utter randomonium

ISS Tracking

Posted by melydia on May 23, 2006 No comment

Where is the space station right now? Real Time Satellite Tracking can tell you. It also shows the Hubble and a host of other satellites. It’s amazing to see them in real-time, and to realize just how fast they’re moving.

(Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the link.)

Body Worlds

Posted by melydia on May 20, 2006 No comment

Body Worlds: An Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. Yes, that’s actually what it’s called and actually what it is: people who donated their bodies to science, on display to teach others about anatomy and physiology. The bodies have been plastinated, a process where the water in the body is replaced with a hardening substance which enables the body and its parts to be posed.

I’m waffling between fascinated and a little creeped out on this one, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to see exactly what the body looks like up close – not just plastic models or blurry x-rays. And these people were volunteers, after all. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be a little unnerving to look at real corpses on display? Well, no more so than the body slices at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, I suppose. I admit I’m a little embarrassed of my squeamishness. Too bad this exhibit won’t be nearby anytime soon. I’m curious.

Earth Sandwich

Posted by melydia on May 19, 2006 No comment

If the earth were a sandwich, right below me would be the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia. That’d be a lot more interesting if the same weren’t true for the entire continental United States.

White Oleander

Posted by melydia on May 11, 2006 No comment

White Oleander: I read the book and loved it. That was my first warning sign. The whole tone of the movie was different from the book, especially the end. Most of the people were miscast or had their personalities left on the cutting room floor. They tried to cram too much of the book into less than two hours and ended up just glossing over everything, including the most important part: the relationship between Astrid and her mother. I am not the slightest bit surprised that this film got such mediocre reviews. However, I do have one piece of high praise for this film: they got Paul exactly right.

Assorted Movie Reviews

Posted by melydia on May 10, 2006 No comment

I know I’ve been really slacking on my movie reviews lately. Here’s a bunch to make up for it.

Trekkies: This is a documentary about Star Trek fanatics, interspersed with commentary from several cast members. It’s very funny and occasionally disturbing without ever blatantly making fun of anybody. The interesting part is how many people I know who are just like these people – not Star Trek, but another television show, series of books, sports team, historical reenactment…there are fanatics everywhere. And while I would consider myself a fan of Star Trek, I realized that what most separates me from the Trekkies shown here is merchandise. I don’t have any desire for memorabilia or replicas or costumes or models. It’s the financial commitment that, to me, sets them apart more than anything else. And maybe the wearing of uniforms outside conventions. That’s a pretty big difference too.

Mission: Impossible III: There is a fine line between suspense and get-on-with-it, and there was nothing suspenseful about this movie. In between explosions and chase scenes, there are some kinda-terrorists and some kinda-righteous rogue government agents and a lot of random twists that never get resolved. Lame.

Poltergeist: I’m glad I didn’t see this as a kid, but it’s certainly not scary to an adult. I am afraid of what I can’t see; I am on the edge of my seat when I’m not sure when, how, or even if a character is going to die. Spielberg does not kill children in his movies, and the threat in Poltergeist is shown early on, almost humorously. Without suspense, there isn’t a whole lot to this movie. I’m glad I saw it and finally experienced this piece of pop culture, but I probably wouldn’t bother had it been made today.

Citizen Kane: “Classics are classics for a reason.” This is what I tend to believe about old movies, that if they weren’t any good they would have been forgotten by now. This is of course not true, especially with today’s rampant DVDing of every scrap of film that ever went to print, but I like to think the more famous movies still follow the rule. I say all this to explain my disappointment in Citizen Kane. It starts with a newsreel documentary of newspaper tycoon Kane’s life and death, then spends the rest of the movie rehashing it all in only slightly more detail. The whole Rosebud thing was kind of telling, but by the time it was revealed I was so tired of seeing everything twice that I didn’t care anymore. One thing I will say for this movie, though – it’s crossed my mind several times since I saw it. Kane was a man who wanted nothing more than for people to love him, and would pay any price for it – save giving his love to anyone else. It’s a subtle yet powerful character flaw, and Wells played it masterfully. Too bad the rest of the movie didn’t live up to its lead actor.

Jump the Shark by John Hein

Posted by melydia on May 9, 2006 No comment

He was sent sailing straight over the shark.
The shark smelled blood.
The shark started to circle.
We spotted a fin.
But the damage had been done.
The shark had moved on to its next victim.

