It’s a good excuse to take a personal day. I’m going to fix a cup of hot cocoa and sit back and read a book to the tune of the wind howling outside my window.
What are you all planning to do for a quiet Sunday?
I have to admit, I walked out of Alita: Battle Angel half-liking it. It’s set in a somewhat creative world where the oppressed citizens are dominated by a floating city overhead, and the only way out is to win a championship game of some kind of ultra-violent murderball. Dystopian society: check.
For some reason, an awful lot of the citizens of this city are missing limbs or other body parts, but they’ve been replaced by advanced cybernetic prosthetics. Some people have had their bodies entirely replaced, and are just human faces on bizarrely complex robots. Ubiquitous futuristic technology: check.
Christof Walz is a guy (all body parts human) who has the job of repairing all those prosthetics, making him indispensible. He’s also moonlights as a hunter-warrior, going about collecting bounties on bad guys. He finds a head in a junkyard — the brain is still alive, somehow — and installs it in a new robot body. That’s Alita. She’s got giant eyes, but is otherwise a pretty, teenaged gamin. Main character camping happily in the uncanny valley: check.
She’s super good at fighting, beating up all the bad cyborgs, ripping their arms off, crushing their human heads, etc. Much fight choreography. Much balletic violence. Super zippy CGI. Action movie tropes: check with a sword slash and an explosion.
Another bonus: Jennifer Connelly. She’s still beautiful, but she’s matured into an icy, stern, scary kind of older beauty. That time with the goblin king has turned her fey. I love her work.
So I’m enjoying it for what it is, as long as it’s swooping along kinetically with CGI fights and weirdly fascinating anime robot girl doing her thing. But it had 3 big problems.
They killed the dog. I’m not happy with that.
The love interest just came out of nowhere, and the boy did not have the charisma to warrant the girl abruptly (and literally) offering him her heart. It was stupid and superfluous and compromised Alita’s character. I wish a giant cyborg had murdered him on first sight, rather than the dog.
Worst of all, the ending. There wasn’t one. It just stops cold on the brink of the big battle in the murderball arena. I practically got whiplash, slamming on the brakes that hard. This was clearly a two-parter, at least, and there’s no warning of that anywhere, and it was a risky enough venture that it’s not at all certain the sequel will be made.
It’s half a movie, more like a mega-elaborate over-long trailer for a story in development. If you’ve ever wanted to watch a Margaret Keane waif slice a cyborg juggernaut in half, lengthwise, but aren’t worried about seeing a plot resolution, this is the movie for you.
My wife just interrupted me and told me I had to go to the store for various items. Very well then; I also have to throw dinner together, so maybe I’ll get a special treat or two.
The recipe looks fairly straightforward, although they don’t list the ingredients. It looks like green onion, garlic, peppers, cooking oil — I’ve got all that already — oh, is that Haplopelma? I’m fresh out. I wonder if they have any in stock in a small rural midwestern grocery store, or if I’m going to have to go to Cambodia to pick up some?
I’ll probably have to fix something else for Mary’s dinner, since I don’t think I can zip to Phnom Penh and back in time for my other evening plans (gonna check out Alita: Battle Angel at the Morris Theater). It’s too bad, I’d really like to try that sometime.
Watch those billions of dollars stack up behind corporate brands.
There have been so many times when I’ve seen Apple tumble in value, and I’ve thought, “I should buy stock”, and then it surges upward and I think “Now I can’t buy stock”, and then I think “I’m not the kind of guy who plays the stock market anyway”, making it weird to watch Apple’s brand value soar. Why? I don’t know? The iPhone?
Not going to invest in it now, anyway. I’m just waiting for capitalism to burn to the ground making all this meaningless.
It’s not fair. The horrible wretched campus conservative newspaper gets shoved under my office door in multiple copies, and they threaten to sue me for throwing them out, but the local chapter of Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future come out with a newsletter, and I don’t know about it until I stumble across a copy in a dark hallway. I am so here for this. Here’s the letter from the Void Mother.
And here’s a sample article, “How to Ritually Consume Your Girlfriend in 10 Simple Steps” (Don’t worry, step 1 is to ask for consent).
The part about whispering into her belly button “Be the deviant and strange change you wish to see in the world.” Charming.
I hope all the parents of our students are also charmed and consider this a perfectly lovely way to live. It’s so much sweeter than the hatefests we get from the College Republicans.
Be as excessively ambitious in every little project as Tim Follin was in composing the music for a cheesy Nintendo Pictionary game.
Seriously, dude, that was overkill. You should be so proud.
