Big Answers to Small Questions

Today I finally got around to watching the trailer for the new Fantastic Four movie. I am absolutely jaw-dropped and looking forward to seeing this movie, which I never really expected to be. It's as if someone at Marvel read my post from last year about why previous Fantastic Four movies hadn't really worked well and taken my ideas to heart. I don't think I can ever recall a studio making the movie I wanted them to make!

Tonight, as part of celebrating Z.'s 30th birthday, we watched 13 Going on 30 (at her request). As the credits were rolling, I happened to glance over just as the song credits started rolling by. Once of the songs used in the movie was Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." Because of the sample from "Under Pressure," David Bowie and the members of Queen all got songwriting credits on "Ice Ice Baby." Whoever wrote up the credits for 13 Going on 30 put all the songwriters in alphabetical order, so it reads "Written by David Bowie, John Deacon. . ."

Welcome to Write Every Day (WED) day #6!

Today’s historical tidbit was rather hard to choose — the events listed for today were all either uninteresting or unpleasant. There were a couple of near-firsts, though I think they would have been more interesting if they could have been actual first, without the weasel words: (emphasis mine) “1600 — Eurydice, the oldest surviving opera, receives its première performance, beginning the Baroque period.” and “1927 – Opening of The Jazz Singer, the first prominent "talkie" movie.” Also, in the list of people born on a day, I was struck by the interesting combination of professions for ”Alice Timander, Swedish dentist and actress” (1915-2007). She sounds like an interesting person, and her entry is fairly brief — you should check it out!

Have a great day!

Links:

• October 2024 welcome post
• Rec Your Works post

Day 6: badly_knitted, brithistorian, calimac, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lunabee34, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme

( Days 1-5 behind cut )

Marvel announces the cast for their latest Fantastic Four movie.

Obviously they didn't ask my opinion. If they had, I would have told them that the reason they keep having problems with Fantastic Four movies isn't because they're choosing the wrong cast or wrong director or wrong writers. The problem is that the Fantastic Four are very much Of Their Time and (IMO) cannot work if transposed to a modern setting. The Fantastic Four debuted in 1961, and the whole series, from concept to execution, relies on that Space Race-era sense of techno-optimism in order to work. Having seen the way the tech industry actually played out, the Fantastic Four seems hopelessly naive and cartoonish, and that's why the movies keep not working right.

Today I ran across an article on Lifehacker "25 of the Most Obscenely Patriotic Movies ever." I was surprised to see that I hadn't seen them all. Of course Rocky IV was on the list. This was one of my favorite movies growing up, and I considered watching it, but I realized there were just a few parts I actually wanted to see. So I watched those bits on YouTube, then decided to post them here, in case any of you hadn't seen the movie - I can save you 72 minutes by showing you the 19 minutes that are worth watching:

The training montage:

The big fight at the end:

And Rocky's speech after the big fight:

Tonight A. and Z. and I watched a movie together. (L. watched the trailer but decided not to watch the movie.) Afterward, as I was loading and starting the dishwasher and putting away the leftovers and writing when they'd be good until on the pad on the front of the fridge, it occurred to me: I feel like I've finally adapted to not being in school." And my first thought was "About damn time. It took you four months!" And then I thought about it some more, and thought "After spending 5-1/2 years in school, I was able to adapt to such  major change in my life in only 4 months. That's not bad!" (And then as I was writing this, I had to reframe. I had been thinking "It took me this long to learn this!" but then I reframed as "At least I learned it.")

One of the projects I had set aside for "after I graduate" is that I had my old laptop down in the basement and Z. had installed Ubuntu on it for me, but the battery wouldn't hold a charge and the keyboard wouldn't work properly. (As it turns out, being able to type the number 4 is pretty necessary.) Earlier this week, I found it and brought it upstairs (and marveled at how heavy it is compared to my new computer) and started trying to fix it. I was able to get the battery to charge. (All I had to do was remove the battery, hold down the power key for 30 seconds, then put the battery back in and plug it in until it charged. Then I learned how to remove the keyboard. I cleaned it out as best I could and it worked somewhat better, but still not well enough to actually use. But I learned where to buy a new keyboard for it and once it arrives (in about a week), I'll be able to install it and I should have a working Ubuntu laptop!

ETA: I just realized someone is probably going to ask what movie we watched. We watched Bros. It was a great gay rom-com. There was one moment where I had to leave the room for a moment because I was getting overwhelmed with secondhand embarrassment for the protagonist, but all in all we really enjoyed it.

