Mulan, in Live Action

Somebody urged me to watch this movie yesterday, and I loved it!

There were lots of hints in the media that the live action version—let’s call it Mulan 2020—was different from the animated version, Mulan 1998.  I didn’t know what to think of that; I had already fallen in love with the animated version, and I could not imagine how different the live-action version could be, and still be the same story.  Also, I was going to miss the little dragon a lot; not just because I loved Eddie Murphy in that role (though he was so not Chinese), and I thought that all the unbelievable stunts would make more sense in a sort of fairy-tale feel of an animated version.

Well, the first thing that happened is that the actress who played Mulan in the new movie just waltzed right in, and made believers of us all.  Her name is Yifei Liu.

(I was amazed at how well she was acting, but just a few seconds ago I learned that she had been trained in a Chinese acting school, and was already famous in China and neighboring countries having starred in a couple of top-ranking features, including a major motion picture.)

Yifei—assuming that’s her personal name!—and the actresses who played her younger selves, were brilliant at capturing the essense of Mulan's sense of humor.  I guess that means that the humorous aspect of the character as envisaged by Niki Caro, the director and creative force of the movie, was well transmitted to both acresses.  The writing was also excellent; the dialog was funny without being clumsy.  I guess Disney writers are good at that game!

In the end, the absence of the family Dragon mascot didn’t make much of a difference; somehow Mulan absorbs the lessons that she needs to pull off her deception.

For more than half of the movie, these strengths were enough for me; Mulan learns to deal with the crude fellows in her squad, without revealing that she wasn’t a guy.  But then, we arrive at the Martial Arts part of the show, and here the editing became far too self-indulgent.  There were lots of quite unnecessary slow-motion segments showing Mulan in a wild airborne roundhouse kick, and now we’re in the Martial Arts Universe, with all it’s momentum-destroying fan service, I think it’s called.  But normally, the editing in these Martial Arts movies are brilliant; in this movie, it's just a little too plodding!  Overall, though, I think it is a lovely movie.  (I'm sure someone could tighten up the editing before it’s released on BluRay.)

Kay

Christine's Christmas

One of my stories which I published in an unfinished form was Christine's Magical Christmas, about two teenagers who, with their high school choir, get pulled into a performance of J. S. Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium, or the Christmas Oratorio.

The story is about how some six high school choirs are invited to learn and perform the Oratorio, after which four from each school go on to sing it at a concert, with professional soloists and a Baroque orchestra.  In the story, I describe how a certain solo aria is sung with a very difficult solo violin accompaniment.  But I just saw a video of that very song this morning, and---guess what!  It is accompanied by two solo violins!  So now the story has to be 'repaired'.

More than repaired, the story has to be completed; this is not a story that can be left the way it is; it sits there, glaring at me, demanding a completion.  Well, I must make it believe that I fully intend to complete it sometime this Christmas.

I have added below a photo of the two violinists playing the accompaniment to the tenor aria mentioned in Magical Christmas.

Kay

P.S. I have just uploaded a new edition to Smashwords.  There is no new content; I have just made sure that the Table of Contents has working hyperlinks.  (This is such a short story that these hyperlinks are not very useful!) - Kay

Violin Obbligato

It's the Weekend Before Christmas!

Christmas plays a large role in my stories.  I ought not to, but I feel that I should apologize to my Jewish readers and friends, for not investing an equal amount of excitement in Jewish festival days!  I must admit that I know very little about the Jewish religion, except for what little we see through the lens of Protestant Christianity, from which the anti-Jewish hysteria (and there's a whole lot of that, I'm sad to report) has been carefully removed.

Honestly, Christmas is, to my mind, the only Christian festival worth celebrating.  It stands for everything I believe in: eradication of poverty; generosity; shelter for the homeless; survival under a hostile regime, even if it is our own.

There are things to deplore, as well: principally the commercialism, and every sort of excess that businesses are eager to encourage.  And this year, it is somewhat amusing that businesses are greatly frustrated at being unable to encourage the usual foolishness of the season.  I am going to support the local soup kitchens as much as I can, though I'm living on savings right now.  One hopes that they plan for the future, and spread their revenues over the whole year.

There are several stories in which Christmas figures prominently.  (You need not read these if you're not so inclined!)

Christine's Amazing etc. Christmas

Jane

Helen and Lalitha

Helen on the Run

Helen vs. Handel's Messiah

Helen at Westfield

I must admit, every story whose timeline goes through December has some Christmas references, including Alexandra, in which I thought the Christmas chapter was particularly poignant.   Jane features two Christmasses; Westfield has an attempted suicide shortly after Christmas, which was tasteless of me, but my stories that year were rather drama laden.  I did not mention Christmas on the Voyager, though it was a particularly romantic one; the same goes for the holiday season in Helen and Lalitha.  In On the Run, Helen is hugely pregnant at Christmas, and there's a lot of excitement for various reasons.

