…beyond the fact that I can never remember how to spell “embarrassing.”
So the new Mad Max movie is getting hella good reviews. I startled myself after the first trailer when I realized I wanted to see it, because, and this hurts to say, because as a proud geek this shouldn’t be true, but I’ve never seen any of the Mad Max movies. I don’t even think I’ve seen parts of any of them. I have a hazy awareness that Tina Turner is in the third one but that’s it.
My wife feels that this cannot be allowed to stand.
I know I’m not the only one of my people out there. What have you not seen, or not read, that you really ought to have seen or read by your advanced age?
(Here’s the trailer. This looks good! I am surprised.)
I was out of work for the last two days because of the creeping crud I’ve been complaining about. It isn’t really any better today but I’m out of sick days until mid-June and it’s not like I’m dying so I went back in. The administrative team had a fairly lengthy meeting this morning because there were some critical decisions that needed to be made by the end of the day today. At some point, there was a bit of large-scale, mutual glassy-eyed staring for a few moments, and we looked around the table and realized that out of the seven people sitting around the table only one of us didn’t appear to be actively doing her best to not die.
One of us commented on it. “How’d you get so lucky? You’re the only one who isn’t obviously sick as hell.”
“I am trying very hard not to throw up right now,” she deadpanned, and everyone laughed. And then we all started coughing at the exact same time.
Bonus points if you can guess which of the seven of us said “Can we just tell them school is cancelled and that they all have to go home?” at one point during the meeting.
If you said the principal, you are hereby awarded bonus points.
I hesitate to call BOB ZOOM the new hotness; more like a passing fancy– the kid noticed it and insisted on watching it a few times and then it disappeared from Netflix like a bad Brazilian dream. Bob Zoom is an ant. He does not, in any noticeable fashion, ever zoom anywhere, and the provenance of his last name is unclear. Then again, the show is Brazilian, and translated from Portuguese, and I’m really tempted to ascribe all of the weirdness to the fact that the show was originally written for a Brazilian audience. But I’m not convinced. They find this shit weird too, right? They have to.
Start off with this: the ant’s name isn’t Bob Zoom. It’s Bobby. They never once call him Bob, ever. I originally wondered if this was also an artifact of translation, and the show was originally called Bob y Zoom, and Zoom was some other character, but there’s no sign of him anywhere and I’m not sure y actually means and in Portuguese anyway. But here, watch the intro to the show. His name’s Bobby!:
There’s no actual storyline to BOB ZOOM; there are (well, were) two episodes on Netflix and they’re entirely composed of songs. Bob himself doesn’t do much of anything. Some of the songs are fairly normal; there’s the alphabet, and they do a version of BINGO that isn’t far from the American standard but has entertainingly been translated from English to Portuguese and then back to English again. There’s a Maori song called Epo I Tai Tai é, and I dare you to head down the Internet rabbit hole that trying to figure out what that translates as will lead you to, because it’s terrifying.
And then there are what I assume are a couple of traditional Brazilian children’s songs, and that’s where the show gets weird. Well, not immediately. The song about the cow named Barnabe who is in love with another cow is fairly catchy and fun and normal:
Your foot’s tapping, right? And you’ve already got it sorta memorized? That’s how kids’ songs are supposed to work.
I give you Mrs. Cockroach:
Now, before I say more, let me point out that my wife works with an actual Brazilian national and he has never heard of this song. Which is comforting, because make fun of the lying poor person isn’t something that I’ve gotten an impression is a big part of the Brazilian psyche, and this song vibes all sorts of creepy and very probably racist in some sort of coded Brazilian way. And the animation is messed up, too; Mrs. Cockroach spends the occasional moment in the video looking seriously depressed and sad and then puts on her strong face, fully aware that the white children in the back of her car are going to keep making fun of her no matter what she tries to do.
And that’s before we get to what are obviously translation issues: her shell being hard as steel seems difficult to connect to her class ring, for example. But this song, and one more that keeps the weird but takes away the creepy and the “Wait, is this racist too?” element, definitely put BOB ZOOM high among the ranks of weird shit that I would never have been exposed to if I hadn’t had a kid.
Ah, what the hell, I’ll give you the chicken song too. It will haunt your dreams. Enjoy:
So, weird thing: I got interviewed three times last week, and each time mentioned that I planned for my next book to be about teaching. I have the cover picked out and everything.
And then yesterday while I was proctoring the final set of ISTEP tests, the last two sentences of the sequel to SKYLIGHTS wrote themselves, and now I’ve got the broad plot outlines of both books done.
The sequel to SKYLIGHTS is called STARLIGHT, I think, in case you were wondering.
Hmmm.
(Still poorly. Hoping for fuller humanity tomorrow; we’ll see.)
So I’m sick. Still. I’ve had a low-grade flu for something like two weeks, and I suspect if I just have a day to sleep and lay around it’ll go away, but that hasn’t happened because lately my weekends have been as busy as my weeks.
