Steelware

Me: Honey, I found our silverware pattern!

Bey: [looks] No.

Me: Look, cutlery, and tools!

Bey: Nooo.

Me: It's perfect, for when you want to eat a five-course meal, then work on your car!

Bey: Nooooooooo. But feel free to blog about it.

(Link courtesy brassgoggles, the Steampunk blog.)

Go Tell The Spartans: 300

-Today, saw 300 with buxom_bey, nchanter, asciikitty, bluegargantua, and co., for Eamon's birthday. Briefly, it's very violent, but I think well worth seeing, for a couple reasons. First, it's another glimpse of the heavily-digitized future of film, where computing power is used both to simulate reality, and to simulate something other than reality (in this case, a comic book).

-Second, while it's a ridiculous exaggeration to say that we in America owe our freedom to the 300 . . . to the extent that one of the great sources of our culture is Ancient Greece, and to the extent that democracy in America has its roots in Athenian "demos kratos", and, finally, to the extent that the sacrifice made by the 300 preserved Greek culture in the face of invasion, it can be said that our lives would be different today, if not for them.

(Of course, given chaos theory, that's a trivially true statement, but let's pretend I said something meaningful.)

-And, third, I've seen political interpretations of this film which place Bush in the role of Leonidas, and other ones which place him in the role of Xerxes. Given that Miller created the comic in the late 90s, and this is a pretty faithful adaptation, I don't think either reading is what the creators had in mind. Still, in these times, thinking about the cost of freedom is always worthwhile.

Books: Pulp Art and Analog (1968-1974)

Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines, edited by Robert Lesser

-I have a thing for classic pulp fiction, and the art that illustrated it, and have a fair collection of books on the subject. This is my first that focuses on the art (and not as much on the fiction), and contains lengthy discussions of how the art was commissioned, created, modified, and then thrown into a dumpster, burned, stored in a warehouse which then burned, or given away to people who didn't really give a damn. Out of about 50,000 cover pieces created, around 500 are believed to survive. Oh, for a time machine . . .

Analog Magazine

-The used bookstore in Davis Square has a crappy SF section (two shelves, rarely full), but a few months back I found a stack of old Analogs there. Analog is the SF magazine that was originally Astounding, where, arguably, SF advanced through a quantum leap in quality under the hand of John Campbell, editor, in the 1940s. I grabbed a dozen or so issues spanning 1968 to 1974, and have been reading them over the past few months. This covers the period when Campbell died, and the editorship passed to Ben Bova.

-My first impressions were: Wow, Campbell was a bit of a jerk. And: Wow, a lot of this stuff isn't that good. Not to mention: Hey, you can tell when Campbell died, 'cause suddenly there are black protagonists. Still not many women, though.

-However, there are a few gemstones of stories buried in the feet of clay, and while I can judge this magazine harshly from the standards of 30 years later, I can also tell that Campbell, Bova, and their writers were trying as best they could to create a better future.