---

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Misguided Faith on AIDS. Increasingly, the Bush administration makes life or death decisions about sex-related initiatives abroad based on what appeals to conservatives at home. [New York Times: Opinion] 9:30:20 PM  Permalink  comment []

Over God. Founding fathers quotations about religion. Sick of hearing fundie pundies say "the US was founded on a vision of Christianity"? Let TJ and the crew speak for themselves. [MetaFilter] 8:57:00 PM  Permalink  comment []

Chinese puts its first man in space. China's first manned space craft enters orbit as the nation becomes only the third to send a human into space. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition] 8:54:00 PM  Permalink  comment []

Get this -- Czeck best sellers Here's an email from my old pal Charlie Cockey, listing the bestsellers in the Czech Republic: You may find the following a bit hard to believe. But it's true. You will NEVER see a list like this in the US, not in 2003, no sirree bob! TOP 10 BESTSELLERS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC July-August 2003, as per Kosmas a Czech online bookseller #10- Peter Hoeg - Conceptions of the 20th Century (I don't know this book, and I just translated it from the Czech, so if the title is a bit different... let me know? Hoeg of course wrote Smilla's Sense of Snow) # 9- Snorri Sturluson: The Yngling Edda and Saga (I'm not really really sure which saga this is, but Sturluson is the source for prose translations of them, Egil included, plus plus King Harald and the Heimskringla) #8- Anthology of stuff on India #7- Edgar Allen Poe - The Raven and other poems (yep, Poe and Poe-try - in the top ten!) #6- Douglas Addams - Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1 (First in the 5 book trilogy) #5- W. Szpilman - The Pianist (The book, not the film) #4- R Grant & D Naylor - Red Dwarf #1 (A popular and very very silly British spoof science-fiction TV-Tie-In series. Definitely silly stuff) #3- William Burroughs - Naked Lunch #2- P Coelho - The Alchemist (OK, so even here new-age "philosophy" sells. Nobody's perfect) #1- Red Dwarf #2 (the latest translated here) The closest fiction books we have here to the usual bestseller fare are the Red Dwarfs and Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Alchemist is, well, The Alchemist. I don't know why it's so popular everywhere, but there (and here) it is. But beyond that - when did you ever expect to see, on the COUNTRY'S Top-10 Bestseller list, William Burroughs, The Pianist, Poe's Poetry (ANY poetry, for that matter!), and The Norse Sagas (!!!). Not only that - the Czechs had Vaclav Havel. California gets Arnold Schwarzenegger. Biiiiiiig difference. I wonder if Arnie was a fan of Frank Zappa? 8:42:03 PM  Permalink  comment []

The Mercury 13 Just finished reading this book about what could have been early women astronauts. On a parallel track to project Mercury, in the mid 50s, some skunkworks researchers were working with some of the top women flyers of the day to put a woman in space, instead of a man. This book does a terrific job telling the story, capturing the unique personalities of these women, as well as those they worked with (and who refused to work with them). Like The Right Stuff, it captures the times well, too. It's strange to look at those times, when a group of especially qualified people were ridiculed and ignored because of their sex, and pretty hard to believe, in many ways very depressing. 2:50:16 PM  Permalink  comment []

Kill Bill Saw Kill Bill, the Tarantino blood-fest the other night. It's a gripping movie, action from start to finish. Technically, it's extremely well-crafted; the fight scenes (which seem to be most of the movie) are somewhat believable, and really exciting. Uma is a joy to watch, even covered in blood as she seems to be for most of the movie. Unfortunately, for me, anyway, there isn't much heart to the movie (pun intended -- there's plenty of what flows through the heart, blood); that is, though you "root" for Uma to get her revenge on those who tried to kill her, you don't know enough of the story to really get involved in it. Perhaps with the release in Feburary of Volume II, more will be revealed. Nonetheless, I was really enthralled by the movie, and there are some really memorable scenes. Recommended, if you go into it expecting to see lots (and lots) of blood. The night after seeing it, I rented Jackie Brown on DVD. It's every bit as good (and long) as I remembered it being. The performances are all fantastic. The dialog is some of the best movie dialog I've heard in years; but that's because Tarantino had such good material to start with, Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. I see how Tarantino was after something different in Kill Bill, but I did miss the depth of characterizations and complexity of plot. 11:57:44 AM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.