Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:30 PM

Okay! I have just added three short stories that I wrote in college -- including one which won an honorable mention in Writer's Digest's 1990 writing competition -- to my website. As I go through my Banana junior, I may post more, if I can find pieces that don't make me cringe (I'm very critical of my writings).

If anybody feels like reading them, I'd really like to hear what you think.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:15 PM

As of noon today, osmond-riba.org has gotten 285 hits referred by www.livejournal.com and 110 hits referred by cheshyre.blogspot.com, due to those Watto photos I posted Thursday night. Several people that I don't know from Adam have put me on their friend lists. I think that some community researcher could make an interesting study of the social networks expressed and formed on LiveJournal.

Anyway, a few last Star Wars tidbits:

• Since I quoted this 1997 Usenet post of mine, I went out searching for the article by Mojo (FX wizard of Babylon 5) that I referenced. I found it here, but even more prophetic was this response.
• After seeing it on Slashdot yesterday morning, I thought of linking to this Weekly Standard article, The Case for the Empire. But now I see dozens of blogs linking to it (what Steven Johnson calls "the Blogger Effect"). I'll instead point folks towards David Brin's essay on the unsavory "moral" lessons of Star Wars.
• I have two words for those who say that George Lucas lost it after Empire: Holiday Special. Lucas lost it well before that, if indeed he ever had it.
• And, for those who claim Lucas had some master plan of the whole storyline before the first movie was released, I rebut: Splinter of the Mind's Eye. (Alan Dean Foster even acknowledges, "As far as I know, Empire was no more than a snow glint in Lucas's eye when I was writing Splinter.")
• But Ian & I rewatched the original Star Wars movie on video last night. Still a damn fine movie. But the new backstory given in I and II (and implied for III) doesn't mesh with what characters say in Star Wars. Heck, even the relevations in Empire don't quite fit.
  "Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough" When and how did this happen? "Hey, Obi Wan. I've decided to go to the Dark Side. Give this to my kid."
• We followed that up by watching Hardware Wars. I'm still incredibly impressed by HW -- it's just such a spot-on parody, especially considering how soon after SW it was released -- and before VCRs were common. Hardware Wars is not online (OMG! They've got it on DVD!?), but you can see a few clips. And, for those who haven't yet seen Troops... well, what are you waiting for?
• Finally, for any filkers out there, a free starter. The word Padawan has the same meter as Panama. Anybody want to play with the Van Halen song?

In other news, yesterday we picked up a few rolls of films from the developer. It includes photos of Boopsie, the swan's nest (someone else told us they saw five eggs), the Zakim bridge, and more of my hair. I'll try to post some up on the website soon.

Last night, I also plugged in my old computer from college. After some initial keyboard problems, my Banana Jr. (an 8088 luggable) still works. I've been reading story fragments that I haven't even looked at in over a decade. I've still got to work out some issues (finding particular files, how to read .ARC and .LZH compression, bulk transfers and backing it up to my current machine), but my goal is to post some of my old fiction up on the website. Stay tuned...

And that's about it. I got an e-mail from Simmons that the professor of my first class wants us all to have read Working Knowledge before the first session. Since I'm only one chapter into it, I really need to get cracking.

BTW, next weekend we'll be attending a wedding in the Albany, NY, area. As long as we're up there, we're going to take an extra day for some touristy stuff. We've never been to the area, so I'd really appreciate it if anyone can recommend local attractions to seek out or avoid and/or any good restaurants. Thanks.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:01 AM

When I first started evaluating journaling programs and sites, I created an account on LiveJournal to check out their system. Eventually, I chose Blogger, but I kept the LiveJournal account in order to post responses to my friends' LiveJournals.

At 10pm last night, I moved the images of Watto and of Nazi propaganda to a subdirectory on osmond-riba.org, because I kept having problems with the hosting sites for the images not delivering them properly.

At 10:50 PM, I posted an edited version of my Watto comments to LiveJournal, where I thought they might garner a little more attention than they would here.

Wow.

As of 10AM -- twelve hours since the links were posted on my BlogSpot journal, and just over eleven hours since I posted them to LiveJournal -- the site statistics for osmond-riba.org are as follows:

• www.livejournal.com is responsible for 143 referrals
• cheshyre.blogspot.com is responsible for 31

Again, that comes from one post made to LiveJournal compared to nearly a month that this site has been up. The LiveJournal post has also gotten about a half-dozen posted responses, and at least three other LJ users have commented upon my observations in their LJs and added links (further increasing the number of hits). I don't know whether to consider that humbling or impressive. Part of my reason for starting a journal was to gain a wider audience for my observations -- and this Watto post on LiveJournal certainly seems to be making an impact. I'm not switching from Blogger -- eventually, I hope to move this journal onto osmond-riba.org directly, to keep everything as self-contained as possible -- but it is impressive.

