Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:00 AM

I know -- it's late. Just one last note before I go to bed.

There's something I need to print that runs several hundred pages (unique pages, not several hundred copies of something shorter). I know our printer won't handle it, so any recommendations for places or means to print it on the cheap (we're talking under five cents a page)?

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:45 AM

Recent news on the Leaky Cauldron has fans buzzing about a subtle change to JKRowling.com.

Until just last week, the Welcome page used to say (emphasis added):

This is where I can tell you the truth about rumours or news stories, where I can share the extra information I haven't put in the books, where I can give you hints and clues about what's going to happen to Harry next, and where I can announce I've finished book six... and no, that's not going to happen very soon.

However, it now reads:

This is where I can tell you the truth about rumours or news stories, where I can share the extra information I haven't put in the books, where I can give you hints and clues about what's going to happen to Harry next, and where I can announce I've finished book seven... and no, that's not going to happen very soon.

Seems to suggest that if she hasn't finished Book Six already, the end may be real imminent.

Some fans are hoping for an Xmas announcement; I'll just note that the release date for Book Six (June 21, 2003) was announced that January.

Rowling is expecting her third child, and I wonder if she isn't racing to deliver the book first so she can then devote more time to her family. As she wrote in another recent site update: "the distance between the keyboard and yours truly increases day by day as my third child races Harry?s next adventure into the world.

[Here's a list of other recent site updates courtesy of The Leaky Cauldron: a useful central site for Harry Potter news.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:30 AM

I understand that many people have been quite unhappy with the recent film adaptation of Earthsea (I have neither read the books nor have interest in seeing it).

However, in light of Harry Potter and LotR, other books have been optioned and some look a bit more promising.

Everybody's already been buzzing about the new trailer for Tim Burton's Charlie and the chocolate factory starring Johnny Depp.

Meanwhile, a year from now we'll see a big screen adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe -- by Disney and WETA. While I know the former name sends chills through purists' spines, the latter actually sounds redeeming. Over on AICN, Harry found some preview information including a few concept sketches (the house looks just as I imagined it) and this 25 meg Quicktime movie of WETA showing some of their work. Impressive...

Oooh I just checked some of the casting on IMDB:
 • Tilda Swinton as the White Witch,
 • Ray Winstone and Dawn French as the Beavers,
 • Rupert Everett as Fox,
 • Brian Cox as the voice of Aslan,
 • Jim Broadbent as Professor Digory Kirke...
I can definitely see it...

Meanwhile, the new trailer for Constantine looks faithful, even with Keanu Reeves. Further rumors on AICN suggest Joss Whedon will either be doing X-Men 3 or Wonder Woman. According to the Leaky Cauldron, the producer of Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire says filming is 75% complete. And Gaiman & McKean's MirrorMask should also be out next year sometime. I think it may be a good time for

Oh, and so far the earliest reviews for Lemony Snicket on Rotten Tomatoes are running positive, so fingers crossed on that for this weekend...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:10 AM

I have to just echo Susan:

Is it just me, or do you suppose the Catholic Church is sending a mixed message here?

Well, Ian and I had the same reaction, so at the very least you're not alone...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:01 AM

Well, my new Free Will Astrology horoscope is up:

Over the centuries, numerous ships carrying treasure have suffered mishaps and sunk to the bottom of the world's oceans. Most have remained there undisturbed, their gold and jewels seemingly lost forever. In the last decade, though, teams of treasure hunters have developed high-tech recovery equipment that allows them to locate and extract the sunken riches. I believe that there will be a comparable development in your life in the coming months, Cancerian. You'll find ways to access valuables from the past--stuff you had always assumed was irretrievable. Your first project will become apparent soon. Here are a few symbolic holiday gifts you might consider buying yourself: sonar, a diving suit, a treasure chest.

I've got boxes of stuff in the basement from my shelves at Lotus that I've been meaning to go through to see what I should bring into my new cubicle. I'm not entirely sure what's down there (and unfortunately, they're not all that accessible), but I'm pretty sure that's where I can find my old research on modelling search behaviour, and lots of other non-book research papers I printed for informational purposes.

I was going to hold off my excavation until one of the upcoming holiday weekends (Xmas or New Years), but maybe I should push this up and do it sooner...

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:23 PM

Working fulltime hasn't left me much time to read blogs. [I'm currently about a day behind in my LJ flist.] At any rate, a few quotes of note in my web wanderings this evening:

• Mark Kleiman's definition of "weregeld"
• If you want to get paranoid, Dave Johnson has found that critics of U.S. intelligence have a history of suicides by self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
• Boston Online points out the architectural false history in Kenmore Square
• A 70-year-old retired oral surgeon who left the military in 1980 has been called back to active duty. You know, at Hanukah, we were joking about these stoploss orders with my father-in-law and his father (veterans of Vietnam and WW2 respectively), but the risk seems suddenly much more likely. [Source: USNDemVet; more at the Left Coaster including some more statistics about seniors in the military.]
• The American Street found the poop on the Pentagon's revised order for armored Humvees: in short, they're "increasing the rate of production, not the total number of vehicles." [via Julia]

Sigh... I have so got to clean up my blogroll. Lots of links on there that I haven't followed in ages...

And now I must run off to pick Ian up from work. Later!

