New Month, New Masthead

I hope you all like this one!

(UPDATE: No, this image isn't staying around forever. I'll replace it sometime tomorrow.)

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Move Over Br....nah, I can't go through with it.

I was going to post a certain picture here as an April Fool's edition of Move Over Britney!, but....well, I just love my readers too much to subject them to such things.

Go look at the item I'm sparing you.

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Lazy Linkage

Not much to talk about, but here are some items of interest. Or not. (Yes, it's a slow day, and I had a lousy day at The Store. You know how to tell bad karma when you're working at a grocery store? When you get paged to come quick because one of the front doors fell off its hinges. And that was at the end of my day. Yeesh.)

:: Alistair Cooke has died. I never heard his "Letter From America" radio feature, but I remember my mother's faithful watching of Masterpiece Theater when I was a kid.

:: Matthew Yglesias links this poll of the 10 sexiest women. Regular readers will know that I nearly covered my monitor in Pepsi from my oral cavity when I saw who was Number One. But then, my idea of "sexy" involves brains and talent, and does not involve a stainless steel pole and guys waving dollar bills, so there you are. (Like Matthew, I don't even know who a couple of these women are.)

:: All the writing books say not to try crap like this, but when you see news items that endorse it -- with supporting quotes from the publisher, no less! -- one is tempted to despair for the idea that maybe just writing the best book one can is the way to go. The publisher in question, though, seems to be a bookstore-chain associated label, rather like "Barnes&Noble Books", so I'm not sure this really counts as "using a gimmick to get published" in the classic sense.

:: The Ten Best Rock Bands Ever. Start quibbling, I guess. I can't really say -- while I can't deny the Beatles their place in history, I can certainly admit that I don't much care for them as a listening experience. I almost always prefer hearing Beatles songs performed by, well, people other than the Beatles. And I will go to my grave thinking that "Hey Jude" is one of the most horrible, Godawful, please-drive-an-icepick-through-my-eardrums songs in all of history. But then, I'm a guy who thinks that Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits is the best rock album of the 1980s, so again, what do I know.

:: As a follow-up to my post a few days ago about why The Apprentice is better than Survivor, I see an MSNBC article that argues convincingly that The Apprentice is better than Survivor. Hell, if I'm ahead of the pro writers, how come I'm not one?

:: LiteBrite, on the Web. Believe me, it's more fun doing LiteBrite on the living room floor with a four year old while The Simpsons is on, but hey, what do....[head explodes]

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An Impending Hiatus, and a couple of other notes.

Just a heads-up for my regular readers: I will be taking a week-long hiatus starting on Easter Sunday and ending the Saturday after Easter Sunday. This hiatus will coincide with the wife's vacation, so we'll be doing some fun stuff away from the computer, and anyway, it's been a while since I took time off to recharge the blogging batteries. I'm falling dangerously behind on my 2004 Reading List, for instance.

Also, I'm kicking around ditching BlogRolling for maintaining the blogroll, just to speed things up, really. I never found it all that easier to use than by merely hand-coding links, and the "Recently Updated" thing doesn't seem to actually work for all blogs. I'll probably implement that change in the next few days. Nothing against BlogRolling, really, but the load-time issue is a biggie, and I just don't gain as much by using that service as I thought I might when I signed up. (I was considering this move before the service was bought by some other company, so this isn't some grand stand against the corporatization of the Web.)

Finally...well, there is no "finally". That's it.

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Duke is evil? When did that happen?

No links, but I've seen a few comments here and there that for purposes of the NCAA tournament, Duke has become the college basketball equivalent of the New York Yankees: everybody is either a fan, or hates them. Not being up on my college basketball, when did this happen? I seem to recall a lot of admiration for Duke and for Mike Krz....their coach. Did I miss something?

And speaking of the Yankees, I see they lost on opening day. Don't get excited, Yankee-haters, and don't get downtrodden, Yankee-lovers. The Yankees opened their 1998 season with two straight losses, and then they went on to win 120 games (I think...I'm not looking it up).

And then there's my team, the Pirates, who have posted losing records eleven years in a row and are now in their third rebuilding phase, by my count. But maybe if this rebuilding project takes, Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy can have a speech like this:

"Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands."

Oh well.

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Confessions of a One-time Minister

Fascinating post about one man's Christianity, here:

"I'm trying to get my head around were I stand right now vis a vis Jesus Christ. Not God; Jesus. God's a done deal; God has returned my calls consistently over the past year and a half; as for Jesus, I can't even get Jesus' voice mail. He's probably busy dealing with the whole Mel Gibson thing."

Via the Unsinkable Mr. Jones, whom I know has done a great deal of reading about religious matters and whom I wish would write some of his own essays about his thoughts thereof.

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Post-modern Blogging?

Yesterday when I logged on to Blogger for some posting, I noticed that three of the "Recently Published" blogs sported really minimalistic titles: "Weblog", "A Blog is a Blog is a Blog", and the self-referential "This Is Not a Blog".

I failed to click through and observe any actual entries, however, so I can't vouch for what the content might have been. I just found the presence of three such blogs on the list kind of funny. (Emphasis there on "kind of", rather than on "funny".)

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Yes, it's serious music, dammit!

If you ever want to see some thin skins in action, just wander onto a film music discussion board and suggest, in as condescending a tone as possible, that film music doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as real classical music.

Some people out there, though, get it: of course it does. The Washington Times had a great article the other day about it. (I know, liberal bloggers aren't supposed to approvingly link the Washington Times. Well, I'm doin' it anyway. Harumph.)

Here are a couple of key passages from the article:

"The death of classical music in the 20th century has become an almost tiresome cliche, but maybe now is the time to ask if these reports of serious music's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps we have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Perhaps it merely went into hiding in a place where you would least expect it: the Hollywood soundstage.... As these new recordings and others amply demonstrate, it is long past time to recognize Hollywood's greatest film scores as significant milestones in the legitimate classical repertoire. Continued academic snobbery and pointless experimentation will only further alienate musical culture from its traditional and popular roots in the unities of dramatic presentation and formal structure."

Go read the whole thing. The re-recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood score to which the article refers is here. It's worth noting that William Stromberg and the Marco Polo label have been re-recording classic film scores for years, and that this is only the most recent of their releases.

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I think it's a bunny. Or an axe-wielding madman.

Yet another nifty post by Lynn Sislo, in which she provides three abstract paintings but doesn't identify the artists. One of them is apparently by a "name-brand" artist, while the other(s) are by amateurs. There's some interesting discussion going on, too, but as is almost always the case, I don't really "get" some of the statements made by people who seem to know what they're talking about. Of course, my own personal definition of art is hyper-inclusive, and there's also my general rejection of any objective standard of good versus bad, so there you go.

Anyway, I like the second painting she posts. It seems to me to be best organized around a visual theme.

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The Smoking Exploding Space Modulator

After finding clear evidence of water on Mars a couple of weeks ago, something even more exciting has been detected by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft in Martian orbit: methane. What's so exciting about methane? The methane molecule is not stable in the Martian atmosphere, so unless it is replenished it would disappear within several hundred years. And methane, so far as we know, could be replenished in two ways. One is volcanic activity (for which there is no current evidence of there being any on Mars), and the other is microbial activity.

Now, if they find a beat-up road sign reading "Barsoom City -- 50 miles", that'll really be something.

(link via Warren Ellis)

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Oh, give it up, Atrios!

Sometimes I wonder if Atrios's staunch pseudonymity is just a test to see how long he can keep it up. Case in point: Kos has pictures of Atrios with the face blurred.

At some point it all becomes just an exercise in silliness, doesn't it?

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How DARE they quote the Bible! It's ours! Keep thy mits off, libruls!

Kevin Drum points out something funny. It seems that the Bush campaign is mad because John Kerry quoted scripture in the course of criticizing the President.

I know that a lot of conservatives think that the Bible is theirs and theirs alone to use as a rhetorical cudgel against their political foes, but something tells me they're about to discover that it goes both ways.

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God's person acting troupe continues to grow....

British actor Sir Peter Ustinov has died.

I'll bet there are some amazing productions of Hamlet in Heaven these days.

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Fuel for Anti-Semitism

A common criticism of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is that, if the film itself is not anti-Semitic, it might well provide fuel for anti-Semites who want to believe that "the Jews" were primarily responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. I'm not sure how fair a criticism this is -- I'm generally wary of blaming art for the actions of people who view it -- but I do note at least one instance of it happening. It seems that a Shi'ite cleric in Kuwait wants the film to be exhibited, over that country's ban on films that depict prophets (Muslims hold Jesus to be a prophet), because it exposes "the role of the Jews, the killers of prophets".

Gibson has insisted that he intended no anti-Semitism in making this film, so I hope he condemns this blatant attempt by some to graft anti-Semitism onto his effort.

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Down with the Academy!

PZ Myers offers up a charming story from his own life about how a single professor tormented him in his grad school days. I sometimes regret that I didn't go to grad school...but not often. This kind of thing is the reason why; and since my father and sister are both in academia, I've heard many a story of this sort. I suspect that the combination of difficulty of subject matter -- one has to be very smart to master enough of a subject to earn a doctorate -- and tenure makes mean people delight in their freedom to be mean.

I'm reminded of a quote from an essay by philosopher Paul Feyerabend that I once read in which he bluntly stated that "Never before has the field of philosophy of science been dominated by so many creeps and incompetents". (Not exact wording, but I don't feel like digging for the exact quote.)

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Answers to the two book quizzes

OK folks, I'm providing the answers to the two book quizzes (here and here) in comments to this post. Feel free to peruse the quizzes, those who might have missed them. And the winning entry for the Grand Prize, the 2004 Humvee with gasoline provided for life, has sadly been disqualified because in each case the entrant gave twenty answers to quizzes that only had fifteen questions. Sad, really....

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Beam us up!

Has anyone written anything, maybe a book or at least an article or two, about how Star Trek has shaped the course of technological development over the last few decades? I'm thinking of things like this:

:: We all remember the communicators from the original series, which Kirk and company would flip open and hold to their faces, walkie-talkie style. Current cell-phone design seems directly inspired by this, no? Will future iterations of cellular technology bring little badges you wear on your chest, Next Generation style?

:: On Star Trek, everyone would read things via computer pads. Today, Angie McKaig points out the parallel to reading on today's PDAs and tablet PCs.

:: Finally, I'm wondering if people don't expect the Net in general to function the way the library computer does on the Enterprise, in which crewmembers can apparently request nearly any work ever created. Remember the Next Generation episode in which Ryker, Worf and Data get stuck in a simulacrum of a ritzy hotel, created by aliens for a human astronaut who had crashed on their planet? (The guy was reading a copy of some really bad novel set in a ritzy hotel at the time of his crash, and the aliens took that novel as a guide for what human life was really like.)

Anyway, according to the episode, that novel was written three centuries before the adventures of the Enterprise-D, and it deservedly slipped into complete obscurity, but Captain Picard is able to call up its text on the Enterprise computer almost instantly. And that's just one example; there were numerous other instances in The Next Generation when someone would take advantage of Data's staggering reading speed and give him an order like, "Data, search through the entire Federation database for any mentions of one-eyed purple people-eaters". And ten minutes later, he'd report back: "One hundred years ago, there was a single incident recorded on the planet MumboJumbo III...."

What I'm wondering is if we've come to expect the Net to be our version of Star Trek's library computer, and if some of the current copyright debate springs from the clash between what we want the Net to be versus what the Net really is, at least right now.

(Yes, this is just half-baked speculation. In fact, it's not even half-baked -- the oven's not even done preheating.)

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Search Engine Strangeness

I'm flummoxed by a couple of search engine queries that have recently steered a bit of traffic here. First -- and I'm pretty sure I've commented on this before, and I have no idea why it's happening again -- are searches for people evidently wondering if the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kevin McClatchy, is gay. Well, as a Pirates fan, I'm more interested in just when he's planning to end the streak of consecutive losing seasons (currently 11, nearly certain to be 12 after this year) in which the Bucs are mired.

Second, in the last twenty-four hours I'm seeing a bunch of hits from people looking for info on the 9-11-01 Memorial Edition of that "Jenga" game. Lord, I hope such a thing does not exist. Not even my sense of humor, which is pretty dark at times, finds much to laugh about there.

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Crap, it's been two months! Somebody give me a big idea to just toss out there, unformed and unspecified!

President Bush calls for "universal broadband" by 2007.

Of course, he doesn't offer Suggestion One as exactly how to do this in just three years, but hey, he's a "big picture" kind of guy. No doubt I'll be able to use my spiffy new broadband connection in 2007 to keep up with all the activity in his "Colonize Mars" program.

(Hey, here's a question. Why doesn't he propose "Universal Employment" by 2007? Actually, I'm not sure I want an answer to that.)

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Catchin' a Wave in the sky....

Jan Berry, of surf-music duo Jan & Dean fame, has died. The surfer stuff isn't really my cup of tea -- a little Beach Boys goes a long, long way, for me -- but that's still sad.

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Come home, Sammy! We missed you!

Eight years after a contentious departure/firing, Sammy Hagar has rejoined Van Halen for an upcoming tour and possible recording. I'm not sure how much, if any, interesting new stuff Van Halen can bring to the table (especially after that album with Gary Cherone -- yeeccchhh!), and I'm really not sure if Hagar's voice these days is capable of producing the kinds of high notes that the best songs from his Van Halen output require, but I always liked the Sammy Hagar phase of the band's history. (The David Lee Roth era was great, too; I tend to like both equally.)

I remember an interview with Hagar after his departure in 1998 in which he sadly noted that "I'll never make music again as good as I did with those guys", which seemed to me a refreshing bit of honesty, especially after David Lee Roth's "Who needs them? I'll be bigger than Jesus!" attitude after his original exit. I also thought it a good illustration of the idea that "Living well is the best revenge" when I saw Sammy on, of all things, an episode of Emeril Live! on the Food Network a few years later, in which he reported that since leaving the band he got a place in Mexico, on the beach, where he makes his own tequila.

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Striking a blow....

I'm not sure if this works, but I saw it over on Nathan Newman's blog, and I figured if I can help it along by linking it, why not. It's a site that is nothing more than a gigantic collection of bogus e-mail addresses, intended to gum up spambots. Spam hasn't been that big of an issue for me, especially since I switched to EarthLink as my primary ISP, but it's still annoying.

(I do, though, have to grudgingly admit a bit of admiration for whoever generated one spam message that showed up in my Hotmail inbox yesterday. Like everyone else, I've watched as spammers come up with nifty spellings of sexual organs in order to get past the filters, such as "Ma.ke yer pen.!s b!ggur!" Anyway, as a lover of words, I have to be honest and admit that "Bulkify your member!" is a pretty clever construction.)

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Ewwwwww!

Longtime viewers of Friends remember that the gang used to occasionally gaze out the window of Monica's apartment and follow the adventures of "Ugly Naked Guy", a guy who lived in an apartment across the street and who apparently never wore clothes. (Ugly Naked Guy eventually moved away, leaving his apartment open for Ross. "Ironically, all those boxes seem to be marked 'Clothes'," Chandler observed as UNG was packing.)

Why am I bringing this up? Oh, just because....

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Questionable Sales Strategies

In the middle of an update about life stuff, The Grey Bird relates a call she received from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra's ticket sales people. I read this with mild interest, because when we first moved from the Southern Tier to Buffalo four years ago, I actually interviewed with the BPO's sales staff for a job, and I got to listen in on one of their sales calls, which starts with a "Hi, we're just calling to see if you liked the concert" type of thing before awkwardly sliding into a sales pitch. (Why do companies think that sales calls can be disguised thusly? Yeesh.) But I have to say, the call that I got to hear didn't go anywhere near as far afield as Grey Bird's did. Wow. No way I'd be comfortable doing that.

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Video Store Advice

Looking for something good to watch when all that's on is boring basketball? Or are all the copies of From Justin to Kelly out of stock at BlockBuster? Well, Sean links a nifty list of underappreciated movies, and it really is a good list. There are 100 movies on this list, and the only ones I'd question are as follows:

Dragonslayer In fairness, it's been a long time since I saw this one, but I recall it being pretty dour and humorless. I should watch it again, though. (Alex North's last film score, by the way.)

Alien 3. I don't like any of the Alien movies, but this one's especially bad. Not even a good score (Eliott Goldenthal) saves it from being dreck.

Young Sherlock Holmes. This is two-thirds of a really good movie. The ending, in which the great detective suddenly becomes an action hero, stinks. Great score by Bruce Broughton, though.

