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Feel free to share this around. Let's make it a Thing.
Feel free to share this around. Let's make it a Thing.
I thought this clip would be up on YouTube dozens of times, but there were only two! Apologies for the annoying fuzzy text over about 30 seconds near the end -- my only other option was the BBC's official clip, but they cut it short so it ends before the fade-in of the field of poppies. Which is, you know, kind of necessary for the full impact.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below...
[Error: unknown template video]
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below...
[Error: unknown template video]
A week's trip out of town, catching up from a week's trip out of town, and mass quantities of freelance work = no time for anything, including reading, writing or (in some cases) sleeping. Grrrr. Note 1 to self: Say no to any and all jobs for the next, oh, two months. Note 2: Spend newly acquired free time gloating over the lovely SSHG Exchange prompts gifted to me by the mods. Can you say Plot Bunnies??
In other news, the transit of Venus is way cool. Watching that little circle move across the sun makes my brain feel funny as I try to wrap my head around the reality of giant flaming balls of gas floating in space. It's no wonder ancient man invented things like the celestial spheres and Prolemaic model. Much easier to grasp.
In keeping with my 100 Things (Surprises) commitment, I can add that I was quite surprised to learn how important the transit of Venus was in terms of astronomy and cosmology. Scientists used it to calculate the distance from the sun to the Earth, of all things -- the NASA guys cleverly glossed over exactly how they did this, saying something about the parallax method and trigonometry (bane of my existence) before zipping on to show pictures of the sun that make it look like some sort of hell dimension (oh great, our solar system is situated on the Hellmouth...). Other surprising Venus trivia: its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, its surface pressure is 92 times that of Earth, it rains sulfuric acid, and it suffers from pretty much constant hurricane-force winds. So not a good place for a vacation. Oh, and it rotates backwards.
None of which I knew before, so today was a net gain in that I learned something. Yay me!
In other news, the transit of Venus is way cool. Watching that little circle move across the sun makes my brain feel funny as I try to wrap my head around the reality of giant flaming balls of gas floating in space. It's no wonder ancient man invented things like the celestial spheres and Prolemaic model. Much easier to grasp.
In keeping with my 100 Things (Surprises) commitment, I can add that I was quite surprised to learn how important the transit of Venus was in terms of astronomy and cosmology. Scientists used it to calculate the distance from the sun to the Earth, of all things -- the NASA guys cleverly glossed over exactly how they did this, saying something about the parallax method and trigonometry (bane of my existence) before zipping on to show pictures of the sun that make it look like some sort of hell dimension (oh great, our solar system is situated on the Hellmouth...). Other surprising Venus trivia: its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, its surface pressure is 92 times that of Earth, it rains sulfuric acid, and it suffers from pretty much constant hurricane-force winds. So not a good place for a vacation. Oh, and it rotates backwards.
None of which I knew before, so today was a net gain in that I learned something. Yay me!
::: Inferno (Niven and Pournelle)
5 April 2009 03:09 pmCouldn't stop myself. Had to go back and re-read it after reading their sequel and Dante's original. It's as good as I remembered. Like any good retelling or adaptation, it's true to the spirit of the original but transforms it into a shape that's relevant for the new audience (some critic said the Watchmen movie suffered from its slavish devotion to the original -- said it was "more a curation than an adaptation" LOL!). Double plus good :)
