IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Edmund Fitzgerald, in trouble on Lake Superior.

For me, the two most fascinating shipwrecks in history are that of the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down on November 10, 1975 in a severe storm on Lake Superior. I found this painting on a site devoted to the wreck (the painting links to it), and I just found this one pretty striking.

UPDATE: Darth Swank and Robert in comments remind me of the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, which went down in the St. Laurence River after being rammed by a Norwegian collier. The loss of life was greater than that of the Titanic, but the Empress of Ireland did not have anywhere near the mythic opulence of the earlier wreck, and the ship went down so fast that there was no time for the heartbreaking stories of families bidding each other farewell on the decks to take place as they had on the Titanic. Most fascinating to me, though, is the fact that the Empress of Ireland went down within sight of land (well, it would have, if not for the dense fog that led to the collision in the first place).

Here's a good writeup on the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, and make sure to check the rest of that site out as well, including the Flash-driven "Diagram of a Colossus", an interactive tour of the Lusitania.

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WTF??!!

Apparently NBC is under the impression that viewers don't realize Scrubs is a comedy, because I've just watched a preview for next week's episode that punctuates the jokes with a laugh track.

Scrubs does not use a laugh track.

Oy.

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The Powerless Samaritan

La Gringa wonders if she should be feeling guilty for not doing more to help the person who called her at home at 4:00 a.m..

Personally, I'm amazed she stayed on the line as long as she did.

(No, not that I'd have hung up on her had I been conscious enough at that time to process what was happening; in the more likely scenario, I would ascertain that the person on the other end is not a family relative calling to give me bad news, mumble something like "Wrong number", and then hang up.)

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Mr. Quest

Today while driving around Buffalo in a U-Haul, I tuned in for a while to whatever the ESPN Radio show is that has replaced Tony Cornheiser's show since Cornheiser stepped down. I don't know who the host is now, but he was going on about the fact that he loves the old cartoon show Jonny Quest, and he was lamenting the fact that nearly every other old cartoon has seen some kind of successful revival, but Jonny Quest has not. He even said that he couldn't find anything online about the show, which makes me wonder if he was spelling it "Jonnee Kwesst", since it took me a single search under "Jonny Quest" on Google to turn up some stuff: this and this, for example.

I liked Jonny Quest a lot when I was a kid, although I didn't get to see it often because if I recall correctly, the places I lived didn't air it often. It was just a straight-forward adventure show, without a whole lot of goofy humor stuff. I remember that when there was a short-lived revival some years ago, I was excited because not only was it Jonny Quest returning, but because I worked at Pizza Hut at the time and we had the official tie-in stuff.

(Which, sadly, turned out to be pretty lame. There was what I thought was a nifty-looking Jonny Quest action figure, but it turned out to not be so much an action figure as just a figure: it was not posable. A pretty good example, really, of the crappy toys Pizza Hut always had for its kid's meals. There was also a plastic collectible drinking cup, with a picture of Jonny pointing at, well, you. One of my employees, who was a stereotypical dirty old man, took one look at this cup and said, "I think he wants you to pull his finger." That pretty much killed my excitement.)

Anyhoo, the guy on the radio show wondered why there has never been a JQ movie or something similar, except for that brief revival in the 90s. I suspect that it would be hard to pull off: a show about a bunch of crime-fighters who are all guys, except for one woman? Two of whom are kids? I can just imagine the critics pumping their reviews of such a movie full of speculations of homoeroticism. I mean, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly -- she who no doubt snuggles deep-down into her sheets with Pauline Kael's picture on them after every pretentious review she writes -- would be a veritable fountain of drool at the prospect of writing a review of a Jonny Quest movie full of "Wink wink nudge nudge" innuendos. Probably actually using the words "wink wing nudge nudge".

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When To Run Screaming From Your Boss, #4857

A good time to make a very quick getaway from your supervisor is when he says, "We have some furniture to pick up from a few local stores. How do you feel about driving a U-Haul?"

So began a four-hour odyssey around the Greater Buffalo area today, as I went to three different establishments in a 14-foot U-Haul truck to pick up bookcases, tables, et cetera. For a grocery store. For reasons passing understanding. Oh well.

The drive wasn't bad, actually, except for the fact that none of the things I'm usually supposed to do actually got done in my absence. The truck had air conditioning, which was a plus given that it was actually pretty warm today, and I got to listen to a bit of the Jim Rome Show, although he didn't have any guests on that interested me today.

The weird part is that since I was out of the store until about 2:00, I had to take my New York State-required thirty-minute lunch break when I got back -- despite the fact that I was scheduled to leave at 3:00. So I took a half-hour off, sat around, then punched back in for thirty more minutes of work. C'est la vie.

And if you're not incredibly bored yet by this post, well, you need to get out more. I'm writing it and I'm bored.

(Oh, and this was all after I helped unload yet another #$*%&#!! truck full of trees and bushes for the #*$&%(@!! Garden Center. Hence, I'm incredibly tired, and hence the lack of posting until now.)

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So long, John.

On American Idol this week, local boy John Stevens, the sixteen-year-old carrot-topped crooner who has been inexplicably moving on each week, finally saw his luck run out. He's been pretty much in over his head for several weeks now, and he's outstayed at least three more deserving contestants.

Still, John's departure was a bit sad to behold. Simon Cowell made a point last night of telling John what a class act he is, and John showed it one last time tonight: after reading the results, host Ryan Seacrest asked John what part of American Idol he was going to miss the most. John didn't hesitate at all as he pointed to the remaining five contestants and said, "Them."

Good luck, John.

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Your semi-occasional dose of GAAHHHHH!!!

After I got done reading the fascinating post linked below over on Libertarian Jackass, I figured I'd keep on scrolling down.

And I saw this, taken from here. What we have here are the "Great Moments in Human Development", as viewed by that whackiest subset of libertarians, the Randites. At the bottom, we have Homo erectus discovering fire; then a cave painter; then an Ancient Egyptian scribe, writing on papyrus; then Aristotle; and finally, the crowning achievement of all human thought: Ayn Rand herself.

Yes, folks, they really think like this. Take my word for it.

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Q&A on the War on Terror

Libertarian Jackass reproduces a set of questions, and their answers, on the War on Terror, focusing specifically on al Qaeda. It's a sobering read. Go check it out.

(Original article here.)

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Scalzi on Music

For his recent "Reader Suggestion Week", I posed the following question to John Scalzi:

"Will things like iTunes destroy the way we used to allow songs to 'grow' on us, as we tilt toward buying songs that are immediately pleasing? And will the fact that apparently the individual song is increasingly the atomic entity with respect to music distribution, will this kill the idea of the album? And what place classical music in the grand world of downloading, when the paradigm of 'Hey, bands, just record your music in your basement!' doesn't really scale to symphony orchestras?"

He offered the following answer in the middle of a "grab-bag" post of all the questions that didn't inspire a full-length post of its own:

"Well, it's not like orchestras ever fit into basements. Didn't stop hundreds of years of symphonies from being written. And when you have the capability of being able to replicate an entire orchestra from a synth, what's to stop some ambitious person from composing a symphonic score?

Yes, I think iTunes et al will change how we approach music, but it'll change it back to what it was, say, in 1903, when most music was sold as songs (through sheet music). Albums are a fairly late development in terms of being the accepted basic unit of musical currency. Also, I think we've all always tilted toward songs -- it's why even in the era of albums bands always released singles. I've mentioned before that I do think the idea of an album meaning "a set number of songs determined by the physical limitations of the recording media" is going out the door, but I think musically ambitious bands will always release suites of thematically-linked songs. Would it be so bad to live in a world where Radiohead or Wilco could release album-length works and Britney and Justin simply released singles? Digital distribution allows for both."

I wish I could put my finger on it, but this answer just doesn't seem right to me, and I'm not sure why. I can cite a number of places where I diverge with John, but I'm not sure they add up to him being wrong. So, I'll just respond to a few items here.

:: First, I think he totally missed my fear, expressed in the opening of my question, that downloads will hasten the compression of our attention span, which is already alarmingly diminished. If we assume that most people who buy music by the song will only buy those songs whose first few seconds immediately appeal to them, have we lost something as a musical culture? I mean, if you bail out on Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique after the first four minutes, you still won't even have heard the idee fixe, the theme which ties together the entire work. That's an extreme example, to be sure, but I think it helps illustrate what I'm getting at.

:: I think John's a bit flip about dismissing my concerns about classical music in general in the age of downloading. No, composers didn't write symphonies and record them in their own basements, but there were a lot more orchestras then, as well. And I mean, a lot more orchestras. Every town had its own orchestra, many nobles even had their own orchestras, et cetera. Since the era we're talking about was mostly the pre-recording era, the premium was on performance, which no longer seems to be the case at all. Live music was music, whereas now recording has become so entrenched that we constantly have to remind ourselves that live music even exists. Some commentators I've seen (and I'm not sure if John would fit in this category) seem to think that the demise of Big Recording (assuming the demise of Big Recording) will lead to some grand rebirth of live music, which I'm not at all convinced will be the case. And the problem to classical music, in particular, seems to me to be potentially pernicious: as fewer recordings get made, fewer ensembles will exists in the first place, which means fewer opportunities for the composers to get their works performed at all. And besides, those hundreds of years of symphonies were largely written before the rise of the synth, electric guitar, and drumset.

:: I'm a bit dismayed at John's suggestion that the synthesizer can replicate a symphony orchestra. Approximate, yes. Replicate, no. I don't want to dismiss the possibilities of electronic music -- a lot of my favorite music is electronic in nature -- but I don't want to downplay its limitations. If we reach a point where there are only a handful of orchestras left, I really can't imagine that the fact that a synthesizer can simulate one will really inspire too much creation of new symphonic music.

:: John says that the musical culture will revert to that of 1903, when the song was the chief means of musical distribution, in the form of sheet music. This analogy troubles me, because the only point of convergence is in the song-as-musical-atom. Sheet music dominated, firstly, in the era prior to widespread recording; and second, more importantly, sheet music's popularity depended on widespread musical literacy to a degree that I regret to say I find unlikely to ever exist again. For sheet music to be of any use, someone has to be able to play the piano, and not just plink out a tune or two, but actually play the thing. Song-as-atom or no, music was a participatory thing to the people of 1903. Not so now. The song, back then, was still seen as just a first-step into music. Now, it seems as though the song is the only thing that matters. Witness, today, the track list of a mix CD John made for his daughter. It's all songs, and rock or pop songs to boot. Not an iota of orchestral music there, no suggestion of longer forms.