The Mosquito Coast. I can't say I like this one much, but it's worth watching just to remind oneself of what Harrison Ford was capable of doing before he decided, after The Fugitive, to stop challenging himself.

Point Break. Good idea for a movie, really, and it's fun for a while. But about two-thirds of the way through it just won't stop taking itself so damned seriously. Scrubs fans can enjoy a younger John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox), though, as a snotty FBI superior.

The Last Boy Scout. Nope. Sorry. I love this movie's opening credits, and the very first scene is pretty good ("Whoa, did that football player really just do that?!"), but after that it's pretty dull and depressing. And really, I can't get behind a movie that has Bruce Willis, after he's defeated all the bad guys, embracing his wife and whispering "Fuck you" in her ear. Come on.

The Hudsucker Proxy. I like weirdness and flights-of-fancy and all that, but this one is just too "out there". Good production design and all that, but we're talking about a movie whose MacGuffin is a hula-hoop. Sure.

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Anime Goodness

A couple of anime notes:

:: First of all, the big news is the recently announced DVD release of three more Studio Ghibli films. I'm looking forward to seeing Porco Rosso and Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and I'm really looking forward to having a DVD of My Neighbor Totoro, which is quite simply one of the finest films I have ever seen. As ever, keep an eye on Nausicaa.net for Ghibli-related news, and Destroy All Monsters for general Asian pop-culture stuff.

:: Regular readers of USS Clueless know that when he's not writing 9000-word essays about how America should be bombing into submission everything between Tunis and Calcutta (yes, I'm oversimplifying!), Steven Den Beste has quite the budding interest in anime. ("Budding" probably isn't the word, since he's amassed an anime library that's apparently rather impressive.) The other day, SDB posted a helpful summation of his recommendations thus far. His post centers on the anime series he has watched -- i.e., no stand alone films -- which actually strikes me as being pretty helpful, since I tend to look at the anime section at Media Play and wonder which end is up.

:: Not quite anime-related, but I have a new review of an "issue" of a manga called Dragon Knights over on DAM. It's probably not a very helpful review for those wondering if they want to read that series (for reasons I explain), but there it is.

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Friday Saturday Burst of Weirdness

Since I seem to be slipping into making Friday my general day of inactivity here, I may just redub the Burst of Weirdness on a permanent basis. But I don't know yet, really. So I'll just keep toying with expectations. Heh!

Anyway, I've noticed over the years that for any occupation that exists in pretty much any locale, somewhere there will be a museum and/or Hall of Fame devoted to that particular occupation. Case in point: The International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame.

On a related thought, how long until someone puts up a "Blogging Hall of Fame" on the Web?

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Hoo-boy.

I can't wait to see what happens when the right-wing of Blogistan sets its sights on this. Keyboards will be bursting into flame, no?

This, to me, is a perfect example of the Universe's warped sense of humor. I mean, the guy's gotta have a lawyer, but this is just too much!

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Planetary Astronomy for me, but not for thee

Right now, five planets are visible to the naked eye from the Earth's surface. This alignment will not recur for 32 years.

And what's the weather like in Buffalo, for those of us who'd just love to get outside and see our planetary neighborhood? And, you know, show it to our daughters who after all will (theoretically) be off and making lots of money in her own career next time this happens?

Friggin' cloudy, that's what. We've been overcast for four days in a row.

The window for viewing all five planets closes on April 5, so hopefully there will be at least one clear night between now and then. Problem is, spring in Buffalo tends to be our worst season, weather-wise. Here's hoping.

0 hath spoken!

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Sunrise on March 22 over the Western Canal in Tempe, AZ.

Taking the lazy-way out again by pilfering the Astronomy Picture of the Day from a few days ago, I just thought this one was unusually striking. The Western Canal runs directly east-to-west, so one day after the vernal equinox (the one day being due to Tempe's latitudinal position), the sun rises exactly in alignment with the Canal, yielding this blazing image. How cool is that!

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So, what's the statute of limitations on Clinton-blaming?

And what would Peggy Noonan, she of the ever-so-tossable (and ever-so-empty) head, have written had he done what she now insists was so clearly what he should have done all along?

I'll tell you what, Peggy. Don't bitch about it now. Show me that you were writing columns insisting that Bill Clinton take on the terrorists back then, when you were having your "off the record" lunch. (Pretty convenient claim, that.) Show me the columns you wrote during the 90s when you said that if Bill Clinton took us to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein, why, you'd support it one hundred percent. Or, how about a column from 1996 in which you argue that a President Dole would be a lot better at fighting terrorists?

Oh, that's right. There weren't any such columns. "Bill Clinton didn't do enough to fight terrorism" isn't much of a claim if you have no basis for the idea that "A Republican would have done so much more!" This kind of crap reminds me of what I wonder about people who insist that Nostradamus predicted the 9-11-01 attacks: "How come nobody out what Nostradamus was talking about before it happened?!"

(link via TBogg, who reads a lot more of this kind of crap than can really be healthy.)

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All right, NOW we have a manhood problem.

Longtime readers of mine know that I don't put a whole lot of stock in the idea that America has somehow "lost its manhood", a thesis that I generally find holding sway in people who have watched too many John Wayne movies and who have the whole "gun as surrogate phallus" thing going on to a level that's a tad creepy. (See that idiotic "Pussification" essay by Kim Du Toit from a few months back for the best -- or worst -- framing of the "argument".) I tend to think that America has never been any greater a repository of "manhood" than anyplace else, and that American "manhood" is doing just fine. OK? OK.

But come on!

"Exercise guru Richard Simmons allegedly slapped a man who made a sarcastic remark about one of his videos, police said. Simmons, known for his Sweatin' to the Oldies series of exercise videos set to songs from the 1950s and 60s, was cited for misdemeanor assault."

Just think: there's a man out there, somewhere, who had to tell the police that he was assaulted by Richard Simmons. Well, I hope he was a midget; otherwise, someone's got a problem in the "testosterone" area.

(Actually, isn't the mental image of Richard Simmons in a Greco-wrestling match with a midget kind of appealing, in a "I'd like to watch that on the USA Network at 1:30 a.m. after drinking eight beers" kind of way?)

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Who needs Sorkin, anyway?

In general I've been pleasantly surprised with The West Wing this season. Writer Aaron Sorkin's departure does not seem to have doomed the show, in my opinion. But last night's episode, dealing with the political realities of an appointment to the Supreme Court, was the first since Sorkin's exit that actually felt like a Sorkin episode. A lot of the old Sorkin touches were there: the idea that public service is an honorable thing, and that committed people on opposite sides of the aisle can still have a constructive debate; rapidfire dialog with occasionally humorous results (twice involving the ever-amazing Lily Tomlin); badmouthing of conservatives until one actually shows up and makes them realize that they're not actually demons-in-disguise; and the old trick of having a character come up with an idea that couldn't possibly work, although in the end it works perfectly.

Basically, what happened is this. Earlier in the season, there was an episode involving the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and his troubling health; in a closing scene, that Chief Justice -- apparently a giant of Earl Warren stature in the West Wing universe -- bemoaned the fact that Washingtonian hyper-partisanship now means that only bland moderates can get confirmed. To start last night's episode, then, a SC justice has died (not the Chief Justice, though, which becomes an important point). The White House staffers gather a list of nominees, leaning toward one guy who's exactly the kind of bland moderate they don't want to have to settle for, and for window dressing, they interview a firebrand liberal justice (played by Glenn Close). Problem is, Josh Lyman falls in love with the idea of getting this woman onto the court, which is clearly not possible.

Except that Josh comes up with an idea: if he can talk the Chief Justice into stepping down as well, thus creating two vacancies, the White House will name as its second nominee whoever the Judiciary Committee picks -- and the Committee is, of course, run by Republicans. In comes a very conservative justice (played by William Fichtner -- some great casting in this episode), and in the end, President Bartlet ends up nominating both judges to the Supreme Court, under the idea that the Court produces its best work when it has both a brilliant liberal and a brilliant conservative to battle each other.

This was just a really good episode that had that first or second-season feel, the message that "Yeah, there's lots of partisanship down there, but Washington really doesn't suck".

The only downside, as far as I could see, was a bit of a continuity error: the episode oddly makes no mention at all that President Bartlet already has made a Supreme Court appointment. One of the major story arcs of the first season involved the confirmation battle to get Judge Roberto Mendoza (Edward James Olmos) onto the SC. I don't recall if anything in last night's episode specifically contradicts that, but it seems an odd fact to not come up at all in the show.

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Come on, Minnesota!

Aaron is incensed that his state has begun the process of amending its constitution to permanently ban gay marriage. His position mirrors mine almost exactly.

But more than that, I resent the Rick Santorums of the world who insist that "straight" marriages will suffer if gay marriage is allowed. The idea that my commitment to my wife could be shaken by someone else's desire to show equal commitment to yet someone else is revolting.

Anyway, that's that.

0 hath spoken!

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Best Quiz EVER

I rarely do those online personality quizzes -- you know, "Which Biblical prophet are you?" and the like, but I couldn't resist this one, based on the work of Edward Gorey.


You will be smothered under a rug. You're a little anti-social, and may want to start gaining new social skills by making prank phone calls.

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
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That's pretty funny, I think. And if you don't get it because you've never read The Gashlycrumb Tinies, well -- here you go. I once owned a poster with the entirety of The Gashlycrumb Tinies upon it; it provided many moments of humor in college as I watched midwestern Lutherans grapple with the bleak humor of twenty-six alphabetically-named youngsters meeting their doom in horrible ways.

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I'm pretty sure that's not how Martin Yan said to do it.

Scott decides to do a little stir-fry. Hilarity ensues. And, maybe, a little salmonella.

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Let me turn down the lights, dear....

Darth Swank opens a post thusly: "Last night, my lovely wife and I sat down to watch our new DVD of Dawn of the Dead." Suddenly, I'm wondering what their first date was like!

"Hey, I hear there's a midnight showing of Guzzlers of Blood III: Bring Your Own Bucket down at the Bijou this Friday. You wanna go with me?"

"Will you be embarrassed if I wear my black wig and vampire teeth?"

"Oh baby...."

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The Descent, continued

Oliver Willis posts a photo of his-inexplicably-beloved Britney, and looking at it, I wonder now if my "Move Over Britney!" series is now pretty much irrelevant. I mean, there's the total package: unimpressive body, bad hair, vacant eyes that might as well be made of glass. Britney's not a person, she's a product, and not even a particularly good one.

Oh well.

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The Jack Bauer Power Hour

For a variety of reasons, Lynn Sislo is frustrated with 24. Some of her reasons deal with the show's writers, and some deal with the FOX Network, which has historically tended to make really goofy decisions regarding programming. (Witness their cancelling of The Family Guy, only to see that show set records as a DVD release. Now there's a strong possibility that FOX may bring the show back. Now, that's a show that I can't stand, but axing it was a pretty dumb move.)

Lynn's primarily annoyed that 24 has been off the air for several weeks now, and will remain so until next week. Here I think the show's structure (an entire season telling a single day's events in real time, one episode per hour) clashes with the realities of a TV season. FOX needs to time 24's climactic episodes with May sweeps, but they can't just do like other networks with hit shows and have a new episode here, and a new episode there during the non-sweeps months, because 24's unique story structure would likely suffer if they do that. It's actually a lot easier, probably, to recall where things are right now and then plow through the last nine episodes of the season; and this way, we're spared the annoyance of saying, "Hey, is 24 new this week?"

So I can't fault FOX for the programming, believe it or not. Now, I will grant that the show isn't as good this year as last year, but that's a writing thing, not a FOX thing.

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NOOOOOOOO!!!

I'd like to take a moment to offer a piece of advice to all my wonderful readers. If you ever find yourself working in a position in either a restaurant or a grocery store that involves a lot of cleaning and "grunt work", there is one question to which the only proper response is to run away, screaming.

That question is this: "Hey, could ya give me a hand cleaning this grease trap?"

Aieee!

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Templates galore....

By sheer happenstance -- it was listed under the ten most recently published blogs on Blogger's main screen -- I found this blog, which is nothing but a clearing-house of new templates you can try, if you're on the prowl for new templates. The most recent ones posted there may be of interest to Matrix fans.

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Two Observations

ONE: I just saw an ad for The Passion of the Christ which is one of those "Our movie's been out for a month now, so here are some catch-phrases from our critics" ads. At one point, the portentous announcer says something like, "Roger Ebert calls The Passion powerully moving!" Which made me think, wouldn't it be funny if someone made a movie of the Christ story that critics found "strangely uninvolving"?

TWO: Years ago, one of the ESPN guys on SportsCenter defined disappointment as "Sitting down to watch NYPDBlue, noting with excitement the warning about partial nudity, and then discovering that it's Detective Medavoy who gets nude." Well, that's exactly what happened tonight. Yeeesh....

(Medavoy, for those uninitiated, is the portly, middle-aged cop on the show. No, not Dennis Franz. The other one.)

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Portable Writing

In comments to not one post but two, John Scalzi is encountering opposition to his apparent belief that writers who go to Starbucks or the like and set up camp with their laptops are really just poseurs who aren't really writing but want to be seen writing. I guess I can see his point, sort-of. But not really.

I'm one who used to enjoy writing in different places, back when I was still doing all my first drafts in longhand. I'd estimate that I did about, oh, 75% of my writing at home, at my desk, with the headphones delivering high-quality classical or film music to my eardrums, but sometimes, I just plain wanted a change of scenery. So I'd pack up my papers and my pens and go off to the cafe at the grocery store or maybe the library, and I'd sit there and write.

I've always been pretty good at shutting out the outside distractions of the world and attending to my writing (an ability that I cultivated much to the chagrin of more than a few of my teachers through the years), and those abilities came in pretty handy when I just wanted to sit somewhere other than the same exact chair in front of the same exact desk and work on the same exact manuscript. If I'm really losing myself in the writing -- and you'll have to take my word for it that I am -- well, what difference does it make where I'm doing it?

And yes, I'll admit that when I sit at the cafes and libraries of the world, I do tend to put the pen down and "people-watch" a bit, which I think is part of what John interprets as indicative of "poseurness". (Poseurity? Poseurdom? Hmmm....) But that doesn't mean that, if I were sitting at home, I'd be that much more productive. You know why? Because my desk is surrounded by my books. And believe me, the tendency to just look up "a passage or two" from Tigana or The Return of the King or any other book is, at least for me, one hell of a lot stronger than the tendency to watch the cute girl in the black turtleneck and baggy jeans who's mixing all the cappucinos.

(In fact, since I don't own a laptop, I can't blog anywhere other than here!)

Some writers subscribe strongly to the idea that you should have one place where you do all your writing, and that's it, and it should be your place and it should be the only place where you ever get any real work done. Well, if that works for them, great. Not all writers work that way, just as some writers insist that you should outline your novels, and others resist outlines religiously.

Now, since I pretty much stopped doing first-drafts longhand in favor of typing, all of my writing activity that involves stringing words together has to take place right here, at this table in my living room. But I can still edit my manuscripts elsewhere. And I have, and will continue to do so.

So there!

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"The Apprentice" vs. "Survivor"

I've made no secret over the years that I positively hate the show Survivor, because it's boring and it rewards people for behaving in ways I'd never ever ever want to see rewarded in real life with anything other than a swift kick in one of several nether regions. But then, I've become hooked on The Apprentice, which is basically Survivor transposed to a business environment. I've been trying to figure out why I like Donald Trump's show and not the other one, and I've come up with two main reasons.

:: The "challenges". Both shows divide a group of people into two smaller groups, who are then set to competing against one another in a specific "challenge" (in Survivor lingo), or "task" (as it's called on The Apprentice). The team which wins typically earns some kind of reward, while the team that loses gets to sit down with Trump or Jeff Probst, dissect the defeat, and then see one of its members shown the door.

On The Apprentice, the tasks are business related things that do pertain to actual skills a business person might need: negotiation, sales skills, management of personnel, et cetera. Yes, they're still manufactured tasks -- such as the episode when the two teams each took a day "managing" the Planet Hollywood at Times Square. (I'm sure they weren't really managing the entirety of that restaurant's operation.) But for the purposes of the show, they're real enough. Contrast that with the dorky games they come up with for Survivor:

OK, Survivors, listen up! What we have here is an obstacle course! First you're gonna hop on one foot across these three-inch wide beams over those mud pits. Then, you're going to get into one of these rowboats and row across this pond using oars from which the blades have been removed. When you reach the other side, you'll find a piece of paper on which the name of a Broadway show has been written; you must sing one verse of one song from that show before you move on to the rope ladder which we have covered with maple syrup. At the top of that ladder, you'll find a flag. Pull that down and then swim back to the starting point, at which point your second person will go. The first team to bring back all five flags wins immunity!

