"Underneath the river bed, we burned the river down."
Okay. I am awake. No, really. Just ask the platypus inserting bamboo splinters beneath my toenails.
First, stuff from Friday:
I wrote 1,308 words of Chapter Six of Blood Oranges, in which a new troll - Otis - makes an appearance. I really do not know what to make of this strange, strange book. It is what it is.
Also on Friday, there was a Telephone Conversation of Great Importance, which I am not free to discuss (and let me tell you, these things I can't talk about are driving me fucking nuts).
I received a package from Stephen Lubold containing, among many other wonderful things, two Penguin Classics collections - Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (and LJ can't spell the plural of sorcery) and Lord Dunsany's In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (both edited by S. T. Joshi) - and Denise Gess and William Lutz' Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, It's People, and the Deadliest Fire in American Hitsory (2002). I immediately began reading the latter, as the Peshtigo Firestorm (and associated fires on the night of October 8, 1871) have long been an obsession of mine, but I haven't read this book. So, thank you again, Stephen!
The package also included a copy of Huan Vu's (German, 2010) film Die Farbe, which I now know is the most faithful adaptation of HPL's "The Colour Out of Space" that anyone has made thus far. I did not even know of this film's existence. It moves the events of the story from New England to pre-WWII Germany - which works far better than it has a right to work - and the climax to WWII itself (which really doesn't work). That is, the narrator's story is cut in two, and framed by an American searching for his lost father. As strange as all this sounds, and despite what must have been an almost nonexistent budget, most of it works very well. The move to film in black and white was smart (I've always said I'd do "Colour" in b&w), with a very judicious use of a color effect, that was smart. The acting is decent, the casting good, the cinematography so-so, the SFX uneven, but sometimes very impressive. The sound was awful. I don't know if it was a bad transfer to the DVD, or trouble with sound editing. But...if you're a fan of HPL or the story, it should be seen. It is at least a one-hundred percent improvement over the two previous attempts at filming the story - the laughable Die, Monster, Die (1965) and the unspeakably laughable The Curse (1987).
Oh, I'm also adding a photograph of the "pregnant plesiosaur" to yesterday's entry, for posterity (because it's an amazing fossil, and sometimes links go poof). And thank you, corucia for sending me the full paper from Science.
---
And now...yesterday.
Whoa, David Bowie flashback. No, I'm better now.
More hookey. Inexcusable, I know. No, it truly is. But, and still, Spooky and I went to Moonstone, because how many more days of summer are left? Not many, that's how many. And it rained all June, and we didn't have a car in July, and...anyway, we went to Moonstone. The air temperature was around 80˚F and the water somewhere in the 60sF. I swam. A lot. I've regained so much strength so quickly that I'm sort of astounded. I floated and dove in deep green water. The sky above me was blue with the white brush stokes of cirrus clouds and contrails and with gulls. There is utter peace, only fifty yards offshore. There were virtually no swells, the water was so calm (except when some asshole in a motorboat roared past). The only slightly spooky moment was when I found myself in a riptide that moved me twenty or thirty feet south in just a few seconds. But I stayed calm, swam to the east, and was immediately out of the current. Back on shore, we saw another osprey fishing. Likely the same one we saw back on July 30th.
I so need an underwater camera.
As we were leaving, I spotted the blackened and sun-shriveled remains of a very young dolphin or porpoise - possibly a newborn calf. The dorsal fin had an orange plastic tag that had been attached by researchers from the Mystic Aquarium, and, oddly, what remained of the carcass was tied to a tiny raft made of driftwood. The aquarium's tag noted it had been dead when tagged...which could have been weeks ago, based on the degree of decomposition. The skull, flippers, and tail fluke were missing (not surprising, as these tend to be taken quickly by scavengers). I wanted to take the whole thing away with me for what was left of the skeleton (in excellent shape), but I took only a single anterior thoracic rib. Anyway, there are photographs from yesterday behind the cut:
I'm pretty sure this is the same Ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis) that begged us for food back on the 30th.
Yes, my labret pokes out when I smile.
A Man Ray kind of sky.
On my way out during the second of three swims. Block Island is clearly visible behind me, ten miles south.
And back ashore, proving that I really do have a tongue, but no sense of propriety.
The dead cetacean. Maybe three feet long, if the head had not been missing. Maybe a little less. Here you're looking at the tail (caudal) region. The vertebrae with their transverse processes and intervertebral discs are clearly visible.
All that remained of the carcass, with the Mystic Aquarium tag.