Kay

"On The Run" has a new cover, by Halchroma!

I'm gradually getting our artist Halchroma to replace all the goofy covers for my books published through Smashwords, as most of you know.  When I say goofy, I meant that many of Halchroma's covers are better than mine, and many are a lot better.  (Yraid 's cover was by Chayna-Gina, and was really based on a self-portrait of her.)  You can read the detail in the post "On The Run is getting a new cover!" on the Helen blog; it comes after the so-called jump break at the bottom.

Kay H. B.

[About the] Smashwords Price List

Dear Readers and Friends,

A few days ago, I went on Smashwords and assigned prices of mostly 99c to almost all the my books.  As usual, I anticipate that the downloads of these books will plummet, but I believe that most readers who follow me (using the phrase in the most liberal sense!) have already acquired almost all the books they really want, which means that only Smashwords members who are new to my stories will have to shell out 99 cents for books!  Some of you get the books from Apple Books, and I have no idea how that works.

In the scheme of things, that's not an exorbitant price; most readers can afford a dollar for even something they might not want to keep.

As I blogged on Helen a few days ago, I'm anticipating a new cover for Helen On The Run, which would be lovely.  The cover I had put for it was somewhat offputting!  Our artist, who has just begun to attend college last year, is working like mad over the summer, and trying to keep up with schoolwork.  I sincerely hope she does not get infected with the Coronavirus, that dastardly enemy of good artwork.  A pox on it.

Well, keep healthy, all of you, even if it means not attending large Thanksgiving dinners.  Especially those of you who are diabetic (like Helen), or older (like Olive), or who carry a few extra pounds (like Olive, again), stay home, and give them any excuse, and plead for your portion to be dropped off!  (That would be a lot of packing, but they may oblige!)  Trump survived the virus, so how bad can it be?  As some of you might be able to guess, I personally don't like turkey, so I will probably have a little roast chicken, which is easy to make, and easy to eat.

Hey, I might write a recipe book one day.  That gives me a lot of satisfaction!  Shall I call it Helen's Favorite Recipes?

A happy Thanksgiving to all you!  I think we all deserve a good Thanksgiving, even if great doubt has been cast on the motivations of the participants of the original feast.

Kay

A Broken Society Someone Has To Repair

We won!  Or, at least, the Democrats won, and I was solidly behind the Democrats.

I should explain why I was behind the Democrats.

(1)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned about the poorest citizens among us.  I just can't believe that the rest of the country seems to be unconcerned about the poorest of the poor; those who are hurt most by being required to work during the COVID crisis.  I'm sure there are some among the Republicans whose hearts are moved by the plight of these workers, but perhaps they have some reason why they feel that helping them is bad for somebody.  The facts will come out over the next year.  Maybe it is that they do not believe that the Democrats will actually help these people, and it is all a lie.  Maybe it's racial prejudice; a belief that only minorities are in this group of poor citizens, and need not be a concern for us.  This is sad, and need not be a permanent state of affairs.

(2)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned with the Environment, and with the COVID pandemic.  I know why Republicans did not believe in these issues; they do not think that they are important.  They also do not believe in Clean Energy, because they feel that Clean Energy will not be enough energy, and will not be cheap.

(3)  I felt that the Democrats' promise about helping pay back student loans was a huge idea; I hope that if this is made into law, that those Republicans who benefit from it give the Democrats a second chance, and consider helping the Democrat plans for the nation.  At the very least, the interest rates for college loans should be fixed as low as home mortgage interest rates.  I don't think a college degree helps everyone to be a better citizen.  But I firmly believe that the young person with an inquiring mind can get an enormous amount of information from a college education.  On the other hand, a young person who has to be handed everything on a plate could easily not acquire an education, because the last thing a college professor wants to do is to stuff an education into the head of an unwilling student.

(4)  I firmly believe in consumer protection.  Businesses, with the best will in the world, will not voluntarily be honest about the problems with their products.  This is why there are so many rules about what they have to do.  Don't we all depend on the ingredients list in food?  I don't know exactly what regulations the Trump Administration threw out; when I find out, I will be better able to defend why they should be reinstated.

Above all, I think we have to engage young Republicans in talking about government, and in making reasonable decisions about what regulations should be kept, and which ones should be thrown out.  Handicapped individuals are now part of our society, and any rules about  handicapped accessibility should remain.  But it is important that, as individuals, we do not make the divisions wider between ourselves and Republicans; we must learn to agree to disagree more politely, or with a willingness to try a second time to understand their point or view, or the third time, or as many times as needed.

