Kevin Drum ruminates a bit about the NASA bureaucracy, which was fingered today as the main culprit behind the Columbia disaster. I think he raises an interesting question: Is NASA's "culture" really significantly worse than any other large-scale, bureaucratic-type of "culture"? Or does it only seem that way, because when NASA goes awry, the poor results tend to be rather spectacular? I don't know, really. But I do have to consider that of the many, many spaceflights we have executed, only three have resulted in fatalities to the astronauts, and one of those took place on the launchpad. (Hell, was the Apollo 1 fire even a mishap during launch, or were those three men merely doing a kind-of "dry run"? I'll look this up later.)

Now, I do think that the Columbia disaster points out some shifts in philosophy that need to be made by NASA -- not away from human spaceflight, but toward maybe actually coming up with new ships once in a while. I'm just guessing here, but I somewhat suspect that we could have come up with a better, and safer, launch vehicle than the shuttle at some point in the last 25-plus years.

I recall one of the several good lines in the movie Armageddon (yes, it had a few, as bad as the thing on the whole might have been): when the oil-rig workers are strapped in and awaiting lift-off, someone says something like, "Hey, we're all trusting our lives and the whole planet to two machines that were built by the lowest bidder!" And I also think of how, whenever we see someone struggling with a task that shouldn't require that much struggling, a common metaphor is rocket science, as in, "Hey, this ain't rocket science! It's not that hard!" So, it seems to me that maybe we should try to limit the histrionics when something bad happens to the people who actually are doing rocket science.

(Oh, and here's another linguistic complaint: I hate the use of the word "culture" in the above context. It's another appropriation of a word by the business-and-bureaucrat community to elevate something to higher importance than it should have.)

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I just checked the Realms of Fantasy slush-list to see if maybe the story of mine that's in their possession has been read yet, and apparently, it hasn't. That's not terribly surprising. What is disconcerting is that apparently the slush-reader left some manuscripts in someone's car. Aieee!

(BTW, for those wanting a numerical illustration of the odds one comes up against in writing fiction, drop down to the numbers on the lefthand side of the page. The current batch represents 301 submissions, of which 7 have been held for further consideration. Not purchased, mind you -- just held for later. I must be insane.)

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Apparently, I'm not the only one with Frank Lloyd Wright on the brain. Lynn comments as well, and she's responding to yet someone else. There seems to be a big disconnect between Wright's apparent view of buildings as "walk-through sculpture" and the more general, public view of buildings as, well, places for stuff to happen, whether it's lives being lived, business being done, or art being shown. From what I know about Wright (and that, really, isn't much), he didn't seem to consider function much in his designs.

But I still enjoy looking at his buildings.

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Continuing my tour through the wonderful world of Women Whose Toilets Britney Is Not Fit To Scrub, I find the luminous Kate Hudson.



Hudson was the best thing about the movie How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, a piece of pure sit-com fluff which somewhat captivated me nonetheless on the basis of the way Hudson glows whenever she was onscreen. And there's one scene in which she takes a big bite out of a sandwich that....oh, never mind....

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Dennis the Dastardly responds today to a checklist of things women think about men, or some such thing. I don't have much comment of my own, basically because I think everybody's full of crap.

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ESPN's tour of all the major-league ballparks hits Minneapolis's Metrodome today.

I have a lot of fine memories of the Metrodome, all from my four years in college. I thrilled to the Twins' exploits in the 1991 World Series, when they defeated the ever-evil Atlanta Braves in seven games. (The Braves are a tiny bit more palatable to me than the Dallas Cowboys.) The second of the Bills' four Super Bowl defeats came in the Metrodome. And, I spent my twenty-first birthday there (in part). A bunch of my friends got together and went to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival during the day, and then at night we went to see the Twins beat the Royals, 9-2. I remember walking in and being struck by the apparent difference in size between a large venue in person and a large venue on TV; I actually looked around and said, "They had a Super Bowl in here?"

(In fact, there was a one-year stretch in which the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NHL Finals, and the NCAA Final Four were all held in Minneapolis.)

Of course, unless one is quite rich, one doesn't get drunk spending one's twenty-first at a baseball game. I had one beer, and the guy at the booth said after he looked at my ID: "Happy birthday. Five bucks." But I figured, hey, I'd been drunk plenty of times. That sensation wasn't going to become any more unique by virtue of doing it legally.

And one lasting memory of the four hours or so I spent in the Dome is of this horrible jingle for some local pizza joint that they insisted on blaring over the loudspeakers. To this day, I get this damn tune going through my head sometimes, even though I only heard it once. Dial four eight eight eight eight eight eight, for the very best pizza you ever ate….AGGGHHHH!!!

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The correct grammatical use of "sucks" can be illustrated thusly:

Having the World Science Fiction Convention just a ninety-minute drive away and being unable to attend because of financial constraints really sucks.

I expect this to be included in the next edition of Strunk and White.

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It's interesting to note the way blogging - - both writing and reading - - takes shape to accommodate other bloggers' habits, and how my own habits get slightly thrown out-of-whack when a favorite of mine either goes on a hiatus (as SDB did last week) or has some shift in life-circumstance which changes their posting habits (e.g., Pandagon). Some bloggers I tend to check in the morning, either because they post late-at-night, or - - more likely - - they're Californians, and thus post some stuff after I, being an East-coaster, have retired for the evening. So it gets comforting somewhat, to get up in the morning and read SDB and Kevin Drum and TBOGG*; it's also comforting to check back a few times during the day when Pandagon or Matthew Yglesias puts up something new on their "sporadic" basis. And it throws me off if bloggers I've tended to read at certain times of the day change their routines.

What's strange in all this is that I haven't settled into any particular posting habit of my own, as far as I can see. Sometimes I'll write a day's posts the night before, using Word, and slap them up in the morning. Other times I'll just wait until mid-afternoon. Sometimes I'll do an Yglesias-type day and post several times in a day. About the only main habit I've settled into is that I usually post nothing at all on Saturdays. Generally speaking, I try to do all of my posting for the day at once, but that's not a habit so much as a preference that I don't try to hard to avoid breaking. My point in all this? Glad you asked.

I don't have one.

* Best wishes to Tbogg on the current difficulties facing his family.

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Well, isn't that interesting: I'm writing this post on one browser window, and according to the other browser window I'm running, Byzantium's Shores cannot be found. Erk. I suspected a problem was brewing last night when I discovered that my permalinks weren't working again. Anyway, let's get this fixed soon, guys. Thousands of lives are at stake.

UPDATE (two minutes later): Now the page is showing up again. I've entered the realm of Bizarro-Blogger.

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Oh, swell. For people looking for slash fiction featuring Magnum and Higgins from Magnum, PI, I am as of this writing the number four site, according to Google.

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I read Kevin J. Anderson's A Forest of Stars this weekend. This is the second book in his Saga of Seven Suns series, which began with last year's Hidden Empire. That book was a decent light read, although I found Anderson's characters a bit wooden and his tendency for cute allusions and references gets annoying after a while. The big problem with Hidden Empire was that it felt like five hundred pages of set-up, with Anderson taking forever to simply get all of the pieces in the right positions.

No such problem afflicts A Forest of Stars, which is a much better read than the earlier book. It's still light space-opera, with galactic conflicts, apocalyptic battles, ancient alien artifacts, a King and his scheming ministers, a society loosely based on Gypsies, a society of religious mystics, and aliens who are basically uncorking the galaxy's biggest can of "Whoop-ass" on the humans.

The model is still George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. Anderson gives us lots of short chapters, each from the viewpoint of a different character. Even the title A Forest of Stars mirrors Martin's titles in his concurrent fantasy masterpiece. Anderson still lacks, though, Martin's skill at characterization, so a lot of the book seems more plot-driven than character driven. Most times that's not a problem, but there are spots where certain developments seem awfully convenient, such as a pivotal discovery made by a character who has gone off alone into space for personal reasons. Anderson's main skill, as always, is in using words to convey the visual sense of what's going on in his story. If this book were made into a movie correctly, it would be eye-candy of the highest order. I'd love to see those huge, diamond-hulled Hydrogue war-globe starships.

The story of the entire series involves a titanic war that began when humans used an alien device to ignite a gas-giant planet into a star, unaware of the beings called Hydrogues who live in the depths of the gas giants. It's a lot more complicated than that, and by the end of A Forest of Stars, there are four new and previously-unknown alien races on the scene, relegating humans to the status of mice on the battlefield.

The third book in this series should be out next summer, and there is a prequel graphic novel coming out this winter. This isn't a great series, by any means, but as space opera I actually find it preferable to, say, the military SF of David Weber. Sometimes you just want a big, galaxy-spanning tale of aliens and war and love and political machination, and that's what Anderson's delivering.

Labels: Space Opera

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I have two new reviews up today (well, yesterday, actually) at GMR: Richard Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance, and Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist.

Actually, there's a lot of good new stuff at GMR this week. Check it out.

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Hooray and Huzzah! The Ecosystem is back up and running, and even better, I've made the evolutionary leap to Marauding Marsupial. Of course, I still have some work to do: the unupdated-in-six-months William Burton still outranks me, as does -- gasp -- the dullest blog in the world.

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I am really starting to be glad we got out of the Syracuse area when we did, even if our stay there was for only six months. The big basketball championship aside, I'm starting to wonder if there isn't some kind of curse hanging over that entire region. And this one hits kind-of close to home: yesterday, one of the buildings at the apartment complex where we lived burned to the ground. It wasn't the actual one, but judging by the address, the one that burned was within a quarter mile of our old apartment.

And while we did live there, a quarter mile in the other direction, a murder occurred. And there was the big ice storm in April, on the weekend we had to pack and leave. And there was generally a ton of snow. And the constant news of factory closings. And....man, there's a pall over the Central New York region.

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Happy Birthday, belatedly, to Greg Harris. He doesn't provide a number, so I'll assume that he turned 57 until I am informed otherwise.

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I noticed a couple of funny things in the course of my latest viewing of The Fellowship of the Ring last night, both during the Moria sequence.

:: Remember the famous Far Side cartoon, in which a student is attempting to enter the Midvale School for the Gifted by pushing on the front door, even though the door is clearly marked "Pull"? Well, one of the things Gandalf does when he's trying to open the Doors of Durin is to push on them with his shoulder...but when Frodo figures out the riddle and the doors open, they swing outward.

:: In Balin's tomb, when Gandalf is reading the last entry in the journal kept by the dwarves before their deaths, we get a glimpse of the very last line, in which the dwarven runes trail off in an angle scrawl across the bottom of the page. I'm sorry, but this put me immediately in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "The Castle Arrrgggghhhhh...he must have died while carving it!"

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You know what I love? I love when it's the middle of August and, even though we haven't had anywhere near as hot and humid a summer as we've been known to have (and Buffalo summers aren't nearly as hot and humid, as a rule, as those you'll find in cities closer to the Atlantic), Canada will look down on us from her lonely perch in the north and say, "You folks could use a bit of arctic air." That little kiss of Canadian chill, which in January or February threatens to freeze us to the marrow, is the most refreshing thing possible when it comes in August.

Thanks, Canada.

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Is John Stossel -- that guy on ABC's 20-20 -- an obnoxious doofus or what? In his always provocative segment entitled "Give Me A Break!" the other night, he indignantly complained about -- gasp! -- the fact that movie studios, when doing publicity for movies everybody hates, will selectively quote from bad reviews to make them sound like raves, and they will use actual raves by little-known pseudo-critics who write gushing praise about every movie they see. And lest anyone think maybe they were simply re-running an old Stossel piece, all of the films featured are current or very recent releases, like Gigli and Alex and Emma.

I wonder if next week Mr. Stossel might do a "Give Me A Break!" piece on, say, the old practice in Radio Shack where the clerks would ask for your address if you were just buying a three-foot piece of video cord. Or maybe he'll get angry about those unlawfully-removed mattress tags.

POST-SCRIPT: I actually wrote this post, as I am occasionally likely to do, on Friday night. (Sometimes I like to write posts in MSWord and then cut-and-paste them into the blog at a later time.) In between then and my actual posting it here, Jesse of Pandagon commented on the same Stossel feature. Weird. But Stossel's still a doofus.

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Over on 2Blowhards, there are a couple of items of interest to me as a Buffalonian. The items aren't specifically about Buffalo per se, but they do touch on a few issues of ongoing interest in this former rust-belt city that has had more trouble than just about any of its other brethren in moving beyond the hangover caused by the decay of local manufacturing, the concurrent population loss, and the mistakes that most cities have made over the last few decades.

First, one of the Blowhards speaks out against Frank Lloyd Wright. Buffalo is the home to one of Wright's masterpieces, the Darwin Martin House, which I've written about before. The Martin House is a current object of a big restoration effort, and it is generally held to be one of the very finest of Buffalo's buildings in a city where architecture is a big thing. I'm not sure I agree (or even if I know enough to really form an opinion, having never actually set foot inside a Wright building) but their take on Wright is pretty interesting. I never knew that Wright had something of a mania for low ceilings, and in the course of doing a little online research on Wright, I found that when he designed his famous Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and when museum officials pointed out that his ceilings would not allow clearance for some of the paintings, his response was: "Cut them in half." Referring to the paintings. Wright, apparently, was something of an ass. (Which partly explains my negative reaction to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead: Howard Roark, who was if I am not mistaken based on Wright, is supposed to be admired for his refusal to buckle under, and yet all I kept thinking as I read the book was, "Geez, this guy is an ass.")

Second, the Blowhards did an absolutely fascinating two-part interview (part one, part two) with David Sucher, a writer and blogger whose main interest is in what he calls City Comforts: architecture, but as a function of how it serves the neighborhoods in which it occurs. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in this interview, and I plan to spend some time investigating Sucher's work and blog in the future. I've already requested his book from the library. (Gods, I don't ever want to live in a place where I cannot take advantage of a large metropolitan library system!)

One thing that immediately struck me is Sucher's suggestion that all those mini-strips that seem to be popping up everywhere, especially in sprawled-out areas like Buffalo where new construction keeps going on out in the fringes while older, inner neighborhoods crumble and die, should at least be built right out to the sidewalk, with parking in the rear. As I drive through Buffalo's suburbs, there are parking lots upon parking lots upon parking lots. Parking lots everywhere, with mini-strips and plazas and malls or whatever set back, way back, from the street. So pervasive has the sprawl become, and to such a degree have we conceded to the car and marginalized the pedestrian, that a lot of these wide streets do not even have sidewalks.

Sucher also has a blunt, practical attitude that is fairly refreshing in the face of all the bizarro "newspeak" that so often seems to be de rigeur for urban-planning types. Sucher doesn't hate suburbs, he doesn't hold them in disdain, and he simply says, "We can tear down the buildings if we need to." This is certainly true. Modern construction isn't like the building of a medieval cathedral, when a cornerstone would be laid in the year 1150 and then construction would finally end in 1325. We put buildings up in months these days.

Buffalo has a lot of problems, many of which are related to failed urban planning. I look forward to seeing if some of Sucher's ideas are applicable.

(EDIT: I replaced my original link to Mr. Sucher's blog with the up-to-date one.)

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Happiness is a Return of the King photo gallery. I especially like this one, which I assume happens just after Frodo is stabbed in the back by Bilbo, who has tracked him all the way from Rivendell to seize back the Ring.



(No, that's not really what happens. Duh.)

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Via MeFi here is an interesting (I think) annotation of a scene from The Matrix Reloaded, in which Neo talks to someone called the Architect. I haven't seen the movie yet -- The Matrix is, for me, a wait-for-video venture -- but this scene, although it sounds a bit spoilerish, didn't spoil much for me at all. At least, I don't think it did. It's a lot of the "You don't understand your true nature" stuff that filled the first movie. But fans might find the annotations interesting.

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I'm torn as to how to mock this story, so I'll just toss up a couple of alternatives and let you all choose the one that tickles your fancy.

1. "Based on the event currently scheduled for September 13, I think that folks living in the vicinity of Neverland may want to watch the skies for the mothership to show up on September 14 and spirit Mr. Jackson back home."

2. "In a related item, judges in the county where Neverland resides are already preparing the forms in advance for restraining orders, names to be filled in later."

3. "When told that some of the proceeds are expected to be donated to his gubernatorial campaign, actor and candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is said to have screamed, 'No! No! Anything but that! What's he trying to do, kill me?!' National GOP overlord Karl Rove, though, speculated that Mr. Jackson is a secret French agent whose mission to disavow America has gone seriously awry."

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The next entry in my occasional selection of Women Who Are To Britney As Chocolate Ice Cream Is To Syrup Of Ipecac is the stunning Ming-Na, of NBC's ER.



She's getting more beautiful every year, too.

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Embrace the Geekiness:

:: Observing my daughters third viewing of The Wizard of Oz this week, I was struck by one of the Wicked Witch's lines as she's in the process of expiring. Yeah, she whines "I'm melting!" over and over, but then she says something like, "Oh, who would have thought that a miserable girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness!" And, being the Star Wars geek that I am, I immediately wondered: if we were to replace the Emperor's shriek as he plummets down the reactor shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi with a similar line, what would it be?

"You were a runny-nosed teenager before I took you in!"

"I got you a girlfriend and gave you my biggest Star Destroyer!"

"They promised me that turning to the Dark Side was permanent!"

"Who could have thought the pod-racing runt that Qui Gon found would be the one to destroy my plans!"

Any other suggestions, folks?

:: Over on Tosy and Cosh (wasn't that a movie starring Fred Dryer and a German shepherd?) John wonders what the final image of Episode III will be, given that the final images of TPM and AOTC mirrored to a small degree the final images of ANH and TESB.

I don't know how Lucas could mirror that final gathering of the heroes smiling in ROTJ. The most often-suggested final image for Episode III I've seen, in various forums, is for Obi Wan to turn over baby Luke to Owen Lars and then wander off into the Tatooine wastes. Personally, assuming that Padme dies in the film, I think it would be interesting to see the newly-minted Darth Vader visiting her grave. That would plant a few of the seeds for Anakin's eventual return to the Good Side.

