Interesting blog entry with a touch of sarcastic humour.
Star Wars
I tried to watch Star Wars when it was on tv yesterday, but I couldn’t do it. Two reasons:
- It was the “special edition”, which means Lucasarts messed with it digitally, and
- It was pan-and-scan, rather than widescreen, which irritates me to no end.
When George Lucas and his digital wizards churned out the special edition, they inserted all kinds of unnecessary scenes and made changes that actually ruined scenes. For example, remember that scene in the saloon, where Han shoots Greedo, the bounty hunter? In the special edition, Greedo shoots first, but inexplicably misses Han’s head by a foot. That completely ruins Han’s introduction as a morally dubious smuggler. Over the course of the original three movies, his character develops into someone almost respectable (“General Solo”). That’s a good story. But Lucas had to bugger it up.
The CG animals and droids in the Mos Eisley scenes do nothing but upstage the action in the foreground. Why is it necessary to have a snorting, mooing lizard in the background when the storm trooper pops up from the bottom of the frame to say, “Look sir, Droids”?
As for pan-and-scan, it should be abolished. If the cinematographer composes an image for a wide screen, it ruins the movie to show only half of the composition.
I’ve read recently (I can’t remember where) that Lucas will never release the original Star Wars edit on DVD. All I have to say to that is Harrumph. Somebody smack that guy over the head. Once for the three “special edition” edits of the original trilogy, and twice more for inflicting Jar-Jar on us and ruining the mystique of the Force by introducing these midi-chlorien creatures (however you spell it).
Oh well. At least Princess Leia is easy on the eyes, as they say.
Missing: City of Richmond, BC
When I recieved this brochure for a tourist attraction at Stave Lake, BC, with my power bill, I did the usual thing with it, which was to ignore it. When I looked at it again, something bothered me that I couldn’t put my finger on.
And then it hit me. There it was on the map of BC’s lower mainland. Actually, there it wasn’t, because the thing that I couldn’t put my finger on was the City of Richmond, which was completely absent from the map.
To clarify, I don’t mean that the map omits a little dot or a label or something. Richmond is located on a very large island at the mouth of the Fraser River (it’s named Lulu Island for some reason, but nobody calls it that, because of the embarrassment it causes). It’s really hard to miss, especially if you’ve ever tried to travel south from Vancouver. On BC Hydro’s map, however, there’s only a big, blue empty space south of Vancouver.
This made me wonder… is there some plan afoot to remove Richmond? Has Premier Gordon Campbell in a fit of public-private-partnership madness sold Richmond to a private developer, who will tow it to a more exotic location?
The other alternative is that Richmond is simply a figment of my imagination, and I didn’t actually spend a large part of my childhood living there. No, Richmond has a website. None of my other figments have websites, unless I’ve imagined all of you. Hmm.
Anyway, I want answers from BC Hydro. Why is a city of 165,000 people missing? Who drew that map, who paid for it, and what’s their agenda?
I’m betting that it’s the same people who misplaced Prince Edward Island in the Fodor’s travel guide.
Deletia and oxen
In an attempt to correct a nasty problem, today I removed about a thousand words from my story, then replaced it with almost two thousand more to bring me to a total of 11,200. Our heroine now enters the story on an oxcart rather than in an endless, vomitous spew of exposition. Every story should have an oxcart. They’re so useful.
Here comes the rain again
Some people will tell me I’m nuts, but I’m thrilled to see that it’s raining again. It’s such a relief after weeks of relentless heat.
Go rain. Woo.