Acheron

After hearing the Yankee fans boo Papelbon, I would have been perfectly happy seeing the AL lose the All-Star Game if it meant Rivera blowing it. Ah well. In the event, didn’t stay up until the 15th inning, gave up around 12:20 (end of the 12th I think). Good work Michael Young (again).

Eric Wilbur of the Globe:

In any case, the Daily News nearly incited a riot by taking the Red Sox closer out of context with a story that proclaimed him, “Papel-bum.” See how they did that? To be in on a meeting with those cutting-edge editors at the Daily News, boy, that would be something.

But these are rationale[sic] Yankee fans we’re talking about here. Surely they could see through the blatant misrepresentation that the Daily News was out for.

Oh, right.

I came up with this list:

1. “So Fast, So Numb” by R.E.M.
2. “Kinakeet Island” by Carbon Leaf

It’s not much of a list yet.

Is it lame to not post for like 3 months, and then suddenly make a new post on my birthday? Maybe, but I found a song lyric with my new age in it to use as the title (from “Flower in Rain” by Stephen Kellogg), so I don’t want to let it go to waste.

So if anyone out there only gets news from me by reading alarak.com here, they may have wondered if I had been captured by Spanish pirates or something. This did not happen; we encountered no pirates while in Spain. Monkeys*, yes, but no pirates. I will put up pictures soon, and write commentary and such. I’ve said this before about other trips and things and never done it, but it actually happened with Hungary, so I am more optimistic, despite it now being a month since we got back.

(Also I think I will start tagging posts in addition to categorizing them. So in addition to finding all travel-related posts, one could also find all posts relating to Spain, or pirates.)

*Not actually monkeys, but some other sort of primate.

Heading to Spain on Thursday. Renting a villa near the southern coast with Jeremy and Liz. Going to be there for 10 days… don’t really have any specific plans of what we’re going to go see. Granada is close by, so that’s a lock.. other than that, we don’t know. The beach is close, as are mountains. Depending on how far we want to try to go, there’s Cordoba, Seville, and Gibraltar to the west, and Almería to the east. So we’ll see what happens.

Also just found out the good news that the Euro is at a record high vs the dollar! So I meant good news for Europeans traveling to America, and Americans trying to sell things to Europeans. Not so much for Americans traveling to Europe though.

About four years ago, in a different medium, I wrote this:

“[x] jumped out at me like a… I don’t know, something that jumps.”

I was not especially in the mood at that moment for coming up with witty analogies, and ended up leaving that. However, once I get that time machine working (and assuming it only travels to a specific day in 2004, I guess, since otherwise I could think of better uses), I now have a much better line to use, courtesy of Fire Joe Morgan (and since I will have used it four years before they did, it’s not stealing):

“[x] jumped out at me, faster than an awesome jumping frog hopped up on jumping beans on a trampoline at a frog-jumping convention.”

In other news, I built a new server, which is why the site was down for awhile. The new server is pretty cool. The site I made for photos is still not working, because Mono is not cool. I guess I should have known trying to combine Linux and Microsoft was a bad idea. So I’ll keep messing with that, but I may try to go with PHP or something. (This is more likely than installing a Windows server.)

(Alternately, I could just, you know, use flickr or something, but what fun is that?)

So, Carbon Leaf. See here and here.

Earlyish December, saw them again (#3) at the 9:30 Club in DC. First time trying to drive to 9:30 since the show was on a Thursday night, and the metro stops running early on weekdays. Wasn’t as bad as expected/feared. (Not as bad as driving to Alexandria, for example, though there was the huge crash that delayed that.) Anyway, show was great, etc.

Then it turned out they were doing a New Year’s Eve show in Richmond. So we ended up finding a hotel and going down to that too. It was great as well. They played two sets: the first set was as if they were an opening band, and they played a bunch of very old songs from their first three albums (they called themselves “Me and Her”, a reference to their first album Meander, from which they played three songs, probably for the first time in 10 years or something, as Barry, the lead singer, is known to not like Meander very much); second set was more of a normal setlist. Only bad part of the night was a group of very drunk girls who were shoving around everybody who was up front, but the show was great anyway.

The Hobbit is being made into a movie, with Peter Jackson signed on as executive producer. Also there will be a “sequel” of some sort. Trying to aim for first movie in 2010 and second in 2011 (which seems awfully far off).

Thoughts on this:

1 - the LOTR movies - This announcement has prompted the people who did not like the LOTR movies to come out and say so again. As you may be aware, I absolutely love the LOTR movies. Most of the people against the movies are mainly fans of the book (as I am as well) that can’t take any changes at all to the story as presented in the book. One comment I read the other day listed about 4 changes that he hated, one of which was the removal of the character Erkenbrand. ERKENBRAND. There are probably at least 10 more book characters not in the movie who were more important than Erkenbrand. (To refresh your memory: Erkenbrand led the Rohirrim to Helm’s Deep with Gandalf to rescue everyone trapped there; Eomer was at the battle the whole time. In the movie, Eomer was off somewhere and so was able to be the one who led the riders to the rescue.) Off the top of my head, I’d rather have seen Imrahil, Beregond, Cirdan, Glorfindel, Gildor, Elladan and Elrohir, Bill Ferny (though without the Scouring there’s no point in him), etc. If you’re going to complain about Erkenbrand, then you’re obviously not ever going to like any adaptation at all, and should just stick with the books in the first place.

There are changes from the books in the LOTR movies I don’t like, some that I’m more neutral on though I wouldn’t have done it that way myself (you know, if I were a screenwriter and director), some that I don’t really like but can see the necessity (the Scouring of the Shire chapter near the end is one of my favorite parts of the story, but I don’t know how well it would have worked on screen), and even some that I do like. But whatever the differences from the book story, the LOTR movies are absolutely wonderful. So I’m happy that they are going to do a Hobbit movie.

