Posts by Sam F
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I recall a dystopian British kids' show in the early 80s that sounds like The Survivors, although I remember it as The Changes. For some reason, pylons featured in it as images of evil. As in, the camera would zoom in on a pylon and the scary music would play. No idea what it was about, but I've never been keen on pylons since (also that educational safety film with the kid who goes to get his frisbee in the substation, whose trousers catch on fire. Brr).
Assuming you haven't read it already, you might get a wee frisson from Nigel Cox's Cowboy Dog, in which pylons exercise a creepy sort of control over landscapes and people. I was and remain pretty damn impressed with the book in general.
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I don't need to read it again while it's wearing a wizard hat and robe and calling itself Faith of the Fallen.
I cannot read that sentence without thinking of this. (NSFW)
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From the sci-fi sublime to the ridiculous: I finally managed to watch I, Robot through to the end last night (the last couple of times it was on the box I actually fell asleep about half an hour in).
It's pretty tragic stuff, packed to the gunwales with product placement and already looking a bit dated just four years on, and perhaps no more so than in Will Smith's hovering Audi supercar - a kind of fictional prototype for the R8 supercar which came out a year or so ago. Cue lots of lingering shots of the white plasticky body, glowing wheel hubs and the four Audi rings. As a sleek, vacuous Will Smith vehicle it's actually quite a neat metaphor for the entire movie.
(Who wrote the rule that every postmillenial sci-fi tortured detective must own a supercar to crash as a plot point later on? Or is this just a standard movie detective trope that chimes neatly with the interests of carmakers?)
That said to my amazement I actually enjoyed watching the film, mostly because my eyes absorbed the visuals whilst I chucked Asimov's Three Laws around in my head and tried to envisage building a movie around them that would actually be good.
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Another anecdote: I regularly come down with terrible flus in autumn, which persist for weeks (thank the gods for my convoluted sinuses). However, this year I somehow managed to stay well over the last stressful month of my MA thesis, until I handed it in in April - and then promptly got laid out in a sniffling heap.
I noted precisely the same phenomenon around essay hand-in times and exam periods over the previous five years. So I'm a believer.
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Who wants to kick this team when they're down? For a start your leg would get really tired.
Superb.
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If it takes them a whole three months to slowpoke their way here on an issue dear to their hearts, we can probably handle it.
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Well, not when the stretching demonstrates what a trite metaphor it was in the first place.
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...and I sincerely hope that's the last time we here the old 'wall street/mainstreet' metaphor. Not that it's a particularly baddie, just a little overused i felt.
Just slightly off on a tangent here, whilst I have an opening of sorts - I remember hearing a piece on NatRad recently featuring a representative of the NAACP. He commented that the test of the new government won't be what it delivers to "mainstreet America", but what manages to filter down to the "backstreet" - in other words, to people in poverty and to the working poor who are still struggling towards the modest prosperity which the "mainstreet" trope implies.
I liked that.
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Heh. I probably couldn't have justified the spend on a new TV of any sort, even before the arrival of the credit crunch/global slowdown/George's Revenge/Four Horsemen of the Debt Apocalypse.
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I am a Braunias fan. He is not always on form, and he can descend into self-parody, and I find some of his posturing and tics annoying. But unlike 90% of other writers in New Zealand periodicals, he knows about timing, pace and tone, and actually seems to care about his language.
Very much with you on this.