:: Finally, John says that digital distribution still allows for the concept of the album. I don't disagree, but that's not what I'm getting at. What can be done with digital distribution is one thing; what is likely to be done with it is something else. If Radiohead releases an "album", in the classic sense of the word, online, but people are able to buy either a song or two from it up to the whole thing, what's the point of the "album" in the first place? Can the "album" even be said to exist? It seems to me that the idea of artistic context that is inherent in the album concept would suffer dramatically in such a scheme.

(Postscript: I don't want this to sound like a big attack on John Scalzi, because I love the guy's blogs in general and his thoughts on writing in particular. But there's just something that bothers me about today's music talk: it's entirely about songs. Song this and song that, and here's a great song, and here's the ecletic bunch of songs on my iPod, et cetera. The word "music" now seems to be a singular plural for "songs". I really do worry that longer forms will no longer exist with any kind of true vibrancy.)

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The Tempting of Luke

Wow, that sure worked: lots of good comments to the discussion question below, in which I ask if Luke Skywalker was possibly tempted by the Dark Side of the Force when Ben Kenobi was struck down.

The answers seem to trend largely to "No", which is why I am sure it will not surprise anyone that my answer is "Yes". Ha! Take that, Smithers! Er....anyway, my rationale follows.

First, I think it's important to distinguish that there are varying degrees of "temptation by the Dark Side". I fully grant that whatever Luke feels at that moment, Dark side-wise, is much, much milder than what he feels in The Empire Strikes Back after his vision of his friends in pain, and not even close to what he feels in the throne room in Return of the Jedi. But I do think he's tempted: just a tiny bit, perhaps, but tempted nonetheless.

It's worth noting how Yoda defines the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back: "A Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression -- the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight." (Emphasis mine.)

I'd submit that Luke most definitely feels at least two of those emotions in that moment, as he stands still and starts blasting away at the stormtroopers: anger and aggression. The closest thing he's ever had to a father figure has been struck down before his eyes, by the very man who (he believes) killed his own father, and in that moment, nothing to him matters except vengeance. He ignores Leia's cries for him to get aboard the ship, while heeding Han's helpful advice to blast the shield door controls. Only when he hears Ben's voice in his mind does he realize that he has momentarily lost perspective.

Now, in comments, Nefarious Neddie notes that not all instances of anger, fear or aggression constitute Dark-Side temptations, and I'd agree, although I'd also point out that in Obi Wan's duel with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, anger and aggression very nearly get Obi Wan killed. There's a closeup of Obi Wan's enraged face as he brings down a fierce blow which Maul barely parries, but this leaves Obi Wan open to Maul's "Force blast" which sends him over the brink of the shaft. The implication is that aggression and anger lead to dolorous ends, even if not always to a Dark-Side conversion.

What really convinces me that Luke's moment in the Death Star landing bay is a Dark-Side temptation, though, is a parallel moment in Anakin Skywalker's life in Attack of the Clones. It's been well-noted that Anakin's life in the prequel trilogy roughly parallel's Lukes, but with Luke making the right decisions at the appropriate moments while Anakin keeps making the wrong ones. Consider the two moments I'm talking about: Luke/Anakin witnesses the passing of his closest parental figure, in the company of those responsible (Luke sees Ben fall to Vader, Anakin cradles his mother as she dies in the Tusken camp). And then compare what happens afterward: Each lashes out at the perpetrators (even though Luke can't really get a good shot at Vader, he dispatches a number of his surrogate Stormtroopers). Each hears, in his mind, the voice of the Jedi who first "discovered" him, warning him away (Luke hears Ben saying "Run, Luke, run!"; Anakin hears Qui Gon saying, "Anakin! Anakin! NO!").

But -- and this is the important part -- where Luke heeds the voice he hears, Anakin ignores his -- and I think it's pretty clear that Anakin's slaying of the Tuskens is his first foray into Darkness. (John Williams, as always, tips us off: when Anakin tells Padme what he's done, we hear the Emperor's Theme alternated with Vader's Theme in the score.) The two moments, in my mind, are closely parallel, which leads me to believe that Luke was, in fact, tempted by the Dark Side at that point. But while Luke turns away from his temptation, Anakin gives in to his.

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The Gold Watch

Andrew Cory suggests that when John Kerry debates President Bush this fall, he should explicitly mention the fact that he still has a piece of shrapnel embedded in his posterior. I'm not really sure this is a good idea; in my mind at least, if Kerry did this I would be forced to envision Christopher Walken telling a little boy, "I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years...."

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Stealing the Government's Bandwidth

Actually, is it stealing the government's bandwidth, since I'm a citizen and I pay taxes and all that? Hmmmm....anyway, time for my standard "Too tired to blog, but wanting my posts to take up more space on the front page" trick of swiping a recent Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here are some nebulae:



For more details, go here. Weirdly, the APOD site uses nebulas as the plural of nebula instead of nebulae, which I always thought was correct but which I now see by looking it up that nebulas is an acceptable plural form after all. I don't know, it all seems pretty nebulous to me.

Bada-BING!

(By the way, I see via Patrick Nielsen Hayden that NASA has recently discovered that politics trumps science in the Bush Administration. Oh, goody.)

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Your STAR WARS discussion question

Here's an experiment for the comment thread: a discussion question. Because, you know, I'm tired and scraping the bottom of an already shallow mental barrel for blog stuff. Here's the question:

Would it be fair to say that the scene in A New Hope immediately following Ben Kenobi's death -- when Luke is torn between escaping with his friends on the waiting Millennium Falcon and standing his ground against the stormtroopers (and, presumably, Darth Vader) to avenge Ben -- constitutes the first time Luke is tempted by the Dark Side of the Force?

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A Class Act

Say what you will about Drew Bledsoe's recent performance with the Bills -- 2003 in particular -- the fact is that Bledsoe is still a classy guy. Today he agreed to a restructuring of his contract, which as most NFL contracts do these days would have put him into stratospheric heights with respect to the salary cap after this year. Now the Bills are no longer virtually committed to dumping Bledsoe after the 2004 season, which gives them enormous flexibility: if Bledsoe tanks in 2004, they can get rid of him more cheaply and move on to the J.P. Losman era, or if Bledsoe returns to form, they can keep him and give Losman another year of development in 2005. And the money not being spent now on Bledsoe means that the team may be able to pick up an additional free agent or two to plug into whatever holes still need filled.

I personally never viewed Bledsoe as anything more than "the guy to play while they groom the next guy", but it's nice that the Bills will have flexibility to really spend their time carefully developing the next guy.

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Hmmmm, time for some new posts.....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Posting here may be a bit light this week due to a rather intensive period at work. The Company has decided to operate a full-blown Garden Center at The Store, which is a sort-of "prototype" operation that will be replicated at other locations next year if we're successful this year. Last week saw the construction of the Garden Center. This week sees the delivery of plants. Lots and lots and lots of plants. Today I helped unload the first three deliveries, totaling almost a thousand plants (and by "plants", I also include trees and shrubberies [Ni!]). And when I left for the day, the fourth truck was waiting in the wings. So between all that hefting of plants, wallowing in dirt and potting soil, moving wooden pallets around, and climbing into and out of the backs of semis, I'm really rather tired.

(But hey, I got to drive a forklift. That's always fun. I haven't been able to drive a forklift in over ten years. There is no finer macho toy than a forklift, if you're a guy who doesn't actually have to drive one on a regular basis.)

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Anyone want to run for Congress from Buffalo?

Buffalo Congressman Jack Quinn, a Republican from Hamburg (one of Buffalo's Southtowns), has announced his retirement this year. This could be a good seat for Democrats to pick up: the district is predominantly Democratic to begin with, and Quinn himself was a political moderate (he spearheaded a move to raise the minimum wage and has been fairly labor-friendly, by Republican standards). I'm excited as a Democrat at the prospect of a pickup here, but Quinn was a good advocate in Congress for Buffalo, and that's a legacy that needs to stand. This city needs all the help it can get.

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Next week, watch as Jerry discovers that water is wet!

Yep, with the return of the NFL to the front of the sports page on Draft Weekend comes another wonderful article by Buffalo News sportswriter Jerry Sullivan, in which he points out that even after the draft, the Bills still aren't as good as the Patriots, as if it was possible for the Bills to make up that deficit in a single draft.

Keep up the great work, Jerry.

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Book Memes, Two.

PZ Myers has three book memes in one post. One of which is The List, which I've already discussed, but I'll take on the other two. First is simple: what are my rules of what constitutes a good story?

I guess I'd lead off by saying that I don't think there are any "rules" for fiction; better, probably, to try to describe what characteristics are common to stories I love. With that in mind, here I go:

1. Don't depress me. This is big: I don't like stories that are just depressing. But this does not rule out sad endings, because "sad" does not equal "depressing". Likewise, "dark" (or "gothic" or "downbeat") also do not equal "depressing". Schindler's List is a terribly sad movie; Seven is a depressing one. I guess the difference is that sadness can still seem to serve a purpose, whereas depression is without purpose: it's just there. I don't want a story in which characters are subjected to just one damn thing after another, with no hope at all for a respite or even a good lesson learned beyond "Life sucks". If I want "Life sucks", well, I'll just look at, you know, life.

2. Engage my emotions. This goes hand-in-hand with "Don't depress me". Even though I don't want to feel depression after reading or viewing a story, I do want to feel something. A story that is the emotional equivalent of an unsalted saltine cracker is not a story for me.

3. Tie up your loose ends. Unless you don't want to. I tried coming up with a better way to say this, but I can't. I love both kinds of stories I'm talking about here, really: I love it when everything ties up into a neat little package, and I also love it when a story lets some things stay open, as if to suggest that the story was really just a segment of someone's life that we've just watched. Guy Gavriel Kay does the latter a lot; John Bellairs does the former. Either works.

