Saturday, July 20, 2013

Saturday Grab Bag Summer Breeze

Pursuant to this post, it turned out that the big announcement regarding the Kingkiller Chronicles was that the property had been optioned to 20th Century Fox to become the basis for a television series. Which is less viscerally exciting than a date on the 2014 (or 2015) calendar to circle for volume three's release, but still pretty cool. (Because clearly what I really need is yet another long-format serialized program to somehow find time to keep up with on a regular basis.)

The mailing list devoted to all things Rothfuss went predictably nuts over the announcement, although the volume and intensity of acrimony caught me off guard, a bit. I kind of thought we, as a culture, had moved past the whole other-people's-interpretations-of-properties-I-like-cause-me-pain thing, but apparently not. Seriously? Even if you are a superfan of Rothfuss's in-progress trilogy and love it with the burning passion of a thousand love-suns, it should make no difference to you whatsoever if someone makes a weak cash-grab movie or a phenomenal Broadway musical or anything else out of it. The novels will always be there. Check out the adaptation if you want, or ignore it if you choose. Either way they literally cannot cross-contaminate each other, so relax!

+++

In the interest of blogger-istic even-handedness I feel compelled to offer a slight addendum to my post on Thursday in which I was extolling the virtues of my children. I stand by every word I wrote and every iota of admiration and appreciation I expressed, but lest anyone think I am blinded by my feelings and convinced my children are perfect, a counterpoint: my two-year-old daughter has started having howling freakouts about bath time. When I posted on Thursday, she had made bath time excruciatingly difficult the night before, but I had tried not to let it get to me. However, she pulled the exact same routine on Thursday night, and that wore me out a bit. (Although I was able to defuse the situation somewhat in round two via judicious use of a monkey-shaped washcloth, so thank goodness for that.)

Now, as I've already pointed out, she is only two, and "two-year-old" is a synonym for "tantrum-thrower". And part of the deal, I believe, is that the past two nights were the nights my wife worked late and I was juggling all three kids through their nightly rituals, which displeased my daughter to a certain extent in principle because lately she's been (presumably) gender-identifying more and more with mommy and (for sure) asking for mommy to be the one to give her a bath and get her ready for bed when the option of choice exists. And the hardest thing for very little kids to deal with is when things aren't always the same day to day, even if there's a weekly pattern that's visible to more long-view oriented adults. So, I get all that and I don't hold it against the little girl. But the screaming is a bit much, sometimes.

Anyway, don't think that all three of our children are (in reality or in my mind's eye) genteel little angels who frolic in softly lit slow motion and life around our house is always like a commercial for domestically produced textiles or anything. Life is good, but there's wide open wild spaces between good and perfect.

+++

I meant to blog about this a couple weeks ago when it actually happened, but better late than never: so my wife and I were watching Key & Peele (the upcoming new season of which is yet another thing I'm looking forward to), an old episode but one we had never seen. And there was a sketch wherein they made fun of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers via their own creations, the Power Falcons.

Feel free to watch the sketch, it's pretty funny. It also speaks to the fact that both Key and Peele are geeks, who can mock the genre trash I'm a fan of and make me laugh because they do it from a place of loving and understanding it themselves. But all of that is beside the point! The real point is that the sketch started with the multi-culti Falcons doing their roll call and I turned to my wife to tell her the sketch was already awesome, and before I could even get a word out she was extremely excited to point out to me: "A five man band!"

She totally gets me.

No comments:

Post a Comment