Friday, October 4, 2013

Follow Friday - Gilgamesh Ruled Over Uruk for 126 years

  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Book Butterfly and The Attic Young Adult Book Reviews.
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book (or TV show or movie) have you not read that seemingly everyone else has?

Even though everyone else in the book blogging world seems to have done so, I have never read Twilight. Actually, I have never read any of the books in Stephenie Meyers' series. I also have never seen any of the movies adapted from any of the Twilight books, although I have seen enough clips to conclude that they look like they might benefit from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. I have all the books, but they just keep getting pushed pack further in the reading queue. I'll probably get around to cracking them open in 2030 or so. By then the idea of sparkly vampires might not seem so ridiculous.

On another note, this has been something of a lost week for me. As a federal employee, I have been furloughed since Tuesday. This means that I have been sitting at home instead of working, but it also means that I have no idea when or if I will be getting paid again. While Congress bickers, I, and several hundred thousand other civil servants are left wondering whether we will be able to pay our bills on time, because we don't know when we will be allowed to return to work, or when we might see another paycheck. One might think that sitting at home would be an opportunity to take care of a collection of things at home - like catching up on reading books and writing reviews. What it really means for me is obsessively checking the news on a regular basis to see what the now buffoonish inhabitants of Capitol Hill are up to.

One thing that should be noted is the "clean" continuing resolution that Senate Majority leader Harry Reid has asked John Boehner to put through the House of Representatives is the result of compromise. A little over a month ago, Reid, Boehner, and the other Congressional leaders got together and negotiated a deal to provide short-term funding for the government, because it was clear that a full appropriations bill was not going to be passed before the end of the Federal fiscal year. In that negotiation the Republican leaders asked for, and got, a concession from the Democratic leaders that involved setting the level of funding for the government in the bill at the level the Republicans wanted, which is about $988 billion. This is lower than the amount the Democrats wanted, and was the result of some give and take between the two sides. The "clean" continuing resolution at that level is the compromise. What the House Republicans are doing is saying that now that they have a deal, they'd like to renegotiate and claim that because the Democrats won't do so, they aren't willing to compromise. In short, the Republicans are lying. To bring this back to the science fiction genre, the House Republicans are effectively saying the same thing Darth Vader told Lando Calrissian: "I'm renegotiating the deal. Pray I don't renegotiate it any further." In The Empire Strikes Back, this line emphasizes just what an underhanded villain Vader is. Just consider what it means that the Tea Party members of the House of Representatives think this is a good model of behavior to follow.

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  1. Sorry to hear that you are directly affected by the "hostage-taking" by the Tea Party minority. Old follower. My FF

    1. @greg: Thanks. Federal workers like me gained a small measure of security today when the House voted to provide back pay to furloughed workers once the government reopens. This is a small step, and I'm happy that it happened, but on the other hand, we will still only be paid after the government reopens. Until then, we're on our own.

  2. Twilight... I read the series because my daughters put so much pressure on me to read the series. Despite the awful prose and the overused ansty trope, I got the appeal of the first book. Romeo and Juliet. Two characters doomed to love yet lose. However both protagonists are blank wallpaper - you can project any fantasy you, as the reader, want to project. It's like those choose your own ending children's books - you can turn yourself into the main characters. The second book had moments of flesh and blood. In other words a single character was written as 3 dimensional - Jacob. The third and fourth books were a science fiction joke. The cardinal rule of sci fi - you cannot break the established rules of your own fictional world. The author tosses that out the window.

    1. @Julia Rachel Barrett: That's interesting, but as I said in the post, I haven't read them, so I really can't comment on them. But the fact that you think the books veer so wildly out of control in the later installments of the series makes me want to push them up a little bit in my reading and get to them sooner.