4. But if you're gonna tie up your loose ends, be careful about it. Too often, a "no loose ends" book or movie starts to feel like one: about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice a relentless pace at which one thread is tied up every few pages or minutes or so. And then there's Neal Stephenson, who leaves everything in the air until the last ten pages, and then whammo! It's all bundled up with duct tape and baling wire. That's not satisfying, really.

5. Great stuff along the way will make me forgive a crappy ending. But the stuff along the way had better be really great.

6. Beware the surprise ending, or the shocking revelation. I love being surprised in stories, but the surprises have to arise logically out of the content of the story, so even if I didn't see it coming, I can still reexamine the story and see the clues and note the construction by which the surprise or revelation comes. A great example of how not to handle this is the movie Basic Instinct, whose final shot reveals whether or not a certain character is the murderer. The way the story has been constructed, it could have gone either way and made equal sense. That's bad storytelling.

7. Show me something new along the way. Discovery is cool. And it doesn't have to even be something totally new; it can just be a new way of looking at something really familiar. Don't be ordinary.

8. The word "said" should comprise at least 97% of your dialogue attributions. And for the love of God, please don't use "ejaculated" as a verb of dialogue attribution. I can't read about someone "ejaculating" a sentence without thinking of that one scene in There's Something About Mary.

Finally, I can probably distill all this into a single, three-part rule: Don't bore me, don't make me feel bad for having been told your story, and don't do anything that breaks the spell you're trying to weave.

I could probably come up with lots more, but you probably get the idea. You probably also get the idea that I'm a pretty permissive reader. That I am, and I've never made any bones about it: I tend to like lots of stories, of different kinds, told in different ways.

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Book Memes, One.

There are suddenly a lot of book memes circulating. While I'll take a pass on the "List the great books you've read" one, here's one via Wil Duquette that I like: listing the ten books that had the biggest impact on my life.

Now, it's really hard to do this, now that I've been thinking of it for a day or two. It's tough to gauge impact, because I find that books can often lay in the tall grass, so to speak, for many years -- I'll read them, file them away in my brain, and then suddenly discover later on how they moved me in one direction or another. I've waffled on a lot of these titles, and who knows, I may come back and change them later. Anyway, here are ten books, some of which won't be a surprise to longtime readers. (These are in no particular order, and as I tend to do in "List" posts, I cheat. A lot.)

1. Cosmos, Carl Sagan. To this day, this is still the book that has influenced my overall worldview regarding the Universe and our place within it more than any other. I find so much more awe, so much more poetic beauty, so much more reverence in a Universe that is billions of years old and through physical processes eventually gave rise to life and consciousness than I do in the idea of a static Universe popped into being in just six days, six thousand years ago. The science of this book may be out of date, but I don't care. As far as I am concerned, it is a towering achievement of twentieth century science writing.

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. It's pretty obvious why, I think.

3. Salem's Lot, Stephen King. This is the first out-and-out horror book I read, once I was ready to really delve into the genre.

4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. This book provided the answers to questions I didn't even know I had.

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke. I'm pretty sure I read some science fiction before this, but this one cemented my love of the genre for all time. And not only that, this book showed me what was possible in the genre besides Star Wars space opera and Star Trek "sociological" SF.

6. The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander. (Yeah, it's a five book set, actually. Deal with it.) My first encounter with epic fantasy, two years before Tolkien.

7. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. It's not my favorite GGK novel, but it's the first that I read, and in the same way 2001 pushed me beyond my original idea of what SF was, Tigana broadened my horizons of what fantasy can do.

8. The Joy of Music and The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein. I group these together because the content of each -- essays, teleplays from Bernstein's TV programs, interviews -- are so similar in style and tone. These two books shaped my love of music more than any others. I always adored Bernstein's ability to adore and venerate a very wide range of music, and I have always tried to follow his example. (This is a man who would as soon conduct Mozart as he would David Diamond.)

9. Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades, John J. Robinson. A fascinating era of history, engagingly written by a writer who didn't produce nearly enough books.

10. The Book of Marvels, Richard Halliburton. This man's travel writings, all of which roughly correspond to the years between the two World Wars, are a clinic on how to convey "sense of wonder". Track down a copy, and when you read it, try to ignore the obvious anachronisms (like the fairly obvious "white man's superiority" stuff, which is par for the course for the book's day).

And, you know, why not a couple of honorable mentions:

11. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud can teach you a great deal about storytelling, and not just about comics.

12. The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, is less about storytelling and more about the possibilities inherent in a digital age.

13. Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade William Goldman. These will also teach you a great deal about storytelling; and for me, they pretty much squashed any idea that I'd ever try to sell a film script. (Not that I could sell the ones I've already written, of course, because they're Star Wars fan-fictions.)

14. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan. Essential reading, really, in this age of belief in UFOs and holeopathic medicine and various other nonsense items.

15. The House with a Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs. Just because Bellairs is a favorite author of mine, and this is the first of his that I read. Gothic fiction for kids. Great stuff.

16. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Humor, warmth, darkness, cruelty, love, pain, redemption, and the perfect ending. All in one book.

OK, that's it. For now. (I told you I cheat!)

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Ye Olde Britney Blogge

In the space of a couple of days, I found two conflicting articles on dear old Britney.

First, Michael of 2Blowhards says he actually likes Britney, for heaven's sakes. The mind reels:

"Nonetheless, as everything that really matters goes to hell, I can't help being amused by her existence among us as the all-triumphant porno-pop princess. I love her clumpy, graceless dancing; her clothes-shedding rivalry with Cristina; her Daisy-Mae grit and determination...."

For my part, I left a link to the latest Move Over Britney! entrant in comments, in hopes of rehabilitation. (To be fair, Michael makes clear that his enjoyment of Britney is of the "Since we're circling the drain, we might as well enjoy the sideshows on the way down" variety, which is about the only manner of Britney-admiration I'll admit as worthwhile. Maybe. But maybe not. I'm cranky that way.)

More my speed is this article which appeared in today's Buffalo News, reacting to Britney's apparent wish to be the heroine of a James Bond movie. A representative graf:

"A Bond Girl has sex appeal. Her allure stems from her classic beauty - tall, lithesome, elegant. Dr. No Bond Girl, Sylvia Trench (played by Eunice Gayson), is described in the screenplay as 'willowy, exquisitely gowned, with a classic, deceptively cold beauty.' Britney, on the other hand, is already looking over-the-hill at 22. In fact, she'd look right at home in a trailer with three to five kids."

Zing!

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Man, am I reading the wrong books....

One blog meme which I will not be picking up is the big list of great books that's going around, the idea being to bold the one's you've read. (You can see the list here, in Lynn Sislo's version.) I won't be doing this list because for one thing, I think it's a pretty odd -- it includes Shelley's Frankenstein, but not Stoker's Dracula, for example, and I'm not really sure how to count some works. There are things I read in high school to which I have not given a single thought since, so much so that I couldn't possibly talk intelligently about them beyond saying "Yeah, I read that in high school." Would that count? And while I haven't read Pygmalion since high school, does it count that I know My Fair Lady by heart?

But more than that, I prefer to maintain my belief that I am actually a fairly well-read individual, and posting visual evidence that I've not read the vast majority of those books would do damage to my self-image. And I'm all about self-image, you know. Uhh....or something like that.

And then there's Jason's copy of the list. Man, is he well-read. Yeesh. It reminds me of an exchange in an episode of The West Wing, when Josh Lyman glances over Charlie Young's shoulder at his school transcripts as Charlie is filling out college applications:

JOSH: Charlie, just how smart are you?

CHARLIE: I got some game.

Jason's got some game, too.

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The Draft (NFL, that is)

One thing I love about the NFL is the way the long, slow offseason is punctuated at about the halfway point by the annual College Draft, when teams select their "players of the future", and hope for, say, a second-rounder who will become a Hall-of-Famer (Thurman Thomas) while avoiding a first-rounder who flops horribly (Ryan Leaf). The Draft is split over two days, with the first three rounds on Saturday and the last four rounds on Sunday. The Draft gives fans the first inkling of what their team is up to and how things might shape up in the season to come.

First thing's first, though: Eli Manning.

I can't stand it when young athletes enter the draft of some professional sport but then whine when they don't like who drafts them. I never really liked John Elway because he started his career with this kind of crap (the Colts – then of Baltimore – drafted him, but he pitched a fit and got himself traded to Denver), and so did Eric Lindros when he entered the NHL. My belief is that if you do something like enter the NFL draft, you take your chances. It's no secret at all that the bad teams get the first picks, so if you're one of the very best college players in the draft, you know you're going to play for someone who's rebuilding. And these days, if you really don't want to play for them, just put in your four initial years and then exercise free agency.

So Eli Manning, who pitched a fit about not going to the Chargers, got his wish and was traded to the Giants about an hour after he was drafted by San Diego. Fine. I don't blame Manning, really, for not wanting to go to San Diego, seeing as how that team's front office is only marginally better managed than that of the Arizona Cardinals, but still -- they had the first pick, and Manning's the guy. By pitching a fit, he's already shown without ever so much as putting on shoulder pads in the NFL that he places himself ahead of the team. So I hope he tears his ACL in his first game and never plays again. Seriously.

(And for some reason, I've never been too wild about Eli's older brother Peyton either, but I don't know why. I mean, he's a very good quarterback, but he just bugs me, somehow. Maybe it's my suspicion that he was named after a soap opera?)

Now for the really important stuff from yesterday's first three rounds of the NFL Draft (with rounds 4-7 happening today): how did the Buffalo Bills do?

Well, I dunno.

I mean, there's that metaphysical sense in which I don't know: you obviously can't predict the future. Back in 1991 or thereabouts the Indianapolis Colts had the first and second picks in the draft overall, which they used to take defensive end Steve Emtman and linebacker Quentin Coryatt. Those picks, everyone thought, would lay the cornerstone for the Colts to build a defense that would dominate for years. Instead, both guys suffered through short, injury-riddled careers before leaving the game. And then there's the whole San Diego Chargers' Ryan Leaf fiasco, which put the Chargers this year into the position of using a top five pick to take a franchise quarterback twice in five years. Ouch. So, I don't know how the Bills' picks will pan out, obviously. (And I've always had this sneaking suspicion that Mel Kiper has somehow managed to craft a career out of not really knowing anything.)

