A Song of Ice and Fire – George R. R. Martin

At the end of 2011 someone gave me an article to read, literally torn out of their copy of The New Yorker – The Dragon’s Egg, by Adam Gopnik. Always good to start with a digression, I think.

I said it would be easy…

1998, HBO DEVELOPMENT MEETING:

“Hey, Chad.”

“Hey, Brad.”

“We got ourselves a problem, buddy.”

“Hit me.”

“Don’t tempt me, pal, don’t tempt me! No, seriously, all our stuff is the bomb –“

“The muthafuckin’ bomb.”

“– as you say, Chad, mutha and fuckin’ and bomb. But is any of it for chicks?”

A pause.

“Shit.”

Samurai Champloo

I’m something of a love-hater of anime. At its best, it offers the best mix of quality animation, inventive storytelling and general originality you could ask for; but then you get the turkeys, adjective* dialogue and/or narrative and/or adjective** animation. If I had to pick some high and low lights: Akira (+), Vampire Hunter D (-), Ghost in the Shell (+), Ghost in the Shell 2 (-), Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (+, series one anyway), Apple Seed (-), and so on, probably for ever… So when approximately like-minded friends told me to watch Samurai Champloo or die unfulfilled, I took their words with a pinch of salt (because they own all three hundred thousand episodes of Dragonball Z for a start). They were, however, in this case, absolutely correct. It’s brilliant.

Dark Storm

Gray’s Wife: Where’s Daniel?
Andy: He’s in the vault with a full containment breach.
Gray’s Wife: What does that mean?
Andy: I wish I could tell you.

The evil US military have a new super-weapon at their fingertips – government funded scientists are manipulating huge visible clouds of Dark Matter with their benignly apocalyptic “Erupter” satellite, firing rays of blue-black energy at awkward problems such as disused and radioactive nuclear facilities, utterly and above all safely erasing them from existence. This concentrated dark matter merges with the ordinary molecules of ordinary matter and ordinarily completely disintegrates them, returning the whole kit and caboodle to the sub-atomic underwear – I mean undercarriage – of our universe.