so, to continue with my mundane posts about trivial matters... (don't worry, no spoilers ahead - only a critical mention of the pace of the book, if that matters)
JK better hurry up and write Book 7. i haven't been afflicted with Harry Potter fever before now, but this year it hit me. i was patient enough with book 5 - i mean, i didn't read it until it was released in paperback and then some. and i managed to not have it spoiled for me all the while...
but now i'm hooked. now i want Book 7. and i want it to be good. i won't accept disappointment. JK's been good at meeting expectations so far.
i've read many complaints about the clipped nature of the new book - it seems rushed. i, for one, thought Order of the Phoenix felt overly long and was happy with the length of this book. i thought the rushed nature of this book gave it a greater sense of urgency and i liked it. it made me more frantic as i read it, too.
so, i'm going to geek out here, for a moment, if you'll allow me to...
i don't know if i can take comic book-based films lightly any longer.
i'm basing this on my own judgement of the recent spate of films.
a little history, i was a comic book geek for a few years when i was younger. which, of course, gives me a biased viewpoint when it comes to films based on comic books. i have an idea of how they should be and if they don't meet that expectation, they leave me disappointed.
recently, special effects have reached a level where films can finally do justice to the books.
i mean, there was a fantastic four film made a long time ago that never made it to light because it was considered to cheesy. what about the punisher film starring Dolph Lundgren from the 80's? or the Spiderman film from the same era?
in the past three days, i've seen both Batman Begins and Sin City. i have now seen all of the Batman films (even the one based off the hilariously campy tv show) and Batman Begins, by far, is my favorite. i attribute that judgment to the heavy-handed tone Christopher Nolan took with the source material. it's a very dark, very moody film and it has little humor. i like that. it works.
but it also sets expectations high. the inevitable sequel better be better, or i will be disappointed. Spiderman 2 lived up and surpassed the first one, which at the time i said was my favorite comic-book-to-film film.
Sin City, a comic which i never read as i always stayed fairly mainstream in my comic-obsession years, was a much more stylized and hyper-violent film. it was expertly depicted and felt as much like the comics as i imagine it could. the stylization was fantastic and the use of color was done exceptionally well. i didn't like it as much as batman, but that is probably due to my having never read the book.
anyway, that's my little blah about comic books to film.
i started writing this entry while i was still on vacation. and now, July 31st, i'm going to bother to finish it.
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i'm currently in the basement of an internet cafe in central Glasgow, Scotland.
i've just spent the past week hiking with my dad and my brother and then touring around the western coast of the scottish highlands for the past few days with the aforementioned two plus my mom.
and so now the trip is winding down.
my brother is leaving for the states tomorrow. my parents and i will then travel south(west - to a small village by the name of Wigtown) for two nights, followed by one more night in glasgow before hopping on a plane for my return to praha (and my parents respective return to the states).
i spent the first full week of july in rostock, germany playing in the EUCC (european ultimate club championship). we played okay (but not really) the first few days. in the first three days we lost just as many (3) games. the last one was a shocker (17 to 7) and we decided we didn't like that.
after that we started kicking ass and taking names and didn't lose another game - we finished the tournament as we started it, by playing a team from Edinburgh named Fusion - and we won by 1 point in a sudden death point... just as we did on the very first day to the very same team.** it was a glorious end, as we finished in 9th place. to be honest, i didn't expect us to finish in the top ten but rather only in the top half (16 or above)... and i thought i was being overly optimistic.
**some photos of our penultimate game are here.
photos of the last game are here, including a close up of me yelling so hard that the veins on my neck stand out - we're in the nice purple jerseys.
but we started clicking. one of our best players got injured, which sucked, but we decided to step it up in order to compensate. finishing in 9th was probably the maximum of our potential and i think we achieved it. we were all very satisfied with the finish.
we returned to prague victorious.
and i spent a few days adjusting to living in what could be considered the boondocks of prague (roztylyl, for those who know praha). and then i got on a plane on July 13th, bound for Glasgow (via London Stansted).
i arrived in the early evening (5-ish) before my father, who i was going to meet that day. so i wandered around only to discover that most stores in glasgow (and the UK in general) close at 6 p.m. so i was bored with nothing much to do.
i ended up reading my book (Wells' "War of the Worlds") in the lobby of the hotel until my dad showed up at around 9-ish.
the next day, after some confusion with the tickets and my brother's arrival, we boarded a train for Pitlochry in central Scotland, just inside the Highlands. we stayed at a 4-star b&b and walked down to the river in town the day we arrived. the next morning, we woke up and started hiking. we did not see the interior of an automobile for the next three days.
