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holidays. visitors. utter and complete laziness. i love vacations.

a time for a bit of reading. at the turn of the year, give a glance back to years past, and ponder how much we really know about history. like, for example, the legend of Pope Joan, who (supposedly) disguised herself as a man from her youth, became a monk, and eventually a Pope named John, only to be discovered due to (and die because of) giving birth in the street in the middle of a papal procession.

I had never heard about this before. I have now because I was lent a historical novel called "Pope Joan" by Donna Woolfolk Cross, who surprised and greatly interested me in her Author's Note by laying out historical arguments about the existence of Joan. To excerpt:

Today the Catholic Church offers two principal arguments against Joan's papacy: the absence of any reference to her in contemporary documents, and the lack of a sufficient period of time for her papacy to have taken place between the end of the reign of her predecessor, Leo IV, and the beginning of the reign of her successor, Benedict III.

These arguments are not, however, conclusive. It is scarcely surprising that Joan does not appear in contemporary records, given the time and energy the Church has, by its own admission, devoted to expunging her from them. The fact that she lived in the ninth century, the darkest of the dark ages, would have made the job of obliterating her papacy easy. The ninth century was a time of widespread illiteracy, marked by an extraordinary dearth of record keeping. Today, scholarly research into the period relies on scattered, incomplete, contradictory, and unreliable documents. There are no court records, land surveys, farming accounts, or diaries of daily life. Except for one questionable history, the Liber pontificalis (which scholars have called a "propagandist document"), there is no continuous record of the ninth-century Popes - who they were, when they reigned, what they did. Apart from the Liber pontificalis, scarcely a mention can be found of Joan's successor, Pope Benedict III - and he was not the target of an extermination campaign.

There's also the heresy trial of Jan Hus, and the "chair exam". All circumstantial, of course. I tend to favor Cross's attitude that with so much smoke, there must have been a fire there somewhere, but legends and stories can have lives of their own as well. At this point, no one will ever know for sure. (And I am extremely suspicious of anyone who claims certainty, in either direction.)

but that certainly won't

stop

people

talking

about her.

For which I am very glad. I hate any loss of information or knowledge, and abhor intentional destruction of it. It certainly wouldn't be the first, nor the last, time that some persons in power tried to deny and eliminate embarrassing facts. Even if it is a story instead of history, I'd much rather it be talked about than stomped on.

was always one of the most aggravating things about history: men who kept insisting over centuries that women were stupid, and an educated woman "unnatural" (read: threatening to their own power). ooo, still makes my blood boil every time I think of it. yeah, even if I'd lived to adulthood in those times of rampant disease and sundry dangers, I might have been burned at the stake right quick, you betcha.

Still, it does help me appreciate the times in which I live. Whatever else they may contain, and whatever disparaging comments some people make from various angles about the problems we have now, given my choice of any other time and place in history, I'm staying right here, thank you very much.

happy new year.

The Knickerbocker sign is once again whole. In case anyone but me is interested.

shockingly, I will not be attending a midnight two towers screening, because I ALREADY SAW IT LAST SATURDAY EVENING HAHAHAHAHAHA! at the screening at LACMA connected with their movie music series featuring Howard Shore.

Still, if I didn't have a regular day job, I would go to the midnight show anyway. I'd planned to join (indeed, had signed up for) the TORn group's line party at the Vista Theater (a theater I haven't been to but which is said to be great) until I stumbled into the awareness on Saturday afternoon that there still existed the possibility of getting into the LACMA screening. with other fans like me.

i liked it. we liked it. a lot. my precious. i could wish that treebeard and the ents had been given the weight and depth that they deserved, i could wish that faramir had been the same faramir that i had a teen crush on, i could wish that the storyline had not been tweaked quite so much, but though these combined things mean that i still like fellowship better, they do not mean that i disliked two towers. i shall be seeing it a few more times yet. and shall cherish probably unrealistic dreams of the redemptive powers of the 30-minute dvd extension on treebeard's and faramir's characters.

and gollum, and the fighting bits, are as cooool as everybody has been saying they are, maaaaan.

go see it early and often, with eager fan crowds. that's the way to do it. i need to hurry and become a writer so i can set my own hours and not worry about whether i stay up after 3 am on a work night or not.

next year, though. for sure.

At the 1967 Montreal Expo, in the Czechoslovakia pavilion, there was a film shown called "Kino-Automat" where the audience had five opportunities (though only four are described by page author Jeffrey Stanton) to vote with buttons at their seats on which of two courses of action the main character should take.

It was a study in group behavior with unexpected results. Audiences always voted for the adventurous course of action, whether it was prudent or not, moral or immoral. A typical audience would vote two to one for letting the blonde in the apartment and four to one for breaking the traffic laws. The audience in over 100 performances, except once, voted for Mr. Novak to hit the porter over the head. The film makers learned that people decided outcomes, not on a moral code but on what they like to see - essentially group fantasy. As an experiment it was great entertainment, perhaps the funniest forty-five minutes at Expo.

Unexpected by whom, exactly?

speaking of fantasy, Lord of the Rings: Two Towers opens at midnight tonight! woohoo! (have i not shown admirable restraint thus far?)

there was something otherworldly about standing in the backyard last night when i got home, city light orange glow greatly blocked by the house behind me, wide space of open starry sky and moon above, shreds of silver cloud scudding up and across and below the moon. the clouds were in a very great hurry, more of a hurry than is typical of langorous los angeles cirrus. these were visiting clouds, just in from the wild swells and surges of the pacific ocean, flying low over the palos verdes hills, close enough that i could feel their frosty moist breath in the wind.