ETA2: When I was looking over this post after the last edit, I realized that the title is an inadvertent quote from Queen's "I'm Going Slightly Mad," so enjoy:

A. and I just watched the Hulu original movie The Princess. It was. . . an experience. Here's what I wrote about it in my APAzine:

• Today was the first and longest day of interviews/assessments for the new museum studies professor. I had to be on campus at 10 a.m. for the student interview and back at 3:30 for the teaching demonstration. It was a very interesting process, and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.
• For lunch I used Google Maps to find the nearest Burger King. I got there only to discover that the dining room was closed, so I had to go through the drive-through and then sit in the parking lot and eat in the van. Looking around while I ate, I figured out that I wasn't in the best part of town when I saw that I was in the parking lot of a shopping center with a tobacco shop and a pawn shop that was across the street from a shopping center with a tobacco shop and a pawn shop.
• Once I finished eating, I went to the Caribou Coffee across the parking lot, got an iced mocha, and sat down to read for a while before heading back to campus. While I was there, I couldn't help overhearing the staff talking, where I heard this gem that I'm still trying to figure out exactly what she meant and/or why she said it this way: "We used to go there every other two weeks." Is she trying to say every two weeks and just being redundant (maybe witching from "every other week" to "every two weeks" mid-stream) or does she really mean every four weeks (in which case why not say "every four week"?). Language is a funny thing.
• Speaking of language, I've been thinking about Braille lately. I'm fascinated by the systems of Braille in different languages. Most languages written in the Latin alphabet use a version of Braille based on the international standard, but varying (sometimes greatly) depending on special characters used in the language. Likewise, Cyrillic and Hebrew Braille are based on international standard.[1] Then, there are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Brailles that have no relation to the international standard. But they all use the same 6-dot Braille matrix.[2] Which got me to thinking: If a blind person was confronted with a Braille document that they didn't know what language it was in, their only chance of figuring out what language it's in is by trying to read it in each Braille they know![3] This is just mind-blowing to me: That there is no Braille equivalent of how a sighted person can often look at a document and recognize what language it's printed in even if they don't speak the language.
• While driving today, I saw a vacuum cleaner store[4] called "Vac That Thang Up"! ^_^
• Also while driving today, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said "People who don't understand sarcasm are great!"
• Yet another movie remake that nobody asked for: They're remaking White Men Can't Jump. Why?

[1] I think Hebrew is particularly well-suited for Braille because of the way the lines alternate direction, so you're not faced with making sure you've correctly identified the correct next line.
[2] There are also expanded English and Japanese Brailles that use an 8-dot matrix, but we're ignoring those for the moment.
[3] This task would be hard enough on level 1 (fully-written out) Braille, but would then be orders of magnitude harder on level 2 (standard abbreviations) or level 3 (personalized abbreviations) Braille.
[4] I had no idea vacuum cleaner stores were still a thing!

I was at the Disney+ website this morning (trying to find out if their Korean show "Rookie Cops" was going to be released in America - no answer, so I asked them on Twitter), and I noticed that one of the sections of movies of movies was labeled "Rediscover These Classics." I was kind of surprised to see that the first movie in the section was "Caravan of Courage" (AKA "The Ewok Adventure"). I was 11 when this movie came out, and a total Star Wars nut. But I don't think I would have called this movie a "classic" even then! ^_^

In other news, I don't seem to be having an ill effects from my booster yesterday. I might be having some low energy, but that could just as easily be because it's early in the morning and I haven't finished my first cup of coffee. If I'm still feeling down by lunchtime, then I'll chalk it up to side effects. But even if it is, if this is as bad as it gets, then I think I'm getting off pretty easy.

For some music this morning, I give you Bite Me Bambi's cover of The Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed."

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate, and Happy Saturday to those of you who don't. Hope you all had a great day today. It was a good day here - we just hung out around the house, reading and playing games.

A. got me the new Weki Meki album, "I Am Me." I had accidentally discovered that she had ordered it for me, thanks to international postal regulations and their requirement to print contents on the outside of packages, but I did my best to pretend I didn't know and she didn't actually let me have it until today. Continuing the Korean music industry's efforts to package albums in something more interesting than a jewel case, the CD was packaged inside a hardcover photobook of the band. It also came with a poster (that will almost certainly never end up on a wall), a photocard, a 4-photo strip card (approximate size and shape of a bookmark), and a sheet of not-terribly-interesting stickers.(A set of file folder tops with the members names, some colored strips, some colored circles, and some colored blobs. If they had punched the place where it said "I Am Me." on the sticker sheet so that that could have been used as a sticker, that would have been an improvement. I almost feel like the album is worse for including the stickers. I mean, I'm still saving them, because I'm a collector like that, but I really could have done without them.) All complaints about the stickers aside, it's a great album, and A. is awesome for ordering it for me. And not only that, but from when it arrived, she must have ordered it early enough that the sale counted in that crucial first week of album sales.

Also, tonight we watched a new (not just new to us, but new as in actually came out in 2021) Christmas movie: Christmas Again. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's Groundhog Day, if Groundhog Day took place on Christmas and if Bill Murray was a teenage Latina. The first half hour of it, where Christmas day was going badly for her, was kind of hard to watch, but after that it was pretty good. I don't know if it will find a spot in our regular holiday movie rotation, but it was definitely worth seeing once. Also, for those of you who watch Lucifer, the heroine in Christmas Again is played by Scarlett Estevez, who plays Trixie on Lucifer.

And now I'm off to bed. Stay safe, and I'll see you all tomorrow.