Mr. Kamen's Opus

The film music community received a bit of sad and shocking news today: composer Michael Kamen has died. He was only 56, but he had been battling multiple sclerosis for a number of years.

Kamen wrote the scores for all the Lethal Weapon films, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the first X-Men film, the James Bond film Licence to Kill, and -- my favorite score of his -- Mr. Holland's Opus. Kamen's work will also be known to rock fans; he was behind a lot of the orchestral stuff used by "arena bands" like Pink Floyd.

Yet again I have to wonder why creativity and the ability to bring pleasure to many people is so often not rewarded with long life.

Farewell, Michael Kamen.

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A Report from the Department of Useless Dichotomies

The Department of Useless Dichotomies has placed the following report.

:: It has come to our realization of late that the people who inhabit this world may be separated into two distinct populations. Of the first can be said this: They are polite, and they demonstrate such by using the phrase "Excuse me" in its intended circumstance: as a signal to people who are occupying the path they wish to travel, that said obstructing people might duly acknowledge the person and shift accordingly, thus allowing the polite person to pass.

More pernicious, though, are the members of the second population. These people, to whom the word "Boor" can be reasonably ascribed, do in fact use the phrase 'Excuse me', but they do not use it as a signal and request. Rather, they utter said phrase while continuing to move at their original rate of speed and along their original trajectory, whether the persons unfortunately in their path have sufficiently shifted to allow passage or not. The meaning of "Excuse me" to the members of the second population, therefore, appears to be a means of self-absolution of any responsibility for collisions that might occur by way of their failure to allow others sufficient time to move.

Of course, any suggestion that the "Boor" might actually be at fault for failing to either look in one's path to note the presence of others or to at least slow their approach so that others might move is as futile as trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teaspoon; the inevitable refrain one shall hear upon attempting such correction is "I did say 'Excuse me'!", usually also accompanied with rolling of the eyes, if appropriate. The temptation here to simply inflict bodily injury on the offender should be resisted; the Department does not recommend physical violence as a matter of legal course. But it occurs to this Department that our sister organization, the Department of Just Desserts, might counsel one to utter a very quick and sotto voce "Excuse me" before punching such a "Boor" in the nose, and then say, "I did say 'Excuse me'," before departing the scene. As usual, the Department of Useless Dichotomies does not specifically endorse any recommendations by the Department of Just Desserts.

Yet.

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"The Green Fields of France"

I'm surprised that it didn't occur to me a week ago, given that it was Veterans' Day and that Teresa Nielsen Hayden had a whole bunch of stuff up about World War I and Armistice Day (what Vets' Day was, originally), but one of my favorite Celtic/Folk songs is "The Green Fields of France" by Eric Bogle, the lyrics of which I personally find more moving than the oft-cited WWI poem, "In Flanders Fields" (although the song alludes to that poem in the final verse). These are the lyrics as I know them from the several recordings of the song I own, but there are variations.

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile 'neath the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Chorus:

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

(Chorus)

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

(Chorus)

And I can't help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

(Chorus)

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First in Space, now First in the Environment....

Via Nathan Newman I see that China is on the verge of implementing fuel economy standards that are tougher than those of the United States. According to the article, all new SUVs and minivans in China will be required to meet the same fuel efficiency standards as automatic-shift cars of the same weight. Wow. (Pickup trucks and commercial trucks are excluded, but apparently pickup trucks are not popular in China except for use by businesses.)

Another interesting factoid that I did not know was that American fuel efficiency standards are based on the averages for entire fleets, whereas the Chinese standards will apply to each vehicle. That is why American manufacturers can sell vehicles with abysmal mileage, as long as they have some other vehicle like a Geo Metro in the product line that brings the total average up. That won't be possible under the Chinese rules.

Interesting.

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Dogs and the Demented Souls Who Love Them

The Grey Bird has a few thoughts on the expectations people should have when entering the lair of a dog-owner. I can sympathize, but as always, I am very glad that I have seen the inherent superiority of cats.

(By the way, surely it is an indicator of something that you almost never see cats on Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks", an installment of which aired last night featuring -- you guessed it -- two dogs and a macaw bird.)

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Writing Update

After finally engaging in a bit of a breakthrough over the last few days, the writing on the Novel-In-Progress has become easier, and as of this morning I broke 76,000 words. (I'm planning for a first draft between 180K and 190K words.) Very cool. Part of the problem, I'm convinced, has been that I've simply allowed too many days to go by without getting anything of substance written -- less than 200 words, for example. That's simply not enough to keep the ball going and the characters fresh. Continuity of effort is essential; otherwise, you simply lose sight of what the hell it is you're doing.

Anyhoo, another weird problem came up. I have a main character -- a fairly major character -- who has been spending much of the book thus far behaving in a way that doesn't entirely make sense. I mean, it's not totally illogical, but there really are better ways for him to go about things, and I finally reached the point where that fact had to be confronted. Now, since I don't work with outlines, my original temptation was to simply backtrack and fix this character's actions so they make more sense, but I kept rejecting that on the basis that it would just be too much stupid work. I will backtrack if I have to, but I tend to be very militant in how I judge "if I have to". Even if I'm writing a short story, I resist backtracking as much as I can; in a novel, a backtrack would represent the loss of several months of work. So I kept this character acting in ways that aren't quite up-to-snuff, and over the last week I've written no fewer than four versions of a scene where he tries to explain himself.

Yesterday, though, I finally realized what I had been missing: I had been working too hard on making his explanations make sense, as if his actions really did have to make sense. Yesterday, though, a simple thought popped into my cranium: "What if he's actually full of shit, and what if everyone around him knows it?" Which is, of course, the right answer, because it gives the character in question a much-needed third dimension, it adds conflict and tension, and best of all, it sets the stage for events which I already knew were to come. Now he's not just a cog in my plot-wheel; this person's actions will be partly responsible for a major disaster that's in the offing a few chapters from now.

Lesson learned: If your characters are screwing things up, that is not a sign that you, the writer, are screwing things up.

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A Couple of Film Music Thoughts

As I noted a few days ago, I've been recording some of my favorite film scores onto my hard drive for listening purposes when I'm writing. (Many times I like to listen to music on headphones when I write, unless I'm home alone.) One score that was a big favorite of mine in the late 90s, but which I hadn't really listened to much in several years, is James Horner's Braveheart. As much as I've become annoyed with Horner's constant, well, "Hornerisms", this score is still as good as I remember it, and the first half of it is downright extraordinary. It has a wonderful meditative quality that is almost otherworldly, particularly the track "The Secret Wedding", in which Horner plays out one of his longest and most intricate melodies. I think the second half of the score (the stuff after the Battle of Stirling) isn't quite as good, but man, those first nine tracks are sensational. I've long believed that James Horner reached his high point right around 1995, when he composed excellent scores to Braveheart, Apollo 13, and Legends of the Fall. Those three scores are why I didn't mind when he won an Oscar a few years later for Titanic, even though that score really wasn't all that great. Better a few years late than never, I always say.

I also picked up the score CD of The Matrix Revolutions yesterday, and I listened to most of it this morning. I've yet to see the film, and since I also missed Reloaded, I'll likely wait for the DVD, but as I've long maintained, seeing the film is in no way a requirement for enjoying the score. Don Davis turns in some really superb work here -- the disc is a fascinating blend of techno stuff and straight-forward orchestral writing, some of it purely atmospheric and some of it strongly melodic. This should tide me over until Monday, when the score CD to Return of the King hits the stores in what I am sure will be the film music event of all time. (Or at least November.)

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Buy Buy Buy!

Back by popular demand (well, not really, since nobody's asked) is the "Marketplace" section in the sidebar, wherein I put some of my old books and music and ancient ushabti from the tombs of the Upper Nile. Check them out and buy. Great Christmas stuff, and all that. Or something.

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A Momentous Occasion

Over the weekend, Darth Swank was entrusted with one of the most closely-guarded secrets in all history. He now knows the eleven herbs and spices.

(Yeah, like he hasn't heard that one before....)

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News Flash

Things aren't all that great in Afghanistan.

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And the one panda became two....

Jesse of Pandagon has been joined by Ezra Klein, late of several other left-side blogs. Niftiness of the highest order should ensue.

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Forgotten Arts

Sometimes it's neat to see old arts and methods applied to more modern things. Such as the Declaration of Independence, illuminated as medieval books were. Wow. Now I want an illuminated edition of The Lord of the Rings!

(via Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Particles.)

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Best Search Ever!

I haven't witnessed any traffic to Byzantium's Shores based on really weird Google searches in quite some time, which is a bit disappointing. But even if I did, I seriously doubt I'd have anything to match the one that Jenn Manley Lee received last week. I have never seen a search that reveals so much about the searcher, not just in what they are looking for but in the way they look for it. Wow.

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Crap. I thought they said LON Cheney was visiting.

The Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, is visiting Buffalo today. Pictured below is his reaction after being informed that, in the wake of yesterday's disaster of a Bills game, all defibrilators in the greater Buffalo area have been found to be in working order:



Cheney indicated his disappointment that he won't be able to partake in Buffalo's signature culinary delicacy, chicken wings. But he further noted that he is not avoiding wings for the reason many would expect (his heart trouble). It's that he knows that his boss would likely insist on him bringing some back to the White House, and after that pretzel incident, the President is most definitely not to be entrusted with small chicken bones.

Further, Cheney is vigorously denying reports that are surfacing in French newspapers that his "undisclosed location" has also been used to house the Buffalo Bills' offense. But his veracity in this matter is suspect, given his continuing insinuation that the Bills' lack of scoring is somehow connected to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

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Look, a string! Let's play it out!

Yep, folks, you can stick a fork in the Buffalo Bills. They are done. Sure, they have the proverbial "mathematical chance" at making the playoffs still, but somehow I suspect that the 2003 Bills aren't about to become football's equivalent of the 1969 Mets. They're 4-6, they lost yesterday to an injury-ridden second-year expansion team, their offense has not scored a touchdown in four weeks, et cetera. They might have won yesterday had their placekicker made the two field goals that he missed, but even then, as I've noted a number of times before a team whose offense can't find the end zone isn't going to win much unless their defense is one of the best ever, which this one ain't.

Oh, and they might have lost running back Travis Henry for the season. He cracked his fibula in the second quarter, and then played on that leg in the second half. This guy's got heart, so it's too bad that he's probably going to be traded the second the Bills decide that Willis McGahee is ready to take the reins as the fulltime starter.

I always find it a strange feeling when the Bills are eliminated (officially or figuratively). There's disappointment: a lot of it this year, because I can safely say that nobody thought that a performance this bad was in the offing back in September. But there's also relief in that even if they lose every remaining game, it's now pretty much meaningless, so I go back to being a football fan instead of a Bills fan. That means I can pay more attention to what's going on elsewhere in the league. Whoopee! (Or, alternatively, I can just flip to ABC and watch figure skating in the vain hope that someone can knock off Evgeny Pleshenko....)

What to say about yesterday's game, then? Not much, really, that I haven't said before. The Bills ran the ball well, but not when they needed to; the O-line couldn't give Drew Bledsoe enough protection to keep him upright until the receivers could break their routes; a fine defensive effort was squandered; the coaches are in this perpetual fog (they actually had to call a timeout after a third-down because they hadn't yet decided whether or not to kick the field goal). Yada yada yada. I do, though, have a theory as to what on earth is wrong with Drew Bledsoe.

Everybody in Buffalo is down on Bledsoe, mainly because he's so immobile that he either gets sacked or he throws a horrible pass in desperation in the face of pressure. The refrain goes that in today's NFL, quarterbacks with that little mobility are toast. I'm not sure I agree with that. Look at some recent Super Bowl quarterback heroes: Kurt Warner, Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson -- not exactly the names that leap to mind when one thinks of "mobile quarterbacks". And the two poster-children for mobile quarterbacks, guys who really run, have missed significant amounts of time the last two seasons to injuries sustained by running: Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick. But Bledsoe has most definitely been a lot less effective this year than he was last year, with his current performance matching a similar decline in Bledsoe's 1999 and 2000 seasons. (In 2001 he was injured early in the year, which gave rise to The Devil Incarnate Tom Brady taking over in New England.) What, I wondered, was so different about the guy up to 1998 and last year?

So I thought back to when I used to see Bledsoe twice a year when the Patriots played the Bills, in the mid and late 1990s, and what I remember of Bledsoe back then is that he used to constantly kill the Bills -- and the Bills' defense was great back then -- not by completing lots of deep passes to his receivers, although there certainly was some of that. No, the big spark plug was his tight end, Ben Coates, who at the time was one of the very best tight ends in the NFL. But Coates's production fell off substantially in 1999 -- I'm not sure if he played hurt that year, or what -- and then he was gone. But interestingly, Bledsoe's statistical fall-off tracks precisely with Coates's, and continued when Coates was gone.

Flash forward to 2002, when Bledsoe joined the Bills. Suddenly the guy could do no wrong again, for most of the season. A lot of it was that Eric Moulds and Peerless Price were better receivers than he ever had in New England, but you would think that even with losing Price for this year Bledsoe wouldn't totally fall apart. So what else was different? Well, it wasn't just Price who left. The Bills also ditched running back Larry Centers, who was almost never used to run the ball but whose receiving skills are such that he has more than 800 career receptions and may end up in the Hall of Fame. Last year, Centers played the same role that Coates used to play for Bledsoe: the safety-valve guy who could grab the short passes when the pressure was coming too hard for Bledsoe to wait for his receivers to get open. Centers had 43 catches last year, more than Jay Riemersma (who was the actual tight end last year) and thus far more than the Bills' current two tight ends combined. This suggests to me that if the Bills want to improve their offense next year, they need to do two things (aside from firing coordinator Kevin Gilbride, who is almost certainly guaranteed to be gone):

1. Improve the offensive line for protection purposes. Bledsoe is a rhythm quarterback, but the current line never lets him get into a rhythm.

2. Upgrade the tight ends or "backfield receiver" to give Bledsoe a credible threat underneath, which will help him get out of jams.

Well, anyway, there it is. As I noted, the Bills aren't officially out of it yet, but they might as well be. They would have to win every remaining game to have a shot at the division, and given their current woes, I don't see them beating Indianapolis or Tennessee at home or the Patriots on the road. So I'm thinking about next year, mildly embarrassed that my expectations for their 2003 season were so far off the mark. But I'm not remotely alone in that regard.

:: Note to Vikings fans: The 2002 Oakland Raiders suffered a four game losing streak at one point in the season. And then they went to the Super Bowl. (In which they got blown out. Don't look too far into history for lessons, I guess.)

:: Remember, I'm on hiatus next week, so I won't be posting about the Bills' inevitable loss to Indianapolis. But I expect that fans at Ralph Wilson Stadium will get to see some touchdowns being scored. (By the wrong team, of course, but still....)

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Your Source for Jovian Goodness

Paul Riddell linked a couple of interesting items this week that relate to Jupiter, space exploration, and how lame we've become at it. Here is an article about the end of the Galileo probe and the general lack of interest in space in the US, which is tied back to science fiction and its failings as a genre in recent years. Also, check out these animations of Galileo's final plunge.

And finally, NASA released a photo of Jupiter that was taken by the Cassini probe as it went by. (Cassini is on its way to Saturn.) Technically a mosaid of small photos, the released image is billed as "the best picture of Jupiter ever", with the colors unaltered this time. (Previous photos used false color enhancement to make the cloud details easier to see. Image alteration for study purposes is common in astronomy; a good example is those topographical images of the Venusian surface that were made some years ago, in which the topography is exaggerated.) The image really is pretty amazing: check it out here. That is one amazing image. I can't wait to see what Cassini reveals about Saturn in 2004.

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Of Traffic and Hiatuses

I'm hoping that November is proving to be a slow month, if terms of traffic, for everyone else in Blogistan, because if it's not, then I have a serious problem with my content. I have witnessed a substantial drop in traffic here lately, with the big drop coinciding with Sheila's decision to close down StarLines, although I'm hoping that's not actually a factor. (Not that I'm hoping that my content has suddenly dropped in quality instead!) I suppose that a drop was due after two months of substantial increases in September and October, but still, it's a bit of a bummer.

Anyway, seeing as how traffic has already dropped off quite a bit, I've decided that it won't be much of a big deal if I take a bit of time off. I will go on hiatus starting this coming Saturday (November 22) and I will return Sunday, November 30. So, this Friday's update will be the last for nine days. I suspect that traffic would drop anyway during Thanksgiving week, and I could use a bit of time to recharge and work exclusively on the damn book novel-in-progress.

As with my last posting holiday, I will still be reading my usual blogs and answering e-mails and all that - - it's not like I'm taking an expedition to see the caribou in their natural habitat in the Yukon or something. Also, as with last time, I'm not swearing off posting to Collaboratory.

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Skiffy! We got yer skiffy here!

I'm gradually becoming a big fan of science fiction author Timothy Zahn. Like most folks, I suspect, I discovered him first through his series of Star Wars novels; he was the first author in the now sprawling enterprise known as "The Extended Universe" (i.e., the post-Return of the Jedi stories). In those books, Zahn displayed a real talent for fun, zippy space opera with a dash of mystery and neat SFnal ideas, and in his non-Star Wars books, that seems to be exactly the kind of thing he writes. So if you crave SF that's fun and action-packed, Zahn's your huckleberry.

I just read his latest book, Dragon and Thief, which is subtitled "The First Dragonback Adventure". The start of a series, then: the dust jacket promises six books altogether. The title might lead one to expect a fantasy novel - - the dragon thing, you know - - but it's not. This is pure SF, and it seems to be intended for younger readers. The SF genre has really been in need of a way for adolescents to come in - - Young Adult Fantasy is in great shape these days, mainly due to the rising tide created by Harry Potter, but there hasn't been the equivalent for SF. Zahn's new series might help to fill a big hole in the SF readership.

The story involves an orphan named Jack Morgan, who is eeking out an existence in space with the help of his intelligent space ship until he's framed for a theft he didn't commit. While on the run, he comes across an alien named Draycos, who is basically a dragon. Draycos is the sole survivor of an attack on his ship, and he wants to find the beings who are killing his people (the "K'Da"). Thus, Jack and Draycos join forces for mutual benefit - - including forming a symbiotic relationship, because the K'Da must have a host or they die within six hours.

There are some nifty SF ideas in the book, including some stuff involving dimensional perception, but Zahn keeps the technobabble from overwhelming the story and characters (too bad he never wrote for Star Trek…), and in typical Zahn fashion, he keeps the story moving constantly. This is a zippy read, the kind of short and fun adventure that can really be refreshing to read. If you have a young reader in the family or you know one, here's an SF book that they will enjoy. And if you're an adult reader who needs something light and fun, this is a good choice.

A couple of provisos:

:: Dragon and Thief is the first book of a series, so not all plot threads are resolved. It ends with the kind of "open-ended closure" that you find at the conclusion of each Harry Potter book, so don't expect a total ending.

:: This book has one horrible cover. Really. I hope they get a new painting for the paperback, because the hardcover is ghastly. I seriously doubt I would have given the book a second look if I didn't know who Timothy Zahn is.

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Was there ever such a thing as an MP2?

I've started experimenting with digital music on the computer over the last couple of weeks. I've been burning some of my favorite film music CDs onto the hard drive, and then listening to the resulting tracks on the headphones while I write. I have to admit that it is a pleasurable way of doing things. It's fairly nifty to be able to just use a couple of mouse-clicks to bring up a certain track, if that's what I want to hear. But I still can't see MP3s ever being my main, preferred means of listening to music.

First of all, they simply don't sound as good as the CDs. I use MusicMatch Jukebox to rip and play, and I rip my MP3s at the highest available rate (160kbs), and even I - - as a relatively low-level audiophile - - can hear a noticeable dropoff in sound quality. They sound "good enough", certainly; even "pretty good" and in a few cases, "pretty darn good". But not as good. Secondly, the ad slogan used to be "Rip. Mix. Burn." Well, I have never been one to "mix"; as I've noted many times before, I am primarily an album listener, so the whole "mixing" aspect isn't that big a deal to me. I prefer to spend extended periods of time in a musical artist's sound world, and one thing that worries me about the "Death to the CDs! Distribute everything digitally! Download your songs, and never darken the doors of a music store again!" crowd is the forcing of a Smorgasbord approach to music upon everyone.

Finally, there's a minor technical issue that's plaguing me. My MusicMatch player does a brief pause between tracks in a playlist, which seems perfectly normal, but there are times when that pause should not be there. This manifests itself, in fairly ugly fashion, in my playlist of the extended score to The Phantom Menace, in which long swaths of John Williams's score are broken into fairly short tracks that play continuously on a CD player but which have audible pauses when played from the hard drive. This drives me crazy, and unless there's a way to get tracks to play seamlessly, this means that I simply won't be able to listen to a fair number of classical music works on my computer, because it's not at all uncommon for classical recordings to have one long, unbroken work recorded as a number of shorter tracks that are to play without pause. I am not going to listen to Richard Strauss's longer tone poems on my computer if I have to put up with myriad one-second breaks. Ditto Wagner's operas. Or Mahler's symphonies. And so on. (Now, if there's a way to disable this feature or work around it, let me know and I'll retract what I've said here.)

And that's to say nothing of the whole "digital versus physical" media issue from a preservation standpoint, except to note that I'd almost bet money that ten or fifteen years from now I will still be able to listen to my CDs, but MP3s will be as useless as those old 5-inch floppy disks from the Apple II/Commodore 64 era. The whole MP3-thing is a neat addition to the music pot, but I don't think it can support the whole dish without changing the dish so radically that I'm not even sure I'd want to continue consuming it.

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Friday Burst of Weirdness

Actually, I'm not at all sure how "weird" this is -- it's just one of those cultural differences. Anyway, when one reads a lot of cookbooks and food history, a theme one quickly detects is that foods of necessity in one era eventually become foods of delicacy for the next. Case in point: In Cambodia, spiders are a gastronomic delight.

As I note, this is really more of a cultural difference; I'm sure there's some staple of American diet that the spider-munching Cambodians would find nauseating. But it was a slow week for weirdness online, so that's what I'm going with. Bon appetit!

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I could have SWORN that "Stillwater" was a real band!

I watched the film Almost Famous the other day, and I really enjoyed it. Films about rock music have a tendency to go overboard with their sense of the cosmic importance of it all; or, on the other hand, they can err too far on the other side, which if you're intending to make a comedy like This is Spinal Tap is fine, but if you're not, well, it can kill you.

