Posts by Josh Addison
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It's my suspicion that some authors of series which become hugely popular, are all like, now I have the power and I can leave in all the tedious nonsense they cut out of the first two if I like.
It certainly happens in movies -- see the Matrix sequels, which the Wachowski brothers freely admit contain every idea for a film they've ever had, in the absence of someone to give them a slap and tell them to focus.
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And last but not least, if your life is too short (and your patience too short) for Neil Stephenson
Hear hear (for everything post-__Snow Crash__, at least). From The Diamond Age onwards, the man's literary career consists of little more than wanking on about how much research he's done and how knowledgeable he is about the subjects he's writing on, before reaching a point where the ending can be inferred and just stopping rather than bothering to write it for us. And then there's the underage sex/rape and obsession with ejaculation.
I read Cryptonomicon to impress a girl. Wasn't worth it.
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Julia Roberts -- seriously, what has she ever done to get on the "A-List", let alone remain there all this time? Pretty Woman, that's it. Read any article about her success, no matter how recent, and that's the film that gets mentioned. Twenty years ago she played a hooker with a heart of gold, and Hollywood still swoons over her, while countless other actresses fall by the wayside, due to the poor tactical move of aging past thirty.
Is it her enormous mouth? Do people mistake her for Steve Tyler and assume that if she has a rock band and an acting career she must be special? Are they afraid she'll eat them if she doesn't get decent roles? Answers on the back of a postcard.
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The Highlander (movie) sequels are really really bad
There are no Highlander sequels.
I rarely have the attention span for books, but I'm exceptionally good at enjoying movies, no matter how crappy they are. (Die Hard 4? Awesome action film; so-so Die Hard film.) It's a rare film that I find myself wondering why the hell I'm watching it -- of the top of my head, that list consists of Very Bad Things, Species 2, Highlander 2 and Mortal Kombat 2 (in which the "uniquely attractive" Brian Thompson intones, in his velvet Shakespearean murmur, the word "millenniums").
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Jumping on the pedant bandwagon, as a former Philosophy major, I still twitch when I hear people use the phrase "begs the question" incorrectly, but I guess I have to concede that that one's original/proper meaning is obscure enough, and the current meaning sensible enough, that it's probably not worth bitching about. (Doesn't help that I was a Linguistics minor, with all the "descriptivism over prescriptivism" that implies...)
And I guess it almost goes without saying, but:
Naming scandals by adding -gate to the end of a related word
I long for the day when a politician is caught having sex against a farm gate, or taking bribes to relax standards relating to gated properties or soemthing, forcing the media to start writing stories about "Gategate".Actually, now that I think about it, what's going to happen if there's ever a scandal that actually relates to water?
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Does it count if it's a story about giving good service instead of receiving it?
It seems most common for "good customer service" stories to start with things going wrong, then being fixed by the serviceperson -- it would be nice to think that having things run smoothly and pleasantly is just the norm. At any rate, in my student years, I spent a while working in the menswear department of Farmers St. Lukes. As you may imagine, the possibilities for causing delight in our patrons by selling them business shirts and underpants were fairly limited, but there was one experience where I felt proud of myself for the work I did as a dispenser of customer service:
A guy had come in wanting a pair of dress pants in a particular size and colour, which we didn't have in stock. We were able, after a lengthy bit of ringing around, to locate a pair at another branch, which we asked to get sent over. That had been a bit of a performance - trying to describe them over the phone ("it's a dark greeny teal sort of colour") before settling on using the barcode number to check that it was the right style - but we eventually got what we wanted and sent the customer away with the assurance that it'd be sent over to us and be ready for him to pick up the next week. It took longer than we thought for the pants to arrive, and when they did we found that they'd sent us the wrong ones, despite our best attempts to make sure what they had been looking at was what we were describing. We rang back to get them to send the right ones, but it was going be another week before they got to us. I was at the counter the next weekend when I saw the guy approaching. "Shit," I thought, "this guy's going to be well pissed unless I play this right."
"Mr. Stevenson!" I proclaimed in my cheeriest voice*, going on to apologise profusely for the failure of our comrades at Lynn Mall to supply us with what he was after and assure him that the right ones would be on their way as soon as possible. He was a nice guy, not the sort to get shitty at a lowly counter jockey, but nevertheless was suitably mollified (at one point actually saying that I'd "redeemed myself") and went away genuinely happy. I'm pretty sure that it was calling him by name that did it - just the experience of having a wage slave who'd have served hundreds of other people since we last spoke recognise him by name and know what he was after without having to be told seemed to be enough to make him feel appreciated.
So there's my story - I took a guy with a problem, utterly failed to solve it, but sent him away with a spring in his step anyway. That's... something.
* I am not a naturally cheery person, and commented on a recent thread here that I hate calling people by name, but it paid dividends this time. -
Any 'Spaced' fans lurking?
My 3-disc Special Edition boxed set says "Yes".
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Pollution
It's all around
Sometimes up, sometimes down
Pollution
Are you coming to my town?We're on different buses, pollution.
But we're both using petrol...BOMBS!
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I'd recommend fans of Jeremy Irons avoid his craptacular performance in Dungeons and Dragons.
Ah, that was a glorious performance. Some friends and I once devised a scale of scenery-chewingness - it went some like:
1 Jeremy Irons in__ D&D__ = 10 Nick Nolte in Hulk = 100 John Travolta in Battlefield Earth
As far as majestic voices go, it was Tom Baker who apparently claimed "I can make whippet shit sound like The Old Testament!"
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Several others thought that NZ was like England in the 1950s.
I'm occasioanlly of the opinion that WWII was the last time that the US had to pay attention to the rest of the world, and once that was over, they no longer bothered, leaving their impressions of other countries out by several decades. That would explain the "surrender monkey" attitude to the French and the belief that British humour consists of people running around to the tune of "Yakkety Sax", despite Benny Hill having been dead for 16 years. (Seriously, of the many reasons one could choose for hating the Wachowski's adaptation of V for Vendetta, surely top of the list is the pathetic "comedy sketch" sequence they foisted on it. How they talked Stephen Fry into that I'll never know...)
It could also explain those Britons' belief that NZ hasn't progressed since the postwar period.