L o b a B l a n c a {dot} c o m

Here’s another entry that’s been writing itself in my brain for a while. This is the “British Quad” poster for 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. I figured it was time to showcase the British Quad style of movie poster, and what better way than with a British movie?

So, first, a bit of poster pedantry. Here in the States, most movie posters, referred to as “one sheets,” are designed for a vertical format and are generally sized at 27 inches wide by 40 inches tall (although sometimes they can be 39 inches or 41 inches…I really don’t know why the discrepancy, but 40 is usually the norm). These are the posters that you see hanging in light boxes throughout the movie theaters. These are also generally double-sided, with a mirror image printed on the back. I’ve got several of these posters, and sometimes I like to display them with the mirror image showing rather than the proper side. I’m a little weird like that. The purpose of the double-sided printing is to give the image a bit more substance when the light from the light box shines through (makes the lit-up image look richer than if the back was just white).

Anyway, over in the UK, they prefer their movie posters in a horizontal format. Queen’s prerogative and all, you see. Actually, I’m not really sure why they like their posters in a horizontal layout, but I do like how most often the U.S. design needs to be altered, sometimes significantly, to fit the quad format, which is 40 inches wide by 30 inches tall (don’t ask me for the metric size; I’m American and my brain simply isn’t that talented).

So, Shaun of the Dead. Right from the start, fans of the zombie genre will recognize that the title is a delightful play on the title of the George Romero classic Dawn of the Dead. Already, we’re clued in to the fact that this is going to be a spoofy take on the zombie flick.

The U.S. design is all right, but there is something so delightful and so intrinsically English about the UK Quad version. We start out with the tagline, “Ever Felt Like You Were Surrounded By Zombies?” in a nice, smooth sans serif font. The entire image is composed of what I’m sure any proper Londoner will immediately recognize as the doors to an Underground train car. The black rubber of the closed doors perfectly bisects the design, and you get the two windows on each side taking up a significant portion of the design.

What I love most about the choice of the Tube setting is the double meaning it gives to the tagline’s “surrounded by zombies” statement. Anyone who takes public transportation with any frequency will understand the figurative take. Sitting or standing in a packed-to-capacity train car, not yet fully awake, surrounded by other still-groggy commuters smelling of coffee, toothpaste, and too much cologne/perfume…it’s the zombie shuffle in its truest form as we worker bee automatons drag ourselves on our programmed daily commutes. All that’s missing are the bloody body parts on the floor and random cries for “Braaaaaainnnnnssss!” (Actually, I’ve had morning commutes that came pretty close to having both…but that’s for another post.)

Here, however, the tagline takes on a more literal meaning as we see this particular train is packed with zombies…and our hero. I love how the most vivid colors on this poster are the blood-red train doors and our eponymous Shaun and his bouquet of flowers. The zombies all have properly pale zombie skin, but even the color of their clothing has been muted. Check the zombie dude in the bottom right corner; his red outfit has been dulled to a muted rust color (I feel like I should be writing “colour” in honor/honour of this movie).

Our eyes are irrefutably drawn to Shaun because of his vivid coloring—the yellow flowers, the red of his tie, the pink flush of his living skin—as well as the wonderful look on his face. Not necessarily a look of fear…more of reserved disquiet. It’s a wonderful “WTF” look if ever I saw one. I also love how Shaun is the only one on the train who isn’t looking forward. All the zombies are pretty much making eye contact with anyone looking at this poster. Shaun, however, is looking at what the rest of us are looking at…all those effing zombies.

We then follow the design down to the title of the movie, again presented in a sans serif font (I know it sounds incredibly nerdy when I point out the font type, but I’m a bit of a font geek and have in fact been accused of font snobbery, an accusation I rather happily accept). This is a nice, bold font as well, quite striking in appearance. It’s been distressed, although the red of the Tube doors makes the title look instead like it’s been splattered with blood. Also, note how the “A” in “Dead” is partially formed by a hand reaching upward in a rigor-mortised claw of classic zombie design. Sweet.

Then comes the second tagline, “A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.” followed by the movie’s Web site, “www.romzom.com” (which is, sadly, no longer the movie site). I love how the URL has such perfect symmetry as well as plays, perhaps unintentionally, with the fact that we typically hear about “rom-coms,” those schmaltzy romantic comedies that make you feel so close to sugar coma by the end that you get a free shot of insulin as you’re leaving the theater. Here, there’s a bit of an interruption in the rom-com in the form of zom…romzomcom.

This poster gives you everything you need to know about this movie while giving you absolutely nothing. All it tells us is that there are going to be zombies. And romance. And humor. Er, humour. And a guy named Shaun. Oh, and it’s all going to be very British. But, as with previous picks for this series, this poster does its job so very brilliantly. It’s concise, it’s clever, it’s whimsical, it’s well planned and executed, and it gives the proper amount of teasing needed to draw people and make them want to know more.