This is a film that explores the lifestyle of a touring rock band that hasn't quite yet made it, and its effect on a young man just entering this world. With the film's endless bus rides, the strange groupies who make this band the center of their existence, the odd doings at various concert venues, and the occasional forays into sex and "what it all means", I suddenly realized after watching it that Almost Famous is actually Bull Durham, but about minor-league rock-and-roll instead of minor-league baseball. Cameron Crowe (who wrote and directed) brings the same sense of affection for the subject matter to Almost Famous that Ron Shelton did to Bull Durham, with much of the same effect: one realizes, watching this film, that there are entire lives being lived in the rock music world that only once in a while, and very briefly, come into contact with the rarefied air of the Led Zeppelin's and the Rolling Stones of the world.

The story is inspired by Cameron Crowe's own life. A 15-year old boy named William Miller somehow gets Rolling Stone Magazine to give him an assignment: get an interview with up-and-coming rock band "Stillwater". Through a long line of delays and stalling efforts, though, William ends up actually joining the band on its tour through the United States, during which he often calls his mother to tell her he's OK. (She is very worried about him; she completely distrusts the rock music world and at every interaction tells her son, "Don't take drugs". Good detail there: a lesser writer would have used the more commonly-known construction "Don't do drugs".) And along the way, William falls in love with a groupie who goes by the name Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson, who may be the most luminous person on earth today), who is already in love with Russell (Billy Crudup), the band's guitarist, who is in turn a guy whose heart is in the right place but nevertheless continually blunders and mistreats people.

Almost Famous is a virtual study in naivete. William is naive about pretty much everything; Penny Lane carefully constructs an air of wisdom about her, but it is eventually exposed as pure sham; William's mother is naive in her exclusively-negative view of the rock world; Russell is naive about pretty much all of his interactions with others; et cetera. The movie conveys a world in which everybody is wise about some things and totally clueless about others, and the only real difference is in the way some people's areas of cluelessness are more disastrous than others.

I've read a few reviews of Almost Famous since I watched it, and I've read some that take the view that Crowe's depiction of the rock world is too positive, and that the film is lacking in "edge". I don't know about that -- I can sort of see their point, but I suspect that Crowe adopted this tone purposely, because he's a guy who has made it big from pretty much the beginnings that we see for William. I just don't think that extra "bitterness" would help this movie; in fact, it would add a certain false note, a kind of "If I knew then what I know now" quality that's not always appropriate, because not every lesson needs to be learned in the manner that one learns not to touch a hot stove.

Now, if Cameron Crowe ever wants to make a movie about that period in rock history that does have more edge to it, all he has to do is make an entire film about rock critic Lester Bangs, who shows up as a supporting player in Almost Famous (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Now there is a movie I'd like to see.

(Incidentally, I'm now dipping into the book Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. This guy was fascinating. You can tell a good writer when they captivate you while writing about music groups one knows nothing about.)

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Move Over Britney

Yes, it is once again time to stroll down Britney's Talent Being Eclipsed Lane. This time I'm reaching a bit, just because I've only seen this woman work in the dozen or so episodes of Buffy that I ever watched during the show's run, and thus I am working from a small sample size. But I like her looks and smile and I enjoyed her character on the show. So she makes the cut: Alyson Hannigan.

Labels: ROWR

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Oh, yeah, THAT movie!

Here are a few films that I've always liked, and yet I don't see mentioned all that often in various forums or in real-life. They're the kinds of movies that sit on the shelves at Blockbuster, unloved, or tucked away a safe distance from the "New Releases" at your local Media Play. They might even be in the bargain bins....but they're actually really good movies that deserve to be seen more than they are.

:: Real Genius. The ultimate "Science nerds in college" movie, with some of the best dialogue I've ever heard. It features Val Kilmer before he became a really big name as a brilliant college physics student who has slacked off into eccentricism, top secret government defense schemes, gonzo practical jokes that only the Physics Nerds could come up with (such as using a quarter-sized slice of frozen nitrogen to get pop out of the vending machine), and more.

:: Top Secret! Another early Val Kilmer movie, made by the producers of the Airplane and Naked Gun movies. You can't dislike a movie that lampoons World War II espionage flicks and includes a cameo by Peter Cushing as a Swedish bookseller with a horribly misshapen eye.

:: Dead Again. A thriller with supernatural overtones, a witty script, and a half-dozen "Gotcha!" revelations along the way. It's also one of those thrillers that's fun to immediately watch again after you see it the first time, so you can reinterpret all of the early stuff in the light of the secrets unveiled later on. This is my favorite Kenneth Branagh movie. (Patrick Doyle's score is a barnburner, too.)

:: Grand Canyon. This is a powerful drama about a circle of people from disparate walks of life in Los Angeles. Their lives intersect in surprising ways, and each person in their own way feels that not-uncommon modern sense of life spinning out of control.

:: The Man Without a Face. Since I keep getting hits for people looking for explanations of Dead Poets Society, allow me to plug this film again, which is a far better movie about the student-teacher dynamic. Leave the "Robin Williams angling for an Oscar" movie on the shelves and watch this one instead.

:: Broadcast News. I haven't seen this one in far too long. I have no idea how accurate its portrayal of TV news may be (although Aaron might -- care to weigh in?), but I really dig the interplay of the lead characters. To this day, the line "A lot of alliteration from anxious anchormen placed in powerful posts!" is one of my favorite lines in a movie of all time.

:: Far and Away. OK, this may qualify more as a "guilty pleasure" than an actual good movie. It's the kind of story you'll find in numerous versions in the Romance section at Borders, but so what? It's engaging and fun, and it's got one of John Williams's most underappreciated filmscores.

:: Hear My Song. Here's a movie about a shady Liverpool concert promoter. How shady is he? Well, he spreads the word that Frank Cinnatra will be playing his club. (Hey, it's not his fault if it sounds the same as the other guy!) And he constantly appeals to older Brits for help by saying things like, "I grew up in peacetime. I haven't seen what you've seen!" Anyway, this guy ends up going in search of a legendary singer who fled England for tax reasons. I really can't describe the plot any farther than that, except to say that this is one of those movies that leaves you totally satisfied. You have British humor, Irish singing, con games, and two tender love stories. Next time you're looking for a "date movie", check this one out. Trust me. (Trivia note: the lead is played by Adrian Dunbar, who would later play Senator Bail Organa in The Phantom Menace -- but his scenes were either cut or not filmed, and the role was recast for Jimmy Smits in Attack of the Clones and, presumably, Episode III.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Phaistos Disc.

This strange object was unearthed in the ruins of the ancient city of Phaistos, in Crete, in 1908. Numerous mysteries surround the Disc's origin and meaning, which has apparently not yet been conclusively deciphered. (Claims of deciphering have been advanced, with some claiming the Disc's writing is a prayer, while others maintain that it is a mathematical proof. Details here and here.) The Disc's nature is mysterious partly because no other similar artifacts have ever been found, and because the nature of the characters inscribed on the Disc -- showing little, if any, variation -- imply that the Disc may actually have been "struck" as an example of ancient typography. The Disc dates to 1700 BC.

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Hey, if I mash the red and blue pills together, what happens when I take the resulting purple pill?

Nefarious Neddie is continuing his crusade to explain The Matrix. Check it out, those who want to know why Agent Smith seems to really like charcoal-gray.

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Blogging Rule #85

If you gotta wait two months between posts, make it good when you return.

Of course, this seems to stand in contrast to Rule #43, which reads: "If you're good at blogging, don't wait two months between posts".

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Oh! Make him stop! That Rall guy is such a pistol!

Via The Modulator I see an article by Ted Rall that's pretty breathtaking. Reading it, I can certainly imagine the arteries that are just a-poppin' at places like LGF and that Rottweiler guy. I'm sure they're taking it as a "This guy wants Americans to die!" type of thing, but I don't think that's quite what Rall is saying: rather, I think he's trying to make the case that Iraqis really want Americans to die, and thus, we should get out of Iraq immediately. He's using a provocative viewpoint to illustrate his belief that Iraqi resistance is likely to get more focused and more energetic, that American forces are likely to face a more and more difficult road, et cetera. Basically Rall's piece is saying, again very provocatively, that we're headed toward a full-bore quagmire. Agree with that message or not -- and I don't, entirely (although I think the possibility for "quagmire" exists in greater likelihood than the Administration and its supporters admit) -- I don't think this piece supports a reading that implies Rall's delight in American soldiers dying.

Generally, I'm not a fan of Ted Rall's: I think he tends to strive for provocation for provocation's sake; his views are so far to the left that his starting point often seems to be an assumption of Hitler-like evil on the right; his cartoons and writings often strike me as the rhetorical equivalent of that Monty Python sketch with the two "Great White Hunters" who use high-tech artillery to kill tiny animals ("We use an AK-47 to kill mosquitoes. Now, some people ask why we don't just use a flyswatter. Where's the sport in that?"). Plus, I just plain don't like his artwork. And even if I think that Rall is making an argument here that isn't quite what the LGF crowd thinks he is, and even if I think that he's merely using a rhetorical device known as "changing the viewpoint", I think it shows some pretty poor taste in writing a piece like this for the general consumption on Veterans' Day.

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Two days late, two dollars short, etc.

Tuesday was the Space Waitress's birthday. I hope it was happy.

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Gentlemen, start your twenty-siders!

Scott of The Gamer's Nook wants to take a leaf from "National Novel Writing Month" (or, NaNoWriMo) and do something called International Game Design Month, during which people who like role-playing games (or, RPGers, for short) would spend the month designing a world from scratch, or something like that. He wants to do this in January, which I've always thought would be a better month for NaNoWriMo anyway, given that January doesn't have anything in it like Thanksgiving Weekend. If you're an RPGer and you've been meaning to do some game design, drop by Scott's blog and discuss it. Imagine thousands of gamers worldwide, embracing their inner Gygaxes....

(I did some RPG stuff in college, strictly AD&D, and I've never done anything with it since. But at least I can still tell you what "THAC0" means.)

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For 2004, I nominate Gray Davis!

I'm not sure how I missed this, or forgot to note it here, or what. But there is such a thing now as the Robot Hall of Fame, and one of the inaugural members is none other than everybody's favorite garbage-can shaped Swiss-army-knife from a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2!

The Robot Hall of Fame seeks to enshrine both robots from science fiction and robots from real life, which is pretty cool. I do quibble a bit with their induction of the HAL-9000, whom I've always thought of more as a computer than a robot. But I'm not on the selection committee, so my opinion matters for naught.

Anyway, here's hoping for the future enshrinement of such wonderful robots as Robbie, the Iron Giant, and the Terminator(s). I'm not sure if C-3PO warrants induction on their criteria, but I'm pretty much convinced he should be there. He did, after all, manage to sway the Ewoks to the Rebels' side, thus allowing them to take out the shield generator and basically win the whole thing. Or something like that.

I suspect, though, that the whole "Robot Hall of Fame" exercise should be shut down if they ever come round to inducting this robot.

(Link via Aaron.)

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Nope, not funny.

Matthew Yglesias points out a British political cartoon that's not funny. I mean, it's really not funny. See for yourself. This cartoon is a one-panel clinic in how to not be funny: make your joke so obscure that your point is undecipherable, engage in caricature for no particular reason, and invoke the dead, just for starters. Wow.

Matthew makes the point that a lot of times when people say, "I don't think this cartoon is funny" what they're really saying is, "I don't agree with the political viewpoint being expressed here", which is probably true in a vague and general sense. But there's a lot of political cartooning I don't find funny on the liberal side, and the only conservative political cartoon I personally know of -- that Ramirez guy, who I believe cartoons for the LA Times -- I actually do happen to find funny on occasion. Those are probably exceptions that prove the rule, though. I'm not sure if I have a point, so I'll stop now.

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Wind. Lots and Lots of Wind.

Winter appears to be arriving in Buffalo today, in the form of an incredibly windy storm that's also packing some snow, although the wind is such that right now there is virtually no chance of snow actually accumulating. Thus it begins.

UPDATE: Now, six hour or so after I wrote that post, the winds have slackened a bit, thus allowing the snow to begin accumulating. The amount isn't such that it can be meaningfully described in terms of inches, yet, but it may get there. But hell, after spending last winter in Syracuse (which gets significantly more snow than Buffalo), I'm ready. Bring it on!

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Building a Better Party

A really rich guy is basically giving a lot of money to the Democrats. This is a very welcome development. Something that's been bothering me in recent years is what I've come to call the "Assumption of eventual victory" attitude of liberals: it's the idea that our views are just plain right, goshdarnit, and since the truth always wins out, all we have to do is wait for the people to come 'round to our way of thinking and sweep all those wrong-headed conservatives out into the street. Thus we end up with lackluster candidates who basically "play defense". Matthew Yglesias pointed a form of this out last week, as did Morat. It's quite a problem, and it represents a dilemma I've been stewing over for a while: What is more important to me as a liberal? Is it beating George W. Bush in 2004? Or is it starting the longer, harder work of pushing the debate in America back toward the left, even if that possibly means taking a huge one on the chin next November?

I am thinking here of the 1964 election, when the Republicans sent Barry Goldwater to his doom against Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater got blasted out of the water. The election was not even remotely close, and it seemed that liberalism was ascendant once again. But in the wake of the 1964 campaign, Republicans started the long process of gathering future voices for their party (including a fellow named Reagan), and basically laying the ideological groundwork for the eventual conservative era that began in 1980 and reached its current high point starting in 2000. So what's more important? Preventing any more damage (as I see it) from this President, or working now to ensure a "New Liberalism" in 2020 or so that will hold sway for several decades? I'd love to see a Democratic President take office on January 20, 2005; but I also want to stop "holding the line". I want to see Liberals discuss things not in terms of "stopping the bleeding" or "preventing any further damage", but in terms of enacting what we believe. What scares me is the prospect of getting beat in 2004, and having liberals basically go to sleep again until 2008.

So I think it's time for Liberals to start doing some heavy lifting. We need to fix our own ideological infrastructure and get some arguments; we need to stop waiting for the country to wake up and see the natural goodness of our positions. And if we do get blown out next year (which I emphatically do not believe is a "given"), let's make damned sure we do it in such a way that gets the fires burning again. This means being proactive in shaping the debate and concentrating on winning local, grass-roots elections with good, articulate candidates -- two things the Republicans have been really good at doing for a number of years now, and two things the Democrats have not.

(Demosthenes has more thoughts on Soros.)

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Workers of the world....

I've been stewing for a little while over a few comments I've seen in various blogs and comment-threads, such as in Kevin Drum's recent postings about a strike of supermarket workers in California. (Additional posts by Kevin here, here and here.) I don't want to comment on the whole vagaries of the strike and the various unionization issues involved, but what has got me worried is the tenor of some comments I've seen. Specifically, statements like this (rough paraphrases; I'm not looking up specific quotes here):

"Jeez, how much do we want to pay unskilled labor, anyway?"

"Go get yourselves a college education, and then we'll talk about health care."

I find these kinds of thoughts enormously disturbing, and I've been reading a bit more about low-wage workers. Right now I'm on a book called The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, and it's quite the eye-opening volume. It's more of an academic study of the low-wage part of our economy than, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: it covers some of that territory, but it also gives a lot of numbers backing up the problems faced by our nation's low-wage workers. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the book, but so far the most valuable stuff I've found here is the demographic information about low-wage workers and the jobs they hold. Here's a hint: low-wage workers are older, whiter, and better educated than the general stereotype implies.

:: Forget "flipping burgers". Fast-food jobs constitute less than 5% of low-end jobs.

:: Teenagers hold 7% of low-wage jobs.

:: A majority of adults who hold low-wage jobs also have families.

:: Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers are white.

:: While blacks and Latinos constitute a minority of low-wage workers, they are represented in the low-wage workforce by a greater percentage of their overall workforce than are whites (31.2% of blacks and 40.4% of Latinos, versus only 20% of whites.)

:: Women constitute 60% of the low-wage work-force.

:: Three-quarters of those women are white. (But again, blacks and Latinos are overrepresented here.)

:: 40% of low-wage workers have a high school diploma, 38% have some post-secondary education, and 5% have a college degree.

I found all those stats useful in reminding myself that low-wage workers aren't stereotypes; they're real people working real jobs, facing real problems. Too much of our rhetoric seems to completely forget that, as in the two representative comments above: Do we really want only the college-educated to have access to affordable health care? Do we really view these people as lacking skills:? Do we really not see the rank elitism inherent in such views of the people who are, after all, a giant part of our economy?

Show me an unskilled and uneducated worker, and I'll show you a worker. In fact, I'll go you one better: I'll show you a worker who isn't unskilled, but a worker whose skills are underrecognized and undervalued by a society that sometimes seems to equate "skill" with "number of diplomas". It's a curious thing that we should build our economy around the efforts of these people and the jobs they work, and then look down our noses upon them while they're working.

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Shorter Kim Du Toit

If you're smart, then screw you, because my essay was meant only for people as dumb as me.

(Link)

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The "Heart of Stone" Test

Read this Patrick Nielsen Hayden post, and then see if your eyes are tearing up. If not, you are either heartless or Klingon (because they have no tear ducts).

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No! You can't make me devolve! I won't be a microbe again!

I pay attention to my ranking in the TTLB Ecosystem on a daily basis. (Right now, I'm a Marauding Marsupial.) Yeah, that sounds kind of anal and geeky; after all, the Ecosystem merely tallies the number of member blogs in the Ecosystem that link to your own blog, and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with actual readership. (It can get a little disheartening to check Sitemeter, see that I've had a lot of hits, and then upon checking the referrals discover that they're all Google search hits.) But it only takes about ten seconds to check the Ecosystem rankings, they're only updated once a day (so checking it a bunch of times throughout the day would be stupid), and it is a fun way to track the growth of one's blog, much like the Technorati Link Cosmos.

But now, I see via Lynn Sislo that some kind of folderol is going on in which some blogger or group of bloggers is involved in collusion to drive up their own rankings (details here and here). This is, as Lynn and the Bear note, a rather silly exercise that is really unlikely to generate traffic, if that's what the participants are intending. Believe me, I know: I check my hits any number of times throughout the day (again, geeky and all, but also again, it takes all of five seconds), and frankly I can't remember the last time I got a hit off the Ecosystem page. And for those bloggers in the top 100, they're there because they have so many inbound links that this is how they generate traffic. Trying to artificially "move up" in the Ecosystem really isn't likely to pave the way to huge traffic and respect in Blogistan. It's the blogging equivalent of all those people who think that success in writing is a function of having the right agent, knowing the right people, or getting Stephen King (or Steven Den Beste) to read your manuscript and give it the green light to the folks on the inside.

Yes, I have done a massive-link post as a way of giving a fellow blogger a "boost" in the Ecosystem; in fact, I did it a couple of weeks ago, on Morat's behalf, but I think it was pretty clear that I was doing that as a one-time throw-away thing (and more importantly, because I really do think that Morat runs a fine blog that could do with more readership). And yes, I know that it can be frustrating to blog one's heart out and have the posts-of-wisdom go unnoticed by the SDB's and the Atrios's and the Reynolds's of the world. What's even more frustrating is when I, having blogged for nearly two years now, see someone from Kevin Drum's comments section start their own blog and get a front-page mention on his on their "launch day", which almost immediately sends their traffic surging higher than what I've managed to build in two years with no such connections. But them's the breaks.

Just a few more random thoughts about the Ecosystem and such:

:: I pretty much agree with everything the Bear writes, except for his rather ham-handed attempt to describe the whole "League of Liberals" scheme in the light of liberal politics. It's a goofy scheme, but let's not try to make it into some larger lesson about liberals in general.

:: Here's something weird: when I glanced briefly at the League of Liberals blog, I decided to check their Sitemeter, at the bottom. Strangely, the Sitemeter on the League's blog doesn't link the League's Sitemeter stats; rather, it links the stats of a blog called Rush Limbaughtomy, which in turn has five Sitemeter links at the bottom, one of which actually is for the League. What is the point of doing all that?

:: Finally, a brief thought on the Ecosystem's functionality. I don't know anything about such things, so maybe it would be too difficult for this to be done, but perhaps the rankings might be more accurate if "dead blogs" could be somehow weeded out. To cite my favorite example, William Burton's blog has not been updated in ten months, so should blogs he linked way-back-when still get credit for those links?

UPDATE: Well, on the first of my "additional thoughts" above, where I take the Bear to task for trying to draw some lesson about liberalism from all this, it turns out that he was actually responding to one of the Conspirator's attempts to do the same. Guess I should have, you know, "read the whole thing". Yeep!

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Veterans' Day

Someday I must make it to Arlington National Cemetery, where so many veterans now rest.



Thanks to all veterans, from all wars.

And for those interested in Armistice Day, the precursor to Veterans' Day, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has enough linkage to happily explore for days.

"We were together since the War began.
He was my servant -- and the better man."

(Rudyard Kipling)

(Arlington link via Lynn Sislo.)

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Ewwwwwwwwww....

Last night's Monday Night Football game had the Philadelphia Eagles visiting the Green Bay Packers at Wisconsin's historic Lambeau Field. Now, anyone familiar with the upper Midwest knows that the "brat", or bratwurst, is one of the major food groups. These wonderful sausages are grilled and then consumed in a roll, preferably with brown mustard. A lot of folks like to further supplement them with sauerkraut, which is -- well, it's not my favorite thing. I love meat that's been cooked in sauerkraut, but the 'kraut itself is not my cup of tea.

Well, apparently the concessions folks at Lambeau field go through a lot of bratwurst, which in turn means that they go through a lot of sauerkraut -- so much so, that at one point ABC's telecast cut to a shot of two guys standing in what appeared to be a giant vat, wearing hip-waders and using pitchforks to transfer what looked like a ton (literally) of sauerkraut from a tractor-pulled wagon into the vat. I can only imagine what that smelled like.

UPDATE: Apparently, what they were showing wasn't some "Sauerkraut Loading Dock" at Lambeau Field, but a factory where the stuff is made. Leave it to a Vikings fan to set me straight about something in Packer-land!

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Ah, that's better!

The news isn't all bad, though, for lovers of fine blogs and fast cars and....well, fine blogs. A longtime commenter and reader of mine, Michelle, has finally succumbed to my ever-increasing pressure and launched her own blog, Apprentice Contrarian. What to say about Michelle? Well, she loves Guy Gavriel Kay and Star Wars, and she already has a few intelligent posts up with many to come. Go, read, link.

