The Boswell crest: a hooded hawk, with the motto Vraye Foy

HoodedHawk

A Scanner Darkly

·Books, Film

actor Donna
Went to see the film “A Scanner Darkly” today. It’s based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. Whoa. Great movie. I knew the movie was coming out this week, so I recently re-read the book; I found the movie to be really faithful to the book. Barris
Luckman
The movie uses a neat type of animation, “rotoscoping”; it is shot live-action, and then “animated” over that. The effect is really neat – you can definitely tell the “live” actors underneath. It’s especially appropriate for this movie because the plot revolves around a set of people addicted to a (new) drug, called Substance D.


Keanu Reaves plays Bob Arctor in the film; Arctor is an undercover cop, living with a couple of stoners. His girlfriend (Winona Ryder) is his dealer, and he’s basically trying to find out who her supplier is. The problem is Arctor is also taking Substance D (hey, he’s undercover and has to fit in), and it starts to affect his brain.

It’s not an “action” movie – it’s got great dialog, and I found the pace just right. Robert Downey Jr. is over the top as Barris the pseudo-intellectual, and Woody Harrelson is hysterical as Luckman. The scenes involving conversations and interactions between Barris and Luckman are hilarious. But the movie is quite serious. Dick based a number of the characters in the book on the people/friends made during his own drug-experimentation phase.

Highly recommended.

The Tango Singer

·Books

The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez.

I enjoyed this slim volume – mostly, I think, because Kirsten and I vacationed in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Feb. of this year. The book follows NYU grad student Bruno Cadigan as he goes to Buenos Aires to work on his thesis. He is trying to find the elusive Tango Singer, Julio Martel, rumored to have one of the greatest voices in Argentina.

He’s helped in his quest by “el Tucomano” – someone he meets at the airport. This thread is what holds the novel together; it is basically a number of vignettes about Buenos Aires’ past and present. Bruno arrives at the end of 2001, as Argentina’s economy takes a nosedive. A lot of the historical vignettes are “as told to” Bruno by Martel’s female companion, Alcira.

What really held my interest, however, were the stories and descriptions of various places in Buenos Aires that we actually visited. It was like being there again. Even though the images the author invokes are very detailed, they became even more vivid since I didn’t have to imagine them.

Darwin Fish found

·Science

tiktaaliktiktaalik
A team of paleontologists and zoologists have found the “missing link” fossil, showing the progression from water to land. The researchers report in the April 6, 2006 issue of Nature that they found the 375-million-year-old fossils in the Canadian arctic (in an area once a balmy river delta ). They’ve dubbed the new beast Tiktaalik roseae, which is Inuit for “big freshwater fish”.

So, the standard anti-evolution argument that such “missing links” are not found can be laid to rest. This animal is partway betwwen a fish and early tetrapods. It has lost some of the bones that fuse the head to the shoulders in fish (i.e., it has a neck). And its front “fins” have bone structures similiar to “wrists”.