At 4:44 AM CST the winter solstice occurs marking the longest night of the year. If everyone has been good, the days start getting longer tomorrow. Locally, the sun will rise at 6:39AM and set at 4:39PM for a total of 10 hours and 10 minutes of daylight, but tomorrow will be a whole 1 second longer.
This also marks HogsWatch, so don’t forget to put out the turnips.
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10 comments
I am re-reading “Hogfather” to celebrate.
That was my normal plan, but this year I have the DVD and it is a very faithful version of the tale with only 3 hours to work with.
I rather like Death’s granddaughter. She wields a mean fireplace poker :).
Ahh! So you finally got the movie Bryan? LOL I think Michelle Dockery portrays a good Susan, and David Jason is rather good as Albert. 😀
I just watched it again also. And then for an extra laugh, just finished what is possibly the most insane movie ever made, Casino Royale (the original 1967 version). Talk about a cast of star’s! One cast member I thought was fitting was Geraldine Chaplin as one of the Keystone Cops! 😀 I’d forgotten what a laugh it is. 😀 More like one of the original Pink Panthers than a Bond movie. Maybe that’s why Peter Sellers was the headliner. 😉 And of course Ursula Andress. Always a good reason to see a film. 😉 😀
It was a good evening. I also watched It’s a Wonderful Life in memory of Mom who loved that movie and watched it every Xmas. 🙂 I got the 3rd (and best IMHO) colorized version produced in 2007 when it came out as a BluRay version in 2012. I’d gotten Mom the 1st colorized version when it came out on VHS in 1990 as an Xmas gift. I still have that sealed in plastic in a box. No VHS player any more though. I kept a few tapes. 🙂
I hope all have a great day. 🙂
Susan is one of my favorite characters, Badtux. Lots of ATTITUDE.
The DVD was a lot better than I expected it to be. I know what was left out, but the tale is still told. The only problem is that it is a lot more fun for people who are familiar with the books than than people who aren’t – people who aren’t will miss a lot of the jokes.
It’s a Wonderful Life & Miracle on 34th Street are two movies I avoid as I overdosed on them in my younger years when they were in the public domain and played non-stop from Halloween to New Years. The Alistair Sims version of A Christmas Carol has been saved by bad remakes.
Going Postal was also better than I expected. 😀 And yes, you have to have read the books to get the most from the films. 🙂 I like the way the children behave with Susan. 😀 Not afraid of her at all, or the monsters. They just tell Susan and she get’s the poker. LOL
The Color of Magic was Good. David Jason played Rincewind and I think got the character pretty right. Sean Astin as Twoflower. I wasn’t sure about him at first, but he grew on me as the film progressed. 🙂 Jeremy Irons played the Patrician well. 😀
Hmmm. I may have to watch those again! 😉 😀
I like that Sir Terry Pratchett has a cameo role in his movies… 😀 He was the Toymaker at the end of Hogfather for example. It’s a nice touch. 🙂
Don’t be frightened be angry – a slight variation on anger management 😉
I’ll check out the other two, thanks.
LOL Yes… “Susan says, don’t get afraid, get angry.” It’s sort of, the military way of thinking. 😉
Hmmm… I haven’t posted many of my favorite quotes for awhile. Just too busy existing the past year or so. 🙂 I think some of Sir Terry Pratchett’s quotes would be appropriate at the end of 2016, in memory (rather than from his stories, and not in any particular order):
In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, “The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting” attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.
I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
I’d go for “really great writer.” Although I don’t think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it.
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I’m fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it’s amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
‘Educational’ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month.
You have so many sources to draw on when you’re a fantasy writer.
It’s very rare that I ever go and research a particular subject. Mostly I do serendipitous research, I read stuff, things spinning out of the page.
Some of my best sources are ex-policemen, just to get a feeling of what it’s like to be one. And it’s quite different from being a civilian – except, of course, that I believe that policemen are just special sorts of civilians. Things like how hard it is to hold someone that doesn’t want to be held. This is the kind of thing that is worth knowing.
One of the important things about being a small-town reporter is knowing what not to put in the paper.
I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn’t what happened last night – it’s some cumulative thing that’s happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.
I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.
Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist.
All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be “do as you would be done by.” It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.
Terry and I see things in a very similar fashion – noise makers for children, citing the criminal law when reading fairy tales. My niece knows that Goldilocks went down for burglary, petit larceny, and criminal mischief when the Bear family returned and found her in their house. I will definitely check out the other DVDs.