Yeah -- the ability to do that well is one which will really come in useful sometime down the line. And really, there's something about the whole Survivor exercise that reminds me of my grade school gym classes, when we'd walk in to discover the gym set up in some weird fashion we haven't seen before -- say, the high horse sitting in front of a miniature dodge-ball court in turn in front of a rack of medicine-balls -- with the teacher standing there with his hands behind his back, whistle around his neck, and always starting each instance of gym class with the words, "OK, listen up!" We'd be thinking, "What the hell is this?", with much the same expressions of bewilderment that the contestants on Survivor display. Of course, back then, we didn't get fresh pizza or a trip to a spa on the next island over if we won.

None of that crap, though, on The Apprentice. Briefings on-the-fly by the boss are pretty standard in any job these days.

:: My other reason for liking The Apprentice while hating Survivor is simple: NO ALLIANCES.

Half of each episode of Survivor seems to always be devoted to contestants trying to form alliances with their teammates to get rid of other teammates, preserve themselves in "the game", et cetera. I guess the show's fans find this all very interesting, but to me it's always incredibly boring. There really are only so many hushed conversations out by the water hole or down by the waterline about whether or not it's George or Tammy or Brunhilde's time to go or whether they're a threat next week or whether they can be counted on when voting time rolls around which I am prepared to watch, and I reached my quota way back during the very first iteration of Survivor. Of course, the show's fans may claim that each season this stuff gets more compelling, since the initial level of trust now seems to be set at zero, but really, it's all terribly boring and the same.

On The Apprentice, though, this alliance-stuff doesn't happen -- or at least, not nearly to the extent it does on Survivor. The show is structured to keep it from happening. Nobody is "voted off" The Apprentice; each week, Donald Trump alone decides who gets tossed. The losing team's "Project Manager" -- i.e., the team member who took charge of that episode's "task" -- decides on two teammates who will confront Mr. Trump, while the remainder of the team, now safe from being fired, goes back upstairs to the suite. Then, Trump quizzes the Project Manager and the two teammates before finally firing one of these three. (Now that the show has progressed to the point where there are too few contestants left for things to work this way, I assume the process will change slightly.)

When there's only one vote being cast, and it's not even being cast by a contestant, there's not much to gain by trying to gather everyone to your side. Sure, there's a little of it -- pledges by project managers not to take certain people into the board room, and that kind of thing -- but it's really surprisingly ineffective. (A couple of weeks ago, just such a strategy completely backfired for a Project Manager, and she got fired.) This lack of all that boring crap about alliance-forming and who betrayed whom and so on makes The Apprentice a lot more interesting to watch.

Of course, once The Apprentice is into a fifth or sixth season, all this might have changed and the show may have become boring. But I found Survivor pretty uninteresting in its first season, whereas I'm enjoying The Apprentice a lot.

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Oh, come ON!

It used to be that you never knew when you'd want glowing, flashing, technocolor teeth while out for a night of club-hopping, dancing, and frolicking about. Well, once again, thanks to technology you'll never have to pine for a glowing oral cavity again! Behold the Oral Disco!



I'd like to see someone where one of these into a biker bar, in a small town in Georgia, after midnight. Now that would be fun. Or, as they say in some parts, a "hootenanny"!

(Need you ask? via Warren Ellis)

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Great Moments in Candy-Making (and some not-so-great ones, too)

You know those easter-egg shaped Reese's Peanut Butter Cups that come out every Easter? Well, someone at Hershey or Mars or wherever finally had the most obvious epiphany of all time: Why do those egg-shaped knockoffs of popular candy bars have to be Peanut Butter Cups, and only Peanut Butter Cups?

Hence, today I discovered Easter-egg shaped Milky Ways, Snickers's, and -- oh joy of joys -- Mounds's and Almond Joys. I nearly cried at the beauty of it all.

But then, there's the flip side. I love candy corn in the fall, I really do. It's one of the few food items that I associate with a very definite time of year, so much so that I won't even consider buying candy corn at any time other than late September and the month of October, no matter how much I like the stuff. (And I like it a lot.) I'm not going to change on this, either, so I'm afraid that changing the color of candy-corn from orange to a variety of pastels, and calling it "Easter Corn", is not likely to change my mind here.

By the way, there's something I enjoyed some years ago, and I've never seen it since -- nor did I make note of the brand name, so I have no idea where to even look. It was a peanut butter cup, and I figured I knew what I was getting, since the wrapper said "Peanut Butter Cup" on it even though it wasn't a Reese's. But when I unwrapped it, I discovered that it was, in fact, just that: a peanut butter cup. There was no chocolate at all. It was as if the peanut butter center of a Reese's had been expanded to become the entire cup!

The Reese's people did come up with something close to this a while back, on a limited basis. They called it an "Inside-Out Reese's", and it was a peanut butter shell with a chocolate interior. That was close, but I still want the version with no chocolate. (Nothing against chocolate, mind you. I adore chocolate, in all its forms -- even white. Yeah, I know, white chocolate isn't technically chocolate. So what? Root beer isn't really beer!)

I seem to recall that one of the standard pieces in a Whitman's Sampler is a no-chocolate peanut butter cup, but it has been many years since I enjoyed a Whitman's Sampler, so I'm not sure. Whitman's Samplers were always fun, though, when I was a kid -- I still recall vividly that first discovery of the second layer of candy, and I recall the ritual that the piece shaped like the Whitman's delivery boy was the last piece of the upper level to be consumed before proceeding to the lower level. Those were the days.

Oh, and back when I used to receive lots of shopping catalogs (those were the days -- catalogs make great bathroom reading, because that is the only room in which one can look at some of the items in the catalogs and actually think, "Damn, I need one of those"), one of them always advertised "Maple Nut Goodie" candy bars, sold by the small tin for something like $29.95 plus shipping. The catalog claimed that these candy bars are beloved in Minnesota. Well, I happen to have some Minnesotans amongst my readership, so, are these things beloved? Or, are they merely good? I ask because I love the flavor of maple.

Also, I admire the elaborate lengths to which folks who make suckers and lollipops go these days, but for my money, there will never be any sucker better than your basic old Tootsie-Pop. (I always buy them at the bulk section, because that way I can avoid getting the chocolate-flavored ones. What I said above about loving chocolate does not apply to chocolate-flavored hard candy.)

And to conclude this rambling paean to All Things Bad For Your Teeth, here in Buffalo there's a popular item called "sponge candy". I find it hard to describe, but it's like if they take yellow sponge cake and somehow cook it until it's very hard -- maybe they fry it -- and then it's dipped and coated in either milk or dark chocolate. People in Buffalo adore this stuff, but for some reason, I just don't get into it. I find the texture weird and the sponge center flavorless.

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Yeah, yeah, TPM sucked, I get it.

Last night's episode of The Simpsons opened with a five-minute long meditation on Star Wars fans. Basically, everybody in Springfield is shown standing in line to see a movie called something like Cosmic Wars I: The Gathering Threat. At the head of the line is Comic Book Guy, decked out in flannel and jeans, just like the genius creator of Cosmic Wars. And then the movie starts, with the opening crawl droning on and on about "regulatory agencies" and whatnot. And a character named "Jim Jom Bonks", and so on. Basically, The Simpsons invoked nearly every pithy whine about The Phantom Menace ever uttered, and all as a set-up for a story about Homer and Marge drinking too much.

Some of it was kind of funny, but it was also tired and lame -- I'll admit that I laughed, but it was at the same time that I was thinking, "Good Lord, that movie came out five years ago! You're just getting around to lampooning it now?" Not the finest in topical humor, guys.

(Apparently, the Star Wars parody stuff can be downloaded at TheForce.net, if you're dying to see it. I'd advise waiting for the rerun. The episode's main story was pretty dull.)

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Geez, why didn't I ever think of that?!

In the last few hours, I've seen two articles linked from outposts in Blogistan that involve artistic folks who have been forced, via shifts in the nature of their chosen artistic field, to get day jobs not in that field. One is cited here, by Friedrich of the Dynamic Blowhardic Duo, and I've seen the other in a number of places already -- John Scalzi first, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden has devoted space for what's sure to be a long comment thread about it.

I'm of mixed mind when I see things like this. First, it annoys me that we're constantly bombarded with rhetoric in this world that we can do anything we want to do, and yet, we really can't; but then, it also annoys me that people complain that they can't, as if they're shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that we haven't come round to the world depicted in Star Trek when self-betterment is the goal of everybody. I don't know, really. I tend to be a believer that one should play the cards they're dealt, but I'm also sympathetic to the fact that the cards just don't get dealt fairly, and ultimately I suspect that we aren't afforded nearly as many choices in this world as we like to pretend we are.

No, I have no point here, just half-baked ramblings.

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Blogging versus Writing, again

Will Duquette posts some thoughts in response to my thoughts yesterday about whether blogging is good practice for writers.

I, too, have seen the "Get a blank piece of paper and fill it" practice advice, and I tried it for a time a few years ago; it came from a book called Writer's Book of Days or something like that, and the book offered topics or scene suggestions to get started. I enjoyed it, but after a while I stopped, and not for any particular reason, really. Basically, I figured that once one gets used to writing every day, one doesn't have to practice it -- one merely does it. That's the function of the blog these days, I think.

By the way, the other day I discovered an old John Scalzi post about some of the same issues while digging through his archives for something else.

(Will also asks, in his post, how to pronouce "Jaquandor". I suppose it doesn't matter much, since I swiped it from an obscure 1980s comic book, but my way of saying it is "juh-KWAN-dor". I've kicked around using "Jack Wander" as a pseudonym on my horror novels, if I ever get around to writing them, as a nod back to my longtime Net alias. I doubt that would have much mileage, though, joke-wise.)

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Crap....which button do I push to let the water out of the dam, again?!

If you have an AOL Instant Message account, apparently you can put it to good use by playing classic Infocom text adventure games like ZORK. Man alive, did I ever NOT need to know about this. And now I have a hankering to play Colossal Cave, too....and all those bare-bones, but still entertaining, Scott Adams text adventures.

(If you like graphical adventure games like MYST, and you've never tried their text-based forebears, then what are you waiting for? Just don't start with Suspended. That game will make you want to kill people. Trust me.)

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Damned Kids....

When I worked for Pizza Hut, the most dreaded time of year was not the Holiday season, or even Mother's Day. What we hated most was Regents Exam Week in New York State, because that's when classes end in public schools and kids only have to show up to take whatever exams are required of them. So, if they only have a single class in which there's an exam, the only time they need to be in the school is the appointed hour of that exam. Otherwise, they are pretty much given free reign. And that almost exclusively affects high schoolers; middle school kids – your seventh, eighth and some ninth graders – have no exams at all, and thus they're basically on vacation as soon as Regents Week dawns.

In the town where my Pizza Hut was located, the middle school would have "half days" for the entirety of Regents Week, which were little more than exercises in school-run babysitting in the morning. Around noon, the kids would be unleashed, and since my restaurant (among others) was just a half-mile's walk down the street, we'd get swamped with horribly behaved kids absent of any adult supervision whatsoever. It was pure, unadulterated hell. They'd trash the place, demolish the lunch buffet, and leave the servers almost nothing in tips. And for some reason, the adult lunch crowd would never understand why the place was always such a mess that week.

I'm reminded of all this by Sarah Jane Elliott's collection of things she's finding herself saying to the kids inundating her workplace on Spring Break. Ah, the memories….

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Another Book Quiz: First Lines (but with a twist)

I had fun compiling the "Last Lines of Books" quiz from the other day, so here I am, coming up with another. This one's "First Lines", but with a twist: these aren't the first lines of the books themselves, but rather the first lines of spoken dialogue in the books. And in some cases, books can go pages and pages before anyone talks! Take that, Flanders!

In terms of method, what I do here is quote the lines themselves, stripped of dialogue attribution that would identify the speaker. I have not, though, edited out any names mentioned within the dialogue lines themselves, which may tip a few of them off. OK? Here we go….

1. "Come out, Neville!"

2. "Good evening, rya. Will you eat some dinner? They've got a hotchewitchi on the fire, smells very kushto."

3. "Raziel, what in heaven's name are you doing?"

4. "I seen him about three months ago. He had a operation. Cut somepin out. I forget what."

5. "Go away! Get out of here! You ought to be ashamed!"

6. "Why? Why must it be horseshoes? As if we had any horses!"

7. "You're not taking this seriously. Behave yourself."

8. "Is he not small for his age, Jessica?"

9. "I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."

10. "It will have to be paid for. It isn't natural, and trouble will come of it!"

11. "Do you think the roof will fall in on us today? Did the frost hurt your stinkweed?"

12. "Yeah, that's true. It's even better when you've been sentenced to death. That's when you remember the jokes about they guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they'd die with their boots on."

13. "We should start back. The wildlings are dead."

14. "We be jammin' now, mon!"

15. "Be careful, unless you want to trip over a sculptor."

16. "Hmmm. That's quite a drop."

Answers will appear Thursday, if I'm so inclined. So have fun, and have a look at the other quiz, too!

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Aw, mannnnn....

One danger of being both a reader and a wanna-be writer is the fact that I often encounter things that make me think, "Geez, I suck."

Like this.

Geez, I suck.

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A question of Method

It occurs to me that, in a lot of cases, rather than use a blogger's commenting feature, if I have something to say I'll actually post it here. Am I alone in this? How do you all decide between whether something warrants a quick comment on someone else's blog versus a full-fledged post on your own?

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What good is a scientist?

PZ Myers points out the disconnect between what scientists know and what we expect them to know. I discovered this, actually, at a pretty early age when I was shocked that my father, a mathematics professor, didn't know the sum of 384759 and 294824 off the top of his head. Lots of folks, it seems to me, view science as a collection of facts, whereas scientists see it – correctly – as a process that is brought to bear on a collection of facts. This leads in turn to things like belief in UFOs and objecting to evolution on the basis that "it's just a theory".

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Potato, Po-tah-toe

I never saw the point of making fun of Dan Quayle for misspelling "potato"; in my experience, good spelling isn't necessarily an indicator of intelligence. Or, more specifically, I've never found bad spelling to be a reliable indicator of low intelligence. One boss I worked under for five years is a highly intelligent man, very articulate and pretty well-read – but his spelling is utterly ghastly. Occasionally he would try to post a strongly-worded notice to the employees of our restaurant over some recent performance issue, and the only result would be that the employees would cluster around the notice and laugh at its level of bad spelling and grammar. I eventually told him that he'd better leave that stuff to me. (And since I've encountered the "smart-when-talking, dumb-when-writing" combination numerous times in my life, I wonder why this should be so. Stephen Pinker has probably covered this in one of his books on language and the brain, somewhere.)

Of course, all that is just preamble to my linking this, at which I admit laughing despite my statement above. I'm so ashamed. Stricken, even.

(That's a great site, by the way. Take a few moments to explore the archives. Like this one: something tells me a sign like this at the boundary of Fangorn Forest might have saved Saruman a lot of grief, eh? Oh, and it's all via I Love Everything.)

(UPDATE: Well, this is a first: I've managed to contribute to demolishing some poor site's bandwidth, thus forcing its temporary removal from the Web! I'll try to remember to resurrect this post next month, after the site in question returns.)

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Two words and a picture.

Between the title of the post and the content, this is a triumph of minimalism.

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Squashing the Product-Hawkers

If you're looking for ways of minimizing the advertising that is foisted upon you in the course of doing stuff online, Steven Den Beste has a couple of recommendations. I tend to do very little in terms of this kind of thing -- basically, running EarthLink's pop-up blocker is fine by me, although it's a bit overzealous, frequently getting in the way of Javascripts that open new windows, and in terms of spam, I really don't get a whole lot, thanks to AOL's filters. Like SDB, I do get a lot of the "Help the President of Zimbabwe smuggle $50,000,000 out of the country" messages, and I see that mails for Viagra have given way to mails for Cialis, but that's about it. In general, I actually seem to get less spam at my main inbox than real messages; although this is no doubt because I'm on a couple of fairly high-traffic lists (both for GMR staffers), the amount of spam that gets through isn't debilitating at all. (At least, not yet.)

