Women should be seen but not heard, even when they're Jedi (apparently)

Sadly, I have to correct something I said earlier. I was so happy that Lucas had come up with cool female Jedi, but my husband just saw Ep. III and reports there is no Shaak Ti, no Luminara Unduli, no Aayla Secura. Some women stand around in crowd scenes, but they don't talk and they certainly don't kick butt. I guess Kit Fisto and Ki-Adi Mundi aren't there either, so it's not just the women.

At any rate, credit for cool Jedi women probably goes to Genndy Tartakovksy (whom I already love for Samurai Jack) who seems to have come up with great characters out of a collection of Jedi standing in the background at the end of Ep. II when he made the Clone Wars cartoons. It's just as well, that's as much of Ep. III as my boys will be seeing for a few more years anyway.

Writing update

I've started the next draft of the novel, which would be the second if we're only counting versions that go all the way from beginning to end (I managed a half-length version we can call Version 1.5, but it was going the wrong direction so I scrapped it). This is going deceptively well. I've been writing every day, over 1000 words and today over 2000! I'm starting to flinch; I sense a great big brick wall in the future and I think I might be about to hit it at full speed. Of course I've been living with some version of this story for more than seven years now, and have been in full stew mode for the better part of a year. The actual committing to paper should be easy. Alas, it never quite is.

On the short story front, I won't here back about Saga... until probably mid July, and another WOTF deadline will pass before then, but I have a story almost ready to go. I also sent Tao of Troth off to Asimov's. I realized that while it was not perfect, it wasn't changing much from tinker to tinker. It was time to cut the umbilical. Besides, I need to start collecting rejection letters. I only have three!

Another short post

Two of my great musical loves converge: Yusuf Islam has done a single for tsunami relief and one of the other musicians involved is Magne Furuholmen from the band a-ha. The word "favorite" doesn't really describe my feelings for this band. They were crucial to getting me through the teen years, and just got better in my twenties and thirties when the rest of America forgot about them (oh, there are a few other fans here and there, but we're a rare breed).

At any rate, the song is called "Indian Ocean" and because its from Yusuf, whose not hip with the kids, and because it is 6+ minutes long you'll probably never hear it on the radio. I got it from iTunes. I'm sure the single is findable in the better music stores. Check it out. It's beautiful and sad and enchanting and really makes me wish Yusuf would record more music again.

It was at the library!

I read those Teen Titan comics at the library. The covers were all plasticked over (so not a word), I remember it all so clearly now. Phew! Mystery solved.

Cool things

It's a tough time to be a parent of young boys. The full media blitz has been unleashed for Star Wars Episode III, working them up into a lather of longing, and of course they can't see it. I hear the PG-13 is the MPAA being generous; it could just as easily be an R. I presume it's just because they kept the language clean. On the upside, they have new episodes of the Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network to tide them over, and perhaps when the DVD comes out we can play an edited version. That's the true beauty of DVD. When Aidan was three, he was mad about Moulin Rouge, although the version he was familiar with was only about an hour long.

I'm excited to see the movie anyway, although I'll feel a little weird dropping the boys off with a babysitter to see a film they're so excited about. It's not as bad as when Aidan was just past one and we left him with a babysitter to go see Disney's Mulan, or maybe it's worse because it's not like he knew then that he was missing anything. Mostly I'm excited because it seems like someone finally tipped Lucas off that a certain demographic likes to see women in movies. Honestly, when I was a kid it was always irritating that the only woman in the first three films was Princess Leia. If you were playing Star Wars and there was more than one girl there, someone had to be Mon Mothma. Now there are Jedi women, and they're cool! Oliver even likes them. His favorite character to play on the Lego Star Wars is Shaak Ti.

On a not-very-related note, I found another movie they both quite like called Shaolin Soccer. It's from Stephen Chow who made Kung Fu Hustle (rated R, of course). Aidan and I saw a trailer for Shaolin Soccer when we went to see Spy Kids 3D, and Aidan and I both agreed it was something we really wanted to see, but it never came in theaters and I eventually forgot about it. I only remembered about it when Kung Fu Hustle came out. I found the DVD on Amazon.com and it was waiting for us when we got back from Arizona. It is such a cool movie; we all really enjoyed it. The main character in the movie wants to teach people that kung fu isn't just for fighting, it can help you do just about anything, and he ends up using soccer as a way to prove this to people. It's very warm-hearted, which seems to be a quality in short supply these days.

I am not Steve Irwin

The family and I have returned from our annual trip to Arizona. This one was a bit more eventful than trips past in that I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake that was sunning itself in the middle of the path we were hiking on.

We had been on this trail before in years past, but there were no other hikers that day, I reckon because it was cold for AZ (we Minnesotans were wearing shorts; my mother had on a sweatshirt). I suppose the cold temperature and lack of the usual people tromping about were what drew the snake out. I had just taken a picture of my boys who had run ahead of us to look at the pictures on a plaque, vaguely wondering if it was a good idea to let them run like that (mostly worried about the steep fall off the mountain, not even thinking about what they might step on), but mostly fussing with the settings on the camera when I saw the weirdest-looking brownish gray rock. The rock twitched and I jumped back with a shriek even before it got its rattle going.

In retrospect it seems I stood there forever looking at that "weird rock", contemplating it. It seems stupid of me now, there was nothing very rock-like about it and everything snake-like. I'm sure it was only a split second at the time and my memory is warped by the subsequent adrenal surge. The next few seconds are all a blur. I think a teleported several feet back, I don't remember the jumping part. I remember regretting screaming because of course both boys came back to see what Mom was going on about. Luckily the snake had already had enough of us loud people and was retreating back into the densest patch of prickly pear I've ever seen.

Quin snapped me out of my daze by insisting I take a picture of the snake then asking for the camera. He decided not to follow the rattler, since that patch of prickly pear could be a snake condo for all we knew.

The rest of the trip was spent with my mother retelling this story to Arizona residents, all of whom came back with, "I've been living in Arizona for ___ years and I've never seen a rattlesnake!" My husband was also excited; seening a rattlesnake in the wild had apparently been on his list of things to do while we were in Arizona. My other favorite line was, "Well, you know rattlesnakes have a bad reputation, but they won't bother you if you don't bother them." Which is all well and good but I think stepping on a rattlesnake falls under the heading of "bothered".

So I still prefer living in Minnesota, even if it snows in May.