Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Private Party

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I just got back from The Vogue‘s holiday potluck party — apparently an annual event, though this was the first year I’ve been invited. I’ve got to admit, it’s kind of cool to walk up to a club with a sign that says “Private Party — Vogue Employees and Guests Only” and be able to walk right in.

Lots of good food was there (I brought along some gingerbread cookies that Prairie had made this weekend, which were definitely a hit, being declared “delicious” a few times over the evening), and spent a very pleasant evening chatting with Paul and Ellen (a couple I met through Valindria), Evan (The Vogue’s Saturday night DJ), and Graves. Got to spread a few stories about Alaska, reminisce about DJ’ing with Evan, and geek out with some fun computer talk (including a “Oh, you’re that guy!” comment from Paul at one point).

Not a bad way to spend an evening, all told.

iTunes “Han Solo Returns (At the Court of Jabba the Hutt)” by London Symphony Orchestra, The/Williams, John from the album Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology (1983, 4:09).

Quick Review: ‘Salem’s Lot

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Part of Prairie’s scheme to familiarize me with Stephen King’s work has included renting some of the many adaptations of his work to film. Quality varies, of course, but when they’re good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, it’s generally fun to look at the differences between the original story and the filmed version and see what went wrong.

This past weekend, we went with a recent TV miniseries version of ‘Salem’s Lot.

It started out rather promising, with a strong cast (Rob Lowe as Ben Mears, Donald Sutherland as Richard Straker, Rutger Hauer as Kurt Barlowe, and James Cromwell as Father Callahan), and the first half of the show was overall fairly well done — while there were definite alterations made, due both to moving the story to the small screen and updating it for a modern setting, most of them weren’t very troubling, and the tone of the film was dead on.

There were two definite “What??” moments in the first half, though. The film opened with a scene (Ben attacking Father Calahan and hospitalizing both of them after a fall out of a second-story window) that was not anywhere in the book, and had Prairie and I both quite confused, as it didn’t seem to make any sense for either of the characters — though we decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt, and see where things led, especially when the next few scenes covering Ben’s arrival in the town were handled quite well. Also, the doctor was combined with another character in the book, which ended up drastically changing his character for the worse. That bothered both of us, as he was one of the nicer characters in the book.

Other changes were more acceptable, though — various characters being combined, slight tweaks here and there — and most of what we noticed were differences in interpretation. For instance, we had each pictured Straker as far more slick and smooth, and very politely menacing, while Sutherland played him a little more wild. Still, the feel of the book was captured quite well, so even with the slight changes, things seemed to be going fairly well.

Then we hit the second half, and things suddenly starting going downhill. Mark, the boy hero of the book who survives in large part due to his childhood innocence and open acceptance of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night, is made far more cynical and something of a troublemaker, robbing his character of many of the qualities that allowed him to survive through the book. The changes made to the doctor’s character continued to eat away at our perception of him, making him far less sympathetic.

But the real crimes were in the sudden and drastic deviations from the plot of the book as the movie drew to a close. Ben’s encounter with Hubie Marsten in the old Marsten house is substantially changed, and ends up being nowhere near as creepy or effective as in the book. Susan’s death, one of the big moments for Ben in his struggle to deal with the situation, doesn’t happen when it should, instead being pushed into an absolutely ludicrously silly final confrontation near the end of the movie. Father Callahan goes from being a very interesting and ultimately tragic figure to being little more than evil and rather dumb. The vampire “dusting” effects are just silly — surely they could have found another way to distinguish their vampire deaths from those of other shows without having the vamps suddenly levitate towards the ceiling and explode into glitter. And Barlowe’s final moments are just laughable.

In the end, it was one of the more disappointing adaptations I’ve seen, simply because it seemed to start so well — to have it take such a drastic turn for the worse was more frustrating than if had simply been bad through and through from the start.

iTunes “Kiss, The” by Cure, The from the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987, 6:14).

Odd Movie Combinations

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I saw a couple movies in my Netflix New Releases feed that made me laugh today…

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid — Anaconda plus Adaptation? It’s actually a sequel to Anaconda, has gotten worse reviews than the original (which is amusing, as I hated the original), and I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with Adaptation, but the idea of trying to combine the two amuses me.

Alien Species — Alien plus Species? Aside from both being sci-fi/horror films featuring creatures conceived by H.R. Geiger, they’re not really that similar, and this just looks like a generic sci-fi flick. The cover image (here it is on Netflix, Amazon apparently doesn’t have one) even looks like they’re ripping off the martian attack machines from the old film version of War of the Worlds.

