Welcome to my mix of public thanks, travelogue, and short reviews. The joy of the Internet is, there’s still time to click “back” on your browsers. Going… going… gone.

So, first: THANK YOU to all who joined us for our awesome Stratford adventure, but particularly to our generous drivers, Juliana and Dave, and to my Ottawa Branch co-organizing sister, Debra. Hope you all had as much fun as I did. For those in the Toronto or Ottawa areas who think the sort of thing I’m about to describe sounds like fun, stay tuned for next summer, when I hope to organize something similar on a larger scale, involving bookings of group tickets in January and perhaps even the rental of a school bus.

Our adventure begins on the Saturday morning when the Car o’Joy set out from the TTC station with maturity levels directly related to proximity to the trunk: Read more »

Did I already give a blog entry this title? I could swear I did. I could probably go through the archives and check, but that would be Letting the Terrorists Win.

(Also, for those of you picking this up on Facebook, I’d just like to maintain that I really do update this every Sunday. Facebook is just weird and sporadic about the timing of importing entries from my RSS feed…)

So I just got back from a trip to the Stratford Festival (fun courtesy of my AWESOME friends and sister), where I noticed something sobering: the more I was looking forward to a play, the less I actually enjoyed it. More on the actual trip next week, but my point is, I wonder if I’ve been remiss in not identifying my expectations when I ramble on about movies, TV shows, plays, and/or books that catch my interest.

In other words… Great Expectations, Robots (Moderately) Short Reviews In Disguise!

Work: Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010) Read more »

When the season finale of House (or Dexter, or The X Files, or whatever single TV show I’m into) airs, I promise myself: next season, I will not fall for the same old trap. I will not seek out spoilers from Wikipedia or fanboards. I will not skim through fanfiction.net to see what curious things other people have come up with for these characters. I will not read reviews, blogs, or comments on the episodes and get worked up that other people seem to have interpreted the same story in a completely opposite manner (or that some of the posters seem to disagree with me on what stories are and why one should care about how they’re made).

I did OK on the spoiler front this past season of House — the one or two I read were entirely by accident, and they mostly turned out to be false. I did manage to spoil plenty of episodes for myself by deciding that next week’s preview looked like it could be an awesome episode about X only to find it was really a boring episode about Y, but that’s neither here nor there. I did slightly worse on the fanfiction front — didn’t read any stories, but occasionally scrolled through the summaries to find out what people thought of recent developments.

(Fanfiction is better than essays for that, IMHO. What people really think floats to the surface of the plot and characterization. For example, it’s pretty easy to tell when many fanfiction authors a) hate a certain character; b) see themselves in a certain character; or c) believe two characters should hook up.)

And up until the finale, I was doing pretty good at divorcing myself from fandom. I hadn’t checked out message boards, internet forums, or comments on various places that review the story.

*sigh* Yes, that was in past tense. Which leaves me wondering: is it more fun to be part of an online fandom or not? Read more »

I totally had to look up “Pharisees” on Wikipedia to make sure it actually meant what I wanted it to. It may wind up coming across way harsher than I wanted when I get into the actual topic of this blog, but, hey, that’s the price we pay for alliteration.

This is my — personal, biased, emotional — reaction to an attitude in myself and others that annoys me a lot. This attitude encompasses a lot of things, but it seems to me to be embodied in one use of the phrase “first-world problem”.

In a nutshell, the phrase means a problem that one is fortunate to encounter because it exists only for those born into financial and social privilege. Read more »

(Yes, I know this is long. But I’m out of the country come Monday, so this makes up for no blog next week.)

I love surprise endings. I enjoy reading them — nothing makes me feel more satisfied with the ending of a book or movie than a well executed twist — and because I enjoy reading them, I also enjoy writing them.

