“Upturning the tea table” is a phrase used by developers at Nintendo to refer to a sudden and dramatic change of direction suggested at the latter stages of the development process
From an article (part one of five) on the Nintendo Personal Trainer: Walking game.
“With Social Security Search you can uncover anything in their past that they are not divulging.”
Brad: Kate, we have to talk.
Kate: What?
Brad: There’s… there’s something I need to know. Well, something I already know.
Kate: Brad, you sound so serious! What is it?
Brad: The report I got back, the report on your social security number. It said that you didn’t really like my mother’s cooking when we visited last Christmas. You said you loved her green bean casserole! How could you just… lie like that?
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox. Okay. A friend of the Collective brought this documentary to my attention, and having enjoyed the Bronner labels for several years, I was interested enough to throw it on my Netflix queue. It’s a bit of a ramble, which is probably fitting for the topic, but does make it a little too easy to do other things while watching it.
The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works, Waxman. Non-fiction. If I were to suggest a sub-subtitle for this book, it would be “It’s As Bad As You Think.” Waxman presents what appears to be a little-varnished (though frequently self-congratulatory) look at how legislation happens, and the old saw about law and sausage definitely applies—though I have slightly more hope that the sausage-making could be reformed.
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I enjoyed the second series of Alfresco more than the first, and suspect that that enjoyment is related to Fry and Laurie writing enough of it that they now share credit with Ben Elton. Emma Thompson seems to have been given one sketch per program, apparently to demonstrate that Bob Newhart’s telephone bits are harder than they look.
Also included on this disc is the three-episode run of Nothing to Worry About, which served as something of a pilot and is correspondingly rougher even than the first series. I still can’t recommend the series for any but historical purposes.
Manna from Heaven, Zelazny. Yes. I don’t know how I missed this publication. I didn’t let Zelazny’s death prevent me from examining the appropriate section of the book store on every visit, but I nevertheless was unaware of this 2003 collection. Given the ongoing publication of The Collected Zelazny, it is of somewhat less interest, though the introduction (by Steven Brust) is unlikely to show up there, and it’s not clear whether the seldom-seen prologue to Trumps of Doom will, either.
The collection itself is not terrific, leading me to suspect that maybe everything Zelazny was willing to see republished was collected before his death. Still, it’s Zelazny (though the Amber short stories show some signs of less than full engagement), and even substandard Zelazny is worth reading, at least once.