As Victor Laszlo said, "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win." And in the immortal words of Socrates, "I drank what?"

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Geez, and still emptier....

OK, I hope Sheila didn't start a mass-exodus or something. Now Holly Lisle is abandoning her Blogistan homestead as well. Holly was never my favorite writer/blogger -- her politics were so far from mine I couldn't really bridge the gap in thought -- but her writing-stuff is largely superb. Best of luck to her, too.

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Blogistan seems emptier this morning....

I don't recall when I started reading Sheila's blog, StarLines, or how I found it. I know that it was fairly early on in my own blogging "career", and I suspect that it was pure serendipity on my part -- just clicking on one of those "Recently Published" blogs listed on the Blogger main page, perhaps. But since then, she's been a daily read of mine, nearly every morning, providing not just inspiration for this writer-in-progress (a better term than "aspiring writer", because dammit, a writer writes and I'm writing) but a look at what life is really like for the "working stiffs" who don't generate King or Rowling or Grisham-like first press runs. She's been a daily reminder of the work.

Until now.

Sheila has sadly decided to hang 'em up and concentrate on those pesky books and stories and whatnot, and while I can't quibble with her decision -- well, I can quibble with it, but hey, what's the use? -- I hope she'll at least consider a sporadic "Hey, wish you were here" type of post, like that blank postcard Red gets from Andy at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. (I also hope that the whole "Luddite" thing didn't end up being the final grain set on the side of the balance that was leaning toward "Quit blogging".)

Anyway, Sheila, best of luck, and I'll try to track down as many of your books as I can (you're not making it easy, what with eight pseudonyms spread across eleven genres!). I hope you'll continue to drop by here once in a while -- especially on that inevitable day when I finally post news of my first sale. Otherwise, I might just have to start up some underground rumors that you're attending SF conventions again. Who knows? Maybe in SF circles, "SL Viehl sightings" will take on an Elvis-like air of legend!

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Three Weeks....

....until the arrival of this small item in all your finer retail outlets:



Reviews here and here, the latter with sound clips. (Also, maddeningly, the latter makes at least one mistake: they identify the meter of the very first clip as being 3/4 time, which it is not: it is standard 2/4, duple time.

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A Service to my Readers.

I love you all, Dear Readers. You know that. But I feel that I must be honest with you, as only a true friend can be, so here goes:

You are inadequate. If you doubt me, go here, put in your age, peruse the results, and accept your cosmic inadequacy.

But it's all good, because the rub here is that I am cosmically inadequate too. (Among other things, I'm just four years shy of the age Mozart had reached when he shuffled off this mortal coil.) So remember Sturgeon's Law, folks: we're all in the lower 90%!

(via, who else, John Scalzi.)

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Heh. Indeed.

Via The Modulator I see the definitive takedown of Kim DuToit's incredibly stupid "Won't someone please think of the men!" string-o'-paragraphs. Not much to add, except to wonder if (a) Glenn Reynolds will ever read it, and (b) why don't I ever get linked by Atrios on the rare occasion that I write something penetrating and wise? Oh, woe is me....

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Stick a fork in 'em....

Yeah, I think that the Bills are done now. They're unlikely to make the playoffs now, after losing to the Cowboys yesterday 10-6. Strange thing is, I'm not sure how to react now. Sure, I could be a typical football fan and get all mad and stuff, but I don't much see the point: I'd already decided that the Bills faced an uphill battle to get to the playoffs, and that their current coaching staff just doesn't seem up to the task of mounting such an uphill battle. I think they'll finish with no better than a 9-7 record, and the division will go -- Lord help me -- to the Patriots.

Yesterday's loss was the type of loss that, had it happened in the first month of the season, wouldn't be discouraging, really. The defense played very well, the running game showed some life, etc. But after two months of sporadic offense and road-blowouts, the Pyrrhic victory of hanging tough with a good team on the road ain't much to get excited about. Thoughts:

:: OK, I'm finally starting to fall off the Drew Bledsoe bandwagon. Two lost fumbles and general ineffectiveness will do that. But also, it's November. Shouldn't that young offensive line be showing some improvement at pass-protection? Can't they ever pick up a blitz? If you're an offensive coach, and your quarterback is a guy whose effectiveness drops like a rock whenever the pocket collapses, wouldn't you do everything in your power to keep the pocket from collapsing?

:: Another game with just one sack of the opposing QB by the Buffalo defense. They have to get a passrusher in the offseason. It is a moral imperative.

:: And for Heaven's sakes, when are the Bills' defenders going to start catching the ball instead of deflecting it? By my count, they had at least two instances of plays where the defender would have been able to run unimpeded into the end zone had they merely intercepted the ball instead of knocking it down. Maybe the Bills' current defenders don't give up lots of yards, but I think back to the days of Kurt Schulz, Nate Odomes and Mark Kelso and I remember that if those guys were in a position to pick off the ball, they picked the damn thing off.

:: My complaint this week about Buffalo News columnist extraordinaire is this: he referred yesterday to "the Bill Parcells Myth". Now, I'm not sure if he meant this to suggest that Parcells is overrated, but I don't like Jerry so I'll charitably assume the worst. Bill Parcells is a damned genius, as far as I'm concerned. The guy's on his fourth franchise, he has taken over each team in a moribund state and propelled each of them to respectability. His Giants won two Super Bowls in five years. He took over a 1-15 Patriots squad and rebuilt them on-the-fly, getting them to the Super Bowl in three years. (They lost the game, but they played the Packers tough before finally bowing to a superior team.) He didn't get the Jets to the Super Bowl, but he got them to the AFC Championship Game in 1998. Now he's got Dallas at 7-2, and the last time the Cowboys were 7-2 was also the last year they won the Super Bowl. NFL history is studded with coaches who worked wonders with one franchise but couldn't translate their success to another franchise; Parcells has done it everywhere he's been. That's no myth. That's history.

Other football babbling:

:: When the season ends and the Bills are in the market for a new head coach, I hope they don't hire the Dolphins' Dave Wannstedt, who is almost sure to get fired now that the Dolphins' playoff hopes are flickering just a tiny bit brighter than the Bills's are. It was sure fun seeing the Dolphins get blown out yesterday, though. They're starting December a little early, aren't they?

:: Because San Diego beat the Vikings, I expect the small chorus of Bills fans who have never gotten over the misbegotten idea that Doug Flutie might have brought the Bills a Super Bowl victory to start singing again. Thanks, Vikes.

:: The Jets' receiver Santana Moss had the best touchdown of the day when he caught the ball and got wrapped up by an Oakland defender, who tried to spin him to the ground but only succeeded in spinning him around a full 360 degrees and basically giving him a speed-boost toward the end zone. This was the best missed-tackle I've ever seen.

Finally, here are the current divisional leaders, with my original divisional picks in perentheses:

AFC East: New England (Buffalo)
AFC North: Baltimore (Pittsburgh)
AFC South: Tennessee (Tennessee)
AFC West: Kansas City (Kansas City)

NFC East: Dallas (Philadelphia)
NFC North: Minnesota (Green Bay)
NFC South: Carolina (Tampa Bay)
NFC West: St. Louis (San Francisco)

Two out of eight. Ugh. And my pick for Super Bowl champs, the Bucs, look unlikely to even make the playoffs. Oh well.

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Recent History, revised.

(Warning: Politics Here)

I'd be a lot more confident about this whole Iraq thing if the various people in the Administration would say something like "Yeah, we were wrong in our expectations, but given the current problems here are our plans for getting things on track", as opposed to a whole lot of "Nope, we never said that"-type stuff.

Yes, you did say "Mission Accomplished".

Yes, you did say "They'll welcome us as liberators."

Yes, you did say "They pose an imminent threat."

Lord, I'm getting ever-so-tired of being told that the people whose operational policy is "Deny Everything" -- even stuff that can be looked up by anybody able to work the awesome technology that is Google -- are the ones who are "serious" about national security.

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Diego?!

OK, I'm not doing any research here, so maybe I'm completely off-base. If I am, and anyone can set me straight, feel free to do so. Here's my question:

Why the hell does Dora the Explorer need a little boy named Diego to hang out with?!

Is this some kind of marketing thing, where some suits looking at numbers decided that not enough boys were watching Dora the Explorer and thus advocated the addition of a male character? If that's the case, then shame on them. God, I wish we'd get out of this "Everything is demographics and everything's a sales pitch" morass our culture has fallen into.

Yes, I'm focusing my anger about modern American society on a Saturday morning kid's show. Ya got a problem with that?

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Classical Music: A Starting Point

A while back I was asked to provide some recommendations for people getting started in classical music, and I began by providing a "road-map" of sorts for your typical classical music section. And then, in my own indomitable fashion, I forgot about the whole thing.

Until now. [Insert rolling chords of portentous doom here]

The problem that comes up is mainly one of strategy. How should one enter the world of classical music? It's not that big a deal, really; there's nothing more daunting about making one's first real foray into classical music than there is about making one's first real foray into, say, poetry or sculpture or whatever else. But for some reason, a lot of times people take the wrong strategy for entrance, and thus classical music ends up overwhelming them. (Not unlike my high school's practice of tossing ninth-grade English students right into Shakespeare in the first two weeks of school. I've long been convinced that this practice more effectively kills any possible love of Shakespeare that might have otherwise developed.)

My own experience with classical music was fairly complicated: first of all, I loved film music long before I got into classical music in a big way, so I was at least passingly familiar with the ins-and-outs of an orchestra and the sound it makes. Also, my older sister was always into classical music as long as I can recall, so I was always hearing it in the next bedroom, even if I wasn't actively listening. And finally, I myself participated in the school band from fifth grade on, so I had some theoretical background in music before I got into classical in a big way. (This occurred roughly in ninth grade.)

So, I'm not sure how to present classical music to someone without similar background, someone whose exposure is significantly less than mine was at the time that I came to it. But for what it's worth, I tend to advocate not piling up collections of the "Old Warhorses" of the classical music literature in slapdash fashion, snatching up Beethoven and Bach and Mozart and Wagner just because they're, you know, the Old Warhorses. Instead I recommend that people begin their explorations with works heavy in both melody and drama and then branching out, often working backward. (And if you're really new to classical music, avoid any music described as "serial" or "atonal". Trust me. This kind of music is composed on a totally different set of assumptions from what you're used to, and you'll be right in the midst of "Shakespeare for thirteen year olds" again.)

So, I'd start with works like Rachmaninov's Symphonies and Piano Concertos; for the Symphonies, I would highly recommend Vladimir Achkenazy conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra (which are helpfully available in a two-disc budget package, last time I checked). In fact, I'd recommend Ashkenazy in general with regards to Rachmaninov. With Rachmaninov, you get shimmering orchestrations, sweeping melodies, and a good healthy dose of brooding Slavic character. From Rachmaninov, one can then branch out into contemporary Russians: Scriabin and Prokofiev, definitely, and then Shostakovich.

Then, staying with Russians, go to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. In the case of the latter, get a recording of Scherherazade. This is a spectacular symphonic suite inspired by The Arabian Nights, and its orchestration is guaranteed to amaze. Tchaikovsky is the greater of these two; here I'd recommend any (or all) of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies, along with the Piano Concerto #1 (actually, this work is probably a bit overexposed, but it's a good way to find out what concertos are all about) and the ballets. Don't bother with the ballet suites, get the entire ballets. And if you must, get a recording of the 1812 Overture (make sure you get digital cannons), and the Capriccio Italien, although neither of these are favorites of mine.

That's probably a decent start for now. If you're like me in that your interest in classical music is fueled somewhat by an appreciation for film music, taking the "Russians First Approach" might be the best way to make the transition from film music (which tends to be all melody-and-drama) to music where form becomes more important. It's about training the ear to listen to the orchestra and to attend to longer forms of music than one is accustomed to, but with the emphasis on drama and melody typically in the Russian tradition, I think a newcomer might be a bit less "at sea" as they begin their explorations. Of course, one can't stay with Russians forever; sooner or later, a person exploring classical music must grapple with the Germanic tradition, which is by far the mightiest current in all of classical music. So that's where I'll try to go next time.

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Must be the movies them kids is watchin' nowadays....

I don't read every review Roger Ebert writes, so I didn't initially check out his review of a film called Elephant, which is apparently inspired by the Columbine school shootings. But in the review, Ebert provides his own interesting rebuke to those who invariably want to blame such events on violent films. I'd be interested to see him develop his point farther. Or anyone, really.

(via This Century Sucks)

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Thanks, Guys!

The Astronomy and Sky Gods evidently felt a bit of guilt for clouding up the Buffalo skies during the remarkable instances of aurora borealis a week ago, so they made up for it last night by shooing every cloud away during the total eclipse of the moon. Watching the black shadow start to slide over the Moon is always a thrilling experience, and each time I see an eclipse I wonder how the ancient civilizations reacted to it -- a normal moonlit night gradually going dark, and then light again.

Here, by the way, is a recent Astronomy Picture of the Day that shows an eclipsed moon in the infrared spectrum. Very cool.

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New at GMR

I have two new reviews up at GMR this week: Caitlin R. Kiernan's novel Low Red Moon, and the album Somerset Sisters by Roots Quartet.

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Wrath of the Northmen

Via Neil Gaiman I see that worship of Thor, Odin, Loki and all the rest of the Norse pantheon has been recognized as legitimate religious practice in Denmark. Upon receiving the news, residents of England's northeastern coast put new locks on all their doors.

Additionally, the Danish government has seized all documents and publications relating to this guy, on the basis that they are now religious relics.

In related news, representatives of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins insisted that the author duo has no plans to write a series of turgid and boring books about Ragnarok.

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I don't want to know where he keeps the ice.

Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Particles, I think I've discovered just where Kim Du Toit, leader of the South African Expatriates Testosterone Brigade, gets his interior decorating supplies....

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Friday's Burst of Weirdness

Wherein I present the strangest thing I've found online this week: Mustaches for Peace!

Yup, they're growing mustaches to make a statement for World Peace. OK then….it's one thing to put a ribbon on your lapel for a cause, but something like this strikes me as a tad disingenuous, as if all the people who already have mustaches are somehow co-opted into the cause. (I don't have a mustache.)

When I was in college, the school's "Gay and Lesbian" support club decided to have a "Wear Blue Jeans for Gay Rights Day", which completely flummoxed me: not only do I not even own any blue jeans, so I wouldn't have been able to participate, but blue jeans are pretty much the uniform for college students. Why make your symbolic article of clothing something that most folks are going to wear anyway? That's like coming to Buffalo on January 15 and having "Wear a Parka to Save the Whales Day".

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Move Over Britney!

Joining my cavalcade of Women Who Crush Britney Like An Empty Beer Can is one of several actresses I'd consent to playing the lead in the inevitable movie of my novel-in-progress (to be directed by Peter Jackson, of course), Anna Paquin.

BTW, in the course of sifting through many photos of beautiful women for this recurring series, I'm struck by how many pictures there are of beautiful women not smiling. I like smiles, a lot. In fact, I've got to give Britney her due here: for someone I don't find remotely interesting, at least she seems to smile a lot.

Labels: ROWR

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If it's Sweeps Month, then "ER" must be killing off an older actor

As much as I love Bob Newhart, I must admit I'm getting tired of ER's habit of bringing in "elder statesmen" actor and actresses to play older people with long-term health problems. In addition to Bob Newhart going blind, we've had Alan Alda with Alzheimer's, James Cromwell dying of something (cancer, I think it was), Sally Field with bipolar disorder, William H. Macy losing his mojo, et cetera. But then, I think it would be funny if ER lasted, say, another twenty years; that way when the Med School class of 2023 is working County Hospital, George Clooney can come back and play Doug Ross on death's door.

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Putting the "Crap" in "Craptacular"

Writing has sucked for about a week now. It's not a blockage, so much as a scene that I can't seem to wrap my mind around. I thought I had it figured out, and I had about 600 words done in the scene Wednesday…but then yesterday, my Muse knocked on my door, pointed out the gross continuity error I was committing, and then whacked me on the knee with a crowbar before leaving again. Ugh.

(Yeah, I could just skip the tough scene and come back to it, but I just don't like to work that way.)

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The Life of an Iowan

Sean has decided to do something new: he's experimenting with autobiography in blog form, with a new blog called My Childhood In Iowa. Presumably the project will end when he gets to the momentous day that he met Yours Truly.

(Yeah, like he remembers that! I actually do remember meeting Sean, though, because he was one of the very first people I met in college outside of the little circle consisting of myself, my room-mate, and two guys across the hall. I'd have met a lot more people than that in the first days, but I missed out on all the "Freshman Orientation" stuff because of a summer job of mine. I was a counselor at a summer music camp that went so late that by the time I got to college for Freshman year, the Orientation business -- wherein the incoming Freshmen basically played a whole lot of "Get to know each other" games -- was pretty much over. If I recall correctly, I was supposed to get there on Wednesday before the first week of classes, but I actually arrived on Saturday evening. Not much of a loss, really; I've always had a tendency to clam up in situations that are specifically designed to force one to meet others. I prefer to get to know people in "real life", when they're far less likely to be "faking it".

Anyhoo, my chief memory of Sean is of him sitting in these incredibly-early morning philosophy classes as he issued sage proclamations whilst munching a bagel he'd snarfed from the Caf during our five-minute break halfway through class. My own proclamations were considerably less sage, which I attribute to my then-inability to function before 10:00 a.m. And with that, this post has crossed the line from "interesting anecdote" into "dull filler".)

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Matriculations

Those who have seen The Matrix Revolutions might want to check out Nefarious Neddie's take on the ending. Or they might not. One can never tell. (I read it, even though I haven't even seen Reloaded yet. Not that this means anything.)

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Worst List Ever!

As long as I'm catching up on all things Mickey, he directs my attention to a BBC list of the worst films ever. I confess that I find it curiously refreshing to see such a list that does not include either The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones -- maybe the tide is turning on those two films! -- but still, I just don't get the continual backlash against Titanic.

The film's overall story arc is masterfully done; I love the way the mechanics of the sinking are explained right at the beginning of the movie, so that when we get to that point in the flashback, two hours later, we know exactly what's happening the whole way. The effects are wonderful, the pacing is good, and really, the love story isn't that bad -- unoriginal and clunky at times, yes, but it's not bad. Plus, given that Titanic is the most wildly successful film ever, doesn't its placement on a list like this imply that the masses who propelled it to that status (and let's not pretend it attained that status solely on the backs of preteen girls in need of a Leonardo DiCaprio fix) are a bunch of dolts?

I don't have any comment on the other films on the list, the ones of which I have seen I readily admit really are bad. I do note, however, that to this day I find Highlander actually worse than its sequel, merely because I saw the first one expecting a good movie, a state of affairs that did not exist when I saw the second one.

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Heavens, how did I forget about that guy?

Every so often I'll spontaneously realize that I've completely forgotten about someone on my blogroll, and I'll immediately visit and catch up on all the good stuff there. Case in point: the Short Fat Guy. Anyway, check him out -- especially his spoiling of the very last shot of The Matrix Revolutions. I guess the small number of people in the theaters who scratch their heads and say, "I don't get it", are Mac users.

0 hath spoken!

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Over One Thousand Served!

A short while ago, some intrepid person named "Joy" left the one-thousandth comment on this blog. For this high honor, Joy receives...well, nothing. I just thought it was cool. (No, I'm not the one counting. The YACCS control panel has a counter on it.)

The lucky comment was an addition to -- what else? -- the "Luddite" thread, occasioned by this post, and can be read directly here. Incidentally, that comment thread is without question the most substantive comment thread ever achieved here; usually when my comment threads go beyond six or seven comments, it's because Nefarious Neddie and I have fallen headlong into banter.

BTW, Sheila, I now count two people who (a) disagreed with your position, but (b) were sufficiently impressed with you that they plan to buy your books! How cool is that?

(Oh, and I'm sure that Darth Swank will be thrilled to know that he would have left the one-thousandth comment, as opposed to the 1001st, had he been just a bit quicker on the draw. Better luck next time!)

0 hath spoken!

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Voyager One spacecraft.

As Darth Swank notes, the spacecraft Voyager One is either leaving the Solar System or is about to do so. The border of the Solar System is generally defined as where the outgoing particles emitted by the Sun are no longer detectable and particles emitted by other stars take over. This border, called the "Heliopause", is roughly where Voyager One is now, although there is scientific disagreement as to whether the ship is actually at the heliopause or is merely approaching it. Anyway, Voyager will soon be in true interstellar space. The trajectories of both Voyager ships can be seen at this site

(And we don't need to worry about Voyager returning after being found by some aliens who can't be bothered to scrub off the name plate all the way. That fate is reserved for Voyager Six, not Voyager One. Also, rumors that Voyager Two discovered Iraqi WMDs stashed in solar orbit high above the plane of the ecliptic are completely unfounded.)

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Mostly Mozart, a Smattering of Smetana, some Brief Beethoven, but Rarely Rachmaninov

The other day I found a really good classical music review site: ClassicsToday.com. Check it out. It has an immense selection of reviews, and the search function is terrific: drop down menus that let you search not just by composer but also by genre and record label, so that if you wanted to, you could search for every review they've done of a Mozart opera recorded on the Deutsche Gramophon label. Very cool.

0 hath spoken!

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I love Canada!

Canada rules!

Why, you ask? Well, a bummer of late hereabouts is that since my family doesn't bother getting cable -- and we don't really miss it -- I can't watch The Daily Show, which is on Comedy Central. Oh well, we thought: the few things we would want to watch on cable, Jon Stewart's show being one of them, aren't enough to justify that expense.

BUT, living in Buffalo has as one of its perks the fact that we can receive a few Canadian broadcast stations. (We couldn't get these stations where we used to live in Buffalo, because our current apartment complex has wall-jacks that are connected to nice, big antennas somewhere, whereas in our previous Buffalo residence we used a set of rabbit-ear antennae.) And, one of those stations carries The Daily Show at midnight!

So, when I destroy the world, I may just spare Canada. Maybe. I'm undecided about Saskatchewan.

0 hath spoken!

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Darwin's Revenge

Kevin Drum has a pretty interesting example today of the press's increasing desire to avoid controversy not just by ignoring one side of an issue, but also by pretending that more division exists on a given issue than actually does. The issue at question is evolution, which is again in the news as the Texas School Board gets ready to pick textbooks or whatever it is they do. (This is an issue of national import because textbook publishers don't want to spend extra money to have one set of books for Texas and another for the rest of the country, so whatever Texas wants in its books, the rest of us get.)