I just wonder whether it will make any difference.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:17 PM

For your consideration:

All the pictures of Watto shown above come from Star Wars: Episode I. When that film was released, Jews complained that Watto was a Jewish caricature, and Arabs complained that Watto was an Arab caricature. So, Lucas modified Watto slightly for the new film. Now, he looks like this:

Does that make matters any clearer?

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:32 PM

I just saw Star Wars: Episode II. I feel unclean.

Although I started out in a rather sarcastic mindset, after a while I began to enjoy myself. I thought that I'd be able to post that SW wasn't bad -- it wasn't great, but it was eye candy.

Then, Watto appeared on the screen.

You remember Watto? The junk dealer? Anakin's former boss? The one everyone complained was a compilation of anti-Semitic imagery?

Well, he's gotten even worse in Episode II. He wears a black hat that resembles a shtreimel, has a black beard, wears a white shirt and black vest, and his greed for profits has led him to traffic in slavery, having sold Anakin's mother a few years back.

Watto from Episode I:

Actual Nazi propaganda:

It was so painful, I couldn't even bear to watch the screen while he was on. All I could think of was "this will play well in the Arab markets."

That scene pretty much ruined the rest of the movie for me. I couldn't regain my ability to suspend disbelief. At the 1:20 mark (2:10 PM), I started looking at my watch and seriously considered walking out and demanding a refund. I decided to stick with it until the end, but found myself watching the rest in grim-faced silence.

With a more critical mindset, I noticed how appallingly sexist the film was as well. There are two scenes where the men get down to serious work, while all the women do is bring them refreshments. Don't they have droids for that kind of thing? The only major female character is Padme Amidala, who is merely a throwback to Princess Leia. There are a couple female Jedi, but none of them have speaking roles. Now, sure, the original movie wasn't much better in terms of women's roles, but that was 25 years ago! Shouldn't things have gotten even a little better in all that time?

Also, Anakin's angry slaughter of the Tusken Raiders -- his first step towards the Dark Side -- was too clean, too justified. No sense is ever given of their humanity (or the alien equivalent). They're consistently described in derogatory terms, portrayed as savages, and nothing redeeming is ever shown of them. No sense of diversity, I thought at the time. Anakin gets upset and attacks, and the scene cuts away. This isn't about protecting the kiddies, because other scenes of violence are easily shown. Lucas calculates every shot very carefully for maximum impact. Later, when Anakin guiltily confesses, all we saw was sympathy towards him, none towards the victims.

The characters all used movie-logic, rather than real logic -- trying to kill the heroes in the kind of elaborate escapable death trap that Austin Powers parodied. Give any scene too much thought, and it falls apart. (For example, why did C3PO join the party? He was owned by somebody else, who presumably needed the help of droids.) Yeah, the final battle is big, but there was no joy in it at all. Spider-Man was gleeful, giddy excitement. This was just relentless.

As I child, I loved Star Wars. I belonged to the fan club for many years. Now, I feel nothing but disgust. Not only don't I want to see Episode III, but I don't want any more of my money going to George Lucas.

Postscript: Ian pointed out to me that we have friends with contacts in HRSFA (Harvard-Radcliffe SF Association). I know Natalie Portman attends Harvard. I wonder if there's any way of getting this to her, to pass on to Lucas.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:20 AM

• the Village Voice: [T]he endless exposition is such irritating gibberish that you're prone to ignore it and look out the windows as the digital planes sail by. When I was a kid in school, we called this "tedium."
• Salon: Scene after scene, "Attack of the Clones" looks, sounds and smells bad.
• the Boston Globe (ominously titled Strike II)
• Roger Ebert: [A] technological exercise that lacks juice and delight. The title is more appropriate than it should be.

I've got a ba-ad feeling about this...
Mark Tatulli summed it up best:

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:25 AM

Crazy thought:

Okay, so yesterday was the final night of counting the omer, and the holiday of Shavuot begins tonight. Shavuot is celebrated by pulling an all-nighter study session, called Tikkun Leil, and cheesecake is a traditional food served at these events. That's my kind of holiday!

And I had a crazy thought. All-nighter debates on nitpicky religious issues with cheesecake? Sounds like a mini-SF-con. It's too short notice to organize for this year, but maybe next year we could hold a regional "Shavuacon" or "Tik-Con Leil" to discuss Torah from an SF perspective (issues such as how to build a kosher mikvah in a spacecraft or growing Kosher l'Pesach matzoh in space, since hydroponic food is shehakol, not motzi). Get at least a dozen people, come up with some topics for discussion, bring along a lot of books for reference, possibly intersperse with some filking and reading of Jewish SF... Given the increasingly noticable presence of religious Jews at SF cons, and the fact that every SF con I attend tends to have some form of "Jewish SF" panel which is always overcrowded, I think it might actually be feasible by next year...