If hearing those phrases repeatedly does not bother you, then you will enjoy the abridged audiobook version of Jump the Shark, written and read by John Hein. I can’t fault him for running out of shark metaphors, and it really was my only complaint about this humorous collection. Hein walks us through several television shows, musicians, politicians, actors, and sports, detailing the exact moment when they took an irreversible turn for the worse, starting with that fateful episode of Happy Days when Fonzie literally jumped a shark on waterskis. I confess to fast-forwarding through some of the sports and politics spots, because I’m unfamiliar with most sports figures and a lot of the political commentary was kind of dated. I also had to take a break between discs to listen to something else for a while – those shark metaphors drove me crazy. I imagine it works better as a book, which you can pick up, read a couple pages, and put back down. In short, while this is a funny diversion from time to time, it gets a little tedious when listened to all at once.

Also posted on BookCrossing.

Before the Mask by Michael and Teri Williams

Posted by melydia on May 9, 2006 No comment

Before the Mask [Dragonlance Villains Series Vol. 1] by Michael and Teri Williams: This is the story of Verminaard, unloved bastard son of Solamnic Knights, and his road to evil. My husband adores the Dragonlance series and insisted I read this. He’d finished it in a weekend, so surely I, the voracious reader, would speed through as well. He was wrong. Though far from being a bad book, it just didn’t draw me in. Verminaard’s evilness seems to be inborne rather than reactionary, to the point that the supposed contributing factors – the unloving father, the loss of the beloved brother – seem more like asides and much less sympathetic. Likewise with his half-brother Aglaca, who is unfailingly upbeat and loyal for no apparent reason. I understand the story the Williamses were trying to tell, and it took a while to put my finger on what was wrong. Then I realized it was missing a vital element of all great drama: levity. The human experience is not serious all the time. Even in the grimmest tales there is laughter. The unrelenting depression of this book left me frankly unmoved.

Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz

Posted by melydia on May 4, 2006 No comment

Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz (unabridged audiobook read by John Bedford Lloyd): On a stormy night in 1974, Josef Tock sits up in his hospital bed and makes a series of predictions about his grandson, Jimmy, who is about to be born just down the hall. The bulk of these predictions consist of a list of “five terrible days” in Jimmy’s life, the first occuring in his twentieth year. Moments after speaking, Josef dies. The night of mixed grief and joy quickly turns to terror as a crazed clown, whose wife died in childbirth that very night, guns down two hospital employees.

Jimmy himself narrates the story, going through each “terrible day” one by one. As one might expect from a story beginning with prognostication and a deranged circus performer, the plot takes a series of unlikely and frankly ridiculous turns. But it’s also very funny. Jimmy’s commentary, though it occasionally gets a bit long on the introspection, is vivid and full of amusing asides. The other characters are just as memorable, and this is due in no small part to the excellent reader. His intuitive grasp of the characters’ personalities made for spot-on inflection of some very bizarre lines.

As the roller coaster plot careened along, I was able to predict almost all of the strange twists ahead of time, but this actually added to the charm, like I was playing a trivia game. Usually I don’t like knowing what happens next (hence the reason I don’t do much rereading) but in a few cases (like this one) the journey is just as much fun whether you know the destination or not. Koontz is usually a reliable spooky read, but this was a rare view of his humorous side. Highly recommended.

Seizure by Robin Cook

Posted by melydia on April 25, 2006 3 comments

Seizure by Robin Cook (unabridged audiobook read by George Guidall): Dr. Daniel Lowell has discovered a new stem cell procedure to cure many currently terminal diseases. Senator Ashley Butler publicly opposes all such research but secretly offers to become Lowell’s guinea pig to cure his Parkinson’s Disease before his illness is discovered by the public. The rest of the book is a tangle of intrigue involving the mafia, the Catholic Church, the Shroud of Turin, organ harvesting, and US politics. It’s a great set-up, read by a truly talented voice actor, but about halfway through I realized that horrible truth: there’s no way it could end satisfyingly. And it doesn’t. Most of the issues raised are never resolved, and the so-called climax is very, well, anti-climatic. I could deal with it if it was just the social, ethical, and political questions that were left open-ended, but even much of the plot just sort of fizzles out. I’ve enjoyed the other books I’ve read by Robin Cook, but this one felt like it bit off more than it could chew.

Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding

Posted by melydia on April 12, 2006 No comment

Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding: Rosie Richardson works at a refugee camp in Nambula, Africa, where she’s been for the last four years after breaking off a toxic relationship with the famous television man Oliver Merchant in London. It took me a while to get into this book, as it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a serious look at starvation in the Third World, or Bridget Jones Goes to Africa (yes, I know it was written before Bridget Jones’s Diary, but you get my drift). Some parts were very funny, and others made me feel like Fielding was trying to browbeat me into donating to charity. At first it stirred my compassion, but by the end it felt more like a lecture than a story. Fielding also relied a bit too heavily on dialect for differentiation, turning her characters into charicatures. Still, there was a fair bit of humor and reasonably engrossing drama; this was certainly not a bad first novel, but I can understand why Bridget Jones is so much more popular.