But SDB generally knows what he's talking about with stuff like this, so if you're looking for solutions to these kinds of problems, check out the two programs he recommends.

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Blogging versus "Real" Writing

Sean e-mailed me a link to this blog post a while back, and I duly bookmarked it and then completely forgot to address it. The basic thrust of the post seems to be that blogging isn't really good for writers, in the sense that blogging helps them improve their writing, develop their relationships with editors, sell their stuff, streamline their prose, compose their ideas, and the like. Basically, blogging seems to be a kind of "cat-vacuuming", just another activity used to avoid doing the real work, the actual heavy-lifting.

To an extent, this is true. I started my new job more than a month ago, and I've kept Byzantium's Shores pretty regularly updated since then. But in that time – and here's an admission I'm loath to make – I have committed fewer than 1,000 words to The Promised King, Book II: The Finest Deed. That's pretty ugly. In fact, it's downright embarrassing and unacceptable. While there are pressures of learning a new job, as well as getting myself up to speed in a new organization staffed by more than 300 people, and while there have been other things to do (I can't just stop reading, especially when I have items for which reviews are expected by various websites), the fact is, aside from blogging, I have spent almost no time since starting the new job writing, except in the sense of mulling over plot-details while wheeling carts around.

And yet, I keep updating here. Why? Well, because it is easier to focus on doing this than on doing that, or at least it has been. But the nagging sense of disquiet is growing, and it's time to get back to the writing that really matters. No, that doesn't mean I plan to slacken my efforts here. It does mean, however, that I'm going to get back to squeezing writing from the time that is given me.

To get back to the linked post above, I'm not sure that blogging is bad for writing, although I am no published writer, so my opinion on this really isn't worth much, I suspect. To me, blogging for the last month has been the equivalent, say, of the kinds of exercises a person who engages in regular weight-training might do when they go on a long business trip and can't get to a gym in the meantime. Blogging might not keep every writing muscle sharp, but at the same time, it keeps all of them from going into atrophy; and besides, I've always viewed blogging as kind of a side-venture that helps writing in other ways: it's another source for grist that I can feed into my own particular mill. I doubt very much, for example, that I'd have ever read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds had Will Duquette not reviewed it (and had I not been reading his blog in the first place).

So, is blogging a waste of writing time? I'm not really sure. It could be, I suppose, if I define it in terms of a strict accounting of minutes logged writing the novel or a story in terms of minutes spent writing posts for Byzantium's Shores. But then, I've never been much for strictly tallying the minutes of my life.

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I'm sure barging into the conference room before Mr. Trump called her had nothing to do with it....

Via the Libertarian Jackass, I see that recently-departed Apprentice contestant Omarosa wants to have is still insisting that she was the victim of racism. Well, maybe she was, maybe she wasn't – but I'm not about to take seriously the ravings of a person who thinks that the old canard about "the pot calling the kettle black" is a statement about race.

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All Pings Welcome!

I've made it standard practice to ping Weblogs.com for about a year now whenever I post. This, I am told, allows services like BlogRolling to know when I've updated, so I show up on BlogRolling-powered blogrolls as sporting new posts. And since I tend to do all my posting for a given day in one shot, my typical practice is to write a couple of posts, publish them, and ping Weblogs.com; then I'll write a few more posts and publish those, but not ping Weblogs.com until hours later. In this way, I get two pings out of a single round of updates. I have no idea if this helps generate traffic or if it's just a useless scheme I've cooked up, but it seems harmless.

Except that I've discovered that at least over the last couple of days, Weblogs.com has been accepting my pings even though I have made no changes to Byzantium's Shores in the interim. I pinged a short while ago, with nothing new published here since the last time I pinged (on Friday), and it went through just fine. Hmmmmmm. (This could all just be meaningless blather on my part, as well. Ya never know.)

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No! I won't do it! You can't make me!

I have personally gone to great effort to remove a certain bit of wardrobe-related knowledge from my brain, but Andrew Cory brings it screaming back. Dammit! (The article of clothing in question is, to my way of thinking, the most spectacularly evil and useless item in the entire world of clothing. That is, considering only the stuff I'd ever have to wear. I'm certain that women can lay claim to all manner of items of at least equal evil value, starting with high heels.)

At least the page Andrew links is written with a "Yeah, this sucks, but if you're unfortunate enough to need it, here it is" tone.

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Talking Good, versus Speaking Well

Here are a couple of language-related goodies I've found lately:

:: First, some handy new terms for the workplace that I hadn't seen before, such as "Seagull Manager" (every organization seems to have a member of Upper Management whose only function is to behave in this way) and "Irritainment" (not work-related, really, but reading certain blogs, such as Kim Du Toit's, can be described thusly).

BTW, the linked list is apparently edited down from a longer list! I want to see the whole thing.

:: Second, via I Love Everything, here's a list of words that are either very commonly mispronounced ("February") or words that simply do not exist ("irregardless"). While I'm generally less anal about precision in language than many people I know (my view tends to be that you can't stop language from changing and evolving, unless you kill all speakers), I do have my linguistic pet-peeves and thus I'm thrilled to see "Orientate" listed as a non-existent word. You don't "orientate" yourself to the sun, and you don't "orientate" new employees, people! Sheesh!

(It turns out that Languagehat hates this list, and points out a few errors.)

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New Blogroll Additions

I've added these folks to the main blogroll, because, well, I can. (That, and they're interesting reads.)

:: Redwood Dragon
:: Experiments in Writing, Singing and Blogging
:: Peevish
:: The Gray Monk

No descriptions; just go check them out.

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Video killed the radio star....

Original MTV veejay J.J. Jackson has died at the age of 62. He had a heart attack. I'm one who grew up with MTV -- I first saw it when I was 11, about a year after it started -- and I well recall Jackson, along with Martha Quinn, Adam Curry, Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman. There really was a time when MTV was pretty friggin' cool, and J.J. Jackson was a big part of that.

(via Darth Swank, who had his own drive-by of the Grim Reaper yesterday.)

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Last Lines

OK, on a pure whim, here is a quiz I'm cobbling together. Very simply, these are the last lines of books I own. (By "last line", I mean, the last line of the story of main body of the work. No appendices, author's notes, or anything like that. By that standard, many would have to be some variant of "This book is set in 11-point Helvenicia, a typeface designed by Sir Wadrick the Walloper of Northsandpembrokewichshire in 1644 as a result of a lost bar bet.")

Most are fiction, but some are not. A few will be obvious, a few not so obvious. Enjoy. I'll post the answers next week sometime.

1. "He braced himself for this big fucking scream."

2. "End it with the ending of a night."

3. "We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things."

4. "Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars."

5. "Away on the horizon he could see the golden edge of a kingdom where, since he was a small child, he had always longed to go."

6. " 'Boy, I'm glad all that supernatural stuff is over,' the bat said."

7. "To a receptive audience, it might be a kind of Second Coming."

8. "Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again."

9. "The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart."

10. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

11. "Therefore, we say -- speaking as living and (we think) thinking beings, as carriers of the fire -- therefore, choose life."

12. "What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my fahter, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had."

13. "They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way."

14. "Again: If you receive this message, please respond!"

15. "So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."

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Wow....in blog years, that's friggin' ancient!

Archipelapogo celebrates three years of blogging today. Congratulations to Scott!

Oh, and he's doing a bit of fundraising: donate at least $3.00 to one of three causes (he specifies them), and he'll send you a CD-R of depressing music. Scott seems to know a lot about the contemporary music scene (something which I know perilously little about), so I have some confidence that, despite the theme of the CD, he'll pick good stuff.

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I hear things....

In the course of my job, I wander in and out of many departments for just moments at a time -- seconds, even, if I'm just passing through. This means that I overhear bits of conversation between employees that, in some cases, are intriguing and in others make me think, "GAAHHHH, I gotta get outta here!" Here are a few from the last day or two:

1. One guy, standing on top of some very high shelves to do some stocking, calls down to his helper on the floor: "Hey, do you think those boxes will support me when I jump down?" (He was about twenty feet off the ground. The boxes stood at no higher than four feet.)

2. One woman, to another, unaware that I was anywhere near, even though I wear keys that jangle and frequently hum whilst walking: "Yeah, the doctor's going to do an examination because he thinks my eggs aren't implanting. And I really hate those exams, because I don't like the way it feels when--" (At this point I feigned several loud coughs.)

3. Produce Guy #1: "I dunno, you think he'll be pissed?"

Produce Guy #2: "Dude, she's his sister!"

(This one, I wanted to stick around for. Alas, I couldn't figure out a way to do it without being obvious.)

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Friday Burst of Weirdness

The Exorcist, in thirty seconds.

Oh, and re-enacted by cartoon bunnies.

(via Jay)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Ardagh Chalice.

Considered one of the finest examples of Celtic art and metallurgy, the Ardagh Chalice was found in the mid 1800s (I found several different years for its finding while researching online) by a young man in Ardagh, Ireland, who was digging potatoes at the time. The Chalice dates to the 8th century AD, where early Irish church fathers used cups like this in performing Communion.

I first read about the Chalice in Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization. In describing the Chalice, Cahill describes how a worshipper drinking the sacramental wine from the cup will, in the course of draining it, tilt it toward Heaven, revealing its intricately-carved underside to God. This bit of detail has always struck me as a particularly lovely facet of ritual. I was unable, sadly, to find any images of the carved underside on the Web.

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Yes, it COULD be worse....

I suspect that at least a few of my readers are baffled at the fact that, at least for now, I'm genuinely happy to be working as a clean-up guy at a grocery store. Well, I actually am enjoying the work, but if you'd rather see some context in which my current job looks even better than I already think it is, feast your eyes.

That third photo just kills me. I imagine this poor guy saying "Excuse me, Captain? I was reading a book last night and it mentioned something called a tripod. Do you think we could try--" "Shut up and go hold that thing up!"

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Putting Ignorance to My Advantage

I tend to get stopped at least once a day in The Store by customers looking for stuff, and since I've shopped in that store for years before getting hired to work there, I pretty much know where most things are -- but I can't rattle off the aisle numbers, because I don't know those. So, when I get stopped by customers, I'll often tell them something like "I'm new, so I'm not really sure. But let's see...I think they're down this way...I'll run and look for you...ah, yes, there they are! Can I get them down for you? Will two be enough?"

They love this. Oh yes, they do. Not that it will help them when our overlords come back to reclaim the planet...heh heh heh!

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Ohhhhhh, you're KILLING me....

Bára's been at the self-portraiture thing again, and if ever I've seen a photo online that made me want to see what lay beyond its boundaries, this is the one. Wow.

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Maybe they can ditch lethal injections in favor of burning at the stake, while they're at it

One of the little mysteries of the 2000 elections was how Al Gore managed to lose his own home state of Tennessee. Of course, most on the right seized on the notion that he never really lived there, but generally, I suspect it's just that his state has been trending more conservative in recent years. Had he not become Vice President in 1993, I wonder if he would have even been re-elected to his Senate seat in his next election.

Stuff like this makes me think, probably not. "Crimes of nature", indeed.

(via Atrios)

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Five Times Five

For some reason, I seem to steal "posting memes" from Lynn Sislo more than anyone else, such as this one. She comes up with pretty neat ones, though, so here goes. She doesn't provide an explanation, so I'll assume it's "Five Favorites".

MUSIC

1. Berlioz, Romeo et Juliet
2. Howard Shore, Lord of the Rings film scores (I consider all three to be one major work)
3. Pink Floyd, The Wall
4. Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen
5. Williams, Star Wars film scores (see note to Shore)

BOOKS

1. The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay
2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
4. Cosmos, Carl Sagan
5. The Book of Marvels (both volumes), Richard Halliburton

MOVIES

1. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
2. Casablanca
3. Schindler's List
4. My Fair Lady
5. The Sea Hawk

(Note: I restricted myself to a single Star Wars film. I could as well have just listed all five movies to date and called it good.)

PLACES

1. Buffalo, NY (anywhere, really, but especially the Southtowns. I want a house in East Aurora.)
2. The Twin Cities.
3. Presque Isle State Park, Erie, PA.
4. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
5. Allegany State Park, NY.

FOOD

1. Pizza with sausage and banana peppers.
2. Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, with provolone and mushrooms. (I don't care if the lack of Cheez-Whiz renders it an "unofficial" Philly cheesesteak. Keep that orange crap off my sandwich!)
3. Haagen-Dasz: Coffee flavor. (The stories I could tell about this stuff!)
4. Buffalo-style chicken wings. (I only indulge in these once in a long while anymore, since they're so spectacularly unhealthy. But God, are they wonderful, if really done Buffalo-style.)
5. Grilled Italian sausage on a long, hard roll and topped with grilled onions, green and red peppers, and brown mustard.

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Mourning Dr. Sagan, yet again....

A couple of weeks ago, the Opportunity rover observed a transit of the sun from the Martian surface, by Mars's moon Deimos.

Well, now Mars's other moon, Phobos, has joined the transit party. My jaw is starting to ache from all this dropping!

(via Jay Manifold)

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Raise the glass for St. Paddy!

A happy St. Patrick's Day to all my readers, Irish-descent or not. (I am Irish on my mother's side; my father's side is German.) I had hoped to take the kid to Buffalo's St. Patrick's Day Parade the other day, but family misfortunes ruled that out. Maybe next year. So now I'm just sittin' and bloggin', whilst listening to my Naxos CD of "An Irish Symphony" by Sir Hamilton Hardy (1879-1941). Later I'll listen to some Chieftains, although I'll have to be careful and play the Irish stuff, and not the Welsh stuff or the Scottish stuff or the Galician stuff or the Canadian Celtic stuff or...you get the idea.

And maybe I'll have a beer, since my brand of choice at the moment is, conveniently enough, Michael Shea's. (Good thing, that -- last time I bought beer, I came very close to getting Tsing-Tao instead, which just wouldn't be appropriate.)

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Who's Vivienne?

Jay Manifold is wondering who Vivienne is (I assume he's referring to this month's masthead image, or else it's a really weird question).

In many versions of the Arthur legend, Merlin is done in when he is seduced by a wicked woman who tricks him into revealing to her the secret of his deepest lair -- usually a cave of crystal. The woman then seals Merlin inside forever, which is why he's not around later on when things in Camelot start to turn for the worse. In Tennyson's telling of the legend, Idylls of the King, this woman's name is Vivienne. Thus, the picture above depicts her seduction of the old and weary mage.

Now, her name is not the same in all versions. Sometimes she is Vivienne; sometimes Viviane; sometimes Nynaeve or Nimue. Sometimes she is also the Lady of the Lake, other times not. These variations are part of what, for me, make the Arthurian legends so compelling.

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How many balloons could you fill from the gas in Paula Abdul's head?

The real competition on American Idol has begun, and I'm not sure who I'm rooting for. There's young crooner John Stevens, who is also a local boy, but he's awfully young and I just can't see his style carrying him all the way through to victory -- especially with Randy Jackson getting more hostile toward him every time he picks up the microphone. (And Simon is nice to him! Weird....)

I also finally started to see what they like about Fantasia Barrino so much. She's the one the judges have gushed over, unanimously, each time she has sung, but I haven't really been able to grok her stuff since she keeps doing songs that I don't like that much. Last night, though, she did a good one, and I got a kick out of it.

I also really like that football player guy, Matthew Rogers; but for my money, I think I'm really rooting for George Huff. I really like his voice and his exuberance. In fact, I really like his exuberance, and the way he's constantly smiling in that "Gosh, this is all just so much fun!" way of his. And this will probably sound weird, but he reminds me of Josh Exley, the alien-turned-1940s baseball player from the X-Files episode "The Un-natural". The gist of the episode -- which is one of my favorite episodes of any TV series, ever -- was that an alien from a species that had no concept of joy discovers it for himself in the course of playing baseball. Like George Huff, the Josh Exley character was a good singer, smiled a lot, and just enjoyed the fun of it all. And George even looks like Josh Exley.

Maybe that's a strange reason to root for a contestant on a reality show, but it's my reason, and I'm sticking with it.

(BTW, I taped the last half hour and watched Scrubs instead -- brilliant episode, as always. But did Paula Abdul actually manage to make it through an entire show without telling a contestant some variant of, "I'm so proud of you, you chose a really hard song, but you made it your own"?)

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Bills news....

