Warning: The following are the disjointed ramblings of somebody trying to return to blogging after a months-long absence. Read at your own peril. Spoilers are few, but this will likely only make sense if you’ve seen the movie and/or read some Sherlock Holmes.

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Kyle Smith really, really didn’t like Sherlock Holmes. Despite a large and growing set of indications that his tastes and mine are quite dissimilar, I have every respect for his powers of analysis and rhetoric and thus almost let his opinion talk me out of seeing it. That would have been a huge mistake.

I must be getting soft in my old age, because at first glance, almost everything Kyle said about the differences between Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock and Conan Doyle’s seems true, and yet I found the movie to be great fun, brainy, and even very moving. Almost everything Kyle said about the banal one-liners is true too, but he apparently let them overshadow the real dialogue, of which there was plenty, and the clever pacing and excellent fight scenes, which took what what is by now a very old formula about the working of Holmes’s mind and gave it new life.

This movie is like Sherlock Holmes as the Illusionist Meets the Pirates of the Caribbean at Fight Club, but for all that, it’s a great movie in which the spirit of Holmes does, in fact, despite his seeming differences from his literary namesake, rise again.

When I saw the trailer I knew the movie would be radically unlike Doyle’s Holmes. I was originally prepared to like it in spite of that–Kurt Loder’s comment that they should have called it Robert Downey Junior instead of Sherlock Holmes was right on the money–but I was not prepared for both how much I did like it and how much of Holmes still lived in it. Ritchie and his screenwriters accomplished something I wouldn’t have believed possible if I’d anticipated it beforehand: They made a new Holmes true to the old one. People keep telling me J.J. Abrams has accomplished this with Star Trek, too, but I’ve yet to suspend my disbelief for a couple hours and watch it. The thing is, with this Holmes, the supposed differences from Doyle turn out to be mostly on the surface, and they’re mostly showed up only by other cinematic renderings of Holmes. They tend to sink in significance or disappear altogether when compared to Doyle’s actual stories. (more…)

Him, throwing a small fit over a seemingly minor issue.

Me: “I think you must be tired.”

Him, wailing: “You always say I’m tired and I never am.”

Me: “When you throw a fit like this over things that aren’t a big deal, I think it must be because you’re tired.”

Him: “Well, I’m not.”

Me: “Then I guess you must need some cuddles and some kisses!” (Suiting action to the word.)

Him: “No, I don’t need anything except my way.”

Earlier than expected: NBC has ordered six more episodes and will likely bring Chuck back in January rather than March. Hallelujah.

Got it from Instapundit.

I see the attraction of Twilight. I’m nearing the end of the first book, and my editing hand is not as twitchy as you might think. Past the obvious, the obsessive love story, there is a powerful attraction in a pack of potential monsters who have perfected their own small civilization willing to use their powers to protect you, personally, against all comers.

It’s the same thing that made Logan Echolls the hands-down winner over Duncan Kane in Veronica Mars. It’s pretty hard to resist.

Interviewing Rod Blagojevich and using words unfamiliar to him, such as “accountable.” Apparently it kind of pissed him off.

Blagojevich became so riled by the questioning, Hunt jokingly asked for “a sidebar.”

“You went to law school, I didn’t,” she says. “I’m only a nurse, but I might inject you with something just to get you to quiet down.”

If we can’t have any more movies like Return to Me, at least we can hope she’s going to keep interviewing bigger and bigger politicians in the same way.

Via Hot Air headlines.

And never go soft on the ones who did it and all of their partners in heinous murder.

RIP, Mr. Kelley, your coworkers, airline pilots and passengers, firefighters and police.

I have one of those “amazed at obvious, mundane stuff” moments when I consider how many children have been born since 9/11 who have no clue yet and who won’t have to for some years to come, when they’re learning about the attack as history. My father was born seven years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I wonder how old he was before he learned about it? My own child was born two years after 9/11, and I feel a sense of relief for his kindergarten teacher that she won’t have to be the one to try to tell her classes about it.

