Fantastic Voyage

As a follow-up to the previous entry, I’m now now re-reading The Shadow of the Torturer (which I’ve not read since it first appeared in paperback) – and enjoying it a lot more than Pirate Freedom! Maybe there are layers of meaning and relevancies in PF that I missed or didn’t consider particularly deep so I may track down a review or two to see what they say but I doubt I’ll go back to the book itself. Or maybe I’ll leave it a good quarter of a century like I have SotT!

The Mighty Boosh was on last night, parodying the 60s movie Fantastic Voyage, which I’ve always liked.  They did it brilliantly! And the punks, jazz and Star Wars elements were neat, too. Better than the season opener last week, with luck the series will live up to it’s predecessors! One minor nit-pick is that their bogey-men like eel-man and jazz-virus always seem a bit too similar.

And now I wish I had made the effort to see them at the Fringe sometime – they played here for years and they never seemed quite what I wanted to see…

Pirate Freedom

Well, I’ve just finished the lastest Gene Wolfe hardback and I was not impressed.

It’s a fairly easy read about a multilingual priest who decides to leave his Cuban seminary and discovers that he’s actually back in time somehow to the age of pirates and the Spanish Main. Should be exciting, but his memoir drifts through his adventures very blandly with no particular sense of excitment. Perhaps it’s because it’s written as a memoir written years later in a hurry that any emotion seems to have been leached out of the telling.

There’s absolutely no explanation of the time travel aspect of the story; it just happens as he wanders down the road to Havana. There’s a twist of course, and a revelation, but ultimately it’s one of the least exciting books I’ve read – I was actually keen to get back to my history of the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and it’s carve up (The Peace to End All Peace) which I realise has taken me 3 years to get 1/2 way through! (I mainly read it a few pages at a time between novels when I remember… like a palate cleanser!)

Esquimaux

Last night was interesting, in an academic kind of way…

It was the monthly RSGS lecture, which is usually a talk by an ‘adventurer’ with lots of slides of mountains, jungles, whatever exciting bit of the world he or she had been off to. Last night was attended by both the French and Norwegian Consuls and their guests because it was a little more high-powered than usual. It was a brief talk, loosely translated on the fly from the French, by Prof. Jean Malaurie, founder of the Centre d’Etudes Arctique back in 1957 – one of the top anthropologists working with the arctic peoples for decades… followed by the screening of his classic French documentary (with a recently added English language voiceover) ‘The Last Kings of Thule‘ filmed in N.W. Greenland in 1969.

It was an eye-opener as regards their way of life even into the modern era and if film had been about a century or two before, it would probably have looked very similar.

Brrrrr.

You saw perfectly why everybody wore layers of furs, etc. yet how happy they seemed overall with their lifestyle. We saw Nanook of the North in the cinema a while back and it looked idylic compared to this!

Next month, it’s some Namibian desert stuff; much warmer looking, I’m sure! Here’s a link for the RSGS evening lectures page:

http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/~rsgs/regional/Edin%20Eve.pdf

There she blows!

This was fun! It’s an incredibly condensed version of Moby Dick, done as a short graphic novel, but with pop-ups!

The Pequod has thread rigging, the harpoons have little ropes and all sorts of other details are there; the pop-upper learnt his craft from Sabada, the bloke who does the Prehistoric pop-up books of dinos, etc.

Must admit, it doesn’t have quite the depth of scholarship that the original does!

The New Herd

So, the new herd has arrived for christmas – most of the usual unusual critters – mammoth mammoths, sloths, aardvarks, bats, etc. and a couple of new additions to the stock – reindeer and badgers.

People have been asking about badgers on and off for ages, but they never quite seemed exotic enough. But they’re here now! And reindeer are seasonal, but this is the season!

Lots of art books in as well – including a big book of Matt Wagner’s Grendal. Reminds me  how good the comic was – and that I’ve got a whole bunch of the early comics at home in a box and I doubt I’ll ever  read them again, unless I read them again before I get rid of them somehow. Hmm, I doubt they’re actually worth very much, even if some of them are in a Grendal slipcase… I should probably sell my Mage graphic novels as well sometime.

One of the other neat looking books is Storeyville, which is an outsize hardback graphic novel with an early 20th C  setting, drawn or sketched in fairly pastel colours. I see horse drawn carriages, sailing ships, early motorbikes – I’m intrigued!

Culture & fresh air

Saturday night was culture night.

We went to a performance of Endgame by Samuel Beckett at the Theatre Workshop.

It was pretty well done, with props by the Glasgow autonomicon company, Shermanka, and, being the Theatre Workshop, the cast were differently abled.

One of the characters lived in a birdcage (more or less), his parents lived in rubbish bins, and his son (? not certain of their relationship, actually) looked after them. Much sniping comments and a hint of Steptoe and Son in their banter.

I had a horribly uncomfortable seat (being broken and sloping at 10 – 15 degrees) but I survived to the end! I needed beer in the Bailie afterwards and then it was out the door straight onto a bus right home!

Sunday, we went to the zoo but didn’t take the safari bus to the top ’cause it was too busy; we walked up as far as the tiger enclosure instead and then back down, via most of the usual suspects.

And then a quick visit to the European Market at Castle Street on the way home for a snack (a ham and cheese crepe for me) and to pick up some cheese and olives. Some of which I shall now have for lunch!

Books I’m sampling right now

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon is a cute little hardback about a couple of rogues (think Fafhrd & the Grey Mauser or Conan & Elric) bumbling through various escapades in the Caucasus region around 1000 A.D., when the Khazars ruled around there. The prose is meant to be rather ornate, in the style of the Arabian Nights, but the grammer & sentence construction is sometimes just a bit OTT. It’s a fairly easy read, but I won’t feel I’ve missed much if I don’t finish it…

Horizons by Mary Rosenblum is the closest thing to cyberpunk I’ve seen for a couple of years! Our female assassin, enhanced with all sorts of electro-trickery, is on a mission to one of the huge orbiting habitats (this one is NYUp) and is currently on the run through the hydroponic farms in axlewards where the gravity is weak.  I’ve not read much but it’s good so far.

The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt looks to be trying to fill a similar niche as His Dark Materials. It’s light, Dickensian-background fantasy so far – an urchin has been caught reading! If nothing else comes along, I’ll happily read more…

A work in progress

Hmmm, the Header needs work to have the blog title there as well – it may not be obvious, but this is Semaphore for Ducks!

There’s some other stuff I’m occasionally wrestling with that I’d like but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get what I have in mind – have to read the FAQs a bit more, I guess.