Meme tag! I'm it.

Qalmlea has tagged me with a meme. PZ Myers started this on Pharyngula a while ago.

Here are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My Ancestors:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My great-great-great-grandparent is Laelaps
My great-great-grandparent is Quintessence of Dust
My great-grandparent is An Evangelical Dialogue On Evolution
My grandparent is Exploring Our Matrix
My parent is Sporadic Maunderings

The Questions (and Answers):

1. The best scary movie in children's movies is:

Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. Hey, it scared the hell out of me when I was seven. To date I still think it's the creepiest movie I've ever seen. The new version with Johnny Depp is mild by comparison (The modern special effects actually make it less creepy).

2. The best song that moves me inexplicably in 80s pop is:

80s pop is the soundtrack to my teenage years. A lot of people are going to lose any respect they may have had for me when I admit this, but I have always found Hatful of Stars by Cyndi Lauper to be incredibly sad.

3. The best adventure story in Historical Fiction is:

The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour. Really, there's nothing more to say here.

4. The best book appealing to both children and adults in Fantasy is:

This one was hard. I was racking my brain, and I had just about decided to cop out and ditto Quamlea's answer (an excellent choice, but too advanced for younger children, I think) when I remembered a book Mom read to Marie and I when I was 4 or 5, and that I read again myself several times. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I also remember, even as a little kid, being disappointed that the Disney cartoon was basically just the chapter "The Battle for Toad Hall".

5. The most fantastic melody of all time is found in:

Superman, the main title. That melody is really versatile. Just by changing the tempo it can be sad, tense or exciting. John Williams is awesome.

So now I tag Phil, Tom and Jackal. Maybe this will get them to update their blogs.

Cool trivia: The stories and screenplays for Superman and Superman II were written by Mario Puzo, the author of (and screenplay writer for) The Godfather

Later,

UPDATE: I just want to say that I think the best melody [full stop] is In the Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg, but I couldn't fit it to the question.

Later,

The Great Yokai War

The Great Yokai War was hilarious. I don't know if it was meant to be serious, but any movie with this many cheesy monsters is going to be comedy gold.

Not to mention the extremely non-linear plot, and the fact that the hero isn't the one who defeats the villain.

The review that I mentioned in a previous post sums this movie up better than I can.

Later,

Has anyone ever actually fallen for this crap?

Here's an email that somehow got past my spam filter:

"good_lock1@oi.com.br"
to undisclosed-re.

show details
12:29 pm (5 hours ago)
BILL AND EXCHANGE OF THE FOREIGN REMITTANCE DEPARTMENT OF ZENITH BANK PLC, LAGOS.NIGERIA.
contact me at: mr_nzeribe2@yahoo.it

Dear Friend ,

TRANSFER OF US$7.500, 000 MILLION DOLLARS

I'm Mr Ben Nzeribe, Operations Officer, BILL AND EXCHANGE of THE FOREIGN REMITTANCE DEPARTMENT OF ZENITH BANK PLC, In my department we discovered an abandoned sum of US$7.500,000(Seven million five hundred United states dollars) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers who died along with his family in Tuesday, November 2, 1999 in air crash.

Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of Kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless somebody applies for it as next of Kin or relative to the deceased as indicated in our banking and financial policies but unfortunately we learnt that his supposed next of kin or relation died with him in the accident leaving nobody behind to claim the money.

It is therefore upon this discovery that I decided to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and we don't want this money to go into the Bank treasure as unclaimed bills.

The Banking law and guide line here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after Six and half years, the money will be transferred into the Bank treasury as unclaimed fund.

The request for a foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner and an indigence cannot stand as next of kin to the deceased family. We agreed that 30% of this money will be for you as foreign partner, in respect of your assistance in this business, and 70% would be for me and two of my staff in the business.

Thereafter,I and my colleagues will visit your country for disbursement according to the percentages indicated.Therefore, to enhance the immediate transfer of this fund to you as arranged,you must apply first to the Bank as relation or next of kin of the deceased indicating your private, telephone and fax number for easy and effective communication and location where the money will be remitted. Upon receipt of your reply,

I will send to you by fax or e-mail the text of the application.I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer.You should contact me on MY E-MAIL, as soon as you receive this letter. I decided to contact you as you have products of interest in your part of the world where we can invest our own percentage to avoid peoples awareness as we are civil servants.

