Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Yay! I'm caught up

with class, having learnt to play with Google Docs. I even found out how to create and publish presentations to a website such as this blog. See?:



It's just a simple set of comments on what I've been learning.

What else have I been up to? Yesterday I watched a videotape of a made-for-TV movie called 'The People', starring William Shatner and Kim Darby. It was based on Zenna Henderson's stories of aliens who live in isolated communities who have special powers they hide from outsiders. The movie was nice, although the stories are far better, and they have the perfect blend of isolation and alienation so that virtually anyone who ever felt like an outsider would identify with the People. There's also an interesting website out there discussing similarities between Henderson's work and the later books by Alexander Key, such as Escape to Witch Mountain (my favourite being The Forgotten Door). Some have accused Key of lifting from Henderson. The website says the themes may be similar, but the plots were very different.

Henderson's firsts were also in portraying children as they really are, rather than small adults (she was a teacher and had a wealth of experience in that department) and she was one of the first women sci-fi writers to write under an obviously female name. She was quite remarkable.

I also got my mattress today. It's a Serta (you know, of the Counting Sheep), really thick, with a pillow top. Heaven! I'm headed there right now. Good night.

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