So, there you go. Our very first Quad poster. Hope you enjoyed it…and if you haven’t yet seen Shaun of the Dead, whatever are you waiting for?

Ah, Sweet Thunder. This was my very first “Big Girl” bicycle. It was a classic Huffy “no-speed” with fenders and a banana seat, and those awesome bumpy off-road tires. And its own name and number. The flash kind of washes out the number, but it’s 2. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why the bike was called Sweet Thunder. Or why my parents thought I should have a pink bike. Minus a horrible 6th-grade graduation dress decision made by my mom, involving a pink dress that flared in all the places that a fat girl never wants her clothes to flare, this was the only thing my parents ever gave me that was pink. Well, Pink Panther…but he doesn’t count. He’s supposed to be pink.

My parents bought this bike for me for, I believe, my 5th birthday. Yes, before you even ask, it was way too big for me at the time. But my dad, realizing that his daughter was destined to have massive growth spurts throughout her childhood, knew that I would quickly grow tall enough to handle this wheeled pink fury. Plus, it’s a “girl bike” frame, so I could stand up and pedal without fear of falling on that dangerously pointless bar that “boy bikes” have.

[Boy Bike Tangent: Could someone please explain to me why the bicycle frames built for boys have that bar positioned in such a place that would, I assume, cause maximum damage to any guy who slipped and knocked into it? It makes no sense to me whatsoever. I mean, I get that the reason that girls' bikes don't have the bar is so that we delicate flowers can mount our bikes modestly while wearing our hoop skirts and corsets, but that bar just seems so ill-positioned for the gender with "outtie" bits as opposed to "innie" bits that might fare a bit better in an altercation involving that bar. Were boy bikes designed by some bitter spinster who wanted to hurt any man who rode her creation? Or is it just a stupid piece of metal that someone tacked onto the frame to make sure that dudes knew they weren't riding a girly bike? They were riding a manly bike with a manly, ball-breaking appendage!

Oh, and by the way, I'm still giggling from writing "mount our bikes."]

So when I first got this bike, it definitely needed training wheels. I hadn’t yet developed the enviable balance I have today, which allows me to do things like stand on one foot while unlacing one of my Docs after having way too many margarita swirlies down at Uncle Julio’s. I also think I was terrified by the sheer size of this bike. I was a wee pup when I was 5. The freakish growth spurts (both of the vertical and horizontal varieties) didn’t start to kick in until around 7. So the training wheels stayed on much longer than they should have.

Finally, my dad decided that it was time to call my bluff. He removed the training wheels while I was at school, so when I came home, there sat Sweet Thunder, mocking me with its now only two wheels. Being the pure bundle of stubborn that I am, however, I refused to play my dad’s game.

That’s when the bribery came in.

Growing ever-irritated by the fact that the bike was steadily developing a patina of dust from my disuse, my dad threw down the gauntlet in the form of monetary inducement. If I could ride my bike around our quarter-acre of yard without stopping or falling, he’d give me $20.

Next day, there I was, doing my best to learn how to ride a bike with only two wheels. However, not without incident. We had a holly tree in our back yard. It was a beautiful tree, especially in the snow. Looked very Christmas-y with its dark green leaves and red holly berries. Know when a holly tree isn’t pretty? When you’re losing control of your Huffy and heading face-first into a low-hanging branch full of prickly holly leaves.

Know what makes a face full of holly leaf scratches okay? A crisp 20-dollar bill in your pocket. Yes, sadly, I had to be bribed into learning how to ride a big girl bike.

Through the years, I decked out Sweet Thunder with streamers that inevitably disintegrated, a headlight kit, a bell that at one time had a little Snoopy on top that spun whenever you rang the bell (Snoopy fell of at some point, but you can still see the bell portion on the left handlebar grip), and a little pink basket that had Snoopy’s “Joe Cool” alter ego leaning against a giant strawberry. Oh, that I wish I was kidding on that last part. The only reason that the basket isn’t still on the bike is because the bottom rotted out. They sure made quality bike accessories back in the day!

I rode this bike until Christmas of my 6th grade year (yes, the year of the traumatic pink graduation dress) when my parents upgraded me to a 10-speed. This time, the bike was blue. And I outgrew it in pretty much a year and inevitably had to switch to riding my dad’s 10-speed. Dangerous, those growth spurts.

