Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Signing off

By Brendan Loy

G'nite, all. See you on the other side.

The line must be drawn here!

By Brendan Loy

Apropos of nothing, except a comment by Josh on a previous post:

Paging William Shatner...

By Brendan Loy

Fun with Scrabulous:

Oh, come on, that should totally be a word. :)

Arthur C. Clarke takes his final odyssey

By David K.

An aide to the famed science fiction writer has reported his passing.  Details to follow as they become available.  Sir Arthur C. Clarke was 90.

Clarke was a prolific science fiction writer and futurist, most famous as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was later turned into an epic film under director Stanley Kubrick.

UPDATE: A little bit more here.

Newest addition to Inheritance Cycle announced

By JLR

Wow, I can't believe I beat Brendan to this.

The newest book in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle (to follow Eragon and Eldest, for the uninitiated) will be entitled Brisingr.  The book will go on sale at 12:01 AM on September 20, 2008.  (Brendan: I expect a countdown in the "Upcoming Events" section of this blog...)

Compass goes south at box office

By Brendan Loy

Apparently I'm not the only one who thought it wasn't that good. New Line's $250 million adaptation of The Golden Compass is a box-office flop, making just $26.1 million in its opening weekend, a "dismally low figure" that "almost certainly means no sequel for the proposed trilogy," according to MTV.

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke says, "This flop should sink New Line Cinema chairman Bob Shaye's chances to stay on when his contract expires in 2008." Cinema Blend's Josh Tyler says we should just "pray New Line can remain solvent long enough to get The Hobbit made." As for Compass, Tyler writes:

I’m sure the religious right will declare the failure of The Golden Compass at the box office this weekend as some sort of victory for Jeebus, but the truth is the movie failed because it wasn’t that good, and audiences are getting sick of these second-rate fantasy adaptations.

I think that's about right. Personally, I don't care what, if any, religious messages my movies preach. But I do generally prefer films that actually take the time to develop their characters in some semi-meaningful way. And if the plot makes at least a modicum of sense, all's the better.

It's an Alethiometer. It tells the truth.

By Brendan Loy

Gandalf?

Becky and I just got back from watching The Golden Compass. Oddly enough, given the genre, Becky liked it and I didn't. Having not read the book, I felt a bit confused and was never really able to get into the movie. When the climactic battle began to unfold, I found myself thinking, "Is this it? Really? Who are these people again, and what exactly are they fighting over?"

Don't get me wrong -- the movie explained many of the individual plot details well, but I felt they never adequately explained why it all matters, in the big picture. They sort of missed the forest for the trees. There was no equivalent of the scene early in The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf sits down with Frodo and explains that "Sauron needs only this Ring to cover all the land in a second darkness," leaving no doubt in the viewer's mind what the events of the next ten-plus hours will really be all about.

(Some vague spoilers after the jump.)

"This is not a class in temporal logic!"

By Brendan Loy

And now, for a little change of pace from football... here's one of my all-time favorite bits of Star Trek dialogue. It's from the episode "A Matter of Time," and Captain Picard is trying to convince a time-traveler -- who claims to be a historian from the future -- to use his foreknowledge to help Picard decide whether to take a risky action that could save, or kill, millions of people on the planet below. Here it is, for your viewing and/or Brendan-mocking pleasure:

"It's not theoretical, it's not hypothetical, it's real!"

Search engine hit of the day

By Brendan Loy

Someone just found my blog after searching for "Romulan Woman Having sex." (Scroll down; this post is #10 on the list.)

Heh.

R.I.P., Madeleine L'Engle

By Brendan Loy

Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of the Time Quartet, has died. She was 88. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

I read the books in middle school, but to be honest, I don't recall much about them -- though I do remember liking them. And I remember how one of them was centered around "mitochondria and farandolae." When I subsequently learned that there actually are such things as mitochondria, I was fascinated... and disappointed that farandolae are fictional. :)