At long last: an official "Where the Wild Things Are" trailer!

Of all the movies that have come out in the last few years or are currently in the works, this is the one I am most excited about. This is so lovely that it manages to simultaneously give me chills and make me feel warm inside.

Five Years of Theatre

In January of 2004, I began a semester of study-abroad in England. One of the great things about it was that I had the chance to see a lot of West-End shows, and during that semester I decided to start keeping track of every piece of theater that I saw. In a lovely bit of unplanned symmetry, I saw the world premier of Inana at the DCPA this evening, exactly five years after I saw Les Mis during my first weekend trip to London.

Here is the complete list of all 86 shows (82 different productions if you subtract the 4 that I saw twice) that I've seen in the last five years (favorites in bold):

Les Miserables, January 16, 2004 (Palace Theatre, London)
Stones In His Pockets, January 17, 2004 (New Ambassadors Theatre, London)
The Cherry Orchard, February 13, 2004 (Abbey Theatre, Dublin)
Macbeth, March 6, 2004 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Anything Goes, March 8, 2004 (Drury Lane Theatre Royal, London)
His Dark Materials I, March 11, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
Endgame, March 15, 2004 (Albery Theatre, London)
Jerry Springer- The Opera, March 19, 2004 (A Really Useful Theatre, London)
His Dark Materials I, March 20, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
His Dark Materials II, March 20, 2004 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
Le Papier Peint Jaune, March 27, 2004 (Théâtre du Grütli, Geneva)
Romeo and Juliet, March 31, 2004 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Handler, September 30, 2004 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
A Bright Room Called Day, October 21, 2004 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Jane Eyre: The Musical, November 13, 2004 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Flyin' West, February 25, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Months on End, March 23, 2005 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Our Town, April 15, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
The Birthday Party, May 19, 2005 (The Duchess Theatre, London)
The Importance of Being Earnest, May 21, 2005 (Bristol Old Vic, Bristol)
The Tempest, May 22, 2005 (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Henry IV Part 2, May 24, 2005 (National Theatre Olivier Theatre, London)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, May 25, 2005 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Solstice, May 26, 2005 (The Other Place, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
A New Way To Please You, May 27, 2005 (Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Twelfth Night, May 28, 2005 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
The Knot Garden (Opera), June 3, 2005 (Theatre Royal, Bath)
Henry IV Part 1, June 17, 2005 (Royal National Olivier Theatre, London)
The Barber of Seville (Opera), August 16, 2005 (Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe)
Anatomy of Gray, September 23, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Anatomy of Gray, September 30, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Landscape of the Body, October 14, 2005 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
A Little Night Music, November 11, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
A Little Night Music, November 19, 2005 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Little Shop of Horrors, December 24, 2005 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Six Characters in Search of an Author, February 17, 2006 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
Wonder of the World, March 24, 2006 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Tartuffe (Opera), April 1, 2006 (Wheeler Concert Hall, Evansville)
The Taming of the Shrew, April 28, 2006 (Shanklin Theatre, Evansville)
One Last Hope for the Lonely, May 1, 2006 (May Studio Theatre, Evansville)
Hay Fever, May 26, 2006 (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London)
Titus Andronicus, May 27, 2006 (Shakespeare's Globe, London)
Julius Caesar, May 31, 2006 (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Avenue Q, June 15, 2006 (Noël Coward Theatre, London)
Sunday In The Park With George, June 16, 2006 (Wyndham's Theatre, London)
Speed-The-Plow, June 17, 2006 (Library Theatre, Manchester)
As You Like It, October 7, 2006 (Eugenia Rawls Courtyard Theatre, Denver)
Amadeus, October 25, 2006 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
The Magic Flute (Opera), November 19, 2006 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
365 Plays/365 Days, November 26, 2006 (Cafe Europa, Denver)
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, January 18, 2007 (Town Hall Arts Center, Littleton)
King Lear, January 24, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, January 28th, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Ragtime, March 8, 2007 (Boulder Dinner Theatre, Boulder)
The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, April 4, 2007 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
Working- A Musical, April 11, 2007 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, May 16, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, May 22, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Wicked, June 1, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Urinetown, August 17, 2007 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Third, September 13, 2007 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
You Can't Take it With You, September 20, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Monty Python's Spamalot, September 21, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, October 28, 2007 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
La Traviata (Opera), November 11, 2007 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
Pride and Prejudice, November 15, 2007 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Lydia, January 17, 2008 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
Plainsong, January 24, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Spring Awakening, February 2, 2008 (Eugene O'Neill Theatre, New York City)
Rock 'N' Roll, February 2, 2008 (Jacobs Theatre, New York City)
Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, March 19, 2008 (Jones Theatre, Denver)
Merry Wives of Windsor, March 20, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
My Fair Lady, March 28, 2008 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Gee's Bend, March 29, 2008 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Harvey, April 17, 2008 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
The Laramie Project, April 24, 2008 (Tramway Theatre, Denver)
A Writer's Diary (Adapted from Virginia Woolf's diaries), June 20, 2008 (Hamilton Recital Hall, Denver)
Sweeney Todd, June 29, 2008 (Temple Buell Theatre, Denver)
Henry the Eighth, July 20, 2008 (University Theatre, Boulder)
Love's Labour's Lost, July 25, 2008 (Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, Boulder)
Avenue Q, September 20, 2008 (Ellie Caulkins Operahouse, Denver)
Noises Off, October 2, 2008 (The Stage Theatre, Denver)
Glengarry Glen Ross, October 9, 2008 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)
The Miracle Worker, November 13, 2008 (The Space Theatre, Denver)
Anywhere But Rome, December 18, 2008 (Buntport Theater, Denver)
Inana, January 15, 2009 (The Ricketson Theatre, Denver)

The RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is not only my favorite show on the list, but it is absolutely the best piece of theatre that I've ever seen in my life. The list includes 15 out of 36 from the Shakespeare canon, and for my lifetime I've seen 16 total (the other was Othello my freshman year at Evansville). I will add one more later this month when I see the Richard III at the DCPA.

I'm off to attend the presidential inauguration in Washington DC, so I should have some interesting stuff to write about when I return next week.

More Fun with Word Clouds

As you can now see on the left-hand side of this page, I've added tag cloud for this blog. It was a piece of cake thanks to these great directions.

That cloud is only made up of the labels that I've selected for each post, but I've also been playing around with a site that generates clouds like the ones in my previous post that are based on the frequency of words in a given body of text. Wordle is far and away the most attractive one that I've been able to find. If you enter a link it will only generate a cloud based on whatever is on the front page, but with a little bit of copying and pasting I was able to produce this word cloud out of all of my posts:

Obama does well in the clouds

Since I started playing around with Goodreads, I've been exploring the odd aesthetics of tag clouds (aka word clouds), and I'm still debating whether I want to add one to this site.

This morning I came across an interesting meta-data experiment conducted by the Washington Post in which they generated word clouds based on the two presidential candidate's campaign blogs. The one on the left if Obama's and McCain's is on the right.

If you've got sharp eyes, you may actually be able to find the "McCain" tag.

I love books (and hilarious online video thingies)

I've been meaning to check out Goodreads for a while now, and this evening I finally got around to it (along with discovering the delightful online series The Guild). It would be madness to try to go back and write reviews for all of my favorite books, but there are a some books that are too dear to me for a simple star rating to suffice, and I'll cross post them here (I'm also filling in some of them with past posts from here in which I talked about books I'd read).

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ender's Game captured elements of my childhood that no other work of fiction (or anything in any other medium) has ever presented in a way that felt believable. There have been countless works in which I sympathize with the protagonist, but the character of Ender captured something about me that I probably couldn't even have articulated before I read the book.


Dune by Frank Herbert

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The sublime is a pretty elusive quality, but my definition has always been closely tied to a sense of transport. A truly sublime work of art is that which transports me out of myself, and Dune is one of the few books that achieves that rare feat. The rush of ideas in the passage describing Paul's emergence into his power managed to produce in me a visceral sense of vertigo. It's hard to imagine a more compelling example of the power of fiction.


Paradise Lost by John Milton

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Milton's masterpiece is not only the greatest epic ever written in English verse, it has actually had significant influence on the way that people think about the Christian mythology. In my conversations with mainstream Christians, the things that they say about things like angels and Satan are much more consistent with the way that those concepts are depicted in Paradise Lost than how they a represented in the Bible.


His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This trilogy starts off as a seemingly simple jaunt into the realm of adventurous fantasy, but the intellectual depth quickly reveals itself. Few books even attempt capture the agony of the conflict between romance and responsibility, and of the few that try, it's rare to see an author avoid the slippery slope of melodrama. The worlds that Pullman conjures are magnificent in and of themselves, but his true achievement is that he captures the joy and pain of growing up without romanticizing childhood or looking down on it.


View all my reviews.



