask whether we should be.
UPDATE: As Chef Mojo surmises, I had originally posted something about the tremendous new doings happening within the Anglican Communion, what with the formation of this GAFCON movement and all. But I changed my mind because I didn't see any point in stirring things up here.
For all of you interested in what is happening (including Mom, who is praying daily that African missionaries come to her little corner of the ECUSA and save it), nip on over to Kendall Harmon's place and start scrolling.
DD; 