Halfway through The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe’s mind-bending fantasy/sci-fi tetraology, I knew I wouldn’t have a lot to say about it when I was done. Not due to a lack of things worth talking about, but simply to avoid embarrassment—it’s one of those works so dense, allusive, and trippy that you can’t really say you’ve read it until you’ve read it twice. And, having read it in fits and starts over a period of several months, I can barely say I’ve read it once. Indeed, if I was smart I would just shut up now, and save my comments for after I get a chance, someday, to read it over again.

But what fun is that? So here we go. For those who haven’t read it: The Book of the New Sun is the story of Severian, a member of the torturers’ guild in a far, far future society. So far, in fact, that the sun is old and dying and the civilization that currently exists on top of the ruins of the dozens before it is rather medieval in technology and sophistication, though those in power (the Autarch and his court) have access to the high-tech goodies of the past. That description, though, doesn’t convey just how far-future weird things can get, though. In the capital city of Nessus, there’s a sort of botanical garden where the different rooms apparently exist as separate dimensions and/or times. In the second novel Severian meets the Green Man, a guy who’s traveled back from a time when humans have synthesized plant matter onto their skin so that they’re literally fed by the sun. The Autarch’s elite troops include animal-human hybrids and flying warriors with angelic wings. In one particularly bizarre chapter, Severian encounters in the wilderness the ruler of Earth from a previous age, who has survived by grafting his head onto the body of a new host, alongside the existing head. Plus, the first time Severian meets him he’s a shriveled two-headed corpse who somehow gets re-infused with life—I forget how. Probably the Claw. Don’t get me started about the Claw.

You may be wondering how all of these details hold together in a cohesive story, and the answer is, they only sort-of do. We know from the outset that the narrative tracks Severian’s life from growing up in the guild to his improbable ascent to the rule of the land as Autarch. That path is not so much a natural progression as as picaresque series of encounters, usually disconnected from the one before (unlike a picaresque novel, though, there’s real and deep development of Severian’s character). I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn from a Wolfe expert that many of these encounters are metaphors or even allegories of assorted philosophies and political theories that Severian must consider on the way to the top.

The Book of the New Sun is Severian’s first-person narration of his ascent to the throne, told at some later date. Actually, that’s not true—as the notes at the end of each book indicate, it purports to be Wolfe’s translation of Severian’s as-yet-unwritten autobiography, a “study of the post-historic world.” Severian possesses an eidetic memory, a fact he is constantly reminding the reader of in his narration. But there are inconsistencies in his tale—far more than I noticed in a single reading, I’m sure—so there’s an indication that he may be an unreliable narrator. Toss that into the mix with a plot involving time travel and you can see why one reading barely scratches the surface. (Indeed, in this future world, travel through space, travel through time, and travel across alternate universes appear to be pretty much the same thing. Einstein would be pleased as punch.)

The translation conceit adds another odd level to the experience. Rather than invent new words to describe the myriad oddities of this world, Wolfe mines the O.E.D. for obscure and defunct words that suggest what he wants. At the same time, though, since Severian’s narration is treated as a post-historic document, Wolfe does the reader no favors when it comes to exposition: concepts and creatures are introduced offhandedly on every page and often aren’t fully described or understood until much later. Just one example: the first time you read about someone riding on a destrier, you probably imagine a horse, whether from context or because you’re enough of a word geek to know what it means. Only several chapters later will Severian mention a destrier’s claws, which forces you to revise your mental picture. After having your chain yanked a few times like this, you find yourself distrusting your mental images and holding off (as much as one can) until Severian gives you a bit more information. This approach is paradoxically immersive and anti-immersive at the same time: the lush vocabulary and historical stance draw you in, but the constantly shifting landscape of detail keeps you at a distance. I found this experience alternately delightful and annoying; whatever else, it’s definitely unique.

I can see why Wolfe is so highly regarded among the conossieurs of the genre. Which genre, you ask? In a technical sense, undoubtedly science fiction, though like Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels, the tetraology straddles the genres and confounds the usual definitions that distinguish them. If I hesitate to include it on the list of Great Works, it’s because The Book of the New Sun is as much game as story: something not just to be read and experienced, but also puzzled out. It’s the work of an extraordinary genius, and an excellent prose stylist—a rarer trait than it should be in these genres—but sift out all the mind games and esoterica, and the story that’s left is good, but just good. And as regular readers should know by now, in Polytropian Aesthetics, story trumps style, philosophical sophistication, and certainly cleverness. Now if we could just come up with a decent definition of “story,” I’d know what that means . . .

