New trend in Hollywood?

I saw two movies last week, one on Friday and one on Saturday, that both did the same thing: adding a black actor to an otherwise white cast - and making him the villain.

The details vary, of course. As is well known, Tim Burton cast Samuel L. Jackson as the over-the-top villain Baron, while keeping all the other characters white. Even in Florida we don't see a black person anywhere. All the children are white, though it would have been trivially easy to make one of them West Indian or India Indian at the least. Burton is famously on the record about being offended by adding black characters to white-sourced books or tv shows (though "fidelity to the source" isn't a Burton characteristic). But somehow he has no problem changing a white villain to a black one. hmmm.  

Inferno goes a different route. Its lone black actor plays a villain who wasn't even in the book at all, not just as a white man. And I find it very odd that the blatantly unnamed provost (described in the book as "a tiny, stunted man with tanned skin and deep-set eyes") not only gets a name in the movie (and is never called "the provost") - a very English name, too, Harry Sims and is played by Irrfan Khan.

Are film studios going to respond to the call for more POC in movies by making them all villains? Not so sure that's progress.

Happy Halloween part 2

Happy Halloween

No mas

An email I just sent to End Citizens United, in response to one from them with the subject line "Did Karen ABANDON Hillary?", which I found pretty rich since I just got hit up by her campaign.

I'm sure this is useless but I am going to say it anyway. Trying to guilt people into giving is an obnoxious tactic. Especially all this crap like "Did Karen abandon Hillary?" or "Karen voting for Trump?" And the damned surveys that end with a choice of giving X dollars or giving more. ENOUGH.

I am getting upwards of 75 emails A DAY asking for money. At least 1 phone call a day. You, a bunch of congressional and senatorial candidates and their campaigns, the Clinton campaign, DNC, DSCC, DCCC, DDLC... freaking James Carville calling me a slacker. And everybody sends them over and over, sometimes daily, certainly weekly. Everybody wants $300 or $400 and then they want me to add "just" $20.16 or enough to get the matching funds up to some bigger number. Everyone is desperate and everyone just needs 4 more people ftom my ZIP code or 10 from  my city. I CANNOT GIVE EVERYONE MONEY ALL THE TIME. STOP ACTING LIKE YOU ARE ALL THERE IS.

I'm sure it won't even be read. But I feel better for sending it.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Inferno, perfectly adequate if not as good as the first one in the series. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - I went to see this with a friend who hadn't read the book and she was a bit puzzled by a number of things. She also wasn't clear as to whether Miss Peregrine was really a good person, which I think is a question the books leave open, too. And Miss Hokusai, a lovely episodic film about the famous painter's daughter.

TV: The Good Place, which was entertaining while raising some important questions.

Read: Finished Inside the Zhivago Storm. Read Inferno, which was fairly boring but had a startlingly different ending than the movie did. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe! which was a total delight.

A first!

Here is a Red-breasted nuthatch sitting on the bird bath. I don't remember ever seeing one before. It's a male; a female would have a white throat and a gray crown. (For size comparison, here's a chickadee on the same bath.)

There is an irruption of RBN's in the eastern US this year, so keep an eye out:  you might see some, too.

New visitor

A Downy woodpecker found the suet feeder this morning.  Titmice are on the other feeders.

No, thanks

Protip: I'm not sending any money to anyone whose calling technique goes like this:

Them: "May I speak to Jessica?"
Me: "You have the wrong number."
Them: "Sorry, but maybe you can help me. I'm calling on behalf of..."

Feeders

I put up some feeders. The first few days was nothing but chickadees and titmice - which, no complaints! - but then others started showing up. Here are some pictures. Note that chickadees generally don't stay at the feeder; they can't crack open the seeds easily, so they grab one, take it to a tree, eat it, and come back for another. Titmice will often do the same thing, but sometimes they stay and crack open the seeds on the bottom of a usefully-shaped feeder.

 Carolina chickadee

 Tufted titmouse and chickadee

 Northern cardinal (male)

 Northern cardinal (female)

Carolina chickadees

 Tufted titmouse and a departing Carolina chickadee

 Red-bellied woodpecker (female)

 Carolina wren trying to make up its mind

 Sunflower seeds...

