He's been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka...

... and now he's cleaning up on Jeopardy! Fred Beukema, that is, he of the yearly Beukemixes which we all adore around these parts. He's won two games already and is playing game 3 today. (Since 4:30 is perhaps the most inconvenient time of day for me to sit in front of the TV I've finally had occasion to use the recording capacity of my PC. I grossly overestimated the amount of TV I care to record anymore when I bought the thing. At any rate, it works pretty slick.)

Fred put a lot of work into preparing to be on the show (he documents it pretty thoroughly on his blog), and as Quin has mentioned mmmph times, Fred was always his chief competitor at the Isaac Asimov superquiz when they worked together. This is very much his sort of thing. It's fun to watch someone you know, especially when he's doing so phenomenally well (in both of the first two games Fred went into Final Jeopardy with a score more than double the second place contestant's, so he couldn't lose unless he deliberately bet a huge amount on the FJ question. And as you can tell from the Daily Doubles, Fred is a conservative better). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to bet $Texas and answer "Suck it Trebek", but they probably screen for that sort of behaviour before they let you on the show.

So congrats to Fred! I'd say good luck in game 3, but since it was a done deal weeks ago that would either involve some sort of time machine or some very careful verb conjugations (future perfect tense, maybe?)

(The title of this post makes sense if you watch his Hometown Howdie, but that link will only work for a few days).

Why on Earth did this song just pop into my head today?

Perhaps it's because I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Quantum of Solace. Who knows?

Damn Paul McCartney and his catchy tunes; I'm going to be singing this for the rest of the week...



I wonder if this movie holds up? I remember liking it at the time, but maybe there's a reason I've never caught it on cable. Then again, they played Summer Rental with John Candy a dozen times last month, and that wasn't exactly laugh-a-minute.

Well, back to singing while I work...

Movies in February

Not much movie watching in February. This is largely because 1) I really was too sick to bother and 2) getting a new furnace, AC and water heater all at a blow took quite a bite out of my cash flow. (Wait, is that a mixed metaphor? Blow, bite, flow... maybe). So I'm relying on rewatching all faves plus perusing what's available at the library. But February was when I polished off my Christmas/birthday haul. So...

First up: Vicky Cristina Barcelona. My husband is a big fan of both Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson, so he thoroughly enjoyed this. I suspect it was a movie only made because Woody wanted to see Scarlett and Penelope Cruz kissing... As with most of Woody's work, I wished he'd spent more time on it. It's an intriguing idea that feels only half thought through. And it shares a complaint I have with a lot of his work; in the end, his characters have changed not a whit due to everything that's been going on over the last 90 minutes. Which gets frustrating. But he writes such good scenes, particularly here the scenes where Penelope is ranting in mile-a-minute Spanish while Javier Bardem tries to simultaneously calm her down and apologise to the non-Spanish-speaking Scarlett (at one point messing it all up and apologising to Scarlett in Spanish). I'd say Penelope earned her Oscar, it really was a great part, but the movie as a whole felt rather slight.

My only other English (mostly) language film was Mississippi Masala, one of Mira Nair's earlier films. It's about an Indian family from Uganda who is living in a hotel in Mississippi, and more specifically about the daughter who breaks away from her family to be with Denzel Washington (who wouldn't?). I loved the look of the film; it felt like a sweltering hot Southern summer, which is nice when it's actually the last dregs of a Minnesota winter.

I watched the last two movies in my Bollywood stash as well: Aryan and The Jewel Thief. Aryan I was a bit nervous about; the cover with Sohail Khan as a boxer made me expect lots of bloody fist fighting a la I Proud to be Indian, but it's actually the story of two young people who both have to adjust when they get pregnant and then married. The songs weren't great, but the movie was heartfelt and I enjoyed it. The Jewel Thief is old school Bollywood (it's from 1967). I like these old films, and this one is very early Bond, very 60s. I don't believe this is a Bollywood retelling of any Hollywood film; certainly the plot twists all came as a complete surprise. Great story, but really fun for the look of the thing. (Honestly, there are enough of these sorts of films I'm surprised there isn't a Bollywood Austin Powers to really revel in it.)

TV on DVD: I watched seaons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, which I also enjoyed immensely, although Quin not so much. I don't think it was the rampant bisexuality that bothered him; it was the "Dr. Whooey quality" that he kept griping about. I found some of the plots a bit Buffyesque (or Angelesque), but when they actually put James Marters on the show, I can totally forgive that. Cause he's awesome.