Also, if you haven't checked out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, what are you waiting for? Act II is up now (and is even more super-awesome than Act I). Even my friend Ben, who hates musicals, loved it, so nobody who is reading this has any excuse for not checking it out this weekend while it's still available for free (magic word!). I'll be done with my MA soon, so you'd better take my advice lest you find yourself on the wrong side of a guy with a PhD in Horribleness (I hear Duke offers five years of funding).

Dr. Horrible!

Watch it.

Geeking out on the work of pre-theoretical knuckle-draggers

I started reading Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash this weekend and finished it earlier this afternoon. Part of what I enjoyed about it was that it played around in the territory of genres like cyberpunk without setting down its roots in them.

Because of that interesting feature of the novel, I was all the more intrigued when I came across a post on Boing Boing with this video of a recent lecture by Stephenson on the topic of literary genres.

Learning from movies

This afternoon I went to see WALL-E, and I was quite pleased that it managed to live up to the elevated expectations that I had as result of all the good reviews and positive word of mouth. To make a movie about a trash robot, and to do it without any dialogue for 90% of the movie is an unimaginably bold move for a Hollywood film of any sort, but Pixar has proven their brilliance once again by crafting a touching and thoughtful film that is a stellar example craftsmanship in cinema.

It's not giving anything away to say that it has a surprisingly subversive message about how our wasteful consumer culture is destroying both the planet and the human race. The movie makes its point seamlessly, without any blunt didacticism, and it's hard to imagine a more compelling way to communicate concepts of conservation and good stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, the power of the film's impact on me made it that much more depressing to see that it did not penetrate the minds of my fellow movie patrons, who engaged in the typical movie theater behavior of leaving all of their scattered trash behind for someone else to clean up. If a film like WALL-E couldn't get people to change their behavior, it leaves me with little hope that we'll be able to achieve a happy ending of our own.

Can't Anybody Tackle Bo Jackson?!?

The unstoppable force that was Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl has already been written about, but now he lives again!

I upgraded to Firefox 3.0 today, and I discovered a truly magnificent add-on. FireNes lets you play all of the games from the original NES system, including Tecmo Bowl and all of the other classics of my childhood.

Needless to say, I've been busy making sure that not even super-human Bo Jackson can defeat my beloved Broncos. Bo knows... defeat: 42-27!

Hi, I'm an ad campaign... And I'm a parody.

I find the Mac/PC ads (and television ads in general) pretty annoying, which means that I'm generally not too receptive to the massive number of parodies of them, but as someone who enjoys comics and has followed the buzz for the two big comic-book films that are coming out this summer, this one actually tickled my fancy:

Congratulations! Here's your aluminum-alloy medal.

While watching the latest edition of the always entertaining Zero Punctuation reviews, I noticed them encouraging people to vote for them in the Webby Awards. I'm quite happy to support the sites a like when all it costs me is a few minutes of my time, so followed the link and prepared to cast my vote. What I didn't count on was having to wade through literally hundreds of nominees to find the one that I wanted to vote for. With scores of different categories and five nominees in each one, it looks like a Webby is about as difficult to win as the prize in a Cracker Jack.

Hello television. We meet again.

It's going to be very tough waiting until Friday.

Frak you Ben.

It's getting eerie, what's this cheery singing all about?

I find it odd that while I lack any passion for music, to a degree that I've wondered at times if there's something wrong with me, I do have a clear fondness for musicals. Part of it is my general enjoyment of the theatre, but there's also element of escapist longing to live in a different world where emotions can be expressed by bursting into song. In short, I sometimes wish my life was a musical.

A few weeks ago my Aunt Laura emailed me a link to what is now one of the my all-time favorite online videos, in which a group of people stage a seemingly spontaneous musical in the food court of a shopping mall.

Words cannot express how much I envy those people.

Failing a saving throw against health problems and old age

The news is a couple of weeks old now (and thus has already been on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me), but I have to post something on the passing of Gary Gygax. In case there was any doubt about my nerd credentials, I am also a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons. The necessity of having a group was always a limiting factor, but I could fill in the gaps with computer versions like the excellent Baldur's Gate games. The only reason I'm not still playing it now is that the friends I played as an undergrad all graduated and went to different places.

I actually my first exposure to D&D in the form of Gygax's first edition of the rules, a set that had been left in our basement by my half-brother many years before. It is difficult to recall that many of the fundamental concepts of the entire genre of role-playing games were invented by just one man. It's disappointing that the business side of things and the various legal battles cast a shadow over the last few decades of his career, but he will be remembered for creating a game that made the trials of awkward youth a little less painful.

It shreds stuff AND lights it on fire? Tell me more...

