Oft him anhaga,
are gebideth...
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I've got myself a domain name, and so I'll use it to continue my ramblings on matters poetical, educational, edible and fermentable.
I think I'll be more inclined to post to and maintain this new blog, as I'm running it on my own machine, with all the bells and whistles and gears and cogs and little lights that go bing! at my fingertips.
http://blog.doctorhrothgar.net/
"The sky's the limit."
The robotics competition in which my students are engaged is supported by NASA, and their engineers and spokespeople have been saying that to us about themselves for months. I truly hope they do not realize what they say.
I saw the new Beowulf flick the other day, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a goofy action movie sometimes, and some of the bit parts are poorly animated, but overall it's a delightful treatment of the Beowulf story.
Most of the reviews I've read and most of the responses I've heard from friends and passerby are self-righteously scornful of the "changes in the story" that make this movie different from the thousand-year-old text. In particular, everybody seems to be acutely aware that Grendel's Mother doesn't quite look or act like a hideous sea troll, and claim this as cause to pooh-pooh a plot that neatly ties together the rather disjointed and rambling "original" tale.
So, yes. Neil Gaiman and Bob Zemeckis aren't just retelling Beowulf, they're playing with it. It's gained a layer of shiny plastic, it's been pared and interlinked and slightly warped, and it's still recognizably Beowulf. It's clear that if the events presented were remembered in song and written down by a monk, they'd look a lot like the text that so many high school students have read the Cliff Notes for.
I rather think that any screenwriter worth his salt would find it tedious and painful to represent even the core three-monsters line of the Beowulf text faithfully as a film, and the producers would be hard-pressed to find an audience that would accept it as entertainment.
And if dropping a hot chick into a subterranean lake gets more folk out to hear a song as old as our tongue, I won't be miffed.
My own nitpicks and glories (small spoilers may be present):
Although it's historically flawed to have the Monster Family and Old Beowulf's Bard speaking Anglo-Saxon (PIE and Old Norse would be the correct choices, respectively), it's thematically appropriate and awesome - the bard's lines are straight from the text, and Crispin Glover delivers his tortured words in teachable form. Both his and Jolie's lines are thick with cognates, so an audience of moderately quick ear can pick up both meaning and structure from their dialogue. I winced a bit at Angelina's all-too-modern pronunciation of those words as old as sharks, but accuracy must give way to audience acceptance. I'll consider Jolie a gateway drug - may her flashy flesh and the time-warped words from her luscious lips gain a few more seats in Anglo-Saxon Studies courses worldwide.
I rather wish the film had mentioned Scyld, founder of Hrothgar's line. Lineage is such an important part of the root text, and the movie's plot itself. Just a casual name-drop would have been enough, but I could totally get behind a flashback scene, perhaps implicating Scyld in the same curse as befell the story's two kings.
The little links that Gaiman wove between the parts of the story were sometimes artful -- putting the big and obvious plot-twisting addition aside, Unferth, his slave, and the Horn provided a nice bit of continuity between the Act Grendel and Act Dragon. Unferth the Christian was also most appropriate.
And I still need to see it in 3D. Having seen the movie in a measly two dimensions makes it clear to me that it was built for a species with binocular vision. The majority of the animation, especially for facial close-ups, is top notch - believable, expressive, and shiny. I owe it to myself and the artists to view it in fulness.
Wyrd bith ful ared.
I forgot to link to the Snö application yesterday, so here it is. And here's the source.
Also, I just got back from dinner at the same restaurant where Bill Richardson was holding a campaign shindig. We were the only people there who weren't there to see Bill, and it felt a little odd - almost like trespassing - to sitting there on the edge of the hobnobbing. We only saw the man himself on his way out, which took a while as he was buffeted between photo-seeking suits. He seems nice.
The food was quite good, too.
Today was election day, which in Baltimore City means the schools are closed! I spent the day a-puttering. Firstly, I kicked some of the rust off of the Mac OS X application "Snow Desktop", also called "Snö" (I had previously modified it so that the flakes would collect atop windows, and so the rate of snowfall would be tined to network bandwidth, and added the ability for the flakes' color scheme to adjust chameleon-like to your desktop background). My modified Snö hadn't worked with Leopard, and now it does, and has a few minor tweaks and whistles in tow. The color-matching now correctly samples the entire image, and flakes can be set to fall *behind* desktop icons and in front of the desktop background. Many of my earlier modifications to the Cocoa were hackish and blunt, I might like to go back and clean it up later (especially the part that loads image-packs. On the upside, there are now nice Autumnal Leaves. And pretty flowers.) I also started what I hope will be a nice cranberry mead, with about three dry quarts of fresh cranberries and 8 oz of cranberry concentrate. There's a handful of ginger and a healthy dose of cardamom, and half an ounce of dried sweet orange peel. The honey was free (maybe 1.5 gal of 22% water honey), to boot. I think I might call it "Mad Doctor Hrothgar Can't Fit Down the Chimney," but I'm not sure it'll be ready in time. Perhaps "Mad Doctor Hrothgar Prevents Urinary Infections"? That's a nice, timeless name...