But in general, I think they did pretty well yesterday, but I was hoping for something slightly different. My belief, before the draft, was that the Bills had to get the following in the first couple of rounds, and hopefully in this order:

1. Defensive Back
2. Quarterback
3. Wide Receiver

What the Bills actually did was to make a trade with Dallas to end up with two first-round picks (and no second round pick), which they used thusly:

1. Wide Receiver (Lee Evans, Wisconsin, 13th pick in the 1st round)
2. Quarterback (J.P. Losman, Tulane, 22nd pick in the 1st round)
3. Defensive Tackle (Tim Anderson, Ohio State, 11th pick in the 3rd round)

So the Bills apparently got the speedy wide receiver they were looking for. I wouldn't have gone with a first-round pick at this position, since this draft is supposedly rich in WRs, and the Bills aren't exactly desperate at that position, no matter how the fans might whine. A local sports-radio personality used to maintain that receivers grow on trees, and while I don't think good ones are quite that common, I don't think they're so uncommon that a team with other deficiencies needed to spend its high draft pick on one. But maybe Tom Donahoe was thinking in terms of Eric Moulds's longevity, after Moulds's injury-prone 2003 season. I'm also not sure what message this sends to third-year man Josh Reed, who's a guy who has taken a lot of abuse from fans for what they perceive to be his lackluster second year, even though that second year saw much more production that either Eric Moulds or Peerless Price displayed in their respective second years.

I wanted to see a defensive back drafted this year, badly. The Bills' secondary is usually pretty decent at tackling, but they haven't had a real interception threat since Kurt Schulz left the team years ago. They need someone who can pick off the ball once in a while. Maybe they're thinking that since they signed Troy Vincent, they're fine in this aspect, but I'm not sure yet. All I know is that the Bills filled out their Draft Day One selections with a defensive tackle. This probably isn't that bad an idea, since I've been harping on their inconsistent pass rush for about two years now. I seriously doubt this guy will step in and start, but well, there it is.

And finally, they needed a quarterback, and they got one in Losman, who is apparently an even better athlete than the guys taken in the draft's top eleven (according to Len Pasquarelli, an ESPN football writer). This pick is obviously a warning shot across Drew Bledsoe's bow, but it's also necessary: nobody really expects the Bills to still have Bledsoe around in a couple of years, so they needed to get their quarterback of the future now, when he could sit on the bench and absorb the game a bit before being anointed the starter. To get Losman, the Bills traded next year's first-round pick to the Cowboys (along with a second and a fifth-round pick this year), which means that for the second time in three years, the Bills have traded a future first-round pick to get a quarterback. Losman will also be the third "quarterback of the future" for the Bills since Jim Kelly's retirement (Todd Collins and Rob Johnson were the first two), so here's hoping Losman's the third-time charm. I actually don't mind the Bills trading a bit to get him, since this draft is deep in quarterback prospects, and had they waited another year, the pressure to deliver on a QB would have been that much higher.

So, the Bills ended up addressing two of the three main areas in which I was concerned, and they seem to have done so fairly prudently – i.e., they didn't give up the farm like the Vikings did when they decided that Herschel Walker was an important enough guy to get that they unloaded enough draft picks on Dallas for the Cowboys to build a dynasty team. As for the rest, I dunno. I can't predict the future, and anyway, I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the college game to begin with.

My readers are, as always, welcome to opine in comments about their teams' successes or failures in the draft (even fans of the Stupid Patriots are welcome, although my only interest in the StuPats draft would be if they "drafted" a letter withdrawing from the NFL). And thanks to Sean for tipping me off about the Pasquarelli article linked above.

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Harumph!

For the second time in three days, I see that Steve the Modulator in not being as thorough about reading every post of mine as he should be.

There is simply no excuse for not going through my blog with a fine-toothed comb, people! Don't make me open up a can of this. It wouldn't be pretty, believe me.

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What if Ozzel hadn't come out of lightspeed too close to the system?

Last week at the library I found a copy of Star Wars Infinities: The Empire Strikes Back, and I couldn't resist, even though I've generally found Star Wars comics (and the Expanded Universe stuff, in general) to be a very mixed bag. And yes, Infinities: TESB was a mixed bag, but it was an interesting one.

The idea of the Star Wars Infinities comics is a kind of Star Wars alternate history: a small detail is changed in the plot of the movies, and then the resulting story is told from that point on. Apparently their version of A New Hope has Luke's torpedoes failing to destroy the Death Star, and in The Empire Strikes Back, the point of diversion comes much earlier: Han's attempt to rescue Luke on the frozen wastelands of Hoth fails. Luke dies, the Empire pretty much crushes the Rebellion, and so forth.

I don't want to say too much about the plot here, since the delight of such a story rests in a new set of surprises. Much of what happens in the film is reflected in the Infinities version – Yoda, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett still appear – but in very different ways. The story's ending, though, is very much of the "start with a bang, end with a whimper" variety, and it relies on a particular character exhibiting a kind of vulnerability we'd never expect that character to have.

I was also a bit nonplused by the comic's adherence not just to the main threads of The Empire Strikes Back, but also to The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The comic shows Boba Fett and Darth Vader without their helmets, drawn in such a way as to clearly reflect their origins as revealed in the prequels. I found this rather jarring. The original film obviously could not include all of that, and for that kind of material to show up here felt really out of place to me.

Still, the hour I spent reading Star Wars Infinities: TESB was a pretty entertaining hour, so if you're of a mind to see how it might have turned out differently, give it a try.

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"The Chickens of Mars"

PZ Myers – who apparently thinks I look like a deranged chainsaw murderer, which I am not at all sure is not actually a compliment! -- has a link that can only elicit the response of "Oyyyyy….", accompanied by a slow shaking of the head.

Apparently the "Face on Mars!" people have had their thunder stolen by folks who are now poring over the close-up photos of rocks from the Martian Rovers and finding….










(wait for it)








Fossilized bird skeletons.

Oyyyyy….

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Feline Indignity

La Gringa brings some awful memories screaming back by linking this. I once had to assist my parents in precisely this operation, and if I ever could select ten memories I'd gladly have removed from my brain, this one might just make the cut.

And I've also given baths to plenty of cats in my time, so this kitty's expression is well known to me:



"Someday, one of my larger brethren will kill you and eat your heart, pathetic human!"

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Kegs, pitchers, bottles....it's all good!

In a corner of the area where we keep the beer, I saw that The Store recently got in a shipment of Leinenkugel's, which is a small brewery in Wisconsin. I liked this stuff when I had it in college, but I've never seen it here, so that's pretty nifty. (There really is something to be said for Wisconsin, a land where the major food groups are beer, cheese and sausage.)

Now, if only I could find Yuengling's in Buffalo, I'd truly be happy on the beer front. (And I know I should practice what I preach and taste the locals. I still haven't got around to drinking any Flying Bison yet. I'm not sure why The Store doesn't carry it.)

As long as I'm babbling about beer, I should talk about my preferred drinking glasses for the stuff. I have a nice, thick glass engraved with the Killian's Irish Red logo that I bought at the Coors Brewery; I like that glass a lot, although it's pretty heavy and the handle is only large enough for me to get three fingers through. Then there's the authentic German stein that a certain room-mate brought back from college for me, but that one's just a bit too nice to drink from – the thing's an actual work of art – so it stays on one of my bookshelves. (That, and when I drank from it, I was always afraid that if I had a few too many, I'd start clunking myself in the face with the stein's open lid.) My favorite glasses for actual drinking are a pair my sister bought for me. I'm not sure where she got them (some catalog, I imagine), but the handles are wide enough for a good, four-fingered grip; the base is thick and heavy while the glass at the top become pleasantly thin (and with no lip), making for nice balance; and the sides are engraved with the delightful health:

"Fill up the goblet,
Let it swim in foam,
that overlooks the brim;
He that drinks deepest,
Here's to him!"

I love that. It makes me want to take a long and deep draught, dance a jig, and go beat the crap out of an Englishman.

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One keyboard, stilled...and Peggy Noonan's keeps writing

Longtime political columnist Mary McGrory has died. I always enjoyed her writing, and I will miss it.

(via Thousand Yard Glare)

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Must....watch....Jerry....Orbach....

Remember the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which some aliens decide to enslave the crew of the Enterprise by getting them all addicted to a video game that directly stimulates the brain's pleasure center? And how they first had to deactivate Data, since he's immune to the game's effect?

Sometimes I think that Law and Order is the same kind of alien plot, and I'm Data. I mean, I think it's a good show and all, but two or three episodes a year and I'm good. And that's just the original show; I've never seen a complete episode of Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, Criminal Victims, Special Intent, Kojak: That 70s Law and Order, or any of the other ones.

(via TBogg)

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Friday (!) Burst of Weirdness

Scott emerges from his Nook to provide me with this week's Burst of Weirdness, for when you want to combine your love of cannabis tobacco with your love of cuddly Japanese felines:

The "Hello Kitty" Bong.

Make sure you scroll down to the pictures detailing the bong's construction. They're hilarious, especially that first one: it makes me wonder if Kitty went vampiric on us.

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Your Weekly Display of Idiocy

Someone saw a picture of John Scalzi's daughter (who is only slightly less cute than my daughter) and made the endearing comment, "Cute little wetback girl. I wonder if she'll grow up to do donkey shows like her whore mother."

And from there, this person only got stupider.

John, I must say, is taking this with a lot more evident humor than I would.

(No, this is not the start of a new weekly feature.)

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I say, put him in Canton.

On the day that my family moved from Syracuse back to Buffalo -- just over a year ago, now -- I was excited when, in the course of the drive, my radio finally managed to pull in Buffalo's sports-talk station, WGR. This made me happy because I finally got to hear the Jim Rome Show again (it had not been available in Syracuse at the time, unless it aired on a tape delay at an odd time). And I've never forgotten the feature story on Rome's show that day: an interview with the agent of Pat Tillman, a player for the Arizona Cardinals, who had left football to sign up with the Army Rangers in the wake of 9-11-01.

It was a moving story of a patriot who set aside career for service to his country, and today the story received a postscript that I had never hoped to read.

Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Publicity still from the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

AICN posted a series of stills from this new movie today. The film is to be released in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. I find the design elements, which suggest Fritz Lang to me, utterly fascinating.

