Yet Another Instance of Randomicity

• So I have recently discovered that Hume might be less unintelligent than I'd thought—not that that's saying much, as I'd thought him to be an early beneficiary of the truncated omnibus. Apparently he somehow overcame his racial handicap and managed to be an intelligent, actually skeptical English atheist.


• So Ben Shapiro has been rattling cages over at Big Hollywood simply by being capable of killing the Buddha, specifically by saying Alfred Hitchcock is the most overrated director of all time. It's quite hard to argue with; Hitchcock was good, but people act like every frame of his films was divinely inspired. It's also hard to argue with his point that Hitchcock's show was better, because he was time-limited and couldn't sprawl.


• Shapiro also came up with a good review of Lost in Translation, one shorter than the title:

  Living death.

  In, as they say, a nutshell. See, it's a movie about people being bored in Kyoto. Sorry, but if you can be bored in Kyoto, you'd be bored in Rome, Paris, or any other incredible city. Kyoto's got the Abe no Seimei shrine—that is, you can go to fricking Merlin's house—and the Shinsengumi, who were the Untouchables meet Jack Bauer, only samurai. If you're bored with that, kill yourself.


• So, you know the AP English reading list, in high school? And you know the song Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen? The latter really negates the necessity of the former. Seriously, think of the lyrics. Now think of The Stranger. And Invisible Man. And Native Son. And A Lesson Before Dying. Yeah, literature is dead. Long live genre.


• So it's apparently unthinkable to tropers that anyone could ship Jayne and River, in Firefly. Aside from the fact Whedon pretty much made that de facto canon, by having them be karmic mirror-images—she's his women-are-incapable-of-failure Mary Sue, he's his men-are-the-authors-of-all evil Straw Misogynist—there's a trope called Slap Slap Kiss. They're kinda like Moonlighting. And hell, if Fox had taken a few more seasons to come to their senses...and if Whedon was capable of writing a male character...Jayne could've gotten some character development and their relationship could've grown.


• Jayne's already more likeable than Mal, whose Han Solo-ness is so forced—it's the thing from The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond about how the pretense of immorality is the new hypocrisy. Mal is plainly Whedon's Author As Faust character, but Whedon's such a spiritual wuss his idea of Faust is "sometimes rude to high-class hookers"; when the façade slips Mal reverts to Alan Alda.


• I think Chretien de Troyes may be my new favorite writer, or at least in my top 10 (I don't really rank 'em). His Yvain, the Knight with the Lion is awesome, though it helps that, well, he wrote about knights and such in the twelfth century.


• Other favorite authors of mine include C. J. Cherryh, the Chesterbelloc, Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb as a team, Leiber, Lovecraft (the only one I value more for his significance than his enjoyable-ness), and Robert Howard. Niven is a writer I really like when he's good, but when he's not he actually hurts, so I'm not sure I'd say he's one of my favorites. Also, I somewhat like Dragonlance (I know, surprising, right?), but Krynn is a really emo world; I have said that the entire Krynnspace crystal shell has a wristband around it.


• One of these days, after I get my SF, fantasy, and dark fantasy books outta my system, I'll write my steampunk/gaslamp fantasy/alternate history story, with a Japan whose Meiji and Taisho eras are dominated not by zaibatsu, but by a resurgent Onmyôryô—the era being summed up with, "When the chrysanthemum and the hollyhock quarreled, it was the bellflower that won."


• Anyone else notice that Zuko, from Avatar: The Last Airbender, totally looks like Ryûji from Toradora when he wears his hair down?