Chicago will be ours!

DIARY

Would you believe me if I told you that I was one of two hundred plucky souls who, as part of a progressive movement, brought rush hour traffic on Lake Shore Drive almost to a complete standstill?

It's true.

The #6 Jackson Park Express bus I was riding progressed up the Drive before encountering functional difficulties while stopped just north of the McCormick place. Lake Shore Drive is six lanes at that point and the bus was in the second from the left.

I think the problem was electrical, because the driver couldn't even get the engine to turn over. After attempting for about a minute she said, "you'll have to transfer," and opened the doors. The passengers stared at her as if she was crazy; cars were whizzing by at fifty mph inches from the open door now.

Fortunately, two more buses pulled up shortly: a #6 to the left and a #28 to the right to take on all us stranded folks. Another bus showed up after a couple moments, to provide cover for those boarting the #28. They were just parked, parallel, in the middle of the Drive. They occupied lanes one through four of six.

So you see, I was one of two hundred plucky souls who, as part of a progressive movement, brought rush hour traffic on Lake Shore Drive almost to a complete standstill.

* * * * *

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

11 hours, 56 minutes.

The Times reviewer A.O. Scott has described it as "grainier and grimier... It feels at once more dangerous, more thoroughly enchanted and more real."

Which is incredibly encouraging. This is what I wanted from the beginning.

Normally I am a stickler for faithfulness in movie adaptation (while I enjoyed Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy on the whole, I was disgusted with The Two Towers. I see movies, as long as there is nothing to lead us to believe it is not a literal translation (eg. Ran or O Brother, Where art thou?), the audience's interpretation will be that they are seeing the same events depicted in the book. While I believe it is possible to jusify exclusion, I think contradiction is a much thornier problem.

Still, I am willing to accept Cuarón's cuts and alterations, as long as he employs them with better judgment than Columbus. To illustrate, at the beginning of the first movie, Dumbledore spends the better part of a minute extinguishing each streetlight in Surrey, while they evidently can't spare two seconds moments later for Hagrid to tell us where exactly he got the damn bike. It's that sort of nonsensical choice that pisses me off.

I'll be sure to write more on this tomorrow... once I'm two hours and nineteen minutes further into the Harry Potter Movie Saga.

* * * * *

CASTLEVANIA FAN FICTION

I've decided my next adventure in Fan Fiction will be a literary interpretation of the Castlevania/Super Castlevania IV/etc. cluster of games... that is, the original story featuring Simon Belmont.

In recent years Konami has taken some pains to at least marginally locate the story within the regional framework of Transylvania. The Belmont clan is descended from Crusaders, and since Dracula is revived every hundred years, it allows for the events of Stoker's novel to transpire when the time is right.

Still, they've not even begun to tackle the historical nettles they've mired themselves in; namely, French-descended heroes confronting Szekely Undead Lords in a land ruled by the Habsburgs and Saxons, at war with the Poles, Russians, and Turks, dominated by a peasant Romanian population and a large number of Roma (gypsy) slaves.

Oh Konami, Konami, how did you so entangle and enoosify yourselves whist merely flossing your fangs?

Mess for them.
Creative opportunity for me.
More as this develops.

~ Connor