The article Kevin links presents a profile of a "scientist by trade" who works in academia and, being an Evangelical Christian, disbelieves evolution -- the result being to create the impression that there is considerable controversy over evolution in scientific circles to this day. But then, Kevin points out the things the article's profile leaves out: that none of the guy's professional credentials involve biology, he doesn't actually have a degree in science at all, he's worked for Creationist organizations, and so forth.

The press likes to do this kind of thing: insist on covering both sides of issues that are actually pretty-close to one-sided. In this case, the scientific community is very much not divided on evolution, as this study (which I saw the other day via Pharyngula) demonstrates: In the United States, where Creationism is strongest by far, less than five percent of scientists in all disciplines disbelieve evolution. And when you actually look at the specific sciences relevant to evolutionary theory, that percentage drops to less than .15 %.

Say what you want about evolution versus Creationism, the simple fact is that a vanishingly tiny minority of scientists believe in it. It would be nice if the media would stop acting like this is a controversy in scientific circles, because it isn't.

(Dominion has more on the whole Texas textbook business.)

0 hath spoken!

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You can call me "Adlai"....

For reasons passing understanding, I spent some time noodling about right-wing and militant libertarian sites today (beyond the couple that I normally follow), and man, if the things I've read pan out, the Democrats are screwed. I mean, we have no chance in 2004 anyway, but now in the course of fighting the good fight we're likely to be just plain bad Americans. The end result of all this, of course, is that Democrats will go the way of the Whig party, resulting in apparently a big Republican party and a few other smaller parties (this from a guy who, although unenthused at the prospect of emboldened Republicans, thinks that the key to salvation for the Democrats is to sound like Republicans).

But maybe it'll all turn out good for the Democrats after all, since we all know women tend to vote Democratic and we're all turning into women. Or something like that. Boo-yeah!

(Now, I've just read the released transcript of the memo, and maybe I'm either dense or naive or just plain dumb here, but the memo specifically says this, about a third of the way through:

In that regard we may have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims. We will contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified.

Perhaps I'm misreading the stuff in the memo that comes afterward, where it refers to "intelligence issues" and whatnot, but the memo seems to imply that any inquiry along these lines will be based on intelligence that is already declassified. So, what's the big deal here?)

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More movies! We got more movies!

Michael Lopez put up his list of twenty movies since 1980. He's got a lot of good picks on there, a couple of which (The Shawshank Redemption, particularly) I'm now kicking myself for forgetting. He also has a few that baffle me (The Usual Suspects, The Thirteenth Warrior), but you can't have agreement in all things.

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Signs of Winter

Here in Buffalo, most of the trees are now bare, which actually makes for a brighter living room now that all the trees around our building aren't shading the sliding glass door in the living room. And the other day, the work crews were out installing the snow-plow markers: wooden stakes and steel rods, about four feet tall, whose purpose will be to show the plows where they should stop lest they demolish curbs and scrape the ground apart. Next, I suppose we'll have the installation of the ice boom in the Niagara River. In the words of House Stark, "Winter is coming...."

(BTW, those who understand that last reference might want to check out the sample chapter of A Feast For Crows that George R. R. Martin recently posted to his website, here. The bad news is that he still isn't done with the damn book!)

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Luddites Fight for the Right to be Quite Bright while eating Vegemite!

Wow, the whole "controversy" over the word "Luddite" marches on. (For those keeping score, it began here, and the latest comments can be found here and here.) I'd just like to offer a few thoughts on the whole rigamarole.

1. Firstly, for those who might not have AOL access but do have New York Times registration (it's free, yada yada yada), the William Gibson article that got under Sheila's skin can be read here. To sum it up, Gibson wishes that he could set up his computer to "color code" news stories, so that "outright lies" show up in Pistachio, "spin" in Sky-blue, and "misperceptions" in Plum. (Tellingly, he provides no color for what would be "the truth".) His last graf reads thusly:

Some people, I suppose, might complain that it took the fun out of guessing. Luddites!

I think that Gibson was trying to be funny here, as opposed to insulting. Of course, whether or not he is funny is purely a matter of opinion, but the joke probably fails completely if -- like Sheila -- you don't happen to know what "Luddite" means when you see it here. Plus, I can imagine that Sheila wasn't even in the mood to look up the punchline of a joke at all, given that the first graf of Gibson's piece, brief as it may be, is rather amazing in its stilted tone. I mean, this passage is just plain square, and to me it is Gibson screaming out: "Look at how hip I am, and look how I can talk like all the Cool Kids!" It renders the meat of the piece, his color-coding of news coverage, inert. It's as if Gibson is telling a joke that should begin with "A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar", and instead starts off with, "In the data-encryption havens off the coast of Connecticut, beyond the invisible line that only exists on maps to demark the limits of one nation's claim on the waters...."

So, we have a piece where Gibson is trying to be "cute", and not really succeeding; and then, to top it off, there's "Luddite" as the very last word. I begin to see how this all happened.

2. One of the commenters on Language Hat's post (link above) on this business issues a breezy dismissal of Sheila, because she was unable to get past Chapter Two of Neuromancer. Well, first of all, judging someone by the books they like is generally dangerous: it's precisely the kind of attitude that Sheila is complaining about in the first place, the "You're not worthy unless you read and admire this". And secondly, I'd have to be in that camp too. I think I tried to read Neuromancer no less than six times in the mid-1990s, when I was concerned with reading what I was supposed to be reading. I never got past the fourth chapter, and quite honestly, with the sole exception of Neal Stephenson I've never been able to finish anything in the cyberpunk subgenre of SF. This does not make me stupid, or "Luddite". It makes me a guy who doesn't like cyberpunk. I'm sorry, but for me, William Gibson's literary legacy consists solely of that great metaphor of his, where the sky is the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel. (Which, on my TV now, is a nice sky blue anyway, which I don't think is what Gibson was getting at.)

3. A lot of the commenters, both at Language Hat and at Sheila's blog, are aghast that Sheila does not profess a singular love of words. This is kind of hard, and I'm not sure I've got a total handle on it, but my reading of all this is that Sheila (and here I go, putting words in the mouth of someone who is eminently capable of doing it herself) values storytelling above all, and sees language as a means to that end. Now, for people who steep themselves in language and words and poetry and metaphor and theme and all those other wonderful things, a person whose primary interest is solely focused on "mere" storytelling seems like an odd entity indeed. Why, they must wonder, would anyone want to just tell stories, and not attend to all the other wonderments of literature? Well, maybe that's a fair question, but even if it is, so what? The idea that literature has to rise above pure storytelling to be worthwhile is pretty obnoxious, especially when it tends to lead to writers who completely abandon storytelling in favor of wordplay. Inadvertently, many of these commenters end up committing precisely the error that Sheila's complaining about in the first place: assuming that "mere story" is just something for the stupid hoi polloi. (Now, I don't necessarily agree with Sheila that "Luddite" is an example of coded language for that attitude, in this particular case, but I am one who has seen the word in play a lot, and yes, it really does get used that way a lot of the time.)

What I think Sheila finds troubling is not so much the idea that one shouldn't write for the masses, but that often "literary" writing exhibits a condescending view of the masses. Again, I'm not sure that's really what Gibson is doing in the piece in question, but I'm also not sure that a lot of the people who are arguing against Sheila are in fact arguing against the point she's actually making.

0 hath spoken!

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It's a boy!

David Letterman's kid was born, and as the title indicates, it's a boy. Congratulations, Dave! On the vanishingly rare chance that he reads this, I'd like to offer a few thoughts.

1. It's a baby. Don't try that "Will It Float?" game with him.

2. Ditto that game where you toss things off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that kids can't taste things until they are three. Remember this when you fall into the "But you loved peas when you were a baby!" trap.

4. You're raising a male, so if you're wondering how best to raise your baby into a real man, take careful note of this lengthy bit of rumination on manhood...and do the exact opposite. Please oh please.

I was going to try to come up ten of these, you know, for a "Top Ten" list. But then I got lazy. Enjoy the kid, Dave!

0 hath spoken!

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Quiz Time!

If you're just dying to take a quiz today, you can test yourself either on 80s song lyrics (via John Scalzi) or on horror literature (via Jessa Crispin).

As yet, I have taken neither quiz. Or maybe I have, and am simply too embarrassed to share my results. You be the judge.

0 hath spoken!

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What is "Real"?

Lynn Sislo, who's getting into the whole discussion of "Luddite", also says this:

It's funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real "real life." And there's another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of "real life" as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term "realspace" to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I've seen the word "meatspace" which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

She's right. I don't want to steal her thunder, since she mentions the possibility of a future post on this, but I don't get the whole separation of "online" stuff and "real" stuff -- or, like Lynn, I don't think of what I do online as any less "real". It's all real, to me; I just think of all the books I'd most likely have never read if I hadn't seen them mentioned online. Or the music I'd never have heard. Or the films I'd not have seen.

Just to give one example: my budding love of anime began when I saw Princess Mononoke. But why did I rent that film one night, four years ago? Because I already owned the score on CD and, loving the music dearly, wanted to see the film that accompanied it. But why did I already own the CD? Because I'd seen it glowingly reviewed a year or two before that, on one of the film music sites or forums I read. And the causal chain doesn't stop there, but goes back farther, and it keeps going on: for example, would I have started exploring other areas of Japanese culture (cinema, classical music, food) if not for my introduction to anime by way of a single film by way of a soundtrack CD?

What I do online informs my choices and offers directions for my "real" life that I'd be less likely to consider otherwise. I see no reason to separate the two, the "cyber" and the "real". And there I'll stop, before I start sounding like Morpheus in The Matrix.

0 hath spoken!

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Hey, what's them black bars on my TV!

For those Luddites (sorry Sheila, I couldn't resist!) out there who aren't up on such things, Terminus has a nice two-part explanation of widescreen video releases and their implication for TV. I'd disagree with him about the worth of widescreen being used on such shows as ER and The West Wing; I like the widescreen compositions, and I'm willing to have a smaller image on my TV to get a wider shot. But he provides a pretty good explanation of what's going on, including a reminder that not all movies should be shoehorned into widescreen aspect ratios (like Casablanca and Singin' In The Rain).

0 hath spoken!

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I hope he doesn't bring in the video for "Stupid Human Tricks"

I flipped over to The Late Show with David Letterman last night, to find Paul Shaffer behind the desk. It turns out that Letterman's significant other was in labor with their first kid. As of this writing, I'm not sure if the kid's been born yet or not, so here's hoping everything goes well and that the kid, when born, is healthy, has all his finger and toes, and is born with more backbone than, say, your typical CBS executive.

0 hath spoken!

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When Critics Attack

I've been keeping an old copy of Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion in the bathroom lately, because it makes good bathroom reading: just thumb through, find a review, read it, and then...well, you get the idea. Ebert's always been my favorite film critic, even though I only tend to agree with him about 70% of the time, and he's never better than when he's teeing off on a bad movie. A case in point is this hilarious first sentence to his review of some action movie called Money Train:

"Like a guy working two shifts, Money Train keeps slapping itself to stay awake."

That's almost as good as his contention that the first Charlie's Angels movie was "eye candy for the blind".

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Movies, we got movies....

Apparently a lot of folks are listing Top Twenty Movies Since 1980, and since I'm always on the prowl for stuff to post, here's my own list. (And to be fair, I'll confine myself to a single Star Wars movie.) In no particular order:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. The best of the Indiana Jones movies.

2. The Empire Strikes Back, 1980. Yeah, I personally rank A New Hope higher, but it came out in 1977.

3. Braveheart, 1995. Battle scenes galore.

4. Rob Roy, 1995. Even better than Braveheart, although the latter won Best Picture.

5. Pulp Fiction, 1994. A great film that spawned a lot of lame imitators, because those lesser filmmakers assumed that the film was remarkable for its jaded and hip tone and imitated that, without realizing that the film was really remarkable for its tight storyline and razor-sharp dialogue.

6. When Harry Met Sally…., 1989. Still my favorite romantic comedy.

7. Say Anything, 1989. The greatest teen romance ever filmed, period.

8. Beauty and the Beast. Disney's greatest film.

9. Bull Durham, 1988. The best baseball movie.

10. Princess Mononoke, 1997 (I think). My favorite Miyazaki film, although like every other blog post I've seen doing this, you could plug in any Miyazaki film at random here.

11. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. I flipped a coin between this and The Two Towers.

12. The American President, 1995. Lord, I love this movie.

13. Whale Rider, 2003. Wow. I literally just watched this one two nights ago. I'll have more to say about it later this week.

14. RAN, 1985 (I think). Kurosawa does King Lear. Stunning film.

15. Schindler's List, 1993. This is one of my "desert island" movies.

16. Amadeus, 1985 (guess). The best movie about classical music I've seen.

17. The Abyss, 1988. Still my favorite James Cameron movie. I prefer the Director's Cut, even though it takes the "preachiness" at the end a little too far.

18. Die Hard, 1988. This movie still gets the blood pumping.

19. Witness, 1985. Harrison Ford's best performance. I wish he'd get back to doing roles like that.

20. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982. Magnificent story, magnificently told.

There you go.

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We hates him forever!

The Pats won. Ugh.

I've previously established that I don't hold Bill Belichick as a great football coach, although he's a pretty decent one. Yeah, he's most definitely better than Gregg Williams, but George Halas, he ain't. Plus, he's the coach of my team's hated nemesis, the New England Patriots (of whose 2001 Super Bowl victory I will go to my grave thinking it was the most undeserved championship in sports history). But, I gotta give the guy at least this much credit: unlike many coaches in today's NFL, Belichick understands that sometimes the biggest factors in winning aren't scoring but time and field position. He showed this in last night's game against the Broncos, in which Belichick made a startling decision. Trailing by a single point and forced to punt the ball from his own end zone late in the fourth quarter, Belichick directed his long snapper to put the ball over his punter's head. The resulting safety extended the Broncos' lead to three points. Why willingly give up points?

Because, after a team gives up a safety, they have to kick the ball to the other team, but not from the end zone. Instead, they kick it from the 20 yard line -- which means that by giving up two points, the Patriots were able to put the Broncos into significantly less favorable field position. If they had merely punted, the Broncos would likely have had the ball in Pats' territory, and thus been able to move for a possible clinching field goal. Of course, they could have done this following the safety, but Belichick had to assume that his defense would be able to hold the Broncos -- which it did -- and then his own team would get the ball back in better field position than if they had held Denver to three-and-out after a normal punt.

I hate to say it, because I don't like the guy, but that was excellent football strategy on Belichick's part.

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The Roots of Anime

I've been meaning to link this for three days, and I've forgotten each day: Alexandra (the force behind the fine blog Out of Lascaux), who has been reposting her own oldies-and-goodies, has a fascinating post about anime and its roots in Japanese art. Anyone with an interest in anime should read this post.

(And Alexandra? If you want to write that book, write it. I'd read it!)

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Time for a round of "Pants On Fire"!

Sara Donati has an interesting blog about storytelling, which she has adequately titled Storytelling. She described an interesting exercise the other day, which I've done before. But when I did it, it wasn't part of a writing workshop or class, but rather one of those goofy games that managers like to do to start off meetings where people don't know one another. Usually I detest games like this, but this one appealed to me because it actually requires creativity.

What happened was this: During the standard "Go around the room and tell us your name and something interesting about yourself" phase of the meeting, we actually had to tell three things about ourselves. The catch, though, is that two of the three things were to be true, but one was to be false. And then the others in the group would try to quiz you and find out which was the false bit of biography. If you were good - - i.e., creative with a good eye for detail - - you could baffle the guessers.

This was easily the best "meeting icebreaker" I ever got to do, and I never thought of it as a writing exercise. Cool.

(Sara Donati, by the way, is the writer of a series of romance novels that my wife likes and which I've always been tempted to read. Maybe I will, this winter.)

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The Land where Giants and Colts and Dolphins play.

Often while watching football games on TV, I'll have to brief the Kid on which team we're rooting for and which team we want to lose, as you might expect. These discussions usually take the form of "the white guys" (i.e., the team in white or "road" jerseys) and then the "blue" guys or the "orange" guys or whatever color jersey the home team is wearing. OK?

So yesterday, after the Giants disposed of the Jets in OT, we cut to the Redskins and the Cowboys, not a game I really care much about, but it was the only late game we had, so that's what we watched. I informed her that we don't like the Cowboys, who were "the guys in the white shirts", or for short, "the white guys". Then she asks me about the other team, and I shrug and said the following (keep in mind that the Redskins' dark jerseys are brown in color):

"Well, yeah, we hate the Cowboys, but we don't really care about those brown guys much either, because they're the Redskins."

Now, there's a sentence I never thought I'd say. For a second I felt like I was a Klan member.

And now for some randomly collated thoughts about yesterday's football action....

:: The Bills, of course, were off yesterday, which accounts for my lack of rage and heart-palpitation this morning. In fact, the Bills had a good week even by not playing, because two of their three division rivals lost (the Jets and Dolphins, to the Giants and Colts respectively), and the third (the Patriots) could lose tonight when they play the Broncos. Thus, the idle Bills gained ground on one of the teams ahead of them and got some breathing room over the division cellar-dweller. Good news for everyone.

:: I suspect that Steve Spurrier's days in Washington may be numbered. The guy just looked totally bewildered yesterday against Dallas; he had no answers and nothing to offer while his offensive line, which might be the worst line I've ever seen, kept allowing young quarterback Patrick Ramsey to get tossed around like a rag-doll.

:: Readers who don't skip over my weekly football posts will recall that I've criticized the Bills for being too reliant on passing the ball in game-situations that would normally call for running it. This syndrome is sometimes referred to as "going pass-wacky", and it's a real thing. Buffalo News columnist Bob DiCesare had an excellent column in yesterday's paper about Bills' offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride, who, it turns out, has always been pass-wacky. It's a good column. Check it out. (A telling stat is that the Bills have faced third-down between the 20-yard lines 56 times this season, and they have passed on every one of them. Come on!)

:: Speaking of pass-wackiness, Tony Dungy and the Colts came perilously close to losing yesterday against the Dolphins because of it. Leading 23-17 with about three minutes to go, the Colts got the ball deep in Dolphins' territory. This was the perfect situation to just pound the ball on the ground, letting the clock run and forcing the Dolphins to spend their final timeouts before getting the ball back, on a day when the Dolphins hadn't been moving the ball consistently. (And if the Colts pound the ball on the ground and get a first down, the game's over.) But the Colts decided to go pass-wacky, which (a) doesn't grind enough time off the clock and (b) even worse can result in an interception, thus giving the Dolphins back the ball in the red zone. In this case, scenario B is exactly what happened: instead of running Edgerrin James up the middle (yeah, it was third-and-seven, but the clock is more important here), Peyton Manning goes back to throw and gets picked off. Dolphins' ball, at the 15-yard line, and if they score a touchdown and make the PAT, they probably win, unless they give Indy enough time to drive for a game-winning FG.

But maybe Tony Dungy knew what was going to happen. Maybe he looked across the field, spotted Dave Wannstedt on the Dolphins' sideline, and remembered that Wannstedt has put his own virtual trademark on "going pass-wacky". The Dolphins had all the time in the world to score the touchdown, they had Rickey Williams in their backfield...and yet, after rushing him just once, Wannstedt sends in a passing play. Dolphins QB rolls right, never sees Colts DE Dwight Freeney coming up behind him, gets sacked and fumbles the ball, which is recovered by the Colts. Game over. But then, what else to expect of Wannstedt, who in a low-scoring, tight game like this only had his offense run the ball 14 times in the entire game.

I don't care how good your defense is, Dolphins fans. Your boys aren't going to win the Super Bowl this year.

:: The Vikings have now fallen to defeat twice. My pick to win it all, the Bucs, are looking more ordinary with each passing week. I haven't checked the standings yet today, because I have the uncomfortable suspicion that not one team I picked to win a division is in the lead. Ugh.

Next week, the Bills travel to Dallas to take on the hated Cowboys. It's a must-win game (they all are, from this point on). Ought to be a good one. (I've pretty much become convinced that Bill Parcells is the greatest coach in football history.)

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Gypping the Gipper

Demosthenes brings up the subject of President Reagan and the Cold War.

I'm no fan of Reagan's, the original "family values" crusader whose own family was a train wreck, and the original "tax cuts are the solution to everything" President. Like Demosthenes, I've grown rather weary of the persistent habit of the American political Right to attribute any positive development in American life after January 20, 1981 to Reagan (which parallels their same habit of attributing any negative development since January 20, 1993 to Bill Clinton). And, like Demosthenes, I'm tired of the simplistic myth that has Reagan winning the Cold War single-handedly, by ratcheting up the rhetoric and the weapons-building, after the preceding seven Administrations had bumbled their way through four decades of appeasement, containment, détente, and other lackluster policies. Demosthenes is correct in noting that Gorbachev's rise to power was a far bigger factor in bringing about an end to the Cold War than is typically admitted, and may actually be a more important factor than anything Reagan did.

But I don't totally dismiss Reagan, though. For all the guy's inane "Evil Empire" blatherings when he took office, Reagan at least was able to recognize the opportunities a guy like Gorbachev presented, and though he was wary, he still took advantage of them and embraced the changes evident in the Soviet regime. I do think that Reagan tends to get way too much credit for the end of the Cold War. But he wasn't a passive watcher, either.

This was a fascinating time in history, not just for what happened but for all the "What ifs": What if Hinckley's bullet had struck home, elevating George H.W. Bush eight years earlier? What if Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, or any of the others hadn't died? What if Gorbachev had never risen to power, or what if he had been more of a hard-liner? Food for thought, probably, for the Harry Turtledove's of tomorrow.

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Only Luddites don't know what Luddites are!

Sheila has just encountered a word for the first time. The word is "Luddite".

Reading her post, I'm struck by a couple of things. First, I agree with her that a lot of times the "intelligent folks" can get really condescending and arrogant, although I'm not sure if that's the case with the William Gibson article she links (it's an AOL-only article, which makes me lazy since I'm an AOL subscriber but I didn't care to sign in to read it). And "Luddite" has definitely taken on a connotation of "enlightened dismissal"; it's commonly meant to be an insult.