Lastly is Full Metal Alchemist. I actually only watched Season 1 in February, but having since watched Season 2 plus the film The Conqueror of Shamballa I'll deal with them all together. I loved this show. I loved the worldbuilding, the rules of alchemy and how they were used or how they were worked around; I loved the vast cast of characters (this show has surely spawned mountains of fanfic and slashfic). The animation has that lovely attention to detail that good anime always has. My only disappointment is that it was just a bit too intense, too violent to share this with my boys. Which is a pity; the show focuses on two brothers who squabble and fight like real brothers but still really rely on each other. The bond between them is the bedrock of the show. But alas, there were too many things that would be upsetting for a few years yet. And it's not something that can be edited around; the things that happen are integral to the plot, or are disturbing for psychological more than gory reasons. So it's violent, but not gratuitously violent. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out for teens and up, though.

I understand that like with Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, the associated manga tells an entirely different story with the same cast of characters (although unlike those two the FMA manga came first). I'll have to check that out when I have the cash. Also like those two, the music featured in the show is wonderful. Cowboy Bebop is far and away the best of the three for music (and it would be impossible to summarize just what that music is, it's so all over the map). Samurai Champloo was very hiphop inspired. FMA goes more for pure Jap pop, which I love, particularly this track, which sounds like a Japanese Go-Gos doing disco (love that bass line...)

Books in February

I only read six books in February, and three I'd already read before (although it was about ten years ago).

First up: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A very interesting look at several different people's lives in Mumbai. I first heard about this book on a show on PBS (I keep catching this show about life in India but never catching the title, which tends to happen when you're not the one with the remote), and I also read a piece he had written about Mumbai after the attacks last November, so this book has been on my radar for a while. Mehta was born in Mumbai, grew up in New York, then moved back to Mumbai as an adult, so he has a split perspective; he's both a native and an outsider at the same time. Mumbai is a very interesting city: it's the size of New York City and LA together in terms of population and if you look at it on Google Earth it's very easy to spot the slums, where everything is packed in so tight together and stops mere feet from the train tracks. (My fascination with slums has a lot in common with my fascination with the life of the Inuit which I researched for my last novel; I'm amazed at how much they can do with so little, but also saddened, because no one should have to get by with so little). I found this book honest and unflinching about the good and the bad, but in the end I found it hopeful about the future. And it struck me as I read that many of the problems in Mumbai were reminding me very strongly of what I was reading just a few months ago about New York City at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. (Which reminds me, apparently I owe the movie Garv a huge apology. I found the police force shooting on sight gangsters they had been sent to arrest because they knew they would never be justly tried in the courts implausible, when it is in fact quite true.)

Light at the End of the World by Wade Davis is a collection of essays on different cultures around the world. Apparently these originally appeared as part of a collection of photographs, and I rather wished I had hunted that book down; I would love to see some of the things described here. It was a bit of a mind twist after reading a book about India to follow it up with a book where "Indian" means Native American, though.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon is the latest by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's the best of the series so far, and yes I said that about the last one as well. It's just the story keeps going deeper, and the canvas it's told on keeps getting wider. This, frankly, is why I love reading series. And I have no idea where she's going to take these characters next, but I bet it's somewhere I could never predict.

OK, I finished off the month with Larry Niven. I've read some of him before (as I mentioned, it was more than a decade ago). I couldn't really pick out which ones I had though, so for the sake of completeness I started with the oldest Known Space books, and the first three are all ones I'd read before: World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth and Neutron Star. World of Ptavvs would be my favorite of these three, if just for the moment when the real alien wakes up (if you've read the book, you know what I mean. That moment, just there, is awesome).

In all likelihood, March will be nothing but Larry Niven books. I hope you're prepared...

So, been sick...

... as those of you on Myspace or Facebook already know. Haven't been that sick in ages. It started as one thing and then became one or two others; that's all I'm gonna say. I had to get out of bed yesterday because our new furnace/air conditioner/water heater were all installed, but I wasn't exactly lucid; I kept conking out on the couch and the installers would have to wake me up to ask me questions or show me things. (One of them said to Oliver "Your mom sure is sleepy!" to which he said... nothing, because the boy won't talk to strangers unless he's trying to out-talk his brother). And when I went downstairs to look over the finished work, my very addled brain came up with "shiny" as my only comment. And I think they thought I was talking about the lustre when I'm pretty sure my brain was talking Firefly-speak. Heck, I was so out of it I probably was just finding it, you know, shiny.

So no writing done on my week of school break, and most of this week's school was a wash as well. We kept up on math and that's about it. And my movie and book posts will be unusually short as well; I really was quite out of it the last half of February. When I wasn't just flat-out asleep I couldn't handle anything more complex than music DVDs. So it's cool that I have a ton of those. For instance, can you believe this concert was already a decade ago?

I would love to see an NSYNC reunion tour (with CD of new material as well, please). They put on such a show. And you know, they take their work seriously but never themselves, and there's something to be said for that.

And that's not just the fever hangover talking...