Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Initially I misread the announcement and thought that the Kindle came bundled with the OED as its built-in dictionary. I would happily have paid $399 for the complete contents of the OED in something that weighed less than a paperback book that happened to also be able to wirelessly download 80,000 other books and store up to 200 of them at once, particularly since the OED on CD-ROM goes for about $236 (and if my experience is any guide will just stop working round about the 3rd license update). Unfortunately a second read reveals that it’s the far less exciting New Oxford American Dictionary that ships with the Kindle. The NOAD is the dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, which is fine and all, but without the quotations and the date chart, it just isn’t the same. sigh

By a startling coincidence, Miyazaki has made a movie that happens to have the same name as one of my favorite YA novels. Even some of the characters have the same names.

It wasn’t bad, exactly, although it was trite, but it does really raise the question of why Miyazaki even bothered to base it on the book if all he was going to use was a couple of chapters near the beginning. Not even the themes survived (Spirited Away was much closer to the themes of the Diana Wynne Jones book than the movie of Howl is). I guess he really liked the image of the castle that moves about under its own power, and the fire-demon that lives in the hearth.

It’s entirely possible that if you’ve never read the book, you’ll really enjoy the movie. But as hard as I tried to put aside my knowledge of the book, I just couldn’t get swept up in it, and the absurdly pat ending just left a sour taste in my mouth.