2 - continuity with the LOTR movies - The Hobbit is an entirely different type of story from LOTR. So the question when making a movie from it is do you stay with the style of the book, or do you stay with the style of the LOTR movies? I would bet that it stays with the LOTR movie style, and becomes a bit darker than the book. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

There are a handful of cross-over characters: most notably Gandalf and Bilbo, also Gollum and Elrond. (Gloin is in the Fellowship book, and ostensibly is at the council in the FOTR movie, but wasn’t especially noticeable.) Ian McKellen absolutely needs to come back as Gandalf, as does Andy Serkis for Gollum. Hugo Weaving as Elrond would also be good. I don’t think Ian Holm would be able to reprise the Bilbo role; they made him look younger for a brief shot in the LOTR prologue, but if I remember correctly it involved stretching the skin on his face back and such, and while it worked for a 2 second shot it wouldn’t be workable for a full movie. So Bilbo can probably be recast.

It’s unsure if PJ et al. are going to direct or write, right now they are signed on as executive producers. If PJ still has a great deal of influence over the direction of the movie, I am ok with someone else directing — George Lucas didn’t direct Empire Strikes Back and that probably improved it. We’ll see how it goes.

One other person who absolutely needs to come back: Howard Shore, the composer. The music of the LOTR movies is incredible.

3 - the nebulous ’sequel’ - Some places say the “two movies” are just going to be The Hobbit split into two movies. With some expansion on the story I can see that. More common rumor is that the second movie is going to somehow cover the gap between The Hobbit and FOTR. I have to say I’m unsure about this. The whole point of LOTR is that it’s the sequel to The Hobbit. If there was anything interesting going on in those 60-ish years in between, the sequel would have started then. So unless we’re getting The Adventures of Tom Bombadil: The Musical! or something, I don’t know what exactly they’re planning on.

Another problem is that PJ et al. has no movie rights to anything of Tolkien’s outside of The Hobbit and LOTR. JRR himself sold the rights off decades ago, and they’ve bounced around since then, but anything else is still held by the Tolkien estate, which practically means Christopher Tolkien. Everything I’ve heard suggests Chris is extremely unlikely to want to sell movie rights to anything else. So I don’t know how it works, but it seems that if it’s not in the LOTR prologue or appendices, they can’t use it for this sequel movie. For example, there’s a short story in the Unfinished Tales collection, called “The Quest of Erebor”, I believe (possibly “for”, not “of”), that goes a long way towards reconciling some of the contradictions between The Hobbit and LOTR, but I guess they aren’t allowed to use anything like that. Or anything in the “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” section of The Silmarillion.

Still, I am excited. I hope it goes well; I’d rather it not be made, and let us have our LOTR movies, then have them put out a bad movie (or two) and ruin the taste of the trilogy (not that I’m drawing comparisons to The Phantom Menace or anything, no, not at all).

Completely coincidentally, I’m rewatching the LOTR movies: I had just finished FOTR the night before the news about The Hobbit came out. They’re still great.

So I suppose there are a couple things to write about (I know you want to read more concert posts!), but first: the site is back up, as you may notice.

Downtime came due to the sudden death of palatine, the gateway/router/wireless access point. Wasn’t doing anything to it, just happened to be on the computer when suddenly I lost all net connectivity. palatine wasn’t responding to pings or anything, which seemed odd, and finally I went over to look at the thing (it’s a Linksys WRT54G, version 3.1 if you care to know) and the power light was flashing. So that definitely seemed odd. It’s something that can happen if you’re flashing it with new firmware and something goes wrong, but I hadn’t touched the firmware for months. Apparently it just up and died.

Anyway, the easy solution is a hard reset, which involves holding the reset button down for awhile, unplugging and replugging and so on. That didn’t help, so it was on to the next solution, which involved prying the thing open and shorting a couple pins on the flash chip. You can see helpful pictures and instructions here, and a picture I took of mine after it started working here (I didn’t bother resizing that picture so it’s pretty big). The first method on that page, shorting the pins with something, didn’t work out, so I proceeded to the next method, using a wire to ground a pin to the antenna. Somehow that worked, and palatine started back up again. Kind of amazing, really, and saved $50 or whatever.

Since I only have today left to write a post in November (got to keep that consecutive months-with-a-post streak going!)…

Saw Stephen Kellogg & the Sixers at the Birchmere last night. I absolutely love the Birchmere… have only seen two shows there (one on each of their stages), but it is already possibly my favorite place to see a concert. Except it’s in the distant land of Alexandria, so getting there on a weeknight is really tough from Sterling (30 miles, took me almost 2.5 hours). If I started from work in Chantilly it might be a little easier, so maybe I’ll try that next time. Last night I got there barely in time to catch the opener, so had a pretty bad seat, but even from there I had no sound issues and only a few viewing issues (there was a big support pole a little ways in front of me, but it didn’t block too much). Also, they serve good food.

The concert was good too… all the songs I wanted to hear, etc. (They came out for a second encore and played in the center of the room with no mics and just acoustic instruments to play the last song, which was the last one I wanted to hear and hadn’t yet.) Also special surprise guest appearance by Pat McGee for a cover of ‘Piano Man’. (Double surprise since I thought he was supposed to be opening for Sister Hazel at the 9:30 Club last night, but I think that was an early show, so I guess once he finished there he hiked on out to Alexandria). Would probably go see them again when I got the chance, though I don’t know if it’s an automatic thing like with Matt Nathanson or somebody. (Also, would not mind tearing down the Birchmere, loading it onto trucks, and rebuilding it exactly the same way except in someplace sane, but I suppose that is unlikely.)