Thing is, twist endings are difficult to pull off. And they’re also difficult to write about, because you can’t discuss any examples without potentially ruining awesome stories for anyone who reads your essay. (Or maybe not — more on this later.) Even identifying the stories you’re going to talk about might ruin them whether or not you give anything away. Sometimes, knowing that the story you’re watching or reading has a twist ending is enough to help you guess that twist ending, sort of like the way that knowing how the author of a murder mystery is trying to provide you with enough clues to guess the identity of the murderer but enough diversions to make the real villain invisible to you until the end can help you figure out which of the characters dunnit, even when you don’t know how or why they did.

So, here is the spoiler warning for the spoiler warning: although the stories I’m about to talk about are fairly well known for their twist endings, I’m about to list them after the cut, in the next paragraph. Read more »

Greetings, people of Earth!

Our superior alien race finds your puny starships laughable. The extent to which you hu-mans rely on “dilithium crystals” is outrageous. Why, what will you do when the supply runs out in approximately 345.3 Earth years, or, as we like to say on Arcturus, 93 h’waxlobs?

I suppose you’ll do as you did now, and send your eight mightiest teams out to search the galaxy for hidden caches of the compound you need so dearly. Odd, its strange resemblance to the hu-man children’s toy known as “play dough”! Read more »

SPACE RACE update next week when I have all the requisite photos for a glorious illustrated entry. In the meantime, they’re baaaaack… Read more »

(PRE-POST NOTE: There are lots more important things to blog about this week than what I prepared for today. But it takes me a long time to think about things until I’m satisfied with my conclusions and even longer to write them up in a way that makes sense to other people. So this is what I got. For now. Stay safe, friends, whether protesters, bystanders, or plain Torontonians.)

Remember when I pretended I wasn’t going to blog about how difficult it is to write the “Aha!” moment in a mystery in which the protagonist figures everything out? I lied!

And remember when I didn’t want to mention Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes? Actually, I still kind of don’t, because they’re cop-outs. Using a detective-at-a-distance like Holmes, Poirot, or Nero Wolfe allows the author to get away with not showing how our figurer-outer came to his or her conclusion. Instead, all you have to do is let your genius stare into the middle distance making the Epiphany Face, have him or her exclaim, “I have it!” (optional), and then pen in some dialogue in which everything gets explained bit by bit to Sidekick McEveryman  and, hence, to the reader.

Those are relatively easy to write, from my admittedly minimal personal experience.* Read more »

“I’ll tell you something,” said Francis, urgent with shoe-lace, “if we keep on saying things weren’t when we know perfectly well they were, we shall soon dish up any sort of chance of magic we may ever have had. When do you find people in books going on like that? They just say ‘This is magic!’ and behave as if it was. They don’t go pretending they’re not sure. Why, no magic would stand it.” – E. Nesbit’s Wet Magic

One of the things I find most challenging about writing in the genres I love is handling the moments when everything changes: the part of the mystery when the protagonist puts all the clues together and figures out what’s going on (I knew it all along; how do I make it seem like she didn’t?), or the point in a fantasy when our heroes stumble across magic for the first time (of course there are zombies/fairies/vampires/ghosts! That’s the whole point of the story, isn’t it?).

In what follows, I’m going to focus on the fantasy problem not only because it’s what’s on my mind now, but also because I’m pretty sure that if I talk about ways to deal with “eureka!” moments, I’ll end up mentioning Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House again, and then at least one of you will stab me through the Internet. Read more »

Listen, I know I don’t fit most of the ideological and behavioural criteria for being Jewish, even supposing there are criteria, and whoever wrote them can have the moral right to make that call. I don’t believe in G-d or in the divinity of the Torah; I don’t celebrate most Jewish holidays the way you’re supposed to; and support for Israel is not high on my list of political priorities. I avoid Jewish social events and Jewish media, I make vaguely anti-Semitic jokes*, and I find a lot to dislike in various Jewish political and ethical ideas. Yet I still call myself a Jew.

That seems strange to a lot of people. Read more »