:: A few days ago, my wife and I watched Mission: Impossible!, which is a favorite movie of ours. (Yeah, we still like Tom Cruise. Sue us.) Anyway, I just want to note what is one of my favorite villain's lines ever in a movie. At the end, when Ethan Hunt explains to Mr. Phelps how the Bible that Phelps had boosted from a hotel was the clue Hunt needed to figure out that Phelps was behind everything, Mr. Phelps says: "They stamped it, didn't they? Those damn Gideons." For some reason, that line always cracks me up.

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In the "She Went Doing What She Loved" Department, a 101-year-old legendary cowgirl has died after being thrown by her favorite horse. (Via Joseph Duemer.)

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Watching the fourth quarter of a preseason tilt between the Steelers and the Greatest Force for Evil In The Western World (the Cowboys), I'm suddenly wondering: how do the commentators on the network football broadcasts manage to maintain any interest in doing play-by-play and color commentary on the exploits of guys whose NFL careers are, in all likelihood, within fourteen days of ending? I watch these sixth and seventh-round picks going all-out, desperately trying to make the team, and all I can think of is that episode of The Simpsons where Homer takes over the Pee-Wee football team.

"And now for the easiest job a coach has…the cuts!"

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Scott of The Gamer's Nook has just learned that the current economic miracle-in-progress is about to put him on the unemployment line. Since he's been off the actual job market for more than thirteen years, he's looking for advice on how he should craft his resume for the IT industry. Anyone with any thoughts (like you, Sideshow Bob) should go give him a kibitz or two. I'm afraid that the only advice I'd be able to give him involves adding the phrases "all-beef patties" and "Super-size" to his lexicon.

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I got caught up on my taped episodes of The Restaurant last night; all that remains is this coming Sunday's finale, in which I expect Rocco (the chef and restaurant owner) to rip the mask off his head and reveal himself to be Old Man Carruthers. "I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddlin' kids!"

In the fifth episode, anyway, there are three line cooks who get together and decide to screw Rocco by claiming to have been involved in a bar fight after work, with one of them going to the hospital. Thus, of course, they don't show up for work. Believe me, even in a large kitchen like this place, having three cooks not show up for work is a major headache. But later, Rocco learns of their deception when he actually tries to call the hospital to check on his employee and learns they've never heard of him. Surprise!

This little incident brought back all the unpleasantness I ever experienced in the restaurant business. There are always employees who are lousy, and who pull stunts like this; they always think they are stickin' it to the man. What they never realized is that the restaurant's doors were going to open the next day at 11:00 or whatever, whether they were there or not, and that the only people they were screwing were the coworkers who were about to show up for their shifts and then find out that they now have to work two or three times as hard.

A constant fact of restaurant management was that good people tended to move on, by virtue of the fact that they are good people; and the restaurant business tends to attract the bottom-feeders of the job market. You try to minimize this, as a manager, by staying attuned to your people and keeping the good ones happy. On this score, Rocco seems to be pretty piss-poor as a manager. Now, obviously this show probably isn't giving the total picture since they are distilling multiple days of business into 42 minutes or whatever of a prime-time show, but on the basis of what I am seeing, about the only way Rocco could be more divorced from what his people are experiencing is if he actually wasn't in the restaurant at all during the business hours.

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It seems that the Ecosystem is having some difficulties, and NZBear will shortly be looking into alternatives and doing some digging to see if it's a problem on his end.

Anyway, I just wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank NZBear for the work he's done on the Ecosystem. I've found it a really fun way to track the growth of Byzantium's Shores aside from simply watching my hits go up.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Muhammad Ali (standing) after knocking out Cleveland Williams (prone), 1966. (Discussion by the photographer here.)

From this SportsFilter thread, I find The Observer's ten best sports photographs. The list, as one might expect from a British paper, is heavy on boxing, soccer and rugby; nothing from basketball, football (American style), baseball, or anything else. But the pictures are pretty cool.

I don't like boxing much at all; my feelings are encapsulated by something I once heard from a comedian whose name I've long since forgotten: "You have to wonder about a society that considers masturbation 'self-abuse' and boxing, a sport." I just don't like watching two people beat the crap out of each other for sporting purposes. But I've always had a fondness for Muhammad Ali, and I have to admit I choked up a little when I recognized him as he went to light the Olympic Flame at the 1996 Summer Games. Plus, as boxing images go, this picture is just cool. As the photographer notes, back then there was no advertising emblazoned on the floor of the ring; just stark white that contrasts well with the bodies of the men actually fighting in the ring.

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You know, the more I learn about Iceland, the more intriguing that place seems. I think that after I finish reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, I'll finally get round to reading the Icelandic sagas that have been sitting on my bookshelf for a long while.

I mean, how can anyone not be intrigued by a country that has a museum dedicated to…well, this?

(via Bara)

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Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, check out this compare-and-contrast of the area affect by last week's blackout, versus what that same area usually looks like. NYT registration required.

(Why is it that every time I read a story about the possible causes of the blackout, I picture that guy in Airplane! who unplugs the landing lights as the plane makes its final approach and then says, "Just kidding!" as he plugs them back in? Anyway, that single blip of bright light in the Buffalo area is not me standing outside shining a deer-spotlight into space whilst doing the Nelson Muntz "Ha, ha!" So don't ask.)

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Jason Streed, he of the long-time resistance to blogging, has a great satirical piece about the plight of the underappreciated blogger. Check it out.

(BTW, for some reason Jason's blog seems to have display problems, at least in IE. Hitting F11 twice fixes it.)

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Gregory answered the five questions I asked him. Anyone else up for a go? Let me know, or if you know Gregory better, ask him! It would be pretty cool to see this thing propagate around Blogistan.

Greg also mentions the film Road to Perdition. Here's a film on which I apparently beat him to the punch, quite a while ago. Ha!

(BTW, Greg, is something wrong with your comments, or is it just my computer? I occasionally try to leave a comment, but when I click "post" it simply reverts to the zero-comments window.)

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Lately I seem to be more of a "linker" than a "writer", as far as Byzantium's Shores is concerned. Maybe it's the stunningly gorgeous summer we're finally having in Buffalo, after we got that three-week "rain every day" stretch a while ago, and maybe I really do need the hiatus that I'm scheduling for next week. It's not so much that I lack for ideas on things to drone on about; it's more a "motivation" thing to sit down and crank out more of the essay-style stuff that's the meat-and-potatoes of blogging. I actually have plenty of ideas on stuff to write about. Who knows…but substance will return here. Oh yes.

(And it's not a motivation problem as far as writing-in-general goes, because I'm motivated as hell to do my fiction stuff; I just wrote two reviews for GMR; and I have a pro bono copywriting assignment that I'm excited as hell about. It's pretty much limited to doing essays for the blog, which seems to me a big indicator that I should take a fallow period.)

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Sometime today I will hit 19,000 hits. Woo-hoo!

In related news, Glenn Reynolds just absently waved a hand by his ear, thinking he'd heard a gnat buzzing by.

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Just a heads-up to my regular readers: I'll be taking a four-day hiatus early in September, most likely between the 4 th and the 7 th. (That covers the Thursday through Sunday of Labor Day weekend.) This will simply be one of my occasional "recharging of the batteries" breaks in posting, the periodic enjoyment of which keeps my stuff here from becoming banal and repetitious. (Shut up, you. Mr. Poo, indeed.)

ADDENDUM: That's what I get for not reading the calendar that actually identifies the holidays; Labor Day Weekend is actually next weekend, with Labor Day falling right on the 1st. I sort of thought that Labor Day worked the same way that Election Day works (i.e., it can't fall on the 1st), so clearly I was in a bit of error there. Whoops. Thus, I shall actually move my mini-hiatus up one week, to August 28 through the 31st. I thought about keeping the dates the same, but I wanted to do my hiatus during the actual holiday weekend since my traffic tends to nosedive on holiday weekends anyway.

I'll tentatively plan my next hiatus, after that, for Christmas Day and the two days before it, December 20-22.

(blinks)

What now?

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The movie of the week here is The Wizard of Oz, which has never been as high in my estimation as in a lot of other people's, but I do appreciate it. There's a lot of good stuff there, and I even noticed something last night that I hadn't seen before. There's one scene where I swear a guy commits suicide….

But seriously, in the early scene where Dorothy meets the magician-psychic guy, he is shown clearly rifling through Dorothy's belongings to glean little bits of information about her, so he can then repeat them back to her and look as if he's an actual mind-reader. It's too bad more people don't catch on to this and realize that this is what all so-called psychics do. Especially that creep on Crossing Over, who I think really needs to be taken off and devoured by those shadow-beasties from Ghost.

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Mickey has been building his own computer for a while, and he seems to be almost done. It's pretty nifty-looking, although I do wonder if he might need to put a sticker on the side of it so birds don't think it's empty air and smack into it.

Mickey also reports that The West Wing is coming to DVD in the US. This is, of course, a good thing.

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In the "Not Quite as Good News as a Paying Gig, but Good News Nonetheless" Department, I met this morning with the bosses of a Buffalo arts institution about doing some copywriting for them, on a pro bono basis. If they like my work - - and why wouldn't they, right? - - not only will it be valuable experience for me, but they've also agreed to help me out in marketing my services. This will be of enormous benefit, as I decided when I started doing this that I was going to avoid cold-calling like the plague.

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Time for a writing update: I haven't actually made my 1000 words-per-day target lately, but I did reach a natural finishing point for Chapter Three. Now I'm going to begin…chapter four. Yep, we're livin' on the edge, here. Hold on!

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This is why swimming in the ocean with seals doesn't seem like a particularly good idea.

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Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column returned last week, and this week he's got his AFC Preview up. I don't know...I lost quite a bit of respect for Easterbrook back when he wrote his ludicrous attack on Senator Hillary Clinton, and well, I just don't find as much fun in reading him since then. He seems to be shifting into a mode of "Look how smart I am", which is weird considering how many details he gets, well, wrong.

Just focusing on his notes about the Buffalo Bills in today's column (you have to scroll a bit), he makes an unbelievably dumb statement that makes me wonder if he's watching football games on a black-and-white TV set from the 1950s or something:

"Not only did Buffalo toss out a good-looking uniform and bring in an ugly one, the Bills abandoned the colors of the American flag - not to put too fine a point on it, the single most successful color scheme in world history - for a look based on a color that appears to be Nineteenth Century Rusting Russian Dreadnaught Aft Bulkhead Cyanic."

Now, reading this, one gets the impression that the Bills went from using red, white, and blue to something like, oh, orange and teal. I grant that the Bills' new uniforms aren't nearly as spiffy as the ones that saw them go to four consecutive Super Bowls, but geez, look at this pic of their new road uniform, and you can see other shots of the home uniforms here.

This is what Easterbrook considers "abandoning the colors of the American flag"? As TMQ might say, "Ye Gods...."

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Short hits:

:: Nope, no double standard here. Move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

:: Geez, you mean we didn't actually win yet?

:: Geez, you mean we didn't actually win yet?

:: I didn't need to know about this.

:: Jacques Chirac is the greatest Head of State in the world! (Not really. Just trying to jolt this guy out of his current slump.)

:: Kudos to Senator Kerry. Cheez-whiz is disgusting. Provolone is my cheese of choice for a cheesesteak.

:: Today's entry in my newly-sporadic series, "Women Who Are Wwaayy More Beautiful Than Britney" is Gillian Anderson.



And for good measure:



Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

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Here's something weird: now that we're using EarthLink, I've discovered that their pop-up quashing software initially quashes new windows opened up by Javascript links, like weblog comments on MovableType blogs. Strange. (They open, though, the second time I click the link. Hmmmm....)

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The peach has never been my favorite fruit. Part of that stems from years of consuming nauseating canned peaches in the school cafeteria, but even fresh peaches tend to be "iffy": I've had many a peach that was nice and firm, perfectly ripe with lots of juice, and yet had little flavor at all. And I've never been terribly fond of peach-flavored stuff.

But the other day I tried a white peach from the local grocery store, mainly out of curiosity. And now I'm in love with the damned things.

Now, if only I could ever find a Cox's Orange Pippin apple in this country....

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Here's something fun I saw over on Archipelapogo, and I figured I'd give it a shot. (Scott, 'pogo's writer, is one of the fellows from Collaboratory.) What happens is this: he e-mailed me five questions, and I answer them below. Then, anyone who reads these and wants to take a whack, leave a note to that effect in my Comments for this post, and I will e-mail you with five questions of your own. Sort of like those "Friday Five" things that I used to see on blogs (though not so much anymore), but the questions are actually targeted to the person, as opposed to merely being five generic-type questions that might not even apply. Got that? OK, here are my answers to the questions Scott posed:

1) Where did you get the name Jaquandor? What is it’s special significance to you?

This is a bit of geekiness, and thus far I've only encountered one person who ever recognized the reference. "Jaquandor" is the name of a minor character in the 1980s comic book Six From Sirius, which was a four-issue limited-series put out by Marvel's Epic Comics line. It's a science-fiction story about a team of six elite agents who work for Sirius Swarm, the Galaxy's dominant government. They basically go on space opera-ish James Bond type assignments. There was a sequel series, called Six From Sirius II. Both were written by Doug Moench and illustrated by Paul Gulacy. I always wished those guys would have done more series with those characters. (I could have used another name from that same series, Jakosa Lone, but that would have drawn cries of derision from certain quarters….) Anyway, I've been using the name online for about five years now; I started using it when I was active on Usenet.

2) If you could give one bit of fatherly advice to your daughter today for her to receive twenty years from now, what would it be?

The world is an amazing place; never stop being awed by it and never stop learning from it. Never lose the "sense of wonder". Always look for beauty and knowledge. (And yes, that's all one piece of advice.)

I'd love it if she went into a "creative" field, but really, I think I'll be happy no matter what she does, as long as she always keeps learning and doesn't slip into the trap of confusing her day-to-day minutiae with the entire world. (Well, I'll probably be unhappy if she becomes Chair of the Republican National Committee. But you get the idea.)

3) What was it like having a college professor for a dad? What were the pros and cons?

Hmmmm…in general, my father has always been fairly laid-back about his academic background. He's not one of those people who insists on being called "Dr." by complete strangers, and he's been known to teach classes in t-shirts. He was quite concerned about my academic performance, of course, but I don't think he was any more concerned about that than other intelligent parents. (It's the unintelligent parents you have to worry about.) Of course, there were the obligatory howls of consternation when I'd bring home a bad grade in his particular subject (mathematics), not really because he assumed I'd have a similar level of ability there but more because clearly I wouldn't have actually asked him for help in long division or trig or whatever. Occasionally, when I would go to him for help with the math homework, he'd be appalled when he realized that I was being taught incorrectly (I think), and this would bring about the inevitable tirade about teachers and whatnot. But that didn't happen all that often.

4) Which of the four Bills Super Bowl Losses was the toughest to stomach and why?

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh!!

I'd have to say the first one (Giants, 20-19), by a pretty wide margin. That's the one the Bills absolutely should have won, and it's almost unforgivable that they didn't. As I think back to that game, it astounds me how badly the Bills were outcoached in that game. Their defensive philosophy of "bend but don't break" (which, incidentally, I hold as the main culprit in all four of those losses) really hurt in the game against the Giants. That's the game where they allowed a nine-and-half-minute scoring drive at the beginning of the third quarter, and when the Bills had the ball on offense for only nineteen total minutes. That's the game where Thurman Thomas rushed for 135 yards, but only had 19 carries. If Marv Levy would simply have noticed how Thomas was cutting the Giants to ribbons and run him 30 or 35 times, there's no way they would have lost that game. Yeah, Scott Norwood should have made the kick - - that's what NFL placekickers are paid to do, after all - - but that game also should never have come down to a kicker never known for his distance being asked to make a low-percentage kick.

What's funny about the two games against the Cowboys is that I firmly believe the Bills could have won both of those games. Both times, their defense actually played tough in the opening half, and both times the Bills had early leads. And both times they were done in on turnovers.

In reality, the only time I think the Bills were actually beaten by a clearly superior team was the second one, when the Redskins beat them.

5) Which three books sparked or reinforced your passion for reading and writing? Pick one from childhood, one from adolescence, and one from adult life.

For our purposes here, I'll define "childhood" as up to 13; "adolescence" to include college; and adult life to mean after college. (Hell, I'm not at all certain I'm an adult even now!)

Childhood is something of a toss-up, but I'd probably go with Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. This was my first encounter with multi-volume fantasy series, set in imaginary worlds with a map inside the front cover. (I could as easily have chosen John Bellairs's The House With a Clock In Its Walls, which cultivated my love of Gothic and horror fiction, and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which began my love of written SF. And of course, it's not a book, but the bedrock of my storytelling world has always been Star Wars.)

Adolescence: This is pretty hard, actually. Music actually eclipsed reading for a long time; I actually started college as a music major, and listening and performing were paramount. I suppose the book I'd pick here would be one I read during my sophomore year in college (during May Term, actually - - remember those, Sean?) when I'd go sit on a blanket under a tree reading it after class. This was Carl Sagan's Cosmos. And actually, this is something of a cheat, since I had been transfixed by the television series when it had first aired during fourth grade. Maybe I'd instead choose John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, which kindled a fascination with the Arthurian legend that is still flowering in me to this day, in the form of the novel I'm writing. But actually, given my answer to #2 above, I'll go with Cosmos.

Adulthood: This is even harder. Again, I'll cheat by narrowing it to two: Guy Gavriel Kay's three-volume Fionavar Tapestry and Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Aside from Arthuriana, my love of fantasy in general was pretty dormant until I encountered the Kay series (although it, too, is Arthuriana in part). And King's book crystalized so many thoughts I've had about writing over the years. At one point in the book he says something like, "Do you really need a permission slip from me or something like that to call yourself a writer?" Funny, because in a way, that's precisely how I've come to see that book.