All photographs Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
Also, some decent RP in Insilico last night, as Grendel enters the yakuza.
First, stuff from Friday:
I wrote 1,308 words of Chapter Six of Blood Oranges, in which a new troll - Otis - makes an appearance. I really do not know what to make of this strange, strange book. It is what it is.
Also on Friday, there was a Telephone Conversation of Great Importance, which I am not free to discuss (and let me tell you, these things I can't talk about are driving me fucking nuts).
I received a package from Stephen Lubold containing, among many other wonderful things, two Penguin Classics collections - Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (and LJ can't spell the plural of sorcery) and Lord Dunsany's In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (both edited by S. T. Joshi) - and Denise Gess and William Lutz' Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, It's People, and the Deadliest Fire in American Hitsory (2002). I immediately began reading the latter, as the Peshtigo Firestorm (and associated fires on the night of October 8, 1871) have long been an obsession of mine, but I haven't read this book. So, thank you again, Stephen!
The package also included a copy of Huan Vu's (German, 2010) film Die Farbe, which I now know is the most faithful adaptation of HPL's "The Colour Out of Space" that anyone has made thus far. I did not even know of this film's existence. It moves the events of the story from New England to pre-WWII Germany - which works far better than it has a right to work - and the climax to WWII itself (which really doesn't work). That is, the narrator's story is cut in two, and framed by an American searching for his lost father. As strange as all this sounds, and despite what must have been an almost nonexistent budget, most of it works very well. The move to film in black and white was smart (I've always said I'd do "Colour" in b&w), with a very judicious use of a color effect, that was smart. The acting is decent, the casting good, the cinematography so-so, the SFX uneven, but sometimes very impressive. The sound was awful. I don't know if it was a bad transfer to the DVD, or trouble with sound editing. But...if you're a fan of HPL or the story, it should be seen. It is at least a one-hundred percent improvement over the two previous attempts at filming the story - the laughable Die, Monster, Die (1965) and the unspeakably laughable The Curse (1987).
Oh, I'm also adding a photograph of the "pregnant plesiosaur" to yesterday's entry, for posterity (because it's an amazing fossil, and sometimes links go poof). And thank you, corucia for sending me the full paper from Science.
---
And now...yesterday.
Whoa, David Bowie flashback. No, I'm better now.
More hookey. Inexcusable, I know. No, it truly is. But, and still, Spooky and I went to Moonstone, because how many more days of summer are left? Not many, that's how many. And it rained all June, and we didn't have a car in July, and...anyway, we went to Moonstone. The air temperature was around 80˚F and the water somewhere in the 60sF. I swam. A lot. I've regained so much strength so quickly that I'm sort of astounded. I floated and dove in deep green water. The sky above me was blue with the white brush stokes of cirrus clouds and contrails and with gulls. There is utter peace, only fifty yards offshore. There were virtually no swells, the water was so calm (except when some asshole in a motorboat roared past). The only slightly spooky moment was when I found myself in a riptide that moved me twenty or thirty feet south in just a few seconds. But I stayed calm, swam to the east, and was immediately out of the current. Back on shore, we saw another osprey fishing. Likely the same one we saw back on July 30th.
I so need an underwater camera.
As we were leaving, I spotted the blackened and sun-shriveled remains of a very young dolphin or porpoise - possibly a newborn calf. The dorsal fin had an orange plastic tag that had been attached by researchers from the Mystic Aquarium, and, oddly, what remained of the carcass was tied to a tiny raft made of driftwood. The aquarium's tag noted it had been dead when tagged...which could have been weeks ago, based on the degree of decomposition. The skull, flippers, and tail fluke were missing (not surprising, as these tend to be taken quickly by scavengers). I wanted to take the whole thing away with me for what was left of the skeleton (in excellent shape), but I took only a single anterior thoracic rib. Anyway, there are photographs from yesterday behind the cut:
I'm pretty sure this is the same Ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis) that begged us for food back on the 30th.
Yes, my labret pokes out when I smile.
A Man Ray kind of sky.
On my way out during the second of three swims. Block Island is clearly visible behind me, ten miles south.
And back ashore, proving that I really do have a tongue, but no sense of propriety.
The dead cetacean. Maybe three feet long, if the head had not been missing. Maybe a little less. Here you're looking at the tail (caudal) region. The vertebrae with their transverse processes and intervertebral discs are clearly visible.
All that remained of the carcass, with the Mystic Aquarium tag.
All photographs Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
Also, some decent RP in Insilico last night, as Grendel enters the yakuza.