The Buffalo Bills have started reworking their roster for next season. They signed former Eagles cornerback Troy Vincent, which should be an upgrade: departed CB Antoine Winfield is a vicious tackler, but he has the worst hands I've ever seen and almost never even comes close to intercepting the ball, which is really what you want out of a CB anyway. (One of the Buffalo radio sports guys said of Winfield, "A corner who tackles well is like a receiver who blocks well. What's the point?" That's putting it a bit strongly, but there's a grain of truth there.)

The Bills also released veteran backup quarterback Alex Van Pelt, who has already signed on to do color commentary for the team's radio broadcasts next year. Van Pelt is a classy and intelligent football guy, and I'm sure he'll do fine on the radio, although I rather expected him to go into coaching rather than broadcasting. Off and on through his career, when the starters ran into trouble, some fans would call for Van Pelt to be allowed a shot at the starting job, which is testament to his leadership and football acumen. Too bad that his physical skills were never up to par, especially in the arm-strength department. Alex Van Pelt had all the attributes of a fine NFL quarterback -- except the arm, which you really can't do without.

Now the Bills are looking seriously at Billy Volek, the backup QB from Tennessee who is an unrestricted free agent. That would be a good signing. He's experienced (four years) and young, so when Drew Bledsoe departs -- sooner or later -- the Bills would have someone to plug in for a while, if not for a long time.

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I hate Kevin Drum.

Why? Because starting today, he's a paid blogger. I'm sure that one of these days, the Buffalo News will realize its dire need for a blog...but until then, Kevin's evil and must be destroyed.

(Yeah, I'm linking him anyway. Who ever said I had to be rational?)

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The ever-shifting sidebar....

In accordance with prophecy my general tendency to keep moving things around, I'm shifting the sidebar about. Firstly, there are a few folks I want to add to the blogroll, but I'm trying to keep the blogroll that's actually maintained via Blogrolling.com at a certain length, because once it starts getting really long it tends to slow down the loading of the page. (Longtime readers of Brad DeLong's blog, for example, may recall some truly glacial load-times before he moved his titanic Blogrolling-powered blogroll to its own page some months back.)

So, what I'll do is move all LiveJournal users to their own section in the sidebar, titled "Pilgrims from a Strange Land". (This is because LiveJournals strike me as a bit odd. That whole "friends" thing is weird, and navigation of LJ archives tends to be a nightmarish affair.) Another new section is entitled "Mapmakers, Sages and Scribes"; this is where I'll list professional bloggers -- i.e., people who are either directly paid to blog or folks who are actual journalists for whom blogging is part of the whole package of their work. All this will open up a few spots in the main blogroll. Of course, blogs that are relocated from the Blogrolling-powered blogroll will no longer be marked as recently updated when they have new posts, but since not all blogs seem to respond to that service, this doesn't strike me as a problem.

These changes will be effective...right now. BOOM! There, that didn't hurt, did it?

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The ever-expanding cosmos

That's an artist's conception of Sedna, the most distant object found in solar orbit. The consensus seems to be that it's not a planet, but rather a planetoid and, more specifically, an Oort Cloud Object. It's out beyond even the Kuiper Belt -- very far, indeed.

Man, does a single day go by anymore that I don't go online, see some bit of planetary astronomy news, and think, "Damn, if only Carl Sagan hadn't died just a handful of years before all this!"

(link via Jay Manifold)

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An Irrefutable Formula

Suicidal Tendency + Failure to Plan Properly = Mocking from Blogistan.

This one's kind of gross, folks, but it hit my "black humor" nodes dead-on. I have no trouble imagining the guy's cry of "Oh, noooooooo!" as he reached the point of impossibility in his plan.

(via Warren Ellis, of course)

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"Compassion" in government, in action

One would think that the State has an economic interest in making sure that, as much as possible, only the guilty get imprisoned, since room and board in prisons costs money, and if you're spending that on locking up an innocent person, well, it's money wasted. Except that someone's hit on the idea that the state should be able to recoup that investment and charge those unlucky duckies for that room and board.

At least it's happening in Britain and not here...but you never know. Good ideas have to wait for their time to come, but bad ones whip around like oversugared five-year-olds at Chuck E. Cheese. I just know that sooner or later, some legislator in this country, full of desire to up his "law and order" and "fiscal responsibility" street cred, is going to propose something like this. You watch, folks.

(via He Who Modulates)

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Oh, THAT explains it.

It turns out that today's snow in Buffalo is a time-delayed gift from His Swankiness. Thanks. Tons.

(BTW, in keeping with his "Swank" theme and his general fascination with Asian stuff, I've considered paying homage to The Mikado (my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan operetta) and dubbing Mr. Harris "Swanki-poo". Somehow, I don't think he'd totally appreciate that....)

Speaking of Mr. Harris, today he quotes in its entirety one of the great film monologues of all time, Quint's account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis from Jaws. I've long thought that this may be the moment in the film that elevates it into greatness. Also, it was this scene, more than any other in any film, that drove home to me the evils of the "pan-and-scan" formatting for televisions. I saw the film many times on VHS and whenever TBS aired it, and this scene always kept Robert Shaw in tight close-up during the monologue. Little did I know that, in Steven Spielberg's original framing of the scene, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is off to one side, listening with a haunted expression in his eyes.

Regarding the Indianapolis, I once saw a TV documentary about it -- I don't recall if it was a National Geographic special or what -- that interviewed some of the survivors. As Greg notes, it was a far more horrific ordeal than the Jaws monologue conveys. The bit that's stayed with me is how one of these men described how a friend of his finally succumbed to dementia and announced that he was going to dive down to the fresh water beneath the salt water on top of the ocean and have a drink. Down he went, and that was the last anyone saw of him.

Anyway, they delivered the bomb.

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So, have you folks read it yet?!

I know I have some Guy Gavriel Kay afficionadoes amongst my highly intelligent readers, so since Last Light of the Sun has been out for a couple of weeks now, have any of you read it yet? If so, weigh in now! And if not, well -- you're all slackers. Heh! (Insulting one's audience is said to be a great way to bring 'em back, you know.)

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It was as if millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced....

As I write this, BlogSpot appears to have suffered some kind of outage. Ugh. Of course, since you're reading this, it's back again, which raises the interesting question of why I'm bothering to write this in the first place. The answer is...Hey, what's that over there behind your shoulder?

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Notes on stuff I haven't read

It amazes me that these days I can walk through Borders, make note of all the new titles I want to read, and in nearly every case, my thought isn't "Man, I wish I had enough cash to pick that up", but rather, "Geez, why did I forget to put a pen in my pocket so I could write down these titles and get 'em from the library?" Ach!

I spotted a number of new books I want to read -- Peter Hamilton has a new space opera out; I've been meaning to read Charles Stross's Singularity Sky for quite some time; there's a nifty looking fantasy called The Anvil of the World. Sometime I need to pick up an official copy of GGK's Last Light of the Sun (getting the review copy was super cool from the "I get to read it two months before everybody else!" standpoint, but review copies, as books-in-themselves, are kind of crappy: uncorrected typos, incredibly stiff binding, generic cover with no art that's made of card-stock). And that's just in the SF department.

I also thumbed through the latest issue of SF Chronicle, which I like to peruse for news and such, and I learned there that Stephen R. Donaldson has signed the contract for The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It will be four books, bringing the total number of volumes in the three Covenant series to ten (not including the "out-take" published separately in a short fiction collection some years ago). This excites me greatly; the Covenant books are longtime favorites of mine, even though it's been well over a decade since I last read all of them (I did read Lord Foul's Bane a year ago, but as yet have not moved on to the remainder of the series). I know that Covenant isn't for everybody, but I sure liked it. In fact, if memory serves, I read the Covenant series before I read The Lord of the Rings. (Donaldson has long maintained that the series was not finished after White Gold Wielder, so I don't think this constitutes a case of an author returning to the "cash cow", such as all those additional Foundation books Isaac Asimov penned late in his life.)

Let's see, what else from Borders today...I thumbed through Sauron Defeated, which is one of the later volumes in the History of Middle Earth series that Christopher Tolkien has produced (using notes and materials left behind by his father). What caught my eye here was an unpublished Epilogue to The Return of the King, which takes place after Sam's line, "Well, I'm back". It was interesting from a Tolkien-geek perspective (even one so neophytic as myself), but I can see why it was omitted in the end. It's basically a kind of "Here's what happened to the major characters after the story's end" bit, not really necessary.

And I also discovered that a second collection of shooting scripts from The West Wing has been published, this one from the third and fourth seasons. Interestingly, the book includes Aaron Sorkin's script for "Isaac and Ishmael", the "special terrorism" episode that was produced on the double just after the 9-11-01 attacks and was hated by just about everybody, it seems. (I liked it, but it's definitely "flat" compared to just about any other episode -- although I'm not sure how it couldn't avoid that.)

Lastly, I ended up buying two CDs -- Naxos's latest entry in its "Japanese Classics" series, this one being works of Koscak Yamada; and a CD of Chinese ballads written by Teresa Teng and sung by Huang Hong-ying. I'm not really sure what this one's all about, and I will report later.

All in all, a pleasant hour spent in Borders today, while the snow flew outside the windows. Three to five inches on the way...March in Buffalo!

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I'd headline this "Lost In Translation", but....

....according to the FAQ, often there is no attempt at translation.

It's Engrish.com, which collects examples of fractured English used in print materials and on products from around the world, and often in Japan. Apparently, the use of English words is something of a design tendency -- just because they look cool, which sounds odd at first until I consider that I own a lot of stuff with Japanese or Chinese characters on them, and I have no idea at all what they say, either. This, plus the problems faced by Japanese people attempting to speak English (few opportunities for use in any kind of vernacular setting, different grammatical structures, and entire sounds in English not present in Japanese), combine with often funny results.

(via Libertarian Jackass)

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Didja ever give a man a foot massage?

Some folks use their impressive mental powers to better the world; some don't. Unless, of course, you consider figuring out the amount of time spanned by the interwoven storylines of Pulp Fiction to be "bettering the world", which is something I'm not sure I'm expert at myself -- I mean, just look at some of the geeky stuff I write in this space. Glass houses, eh?

Anyhow, it's pretty airtight -- except for one piece of evidence. Mr. Nefarious uses a line of Mia Wallace's to demonstrate on which night the boxing match takes place, in relation to the night of her date with Vincent Vega. I've just checked, and unfortunately, the line isn't quite the way Mr. Nefarious remembers. Mia doesn't say "Thank you for last night", she says "I never thanked you for dinner" -- which doesn't quite establish the number of days that have transpired between the dinner and the fight. It could have been a couple of nights ago, it could have been last night. You never know. Or do you?

EDIT: Link fixed. And how embarrassing that Neddie was the one discover that I failed to correctly link a reference to him! The shame of it all! Woe, woe, woe....

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All the old, familiar places....

A couple of old conversation partners from my days of posting on rec.music.movies have, since then, done as I did and entered Blogistan -- although the two I mention here seem to be ensconced in Blogistan's breakaway province, LiveJournalopia. First is Jostein Hakestad, a guy from Norway whose tastes generally follow the formula 80% in total agreement with mine, and 20% in maddening disagreement.

And then there's Jason Blalock (also known as Jay), of whom I lost total track until I happened to turn him up again over the weekend. He was the force behind a favorite film music review site of mine, ScoreLand, before his interests shifted and he left film music behind. He is no longer updating ScoreLand, but he has made all the old content there available. Just don't stare for too long at those spinning CDs at the bottom of his reviews.

(And if you mention ScoreLand -- the film music site -- on your blog or journal, you'll get lots of search engine hits from folks looking for, well, this. NSFW!)

Lastly, I also note via Aaron the presence online of an old college friend who played double bass in the orchestra and electric bass in the jazz band, Mark Cuthbertson. Mark is one of the most unbelievably unflappable people I've ever known, and the closest I ever saw him come to pure anger was when none other than Wynton Marsalis, in a clinic-master class setting, announced that the electric bass isn't an instrument for real jazz musicians, or some such thing. I think Mark raised both eyebrows at that one....

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Which came first, the market or the product?

His Swankiness quotes, and comments on, an editorial that suggests that the blossoming market for Japanese manga and anime in this country are entirely fan-created: it's not as if some bunch of suits sat down in a board room, conceived a product, and then proceeded to construct a sales strategy around that product. Interesting. I wonder, though, when did anime start to reach its current level of critical mass? Did the rise of manga and anime coincide with the rise of the Web? Just curious, 'cause I don't know.

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Would there be a production number called "Springtime for Gollum"?

I just want to go on record as saying that this is a really good idea.

And by "really good idea", I mean "really friggin' bad idea".

(via Atrios)

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Immersion in Middle Earth

Well, I'm off to see Return of the King for the second time in less than an hour, so I presume I'll have updates later on today. Yes, the film's been out for three months, and I'm only now getting around to seeing it again. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to see it again in a theatrical release (although buying the DVDs is a no-brainer), but I decided that since I have no idea at all when I'll be able to experience these films again in their intended theatrical presentation, I'd better do it.

Last night, though, I completely immersed myself in Middle Earth, watching the first two films back-to-back. That's quite the experience, and if you haven't done so, please do. I know it's hard to free up the eight or nine hours necessary to do it (adding extra time for trips to the kitchen for snacks and to the loo once the snacks from the first movie need to come out toward the end of the second), but you really get a sense of the story's emotional sweep that way.

Before I go, just a couple of things about the Extended version of The Two Towers:

:: There's a scene at Edoras in which Aragorn calms a terrified horse, and then directs the stablekeepers to set the horse free, saying something like, "This animal has seen enough wars." Is this the same horse that later finds Aragorn after he goes off the cliff and floats miles downriver?

:: The extended ending of The Two Towers simply doesn't work as well, in my opinion, as the theatrical version. Frodo and Sam are warned by Faramir that Cirith Ungol is a particularly dangerous path, which to my mind mutes the idea that Gollum is leading them unawares into horrible danger; and Merry and Pippin's finding of the pipeweed, while a charming scene, rather deflates the pathos of the film's conclusion.

:: Legolas has something like twenty "kills" in the first ten minutes of the Battle of Helm's Deep, but only ends up with 42? Did he take a long lunch or something?

:: I loved the moment when Fangorn Forest exacts its revenge on the orcs.

:: I'd like to know what the state of mind was of the person who first scouted the location for Osgiliath and said, "Yep the foothills of Mordor are a fifteen-minute walk away, so let's build a town right here!"

:: After having seen Return of the King and watched Legolas single-handedly bring down an oliphaunt, the cave-troll fight in Fellowship plays a bit differently. I'm thinking, "Oh come now, quit messin' around! You can defeat a beastie twenty times your size, but this troll is beyond your ability?"

:: One facet of Peter Jackson's story construction is pretty obvious: needing some major deaths along the way but not really given any (except Boromir), he simply looks for characters who are never mentioned again in the books after their initial appearance (Haldir, Hama) and then brings them back to kill them. Brilliant!

OK, that's it. I'm off; back later.

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Sigh....

I was up early this morning to get the Wife and the Kid to the airport, and I've spent most of the four hours since their takeoff hitting "refresh" on the airline's flight status page every minute or two, and wondering if the Kid's reaction to her first ever airplane flight rises from her "Everything's an adventure!" self, as opposed to her "Everything's a big terrifying monstrosity!" self. I'll find out later, I suppose. Meanwhile, nothing more for today -- I'm going to decompress for a while and watch Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers back to back. (Extended versions, which is cool, but on VHS, which isn't. The DVDs were already rented out at BlockBuster. No, I don't own either of the Extended versions on DVD yet. I decided to hold out until the inevitable mega-box set arrives. Sooner, I hope, rather than later.)

Meantime, by all means peruse the fine folks in the blogroll. Lynn Sislo (Reflections in d-minor) has a couple of nifty conversations going on about music, interesting stuff as always at 2Blowhards, and yet more great stuff at Wil Wheaton Dot Net. Enjoy!

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Yet More Martian Coolness

The Earth, from the Martian surface. Man oh man!

Also possibly observed was an old Viking orbiter, long after the Viking missions ended. (It could have been a meteor, however.)

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Random Wishes, #4857

I want to see a complete episode of that action TV series they're always watching on King of the Hill -- the one where the hero is apparently a Mexican or Spanish priest who always says "Vaya con Dios!" before dispatching the bad guys in pretty violent fashion.

Actually, I like the idea of fictional works of art that come up in stories -- they always add a bit of richness, a sense that we really are looking into another world and that the people there are acting out lives as opposed to a plot. It's that level of extra detail that makes fictional worlds convincing.

