In like a lamb

Consider the past 2 weeks of inactivity here at ianwallace.com a vacation, if you will. 2002 has already seen an unparalled level of content, and although my life hasn't been completely uneventful lately, I just haven't felt compelled to type it all out. But right now my design professor, whose word-to-though ratio is somewhere in the neighborhood of 23:1, is rambling about some arbitrary design bullshit and I'd rather do this than listen to him. My mental preservation is your momentary distraction.

On Feb. 22 I got a new computer. It's an AMD Duron at 1 Ghz. I bought it wholesale as a very low-end machine, and spruced it up with some of the components I bought for my old machine over the years. So it presently has 60 GB of hard drive, 256 MB of PC133 SDRAM, 4 USB ports, an LG 8x CD-RW drive and generic 52x CD, a Logitech 2-button scroll mouse (my trademark mouse), and a Creative USB WebCam2 that both Colin and I were certain was broken. It's been ressurected thanks to the infinite glory and wonder of Windows XP. Say what you will about Microsoft's strangling oligopily; I love XP and I don't care what ya'll think. Any OS that can detect and render operational dead hardware and recognize all my drives despite rampantly incorrect pin settings is okay in my book. XP is like the Canada of operating systems - it takes abuse from people who don't understand it, and just keeps doing whatever it was doing already.


Saturday night I went to a production of Beowulf at the One Yellow Rabbit theatre. The tickets were a well-guarded surprise from Michelle, who cleverly kept me thinking we were going to Fred Penner. The show was done with Puppets, and was very... interpretive. There was no dialogue, only music and strange sound effects. It was visually quite impressive, and you could tell that the puppets and masks were products of loving craftsmanship. The monster Grendel looked like a cross between a Tim Burton creation and a creature from Where the Wild Things Are, and was - in my humble opinion - a master in the field of comically devouring puppet knights. But I can't say that the story of Beowulf was delivered very clearly, and some of the comments I heard from my fellow attendees while leaving the theatre were extremely confused. The production focused on the life of Hrothgar, the father-killing, incestuous, stag-fetishing King whom Beowulf saves from Grendel in the original work. I get the impression that a lot of watchers thought that the King was actually Beowulf, since he was the main character. It was certainly an interesting angle to take with the production, but would have been immessurably helped by some sort of explanatory monologue or something at the beginning, just to make it totally clear what was being watched. And perhaps a better title would have been "From the Tale of Beowulf: Hrothgar" or "Stag King: Inspired by Beowulf" My grandfather used to say that you just can't take an 11th century epic poem and tell it with puppets in 55 minutes, and I guess he was right.