While celebrating the end of the winter quarter with some classmates in a bar last night, the drunken conversation somehow ended up on the colossal geekiness of my teenage years (and all the nonexistent dates that ensued because of it).

I had consumed enough at that point that I told a story from my time playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game, in which my character (a teenage mutant ninja moose) defeated the heavily-armored villain who was standing on a shipping container full of Styrofoam packing peanuts by firing a machine gun at the container until the peanuts burst into flames.

The point of sharing that story is that it reminded me of the following unspeakably awesome video clip I watched a few weeks ago from the show Mythbusters, in which they demonstrate that you can in fact cut a tree down with a Gatling gun.

Shmashmentine's Day

Mega-kudos to Jess for having the radical good taste to rock my mailbox with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card, and for this site that expresses my general feelings about February 14th with things like this:

It's funny to think that all of the atrocities against poetry that are committed on this day can be traced back to Chaucer. If it weren't for him, this day's saint would be just another Roman Catholic bishop who died a horrible death. Nothing says martyrdom like lingerie and chocolates!

In the same vein of bitterness, I really like this video that I found a couple days ago:

Obama Sweeps the Potomac

Barack Obama's win in the Potomac Primaries is impressive, giving him eight victories in a row, but the bigger news is that he won among those who were supposed to belong to Hillary. Regardless of what the pundits say, the whole momentum factor remains minor because it takes effect when voters perceive that they would be throwing their votes away if they went against the momentum, and at this stage there's no way that Clinton supporters are going to conclude that she's a lost cause. Barring an a reversal in Wisconsin or Hawaii, Barack will be heading into the contests on March 4th (Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island) with a substantial delegate lead and victories in half of the states in the nation. So far, Huckabee has delayed McCain's nomination on the Republican side, but McCain's narrow victories in today's primaries will probably hasten Huckabee's withdrawal. Hopefully Obama can win both Ohio (looking increasingly plausible) and Texas (still doubtful, but winning among Latinos in Virginia gives hope), which would allow him to get the full force of the party behind him and start preparing for the general election.

* * *

I also came across a delightfully geeky website this evening. If you've ever wondered how a Star Destroyer and the Enterprise would look next to each other (or the relative sizes of any other science-fiction vehicles), this site has the answers. It's particularly nifty that he provides some real-world examples too. I like that Serenity is almost as big as a 747, and comparing things to the Empire State Building is far more fun than you'd think...

Occasionally a geek will actually have a date to the prom

In a lovely bit coincidence, Ashley, an old friend of mine from high school, started a blog recently. She gave me a shout-out in her blog the other day (and was the first to comment here), so I'm returning the favor as part of my general policy of supporting anyone who gives me gratuitous praise.

Her boldly titled blog.

Coming from a mind crazy enough to be my date to senior prom, it's a safe bet that interesting will not be in short supply, so check it out. I've also added a list of links to some other blogs that I like.

* * *

In an earlier post I presented the following grotesque sentence that some friends and I came up with in class:

I have the awareness that the flesh of young humans, ideally humans within the age range typically defined as infancy, is indeed capable of being processed by the gastrointestinal tract, in ergo facto providing the necessary je ne sais quoi of a meal more delicious than the love of Baby Jesus.

After spending some time wandering through the Forest of Rhetoric, I thought it would be fun to list all of its stylistic vices:
macrologia- Longwindedness. Using more words than are necessary in an attempt to appear eloquent.
tautologia- The repetition of the same idea in different words, but (often) in a way that is wearisome or unnecessary.
cacozelia- Bad taste in words or selection of metaphor, either to make the facts appear worse or to disgust the auditors.
soraismus- To mingle different languages affectedly or without skill.
acyrologia- An incorrect use of words, especially the use of words that sound alike but are far in meaning from the speaker's intentions.
catachresis- The use of a word in a context that differs from its proper application.
hypallage- Shifting the application of words. Mixing the order of which words should correspond with which others.
cacemphaton- An expression that is deliberately either foul (such as crude language)or ill-sounding (such as from excessive alliteration).

* * *

Anyone geeky enough to still be reading at this point should get a kick out of this:

The Edge of the Bell Curve

There's nothing like reading a nice Victorian novel to set the mind wandering on the subject of marriage.

* * *

It's somewhat old news, but I'm still amazed at the window-washer in New York who fell 47 stories and lived. I can even understand all the miracle talk, even though it's not too hard to understand if you accept his incredible good luck to have avoided injuring either his head or pelvis. People don't think very clearly when it comes to statistically improbable occurrences.