Strangely, my dad has kept Sweet Thunder in the family. Even during the great detritus dump that my parents did when they moved out of the area, he refused to get rid of my first bike (although I believe he did sell my 10-speed). The Huffy was packed into the moving truck and now lives in my parents’ garage, where the above photo was taken. I asked my dad why he kept this bike, but he just mumbled something about not knowing why and then promptly wandered away to organize his tools or something. I say he’s far more sentimental than he ever lets on, and that’s why my little pink Huffy bike still has a home.

Whatever the reason, it’s sweet. Just like Sweet Thunder.

Didn’t Loba tell you to stop your grandmother from talking about tea bagging?

The number of captions that flooded into my brain when I saw this photo at Pundit Kitchen caused a massive surge and subsequent reboot of my primary sarcasm core. All I could do was laugh until I was literally crying. I’m sure at that point they raised the temperature in my own suite in hell by several degrees.

How can one series hold such a wealth of happiness for one little geekling that just watching this video makes me all teary with nerd joy?

I finished this book a few weeks ago but completely forgot to talk about it here. Where did I remember to talk about it? That’s for Loba to know and you to figure out.

This was a delightful find that I stumbled upon while perusing the sci-fi section of the local library. Yes, I know that I said I was going to make this year all about reading my own books. But…it’s the library. And there are so many books there. And they know my name, and they call out to me when I haven’t visited them in a while.

So, Women Writing Science Fiction as Men might sound like the most boring title imaginable for an anthology…and really, it is pretty damned boring. But that should in no way reflect poorly on the anthology itself. Edited by Mike Resnick, this collection of 16 short stories, all written by women authors, is a fascinating exercise in creativity as well as an interesting commentary on gender relations, particularly within a genre that continues to be so intrinsically male-oriented (minus sad attempts at luring women in with “space drama” a la Caprica, which now officially feels more like betrayal than entertainment).

The crux of this anthology’s challenge was this: The women who wrote the short stories had to present a sci-fi story from the perspective of a male character. And the male character had to be so decidedly male as to be irreplaceable by a female protagonist. So no gender-generic storytelling here.

Were the women who accepted this challenge successful? Well, it was definitely a mixed bag of success and failure. And even those who succeeded did so in such a way that was either completely spoofing the challenge or was somewhat foggy on the whole “male-only perspective” requirement. In fact, one writer presented a story that was narrated by a woman. I’m still not sure as to how that one slipped by, but it did.

All in all, however, this is an intriguing anthology. True, the tongue-in-cheek takes on the challenge were sometimes a bit too goofy or stereotypical in presentation, but even some of those were funny enough to be forgiven their male caricatures. Plus, several of the stories were serious attempts at tackling this challenge, and they were the ones that shone brightest among the mix. Although even those beg the question, did the women writers truly succeed at writing believably from the male perspective? Or did they simply succeed at writing as women perceive men to behave? I’d love to hear from men who read this anthology and find out what they think of these writers and their attempts at capturing the essence of “maleness” in their stories.

Final Verdict: True, this was a library book that I had to return once I was finished with it, but the first thing I did once I got home was find a copy for myself at Amazon Marketplace. Found one for 98 cents. W00ts. I also discovered that there is another anthology edited by Resnick called Men Writing Science Fiction as Women. I was pleased enough with the first anthology that I checked out the description of this one on a whim. I was sold the instant I read that Robert J. Sawyer and David Gerrold were two of the contributors, and I bought a copy of this through Marketplace as well. Was there some kind of subliminal message to be learned that the price for a used copy of this book was 25 percent more than the anthology by the women writers? Nah…

Watched this last night OnDemand and it’s been stuck in my mental theater ever since. I think this is one of the most wonderfully weird music videos ever made. All thanks to Christopher Walken.

Finally. This, ladies and gentlemen, has been the bane of my reading existence for the better part of a month. And it has brought me down quite a few pegs in regard to my literary prowess. See, this is another one of those science fiction books. Not sci-fi. Oh no. Ain’t no shootin’ or beamin’ or Bajorans or Vulcans in this here book. This is hard-core nerdity of the fiercest variety. The kind that really makes you think.

Think there’s gotta be something wrong with my brain because I’m just not getting into this this book or comprehending what it’s trying to say to me. And that kind of realization doesn’t do much for one’s spirit…or self-esteem.

Truth be told, as the old saying goes, “There is no new thing under the sun.” Ursula LeGuin does not tackle anything new in her novel The Dispossessed. Her novel broaches popular sci-fi examinations of religion, societal constructs, economic systems and their varied successes and failings, sexual freedoms and mores, philosophy, socioeconomic status…the whole nine utopia vs. dystopia yards. Although it wasn’t a truly black-or-white, right-or-wrong comparison. LeGuin provides insight into the promise and pitfalls of both sides, and makes quite a compelling argument both ways. True, the bias does seem to be toward leaving behind the more capitalistic mindsets for a more “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” attitude. But neither side is completely perfect.