Kay

Unexpected News about Trump Supporters

Well, what do you know.

I had subconsciously assumed that Trump supporters only tolerated him because they had somehow gotten to believe that his policies would ultimately help them; or, if not, because they had bought into the glamour of his personality, such as it is!  But just yesterday I got a call from a friend who lives in a rather liberal city, and she says that, watching the progress of the vote-count, Trump fans—who are a minority there, of course—are practically in tears!  This is completely unexpected.  I had assumed that people were only interested in Trump from a political point of view.  Instead, they appear to be very hurt by the fact that Trump isn't sweeping the election.  (And Trump appears to be confounded, too.)

In my own view, I thought the attraction of Trump was that he was not a Washington insider, but had spent ages deploring the actions of Congress and former presidents, and had ridden to power as the glamorous outsider, who said what he thought, and made remarks off-the-cuff, which his fans loved.  His unscripted speech was welcome to those who felt put-off by the gramatically 'correct' sentences of ordinary political leaders.  But the fans seem to actually identify with him far more than the rest of us imagined.

Now, carefully crafted sentences might be offputting to many, especially those to whom conventional, grammatical language does not come easy.  But to the typical lawyer—most congressmen and senators, and even presidents, start out being lawyers—writing a sentence whose meaning is unambiguous is second nature.  If you're writing up an international agreement, for instance, you can't shoot from the hip.  So Trump's sloppy language might be refreshing, but its refreshing-ness should have worn off after four years.

If we're to have all these people who have strong emotional ties to Trump, life is going to be very difficult.  I can just imagine an unending string of Trump Tweets about every little action of Congress or the Senate or the White House, which will start off being annoying, and end up being highly disruptive.  This looks like the future that's facing us.

On top of all of this, Trump fans are fed an endless stream of untruths and misinformation.  This is possible, because these fans do not like the Media, either.  They only watch Fox News, I suppose, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, but claim to not entirely trust those sources either, but only trust Trump himself.  This makes it difficult or impossible to reason with them about reality, because their own reality, roughly thrown together by Trump, has such a strong hold on their imaginations.  In their minds, vote counting centers are filled with suspicious people, ready to slide in fake ballots at any opportunity.  In actual fact, they are filled with very serious people, half Republican, half Democrat, who labor for hours, trying to be as careful as possible about recording the ballots.  I know at least one of these people personally, and she was in physical pain, after crouching over a table from six in the morning to ten at night, working with mailed-in ballots.

The voting in every state is different, but in Pennsylvania they take elections very seriously.

Mailed ballots come in an envelope with the details of the voter written on it.  All that information is recorded carefully by hand, checked against the voter rolls, in case the voter is trying to vote twice.  Then the envelope is opened up, and inside is another envelope, which contains the ballot.  That one is anonymous, and is put in another pile.  A second pair of workers opens that envelope up, and runs it through the vote-recording maching.  This machine reads the votes—scans both sides of the sheet—and stores the result.  (Sometimes it rejects the ballot, which must then be re-scanned in all possible ways, backwards and forwards, etc.  Very much like feeding a dollar bill into a machine in a rest area on a highway.)  This proceeds as efficiently as possible, but cannot be sped up very much more.

Because of the mail-in ballots—which are being used widely for the first time, because of convenience, and the virus—the procedure is necessarily complicated.

The scanners are not connected to the election center.  This is for fear of hacking.  The results are called in every hour or so, which is then reported to the news services.  The total ballot counts are known already, at the times the ballots are closed, by simply counting the people coming through, and the total mail ballots sent out.  Only the actual votes are counted slowly.  So the news services know the percentages of how many votes were counted, e.g. 86%, or whatever.

Now, there are calculations the news services can make.  They set how much error they can stand, and figure out what percentage of the votes must be counted to keep the error in their estimate of the total vote below that percentage they have settled on.  This part of the process cannot be easily explained to laymen; in fact, I only understand the mathematics in the broadest outline.  So the news services have to wait until the probability of error in their prediction (of any particular state result) is less than, say one-tenth of 1%.  Until then, all they can say is that it looks like Trump is ahead, or whatever.

Finally, the Electoral College adds another wrinkle to the mess.  Trump is careful not to criticize the Electoral College, because he was convinced that it is the E.C. that allowed him to win in 2016.  This year, the Electoral College seems to be giving the win to Biden, and the popular vote seems to be going to him too.  There are a long list of things that Trump will love or hate, depending on the outcome of the election.  His lawyers have entered lawsuits against three states.  We don't know how far these lawsuits will go.

Kay