However, I was surprised that Sheila had not encountered the word until relatively recently (within the last year). I know that she reads and writes a lot (man, does she write a lot!), but maybe she doesn't read the kind of stuff where the word "Luddite" comes into play. Similarly, I suspect that a lot of medical terminology that she knows fairly well would be totally alien to me, a guy whose medical vocabulary derives from watching a lot of ER and CSI. It's a fairly common error to assume that certain things that are common knowledge in our experience are also common knowledge outside that sphere of experience. (This is also part of why I don't believe that "common sense" really exists.)

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Priorities, man! Priorities!

How can SDB routinely spend 6000 or more words to explain US foreign policy, but only about 2500 to explain General Relativity? Surely the Bush Administration's policies aren't more complicated than Einsteinian physics!

(I'm just kidding here. Really. I love it when SDB writes about science, except for when he rains on the "space elevator" parade. It'll work. You'll see!)

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At least she's not an athletic supporter....

Lynn Sislo is a bit miffed because someone used the phrase "Bush supporter" to describe the awesome force for intelligent thought and artistic skill that is Britney Spears. Now, Lynn's probably right that the person writing this intended "Bush supporter" to be an example of how dumb Britney is, as if it's impossible to be an intelligent Bush supporter.

But when you actually track down Britney's quote on the matter, it's clear that she is, in fact, a dumb Bush supporter: "We should just trust the President because he knows what's best" (a rough paraphrase). Now, this exact sentiment would be equally dumb if the referent were, say, Howard Dean; so it's not that Britney's dumb because she's a Bush supporter. Better to say that in this case her awesome dumbness found voice in her Bush support.

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Traffic-babbling

I just want to thank everyone for stopping by. To my great surprise, October turned out to be my best traffic month ever, and by quite a margin, too -- the hits in October eclipsed the previous best month, September '03, with a week to spare. That's two months in a row I've set new records here, and four times in the last seven months. Woo-hoo!

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Of hiatuses, and the Bloggers who take them....

Mike Finley has put his blog on the back burner, which isn't that big of a surprise considering his sporadic posting and his previous comments on a general sense of ennui. I hope his hiatus doesn't last long.

Ditto James Capozzola, whose real life has also intruded.

Mike's Baseball Rants has gone on permanent hiatus...but in a good way. He left BlogSpot and took up Movable Type, so now he's writing...well, Mike's Baseball Rants. (I also just scanned through Mike's Halloween-day post...Holy Tabular Data, Batman!)

Finally, I should pass on to my loyal readership that I am planning a hiatus of my own for Thanksgiving. My current scheme is to not post from the day before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after, but who knows, I may just take an entire week off. It would be nice to do that without it being because we're moving from Buffalo to Syracuse, or back again.

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My place in space is mainly on your face.

I see that the film ALIEN is in re-release right now, and that over on AICN everybody's in a lather because the most fanboy-wankish project of all time, Alien Versus Predator, is apparently going to be a bad movie. (That they are surprised by this defies my imagination. How could a movie like that not suck?)

Anyway, I figured this would be a good time to drop an earth-shattering bombshell upon my loyal readers: I hate the ALIEN movies.

Yeah, I know, the first one's a classic of horror, but it just doesn't do it for me. Sure, it was effective the first time I saw it, but the couple of times I've bothered to watch it again it was rather like riding "Space Mountain" with the lights turned on: a movie whose entire reason for being is gross-out stuff and "beastie jumping out from behind things" scares loses something when I know what's coming. And unlike, say, Jaws, which has other strengths going for it - - theme, character - - ALIEN is like the wind-up toy that is a lot less interesting after playing with it for five minutes.

Then there's the sequel, ALIENS, which, again, everybody loves but me. It's slick and well-made, but the plot is just one predictable complication after another, so even while I was watching the first time (on video, in college) I found myself ticking off every culmination of ham-handed foreshadowing early in the movie. And quite frankly, the entire last third of the movie just drags on and on and on. In his review, Roger Ebert likened this part of the film to a roller coaster ride that lasts for half and hour. Personally, I liken it to one of my favorite lines from The West Wing: "I'm sorry. I hung in there as long as I could, but you've long since past the point where I stopped caring."

Finally, there was the third one, in which we go right back to beasties jumping out from behind things and lots of nastiness and drooling and whatnot. I never bothered with the fourth one. So, there you go. My deep, dark secret is out.

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Cetacean outrage

Oh, my God.

You know how we (well, a lot of us) try to avoid consuming tuna that is caught with nets that also endanger dolphins? Well, the Japanese have figured out an ingenuous solution to the problem. They hunt the dolphins directly. They lure and confuse the dolphins into coves where men in boats can easily kill them with sickles, spilling so much blood that the water literally turns red. (Warning: the link contains graphic pictures of bloody water which seem to have been Photoshopped to make the water red to an absurd degree. Personally, I find the pile of dolphin cadavers in the boat as damning as the bloody water.)

As much as I love the Japanese and Nordic cultures, their insistence on hunting marine mammals (and let's not indulge the fantasy that these animals are killed for "scientific research" reasons) disgusts me to the core. (I should note a bit of "balance" here, as there's a lot about my own culture that disgusts me to the core.)

(Link via John Scalzi.)

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Watch the skies, please.

This kicks a staggering amount of ass: a Flash-based planetarium. Turn off the lights, fire up some Vangelis on the stereo, and explore the skies!

(via MeFi.)

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Cityscapes, at night

Also stolen from MeFi is this incredibly nifty collection of panaramic pictures of Japan at night. Despite my one major gripe with Japanese culture mentioned above, I'd love to visit that country.

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Get candy. Get candy. Get candy. Get candy.

A good time was had by all on Halloween - - the most important being the kid, of course. The good news is that there doesn't seem to be the Local Health Nut anymore; you know, he's the guy who used to give out apples for Halloween. The bad news is that it's pretty much all the same now: the same Hershey's Miniatures, the same Dum-Dums, the same Tootsie-Pops, et cetera. The cool thing about Halloween used to be the amazing variety of candy one would end up with; we seem to have lost our "candy diversity". That's kind of sad, because let's face it, when half the bag is full of Kit-Kats, Tootsie Rolls, Smarties and Dum-Dums, it all looks the same.

There were some interesting things, though. The bag's weight nearly doubled after we hit the two houses that were giving out juice-boxes. I see they still make candy cigarettes these days, but they obviously can't market them as such, so they're just "candy sticks". The sameness of two-dozen rolls of Smarties was broken up by the discovery of "Extreme Sour Smarties", which I discovered unawares when I put three of 'em in my mouth. Yeesh. And the kid's first-ever encounter with a Jawbreaker was pretty entertaining. (She ended up spitting it out after sucking it for about five minutes.) At least she didn't get any Milk Duds.

Oh, and not related to Halloween, but since I'm babbling about candy I might as well gripe about this here: What is Hershey thinking, abandoning the foil-wrapper in a paper sleeve for its chocolate bars? Now they just look the same as every other Mars Bar or Nestle product out there. No distinctiveness. I've therefore decided that whenever I want a chocolate fix, I'm going to go for some of the underappreciated bars out there. I love Butterfingers, but when I want one of those I'll get a Clark bar instead. Skor, instead of Heath. I'll get a 100 Grand bar once in a while. Something I've sought, and not found, for the last two years is a peanut butter cup in a brand I don't recall. Not Reese's, but some small brand that was wonderful because it had no chocolate at all. It was a peanut-butter cup of just peanut butter. Now, Reese's has something out right now called "Inside Out", which has a peanut-butter shell with a chocolate center, but what I'm looking for is the peanut-butter shell all the way through.

And for the love of God, bring back the Dark Chocolate Kit Kats and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! And do more with White Chocolate, which I love. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy if milk chocolate went away entirely, leaving behind only Dark and White Chocolate.

And here's a site about candy bars. And here's a quiz where you identify candy bars by the cross section. And here's one of many sites where you can get "retro" candy. And here's a hilarious Wil Wheaton post that the writers of Scream probably read. And...and...and....

(This post is what happens when a blogger ingests too much sugar.)

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Friday's Burst of Weirdness

Continuing my new tradition (launched last week) of posting here the strangest thing I've found in the intervening six days, I proudly call your attention to the strangest "extreme sport" I've yet seen. Combining "extreme outdoor activity" with "the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt", we have....

(I swear I am not making this up)

EXTREME IRONING!

And check out the galleries. It's a world gone mad!

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"In Longhand" (a short fiction excerpt)

Peter Bernstein put down his fountain pen and stared at the words he had just spent four hours writing. He had resisted the feeling at first, but it had come with increasing certainty until he could no longer deny it: he couldn’t finish this story, either. He carefully screwed the cap back onto his pen and placed it in the cup with the rest of his pen collection, and then he put the story in a drawer with all the other ones that he couldn’t finish. It was never a case of not knowing how the story should end; it wasn’t uncertainty as to what to write next. It was the certainty that what he was writing wasn’t any good. Surely he could do better than this. Surely he could write something better than a mere bodice-ripper. But maybe not. How many months since he had finished a story? And how long since that wondrous first sale, which had never been followed by a second?

He glanced at the index card taped on the wall with his credo written on it with his broad-nib Parker Duofold: Nulla dies sine linea. Never a day without lines. But his lines, his writing, never amounted to anything at all. How ironic that he had become a pen collector to have writing instruments equal to his prose – and now the prose was hardly fit for a disposable ball-point.

***

Early the next morning Peter got up and went to work. His classes were scheduled so that his teaching day was always done by two thirty, which gave him ample time for office hours and his various other duties. On Tuesdays his first class was at ten thirty, so he looked through a pile of papers from his freshman comp classes. When his mind began to wander, after the third time he read some teenager’s outrage that his or her tax dollars were going to keep murderers alive, he got up and walked to the Humanities Lounge to get some coffee. Sitting in the lounge, as always, was Professor Lawrence Tatum of the History Department.

"Peter!" Tatum yelled. He said everything in a near yell. "Find anything over the weekend?" A very large man with a great shock of red hair, Tatum had his day’s work spread across one of the lounge tables; the common joke was that his office might just as well be converted to a broom closet

"Nope," Peter replied. "I actually didn’t do any shopping this weekend."

Professor Tatum tsked. "You should always be on the lookout, Peter! For all you know, some stranger found a pen that was destined for your pocket."

Peter laughed. Professor Tatum was a voracious collector of antiques of all types, and he had amassed a very valuable collection over the years. He was planning to open his own shop when he retired. In fact, Tatum could have probably opened a shop now; he had some items of great value indeed that would fetch a high price at any auction. He only delayed because he still loved teaching history. Peter had actually met Professor Tatum at one of the local antique dealers, when Peter had been looking at vintage pens. Tatum knew of Peter’s pen mania, and he occasionally would acquire an item that would pique his friend’s interest.

"Never a day without shopping, young man!" Tatum said with a laugh as he gathered his papers and headed off to class.

He knew that Peter was a writer of sorts, and found Peter’s credo amusing.

On his way home that afternoon Peter walked through part of downtown, which he did a few times a week; he liked the variety of it, and he liked to observe people to incorporate into his stories. He walked through Chinatown, which was just a two block area with three Chinese restaurants, a Japanese place, and a couple of Asian gift shops. He loved this particular area, and he ate there at least twice a week. Today he stopped with interest at a formerly vacant storefront that had just acquired a new tenant; they had removed the tarpaulins covering the storefront just that morning. To his surprise, it was an antique shop. The front door, one of those heavy wooden doors that rattled threateningly when opened and closed, bore fresh gold lettering that read "Karl Strassheim, Antiquarian." Below these words was a picture of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of death, and below that, written in smaller lettering: "By appointment only." Peter peered through the glass in the storefront and saw that this Strassheim dealt in very fine antiques. Peter doubted very much that a place like this would ever be in the price range of an English professor.

***

Later that evening Peter went to Queequeg’s, a coffeehouse in his neighborhood. The owner was a freak for nautical decor, and her favorite novel was, as one might expect, Moby Dick. The walls and ceilings were covered with sea charts, fish nets, lobster cages, harpoons, old photographs of fishermen, and the like. Peter ordered his usual, the "Captain Bligh" (double mocha cappuccino topped with nutmeg) and then took over a booth. He loved to write here, and he pulled out some paper and the fountain pen he was using that week. Since he was currently "between stories", he wrote character sketches of the denizens of the coffeehouse. Most were younger than he, and some were even his students. He wrote about a number of these, describing physical characteristics first and then creating life stories for these people. And then a new arrival, someone he hadn’t seen before, caught his eye.

This man was elderly, possibly in his eighties. His thinning white hair was perfectly combed. A pair of rimless spectacles was perched on his slightly red and bulbous nose. He wore a white silk dress shirt under a black pinstriped jacket with a red silk handkerchief folded into the breast pocket. Peter watched the way the man very precisely measured three spoonfuls of cream into his coffee. Then he opened three sugar packets, one at a time, by flipping each one three times before tearing along a crease he folded in the top of each packet. After three sips of coffee, the man produced a leather-backed journal and began to write in it using a pen that Peter recognized even twenty feet away.

He had seem pictures of it in his pen collector’s books. It was a Pelikan M-900 Toledo. The black acrylic barrel was encased in a series of engravings in twenty-four karat gold. The manufacture of this pen, by the makers in Hamburg, required almost one hundred steps. Suddenly the vintage Sheaffer in Peter’s hand felt very inadequate. Peter was still staring at the gentleman when the gentleman looked up and met Peter’s gaze.

Peter shuddered. The man put him in mind of his Uncle Saul, who had traumatized Peter when he’d been a boy and his parents had taken him for monthly visits. Uncle Saul had been a stern man, a cold banker whose home had smelled of antiseptic and was full of things that little boys dare not touch lest they be locked in the cellar with the Beast Beneath the Stairs. Peter had no idea why a complete stranger should remind him of Uncle Saul. He gave a quick smile and then dropped his eyes back to the page again. He put his left hand across his brow, blocking his upward gaze with his fingers as he tried to refocus his attention on his writing and give off the impression of uninterruptible intensity of work. Let’s see, where was I….he took a slip of scratch paper and scribbled to restore the flow of ink to his pen.

"Here, try mine," a voice said. The voice was foreign – Northern European. Not French. Peter looked up and found himself face-to-face with the gentleman from across the room. He was holding out the Pelikan Toledo. He nodded and smiled genially. "You may find the nib to your liking, I think." Not Swedish or Norwegian, either….

"Thanks," Peter stammered as he accepted the pen. It was fairly lightweight, and when he unscrewed the cap and posted it on the opposite end the balance was almost perfect. He touched the silver and gold nib to the paper and wrote a few lines in his miniscule script. The pen left behind a smooth, thin line in sapphire ink. "I prefer black," he said as the man took the seat across from him.

"Chacun a son gout," he replied. He picked up Peter’s pen and looked it over. "Very nice," he began, peering at it as a jeweler would a diamond. "The Balance, made by the W.A. Sheaffer Company. Gold and palladium nib. Well preserved indeed; this pen has seen a number of caring owners. But look here: a few hairline cracks in the cap, where the clip is fastened." Age had not diminished this man’s visual acuity at all.

"You know fountain pens?" Peter asked as he handed the Pelikan back to its owner and recovered his Sheaffer.

"I know many old things," the man said, waving a hand of dismissal. "There is much business to be done in things that are old."

German! Peter realized. "You’re the new antique dealer in town," he said.

"Indeed." The man nodded slightly. "Karl Strassheim. I am new here in town; I lived in the South for a long while, but I regret that my life has come to the point where I need the cold. It reminds me I’m alive. I could not bear to take refuge from the world behind the gates of a sterile community in the bosom of the Tropics. Don’t you agree?" He smiled throughout, saying all this in a single unbroken breath.

"Yes," Peter said, momentarily taken aback. He did in fact prefer the colder climes.

"I thought so," Strassheim said. "May I have your name?"

"Peter Bernstein."

"Ah, Bernstein! Any relation to Leonard?" Peter shook his head. "Pity. I have one of the Maestro’s earliest batons in my shop. Tell me, Mr. Bernstein – may I call you Peter? I do like some informality – tell me: are you a practicing Jew, or do you merely carry the name?"

Peter’s eyes narrowed as he tried to judge this man. "I’m not what you would call religious," he finally said.

"Not many are," Strassheim said. He reached into his jacket, drew out a small brass case, and pulled a business card from the case. He placed the card on the table and wrote something on the back with the Pelikan Toledo. His fingers were long and fine-boned. "I may be able to help you, Mr. Bernstein."

"With faith?" Peter stared at him.

Strassheim raised his eyebrow. "With pens." He handed Peter the card, tipped his hat, and left the coffeehouse. Peter looked at the card. On the left was a gold-ink Anubis, the same design that Peter had seen on the door to Strassheim’s shop. Next to Anubis was Strassheim’s name and his shop’s address in raised purple ink. At the bottom, in red: "We know not for what we seek." Peter turned the card over, to where Strassheim had written: "Monday, precisely 4:00 p.m." His penmanship was perfect and patrician.

[Enter Keanu Reeves, doing ninja-battle with Hugo Weaving]

(I wrote this story a few years ago. It's the first horror story I ever wrote, so I'm putting up a piece of it today -- Halloween -- even though the horrific stuff doesn't come until later on. I suspect that the "Guy with writer's block" thing is something of a cliche; in fact, that was cited as a reason for one of this story's rejections. This was not meant as any kind of roman a clef; the writer in the story is not based on me, except in one detail: his fascination with fountain pens, which leads to the other stand0by horror cliche I used here: the "Mysterious Antiques Dealer", who actually is based on someone from real life, one of the very few times I've drawn inspiration from real people.)

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Hmmm....can a blogger be "Uplifted"?

A common meme in SF these days, beginning (I think) in the work of David Brin, is "uplift", wherein life evolves to a certain point but must then be acted-upon by an outside source to achieve sentience. And since Morat is dismayed at his slide in the Ecosystem, I'll toss out a cluster of links here intended to uplift him! (Yeah, it's a slow blogging day.)

His wife was in a car accident. She's banged-up but OK, apparently; sadly, her bosses at her retail job were less than sympathetic. He also picks on Gregg Easterbrook's belief in Intelligent Design; offers a take on Donald Luskin (actually, two takes); thinks that Wesley Clark's campaign has a few problems of the "viability" variety; and finally points to a partial quoting of something funny Jon Stewart said about our President.

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Silver (the Quick variety)

I haven't read Quicksilver yet, although my copy is sitting on my shelf, staring at me. (I have a number of things that need to be cleared from the deck first.) But I've noticed a couple of "in-progress" takes on the book: Morat seems to be enjoying the book, and Kevin Drum isn't. So we'll see.

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A Public Notice, from a former pizzeria manager.

When I worked in the wonderful pizza business, even though I was a manager I had to join our delivery drivers on the streets on really busy nights, like Halloween. So, if you order a pizza for delivery tonight, keep the following in mind:

1. It's Halloween, and it's a Friday night. This means pizza places will be very busy, so don't get upset when it takes longer than 30 minutes.

2. Likewise, everybody else will have the same idea as you: that by ordering between 4:00 and 5:00, you'll avoid the crowds. Forget it. Dinner rushes on Halloween tend to hit very early. Your best bet, actually, is to order late.

3. Not only should you expect longer delivery times because of the sheer amount of business, but you should expect that delivery drivers will be going a lot slower due to all the kids out and about.

4. If you're not offering candy to kids, and thus you're leaving all your outside lights off so as to avoid having armies of people knocking on your door, please reconsider ordering your pizza for delivery. Consider ordering carry-out and going to get it yourself. It's a tremendous pain to locate the houses whose lights are shut off (because then the numbers on the door aren't legible), which means it'll just take that much longer for the thing to get to you. And in some areas, drivers might actually be trained to not deliver at all to houses with no lights on. (Or, maybe you could turn on the light while you're waiting for the pizza and stick a sign on your door saying that you're not offering candy.)

5. TIP YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER !!! Really, you should be doing this anyway, but Halloween is probably the most stressful night of the year for people who make their living schlepping pizzas around. They're under pressure to deliver hot food to people quickly, and not run over small children while they do it. So if your pizza is $10.50, don't just give the person $11 and tell them to keep the change. And don't think for one second they'll consider candy in lieu of a tip. (Well, if they're good at their job, they'll accept the candy and act happy about it. But it's really not a nice thing to do.)

6. Even better, consider actually going to eat in the dining room at the pizza place. In my experience, our dining room was always dead-as-a-doornail on Halloween nights, when Halloween fell on a Friday or Saturday.

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Another Grand Master Passes

Science fiction author Hal Clement has died. He was an SFWA Grand Master in 1999, and memorials can be read here. I don't recall if I've read anything by him, but it's always sad to see the old masters pass on.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

'Young Woman on a Bridge at Llangollen' by Peter Edwards (oils).

I was noodling about a site of Welsh culture and art, and I found this lovely painting, which I reproduce here solely because the young woman pictured herein looks very much the way I picture the heroine in the novel I'm writing. That's all. This is the first time I've ever seen a painting that looks like my heroine, although I've seen a number of real people who do look like characters of mine. (And one blogger.)

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Good Lord, what an ailment....

Two different bloggers have posts that have me feeling a bit glum about the future of reading today.

First is this news item, cited by John Scalzi. It seems that kids just aren't used to handling books for long periods of time, and thus are getting headaches from the physical effort of reading...Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. That's all we need: a medical reason not to read. (Yeah, I'm taking this too seriously. Sue me.)

And if that doesn't make you give up all hope, this missive from one of the Blowhardic Duo might. There's a lot here, so read the whole thing, but the sad gist of it is Michael's belief that reading in-and-of-itself, in the form of sitting down with a book and just reading it, is going to continue to regress into its own little niche. Ugh.

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Poor Donald....

I didn't learn about the whole Donald Luskin-taking-legal-action-against-Atrios thing until late last night, and I didn't feel much like posting about it then, so I'll just chime in with my predictable view here that Luskin is always dumb and a stalker, but now he's just plain insane.

Anyway, it's funny how those who continually beat Democrats over the head for having trial lawyers as one of their big constituencies don't seem all that hesitant when it comes to having their own trial lawyers sue people who insult them.

And by the way folks, how can Luskin have any kind of claim against Paul Krugman for the whole "stalker" thing if Charles Johnson apparently doesn't have a strong claim against IndyMedia for the whole "child molester" thing? Anyone?

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A Late Day....

Yes, I am late in producing new material here today, because we decided to vacate the home for a while. In fact, we vacated the city: we trekked to Rochester, NY and visited the Strong Museum, which is a museum whose main exhibits are designed for children. There's an antique carousel, a small train, craft tables, and all manner of other stuff. Right now they are housing an exhibit centered around Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which allowed me to follow up a bit on the strong similarities between that story and Hayao Miyazaki's great film Spirited Away.

