Elkit in Wonderland

Science Fiction ... Double Feature

NPR has a reader-voted list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels. Like so many other people, I love checking these out and checking them off. Let's see the tally of the ones I've read:

1. The Lord Of The Rings
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
3. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series (I read the first and part of the second, but not the whole series yet. Am mightily looking forward to the second season of Game of Thrones on HBO)
4. 1984
5. Fahrenheit 451 (I've probably read everything by Ray Bradbury)
6. The Foundation Trilogy (I've probably also read everything by Isaac Asimov)
7. Brave New World
8. American Gods (I *think* I've read this.)
9. The Princess Bride
10. Animal Farm
11. Neuromancer (and Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero, and almost all his other novels)
12. I, Robot
13. Stranger In A Strange Land
14. Slaughterhouse-Five
15. Frankenstein
16. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
17. The Handmaid's Tale
18. 2001: A Space Odyssey
19. The Stand
20. Snow Crash
21. The Martian Chronicles
22. Watership Down
23. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
24. The Time Machine
25. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (probably also read everything by Jules Verne when I was a teenager)
26. Flowers For Algernon
27. The War Of The Worlds
28. The Mists Of Avalon
29. The Left Hand Of Darkness
30. I Am Legend
31. The Time Traveler's Wife
32. Journey To The Center Of The Earth
33. The Dispossessed
34. Something Wicked This Way Comes
35. Wicked
36. The Eyre Affair
37. The Illustrated Man
38. Doomsday Book

Seen the movie, haven't read the book:

1. A Clockwork Orange
2. Starship Troopers (for the record, I think it's a really good movie)
3. Contact
4. The Road (I keep trying and failing to read Cormac McCarthy. It's not that I don't like him, but there's so. Much. STUFF. in there that I can't slow down enough in order to really get it. It's just too dense.)

Of all of the listed books, my personal favorites are (in no particular order):

• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• The Left Hand Of Darkness
• The Dispossessed
• Fahrenheit 451
• Doomsday Book
• Flowers for Algernon
• Wicked

And other personal sci-fi and fantasy novel favorites that I would add to my list:

• Kindred, Fledgling, and Bloodchild, all by Octavia Butler
• Passage, my favorite Connie Willis
• Engine Summer, by John Crowley
• Little, Big - also by John Crowley. I just got the audiobook read by the author.
• The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner
• The Stone That Never Came Down, by John Brunner
• The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson
• Moderan (Festung Zehn, in German), by David R. Bunch
• Das Jesus-Video, by Andreas Eschbach ... and ooooh! German Kindle books!!!
• His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass trilogy), by Phillip Pullman

If a zombie romantic comedy and vampire noir count in this category, then I would also add:

• S.G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament
• Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series

Here Be Dragons

Went to see this and liked most of it, except a few nitpickers.

Absolutely loved the opening credits, and might go to see it again just for these.

Mara and Craig were fantastic.

And I really liked the Fincher color palette.

Saturday, Saturday

[copying my Health Month daily report over here.]

What a gorgeous Saturday that was! Temperatures in the mid-eighties, sunny and balmy.
I got up earlyish because my employer said that I could go to a free screening of Cars 2, the new Pixar movie. I’d seen the first one and had really liked it, and I really enjoyed this one as well.

Decided not to stop at work, and to do that tomorrow instead. (It’s not a hardship – I volunteered for a few extra hours for this weekend.) Did some shopping on the way home – nothing exciting, just cleaning products and kitty litter.

Fixed myself a nice lunch when I got home – man oh man, I sure got my recommended daily servings of vegetables, and then some! I actually had veggies even in my breakfast (made scrambled eggs with spinach, onion, and cheese), and I think this might be the key in “beating the box”, using up all the veggies this week before I pick up the next box on Friday. Anyway, lunch was a big bowl of arugula, bell pepper, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, basil, avocado, and that delicious tomato walnut vinaigrette that had winked at me at the farmers market a few weeks ago. Oh, and some walnuts on top, to match the vinaigrette.

After this late lunch, it was high time for the first stage of the Tour de France. It’s my favorite sporting event to watch – first of all, it’s such a great athletic feat, to ride a bike for 5-7 hours every day for 3 weeks. And not just toodling along, but making serious time up big mountains in the Pyrenees and Alps! There are all these specialists – climbers and sprinters, and supporting riders for the team captains and main contenders, and leadout men to get the sprinters in perfect position for a win at the end of the sprint stages.
And then there’s all the team tactics! Lance Armstrong has said it’s “high speed chess”, and I agree. I find it just fascinating. And the commentary on Versus is just excellent; they explain all these things really well. I recommend it highly.

It was an exciting first stage, made even better by the fact that I managed to stay away from the results on Twitter and Facebook, so I didn’t know who was going to win. I was riveted.

Whew. I was all spent after that. Needed a nice dinner, which of course was more vegetables – I used some of the mizuna and tatsoi for a stir-fry, and loaded up good on some of the onions and garlic that have been piling up for the last few weeks.

