Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters'
Finished the audiobook of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Read by the author: sounded a bit monotone and halting at first, but soon got used to it. Actually works out better than the shouty-whispery readings of over-dramatic actors, since I can actually hear it consistently over the traffic noise on the way to work.
Plot concerns a character who grows up in Afghanistan, eventually fleeing to the US. Veers oddly between kitchen-sink realism and lurid melodrama. Works pretty well at times: he's good at ratcheting up the suspense and creating a sense of doomed inevitability. Problem is Hosseini's not so good at resolving it: you get a big climax and then a bunch of droning on about trivia.
Would probably work better on paper where you can appreciate the descriptions and the set-pieces, and skim through the boring stuff.
Review, review, review, review. Amazon.com.
Next up is another Teaching Company course: Argumentation. 24 lectures on classical rhetoric and logic.
Words, watching
Liked this series of Dr Who. The last one seemed a bit uneven in quality, but this was
better. Season finale was a bit silly, but that's what Dr Who is all about.
I think people are getting a bit loose with the term "deus ex machina" though (as seen in this metachat thread), as if it means "any ending I didn't like". If an ending is foreshadowed and achieved by the characters efforts, it's not a deus ex machina. In Dr Who, the psychic satellite network was heavily foreshadowed as being important, and achieved by the Martha Jones efforts in wandering the globe. It might be stupid, but that doesn't make it a deus ex machina.
Also, I quite liked the way it was imaginative. The people complaining about this seem to be perfectly happy with drearily predictable endings. Do we really want yet another ending where he runs down some corridors and sabotages a machine with his sonic screwdriver?
And there seems to be something creepily propagandistic about the whole concept. All plots must portray the idea that the heroes always win and always by their own efforts. I've seen complaints that the end of the War of the Worlds is a deus ex machina, which completely misses the whole irony of the ending.
Watching 2
Finished series 3 of
The Wire.
Found it quite disturbing when Stringer Bell died. I was sure
that he was going to kill Avon Barksdale rather than vice versa.
I even dreamt about being killed in the same way.
I keep going on about The Wire to people but I never seem to be able to explain why it's so good. Everyone just thinks "oh, it's just another cop show." It doesn't have a Unique Selling Point. I just find it interesting because:
- "We are bored with good and evil". No goodies, no baddies, just characters
- No "PREVIOUSLY ON THE WIRE!", no flashbacks. It's designed to look and feel more real
- Complicated plots. Realistic characters.
- Realistic politics, in both the gangs and the police. It's the only cop show where things work the way the real world works. People work at cross purposes, and egos and rivalries undermine everyone's goals.
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