I guess it’s just the “HP and the A of B” pattern, combined with the new movie coming out, but I’d like to see titles like:
But let’s stay away from titles like:
…but if the date is to be believed, I haven’t bought it yet.
As a followup, the local KFC has replaced their Hot and Fresh Breast (Meal) poster with a Hot and Fresh Strips Meal.
This time, we got pictures:
The two of us and our friend Daniel were wandering through Borders last night, looking at the Harry Potter display. Oddly, it was right next to the sections on Astrology, Speculative (I guess New Age is too passé), two whole shelves on Magical Studies, Christianity, Metaphysics, and finally Self-Help. (How’s that for an interesting combination?)
Among them we found some frightening titles, like Dreams for Dummies (they don’t already have them?), or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Psychic, which made the claim that everyone is psychic, as opposed to the book we found down the shelf, which proclaimed merely that All Women are Psychic. Wiccan Feng Shui seemed like an interesting idea.
Daniel found the real kicker: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem. Just think about it.
On the same corner where a few weeks ago someone had placed “Atomic X For Governor” signs, Katie and I saw a new parody. There’s a candidate in a local election named Brett Floyd, and someone had gotten neon pink cardboard and written up a “Vote Pink Floyd” sign.
For once we actually had a camera in the car, but couldn’t get it out fast enough.
Update November 7!
We got a photo on Saturday, and finally got the pictures back! It was too blurry to read, so it’s overly processed, but here it is:
I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack for a while, but kept not finding it. A few weeks ago, we were listening to a copy of Holst’s The Planets we had just picked up. I’d heard the whole suite before, but had only heard “Mars” recently, so one section of “Jupiter” just leaped out at me. I was absolutely certain I had heard something very like it, but not exactly the same, in a movie, probably sword-and-sorcery. I tried several net searches, but had no luck – it’s not as if you can plug a few notes into Google and search for pieces containing a melody.
A while later it occurred to me that it might have been from Conan, so I tried to find it online, only to learn it was out of print. This looks like a job for eBay! It took a couple of auctions to get it (I really hate snipers), but I did, and the CD showed up in the mail a few days ago.
And sure enough, the piece I couldn’t help but think of while listening to “Jupiter” was there: track 12, “The Kitchen/The Orgy.” Interestingly the liner notes go into how Basil Poledouris constructed the piece, but don’t make a single mention of Holst, despite other tracks acknowledging influences such as Orff’s Carmina Burana, or the Gregorian chant “Dies Irae.” But the similarity is undeniable – even more similar than “Charging Fort Wagner” from James Horner’s Glory soundtrack or Joel McNeely’s battle music from the Verdun 1916 episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is to Orff’s “O Fortuna” (neither of which credits that influence either).
Got someone’s virus-generated email today (though that’s far from unusual). The mail server strips out known viruses and obvious subterfuge, but this one still had a huge HTML file attached… containing, oddly enough, the complete lyrics to Rent. (Incidentally, some idiot decided to make the show’s entire official website appear in a popup. If you have popups disabled, all you see is a message telling you to install Flash, even if you already have it.)