Note that we can conclude tis operation within ten banking days.Please keep this very confidential for obvious security reasons. Contact me for more information, all confirmable before you apply if you want.

Trusting to hear from you sortly for a detailed information which are confirmable before you can make up your mind to apply.If however, you are not interested,do let me know by return mail too as I will not contact anybody else until I hear from you.

Please reply me immediately only through this my private email address at: mr_nzeribe2@yahoo.it

For more informations about the crash you can visit this site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/502503.stm

Regards,
Mr Ben Nzeribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aqui na Oi Internet você ganha ou ganha. Além de acesso grátis com qualidade, ganha contas ilimitadas de email com 1 giga cada uma. Ganha espaço ilimitado para hospedar sua página pessoal. Ganha flog, suporte grátis e muito mais. Baixe grátis o Discador em http://www.oi.com.br/discador e comece a ganhar.

Agora, se o seu negócio é voar na internet sem pagar uma fortuna, assine Oi Internet banda larga e ganhe modem grátis. Clique em http://www.oi.com.br/bandalarga e aproveite essa moleza!

Really, does anyone fall for this anymore? Did anyone ever?

Later,

Jackal has a kitten blog

My cousin started a blog about the kittens she is taking care of.

She told me that she'll start posting pics tomorrow.

Later,

The fig tree incident explained

I found this webcomic via Pharyngula
I've added it to my sidebar.

Later,

Moonlight

So I just finished watching the second episode of this new vampire show, Moonlight.

I've only seen two episodes so far, but it's pretty good. It seems less broody than Angel. I never got into Forever Knight, so I can't compare it.

I have one gripe, but I have the same gripe with almost every show/movie/book with a superhuman hero.

They become idiots when the plot requires it.

They have superhuman strength, speed and senses, and yet the villain always manages to blind-side them.

An example from Moonlight episode two.

Mick (the vampire hero) jumps into a warehouse, kills two thugs, frees the kidnapped woman, and then gets shot by the main villain (with silver buckshot). It has been established that Mick has a super-keen sense of smell, and is familiar with this guy's scent. He should have known the guy was there. Nick, like Angel, also makes a lot of amateurish mistakes, despite being 90 years old (Angel was 230, I think, but had no real experience as a PI, whereas Nick has been a PI for at least 30 years, so I figure it balances out).

This is common to villains, too. A villain will be kicking the hero all over the set (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively), but when the time comes to wrap up the story, the villain regresses back to kindergarten.

As for the silver, well, the writer's get to set the rules, so I'm okay with that.
My Classic Mythology professor back at Penn State used to say that stories can vary widely in details and still be the same at the root, but "you can't give Helen back"¹. I was not happy with the way Angel dealt with sun exposure, but the wayMoonlight does it, it almost seems to be trying to give Helen back.

Still, I'm enjoying it, so I'll keep watching.

Later,

¹ "Giving Helen back" refers to the story of the Trojan war, and is something that would destroy the plot.

I may have found the holy grail

If you read my complete profile, you will see that I like "Cheezy B-movies with hilarious titles".

"Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD", "Hell Comes to Frogtown", "Killer Clowns from Outer Space", "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown", "Cemetery Man" , "Blood and Donuts", ... you get the picture.

There is similar genre that also appeals to me. Chinese/Japanese fantasy movies. "The Heroic Trio", "Green Snake", "Ultraman", "Zeiram", that sort of thing.

I won't go into the rather convoluted series of links that brought me to this movie, but upon reading the review, my first thought was, "I must see it".

Seriously, if I was into that sort of thing, I would sacrifice a goat to Netflix in order to get this movie. Since I'm not, I just went to their website and did a search. They do have it, and it is now at the top of my queue.

On a side note, I have actually seen/read about 2/3 of the other items reviewed. And now that I am aware of the rest, I will be seeing them.

Later,