Never forget, for sometime you will need to talk about it with your children and help them understand sufficiently but not excessively. There is not much call for making them feel the shock and the tears I felt as I watched a tower burn and crumble on TV, but they will need to understand what some people are capable of. Eventually. But thank God, not today, for them. Only for those of us who were alive and aware–who remember, as they never will. Never forget, because as a limited number of people who remember, we’re called upon to do so.

Fox picks up “sci-fi western with a twist.”

Because of the adoration for and longevity of Firefly, oh and, um, Brisco County, Jr., right?

Saaaaaad.

Cutting to the chase: Nine hundred-plus Dragon*Con participants doing the “Thriller” dance in hopes of breaking the Guinness record. They start out well, some sputter a little in the middle, but they don’t seem to run out of gas.

It surprises me occasionally what sinks deep into the cultural part of my brain and psyche without me being totally aware of it. I’ve never been a Michael Jackson fan; I acknowledged his talent but disliked watching him grab his crotch and for the most part despised his vocal style. When he died, I thought Sippican had summed it up best, well before his death: Did you know Michael Jackson could sing?

But Quincy’s magnum opus was fixing it so you didn’t notice that the greatest child soul singer, ever, couldn’t sing a lick anymore. Every bit of Quincy’s talents were needed to foist this future circus freak on the public, when the freak had nothing left in the tank but a visually disorienting dance step. And Quincy kept moving the musical cups around so you couldn’t find the little ball under the one marked “He can’t sing.” Because poor old Michael couldn’t sing a lick after his Adams Apple showed up.

… it was over for Michael when his voice changed, and he knew it. And it’s probably what drove him crazy. And if Michael Jackson is anything, it’s crazy.

Perhaps you’d go crazy too, if you were given that gift, and then it was taken away from you like that. And it is a gift. Michael’s father Joe couldn’t beat that sound out of Tito or Jermaine, after all, no matter how hard he tried. Michael had it, and out it came.

So I had a lot of sympathy for Michael Jackson (notably after his death, however), and a certain amount of grief and disgust over an American talent and celebrity descending into a not-quite-psychotic mental twlight, but wasn’t what I would call a fan. So I can’t really explain why I actually got tears in my eyes over this: Nine hundred-plus Dragon*Con participants doing the “Thriller” dance in hopes of breaking the Guinness record. They start out well, some sputter a little in the middle, but they don’t seem to run out of gas.

Is it worth what he went through and what he became to have such a deep and lasting impact on people? I don’t know. What does that impact consist of? Individual resonance, certainly, but also shared cultural watermarks and experience. Sharing that experience over millions of people is no small feat, notwithstanding the fact that of course he never did it alone. How frustrating that the bigger the celebrity, the bigger potential for a harder fall into a nastier trough–harder because even if he/she gets away with whatever he/she pulls, the public knows and never forgets, and nastier because for whatever they do to whomever, it’s played out on national television. RIP, Michael Jackson.

I wondered, as I watched the video, how they taught all those people all those moves in the proper order; it’s not a short song, after all. Check it out:

H/t: Calisuri.

Oh, and when the government’s also responsible for building an extension onto your housing: 1) If you disagree with or question the government doctors, the government social workers take your children; 2) If you question the government’s failure to provide the proper housing, the government social workers say you can’t care for your child because you lack adequate housing and they take your children.

This is chilling.

Via Instapundit.

If your name were “Squitiro,” wouldn’t you probably go ahead and take your husband’s name, even if it was “Funkhouser?”

No, wait. You’re crazy.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. Isn’t it pretty? Matches my writing table, an’ all. I do wonder if Mr. S grumbles as he paints over the grain of tiger maple, though. Still haven’t decided what kind of Sippican I’ll get next. Did you know he has a nifty little branding iron that puts the maker’s mark onto the underside of the wood? So that when your stuff goes up for estate sale, somebody will say, “Hey look, a Sippican, I have to bid on that.” No use looking for it in thrift stores before that; who would part with a Sippican voluntarily?

Not I.

And amen.