Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is primarily a schoolgirl's diary with a bit of the unusual thrown in. Ishiguro seems to be obsessed with the propriety of British public school life and the repressed attitudes it engenders, so there's a palpable atmosphere of impotence mixed in with fear of societal opprobrium; even if one wanted to stand up for oneself, well, it wouldn't do, don't you see? It's simply not done. One doesn't tell off one's supposed friends; at best, one traps one's frenemies in awkward social circumstances where one can heap castigation without fear of reprisal.

It's like playing Spades with barbs and jests and feints instead of cards.

The thing is, Ishiguro is very good at writing in this fashion, and the story flows past like a powerful stream, not unpleasant at all in its flow, but inexorably pulling toward an unpleasant end. Kathy, his narrator, tells the story in a series of gushing remembrances, almost as though confiding to a carer of her own; her restrained passion for her story, and her need to confess it to the reader, are infectious, even as the story becomes more sinister and creepy.

In the end, however, propriety and its ability to rob one of all outrage win out, leaving this reader to wonder many things, not least of all, can the horrible complacency be undone?

Tron, Legacy, Etc. (No Spoilers)

Before the movie, the theater showed one of those Dolby Digital Cinema ads:



This may, in retrospect, have set the bar for computer graphics a wee bit high; the way that fire burns along numbers 7, 6, and 5 is just amazing stuff.

So, when we get to see fireworks in the Grid, I somehow, you know, had expectations. Instead: 80's style laser-light geometric shapes.

Ah. Oh. Ew.

Capsule review: fun, a little sloggy toward the middle, beautiful to look at in many places, but all-in-all very Disney, and not a whole lot there.

This Takes Some Parsing

According to the Boston Herald:

"Headline: Luggage that left from Logan explodes in Fla."

First off, bravo to the Boston Herald: their incredibly misleading and sensationalist headline got them the top spot on Google News, which is where I spotted it.

Next, a big raspberry to the Boston Herald: their headline makes it sound like a terrorist cell's bomb went off on a plane in Florida; their article makes it clear this is not the case... but then skimps on the details.

The first line of the story gets even more confusing:

"A man attempting to fly a bag filled with hundreds of bullet primers from Boston to Jamaica was thwarted when a baggage handler slammed his luggage on the tarmac in Miami and detonated the minuscule explosive wafers, the FBI said."

The first part sounds like a bad urban legend or a Darwin Award entry: did you hear the one about the guy who tried to fly on a bag filled with hundreds of bullet primers? He was thwarted (thwarted? Really? That's the word you want to go with here? What, did he twirl his mustachios and cry, "Drat!"?) when a baggage handler "slammed his luggage on the tarmac."

Yeah, you read that right. That guy who broke the suitcase you were assured was gorilla-proof? He's just been made a national hero for slamming that bag. Way to scare anyone out of ever checking their luggage again, Boston Herald.

But just in case you thought anyone might have been hurt, turns out they were miniscule explosive wafers.

Like, you know, mini cayenne-flavored Nilla Wafers.

Pop, pop.

You know what else goes pop? Boston Herald journalism, when you poke it with some facts.