The Singular Orbifold

Holiday nearly over. Attached to internet by thinnest of dial-up threads. Will be home on Thursday, hopefully conscious on Friday.

I just got back from what was possibly the most fun...and the loudest...wedding I can ever recall attending. Also the smokiest.

On another note: taking a cab up highway 27 in Toronto, at 5:30 in the afternoon on a weekday: not the smartest thing I've done ever. Anyone familiar with Toronto in the slightest will understand.

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett have both passed away.

...

Michael Jackson was fifty? Really?

...

I'm probably fixating on the wrong thing, here.

Work visa: RENEWED! Or at least, it will be, and I'll be receiving e-mail notification within 24 hours to confirm it.

Damn, but I was stressing out about that. Visions of having to reschedule incredibly expensive plane tickets, rebook hotel reservations, and skip a good friend's wedding were dancing through my head.

I am now having a happy fit.

Edited to add: Good grief, I just noticed that my first LJ post about getting a new visa was on the 22nd...of April. No wonder I've been going mad.

I've been getting a startling number of phishing scam e-mails at my work addy lately, typically two or three a day. Okay, maybe that's not startling for some people, but it's way above average for me. Anyway, the last one was almost clever. It was an e-mail claiming that there had been a suspicious charge posted to my account from an African internet address, and please click here to dispute the charge..."here", of course, being web address in South Africa. Cute, no?

If I actually had an account with the bank the phisher claims to be representing, and if I had had a lobotomy, then I might be in trouble.

The current Governor General of Canada is a fascinating woman named Michaëlle Jean, a former radio broadcaster. She is the official representative of the Queen in Canada, technically the commander-in-chief of Canada's armed forces, a de facto cultural representative of Canada to the entire world, and recently she gutted a freshly slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart, and ate it.

Tell me that's not awesome.

Busy couple of days recently. This weekend I finally met tyellas in person, and accompanied her and my wife on an expedition to check out the Czech (get it?) and Slovak restaurant in our area. A lovely restaurant it is, too: a good time was had by all. I had pork and dumplings (not the Asian kind, obviously, the other kind) while the ladies had Haloushki and declared it tasty but extremely rich. Which I was able to verify on Sunday, when I had some of the leftovers.

I slept really badly Sunday night; I'm not sure if I should blame the Haloushki or all the caffeine I had at the crit group meeting. Whatever it was, I woke up a lot and had incredibly uninteresting nightmares when I did manage to sleep. Homicidal clowns with knives: terrifying at the time, but not very original in hindsight. The fact that it took place in some kind of prototype holodeck running a simulation of Paris redeemed it only a little.

I've signed a new contract with the University, and this afternoon I applied for a new visa. Later I'll apparently get a new staff card. So there's that.

Now it's raining, which I find entertaining in the new place. I've never lived in a neighbourhood with tin roofs before, despite living in Melbourne for three years. I love the sound rain makes here. It's like being in a parked car in the middle of a rainstorm, which I also find entertaining. I guess I just like vaguely rhythmic white noise.

No detailed review, just the following comment: Star Trek in IMAX? Awesome.

(Except the bit where the ship was turning deasil and the background was turning widdershins and everything on the screen was moving one way or another, because that on a giant screen set off my "OH CRAP I'M FALLING" hindbrain response. But that scene was brief.)

I'm moving! I'm acquiring/pushing through paperwork for a new job and visa! I'm covering a colleague's classes all next week! I have appointments with vets and appliance rental people, and I have to make appointments with carpet cleaners! I'm giving a talk for the local undergrad student seminar next week! I'm arranging international financial transactions! I'm correcting proofs for a journal article! I am, in theory, doing research! I'm going stark raving mad! Whoop whoop whoop! Whoop whoop whoop whoop!

...whose name I couldn't remember, was CQ, which you have to admit is not a very mnemonic title.

Feel free to not worry about this.

Their titles do get right to the point, don't they? Language not safe for work...

I could have sworn that yesterday, when I applied to use up some my stockpiled leave so that I'd be home for the arrival of the new furnace, that I had 18 days of leave saved up.

Today, with my supervisor's blessing, I also applied to use some of my leave for the rest of that week.

Tonight, when I checked what my leave balance would be as of the day after that week, it came out to 19 days.

No wonder I've got so much leave saved up.

The two northbound lanes on Swanston street currently look more like one northbound lane and one southbound river.