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Summer in Iceland

Here.

And, as always, wait for the wonderful self-portraits to load, because Bara's beautiful.

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Testify!

Jay on the Atkins Diet:

"Or maybe the populace will wake up, get off of an idiotic diet that works solely by throwing your digestive system into a panic and giving you THE GOUT as part of the bargain, and go back to diets which are at least halfway sensible like counting fat and\or calories."

Amen!

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WTF?!

I've often numbered Michigan among the states in which I wouldn't mind living, but this seriously gives me pause. Allowing doctors to set aside their Hippocratic Oath at will? Nauseating.

(via Eschaton.)

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Blogs...is there anything they can't do?

Via DPS I came across Kyushu Journal, which is a blog written by an American now living in Kyushu, Japan. Upon initial inspection, it appears to be an interesting read. Looking at its owner's bio, I see that he apparently plays the shakuhachi flute with some skill. I'm just guessing, but I bet he sits up a bit straighter and grins whenever he's watching a movie with a James Horner score.

And following links around, I see via Kyushu Journal a really good parable (I think it's a parable, anyway – maybe it's just a good story with a nice moral, or a "slice of life" observation?) by a blogger called Real Live Preacher.

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Why he earns the big bucks

Last night's episode of The West Wing was notable to Matthew Yglesias from a policy standpoint. The same episode was notable to me for a continuity error in which Josh refers to Bartlet "winning Iowa", when Bartlet did not actually win Iowa. Oh well.

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Sow a million seeds, reap one potato

I'm not much of a James Lileks fan. I linked him for a while when I was fairly new to blogging, but I also delinked him fairly soon thereafter when he stopped interesting me. I go to Target a lot myself, and with my own four-year-old daughter, so I don't need to revisit those trips in reading other peoples' blogs. Plus, I generally tend to keep a running list of stuff I need, and I go to Target either when the list gets pretty long or when the need for one item on that list becomes urgent. Lileks seems to grab the wallet and pack up the kid at the merest thought that he might need a new pack of Gilette twin-blades sometime in the next six weeks.

And generally, his political commentary isn't very good, either -- just a lot of anger, really, worded a bit more poetically, but even there he never manages to put anything in a new or interesting way. And the way he goes out of his way to locate the most un-nuanced left-leaning person out there and "fisk" what they have to say to within an inch of its life is just strange. I mean, we're talking about a guy who once fisked, with great gusto, Harry Knowles, for God's sake. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News. (And there, of course, was Glenn Reynolds all a-twitter with the wish that we "read the whole thing".)

But I still look over there once a month or so, just because I know that on average, Lileks does still produce an essay or post once in a while that strikes me as being really worthy, even if I think upon reading it, "Where's the guy who writes this stuff, and why doesn't Lileks let him post a bit more, instead of the pedestrian thinker with the tendency to rely on the too-cute metaphor?"

Anyway, I thought this was just marvelous. I hate to call such a fine piece of personal writing a "Bleat". It seems more like a song to me.

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Things I want to see, #4897

I'd like to see a story set in a police department where the "regular cops" look up as the Internal Affairs guys enter, and say something like, "Hey, Eddie! I haven't seen you in months! How are things down in IAB, anyway? Any good collars lately?"

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What's a blogger gotta do, anyway?!

(Unseemly whining contained in this post.)

All of a sudden, today I'm seeing that blog devoted to news items about Walmart linked like crazy all through Blogistan. Why, it's almost as if no one noticed that blog before today....no one but me, that is. Harumph!

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You know what's creepy?

When you think of someone you haven't thought of for a number of years, and you make a mental note to check sometime to see if they're still alive...and then, two or three days later, you discover (having forgotten totally about it) that they have just died.

Just the other day I was wondering if the guy behind the Guiness Book of World Records, Norris McWhirter, was still alive...and while looking through MeFi just moments ago, I saw that he just died.

Anyway, I always enjoyed thumbing through the Guiness Book in my youth, and like Bobby and Cindy Brady, I occasionally thought of setting my own record. I wonder if "Blathering on a Blog" is a Guiness-approved category?

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Parental Priorities, in action

This week, I have exposed my daughter to the wonder that is Neil Gaiman, via his illustrated children's book The Wolves in the Walls. Illustrated by Dave McKean, who also did the pictures for Gaiman's Coraline, this book tells the tale of a young girl who hears strange noises in the walls of her home. She is convinced that the sounds are made by wolves living in the walls, but her family insists otherwise, citing rats and mice and bats and casually intoning, "When the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over".

Of course, in typical Gaiman fashion, this fairly creepy start eventually gives way to a pretty humorous conclusion once the wolves actually do come out of the walls. When I was a kid, I always tended to enjoy the stories that had a slightly creepy air about them -- Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak, John Bellairs -- and I'm glad that Gaiman is keeping this kind of thing going.

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Can R2-D2 whistle a few bars?

Morat takes time off from caring for his two temporarily-wayward dogs, who are apprently dumbasses (and one of whom is apparently very tired), to wonder about which Star Wars parody song is best: Weird Al Yankovic's, or Mark Davis's. Well, those are both funny songs, but as far as I am concerned, no Star Wars parody song is ever likely to top my favorite of all.

By the way, researching this post yielded a wealth of Star Wars parody stuff on the Net to which I plan to devote much time exploring over the next few days. For now, though, have you ever considered that somewhere in the Star Wars galaxy, a series of words comprised of yellow letters in a block font are apparently floating unimpeded through space? Ever wonder what happens when those words inevitably encounter another object? Wonder no more.

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Don't make so much noise. Gardner's dozin'.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke reports that Gardner Dozois, the longtime editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, is stepping down. Maybe the new editor will actually buy my stuff for once; I mean, how many more Charles Stross stories do we really need, anyway? Sheesh.

(Actually, the correct answer there is "A lot", since Stross is awfully good. Sigh. Well, maybe we can lay off the Robert Silverberg stories...nah, he's good too. Double sigh.)

Failing that, maybe the new editor can at least rewrite the standard Asimov's rejection letter, the one that basically says, "We can't take time to tell you exactly why we're rejecting your story, but the odds are overwhelming that it was crap." Oh well, best of luck to Dozois, a guy whose reaction to my well-wishes would almost certainly be, "Who the f*** is he?!"

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Hmmmmm....

Judging by the fact that traffic has not fallen dramatically, I can only assume that the picture of my mug in the sidebar has, in fact, neither struck my readers into stone or reduced their minds to insanity. All-righty then!

(As long as no one tells me that I look like a long-haired Drew Carey, I'm good.)

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Happy Birthday, Maestro Rozsa

One of the giants of film music, Miklos Rozsa, was born 97 years ago today. Rozsa is one of my favorite film composers, with such brilliant scores amongst his output as Spellbound, Ivanhoe (my favorite score of his -- what a swashbuckler!), King of Kings, and the magnificent Ben Hur. In recent years Rozsa's star has also been rising as a composer of concert music, of which he wrote a lot; his violin and cello concertos, for example, are showing up more often on concert programs. His concert music is a great deal more "nationalistic" than his film music; in his concert work, Rozsa allowed his adoration for his homeland of Hungary to constantly shine through.

Check out Rozsa's filmography; he was one of the hardest working composers in Hollywood. In the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Rozsa himself appears in an early scene at an orchestra hall (he's the conductor). His autobiography, A Double Life, is supposed to be a wonderful book, but it's long out of print and the copy at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library is non-circulating, alas.

(And for some reason, I have never been able to remember whether the 's' or the 'z' comes first in his name. I always have to check. And thanks to Lynn Sislo for the reminder.)

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Why they killed

A chilling Slate article by Dave Cullen reports that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not kill twelve classmates and a teacher five years ago, at Columbine, because they were angry at being made fun of by jocks or because they were Goths who got just a bit too into the whole death thing. The idea is that Klebold apparently was a suicidal little shit with a hot temper (never a good combination), and Harris was a psychopath (not in the pop-cultural sense in which any person who kills is a psychopath, but in the actual clinical sense). About writings on Harris's website, Cullen has this to say:

"These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority."

Harris was, in all likelihood, going to snap sometime, somewhere. It happened in high school:

"Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse."

This is scary, scary stuff.

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If I don't get to sleep, they shouldn't either, dammit!

I don't recall the last extended period of my life when I averaged more than six hours of sleep at night, and during college, I had stretches when I averaged less than five. So the students of Duke University should just deal with it, you know? Yeesh.

What gives me pause is the factoid, contained in the story, that college students average between six and seven hours of sleep a night. Somehow, I suspect that this is skewed a bit. If my experience is any guide, ninety percent of the students are getting between three and five hours, while the remaining ten percent -- the stoners, drunks, hop-heads, and just plain freakin' lazy -- pile on more than twelve or thirteen hours a night.

(via Mickey.)

(BTW, something of which I am proud is that I graduated cum laude, and yet I never once pulled an all-nighter studying. I did pull an all-nighter once watching The Wall and a couple other messed up movies, but that was a weekend and I made up for it by sleeping until noon. I think.)

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Looking up at the right time

A new project at The Store is the trial launch of an outdoor home-and-garden center, where we'll be selling trees and bushes and flowers and mulch and plastic flamingoes and all the stuff you'd need to dispose of a dead mobster or two. If it goes well, the other Stores in Buffalo will do it next year. This is the week when we're putting the whole thing together. I haven't had much to do with it myself as of yet, but today at around 9:10 a.m. I was out there after carrying out some boxes of stuff. Then I stood and shot the breeze with the woman running the show for a few minutes.

About that time, I heard the unmistakable sound of a jumbo jet's engines on final approach. One hears this a lot in Buffalo's Southtowns, since most incoming flights to Buffalo Niagara International Airport approach from the south, but this was different. The plane was quite a bit larger than I'm used to seeing land here, and its approach path was much lower than any other plane that's ever gone over The Store. It was very different, so much so that the guy standing next to me also said, "Doesn't that plane look a little low?"

"Yeah, it does," I said, glancing around at my coworkers, who were apparently taking no notice at all of the plane. After all, as I've said, planes in descent over the Southtowns is nothing new.