In other news, I'm going to see Episode II today at a 12:35PM showing. Honestly, this isn't the kind of movie I'd otherwise see opening weekend, in part because opening weekend grosses have become so important and I have this odd urge to punish Lucasfilms by denying them a higher initial take. [In short, while I loved the original Star Wars to pieces, I didn't care for any of the other pictures. To my mind, "There can be only one." The release of Special Edition, in which IMHO Lucas made exactly the wrong changes, proved that SW was a fluke and for all his highfaluting talk of the power of myth, Lucas didn't actually know what he had. That opinion was reinforced by the atrocity of Episode I.] But I'm going today anyway, because want to hang out with the group of friends who are also going to this showing.

Added at 8:35 AM

I just saw this while wandering around some LiveJournal. Ewww...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:55 PM

Okay, I've got to take a few minutes to rave about the Lemony Snicket books. They're incredibly witty -- a word which here means "droll in an erudite manner." And, although they're officially children's books, neither Ian nor I found them the least bit childish. We've read every book in the series that's currently available, plan to read the rest of the books when they come out, and I highly recommend it to everyone I know who might be reading this journal. You can read the introduction and first chapter of the first book online.

Two things in the series which make them so interesting.

• First of all, as in many series, the author seems to slip into a pattern over the first 3 or 4 books. Then, in book 5, he pulls the rug out and shifts direction entirely, with new characters and complications. The last several books have gone in ways I never would've predicted when I started the series.
• The second feature is that there's a meta-mystery going on behind the plot. Who is Lemony Snicket and why is he so concerned about the Baudelaire orphans? And what's the tragic story behind Beatrice, to whom the series is dedicated? As we've progressed thru the series, we've been trying to make sense of all the hints and asides, which add up to an even more fascinating story than the main plot. We just finished reading the latest book: Lemony Snicket: the unauthorized autobiography (which may not make full sense until after reading books 1-9). It's like Illuminati for kids -- and the conspiracy extends into other authors' books, as well (Ramona Quimby, age 8, Little house in the big woods, and Charlotte's web all have connections to the secret society)!

Right now, the Lemony Snicket series has been battling with Harry Potter for dominance in the children's bestseller lists, and I'm beginning to think that Snicket is the better writer, at least in terms of planning for the long haul. (Sorry, Rowling fans, but as much as I love that series, there were some big problems with book 4, and the publication of book 5 has been delayed yet again. I think she's in trouble.)

As I said at the beginning, I highly recommend the series, and I'd love to hear comments from anybody who has already read these books, or, if this post convinces you to try them, I'd like to hear about that too. Post follow-ups in the comments section.

And that's my plug for the evening.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:01 AM

First of all, I just have to gripe that MS Word's conversion to HTML is atrocious. I'm working on converting more of my old writings for the website, but their HTML is horrible. It seems like it adds a <span> tag between every sentence. Ugh.

Second, I've got the Boston Globe photos posted to my Pictures page, if you want to see.

Third, a piece of advice from the local pharmacist. Over-the-counter sleeping pills are antihistimines. Same active ingredient, same dosage as Benadryl. The drug companies have just decided to market the "side-effect" of drowsiness as its main function. This means that (a) if you already have antihistimines, don't bother buying sleeping pills, and (b) if antihistimines don't make you drowsy, sleeping pills probably won't work either.

Finally, I'm setting a goal for myself: a minimum one chapter in a textbook per day until either classes start or I finish the books. We'll see how that goes.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:15 PM

Oh, cool! We're on the front page of the Boston Globe! You probably can't see us too clearly in the shrunk-down version that they posted on their website, but nearly dead-center, you can faintly make out the back of a gray cloak. My father-in-law's face is also visible, as is the back of Ian's head.

It's hard to see, so three cheers to Papa Tuny for picking us out of the crowds.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:18 PM

Whew. Well, I just finished reading Kavalier and Clay.Wow. What an incredible book. It was difficult to read, in certain respects. The two title characters are a pair of lovable schlimazels^* for whom you constantly wish good things, all the while knowing they're about to get screwed over. I had to keep walking away from the book, because I couldn't bear my knowledge of their impending tragedies... It's got a very accurate feel for the times it portrays, though I wonder how that affects readers less steeped in the history of comic books.

* A "Schlemiel" is a person who gets a job as a waiter and spills hot soup on his first customer. A "Schlimazel" is the person the soup is spilled on.

Now that I've finished that (book #68 for the year!), time to put away the escapist fiction and start reading ahead for the library science classes to come.

Back in the real world, things have been less smooth. Ian hasn't been feeling well -- symptoms are very similar to those of chronic fatigue, but they may be side effects from some medication he's taking. But between his general incapacitation and some increasing stress on my part due to my joblessness, we've been snapping at each other a bit more than usual. On the positive side, we walked up and down the Zakim bridge on Sunday (Boston Globe story). We arrived at 11, one hour before the event was supposed to start, so we were near the top before it really started to rain. Ian took some lovely pictures (I really should've brought more than one roll of film, though). We dropped them off to be developed today, so hopefully by the end of the week I'll be able to post some to the website.

I think that's about all for now. It sounds like Ian has dinner almost ready, so I think I'll post this to the website and log off for a while.