Another long week

Is it Friday afternoon yet? This has been one of those weeks that started out OK, then went into a bit of a slide. There’s been a little extra stress at work the past two days, and I realized that I managed to miss seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the same way I missed The Tempest and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 this past winter: I wanted to go, and I had access to a movie theatre, I just didn’t seriously think about making time to go until it was too late. Oh well. It won’t quite be the same, but I’ll probably see about borrowing a copy when it comes out on DVD. Hopefully I’ll get my heine in gear to see Anonymous – the historical drama centered around the Oxfordian view of the Shakespeare Authorship Question – Oxfordians are convinced that Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays attributed to Will Shakespeare, The Man from Stratford.

At this point, I’m really looking forward to NY ComiCon, which is 2 weeks away. I bought my ticket for the Saturday, and I understand that two friends of mine are going to be attending that day as well! Maybe I’ll get to meet up with them for a bit when I’m not trying to get Peter Mayhew and Stephen Lang’s autographs or just wandering and passing out Lunacon 2012 bookmarks. I also heard from another friend that Rockapella is going to be performing in Manhattan in early January. You may remember that a few months ago I was getting more excited about seeing Rockapella perform live at Fairfield University in Connecticut than I was about the Royal Wedding. Jeff Thacher, Human Drum Set, truly rocks my worn-out socks!

Has Fall fallen yet?

The weather’s getting cooler, and the Halloween preparations that got started way back last month are kicking up even higher. I’m glad the super-hot weather is mostly gone, but I’m not a fan of the shorter days. As long as we don’t get another Snowpocalypse like last winter, I won’t mind too much.

Anyways, I finished Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo today, and it’s most definitely good stuff. I look forward to reading Played With Fire and Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and I’m already sad that Mr. Larsson died before he could give us more stories. I got the three existing Millennium books in a thrift shop, in trade, and from a library’s book sale respectively. I learned some about Swedish culture and lifestyles, journalism, and business. I checked with some friends, and I’m not the only one who thinks Lisbeth Salander reads like she has Asperger’s Syndrome. I actually came to that conclusion before Mikael Blomkvist wondered about it in the story. I’ve read quite a bit about AS, along with having friends who have it.

I’m getting rather ticked off with my computers (3-year-old laptop and older desktop) – both systems are refusing to play my DVD of Comic Book: The Movie that I got from some friends back in March. It’s a mockumentary similar to This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, Best In Show, and the other hilarious Christopher Guest movies, only based on the relationship between the film industry and comic book fandom. My situation is especially irksome since I’ve decided to attend ComicCon in Manhattan next month, and some of the slated Special Guests (Mark Hamill, Kevin Smith, Peter Mayhew) were in this movie. Regardless, I’m planning to attend the Saturday of the Convention. With luck, I’ll get to meet Kevin Smith (aka Silent Bob), Peter Mayhew (aka Chewbacca), Ian McNeice, and Stephen Lang and shake their hands. That would be awesome.

Books, Bun Bun, and answering phones

As I’ve probably mention, I’ve been working in an office answering phones for the past eight weeks or so. Along with all the wrong-number callers and hang-ups, one of the inevitabilities of doing phone work is getting telemarketers. Some of them are automated, some of them call multiple times in the same day, and they’re all annoying. I stay as polite as possible with the live ones and usually just hang up on the automated messages even if they claim it’s “highly urgent.” At least I know I’m not alone in being annoyed by these people – there is also Bun Bun, a character from the web comic Sluggy Freelance. I haven’t read Sluggy yet, but I’m familiar with Bun Bun thanks to his appearances and honorable mentions in the works of John Ringo. Bun Bun is a cute little bunny rabbit who carries a switchblade, looooooves the Baywatch girls, and harbors a burning (he torched it himself) hatred of telemarketers. I purchased a small Bun Bun doll from the Sluggy Freelance online store, and he’s sitting on my desk at work as a reminder to just let it go when the telemarketers get too annoying. He will be joined soon by Monty Python’s Killer Rabbit – I figure they’ll get along great. “We’d better not risk another frontal assault. That rabbit’s dynamite!”