"The Knickerbocker" is incomplete again - the initial K, this time. There were faint glimmers along the stem of the K, but no, it's pretty well out. Not the only thing out today, though, one of those few days per year that the L.A. weatherpeople get all excited because they get to use their super-duper Doppler radar.

dammit. Firefly now officially cancelled. pfui.

at least Whedon says he'll try to get another network to pick it up. we shall see. do dvds get put out for shows that only lasted half a season?

they'll show the last few eps though. three more? does that include the pilot? anyway, set your VCR 'cause this may be your last chance for a while.

okay, so last week's Firefly rested in large part on a rather silly and not believeable (at least to me) interpersonal conflict and resulting actions re Wash suddenly inexplicably getting jealous. after they've all worked together how long? sigh. I still wish the show would not go away until I have the chance to learn all the details about what is going on with River and with Book.

Firefly! tonight (Friday)! Fox! 8 pm! maybe THIS time it'll be another one as good as "Out of Gas" or "Ariel".

and even if not there are good bits in every episode. 'this is something the captain has to do for himself.' 'no! no, it's not!' hee.

another small new batch of England photos now up, mixed in chronologically with the others, at regulus.org.

do not forget that we are living in the future and the past at the same time stop i am reminded every morning and evening as i commute through the freeway interchanges of los angeles, concrete pillars and roadways soaring high above stop a hundred years from now perhaps someone like me will think about what it might have been like to drive upon those freeways today, in 2002 stop the city with its swirling concrete ribbons looks much like the imaginations of all those fifties cities of the future stop even roman aqueducts' designers could not conceive of such interconnected roadways so high above the ground stop or of so many people wanting to use them at one time stop stop go stop go stop stop stop stop stop

The following is a completely useless and probably confusing rant but here we go. I hope I can describe this clearly.

Near my house there is a shopping center, aka strip mall, which occupies a large rectangle that is one corner of an intersection. The long side of the rectangle faces a busy street that has two lanes each way, and a median strip - no center lane. So, if you want to make a left turn out of the shopping center onto this street, through the gap in the median strip that allows this, you have to wait until you're clear in BOTH directions. There is another shopping center opposite you, and gas stations on three of the four corners of the intersection. It's a bit busy.

People get impatient, trying to make a left turn out of there. Over time there have been many accidents due to people taking risks because they want to get the heck out already. And then, there's the people like the woman this morning who took the opportunity to cross the first lanes of traffic while they were free, and then wait for the other direction to clear. Meanwhile, she's blocking the left-turn lanes into the shopping centers in each direction - no one in those this morning, but I was approaching in the fast lane, and her car's butt was in that too. Dammit. I was able to change and go around her this morning, but that's not always doable.

I understand their aggravation, and might be less impatient with them EXCEPT THAT THERE IS A PERFECTLY REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE. this is the crux of my annoyance. It is easy to simply exit the shopping center on the OTHER street, the short end of the rectangle - it's a less busy street, and it has a center lane. And the intersection has a signal, so all you have to do is wait your turn, and go left on the arrow. I believe it would often be even faster to do that than wait for BOTH DIRECTIONS to clear on PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY. Not only that, it saves you (and me, and others) aggravation and stress, and maybe even an accident. I don't understand why people don't just GO THAT WAY.

that is all.

Anyone interested in seeing a (very) small number of the shots I took in England last summer may now mosey over to the England page of my wannabe-travelogue site, regulus.org, and check them out. There will be more... someday...

As a rule, I have no problem with motorcyclists sneaking between backed-up lanes on the freeway. They're more likely to get wiped out than somebody in a car, just in general, and they're using a lot less gas per person than most SUVs I see, so why not let them have a little perk like lane-sneaking, or whatever the "official" term for that might be. But it's one thing for your basic bike with just the driver on it. Seems to me it's rather another for one of those big cross-country vacation cycles with big ol' trunk boxes on each side of the rear wheel. I mean, come on, when your bike is like three or four feet across, that's almost as wide as a Metro. I think you've lost your lane-sneaking privileges, there.

Okay. I know some of you watched one or two episodes of Firefly and didn't like it. It is true, the launch has been perhaps slightly uneven here and there. But did you see "Out of Gas"? or "Ariel"? Because those in particular were some good watching, says I. And it's certainly better than a lot of other stuff that's on. Now Fox is putting it on "hiatus," so these last few December episodes may be your last chances to catch it for a little while. Supposedly creator Joss Whedon says the ratings for December will be important in determining what "hiatus" turns out to mean. And if the recent aforementioned episodes are any guide, as I hope they are, you won't be sorry.

Fridays. 8 pm. Fox.

oh enough with the polite deference. I love this show. I like seeing a possible future world and ordinary people mucking about in it; I wonder about that stuff a lot anyway. With most stories, the world created is a big factor with me. If it piques my interest, I am there. And Firefly does that. Characters, always important as well. Am greatly liking the Firefly characters also. Well, ok, most of them, but who in this world has ever liked every person they've ever met? not gonna happen. Watch Firefly, dammit.

Firefly official site

FireflyFans.net

okay. the new deadline for my first 50,000 word draft of novel is December 30. go here to point and laugh.

Well. Shopping day countdowns, already. I know time appears to speed up as one ages, but Christmas seems to be sneaking up on me with extra wiliness this year. And I can't remember noticing Chanukah happening so early before. I suppose part of my surprise has to do with Thanksgiving being so late. Gotta get going on those winter solstice cards, yup yup.

( 2001 ) ( january ) ( february ) ( march ) ( april ) ( may-june-july ) ( august ) ( september ) ( october ) ( november ) ( 2003 )

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