Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

NPR has been hitting it out of the park for me lately. So many interesting things were talked about this morning!

First was a story about an English cathedral with a rather unique welcoming message on their door:



You can listen to the full story here: Link.

The second might be news only to me, as he's been on Conan now. Disturbed is a hard rock band, but the lead singer had been raised as a Hazzan (a Jewish person "trained in the vocal arts who helps lead the congregation in songful prayer"). He did a cover of The Sound of Silence, which is beautiful. He makes it sound like a more traditional religious song, his voice is so rich and wonderful:

Disney made a video of Dug (the dog from Up) in real life. This may be the cutest idea ever.

In this season of Game of Thrones, there was a big battle. Supposedly one of the biggest ever made for television. I hadn't realized how much of it was done with special effects (basically, almost all of it).

I'd say that even if you haven't seen the season yet, this video is only minorly spoilery. You should probably skip it if you want to avoid all spoilers, but be sure to bookmark it to watch later, because it's really cool to see how they did it all.

isiscolo posted this mashup of Hamilton (the musical) and Batman.. Even not knowing Batman well, this worked for me. Such singing talent! A really well-made mashup/parody.



This second one was linked to me as a joke, supposed to offend? shock? me, but I loved it. Smashmouth's All Star song mixed with In The End by Linkin Park. In my opinion, this makes both songs much, much better -- the silly lightness of All Star made dark and serious. And the two seem made to be combined into one song.



I love it so much!

This sounds like a win-win situation. Sesame Workshop, the makers of Sesame Street, is partnering with HBO in a 5 year deal. Sesame Workshop will be able to produce a lot more content ("35 new Sesame Street episodes a year, up from the 18 it now produces", as well as two new shows). HBO shows the episodes first, and then after nine months PBS stations get all the shows for 100% free.

I don't see a downside to that, other than if HBO tries to influence the content. The story I linked had parents upset about "having to pay to see the episodes", but I suspect that's just people wanting to be upset -- do kids really care how soon they get new Sesame Street episodes? As young as that audience must be?

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And in wacky Japanese video news: Cats wearing hats shaped like cats wearing hats:

Child of Grass (Book 2 of the Sea of Grass Trilogy) by David Gerrold
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)

In book one of this trilogy (which I loved so much), Kaer and her family were getting ready for life on "another planet" (an alternate Earth), a very low tech world with a young culture. It was a slow story full of wonderful worldbuilding and very little plot. What plot there was I disliked, but there was so little of it, I enjoyed the book overall. Unfortunately book 2 was just the opposite: Nothing but that plot I disliked.

While I'm no fan of organized religion, I really, really hate the "all organized religion is evil and everything bad in the world is caused by it, and every single religious person is bad/evil/stupid/cruel" plot device. It smacks of lazy writing. That was the whole plot of this book.

In the first book, we learned that one of the families that went to the new planet had lied through all their training: They, like other religious families in the training program, never intended to give up their current religion (basically Christianity -- it had a different name, but the main figures in it were named Jesus/Mary/Joseph/etc) and adopt or pretend to adopt the local religion. People from Earth had to believe or pretend to believe the new world's religion, since no one was supposed to find out they were from a different planet.

I lost interest before I got 10% into the book, but forced myself to keep going because I had liked the first one so much. By 20% I found myself skimming more than anything and forced myself to slow down and read... at which point I encountered many pages of two characters talking about what 'empowerment' meant -- just two characters, father and daughter, doing nothing about talking about what that term meant. (Which fed back into the 'all religion is bad' theme, since religion disempowers people.) I gave up on the book at that point.

I loved the first book of this trilogy so much, but I couldn't even come close to finishing the second one. But what really pisses me off is that Child of Grass made me want to defend religion! Arg!

You know, it's almost odd to run into an accurate Amazon review anymore. I checked them after writing this post. One reviewer wrote:

Kaer proves herself to be one of the more deep-thinking and resourceful 12-year-olds you're ever likely to encounter.

Unlike last book, I didn't for a moment believe Kaer was 12. I constantly found myself thinking she was an adult. She was smarter and "deeper-thinking" than any adult I know. Moral issues, planning/tactical issues, everything.

"Child of Earth" ends rather abruptly and continues seamlessly in "Child of Grass."

That amused me. My one complaint about the first book was that the author seemed to have the whole story ("trilogy") finished and just cut it into three chunks to publish -- there was zero attempt to make book one into a complete story at all, it cut off mid-scene to be continued into book two. "Ends rather abruptly" indeed.


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Game of Thrones: Season 5. No spoilers outside of the cut.

Oh man, this season. What a miserable mess. I heard nothing but bad from everyone about it, so my expectations were low, but the season was even worse.

There were a few enjoyable moments in the season (and I literally mean "moments" -- a good episode meant there was an enjoyable scene somewhere in the hour). But there was so so so much bad. Really bad. Unwatchable bad.

( Spoilers/details back here. )

I think by this point in the story I had lost interest in the books as well. I'm not intending to get the next book when it comes out, and it's highly questionable if I'll bother watching season six.

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chichiri posted a link to some beautiful, interesting music, perhaps from a video game:

My to read pile is getting "low" (only ten pages of books on my Kindle, six books per page), so I decided I could let myself look for some new ones. Oh the number of wacky books out there.

- The Green Kangaroos by Jessica McHugh
Overview: Perry Samson loves drugs. He’ll take what he can get, but raw atlys is his passion. Shot hard and fast into his testicles, atlys helps him forget that he lives in an abandoned Baltimore school...

- This Shifter Squad series, which has laughably bad covers:


And for the porn: I love these comic book movie porn spoofs. This is just the trailer for one, and work safe (no naked bits, no sex). It's quite amusing, and has an ending more serious than I would have expected from even a non-spoof:



Hopefully the full movie will be around online somewhere, like most of these porn comic book spoof movies are (official free online releases, not pirated). I suspect it will be quite amusing. (The DVD is even offering a non-sex version of it!)

I'm rolling at this trailer. I laughed out loud a number of times!



In Lost news: Wow, season 6 is really, really good. I'm about halfway through it, and I'm so very tempted to go spoil myself because I want all the answers NOW NOW NOW. I suspect I'm going to really like how the series wraps up, this season is hitting all the best religion-in-fiction buttons for me.

It was worth sticking with the slow seasons to get to this point.

There's an amusing new game show on Japanese TV: Can men sing karaoke while getting a handjob from a pretty young woman?

Video is NWS, though no details are shown.

( Video preview screenshot is suggestive, so sticking it behind a cut. )

The Jurassic World Lego Game Trailer is really cute:



And look, Star Lor-- er, Jurassic Park raptor wrangler guy!


Neither cute nor funny: They're remaking Poltergeist. Because of course, what in the world aren't they remaking?



All the best Superbowl commercials done with Legos:



I want one of those Lego raptors!