Chad Engbers “almost met Frederick Buechner”:http://www.locustwind.com/archives/000022.html; he writes about in a way that reminds me that the world would be a better place if Chad had time to blog more often. I went through a big Buechner phase right around the same time as he did, and, like him, still rate _Godric_, _The Book of Bebb_, and _Telling the Truth_ as first-rate books. Unlike Chad, though, I _would_ feel the need to say something to the guy, and would inevitably embarrass myself as a result. In the past I’ve managed to say stupid and/or stupidly obvious things in front of Suzanne Vega and Dave Barry, and been stunned into silence in the presence of “the Johns”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000157.html. There must be others that I’m forgetting. The only celebrity artist I’ve managed to carry on an intelligent conversation with is John Barth, and that’s because we were stuck in a car together for a couple of hours and I had only read one of his books. Turns out you can go far on a shared love of Scheherazade.

People who write reviews for a living would be in big trouble if it weren’t the fact that griping about faulty movies is far, far easier than writing praise for good ones. That’s mainly why I haven’t mentioned “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/, which I saw last week and found very fine indeed. Charlie Kaufman has finally come into his own. _Being John Malkovich_ was good fun, if not quite as clever as everyone gave it credit for, and _Adaptation_ was grossly overrated. But in _Eternal Sunshine_ all that Kaufmanesque reality-bending is done in service to the story, not as ornamentalism or coy self-reference. And what a sad, sweet tale it is, too: emotionally powerful while never devolving into sentimentality, and speaking the truth about every romance that’s ever lasted more than a couple of months.

And Kate Winslet: ho boy! She’s right back on my Top Five list after this performance. There’s a vacancy, too, ever since Kate Beckinsdale’s prompt ejection on grounds of Unforgivable Romanian Accent in a Film Trailer. Jim Carrey performs well, too, and there’s even room for his physical comedy in a way that, again, is done in service to the story and not just to See Jim Be Funny.

Definitely wins the B.M.S.F.T.Y. award.

It will take some time to determine whether or not Kill Bill marks a dip in Quentin Tarantino’s career, the beginning of a precipitous decline into irrelevancy, or the outing of him as an overrated hack. Some folks have held the latter view all along, but with three excellent movies to his name, I’m inclined to give the guy one more chance.

Mind you, I kinda liked Volume One, and looked forward to see some of its promise fulfilled in Volume Two. Instead, everything fell apart. The word of the day, ladies and gents, is “self-indulgent.” Set aside your notions of Tarantino’s violent epic being underappreciated by skeptical studio bigwigs, so that rather than do damage to his masterwork by slicing it down, he insisted on releasing it in two parts. It’s now clear that slicing it down would have been doing it a great service—and I say that as someone who appreciates the patient, even languorous cadence of much of Tarantino’s camerawork. But Volume Two was downright boring at times, because the dialogue only occasionally lived up to what we’ve come to expect. There was the Hanzo stuff in Part One, and in Part Two . . . I dunno, Darryl Hannah was good, and maybe about 40% of Michael Madsen’s lines had the old familiar punch. But the old Pulp Fiction vibe, where you could have listened to Vincent and Jules just talk about any old stuff for hours, is long gone. Many scenes in Kill Bill, including the ho-hum final minutes with Bill himself, sound like a high school kid imitating Tarantino badly.

There’s no doubt that he was trying to live up to his previous successes, so the question is, why does he fail so thoroughly? Something I’ve long suspected, based on the how he comes off in interviews and other publicity, is that he has no flying clue what made his first couple movies so good. Kill Bill has little cohesion; it ends up being a series of cool moments—or rather, moments that Tarantino thinks are cool. He’s only right some of the time.

Another, darker failing of his that has finally become clear to me is this: he finds abhorrent violence terribly funny. One of his strengths has always been the fact that he does not sugercoat violence, or pussyfoot around its most graphic and troubling aspects. He doesn’t allow us to get comfortable. But I’m afraid this may be accidental, because for him the violence we’re talking about—a goon splurting blood from a lost limb, a woman thrashing on the floor after losing her last eye—is already comfortable for him. If this is true it is rather damning of the man, not necessarily his work, though this particular movie seems to be a clear expression of his personal quirks unfettered by editorial critique or high inspiration.

