In doing the research for Jonathan Livingston Seagull for my post about having a climbing breakthrough, I saw a lot of stuff that I already knew and stuff I didn’t know.
For example, I knew that there was a movie. Here, watch the trailer:
But I *DIDN’T* know that Richard Bach asked that the movie contain a disclaimer saying that Bach disapproved of the final cut.
I knew that Neil Diamond did the soundtrack for the movie, but I didn’t know that the soundtrack made more money than the movie did:
I knew that Richard Bach was the voice behind the audio book for Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
But I *DIDN’T* know that the first version of the audio book was read by Richard Harris Himself:
The Wikipedia says that the audiobook LP was the only format for Richard Harris’s reading and the subsequent ones were read by Bach. It doesn’t mention whether there were rights problems or if Bach listened to Richard Harris and said “I can top that.”
So that’s the audio book that I’m listening to this morning.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
The New York Times featured a reminiscence about Alistair MacLean, who wrote (IMO) some really great thrillers that have now been largely and unjustly forgotten. I read a bunch of them when I at about the age that the author of the Times article encountered them, though being a boy I didn’t much pick up on the romance angle.
I noticed that most of his books had made their way to Kindle about a year or so ago and re-read Ice Station Zebra, and found that I enjoyed it every bit as much as I did when I was twelve.Report
I read Ice Station Zebra at about that age, much of it while I was babysitting, after the kids were in bed. The outside temp was about -20 °F. The house was old and drafty. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt quite so cold in my life.Report
Reading my own writing and watching little video clips I generated. Still playing with the idea of having a cartogram site and open-sourcing the code I’ve written. A page with an example of a generated video clip morphing a flat map into a seriously-distorted cartogram is here.
There’s at least a dozen cartogram projects on GitHub, some current and some apparently abandoned. Everything seems to be R, JavaScript, or Python; and most seem to be concerned with implementing the core algorithm rather than use. ScapeToad in Java at Source Forge is relatively well known, but hasn’t been updated for almost five years. WorldMapper has neat cartograms at the world level, but their tools aren’t available and the project is defunct. I haven’t found any place that has both tools as well as any “Look at the neat cartograms we’ve made!”Report
Did you know there was a book-length parody (probably longer than the original) about a Jewish chicken named Jonathan Siegel who thought there must be more to life than winding up as soup?Report