Merry Christmas everyone, see you all in the New Year! I’ll resume posting sometime in January.

Oh and Merry Christmas from my little girl and Santa too!

Not only is this hilarious and utterly genius, it’s also highly useful to anyone who wants to become a writer. A must watch.

It’s hard to maintain a career as a writer when places make decisions like this.

A major metropolitan area has decided to close its last bookstore.

LA Times.

Finally saw it. Here’s my take, for what it;’s worth.

To say that Avatar is like Dances with Wolves is to do a disservice to Xerox machines everywhere.

Yet I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’s not like Cameron hasn’t done this sort of thing before. read Crichton’s Congo then watch Aliens. It’s the same thing.

In this case though, I think the decision was absolutely intentional. I’m “fairly” sure the idea was to clothe the Na’vi in familiar themes so that at their heart they were familiar to us, and immediately sympathetic, while they looked goofy and alien. It makes the audience see past the differences.

I thought it was a brilliant piece of film making. And I don’t say this lightly. I thought the trailers were the most god awful cheese-fests ever assembled. Those things damn near killed the movie at birth.

I know this much. I really want to see it again.

On a final note, I particularly enjoyed the floating islands. When I was 12 or 13 (back in the early 1980s) I entered a drawing contest where I drew a bunch of floating islands with a rider on the back of a flying bird type thing, flying past them. I have the sketch somewhere. I should dig it out.

Site was offline most of today. After some tinkering everything seems to be working again.