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 PM

As I'm sure I've mentioned far too many times, one of the unwritten perks of this job has been prowling through the company's databases looking up things for my own edification and education. In the process, I've found a lot of new Marloviana.

First of all, I should let y'all know that I've just updated my Marlowe in modern fiction list with a handful of new titles. [These were the additions during my previous update, in August. I also added but did not publically log Tamburlaine must die by Louise Welsh back in June thanks to a pointer in my comments.]

Anyway, here are the new titles I've added:

Meanwhile, I'm finding lots more nonfiction works that I want to read. I'm going to list them all here, so I have them in one place outside the product folders, and can look them up more easily from other libraries. Also, in case any of you are interested in the academic literature on Marlowe...

As far as Marlowe is concerned, I've read enough biographies, that (assuming that new works build upon the findings in earlier ones) I really should only concern myself with the newest. And I did find three books from this year and two more due in January. Still, the angles on some of the older books do sound intriguing. If you're familiar with any of these, please share your opinions.

• The world of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs (2005)
• The time is out of joint: skepticism in Shakespeare's England by Benjamin Bertram (2005)
• The mystery of the murdered playwright by Pat Perrin and Wim Coleman (2004)
• History play: the livse and afterlife of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt (2004)
• Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: journeys through the Elizabethan underground by Roy Kendall (2004)
• Elizabethan news pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe & the birth of journalism by Paul J. Voss (2001)
• Who killed Kit Marlowe?: a contract to murder in Elizabethan England by M.J. Trow and Taliesin Trow (2001)
• Christopher Marlowe: a literary life by Lisa Hopkins (2000)
  While searching the academic journals for new articles on Marlowe, I've turned up several with intriguing angles by this author. Some of the information may be have been superceded, but I'm curious to explore her POV.
• Playing with desire: Christopher Marlowe and the art of tantalization by Fred B. Tromly (1998)
• Marlowe's counterfeit profession: Ovid, Spenser, counter-nationhood by Patrick Cheney (1997)

Plus two non-Marlowe books that caught my eye:

• The English court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War by David Starkey ... [et al.] (1987)
  I'm really only interested in one of the chapters in this anthology: "The Revival of the entourage: the bedchamber of James I" by Neil Cuddy.
• Shakespeare on the American Yiddish stage by Joel Berkowitz (2002)

And these are just the books (and book reviews) I've found. I haven't even started listing some of the journal articles I'm going to have to try to track down...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:45 PM

By the way, one tidbit I forgot to mention in yesterday's post on Avenue Q.

Before the creative team started on the musical, they collaborated on a spec script for a new Muppet movie for the Henson folks: Kermit, Prince of Denmark.

Poking around the web, I see they've performed a few of the songs for a benefit cabaret.

"The conceit of Kermit, Prince of Denmark was that Kermit the Frog was going to join all the other Muppets in Denver for a skiing vacation and he gets on the wrong plane and ends up in Denmark."

And then, I presume, he got caught up in all kinds of Shakespearean hijinks.

Muppet Shakespeare! I wanna see...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:41 PM

My senior year in college, I took a class called meta-Shakespeare. I've written about it elsewhere: the course covered how later periods dealt with Shakespeare from Dryden's All for love and Nahun Tate's King Lear (with the happy ending) through Rosencranz and Guildenstern are dead all the way up to the "Midsummer Night's Dream" issue of Sandman. [FWIW, this was my introduction to Sandman.]

The class grade was based upon a final paper, and I had hoped to write an essay about Gaiman's use of Shakespeare within Sandman. However, Sandman was still a relatively new comic at that point -- Doll's House was the only extant graphic novel collection -- and there just wasn't much information to be had.

Well, poking about the company databases, I discovered that somebody else has finally written that essay:

"No more yielding than a dream": The Construction of Shakespeare in The Sandman.
 by Annalisa Castaldo, Assistant professor of British Literature, Widener University, Chester, PA
 College Literature; Fall 2004, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p94, 17p

Well, it wasn't me, but I'm glad somebody has finally written it. [I'm actually surprised it took so long -- the article was only published this year!] Interestingly enough, the author neglects to mention Hamnet's brief appearance in Gaiman's The Books of Magic miniseries, instead saying that Hamnet's fate was merely implied. [I suppose I should write the author to inform her of this.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 PM

So, after hearing a track of Avenue Q on WERS' Broadway program (and after hearing numerous friends of ours praise the show) Ian and I picked up a copy of the Avenue Q soundtrack on Saturday as a Chanukah gift for ourselves.

For those unawares, the concept of Avenue Q is a Sesame Street-like program to educate college graduates on the skills needed to get along in the "real world."

Where was this show when we needed it!?

The music is quite clever and catchy.

Wouldn't it be nice if Joe Raposo could have written songs about budgeting or networking or email etiquette? Balancing menus and balancing budgets and how not to behave at the office holiday party... Useful life lessons taught by fuzzy puppets in song and dance?

I think there's a market, people...

Since I wrote the above, I got to thinking about Children's Television Workshop and Schoolhouse Rock and their means of pedagogy. If I were in advertising and creating PSAs for, say, money management or advice for handling credit card debt, I'd see about writing a folk-y tune, hiring Jack Sheldon and animating a short commercial. I mean, why not, we are the target audience and they were proven to work... [Quick! Recite the Preamble to the Constitution!]