OK, there are my answers. Anyone want me to ask? I won't be asking about the air velocity of an unladen swallow….

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You know, I really try to avoid making fun of the place, but just what is it with Texas, anyway?

(via Paul Riddell.)

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Oh, goody! Via Matthew Yglesias I find that my list of annoying political words has a new entry: OBVIOUST. Yup, it's another of those supposedly cute words whose meaning basically boils down to, "People who disagree with me don't merely disagree; they are actually delusional for not endorsing what's obvious." Oh, and it's an ugly word, to boot. What is it with making up new, ugly, and pretty-much-dumb words like "Obvioust" and "Idiotarian"? Doesn't our English language afford people enough words to express themselves?

And I see that the guy who coined "Obvioust" also trots out the canard that the United States is not a democracy. Now, he leaves off the other end of the formulation, but I assume he's one of those folks who, whenever America is characterized as a democracy, sagely leans forward and pronounces: "Ah, but America is a republic, not a democracy." Of course, you never hear these folks stepping up to correct President Bush whenever he talks about the need for "democracy" in Iraq ("Excuse me, Mr. President, but don't you think we should establish a republic in Iraq instead?"). This weirdo bit of wisdom is always irrelevant, because nobody actually uses the word "democracy" in the sense of, say, ancient Athenian democracy, anymore -- unless they happen to be historians actually talking about ancient Athens. Invoking my handy Oxford Pocket Dictionary, I find that the first meaning of "democracy" given is this: "Government by the whole population, usually through elected representatives". Saying "America's a republic, not a democracy" is like saying "Britney is a woman, not a human", and the only proper response is a loud, resounding "Duuuhhhh!"

The incongruity of a person who wants to adhere to a strict meaning of "democracy" also wanting to make up his very own ugly new word to describe his fairly run-of-the-mill political philosophy would be funny, if it weren't headshake-inducing.

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Ach! damnable MeFi. Every so often there will be a food thread over there, and everyone will chime in with their thoughts or favorite brands of said food, the inevitable result of which is that I immediately want to go out and get some of it, like their infamous discussion of potato chips shortly before the Super Bowl this year.

Today, the subject is root beer, which I love and have not enjoyed in quite some time. Now I'll probably have to go get some IBC, or maybe I'll even spring for some Saranac (which is also a fine microbrewery for real beer).

By the way, the MeFi thread's original poster says that root beer isn't much known for mixed drinks, but here's one that simulates the flavor of birch beer, for those who like that stuff (and I do): simply mix one shot of peppermint schnapps (preferably Rumpelminz) with 12 oz. of root beer (preferably IBC or Stewart's, not A&W or Mug, although Barq's is OK). Be careful you don't use too much schnapps, though, because the result will taste strongly like Scope Mouthwash.

True story: a particularly dense supermarket cashier once carded me when I bought a six-pack of IBC root beer. Since I was under 21 at the time, she actually had to have the manager come over and OK the purchase, because, you know, the label said "beer" on it.

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A couple of movie links, for those inclined:

:: I've never totally warmed up to the work of the Coen Brothers (those that I've seen anyway), but here's a nice fan site for their films, which includes scripts to all of 'em. (Via I Love Everything.)

:: In the wake of Gigli, there's this MSN list of the biggest bombs of all time. I haven't seen all of these, either, but I'm mixed on the ones I have seen. Howard the Duck is one of the most unbelievable horrid things ever made, of course. I only saw Hudson Hawk once, and I'm pretty sure I was at least partially buzzed on beer at the time, but we found it kind of fun and goofy. I've never seen Cleopatra, but its score -- by Alex North -- is a film-music masterpiece that received a glorious restoration a few years ago on the Varese Sarabande label. I have to admit that I did enjoy The Postman when I rented it, although it's chock-full of moments in which Kevin Costner wallows in self-indulgence. (I also seem to recall reading somewhere that the film made back its money in international release, but I'm not sure about that.) And Cutthroat Island really didn't deserve its total critical drubbing -- it's a serviceable pirate flick that suffered from a lack of charisma in its leads. It probably bombed because pirate movies just weren't on anybody's radar back in 1996 or whenever it came out.

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Reading notes today:

:: Figuring that it's long past time I started digging into some of the really bedrock literature of the world, I began reading The Iliad yesterday, in a translation by Robert Fagles. If all goes according to plan, I'll be following up with The Odyssey. This is literature I haven't much encounted since my freshman year in college, when we read very small snippets in handout-form. I always found the whole "Read this two-page excerpt from this thousand-page work of literature" approach pretty much useless; rather than confer upon me some bit of familiarity with the work in question (the point of the whole "liberal arts" thing), I rather found it made for an "in one ear and out the other" effect, and thus my knowledge of The Iliad is confined to my very basic knowledge of the events at Troy and the fact that in some way the work depicts the Gods as being a fairly capricious and mean-spirited lot.

A more personal hang-up of mine regarding the Greek literature is that, for some reason, all the Greek names sound the same to me. Now, I can keep Tolkien's cast of thousands in Lord of the Rings pretty much straight in my head; ditto George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and a host of other works. But inevitably, when I start delving into Greek stuff, I have to keep referring back to see who certain people are. I don't know, maybe it's because so many of them end in 's' -- Achilles, Atrides, Atreus, et cetera -- but that's pretty much a personal stumbling block. It's weird, the little "mental blocks" we form.

Anyway, I'm reading The Iliad in pretty small doses, so I expect it to take a while.

:: Over the weekend I plowed through my first ever novel by F. Paul Wilson, Conspiracies. This novel features a character named Repairman Jack, a secretive soul with a very shadowy background who uses his treasured anonymity to go around solving problems. Sort of a one-man "A Team", blended with Frank Black from Millennium. In Conspiracies, Jack is hired by a husband whose wife has fallen in with an organization of way-out conspiracy theorists (the book is worth reading just to catch up on most of the biggie conspiracy theories of today) and since disappeared. Along the way, a lot of supernatural stuff starts happening; this is apparently the third novel to feature Repairman Jack, but I hadn't read the first two. This didn't pose much of a problem to me, since the novel seems to give whatever information about previous events is necessary to understanding what's going on here. Wilson keeps the plot moving, he has a good eye for detail, and the book is by turns funny and scary. My only complaint was the ending. There isn't one. It's like the old feeling I used to get when I'd watch the first part of a two-part episode of a favorite TV show, but I wasn't aware that it was a two-part episode beforehand, and with five minutes to go I'd suddenly realize, "They can't resolve all this by the end of the hour." Oh well -- at least I know that the follow-up novel has already come out, so it's not like I have to wait a year or anything.

:: I should also note that I read Catherine Asaro's Primary Inversion a week or so ago. This is the first in a series of hard-SF space operas set in Asaro's "Skolian Empire". I enjoyed it, although it's a bit clunky at times and meandering in its plot. It was good enough, though, that I definitely want to read more of this series. It's a stand-alone novel, but I'm not sure if all the "Skolian Empire" novels are stand-alones or not.

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When I attended a summer music camp during my high school years (and later as a counselor during my college days), there was a guy there who each year would tell a long and involved "Ferdinand Feghoot"-style tale* that was somehow musically-relevant. Here, with apologies, is one of the ones he told:

:: Once upon a time, in a small village in the Italian Alps, there was a small village orchestra that was the pride of the village. This small orchestra gave several concerts each year, and every concert was attended by hundreds of people from villages all around, even though the orchestra was one of those where the quality of playing wasn't so much the point as was drinking wine under the stars and listening to the lovely music. Well, one year, the orchestra's conductor, a kindly old man, decided to celebrate the orchestra's hundredth anniversary by taking on an immense challenge: they would perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Nothing so grand had ever been attempted by this orchestra, and a chorus was hastily put together for the performance, but everyone was thrilled beyond compare with the idea of performing one of the very greatest masterpieces of all time. It would be the greatest event in the history of this tiny village since one of Hannibal's own elephants had stopped in the local stream to take a drink. Hours upon hours were spent in rehearsal, with the old conductor shaping his not-terribly-talented but incredibly enthusiastic ensemble into one capable of giving a grand performance of the Ninth, whose four movements require more than an hour to play. And as the day of the concert drew near, everyone in the village and all the other villages in the valley became more and more excited.

Everyone, that is, except for the orchestra's two double-bass players, Meriadoc and Peregrin.

You see, Beethoven's Ninth is a terribly demanding piece for the entire orchestra and chorus - - except for the basses, who only play the first few pages of the first movement, and then must remain silent until the very last page of the last movement, when they finally rejoin their mates. This, of course, made for an excruciatingly boring series of rehearsals for these two men, and the concert would be worse: they would simply stand there, on stage and with nothing at all to do, for more than an hour.

Thus was born, in the minds of Meriadoc and Peregrin, a Plan.

"What we'll do, Pippin, is this," said Meriadoc - - for "Pippin" was Peregrin's nickname. "We can't just stand there on stage; we'll go mad with boredom. So we'll slip away right after we're done with our stuff at the beginning, and have a beer or two backstage. Then, we'll just slip back onstage at the end for our last bit."

"But Merry," said Pippin, "how will we know how to come back? Especially if we drink too much?"

They thought on this for a time, and what they came up with was this: Merry would get a piece of string and tie together the last two pages of the Maestro's score. Thus, when he reached that point in the concert, he would find himself unable to turn to the last page of the Ninth, and therefore he would have to stop the orchestra whilst he untied the bound pages. Then he would take up the baton again and lead the concert to completion. Merry and Pippin, of course, would notice the stopping of the orchestra, and slip in for their final moments on stage.

"A perfect plan!" they cheered, and indeed it was.

So on the morning of the concert, Merry and Pippin followed the Maestro around until just the moment when he set down his score to the Ninth; this they grabbed, and used a bit of twine to tie together those last two pages. And then, undetected, they slipped away. And at last the concert came around, and Merry and Pippin took their position at stage left, behind the cellists, and awaited the Maestro's downbeat. They had already hidden some bottles of beer behind the concert pavilion, and they grinned at each other as the hundreds of people gathered on the lawn applauded the concert's beginning. Down came the Maestro's baton, and so began the strains of Beethoven's Ninth. And just one minute into the great seventy-minute work, Merry and Pippin were done until the end. So they set down their great double-basses and slipped out backstage and thence to the spot where their beers awaited. These they drank in a great hurry, five apiece, while the heavenly strains of Beethoven's greatest symphony echoed around them and through the Italian Alps.

But then, as the last movement came near its close, the Maestro reached the bottom of his score and tried to turn his last page - - and found that he could not. Someone had tied the last two pages together! Not knowing what to do, he signaled for the orchestra to stop, and they did; the crowd became confused at the stoppage, and the Maestro fumbled with arthritic fingers to untie the dolorous knot.

"I think - - hic! - - it'sh time," Merry drawled from backstage, hearing that the music had stopped.

"Yesh," agreed Pippin. "Hic! We should get back on shtage."

Both men liked to drink, but five beers in an hour, on an empty stomach no less, had taken its toll. As they made their way back to the wings of the pavilion and out onstage. But as they picked up their giant double-basses, they hit each other on the head and fell forward, into the midst of the cellists. Two of these poor cello-playing fellows, sadly, were very close to the edge of the stage, and the impact of their bass-playing friends behind them was all they needed to fall off the stage and onto the ground, hitting their heads together and in the process knocking them unconscious. And even worse, a cello - - being hollow - - makes a loud banging noise, when dropped from even a small height; and hearing this BANG, someone in the audience screamed, "A gunshot! A gunshot!" At this, everyone began screaming at once and running every which way, trying to get out of the park lest they take the imaginary bullets in the heart. And in the middle of it all, the Maestro stood, trying to work the knot that was too tight.

"I don't think - - hic! - - the plan worked," said Merry.

"Of courshe it did," replied Pippin. "Jusht look - - hic! - - at the crowd!"

Now, we must step back to place this scene in perspective for the reader:






























The crowd's gone wild, because it's the bottom of the Ninth, two men are out, the basses are loaded, and the score is tied.

---FINIS---

(* A "Ferdinand Feghoot" story is a brief tale which is simply a giant set-up for an incredibly lame pun. A properly-spun Feghoot will make its audience groan in near-agony. Oh, and by the way, the bit about the double-basses not playing for almost the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is pure license. In reality, they play as much as the rest of the strings.)

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AHHHHH!!! My long search for a really good fan site for The West Wing has finally reached a triumphant conclusion:

Bartlet4America.org.

I, for one, am not jumping off the ship yet. John Wells, who has taken over the show after Aaron Sorkin's departure, has a long history of doing quality work on television. I'm sure the tone will be different, but you know, that may be fine.

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Over on Reflections in d minor, Lynn has a hilarious take on how to write a commentary on classical music. It is too true, sad to say.

(BTW, Lynn, can I safely assume that your favorite classical work is Mozart's Requiem? The clues seem to point that way!)

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Fellow Collaborator Jason Streed has his own blog now: Finches' Wings. Judging from his interest in literary matters, I expect that to be a big focus of his. Check him out. He's only brand new, and thus has only a handful of posts up. But he'll be a good one. (And I didn't even have to beat him into doing a blog, unlike some people....)

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Where is Woody Guthrie when we so desperately need him?!

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Andrew Cory has some interesting thoughts about Star Wars, specifically focusing on the differences between the original trilogy and the prequels. He's more charitable than many in discussing The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, although he's clearly disappointed in them -- he thinks that George Lucas is floundering and is unsure of how to proceed with his story. I don't really agree with that, even if there are admittedly spots where the dialogue clunks (although not so many as others believe) or where the actors might have benefitted from a more hands-on director (although, again, not as many as most think).

Andrew makes the point, about TPM, that the film's story is too "local" -- meaning, it's not as epic in tone as what we had expected. This is pretty much exactly the point I made a few months ago when I said that TPM is the Star Wars equivalent of The Hobbit, when fans were actually expecting The Silmarillion. I can somewhat understand the disconnect between what fans were expecting and what they got, but it never bothered me. In fact, I rather liked the idea that the big events we all know and love could have their beginning in a story that seems to be totally disconnected from it. It's often that way in the real world as well; after all, who could have predicted that the scion of a Saudi Arabian family whose wealth was in construction would later become our greatest enemy and force a fundamental rethinking of a century of American foreign policy? I won't delve more into that, since I've said my piece, but I have been considering something about George Lucas: he likes to leave fairly large whacks of his story off-screen, to be implied or established in passing.

Attack of the Clones ends with the first battle of the Clone Wars, and according to current rumor, Episode III begins with the final battle of those same Wars. That means that the Clone Wars take place, mostly, off-screen. This has caused some consternation amongst fans -- it's a point raised in those abominable AICN Jedi Councils, for instance -- but when you really think about it, Lucas has always done this. Some examples:

:: In A New Hope, we get the feeling that the destruction of the Death Star is the Rebellion's first big coup, but it's not: the film's opening crawl tells us that Rebel spaceships have already won their first major victory against the Empire. The war is already raging; Lucas has performed a classic in medias res opening. We don't even get to learn what spies managed to steal the Death Star plans, or any of that.

:: In The Empire Strikes Back, the Imperial fleet pretty much hammer-punches the Rebellion, right? Well, not quite. Again, the opening crawl tells otherwise: "Imperial troops have driven the Rebel troops from their hidden base...." (emphasis mine) So, as we get ready to watch The Empire Strikes Back, we're informed that the Empire already has struck back. The Battle of Hoth is not the first confrontation between the Rebels and the Empire since the Death Star; rather, it's the culmination of the Empire's current campaign.

:: Also in The Empire Strikes Back: when the Rebels flee Hoth, they make for a rendezvous point, which is presumably where the fleet is awaiting that we see at the film's end. Why wasn't that fleet at Hoth already? Clearly it wasn't -- the probe droid surely would have noticed some big ships like that orbitting the planet -- and the implication thereof is that Hoth is only one Rebel base, not the Rebel base. This seems to imply a guerilla-like structure to the Rebellion that is only done away with the the Mon Calamari join up between TESB and ROTJ.

I tend to believe that the Clone Wars were never to be that big a part of the story -- they are backdrop, certainly an important event in the Star Wars universe, but Lucas isn't telling the story of the Star Wars universe. He's telling the story of Anakin Skywalker, and he's leaving a lot of the background stuff way in the background. I'm fine with that.

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Notes from our second day at the Erie County Fair:

:: We saw a performance by a troupe of Chinese acrobats. I don't know what was more stunning: the staggering degree to which they could bend their bodies in any way they wished, or their equally astonishing sense of balance. It was incredibly cool, especially the opening of the act when four of the performers teamed up underneath big costumes to portray two playful cats.

:: The finest meal in the finest restaurant can't taste any finer than an Italian sausage sandwich, piled high with grilled onions and peppers, consumed under the sky of early evening outside, and followed by a heaping plate of ribbon-cut fried potatoes.

:: Lately we've come to love Orville Reddenbacher's microwave kettle corn. Yesterday, for the first time, we had real kettle corn: the stuff popped in a giant copper kettle whilst being stirred by a hulking guy wielding an equally hulking wooden spoon. This stuff was absolutely amazing.

:: Bungee-jumping appears to be out; what's in is being hoisted to the top of the tower, from which one then dangles posterior-first before being cut loose, to drop fifty feet or so into a big net. I'm not afraid of heights, and if I were in the company of sufficiently daring friends, I might well do this. What gets me is the price: thirty-five bucks a pop. That's for the pleasure of experiencing about two seconds of free fall.

:: I don't care about actually riding the rides; for me, one of life's finest pleasures is in simply walking to Midway after dark, when colored lights and joyous noises abound. And while other people are roller-coaster enthusiasts, I could very well become a Ferris-wheel enthusiast. The Erie County Fair's big one towered to 125 feet (at least that's what the label said), and it is positioned such that at its apex one can see the downtown Buffalo skyline (about ten miles distant), Lake Erie, and Canada beyond.