So, what fictional art works would you like to see? (or hear?)

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Bad Fatherdom, in progress

I like to listen to a lot of Celtic music, which -- in its more "fun" forms -- involves listening to a lot of drinking songs. Thus it has come to pass that one of my daughter's favorite songs, owing to its presence on a frequently played CD, is "Beer, Beer, Beer". Well, OK....except the other day I was playing a different CD, and on comes another song about beer, "Beers To You". (It was the opening titles song to the Clint Eastwood movie Any Which Way You Can.) She immediately adopted that one, as well.

But I can draw hope in the fact that she looks at me with disapproval every time I actually drink a beer, right?

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Political Blogging Quote of the Week

No, this isn't the start of a new weekly series. I just liked this bit from Matthew Yglesias, in which he bluntly expresses a long-time frustration of mine: namely, that today's Democrats are so terrified of taking a few lumps themselves that they seem to invariably end up landing no punches either, and often taking lumps anyway.

(Oh, and apologies for the profanity. PG-13 blog and all that.)

"Fundamentally, for Democrats to win they need to change the nature of the 'values' conversation. Values -- the important ones, anyways -- aren't about who has a potty mouth and who fucks whom, and Democrats need to make that case to the American people, not run around like a bunch of chickenshits."

That's exactly right.

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Is this real irony, or just irony in the "Alanis Morissette not-really-irony-at-all" sense?

Before the death in the family (scroll down three posts) occurred, The Wife was scheduled to attend an out-of-town, overnight meeting on Monday and Tuesday, which forced me to request off from work at The Store on those days (since no one would be around otherwise to watch The Kid during the non-preschool daytime hours). Of course, now, they are both going out of town for the entire week, leaving me with a few days completely alone during which I won't even be working, since The Store's schedule for next week was already posted by the time news of the sad event reached me.

So, how to spend the time?

Well....part of me feels a bit dirty for considering doing this, since it rather feels like putting a death in the family to work for my own purposes, but I'm leaning strongly toward taking in the Lord of the Rings films in their entirety. I'd watch Fellowship and The Two Towers tomorrow, and then go to a matinee of Return of the King on Monday. Or something like that. I don't know, really -- all this time just plopped into my lap via circumstances I could not possibly have ever wished for, and I'd really rather actually work. I've notified the managers at The Store that I'll be available if they need someone on a call-in basis, but it's still a weird feeling -- a little like "The Monkey's Paw".

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Belated Congratulations

:: Andrew Cory celebrated a birthday on the anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death, as well as composer Sergei Prokofiev.

:: Lynn Sislo celebrated the second anniversary of her deportation to Blogistan. (Which means, in turn, that this blog is a couple of weeks older than hers! Heh!)

:: And in a surprising bit of epiphany, New England Stupid Patriots cornerback Ty Law is to be congratulated for realizing, however belatedly, his role in the ascendency of the greatest force for evil in all Sports-dom and his concurrent wish to atone for his sins.

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Friday Saturday Burst of Weirdness

I always enjoy the way some of the more extreme Christian fundamentalists undergo tremendous mental gyration in order to fit the current world situation into their interpretations of Apocalyptic writings -- stuff like "Scriptural prophecy tells us that the Kingdom of Beebop-alulah will invade Israel during the Days of Ten Thousand Goats! Clearly, Armenia is the Kingdom of Beebop-alulah!"

In that vein, check out the Middle East Invasion Map, courtesy of that always-entertaining whacko, Jack van Impe.

(via PZ Myers)

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I like rain, but does it have to pour?

Way back when my wife was merely my college girlfriend of just a couple of weeks, in the long days of yore (1991), I met the future in-laws pretty much by surprise when they trekked from their home in Idaho for the funeral of her grandfather. A month of two later, I met the grandmother, a spry old widow who, at the time that I first saw her, was climbing into a John Deere tractor to drive it from one relation's farm to another relation's farm. (This, as some of you may know, took place in Iowa farm country.)

Some years later, that spry old lady made it from western Iowa to Western New York -- about a 950 mile trek -- with another old widower named Orville for our wedding, at which she brought the house down at our reception with some pretty vigorous dancing.

Sadly, her health had been in decline over the last two years, with a pretty serious decline commencing over the last couple of months. Yesterday, it ended. She passed away peacefully at the age of 79.

The wife and daughter will be leaving for Iowa tomorrow to attend the funeral; unfortunately, we decided that we couldn't afford for me to miss a week of work, so I will be staying home. (My wife is salaried, so she won't lose a week's pay, but being an hourly employee, I would.) While the idea of five days of having the place to myself is attractive in itself, the manner in which the opportunity arose isn't.

Alas.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Vintage view of the Peace Bridge between Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario.

The Peace Bridge forms one of the busiest border crossings between the US and Canada, if not the busiest (although I seem to recall hearing that the Detroit-Windsor crossing is busier). Opened in 1927, the Peace Bridge is still going strong, although in recent years there has been much controversy in the region over the Bridge's future. All sides concede that the Peace Bridge's three-lane capacity is insufficient for current needs and must be at least doubled to six lanes, but how to do this has been a real sticking point. Some people -- including me -- want a "signature" bridge, something bold and architecturally striking (see some possible designs here), preferably a cable-stayed concrete bridge that could be built mostly by local construction companies. Others, however, advocate a "twin span" approach, which is exactly that: erecting a nearly-identical neighbor to the Peace Bridge, likewise built mainly of steel (which would have to be brought from elsewhere, as Buffalo is a steel-town no longer).

While I do want a "signature" bridge -- although, quite frankly, people who think that we could build something as iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge are being a tad unrealistic -- I do admit that the Peace Bridge as it stands is a fine-looking bridge, and if it is completely replaced, I would hope that it wouldn't be demolished. Suggestions along this line include making it a "trucks only" bridge, or converting it to railroad use. I like the latter idea, if it would mean enhancing Buffalo's status as a shipping city, which was supplanted years ago with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

This image, although vintage, comes pretty close to the way things look there today. The elevated portion of the bridge in the foreground is called the Parker Truss (it's on the American side of the bridge), and it spans a section of the Niagara river -- clearly visible in this image from the same collection -- that was dredged and deepened to allow for ship passage. The Parker Truss had to basically be shoehorned into the original bridge design to allow for minimal height clearance for ships. This, I believe (although I may be mistaken), isn't much of an issue anymore because the only boats that use that part of the river (the Black Rock Channel) are recreational craft and the rowing teams from the local colleges. (Always a cool thing, to see them out on the water.)

One thing I've noticed when crossing the Peace Bridge is that if there are people unfamiliar with the region in the car with you, they will ask where the Falls are. They think, "Niagara River, ergo, Niagara Falls." And they're right -- but the Falls are about twenty miles downstream. The Peace Bridge spans the Niagara River very close to its starting point as the outlet for Lake Erie.

(The site linked by the picture is an excellent compendium of Buffalo in the first half of the 20th century, when it was still a city on the rise.)

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Another entry in the "Least Shocking Headline EVER" sweepstakes.

Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept. (NYT registration required)

No, really? You mean, the whole "Teach abstinence and nothing else and the little tykes will never ever try things out" strategy might not be working? Ye Gods!

And then there's this article by John Derbyshire, who apparently can't write about anything about how icky he thinks gays are. The gist here is that somehow, allowing gay marriage will completely remove the topic of gender from public discourse. Ummmm....yeah....The website only offers a couple of teaser grafs, with the helpful note at the end that "You can read the rest of this article in our current issue!" Well, maybe I will, but only if you guys promise that the rest of it is as stupid as the grafs quoted.

Derbyshire gets paid to write stupid stuff. I get paid to change light bulbs at The Store. Go figure.

(links via Pandagon and Matthew Yglesias)

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World of the Rings?

The Novels of Terry Pratchett, reviewed as an ongoing project. This guy's one of those authors I never think to look for either at the library or at the bookstore, but people are always telling me how good he is. So I suspect I'll just go right on occasionally thinking that I should really read him one of these days.

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World Wide Wednesday

Warren Ellis did this a few months back, but in a hosting change his old archives disappeared and he did it again yesterday: he encouraged readers to take photos of themselves and send them to him. The Internet, as he says, is indeed made of people. Start here and just scroll down.

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An Evolutionary Biologist's Birthday

Happy Birthday (belatedly) to PZ Myers, who takes advantage of the encroaching grayness of his scalp to do a little science.

And I should probably give him a birthday present in the form of a link (what else could a blogger give?), so, PZ, here you go! Start sharpening the knives!

(link via Sean)

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Oh, thank GOD! (oh, and Mazel Tov.)

At last, the pace at which my "To Read" list has been bloating may abate somewhat, with Will Duquette out of commission for a while.

And I'll bet he wouldn't have it any other way.

Congratulations to him and family (now plus one), and I look forward to his undoubtedly-forthcoming reviews of Goodnight, Moon, Pat the Bunny, and the entire Curious George mythos!

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How to be a successful criminal, Lesson 25

Always do your research before you commit your crime.

This particular crime could also be cross-referenced under Lesson 38, "Do not overreach."

(via He Who Modulates)

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Planes, Trains, and the Royal Mounted Police

If you ever wondered what it's like to be a famous fantasy novelist from Toronto and to go on tour to promote your latest novel, Guy Gavriel Kay has you covered. He's keeping an online journal of his book tour for The Last Light of the Sun, which I guess is the closest we'll ever come to a GGK blog. Check out his March 9 entries; apparently someone approached him with a copy of The Lions of Al-Rassan and not only asked for an autograph but asked him to change the ending. Wow.

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Who ya callin' "Dummy", pardner?

Lynn Sislo apparently hates the idea of the [topic] For Dummies books.

I think she's a bit off on this one. I own a number of Dummies books, on a number of different subjects, and generally I have found each one to be an excellent "Introductory" book about the topic in question. For instance, the HTML skills I have employed to rework a standard Blogger template into the current look come from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page; I've learned a lot about wine from Wine for Dummies; Personal Finance for Dummies was a good starter book on various matters of money (although a year-and-a-half of unemployment rendered that knowledge useless, as we begin digging out of our "paycheck to paycheck" hole). Ditto Magic for Dummies, Management for Dummies, and even Poetry for Dummies.

Yes, these books are targeted toward people who are pretty starting from a "zero point" in those particular subjects, but this seems to me a good thing. Every Dummies book tries to give a fairly brief and readable account of "the basics" of any particular subject, and every one of them includes a lot of information as to where to go for continued explorations. They are most certainly not, in my experience, a kind of "Here's all you need to know about this, and now you don't have to bother doing any more than this, either" which is how Lynn seems to be viewing them. They're more the equivalent of a 101-level class in college. I don't see these books as "dumbing down" anything; rather, they serve as "Invitations" and "Introductions" to various topics.

Finally, in looking at the post and article Lynn links, I see that the Dummies books aren't specifically mentioned in the article -- what they are talking about, apparently, is some series of books that "rephrases" Shakespeare, translating him, for today's young kids. Now, I'm not sure that this is such a good idea (although I sometimes think Shakespeare is either taught too early or mistaught when it is), but this doesn't really represent the Dummies line of books, which are in no way equivalent to the kind of thing you'll find in, say, Cliff's Notes. A Shakespeare for Dummies might explain things like blank verse, iambic pentameter, the structure and nature of Elizabethan drama, and the like -- and it's a good thing to have that stuff explained if you're going to read Shakespeare.

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Hockey sucks.

I've never been much of a hockey fan, and the only time I really work up any enthusiasm for it is if the Buffalo Sabres somehow make it to one of the deeper rounds in the NHL playoffs. I find the game tough to watch on TV ("Where the hell is the puck?!"), I don't see enough nuance in the game to bother figuring out the more obscure rules (every time things get going nicely and I think, "OK, this might be cool", suddenly someone blows a whistle, everything stops, and the announcer says, "Ooooooh, so-and-so called for icing" or "Whosis crosses the blue line!"), and the game's love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with violence really turns me off. What's the damned point about fighting in hockey? Other sports don't need it. It's stupid, macho, idiot crap, and it's no reason to watch a sport. If I wanted to watch a fight, I'd watch boxing. Or a 1970s Clint Eastwood movie.

So I haven't been paying much attention at all to hockey this year, which is why I didn't hear about a violent incident that apparently took place the other night: one player literally came up behind another one and cold-cocked him in the back of the head, sending him first into unconsciousness on the ice and then to the hospital with a broken neck.

I was listening to the Jim Rome Show on the radio a bit ago, and Rome had an interview with some hockey journalist or something who made the usual demands for very strict punishment -- a year's suspension, say -- and speculating on the problems this causes for hockey as a sport. In the midst of this, this hockey-guy points out that this event was likely precipitated by some bad blood between the same two teams dating to a previous incident several weeks ago, and then he says: "If this were a legal case, it wouldn't be hard to prove premeditation."

"IF this were a legal case."

To which I immediately think, "Why the hell isn't this a legal case?!"

Somehow, I suspect that if I walked up behind some coworker at The Store and punched him in such a way as to give him a concussion and result in hospitalization, I wouldn't be looking at a year's suspension from my job. And yet, no punishment has as yet been announced by the NHL on this guy, and to my knowledge, no charges have been filed (although they may come).

As far as I am concerned, this player should not be suspended for a year. He should be banned from the game for life, and that should be the least of his problems anyway, because he should also be awaiting trial for assault.

(last paragraph edited so it makes sense)

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Huh? Whuzzat?!

A frustrating thing about listening to NPR on the way into work is that invariably I'll hear a tease of a story I want to hear that's coming a bit later on, but I'll already be at work and not get to hear it. Yeah, I can hear it on the Web when I get home, but sometimes I forget or it's something really interesting or relates a bit of news I didn't know about. This happened this morning when the announcer says, "Coming up later on Morning Edition, remembering actor Paul Winfield."

Now, knowing as I do that "remembering" someone, in NPR parlance, usually means that they have died, I immediately wondered if Mr. Winfield had, in fact, passed on. Sadly, he did in fact die of a heart attack the other day.

I always liked his work, starting with the first time I saw him: as Captain Terrell, the poor Starfleet officer forced (along with Commander Chekov) to turn traitor in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Later I saw him in good roles in Presumed Innocent and other films, and he had a memorable supporting role in a major story arc on LA Law.

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Eye Candy on a Slow Blogging Day

Today's obviously been pretty busy -- even though I got home from work at 2:00, I had to go right back out again after changing and showering -- and thus, today's entries are pretty dull. It happens. So just gaze upon this wonderment for a bit:



That dust shell is six light years in diameter. Details here.

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Tables of Contents

Check out the ruminations on magazine Tables of Contents over on 2Blowhards. Interesting stuff that I've never given much thought, because I never look at the ToC in a magazine -- I just page through, beginning to end. In fact, with some magazines (WIRED and Realms of Fantasy leap to mind) I specifically do not look at the ToC, lest it spoil the surprise of the contents.

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Really? Me?

Like everyone else right now (including Morat, who wants traffic), I took the Libertarian Purity Test. And yeah, it's pretty stupid. I tend to ignore people in direct proportion to the amount of stuff they want to privatize.

Anyway, what struck me as weird about this quiz was how I got a really low score -- something like eleven or twelve out of 100 -- and still, the thing's grading scale tells me, "You have some Libertarian leanings! Explore them!"

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I felt a tremor in the Force....

Kevin Drum is launching a paid blog, Matthew Yglesias has a new template, TBogg and Darth Swank have new jobs.

The planets are realigning, it seems. Or something.

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Why the Web Was Invented, Reason #48579.

Check this out: A site which archives every TV political ad in the US from the major party nominees. Want to go back and watch "Morning In America" again? or the Willie Horton ad? or any other one? They're all here. Coolness galore, for political history junkies like myself. (One thing I'm sad about is that this will be the first election year since 1992 that I didn't have access to C-SPAN at home. I love how that network shows old political convention coverage, old presidential debates, and that kind of thing. I find political history more interesting, often times, than contemporary politics.)

(via Digby)

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Move Over Britney!

Yes, once again it's time to delve into the Wonderful World of Women In Whose Sewage Britney Is Not Suitable To Bathe. Here we have a heroine from Braveheart and a femme fatale from The World Is Not Enough, Sophie Marceau.





And from sexy and beautiful to utterly adorable:

Labels: ROWR

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"Nothing of note happened today."