Yesterday, I stood up from my chair and nearly fell over. Then I started to walk, and it was like the world was heaving and swaying all around me, and I nearly fell a couple more times as I walked down the hallway, clinging to furniture and walls to keep myself upright. Something was clearly wrong; was I having a stroke? A brain tumor? The aliens had used their mind control beams to take over, making me all herky jerky? I told my wife that it looked like a trip to the emergency room was in order, especially since all the spinning and heaving was making me acutely nauseous.
We got a lift from our neighbor, Ted — yeah, not even fear of my brain imminently exploding will motivate us to pay the bill for an ambulance pick-up — and made it to the emergency room to discover that Saturday, 16 February, is the day everyone has an accident and the waiting room was packed. Fortunately, presenting as an old man pale and sweating and swaying gets you bumped to the front of the line. Sorry, chainsaw accident! Sorry, broken bone! Sorry, ebola victim! Old dude privilege, coming through!
It may have been the fact that I looked like an imminent font of projectile vomiting, which I was, and they wanted to avoid the mess. As soon as they got me in an examining room, it all came up. I’d picked the wrong day to experiment with trying my hand at spätzle in the kitchen, because that stuff looks like a horror second time around.
Anyway, I got diagnosed: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV. My inner ear is messed up. Apparently this is fairly common in us old people over the age of 60, and treatment is simple: I’m taking seasickness pills, which are already helping, and there are some easy physical therapies that can lead to the problem going away in a few days to weeks.
So right now, I’m just sitting quietly, no sudden moves, and the world is mostly motionless. I’ll try to avoid abruptly standing up or turning around to make you all suddenly jump up and get shaken around. Also, no spätzle.
Because I started drooling and making strange guttural noises when I read this story of a remote-controlled 3-D printed snowblower. I was having these mind-blowing fantasies of sitting in my home office with a joystick, clearing my driveway while sitting in warmth and comfort.
(Turn the volume down, you don’t need to hear the awful cacophony of the soundtrack to this clip)
I don’t have a 3D printer, and I probably couldn’t afford the kind of model that would suffice for that thing, so why doesn’t someone come out with a pre-assembled version for sale? I’m not sure this one has enough oomph to handle the mountain ranges of snow that the snowplows drop across our driveway, but it could probably handle our sidewalks.
On second thought, maybe it would be nice to have one where I could just print up damaged parts as I need them. Our existing manual snowblower is currently laid up with a cracked gas tank, and having one I could fix on the spot would be so handy.
But I still think the homologies are misaligned. It’s a better version of what Spider-Man ought to have looked like.
Lots of body horror here, so maybe I should warn you all and tuck it below the fold.
Lutefisk is nothing but a way to make fish that has been dried rock hard edible. You’ve got your dried fish that you’ve stockpiled for the winter, and it’s now got the solidity of a hunk of plywood, and in order to eat it, you soak it in a caustic mixture of lye and then wash all the lye out (important step). Then, instead of inedible slabs, you’ve got a fish-flavored gelatinous blob of protein. The flavor hasn’t really changed, but the texture is radically different and unexpected for fish, which is where most of the objections to it come from.
But that’s not the interesting bit in this story of the major producer of lutefisk in the US (located in Minnesota, of course). They mention that consumption of lutefisk is in steady decline, but the company isn’t panicking, because they’ve found a new market: Nigerian immigrants. They don’t want the lutefisk, but they do want the hard-dried stockfish it’s made from — they have their own methods of extracting tasty protein from it, which involves simply boiling the stuff to make a fish stock for soups in Nigerian cuisine. There’s a Norwegian-Nigerian connection!
Famine or no famine, stockfish fit into the preexisting culinary tradition. “This kind of intense, slightly fermented flavor was already part of traditional Nigerian cuisine,” Ochonu says. While fermented beans and nuts are used in dishes across the country to supply the desired taste, stockfish’s unique, pungent flavor can’t be provided by locally caught fish. Even better, it’s a protein source that keeps without refrigeration. (That said, Ochonu specifies, stockfish is still more common in eastern Nigerian food than in western and northern Nigeria.)
Today, stockfish is an essential ingredient in Nigerian cuisine, although for some it conjures painful wartime memories. Still imported from northern Norway, it’s cut into chunks, softened in boiling water, and used as a base for Nigerian soups and sauces such as efo riro, spinach soup, edikang ikong, a vegetable soup, and egusi, a soup made with melon seeds.
Now I have a craving to visit a Nigerian restaurant — we have some, but they’re all concentrated in the Twin Cities, and we’re kind of snowbound out here right now. When the thaw comes!