But what was new was how I could make out the stripes in the American flag painted on the tail, and I could clearly see the rather distinctive blue-and-white hull markings. And then I suddenly remembered the big news story in Buffalo over the last few days, and I realized that the plane I was watching as it made its slow, final approach was this plane.

I may be no fan of that plane's most important passenger, but still, as an American, there are few thrills to compare with walking outside one's workplace, looking up into the sky, and seeing Air Force One in slow descent. Today, the President of the United States flew over my head.

And only I and the guy standing next to me, out of perhaps fifty people in the parking lot, realized it.

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Ewwwww, broccoli!

Lynn Sislo on picky eaters:

"My grandson is a typically picky kid. Not that I don't expect illogical pickiness from a four-year-old, but he disappointed me recently when he rejected my oatmeal-raisin cookies. To me, oatmeal-raisin cookies are one of the ultimate warm hug foods. When I think about it though, I guess I can understand how someone who has not been clued in on the cultural background that makes oatmeal-raisin cookies a warm hug food might object to a lumpy cookie with black wrinkley things in it."

Now, that gives me pause. I have no problem with the idea of a kid turning up the nose at, oh, asparagus or spinach or lima beans or whatever. But an oatmeal-raisin cookie? And one that I assume has been baked in that wonderful way so that the cookie's overall texture is one of gooey softness while still yielding tiny morsels of crunch where the oatmeal at the edges has browned and become encrusted with carmelized sugar? And hell, even given the idea that maybe, just maybe, the presence of little black lumps in the cookie might be off-putting, but I personally am the type of soul for whom the mere assurance that a food item is, in fact, a cookie will offset any ickiness of the appearance.

Like Lynn, I'm always flummoxed by really picky adults -- the people who can go to a restaurant that has fifty or sixty items on its menu, and only find one or two things to eat. My sister-in-law detests onions, which makes cooking a bit of a challenge for me, since the entire family loves them. My father is repulsed by the idea of casseroles, for some incredibly odd reason; I adore them and am constantly on the lookout for new baked dishes. My mother beamed proudly when, in my twenties, I started drinking coffee at last (she having been a coffee drinker since her early childhood), but her elation turned to horror when I proceeded to dope it up with sugar. And so on.

Turning back to kids, I remember the first time I was told that most kids hate fish, and I thought, "Huh-whuh?!" I don't remember ever not liking fish, although I still haven't got round to enjoying clams (except for chowder, which I love) or oysters. I tried crab, willingly, when I was seven, and I have never stopped loving it. I wasn't too fond of scallops until I was in my twenties, but I would eat them without complaint. When I got to college and met people who claimed to hate eating fish, I could no more wrap my mind around the concept than Einstein could accept the idea that God just might play dice with the Universe.

My own food preferences have shifted over the years. (I may have written about this recently, come to think of it....hmmmm....) I used to hate mushrooms in all forms, but now I actually enjoy them in a pizza or soup or Chinese dish, although I still won't simply sit and eat them whole, and I still think stuffed mushrooms are gross. My appreciation of tomatoes and potatoes has also grown, although I will not consume the former by themselves even if in a salad or the latter in their mashed state. And so on.

Lynn suggests a 12-step program for the rehabilitation of picky eaters. Personally, I rather like the approach Blofeld used in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in which he ritually hypnotizes picky eaters into being less-picky. Of course, he's also hypnotically programming them to carry out his plan to cause worldwide sterility in plants and livestock, but I suppose we could leave out the world-domination stuff, eh?

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Welcome to the Department of Too Much Information. Take a number, please.

Well, all those readers who have always wondered just what the kind of person who generates such drivel as occupies this blog might look like need only check out the sidebar. No, not the best image, but really -- a better image won't improve matters. Sigh. The fact that I'm bearded doesn't show up very well, and neither does my shoulder-length hair. Generally, I think I look like one of the extras from the Rohan scenes of Lord of the Rings. Probably one of the first guys to get eaten by wargs.

Also, in comments below Jason suggested that I put up a picture of my bookshelves, so here is precisely that:



These are not all of my shelves, however: this cluster is flanked by two smaller, three-shelf bookcases, one of which is partly double-stacked. It's hard to tell by this picture, but the walls of this corner form a kind of "stair-step" effect, which yields that nice alcove which is piled with books. Oh, and see that can of compressed air on the top shelf there? If you look on the shelf directly below that can, you can make out a thick stack of papers. This is the original manuscript to The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. My copy of the submission manuscript is in a binder next to this computer.

(If you want to peruse a larger version of this picture, here it is -- but I'll be taking it down after a couple of weeks, since it's a pretty large file. You can make out specific book titles in that one, though.)

And here is a picture of my writing desk, which isn't really where I do my writing these days, since I switched from working primarily longhand.



That's me there in the pic, of course, striking my "pretentious guy reading" pose. I think I did pretty well, given that I had about nine seconds before the self-timer on the Polaroid went off. That book in my hand is my one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings -- the one with paintings by Alan Lee -- and that's my dictionary on the desk, open to somewhere in the letter 'O', I think. You can't tell by this picture, but the top shelf of the bookcase behind me there is my "Bookshelf of High Honor". That's where my Rand-McNally World Atlas, my complete works of Shakespeare, my two copies of LOTR and slipcased copy of The Hobbit, and my collection of Guy Gavriel Kay's novels reside.

That desk belonged to my paternal grandfather, and then my paternal grandmother. (My grandfather had been dead for over twenty years when I was born.) Now, it has come down to me. I dearly love that desk, and I long for the day when I finally own a laptop so I can always write on that surface. Everyone should have something that belonged to their grandparents, I think.

So there you go, more about me than you ever wanted to know. Well, you asked! ("Blaming the readers" always being a great strategy, you know.)

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SHATNERRRRRRRR!

In my longstanding friendship with the ever-flatulent Mr. Jones, one of our more recent conversational tics (when "conversing" online via IM) is that when one of us indisputably falls beneath the crushing grasp of the other's powers of reason, we concede the point by typing KHAANNN!! KHAANNN!!, as per the scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in which William Shatner, for just a moment, achieves the overacting Nirvana that had to that point eluded him. His eyes bulges, his head twitches, he does this weird thing with his mouth, and then he screams KHAANNN!! KHAANNN!! into his communicator. I know, it's hard to describe -- which is why you can check it out for yourself. And thus does the Net come ever closer to total perfection!

(via MeFi)

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Move Over Britney!

Celebrating my return with a new entrant in the ongoing march of Women To Whom, Unlike Britney, the Phrase Playing an Instrument Can Refer To a Musical Ability, allow me to present the beautiful Natalie MacMaster.



MacMaster is one of the bigger names in Celtic and folk music right now, by virtue of her outstanding fiddle-playing. I've heard her work for several years now on the Celtic music radio shows and CDs I own, but I never saw a picture of her until last week.

Labels: ROWR

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Of Matters Zoological

On Saturday, we (the Wife, the Daughter, and I) ventured into Canada. Our destination was the Toronto Zoo, which is a terribly fine place. The best part was that we kept the ultimate destination secret from the Daughter, so when she saw the animals, she squealed with immense delight. Then, we traveled to a suburban Toronto mall (Yorkdale, to be specific) and ate dinner at the Rainforest Café. Here's a dull rundown of our day, interspersed with pithy comments.

First off, color me unimpressed with the current state of Canadian meteorology. I consulted no fewer than four online weather forecasts for the Toronto region prior to leaving, and the worst forecast was "Partly sunny, with showers possible." The sun did not actually emerge until around 4:00, after a day of steady rainfall that began about when we drove past Hamilton (the halfway mark on the drive from Buffalo to Toronto). When one dresses expecting temperatures in the mid-60s and partly sunny conditions, one tends to get really cold when the actual conditions at the zoo – a predominantly outdoor place – are mid-50s and rainy. For the first half of our visit, we kept ducking into the warm indoor pavilions as much to bask in the heat and humidity inside as to look at the animals kept there. And the picnic lunch we packed was consumed in the car. And since I had dressed for the weather I'd expected, I didn't even bring a jacket, so before we ever got to the zoo, we had to stop at a Canadian Sears and buy a jacket for me to wear. Luckily, I've actually been needing a new spring and fall light jacket, and even luckier, the ones at Sears were on sale for over half-off. That rocked. (And by the way, I've never been a fan of Sears, because they are, in my experience, nearly always crappy -- even the newer ones seem to leave me thinking, "When are they bringing the rest of the merchandise in?" Well, now I know why American Sears stores are so icky: because the company apparently spends all its money on the Canadian ones. Those were the cleanest, nicest damn Sears I've ever been in. (Yes, there were two Sears that day. First, to get me a new jacket; second, to get the wife a dry pair of pants for dinner. Did I mention that it friggin' rained for six hours straight?!))

In general, though, the Toronto Zoo is a magnificent establishment. We have been there twice now, and we still haven't seen everything. (There is one entire section, devoted to Canadian wildlife, that is off by itself, separated from the remainder of the zoo by quite a walk. Perhaps next visit we'll get down there.) The monkey and orangutan exhibits are mightily impressive, as were the fully-grown Komodo dragons and the Komodo-dragon hatchlings. The lions were also beautiful, although one of them stood in one place, roaring into the distance in a fashion not unlike the ending of The Lion King. My theory is that since this particular lion was facing the paddock where the giraffes are housed, he was simply thinking, "If these fences weren't here, I'd be eating one of them right now!" And the most amazing thing I saw on this visit was the bat exhibit, which is maintained in darkness illuminated by blacklights. One bat was hanging directly in front of the glass window, and it was washing its wings in cat-like fashion – except when it spread its wings momentarily, I saw a baby bat, clinging to its mother's belly as it nursed. This was a stunning moment.

(By the way, if you're not a person who handles embarrassment well, you'd be ill-advised to take your child to a zoo when she is in the midst of her fascination with, shall we say, "bodily functions". Especially when the elephant twenty feet away decides to void its bladder, upon which no fewer than three different people in earshot make some comment about "opening the floodgates".)