Some days it really seems like we’ve run out of original ideas.

iTunes “Lover Boy/Lover Girl (B[Eat Me Up])” by Lords of Acid from the album Lover Boy/Lover Girl (2000, 5:36).

Stupid Practical Jokes

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News from Oregon of a practical joke gone wrong…

A couple of guys in Oregon who started drinking early in the morning thought it would be funny to stage a murder scene.

But by the end of the day, they weren’t laughing. They were jailed and so was their friend, the subject of the prank.

An alarmed Daniel Maerz told police he walked into the house and found 31-year-old Adam Vickers dead from a gunshot wound. He believed his friend had been killed by his roommate, Kyle Wisdom. After his emergency call, police rushed to the scene, ordering a lockdown of a nearby elementary school on their way.

But after realizing their house was surrounded by police, Vickers and the roommate decided they’d better go outside and explain it was all a joke intended to scare Maerz.

Vickers and Wisdom were jailed on charges including initiating a false report.

Maerz was also arrested, on a charge of methamphetamine possession. But police said he was happy to learn his friend wasn’t dead, even though he was upset with his friends for pulling the prank.

This reminded me of a couple stories I was told by a teacher I knew in high school — he wasn’t one of my teachers, but he was friends with another friend of mine, so we hung out a few times. The man had a somewhat odd sense of humor and a fondness for pranks, which landed him in trouble from time to time — and to be honest, I’m somewhat surprised he never got himself fired.

There were two stories he told us that I still remember (names have been changed, of course).

The first was actually somewhat similar to the above reported story. The teacher was a science teacher, so there was an auxiliary room attached to the classroom used for holding supplies.

One day he invited one of the students in to help him get some supplies, and then once they were in the room, he quickly explained what he had in mind. The two of them immediately started staging a huge ruckus, yelling at each other, banging on things, and generally making sure to get the attention of as many of the kids in the classroom as possible. After a few minutes, things got really quiet, as the student stretched out on the floor and the teacher doused him with some fake blood.

Unfortunately, when he opened the door, expecting to shock the group of students gathered around…it was the school’s principal of security who was the first to greet him.

Obviously, this didn’t go over very well. This wasn’t the worst unexpected outcome he told us about, though.

During one of his classes, he had a student that was apparently completely unable to stay awake during class. Whether she’d been out partying too late the night before, or just hadn’t had enough sleep, or just didn’t care enough to pay attention, he kept seeing her nod off. After seeing her head droop one too many times, he stopped the class for a moment and asked to talk to her.

“Look, Rachel, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m tired of seeing you falling asleep, and I don’t want you to do it again. But I want to make sure the other kids pay attention too…so we’re going to have some fun with this.

“After you go back to your seat, wait a few minutes, then start to nod off again. I’ll throw a fit, threaten you with detention, and you’ll promise not to do it again. Wait a few minutes, then start to droop one more time. This time, I’ll make sure none of the other kids are watching, come over, and pretend to slap you across the face to wake you up. We’ll have some fun, freak the other kids out — and then I want you to pay attention from now on, okay?”

She agreed, and went back to her seat.

A few minutes later, her head started to droop. Mr. Nolan immediately blew up. “Rachel! Dammit, I’ve told you too many times, I want you awake for my class! Now if you can’t stay awake and pay attention, I don’t want you here, and I’ll flunk you out. Do you understand me?”

Rachel nodded, and they went back to their lesson…for a few minutes.

Sure enough, not much later, she was nodding off again behind her book, and Mr. Nolan went nuts. He slammed his book down on the desk. “God_dammit_! Everyone! Page 356, now. Heads in your books, and I don’t want to see any of you looking at anything else.” As the kids scrambled to find the right page in their books, he stalked across the room to Rachel. “Look, I’ve told you before — Richard, eyes in your book, now — you’re in my class to learn, not to sleep. This is my classroom, and you will do as you’re told!” With that, he slapped his hands together, and Rachel went tumbling off her chair and onto the floor.

The classroom went dead.

Mr. Nolan turned and stalked back to the front of the room. All eyes were on Rachel as she shook herself off, got up off the floor, and sat back down in her chair. Mr. Nolan reached the front of the room, turned back around, and glared across the class room.

“Well, Rachel? Have you learned anything today?”

Rachel sat straight up in her chair, and looked her teacher dead in the eye.

“Yes, Mr. Nolan.

“Pain turns me on — do it again!”

Made it!

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The Fellowship

Well, we survived!