So wrote Louis XIV in his personal diary, on the day his subjects stormed the Bastille. (Or so I remember, and right now I'm too lazy to look it up.) Anyway, that's basically the story of my day at The Store today, except that I rediscovered an old affliction that you'll find in every manager on Earth: when they assume a job will "just take a couple of minutes", plan on an hour. It's sort of the reverse of the "Miracle Worker" thing I mentioned a few weeks back, the difference being that if the manager asks you for a time-estimate, you can play the "Miracle Worker" game; but if the manager already has a time estimate in mind, get ready, because you're likely to end up looking like a clod.

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It's "ukUlele"!

John Scalzi asks for suggestions of songs that would sound cool played on a ukulele. Problem is, he misspells "ukulele" throughout the post, going with the common -- but wrong -- "ukelele".

Yeah, I know, this is incredible nitpicking. Thing is, I've had this word as a spelling pet-peeve of mine ever since this particular word's correct spelling actually became an important plot point in the movie In the Line of Fire, which is one of my favorite movies. And if you haven't seen it and you're wondering how a thriller about a Secret Service agent working to avert a Presidential assassination could possibly turn on the spelling of "ukulele", no, I'm not gonna tell you. Go rent it.

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Striking Gold in Blogistan

Kevin Drum has apparently joined the ranks of folks whose blogging prowess is so impressive that someone has offered to pay him to blog. Congratulations to him!

Which makes me dream wistfully of, say, The Buffalo News deciding to upgrade its Web services, including some Buffalo-based blogs. Hiring me would be a no-brainer, right? Oh, and I'd like a pony.

(BTW, my ranking on Google for "Buffalo blog" has dropped to third, which is unacceptable. I will be the Buffalo blog. You know what to do, folks.)

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A Parable for Our Times

Heh.

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You want to buy books....you WILL buy books....

I've finally bothered to update the links to my current books for sale on Ebay, and I plan to offer a few more later in the week. Remember, I don't run commercials here at Byzantium's Shores, and contrary to popular belief, very little of my funding comes from the government and....oh, sorry. Buffalo's NPR stations had their pledge drive this week, and I've got that spiel in my head. But if you see any interesting titles, by all means, bid. Nothing makes the wife happier than seeing books exiting the house, and a happy wife makes for a happy blogger!

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Obligatory blathering about traffic.

The hit-counter surged past 40,000 hits yesterday. Hooray and huzzah for me! And thanks, of course, to all the readers – even the poor soul who came here via this search. I hope no one has been ushered off this mortal coil, though, because they didn't find what they needed here. (Maybe I'll try threatening Google next time I need something….)

By the way, posting here might be light over the next few days, since I have several projects that I really need to sweep from the decks. And that's not even taking account any stuff that I will literally have to sweep from the decks at The Store.

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Up with this, I will not put!

I have a bone to pick with Tom and Ray. Well, not Tom. Just Ray. And not really, because Ray seemed perfectly aware that lots of bones will be picked with him this week. (I'm referring to the Magliozzis, of course – from NPR's CarTalk.)

It has to do with the answer Ray gave to this week's Puzzler. Here is the original question:

"Usually when the subject of a sentence is compound, and the components are connected by 'and,' the verb takes the plural form. For example, we say, 'Bob and his wife ARE planning to drive to Florida'... not, 'Bob and his wife IS planning to drive to Florida.' Likewise, we say, 'The vase and the book ARE on the table,' not, 'The vase and the book IS on the table.'

But, can you think of a situation where the components of a compound subject are connected by 'and,' yet the form of the verb must be singular, and not plural?"

Their answer won't appear on the Web until Monday, but it has already aired on the radio show (at least in Buffalo), so I'll spoil it here. Ray reports that when the two phrases joined by 'and' refer to the same thing, then you have a compound subject paired with a singular verb form, thusly: "My college room-mate and best friend is coming to visit next week." (Assuming that "my best friend" and "college room-mate" are the same person.)

Upon hearing this answer, Tommy immediately protested that this is not a compound subject, since you don't actually have two subjects joined by 'and', but rather two phrases that refer to the same singular subject. It also seems to me that, as written, the sentence-as-such needs commas around the phrase "and best friend", because otherwise it's terribly ambiguous. Anyway, Ray didn't exactly rise to a fierce defense of his answer; in fact, he conceded that CarTalk is likely to receive lots of angry mail from grammarians.

Now, I'm no grammarian. I tend to write by ear, and if I have something troubling come up, I gotta look it up like anyone else. (For instance, I shamelessly use words like "gotta", which no grammarian would touch with a ten-foot-pole even if they hadda.) So, for my more grammariable (I make up words too!) readers, does Tommy have a beef? Is that really a compound subject?

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"Your half-assed underparenting is a lot more fun than your half-assed overparenting."

My daughter was walking around with a flashlight for a time yesterday, just looking at stuff, and poking about in dark corners. I thought nothing of this until she said, "No blood out here."

Alarmed, I queried as to exactly what she was doing, and she tells me, "I'm pretending I'm a CSI!"

There really are times when I expect guys in jackboots to burst through my door and whisk my kid off to a less-demented household.

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Book Stuff

Time for a few book notes on stuff recently read.

:: Orbiter, by Warren Ellis (also of DPH fame) and Colleen Doran (art), is a one-volume graphic novel in which, some years in the future, NASA has been shut down and manned space exploration has ended.



A shanty-town has evolved at the Kennedy Space Center, with the crumbling bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building looming above it. Apparently, there was one space shuttle accident too many: the shuttle Venture disappeared with no explanation. But as the book begins, Venture returns, making its original landing as scheduled at Cape Canaveral. But that's not all: only one member of the shuttle's crew returns with it, and the ship itself is covered with something rather like skin. A scientific team is assembled to find out just what happened. (The book was written before, but released after, the destruction of Columbia. Ellis discusses that tragedy in the Foreword.)

That sounds like it might be the beginning of some kind of Alien-type of story, or maybe that movie Event Horizon from a few years back (which I never saw, but have on good authority was awful). It seems like a standard horror story: Here's a baffling mystery of the unknown, and here are the people who are going to try to solve it. As the story took shape, I waited for the malevolent forces of the Universe to start to strike down the members of the team, until just two survive at the end, fortunate to escape with their lives and secure with the message that the Universe just isn't a safe place and that we're all better off just staying on our little planet and not trying to delve too deeply into What Is Out There.

Well, I don't want to say too much, but that's not what happens. Ellis pretty much turns those expectations on their head, using the kind of "SF Horror story" set-up to explore the fact that we seem to have lost our sense of wonder. The effect is quite thrilling: the book gives us a group of characters confronted with the Cosmic Unknown, and their response is, "When do we leave!" It's kind of refreshing, really.

I also liked Colleen Doran's art a lot (she is best-known for her series A Distant Soil, which I have to get around to finishing one of these days), although I do think she tends once in a while to have the characters gesticulate and grin in over-dramatic fashion.

Check this one out. I read it in a single evening, and it was very enjoyable.

:: I sometimes get the idea that every fantasy and SF writer out there reads tons of history in their spare time, both for leisure reading and for research purposes, for obvious reasons: attentive reading of lots of history is of tremendous use in world-building. On that basis, I probably don't read enough history; but then, I think that a genre I'm surprised I don't see more writers of the fantastic celebrating is travel writing, which I do tend to read a lot. If I could pick a single author from the past whose life I would want to lead, it would be Richard Halliburton's. (Although I wouldn't want to die at the age of thirty when my leaky boat disappears in a storm!) Good travel writing always excites me because it usually involves the kind of culture-clash you also find in history, but usually on a much more personal level.

The Road to Somewhere: Travels with a Young Boy Through an Old World, by James Dodson (book website here) is such a book. Dodson writes about a journey through Europe with his young son, a kid who is on the cusp of adolescence. Their plan, at the outset, is to do a grand world tour: they hope to go on safari in Kenya, visit the Holy Land, see the Great Pyramid, and walk the Great Wall of China. Due to various world situations, though, they never get out of Europe. Kenya is ruled out because of civil strife; Israel is out because of the new intifada; China is out because of the whole downed-spy-plane affair. They took their trip during the summer of 2001, and thus this book recounts one of the last grand tours of the world – or part of it – of the time before 9-11-01.

Dodson writes with a good deal of charm, and most notable in the book are his ruminations on fatherhood on such a journey, when he is at once very protective of his kid (at least two times on the route, he very nearly punches some European in the nose for rudeness to his son), and hopeful that the kid (Jack, nicknamed "Nibsy") is picking up the right lessons from their travels. Humorous incidents abound, as do unexpected encounters with both the good side and bad side of people (based on Dodson's chapter about it, I must say I have little intention of ever visiting Amsterdam). And there are some terribly sad moments, such as when they are touring the ruins of Pompeii and come across another such family whose grandfather has literally just dropped dead in the middle of the street.

The Road to Somewhere is a lovely little book. Recommended.

:: And finally, dammit, Amazon needs to give a way to shut off that "Search every friggin' word in every book we sell" feature of theirs. Plugging in "The Road to Somewhere", this book is the seventh result of more than five hundred items, and it's outranked on the search by two items that don't even feature those words in their titles. When I'm looking for a specific title – and nine times out of ten, I am – this feature is more hindrance than help.

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Opportunity -- is there nothing it can't do?

A couple of weeks ago I linked an image and story about the Mars rovers observing a Martian sunset, thinking at the time, "What could be cooler than that!"

Well, I now have my answer: a Martian solar eclipse.

The Mars rover Opportunity took pictures as the Martian moon Deimos passed in front of the sun, looking like a mote of dust as it did so. It's not really what we think of as an "eclipse", since neither of Mars's two moons is large enough to cause totality in an eclipse, although Phobos could eclipse up to half the sun in its own transit sometime in the next few days. The only reason we have total eclipses on Earth is by sheer good fortune: the discs of the Sun and the Moon, observed from Earth's surface, are just about the exact same size. If the Moon were smaller or farther from the Earth, we wouldn't have total eclipses.

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Well, candlesticks always make a nice gift....

With spring training starting up, any baseball fans amongst my readership had better be reading Mike's Baseball Rants, a consistent producer of good and funny (and, at times, incredibly tabular) material about baseball. Right now he has a pretty interesting article up about the steroid scandal, noting with interest the way the story is breaking in a big way, at the same time that a President who put it into his State of the Union address is about to stand for re-election. Hmmmmmm....

(And wait until the "Joe Morgan Chats" to start up, for some real baseball bloggin' fun!)

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A Periodic Plug, replug'd

It's been a while since I linked this, and I have a lot of newer readers since then (at least, I like to think I do), so if you enjoy fun quizzes about movies, get thee to FilmWise immediately. (Or, whenever you're done reading my stuff.)

Their "Invisibles" quizzes are given most prominent position, but there are a lot of other fun things here -- like this one in which they give a series of computer screen shots from the movies, and you identify the films.

And finally, unrelated to FilmWise but still about movies, are two quizzes -- here and here -- in which you have to identify films based on the font of a single letter from their marketing materials. Some of this is quite difficult. And there we have enough timewasters for anyone.

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"Research", I'll call it....yeah....

In the course of looking for a bit of information for a review I'm writing, I happened upon this quiz about The Simpsons. Check it out. Some of the questions stumped me.

(Yes, this is true. I was looking for a Simpsons factoid for a review! Really! I was! You can't prove I wasn't!)

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Hey, wait a minute....

OK, I have now watched all of one season of American Idol and about half of the next (yeah, yeah, sue me), and yet, to my memory, not one contestant has ever sung a song by Jim Croce. What's up with that? The guy wrote some of the most singable songs, well, ever.

Here are some of Jim Croce's lyrics. "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)" is one of my favorite songs of all time, and so is "Time In a Bottle". Even "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" is a lot better than I suspect most people remember it, although I admit it took me a long time to get over the bad Chinese karaoke version from the movie Sneakers.

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Supersizing....

I can't say as I'm too moved one way or the other by the fact that McDonald's won't be "Supersizing" anymore. First off, I rank McDonald's third of the food chains -- I prefer Burger King and Wendy's, frankly, and if I'm in Iowa, Hardee's trumps everything -- and I don't think their fries are very good. I like a crispy fry, and unless MickeyDee's burns them, they're never crispy. And I don't like Big Macs.

So, nothing doing for me there.

Speaking of fast food, Mickey is annoyed that Wendy's apparently discontinued its fish sandwich. You'd think they would at least bring it back as a season item for Lent, but who knows....since I live in Buffalo, home to a very large Catholic population and therefore an epicenter of some of the greatest fried-fish action on the planet, I never bother to get the fish sandwich at a fast food joint.

In my eyes, a fish sandwich should consist of a large bun -- we're talking the kind you have to go to a good bakery to get -- topped with a piece of fish so long that it overhangs either side of the bun by at least three inches. Remember that scene in The Two Towers when Sam is trying to tell Gollum how wonderful potatoes are, especially when they're plump and golden next to a piece of fried fish? That's what we do in Buffalo, folks. You can use good tartar sauce on the fish -- I like that -- or you can go even better, and use liberal amounts of Frank's Red Hot. (Not Tabasco, which is terribly overrated stuff.)

Our economy is a wreck, our city is stuck in 1981, our politics are a quagmire, but we know how to eat.

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Friday Burst of Weirdness

Plush animals have certainly come a long way since I was a kid, when it was mostly bears and the occasional bird or something similar. Now, just about every member of the animal kingdom has a plush version; displays of same used to occupy honored places in stores like The Nature Company and Natural Wonders (before they were bought out or went belly-up).

But it never occurred to me that our microscopic friends on this planet might also want to be represented in the "soft, cuddly toy" realm. Hence, Think Geek's plush microbes. Wouldn't you love to cuddle with a plush version of the little beastie that causes Halitosis? Sure you would!

(via Paul Riddell)

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Suckage, defined.

In one of the back rooms of The Store, there is an upper shelf on which sits a 55-gallon drum of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This drum rests on its side, and the end facing out is tapped with a spigot. The spigot is kept closed by a combination lock, so that no one comes along and pilfers the oil.

Except, the lock only works as long as it hangs down, below the spigot handle. If it is flipped upward, end-over-end, so the dial points away from the person, the spigot can be opened normally by use of the human hand -- or by the tall cart of crackers that has just been put there by some vendor guy. In the latter case, of course, the oil flows freely out of the drum, down the cart, and onto the smooth concrete floor.

Now, hopefully someone notices this before, say, ten gallons' worth of olive oil spreads out in a giant pool in the middle of the receiving area (the most heavily-trafficked part of the back of The Store). Or, failing that, hopefully the person called to clean this titanic mess up is not me.

Today, unfortunately, was not a day for "hopefully".

(BTW, any readers of mine in the Washington, DC area who are interested in seeing what my company is like can now visit a brand-spanking new location of The Store. Here's the map. Readers in the Washington area who are Western New York expatriates might be really interested. Or, they might not care one fig. Ya never know.)

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It will be mine. Oh yes. It WILL be mine.

Darth Swank -- who is blogging again -- points out that February saw the anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster. This appears to be some kind of musical instrument, mainly employed by them hooligans to make that loud stuff they call "music". I even hear tell that some young Turk used his teeth to play our National Anthem on one of these contraptions! These young 'uns, I tell ya....

(BTW, I have no idea what kind of guitar Hendrix used. So don't flame me if it wasn't a Stratocaster, OK?)

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IMAGES OF THE WEEK

Here.

I'm not posting them here, because I think they work better in the context of the essay which they accompany. But check it out: it's a description of life and things in the Chernobyl region these days, written by a young woman who loves to ride her motorcycle through that area because, well, there is no traffic at all. Some of these pictures are utterly haunting: barges that simply pile up in the river, because they can't even be melted down for scrap (due to radioactivity); a child's doll left on the table where its owner left it before evacuating; domesticated animals that rejoined the wild after being abandoned; a shot from a hill of an entire abandoned city.

(via Warren Ellis)

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Paging Alexandra?

It saddens me that Out Of Lascaux has sported no new posts in over a month, and only one since the new year. I enjoyed reading Alexandra's essays about art, since I know embarrassingly little about how to look at a painting. I hope she's doing OK and returns soon.

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Oh, thank GOD.

My boss informed me today that next week should be the last week in which I have to get to work at 5:00 am on two of my five days. This is staggeringly good news. I should not look forward to the days when I have to be there at 7:30 on the basis that this constitutes "getting to sleep in".

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Glass? Who's he?

