30 October 2013

Recent Books

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Well, we didn't get flooded this year, although I sweated it for a while.  The Rainy Season is over, and we look forward to some relief from the humidity as the monsoon winds shift from the wet SW to more dry Northerly ones out of north Asia.
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I recently read Ender's Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card.  He is a popular science fiction (S-F) writer, but seemingly only marginally libertarian, yet a feature film adaptation is coming, so I read it.  It was a good read and I look forward to the movie.
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I just read Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1953) and really enjoyed it.  I had been looking in bookstores for Levin's This Perfect Day (1970), which won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, but I mistakenly bought this book.  So I had put it on the shelf and didn't think twice about it until getting a good recommendation from Rand's literary criticism by re-reading her The Romantic Manifesto (1971).  Rand and I agree on most of literature and film, and her recommendations have usually been excellent sources of enjoyment for me, e.g., Hugo, Schiller, Fleming, Spillane, Zorro, etc.  Buying the book was not a mistake after all.
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I've been reading Halloween horror on my Kindle, and I'll post reviews either here or on Zenwind soon.
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Boo!
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-Zenwind.
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15 October 2013

Cate Blanchett

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Wow!  I just saw Cate in Blue Jasmine (2013), seeing it solely because of rave reviews of her.  She blew me away with her incredible acting range.
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To be honest, I don’t care much for Woody Allen films (he wrote and directed this), and I rarely finish watching them.  In this one, I almost walked out in the opening third, as I was bored and I would only be out three bucks for the ticket.  But Cate acted yet another great unexpected scene, and so I had to see where this was going.  Reviewers have said that Allen’s script follows Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which is another (in its film adaptation) that I couldn’t finish watching, even with Marlon Brando in it. 
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This film has some great supporting actors, although it’s Cate’s show.  Alec Baldwin plays a creep, and he doesn’t even have to act. 
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It is one of Cate’s best roles, a kind of Galadriel Goes Raving Insane
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-Zenwind.

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No Flood Yet

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The river is high, but it has stopped raining.  The bulk of the run-off from up-stream floods will be reaching us in the next few days while the tide is high, so if we get through this week we should be okay.
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-Zenwind.
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08 October 2013

Flood Watch 2013

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The Chao Phraya River is extraordinarily high, and dozens of provinces up-stream of us are flood disaster areas.  This means that there is a hell of a lot of water slowly but surely headed our way -- expected to reach us around October 15-17.
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Piled upon that horror is the fact that a period of High Tide will start around the 16th.  Our elevation above sea level is so low that a high tide retards the emptying of a high river that is trying to rush huge volumes of water out, therefore the river water seeks other outlets -- such as low-lying riverside communities like ours.
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Most of our valuables were moved up above ground level during the Great Flood of 2011, when water came up over our knees in our ground floor living quarters.  We had help moving the bed and treadmill (after knocking a hole in the ceiling to reach the unused second floor), but the treadmill was more damaged than we had thought from its brief wetting as we tried to move it up.
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The treadmill soon died, so I bought a new one later, a huge, heavy, quality one.  It sits on our ground floor and is the only valuable thing that is threatened now by this year's floods.  Our options are: 1. to hire a knowledgeable guy (the one from the store who set it up for us) to take it apart so we can move it upstairs (since it is too wide to move through doorways when assembled and too heavy), although we question whether the upstairs floors are robust enough for it; or, 2. wait until flooding actually comes to our ground floor and set it up a few feet on bricks.  Either option sucks, and my back aches just thinking about it.
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So, we are watching the river and the news, waiting for the apocalypse to come.  Stay tuned.
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-Zenwind.
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