So, I’m now four books into the Discworld series and I think I will keep going with it (only 33 more to go). Mort is another underdog-type story that I always enjoy and, on top of that, it has an imaginative take on what it must be like to be the grim reaper.
Rhino knows how to put together a great compilation and this 24-track “Best of” Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs is no exception. I already had this 70s “Best Of” record. I think all of those songs are represented here and there’s about dozen or so more without a stinker in the bunch (well “Big Blue Diamonds” is not that good, but I’ll give it a pass). There is also the added bonus of a nice thick booklet filled with detailed history and a few photos.
Aside from the laugh-out-loud “twist” finale involving a cat, a bag and a car driving down a winding road, this was, overall, a pretty crappy Fulci film. There wasn’t even that much signature close-up gore to keep things interesting. The story felt like it would have been better served if it were simply a 22 minute Twilight Zone style tele-play rather than a full-length feature.
Another collection of analog synth laden songs from the members of Poster Children. This one feels a bit more focused and less sloppy than their debut EP. Still, these are loose, live feeling songs and not sequenced laptop tracks. I had always hoped that Poster Children would have incorporated more of this experimentation in their records too, but, alas, that never really happened. The CD includes a bunch of obsolete CD-ROM multimedia that crashes in a modern OS.
The Rutles make you realize just how unique, yet weirdly predictable the Beatles were. Although intended as a joke, the lyrics are not too far off the mark of actual Beatles songs. In fact, I may actually prefer most of these songs simply because they have a sense of humor about them. Stuff like, “Although I may not be a man of words, yeah, yeah” is just great. This CD makes me want to be a hair dresser, or two. I’d like to be two hair dressers.
Don’t Look Now is known mostly for Donald Sutherland’s naked gyrations. I was more impressed with his hobbit-y mop of hair. I thought the movie was overly long and boring. It’s supposed to be horror movie, but you would know that if left before the last four minutes. For the most part it is mostly just people walking around Venice and being dull.
I liked the original Dead Space well enough. The sequel is just more of the same endless dark hallways, jump scares, limb shooting and occasional weightless environment. This makes for some mindless fun, but, like the first game I was just yearning for a little variety.
The story is okay. Once again there’s that marker thingy that kills everyone but for some reason humans keep trying to rebuild it. I guess your job is to destroy it, or find out why you were hospitalized or find out why you keep seeing a ghost or something like that. It doesn’t really matter. Just shoot the arms and grab the ammo. Oh, and then there’s a Fulci-esque eye gouging scene that makes even less narrative sense an actual Fulci plot. If it’s any consolation, your character gets to speak a few lines of dialogue and we get to see what he looks like under that glowing knight’s helmet.
I am not usually a non-fiction reader outside of the occasional political tome, but I bought this after it was recommended by Virginia Postrel on her Twitter feed (and it was a 99¢ deal of the day on Amazon). To demonstrate how the brain’s chemical processes effect decision making, the author uses various real world examples like a quarterback picking a receiver, a pilot crash landing a plane and a world champion poker player. The anecdotes themselves are very interesting and on top of those there are quite a few examples of weird psychological studies. You know the sort: a patient’s brain is missing region X and because of this he can’t do Y. These are always fun to learn about but somewhat depressing when it begins to seem like everything we think, feel or do is because of some chemical fluctuation in our frontal lobe.
Like many one-hit-wonders, that one hit (in this instance “Never Say Never”) sounds completely different than the rest of the band’s songs. On most of the other tracks the screeching, insane saxophone is replaced with a more standard 80s smooth jazz sound—the kind of thing you would hear on a failed late night talk show’s theme song. I wonder if Romeo Void ever played on the Pat Sajak show? Anyhow, this isn’t to say the rest of CD is bad. It’s just less punk-y. The free-form poetic lyrics are still there and many of the tracks like “Charred Remains” and “White Sweater” have nice groovy bass lines to hang your hat on.
The third Discworld novel starts a completely new storyline with no crossover with the first two books. I actually liked this better than the other books because it hit on the sort of underdog themes that I always tend to find appealing: a young girl is trying to become the first female admitted into the school of wizardry. As with the other books in the series, this one is filled with vivid, interesting characters and silly anachronisms aplenty.
