Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
Well, don’t we all?
There are some things you come across in life that, although puzzling, you really don’t want to know more about, because the explanations that occur to you are far more fantastic and entertaining than the reality could ever actually be. The speculation in your head is better than the facts.
As such I present this screen capture from Tyra Banks’ now defunct talk show Tyra…
How could any real explanation for that be better than the ones you can make up?
Blood for Book God! Skulls for the Abnett Throne!
My copy of Blood Pact arrived. Hooray! I’m about halfway through and was seriously concerned for a bit there that Abnett was going to kill Tona Criid. He hasn’t – yet – so I’m happy. For now.
It’s occurred to me while reading that if Daniel Craig isn’t available to play Gaunt in my theoretical TV/Movie adaption, Anthony Stewart Head could also do a very good job. And would probably be a bit cheaper 🙂
Captain Fishface agrees!
We went to Tattooine by mistake!
This is sheer brilliance…
Not safe for work, obviously 🙂
Yes, it’s one of those “who would play so-and-so” entries…
Woke up this morning intending to have a shower, shave, put a load of washing on and get into some much needed cleaning of the apartment. All of these aims have been frustrated by the revelation that I have no water.
There’s a lot of banging coming from the apartment next door, so I suspect they’re doing bathroom renovations and have managed to switch off my water along with their own. I’m tempted to head out to the… what do you call the place where all the pipes and taps are? A tap cupboard? That’ll have to do. I’m tempted to head out to the tap cupboard and start messing around in the hopes of restoring my water while leaving theirs off, but I’d probably screw up and spray scalding steam all over the renovators – not that that’s a completely unappealing idea in my current waterless mood.
Anyway, of late I’ve been indulging in my Imperial Guard fetish (oh man, that doesn’t sound good does it :)) by reading my way through Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. They’re bloody good reads (often summarised as Sharpe in space) and I’ve caught up all the way to Blood Pact, which I will commence upon as soon as Amazon gets its act together and actually delivers it.
When reading a sprawling novel series with a cast of dozens I generally find it useful to consider who I’d cast if I had an unlimited budget to produce a movie or TV series of it. This helps me keep everyone straight in my head. I’ve done this with some of the Ghosts, and – since this is my blog, I can do what I like with it and I’ve got nothing better to do while waiting for the water to be reconnected – I thought I’d list them here.
(I should note that this list is rather strongly influenced by one that I stumbled across online, lest anyone accuse me of casting decision plagiarism. I’d link to it if I could find it again)
Colonel-Commisar Ibram Gaunt: Daniel Craig. As far as I’m concerned Daniel Craig is Gaunt, which makes the current crop of James Bond films rather odd viewing 🙂
Major Elim Rawne: Eric Bana. I think he could easily pull off the combination of charisma and menace required for Rawne.
Master Sniper Hlaine ‘Mad’ Larkin: Hugh Laurie. Not an obvious choice but I reckon Laurie would make a really impressive Larkin. Everyone thinks of him as House of course, and as far as personality goes you couldn’t get much further apart than the domineering doctor and the mentally vulnerable sniper, but Laurie is such a gifted actor that I think he could do it, and do it well. You’d just need to give him a different accent (which you’d be doing anyway) and haircut so everyone doesn’t think “House!” any time he appears on screen.
Sergeant Agun Soric: Bob Hoskins. Another casting choice that just seems to work for me. Hoskins is Soric.
Chief Scout Sergeant Oan Mkoll: Robert Carlyle. Another from the casting list that I stumbled over. At first I thought it was a ridiculous idea, as Carlyle looks nothing like the Mkoll in my head, but after watching his performance in this week’s episode of Stargate Universe I’ve reversed my opinion. He’d make a great Mkoll.
Eszrah ap Niht: Jason Momoa. Momoa seems to be the go-to-guy for big menacing dudes in sci-fi/fantasy at the moment. I can’t recall if Eszrah is meant to be particularly big, but he’s certainly menacing, which makes him seem big 🙂
Major Gol Kolea: Tahmoh Penikett. He’s probably a bit young to really be (former) family man Gol Kolea, but I reckon he’d do the job.
Ayatani Zweil: John Hurt. If he wasn’t willing to commit to an ongoing role, Hurt would also make a great Lord Militant General Noches Sturm.
Trooper Brinn Milo: Colin Morgan. Get rid of that ridiculous haircut and he’d make a great Milo.
Sanian/Saint Sabbat: Ellen Page. Now that’s a casting completely out of left field I know, but I suspect that if she could handle the role, she’d be fantastic in it. Put her on the audition list and see how she goes.
So that’s where my casting list stands at the moment. Yes, it leaves out a bunch of important characters, but I simply haven’t decided who should play them yet. I know I did have a great idea for Varl, but can’t remember who it was. So, roll on the pilot episode people! Let’s get this underway! ;D
He’s an individual – you can’t fool him.
For years I’ve had a vague memory of a TV show or movie from many, many years ago. I only ever saw a few minutes of it, but those few minutes involved footballer Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson driving around in a time traveling truck – or at least a truck that somehow got sucked back to the 1940s where people were very concerned about the Japanese characters on its tyres.
Now this is a concept weird enough to suggest that I dreamed the entire thing. I mean, who would cast Jacko in anything outside of an Energizer commercial? But, a bit of Googling has shown that I wasn’t hallucinating, and the series did in fact exist – The Highwayman, a fairly shambolic semi-sci-fi series that ran for a few episodes in 1987 and 1988.
Good. I’m not completely mad then.
Oh, and who remembers this?
