No Mod Required

I’ve been talking about this story to anyone who might have any interest at all in it over the past few weeks. That’s a much smaller circle than I’d like it to be, but what can I tell you. not everyone is a nut for Holmes, Gaiman’s writing and Lovecraft’s dark universe like I am.

Anyway, I just found out there’s a PDF available of the story available from Gaiman’s site. So now I can share my geeked out enjoyment of this story with the whole Internet. That expands the circle of people who might care significantly.

It lives on Neil Gaiman’s Short Stories page and is available as a PDF- A Study in Emerald.

Check it out, and if you like it, buy a volume or ten of Sandman or one of his proper novels the next time you’re in a place with words for sale.

I check in on favorite authors from time to time to see when their next work is due. Stephenson certainly qualifies as a favorite so it was with glee that I found out that his new book Anathem is due out in September.

Digging around a little bit led me to Kaedrin’s blog, which featured a quote from this Livejournal, which goes a little something like this:

He’s writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It’s set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It’s really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He’s nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn’t finish by the end of the calendar year he’ll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

My response to all of that is “sign me right up.” For full disclosure’s sake, I’ll read pretty much anything the guy writes, but that sounds ready made for me to geek out over.

Am I bummed there’s no Shaftoe or Waterhouse or appearance by Enoch Root? Sure I am (at least on some level.) I didn’t gleefully work my way through through however many pages of Cryptonimicon and the Baroque Cycle (3500?) without coming away with an affection for the inhabitants of that world. Thing is, the above sounds so damn cool I just don’t care. Platonic math meets John Carter (or, if you must, Star Wars)?

That’s the stuff.

The difference, of course, is that Crockford should understand that things are a little more complicated than that, but the ideas that he thinks are good enough to announce to the world are no better than the ideas a 5-year old has before breakfast. “No more iframes! No more document.write!” he declares, blissfully unaware that his employer’s home page uses both. “Strict entity parsing!” he demands… in a page with unescaped ampersands. “UTF-8 is the One True Encoding!” he proclaims boldly… in a page that declares itself as ISO-8859-1. “No more javascript: URLs! In fact, let’s replace Javascript altogether! And I’ll be back to talk about CSS!” It just goes on and on, the awesomeness gradually swelling until it all folds back on itself like a Möbius strip of self-parody. It’s the Bolero of trolls. Everything he claims is secure isn’t, and everything he claims would increase security wouldn’t. Everything he wants to add to HTML would make it worse, and everything he wants to remove would also make it worse. Please, please tell me he’s shooting the moon to make the worst proposal ever. It just doesn’t make sense any other way, at least not from anyone older than 5.

The Bolero of trolls [dive into mark]

The Fixing HTML page itself.

Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle

Alternatively:

The ‘… Is Your New Bicycle’ Meme Is Your New Bicycle
Steve Jobs Is Your New Bicycle
Ron Paul Is Your New Bicycle

Explanation:

Change of Subject - Observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades | Chicago Tribune | Blog

I just clicked for a good five minutes. For me, someone who’s seen the entire internet twice, that’s a significant amount of clicking in one place.

La Vie en Rose

With Let’s Get Lost I had quite a back to back with the movies recently. Both are excellent films about incredible talents with a strong thread of tragedy running through their lives- great cinema, definitely in the downer column. There are worse things, of course, I just thought I’d point it out.

This, the story of iconic French singer, Edith Piaf, is truly a great film. It’d be tough to go wrong with the source material, but it really beat my expectations. That’s due mostly to the incredible performance turned in by Marion Cotillard. On the surface it’s a stereotypical “great” performance. Aided by makeup and highlighted by the physical transformations brought on by Piaf’s poor health, the showy aspects of this performance are of the type that I’m usually skeptical of when similar performances are held up as truly transcendent accomplishments (I’m looking at you Charlize Theron in Monster.) The thing is, in this case the obvious changes are buoyed by a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of the complicated inner life of the singer. makeup or no makeup the emotion that plays out across just Cotillard’s eyes is enough to get me nodding my head in approval. It’s truly a wonderful performance.

Beyond that, and that’s all you really need in my book, the rest of the film is also excellent. Based on the little sparrow’s fascinating, tragic life, the film is well written, paced nicely and well acted across the board. It’s a painful thing to watch, especially with the empathy generated by Cotillard’s performance, but there’s a beauty in the pain, much like Piaf’s music itself.

I can’t go on without mentioning the music. The film is obviously full of Piaf’s music and, for me, that would have been worth the price of admission alone. It’s a glorious, unique* thing, her voice and spending a couple of hours getting to know it and the life behind it better was something special.