After dinner, I sat outside on my kitchen steps for a while … I’ve been contemplating surprising side effects lately. There’s this stray cat who’s been coming around – I think my (indoor) cats encourage him; they’re social little butterflies. The stray (I call him Catman) is a scrawny little thing, so I started feeding him, so of course now he sticks around. I won’t let him in the house because one of my indoors is REALLY territorial – she pretty much turns into Clint Eastwood, snarling at him to git off her lawn. So I feed him outside. I stay while he eats because the Scrub Jays were taunting him very rudely. So, to make a long story … not any shorter, really … I sit there at night and look at the stars, a nice new habit that is all credit to Catman. He eats his dinner, and then he curls up on my lap and purrs and drools and scratches my arms because he is not very careful with his claws when he “makes biscuits”. Oh well, I don’t mind much.

Back into the house and onto the mat at last to do my abs exercises

Been thinking that maybe my Health Month middle name this month should be “Shut Up Abs”, in honor of the Fit Abs Challenge, and even more so one in honor of one of my favorite cyclists, Jens “Shut Up Legs” Voigt.

Oh, aaaand ten minutes of meditating, and about a half hour of reading, which concludes The Game of Thrones. I do not think I will be able to wait for the next season on HBO. I might take another week or two to think about what I think could happen next, and then I'll dive into Book Number Two. 

It's a Love Drive, Wheels On Fire

Got to see Cars 2 this morning, courtesy of my employer. Free screening for employees and their families! And in 3-D too! (And really good 3-D at that. I was impressed.)

I really liked it, and I loved all the wondrous details - great local atmosphere for all the scenes in Japan, France, and Italy. Lots of new Fiat 500! The old Topolino! 

OMG, one of the bad guys was a Zündapp! Professor Z, with a fantastic bad-guy-German accent by a real German, Thomas Kretschmann. Hilarious!

And the voices! Michael Caine as a British spy! Eddie Izzard as Miles Axlerod, intrepid explorer and espouser of new alternative fuels! John Turturro as an Italian race car! And Bruce Campbell!!! And Franco Nero! FRANCO friggin' NERO!!! 

A Citroën 2CV 4 and a DS 21 making out on a bridge in Paris!!! They actually put a DS 21 in the movie! Gotta love those car geeks. I was in heaven. I want to watch this again at home where I can pause and rewind and watch more closely. And I want to see the first Cars movie again as well. 

L'americano

Went to see The Clooney in "The American". Didn't like it as much as Roger Ebert did, but I liked it. But I can understand you'd be disappointed if you expected a Clooney and/or action film (I've heard several people say that it was awful). It's a very European film - lots of atmosphere, not so much plot. I know the director mostly as a photographer, and I *think* he directed the video for David Sylvian's Orpheus, so I had my expectations set in the right range. As with most things in life, your opinions will depend greatly on your expectations.

And a nice surprise: music by Herbert Grönemeyer. I did not know he did cinema scores. Sweet.

I Wanna Put A Bit Of Shine On It (14/2009)

Oh yeah, I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats a couple of weeks ago. Not bad, but I expected more. The film never could decide whether to take its protagonists seriously or not, and the story never did come together for me. 

We Don't Need No (13/2009)

Hadn't been to the movies in quite a while, and then I read the A.V. Club interview with Alfred Molina and remembered that Peter Sarsgaard was in this movie, and I didn't have any candy for trick or treaters, and running off to the movie theatre would be a good idea. 

I liked it a lot - especially Peter Sarsgaard; he has that look of almost harmlessness, but you always wonder what's lurking under the surface -, and I kept thinking there was something familiar about it, until I finally remembered that I had read about this in The Guardian a few months back. 

As usual, I couldn't possibly say it better than Roger Ebert.

Funny The Way It Is, If You Think About It (12/2009)

I like Adam Sandler when he plays seriously. Yes, he's a funny man, and here he gets to do both. I liked this, but do men really come up with nothing but penis and fart jokes when they're left to their own devices? I'm not complaining, exactly, I'm just puzzled.

I did like the story. And the performances. And how it kept going places I didn't really expect. Did I like the ending? Not sure, which is not a bad thing.

I Don't Like The Drugs, But The Drugs Like Me (11/2009)

What. A. RIOT! I love how it starts with a premise so outlandish that you think it can't possibly make sense at the end. And then it does. Perfectly. I think this is going to be one for the DVD collection.

I Hurt Myself Today, To See If I Still Feel (10/2009)

For most films, I wait around for a week or two after their release, and make my way to the theatre when it gets less crowded. Not this one. The Hurt Locker has been at top of my list since I saw the first trailer. And I'd been interested as soon as I heard that it's directed by Kathryn Bigelow - I've paid attention to her ever since Near Dark, way back when in 1987.

So I went to see The Hurt Locker the very weekend it opened here in San Jose, and man oh man, what an adrenaline rush! You can call it an Iraq war movie, you can call it an action film, you can call it a character study. What a powerful film! I literally needed comfort food afterwards.

If you haven't seen it, this won't be a spoiler, and if you have, you'll know what I'm talking about: for me, the most powerful scene in the whole powerful movie is when he says, "I'm sorry! Do you understand? I'm SORRY!"

Man oh man. Man oh man oh man. That just slayed me.

Go check out their web site that really captures the atmosphere. Become their fan on Facebook. And watch the first eight minutes of the movies on Hulu.com if you can.