:: Until yesterday, I had never heard the engines of a monster truck in person. They had one of those big monster-truck shows in the grandstand, and the revving engines of the vehicles could be heard no matter where we were on the Fairgrounds when they happened to press the gas. I don't know -- there just seems something absurdly wasteful to me about such things.

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Our local Blockbuster has a bad habit of being less-than-attentive when shelving movies. For instance, last week we thought we were renting Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, a film in which two dogs and a cat are stranded somehow in the wilderness and have to make their way across many miles of mountainous, wild terrain to their home. Well, I didn't know that this 1993 movie was actually a remake of a 1963 movie, which is what we ended up with. All was well and good, though -- the original turns out to be pretty good, and tells the same exact story.

But it's interesting to note the changes between the 1963 sensibilities and the 1993 attitudes. In the later film, the animals are given voices with which they interact, Babe style, whereas the earlier film has one of those earnest-sounding Disney narrators who describes all of the action. More interesting, though, is the obvious differences in how filming with animals was different back then. There's a scene where one of the dogs kills a rabbit, for example, and totes the dead bunny around in its mouth for a while; later on, the other dog has an unfortunate run-in with a porcupine. In each case I was wondering if they really killed a rabbit and inflicted a porcupine on the dog, since I assume this was before the days of the SPCA monitoring filming. Maybe, maybe not. It struck me, anyway.

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Continuing my on-again, off-again fascination with All Things Cetacean, here's an image that scientists believe to be a whale emitting...well, let's just say that if this whale had a lighter, he'd be a big hit at frat parties.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK





The Illustrated Tale of Genji: the 44th quire Takekawa

My fascination with Asian culture, long smoldering, seems to be catching fire in the last couple of years. The Tale of Genji is one of the earliest works of literature that can actually be called a "novel", and this detail is from an illustrated "edition" commissioned by aristocrats in the twelfth century. I have little knowledge of the book's story (although I did find an online text and an extensive resource site), but I found this particular image interesting, mainly in the blend of color.

And tonight, I think it's sushi for dinner. Yes, it's sushi from the local supermarket. But hey, it's kind of close.

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Virtually the same image is all over the news, but here's the NYC skyline during the blackout, just after dusk but before total darkness settled.

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Like a lot of Net Geeks, I've been following the Texas court case in which a comics-store employee was convicted of selling an adult-comic to an adult (interesting commentary, with links, here). Like most, I'm annoyed at the clear entrapment here, and I'm also dismayed that the prosecuting attorney based his entire argument on comics being primarily a children's medium. But what really got my goat was in his actual phrasing:

"Comic books, and I don't care what type of evidence or what type of testimony is out there, use your rationality, use your common sense. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids."

This angered me because I have come to absolutely detest the phrase "common sense".

First, I hate the phrase because it's totally nebulous. What constitutes "common sense" for one person is a lightning bolt of revelation for another. It's just common sense that you don't wear white after Labor Day. It's just common sense that you have your oil changed every three thousand miles. It's just common sense that you lather, rinse and repeat.

I suspect we all know people - - maybe from work, maybe from school - - who are near-savants when it comes to the books: they get good grades in tough subjects as easily as they breathe, the mere idea of them ever getting anything less than an A is unthinkable. But they are totally clueless in interpersonal relationships, perhaps; or maybe when you accompany them into a subway station they suddenly get that "caught in the headlights" look; or they lack any semblance of tact at all. We often say of these people, "Wow, they're sure smart, but they have no common sense". In that context, the phrase seems innocuous, simply describing knowledge that one really ought to have in order to function with others. But then, deciding just what constitutes that knowledge is a good deal more slippery than that. This is definitely the most harmless use of the phrase, but I still don't like it because it smacks of a kind of superiority: "Yeah, they smoke us on the grades, but we know how to order from the Soup Nazi."

Secondly, I hate it when politicians refer to "common sense". Democrats and Republicans both do it, and it makes me crazy to hear these guys talk about "common sense tort reform" or "common sense healthcare reform" or "common sense antiterrorism measures" or "common sense" anything. You know, when I'm trying to elect someone to lead this country or my state, or represent me in Congress, I don't want "common" sense. I'm looking for "uncommon" sense. I want someone who's smart as hell, and who can come up with solutions that in all likelihood aren't common-sensical at all. There was nothing "common sense" about the establishment of the United States Constitution, for example - - that took a convention of the smartest men (no women, sadly - - another way it took common sense a while to catch up) several months to hammer out a governmental structure such that no one was particularly enamored of the results. The United States exists because a bunch of people chose not to go with "common sense" in a time when "common sense" was that you followed your King and you liked it.

Of course, politicians aren't actually intending to use "common sense"; it's just a rhetorical tool, which leads me to my third and biggest reason for hating it: the phrase, like a lot of political catch-phrases ("We can't throw money at the problem" being another prime example), is actually intended to simply shut off debate. In my experience, one hundred percent of the time when someone invokes the phrase "common sense" in advocating a position, whether it's on something like educational policy or something so mundane as the fact that The Phantom Menace is a good movie, what they are really saying is: "My position is self-evident, and your disagreement with me is evidence of some deficiency on your part." It is meant not to argue, but to assert and put the opponent on the defensive. The prosecutor quoted above appeals to both "rationality" and "common sense", but note his use of "rationality": Ignore the evidence. Ignore all other testimony. I don't care what facts may exist that don't agree with me. This is "rational"? Last time I checked, "rationality" meant looking at the facts and testimony and then using reason to draw a conclusion; but that's not what this guy wants. He wants a predetermined conclusion, and anything that stands in opposition to that conclusion is, in his mind, to be completely ignored. Well, that's not "rational" at all, in the sense of using reason. People who appeal to "common sense" don't want you to use reason. What they want is for you to not think at all.

If you find yourself invoking "common sense" in a debate, the sad fact is this: you haven't done your homework, and you're conceding the logical ground to the other guy and resorting to brute force. Of course, it wouldn't be such a popular catchphrase if it didn't work a lot of the time. Just ask the poor comics dealer.

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And one more thing: It may well turn out that the blackout began with something happening in a Niagara Falls plant, but it weren't no lightning strike. Got it? There was nothing remotely resembling even a cloud in our skies yesterday, much less a thunderstorm. So there.

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Well, that was interesting.

Remember those safety movies they used to show in school, the ones that told us not to plug two octopus-plugs and four extension cords into a single electrical outlet? Well, those folks knew what they were talking about. I'm just sayin'....

But seriously, our own domicile never lost power, as of this writing. Weird. At about 5:15 yesterday, I turned on the TV for no particular reason, and saw footage of thousands of people hoofing-it out of NYC. Of course, my first thought was some kind of terrorist attack, but that was assuaged almost immediately by the headline of a massive blackout. And then the news flashed a map of the effected area, including all of New York State, Ontario, and the eastern half of the Great Lakes Region -- and I'm sitting in the middle of it, with uninterrupted power.

I'm incredibly impressed at the general calm reaction to it all, pretty much everywhere -- if going through something like 9-11-01 can ever be said to have a silver lining, that would probably be it. I find disheartening the parade of experts on TV pointing out that our electrical grid is an antiquated mess and has been for years; I just heard on the Today Show that a year ago Congress refused to allocate money for grid modernization, and I can't wait for the inevitable debates as to the role deregulation played versus the solution being more deregulation. I do hope that maybe something like this will maybe get people to think of nuclear power in terms other than those shaped by Chernobyl.

(Oh, and I lost my writing day entirely due to the outage. Even though we never lost power, I turned off the computer and unplugged its cords in the expectation that we would lose electricity at some point during the restoration process.)

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I'll be postponing the Image of the Week until tomorrow because I'm too distracted today. I have to do dishes, laundry, write something like 2000 words, and watch two reruns of Friends. Luckily, I don't have my wife's murder to plan nor Guilder to frame for it, but still -- I'm swamped.

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It doesn't appear to be loading right now -- probably server melt-down -- but here is a nice, and big, map of Middle Earth for those who want to see in greater detail where the movies take place without actually reading the books. (The camp of those who love the movies but are seriously turned off by Tolkien's writing style is not a small one.)

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Question for the tech geniuses in my readership (there's gotta be one, somewhere): Since I installed my new security programs and applied the various Windows patches and updates, I'm getting error messages informing me that I don't have enough free memory to run all the applications I like to run at the same time. This is becoming inconvenient. Is there anything to be done about this? I don't know if the hard drive space has anything to do with it, but I'm still less than half-full on the hard drive, maybe a little more than two-thirds. What gives, folks?

ADDENDUM: Well, I just exhibited how long its been since I had any tech training (about nine years now): in computer jargon, "memory" does not equal "storage". Ack. I've learned now that I need to pony up for actual, additional chips to install inside the machine. This I find mildly daunting, as I have never delved inside this particular machine before, but I'll get through it just fine. I'm not that daunted. And hey, while I'm at Circuit City pricing RAM chips I can pick up an employment application.

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Random notes on the Erie County Fair, which we attended yesterday. The Fair is one of the biggest such events in the country, although there is some dispute in my family as to whether the Buffalo version is bigger than a fair that's held in Iowa somewhere.

:: Sometimes it's depressing to note that a lot of things really never change, but sometimes it's also heartening. While we were eating dinner, Def Leppard was warming up in the grandstand for their big concert last night. (Yes, I made a tasteless joke about their drummer only requiring half the time to warm up. Sorry.) The entrances to the grandstand were barred, of course, and there were the big guys in yellow shirts with SECURITY in giant letters on the front, standing there and basically acting unmoved whilst skimpily dressed teenage girls and their skinny boyfriends, tried to talk their way inside just for one free look at the guys in the band. It's things like that which make me think that things may be more right in the world than I usually give them credit for.

:: And here's something I always notice: why is it that those amateur rock bands that put on free gigs at street fetivals and fairs and such events never actually end a song? Instead, they reach kind of a consensual point of "Let's stop here, guys", and the lead guitarist will do one final riff of some sort while the bassist stops keeping his part of the rhythm. The drummer, accordingly, does one last bit of pyrotechnics, a sort of rock-esque "stinger" is applied, and then the bassist keeps noodling about for a second, and the drummer gives his toys a few more whacks, with a few thumps on the bass drum, and the lead vocalist says things like, "Yeah! All right now....good one, guys...how about it, people!"

:: Tucked amongst the lemonade stands and hot dog stands and places selling popcorn and cotton candy and Italian sausage and ice cream, you can now find stands trucking in espresso. And there were people buying it, on an 85 degree day. And I though I was hooked on coffee.

More observations later, maybe....

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If you're looking for some good conservative or libertarian leading weblogs to read -- whether you're on that side of things, or you're a liberal who wants to see what the other side thinks -- Kevin Drum has a good list of such today. I link a couple of these, and sporadically check out a few more of them, and they are all good.

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Operating under the theory that "Nonconformity is strictly for squares!", I have decided to join the great "Fair and Balanced" protest thingy. Because, you know, I like stickin' it to The Man. Or something like that. Workers of the world, unite....Oooooooo, donuts!

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Via Pandagon, I see that Glenn Reynolds -- he of "I just link 'em, I don't read 'em to make sure they actually say what I think they say" fame -- links some post on some guy's blog in an attempt to "a little perspective to the -- genuine -- gloating we're seeing from some antiwar folks about 'massive' U.S. casualties". Of course, just who's doing this gloating over deaths of US soldiers is never established. Just one of those all-purpose "leftists think this" bits that doesn't hold up too well when one actually starts looking at actual leftists. And of course, the post he wants to use to give "perspective" to the leftists about gloating includes actual gloating, in the comments, about those poor French people who happen to dying in a heat wave. And of course, he's nice enough to assure us that he sure isn't gloating about French people dying, you know, because linking approvingly isn't the same thing.

This is why I neither link nor read Instapundit.

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Another writing day bit the dust today with only about 500 words done, because I spent most of the time actually updating my pathetically lame and outdated security stuff on the computer. I actually bought a copy of McAfee Internet Security and got the thing installed. Then I spent a lot of time cleaning up the hard drive, and then scanning it, and then downloading updates to the software I'd just installed, and then scanned again, and then set up my firewall settings, and then reconfigured my internet answering machine to work with the new stuff and....on and on. Important stuff, but I didn't get much writing done, obviously. But I learned some stuff about the machine that I didn't know, and I did some lovely thinking-in-circles about a certain plot development in the book and trying to decide if I want to do it or not.

Talk about your boring posts....

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In my Dayquil-induced haze last night, I ended up watching a reunion-show for that old chestnut from my youth, That's Incredible!. Man, I feel unclean. I should have known they'd find some excuse to let John Davidson sing, and sure enough, his voice is still one of the worst I have ever heard. He managed to reduce "One More For My Baby (and One More For the Road)" to something nearly unrecognizable. And I don't know what medical procedure he has undergone, along with Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton, but Vladimir Lenin's corpse has aged more than these people.

But at least they replayed the one segment I've always remembered from that show: the creepy, six-foot-six Yoga guy who managed to get himself squeezed into a two-foot square glass box.

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For future reference, I have listed below every single one of my thoughts on the Kobe Bryant fiasco:




































By the way, the above also constitutes all of my thoughts on World Cup Soccer; the price of yellow tulips in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and whether Intellivision had better games than the Atari 2600.

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TBOGG and Jim Capozzola have posted a couple of fine experiences in customer service they've been lucky enough to experience.

The strangest CSR experience I've ever witnessed was not even something that happened to me. It happened when I worked for Pizza Hut. At one point, the company decided to implement a 1-800 customer service line, under the theory that people not inclined to "voice their concerns to a member of our management team at the point of sale" (i.e., "complain in person" -- gotta love that Business English) might instead wish to complain to an impersonal operator on a telephone hotline, and those operators were authorized to give the customers gift certificates as they saw fit or, perhaps, even pass the contact on to an Area Director for further resolution if it was really horrid.

Well, one day a shift manager I worked with had the unfortunate experience of having a person who was clearly "three sheets to the wind" come in and try to order a pitcher of beer. Quite properly, she denied the request, and the customer stormed out; later, the customer called the complaint-line to report that she had been denied service. The 1-800 operator, who actually worked for some third-party call-center to which PH had outsourced the whole operation, showered this customer with gift certificates and whatnot, and if I recall correctly the Area Director was referred in this case -- all because the Shift Manager in question had done her job correctly. The poor woman was utterly incensed because, in her eyes, this was as if the company was not backing her up.

I'm not sure what the moral here is, but it illustrates some of the pitfalls of business today. Outsourcing is a fact of life, but surely it says something about what companies today think is important when they're outsourcing customer service. "We value you as a customer and we value your business, so in the event of a problem, please feel free to call this number and talk to someone who not only doesn't actually work on our company's payroll, but is in all likelihood not even in the same state as you -- and might even be in a different country entirely, since a lot of these jobs are going to India these days."

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This just in: Akira Kurosawa's RAN is an amazing damn film.

I've already requested The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress from the library. (You just have to love big, metropolitan library systems where each branch is part of one, giant shared collection, and where you can thus request materials from anywhere in the library system, have them delivered to your local branch, and then take 'em home.

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O! for the quick passing of tort reform, that we might finally end the scourge of frivolous lawsuits....

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I had my first experience with Internet hackery yesterday, in the form of the worm du jour. So I got to spend much of my day downloading and installing patches and doing all manner of other wonderful, scintillating stuff -- instead of writing, of course. Between that and my attention being constantly drawn to the mucous draining into my throat, I got nothing of note accomplished yesterday. Damnable hackers.

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Via Matthew Yglesias comes this report of sex-crazed squid, which may be of interest to readers of Christopher Moore's novel Fluke, which is partly about sex-crazed whales.

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Happiness is a trailer to Return of the King. Enjoy.

(Via Greg Harris.)

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Kevin Drum reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger is already dictating to the press. When did our press decide that its reaction to the policy of "You'll get nothing and like it" would be, "Yes sir! May I have another!"

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I actually missed my writing goal yesterday, only coming up with 700 words toward my 1000 that were expected. Ugh. I'll chalk it up to the fact that I spent the time when I was planning to be writing, actually sleeping in my recliner. I'm feeling a bit better today -- still stuffy, but less groggy -- so I'm sure I'll be able to make up the difference.

(BTW, what's the point of having a recliner when we can't recline it, since the second we do one of our cats goes underneath it and falls asleep? They don't get hurt when we close it, but they won't come out until they're good and ready, either. Weirdos. Oh, and another sucky thing about getting sick in August is that when it's mid-afternoon and it's 80 degrees in the apartment, I can't summon up the urge to drink green tea with honey, which is my favorite beverage when sick during the winter.)

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Via Matthew Yglesias, I see that Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich -- whom I have not allowed onto my radar screen, since he's got less chance of winning the nomination than Dick Gephardt -- thinks that we should have a federal Department of Peace.

I don't know...this seems to fall in the category of "Well-intentioned, but incredibly goofy" political ideas. Surely a candidate for President should look at his or her policy ideas and decide, "Is this something that Lisa Simpson would propose, if she were President?" If the answer's yes, then, well, maybe it should be left on the drawing board.

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"Captain Solo, it's possible that this mountain is not entirely stable."

Mt. Ranier, which looms over Seattle, has long been known to be a dormant volcano, and scientists now believe its chances of awakening are greater than they've previously feared.

This brings back some childhood memories. Back in 1980, when Mt. St. Helens erupted magnificently, I actually lived in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, about ninety miles or so away from that volcano. I recall a few Sunday drives into the Washington wilderness to see the mountain, and this is what it looked like:



On the first day that eruptions started, it wasn't much to look at -- basically a big hole opened up in the summit, and steam poured out of it. Those of us in the third-grade classroom watching this on the TV were slightly disappointed, as we had expected something like those ultra-violent eruptions of Hawaiian volcanoes, with gouts of molten lava spraying everywhere. A volcanic eruption without lava just seemed, well, pretty lame.