Maybe the old meme is true, that it was Roger Avary who was responsible for all that was good about Pulp Fiction. There, the contents of the suitcase are left a tantalizing mystery; in Kill Bill, the Bride’s real name is a similar enigma, bleeped out every time somebody utters it, until halfway through Volume 2, when we learn that it’s: Beatrix Kiddo. Huh? That’s it?

I still disagree with Aaron Haspel, though, about the importance of Tarantino’s originality or lack thereof. The man’s a master of pastiche, and until he transcends that he’ll never join the ranks of Great Directors, but in doing so he is hardly alone. The bare fabula of Kill Bill holds promise:

A story of revenge in which a young woman seeks out those who tried to kill her and (she believes) caused the death of her then-unborn child. Inspired by her rage, she overcomes impossible odds and, leaving a bloody wake, arrives at the home of her enemy, who is also the father of her lost baby. She discovers the baby was not lost, but that her enemy has in fact taken her daughter and raised her as his own. He explains that he did what he did in order to punish her for trying to leave her life as an assassin. Knowing all this, the young woman must decide what to do. She kills her enemy and leaves with her daughter.

There’s a good movie to be made out of such a premise; this one fails because of haphazard and at times halfhearted execution. The final scenes are particularly bad, with meandering, mediocre speeches and the use of the Bride’s daughter as a trite emotional bludgeon.

Given all this, why am I giving Tarantino one more chance? Partly because I’ve been here before; after going out of my way to watch the abysmal From Dusk Till Dawn on the strength of the QT writing credit, I told myself I’d give the guy one more chance—and he turned up with Jackie Brown. Also, there’s some stuff to like in Volume Two. The fight between the Bride and California Mountain Snake is a thrill, though for that we can credit Yuen Wo Ping. The RZA’s score remains great fun. I’ll give Tarantino credit for the whole buried-alive sequence, which is claustrophic, merciless, and gripping. Across Volumes One and Two there are perhaps half a dozen scenes like that which remind you of what he is capable of. All in all, a rather poor showing for several years’ work.

Postscript: I try to make a point of not looking a commentary on a movie ‘till I’ve seen at myself and written about it if the whim strikes me. (I did read Aaron’s comments before writing this time, but I already knew what he was going to say.) Having just did a brief scan of some of the reviews out there, I have to say I’m surprised at the generally positive notes for Volume Two. Was I just surly when I saw it? Did my aggravating experience immediately afterward color my impressions? I doubt it. Someday I’ll go back and give Kill Bill another chance: if his next project turns out to be a more unqualified success.

Livonia, MI is on the outskirts of Detroit. If it has a charming historic downtown area, or a pleasant meandering suburban residential district, I don’t know where they are. Livonia appears to be a vast grid of hotels, motels, chain restaurants, and really big stores. I’ve spotted a Target, a Meijer’s, a Walmart, and _two_ Costcos within a couple miles of the Holiday Inn which I’m calling home for a couple of days.

No doubt you wonder, dear reader, how I might find myself in such a hellish situation. ‘Tis one of the burdens of the stay-at-home father. Suanna has a meeting here for work; she doesn’t want to be away from Ella for that long; therefore, I don the nanny apron and come along.

It is in my nature to hate places like Livonia; it is in the nature of parenthood to need them. A classic example: when we got in last night we realized we hand’t packed enough baby wipes. In many places, addressing this problems would have taken considerable time and effort, but ’round these parts you can’t throw a spear without hitting some sort of sprawling superstore with several aisles of infant-related products.

But there’s a ray of hope in all of this: one that I only knew to look for thanks to “Ed’s”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org searches for wi-fi hotspots in Grand Rapids. “Panera Bread”:http://www.panerabread.com is the jewel shining brightly in the middle of the sloburbs. Decent food, good soup, and free, reliable wireless Internet. Having carefully timed my arrival to coincide with Ella’s nap, I’m afforded a chunk of time to jack in and catch up.

