In Which My Raincoat is Vanquished

Two nights ago our area was lacerated by several hours of strong rain, and the clouds' grief just so happened to coincide with the entirety of our walk. I was formerly fairly confident of my raincoat's ability to do its part against the elements, but evidently it had never met this class of rainstorm before. I mean, really, it's made by Columbia Sportswear, you'd think it could keep my chest dry.

I suppose it didn't help that I decided late in the game to put up my hood, only to find that it had filled up with water, which promptly slid under my collar and down my chest. That was fun! :P

Perhaps going to Hillsdale will provide good excuse for procuring a more robust liquid-repelling garment. I fancy that a chilly February here will feel toasty compared to what Michigan can offer. To show what I mean: Detroit's average monthly high/low during January, according to Wikipedia, is 31/18. February is a roasting 34/20. For the same months, Portland averages 46/37 and 50/39. Yep, I'm going to need a bigger coat.

Drenching rainshowers. Sub-sixty-degree nights. At the end of August? Is someone toying with nukes over the Pacific? :-D But I'm not complaining: the weather is actually predicted to be very nice, and I would rather it be unusually cool than unusually hot.

Cheerio! Oh, and if you like, hop on over to my new "intellectual development" blog, The Quintessence of Dust. It will be expanded and further posted upon shortly, but by way of explanation this is a blog I am developing as part of an assignment for my AP English Language and Composition Class. I'm not going mad and trying to keep up three blogs just because. ;-)

Two Trailers: One Awful, One Interesting

This trailer looks like another adaptation of a low-profile, dark graphic novel with a cult following: the sort of thing the movie industry turns to after they've run out of Batmen, Supermen, Spidermen, Iron Men, X-Men, and all other sorts of men. And when they're straining to reach that 18-25 immature males demographic which continues to drink up a healthy mix of dark (yet cheesy) revenge drama, highly improbable combat stunts and...gryphons. And of course women taking their tops off. Can't forget that.

I'll give this one a 8.5 on the King Kong-meter. It lacks the traditional pompous narrator and uninspired text headings, but the supernatural elements are...um...odd, to say the least.

This one, on the other hand, looks interesting--a bit reminiscent of 3:10 to Yuma in some ways, one of those newfangled "realistic" westerns. Plus it has Ed Harris, who is more or less an intrinsically cool actor. ;-) And Jeremy Irons occupying himself with something a lot more interesting than the Eragon movie.

Driving Milestone Numero 3

The other two being learning how to drive at all and dipping onto the highway. This one was my first bout with that seven-headed beast, the manual transmission. And you know what? I shifted into first without stalling on my first try. (!) 'Course, the next time I tried it the call jolted to a halt and stalled out, but I still proved I could do it. 145-mph chases involving black Charger SRTs with converted six-speed manuals are only weeks away! ;-)

Libri Awesomi Sunt

All right, how could I resist doing a quiz all about books? You're right, I couldn't. This is subject to David's same caveat about the Bible: it would apply to essentially all these categories, so it shall be assumed in the background as the ultimate book, but I shall consider non-inspired works in my answers.


1. One book that changed your life: The Iliad. I would never have written Immortality otherwise, nor would I have known about kleos or Diomedes' aristeia in Book V.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: Peace Like a River.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island: The U.S. Army Survival Manual. :P Or if it were abundantly clear that even the best advice in the world would be of no avail, then...oh...dang, I have to choose one? The Complete Works of Shakespeare? I can count a collection of plays and poetry, right? I'm glad you agree.

4. One book that made you laugh: I could name any number of Wodehouse books and short stories, but Huckleberry Finn would also have a spot.

5. One book that made you cry: Out of the Silent Planet, of all things. I was in an odd, exceptionally sensitive phase and I was incredibly frustrated by the expressive gestures of the Huorn to call Ransom into the boat. It made me really sad to think of it being confused and trying everything it could think of to show him what it wanted.

6. One book that you wish had been written: Achilles: The Autobiography or I Really Am William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: One? How about the entire His Dark Materials series. Or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Or Hobbes' Leviathan. Or Flavia Bujor's The Prophecy of the Stones (a fantasy by a fifteen year-old where all good things are accomplished by communal will-power and the key city in the novel is Paris, and nothing really makes sense).

8. One book you’re currently reading: The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

10. Tag five others: Any coves who haven't made the attempt yet. If you exceed five in number, I won't report you. I'm no rat. In a town this bad, who's there to rat to anyway? ;-)

Well, It's Done.