There is also a large Sesame Street exhibit, with walk-throughs designed to actually look like you are walking through Sesame Street. That was pretty cool. One thing I did not expect was a room with profiles of all the major cast members through the years on the walls, along with video monitors which play clips related to each member. I pressed the button for Mr. Hooper, and the video clip that played was the terribly sad scene where the cast has to explain to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper has died. They should have put a warning on that.

Anyway, a good time was had by all. The Strong Museum is a really fun place. Buffalo should have one.

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Up is Down! Black is White! Cats are Dogs!

[This post contains 100% political snarking.]

Digby's got the goods on the Bush re-election strategy. Since a period in which we've seen two major wars is going to be marketed as "Peace", I can't wait to see how a recession, a busted treasury, and two million jobs lost is offered as "Prosperity".

Yeesh.

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Et tu, Jane?

I just read a post by Megan McArdle in which she takes Democrats to task for stonewalling President Bush's judicial nominees because (and I can't believe she wrote this in all apparent seriousness) the judges in question, while being minority judges, are not liberal minority candidates.

Now, I'm not entirely sure why Megan would completely disregard the actual reasons stated for why a relative handful of judges are being opposed; nor am I certain shy Megan apparently thinks that Democrats actually expect the President to nominate "the same judges Al Gore would have nominated"; nor am I certain why Megan is of the apparent belief that it's their minority status that is riling the Democrats (that Charles Pickering fellow -- in what minority does he fall?).

And then, one of the commenters on the thread, in just the fifth comment, provides some factual data that pretty much completely disproves Megan's post. I can only assume that she has the flu and composed this post an hour after drinking half a bottle of NyQuil, because it makes so little sense that I had to check three times to make sure I was even on her blog in the first place. While I don't find it uncommon to disagree with her, I do find it highly uncommon to actually think she's being intellectually dishonest.

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You put the red one on the black terminal, right?

In another attempt to jump-start Collaboratory, I posted a couple of items there for discussion.

BTW, last year we tried to get a Collaboratory book club going, but we got a bit too ambitious and ended up getting crushed beneath the weight of The Brothers Karamazov. We're thinking of taking another crack at a book club, this time with I Claudius, I think. If there's abiding interest, leave a message there under the appropriate thread.

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Our man in San Diego

SDB thinks he's safe from the fires, for the most part, and he also provides a handy map that shows where the fires are (or were, at the time of the map).

He also provides a brief explanation of the numbering system for the Interstate Highway system: odd-numbered interstates are mainly north-south routes, while even-numbered interstates are east-west routes. I'd also add that when a relatively short "spur" or "loop" is added, a third digit is added to the front of the number, with the last two remaining the same as the "mainline" highway with which the spur or loop is associated. Thus, by way of example, in Buffalo we have the following:

I-90: This is the mainline Interstate that traverses the Buffalo region.

I-190: This is the spur that branches off I-90 and leads downtown and then to Niagara Falls.

I-290: This is a loop that branches off I-90 and curves around the northern suburbs of the city (Williamsville, Amherst, Tonawanda).

I-990: This is a spur that branches off I-290 and leads to the University at Buffalo's North Campus and a couple of miles beyond.

So, a "spur" will usually have an odd first digit while a "loop" will have an even first digit. (Strangely, this isn't the case in Syracuse, where I-690 is, despite its even first digit, a "spur" and not a "loop". I-490, though, is indeed a "loop".)

And if you find all this just incredibly fascinating -- and why wouldn't you? -- then you'll just love this page, which has more than you'll ever want to know about the Interstate Highway System, of which Charles Kuralt once said: "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything."

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As if the seafood wasn't reason enough....

Jessa Crispin points out that there may soon be a very compelling reason to move to Massachusetts.

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A Modern Parable

Well, not really a "parable", but a reflection. Or a meditation. Or a thought. Or....[head explodes]

Anyway, yesterday the wife and I had the wonderful occasion to foist the kid off on the grandparents for a few hours, during which we went shopping without the four-year-old in tow -- a one-time normal thing that has been elevated to luxury status since the coming of the kid. We went to a couple of consignment shops, to Barnes&Noble, and a few other places. We were early in getting to the restaurant where we were meeting the grandparents for dinner, so we passed a few moments by going into Clayton's, which is the Buffalo area's nicest toy store. This is where you go in Buffalo if you're looking for real toys: dollhouse furniture, the biggest selection of Playmobile stuff I've ever seen, kid's crafts, fine dolls (both porcelain and Russian matryoshkas), fine model railroad supplies, et cetera. In other words, everything you won't find on the shelves at Toys-R-Us or Wal-Mart.

What was amazing was that we've been looking, to no avail, for a couple of things in other toy places. I've been looking for wind-up bath toys for the daughter, like boats or whatnot. The wife has been looking for "sewing cards", apparently cardboard or felt cutouts in different shapes that come with yarn and have holes punched in them to let the kid lace the yarn through the holes, an item which I guess shows kids the concept of sewing. (I'd never seen these before, so if my description is weird, sorry.) We could not find either of these simple items in any big store -- not Wal-Mart, not Target, and not even Toys-R-Us. But we found both within five minutes of walking into Clayton's.

It amazes me that simple things like these have been eclipsed into the realm of "specialty toys". I walk through toy sections in the big-box stores and my attitude is, "God, let's find what we want and get the hell out of here". But I walk through a place like Clayton's, and I start to actually think back to my own childhood, and I spot the things I used to play with, and a strange mixture of happiness and sadness sets in. I'm happy that I can still find these things and get them for my kid, but I'm sad because I wonder how many parents never even consider going to a place like Clayton's, and thus have kids who will never play with a single toy that Wal-Mart has decided not to stock?

Folks, if you have kids, don't do all your Christmas toy shopping at the big places. Find those small toy stores and get them something they'll never see at those big places. And spread the word.

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Link Clearance! Old Links at Low Prices!

Here some science related articles I've had sitting in my bookmarks waiting to be unleashed on my unsuspecting readers at just the right time. Tremble, pitiful mortals! Mwwoooo-hoooo-haaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!

:: Alien hunters get new respect. After years of being seen by many as a "fringe" activity, SETI research is finally emerging as legitimate scientific inquiry. Where is Dr. Sagan when we really need him?

Someday I hope to see the new Allen Telescope Array, once it's built. When I was in second grade and my family lived in West Virginia, we once drove by the radio observatory at Green Bank (back before they built the new Robert Byrd telescope). I find something beautiful, in a ghostly way, about large radio telescopes -- these giant lattices of steel and mesh through which we have deepened our knowledge of the Universe.

:: Archaeologists recently uncovered evidence that the Amazon basin may not have been an unexplored and pristine jungle before the arrival of the Europeans after all. Evidence shows that the natives of that region were far from stone-age savages, working the region into a network of villages and even building roads.



:: If you like whiskey, you're in pretty good company -- no less a personage than George Washington, hero of the Revolutionary War and First President of these United States, drank the hard stuff now and then. In fact, Washington had his own distillery at Mt. Vernon, and a group of whiskey makers recently used the distillery to recreate General Washington's own whiskey recipe (although, contrary to Washington's likely practice, they're going to age the stuff to make it taste better).



:: Here's a new theory as to why ships disappear at sea without trace or reason: they are swamped, unawares, by giant methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor. What happens is that the pressure at the ocean bottom causes methane to form ice-like structures, like the orange blob in this picture:



But these structures can break off and head for the surface, and as they "thaw", the methane reverts to gaseous form, making a huge bubble that can swamp an ocean-going vessel on the surface if it breaches at just the right spot relative to the unfortunate ship. If this turns out to be true, I wonder if the Bermuda Triangle is merely a region whose sea-bed produces a lot of methane.

:: If you plan to make an Egyptian-style mummy in the future, you'll be happy to know that the secret ingredient in mummification that allows preservation on the millennial time frame has at last been identified: an extract from the cedar tree. (To this day, my favorite bit of the mummification process is when they use a really long needle to pull the cadaver's brain out through the nose. Yeah, I'm warped.)

:: I'm not sure what the environmental implications are, especially for biodiversity, but an ongoing process to take a "census" of the oceans is revealing three new fish species a week, such as this new variety of scorpionfish:



Representatives of Red Lobster could not be reached for comment.

:: Applying Pat Robertson logic, maybe our abandonment of Sun-worship wasn't such a good idea....

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Look out Joe, here comes Jerry!

Yup, it's Tuesday, which mean the Buffalo News (which, being a major metropolitan newspaper, really should be able to afford a website that actually loads more than 60% of the time) runs Jerry Sullivan's football column. Today, he wants to fire Bills head coach Gregg Williams.

Now, I actually (somewhat) agree with that sentiment. I don't think the team is playing on a level commensurate with its talent, and that -- plus the lack of discipline evident after eight games -- seems to me to reflect mostly on the coaching staff. I don't think Williams has worked out, and I now doubt the Bills can make the playoffs. Assuming that at least ten wins are needed to make the postseason (unless one happens to play in the AFC North, a division which can be taken with an 8-8 record), the Bills would have to go 6-2 the rest of the way to make it in. I don't see that happening, not with games left against good teams like Dallas, Indianapolis, New England (as much as it pains me to admit it), the Giants, and the Dolphins (who I still expect to swoon, but you never know). With two-and-a-half years under his belt, and with an upgrading of personnel each year, Williams has yet to really achieve.

But Jerry's not content to can Williams when the current, lost year is over. Jerry wants him toasted right now. Firing a coach in mid-season should, to anyone familiar with football and its regimented, system-dependent nature, pretty much concede that the season is lost. But Jerry goes so far as to opine that such a move might not doom the Bills' season, citing -- of all things -- the Florida Marlins. You see, the Marlins entered the 2003 season with Jeff Torborg as their manager, but they fired him about a month and a half into the season (when they were ten games under .500) and brought in Jack McKeon, who proceeded to steer them to the best record in baseball after that point and the eventual World Series championship. Yeah, that was inspirational and all, but come on, Jerry. Are you really suggesting that a baseball franchise firing its manager one-fourth of the way through a 162-game regular season is comparable to an NFL franchise unloading its head coach at the halfway point in a 16-game season?

(Yes, he's really suggesting that.)

Jerry's column is peppered with all manner of stupidities. Sure, Jerry, the University at Buffalo Bulls are the more respected football team in Buffalo right now. Sure, Jerry, the Bills are "the national joke". Sure, Jerry, "Williams isn't a lame duck, he's a roast duck" is just the cleverest metaphor! And ultimately, Jerry doesn't even answer the question of, What would be the point of canning the guy right now? If you're only going to name an interim coach to play out the string -- which Jerry tacitly concedes would probably be the case -- how is that any less "giving up on the season" than just keeping Williams in place until the year's over and the whole thing can be handled in a manner that wouldn't be a mid-season distraction?

Jerry doesn't have an answer for that, but then, the column isn't about answers. It's about Jerry going, "Look how just darn MAD I am! Wheeeee!"

Worst...columnist...ever.

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Wow....

Via Atrios I found this rather stunning image of San Diego fire damage:



How did the flames manage to completely destroy nearly everything manmade, but leave the trees relatively unsinged, just fifty feet away? Was this due to the efforts of firefighters, or did it have more to do with the way the fires spread?

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Breaking the Theismannic Membrane

Nefarious Neddie observed my expression of disdain for ESPN football commentator Joe Theismann the other day, and points out a Theismann gem I didn't even know. After my expression of disbelief, Neddie instructed me to Google "Theismann Dumb Quotes", wherein I discovered this wondrous collection of idiotic sports utterances. Amazing beyond belief.

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I'm off to seek lions in the Scottish Highlands....

Matthew Yglesias points out a person whose NYC apartment search is likely to take quite some time. My suggestion for this person is: Move to Buffalo.

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From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-zee....

Lynn Sislo has answers to a A-Z Quiz, which I figure I'll answer in an attempt to further my goal of content-free blogging.

A: Actor. Harrison Ford, I suppose. Although his recent work has been lacking, in my opinion.

B: Boyhood Idols. Yeah, that would definitely be Harrison Ford.

C: Chore You Hate. Cleaning cat boxes. Ugh.

D: Dad's Name. Harry.

E: Essential Video In Collection. The Star Wars films. All of them.

F: Favorite Actress. There are so many that I like…just dig through the archives for my "Move Over Britney!" series.

G: Gold or Silver. Silver.

H: Hometown. Pittsburgh by birth, Buffalo by emotional attachment.

I: Instruments Played. Trumpet well, piano not so well.

J: Job Title. Writer/Blogger/Unemployed Schlub.

K: Kids. One.

L: Living Arrangements. Two bedroom apartment in suburban complex.

M: Mom's Name. Theresa.

N: Number People Slept With. I'm not answering this one.

O: Overnight Hospital Stays. None. Wife's had two.

P: Phobia. Hmmm….I recoil fiercely if you even mimic pulling back a rubber band and aiming it at me.

Q: Quote You Like. "If it's not baroque, don't fix it!" (From Beauty and the Beast. More quotes in my sidebar.)

R: Religious Affiliation. None whatsoever. I'm pretty militant in my reluctance to endorse any religious doctrine at all, because I think nearly every religion has something true and transcendent to say about the human condition, and at the same time every religion has something idiotic and bogus to say about the human condition.

S: Siblings. One older sister.

T: Time You Wake Up. These days, sometime between 7:00 and 8:00. If I'm really exhausted, I might sleep until 9:00, and it's not uncommon for me to wake up at 6:00 and just get out of bed under the assumption that it's useless to try to sleep any more than that.

U: Unique Habit. I'm not sure exactly what this means - - unique as in, I'm the only one in the world who does it? Or that I'm the only one I know who does it? Anyway, aside from people online, I don't know any film music collectors personally.

V: Vegetable You Refuse To Eat. Broccoli. President Bush the Elder's revelation that he also detests broccoli nearly had me changing my political affiliation. Luckily for me, there was all that policy stuff that allowed me to remain a Democrat with good conscience.

W: Worst Habit. My sweet-tooth knows no bounds.

X: X-rays Taken. Once when I broke my collarbone in seventh grade, and routine ones during dental visits. (The first dental hygienist who attempted to do this with me discovered my incredibly powerful gag reflex when she made no attempt to describe what she was doing with that little piece of X-ray film they stick in your mouth and simply starting sticking her fingers in my mouth. Heh.)

Y: Yummy Food You Make. Pastitsio (a Greek forerunner of Lasagna). I even posted a recipe for it here a few months back; sometime I'll look for the link.

Z: Zodiac Sign. Given my strong belief that astrology is a lot of hooey and that people who believe in it are boobs, I probably shouldn't know my sign. Sadly, I do. It's Libra.

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Can't they assign a GOOD movie?!

For some strange reason, I'm getting a lot of search engine hits recently from people looking for study guides and such for the film Dead Poets Society. I'm hoping against hope that teachers are assigning this movie under a "Here's how to make a bad movie about poetry" teaching plan, but somehow I doubt it. Anyway, I maintain a link to the article in question in the sidebar, if anyone really wants to know why the movie bugs me. Look under "Notable Dispatches".

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Ummm....a lot of 'em do that, John.

John Scalzi is shocked! shocked! to learn that his cat drinks from the toilet. Well, not all cats do this, but this right now may be the only time in my life when I haven't lived with a cat who drinks from the toilet. It's not universal, but it's not uncommon, either. Cats like cold water, which is what attracts them to toilet water: it's always cold, by virtue of being insulated by as much as two inches of porcelain. If you think your cats aren't quite drinking enough water, especially in summer months, try putting ice in their water dish when you fill it. This has often worked for our cats.

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Suckiest Sucks, Revisited....

I wasn't going to babble more about the Bills' blowout loss last night, but I notice now that since I wrote the post last night in which I mentioned Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan's constant harping that the Bills do not have an elite defense, he went and wrote his entire column in this morning's paper on the non-elite defense.

Now, I'm not about to claim that the Bills played a good game last night on defense, because they didn't. Their pass-rush, which I'm complaining about on a weekly basis, was abyssmal last night, failing to apply pressure to Trent Green even when they sent seven men across the line. They gave up 38 points and 375 yards, they had no sacks and they created no turnovers. That's bad. But Sullivan seems to want to put the entire blame on the defensive unit. As he writes:

But you can't blame the offense for this one. The Bills moved the ball well at times. Travis Henry ran for 124 yards on 22 carries. He might actually have scored a TD if Gilbride had the sense to run on second-and-goal from the 2. Henry ran for 87 yards after halftime. Too bad the game was already decided.

The Bills had to follow a simple blueprint to win. Run and stop the run. They ran OK. The only thing they stopped was any talk that Buffalo has one of the NFL's top defenses.

I can't blame the offense for this one? Really? The offense that scored three points in the entire game, with the team's other two points coming on a blocked punt in the end zone for a safety? The offense that, despite averaging 5.1 yards per carry against a team that everyone knew was susceptible to the run, only ran 26 times? The offense that only handed off to its Pro-Bowl running back, Travis Henry, nine times in the first half? The offense that turned the ball over seven times, with three of the resulting Kansas City drives resulting in points scored? The offense that went pass-wacky at all the wrong times, just as it has so often in this season? I can't blame that offense for this game, Jerry? Please.

This game as a total-team effort. The Bills blew this game in all phases. Let's not pretend it was a defensive melt-down, because it wasn't.

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Boring Traffic Stuff

Today I reached 25,000 total hits, and yesterday, October officially became my best traffic month yet, and there are five more days to go (including today). This also means that three of the last five months have been record-setting months here at Byzantium's Shores, and I've done it the old-fashioned way, with not an Instalanche in sight. (Well, I did have a couple of Den Bestelanches in June. But not an Instalanche.)

Yippee and Huzzah!

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Writing Update

The current word count is just over 67,000, which in terms of a mass-market paperback is roughly between 140 and 180 pages. The story is moving into the second act, and the problem now is that I have a lot of balls in the air here; I have to keep stopping and reminding myself of things like, "You haven't shown this character in four chapters, and we really need to know what he's up to before the next big battle scene because, you know, he sets that up."

I don't revise as I go, unless it's to go back and stick something in to foreshadow something that's going on right now -- the old rule being that if you have a gun going off in the third act, you'd better have that gun on the mantelpiece in the first act. (The greatest example of that rule in action I've ever encountered is the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which director Frank Darabont has every major plot device right out in the open in the film's first half-hour, and you don't even realize it until the end.) I haven't had to do as much of this lately, but in the early going of this particular book I had to a lot of "plot retrofitting". You might think that outlines might solve this problem, but I don't use outlines. Outlines are for the weak. Heh!

(Of course, it could well be that outlines are essential and that writers who don't use them are the kinds of whackos who ride motorcycles without helmets after drinking nine beers in thirty minutes....but we won't plumb those depths right now.)

Anyhoo, onward and upward!

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The suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked!

OK, I've pretty much given up on the Bills' offensive coaching staff now. I'm writing this during the third quarter, when the Bills are down 28-5. Even if they come back and win it, I'm giving up. These guys - - including Gregg Williams - - have no idea what they're doing. Williams and Gilbride need to go, as soon as this season is over. I've heard all the stuff about how Drew Bledsoe can't win the big ones, and yeah, he sure looked awful last night -- three interceptions, two fumbles, one lost, yada yada yada -- but the game plan never seems designed to fit his strengths, the team is always undisciplined, et cetera and so on. When these guys are making the same mistakes in Week Eight that they made early in the season, that's the coaching. For me it boils down to this: Would this same group of players have a 4-4 record, with two of those losses being blowouts, if Bill Parcells or Jon Gruden or Tony Dungy or Jeff Fisher were coaching?

What also gets me now is the way a lot of the radio and print commentators here gripe about the Bills' defense for not being as good as it can be, but hell, when these guys are constantly on the field, what does anyone expect? This is a common complaint for Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan, who is constantly saying, "This is an elite defense?" Well, no, it's not an elite defense. They don't get enough pressure on the QB, their pass-coverage often has holes in it, et cetera...but it's a good defense that would really look better if they weren't in the position of having to pitch a shutout each week. To win with an offense this bad, your defense has to be not just good, not just great, but one of the best defenses of all time. The Bills just don't have it. That's all.

:: Note to ESPN: Joe Theismann is a blithering idiot. The guy is just one dumb comment after another. For instance, just after the second play of the game: "I really like the way Drew Bledsoe is managing his offensive line tonight!" Or this, when the Chiefs took the ball for the first time: "I'll bet Dick Vermiel has his offense throw a long bomb right here!" (They ran the ball off the right side for five or six yards.) "There's no way the Bills kick to Dante Hall in this situation!" (They kicked to Dante Hall.) When the Bills were down 28-5 with two minutes left in the third quarter: "Bledsoe can still bring this team back!" Sure he can, Joe. God, the guy is a nitwit, and he never shuts up. John Madden may be annoying, but he's not stupid. Theismann is.

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Of belts, and the hitting below them

According to SDB, the weirdo-site IndyMedia has libeled the guy who runs the weirdo-site Little Green Footballs. Now, I personally think LGF is one of the most putrid sites out there, but IndyMedia's stunt here is just dumb and very likely libelous. Come on, guys.

UPDATE: Michael Lopez rains on the "It's libel!" parade by being so crass as to actually cite some case law. Geez, talk about a killjoy! (Mmmmm....Blended Puppy Soup....)

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The "Job-is-worthless" Recovery

According to economic journalist Jim Jubak, the economy is finally creating jobs. Problem is, the jobs suck. Woo-hoo.

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Lily Rules!

I turned on NPR yesterday morning and caught the last few minutes of an interview with one of my favorite people in the world, Lily Tomlin. I first encountered Tomlin when I was in second grade; for that one year only my family subscribed to HBO, and one month there was an hour-long comedy special of hers, which I recall enjoying immensely - - I watched in several times - - even though I didn't entirely understand the jokes. Some of her films are still favorite comedies of mine, like Nine to Five and All Of Me. And of course there's her work on The West Wing, which I love.

The NPR site has links to the actual interview as well as video clips of Tomlin's work over the years. The occasion of the interview is Tomlin's reception of the Mark Twain Prize for Achievement in Humor.

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Mr. President, a Mr. Falwell to see you.

