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Follow-up #1: So on Wednesday evening I dutifully followed the recommendations of the Amazon.com troubleshooting guide for Blu-rays and gave my player a full five minutes to read and start playing the first disc of Game of Thrones. (I timed this by warming up a bottle for the little girl.) Lo and behold, it worked! Not only was this a great relief because it meant my wife and I could start watching the series that much sooner, without the boondoggle of waiting for the set to ship back to amazon and the replacement to ship back, but also because when the disc didn't work immediately a lot of my annoyance was aimed at Amazon, and I hate being mad at Amazon. I know Amazon is responsible for the slow death of the small independent book store and whatnot, but I don't care. When Amazon works the way it's supposed to, my cup runneth over. Let's never fight again, Amazon!
My wife and I happily settled in to watch the first episode last night, and it was pretty rad. Having read the books, I thought the casting and the sets and the whole realization of the world was excellent. Having never read the books, my wife nonetheless found the pilot sinking its hooks into her pretty deep. She woke up this morning trying to figure out when the earliest possible opportunity to watch episode two might be. I kind of hated to remind her that the whole series is only ten episodes and we might want to pace ourselves. But it's sweet to have that luxury nonetheless.
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Follow-up #2: One thing I neglected to mention in my review of Fitzcarraldo (because it's honestly pretty tangential) was that there are a couple of documentaries about the making of the movie, the process which is the greater source of my fascination with the flick in the first place. Apparently Burden of Dreams is the main one to see, and I of course fully plan to do this, even though that is not technically one of the 1001 Films. I do still watch other movies from time to time!
This inevitably reminds me of a notion I had a while ago to spend a year trying to build long, unbroken chains of pop-culture consumption based on pop-culture references. By which I mean I would pick, for example, a book to read and I would pay attention to any name-dropping in the text, mentions of other books or movies or albums or whatever. If one or more of those references were to a work I had never read/seen/listened to, then that would be the next thing I would check out. And look for references to other works there, and repeat. I'm sure there would be a number of dead ends, but it would be an interesting game/experiment. Maybe next year.
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From the Vanity Plates Archive: I noticed a car in the parking garage at the train station this week. It is a red Porsche Cayman and its license plate reads HENTAI.
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HENTAI.
OK, this is a bit of inside geekball, and honestly the last thing I want is to send any of you on a Googling expedition to try to figure out what I'm talking about, so how can I put this delicately. Hentai is a Japanese word that roughly translates as "strange attitude" and when used in relation to sex idioms generally means "perversion". Japanese people may also use it as a noun to mean "pervert". Here in the States, it also refers to a genre of Japanese comics and cartoons which are both explicit and twisted. I assure you, if you asked anyone remotely aware of anime or manga to explain what "hentai" was - even if they were totally not into it themselves - the words "rape" and "tentacles" would come up early and often.
I know it takes, ahem, different strokes to move the world, but given all of the above, there is just about no way the guy in the Cayman is anything other than a major creep, right? I can only hope I never actually run into the dude.
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And in an effort to end on a bit of a brighter note, it's a beautiful day out there today, still unseasonably warm for Saint Patrick's Day, so the plan for today is to do quite a bit of work around our property and try to bring our lawn back to life! Or parts of the lawn, at any rate, as the de facto dogrun part of the yard is going to take a while to tend to. One thing at a time!
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