And while there’s no wetware or sensory overlay involved, it really is jacking in, isn’t it? I’m seven hundred miles from home but I’m accessing the Internet with the same machine in the same way and going to the same places. Physical location is irrelevant except, in my case, whether or not the men’s bathroom has a changing table.

So, all hail Panera! With its help, I think I just may survive Livonia.

If you watch a movie at Union Station in Washington DC, the guy at the theater will stamp your parking receipt on the way out. But a “Three-Hour Stamp” does not mean you get three hours of parking for free — you still have to pay a dollar. Not a big deal. The way they get you is that if you stay for longer than three hours, the price goes up to six bucks, even with a Three-Hour Stamp.

I was aware of all this when I parked at Union Station tonight, and even bid early farewell to my moviegoing companions in order to make it out of the parking garage in ample time. I did not despair when I found several cars ahead of me at the exit; I had ten minutes to spare. Those minutes were quickly eaten up by the excruciating slowness with which the lady in the booth ahead of me conducted each and every transaction. Nevertheless, I pulled up to the booth with a minute to spare, according to the clock on my cell phone. I handed over my parking receipt and a dollar bill.

The lady in the booth looked at my receipt. “Six dollars,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “Two minutes over.”

Staffers of parking booths the world over fall into two categories: those who hate catching a customer just two minutes over, and those who love it. This woman was definitely one of the latter. In anticipation of my objections, she turned her monitor so that I could see the screen. “I go by this,” she said. By both my cell phone and the little clock in my car, the clock on the monitor was four minutes fast.

Thus, my moment of choice. Not unwittingly, I had stepped into the jaws of a petty commercial trap, by choosing to park at that garage in the first place, knowing full well how the pricing structure there worked. Now, face to face with the personification of that petty greed, I had to choose whether to make my stand.

Mind you, the most pathetic thing to do would have been to quibble: to point out the discrepancies between the clocks, or to complain about the fact that I had taken pains to exit on time and was thwarted only by this very person’s lethargy. To take a stand, none of these things need be said — certainly the woman knew them full well. To take a stand, I would just have had to wait. Wait until the horns started honking, until the shouts of the impatient queue came bubbling up behind me, the shouts of other customers caught in the same bind as me and seeing their parking fee multiply by six in the space of a second. Wait until this woman came to believe that I would wait as long as it took, until those angry customers started coming out of their cars to find out what was going on, until I started a scene, until the cops arrived. Unless she was a true master of her godforsaken profession, she would, before that point was reached, raise the gate and let me leave.

I thought about it. I really did. All that was ugly about modern America was caught up in that moment, and I thought that if I fought it, I’d be doing my small part, at least for that one day. But in the end I coughed up the extra five and drove home. It wasn’t a case of picking my battles so much as retreating from the field. At least in this case retreating — i.e. making a mental note never to park in that stupid place again — does some miniscule damage to whatever company runs the place. This is a war that will be ultimately won by disengagement, though it will never be won by one person alone. Opportunistic greed in the form of raw deals for the customer isn’t limited to parking garages, and one can only disengage so far, especially when one regularly finds oneself at Babies R Us buying diapers.

Next time, though, I’m taking a stand.

Sometimes a song, an album, or even a whole band gets tied up in your head with a particular place or event, so that you’ll never be able to think of the one without the other again. The Pernice Brothers will always take me back to a bitterly cold afternoon at Common Grounds not long after the place opened. This was before it became a neighborhood fixture and long before the free wi-fi, so there were only a handful of people there. Brad, one of the managers at the time, put on the Pernice Brothers’ first album, Overcome by Happiness and we the patrons experienced what, thanks to High Fidelity, is now known as a Beta Band moment. Everyone sort of stopped what they were doing and listened for a bit. An exquisite sad sweetness filled us from the toes up. When I headed up to the counter for a refill, Brad grabbed me by the shoulders and, after a deep sigh, declaimed the lines from “All I Know”: “All your friends may go / And your luck may go / But you’ll never feel as bad / As when she goes.”

Brad was a little odd, even as coffee shop managers go.

Anyway, with the CG crew boosting them on one hand and my buddy Joe declaring them “the world’s best power pop band” on the other, I got my hands on their music and quickly became a fan. I lack the critical acumen to describe bands without falling back on concepts like ‘peppy,’ ‘sad,’ or ‘cool,’ but if you scan reviews of their albums, you’ll see the recurring words ‘orchestration,’ ‘lush arrangements,’ ‘vocal harmonies,’ ‘layered,’ and ‘awash.’ A Rolling Stone review gets it about right with this: ”[their albums are] as spiffy and catchy as they are timid and wicked.”

