Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Please note: these questions pertain to works of fiction and use of deities/spirits therein, not to interactions with deities/spirits in your real-world belief system. Also, if you answer that the use of Japanese spirits in fiction gives you a pain, no one will assume that you mean all such uses. Just that uses that give you a pain tend to crop up, that many authors have a habit of annoying you by using these elements badly or frustratingly.



I hope my package from Otto's comes today.

lydy was surprised and amused by the vehemence of my answer to the first question at dinner last night, which is why I thought to have a silly poll of this sort to begin with.

N random things make an entry!

1. This morning our package from Otto arrived! So far we have only opened one bag of chocolates, but they are very fine. So apparently we were good children after all. Also we have enough paprika sausage to feed an army, or alternately to feed ourselves for a month or even two.

2. While I was out walking Ista, it flurried beautifully! Snow blew in our faces and she danced and I laughed and passersby smiled at us involuntarily. A few smiled voluntarily, but you can see the difference in how it comes on their faces.

3. Tomorrow I leave for Omaha in the mid-afternoon. I will be going to my cousin's baby shower and to a family Christmas event. I will return Sunday evening. I will try to get a functional lj phone-post number on my cell phone before we leave, but other than that I will not be in internet contact until Sunday night. Be interesting without me, and if something absolutely needs to be said, tell markgritter or timprov; they can relay it to me.

4. Here is an example of why I liked "Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" more than I thought I would: in the funeral scene, when everyone is saying the Lord's Prayer, the camera didn't linger on Stephen Maturin's face. So it wasn't obvious. But when all the C-of-E and/or Dissenter Prots got to "for thine is the kingdom," Stephen shut his mouth. Like he would, because Catholics tend not to say that part. If the camera had lingered on his face while he was doing it, it would have annoyed me, because doing a dance about how true they were to the characters would have been just as bad as not being true at all. No, it was off to the side of the shot, and I actually had to rewind on the DVD player to be sure, but it was there: Maturin was behaving like Maturin when only a few persnickety geeks would notice or care.

papersky characterized this movie as fanfic for the books, and I think she's mostly right. It wasn't that I thought Russell Crowe was Jack Aubrey so much as that evoked Jack Aubrey, and that was enough for a few hours of spectacle, and more than I really expected. It was like -- I think it was like having actual historical figures cast, actually. Where you think, well, he's clearly not Louis XIII or Abraham Lincoln or whomever else, but he'll do as a stand-in; the thing can continue uninterrupted and unargued, as long as we all know that this man is an actor and not the real Jack Aubrey.

Yes, I know there is no real Jack Aubrey. Except that there is, in the books. Perfectly real and himself. So.