 ... no, suet!

  Red-bellied woodpecker (female), better pose

White-breasted nuthatch

Not something you want to see...

At least it's just the shed, not the house!

It's a male red-bellied woodpecker. There's a pair in the neighborhood; I see the female often. Just on trees, like this:

At least the ghosts aren't foreigners

Prepositional phrase placement is important. Sometimes you can get away with separating constituent elements, but sometimes you can't. Like here:

The desired reading is "believed by locals" but unfortunately the embedded clause has a verb that also takes "by" as a complement - "haunted by". And since English tends to run left-to-right and government by the nearest is a thing, the reading this is going to get is not "believed to be haunted" and "believed by whom" but "believed to be haunted" and "haunted by whom".

Such a simple rewrite to remove the structural ambiguity! "Believed by locals to be haunted".

The Week in Entertainment

Live: The Pirates of Penzance by the Knoxville Opera Company. Wonderful performance, energetic, well cast, hilarious.

TV: Caught up on The Good Place, which is intriguing as well as funny. Will definitely keep up.

Read: Inside the Zhivago Storm, about the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Italy (looooong) before its publication in the Soviet Union. Kevin Hearne's first "Oberon's Meaty Mysteries", this one called The Purloined Poodle. It was amusing, and nice to see Atticus again. I have to say, though, that every time the villain's plot was mentioned or "explained" I was stopped dead in my tracks. I simply cannot believe that it would work.

Sweet image

OK, maybe if a "10 year old little girl" actually came up with this (which I doubt), it kinda works. But really. Think about it.

The pumpkin dies. The pumpkin is ripped out of the patch and killed. Then it sits on a porch for a few days or weeks, rotting slowly. And then it's tossed onto the dump. The "yucky stuff" at least can be used to make pies.

And teaching kids that they're filled with "yucky stuff" and that God needs to kill them to make them acceptable? Heinous.

Back to Bing ;-)

(Gasp! A third post in one day!)

The caption reads

Фронтовий герб)
Слава Україні! Смерть окупантам!

(In transliteration, that's Frontovyy herb )
Slava Ukrayini! Smert' okupantam!

Bing makes this

Frontovyy herb)
Glory to Ukraine! Death Okupantam!

Oh, Bing.
Translation fail. Majorly.

First, "frontovyy"? Why doesn’t it know how adjectives are made? That -ov- is one of the two basic suffixes, denoting a relationship - in this case, a герб that is from the фронт. And Bing does know the word фронт.

And "herb" is a transliteration just like "frontovyy" but one that sadly looks like an English word. As in Russian, герб means an emblem, a national emblem or symbol, or a coat of arms.

And as always Bing has no clue about cases, or the need to put in prepositions in English. Okupant is "occupier" and -am is dative plural. Death TO occupiers.

And one minor question... WHY did it capitalize "Okupantam"?

I'll allow it not to know the abbreviated emoji.

Google Translate does a pretty darned good job, by the way:

Front emblem

Glory to Ukraine! Death to the invaders

It doesn't know the emoji, either. And I could quibble with using the bare "front"; it sounds like it means "not the back" rather than "front line". But really not bad.

Mine:

Front-line emblem :-)  (Emblem from the front)
Glory to Ukraine! Death to the occupiers! 

Second verse

The photo was posted as a comment to a post by a woman rejoicing in tears at her autistic son's reaction to his therapy dog. In the post she detailed how hard it was to get the dog.

But this woman? "We prayed for this moment ... and God sent us a dog".

Yep. I guess it just rang the doorbell and had a little note around its neck. There was no 2-year training program, no foster family, no breeder providing the puppy.

Look, I do get that people are happy.

But why does God always get all the credit?

There's that done

Go and do likewise. You know, if you can.

Credit where it's due

First, let me lead off by saying I have always liked Randy Travis as a singer and hope he continues to recover. That said...

Travis' wife, Mary Davis-Travis, spoke about the numerous procedures and operations the Grammy-winning singer underwent to save his life and a six-month stay in the hospital after a viral infection caused his 2013 stroke.

"Randy stared death in the face, but death blinked," Davis-Travis said. "Today, God's proof of a miracle stands before you."