The Pernice Brothers frequently visit the DC area; they played at the Black Cat last Thursday night. Sadly, the backing vocals were mixed so low as to be practically inaudible—I didn’t realize what a crucial element they were to so many of the songs until they were gone. Apparently there were numerous other sound-related issues that irritated Joe but got past me. Still, hearing material live from their most recent album, “Yours, Mine and Ours,” raised my estimation of it considerably—it had been taking a while for it to grow on me at home. (“The World Won’t End,” their second, is still their best, and the best place to start.)

I have a fun game that I like to play whenever I see the band: it’s called “Watch Peyton Pinkerton’s Cigarette.” This fine guitarist smokes up a storm while he plays, but his lips cover no more than a millimeter of his cigarette’s filter. No matter how he bobs and sways while he plays, it rarely gets dislodged. Once, when I saw Peyton and Joe Pernice playing at Iota, it did fall: Peyton was sitting, and before the cigarette had cleared the plane of his seat, he grabbed it in midair and gracefully put it back in his mouth. Since then I’ve longed to witness a similar feat, but just speculating about what cartoon laws of physics apply to Peyton’s cigarettes is pretty fun, too.

A Message for the Patrons of the DC Music Scene:

Dadgummit, shake your asses a little more! Maybe it’s easier to look cool when you’re standing still, but physically responding to the music that you hear is part of human nature. I realize that you’re largely a bunch of program managers and policy analysts who haven’t cut loose since your undergrad days at Stanford or Georgetown or William & Mary or wherever, and that many of you are in bands yourselves and thus for reasons of pride try to avoid liking the band on stage too much, but it’s not like I’m asking you to mosh—just give yourselves over bodily to the music a little more than you are. I promise that the band that’s playing will be much happier if you do—they’re not telepaths, and so the way they know they’re getting through to you is by seeing you do something. As an added bonus, if you and the people around you put on your groove thang when appropriate, the band will get your vibe, and play better as a result. And if you have a good excuse for not shakin’ it, like a bum knee or a heart condition, then at the very least don’t look scornfully at those who are. We’re only doing what comes naturally.

On Lehrer the other night they had a piece on “Alhurra”:http://www.alhurra.com/, the Springfield-based, U.S.-funded, Arabic language, 24-hour satellite TV channel broadcasting in the Middle East. Depending on who you ask, Alhurra is either an attempt to provide an objective alternate to Al Jazeera, or a bit o’ the ol’ propaganda.

But either way, can somebody explain this? Italics are mine:

There are hourlong news broadcasts twice a day, news updates on the hour, and a daily discussion show along with a magazine show, and features on fashion and cuisine. The network’s rundown also includes Arabic subtitled versions of Frontline _and Inside the Actors’ Studio_.

Whose cockamamie idea was it to export “James Lipton”:http://www.bravotv.com/Inside_the_Actors_Studio/?! I can’t really see why Arab viewers would need or want to see American actors get their egos massaged by a stuffy guy spewing sycophantic drivel. As propaganda it’s just confusing, and as an honest attempt to expose new audiences to our culture, it’s just a really dumb choice. Maybe the producers could buy it for cheap. Maybe all those blue notecards can deliver subliminal messages through the camera. Otherwise, I’m stumped.

I haven’t had a chance to absorb much information about Bush’s support for Sharon’s current plans for the peace process. The media coverage left me with a good deal of puzzlement: Is this a major shift in American policy toward Israel, or not?

As if in answer to my unspoken plea, Jonathan Edelstein steps up and “dishes out the clues”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024274.html.

Everybody’s a Firefly fan these days, but I was there at the beginning, watching the show on Friday nights when most people, thanks to the barren time slot and abysmal marketing, didn’t even know it existed. The first episode that aired—not the pilot, yet another gaffe on Fox’s part—was just OK, but after the third one, “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” it was clear that Joss Whedon had outdone himself. I was hooked. Each new episode was like a little gem in a box waiting to be opened. Not since the second season of Buffy had television been that good, and—yep, I’ll come out and say it—Firefly was even better than Buffy.

