There, I’ve said it. I love betas. I join beta groups because I want to be the first to know. My email address must be out there in hundreds of beta databases, even ones I’ve long forgotten about. Especially in ones I’ve long forgotten about.
Sometimes I realize I’m not a good candidate for the beta group – either as soon as I sign up or when it moves out of beta. Very occcasionally I find a perfect niche, a place I feel as if I really belong.
What is best about betas is this – especially if you are among a small group of testers – you get to be part of the in-crowd for a while, especially just when the beta goes out of beta. You already know the ropes and perhaps you had a say in some of the features. It’s like high school and you are one of the popular kids!
The best way to find out about betas is the website of Saurier Duval, Museum of Modern Betas. Add it to your favorite RSS feed and learn about new betas daily. Go ahead, you know you want to.
I don’t get out much – with friends at least, so when Janet called to see if I wanted to see Because I Said So, I replied that I’d love to go. I had not heard anything about the movie, but figured that if Diane Keaton was in it, it couldn’t suck too bad.
Janet called back and said that she was rethinking the film we’d see. She’d looked at films playing at Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema and named a few. She recalled that the last time we’d seen a movie together (The Queen) we thought that the trailer for Notes on a Scandal looked good. I did a quick check on Rotten Tomatoes and saw that it received a tomato meter rating of 86%. Since Because I Said So only received a tomato meter rating of 6% we decided to see Notes on a Scandal. While I’m glad we went to Notes instead of Because, both Janet and Alison would have preferred the comedy.
Notes on a Scandal which stars Dame Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy is no comedy, although there are occasional amusing moments. It is disturbing on many levels and I know of several people who would be seriously offended by the subject matter. Luckily for me, I’m not one of them.
Dench plays Barbara, a lonely aging teacher in a school in a poor area of London. Her attitude as well as the voice over while she writes in her diary relays a disdain of the students she teaches as well as for her fellow teachers. In fact, Barbara doesn’t seem to like anyone. She lives alone with her similarly aging cat.
Blanchett plays Sheba (short for Bathsheba?), the new art teacher at Barbara’s school. Barbara’s voice over describes Sheba as wispy and fey. Sheba has difficulty managing the students in her class, and Barbara swoops to the rescue. Sheba invites Barbara to lunch where Barbara meets Sheba’s husband, played by Bill Nighy, and her two teenagers, one of whom has Down Syndrome.
Before long we discover that Sheba has entered into an affair with one of her students, a 15 year old boy. Barbara also discovers this and the film focuses on what she does with that knowledge.
The acting in the film is superb. Dench is excellent in this unflattering role as a sick, lonely older woman. Blanchett’s acting makes you believe she could do nothing about the affair “it just happened”. Nighy’s role as the caring, albeit somewhat absent minded, father is more or less the role he plays in other films, but it serves him well here. Young handsome Andrew Simpson, as Steven, the 15-year-old boy, plays the part of a randy teen aged boy quite well.
Janet said she liked The Queen better, Alison didn’t really say. I liked this film better – the acting was far better and the story was more interesting to me.
As a longtime time-travel book fan I have read many books with some sort of time-travel. The first book I read that dealt with this subject was called The Thyme Garden by Edward Eager where children went into a garden and crushed thyme between their fingers and traveled elsewhere in time. I recently re-read it, and discovered the author wrote a number of other time-travel books for children. While not really “time travel”, I loved the Narnia series where the children traveled to a different place. Another book I enjoyed was Andre Norton’s Dragon Magic in which people were able to time travel where they wanted. Secretly, my favorite romantic movie is “Somewhere in Time” and I have even written a short story or two involving time-travel.
I purchased The Time Traveler’s Wife a few months ago after briefly hearing about it and thinking the title and cover of the book were intriguing. I suggested it as a possible read for my book group, but another book was chosen. Then an online group to which I belong suggested reading it, and I joined in. My real life book group is still not interested. Pity.
Henry first meets Clare at the Newberry Library in Chicago when Henry is 28 and Clare is 20. However Clare first meets Henry when she is 6 and he is 36. Henry has a disorder that he suspects is a bit like a seizure disorder, except instead of having a seizure, he is transported backwards and forwards in time, ending up naked where ever he lands.
In this book Henry may not change events, although he is forced to witness some tragedies time and time again, he is always helpless to change the outcome.
This book is breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. However it is uplifting and I am envious of the love these two characters have for each other. The author writes it in such a way that the time-travel part of the story is believable.
I had a slightly difficult time with the ending, not the very ending, but what happened to Henry in the year before the book ended. The book was like a pleasant ride on a mild roller coaster, and suddenly it became, for a while, a jarring walk through an evil carnival fun house.
One last thing I liked about the book was the fact that many place names were real. I recently spoke to someone who said that she even went to some of the concerts mentioned in the book.
It is hard to believe that this is Audrey Niffenegger’s first book. It is nearly perfect in every detail. I read an interview with the author that suggested she wrote the book in a different order than in which it was published.
I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me. TTW was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot. (Audrey Niffenegger interviewed by Mark Flanagan. Full interview available here.)
I sincerely hope this will not be Niffenegger’s last novel.
Rumor has it that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have purchased the rights to the novel and are going to star in it. Not who I pictured at all. I can possibly see Pitt as Henry, but Aniston is too much that Friend’s character to me.
Clutch Cargo Lips 