I spent most of Friday on the couch, watching DVDs and feeling vaguely unwell. It wasn't much fun, honestly. I watched a few episodes of Twin Peaks, which was a Christmas present. Yay. I checked out a few commentaries, but they're not great so far. To be fair, one of them is by the DP because Lynch doesn't do commentaries. So 75% of it is about the lighting. Honestly, it's all technical notes and what kind of camera and how the film was developed, and a little of that goes a very long way. I finally just gave up and watched the episode instead. Which wasn't really a hardship anyway.

It's nice to see the episodes again looking all shiny and pretty and uncluttered by "Bravo" logos. There also odd extras, including descriptions of scenes that were cut from episodes, and goofy little interviews with the actors. Most of the interviews aren't about the show at all: Richard Beymer talks about visiting a shaman in South America, and Don Davis takes you on a tour of his house (and turns out to be a very interesting guy), and Al Strobel talks about his near-death experience. I'm not sure I've seen everything yet, because the menu is a bit complicated -- it's fun if you're not in a hurry, but if you want to look at something in particular you're going to be frustrated. Which fits the show, actually, so that might be intentional.

After that I needed something mindless, which meant a Buffy overload. Because I also got the season 2 DVDs, whee! That was fun, too, although once again the commentaries aren't terribly enlivening. I do think season 2 is the strongest season, but that's not saying a hell of a lot. I'm still impressed by the way Boreanaz carries himself differently when he's evil. When those episodes first aired, I remember thinking, "Maybe he's not a terrible actor after all; maybe it's just that Angel's really dull when he's got a soul. In which case, Boreanaz does a great job at portraying that! " In retrospect, I think it might just be that he's better at body language than, well, actual language. Because I can think of a few times on Angel when he really had presence until he opened his mouth.

I felt a bit better over the weekend, though still not very energetic. But at least I felt up to watching things I hadn't already seen countless times, so I watched the rest of Blackadder Goes Forth and then Blackadder Back and Forth. I liked the fourth series because it's so depressing. It might have suited my mood, I guess. I also liked the fact that Blackadder himself isn't really that villainous -- he's certainly not a hero, but he's usually just trying to save his own skin. I think that's what I liked about the second series, too; he's not nice, but he's still the most sympathetic character. Which makes it all a bit funnier, at least to me. It also made me want to reread Parade's End, so maybe I'll start on that.

A couple of links, for the hell of it:

• This is neat: Samuel Pepys' diary will be presented day-by-day starting January 1st. With footnotes!

• Last week the Post's Desson Howe had a nice piece about his school days with Joe Strummer.

• And this may be one of those things that everyone else in the world has already seen, but it made me laugh: Fifty Reasons The Lord of the Rings sucks.

Merry Christmas, if you're into that kind of thing. The holiday media onslaught is moving along nicely. I've watched the Twelve Monkeys DVD that some mysterious person or persons sent me. I say that so casually, but of course I gibbered like a freak over it (and the other presents it came with) and if you're reading this: Thanks! You rock.

You know who else rocks? Terry Gilliam. He and one of the producers have a commentary track on the DVD, which was my first stop. They pointed out things I'd never have noticed on my own (that hamster is invisible, I tell you) and talked about details of the production and how badly the first preview went, and Gilliam is just so smart that he fills me with love. At one point he mentioned that he wants to make movies you can watch more than once, and as I've mentioned that's one of my preferred ways to rate movies (and books). Hence the love. I'd like to go on about this in more detail, but I meant to write about it last week so the details are blurring for me.

There's also a documentary of the making of the movie, which shows some of the events they discuss in the commentary. Although it emphasizes the unpleasant aspects a bit more. So you see Gilliam cursing and threatening to quit and so on, and then I want to make him soup. I'm not sure why.

As I mentioned, there were other presents, but I haven't had time to watch them yet so I'll talk about them later. For my birthday I got the Criterion Edition of Rebecca, oooh, aah, which I started watching late one night over the weekend. And then I fell asleep. The commentary track is a bit dry -- well, it's interesting, but it's clearly a script that the guy is reading, so parts of it seem like they were designed to be read rather than heard, and that can make it hard to pay attention. I like a lively commentary. But I haven't gotten very far into it, or looked at the second disk o' extras.

And I got Dave McKean's Cages, which I'm a hundred-odd pages into so far. I actually got two copies, so one of them will be magically transformed into a big pile of other comics whenever I have time to go exchange it.

Oh and lest I forget, Johanna gave me Angel: The Casefiles. And a Faith action figure! So now she's battling one-armed Angel up on my bookcase. Anyhow, the book covers the first two seasons of the show. I don't so much need the episode summaries, because a lot of those details are already taking up far too much space in my brain, but there's also a lot of trivia and quotes from the writers and cast and so on, and it's pretty interesting. My favorite part, though, is this quote from David Boreanaz: "The overall theme is trying to find some sense of making him a mortal in an immortality kind of world." How true that is. I love the fact that they close the book with that. It's like: "P.S. Boreanaz isn't very bright."