Via Matthew Yglesias I see this Washington Post article, which seems to indicate a long suspicion of mine: Sooner or later, the Evangelical Christian Right, which is overwhelmingly Republican, is going to decide that it's been moderately silent long enough. In other words, President Bush's debts are going to be called in, which should make for some pretty interesting political theater. It's like they're saying, "Fine, we were quiet after our open-mike night at the 1992 Republican Convention, but we want the mike again." I'm reminded of that recent Steven Den Beste post in which SDB maintained that the Christian Right has been marginalized in Republican politics, an idea which struck me as being, well, totally wrong.

But what strikes me in this article is the opening graf:

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are making plans to turn gay marriage into a major issue in next year's elections, with some Christian groups saying that banning same-sex unions is a higher immediate priority for them than restricting abortion.

Presumably, these are many of the same folks who believe that human life begins at conception. The logical result, then, of their belief that same-sex marriage outweighs abortion is this: "We hate gays more than we value human life, and we are prepared to reflect that belief in our activism." That's a pretty breathtaking statement of values, isn't it?

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Is this what they mean by "Posthuman"?

OK, I know that I'm not as well-read in science fiction yet as I'd like to be, mainly because I pretty much abandoned the genre between the ages of 16 and 26. So, I'm not totally up on the concept of "Posthumans", and I need someone to explain it to me. Specifically, are "posthumans" the types of folks who can survive being swept over Niagara Falls with no protective gear and the types of folks who can kill a shark with their bare hands? Is that what the whole thing is about?

By the way, I've been to Niagara Falls dozens of times, and the Canadian side - - the side the guy went over - - is always incredibly packed with tourists snapping photos. How did nobody get a shot of him just as he went over? I don't care about pictures of him waving in triumph after crawling onto a rock at the bottom! I want a shot of him just as he hits the brink, what I call the "Holy Shit!" moment. Come on, somebody's gotta have that picture!

And also by the way, if the guy who went over the Falls is telling the truth and it really was a suicide attempt, then he's got to be the most colossal screw-up in human history. Imagine picking the single most sure-to-be-successful manner of killing oneself that probably exists, and still surviving with only a few scratches. Oy.

(second link via He of All Things Horrific.)

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Reruns, we've got reruns!

Question: When David Letterman takes a week off, why are the re-runs always episodes from about six weeks before? I mean, we just saw these! (As I write this, for posting Sunday morning, Dave is cracking jokes about Rush Limbaugh's comments about Donovan McNabb.) Can't they rebroadcast some really old episodes, from 1995 or so? I'd love to see an old interview of, say, Samuel L. Jackson promoting Pulp Fiction or some such thing.

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This book left me sweaty around the edges.

A month or so ago, I saw a post by Michael, one-half of the 2 Blowhards, about a crime novel titled Mobtown by an author named Jack Kelly. Michael's review caught my notice not because he really liked the book, although his review did pique my interest in the book on that basis, but because of the book's setting: Rochester, New York, circa 1959. That's just sixty miles down the road from Buffalo. I'm quite familiar with Rochester -- it's a nice town that, like just about every other city in New York whose name isn't actually "New York", has fallen on some seriously hard times in recent decades. (Yeah, I know, NYC pretty much fell on the ultimate in hard times in a single day two years ago. That's not what I'm talking about.)

I don't tend to read too many mysteries. For some reason, I almost always find that the last third of a mystery, when things start getting revealed, is dramatically less interesting than the "mystery" part of the story, and to some extent I found that was the case here, as well -- one of those "The journey's more interesting than the destination" things. But it's a really fun journey here, especially because these are locales I know, to some extent. Some of the book's action takes place at a theme park called "Gleeland", which I take to be the park now called "Seabreeze", which was named "Dreamland" during the years in which the novel is set. I've been to Seabreeze, and I've ridden the Jackrabbit roller coaster. I've seen the Genesee River Gorge as it cuts right through downtown Rochester. The Red Wings still play minor league ball there. It's a real pleasure to see these kinds of locales worked into a novel like this. And it's a pleasure seeing a noir story taking place outside of New York or LA or San Francisco.

Parts of the novel left me a bit cold -- as I note, the climax didn't really grab me, and some of the standard private-eye novel cliches show up: the femme fatales, the action at the local boxing ring, the divorced private-eye who promises his kid he'll make the birthday party only to be detained by the local cops until well after the party is over. Still, it was a fun read, mainly for the locales and for Kelly's knack for the language of these types of stories. Michael quotes this bit of description, quite aptly:

Her lipstick had worn off, her hair was all over the place, and she was sweaty around the edges. But, man, could she dance.

A lot of the book reads like that. I hope Kelly writes a similar book for Buffalo. Thanks to Michael for the pointer.

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New at GMR

My newest review for Green Man Review is up: the novel The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes by Larry Millett, which is a novel about an English detective around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who apparently takes a lot of opium and hangs out with a guy named Watson. The game's afoot....

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Searching for Amazons

I see that Amazon now allows one to search not only titles and whatnot, but the entire texts of the books in its database. A lot of folks are thinking this is surpassingly nifty, but I'm not really sure. And quite frankly, I'm not even sure that it really works. I tested it out with two distinctive phrases from the last paragraphs of the chapter "The Siege of Gondor" from The Return of the King, which I would think would be one of the books in Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" database. (The phrases were "recking nothing of wizardry or war" and "great horns of the north wildly blowing".) The book was not listed among the results. Then I tried "Mindolluin", the name of a mountain also mentioned in the same paragraph, and still Return of the King failed to come up. Maybe I'm not understanding how this is supposed to work?

Also, it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to use the new feature, until I realized that it's hardwired into Amazon's search function. So any time you search, your search term results using "Inside the Book" are automatically returned, whether you want them or not. That could be a giant pain, could it not? I'm not saying this is a bad feature, but it seems to me the customer should be able to disable it.

(Just after I finished writing this, I saw that Jessa Crispin had almost the exact same thoughts, and two days before I did, to boot. Terry Teachout had the same thoughts. Geez, I'm getting slow on the draw.)

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That guy dancing in the street -- isn't that Marlin Fitzwater, former White House Press Secretary?

Congratulations to the Florida Marlins on winning the World Series. For the second year in a row, the team I was rooting for was defeated by a team I don't mind seeing win. You know the baseball gods are smiling upon you when your starting pitcher not only nails down the series with a complete-game shutout, but makes the final put-out himself when he fields a slow grounder up the first baseline.

Something that confuses me slightly about the outcome this year is how it reflects baseball's economics. I've long believed that baseball desperately needs to institute some real form of revenue sharing and probably a salary cap system, similar to the one the NFL has in place, which would level the playing field for the small-market teams like my own Pirates. But, the Marlins' title, as well as the recent competitive teams fielded by Oakland, Minnesota, Kansas City, and so on seem to demonstrate that small-market teams can compete. What they can't do is field a juggernaut like the Yankees or Braves; but they can make up for that with good scouting, competent player development, and proper management of the farm system. That's why the Marlins have been able to bounce back from losing something like 105 games in 1998 (one year after their first title and the fire-sale that they held the day after they won it), and that's why my Pirates are now entering their third rebuilding phase since 1992 (their last postseason appearance), even though they haven't had a winning season since that same 1992 season. I still think that baseball needs to get better revenue sharing in place, but this pretty much proves that bad franchises can't blame it all on economics.

I wonder if Cubs fans watched the Yankees' lackluster play in this Series and are now thinking, "My God, our boys coulda taken these guys...."

Finally, two small complaints to the FOX television people: when a team records the final out in a World Series victory, show the entire pile-up of celebrating players on the mound, will you? Last night's coverage cut to the glum faces on the Yankees' bench way too soon. I know, you have to show them, but let the celebration be seen first. Then you can show the losing team wondering what might have been. And the other complaint is more general about TV sports: does every large sporting event have to serve double duty as a promotion for that network's TV shows? I mean, I love That 70s Show, but do I really gotta see the cast shivering in the Yankee Stadium stands? Yeesh.

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O for a thousand eyes, that I might roll them at once....

That can mean only one thing: another gathering of those weirdos on AICN for a roundtable discussion of Star Wars and everything that is wrong with the Universe! Yep, you can read parts one and two today, with a promise of a third installment in another day or two.

Actually, it isn't nearly as bad this time as in previous installments (which set me to a lot of mouth-foaming, here, here and here). A big reason, I think, is that some guy named Carl Cunningham, who is apparently a fairly prominent Star Wars fan on the Net, is participating, and he seems to be both articulate and a guy who hasn't sipped the "George Lucas is a money-grubbing hack who has totally lost it" Kool-Aid. So, a lot of the discussion this time actually revolves around fannish speculation on the plot of Episode III: just when Anakin turns, how it might tie in with the other Episodes, et cetera. Not too bad, although some of the mental gymnastics the group performs get a bit weird -- especially in Part Two, when they start in on when the Original Trilogy will show up on DVD and what kind of filmmaker George Lucas really is and whatnot.

Moriarty's insistence on proceeding from the default assumption that every rumor is true until it is directly contradicted gets a bit annoying, but hey, at least no one mentions Greedo shooting first. Particularly refreshing is the afore-mentioned Carl guy, who immediately responds to the first whiff of "Lucas is out for our money" with something I've long maintained: If all he wanted was the fans' money, he'd have crappy DVDs of the Original Trilogy in stores already. And a bit later on, when someone mentions some interview that Gary Kurtz once gave, this Carl fellow actually points out that maybe, just maybe, Gary Kurtz (the producer of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back) doesn't know what he's talking about. Huzzah. (Kurtz's name is often invoked by fans who hate the Prequels as the real reason the first two films in the Original Trilogy are so good, as part of the "They're good in spite of George Lucas" argument that I reject completely.)

So, it's not as bad as the previous incarnations of the AICN Jedi Council. (I expect that the TalkBacks will, in due course, get flooded with all the annoying idiots who hate Star Wars because it's not The Matrix.)

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Move Over Britney!

Yep, it's time for another installment in my ongoing exploration of Notable Women Whose Dogs Britney Is Unfit To Follow With A Poop-Scooper! This time, we have Mary-Louise Parker.





OK: long-time readers will recall that I expressed some lack of fondness for Ms. Parker's work on The West Wing in previous seasons. Why the change of heart now? Well, basically: I'm changing my mind. I can do that, you know. I've liked her each time she's showed up this year on The West Wing, which baffled me slightly, so I checked her IMDB listing.

Basically, I had forgotten about a lot of good work she has done: Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes, and more. Thinking, then, about why I haven't been turned off by her on TWW this year when I was quite turned off by her the last two years, I realized that it's Aaron Sorkin's fault. But not in a bad way.

Ms. Parker has a fairly low voice, and her vocal delivery is pretty low-key, without a lot of enunciation (and sometimes she outright drawls). She's what I call an "expression actor", in that she can do more with her eyes and facial expressions than she can with her vocal delivery of dialogue. This, I think, put her at something of a disadvantage on The West Wing when she was required to partake in Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue; it simply didn't suit her well and I always found her speaking parts on the show to have an almost monotone-buzzing quality.

But now that Sorkin is gone, the dialogue on TWW has been slowed down a bit (although, quite honestly, it's still been pretty good), and the show has actually explored silence once in a while, which plays to Ms. Parker's strengths as an actress. Anyway, that's my theory. It came to me when I realized that I liked her most in roles where she doesn't say a whole hell of a lot.

And that is more than anyone really wanted to know....

Labels: ROWR

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Friday's Burst of Weirdness

This is an experiment that I might keep up with: a weekly posting, each Friday, of the weirdest thing I've encountered on the Net during the week.

This week is a very odd bit of animation, with music, called We Like the Moon.

(via Particles, a subdivision of Making Light.)

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Digital Distribution in Art (a repost)

(I don't normally do reposts -- in fact, this might be my first repost ever -- but the topic has come up lately, and rather than just rehash it all I can just repost. I wrote this back on February 9, 2003.)

I've been thinking a bit about the "digital distribution revolution" that is unfolding in the music world, and is beginning to bud in the film world -- the uploading and downloading of songs on P2P networks, the various copyright issues, and such. While I grant that the industry attempts to stuff the genie back into the bottle are equal parts laughable, draconian and dumb, I also have to admit a certain suspicion of the motives of many who are allied against the RIAA and MPAA. For all the high-sounding rhetoric about "freeing Mickey" (with which I generally agree; copyright was surely never intended to last for periods measured in decades) and "progress" and "the evil record companies" (with which, again, there really can be no dispute, since the RIAA's typical view of talent is not-that-distinguishable from indentured servitude), it seems to me that the bedrock motive always comes back to money. The RIAA does not want its golden goose killed, and the file-swappers are under the impression that a fabulous new day is dawning when paying for music and movies and whatever else is a thing of the past. "Information wants to be free" has always struck me as a ludicrous idea, especially since the conduct and quick anger of those who insist such never fails to convey the actual message of "I want my information to be free".

Some other thoughts, largely unrefined, have been stirring about in my brain for a bit, so I'll just throw some things at the wall. If anyone has answers or thoughts of their own, feel free to comment.

:: The means of distribution affects art in many ways. For instance, every article I read about filesharing and its related issues discusses the shared content in terms of songs. I see this in the Apple tagline, "Rip. Mix. Burn." I see this every month in WIRED, when some celebrity or important person is asked to list their current playlist, and it's always a selection of ten or twelve completely different songs. When WIRED recently compared a group of music-download sites, they used a single song as the test case. My point? While I do often speak of individual songs, I've always preferred to think of the song as something atomic, with the larger work -- the album -- as the actual work of art. I may be one of a minority in this regard -- I haven't done any research here -- but I wonder if something isn't being lost when our attention turns from albums to individual songs. I worry that the idea of a great album -- say, Brothers In Arms or Led Zeppelin IV or The Wall or Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely -- may die out as our focus shifts to finding those songs that we like.

A great album isn't merely a collection of songs. A great album has an entire character on its own that is defined by the way its constituent songs work alongside one another; how the mood of one song leads into the mood of the next; the ebb-and-flow of the tempi and style of the songs. What place, then, for an album in a world where the song is the standard of exchange?

:: I've thought of getting an MP3 player, once in a while, but I'm not at all certain how much mileage I would get out of it. This is because I tend to listen to entire albums, as noted above; but also for another reason: I just plain like CDs. When I read comments in WIRED that imply that the CD has become uncool and square, I really wonder how on earth this can be. I've never found CDs to be anything other than marvelous and wonderful. They are convenient; their sound is frankly better than an MP3; and I actually like things like cover-art and liner notes and whatnot. And I don't like the idea of my entire musical collection existing as nothing more than ones-and-zeroes on a hard-drive, subject to the various problems that affect hard-drives now and again. I like the physical reality of my CDs. Thumbing through my music collection and finding old gems that I haven't heard in a long while is always a pleasure; although admittedly I haven't tried, I can't quite believe that scrolling through a collection of folders and files on my PC would have the same cachet.

:: If the digital realm is really the future of content -- music and books and film and whatever else -- then I worry even more about the "digital divide", where so many people in our society are unable to join the online world, whether because of cost or disability or whatever. The Digital Divide is real, and it is large; and it seems to me that if we're going to transfer a significant part of our cultural expression to the digital realm, then we'd better make damned sure the Divide is reduced to almost nothing, if not eliminated entirely.

There are many people in this world who cannot afford a computer and whose only opportunity to go online is to use a public terminal at a library, if they can even do that. But a person who might not be able to spend $600 on a computer may still be able to scrape together $30 for a bargain-basement CD player. They need not be shut out of our culture entirely, which is what I fear may happen to an uncomfortably large segment of our society as we become more and more digital.

Digital media are wonderful and have stunning potential. But I'm unconvinced that the infrastructure exists to make our digital world a reality for all people, and if we can't bring the digital to all people, then I am not prepared to allow those people to fall by the wayside, thus creating a caste of Untouchables -- perhaps we would call them "the Unconnected" -- who are not only divorced from the Internet, but divorced from our culture itself even as they walk amongst us.

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Yeah, but did Resphigi compose a tone poem about them?

Kevin Drum decides that for this week's installment of Friday Cat Blogging he'll eschew new pics of his own cats in favor of some pics of the cats of Rome.

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The Diaspora Continues....

Slipping the surly bonds of BlogSpot today is John Lagado's Laputan Logic. Get thee hence:

www.laputanlogic.com

You folks who haven't visited this blog, which is a one-man-band blog version of The Discover Channel, need to check him out now, and often afterwards.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Concorde, coming in for landing at London's Heathrow Airport.

The Concorde jet, which travels at supersonic speeds, will cease to do so after tomorrow's last departure from JFK Airport in New York, and nothing is replacing it, mainly because companies that make and use such planes now believe no such plane can recoup its costs. The era of the Concorde is over.

The picture links to an MSC article by Michael Moran, who wonders: "Have we humans peaked as a species?" He writes:

Slave galleys, paddlewheels, stagecoaches, ocean liners and trans-continental rail service all had their day. Yet in none of those cases did humanity settle for something less when their day had past. In that, Concorde’s retirement may be unique.

In my more cynical moments, I tend to agree with George Carlin in that we were once a promising species, but now we're basically playing out the string. This isn't quite what Moran's getting at here, but I think this way too, more often than I should. I see science fiction authors and aficionadoes turning their back on space travel, at the very most consenting to robotic probes but that's it. I see us basically throwing up our hands and consenting to being screwed with our pants on, simply because "the market" and "the bottom line" demand it. And so on.

Most of all, though, I think we've lost our sense of wonder. That's a hell of a thing to lose, and I want it back.

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It sure beats a puttering mo-ped!

Aaron's wife, Krista, finally has a vehicle that befits her profession, which involves whacking on things with sticks. (She's a percussionist.)

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Knowing it when one sees it

Lynn Sislo is ruminating on an eternal question: What is art?

I've tossed that one around quite a bit in my life, and often I see the attempts at definition which sooner or later arrive at the altar of opinion, usually in a derisive tone: "Rap music isn't music." "Science fiction is fun, but it certainly isn't literature." And so on. A lot of times it seems to me that any such definition is basically fence-building, with the definition serving as the fence to keep the undesirable stuff away from the "good stuff".

In his book Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud comes up with a really inclusive definition of art: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity that doesn't grow out of either of our species two basic instincts: survival and reproduction." Now, this definition strikes me as unsatisfactory, but I'm sympathetic to it because it is inclusive. It's not a definition designed to set up borders and filters that will insulate us from the bad and allow in only the good. So even if that definition doesn't quite work -- and McCloud later admits it doesn't, in his follow-up book, Reinventing Comics -- I think he's on a right track.

My personal definition of art is also inclusive: "Art is any activity whose primary purpose is to stimulate the senses in such a way as to provoke an emotional response, a set of emotional responses, or a set of reflections." Art, to me, depends not just on result but also on intent. And that's why cooking, in my opinion, is every bit as much an art as is painting, composing, and writing. Cooking requires craft, to be sure, but a lot of times I see commentary on cooking-as-art overly dependent on the idea of craft. (I take "craft" to be "attention to the details inherent in any particular artistic medium".)

These thoughts are, of course, half-baked and in need of fleshing out; what I've done here is stick my flag in the ground and stake my claim. I'll worry about what I build there later.

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Change Your Bookmarks

Scott Secrest has left BlogSpot for greener pastures:

www.archipelapogo.net

Go have a look. Any redesign plans, Scott?

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Digital Music

Andrew Cory, who has tried repeatedly to drink the Apple Kool-aid but evidently keeps picking up plain ice water, talks about the new iTunes for Windows thing. I have very little interest in downloading music, and I don't expect that to change until we reach a point when a significant amount of music I want is only available by download, which I suspect will be quite some time. For all the complaining about the price of CDs -- and I do think they need to come down in price -- they're still closer to being an egalitarian means of music distribution than downloading, which assumes a certain level of affluence. Plus, I just plain like having my music collection in a physical, tangible form. I have thought about ripping some of my CDs so I can listen to them while I'm at the computer, but that would be primarily a novelty, since the computer is in the same room as my stereo in the first place.

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A Potential Warning!

A few minutes ago I checked my Technorati Link Cosmos, and found a new site linking to Byzantium's Shores that is, shall we say, a tad surprising. (As of this writing, it's the Number Two site listed there. Not Safe For Work!) Upon further investigation, it appears to be a porn site that's specifically designed to look like a blog. Scrolling downward, I found a very long list of links which I assume is where the link here is located; I also see that this site has 125 referrals already from Technorati, so I assume I'm far from the only one making this discovery this morning.

I don't know, maybe this is all harmless and maybe it's really just someone using blog format for a bit of "High Kinkiness", but in the wake of last week's "Comments Spam" attacks that infected many Movable Type blogs out there with porn links in the comment threads, my "suspicion meter" is set on "High". So, any of my readers with blogs of their own might want to be on the lookout. I'm not sure really what happens next here, but vigilance is always wise.

And this strikes me as a good time to reiterate my own Comments Spam policy: I will ban any IP addresses that attempt to do any such thing on my comments and I will report such behaviors to the appropriate ISPs.

UPDATE: And just like that, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has already found the exact same site. Somehow I suspect that the names "Woody" and "Peaches" are about to become quite infamous in Blogistan....

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Hmmmm....

Last week, NBC postponed the new episode of The West Wing that was to air Wednesday night, presumably because of the ongoing baseball playoffs (both the NLCS and ALCS had gone to sixth and seventh games, and both series involved a long-suffering franchise). Via The Modulator, I see that another theory for the pre-emption, which involves the episode's North Korea-related plotline. (The episode is now supposed to air tonight.)

I doubt that's the case, though, because NBC also put reruns in place of its Thursday night schedule the same week (up against ALCS Game Seven), and CBS likewise postponed a new episode of CSI Thursday night. (I don't watch anything on ABC, so I have no idea if they had to similarly postpone new episodes that week.)

I was surprised that the networks had anything new scheduled at all last week, but maybe they simply assumed that baseball's playoff ratings would continue to be less than the bonanza they used to be, only to be caught unawares by the drama of watching the Cubs and Red Sox come oh, so close.

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The TITANIC, the Administration, and Other Things That Leak

Darth Swank reports on a Defense Department memo, reported in the USA Today, which doesn't quite back up the "Everything's comin' up roses!" view of the War on Terror. Glenn Reynolds, of course, is incensed at the leak (this from the guy who kept maintaining that the Valerie Plame affair was "too confusing"), which is unfortunate because it's not clear that this is a leak at all, and anyway, the Department of Defense has put the memo up on their website. Now, I'm far from an expert here, so let me know if I'm wrong. But it doesn't seem to me that memos intended to be confidential get posted to the Web, even if they get leaked.