Until, of course, May 18th.





May 18, 1980 was a cloudy day in Portland, as I recall, so we couldn't see this eruption from where we were -- but several weeks later, on a clear day, there was a series of follow-up eruptions that likewise spewed ash miles into the atmosphere, and I recall standing around with a bunch of friends on our bikes, gazing northward at a sky much like the one above. It was utterly astonishing, and I've never forgotten it. Even though we were far enough south that we could not see the mountain itself, the tremendous ash clouds were clearly visible. There were other eruptions as well, and one occurred on a wet and rainy day when the winds just happened to be blowing south, so the ash settled directly on our town and those around it. Believe me when I say that shoveling six inches of snow from one's driveway is nothing compared to shoveling a mere one inch of volcanic ash. The stuff is heavy and simply does not move. Luckily, as I recall that was the only day when we got a lot of ash -- there were other days when we received a dusting, but little more than that.

My other memory of the Mt. St. Helens eruption was of news coverage of an old man named Harry Truman who operated a lodge on Spirit Lake, in the shadow of the mountain. When the eruptions began and officials began clamoring for the evacuation of the locals, Truman refused to leave. He died, along with his cats, on May 18th, killed by the mountain that had been his home. I recall news footage of Truman's sister being flown over the ash plain in a helicopter, wanting to drop a wreath on the site where Truman's lodge had been, and the pilot saying something like "I think this is as good a spot as any." Of course, with today's GPS technology, they'd be able to pinpoint the exact spot, I suppose. But back then, all they could do was make a rough estimate. I've always wondered if Truman's sister found any closure in watching that wreath bounce along on a featureless plain of ash.

Finally, there is Spirit Lake itself, which has made a remarkable recovery in terms of life since the eruption virtually sterilized the slopes of the mountain. A few years ago I watched a Discovery channel documentary on Mt. St. Helens, in which I learned that the geological upheaval of the eruption was such that the current bottom of Spirit Lake now lies higher than lake's former surface. This is Spirit Lake before the eruptions:



And here is Spirit Lake just three years ago (from this excellent general site about the mountain). Note that one end of the lake is to this day choked with floating timber from the trees flattened in the eruptions:



But the most awesome indicator of the destruction, the sheer power, that was unleashed in 1980 -- and a chilling indicator of what the environs of Mt. Ranier may one day look like -- can be seen in this image of Spirit Lake, just months after the eruptions:



The Lord of the Rings fan in me can't help but see this as Mordor. And that mountain in the distance? That's Ranier. Sleep well, Seattlites....

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The Buffalo Bills won their preseason opener last night. They beat the Ravens 20-19. I didn't watch any of the game except for an excerpt of a couple of minutes while we stopped Mission: Impossible! for a bathroom break. Generally, I pay very little attention at all to the preseason. Why? Well, in 1990 the Bills went 0-4 in the preseason, while the New York Giants went 4-0. The two teams later met in the Super Bowl.

Preseason tells you nothing about how a team will perform. It also doesn't tell you much about the rookies who are trying to make the team. The only relevance preseason has is if your team's starting running back breaks his ankle or something. Then it's relevant. Outside of that, nope.

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I always liked this guy:



Sad, very sad.

But now, at least Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Gregory Hines are in the same place. I wonder what kind of number they'll cook up.

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Here's something that I haven't seen before, so I don't even know if there's a term for it. I'll call it "Comments Spam".

It works like this: a person leaves a one-word entry in a blog's Comments section, something like "Cool!" or "Neat!", but the URL they enter for their homepage is not their own blog but instead where you'd go if you click any of the links in the e-mail Spam messages that clog your inbox. It's a pretty sneaky way to guarantee I'll look, since I wager most bloggers -- except the really big ones -- tend to check out those URLs when a unknown person leaves a comment.

I got two of these the other day. One of them linked to some credit-card offering site, and the other actually did lead to a BlogSpot blog. But the blog in question only had one post on the front page, and it only had two permalinks in its sidebar, one of which led to the exact same ad site as before. My first thought -- "Hey, a new reader!" -- was immediately replaced by irritation. (Which makes me wonder just when "Irritate your potential customer as early on as possible" became good sales advice.)

On the off chance that I'm wrong, and this wasn't some new wrinkle in foisting advertising on those who don't want it, I merely deleted the comments in question. If this continues, though, I will ban any users who try to leave such links in my comments.

I don't get too worked up about spam in my e-mail; mostly I just delete it en masse. Ditto pop-ups; I don't get offended by them as long as I can close them easily. Mostly I just let them sit there on my screen until I'm done doing Web-stuff entirely, and then I close all current IE windows. But this new thing, if it is a new thing and not just a one-time anomaly, will annoy me greatly.

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Someone's got the house to himself for two weeks. He's already planning a celebration of All Foods Canned and All Pizza Frozen.

He'll deny it, of course, but I rather expect that after about nine days or so a scene much like this will be observable in his living room:



Pray for Mojo....

(Pic from here.)

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I don't know if there's a more incongruous-feeling thing in the world than getting a cold in August. Ugh. I find myself wandering through the cough&cold section at the grocery store or Target, and I'm saying, "This is wrong...I shouldn't be here...it's still summer, I shouldn't get sick until November...."

Ach, it makes me mad.

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Stuff you didn't care to know: In the last ten days I have personally consumed three gallons of sun-brewed iced tea.

(This content-free post is merely an excuse to republish everything, in hopes that permalinks will work when I am done.)

ADDENDUM: It appears to be working now. May the Force be with us.

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Writing update: Almost done with Chapter Two. (I'm figuring on around 22 chapters or so, give or take.) I've made my thousand word goal each day except yesterday, when I as 200 short. But, on Wednesday I did almost 2000 words, so it's all good. I also figured my way through a small plot problem. Hooray.

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I finally got around to watching the first couple episodes of The Restaurant, which I've been taping. Pretty good show, although it would be nice if they'd show some of the good stuff that's certainly going on at the same time as all the bad crap that they keep showing -- stuff like fires in the kitchen, a server accepting a customer's credit card with the order to go across the street and buy some red wine and actually doing it, et cetera. Random thoughts, just in case anybody's watching the show:

:: Unless I missed it, the New York City Health Department is never mentioned in the first few episodes. Wouldn't they be a slight bit concerned about a restaurant that's actually still a construction site on the day it begins serving food to people?

:: When the fire erupted in the kitchen, I was dying to see the place's "Ansel" system get set off. This is a fire-retarding device that spews out a gargantuan amount of powdery white crap, pretty much everywhere all over the kitchen. I thankfully never had to see our system triggered in the restaurants where I worked, because when the thing discharges, the mess is such that (a) you have to shut down the restaurant immediately and (b) cleanup takes more than a day.

:: This restaurant seems to be striving for a classy Italian look, and yet serves appetizers in those red-and-white paper baskets that you get French fries in at theme parks. Weird. (This may have been because they ran out of normal servingware, or some other explanation that I missed.)

:: Servers standing around after the shift which was apparently many hours long, comparing their tips, and no one seems to have made more than $70. Ouch. In the small-town family restaurant where I once worked, on a bad day my best server would take home more than $100 in tips. For a server to do worse than that, in an expensive, fine-dining restaurant that serves alcohol, in New York City no less, is disastrous. The show implies that table-turns were nonexistent on the night in question, which definitely explains it.

:: I was hoping they'd show more of the kitchen stuff and the inevitable tension between cooks and servers.

:: I know space is at a premium in NYC buildings, but putting the kitchen downstairs so food has to be carried up and down what looks like a fairly narrow flight of stairs? Lordy!

:: I'm sure it's an amazing coincidence that the restaurant manager that everyone hates is a Frenchman.

:: It wasn't mentioned, but I'm sure that the kid who got demoted from server to food runner, and then broke his arm in a fall, was treated at the hospital under workman's comp. The show didn't mention this, probably to heighten the "poor restaurant schlub with no insurance" angle (although I haven't watched the episode after that one yet, so I may be wrong entirely).

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I don't do a lot of "Here's the latest cute stuff the kid did" posting, but I like to think I'm doing right: The other night, the daughter and I watched Return of the Jedi. (We had watched The Empire Strikes Back a few weeks before.) A couple of her comments:

"How come the big ship isn't finished?" (referring to the incomplete Death Star)

"Oh, he's still in metal!" (referring to the first shot of the still-frozen Han Solo)

"What happened to Yoda?" (much sadness when Yoda passes)

"There are bears in this movie!" (much happiness with the Ewoks)

"Did the bear die?" (referring to the one shot during the battle when one Ewok dies, and his friend tries to awaken him)

"Where's the part with the girl sleeping and the big bugs crawling on her blankets?" (confusing ROTJ with AOTC)

"Why did Darth Vader kill the bad guy? I thought Darth Vader was the bad guy." (hmmmm....we'll explain this later on)

"Hey, Yoda's not dead!" (referring to astral-Yoda at the end)

Doin' my duty to shape the next generation....

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Gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." Well, I'm not Californian so my opinion matters not in the slightest, but I can't help but recall the last prominent Republican to make that claim whilst seeking higher office....

Also, Atrios makes a funny point about something else Schwarzenegger said. (BTW, I for one am really glad Atrios has apparently re-taken the reins over at Eschaton. His collaborators were game, but they just didn't have his style.) (Oh, Atrios's permalinks are as buggered as mine. Scroll down to the post entitled "Arnold on Gray Davis".)

Finally, here is Jim Rome's take on the whole California business, which is quite similar to what he actually said on the show. (The audio version was funnier, really, but apparently to listen to the Rome Show online you have to be a paid subscriber.)

(UPDATE: The Jim Rome article is here, actually -- apparently the previous link is to his current column, with each column being moved to an archived location after a new one is posted. Thanks to Sean for the update.)

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Annoyance, consternation, and hellfire!!

My permalinks are still broken, as of this writing. My only idea is to keep republishing the entire site, on a daily basis, until this is fixed. I did attempt to use Blogger's nifty e-mail form to alert them of the problem, but the message wouldn't send. It just kept bouncing me back, telling me that I hadn't filled in all the required fields when in fact I had. Annoyance beyond compare. (Yeah, yeah, "ya gets what ya pays for", and all that. Save it. I can't afford hosting and Movable Type yet.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Still from Akira Kurosawa's RAN.

I was thumbing through the video collection at the library the other day, and I spotted a copy of Ran. I checked it out and I have thus far watched about 45 minutes of it. It's pretty engrossing so far, and I had to force myself to shut it off last night (my plan is to watch it in installments after the kid has gone to bed), so as to not stay up until 2:30 watching the thing. The film is inspired by King Lear, and is directed by Akira Kurosawa, whose films I have never seen -- despite my love of George Lucas and the fact that Kurosawa is one of Lucas's main influences.

Unfortunately, the video copy I'm watching is an old VHS issue, with cruddy sound and pan-and-scan video. I'd forgotten how much I hate P&S. There's one scene that really demonstrates how bad P&S is, and it's not even one of Kurosawa's legendary battle scenes (none of which I've come to yet). There is a scene where a nobleman and his wife are sitting side by side in their "throne room" (although they kneel on mats, instead of sitting on thrones -- the term's a descriptor of purpose more than of furnishing), and clearly they are occupying a single shot, which would be fine in a letterboxed format but in P&S requires annoying switching back and forth between the two. Ugh.



(Images courtesy the Japanese Cinema Studies Home Page at Cornell University.)

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Quick hits:

:: Jesse of Pandagon has an excellent refutation of part of the whole "stay married for the kids" meme (responding to a Lileks-in-creepy-judgmental-mode piece).

:: Kevin Drum has a capture of the BBC homepage when Schwarzenegger threw his hat into the ring. Check out the headline above the main headline.

:: Time for my monthly plug of Mike's Baseball Rants. Even if you're not totally up on baseball, his blog is worth reading for the pop-culture references alone (the best of which he seems to hoard for his takedowns of Joe Morgan). (And on a side-note, just how many more souls does John Sheurholz have to sell to Satan, anyway? Atlanta's pitching finally, at long last, stinks, and they're still putting up the best record in the Majors? Huh-whuh?!)

:: Words fail me.

:: Mental image of the day, courtesy of the Jim Rome Show: a California gubernatorial debate featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Larry Flynt, some porn star I've never heard of, and Gary Coleman. Rome noted that Coleman won't be able to use a traditional podium, so maybe they'd get him a table like the ones in nursery schools....(I'll see if I can't find a link for this later on). As Rome said, "Louisiana almost electing David Duke as its Governor isn't even as bad as this."

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My evil doppelganger is evidently possessed of the belief that Britney Spears is good looking. I'm sorry, but I simply can't agree. I look at this picture of her, posted by Oliver Willis (who inexplicably drools over Ms. Sprears constantly), and all I want to do is send her to the local SuperCuts with twenty bucks to get that tangled mop of hair of hers fixed up. As for her body, sorry, it does nothing for me. My personal preference is for the female body to exhibit curves -- real curves, not artificial curves created by standing at an oblique angle to the camera and leaning backward. Britney can't compare, in any way, to, say, Kate Winslet in Titanic.

Oh, and then there's this pic of Ms. Spears (also by ODub, who photoshopped a baseball hat with a vulgar slogan on it onto Britney's head, so bare that in mind if you're offended by profanity), which sums up her attempts to ratchet up her non-existent sex appeal but also emphasizes her deer-in-the-headlights, glassy-eyed stare that's also her stock-in-trade. Sorry, but there are women whom I find more physically beautiful working at my local grocery store.

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Captain, we are receiving numerous distress calls....

(Yup, it's one of those "Is this thing publishing?" posts. Move along.)

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Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Lynn has a post about a few linguistic pet-peeves and such.

I have to admit that I commit the error she rails upon at the very end: When I refer to the body of work Mozart wrote in the concerto form, I say "concertos" (as opposed to "concerti"). I offer no defense other than (a) this is the way I've always said it; (b) I've seen "concertos" used by such music writers as David Dubal and Harold Schonberg; (c) well, that's my entire defense. I hope Lynn doesn't sic the linguo-police on me!

The musical term whose constant misuse does bug me is "crescendo". "Crescendo" is a verb, and it describes the act of growing in volume, as in: "At the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the orchestra crescendoes to double-forte." However, this word is often used -- incorrectly -- as a noun, denoting the pinnacle reached: "At the end of the first movement of the Ninth, the orchestra reaches a crescendo." Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Lynn also points to this list of annoying errors in English, when words are either pronounced quite wrongly or used in place of the correct, similar-sounding word or homynym. A lot of these errors annoy me when I hear them (although I confess to not being overly scandalized by the "nucular" pronunciation of "nuclear"). One that I didn't see on this list is "axe" instead of "ask", as in, "Let me axe you a question." Ugh!

Now, I've noticed in my writing that it's easy, when I'm typing and my fingers start whipping out ahead of my brain, that I can make some of the common errors myself, and I'm always shocked to see them when I edit my manuscripts. While doing my recent edit of The Welcomer, I came across a couple of instances of "your" when I meant to use "you're" (but thankfully, never when I meant "yore"). I also tend to type "to" when I mean "too"; this I simply chalk up to not striking the second "o" hard enough to register, and thus it is not so much an error as a physical mishap. My most common error in typing, though, is really annoying given that I'm writing a fantasy that involves a lot of equestrian-based travel: When I refer to "reins", I invariably type "reigns" instead. I lost count of how many times I had to correct that error in the manuscript in the last few months. As Professor Higgins might say, "The reign in Speign falls meignly on the pleign." (You may groan now.)

Split infinitives don't offend me, but I'm coming to loathe adverbs -- thanks, Mr. King -- so I'm conflicted on that score. Ending sentences with prepositions, though, annoys me to no end. Sometimes it can't be avoided without sounding even worse, though: witness Churchill's famous statement, "This is the kind of English up with which I will not put." This tradeoff strikes me as perfectly fair: languages are human creations, and nothing we ever create is perfect because we aren't.

Finally, I have to admit that I'm less of a stickler for specific definitions of words than a lot of people I know. Someone (I think it was Neil Gaiman, but I'm not sure) once wrote: "I can accept that language evolves and words change meaning, but as a writer, when a word that had a specific meaning loses that meaning, I lose a tool." I sympathize, but only to a point. As far as I am concerned, "decimate" no longer means "to destroy one tenth of"; likewise, "impact" as a verb can mean for one object to forceably strike another. (The OED backs me up on that last point, actually.) I don't like slovenly English, but I don't think it should be on an ivory pedestal, either -- eternal and unchanging. Metaphorically, I like to think of language as a well-tended garden: not static, but also not overridden with ugly weeds and outgrowths beyond the boundaries and tangles.

(OK, one more note: no subset of English angers me more than the Godawful crap you see in the business world, where horrific phrases like "maximize our profit outcomes" and other wondrous feats of nebulous verbosity, often consisting of pages-upon-pages of nauseating passive-voice crap are flung about like manna from Heaven. And what really scares me is the business-types who not only write like that, but talk like that. The purpose of language is to communicate, not to make business people sound important.)

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Bass Pro Stores are apparently the best thing in the world for outdoor types and people into fishing and water stuff, so much so that these huge stores become tourist attractions in themselves. Individually designed to reflect their surroundings, these stores become big draws for people miles away. And Buffalo was in the running to land the first one in the Northeast United States. The idea was to put the new Bass Pro store in the currently vacant Memorial Auditorium (the former home of the Sabres), thus creating some new retail space in downtown Buffalo that would actually attract people to spend money.

But, Buffalo couldn't come up with a plan to make it work, and they are too entranced at the idea of having a damned casino in downtown or on the waterfront (along with an 18-hole golf course, just a peachy idea for an urban waterfront), so they allowed the Bass Pro store idea to fall by the wayside. Now it's going to be built in Auburn, which is about twenty miles from Syracuse.