I finished the third series of Blackadder, which I didn't like as much as the second, but I liked the second series an awful lot, so I think some disappointment was inevitable. And I started watching Blackadder Goes Forth. I think the problem with series 2 was that Hugh Laurie is too dumb to be much of an antagonist. It's more fun when Blackadder has to deal with people who are actively working against him, as opposed to people who are just dopey. And series 4 has Stephen Fry all the time! And he's dopey and working against Blackadder, which is an excellent combination, so I'm enjoying that a lot.

Oh, here's a hopeless request. I'm trying to remember a short story that was a series of nested stories -- like, "It was a dark and stormy night. Some Indians were sitting by a campfire. Suddenly the Chief stood up and said, 'It was a dark and stormy night. Some Indians were sitting...'" You know the style, right? Okay, it's a story like that, but with more complicated scenarios, possibly involving WW2. Or WW1. Or, quite possibly what with the nested stories, both. And it might be by John Sladek. But it might not. I've looked over his bibliography and none of the titles jumped out at me, but that doesn't signify much. If you have any idea what it is, please email me. I don't think it's very likely that anyone will know what I'm talking about, but on the other hand, if you're reading this it seems like you might read the same things I do, and you might remember the story. Right? It's worth a shot, at least.

During my extended vacation, I read Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost. And that's all. Okay, I also read an in-flight magazine, and a "we're calling this a magazine although it's just page after page of advertising for Vegas shows," but I don't think they count. Anyway. Back to the book. I had originally thought it'd be a good selection for the trip because 1) it's a great big huge book and would last for at least a week; and 2) it's a historical mystery, which isn't normally my favorite genre, so I thought that I'd find it a bit dull. So I figured I'd have a better shot at getting through it if I had no other reading options.

I was right about it lasting for the whole week -- barely. I was wrong about finding it dull. In fact, it ended up being a good selection for the trip for the unanticipated reason that, if I'd read it at home, I'd probably have stayed up all night reading it. And then I still wouldn't have finished it because it's huge, and I'd have been exhausted at work and come home and stayed up all night again finishing it, and then I'd have died of exhaustion. All things considered, it's just as well I went on a vacation. I started the book on the plane going out, read it pretty steadily every night , and finally finished it about halfway through the flight back. That's the story of me reading a book. I don't know that it's a very good story, but I'm terribly pleased because usually I either take too many books or not enough, and this just worked out perfectly.

But I'm even more pleased that I really, really liked it. I wasn't reading it in Vegas for lack of anything better to do, you know. In fact, I'm probably going to reread (or re-skim, at least) it this weekend. And maybe take notes. Just a few. Shut up.

Okay, okay. The book itself. There are four parts, each of which has a different narrator who events in Oxford in the 1660's. Each narrator also describes their own history to some extent, and details other events ranging throughout England, so that while some situations turn up in several tales, others are unique to one person's story. And the events that overlap are sometimes described very differently. Insert Rashomon reference here. But it's more than just different perspectives -- each character has their own background and prejudices, and their knowledge changes how you viewed the earlier stories, and the other characters. So, for instance, it's only around page 635 that you learn what the first narrator was really doing in England.

Oh yeah, and there's a murder. It, and the resulting trial and execution, are mentioned by each narrator, and while it's fairly easy to tell who is wrong when they all are leveling accusations, it's harder to figure out who dunnit. The final revelation is a tiny bit anticlimactic, I suppose, but that's also rather appropriate.

I'm the farthest thing from knowledgeable about the period, so I can't speak too much for the book's accuracy, although given the notes in the back and what I've dug up online, it certainly seems to have been researched diligently. But speaking just as my dopey self, it was great at conveying what is essentially an alien world. The political and religious overtones of virtually everything, the way the characters speak to each other, their analysis of each others' behavior, all help create a world that's completely consistent and also very strange. Discussions of what how we evaluate our beliefs comes up repeatedly, and each narrator has their own standards for making "reasonable" assumptions.

And there are wonderful bits that read ironically while staying in character. One of my early favorites is: "When an experiment was to begin, all women were excluded for fear their irrational natures would influence the result..." There's a lot going on in that line. The early steps toward scientific method contrasted with the sexism, plus the joke that the "rational" men don't question the idea that merely having a woman in the same room will contaminate their experiment. A little something for everybody!

There are a lot of little jokes like that, and just flipping through the first few chapters I found more that are only apparent on a second reading (after you have a better idea of what's motives the other characters have). I love books that reward rereading that way. One of the reasons I want to look at it again this weekend is that I have a theory I want to double-check. Oh, and in the "hooray for me" category; I'm glad I knew about the Diggers already because otherwise I probably would have thought Sarah's beliefs were anachronistic.

I looked at a lot of the "reviews" at Amazon because I find that sort of thing interesting. Some people complained about developments in the final section. I can understand their reaction, and I suspect that I might have had a harder time with some of the developments if I hadn't read the book in rather concentrated bursts. Although I also think it's a mistake to assume that the fourth narrator is that much more reliable than the first. Plus, and this is a hint, I think it's quite intentional that the murder isn't the only mystery in the book.