I sent in my application to Hillsdale! *trumpets blare* Now one must simply wait for the result. :D

A Service Startlingly Interrupted

EDIT: I suppose I can't say I don't know any of the circumstances whatsoever--I was given to understand from a churchgoer about as much as Kristoff guessed, that the man was a member who had some "angers" in his life. I believe the pastor explained the situation after the service, but we left quickly and I didn't hear it. I still don't know anything about the specific situation, like why he called everyone hypocrites, though--which did sound a lot like something out of a movie. :-P (end edit)

Today turned into the strangest church service I've ever attended. For more than an hour the service (not at our regular church) proceeded entirely as normal, but right before the end, during the singing of the last song, a man came up to the stage and hurled the entire communion table, with all the elements on it, bodily off the edge of the stage with a huge crash. I had been paying attention to the song and hadn't even seen him coming, so the first thing I knew about was the crash. The man began shouting, "You're hypocrites, all of you!" Then, as several of the men ran forward to take him away, he said, "No, you're going to hear this!" Four of the men wrestled him out through the side door, and that was all. We're not members of the church, so I don't know the circumstances, but it was certainly a strange and slightly unsettling interruption.

In other news, I'm going to drive on a highway for the first time today. So far, driving is progressing well and at a swift rate. It's easier than I thought it would be, but still, if there's any time you're feeling lazy, drive. The level of concentration you need to maintain will kick you into high energy mode in about five seconds. :-)

'ere's yer presents fur the bairns, lassie.

Check this out. :-D

Just For Fun

David's Latin rendering of his own work, and then Kait's Latin poem, spurred me to this effort. One hopes I haven't gotten too rusty--I had to look up a lot of words, some of which I should have known. :-P It certainly shows one how thoroughly we know our own language's grammatical structure without even having to think about it.

No solid guarantees of idiomatic correctness, absolute precision in inflection, etc. are given.

De Anglica:

But she had to run faster. Pelen was gaining on her. Almost without her knowing it, she put on a spurt of speed until her pace was nearly half again as fast as before. She really could go no swifter now: she was like a sprinter in the last straight, only this was not the last straight but a grueling contest of attrition for which nothing had prepared or could prepare her. It was a question of whether her lighter weight and the impulse of adrenaline could outlast his superior strength, fitness, and nearly invincible determination.
Those few who looked out curiously from their windows and saw them in that final sprint saw a thing rare to behold. Stephanie was in the flower of youth, light, nimble, and yet vulnerable, like a doe fleeing the hounds. And Pelen was the hound: powerful, savage, arrogant in his strength, and totally confident of ultimate victory. It was almost a thing of beauty, and yet dreadful, as in the myths when the god Apollo pursued the maiden Daphne to take her.

Ad Latinam:

Sed necesse est curre eum celerior. Pelen in eo increbrescebat. Paene sine ea id sciente, se incitat donec gradus eius erat prope dimidium iterum ut celer ut ante. Nunc vere non potest ire celerior: erat ut cursor in ultima directa, sed hic non erat ultima directa sed certamen difficilis attritus per quam nihil paraverat aut eam possit parere. Erat quaesitio utrum molis gravior eius impulsusque adrenalensis possint permanere potentem superiorem eius, valetudinem, et prope obstinationem invictam.
Illi parvi qui spectaverunt curiose de fenestris eis et eos viderunt in hoc cursu ultima viderunt rem infrequentem aspictu. Stefania erat in florem adulscentiae, levis, agilis, et tamen vulnerabilis, similis ad cervam fugentem canes. Et canis Pelen erat: potens, saevus, superbus in robore eius, omninoque confidens in victoria ultima. Prope res pulchritudinis erat, et tamen horribilis, sicut in fabulis cum deus Apollo virginem Daphne persequatur ut eam rapiat.

What Color Knight are You?

Perhaps no one will be tremendously shocked to hear that I enjoyed The Dark Knight considerably more the second time around. Somehow everything hung together much better. More later!

EDIT: Some thoughts from the second time around. The film seemed considerably more focused and coherent. The first time it seemed scattered, over-long, and somewhat pompous, somehow, but this time I didn't really feel that way about it. There are many plot elements, but they center around some key concepts and themes, and the Joker's hand is in the middle of it all. Although he is a master architect of mayhem, this nonetheless provides a kind of glue for all his machinations.

