Friday,
April 4, 2008

Article Sale!

Circlet Press, my first publisher, accepted my article "The (String) Art of Writing" and it's now up on their website! Coolness!

Okay, that wasn't smart

I wore an old pair of dress shoes to a job interview yesterday. The shoes have absolutely no support whatsoever; as a result of spending a couple of hours in them yesterday morning and afternoon, my feet are screaming imprecations at me and threatening to have Tony Soprano break my kneecaps. How that's going to help them, I have no idea -- they're not really au fait with the whole nervous and circulatory system dealie.

Since 1) our taxes are ready for pickup and 2) Lyndon needs my office as temporary storage space while he reorganizes his office, I'll be out and about tomorrow (attention stalkers!), so I think I will be hitting the shoe stores and see if I can find any decent flats with some sort of arch support. I have slip-in supports, of course, but if the shoes are fairly low as flats usually are, the supports lift my feet just enough so that the backs rub hell out of my heels. Damn, but I miss my nice Dr. Scholl Mary-Janes.

I know this must be fascinating. I'll shut up now.

In other news, we went to see The Other Boleyn Girl tonight. I'd read the book, which was thoroughly entertaining; the movie, meh, not so much, mainly because they chopped out two fairly major subplots (George Boleyn's homosexuality and his wife's wacko jealousy, and Thomas Stafford's romance of Mary Boleyn Carey) and softpedaled another (the charge of incest between George and Anne -- in the movie they change their minds at the last moment, whereas in the book it's fairly clear that George reluctantly fathered Anne's badly deformed and stillborn son) in favor of making Henry look like, well, a complete clot (TOBG has the dubious honor of making Showtime's The Tudors look nuanced and historically accurate), and giving Kristen Scott-Thomas, as Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, way more screen time than her character rated in the book. As I love metaconnections, I was amused to see Scott-Thomas paired up again with Mark Rylance, who was her character's love interest in Angels and Insects; this time, he played the much put-upon Sir Thomas Boleyn who winds up whoring out both daughters to the king only to lose one of them and his only son to the executioner's block. In short, sucks to be him.

As for the main love triangle, Scarlett Johansson was overly bland and martyr-like (I don't blame her so much as the script -- by chopping out the Stafford subplot you never really had a chance to see Mary grow and take control of her life), Natalie Portman portrayed Anne as the Tudor equivalent of Glenn Close in bunny boiling mode, and Eric Bana didn't really have much else to do but stomp around and brood about his lack of an heir. Lyndon put it very succinctly when he said, "I just wanted to reach into the movie and start slapping some sense into them."

On the plus side, the costumes were gorgeous and the scenery lovely, so it wasn't a complete waste of celluloid -- if you can catch a matinee showing and save some money, do so.

<< Back  |  Email  |  Home  |  About  |  Forward >>