I sometimes get the feeling that if Reynolds were the Captain of an English ocean liner on its maiden voyage, his reaction to being handed a note informing him that a very large icefield lies ahead would be to light all the boilers and go full steam ahead.

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A Service Notice

Posting here may be a bit more sporadic than usual next week, as the Amazonian Queen Wife will be on vacation, which will mean setting aside my usual routines in favor of day-trips and whatnot. And Halloween is coming up, which means...well, I'm not sure what that means, except that I remember that my daughter is perhaps old enough to discover the joys of Milk Duds.

(I'm being facetious there. I hate Milk Duds, the most godawful candy in existence. Any candy that requires presoaking in lye just to render it chewable is not a candy I want on any kind of regular basis, even if it is only yearly.)

Oh, and check out John Scalzi's kid's costume. Apparently she likes to play with things before annihilation. Our kid's going to be Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz. Except she's blond. Go figure.

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A Minor World Series Note

Mike of Mike's Baseball Rants, who doesn't think too highly of Joe Morgan as a baseball pundit, might appreciate this: I was driving last night when the game started, and heard the first two innings on the radio. Very early on, Joe Morgan (the color-commentator on the official radio broadcast) says something like, "The Marlins will benefit defensively as the night goes on and the field dries out." I thought that odd enough to begin with, since the game was at night and presumably there wouldn't be a whole lot of evaporation going on.

But then, after I was home for a while and checked in on the game in the sixth inning, it was raining. So much for Joe's prediction.

(I actually like Joe Morgan a lot, but Mike's commentaries on him are usually very funny.)

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Google giveth, and Google taketh away

In an amazing twist of blogging fate, the guys over at Dead Parrots somehow ended up, for a time, with a post of their being Google's Number One site for "Steve Bartman" -- the Cubs fan who went for that infamous foul ball. The resulting traffic to their blog was, shall we say, staggering.

In that single day, they picked up about half as many hits as I've had in the entire time I've been writing this blog. Wow.

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I'm not useless! Really!

Earlier this morning I was flipping past channels, heading for PBS so the kid could watch Sesame Street, when I just happened to catch about five seconds of Alan Colmes, the "liberal" who occupies the seat next to Sean Hannity on FOX News's "fair and balanced" show (in which Colmes always sits meekly by while Hannity foams at the mouth, shouts, interrupts, and generally behaves like Bill O'Reilly). Colmes's appearance this morning was on (I am not making this up) The 700 Club. I didn't watch any more than what I happened to see, so for all I know, Colmes got into a flaming debate with Pat Robertson and struck a blow for liberal decency and all that. (I doubt that.)

I did catch Colmes apparently defending himself against accusation that he serves no useful purpose on the show, by saying "I am not a potted plant!" That made me laugh. From what little I've seen of the Hannity and Colmes show (not much, admittedly), maybe Colmes is right: he's not a potted plant. He's that clump of dead root-bound soil that you discard from an old pot before refilling it for use with a new plant.

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Don't let McCoy get anywhere near it!

Still stealing stuff from Warren Ellis, a nifty new gizmo might be unveiled in Britain next year:

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk in real time could make its debut in Britain next year. Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

I assume this description will put any fan of the original Star Trek in mind of the Guardian of Forever, from "The City on the Edge of Forever" (incidentally, the greatest single episode of Star Trek ever, in any series):

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Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Literally.

It seems that the Powers-That-Be in Bangkok want to avoid President Bush and other luminaries being exposed to their city's riverside slums, so their solution is to put up a giant curtain, obscuring the view of the slum.

Talk about "Out of sight, out of mind" as a policy regarding the poor....

(Via Warren Ellis.)

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A Public Statement of Enormous Gratitude.

The UPS man dropped off a package for me, which was sent in my direction at the behest of one of my regular readers. Thank you, Michelle!

(And don't think for one second that I've abandoned my efforts at coercing you into Blogistan on your own….)

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I hope there's some gratuitous raping and pillaging....

Time for some Guy Gavriel Kay stuff. This time, we have early cover art (which is very tentative and subject to change) for the new novel, The Last Light of the Sun. On the left is the Canadian cover art, and on the left is the American version.



And that reminds me, I really need to watch the DVD of this movie one of these days. I bought it really cheap at Target just a day or two after coincidentally finding some enthusiastic reviews about it online. Also, my current plan after reading The Iliad and The Odyssey is to read my copy of The Sagas of the Icelanders. I've basically decided lately to start reinforcing my background in reading all the really old stuff.

(UPDATE: An alert reader -- a little too alert, if you ask me, harumph! -- points out that my above description of which cover is Canadian and which is American is in violation of at least one Law of Physics. Thus, the one on the right is the American cover, tentatively. Those responsible for the error will be sacked later today.)

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Best Guest Appearance EVER!

Hyper-reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, of whom there are no pictures in existence, will "appear" on The Simpsons. Wow. You gotta love the literary chops of The Simpsons.

(via Jessa Crispin.)

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Scary Movie Scenes

Fun stuff, since Halloween's coming up: a couple of countdowns, here and here (second one "in progress", check back each day). I'll probably chime in with some of my favorites, but for now, this is a placeholder.

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Man, that guy's a heel!*

Maybe someone who's already read The Iliad can set me straight on something here: am I supposed to like or root for Achilles or something? Because quite frankly, he's striking me as a complete ass. "I don't care if all my countrymen get butchered by Hector, I'm mad at Agamemnon so I'm just gonna take my boats and go home." And I'm thinking, "Shut up and fight, you inveterate pansy!"

(I already know, of course, that Hector ends up dying in the end, by the way.)

*Get it? Achilles? Heel? Ha ha ha haaaaa!

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Ugly Stadiums and the Football Fans Who Love Them

As I write this (for posting on Tuesday), I'm watching a bit of the Monday Night Football game, and I'm struck by two things about football in Oakland. First, the Raiders are probably the most amazing example of a football team's cumulative age finally catching up to it in NFL history; and second, the Oakland stadium is one of the dumbest looking football stadiums in existence. To get the full effect you have to look at the aerial shots. Formerly called the Oakland Coliseum (renamed Network Associates Coliseum), it houses the A's and the Raiders, as it did back before 1983 or so before the Raiders went to Los Angeles for ten years or so. But when the Raiders returned to Oakland, it was with the insistence by owner Al Davis that the stadium's capacity be increased for football from its original seating for 45,000 (very low by NFL standards). So, they took the roughly circular stadium with former low-sitting bleachers in the baseball outfield and basically removed the bleachers and erected a giant three-tier seating area that basically makes the whole stadium look like a half-assed cross of two entirely different stadiums. Ugh.

(And the Raiders have just lost, failing to make the end zone to tie the game as time expired by a single yard. Wow.)

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Epidemic Laziness

I may have commented on this before - - I've discovered that self-repetition is a fate to which longtime bloggers are probably doomed - - but it happened again, so I'll mention it again. I had a search-engine hit from someone looking for Cliff Notes on a Stephen King book, this time the novel Thinner. Now, I haven't read Thinner, but it seems to me that it either says something really cool about Stephen King that people expect there to be Cliff Notes about him (something about High Literary Worth or some such), or it says something really bad about our readers.

(I like King; when he's on, his work is superb. He's dreadful when he's off, though.)

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Memo to David Blaine:

A month in a box? Pagh! Standing on a pole for many days on end? I scoff at you!

Now that is a stunt! Don't try this one at home, kids. Or here, for that matter.

(ADDENDUM: I should note that police here aren't yet convinced, as of this writing, that it wasn't some kind of hoax -- like maybe the guy dressed a blow-up doll in identical clothes and then hung out down below the falls for the appropriate moment to climb out.)

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Addendum to today's Football Post

I forgot to mention that yesterday's Bills game was something of a Bills reunion day. Not only was Bruce Smith in town with the Redskins (the Bills didn't allow him any sacks, but he came close and man, is he still quick and muscular), not to mention Rob Johnson (as I noted before), but the big event was the halftime Wall of Fame enshrinement of Darryl Talley, the great former Buffalo linebacker. Talley was the heart-and-soul of the Bills' defense during the Super Bowl years, as well as being a fierce competitor and tenacious tackler. Talley was also known for wearing Spiderman spandex under his regular uniform. Also present for Talley's ceremony were other luminaries from the Super Bowl teams: coach Marv Levy, quarterback Jim Kelly, and running back Thurman Thomas.

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44 Days in a Box....sounds like the average call-center employee

David Blaine came out of the box. Think he actually spent the entire 44 days inside there? This guy doesn't.

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Hey Sheila! Check this out!

S.L. Viehl, who (among other things) writes science fiction and makes quilts, will appreciate this recent NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:



Some of the panels are originals; others are based on actual Hubble photos (linked at APOD). Wow!

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The Descent Into Depravity Continues....

Donald Luskin is mad that Paul Krugman thinks he's a cyber-stalker. Well, gee whiz, Donald: all you ever write about is how monstrously evil Krugman is (and that's not a mischaracterization of Luskin's writings), and it's rather hard to buy into your current description of your attendance of a Krugman lecture and book-signing as a harmless little lark when you went on to describe it in a blog post thusly:

I have looked evil in the face. I've been in the same room with it. I don't know how else to describe my feelings now except to say that I feel unclean, and I'm having to fight being afraid.

I know you're all hot-and-bothered about Krugman and all, and I know that "you demand an immediate retraction". But really, Donald, after you actually called Krugman "evil", why shouldn't the only response to you be "If you can't stand the heat, then stay the hell out of the kitchen"? You reap what you sow in this life, Mr. Luskin. Get used to it.

(via TBogg.)

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Howzabout a side trip to Dayton?

Happy Birthday to Kevin Drum, who turned 45 and gets to celebrate by taking a trip to Cincinnati. He wants to know what there is to do in Cincy, and I don't really know. He could just drive across a steel-deck bridge and hum at the pitch his tires make, I guess, and then repeat "97-X, bammmm, the Future of Rock and Roll!" over and over, I suppose.

(The road trip in Rain Man did start in Cincinnati, didn't it?)

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Writing Update

The novel-in-progress currently stands at just under 62000 words. Up today is the first death of a fairly major character, but this character was introduced for no other purpose than to kill him off, so I'm not too broken up about it. He's kind of a minor MacGuffin who basically exists to nudge the story toward the real MacGuffin later on (the Grail, of course -- it's an Arthurian story after all). There are deaths to come -- I think -- that are a bit sadder, though. And there's one very major character whose fate I probably won't decide until the time actually comes when I have to either spare him or have the knife plunge into his heart. Decisions, decisions.

Over the weekend, I also dug out the most recent short story that's been sitting around half-completed. This one's driven by an image that came to me a couple of years back -- a homeless man starts waking up every morning with a crisp ten dollar bill in his pocket -- and now it seems to be developing into a weird tale about a secret society of highstakes poker players, who all happen to be homeless. Problem is, I don't know the first thing about poker, so I'm kind-of cribbing small details from every poker scene I've ever watched in a movie of read in a book and generally trying to fend off the nagging suspicion that it really wouldn't kill me to grab a copy of Hoyle's when I'm at the library later today. You know, getting the details right.

And the story keeps veering off into other thematic regions which are surprising me: Would ten dollars a day, every day, have any real impact on a homeless person's life, or would it just be subsistence? And what, to the homeless, would constitute "high stakes" anyway? I don't know the answers to these questions, and anyway, my general approach to matters of theme is to try to suggest it but do no more than that. Heavy-handed message-sending tends to grate on my nerves ("If you want to send a message, use Western Union", the saying goes). I'm more surprised at the direction I've gone after following a pretty-much random mental image that came to me for no reason at all.

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NFL Week Seven: Yee-haw!

Late October is when the NFL starts to really get interesting, especially here in Buffalo. The question on everyone's mind is: Which Bills team is the real Bills team? Is it the power-running, stifling defense team that throttled the Redskins yesterday 24-7, beat New England and Jacksonville earlier in the year? Or is it the team with the sputtering offense that leaves its defense on the field too long, resulting in one-sided losses to teams like Miami, Philadelphia, and the New york Jets and barely pulled on an overtime victory against Cincinnati? We Bills fans are desperately praying for the former, especially with a couple of stiff tests coming up: the Bills play at Kansas City (where they almost always get crushed) and Dallas the next two weeks.

:: The Bills actually ran the ball yesterday, and they kept running it. Even when Travis Henry got stuffed a few times, they didn't instantly go pass-wacky. Wow, patience with the running game! Who'da thunk it! (Attentive readers will know that I'da thunk it. In fact, I did thunk it. And "thunk" is one fun word.) They rushed the ball 39 times for once. They ignored the nay-sayers who constantly point out that Travis Henry fumbles occasionally (he didn't fumble at all yesterday). And they actually decided to use Antonio Brown, the rookie receiver-kick returner who's the fastest guy on the team, on an end-around play, which was a nive changeup to throw into the mix (certainly better than fake punts and halfback options and other nuttiness the Bills have tried).

A very welcome development, in addition to the definite signs of life in the running game, was in the success the Bills had passing the ball without Eric Moulds in the lineup. Drew Bledsoe had a fine game, going 19-26 for 244 yards, one touchdown and only one interception. The leading receiver yesterday was none other than Josh Reed, who has come under heavy criticism for too many dropped passes and failing to get open. My contention is that Bills fans have been a bit too demanding of Reed, who is after all only in his second year. I think fans' expectations of receivers have been warped by the careers of such players as Marvin Harrison and Randy Moss, players who are spectacular pretty much from the minute they enter the league, but it's far more common for receivers to take a year or two to develop. Josh Reed's rookie year was better than Eric Moulds's, and if he only catches one pass a game for the entire remainder of this season, Reed's second year will end up eclipsing Moulds's second as well.

The defense played a tight and physical game as well, punishing Redskins QB Patrick Ramsay and eventually knocking him out of the game. Their backup, the former Bills' starter and incredibly injury-prone Rob Johnson, came in and almost immediately was swarmed to the Ralph Wilson Stadium turf. (I still maintain that the Bills did the right thing in making Johnson the starter a few years back over Doug Flutie, even though it didn't work out.) The Bills held the Redskins to 56 yards rushing and allowed only ten pass completions. That's pretty good. They'll need that stiffness next week, though, when they see Chiefs RB Priest Holmes.

One final bit of negativity: the Bills are still far too undisciplined. They are still prone to stupid penalties, and in something I've never seen before, they had to call a timeout before running the very first play of the second quarter -- when they had a two-minute television timeout anyway. That's not the mark of a precision team that's hitting on all cylinders.

Other football stuff:

:: If there is one thing I'm getting sick of seeing in the NFL, it's the way every time a wide receiver has a pass broken up by a defender, he immediately whirls around at the officials and makes that wrist-gesture that mimicks the ref's throwing of the penalty flag. If you get the call, fine; if not, quit begging for it. Yeesh.

:: The Dolphins have now blown two winnable games at home -- first, their opener against the Texans, and then yesterday against the Patriots. And it's not even December, when they wilt every year. Rickey Williams, though, did have one of the most amazing plays I've ever seen, when somehow he managed to keep his knee from hitting the ground with only one hand and his toes to brace against when a Pats defender made the initial hit. You almost hate to see a team lose when they have a player with enough drive and strength to pull that play off. Almost. But it's the Dolphins, so I'm glad to see them lose.

:: But I'm not glad to see the Pats win, because now we'll start hearing all sorts of blather about how wonderful Belichick and Tom Brady are. Gack.

:: I only saw a single highlight from the Vikings' win over the Broncos yesterday. Vikings fans will know what highlight that was. That lateral had no business working. I'm glad it did, but I really hope they're not planning that kind of thing as a matter of course.

:: Now that we're approaching the half-way point in the season, and the races for the playoffs are starting to take some shape, it seems that my Super Bowl prediction for this year is in some trouble. Tampa Bay's awesome defense has looked pretty ordinary, and they're only 3-3 right now, not even leading their division and well-behind in the all-important home-field advantage race. My AFC Champion pick, the Tennessee Titans, are in better shape -- they're 5-2, just a half-game out of first place in the AFC South, behind Indianapolis. And not a single one of my picks to win divisions this year is in first place right now. Ouch.

October's almost out -- the World Series is on, and soon it will be November, when the NFL season starts to really pick up steam. The trees here are now well-past their peak, and we're just about in the time when snow becomes a realistic possibility in the Buffalo weather forecast. Bring it on!

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Come in, mothership...come in, mothership...

Agents from Intergalactic Patrol have released this photo of Agent ZZZ from the Evil Vexorg Empire, as he prepares to contact his superiors for further instructions in their fell plot to destroy all mankind. It seems that Agent ZZZ forgot that he is only to perform this operation in broad daylight, so as to not call attention to the glowing of his head....

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Yanks Go Home....

SDB appended the baseball themed post that I commented on the other day, with a metaphor that in the field of international relations, the United States is comparable to the New York Yankees in baseball. It's a decent metaphor, not just in the way that SDB says but also in that a lot of people believe, with some justification, that the way the Yankees do business, while certainly good for the Yankees, isn't always good for baseball in general.

SDB also says that, while other teams wax and wane, the Yankees don't. That's not totally true, although it's certainly true that the Yankees wax and wane less than other clubs. But they have had their periods of ineffectiveness, as this table shows. They didn't become a force until the 1920s, with Babe Ruth's arrival. This began their most remarkable period of extended excellence, for over the next forty years the Yankees never went more than three years without finishing in first place. But then, between 1965 and 1975, they did not finish first a single time, and six times in those eleven years they finished more than twenty games out of first place.

The Yankees rebounded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, finishing first four times in five years between 1976 and 1980. But after 1980, they didn't finish first again until 1996 (1994, actually, if one considers that strike-terminated season). And the worst Yankees teams ever were the ones that took the field between 1989 and 1992. This whole period, incidentally, encapsulates the career of Don Mattingly, who is one of the most popular players to don the New York pinstripes since Reggie Jackson.

SDB attributes the Yankees' success over the last eighty years to money, and I'm certain that's a big part of it. But I'm wondering how big a role money played, or even what role it played, in the days before free-agency when baseball players were pretty much forced into playing for whatever team they ended up with, unless they got traded. I'm no expert here, so I'm wondering how the Yankees managed to be competitive for all those years when they couldn't just go out and sign the biggest players to the biggest contracts. Did they simply have the best scouting and farm systems in baseball for all those years? Were they simply lucky to have one great player after another -- and I'm talking GREAT players here, many of them among the very best ever -- come through their system? How on Earth did the Yankees do it?

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The Trials and Tribulations of Guys Named "Gregg"

I wouldn't want to be a "Gregg" right now. Maybe a "Greg", or perhaps a "Gregory", but definitely not a "Gregg". The Buffalo papers and media are awash right now in speculations that the Bills' head coach, Gregg Williams, is either about to be fired or is deserving of being fired or should never have been hired and more. And then there's writer Gregg Easterbrook, of whom I have complained before and who is embroiled in a bit of controversy right now over something he said about Jews (earlier post of mine here), has apparently been fired from his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN. Kevin Drum reports here and here, and you can follow his links to all manner of discussion of what Easterbrook wrote, said, apologized for, et cetera.

It's no secret that I've been coming off Easterbrook's band wagon lately, but the manner of ESPN's dismissal of his services is rather odd. That is to say, it makes no sense. They didn't just fire him; they deleted all of his columns from their archives, and actually coded their internal search engine so as to report zero hits on any search for the name "Easterbrook", regardless of whether you happen to be searching for Gregg Easterbrook or some other, unrelated Easterbrook. This isn't a mere dismissal; it's the firing-equivalent of killing the guy, bulldozing his house and then salting the earth where it once stood. Weird.

Speculation now is that Easterbrook wasn't really dismissed for writing something odd about Jews, but because by criticizing Miramax's promotion of the movie Kill Bill, he was actually criticizing his boss. (Miramax and ESPN are both owned by Disney.) Talk about your thin skins at the Disney Company, eh?

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Ah, our modern world....

Roger Ebert takes a break from writing about movies today to wax eloquent about leaf blowers, and how much he dislikes them. I pretty much agree with his sentiment. Blowers are definitely useful for removing large amounts of leaves from the roof of one's domicile, thus preventing them from collecting and rotting in the gutters and rain spouts, but whenever I see someone dutifully shooing the leaves from one's yard with one of these gizmos, I am immediately certain that come June this person will be outside again waging a war on dandelions, those innocent yellow flowers which go away all by themselves in two weeks anyway, if left alone.

And in a nice bit of incongruity, at the bottom of Ebert's article is a small box containing "related advertising links", which in this case are advertising -- you guessed it -- sites that sell leaf blowers.

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Musical Notes from the World Series

As a card-carrying Star Wars geek (well, I'd carry a card if there was one), I got a kick out of the music played at Yankee Stadium last night for the player introductions before Game One. When the visiting Florida Marlins were introduced, the Yankees played the "Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back, which many baseball fans might consider more appropriate for last night's home team, but never mind. Then, the Yankees were introduced to the strains of "Throne Room and End Title" from A New Hope, complete with that wonderful opening brass fanfare followed by the march-version of the Force Theme (originally Ben Kenobi's Theme).

And I thought that Clay Aiken performed a fine rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, except for the moment when the fighter-jet flyover threw him off. I'll admit it, I love Clay's voice. (I'll also admit to liking Celine Dion. Ya got a problem with that?)

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A loogie spit from the roof will strike the sidewalk with what force?

The city of Taipei is now home to the world's tallest building. I've just cranked the numbers, and I'm sure everyone will be fascinated to discover that Taipei's new building is approximately 3.1512 times the height of One HSBC Center, the tallest building in Buffalo. Hmmmm....that's a little more than pi, isn't it?

(The Taipei building is way cooler looking than One HSBC Center, too. I mean, is the Buffalo building the most boring looking building you've ever seen, or what? Every time I drive by it, it just screams out at me, "This is where accountants come to play!")

The MSN article mentions the skittishness some people now have about very tall buildings post 9-11-01, but I still get a kick out of very tall structures. What interested me more was the fact that the big concern for the Taipei building is seismic activity, as opposed to terrorist activity.

And I should note that to me it seems a bit like cheating to build a tall building and then cap it with some kind of ornamental spire just to nab the "Tallest Building" honors. At least the Sears Tower in Chicago is offices all the way up. Harumph.

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