All in all this is an excellent film and one that is most highly recommended.

*It’s interesting that I say unique here, because there are several scenes voiced by an uncanny Piaf soundalike named Jil Aigrot- as I learned from this feature on PRI’s The World.

I’m not sold on this idea. Otomo is signed on as executive producer, so there’s that, but still… I have visions of a rat in front of the statehouse running through my mind.

I’m looking at you Martin Scorcese.

WB takes franchise turn with ‘Akira’

Warner Bros. will turn anime artist Katsuhiro Otomo’s six-volume graphic novel “Akira” into two live-action feature films, the first of which is being fast tracked for release in summer 2009. Legendary will co-finance with WB.

He’s got my full support.

UCI president Pat McQuaid promised Friday to put the full weight of the organization behind an effort to ensure that defending Tour de France winner Alberto Contador will take part in this year’s edition of the world’s biggest bicycle race.

The Tour’s organizers, Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), announced on February 13 that Contador’s Astana team would be barred from competing in this year’s race because of doping scandals over the past two years.

“We will do everything that is possible to ensure that Contador takes part in the Tour,” McQuaid told the Spanish newspaper El Pais on Friday. “It would be a tragedy if Contador could not defend his title.”

Lord knows what they can actually do, but I wish the UCI all the luck in the world in getting the ASO straightened out. I’ve been thinking about it and without Astana, I’m simply not watching the Tour this year, so unless there’s some sense in the world come July I’ll be sleeping in during that month.

McQuaid pushes for Astana reversal

Let’s Get Lost

I’m WAY behind on movie reviews, so I’ll make this quick. So quick I’m going with a list…

Let’s Get Lost is:

• A fascinating look at the troubled life of the late, great Jazz musician Chet Baker
• One of the prettiest documentaries I’ve ever seen. Directed by photographer Bruce Weber, Let’s Get Lost is a stunning visual achievement. Like the best black and whtie still photography come to life, this film matches the melancholy of Baker’s life, the life of those he touched and his music perfectly.
• Depressing. Baker was on top of the world. Then he became a junkie and got his teeth knocked out. Fun times.
• Maybe a little overlong? It’s a somber film. 2+ hours of somber can be a bit of a marathon.
• Features Flea. When I saw this film first, in the theater, I was probably the only person in the audience to even recognize him. Now? Probably a different story.
• Is really a must-see. One of the best docs I’ve ever seen. not that I’m the king of documentaries, but still…

That’ll just have to do. I’ve got much to churn through here.

If you’re feeling nerdy, you can check out the long-neglected comic book blog I run. It’s been redesigned and moved into Wordpress, which means I’m more likely to update it than I was when it was on Blogger.

The design is a “knocked out as quick as possible” special. I’ll be tinkering with it over the next few weeks until I’m fully happy with it. I just wanted to get it out there. It’s a full Wordpress site now, which is really the fun part- Valid HTML; a YSLow score in the upper 70s; easier to update; a fancy new sprite; S3 integration for all those cover scans…

What’s not to love?

Click. If you dare!

It’s All Just Comics

Join the Campaign to Let Levi Ride

On February 13th, the Amaury Sports Organization (ASO) barred Team Astana from competing in any race or event organized by the ASO in 2008. The ASO owns premiere cycling events like Paris-Nice, Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Tours, and the famed Tour de France.

The ASO cited the doping scandals of last year’s Tour de France as justification.

There can be no comparison between the Astana team of 2007 and the new Astana. The entire organizational structure has been rebuilt under the direction of the team’s new General Manager, Johan Bruyneel, who has thoroughly cleaned house. What’s more, Astana has adopted the rigorous doping controls developed by anti-doping expert Dr. Rasmus Damsgaard, and Astana now spends more money on anti-doping controls than any other team in the pro peloton.

“That the happenings of last year…prompted the Tour organizers to leave Astana out of the season’s most important race sounds understandable,” notes Bruyneel. “However, Astana Cycling Team 2008 has nothing to do with the team of last year. We have done everything to change the dynamics of the team. New management, new riders, new philosophy. Only the name of the sponsor remained.”

The ASO has turned a blind eye to Johan’s efforts. By barring the entire team from competing in ASO events, outstanding athletes like Levi Leipheimer, who was not a member of last year’s Astana team and who has never been implicated in any doping affair, are forced to sit on the sidelines while their life’s work passes them by.

“When I saw the Tour de France on TV when I was young,” laments Leipheimer, “I knew that someday I wanted to do that race. I sacrificed my life to participate. After finishing on the podium last year I want to do even better. Now I’m a victim of an illogical decision and have been excluded from the race.”