Way to go, Buffalo. Never go with a good idea when a bad idea will do, at twice the price.

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Governor Schwarzenegger.

OK, I guess it doesn't sound too bad. And hell, it kind of sounds better to me than "Governor Pataki". (Pataki hasn't been a disaster of Gray Davis proportions -- hell, he hasn't really been that bad, really. I'm not terribly impressed with his record in WNY, which basically consists of showing up for photo-ops every time some big project that never actually gets built is announced. I'm just being snarky today.)

I didn't watch the entire Jay Leno thing, but I'm guessing that the interview wasn't particularly big on specifics, as in just what Schwarzenegger's ideas on resolving the California budget crunch might be. I did see the usual bit of "I won't be beholden to special interests" folderol, which is always nonsense; it's generally more accurate to say, "I won't be beholden to my opponent's special interests", but this is almost a required claim for people running for office these days. I also laughed when he said, "I'm rich, I've got lots of money, so I can't be bought." This was quite the applause line, but I was thinking, "Yeah, because none of the filthy rich people in Congress or any other elective office have ever been bought."

Some people are snarking a bit about if he's "qualified" to be Governor. I've never really been one to get hung up on who is and who is not "qualified" to hold high office, because there have been "well-qualified" persons who were disastrous when they got into high office, and we've had distinguished Presidents and such who were not that experienced when they ascended. If Schwarzenegger has ideas that appeal to Californians, fine. The only thing that worries me is that he'll get elected on some kind of hip, celebrity, out-of-left-field appeal instead of his ideas, rather like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota in 1998. But then, Ventura also had the "third-party" thing going on, the "I'm going to tell both parties to stick it!" attitude that seems to be occasionally growing in appeal these days, whereas Schwarzenegger is a true-believing Republican.

I'm still a bit fuzzy on the whole recall thing in the first place. My view tends to be, "You voted Davis in, so you live with it until he comes up again." I'm a bit wary of the precedent being set, where we can recall any official at any time merely because some bumps in the road come along. On the flip side of that -- "You voted the guy in, you've got to live with him until his term's up" -- NPR's Talk of the Nation did a show on the recall yesterday, and one commentator made an interesting point: she suggested that people who didn't bother to vote in 2002 should not be allowed to participate in any recall. That makes a bit of sense to me.

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If my readers needed any more proof that my sense of humor can be, well, a bit "out there", I laughed heartily at this item I found over at SFG this morning.

It seems that the Guiness Book people have listed the World Trade Center attacks as "Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Act". The "dark humor" comes in at the bottom of the entry.

Guys, for this particular entry you might wish to remove the "Break this record" link. Just a thought.

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Just a few short notes and bits o' lazy linkage, as I have a lot on the plate today:

:: The other day I mentioned Buffalo's Shakespeare in Delaware Park festival. Over the last few nights, the Festival's theatre was vandalized, thus requiring the cancellation of at least one performance. Disgusting.

:: Jesse of Pandagon is 21 today. In his comments, I suggested something he could do with his newfound legal status, but I suspect he won't be taking me up on it.

:: Two gems via Matthew Yglesias: A chart depicting how unimpressive the current economic recovery really is (in terms of jobs), and a CNN article revealing that Texas Republicans weren't always of the view that running away for reasons of parliamentary procedure is a terrible, terrible thing. Heh, on both counts.

:: Andrew Cory (on his web log) and Aaron Johnson (in my own comments section) point out that SDB's take on the new Harley isn't right. I have no informed opinion, per se, since I'm not into motorcycles. But the thing looks manly enough to me:



:: SDB also has an interesting post today about some excursions he made into anime recently. I'm not familiar with pretty much anything he discusses, with the exception of Princess Mononoke, which is an utterly astounding film, as he writes, and is astounding for pretty much the same reasons that SDB lists: the way the characters are established and developed, the way the plot develops out of the characters' actions and real concerns, et cetera. The film's theme is ecological in nature, but it's not a Luddite ecological message. And the film sports Joe Hisaishi's finest film score.

:: Terminus returns to his ongoing survey of Oliver Stone's films with an essay on what is my favorite Stone picture, JFK.

:: Michael Lopez has been talking a bit about the need to test for better teachers, and today he cites one of those tests from the 1800s that purportedly reveals just how far we've fallen in our expectations. I don't know...I've seen these kinds of tests cited before, but no one ever seems to cite just what the typical scores were back then, so the assumption that everyone actually knew this stuff may not be warranted. Anyway, here's what Snopes.com has to say about just this phenomenon.

:: Best wishes that Roger Ebert's radiation therapy is only a minor speed-bump for his health.

:: Peruvians are returning to a form of agriculture called "waru waru", which was last practiced by the Incas.



:: Useless political trivia: Barring some weird circumstance, the 2008 Republican ticket will be the first since 1972 to not include a man named George Bush or Bob Dole.

:: Posting may be light this coming weekend, as we will be attending the Erie County Fair. Consumption of kettle corn, glazed nuts, Italian sausage sandwiches, and ice cream is expected to be heavy.

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SDB wrote a throw-away piece on a new motorcycle Harley-Davidson is building to attract a European market. And now, some folks are annoyed with him, for reasons I really can't discern. I'm amazed he's written not one, but two responses to critics of this post, thus using more words than he did in the first place! Wow. I chalk this up to the likelihood that his tongue wasn't so obviously in his cheek here as it was when he brought up the Discordians in an earlier post. Sort-of. (He uses the Discordians to make an actual point, but uses some humor along the way. It's subtle. Real subtle. So subtle you might miss it.)

Anyway, yeah, it's regrettable that Harley is making a "kinder, gentler" chopper for the Euro-set. (And I'm not even one to foam at the mouth on matters European, like SDB can do if he's gone too long without eating fiber.) But then, Harley doesn't have quite the cachet it used to in the US, either. Here's George Carlin on the subject. (WAV file, profanity alert.)

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One possible definition of the word "Annoyance" is this: "That feeling one gets when one has a mosquito bite on the back of one's knee, such that whenever one walks or shifts position while sitting said mosquito bite is rubbed upon by the leg's nearby flesh."

Arrggghhhhh.

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I made a hard decision the other day. I've decided that in the interests of productivity, I have to try and abandon my old practice of writing my first drafts in longhand. At least, for my "major" works -- the novels, mostly. I may keep doing short fiction by hand, just to switch things up and keep things fresh. But I've decided that I need to start striving toward a daily word count, and doing it longhand just takes me too long.

My current goal is a thousand words a day on The Finest Deed. In longhand, that would take several hours which I just don't have, between all the other things I'm trying to get done.

The problem, therefore, lies in surmounting the original reason I switched to writing longhand in the first place: I literally couldn't think as fast as I could type, which resulted in long passages of, well, rambling crap. Using the fountain pen allowed me to slow myself down and let the words come as they should, and it made me feel like writing was more of a "physical" process than it seems when I'm typing away on the computer. (Writing longhand also was appealing when I was working my telesales job, because quite frankly it's hard to work up the desire to sit down in front of a computer after eight hours of sitting in front of a computer during the day, even if the writing is pleasurable. Which it always is.)

So, I'm forcing myself to write at the computer now. How am I coping with the old problem of a sluggish brain? Well, there's the old standby of coffee and lots of it (and I applied for a job at Starbucks this morning, so that might spike even higher!). I'm also keeping browser windows open so I can switch back-and-forth between web-surfing and writing. Yeah, that's unorthodox; all the books say to concentrate on writing, avoid distraction, et cetera. I've pretty much concluded, though, that distraction is a constant in my life, and instead of working on shutting out the distractions (and likely getting annoyed at the lack of success thereof), I figure I'm better served by simply incorporating the distractions. No, that's not for everyone. But it might be for me. We'll see.

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You know, sometimes I wonder if the chasm between conservatives and liberals can ever be bridged, because I can't begin to fathom the moral calculus that posits Bill Clinton as a worse figure in American history than Timothy McVeigh. Not to mention Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. What on Earth is going on here?!

Of course, being less snarky, it could be that people don't normally think of individuals like Manson and McVeigh as historical figures, so much as persons who achieved notoriety in isolated incidents. But since the list includes both, I just don't feel like being that charitable.

(Via Pandagon.)

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I saw a great bumper sticker today. It was a picture of a violin with bow, and the caption read, "Got rosin?"

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The Department of Weird Convergences has been underworked lately, so they've decided to take on new duties as the Department of Weird Convergences and Useless Dichotomies. Their first entry under the new charter is this:

There are two kinds of Chinese take-out restaurants: those that attempt to give themselves a poetic-sounding name (maybe Chinese, maybe not), and those that don't. Here in Buffalo, we have the China Sea restaurant, the Great Wall restaurant, the Nine Pearls restaurant, and that Tai Pei restaurant. Those are the "poetic" ones. In the "non-poetic name" column, we have the China One Buffet, several places simply called "Oriental Buffet", a flock of places starkly marked "Chinese Take Out", and this morning I drove past a place called "Taste Good".

The Department would also like to note a peculiar non-convergence: in the town where we used to live, our favorite Chinese take-out place was called "Lake View". Not only was there no lake anywhere in view, there isn't even a lake within ten miles of the town. Of course, who cares, as long as the food is good, right?

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GOAK (don't ask) is apparently interviewing prospective housemates this week. He provides some tips as to what kind of questions he'll ask, but I rather expect one of his interviews to go roughly like this.

Good-night! dingdingdingdingdingdingdingding....

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I think I got all of my political outrage and anger out of my system for a short while last week, so I'm ready for more fun, non-angry posting. The sun is out after a rainy weekend, I'm showered and caffeinated, President Bush is on vacation -- all signs point to a lower blood pressure this week. So I think I'll just hop over to AICN and see what's up....

AAAGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

Yup, they've gone and put up new installments of their "Jedi Council" series of round-table discussions (or, in another accurate term, "circle jerks"), here and here. Oh, lordy....

(My original responses to this stuff are here and here.)

I won't recreate my earlier blatherings, because all of my points still stand. I do, however, note a couple of "bullet points":

:: At one point, someone complains that having Wookiees in Episode III is going to suck because it will be like the army of Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Interesting, given that a pretty common fan complaint for years has been that Lucas went with Ewoks instead of Wookiees in the first place in the earlier film. Sure, whatever. (Lucas was originally going to have Wookiees as his non-technological race that ended up taking down the Empire, but then he changed his mind when he realized that by postulating Chewbacca's technological abilities in the first two films, he had already ruled out the Wookiees as a pastoral race. It wasn't a scheme to sell plush toys.)

Oh, and Moriarty says that Chewie's entrance in A New Hope is "the greatest entrance". Huh-whuh? He's in the background of virtually every shot in the cantina in which he appears!

:: One smart soul makes the point that it's entirely appropriate for Anakin to talk like an idiot teenager, accounting for all the ridiculous lines he has. (Once more, I remind everyone that all of the ridiculous lines in Attack of the Clones come from Anakin's mouth, which suggests design to me.) This point is totally ignored by Moriarty's couch-buddies who want to slag the movie.

(Incidentally, in his comment on AOTC in this year's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois complains that Anakin spends most of the movie acting like a spoiled teenager. That's because he is a spoiled teenager. O for a point, that I might miss it completely...!)

:: Does every gathering of annoyed Star Wars fans have to lead off with a complaint about Greedo shooting first? I don't like it either, but my God, get over it. I hope that future AICN Jedi Councils stipulate that the first person to complain about this has to pay for the pizza.

:: One of Moriarty's couch-buddies complains about the Jedi in AOTC, saying, "These are some of the worst Jedi I've ever seen!" Welllllll....I'm not sure how many Jedi this guy has seen, because by my count, prior to AOTC, I've only seen three in action (Qui Gon, Obi Wan, Luke Skywalker). Four, if you count Darth Vader. (I don't count any of the ones in The Phantom Menace, because they're councillors and do not act. Likewise with Yoda.) So, exactly where this guy got his "Jedi-judging" street-cred is beyond me.

And besides, here's another "That's a feature, not a bug" moments" that seem to be completely missed by Lucas's detractors. I mean, no less an analytic mind than Steven Den Beste missed this one, so they're in good company, but the thing is: These aren't the best Jedi ever. Not even close. That's the entire point: the Jedi Order has become a shadow of its former glory, which is in large part what allows Palpatine to succeed. So they're supposed to look beatable. Duh.

:: Oh, goody! We're back to the "Let's blame George Lucas for every movie his name's ever been on that we don't like" game. George Lucas is to blame for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which I've actually come to like a lot, more than Last Crusade, over the years), which is quite a feat given that he neither wrote the screenplay nor directed the film. (He has the film's "Story" credit, and the difference between a story and a screenplay is the difference, to crib from Mark Twain, between a lightning bug and lightning.)

:: "A friend of mine who knows what he's talking about" says that Lucas is scrawling dialogue on a notepad minutes before the scenes themselves are actually shot. Sure....

:: The movies are sanitized in their violence, we are told. Interesting, given that The Phantom Menace gave us an actual spray of blood when Darth Maul gets bissected and AOTC shows a beheading (sans the actual head, but there is a shadow and the headless body slumping to the ground). But more to the point, who gives a shit? Really, who cares if the violence is incredibly lifelike or not? At the end of Casablanca, I don't need to see blood oozing from a bullet-hole in Major Strasser's body. In all those Errol Flynn swashbucklers, I don't need to see Basil Rathbone or anyone else spitting up blood and bile when they get run through. My God, folks.

(Now, I do think that Anakin looked a bit too hale-and-hearty when he awoke from his lightsaber-amputation. That one, I'll grant. But the others? Nah.)

:: And finally, here we have the point where my last bit of respect for Moriarty may have just vanished into the luminiferous aether, when he says this of Episode III: "A lot of this is just going to be a third act of Scooby-Doo where it’s pulling masks off."

Ach, I canna take it nae longer. I need a dram o' Scotch....

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TBOGG, in crafting his often-humorous posts, likes to walk as close to the line as humanly possible. The problem, though, with sticking that close to the line is that sometimes he goes over it, leaving the realm of "funny" and into that of "squirmish bad taste". Here is an example. The part comparing Rick Santorum's speech patterns to a "Valley Girl" is funny. The part in which he makes a comparison involving Rick Santorum's wife is not.

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I decided this weekend that Hell, in all likelihood, does not involve any fire, brimstone, or physical pain of any kind. This is because Hell is most likely a Wal-Mart on a Saturday during either the Christmas season or the school-shopping season.

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Here are some words being used a lot in Blogistan's political discussions that I could do without:

"Idiotarian", of course.

"Shillary", "Shrillary", "Hitlery", and any other cutesy misspelling of Mrs. Clinton's name. (BTW, I'm not sure when we all got to be on first-name basis with her in the first place.)

"Shrub". I'm guilty of using this in the past, although I think that was on Usenet and not here. I hope not, anyway. I don't like the guy and hope fervently for his defeat, but he's the President of the United States. (I give "Dubya" a pass, since I've seen that one used as an affectionate term for the man by his supporters and it strikes me as a playful jab at Texas pronunciation as opposed to a slur on the President's stature. I'm likewise unbothered by calling Bill Clinton "Bubba", for some reason -- it's such a mild insult that I'm not always sure how much of an insult it's even intended to be.)

"Wing nut". This one's moderately cute, admittedly, but I'm not wild about attributing insanity to either side of the political debate. (Well, there are the Libertarians, but that's it.)

"aWol". This one's just a turn-off, folks. If all the half-assed accusations of "draft dodging" didn't hurt Bill Clinton, this issue's not going to hurt Bush. Neither are the shadowy accusations of his onetime drug use.

"Demmie". Oh, how cute -- like we shortened "Communist" to "Commie", we can shorten "Democrat" to "Demmie"! Ick.

"Rethuglican". Come on, folks. If you want to call Tom Delay a thug, that's one thing. All of them, though?

"Trekkie". It's "Trek-ker", dammit.

Yup, that coffee ought to kick in any minute now....

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I remember thinking, when I was in first and second grade back in 1977 and 1978, that by the year 2000 we'd have flying cars. Whoops. And then, in my freshman year in college, I predicted that by 2000 the Bills would have won at least one Super Bowl. Whoops. So I'm not the best predictor you'll find out there.

And neither, apparently, were folks way back in 1950. Kevin Drum found an old article of predictions made back then, and he tallies the results in a handy table. Cool! (As much as I love Kevin's political commentary, I'd love to see him write more about books and stuff.)

Here's one example:

Prediction: "No more storms! Before one has a chance to build up steam, oil is spread on the sea and ignited, causing the storm to dissipate."

Reality: "This novel idea does not seem to have caught on, although several supertanker captains appear to have been enthusiasts for the first part of this operation."

As Insty might say, Read the whole thing.

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I'm pretty sure I've plugged this before, but Realms of Fantasy has one of the best services for writers I've ever seen: the online slush list, so you can actually check to see if the slush reader for the magazine has read your story. Wow. (My current submission has not yet been read, obviously, because it is of such staggering quality it will sail right through to the Editor's desk. Hear me roar!)

Also, from the FAQ in this page, Carina -- the ROF slush reader -- writes that she doesn't mind multiple submissions:

I've been getting this question a lot recently and so decided to add it to the F.A.Q. You can send as many stories to me as you like, even in the same envelope, provided THERE IS A SASE FOR EVERY STORY! The reason for this is because stories are often separated. I might reject one, sending it home to you, but want the other one to go to Shawna for possible publication. She's going to need her own method of contacting and/or rejecting you. So send away!

That is helpful information.

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An interesting little ritual on Monday mornings is when I do my morning web-surfing and such, and as the morning progresses, more and more of the little (^)'s pop up next to the links in "Other Journeys", as people post updates to their blogs after the weekend.