(source)

God's proof of a miracle? Or the the proof of medical intervention and treatment? Did God heal him with a miracle? No. It took "numerous procedures and operations" and a long "stay in the hospital". That's what passes for a miracle nowadays?

The Week in Entertainment

Live: An extremely well-done and funny L'Italiana in Algieri at the Met.

DVD: The Incredible Hulk, which was okay, and Hulk, which was ... as odd as I'd heard. Mark Ruffalo is certainly a better Banner than the other two. And having Nick Nolte play Banner's father in the first and then Betty's father in the second (instead of Sam Eliot) was a weird choice.

TV: Caught the first episode of The Good Place on On Demand and will definitely try to catch up this week. It was funny and thought-provoking. And I like seeing Kristen Bell back on TV.

Read: The Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman - extraordinary. "Everything But the Squeal", a funny if slight Scalzi short originally in Metatropolis, so I broke down and bought that ("more or less "the city beyond", says the forward. It should have been "metapolis" - polis is 'city' and that '-tro' in metropolis goes with the 'me' of 'metr-', mother. But I digress.). It's a collection of five stories, and three of them are very good indeed. One ("Everything But..." ) is slight but funny, and the other (the first in the book, unfortunately) just left me totally cold. Couldn't even finish it. YMMV, obviously. The Librarians and the Lost Lamp - can't wait for the show to start. The Inquisitor's Tale, which was truly wonderful. I started Zhivago's Secret Journey but he made so many tantalizing references to things from Inside the Zhivago Storm that I finally gave in and bought that one to read first. Finished Eruption: The Untold Story of Mout St. Helens, which was well-done indeed. Started Kabu Kabu, a collection of short stories by Nnedi Okonafor, which are so far everything I'd expect from her (brilliant, in a word).

The Week in Entertainment

Live: A rather brilliant The Crucible in the little Carousel Theater by the Clarence Brown Theater. And a very amusing, if unevenly acted, production of It's Only a Play! at the Oak Ridge Playhouse.

TV: much beyond some DIY shows on H&GTV. But things are starting up, so that will change.

Read: Finished the second in the "Riddle in Ruby" trilogy. Also, "Hello, Moto"  by Nnedi Okorafor, and another short called "Superior" by Jessica Lack which was okay. Not as good as  C.B. Lee's novel Not Your Sidekick, which was where I found the recommendation for it. Sidekick - a post-apocalyptic (very post, civilization has rebounded nicely) superhero coming of age story - is apparently planned as the first in another trilogy, and I'm looking forward to it. Started Eruption: the Untold Story of Mount St Helens.

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight. Still brilliant.

Film: Took a friend to see Kubo and the Two Strings; she loved it.

DVD: Finished Legend. Too bad it wasn't renewed in that UPN mess of the time... It's very entertaining.

Read: Finished The Fifth Season and went right into The Obelisk Gate. Jemisin is tremendous, as usual. Can't wait for the third book. Wow. Started a thing called Spiderlight; I can't remember why I bought it, where I heard about it. What I know is that halfway through chapter 2 I looked it up on Amazon to see if it was meant to be a parody, in which case it just wasn't matching my sense of humor. But no, it's meant to be straight and a lot of people absolutely love it. Me? No. I moved on to Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, which was very good, no surprise. Then Riddle in Ruby, discovered on Scalzi's blog, because the sequel had come out and I wanted to read it - the one real drawback to the Kindle is that your To-Read pile is easy to add to and hard to see. Anyway, I read it and loved it and am now in the next book.

What the hell is happening

Randy Newman wrote a song called "Louisiana 1927". It starts like this:

What has happened down here is the winds have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

And people are drowning in this flood.

(And one thing to remember: when people are drowning, they will often fight the person trying to save them. Or anybody else. That's one of the first things they teach you in life guard training. Drowning people aren't calm, they aren't rational, they aren't quiet. They're dying.)

Anyway, I've seen several pieces over the last few weeks referencing or quoting the first verse of this song. But I don't really agree.

The winds haven't changed. What's happened is that people are walking out in the rain and taking pictures. Taking videos.

This shit has been happening for a long time. But now (unexpected consequences!) we are seeing it happen.