Happy Birthday, Mike's Musings!

This blog started one year ago today. I began, as one does, with a test post. I also tested uploading a picture (this was well before I discovered Flickr), linked to an odd story I found out on the web, and late that night discovered that I’d chosen a name too much in haste.

Over the past year I’ve had a great deal of fun with this thing. I have reviewed books and movies and blogged about music. I have tracked and memorialized old friends. I have touched on issues, both local and national. I have lamented lamentable events such as the tsunami and the recent hurricane.

I’ve explored my family history. And reported on family present. I have given weather reports. I have given travelogues.

I have become a braggart.

I have bragged about my car, bragged about my kids and the neat things they do, and bragged about my work. I have (painfully) documented a year’s worth of health and dental woes. I find that bragging about forbearance helps me bear up in the face of things that otherwise scare me.

Behind all of it is the patience and love of my wonderful wife, Karen. It is her considered opinion that I spend too much time on line. She’s right of course, and I will try to mend my ways.

As soon as I finish this post!

Some Books

I finished Bob Dylan's book the other day. Chronicles, Vol. 1 is an interesting book. It is not a rock-star memoir. Dylan seems to not want to be a rock star, though he writes fascinating details about wanting to sing and play the music.

What struck me about this book is that it holds up as a book whether its author is a famous rock star or not. This is a literate look at the early folk music scene when Dylan was young, his mid-life as a celebrity, and his re-discovery of the joy of performing late in life.

I also took a day or two to read 21, the unfinished few chapters of what would have been the next Aubrey/Maturin novel from Patrick O'Brian. I had been looking forward to this read, and I will say I enjoyed it. It also made me sad, though. I miss O'Brian's writing.

Book Review: Good Omens

Good Omens is a novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that follows the efforts of a motley crew angels, devils, apocalyptic horsemen/bikers and witchfinders to (variously) avert, cause, take part in, or figure out the apocalypse. It has good and evil, lots of biblical references, and a total screw-up of Armageddon. Funny.

The book came out back in 1990. I stumbled on it at a book wholesaler and decided to take a look. I'd read and enjoyed books by Gaiman (American Gods and Neverwhere) and had heard of Pratchett (I may have read some of his stuff; I have a leaky memory for light novels), so why not?

I have also found word that Good Omens is a movie project, if on hold, for Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python alumnus and director of Time Bandits and Brazil (two of my movie favorites). I like what Gilliam had to say in an interview with SCI FI Wire about why the Good Omens movie has been hard to get financing for:

"Unfortunately, I think our timing was rather bad, because we turned up in Hollywood in November of 2001 talking about a comedy film about the apocalypse. That was just bad timing."

No doubt. Still, I hope the film gets made. There's not enough of this sort of silliness around. I think silliness might be a help, or at least a relief, right now.