In response to my post about Ravel's Bolero the other day, a couple of people commented -- in comments and in e-mail -- that since I don't like Bolero on the basis of its repetitive nature, I probably would hate Philip Glass's music. In all honesty, aside from a couple of film scores (The Truman Show, and I'm assuming that I've heard at least one more of his), I have heard almost no Glass whatsoever. Now, what I have heard seems droning and repetitive, so I'll have to concede that I probably would hate his music. But I don't know.

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Subways of the World

Sean points out this group of maps of subway systems from around the world, all apparently to the same scale (i.e., the actual routes covered by the trains, not those stylized maps you'll see in the subway stations). Interesting. Somehow, I had figured that New York was riddled with subway lines.

I suppose they could include Buffalo's subway, but it would basically be a single line bending very slightly from north to south. And it's not even a subway the entire way; in downtown, starting from the Theater District and going all the way down to HSBC Arena, it's an above-ground light-rail system.

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KILL THE TERRORISTS! (but not that one.)

(political stuff here, move along if my leftist-mode offends)

Ever since 9-11-01, a common claim from more extreme sectors of the Right has been that if only Bill Clinton had ever done more than just lame missile strikes against Osama Bin Laden, how different things would have been. Ergo, how wonderful that we now have a President who realizes how important it is to take the fight to the terrorists, and to kill them whenever the opportunity arises, bringing whatever force necessary to bear.

Except, well, not quite.

"With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger....Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,' said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution. Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq."

Imagine that. Faced with an opportunity to attack a known terrorist group, and quite possibly kill its leader, the plan to do so was shelved because going after the guy with no known terrorist connections and no weapons of mass destruction was deemed more important.

And the guy allowed to go away is still blowing up innocents in Iraq.

Yup, this President is just doing a great job in the War on Terror.

(Link via Morat)

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Ignorance on Display

My own ignorance, that is.

Michelle headlines her most recent post with a directive to "Never forget" -- and the event she is memorializing is one of which I've never heard, despite the fact that thousands died. It is a massacre that occurred on February 28, 1947, in Taiwan.

I believe I mentioned a while back that I need to read more about Asian history, and this reminds me of that.

Part of making sure that we "Never forget" something is to teach people about it in the first place. On that score, Michelle has reason to say, "Mission accomplished".

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Oh, Leonard, Leonard, Leonard....

Words defy me.

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Music, in words

It's always terribly hard to capture, in words, the essence of a musical work. To paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, "If the composer could say in words what he wanted to say, why would he use music at all?" Stirling Newberry, though, gives it a go with this essay about Beethoven's Symphony #7.

The Seventh is often cited as Beethoven's greatest work, and there's a hell of a lot of reason why. For me, my tastes tend to embrace the Ninth more -- not surprisingly, given my predilection for works of massive apocalyptic glory -- but the Seventh is, and always will be, utterly amazing. What always strikes me about the Seventh is its inevitability, the way every single note seems to naturally spring from the one immediately before it.

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Kerry/Clinton?!

Matthew Yglesias points out an article suggesting that John Kerry make a Clinton his running mate -- and not the junior Senator from New York, either, but that other famous Clinton. The one who's been unemployed since noon on January 20, 2001.

Now, you're thinking that the Constitution probably forbids such a thing, and you're probably right, as Matthew describes; one Amendment says that "No person shall be elected President twice", but then, another says that "No person ineligible to be President shall be Vice President", although this might actually refer to the age and "natural born citizen" stuff, as opposed to the stuff about eligibility for mere election.

But really, the idea's just dumb, anyway. If a Kerry/Clinton ticket were even legal (and Matthew is right that surely it wouldn't be a good idea to have a ticket whose very legality would be a major issue), what of it? If Kerry/Clinton were elected, and Kerry died and thus re-elevated Bill Clinton to the Presidency, he'd be an instant lame duck. This would do the Democratic Party no good at all, since they'd have an incumbent ineligible to run again and thus would have to immediately start searching for yet another nominee; and it seems to me that the repercussions of such a transition from VP to President would be worse the closer one gets to the next election. If President Kerry were to die in, say, March of 2008, and VP Clinton ascended the Presidency but couldn't run again, the country would be in the position of having no fewer than three different Presidents in a period of less than one year. (Kerry, then Clinton, then the 2008 winner upon the 2009 Inauguration.)

So, even if the Supreme Court were to decide that Clinton could be Vice President, I don't think it would be a good idea. Now, I do think that a case can be made for allowing former Presidents who have had two terms to run again after a certain period of time -- say, two or three full terms -- given that lifespans are getting longer all the time. But even if such an Amendment to the Constitution ever comes to pass, I'm certain the language would "grandfather" Bill Clinton out of eligibility.

Bill Clinton, like him or hate him, is a compelling figure, and an important voice in America today. But he won't be President again.

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Overzealous Ushers

This morning, I attended a performance of a stage version of Charlotte's Web with the kid, as an outing organized by her preschool group. The performance was at Shea's Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Buffalo, which is in turn the city's main locale for big productions and such. Since there were a lot of different school groups attending this play, the theater seating was sectioned off by school group, so the ushers could -- theoretically -- direct incomers to their appropriate seating area. Fair enough.

Except, they also wanted to pack in as many seats as possible, so since we were actually the first people from the kid's group to enter the theater, our usher -- a cranky little old lady with a button the size of a dinner plate reading "I'M A VOLUNTEER!" -- tried getting us to take a couple of empty seats in the middle of the school group in front of ours! This woman actually expected a four-year-old kid to understand her anal reasoning for not allowing her to sit with her friends, who started filing in moments later.

Luckily for her (the kid), I dug deep into my soul and found that part of me that refuses to respect authority. (Actually, it didn't require digging all that deep.) As I directed the kid to the seat beside one of her best friends, I could hear THE VOLUNTEER! behind me, grousing something along the lines of, "Well, that's not the way we do it."

The performance itself was pretty faithful, although I'm not entirely sure my daughter realized the sadness of Charlotte's Web's ending. She seemed to have a good time, though.

(BTW, a note to theater groups: Please make sure your sound equipment is properly tested before you give your performance, OK? Especially if one of your speakers is prone to emitting sudden and deafening bursts of static with no warning. This is generally not welcomed by a theater full of kids ranging from preschool to second grade.)

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Signs your blogging sabbatical wasn't long enough, #29

Steven Den Beste returned to blogging yesterday after taking a week off due to blogging fatigue, but in two of his first three posts since his return, he bitches about his readers.

Not that he needs my input, but this seems to me a sign that he came back too early.

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Dummmm, dee dee da da doo da dum dee-da dum....MAKE IT STOP!

The other day, in speculating that the fair lass who married Aaron is, in fact, a vampire, I also reported that I absolutely loathe Maurice Ravel's Bolero. In comments, Sean expressed surprise, so I should probably attempt to explain why I hate this piece.

Very simply, it boils down to a single reason: Bolero is nothing more than a single melody, repeated in its entirety something like twenty times, each time played by a different instrument or group of instruments and each time getting louder until, at the end, what started as a single pianissimo snare drum and a flute has become the entire orchestra blasting that melody until the paint peels from the concert hall's walls. And admittedly, the orchestration is pretty damned amazing -- Ravel gets some pretty startling sounds out of the standard orchestra, and you should probably hear the thing just once for that reason alone. I got to play it once, and I enjoyed the trumpet parts, when I got to play; but the rest of it was counting measures to the next entrance. And poor Aaron's wife had to play the damned snare drum part, probably the most thankless task in all classical music after being the poor slob who has to play the bass line in Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Cool orchestration, yeah. But it's that damned melody, see -- all Ravel does with it is repeat it. Literally, he does nothing but repeat it. It never develops, it never opens up into other melodic or rhythmic possibilities, it never goes anywhere except louder and somewhere else in the orchestra. And really, it's not even that interesting of a melody in the first place, sounding to me like someone attempting to improvise a melody who isn't confident enough to move beyond the confinesof the scale. (Hum it, if you don't believe me -- the entire melody is almost completely stepwise.)

True, Dimitri Shostakovich uses a very similar device in his Symphony No. 7 (the "Leningrad"), but I like Shosty's melody more, he doesn't call the crescendo-by-repetition device an entire piece, and it makes sense in that work's programmatic context as representing the long, slow march toward Leningrad of the Nazi siege army.

I have the obligatory recording of Bolero on my shelf, since it was coupled with a recording of Ravel's infinitely more-interesting Daphnis et Chloe Suite #2 and La Valse. Once every two years or so, I'll put Bolero in the stereo, thinking that maybe I'll have finally opened up to it, or, failing that, at least it'll be over in fifteen minutes. And never once have I made it past the eight minute mark before hitting "Stop". Lots of people, it seems, listen to Bolero and hear hypnotic sensualism; I listen to it and hear naught but boring repetition. Ears of the beholder, I guess.

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What a stupid question.

I may have been reading the wrong political blogs the last day or two, because I only learn today -- via Kevin Drum, who is apparently behind the curve himself -- that some journalist posed this question to John Kerry at the most recent Democratic debate: "Is God on America's side?" James Lileks thinks this is just incredibly clever, although it doesn't seem all that brilliant to me, since there are several obvious replies.

Kerry's was "Most of the time", to which Lileks thinks he gets the great trump card, "So, when wasn't he?" Oh, I dunno -- slavery? The resistance to the civil rights struggle? Vietnam? (No, James, to say that God would not have approved of Vietnam does not imply that God therefore supported Communism -- but that's the common rhetoric these days, when "Against this" must necessarily be equivalent to "For that". But James Lileks, whenever I read him, seems utterly incapable of nuanced thinking whenever he goes into political mode. His every politics-centered Bleat is based on the idea that every issue admits only two possible positions, one right, and one Liberal or Democratic.) You just list a couple such instances, and then you say something like "But God is on our side when we learn from our mistakes, because that's what he created us to do," and there you go, question over. Lileks's idea that this question pins Kerry into discomfort is ludicrous.

But an even better response would be something along the lines of, "I can't presume to speak for God, but it seems to me we should wonder if America is on God's side." Short, direct, and it deflects the questioner's attempt at moral superiority.

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Up From Monkeys!

Lynn Sislo points out (just before linking me; Thanks, Lynn!) a blog called Dispatches from the Culture Wars, which has all the earmarks of a pretty damned good blog. Good stuff on evolution taking place right now.

To return for just a moment to my off-hand comment about homeschooling that engendered a pretty extensive (for these parts) comment thread, I guess my real big problem with homeschooling, in principle, is that I think that we need to have a national debate one of these days on just what we think our kids should be learning. I don't like the idea of children learning only those things that their parents wish them to learn, and I especially don't like that idea in a time when science is generally held in very low esteem.

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Nope, that's where we keep the ice cream.

Today I was doing a routine maintenance check of the freezer section of The Store (basically, wandering about with a broom in case someone had dropped a cracker or something). It was apparently a pretty busy "restocking" day for the freezer folks; there were several of the large cargo-carts about laden with product which they had transported from the giant walk-in freezers to the cases. But at this particular moment, the two fellows working the freezer department were not present. They had probably gone off to take their recyclables out, or to the bathroom, or even outside for a cigarette -- I don't know. But even though it seemed patently obvious that there was a restocking-in-progress, some woman still stopped me to ask if we really thought that a cart in the middle of the floor was a suitable place to store ice cream.

My initial impulse -- to lean in close and whisper, "You know, that stuff about freezing ice cream is just an urban legend" -- was pushed down deep, I'm sorry to say. Oh well.

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SCRUBS, anyone?

Do any of my readers watch Scrubs? I've loved this show since I watched the very first episode -- it's always incredibly well-written and perfectly acted. So much of the humor on this show is dependent on precision timing that you'd need a watch made in Switzerland to measure, and yet, the show is hilarious each and every time out.

But right now, I'm wondering if anyone else was completely blindsided by the ending of last week's episode. The way Scrubs manages to cross back and forth between poignance and farce never stops amazing me, but last week's episode was a tour de force, with a twist ending that I literally had no idea was coming and which made the episode resonate emotionally with me in a way that few shows do anymore.

And I guess in this case it's a good thing that Scrubs isn't one of NBC's ratings juggernauts; otherwise, the entire preceding week on NBC would have been awash in promos exhorting us not to miss the last five minutes, since the clods in TV these days are evidently unaware that most of the pleasure of a good surprise ending comes from not knowing the surprise ending is coming in the first place.

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Congratulations to this guy:



The Return of the King Oscar love-fest encourages me, not just because the films are so damned good but because I hope this marks a continuing emergence of fantasy storytelling into the mainstream. I'm sick, sick, sick to death of the idea that only things that are "relevant", that take place in the "real world", are to be considered worthy -- a trend which is not just annoying but also starkly at odds with the rest of culture, where the fantastic holds sway to an impressive degree. Look at how much Shakespeare depends on fantasy; look at Homer. Imagine what the opera world would be like if you struck down all the operas with fantastic elements.

Congratulations, also, to Howard Shore for winning the Best Original Score and Best Original Song awards. The more I listen to these three scores, the more convinced I become that they are the greatest scores since John Williams's work on the original Star Wars trilogy. I was nonplused when Shore was originally announced as the composer, way back in 1999 or whenever -- like most film music fans, my only exposure to Shore was on films like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven -- but man, did he deliver in a huge way.

A couple other observations about the Oscar telecast (of which I didn't watch much):

:: Say what you will about Michael Moore, I loved that he had enough sense of humor about himself to allow a bit of self-parody. (For those who missed it, they showed a clip of the Battle of the Pellenor Fields from Return of the King, and suddenly, there's Moore in the middle of it, shouting, "You don't have to fight, Hobbits! This is a fictitious war fought for a fictitious King!" And then he gets trampled by one of the Mumakil.)

:: I used to watch the entire telecast every year, but I haven't done this in six or seven years. Nevertheless, I seem to have a weird ability to tune back in at the exact moment they're about to do the "Tribute to Departed Stars" segment. I'd forgotten all about how many wonderful people died this past year, and I'm glad the Academy thought to include composer Michael Kamen in its tribute.

:: I really think that Billy Crystal is a fine host for this show -- I enjoy his schtick a lot more than I enjoy Whoopi Goldberg's, for example. (Of course, I'm one who thinks that Letterman's performance wasn't nearly as bad as its legend has become.)

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Ramalamadingdong! (Stuff about Aaron.)

Aaron posts some photos of himself, his wife, and some other guy performing in what for all the world looks like my parents' living room*. Aaron is the bearded one. With the hat. And the grin in the first picture as if to say, "Behold my guitar, foolish mortals!" His wife is the non-bearded one in the shirt that shines under its own power.

Aaron's wife, Krista, was one of the very first people I met in the music department at college (we were freshmen the same year). What I always remember about her (well, one thing) is mildly lampooned by Aaron in the caption to the second photo: no matter what the piece of music is, no matter how frenetic the percussion parts are, she maintains a completely blank expression while playing. I seem to recall her once telling me that she actually worked to cultivate this skill, which I must admit would be absolutely useful in certain situations. For instance, Krista belongs to a special class of people for whom I've always felt the highest levels of sympathy: she is one who has had to play the snare drum part to Ravel's Bolero. (There is no piece of classical music I despise more than Bolero.)

However, looking at these pictures, I note something else about Krista: She shows, to my highly practiced eye, absolutely no sign that she has aged a single day since I first saw her in the music building lobby fifteen years ago**! I spent a bit of my day mulling this over -- as I noted previously, my current job is one that lends itself to lots and lots of time for "mulling" -- and, when I considered the fact that Aaron's job is an overnight one (I think), I came to the staggering conclusion that Krista is, in fact, a vampire. Thus, she spends the time when Aaron is sleeping -- during the day -- also in deep slumber, albeit in a coffin, which serves double-duty at night as the object she uses to tote around her drums. It all fits!

--

* You can tell that I am too book-centric when I look at the photos of Krista and try to identify the books on the shelves behind her. I always do this. Show me a picture of George W. Bush accepting a bribe from Saddam Hussein in front of a bookshelf, and I'm going to try to identify the books.

** Holy Crap, has it been that long?!

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New Month, New Masthead....

Headline says it all, keeping with my Arthurian theme for 2004.

Also, in terms of traffic, February was surprisingly my second-best month yet, owing mainly to the month opening with a lot of hits on "Janet Jackson Super Bowl" (and, even better, "Janet Jackson Supper Bowl") and a link from TBogg at the end of the month. As always, thanks for coming, and for newcomers, don't forget to check out the posts listed under Notable Dispatches.

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