we hiked from Pitlochry to Aberfeldy. the walk had some nice scenery, but the best was yet to come. in Aberfeldy, we stayed at a 3-star "guest house" which seemed more like a 1-star as the owners seemed disinterested and the breakfast was below average.
midnight that night was the prelude to a wonderful day. you see, July 16th is my dad's birthday... i mockingly suggested that i would be buying him the Harry Potter book that was to be released on his birthday. it never happened.
the hike on the 16th yielded quite possibly my favorite scenic piece of land - just outside of Aberfeldy are the Birks of Aberfeldy, which have been immortalized by the poet Robert Burns. it would be foolish, however, to try to describe the sheer fantastic beauty of the Birks because the only way one can fully understand is by visiting. (the same can be said of Mirror Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana...)
after passing such a lovely site, we continued across a hillside into a small forest which could rightfully be considered as one of the most annoying places to ever go due to the infinite number of flies that swarm you as you walk through.. you have no time to concentrate on your surroundings because you're getting molested by flies left and right.
anyway, we finally got through the forest of flies and continued hiking. it was still mid-morning. we passed next to a castle near Kenmore that was built, more or less, for Queen Victoria's honeymoon. it's now surrounded by a golf course. we passed the castle and continued into some woods that skirt the river Tay into Kenmore village itself. as we emerged from the woods, though, something dawned on me.
we were standing next to a wooden dock that i had stood on two years before. it was the dock of the photo on the right on the Taymouth area homepage.
after going around the side of the mountain, we returned back to the valleys and Fortingall village in particular. in Fortingall, we stayed with a wonderful lady who had been convinced to maintain a B&B while the Fortingall Inn was being repaired. (you see, the tour operator normally had hikers stay there but the previous owner decided to run it out of business by refusing entry into the pub of all local individuals, and thus killed the business. the new owner is in the process of renovating it. and that's just one of the odd pub/hotel owner stories we heard.)
anyway, we spent a lovely night in Fortingall.
the next day, our last hiking day, we started by walking uphill for a little under five miles. we climbed somewhere around 700 to 800 meters. it was a lot of work. it was a beautiful hike because it was our most rural. unlike the previous two days, there were no villages anywhere along the route. nor were there very many people - i think we saw 4 or 5 total when we were up in the mountains. we saw beautiful vistas and hiked off trail for a while. my brother and i even decided to walk straight up a hill of heather. we saw ruins of houses dating back quite a very many few centuries - i'm at a loss for the exact amount.
we finished our hike that day in Kinloch Rannoch, which is only a short distance (by car) from the Robertson clan center (Struan). however, to our unknowing later dismay, Kinloch Rannoch is not a very large town. or village. it's not a very large village. it had two hotel/pubs, but one of the two burnt down because the owner went crazy. there are only two restaurants in KR and one closes early on Sundays. and it happened to be Sunday. so we were stuck walking into the one remaining one - the hotel/pub. and they wanted 27pounds95pence per person. that's roughly $50. and we were in our hiking clothes.
and the b&b we were staying in was bad too. the owner/operator seemed completely disinterested. our bedroom was stuffed with three beds and the shower in one corner of the room. (my brother gave me Season 3 of Quantum Leap for my birthday. we jokingly called the shower "the accelerator" because it was amusingly loud and dark and it felt like you should be transported somewhere when you were inside.)
breakfast was alright, featuring homemade muffins - a change from the usual scottish breakfast of eggs and potatoes and tomatoes. and then we got on a bus back to Pitlochry. to catch a train to Stirling. to meet my mom. which we did, in a pub just down the hill from the castle. a pub where my mom and i had eaten two years ago and a castle which my mom and i had toured two years ago. after lunch, my dad and brother toured the castle and mom and i walked around town a bit. we spent an hour after reuniting ordering a professionally made formal scottish outfit (that means kilt and kaboodle, ha ha) for my dad. i rounded out my kilt with a jacobian shirt, sporran and socks.
after that, we got in the car and drove to Oban, on the western coast of Scotland. we stayed in a wonderful b&b run by a wonderfully cheerful and gregarious Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson is a golf fan, participates in Scottish line dancing and will be going to Ireland this fall to accompany the rest of her dance group who are in turn accompanying the local pipe band. we were the only people staying in the b&b for the entire three days we were there.
of course, my reemergence into a fully functioning society means i was once again inundated with harry potter. i mean, it's the UK and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had just been released. i kept feeling a need to pick it up. but i was still reading War of the Worlds...
the first day in Oban, we went to a castle a little further north along the coast. we also took a tour of the Oban whiskey distillery. neither my brother nor my mom could finish their free samples, not being boozers like my dad and i. or so i'm led to believe...
we also arranged for our next day, July 20th, wherein we would take a short ferry ride to the Isle of Mull.
