Today’s Rhapsody is Jericho by Morton Guild.
http://youtu.be/IVHIQh6AhcE
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Well, after being inundated with ads for it on YouTube all day I gave into temptation and checked out SyFy‘s latest show Defiance. SyFy hasn’t really had anything that’s impressed me since Farscape but as I’m always on the lookout for good Science Fiction on television I always dare hope.
Regrettably Defiance will not be the one for me. The pilot was inoffensive enough that I’ll be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and see how it is once it gets it pace going having gotten the baggage of exposition over with in the pilot, but I have my doubts.
What they promised was an epic story of a community recovering from the ravages of an alien “invasion” and the integration of the seven alien races into human civilization. What we got felt like a cross between Eureka and Deadwood with just about every cliche you can think of… New Lawman with a past… An idealistic but naive and extremely green Mayor.. a cantankerous town Doctor… a hooker with a heart of gold… and oh yeah there’s a conspiracy in the back ground driving the story… the list goes on.
The look of the show is all over the place. Half the time it’s inspired suggesting an interesting future society the rest of the time they’re going for a recycled Mad Max feel. It’s like they trying to have the best of both worlds and end contradicting themselves constantly.
Another little thing, perhaps I am being overly PC, but this had to be the most noticeably vanilla show I’ve seen in a long time. Seriously besides Graham Greene and one of the deputies there were more aliens than non whites.
Anyway here’s hoping what could be an interesting premise rise from this mediocre start and become something good.
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During my free time this weekend I was playing with a bit of fan art involving a comical Game of Thrones/MLP: Friendship is Magic crossover. (Yes I know please don’t judge me) which involved the “buzzard” that has appeared in the background in several cartoons. This got me to thinking the representation of vultures in cartoons.
Vultures are usually convenient shorthand for looming disaster and death and this symbolism and humor in American cartoons has continued in figures like Beaky Buzzard in early Warner Brothers cartoons to Sarcophagus MacAbre in Pogo and onward (the one from MLP: Friendship is Magic is a bit of a subversion as while it looks extremely sinister it is clearly one of Fluttershy’s animal friends.) But one thing that always interests me is despite most of these vultures are generally cartoon versions of an old world vulture as opposed to a “buzzard” (a nickname for new world vultures, specifically the Turkey Vulture) for example that ruff most of them probably comes from a Griffon Vulture (though to be fair some Condors have them too. ) The MLP “buzzard” looks a lot more like a Turkey Vulture then most of it’s cartoon predecessors but again they kept the ruff.
The other thing I was thinking about was the use of the word buzzard as a word for an American Vulture. The original meaning (and the meaning that is still in use in Europe) is a Hawk of the genus Buteo or more generally a hawk with with broad wings and a broad tail. Because of this I find myself wondering how “Buzzard”, meaning Vulture, caught on when settlers and taxonomists in the new world would be fully aware of “real buzzards”, like the Red-Tail Hawk, flying around.
Update: After throwing this question around for most of the morning I was pointed towards the Vulture Society Page. Which speculated that since there are no vultures in the British isles (and thus no English word for vulture) the word Buzzard was used by settlers as a catch all term for any large soaring bird.
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I’ve been enjoying the I fucking love science page on Facebook for some time courtesy of the brilliant Elise Andrew. She always has some really great informative tidbits that really make my day. But this… this has got to go viral!
If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when someone says that someone sticking to their views no matter what the new information says is a form of integrity. No. It’s a form of denial and unwillingness to take the next step.
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You may have noticed I don’t have a museum sketch today.
There are two reasons for that the first is I was kind of scraping the barrel for material today where the only thing I hadn’t shared yet was something from the Seattle Art Museum’s Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough exhibit. It was one of those sketches, while not technically bad, was one I had really screwed the pooch on. I’d gotten the scale of the figures completely out of whack. In my defense the gallery was packed and I really have trouble getting into my zone if there are more than five people in the room.
The other, more pertinent, reason was my old scanner finally died. It had a good run but finally after nearly ten years it gave up. It was kind of annoying technically it started its long decline a couple of months ago when it stopped acknowledging the existence of some of the ink cartridges in it’s printer side when I had replaced another cartridge and unfortunately as one of the tech support guys said “Pixma doesn’t multitask” translation the printer doesn’t work the scanner doesn’t work.
I’d managed to make do by keeping the old empty cartridge in place which allowed the scanner to work but since the cartridge was empty I didn’t have a printer anymore and had to make do by either saving important documents as PDFs or going to the library to print. While this worked after an annoying fashion it was still the technical equivalent of stopping a leak with a wad of bubblegum.
Well yesterday the metephorical gum came loose and couldn’t be put back on. And I was forced to get a new printer scanner. Cannon had a “loyal user” discount but that means I have to wait a week until I get it delivered to me. In the mean time the only images that get into my system are the ones I create from scratch.
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I love playing with Google Translate. It’s very useful though I only use it sparingly since I’m never completely sure just how on the mark it really is. One thing I like to do is to run popular quotes through it. I especially like to do this with it’s Latin translator, Roman history being one of my favorite areas of focus as well as having enjoyed Latin in high school. I have this idea for a long term project to do illuminated manuscripts with Pratchett and Gaiman dialogue.
Anyway for today I was trying something simple; Robert Heinlein‘s “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” TANSTAFAL Mostly to see what new acronym I could get… perhaps for a deliberately pretentious T-shirt or something. The interesting thing with translating I find is that it teaches you a whole lot about your own language. To be sure the translating software works properly you have to clean up the original material, remove contractions and make sure everything is as literal as possible. So after tweaking the original phrasing the best I got was “Tale Convivium Non Est Liber“ The biggest problem with it with this was that “Liber”, meaning free, does not mean free meaning no payment necessary. I didn’t for the life of me know what the right word and when I looked for it the closest words really didn’t grasp the concept.
I read a great book on Roman Humor once that began by explaining how Cicero would not have understood the “We are all individuals” joke from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” By the same token I wonder if a Roman would have understood Heinlein’s point that nothing is truly free and even charity is conditional?
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