Good Smeagol Always Helps Wednesday, November 19, 2003

My buddy Dave "Mick," link at left, has an interesting post about how the malefactors who send out viruses shoot themselves in the foot with lousy grammar...i.e., who's going to believe they have to ANSWER THIS E-MAIL IMMEDIATELY!!! Dave suggests this holds lessons for marketing in general. I think the more interesting question is: How long before some hacker turns up who has a buddy with an English degree? Not that I need the work, but...

It took only three days, but I've put down the new translation of "Don Quixote." It's a wonderful piece of work, the prose is crisp and funny and altogether delightful, but it's bigger than a battleship and for all the wonderful jokes I keep turning pages and thinking NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Twenty-first century me. Picked up Evelyn Waugh's "Handful of Dust" (as in, "I will show you terror in a...") instead. Cruel, fearless, hilarious.

Started watching "The Two Towers," the long version. It is terrible. I saw the theatrical version four times, and generally thought they did a good job of getting in all the important parts and making it seem like a movie. They changed some important things, and left out some favorite scenes, but you can't have everything. My thinking going into the extended version was: Ah, now we'll get to see all the wonderful stuff they couldn't include--more or less what they did with Fellowship.

Instead, the extra material feels like a beer gut. The scenes are not only irrelevant, but make what's around them look worse. If you didn't think Aragorn falling off the cliff was dopey enough, now you get an establishing scene with him horse-whispering (so that there's a "bond" between him and the velocipede that saves him). Plus poor, glorious Sean Bean--who turned in the best performance in Fellowship by a long shot--gets thrown into a ridiculous flashback here, something that could've been spliced in from "Krull."

We only made it halfway through before we ran out of gas. But already I'm thinking this is one that will gather dust. Editing is everything. Exterminate the brutes.

@ 8:54:00 AM,

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