Man, that’s a lot of movie. When all’s said and done, it was a lot of fun, and all agreed that it was well worth doing, and definitely something that should be done again.

In a year or so.

The Extended Edition of Return of the King is wonderful, though — at least as good as, if not better than, the extended versions of each of the first two films. A few major additions and a number of minor ones that do an incredible job of fleshing out the film.

However, it’s now almost 12:30, and as we’re well worn out from a long day of sitting on our butts, it’s bedtime for us.

Getting ready…

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Lord of the Rings collection

So far, unless anyone does a surprise show on my doorstep (well…secured entrance to the apartment building), it looks like it’ll be a fairly small group for the Lord of the Rings fest today: myself, Prairie, and Robert, unless something falls through on his end.

We’ve got the house clean (or at least presentable), and Prairie’s working on putting together a plate of munchies to carry us through the first stretch of the day.

I’ve got one half-written post open, and another couple in my head, so there will be more things appearing to make up for my relative quietude of late, but they’ll likely not show up until tomorrow at the earliest.

Just some general ramblings while we putter around and get ready for the day…

32.4 Days

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After adding as many of the 100 overlooked films to my Netflix queue as I could, my queue is now 389 discs long (not counting the four discs of Buffy and West Wing I have left).

Assuming an average of two hours per movie, that’s 32.4 days of movies lined up. Something tells me that that’s going to take a while to get through. ;)

Right now, my queue is ordered only by the order that I’ve added items to it. I’m halfway debating sorting it by year of release and starting with the oldest films, working my way towards more recent titles. Anybody tried this? Think it might be worth it?

For the terminally curious, here’s my queue (358k .pdf).

iTunes “In Dreams” by Masters from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 6:27).

He had a piercing stare…

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This is hands-down one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time — eyeglasses without rims, bows, or even a bridge. They’re attached via a bridge piercing.

Piercing Glasses

I’ve never had a desire to get pierced, but if that was a direction I wanted to go in, I’d give this idea some serious thought.

iTunes “”Non Nobis, Domine…“” by City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Rattle, Simon from the album Henry V (1989, 4:12).

Well, it sounded good…

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Y’know, I seem to remember hearing some old aphorism along the way…something about counting chickens before they’re hatched.

I really should start paying attention to that.

That camera I won? Nevermind. Turns out that that was the prize for the account manager — in fact, the entire contest was between the various account managers, and when the memo announcing the contest was forwarded to me, it was just forwarded to let me know that the contest was going on and that my assistance in collecting positive comments would be appreciated.

I, as the valued employee who interacts with the customers on a daily basis and provide the customer service that gets such high praise, get the hearty thanks of the company for a job well done.

Woo.

On the bright side, though, my account manager does realize that I’m the one there every day doing the work, and was kind enough to get me a \$100 gift card to Best Buy out of her own pocket as thanks for the work I do, which was very appreciated. No, it’s not a new camera — but at the same time, it is \$100 towards getting a new camera, and when I finally can afford it, I can be sure that it’s the make and model that I want, so it’s not all bad.

At least, that’s what I keep reminding myself.

Bleah.
iTunes “Our Lips are Sealed” by Fun Boy Three, The from the album Trainspotting #2 (1983, 2:52).

Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika

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Washington State

Very cool: an early 1950’s pictoral map of the United States of America, apparently issued by the US Government to introduce our country to the people of Germany, most of whom knew little of us outside of what they’d picked up from GIs in their country during World War II.

Relevant commentary from the MetaFilter thread where I found this:

So the State Dept. handed out these maps to give Germans some idea of what the US looked like? I’m interested in their intentions, and the history behind this map give-away.

— thirdparty

well, smackfu suggests that the map is from around 1951. There was only a vague image of the United States in Germany then.

For many Germans Americans were huge, well-fed guys handing out chewing gums to German post-war kids. And some of these guys even were black. (I remember my grandmother telling me how amazed she was when she saw the first black G.I., the first black person she ever saw.) Now imagine what people must have thought of the United States then. Of course they knew about cowboys, the Liberty Statue and so on but that was about it.

I think the map was supposed to give a somewhat more detailed look an the United States, but then again not too sophisticated. The Secretary of State probably imagined that Germans would be overwhelmed otherwise. Maybe they really would have been. I assume that’s why it’s designed like a children’s map.

Then again, in the early fifties Germans started to go on holiday again. So it might be a promotional map for the American tourist industry.

That’s what I can think of.

— heimchen

Check out the full-size (7 Mb) map here.