apostrophes, death and taxes

[sergebroom]

The weekend was one filled with accomplishments, I guess.

First... I cleaned up Sue's web site on Saturday, after fixing a bug in one of my employer's programs. Sue's site had all those pesky curly apostrophes in her story excerpts that were coming up as special incomprensible characters, so I replaced them with single quotes. After that was uploaded, I saw that the site's dialogue marks were also incomprensible, so I went back in, and replaced them all with double quotes, and uploaded the changes. Then I found a few occurences of another special character that I had missed amidst the madding crowd, and took care of that. Hopefully that's the last of it.

(Speaking of apostrophes, did you know that, in French, the word, if used as a verb, means to speak to someone in a brusque and impolite manner?)

It's almost tax time so, yesterday, I spent part of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon going thru Sue's various writing-related expenses of 2007. That was relatively painless and quick, compared to some years when I spent two days on that. I now have to go thru Sue's various incomes, which will be much quicker, for better and for worse. Then I'm meeting the tax consultant at 7am on Thursday. The sooner we know what we owe, the better.

I did relax during the weekend. Last night, while Sue was watching the 1990s Pride and Prejudice miniseries on our living-room's TV set, I was sitting next to her, watching The Revenger's Tragedy, a 2002 movie starring Christopher Eccleston. Officially it was a science-fiction movie, but, as far as I can tell, it stuck to the original Jacobean play's dialogues. That made for some tough going at times, as yours truly isn't a native English speaker. It certainly was interesting. And bloody. By the way, this was the first time I was using my laptop for the purpose of movie-watching and, after I was done with this film, I popped in 1978's Superman, which is when I truly realized how much sharper the image is on a laptop. Or how much blurrier a TV's image is. Almost makes me want to go buy a high-definition TV set.

Anything else?



I just discovered comic-book Iron and the Maiden. Basically, it's a gangster story set in 1939, but not our 1939. It has flying cars among other things. Iron, the titular character, is a steroid-enhanced enforcer for the Syndicate. He's been doing their dirty work for 20 years now, and he's starting to question what he does. Then a debt collection goes very badly, and he loses one arm, and would have died if Angel Chase, the Maiden, hadn't taken him to a scientist friend. All is not well because Iron still has many ennemies out there. And Angel wants revenge for her father's death.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

And in English, to apostrophize is to use one of several types of rhetorical figures known collectively as apostrophe.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I should have thought of asking my wife about a possible English-language verb related to the apostrophe. There doesn't appear an exact translation, although the link you provided does have a definition that involves emotional intensity, if not necessarily negative - in English anyway.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

We had flying cars in 1939. Just not very many of them.

The Waterman Arrowbile and the Pitcairn AC-35 spring to mind.





Dirty secret: Flying cars are not creatures of the future.

[pedanther]

I don't know... you could probably persuade me that those things could fly, but good luck convincing me that they're cars.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

True, Bill. That being said, my succinct description was exactly that. I tried in too few words to describe how that world's year 1939 differs from ours so I went for the most obvious. What I didn't say is that those cars - really hovercars - look exactly the cars of that era in our Reality, but without wheels. Other differences include artificial limbs for amputees. And DNA is already known by then.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

Ooh, something to look for when I visit the comic shop. I need to go and chat with the manager anyway, and this will give me a good excuse to get over there.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Always glad to contribute to the comics-induced corruption of young minds.

P&P

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, did you guys ever watch the movie version of P&P with Mathew Macfadyn? I much prefer it to the BBC version. I think Mathew does tortured hero far better than Colin Firth does.

(Me, KathyF, aka Anonymous Live Journal non-user)

Re: P&P

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I prefer Macfayden's interpretation too. For all I know, Firth's may be closer to the book's, and David Rintoul's in the 1980 miniseries may be even closer. Still, I prefer Macfayden: one gets the sense that there is warmth in his character, but that he's very reluctant to show it.