One of my co-workers is a long-time bibliophile, and she’s raising her kids to be the same way. We’re both big fans of the Pendergast series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. (I’m almost done with Cemetary Dance at the moment, and it’s most definitely up to standard.) I visited a local library’s used book shop last week and picked up some books I thought she and her kids would enjoy, and it turns out that every book I chose is on two of her kids’ reading lists for school. She sends them to a private school, but I’m still highly impressed that those teachers are asking their middle- and high-school-age students to read Clive Cussler, James Michener, Michael Shaara, and Terry Pratchett. I’m also going to finally start Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy this weekend. I managed to pick up used copies of all three books at good prices, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is my next paperback after I finish Cemetary Dance.

What a week.

Sorry for posting late this week, but things got a tad crazy. My job moved its offices a couple towns over (guess what I was doing last Saturday?), so now I need to be up earlier to make sure I get there on time. That means longer days and being more tired when I get home, but I’m sure I’ll get used to the new schedule soon. On the upside, there’s a movie theatre right by work now, so hopefully I’ll get around to seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes one night before I head home. From the trailers I’ve seen, that movie looks truly awesome – if for nothing else than Andy Serkis’s motion-capture work for Caesar and orangutans swinging about on the bridges.

There’s also a Goodwill thrift shop near the new office location. That means I have a handy place to go if I want to donate any books or old clothes or stuff. I went in there last Saturday after I was at the office for a while helping unpack files, and I’m very glad I did. Not only did I find a Tazz the Tasmanian Devil mug to hold pens and stuff on my desk, I found a 1971 edition of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary! It’s a 2-volume slipcased hardcover, very heavy, but it’s got the whole dictionary in tiny print on that onion-skin paper you see in bibles. I later found this edition on Amazon.com and Ebay for ~$30 and up, but I got it for $15. The magnifying glass that was originally in the little drawer at the top of the slipcase was gone, but that doesn’t matter much at this point. I now have a copy of a truly excellent dictionary!

Hurricane season?

The past week has been rather crazy. First there was that earthquake early last week (my friends and family closer to the epicenter are fine), then Hurricane Irene came through over the weekend. I know that there was plenty of damage and a lot of people got flooded or trapped by downed trees and such, but I can honestly remember sitting through worse storms as a kid. The worst thing I know of that happened in my neighborhood was the power cable that came down right in front of my house on Sunday. It was finally taken care of the other day, and it’s a good thing. I didn’t really like hearing the thing hiss at me as I walked around it on my way to the bus, and I’m glad I like rubber-soled footwear. Now I’ve heard about Hurricane Katya. I haven’t been watching the news, but I heard about it on an author fan page on Facebook. John Ringo has a character named Katya in his Ghost series, and to say the woman is Not To Be Messed With is putting it mildly. It’s making myself and fellow Ringo fans wonder about this storm.

I mentioned seeing Captain America a bit over a month ago. The next movie on my list is Rise of Planet of the Apes. I remember seeing the original Planet of the Apes movie with Charlton Heston as a wee young’un and again more recently. No offense to the cast and crew of that project, but the new one looks so awesome! I became a fan of Andy Serkis after seeing Peter Jackson’s movie version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I can hardly wait to see his work as Caesar the chimp. I think I heard earlier this week that PETA endorsed the movie, which I don’t quite understand since all the non-human apes are supposed to be CGI. Yes, humans are apes. I remember learning years ago that there’s only a small single-digit percentage difference between the DNA of humans and chimpanzees, and I’m sure the same would hold true for us and the other apes (gorillas, orangutans, etc.). Anyway, the point is that I want to see this movie. The next on my list after that is Anonymous, which tackles the Shakespeare Authorship Question in favor of the Earl of Oxford.

I also started reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Finally. I haven’t gotten that far in yet, but I’m enjoying it - especially that quip about a certain ”freaky cult” that gathers on the anciently-observed day of the great god Ra to worship an old-school torture device and partakes in symbolic cannibalism. It’s something for certian branches of Christians to think about on Sundays when they go up for communion.