An hour after school let out this afternoon I had just gotten done telling my boss that since I finished a couple of major projects today I was going to take tomorrow as a sick day when we got an email from central office. The email summoned all of us to a meeting at 8:00 am tomorrow. A meeting that I will be attending regardless of my sick day.
Also, my wife is at a late-evening work thing of her own, and I’m sole carekeeper for my son at the moment, so I can’t sleep now either.
My wife and I finished the last two episodes of the first season of Daredevil Friday night. It took, oh, two and a half, maybe three weeks from watching the first episode to get to the finale– which for us implies a fair amount of dedication, as no adult TV happens when the boy is awake and after that literally every single other thing we might wish to do with our lives competes with watching fictional white dudes punch each other on TV. So I can’t claim I roundly disliked the show or anything like that; I didn’t. But on the whole, having watched the whole season, I’m not super excited about watching more of this.
Let’s start with good stuff:
Casting, at least to a certain point. I don’t remember dude’s name and I’m in no mood to look things up, but I liked the dude they’ve got playing Daredevil, and the casting for Foggy Nelson and Karen worked for me too. Racebending Ben Urich was a good call, and Vincent D’Onofrio certainly looked the part of the Kingpin, but more on him later. I loved Rosario Dawson but we didn’t see enough of her. Madame Gao was also fantastic. In general the acting was effective.
Mood/Direction: Excellent, especially early on. Daredevil was a hard show to watch at times, and I mean that as a compliment; when the show wanted to fuck with your head, your head was gonna get fucked with, and the grit and grime of Hell’s Kitchen left me wanting a shower after a few of the episodes.
Fight scenes. At least early on; the hallway fight in the second or third episode was outstanding and the fight with Nobu later on was a standout as well. That said, all the flippy stuff got annoying after a bit and sometimes the fight scenes got a bit repetitive.
Stick. I loved Stick.
Matt and Foggy’s relationship. The highlight of the series to me, in a lot of ways.
All that said, I have some issues:
Kingpin. There’s lots of folks praising Vincent D’Onofrio’s take on the Kingpin to the high heavens; they didn’t watch the same show I watched. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t need Daredevil. It needed Zoloft. Supervillains shouldn’t be in need of antidepressants, and I expected this dude to end every single conversation with a sigh and the words “I’m sad.” There was also enough portentous speechifying to fill a Lord of the Rings film. I kept expecting to find out that Wilson’s middle name was actually Lenny, too.
Vanessa. Related to the Kingpin issues; Vanessa did not help. Their relationship made no Goddamn sense at all and just served to remind me repeatedly that this Wilson Fisk is a twelve-year-old in an oversized body, which could work with certain villains, but not with the Kingpin. And this show had Madame Gao in it! They didn’t even need to put Kingpin on screen in the first season. Make Gao the villain, keep Kingpin offscreen, and use Wesley, who was way more interesting, instead.
Karen. For the last two or three episodes, I kept yelling “You’ve known them for two weeks!” at the screen. No one could hear me. I know Karen’s a character from the comics and all and so she has to be there, but she’s totally passive-aggressively worming her way into both of the guys’ backstories by the end of the series, acting like they’ve all been friends for years and that their friendship as a group is The Most Important Thing Evar. No. You’ve known them for a month. You don’t get to pretend that you’re part of a we yet. Go ‘way. Also, I swear her hair was a different color in every scene, and for most of an episode it was green. Not actually a problem, but super distracting once I noticed it.
I dunno. If you’re interested in checking the show out and you haven’t yet, go ahead; it won’t kill you. But that’s about as excited as I can get about this show right now.
If this picture weren’t a trifle blurry it would be my new profile picture for absolutely everything. I managed to sell 48 of the 60 books I brought with me yesterday– 47 at the signing itself, and one at my other job after the signing, where a customer overheard me talking with a co-worker and started asking questions, and then discovered that I had a card reader and the rest of my books in my car. Which is why I’m going to keep a Square reader in the car forever now.
I haven’t seen all the pictures folks took yesterday– and it seems like there was a fair number of them– but I’m gonna share two more:
These two lovely young ladies are both former students, and are both Tuckerized somewhere in Skylights. I won’t provide any more detail for probably obvious reasons but they’re both high school graduates now so my usual policies about anonymity can be relaxed a little bit. They managed to beat me to the signing, which both entertained and frightened me. Truth be told, I was a sweaty, gross mess for most of the first half hour or so until the air conditioning kicked in and I got used to what I was doing. Memo for next time: bring a handkerchief.
And, oh, next time? It’s not official-official yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be at InConJunction XXXV in Indianapolis in July!
More details to come. For now, though, I’m exhausted, and will be taking it super easy today.
I don’t know what to do with this one.
tl;dr version: More like Dare-MEH-vil, amirite???
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