Raja's Blog

Ignacio's posted some pictures from his birthday party on his blog. The one that features me prominently is titled “Raja Doesn't like Mate So Much”; in the zoomed-out picture, it vaguely looks like I'm smiling; in the zoomed in, you can tell that I'm squinching my eyes fiercely and sticking my tongue out as far as it can go.

I was happy to find out about yerba mate. Yerba mate (pronounced closer to “SHER-ba MAH-tay“) is a popular(ish) drink in Argentina; it's like a super-concentrated tea with orange and tastes like orange dirt (as our friend Simms said). It's chock full of caffeine. There are special containers used for drinking it; one is a bag made from a bull's testicle (!); the container Ignacio and Ana gave us to use was much more like a traditional ceramic mug, but it came with a complicated metal “straw” (which you can't quite make out in Ignacio's photo captioned “Kate tries MATE and finds it good!”. You can find a little more information in the Wikipedia's article on yerba mate.

I was happy because this cleared up a long-standing mystery for me. A few minutes after I tried the mate, I remembered where I'd heard of it:

“I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home—like even Borneo would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there—Fancy Long. Know her?”

“Vision entertainer,” said Harrison. “I've tuned her in. Nice blonde—dances and sings on the Yerba Mate hour.”

This is from “A Martian Odyssey”, Stanley G. Weinbaum's classic
1934 short story. I'd always thought that “Yerba Mate” was someone's name (and pronounced the way it's spelled); it was fun to find out what it really is!

I just woke up with a martial chant in my head:

Nick affiliated!
I went by the goldfish house
It's so complicated
I had to catch a mouse

The corresponding dream featured long stretches of walking endless blocks in San Francisco (which looked rather like Walnut street here in my hometown), trying to phone a friend to hook up for a quick meal since I'd be heading home soon (ironically, said friend lives back here now), and arguing with my parents about eating at a not-quite-diner that prominently featured hamburgers and ice cream sundaes.

Dreams are strange.

Not as good as the Season Four Bonus Disc, but still fun (except for the bonus material menu, which is a real pain unless you've got a full-fledged 2D control to find the hotspots). High points are the outtakes (“Series I Smeg Ups”), the music cues, the model shots, and especially “Launching Red Dwarf”, an after-the-fact 25m29s documentary about how the series got started. Two amusing points: Craig Charles's then-wife asked why he tried for the part, since he “couldn't act” and “wasn't that funny”; and Danny John-Jules (who played Cat) was 30 minutes late to the audition but so nailed the part that the casting folks talked about not looking forward to seeing the other candidates because they knew he'd got it ;-).

Last Thursday I finished reading Neverwhere (the American eBook) and finished watching Neverwhere (the BBC miniseries on DVD). I quite enjoyed both.

Neverwhere is a 6-part 3-hours-total BBC miniseries that Neil Gaiman wrote some years back, taken from an idea by UK comedian Lenny Henry. I first saw Neverwhere some years back when a friend lent me an nth generation bootleg copy from some rich American PBS station. I remember enjoying some aspects and disliking some aspects.

There were some things that Neil Gaiman wrote that couldn't be filmed, sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes because of bad timing, sometimes because they didn't look like they would work on the screen. As Gaiman said in a 1999 interview, every time something would get cut

…I would say, "It's okay, I'll put it back in the novel." The novel, for me, was my way of asserting control. Saying, "No, this is what I meant." Suddenly I had control over the costumes again. Control over the things that I didn't have any control over on the TV screen. On the one hand, you'd spent a few years writing the story. On the rother hand, what's being made is not entirely the thing in your head. You've lost the power that you have writing novels or writing comics. Which is the power of "Because I Say So." You know, why is the character doing that? Because I say so.

The novel and miniseries are quite different; I started by watching the first half of the miniseries (one episode per night with my friend Matt who I was rooming with at the NASAGA 2004 conference), then I decided to switch to the novel, so my perceptions wouldn't be totally colored by the miniseries. There was a bit of an adjustment; the miniseries is very fast-paced, whereas the novel takes more time to ruminate on things.

(to be continued...)

I just discovered Ken Perlin's homepage . Amazing stuff, with quite a bit of Java source code available.