I still didn't like Gyllenhal's Dawes. She came across as cynical and irritating, and not really the type of woman to inspire such admiration, and the majority of her scenes (except her final one) seemed to be relatively extraneous to the plot. The Dent/Two-Face plot also still felt a bit miscalculated to me, and strained. In the first place, Dent's reaction doesn't seem very realistic--how could be possibly blame Gordon or Batman?--and in the second place, the Joker is such a toweringly successful villain that Dent's involvement, especially after the climactic face-off with the Joker, weakens the end a little. As a representative of the Joker's destructive power, he is important, and his involvement at the end does lead up to one of the movie's important themes/moral points, so it might be difficult to simply cut him out. He still seemed like a drag on the conflict, though, dramatically speaking.

The action was more intriguing and exciting, Batman's involvement seemed a bit more meaningful (helpful in a movie about him), the scene with the multiple Batman impersonators didn't completely confuse me, Ledger still delivered, and I paid more attention to the soundtrack, which I like (I find those brooding Batman themes more or less irresistible, as one with a strong taste for dramatic, non-cheesy film scores :D). Gordon is really cool. It's still sad they nuked the Tumbler.

There are a lot of things thematically that I liked about it, too. It seemed less unilaterally dark than I remembered. Even though the amount of evil in it is huge, we still get frequent little reminders of what the good guys are trying to preserve. I thought it made an important point that there are no 'shortcuts' to overcoming evil. The Joker, who seems more or less to be an impersonation of almost pure evil, manically delighting in destruction and negation for its own sake, can't be bullied, bribed, or ignored. Ultimately, those who wish to defeat him must do so by sacrificing themselves. Batman, as David pointed out, can only undo what was done to Dent by taking his crimes on himself. The passengers on the ferries can only foil the Joker's scheme by taking the ultimate chance that the other boat isn't similarly inclined. (I found the climax more climactic this time around. For what it's worth, I didn't notice last time that the big prisoner who throws away the detonator goes over and starts praying with five or six other inmates. Interesting, and pretty cool.)

One thing that rather confused me was Batman's statement almost at the end of the movie when he says that "sometimes people deserve more than the truth. They deserve to have their faith rewarded." This line is spoken in a pretty critical part of the film, so I assume the filmmakers were very intentional about this and meant for viewers to think about it. Is Batman intimating that the best way to reward someone's faith is with a lie? That's doubtful, and probably what he is more nearly saying is that, the citizens of Gotham deserve to have a beacon of hope (Dent); Batman will keep that illusion alive so that the memory of Dent's apparent sacrifice in the name of good will help raise Gotham from the depths, while Batman will be the fall guy. What Batman does here is noble, but this still seems like a bit of a dangerous way to word things. People in the Bible certainly lie to protect others from harm, but this opposing of truth and faith seems like something rather different. But perhaps I'm delving a little too deeply here. I'm confused about the philosophical implications, which means that I will probably misread or misinterpret it somehow if I try to go too far.

So, in sum, the movie was a lot more 'fun' the second time around, a lot more engaging. Despite the prevailing darkness, I found it more hopeful than I remembered. It manages to explore the really tough moral decisions that often need to be made trying to combat evil in a way that few or no other superhero movies have really done, at least in my experience. It has a good screenplay, a good soundtrack, and generally top-notch acting (except Gyllenhal). The ending, though perhaps a bit compromised by Dent, is nevertheless still powerful, closing off the movie nicely while leaving room for more. And the end credits music! Ahhhh.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the scene where Batman is interrogating the Joker at Gordon's place (MRU or whatever it was called) was really quite powerful. The visual imagery of Batman, muscled and armored, a symbol of savage power and unrestrained justice, clenching his fists in furious frustration while the Joker, so supremely confident in his insane worldview, fearless of physical intimidation, laughs hysterically at his feet, was pulled off really well. As The Joker says (paraphrasing): "All that strength, and you can't do anything. You've got nothing to threaten me with." Like I noted above, Batman's spiritual fiber is considerably more important than his martial arts or kevlar. Nolan certainly takes pains to make Batman a cool superhero, but he doesn't let all those forearm strikes supplant more metaphysical issues, and I think that's something that will make The Dark Knight a much more enduring superhero film than, say, X-Men or Spider-Man.

All right, this is getting really long. I'll just close with a thought rather incidental to any critical consideration of the movie, which is that some few parts of this reminded me a wee bit of Immortality--the dark tone, a metropolis troubled by corruption and violence, and a conflicted and unique protagonist.

So yeah, all that to say, it still had some weak points, but over all I liked it a lot more than the first time around. :-)