Nathan Hall's Wired Kingdom

The big hoorays:

Stardust comes out this Friday, the 10th. I’m hoping to convince Juliette to go see it on opening night, which I don’t think will be too packed at all in the theater here in West Palm Beach. Sorry Neil, I’m sure it will be great and all, but your grandmother and all of her friends who live down here with me are just not into you. They get more juiced by running each other over.

I’ve debated re-reading the book so that I was refreshed on the story line, which I only vaguely remember at this point, but I never got around to it. The trailers, which I’ve heard don’t represent the movie in any way, made me doubt whether I had ever read the book… or perhaps it was going to be one of those special movies that claims that it’s based on something and then just rips it to pieces and spits out something that looks like it was run in front of hundreds of test audiences until it was homogenized down to pap. Neil Gaiman, on his blog, claims that this isn’t so however.

In Salon today, there was a cool book review/article about Noga Arikha’s book Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. The premise of the book is to look back at the roughly 2000+ years of humanity where we nearly consistently believed in the “humours” (blood, choler, melancholy and phlegm) as the main fluids in our bodies that needed to be balanced to create a healthy, happy person. From what I gleaned from the article, Arikha makes a decent argument that although our understanding of the human body and its ailments (the discovery of cells and germs) has completely changed, there are some commonalities that remain. Those being the “holistic” approach to medicine that has become more popular in western medicine. For example, understanding stress as an important factor that can affect your actual physical health. The following quote was my favorite from the article and the best advice you could ever receive if you’re feeling depressed:

In the 10th century, the influential Persian physician Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi recommended the following regime for those suffering from excessive melancholy: outdoor exercise, light and gardens, massages and herbal baths, music and poetry, plenty of sexual activity and a light diet based on lamb, fish, eggs, green vegetables and ripe fruit. OK, he also suggested laxatives and occasional bleeding, but on the whole it’s difficult to see how any doctor in that pre-pharmaceutical age could have done better at treating depression.

(maybe minus the blood-letting)

Tonight: I’ve received the new Dr. Who, the second season of Rome and MST3K’s Eeegah! from Netflix today, which one to watch first?

Hope the title doesn’t give away how I think the movie will turn out… anyways, here’s a pic that I got via SF Signal, who got it from someone else, and from someone beyond that, ad infinitum.

Lucas, Spielberg, and Solo-I mean Ford on set of the new Indiana Jones movie, Lucas is wearing a shirt that says something to the effect of Han shot first. He also appears to have a tribble on his head…