The way in which LeGuin tackles these topics is wherein the strength and complexity of this novel resides. If you are looking for something light, a quick beach read or something to distract you as you ride to work in the mornings, then this is probably not the book you want. This is the book that you settle down to read, knowing that you need to give it 1,000-percent of your attention. And even then, you might have to read a passage more than once, to let it completely sink in.

Short and simple: It’s the kind of book that demands a lot from you because it gives you a lot to contemplate. You simply have to be in the proper frame of mind to want to receive what it has to give.

Truth be told, I was very rarely in the proper frame of mind for this story. It wasn’t until I was about three-quarters of the way through the book before things finally started to fall into place and I was able to jump into the story more easily. Prior to this point, each session was somewhat excruciating. Perhaps I’ve allowed my focus to wane a bit too much when it comes to meatier novels, but I found myself fighting the thought of settling into this book each night. That’s not a good place to be when approaching any kind of book. However, I am glad that I persevered. Plus, one of my favorite Star Trek characters shares his name with one of the central characters in this novel: Odo. Ironically, Odo in this novel is an anarchist. Quite the contrast to DS9’s Odo (I’m sure Quark would have preferred LeGuin’s Odo to his shape-shifting nemesis).

Final Verdict: This isn’t my book, so keep or donate isn’t an option. It goes back to its original owner. I can say this, though: This isn’t going on my wish list. Although I did finally start getting it toward the end, and although I do believe that this is the type of book that you need to read more than once, especially at different parts in your life, I simply cannot fathom putting myself through this literary endurance test again. Maybe much later down the road. But not now. Not for a very long time.

“Kes, darling, I’m legally obligated to inform you that I’m on several special intergalactic offender lists…”

If you’re not getting a serious “NO” feeling from this pic, you really should get a check-up from your family EMH. I’ll beat this one into the ground until there’s no breath left in my nerdy body: The pairing of Neelix and Kes was the creepiest May-December romance in the history of whatever Quadrant they were in. And I think this photo pretty much sums up the true extent of what I mean.

DO NOT WANT!!

TrekCore yet again wins kudos for salvaging this one for their rare photos section. I even love the name they gave the image: “kes_and_neelix_rejected1.”

This one’s from the not-too-distant past, denizens. But it’s the conclusion of more than a year’s worth of research and perseverance that has left me incredibly happy today.

When I last visited London in September 2008, I took my cousin to a classical music concert at St. Martin-in-the Fields. Of all the things I love most about London, concerts at St. Martin are at the very tippy-top of the list. It’s no secret that I’m not a highly religious person, but sitting inside that beautiful church, ensconced in the glow of candlelight, the serene silence of history and devotion almost palpable around you…you can’t help but feel the flicker of kinship with whatever greater universal powers might be out there. I hope that my cousin felt something close to the same delight I feel whenever I go to St. Martin.

This concert, however, provided even more delight than any previous concerts. On this particular evening, the Locrian Ensemble of London, featuring renowned cellist Justin Pearson, gave the world premier performance of a piece by British composer Julie Cooper. The piece was “Cariad,” which is the Welsh word for “Love.”

I wish I had the words to capture the overwhelming joy that this piece brought to my heart. Tempered in style and cadence, it pulls you in slowly, softly, and carries you upward as it soars and swells to glorious heights before bringing you once more earthbound. It is rapturous and exquisite, and all other music from that evening’s performance melted away under the memory of this one composition.

I left St. Martin that evening with “Cariad” still playing in my head and heart. The piece was not on the evening’s set list, so I didn’t have the title on hand. But I couldn’t forget the music. So when I returned home to the States, I set about doing my best impersonation of Mrs. Columbo that I could muster since Loba Loves a Mystery, too (somewhere, a Kate Mulgrew fan is smiling right now).

My investigation led me first to Justin Pearson and then to the composer herself, Julie Cooper. Ms. Cooper has very kindly kept me informed about the recording schedule for “Cariad” ever since my initial query. And then, two nights ago when I arrived home and checked my e-mail, there was a message from her, informing me that “Cariad” was finally available for purchase!

I am now the very proud owner of this magnificent piece of music. And it is still as wonderful as it was the first time I heard it. So I’m encouraging all of you to visit Ms. Cooper’s page at CDBaby.com and listen to the preview of “Cariad.” If you like what you hear, by all means, purchase your very own MP3. I promise, you won’t regret it.

And, as a bonus, here’s a photo I snapped of St. Martin-in-the-Fields as my cousin and I sat on the steps of Trafalgar Square. Before you ask, I didn’t do a thing to this shot in PhotoShop. That glorious sky behind the church is all Mother Nature this time.