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energetic More bullet notes.
- Ellen is now safe and happy... and still in Toronto. Air Canada found her luggage at last, and now she's waiting for Cornell to fedex her the necessary form, and is contemplating the wisdom of publishing her story in a major newspaper. She's written an awesome story/article about it, but is wondering about whether Cornell will let her keep her scholarship if she mentions them in a US-bashing context. Ahh, decisions...
- I have called and sent emails regarding the two things worrying me last time (viola and driving). Now, at 1:00 I have a two-hour brush-up driving lesson. Yikes! Alberta Driving GDL Program, I HATE YOU!! HATE YOU!!! A PLAGUE on hour-long advanced driving tests.
- I'm reading 'Eldest' at the moment, the sequel to 'Eragon' by teenaged author Christopher Paolini. It's bizarre, because I've picked up the book each of the last two nights after a moving movie experience... The first night I started reading after finishing ROTK:EE with my mom, who I'm on a campaign to convert to Tolkien appreciation. And last night... We watched the first half of a made-for-TV movie called "A Town Like Alice", which is about British expatriot POW women and children who took a forced hundreds-of-miles gunpoint walking tour of Malaya when Japan took over the country in World War 2. Wow, a neat story. Anyway, we saw Frodo off at the havens and discovered that an Ozzie POW who we thought was tortured to death in fact survived, (best last lines ever: "Is there anything you would like before you die?" "I'll hev one of yourr bleck chick'ns, an' a cauld beeah." Narrator: "There was no beer in the camp. In Bushido, Captain ___ could not let the man die without fulfilling his last request. He would lose face. He ordered the prisoner taken down.") After all of this, I have to say, Eldest has been a let-down. Paolini has a good story, but he has very little that's original and not borrowed from fantasy authors like Tolkien, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, even Terry Brooks. (No Neil Gaiman, that would be too wonderful.)
Time to eat, and then to practise, and read the Driver's Manual!!
August 25 2005, 17:36:08 UTC 6 years ago
August 25 2005, 21:17:08 UTC 6 years ago
Are you busy much in the next week, Diana? Do you have a fixed schedule?
August 29 2005, 07:46:16 UTC 6 years ago
just found out my schedule!
I'm not too busy, I work on wed and thurs night and might be going away on friday for the weekend (maybe), but hopefully we can all get together one more time before everyone leaves for school. When are you going back to UBC?August 25 2005, 21:16:38 UTC 6 years ago
Driving Update
Just back from my driving lesson... Not a total disaster! (I think I may have scraped my teacher's car, though, in a disastrous 3-point turn... Also, he described my driving as involving various 'John Wayne' manoevers... "Safety, Jessica! Always safety!") Nonetheless, in a two-hour lesson he had lots of positive things to say, and it was really fun having a driving lesson again. Good times.And I've scheduled my driving test for Wednesday August 31st, at 8:00 in the morning. Huzzah.
August 26 2005, 08:18:47 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Driving Update
Heaven forbid... Jessica --- Drivers licence --- Every body watch out...(runs from the scene)...Hope it goes well my friend, all the best!!!
August 26 2005, 23:13:37 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Driving Update
Mwahahahaha!Thankee! *touches wood*
August 29 2005, 01:03:58 UTC 6 years ago
Congrats!
Now you're a certified driver! (Driving is so scary, I'm proud of you!)I'm 99.9% sure Cornell will not allow Ellen to keep her scholarship if she publishes anything negative about them. That's just the way it goes. I've seen too much university politics at prestigious universities (i.e. Queen's) to think any differently :(
BTW, how is Eragon? I didn't want to read it because I thought it would be an utter ripoff of Anne McCaffery, Bruce Coville (Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher) and Mercedes Lackey (the Gryphon series). And maybe Tolkien at that. How good is it really? How much of a ripoff? How much will I *headdesk* at the fact that this guy was 17 years old and still managed to publish this book?
August 30 2005, 00:17:18 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Congrats!
No, I'm not yet, that was just the lesson! Wish me luck on Wednesday morning. :-)Ahh, stupid unis.
Eragon is... Sort of like what I imagine reading Final Fantasy would be like. Elves ripped (badly) from Tolkienish beginnings, retaining nothing of Tolkien's beauty except physical attractiveness, physique, another language, and immortality. In Paolini's world, elves are atheists, which interested me. Dwarves, also, identical to how they are in most fantasy. Dragons, like you said. Plus David Eddings. Urgals/Orcs, reasonably unique, for once. Ra'zaq, a terrible, laughable version of the Nazgul/Robert Jordan wraiths, all other wraiths. "You ssshall not esscape!"
But for a 17-year-old... It's darn good. I make fun of it, but I would be incapable of writing something 600 pages long at my age, so I guess there's hope for him. I think all his characters are clichéed and fairly flat, but they have their moments. He loves his imagined world, and although it isn't nearly as good as Middle-earth, it might be considered as good as some of the 'worlds' of other authors. He writes in untranslated Dwarvish for paragraphs, and then translates it all at the end of the book. In short, I think Paolini's an excellent example of the child prodigy who lacks humanity in his/her art because of a huge lack of life experience. But interesting, nonetheless.