(Well, it's interesting to me, anyway. This post was obviously written in a pre-caffeinated state.)

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PBS had a show on this week about....sandwiches.

Lord, did this show make me hungry.

Dedicated to various sandwiches available across the United States, some of which I'd never heard of before, there was even a bit of local pride: Buffalo's Beef-on-Weck was featured, from a restaurant just ten minutes from where I live right now (and in walking distance of where we lived before)! It's always incredibly cool to see something local featured nationally.

(And yes, for my Iowan readers, these got a prominent mention as well.)

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I don't drink nearly as much beer as I used to -- a six-pack of Sam Adams can linger in my fridge for months at a time these days -- so I'd probably not be of much interest to this organization. Ah, well....

(Apropos of nothing, my favorite beer-related quote of all time comes from The Simpsons, when Ned Flanders says: "As a good host I'm obligated to offer you a beer. But I'm so darn mad, it's gonna be mostly head!")

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Two former Buffalo Bills enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame today:

:: Joe DeLamielleure, one of the members of the great "Electric Company" offensive line that plowed the road for OJ Simpson during the 70s.

:: James Lofton, who was the Bills' number two receiver and deep threat during their first three Super Bowl seasons.

That's two Bills from the Super Bowl teams -- Lofton and QB Jim Kelly, inducted last year -- to go into the Hall. Future years will see Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, and Bruce Smith certainly inducted. I also would not be surprised to see Kent Hull, Darryl Talley, and Cornelius Bennett in the Hall. And of course, as a biased Bills fan, I think the Hall would be incomplete for all time if they don't induct Steve Tasker, the game's greatest special teams player ever -- but I'm not sure if that's enough to get him in, as an "objective" football observer. We'll see.

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Wow. This has been a pretty cool summer, here in Buffalo at least. It's now August, and I'm not sure if we've even hit 90 degrees a single time. Usually we're good for seven or eight days of 90s around here. Of course, we may still get them, but I'm hoping not. I loathe hot weather. Our current apartment has central air conditioning, which is a magnificent luxury, and we've use it probably a total of ten times this summer -- and even then, we only turn it on around 7:00 at night, when there's that lag-time between the cooling outside and that inside. We've never yet run the thing all day. (Speaking of which, not only are there people here who run their A/C when it's only 75 and not very humid, but there are people who run the thing full-bore when they're out to work. What a tremendous waste of energy, if their units work as well as ours, as I assume they must, given that we're in a development with identical buildings. Our apartment cools noticeably within the first ten minutes of turning the thing on, and by the time we've run it for three hours, parts of our home are downright frigid.)

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The Last Light of the Sun.

I rather like that title. It sounds like it could be the name of a Guy Gavriel Kay novel....which is a good thing, because it is. Next spring will see the release of this novel. No plot details have been leaked as of yet, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the book is at least set in the same pseudo-Europe as GGK's last three novels (The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium, Lord of Emperors), so a good conjecture might be that the book deals somehow with the sun-based Jaddite religion. Perhaps we are to get GGK's version of the Crusades and the Knights Templar. (Or maybe something else entirely, of course!)

Forum discussion of the new title can be read here.

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We watched a fairly entertaining romantic comedy flick last night, How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days. The story is pure sit-com, and the ending is just like every other romantic comedy you've ever seen (an unraveling of earlier deceptions leads to one partner quitting their job and packing up to leave town, with the other partner chasing them down for a final reconciliation in a very public place, the more disruptive to local traffic, the better). Still, the movie had quite a few funny moments, and I got to spend two hours looking at Kate Hudson, who absolutely glows. (And on the basis of her performance here, Almost Famous just jumped way up in my "To rent" list.)

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Time for some random gibberish (as opposed to my usual gibberish-by-design):

:: By a hair, July turned out to be my second-highest month yet for total hits. I was expecting it to come in third, after the dismal start to the month via the Fourth of July weekend. Not bad. I am also currently ensconced as an "Adorable Rodent" on the Ecosystem. It's neat how this has sort-of grown over the nearly eighteen months I've been doing this.

:: Unrepentant Lucasians, rejoice! An SFSite reviewer likes Attack of the Clones too. Gradually the world will be turned to our way of thinking.

:: Wonderful innovations that you don't see lauded enough include grocery stores with enclosed play areas wherein the kid can be deposited and, in the lack of such an area, shopping carts in the shape of toy trucks so the kid can pretend to "drive" around the store. A not-so-wonderful innovation is those little yellow plastic toy shopping carts that kids push around themselves. Those are the work of the Devil and must be destroyed.

:: Ah, August....that wonderful time of year when I take a fresh look at the Pittsburgh Pirates' roster and say, "Who are these guys?"

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On the occasion of an excellent post on how Shakespeare is taught versus how he should be taught by Andrew Cory, I have to make an embarrassing admission (two in one day, ick):

I have never seen a Shakespeare play performed on stage.

There, I said it.

I know, those of you who live in such cultural wastelands as a city whose last five letters are "polis" might not see the problem here, but I'm from Buffalo. You know, the cultural hub of Eastern Lake Erie. Home of Shakespeare In Delaware Park, an annual summer festival where the Bard's plays are performed in Buffalo's Delaware Park for people who pay no admission to lay on the lawn and take in the greatest dramatist (and, well, writer of any type) to ever labor in the English language.

Horrible, just horrible. I've seen a lot of Shakespeare in the movies, and I've read probably half of the plays (though not in quite a while -- I gotta get back into that, one of these days), but I've never seen one of the plays in its original, and intended, medium. But that brings me to my point of agreement with Andrew: Just why are we teaching these plays in English classes as reading exercises?

My first brush with Shakespeare came in ninth grade, with Romeo and Juliet. The first lesson consisted of a couple of handouts about Shakespeare's life, the way things were done at the Globe Theater, some general lecturing on his staggering influence, and then we were sent home to read Act One and answer the discussion questions at the end of it, on a nice sheet of notebook paper because it was to be handed in. And the questions, of course, were the standard stuff: A few easy ones, just to make sure that we understood who did what, and then a few "Here's a definition of a literary term, find some examples of this in Act One" type questions. Ho, hum.

Next morning, the discussions in English Class before the bell rang sounded roughly like this:

"My God! Did you understand any of that?"

"Not really. Why did he go on for line after line just to have two characters say 'hello'?"

"Yeah! And why did they fight, anyway? 'Did you bite your thumb, sir?' What the hell is thumb-biting about? Stupid!"

"Totally. And those stage directions: 'They fight'. Yeah, that conveys it!"

And so on.

It got worse, though. The teacher, sensing correctly that not one student in the class had gone home and spontaneously grokked the Bard, decided that we'd all read Act One aloud. She assigned some parts, thinking that the cutest boy in class (not me) would just love being Romeo, and so on. Did this properly convey to us Shakespeare's genius? Take a wild guess, folks. And it went on like that, each year after that when we reached our token "Shakespeare of the Year" in English -- it got a bit better, but not much. Some of us actually liked Macbeth when we got to it, in eleventh grade, but for the most part, Shakespeare was still a moderate annoyance to be suffered at the English teacher's whim.

But in my school, one of the perks allowed the senior class each year was an optional field trip to Stratford, Ontario to attend the fine Shakespeare theatre there. (I didn't get to go, for some reason I don't recall.) And to a person, every one of my classmates who went came back thrilled at the experience. Testimonials like this:

"It was amazing! When they're on stage acting it out, instead of reading it, you understand it! All those lines make sense!"

"You mean, all that iambic pentameter sounds cool?"

"It sounds awesome! They should have taken us there three years ago!"

Exactly.

I know that teachers are probably loath to rely on the television any more than they absolutely have to, but the thing is: In the case of teaching Shakespeare, I think they absolutely have to (unless the schools just happen to be located near a place where a lot of live Shakespeare performance is going on). I don't know if ninth graders are really equipped to handle Shakespeare, really -- and even if they are, they probably should go with something good and bloody and fantastic, like Macbeth; appealing to our wish for sopping romance with Romeo and Juliet didn't work out so well, I'm afraid. But even so, I suspect that teachers should make the students watch Shakespeare first. That's the only way you get the sense of drama.

I mean, just try this experiment sometime. Try reading the great "St. Crispin's Day" speech from King Henry V, silently. You'll find that it just kind of sits there on the page, and you'll likely come away saying, "Hmmm, that's nice." Then try reading it aloud. If you have any soul at all, and if you're at all responsive to the sounds and phrases shaped by the Bard's words, you'll find your voice falling into a kind of royal cadence without even being aware that you're doing it. No, you won't inspire those in earshot to go with you onto the fields of Agincourt, but that's fine. You're not Olivier or Branagh, after all; you're only you. But you'll feel it.

I guess that's what my teacher was trying to do, with her "Let's read it aloud" bit, but the damage had already been done. Our expectations of Shakespeare had already been shaped by having it reduced to just one more thing to read at night, in between geometry proofs and French verb conjugations. I have no problem with lit classes teaching Shakespeare -- but let's at least return our initial encounter with him to his own home turf. Yes, it may strike some as unthinkable that we have to help Shakespeare out by giving him some home-field advantage, but there it is.

(Andrew also mentions in his post that his realization that Shakespeare should be seen, and not read, via a movie called Looking for Richard. Likewise, I realized the same from a movie: The Man Without a Face.)

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Had Gregory posted this yesterday instead of today, it would have been my "Image of the Week":



This is a setting from the Miyazaki film Spirited Away, which -- in the most scandalous admission of my life -- I still have not seen. Arrggghhhh!

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Sometimes you just have to back slowly away from the keyboard....

(As if you needed to ask where I got this from.)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Shipwreck in the Black Sea, discovered by Robert Ballard and dated to the fifth century AD.

If I had to name the person with the most purely fascinating career of the last fifty years, I'd probably flip a coin between Carl Sagan and Robert Ballard. Ballard is most famous for finding shipwrecks, but he has also made great contributions to our understanding of undersea environments and the archeological bounty the seas hold.

The Black Sea is special because there is no free oxygen in its water below 200M, meaning that the wood-eating microorganisms that thus destroy wooden ships that sink in other seas and oceans are not found here; thus, sunken wooden vessels in the Black Sea can last much, much longer -- thousands of years, in fact -- than they would in any other sea. The Black Sea is also of interest because of its location and the possibility that it may have played a part in what eventually became the legend of Noah's Flood, as well as the flood legends found in nearly every ancient culture.

Now, what I really want Ballard to find is Flight #19....

Also, Ballard gave CNN interview about the search for ships in the Black Sea.

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This week has seen many screenings of The Little Mermaid in our domicile. It's decent, although it's not my favorite Disney movie -- to this day, it feels like a dress rehearsal for Beauty and the Beast, which was the next one they made and is still the high-point of Disney's current "silver age". The songs are the best thing about it, really. (And to this day I have a creepy association with Ursula the Sea Witch, who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the professors in my college's music department while I was there.)

That's all I have to say, really, about The Little Mermaid.

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ESPN's tour of all the MLB ballparks today hits the granddaddy of the current retro-ballpark craze: Camden Yards.

It's kind of too bad they're not doing AAA ballparks as well, because Buffalo's is a gem, even if it's on its third name (Dunn Tire Park) since it opened (originally Pilot Field, than North AmeriCare Park).

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Oh, hell, as long as I'm on this big SDB kick, I recall a post of his from a few months back when he made fun of the Germans because they were proposing the taxation of brothels. (To be fair, his post seems more aimed at taxation-minded bureaucrats than at German taxation-minded bureaucrats.) Well, the idea had already come up....in Nevada.

(No, I don't know why I remember that particular SDB post. It just stuck in my brain, for some reason.)

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While I'm talking about current political memes, there's another one floating around the right-side of the politico-verse that's starting to really bug me: it's the idea that those of us on the left, failing to be properly impressed with the way things are going, are not seeing what's obviously, objectively, and rationally true, but are instead actively hoping for bad things to happen because we think it will help us get Democrats elected next time out.

This is stupid, asinine, and obnoxious hogwash.

My belief that President Bush's economic policies are not doing much to alleviate problems in the economy right now, and that they are further likely to cause some serious problems down the road, does not mean that I'm hoping the American economy stays in the toilet. (Yeah, I know, the recession has been declared "officially over" as of eighteen months or so ago. I don't care. As long as the GDP grows but my own wallet shrinks, my own counsel will I keep on the state of the economy, to paraphrase Yoda.) Believe me, I'll be happy as a pig in a dunghill if the economy generates nine million new jobs between today and next November.

And ditto on the war. I'm tired of seeing people who don't think that things are going just swimmingly in Iraq being portrayed as irrational boobs. (SDB is getting pretty obnoxious on this front.) I'm not hoping that this war turns out to be a disaster, and I'm tired of seeing people I agree with being called "irrational", "illogical", "out to lunch", or whatever other euphemism for "stupid" you can think of just because we happen to think that the WMD-rationale, and the lack of actual weapons, is important after all; that the looting of the Iraqi National Museum really did happen; that the continued guerilla actions constitute both a continuation of hostilities (despite what the President may have said in his Busby Berkeley-style photo op two months ago) and and indicative of a curious lack of planning on the part of the people in charge.

Just because I see plenty of potential for bad news does not imply that I want to see bad news, and I'd like it if conservatives would stop acting as though I (and people on my side of the fence) do.

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A common meme in American political discourse is that our country is divided sharply between the liberal, Democratic outposts of the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast, with virtually everything in the middle being solidly conservative Republican. This is commonly demonstrated by simply referring to the electoral map in the 2000 election:



But, the truth -- as is always the case -- is more complicated than that, and indicates that we're not as split an electorate as some might insist. The 2002 election results, which resulted in a pretty even split in Congress despite the conventional wisdom that the Democrats suffered a massive bloodbath, bears this out. If you instead combine the percentages of "red" and "blue" -- say, assigning 54% red and 46% blue to Ohio, just to make up an example off the top of my head -- you end up with what Brad DeLong calls "a purple nation". Check this out:



And, for Republicans who like to think that all that geographical space in their red area is impressive (or for Democrats who look at their tiny little blue area and suffer some kind of Freudian envy), there's this map in which state size is represented by the number of electoral votes.



(Crossposted to Collaboratory.)

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Over on Collaboratory, we've stolen some game from MeFi or some such place where you simply go into the comments and use the last word of the last post as an anagram for the sentence of your new post. Got it?

Me either....but it makes for some funny-looking sentences. Join the fun. Or not.

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Dominion managed to really get under someone's skin.

What I found funniest was that the guy who's goat has been so thoroughly gotten by Dominion* can't refrain from taking a lame, cheap shot at some hobby of Dominion's that Dominion has never maintained was anything more than a fun hobby. Hilarious....imagine Howard Dean, debating President Bush in fall of 2004, saying something like, "Mr. Bush's policies are terrible -- and Mr. Bush can't ride a Segway!" He'd be laughed off the stage.

*This may be the worst clause, in grammatical terms, that I have ever created.

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I recall an episode of MASH in which Klinger described one of his plots to convince the Army that he's too crazy to stay in Korea: "I tried shooting off my own toe, but my foot won't stand still." Well, our civic leaders in Buffalo sure don't have that problem. Sometimes I wonder if Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello spends his spare time painting bullseyes on his own feet for target practice, or perhaps placing rakes carefully around his home so that he steps on them and thus causes them to swing up and whack him in the nose. It sometimes seems this way.

As I've noted before, the Seneca Nation of Indians wants to open a casino in the Buffalo area (they already have on in Niagara Falls, thirty miles north). They were looking for a downtown location, but the one they wanted -- Buffalo's convention center -- was taken off the table by the County Executive (Joel Giambra, a guy who vacillates between making really good decisions and really dumb ones), so this week the Senecas announced that they now preferred to put a casino not in downtown Buffalo but in the suburb of Cheektowaga, which happens to be the location of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. This is a suburban location that actually makes sense, because there's no way that a casino will spark the kind of economic development that is needed downtown, but it might give a boost to the slumping hotel market around the airport and spark the creation of a Metro-rail line* from downtown to the airport.

Well, Masiello and Giambra are so sold on the idea of a casino sparking development that now they're suggesting Buffalo's waterfront as a site.

Yup. That's exactly what the waterfront needs: a self-contained casino where gamblers need never go outside to eat, drink, or anything else. That's just the way to take advantage of Buffalo's proximity to water.

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Many fantasy readers seriously dislike Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. This ongoing saga, whose shortest volume is 650 pages, now tips the scales at ten volumes, with no end remotely in sight. I sort of liked the first book, but then I stopped about 150 pages into the second, because I'm not that fast of a reader and I simply didn't want to invest the time in what I knew to be a gargantuan series.

But this person hates The Wheel of Time. I mean, he really hates it.

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Over at TF/N, there's a pointer to one of their discussion forums, a thread posing this question: What would make you walk out of the theater during Episode III?

Well, I can't speak for any of my readers, but this parody poster would do it for me.

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This morning's headlines:

:: Memo Warns of New Hijack Plots

:: Air Marshals Pulled From Key Flights

Well....allrighty, then.

UPDATE: A new headline appeared just now: Flip-flop on Air Marshal Schedules. I'm glad that wisdom has prevailed.

(Cross-posted to Collaboratory.)

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Few things nauseate me more than anti-homosexual prejudice. The fact that Senator Rick Santorum, for example, could say some very noxious things about gays a few months ago, and suffer almost nothing by way of consequence, shames me.

But even so, I'm really not sure that we should have entire schools for gay students. This kind of thing strikes me as strange. A proper appreciation for diversity, it seems to me, would not endorse this kind of thing, especially after "separate but equal" was dismantled as official policy so many years ago.

(Michael Lopez also minces some words on this.)

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The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.

Bara, the Icelandic web-designer whose journal I've been following, has posted some new pictures of herself, looking utterly radiant. Why on Earth people think that Britney Spears is good looking, I'll never know. My own tastes run much more to elegance and class, as opposed to titillation. But that's just me, and I grant that it's pretty much of a losing battle.