I bottled the buckwheat-heather Hart (or "Heorot," for the vikings in the house) brew last night, and I think it's my best yet. It's got the dark robustness of Thunder (my early buckwheat), without its harsh edge or cloudiness, and has the smooth full-mouth texture of the well-aged Midnight Mead (my first brew ever, and the only other I've done with heather). It's delightfully drinkable, and produces a more subtle (complex?) buzz than your standard beer-and-wine fare. I can't imagine how fantastic it'll be when aged a few months.
I've also decided that since I won't be getting to Mars anytime soon, I'm going to go to Antarctica, either next year or the year after. The recruitment season appears to be Jan-May, and working through the contractor Raytheon appears to be the only way to get down there, short of being a scientist. Pfft.
Looking at this year's openings, there are a few places I might fit in. Positions are advertised for help-desk lead and network engineer, although the second is slightly beyond my current expertise, it remains a possibility. I'm given to understand that positions for galley slaves and housekeeping and generalist support staff are also somewhat common, although draw a larger applicant pool. There's also a steady need for carpenters and suchlike, I could see myself spending a summer or two apprenticing at some practical trade to build up the necessary experience for those positions... that's more of a stretch. But I think I might do just about anything to spend a season on an alien continent.
Am I serious? Quite probably. My plan is to keep on doing things on the other landmasses, but to keep applying at every chance for Antarctic work, always staying flexible enough to pack up and hit the ice should the opportunity strike.
Why? Nobody I know has ever been there. It's a world in a bubble, it's Mars, it's a science fiction story. It's an adventure that would be just mine, and it's a frosty kick in the pants to get me back into the weird (wyrd?) before I risk becoming a career anything.
Assembling the BILLY corner bookcase without instructions is like solving a puzzle in Myst - you start by observing the scene, gaining an intuition for the form and function of each piece, and how they might work together. Many of them connect using methods you've encountered while completing other tasks, although sometimes they're put to a novel application. Understanding the mechanism isn't the end of the challenge, of course -- the correct approach and timing must be determined, often by experiment, by interacting with the scene and seeing what happens. You may not succeed the first few times, and you have to start the job over nearly from scratch. Finally, there comes a moment where you suddenly *see* the engineer's masterful plan, the elegant combination of unwieldy factors, you smack your head knowingly and put the pieces together. After which you realize you had undone an early step, and have to start over yet again, but this time with understanding and an appreciation for artful design.
Then the finished piece rises majestically into place, fitting snugly into its corner of the world. You reach out your hand and take a book from the shelf...
I tried to stop the Comcast guy from running their foolish installer, but because Comcast is stupid, ass-backwards, and inefficient, I had to call the Comcast office to arrange for payment for the installation, and he ran the installer before I could clarify my "I don't think you'll need to run the installer" statement more vociferously.
That said, I'm somewhat glad that the installer failed to detect any of my installed web browsers, and so instead installed its own copy of Internet Frickin' Explorer 5.2, and loaded it (and it alone, as far as I can tell) with useless bookmarks.
It's gone now, but none the less, ick. It seems that when IE ran it also shat all over com.apple.internetconfig.plist, but it remains to be seen whether this will affect anything important.
Back to the kitchen, now.
Poison oak is a widespread deciduous shrub throughout mountains and valleys of California, generally below 5,000 feet elevation. In shady canyons and riparian habitats it commonly grows as a climbing vine with aerial (adventitious) roots that adhere to the trunks of oaks and sycamores. Poison oak also forms dense thickets in chaparral and coastal sage scrub, particularly in central and northern California.
(from http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0802.htm)
It was a lovely hike, in any case. Now, it's Tecnu time.
It's been a lovely afternoon in San Francisco - I oriented myself utilizing a hill-climbing approach to find a local maximum from which I could not detect other higher maxima. This ended me atop a hill in LaFayette Park, with a nice view of Alcatraz and surprisingly thick WiFi coverage.
The trees here seem lighter, perhaps more bouyant than the ones in the real world. Perhaps they're made of paper? Some of them are spiky.
It's definitely a Thursday night in the hostel - most folks have been staying for longer than I will be staying, so every night is not an adventure for them anymore. Most folks are in their own mini-worlds. Some girls are making sweet potato latkes in the kitchen, the Brazilian sitting next to me is cruising MySpace and YouTube (her Vista TCP/IP stack recently reset by me). The Brits are playing cards, the couples who haven't gone to bed are planning their tours for tomorrow, or eating a sandwich. I'm writing a web log entry.
In Baltimore, it's 1:20 AM Friday, but it's only 10:20 PM Thursday here. I feel like I shouldn't be ready to turn in and shut down, but I certainly am. My room is just off the common space, though, so while things aren't exactly jumping out here, I know my sleep would not be uninterrupted.
I'm rambling too much. I should stop, and talk more to the Brazilian.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/MapClick.php?site=mtr&smap=1&textField1=37.775&textField2=-122.41833
The climatological monotony might drive me into a hip and easygoing stupor.
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