Philip

I was pondering over the storyline to Gedo Senki/Tales from Earthsea by Miyazaki Goro while reading The Other Wind (book 6 in the Earthsea series) when I came across Ursula Le Guin’s response to the film being made. Best people read it for themselves here, in short probably the same sort of response I’d make having seen the film.

What’s interesting is that the film is more like a mutant version of The Farthest Shore mixed in with Shuna no Tabi (by Miyazaki Hayao), certain elements are the same such as Téa vs Therru, the parts where Ged walks into the deserted ship and steps on some bones, the llama (?) chase through the desert. You can peruse the start of Shuna no Tabi here to see what I mean. It just seems a shame since the Earthsea two-parter was shocking, it appears that the rush to get stuff on film means quite a few author rights and privileges are trampled over.

Anyhow, back to The Other Wind. Interesting stuff as it continues on from where Tehanu/Gedo Senki left off (almost) 15 years later where dragons are razing the countryside and a lone wizard has recurring dreams of The Dry Land in The Other Wind (essentially, a desolate place in an alternate reality where the dead are after their bodies pass away from The Farthest Shore). Meanwhile King Arren/Lebannen is saddled down with the High Princess of the Kargs (magic-free Eastern Earthsea people) with the imminent prospect of being married while Tenar and Tehanu are with him investigating the dragon problem.

Worth reading, similar to the Hyperion Cantos where what’s supposedly good and ignorance is bliss isn’t always so…

John Gibson at Fox New apparently has been pushing the Anna Nicole Smith story since her death on 08/02. No big surprise there, however the interesting thing is John Gibson is calling reporters who moved past the Anna story to cover the Iraq war as “Those people are snobs” and that “…people are a little weary … of your war coverage…” as opposed to the people who are probably tired of hearing from John about Anna’s death.

To wrap it up John ironically says about the other reporters that “… [they’re] too high class for that (Anna) story. [They] won’t stoop to what you want to hear about.” - presumably, the Anna story and not what’s going on in Iraq. So, what we have here is that the death of some celebrity is more important than the numerous US soldiers and Iraqis that got killed since her death? Way to go Fox!

Ruairí Robinson has decided to release his latest short film “The Silent City” for people to watch to show what he’s been up to lately. He pretty much wrote, directed, edited and did about 95% of the CG, pretty impressive. Thanks to this he finally got an agent in Hollywood when his earlier Oscar nomination didn’t do much. “The Silent City” is a short film about a bunch of soldiers on reconnaissance in a war-torn future city. You can download it from Ruairí Robinson’s web site here, you’ll need VideoLAN to handle the Quicktime .mov with H.264.

While browsing Think Progress, I came across a post that pretty much sums up what’s wrong with Fox News in USA and why I’m hoping they’ll get called to account if the Democrats can wring some tougher laws to crack down on faux journalism.

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto decided to have a go at Barney Frank (House Financial Services Chairman) over his ideas to let shareholders choose how much CEO’s and other high ranking managers of companies should get on their so called “golden handshake” as they leave the company with typically millions of dollars, even when they do a lousy job.

Anyhow, if you’ve seen Outfoxed you probably know quite a few of the techniques. I’ll list a few here that Neil’s decided to use:

• Have an agenda (usually, not the guest speakers one)
• Constantly interrupt whenever discussion goes off Fox approved topics
• Insult, belittle and name call guest speakers (typically Democrats)
• Make up bizarre statements that twist what the guest speaker means
• Finger point and make other insulting gestures
• Pretend not to understand what language your guest speaker is using
• Interject snide comments about guest speaker

You can pretty much see them all on this segment here. No wonder USA’s all messed up.