Richard Dansky's Blog, page 53

No ****. Sherlock.

Saw Sherlock Holmes with friends Saturday night, though a schedule accident meant that we also spent some time A)standing in line at the Five Guys in the Southpoint Food Court and B)playing a card game purchased at the games'n'calendars kiosk in said food court. The kiosk in question was manned by a young lady who was so intent on her crossword puzzle that she didn't notice me A)standing in front of the register, B)waving money C)doing my best old-style Questie "I Am A Tree" routine or D)doin...

Aha! There You Are!

The hardest lost item in the world to locate are lost glasses, for obvious reasons.

Fortunately, mine turned out to be exactly where I'd left them. It just took me a week to remember where exactly that was.

On the bright side, having my vision slightly fuzzed may in fact have improved the Daybreakers experience.

Booksquee

I make no bones about the fact that I'm an avid reader of material about ghosts, cryptozoology and other high strangeness. This does not indicate that I am a believer in said weirdness; I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic when it comes to various flavors of fruitbattery. On one hand, I've had folks I know and respect tell me about some very strange things they've seen, and not just in Massachusetts. On the other, I'm rather fond of the scientific method, the laws of physics, and the pr...

Daybreakers

Or, as I like to call it, Ethan Hawke wears Han Solo's wardrobe in Way, Way, Way Before Sunrise.

Yes, I understand that it's a metaphor for Peak Oil and rampant consumerism. That being said, if your fight scenes and dramatic moments are equally giggle-worthy, if your entire plot depends on a combination of everyone being incredibly stupid and you breaking the rules of your own story as needed for airquote-dramatic effect, if you put a loaded vampire on the mantelpiece in act one and not only d...

The Full Monti

Went to The Monti storytelling session tonight over at Alevia's, courtesy of the mighty Badger. Oddly enough, we'd tried to go to Alevia's once before for dinner, only to get shut out because the Monti had taken it over for the evening. This time, Badger wasn't taking any chances.

There were five storytellers up tonight, plus the suitably loquacious host. Stories, all with the theme of "inspiration", ranged from explaining what to do when you've got wasps down your pants and a defensive end ch...

Memo to RTP-Area Newscasters

Please stop referring to the current weather as "unseasonably cold". It is not unseasonably cold. It may be unusually cold. It may be extremely cold. It may be colder than usual. But it is not unseasonably cold, seeing as this is winter, the season when it gets cold.

Thank you.

PS-The next time you threaten the Triangle with an impending snowstorm, I expect brief but intense glaciation. Otherwise, I will have no choice but to assume that you are on Food Lion's payroll, and merely invent these m...

The Imaginarium of Eddie Riggs

Just a thought on my entertainment choices, as I wrap up the last boss battle in Brutal Legend : I play games designed by Tim Schafer for the same reason I go to see movies directed by Terry Gilliam: Regardless of anything else, I'm guaranteed to see something I've never seen before.

Dark Faith Available for pre-order

C'mon. You know you want to. All that writerly goodness, with stories from Brian Keene, Gary Braunbeck, Tom Piccirilli, Lucy Snyder, and more? Resistance is futile (or something to that effect).

The Fine Print

Anyone buying a band's rarities and outtakes album has no excuse to bitch. I mean, if you're buying a disc labeled that way, you know what you're getting into: the weird stuff, the versions they didn't want to put on the record, the covers they recorded for the hell of it. With that in mind, I have absolutely nothing to say about the cover of "Like a Rolling Stone" that closes the Drive-By Truckers' "The Fine Print" CD. Besides, the bile-soaked riff on Zevon's "Play It All Night Long" two tra...

SorbetWatch

Going out to visit Melinda's aunt on the farm generally involves a lot of cooking, and a lot of that involves "What are we going to do with X?" X, in this case, involved a trio of angry-looking grapefruit. Normally, I'd say "Let's make sorbet!", but Aunt Dolores doesn't have an ice cream maker.

Dear friend (and co-author) John Hay, however, does, and was kind enough to share it.

So the grapefruit turned into an exercise in improvisational sorbeting, as I didn't have my usual cookbook to fall ba...