But its whole existence was a struggle, and when Fox canceled the show after only airing eleven episodes, it wasn’t too much of a surprise. Firefly has only grown in popularity since—a movie is in the works, and over on Amazon the DVDs of the TV episodes is ranked #32 in sales, and has a solid five-star rating out of 811 reviews.

I managed to stretch out the experience of watching the DVDs over two months, instead of burning through all the episodes in one sitting, as some are wont to do. I did this by only turning it on while I was giving Ella a bottle, and forcing myself to turn it off at the first commercial break after she was done. I tried to savor every moment, especially those of the three unaired episodes, which I was seeing for the first time. It was a glorious, sad experience. Such a wonderful show. So much potential wasted. The movie might be good, but the setting, the characters, everything about it was designed for a long-term, ongoing tale; the movie can’t hope to capture what was best about the show.

You’d certainly never get what was best about the show by reading a summary. A western in space?? A rusty spaceship hauling cattle between planets?? Laser pistols and western twang? What saves it from being a mere gimmicky genre-mash is the care Whedon took to draft a coherent, detailed, authentic world—er, universe, or in this case, solar system full of terraformed planets. The circumstances that make it possible for there to be a western frontier dynamic in deep space simultaneously reinforce a believeable history. This is nowhere more evident than in the language everyone speaks. On one level, Fireflyspeak is another wacky, mannered dialect along the lines of Buffyspeak or WestWingspeak. But it also fits neatly into the setting, like the way that an Earth dominated by Chinese culture leads to a language sprinkled with expressions in Mandarin. In a sense, though, all this is just icing on the cake. Take away the slang and the spaceships and the special effects and you still have the golden heart of the show: a perfect ensemble cast.

(A brief confession, here: I have taken to using the Firefly expression “shiny” in everyday life. Consciously trying to emulate the language of a short-lived, defunct sci-fi television show probably elevates me to a yet higher plane of geekdom, if that’s possible.)

I thought maybe I’d use this entry to explain Firefly for those who haven’t seen it, but there’s too much to say, and most folks already know the deal. Go see it if you haven’t; what follows is just a fanboy list.

Best Episode: “Serenity,” “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” and “Out of Gas” are the main contenders here, with “Objects in Space” a clear fourth. OMR is definitely the most tightly written and funniest, but OOG and OIS win in the emotional-impact department. The pilot should win some sort of award for “Most Elegant and Seamless Introduction of a Complicated and Bizarre Setting and Tone While Simulatenously Telling a Fine Tale.”

Worse Episode: “Safe,” despite some lovely scenes in the beginning, because of the whole “she’s a witch!” routine at the end. It’s as flat as the show ever got.

Best of the Unaired Episodes: “Trash,” though they’re all good.

Favorite Character: Jayne. Duh!

Character That You Identify With Most Even If You’d Rather Not Admit It: Wash. Duh!

Best All-Around Scene In Any Episode: Last scene of “Ariel,” where Jayne’s trapped in the airlock and says “Don’t tell them what I done. Make something up,” and that’s what convinces Mal to let him live.

Cool Scene That You Know Would Have Been In the Show If Only It Had Continued: Jayne redeeming himself and saving River by totally kicking the shit out of one of those freaky hands-of-blue dudes.

Pet Theory: How about this: Inara’s pregnant, and that’s why she’s leaving the ship. The thing that tipped me off is Early’s line in “Objects in Space” as he and Simon are leaving Inara’s shuttle: “Man is stronger by far than woman, but only woman can create a child—does that seem right to you?” I wish I could think of a River line that hints at the same thing, because that would cinch it.

Coolest Firefly Site I Didn’t Already Know About: The Firefly Chinese Pinyinary, listing and explaining all the Chinese dialogue in the show.

Best News So Far About the Movie: That all the original cast members are signed on. The ensemble is complete.

Rumor About the Movie That Will Please Some But Makes Me Queasy: That David Boreanaz will be in it too.

Question for Gary Farber : Weren’t you, like, totally geeked when you saw “Ariel” and Simon talked about how they removed River’s amygdala?

I realize that by gushing this way about Firefly I’m only jumping on an already-full bandwagon. But it’s a fine wagon to be on. Shiny, even.