*****
The new DVD of Pinocchio has an interactive bonus that takes children to Pleasure Island. I heard the commercials enthusing about the fun of playing on Pleasure Island.
Spoiler alert.
Pleasure Island was the place that bad, lazy little boys who didn't want to go to school were lured to. Once there, they became stupider and lazier until they turned into donkeys and were sold as beasts of burden. I find it disturbing that the new DVD has a game which seems to have reworked the whole concept into a Disneyesque fun-time theme park with no bad consequences. It was supposed to be a lesson, Mickey!
*****
A couple of years ago, Matthew Pearl came out with a fiction book (The Poe Shadow) in which Edgar Allen Poe was a main character.
Right around the same time, Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye was published. Also a fiction with EAP as a main character.
Now Matthew Pearl's novel The Last Dickens has just been issued, a fictional mystery about Dickens' final, incomplete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
It follows upon the publication last month of Drood: A Novel by Dan Simmons.
It's just a coincidence, but Pearl must be getting pretty annoyed by now.
*****
Speaking of Louis Bayard, I ought to give the man credit publically. I read and enjoyed his novel The Black Tower, in spite of the fact that it was written in present tense.
Usually anything written in present tense affects me like fingernails down a blackboard. It's not so much the choose-your-own-adventure-ness of it. I've never been able to work out in my mind exactly why it irks me, so I can't articulate it here.
But anyway, Black Tower was a terrific book. The way he wrote present tense wasn't as intrusive somehow.
*****
Google's smartened up on their phony, idiot stunt from last year's Earth Hour.
We won’t be turning out the lights on our homepage again this year. Our users come first, and while we received lots of enthusiastic feedback last year, some found an all-black Google.com to be a little confusing. (Also, darkened screens don’t actually save energy — modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.)
They haven't smartened up that the thing's an idiot stunt to make people feel that they're making an impact about something that isn't the problem Gore et al have inflated it to be. But yesterday they celebrated it in a less stupid way.
