A few days ago I mentioned the cheeseball glory that is Dhoom 2.

Today, we do a Bollywood 180 for Jodhaa Akbar, a sweeping historical drama based on the life of Akbar the Great.

Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai star in both. I’m glad I saw Hrithik in this before I saw Dhoom 2, and that is all I will say about that. (Aishwarya…does her best.)

Nutshell: In 16th-Century India, Jalaluddin is the young emperor of Hindustan, handsoming his way across the country, trying to be wise and just and whatever. Jodhaa is a stunning Rajput princess who’s married to Jalaluddin as a gesture of solidarity between Hindus and Muslims. Will these two incredibly genetically blessed people ever fall in love? Will Jalaluddin ever reconcile the two religions at war under his reign? Will this movie’s eight bajillion subplots ever get resolved? We’ll find out…in real time. (This movie is awesome, but it is also about eight years long.)

Let’s hit it.
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This weekend was the Steampunk World’s Fair, where I read for the first time from my upcoming novel (exciting), saw a lot of great costumes (very exciting!), and had the usual problems with some elements of the subculture (Me? Have problems with something? Surely not!).

Overall, though, it was great, and I’m still beyond thrilled to have been invited. There were some wonderful costumes, both subtle and flamboyant. There was also a baby with a mustache glued to its face; every time I saw it, it was wearing exactly the expression you would imagine from a baby that has been brought into a huge room full of people and had a mustache glued to its face.

Pictures are still coming in (I didn’t take any of my own, because they would have been a series of nicely-accessorized blurs), but this shot is my favorite so far:

The subtle colorway, the texture, the pose, the face – it reminds me of a Sargent painting or something. Call me a nerd, I just really like it.

Bonus: while I was at the World’s Fair, I received some good news: my story “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen” will be appearing in the Way of the Wizards anthology! That was a nice cap to the weekend, for sure.

Now back to the grindstone, with a new goal in life: to get some Dr. Scholl’s in my zombie-fighting boots pronto, because those things get PAINFUL. Wow. Flat boots are supposed to be more comfortable! Why do you have to make a liar out of me, boots?

So, last night was the Oscars, that gleaming bastion of class and merit, where they will give a woman an Oscar for directing the best film of the year and then play “I am Woman” before throwing to commercial. In keeping with this grand tradition, Hollywood takes the opportunity to go all-out, lining up for the fashion police in a glittery, flawless parade.

I am kidding. It was a disaster. This face says it all:

And when Kristin Stewart speaks for all of us, you know something is wrong.

It’s a sad, sad day.
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Today at Tor.com, I talk about SyFy’s new reimagined-fairy-tale movies of the week. First up will be Beauty and the Beast (naturally), starring Estella Warren (naturally).

Do I think this will be awesome? Yes. But it has some serious work to do if it’s ever going to compare to the most amazing version of this story ever broadcast, and I think you know which I mean.

This one. (Immortalized here on Greendale Elementary’s picture day.)

Now, this show is not amazing for its overall storyline (which was three ounces of story in a two-gallon jug). Nor is it memorable for its individual episodes, which tended to be like the 90s remake of The Tomorrow People, in that almost every episode featured someone new learning about the underground society that has existed in secrecy for decades, except that judging by the discovery rate on the show, by now everyone in New York probably knows about it and just doesn’t realize it’s common knowledge because it doesn’t come up in conversation. The Underground Renaissance Faire: New York’s best-kept secret.

But neither one of those is the element that makes the show truly timeless. That would be the wardrobe.

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So, two things about this year’s Golden Globes:

1. The wrong people won a lot of important awards.
2. It rained.

That second thing disrupted the event in a way that the horrible results seemed not to, which means that people were running through the drizzle with the sort of look generally reserved for the otters you see in the oil-spill commercials. Style this year was largely related to how nonchalantly you could hold an umbrella.

We’ll get to that.

“It’s dial-up madness in here!”
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