Quick update, Florida style

Safely arrived in Orlando for the ICFA. Have already seen many wonderful people, with many more on their way. It's very warm here.

Before we left, I stayed up late several days to finish the job of rewriting the Book of Tales for the new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights and delivered it to the publisher. There's still a fair amount of review of the components on my plate, but this was the big hurdle and I can see my free time returning to me.

My nose feels almost normal now. My last couple of follow-up visits have been almost painless, and both my breathing and my sense of smell are recovering. For about the first month after the surgery, I was so exhausted that even walking down a flight of stairs would leave me wiped out; a couple of days ago, I ran up three flights of stairs to catch a train and was barely even winded. I think I can resume exercising this week.

(Last year's ICFA was when I realized that my nose was actually causing me sleeping problems and lead me to finally start the process of getting my nose fixed.)

Oh, I finally used my relatively new Sansa Fuze to watch TV--I downloaded all the chunks of the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer "Basic Cable Personality Clash Feud Skirmish '09" and watched them on the plane. I found it quite acceptable. It's weird, living in the 21st century.

That's pretty much it. Enjoy!

More about Watchmen, the comics-flavored film product

Over at Howling Curmudgeons, the group comics blog to which I contribute far too infrequently, there has of course been some discussion of the film Watchmen (not the Saturday-morning cartoon). I said this:

I have spent so many years looking at the precise telling of Watchmen--the emblems, the sigils--that I'd forgotten how much I like the story. But every time Snyder missed an opportunity to layer on a sigil or an emblem, I felt it sharply. No triangular bloodflow on Moloch's face? Why not?

(Laurie isn't water in the film. That's just bad filmmaking.)

to which one of my fellow curmudgeons, who is intimately familiar with the source material, replied, "I don't understand that comment."

So, I elaborated:

The six major characters all have physical emblems. Laurie's is water--the snow globe, the perfume bottle, the pool in Karnak, tears, rain. That's all lost in the film, just not there at all.

(This is distinct from the characters' sigils--Adrian's triangle, Blake's smiley face, Jon's circle.)

...

Emblems: Adrian is knots, surprisingly. Jon is watches, unsurprisingly. The others don't come to mind as readily--I might never have worked them all out to my satisfaction. (Is Dan eyeglasses? Maybe.)

Other sigils: Laurie is a wavy line. Rorschach is a stain. Dan is, I believe, a crescent.

Back in 2000, I wrote that I thought that the "minute hand at 11:58" might be Blake's sigil, but I think it belongs to all of them, a loss of innocence and the awareness of death--the most important image of the book, of course, since each of the characters is an answer to the question, "How do human beings respond to the awareness of death?"

The sigils and emblems recur throughout the book, sometimes very blatantly, sometimes very subtly, to connect each part to each other part. Motifs, you might say.

Another commenter, "Scavenger", pointed out that Dan's emblem is probably eyeglasses, which seems right; another commenter, "Jeff R.", added that "Associating Veidt with knots gives him a strong connection to Hooded Justice", which pleased me a lot--one sign of a good theory is that it explains things one didn't think of when one first came up with the theory.

On reflection, I am coming to think that tears are, in fact, the Comedian's emblem, separate from Laurie's. Are reflections Rorschach's emblem? I think they have to be.

Anyway. My biggest single disappointment in the film is that most of this dropped out completely. Even when it would have taken no effort to include the emblems and the sigils, they are (mostly) aren't there. And that's just odd, and sad.