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SDB has a new blogroll, and once again, I'm not on it. Harumph. It's probably because, while I -- like Steven -- am a Jacksonian, my focus is on Peter Jackson, not Andrew Jackson.

(No, I don't know if making lame jokes whenever SDB updates his blogroll is to be a tradition of mine. We'll see. I do think that this lame joke isn't quite as lame as the last one.)

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They're aiming for the lights!

People who work in law enforcement tend to be, well, "masters of the obvious". Never was this more clear to me than when I was driving along in my 1984 VW Rabbit, which was then on its last legs, and the hood actually blew open. I pulled over (of course), and just as I was getting out of the car to push the hood back down so I could complete the drive home (luckily, I was only half a mile away), a New York State Trooper comes by, stops, rolls down his window, and says, "Is there a problem here?"

I'm thinking of this right now because of this news item from Scotland, linked by Warren Ellis, in which Edinburgh detectives describe the death of a local man -- whose body was found fully clothed, stuffed into a suitcase, and submerged in a local waterway -- as "suspicious".

(Yes, that headline is a movie quote, in a tipping-of-the-hat to Sir Matthew the Not Quite So Brave As Sir Robin, who likes to use movie quotes as his own headlines.)

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You know, I don't agree with SDB all that often, and I do think that he tends at times to set up strawmen in his attacks on "leftists", but in general I do find him engaging. He usually gives me something to think about, even if it's only to think about how I think he's stone wrong, and even if he does take a ridiculous number of words to do it (but even in that regard, he's not nearly as bad as this guy). Maybe I'm just not well-informed enough to understand exactly, but I don't quite get why the general reaction to him on the left side of Blogistan seems to be blanket dismissal. Could someone let me know just what it is I'm missing here?

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I realized today that you don't see many Quonset huts anymore.



I remember, when I was a kid during the 1970s, I used to see them a lot -- mechanics' garages, independent food markets, feed stores, et cetera would use them. I even recall a suburban movie theater that was inside a Quonset hut. (It was a second-run house; I never saw a movie there, but I've always wondered what the acoustics were like.) But I suppose they went away eventually, since they were never intended as permanent structures to begin with, and other, cheap methods of construction have been developed.

I only mention this because today I was driving on a Buffalo street that I've driven, literally, for years -- and I realized that a building I've driven past countless times in that span is, behind its faux facade, a Quonset hut.

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I was hoping that Mickey had not forgotten to share the results of this experiment.

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Taking note of this (by way of Gregory), I think that someone in charge needs to read The Once and Future King.

"And then I shall make the oath of the Order that Might is only to be used for Right...."

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At around eleven o'clock this morning, my novel began its trek eastward to New York City to find its fortune. Of course, it's only a portion-and-outline and not an entire manuscript, but I'm thinking that the lack of flab compared with all the other full manuscripts out there will help it stand out.

As the envelope containing the three chapters and outline hit the bottom of the mail basket, sporting its spiffy new postage label, its contents could be heard distinctly singing: "If I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere....", until a pile of pithy greeting cards were dumped on top of it, each of them saying, "Shut up, you."

It's a hard life, I guess, being a manuscript...but even as I send him out into the cold, cruel world, I take solace in the fact that at least he's not just a bill.

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Holy Crap!

In writing the sports-related post below, I indulged in a bit of comic-book trivia hipness, and I had to go look for a link to support it. In so doing, I came across www.marveldirectory.com, which is apparently exactly what the name suggests: an online version of those grand old Official Guide to the Marvel Universe comics. I haven't done much digging here -- well, none at all, actually -- but it's just gotta be cool. Check it out!

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Sports stuff:

:: Ah, July....when ballparks across the nation are alive with the sound of the grilling of hot dogs, the crack of bats, the creaking of thirty-six year old relievers' knees, and....the Pittsburgh Pirates having a fire sale. Come one, come all!

Peter Gammons says it's not so much a firesale as coming to grips with a failed rebuilding project, and maybe he's right, but this is getting pretty frustrating, nonetheless. Since 1993 this is, by my count, the third failed rebuilding undertaken by the Pirates, and this is the one that was supposed to work -- a new park last year and solid, young players coming of age were suppose to add to a run at .500 this year. Instead, the Pirates once again return from the All-Star Break to play out the string. (Gammons also identifies owner Kevin McClatchy as the Pirates' General Manager, which is odd considering that the actual GM's picture -- Dave Littlefield -- appears right next to the graf in question.)

:: Ah, July....when college athletic fields across the nation are alive with the sound of NFL players enduring the dreaded two-a-days, except the ones smart enough to hold out until after two-a-days are over. ("Two-a-days" refers to the early days of training camps, when practices are held twice daily. They are dreaded by players.) I won't be doing my second annual NFL Preview Post until much closer to the actual start of the regular season, but still -- it's getting closer, baby! News on the NFL's proudest franchise, the Buffalo Bills, can be found here. Go Bills!

(By the way, one of the many new faces this year is defensive line coach Tim Krumrie, whom I remember for his godawful injury in Super Bowl XXIII, when he played for the Bengals. This was one of those Joe Theismann-like leg breakings, where the extremity bends in a direction that would be painful for Reed Richards, and of course is replayed over-and-over by the network....)

:: In a column extolling the wonderment that is Lance Armstrong (AOL exclusive, so I can't link it, sadly), sports writer John Feinstein makes this larger point:

Those who mock bike racing and claim it is somehow not a "real" sport should try someday to ride a bike straight up a mountain in searing heat for 100 miles or so. Beyond that, there's simply no need for those who aren't fans of the sport to mock it or attempt to belittle it.

The constant bickering among sports fans about which sport is better or tougher or more dramatic strikes me as silly. Every sport has a niche and a component to it that draws those who love it to care about it. I don't pretend to understand cricket, but seeing the passion of those who do, I respect the passion and understand enough to know that to play it at the highest level takes great skill.

The flip side of the argument is that it is equally foolish for those who do love a sport to put down those who don’t. If you love soccer and see beauty and artistry in a 0-0 tie, that's wonderful. But to claim that those who don't see the game the same way as you are somehow inferior makes no sense at all.

Indeed.

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Brad DeLong looks about for a left-wing analogue to Andrew Sullivan, in terms of disconnect with reality, and comes up with...Noam Chomsky. Now, I'm not nearly familiar enough with Chomsky to know if this is a good comparison, but that in itself strikes me as interesting. I'm not the most active leftist out there, but I'm reasonably informed, and yet I have absolutely no idea where I'd go if I wanted to read Chomsky's regular political thinking, whereas Sullivan is quite easy to find. I don't recall ever seeing Kevin Drum, Atrios, Matthew Yglesias, or any of the other left-wing biggies whom I read regularly cite a Chomsky essay or book, and I don't see Chomsky's name mentioned much on the op-ed page unless someone wants to throw his name out there as the standard far-left bogeyman. Just who is it that's taking Chomsky so seriously, anyway?

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It's that time again: FilmWise has some new quizzes up. I plug this site every few months, because it's just so much fun!

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A couple of notes resulting from two recent posts over at Reflections in d minor:

:: Lynn gives several choice quotes from Sir Thomas Beecham, one of the finest orchestra conductors to ever come out of England. Beecham was one of those erudite wits who seem to breed like rabbits in England. I first read about Beecham in Harold Schonberg's book The Great Conductors (now out of print, I believe), and two of the Beecham quotes related by Schonberg have stayed with me years after reading that book.

To a trombone player Beecham suspected of lackadaisical effort: "Are you certain that you are producing as much sound as is possible from that piece of antiquated plumbing which you are applying to your face?"

And to a tenor while rehearsing an operatic love-making scene: "Observing your grave, deliberate motions, I am reminded of that quintessential quadruped, the hedgehog."

:: Lynn also points to an article denoting the stages of classical music collecting. These stages really do exist - - I've had to explain to other people just why I own five different recordings of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, for example - - and it certainly is true that after you spend a number of years exploring music far and wide, you do return to the Beethoven symphonies or the Bach Masses or the Mozart concertos or the Strauss tone poems and recognize them anew for the works of genius they are.

What differentiates some collectors, in my view, is how willing they are to roam afield. Some classical collectors will pretty much stick to the Germanic symphonic tradition, and restrict their "roaming afield" to lesser works by the greats in that one tradition. Others will take in more - - adding the Russian Nationalist tradition, or the English tradition, or French Impressionism, or twentieth century serialism, and so on. Still others will divulge even farther afield, taking in film music as well, and trying to come to grips with that genre's peculiar set of demands and constraints. Or you can note the rise of nationalism in classical music, and delve therefore into the folk and native traditions on which the nationalist schools are based, thus coming to study Celtic and world music. And then one can leave Western cultures entirely, and take in the fascinating world of Asian classical music as well. Or one can move forward instead of backward, and see how Celtic music has influenced American folk music, and then country and rock in turn.

Many collectors tend to be insular, deciding that once they've reached a certain point, they're happy to set up their boundaries and stay within them, achieving a depth of familiarity with a relatively small number of works. Others take a much wider approach, preferring to know a smattering about a wide variety of music. Both approaches work, and it's a shame that often members of each camp will look down on the other.

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Somehow I totally missed this, but congratulations to Yar on the occasion of his successful spawning. (Actually, his wife probably had more to do with it.)

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Out of Lascaux should be back to normal posting, I assume, now that Alexandra's done with her math test. But reading her update, just the phrase "Factoring of polynomials" is enough to send me into shivers. My high school algebra teacher was a nice guy, and he really was a pretty good teacher. But he had one odd failing that manifested when I choked on polynomials at the outset: he assumed that my sudden tanking on a couple of tests meant that I wasn't doing the homework, and proceeded to impose a daily checking of my homework under threat of detention if it wasn't done. I had been doing it, but for me, polynomials were one of those things that upon first encounter is rather like Roy Neary's first encounter with the alien spaceship in Close Encounters, without the sunburn on the right side of my face. It was his personal attention and help with the subject that got me up to speed (and once I got there, I was fine), not his Draconian "You're a slacker!" bit.

I'm not sure I had a point here, but there it is. I report, you decide, if you haven't nodded off first.

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Joseph Duemer has some neat photos posted of doors in Hanoi. That's right, doors. And they're beautiful.

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Bob Hope was never much on my radar screen, for some reason. I haven't seen any of his movies (strange, since my parents have always loved Bing Crosby), and when he was on TV with regular specials, he never made much of an impression on me. But still, it's sad to see him go.

(I learned of Hope's passing on The Today Show this morning, when the guy who did the news headlines -- not Matt Lauer or Al Roker, but some other guy who's been on NBC for a while but whose name I can never recall -- suddenly said, "We're just learning that Bob Hope is dead. We'll have details later on." Cut to commercial. I don't know -- I understand why they did it this way, but it just seems a tad heartless, you know?)

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This just in: This guy is amazing.

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In an addendum to my post below about the Gene Wolfe fracas, a LiveJournal user named Natalia Lincoln who was apparently there posts her version of what happened, along with a follow-up. What I found interesting was a collection of "rules" or "guidelines" for writing that are apparently from Mr. Wolfe, and I'm stealing them for use here:

1. Live. Have life experiences. Ride horses. Fly planes. Travel.

2. Learn to read. How does the other writer do it? Play with their idea: switch POVs or settings around. Evaluate it: did the writer fail/succeed?

3. Read the markets you're submitting to.

4. Learn to write (Strunk, Transitive Vampire, etc.)

5. Don't worry about what the reader will think of you personally, worry about making yourself perfectly clear.

6. Don't write sentences like ad copy.

7. Read the type of material you mean to write, for a wide range of ages, levels of seriousness, audiences, classics.

8. Don't read endless series.

9. Find a quiet place to write.

10. Writing time: aim at writing at least one hour a day. What will you give up to get this? Sleep? Social time? TV? For 28 years, Wolfe held down a day job, mechanical engineer, and still wrote.

11. Come to grips with the fact that you're not going to be able to write at the same time & place all the time. Adjust and keep going. Writing on a train is great.

12. You will need a computer/typewriter, dictionary and a wastebasket, and printing and mailing supplies.

13. When you correct galleys, use a colored pen, not black.

14. Write your ideas down as they occur to you. Make notes more detailed than you think you need to be.

15. Initial situations are easy. You don't have a story until you have an ending. Furthermore, you don't have a story until you write it.

16. No amount of planning, world-building, etc. constitutes a story. Don't spend more than an hour researching/planning a short story, or a day on a book, before you begin. Only by writing do you find out what you need.

17. Don't mirror your outline or your research. You made it, or found it, you can change it.

18. Writers' groups can be good or bad depending on who's in the group. Creative writing classes are the same, only they cost more. Find out who the teacher is; that's important.

19. Writer's Digest is for people who haven't published a word. Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop online is better. Kathleen Woodbury, editor.

20. Network. Odyssey is good. Get to know the local bookstores, and who works in them. Go to cons (esp. World Fantasy Con, in DC this year). WorldCon used to be good, but it's so big now it's hard to find the right people. You can find valuable friends at these cons.

21. Get to know the fans, but esp. get to know the editors, agents, writers. Sit up front and ask questions. To get into the green room, ask if you can help.

22. Collect all the best writing advice you've ever gotten.

23. Prepare to be able to teach. Study until you know it backwards, forwards, and upside-down.

24. It's easy for you as the writer/teacher to tell people how to write. What's hard is getting them to believe you.

25. Know the rules, and if you must break them, have a good reason to.

26. Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line. (OK, I added that one myself.)

I don't know if Mr. Wolfe actually outlined these rules in precisely this form, or if this is just Miss Lincoln's distillation of lecture notes. But they're still pretty interesting.

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Hmmm....it occurs to me that part of my current anxiety may stem not just from my increasing frustration with matters economic, but from the more prosaic fact that I haven't been listening to much music lately.

A lot of my recent writing efforts have taken place not at my regular desk (where I was doing my rough-drafts in longhand, and where I have a nine-year-old Sony Discman that's still going strong), but at the computer, where I don't have a Discman. But the computer does do MP3s...and I did buy, some months ago, an extension cord that would make it easier for me to plug headphones into the computer.

Anyway, right now I have John Barry's score to The Lion In Winter playing on the big stereo while I edit an old essay, and I'm just happy as a rat in liverwurst (to pinch a metaphor from Stephen King).

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If you want a breakdown as to what's going to appear in the Extended Edition of The Two Towers when it arrives on DVD later this fall, check out AICN's story.

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WARNING: Unsightly whining coming up.

Great googly-moogly*, I know that Saturdays are always my worst days for traffic around here -- so much so that I take a lot of Saturdays off from posting entirely -- but less than thirty hits yesterday?! That's just cruel!

* Where does the phrase "Great googly-moogly" come from, anyway?

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Frustration is getting your novel outline done, printing it out with the first three chapters, printing out the cover letter, getting the whole package nice and ready...and then discovering that your large manila envelopes aren't big enough for all that stuff. Gah!

So it's off to OfficeMax today to grab a set of bigger envelopes, and then tomorrow, this thing's out the door. It's a moderately strange feeling, actually sending out something that I started noodling with nearly seven years ago (and whose central story idea came to me several years before that). But it's not as strange a feeling as I might have expected, since I've already moved on to other things.

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Apparently there was a recent fracas of sorts at the Odyssey Fantasy Writers Workshop recently: fantasist and SF-writer extraordinaire Gene Wolfe apparently gave some fairly caustic criticism to a few stories, and the resulting brouhaha led to Wolfe's bowing out of the workshop. Wolfe wrote his side of the story in LOCUS Magazine, and John Scalzi has a long missive on the subject on his blog.

I've never even considered going to Clarion or Odyssey or anything like it. Not because I'm arrogant and think I have nothing to learn; were that the truth, I'd have something other than a drawer full of rejections to show for my efforts. And not because I'm timid about my writing; I send it out, after all, and occasionally I post pieces of my fiction here, if I decide they've "expired" (i.e., I've decided that they're simply not salable, and I don't just want them sitting in a drawer with their rejections). I don't do the writers' group/workshop thing because they strike me as fairly neurotic. I decided a long time ago that the main way I would measure myself as a writer was by selling my work, and not by seeking camaraderie with other unpublished writers. I guess that, for some, this could mean that I'm a shill who's only in it for the money. So be it, really. Time spent sitting around talking sagely about someone else's stories is time I'm not spending writing my own stories (blog posts and GMR reviews aside), but that's not even the main problem. For me, the weight of producing something on a deadline simply so it can be criticized by a bunch of peers would be the death-knell for my writing. I don't need that. I've got death-knells aplenty, thank you very much.

It's not that I'm afraid of being told that my work is crap, because it seems to me that any writer of any worth at all will be convinced, all on his own, that his work is crap. I don't need someone else to confirm that for me.

As for Mr. Wolfe, I've only read a few of his stories and I am now working my way through the first novel of his I've ever read (Latro in the Mist, actually two novels bound as one). But I know that he is held in very high regard in literary circles and that he has years of teaching experience. A Usenet poster today said, "If Gene Wolfe told me a story of mine was crap, I'd say, 'Thank you sir! May I have another'?" I'm inclined to agree, although if Mr. Wolfe told me he didn't understand my story and I was feeling mischievous, I'd say, "Back at ya, pal."

(And in case there's any doubt that these students could have encountered someone meaner than Mr. Wolfe, there's always Harlan Ellison. Yow!)

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I forgot to link them before it began, and I didn't do any posting yesterday except to update an already-published post, so I'm probably remiss here. But two people on my blogroll, Mickey and Jesse, took part in this year's Blogathon. Had I any extra money I would have sponsored each. Instead, I'll just pipe up a day late to point my readers to these fellows' sudden explosion of content. (Check out Mickey's laser-shining-through-ice-cubes picture, and Jesse's eerie channeling of Peggy Noonan. Aieee!)

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