Robin Pen has a blog, and if you like SF movies, you should go read it. His most recent posting, "Spielberg's 2001" pretty well covers everything I hate about Spielberg. Except he left out the scene where there's a child in peril. But he makes up for it with the description of John Williams' score. My advice is to go read that entry, and then go back to the start and read them all. He's a funny guy with some great recommendations. His main focus is movies, but there some digressions from time to time. Oh, and there are some interesting things to read in his discussion board, including occasional rants from Paul Riddell, who I've been missing.

I've been rereading some more Douglas Adams and whatever else I happen to pick up for an hour or two. Last night I reread parts of Horace Walpole's Hieroglyphic Tales, which I've meant to mention occasionally except I don't know how to talk about it. I suppose I'll try. Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto, which is considered the first Gothic novel. I've heard it's great fun, and deeply strange, and terrible in some ways, and so I want to read it. From what little I know, I suspect that the important thing is to avoid taking it seriously.

The stories in Hieroglyphic Tales were written around 1770. They're very peculiar, but not dated. As with Don Quixote, I kept being surprised by how modern the stories sounded. They're are sort of fanciful parodies of fairy tales, with a lot of absurd humor and satire, and they remind me a little of Oscar Wilde. Although with more flourishes and stranger plots. Yes, really. In his preface, Walpole claims that these are long-lost stories that he has unearthed, and tries to determine who the author was: "We might ascribe them with great probability to Kemanrlegorpikos, son of Quot; but besides that we are not certain that any such person ever existed, it is not clear if he ever wrote any thing but a book of cookery, and that in heroic verse." I think that gives you a sense of it. It's very strange, and quite funny.

I'm about halfway through series 3 of Blackadder. And I watched Blackadder's Christmas Carol to get into the holiday spirit.

I also keep getting sucked into terrible television. My cable remote died mysteriously (no, it wasn't just the batteries), and it took a week or so before I had time to go exchange it for one that worked. While I could technically change channels with the cable box, that meant going up or down through each station and it was awfully tiresome, so I mostly stuck to the 10-channel range where the big networks are. And nothing was on, so I got a lot of chores done. Now I have a working remote again, so the weekend's been a haze of E! and channel surfing and my brain's turned to jelly.

But I did get a few things done today despite all that. Oh, here's a handy tip for the holiday season: if you must go near/to a mall on the weekend, go late. At this point it seems that everyone goes early to beat the rush, which means that there's actually no rush in the afternoon. This is all lead-up to the fact that I hit the comic shop. (I did get some other things done, too, but you don't care about that.) I got:

• Straczynski's Rising Stars #20. Isn't this done yet? I mean, it's fine. It's... fine. With the.. stuff. I don't know. I never cared much about the characters, who were all different shades of self-righteous jerks. So I'm vaguely interested in the story, but I don't feel very involved. As I've said before, it might read better when I can go through it all in a few hours. As a serial, it just feels like an obligation at this point.

• As did Ellis' Global Frequency #2. I haven't actually finished reading it. After about 7 pages I was hit with an even stronger wave of ennui. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for comics today. I can see why it would be fun, and I don't think it's bad. It seems to be a big blazing-guns SF anthology series where they defeat powerful baddies every month, and would it be really mean for me to say that it's a superhero book without the spandex? Or is that the point? I'm not sure. But it doesn't interest me. I may finish this issue later, just because it's here, but unless there's something amazing in there, I quit.

• Luckily, before I lose faith completely, there's Ellis' MEK #1. The artwork is very cartoony and flat, which I kind of like. It's not dazzling; I didn't open it and say, "ooo, purty," but it's also not a muddy mess, which is what tends to happen if you try to do super-realistic art on a monthly schedule. It's about a lobbyist for "physical freedom," the right to have cyberpunk-style body modification, who returns to her old haunts to find out who killed her ex. Or something like that. So there are a lot of people in cool outfits with cool enhancements sitting around and being cool at each other. Although they speak clear English, so it's not completely like cyberpunk, but that's all to the good.

Oh, and on Thanksgiving we played "Chez Geek" and "Ra." We've played "Ra" before and I like it, and not just because you get to say "Ra!" a lot. There's a good description of it here which saves me the trouble of describing how to play. It's not as complicated as it sounds; as with many games, once you play a round you get the idea very quickly. The multiple ways to score is a very cool feature. I did very badly in the first round, and actually lost points, but I made up a lot of ground in the following turns. Granted, I still came in last because I was so far behind after that, but it wasn't hopeless. Which is all I ask. I hate games where you can tell after the first turn that you're doomed.

And I think I've talked about "Chez Geek" before, so briefly: it's a card game where all of the players are roommates, and you're trying to gain a certain amount of "slack" (points) by collecting items or people or doing activities. Tattoos, cats, and live-in SO's all give you slack. It's slightly chaotic, since some cards can be played at any time to keep you from doing things, and I think the more people you play with the better, because that keeps things changing rapidly. It's fun, and there are lots of geeky jokes on the cards.