They has one
After watching the Battlestar Galactica finale a few years back I actually tried to create this chart, but gave up after the sheer volume of information overwhelmed my fairly feeble infographic mojo. But it matters not because Billy Ray Stephens Jr. has done it for me!
Is that awesome or what?
(Well, apart from the various typos :))
It needs a more than a little understanding for this to be a perfect friend.
For crying out loud!
That bastion of high quality journalism Today Tonight is running a story about “Gypsies and the suburbs where they’ve set up to STEAL!“.
What is this? The 1920’s?
(next week they’ll probably be telling us about the yellow peril)
I heard that was you…
Saw two movies yesterday. Well, one and maybe a third of another.
After about a month’s break due to Fabes’s commitments regarding the Dockers and his son we got back to work on the infamous 40k boards again. They are now all sealed, and one has had the magnets installed (they’re actually looking really good now). As is usually the case whenever we get together to work on a project however we realised halfway through that we’d shot ourselves in the feet – installing the magnets on the boards has to be done sequentially and it takes about 24 hours for the araldite we’re using to fix them to cure. Result – an entire afternoon with nothing to do but watch glue dry.
So we put on the TV instead and mercilessly mocked whatever we came across as we channel surfed. We eventually stumbled onto 1972’s What’s Up Doc? and ended up seeing some quite large chunks of it.
The bits we saw weren’t bad. I mean, they weren’t fantastically amusing, but they were OK for a slow Saturday afternoon. And it’s downright startling to realise that back in the day Barbara Streisand was pretty damn cute.
Anyway, eventually I got home, watched the new episode of Dr Who (my opinion on it is in a holding pattern until part two airs next week), then settled down to watch Juno –Â a film that I thought I’d like back when it came out, but never got around to seeing.
As it turns out I was right, it was a lot of fun (for some reason Ellen Page pretending to be a Kraken is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen). And it didn’t feel at all preachy – any movie about teen pregnancy runs the risk of turning into some kind of after school special but to me Juno managed just to be a bunch of stuff that happens without any kind of big moral or message. Good, fun, quirky entertainment with characters that you can care about. And krakens.
In my own life my kitchen is now startlingly clean and organised. This is good because I’ve been fighting a bit of a war with cockroaches for a while and it looks like I’ve broken the back of their offensive. Either that or the roach bombs I’ve put up on the window-sill in preparation for fumigating the entire apartment have scared them off. Today I’m starting on the bathroom, which will be a whole world of fun, but at least won’t take as long as the kitchen did.
(Note to cold climate dwelling foreigners who may be reeling in disgust at my arthropod related revelations. In a sub-tropical climate cockroaches are always present. In cold and temperate zones having roaches may be a sign of complete hygienic depravity, but in these warmer parts of the world it’s not a matter of having no cockroaches, it’s a matter of knowing they’re around but keeping numbers down so you only see them when the weather goes all pre-Cambrian and they think they’re running the planet again and can go roaming with impunity. So having a roach problem doesn’t mean I’ve turned into a ragged-haired, garbage-hoarding, slum dweller, it just means I haven’t done the washing up as often as I should :))
Well, back to it.
I’d have called it a Chuzwozza!
I am, by default, a Monarchist.
What I mean by this is that I’m not a Republican. I’ve never really seen the point in Australia going through all the hassle and expense of dumping the monarchy when they don’t cost us that much, and don’t really do anything to us. I mean, sure, the Queen could mess with our laws and such, but she’s far too smart, and hence doesn’t. I can vaguely appreciate the points made about our head of state being a foreigner, but then issues of nationality and patriotism and such have always seemed slightly suspicious to me – I’ve always instinctively felt that patriotism is but one step from nationalism, and nationalism one step from fascism. Put me down with H.G.Wells – my true nationality is mankind.
So I’m a de-facto Monarchist.
Which is not to say I have any great affection for the Windsors. If the majority of Australians want to kick them to the curb and have a Republic, I have no objections whatsoever. That’s democracy. And it’s going to happen, probably within the next 20 years when all the die hard Monarchists (ie: the Elderly) die off and the die hard Republicans (ie: the Young) take over. It’s inevitable, and is known as progress. On the day the papers are signed and the Australian Monarchy abolished – well I won’t be out there in the crowd cheering, but neither will I be in the crowd booing and hissing. I’ll just be watching the whole hoo-haa on TV, thinking “what a waste of time”, and probably eating a sandwich.
So, my reaction to the Royal Wedding has mostly been one of wishing they’d just get it over with so the TV schedule can get back to normal. Or at least that was the case until the Chaser scandal.
The story in a nutshell. The Australian national broadcaster – the ABC – has purchased two live feeds of the wedding from the BBC. One with commentary by some BBC bigwig, the other without commentary. The commentated feed will be shown on ABC 1, while the uncommentated feed was going to be shown on ABC 2 with local commentary by comedy troupe the Chaser. Was is the operative word as as soon as Clarence House heard about it they whipped off a communiqué to the ABC saying that if the Chaser broadcast wasn’t cancelled, then both feeds would be cut, and the ABC wouldn’t get to show the wedding at all.
This violates what I consider to be one of the most important functions of the Australian Monarchy – leaving us alone to do our own thing. If the monarchy is suddenly going to start interfering in Australian domestic affairs and – even worse – inflicting censorship, then as far as I’m concerned they can go do physically implausible things to themselves. Mocking our (supposed) social superiors is part of the Australian identity, and if the monarchy isn’t willing to go along with that then they no longer represent who we are as a people, and are as redundant as the most rabid Republican claims they are.
So, basically, what I want to say is Queen Elizabeth, if this kind of thing continues you’ve lost my vote!