which we did at 10 a.m. on the 20th. we crossed and immediately headed for Duart Castle, the ancestoral home of the MacLean clan. it has been featured in many films, most recently in Entrapment.
after grabbing lunch in the castle coffee shop, we started our tour of the island. first we travelled to the largest town on the island, Tobermory. there was nothing much there, so we left after a short time and continued our tour around the island. except driving around the island is not as easy as one might imagine. after Tobermory, when you travel around the north and western coasts, the roads are all single lane with passing places. this means frequent stops, occasional reverses, and at least one time getting stuck in the mud when an oncoming driver decides to stop in the middle of the road and not pull over into a passing place, therefore causing you to create a new passing place in really deep mud. but when every car stops to help you push the car out of the mud, and you have eight men pushing, eventually your wheel that is stuck a foot deep in mud will break free. and so it did. and there were no more problems. we took the ferry back to town and had a late-ish dinner, that was punctuated by my mom running off to watch the local pipe band perform in the square.
the next day, we had to head back to Glasgow, as my brother was due to return to the states the next day. before leaving Oban, however, my Potter fever became too much. i bought the new book, but i refused to start it until i finished reading War of the Worlds.
on the way, we detoured and left Oban headed Northeast (instead of Southeast towards Glasgow) because we wanted to drive through Glencoe, the site of a notorious massacre. after going for a short hike in the lovely Glencoe valley, visiting the massacre museum and eating in the museum coffee shop, we proceeded on to Glasgow, where i originally started writing this post...
but i can tell you about what happened between then and now, July 31st...
the next day, we dropped my brother off at the Glasgow airport in the morning and headed to Wigtown, Scotland's National Book Town. on the way, however, we stopped at Culzean Castle, ancestoral home of the Kennedy clan, along the way. Culzean is a beautiful castle that has been magnificently preserved and it has acres of land with organized, walled gardens, swan ponds, hiking paths, etc. it even includes a small exhibition dedicated to former president Eisenhower, as he was given a portion of the castle as a gift for his help for Europe during WWII.
we eventually arrived in Wigtown, which turned out to be a dismal place. it's stuffed full of book shops on every corner, but it seems as if most of the books they are selling are outdated books that nobody will ever want as collector's items and nobody would ever want to read...
we slept. we woke up and drove south to Whithorn, home of the ruins of the priory of St. Ninian, who is known to have been the first person to bring Christianity to Scotland, even before St. Columba.
i sat on a promontory with my dad and watched a fisher catch half a dozen large fish.
and then we went back to Wigtown.
and the next day we drove back to Glasgow. but along the way... we stopped at Threave Castle. Threave was the home of the "Black Douglases" and is only a ruin at this point... but it is on a small island in the middle of a river and in order to see it, you ring a bell so that a man in a motor boat will come and fetch you across. it's something quite different and makes it more exciting. it was a magical place.
we drove up to Glasgow after grabbing lunch in the town of Castle Douglas, weird name, i know. anyway, the following day, my dad ran a workshop on CS at a conference, so that left mom and i to fend for ourselves. we walked around Glasgow a bit, did some shopping (me in particular - NEW MUSIC!) and went to the museum of transport. (the transportation museum will be moving into a new building in the next few years, but only after the building is built - and they had a small display on it and it looks weird...)
for anybody interested in seeing photos of scotland, there are many here under the subdirectories scotland.
thanks for the trip, family!
and then i returned to prague. i finished reading War of the Worlds the day before i left Scotland. so i immediately jumped on Harry Potter. it took me a few days, but i finished it quickly (by my standards)...
prague has been filled with laziness, for the most part. i'm gearing up for a big trip north (Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and if time: Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, in that order) so i expect the next few days will be filled with research, planning, etc.
and so it goes...
pardon my typing, if it is at all off it could be because i'm typing this on a german keyboard where the y#s are z#s and the z#s are y#s and the punctuation szmbols are all off.
i'm in rostock, germany at the moment playing frisbee in the european club championships. the team has done well so far, but not as well as we should've. today it will be decided whether or not we finish in the upper half of the teams or the lower half.
life in prague is and will be quite different now that i am no longer teaching english. i've moved to an old communist apartment complex ("panelak" - so called due to its assembly in panels) that is far outside of the city center, and now i must focus on completing my business plan. if you planned on visiting me, i'm afraid it's almost too late. it is looking quite likely that i will be moving back to CA in November/December sometime... but you never know. i'd quite like to stay in Europe, but my business plan will require me to be in the definite proximity of CA for the immediate time being.
regardless, my mind must remained focused on the next few days here in Rostock, as we proved yesterday, concentration (or lack thereof) can completely change your game...
(p.s. Happy belated b-day, brudder!)