Welcome, friend! Sit down a spell. I just want to share with you the MIND-GIBBERING INSANITY that is the MUMS Puzzle Hunt, in which I have somehow gotten involved despite all sense and reason.

The format is: five puzzles a day for five days, followed by a single meta-puzzle (incorporating the answers to all of the other puzzles) which reveals the location of a hidden object. First team to claim the object wins the prize.

For example, last year the meta-puzzle was a crossword; when you fit the other twenty-five answers into the crossword grid, certain marked squares spelled out the string "ZBSTVIPPBFPVSATBBCPVTZSHL", which describes the location of the hidden object for that year. Simple, no?

What's that, you say? "ZBSTVIPPBFPVSATBBCPVTZSHL" isn't exactly an obvious way to describe the location of an object? Well let me give you a hint: the name of the meta-puzzle that year was "Stars".

( Still not obvious? Look behind the cut-tag curtain... )

I feel a bit like I'm trying to break through a brick wall with my skull, participating in this thing.

...THE HELL?

...did someone shoot continuity in the head and I didn't notice?

...and wtf with Daphne? Nerd-rage...growing...

I occasionally get these happy-manic bouts of energy. Some weird confluence of psychological currents occur and for a few hours I feel like I can do damn near anything, solve any problem, so on and so forth. But they almost always seem to happen at work, and I spend the fit stomping around my office waving frantically at algebra problems and memorizing song lyrics at the same time, or something. It seems like such a waste.

I am currently phone-less: the phone line to my office is on the fritz, and my mobile's battery needs recharging.

Papers with my name on them that have been idling for years on the arXiv are suddenly all getting accepted by journals at the same time, which means I'm up to my ears in tweaking, editting, and responding to reviewer's comments.

And literally two hours after I finished tracking down an old friend's e-mail address so that sauced_again and I could ask her advice on getting the cat back to Canada in a few months...I learn that there's a chance, not a certainly but a likelihood, that I can remain employed in Melbourne for another year.

Which wouldn't suck. 'course, see above about "not a certainty"...I may have to spend the next couple of weeks preparing both to stay and to not stay, in some kind of quantum indeterminacy.

Arglebargle. Bananas! Whoop whoop whoop! Three to the power of eight! A suffusion of yellow!

I just saw someone turn from Peel Street onto Pelham Street at the big traffic circle south of campus, going the wrong way around.

I just finished a three-day stint covering a course for an absent colleague. It was hella fun. It's so easy to get burned out when you're teaching constantly, but teaching when you haven't done so for a while is a remarkably unexpected pleasure.

I suppose I could say something about the Watchmen movie, which I saw on Sunday. It...wasn't awful? Not awful as a whole, anyway, 'cause there were certainly awful bits. My reaction to a sex scene shouldn't be "trying not to laugh out loud", for example.

But I think I still agree with the people who said the Watchmen comic was unfilmable. 'Cause the thing that got filmed was a not-entirely-awful action film, but it wasn't a film version of the Watchmen comic, to my mind. Yes, it had the same plot and set-pieces and character names and dialogue. But the thing of it is, those aren't the important bits.

I'm of the considered opinion that while it is possible to translate, for example, a comic into a movie, or a book into a movie or a book into a comic, the task of translation is very difficult. It's not just a matter of replacing scene descriptions with narration boxes or narration boxes with voice-over monologues. That will get you the plot and the set-pieces and the character names and the dialogue. But it won't get you the themes, or the atmosphere, and in fact a perfect scene for scene transcription, like the Watchman movie nearly was, will, I think, actually erase those things.

(Note to self: actually get around to reading "Le Ton Beau de Marot", which suddenly seems relevant to the discussion.)

The Watchmen comic is, among other things, a detailed character study. It asks, "Why on earth would anyone ever actually become a superhero?", then it provides several detailed answers in the form of characters with remarkably consistent motivations and codes of behaviour. Those motivations and codes of behaviour are first presented, then they're stress-tested by dashing them against the rocks of a moral dilemma of apocalyptic proportions. Most of these moral codes break so cleanly you can pinpoint the exact panel in the comic where they fracture, but it's not shoved in your face; rather, it seems the inevitable outcome of the entire storyline.

I haven't spoiled you for anything, because none of that comes through in the movie.

I don't know what it would take to make all of that come through in a movie format, but the scene-for-scene translation I saw on Sunday wasn't it. And I think it's now probably telling that the last time I thought to myself "that movie/book/comic was an excellent adaptation of the book/comic/movie" was when I watched The Hunt for Red October.