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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Sometimes, I wade into heavily controversial topics. Today, courtesy of some site called How-To Geek or How To Geek or How ToGeek or something, we have some potentially truly divisive assertions. I'll give 'em this much: at least they didn't call it "Top 7 Movies Better Than the Books." I’m an English professor, which means I spend a fair amount of my time uttering four magic words: “The book is better.” There are two types of English professors: those who accept that all genres can have value, and wrong ones. Fortunately, this guy seems to be one of the former. At least about writing in general. About the movies? We'll see. After all, books have hundreds of pages to flesh out detailed characters and build intricate worlds, and it can be tough to translate all of that into a two-hour movie. Yeah, well, even that is easier than summarizing it for TokTik, which is probably the only way to get anyone's attention these days. For 10 seconds at a time, anyway. However, every now and then, there comes a movie that is actually better (sometimes insanely better) than the book. I don't have an opinion on all of these. Sometimes, I didn't read the book. Sometimes, I didn't see the movie. Sometimes both, as is the case with the article's #7 (it's a countdown list like with Cracked). 6. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Wow. I hope this guy has good bodyguards and a paid-up life insurance policy. Okay, I can hear the Tolkien fans out there sharpening the daggers they got from the Barrows, but hear me out. Oh hell no, they're going for the nukes. However, the pacing of the book can be intimidating for beginners, especially those expecting a typical fantasy romp. Hell, man, Tolkien invented the typical fantasy romp. A dear friend once described what it felt like to read the Hobbits’ adventures for the first time as follows: “I’m going through the forest, I’m going through the forest … oh, look, mushrooms!” Okay, that's hilarious. 5. Jurassic Park It's been a long time since I saw that movie, and even longer since I read the book (I was on a Chrichton kick for a while there, and I do remember that some of his books were better than others, by like a lot). As a kind of cautionary tale in a sci-fi wrapper, the book does a great job of exploring the ramifications of science let loose without the restrictions of morality. Here's where it's my turn to get angry. "A kind of cautionary tale in a sci-fi wrapper?" What the hell do you think science fiction is for? Nevermind, I'll answer that: at least 50% of it is meant to be a cautionary tale. 4. Jaws Another "it's been a long time" for both for me. Hell, I remember finding the book in my aunt's paperback stash when I was a young teen, visiting her with my parents. Since the cover featured a naked woman swimming, and you could barely make out a nipple, I felt like I had to keep it hidden from my aunt and my parents lest they accuse me of reading porn. I don't remember much else about the book, except that I did, indeed, read it. And watched the movie. Can't comment on this article's opinion, though. 3. Blade Runner Of all the book/movies on this list, this one is most relevant to me. Few movies are as different from their original source material as Blade Runner. The Phillip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? features some of what movie fans might expect, including our protagonist (referred to as “bounty hunter” rather than “blade runner”) tracking down renegade robots (referred to as “androids” rather than replicants). For starters, Electric Sheep may or may not qualify as a "novel" if you go by word count, which is, at least according to this source,  64,331 words.But that's pedantic. Look at some of the other Dick stories at that link I just did: "The Minority Report – 14,402" and yet it, too, was made into a feature-length film. Most interestingly, though, "The Man in the High Castle- 80,586" Novel-length by almost anyone's standards, it didn't become a movie, but a 40-episode TV series. But we're living in a world where a short novel like The Hobbit gets the three-movie expansion treatment, so, whatever. In this bleak dystopia, our hero must deal with heavy philosophical questions about what humanity and identity are, and what makes us different from the replicants he has been hired to kill. Which is, I say, one of the main purposes of science fiction (sometimes in conjunction with the "cautionary tale" thing above). I'm going to shut up about it now, though. By now, everyone who knows me is aware that the Director's Cut of that movie is my favorite of all time, but I'm not here to discuss it today. All I'll say is that since the book (novella or novel, whatever) and movie are so different, I think it's a little unfair to compare them. There's a couple more on the list, one famous for being a movie and the other famous for being a book. In neither case did I read the book, so no comment. |
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