…like Lileks:
…the power stayed on, damn the luck. In fact the entire storm skirted us – 60 MPH winds downtown, but here at Jasperwood we just got gusts and downpours, the far edge of the mayhem. I was stupid enough to put fresh batteries in one of the lights, too. Now they’ll be useless the next time I need them. They will sit in the lantern for a year and quietly drain themselves, like old men peeing in their pants while they sleep.
There’s a lot more where that came from.
[Update a few minutes later]
I know, I say to read the whole thing, and I didn’t before I posted this. So farther down, I found this:
And must we start with a rap song? Must we? It was like the trailer for “Nanny McPhee Returns,” which have “Everything Little Thing She Does (is Magic)” by the Police to remind you that, you know, Nanny uses Magic. Nevermind that it seems to take place in England in the 30s. I doubt it’s in the movie itself, but when they stick in the Obligatory Pop Song it not only takes you out of the world they’ve constructed, you feel like you’re being treated like a fool. Don’t worry! It may be set in the past, icky icky, but it’s hip as all hell! Here’s a 25-year-old pop song to prove it!
I watched a dumb Jennifer Aniston flick
I won’t absolutely avoid rap music in movies, the question is whether it fits. I had no problem with the Despicable Me score, it fit pretty well. The use of “Every Little Thing She Does (is Magic)” in the Nanny McPhee 2 trailer, on the other hand, was atrocious. Notice that the great sci-fi fantasy movies of the decade–Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, the later Harry Potter movies–didn’t use pop music to make their scores more attractive to “young people.” (Though there’s room for exceptions, and Star Trek had one place where it was appropriate–the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” during young Kirk’s joyride. Similarly, Star Trek: First Contact’s use of “Magic Carpet Ride” was thoroughly appropriate and hilarious. You get a little more room to use pop music when you set your sci-fi in a theoretically real future.)
Edgehopper I think it’s true that in both cases the characters had chosen to play that music themselves, neither song was part of the background score.
early rap (by Gilbert and Sullivan):
I’m very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
iPad.
I can come up with a long list of quirks as a serious machine – but for what you’re doing (frequent traveler, likes more space to do actual work), I would expect it’s a pretty solid fit.