Dinner, as noted, was at the Rainforest Café. The food there is good for chain-type places – i.e., it's not a culinary delight, but it's still worth the higher-than-Applebee's prices – but really, with all the cool stuff on the ceilings and the animatronic elephant stampeding and the giant fishtanks and the butterflies and the fiber-optic starfield and the simulated thunderstorm every thirty minutes, this place is just about the most fun place to eat I know of. It's just a blast to go there and was so last night, even despite the fact that the little nitwit who was apparently handling the seating simply wasn't doing his job, thus forcing us to wait about an extra half hour for a table. A funny thing is that the giant tropical fishtank there includes a single member of whatever species the character of Dorrie from Finding Nemo happened to be. Thus, all through the night, there is an omnipresent chorus of children standing by the tank shouting, "HI DORRIE! DORRIE, COME BACK!"

(By the way, it would be really nice if restaurants that include macaroni-and-cheese on their kid's menus go the extra mile and serve something of slightly-higher quality than regular old Kraft mac-and-cheese. Of course, it's easier to just do the boring Kraft stuff, since Kraft makes restaurant ready single-serving packages of premade mac-and-cheese – it's a cryovac package, all you do is boil it for a minute or two – but it still seems kind of lame.)

After dinner, we meandered a bit through the Indigo Books location across from the mall from the restaurant. This store's appearance is far better than its selection, although I did manage to at last acquire a copy of Guy Gavriel Kay's 2003 poetry collection Beyond This Dark House, which is not available in the United States. Sadly, there was only one copy; I was hoping to buy two and use the other as a gift for a certain reader who's been pretty generous with me in the past. C'est la vie.

Other random thoughts, in no particular order:

:: The drivers of Southern Ontario are insane. I'm talking crazy here. First of all, they speed, no matter what kind of car they have. I don't mind getting passed by a late-model Camaro, especially when I'm already going 68 or 69 on the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way), but getting passed by a 1986 Ford Escort – a car that I can practically see shuddering as it careens down the highway at speeds that would have been questionable when the thing was new – is really disconcerting. Plus, the Ontario drivers have little concern for things like, oh, cars in other lanes. I counted at least six instances of drivers being in the middle or inside lane of a three-lane highway and cutting all the way over to exit (and I'm talking cutting over into the exit, not into the right lane approaching the exit). And since when is it standard procedure to come up behind someone in the middle lane, flash them with your brights, and then pass on either the right or left, which are both open? This happened three times. Weird.

:: But then, the sanity of Toronto-region drivers probably isn't enhanced by the ridiculous Toronto roadways. Mostly, the roads themselves are fine, and I've long known that if you want to get from one area in Toronto to some other area in Toronto, generally there's a fairly easy way to get there. It's when you want to get to one specific point that you're in trouble. You get off one large highway onto a smaller limited access highway, and then you get off that to take yet another busy street, and then you keep driving until you find an entrance to where you're trying to go. And these are rarely marked. It's like you can see where you're trying to go just out your window, but none of the roads you are on actually go to that place, and the proper sequence of roads you must take to get there is not marked in any way. Ugh.

Oh, and what's up with the traffic signals flashing? What does a flashing green light mean? Everyone seemed to react as though it was the Canadian equivalent of an American left-arrow, so that's what I did, but why not just use a left-arrow?

:: Toronto has a beautiful downtown and an impressive skyline, but what I've noticed on my last few visits is the rapid construction of "skyscraper clusters" north of downtown proper. Some of these buildings are quite large indeed – a few would likely dominate the Buffalo skyline, if relocated there – but their location so far away from downtown is always striking to me, as if the businesses ensconced therein wanted a skyscraper but didn't want any part of downtown. There is one particular such plaza, consisting of four buildings topped by art-deco style caps, a sort of twenty-first century homage to the Chrysler Building. I thought for a moment I was driving through Coruscant.

:: In my return-from-hiatus post below, I linked Aaron's picture of the Minneapolis skyline. I've always loved city skylines at night, when the lights of the buildings shine against a dark blue or black sky -- but returning from Toronto, I was reminded of the irony that I live in what may be the only large city on Earth with a skyline that is better looking by day than by night. Buffalo's buildings are mainly stone, with none of the sharply-illuminated steel or glass towers popular in the last couple of decades. Buffalo's tallest buildings are all more than thirty years old; there are a couple of younger buildings that are too short to really show in the skyline. Thus the Buffalo skyline at night is very dark, and combined with fairly dark roadways, in general the city looks pretty dingy when one is returning from the brilliance of Toronto and Hamilton (even though from the QEW, one can see little of Hamilton beyond the factories lining the harbor). It's always amazing how traveling outside of Buffalo can make me glad to get home, but to also give me a mild feeling of dissatisfaction or disappointment when I see anew the faults my city presents to the world.

UPDATE: God in Heaven! Above, where I complain about Toronto motorists? You thought that, maybe, just maybe, I was exaggerating a bit? Nope. In my experience, at least half the drivers in that damn town are like this. And the other half? They're just aggressive speeders. Like Chicagoans or Clevelanders. Thanks to Aaron for finding this, and not linking it before we took our trip.

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I take a hiatus....

....and Jason apparently starts posting again. If I had to choose a blog for the title of "Most Unfairly Un-updated for Long Periods of Time", Finches' Wings would be a serious contender. Right up there with Michelle's and Nefarious Neddie's.

(Aaron doesn't count because of his clairvoyant ability to post whenever I start to think, "Hmmm, Aaron hasn't posted in a while".)

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2006, Taiwan or Bust: An Update

A day or two before my hiatus, I linked an article that speculated that China may be gearing up to invade Taiwan in 2006, for the purposes of bringing its "breakaway province" back into the fold. In that post, I asked Michelle if she wished to comment, seeingas how she is from Taiwan, and she graciously did. She also posted her comments to her own blog.

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A Very Public Service Announcement

You know, folks, I've been buying food in bulk for years. I love getting candy and nuts from the bulk section at the grocery store, where I can control the amount, and my parents used to take my sister and I to those co-op type places where a lot of stuff was in bulk and where all the signs were hand-lettered and the checkout person was either a skinny long-haired guy in wire-rim glasses and a t-shirt with a whale on it or a woman with slightly thicker glasses, jeans not quite as faded as the skinny guy's but still somehow looked like she had done more actual work in them, and that expression in her eye that said, "Yeah, I'm a hippie, but I'm still not a dummy, so don't try to give me any shit".

So yeah, I know my way around a bulk food place. Thus, I think I have good background of experience when I say:

It ain't too terribly hard to fill the plastic bag with whatever you're buying, and get that twist-tie around the top of it, without dumping at least two cups' worth of it on the floor.

And yet, nevertheless, every time I enter the bulk area at The Store with broom in hand, the floor looks like the storm-cellar in Twister after Helen Hunt's daddy has been sucked out the door. Oatmeal, walnuts, peanuts, chocolate melting wafers, M&Ms, Reese's Pieces, jelly beans...all over the damn place.

Not a day goes by that I don't thank whatever Gods there are that we no longer sell bulk pet food. I wake up in the middle of the night, cold and clammy from the sweats, at the thought of what these people would do with a barrel full of birdseed....

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Two Reminders

One: I'm soliciting suggestions for things to post about for next week, so leave suggestions in comments to this post.

Two: I got a pack of film for my old Polaroid "Instamatic" camera the other day, just out of curiosity to see if the thing still works. If it does, should I include some form of "head shot" here? Or would the horror of seeing just what the hell I look like finally doom Byzantium's Shores to a horrifying demise? Answer this one to comments in this post, right here.

UPDATE: By popular demand (two people, I think), I will try to put a headshot in the sidebar sometime in the next day or two. I warn you all: I may be the blogger behind the Move Over Britney! campaign, but I am not a candidate for inclusion in same. And not just because I'm, you know, male.

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Since launching, it forced the cessation of 89 other blogs....

George Carlin once observed that no matter what facet of human existence you name, no matter what obscure activity or hobby or slice of life, it will have a magazine devoted to it. I wonder if now the same thing is starting to happen with blogs. Witness Always Low Prices, a blog devoted to news about Wal-Mart (pro and con).

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A mouse, gone sadly astray....

We caught up a bit on our Disney movies lately, and apparently we're caught up permanently, since Disney has reportedly decided to stop making hand-drawn, traditional animated films entirely. This is yet one more example of how Disney, once a great company, somehow completely lost its mind at some point in the last five or six years.

Home On the Range, the one in current release, is actually quite a good little movie. It's a bit schmaltzy in spots, but by and large its sensibility lies more with the zaniness of The Emperor's New Groove than with the more syrupy stuff Disney's famous for. This movie worked for me on about the same level of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with humorous little asides and character touches that make the going worthwhile, since there is exactly nothing surprising about this story at all. (Well, there is one surprise: the method the Evil Cattle Rustler uses to nab his prey is really pretty funny.) The voice-work is, as always, first rate; even in the darkest of hours, the Disney people still have their knack for getting the right voice for the right character. I can't envision any movie other than this one that would include Dame Judi Dench and Roseanne Barr in its cast. (And Lance LeGault, a longtime favorite character actor of mine who hasn't been in much lately, has a welcome turn as a stern bison.)

And then there's Brother Bear. We watched this on DVD the other night. It really is better than its reputation – I was expecting a crapfest, but it's not. It's surprisingly thoughtful and funny (this is one of those Disney movies that seems designed to inspire a spin-off movie about its secondary characters, in this case, the two lunkhead moose), and its animation is stunning. Parts of the nature-stuff put me in mind of similar landscaping in the films of Hayao Miyazaki, believe it or not. The film's story also starts out strong, but the ending is a pretty stunning collapse. About two-thirds of the way through the film I had a sinking feeling, because I could see that the film had set up a perfect tragic ending, and I also knew that there is no way Disney would ever have the courage to release a film with the tragic ending I envisioned. And, it didn't.

(For those curious about the plot, three Eskimo -- I think -- brothers confront an angry bear, who kills the eldest brother. The youngest goes after the bear, while the middle brother wants to let it be; and the younger brother kills the bear. But then "the Spirits" intervene, and the younger brother takes on the form of the dead bear, leaving his old clothes behind. Middle brother finds the clothes and assumes that the bear has killed his younger brother, and now goes after the bear, planning to kill it. So, brother is tracking brother with intent to kill, not knowing it's his brother. And the brother-turned-bear befriends an orphaned bear cub, eventually learning that the bear he killed and whose form he now inhabits was the bear cub's mother, whose initial angry reaction was simply maternal protective instinct. I won't tell how it all ends, except to note that this tale's potential for glorious tragedy goes completely unfulfilled.)

