Bartender Geek

Just got an email over the shul email list. It's a holiday party. It's a Latke-Pasta bash. To celebrate Hanukkah. And Ramen-dan. Yeah, it's a Jewish/Pastafarian celebration.

The end of the email is a little ASCII Flying Spaghetti Monster.

       _  _(o)_(o)_  _          Flying Spaghetti Monster
   ._.' `:_  ) (  _:' `._.              Wishes You
          / (      )\ `-.            A Very Pasta New Year
      ,-`  _)    (_,                   
</pre?

So,. the other day, temima and I saw the Beowulf movie, in IMAX 3-D.

I'm sure most of you have seen Hal Duncan's review of the movie, and, the thing is, while I cannot find a single thing to disagree with him about, I somehow feel that I enjoyed the movie more than he did.

See, here's the thing: in the movie, everything that, in the poem, somebody else also saw, Beowulf does, more-or-less. Oh, there are changes: Wiglaf, far from being a young warrior in his first battle when he faces the dragon, is Beowulf's oldest friend and comrade-in-arms -- the very first time we see Beowulf, he and Wiglaf are talking. And the battle against the dragon is entirely different. When fighting Grendel, Beowulf manages to wrap a big ol' chain around the monster's arm, and get it around a post, giving him the leverage he needs to rip off the arm, but he DOES rip off the arm and it IS a superhuman feat of strength.

But, the things which nobody but Beowulf sees? Those may be entirely different . . .

Beowulf is always in the company of other warriors, except once -- when he goes in to fight Grendel's mother. So, who's to say that his account is accurate? And that whole bit of the movie is the bit which most people seem to hate most, but which, to me, works the best.

The movie uses the source material of Beowulf to tell a different story than the poem. The movie creates a story from which the poem could have possibly been created -- but it's not the same story. The idea is that the poem is the story that Beowulf is letting people believe -- but it's not, entirely, the true story.

And I find that kind of subversion a lot of fun.

At the Yom Kippur break-fast, ron_newman told us that there's an XKCD meetup tomorrow in North Cambridge. 2:38 PM, at a park in North Cambridge.

See, it's because of the xkcd comic here. It's possible that the correct time is 1438 UST instead of 1438 local time, but most people are going to try to be there at 2:38.

Lis and I are going to try to make it, but if 1300 people from all around t he world show up to squeeze into a tiny little neighborhood park, it's unlikely that we'll actually see anyone SPECIFIC we're looking for.

Fairies can travel at Mach 49.

Data and assumptions:

In Act II, Scene 1 of Midsummer Night's Dream, when sent on a mission by Oberon, Puck says that he will "put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."

Now, as a girdle goes around the widest point of a person, we can assume that Puck is saying that he can do an equatorial circumnavigation of the Earth in 40 minutes. The equatorial circumference of the earth is pretty darned close to 24900 miles, or 40075 km. (The polar circumference is 40036, by the way. They attempted to define the kilometer as 1/10000 the distance from the equator to the pole, but some error crept in, and they didn't hit it quite. Still, as an off-the-cuff number to remember, "40000 km circumference" is a fine approximation.)

24900 in 40 min is 37350 mph, which is just about Mach 49. Therefore, fairies can travel at Mach 49 sustained for forty minutes.

Obviously, there are going to be spoilers here. So here's a cut-tag.
( Read more... )

Look, I suppose that if you are an XKCD reader (RSS feed at xkcd_rss), there's a chance that you'd understand this, too.

But, see, as I was walking home from the store, I started wondering: if you spin Magneto around reasonably fast, does he turn into Static from Static Shock?

(Because, see, Static has control over electricity, and Magneto has control over magnetism, and magnetic fields and electrical fields are the same thing transformed through rotation. . . oh, forget it, it wasn't important anyway.)

So, as all of you who play WoW know, different races dance differently. But have you ever wondered from where Blizzard actually GOT the specific dance moves?

Obviously, this fellow did. And did some research.

I mean, let's face it -- both of them are, well, mediocre story-crafters. And the universes they create don't REALLY hold together all that well -- their world-building is, y'know, okay. Their characters are fairly two-dimensional.

But, damn, there's something there. Something about what they create just sticks with you.

What is it?!

I can point to the weaknesses in Star Wars, and in Harry Potter. But that doesn't matter. There's SOMETHING in those that works.

Are there other fictional universes that just, y'know, get you that way? Even if the people who created them are fairly mediocre in their craft?

And what IS it? Can it be learned? I mean, all of you who write for a living -- you've probably asked yourself this question occasionally, too. . .

Is it the same thing for Star Wars and for Harry Potter?

In a discussion on james_nicoll's lj about Jeeves and Wooster, it was pretty well determined that, in the world of Jeeves and Wooster, neither World War must have happened. They were written post-WWI, and some of them, even post-WWII, but the world is pure Edwardian.

So I was a bit surprised when I was re-reading the 1921 "Jeeves in the Springtime":

"The method which I advocate is what, I believe, the advertisers call Direct Suggestion, sir, consisting as it does of driving an idea home by constant repetition. You may have had some experience of the system?"
"You mean they keep on telling you that some soap or other is the best, and after a bit you come under the influence and charge round the corner and buy a cake?"
"Exactly, sir. The same method was the basis of all the most valuable propaganda during the world war. . . ."

And later, during the same story, as Mr. Little was discussing his cook:

"She has been with me many years, and in all that time I have not known her guilty of a single lapse from the highest standard. Except once, in the winter of 1917, when a purist might have condemned a certain mayonnaise of hers as lacking in creaminess. But one must make allowances. There had been several air-raids about that time, and no doubt the poor woman was shaken. . . . "

So, instead, it seems that World War I, at least, did happen. It just didn't affect anyone.