But that's not what bothers me most; the DVD presentation really gave me pause. It was released, as Disney has been doing lately, as a two-disc "Collectors" set, like many movies these days, but it's not like you're getting tons of extras. Instead, with this set, you get two copies of the movie itself, with a handful of extras. The films are included both in the widescreen format and in the fullscreen, pan-and-scan format. So, for consumers like me who are accustomed to choosing which aspect ratio to buy (and really, if you're any kind of film buff at all, you already know that "fullscreen" is for dunces), with recent Disney DVD releases, you have no such choice: you're forced to get them both. And since there are really only enough extras included that they really could probably get them onto a single-disc release if they wanted, this is basically Disney's way of still being able to charge for a two-disc set. Thanks, guys.

But it gets a little worse. Not much, but a little. When looking at the discs in the box, I saw that disc one was labeled something like "Original Theatrical Aspect Ratio", which was fine by me. The other disc, though, wasn't just labeled "Fullscreen". Disney labeled it "Family Friendly Fullscreen Presentation". (Emphasis mine.) No two ways about it: this pissed me off.

What on Earth is "family friendly" about a fullscreen release? Nothing that I can see. My own daughter has never asked about "those black bars above and below the movie", and I've never bothered to explain it, because what's the point? She focuses on the movie, which is as it should be. But more than that: if Disney is really trying to keep fullscreen video afloat, it just shows just how out-of-touch they really are. Widescreen is normal now. It is common for me to see fullscreen DVDs in the bargain bin at stores while the widescreen releases are still full price, which is a clear indication that the retailers are saying, "Nobody wants these fullscreen ones anymore". And more than that: when Julia Roberts goes on Letterman to promote her new movie, the clip they show is always in widescreen now. Movie ads on TV are themselves increasingly in widescreen. The only holdouts for fullscreen, it seems, are the TV networks (which is odd since quite a few regular TV series now are shown in widescreen, even though they are produced for a non-widescreen medium).

Disney's labeling of "fullscreen" as "family friendly" may seem a tiny thing to bitch about, and it probably is. But it's a startling example of Disney's problem, and it isn't that people want computer animated movies instead of hand-drawn ones, and it isn't that Disney's movies just don't tell good stories anymore (because, Treasure Planet aside, they do). Disney's problem is more fundamental: it's that, on some level, Disney just doesn't get it. Disney has gone from being a leading company to being the fumbling person saying, "Where is everybody going? Tell me, that I might lead them there!" It's really sad to behold, and I hope they can pull out of it, somehow. I'd like my daughter to see the Magic Kingdom while it's still got some magic in it.

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Blogiversaries Abound

Congratulations to The Rittenhouse Review and Eschaton, both of which celebrated their second blogging anniversaries while I was on hiatus. Slightly more congrats to Jim Capozzola, though, because I'm on his blogroll whereas I am not on Atrios's. (Actually, who can tell? Atrios doesn't even alphabetize his!)

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A refreshing exchange

Michael of 2Blowhards links this WIRED interview with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson (which I read when my issue came in the mail). I liked the interview, being a LOTR fan; Michael seems less interested, although he quotes a single exchange:

WIRED: Your early work features some of the bloodiest scenes ever filmed. What do these movies say about you?

Jackson: They all represent the type of film I would be entertained by. That's why you make movies. Because you're interested in a genre.

I'm not sure if Michael posts this to agree or disagree (he uncharacteristically says nothing at all!), but I agree with it. First of all, I admire Jackson simply by virtue of his frank admission that he did gory, bloody movies because he likes gory, bloody movies. No goofy auteur-speak, none of that "What I'm trying to do is meditate on the awful degree of violence in contemporary life" folderol -- just a guy who admits being entertained by violent movies. Now, I don't personally enjoy violence that much, but I'm not really turned off by it either (except in some cases -- I found the ending of The Matrix a bit troubling when all those security guards get mowed down).

Secondly, though, there's a "meta" level of meaning here that I like. I write the stories that I write because I want to read them, but nobody else has written them yet, so I gotta do it. I think that's what Jackson is getting at, and I agree wholehearedly.

(I'm not sure that Jackson doesn't confuse "genre" with a certain set of tropes or imagery that are not exclusive to a single genre, but that's a "choice of words" thing, not a "content" thing.)

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Teeny-tiny footwear

My wife took advantage of her vacation to start a new hobby: crocheting. (Looks to me like knitting, but then, what do I know.) After some initial practice runs, she started in on crocheting a pair of booties.

Now why do you think she'd do a pair of booties? Well, I'll just leave that up to the imagination...and note that she has until sometime in late August to finish them.

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Friday Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oh, God, there's no contest. Not even a hope of one. Not only is this the weirdest thing I saw online during my hiatus, it is one of the most demented things I have ever seen, period.

The mixing, via Photoshop, of animal species.

I can't stress enough how warped some of these are.

(via By The Way; surprisingly, not via Warren Ellis.)

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Meme-stealing, in progress

The other day, John Scalzi announced his second annual Reader Request Week, in which readers toss out topic suggestions and Scalzi then blogs about them. And, being a guy who never met a blogging meme he didn't want to steal outright, I figure, hey, I'll give this a shot. Put your suggestions in comments!

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(With a tip of the hat to Maurice Chevalier)

When last I posted, Scott of the Gamer's Nook had casually mentioned a plan for his day that I found highly intriguing. He followed up in detail later that day: he and his wife are entering the international adoption arena, and I wish them luck.

Scott says he wants a little girl, and I can't blame him. Messr. Lerner and Loewe said it best in Gigi:

Each time I see a little girl
of five or six or seven,
I can't resist the joyous urge
to smile and say…

Thank heaven for little girls,
for little girls get bigger every day!
Thank heaven for little girls;
they grow up in the most delightful way!

Those little eyes, so helpless and appealing,
one day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling!

Thank heaven for little girls;
thank heaven for them all,
no matter where no matter who --
for without them, what would little boys do?

Thank heaven... thank heaven...
Thank heaven for little girls!

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I'm out of it for a little while, and everybody gets delusions of grandeur!

And so do I return from my blogging hiatus, possibly refreshed (although you'll have to tune in over the next few days to see if I'm really refreshed or not). First, I suppose I should take stock of what's happening around Blogistan, eh?

:: Aaron took it upon himself to demonstrate that Blogistan doesn't really need me at all! He stepped in and provided his own entry into the Move Over Britney! series, his own Burst of Weirdness, and his own notable Image of the Week. This last is notable because he took it himself, whereas I always steal and swipe stuff from around the Web. Commenting on his stuff, in order:

1. There's absolutely no doubting this woman's talent and beauty. In fact, she's so obviously surpassing Britney in every conceivable way, that she's almost too obvious. If that makes sense.

2. This guy's a wuss. I want my message tattooed on there. Still, pretty weird.

3. Nifty picture, although I can't endorse the method of its taking! (I'm a firm believer that people who drive whilst talking on cell-phones should be beaten with tire-jacks.) One reason I want a digital camera (maybe sometime in the next year) is so I can get my own shots of the Buffalo environment.

:: Gyorgy Swankov answers six questions I posed him, as part of that "Answer five questions" thing that circulates every so often. Interestingly enough, I myself started making something very similar to the recipe he offers in this post a few months ago, although I have to confess that I just can't talk myself into making pasta sauce from scratch. I buy the jarred stuff (Classico, Emeril's, and my own store brand -- not Prego or Ragu, ugh!).

:: The President of the United States gave a news conference, and most of my regular political blogging reads were unimpressed. But I'm thinking, yeah, so what -- this guy has never been good "off the cuff", and in my life I've known any number of intelligent and highly competent people who were terrible "off the cuff". (I may, in fact, be one myself.) Not that I think the President is highly competent, mind you, but that I just think that piling on his predictably lackluster press conference performance misses the point, in a way.

:: Matthew Yglesias ran afoul the screaming hordes from LGF -- first here, and then again a few times in succeeding posts. Hilarity ensues. Or not. I note in passing some pretty inventive parsing on the part of LGF partisans who insist that Matthew has called Charles Johnson a Nazi, presumably from people who would also insist that "Bush never actually said the threat was 'iminent'!" I also note that for a guy who apparently can't be blamed for the actions of his commenters, Johnson sure does seem to take pride in them.

:: As always, Lynn Sislo provides a wealth of great stuff. First, she reports that Jim Croce's first ever album is being reissued (I adore Jim Croce), and she models a dress she made. (My wife began sewing a couple of years back -- actually she resumed sewing, which she had done a lot in her youth but not since I'd known her, and it's an impressive skill. Plus, it gives her a modicum of revenge for all the years I've tortured her with hours-long visits to Borders, because she can now subject me to hours-long visits to Joann's.)

:: Steven Den Beste calls Europe names, exerting a bit too much effort only to bury his punchline, and complains about his readers. His complaint is not without cause -- apparently he received tons of e-mails correcting him on some factual matter, after he'd already corrected himself onsite -- but he sure devotes a lot of verbiage to the whole thing and then rides it all right off the rails by going full-hog into "the Left and its European allies" stuff at the end. Yeesh.

:: The Evil Mr. Jones posts nothing at all. Dammit. He must still be stalking the refs from the Duke-UConn game.

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Signing off.

Well, that should about do it for me, as I head into a week of radio silence. I plan to resume posting next Sunday, although I may delay my return to Monday if family plans arise that warrant such a shift. As always, it would be cool if the regulars would load the page a couple times in the interim, just to keep traffic from dropping to nil (aside from goofy search engine hits, like this one). And as always, good reading can be found in the various sections of the blogroll.

And for your amusement, here are a couple of ruminations on supermarket shopping, by George Carlin. I've excerpted this from his book Napalm and Silly Putty. The scary thing is, thanks to work I can now relate to this stuff on multiple levels.

"Shopping hungry is great; you just keep loading things into your cart. But then, after several aisles, you realize you may have overdone it: You find yourself pushing a motorcade of three carts, all tied together with long loops of string cheese. Once again, you've lost control.

"And so, as you realize you don't have enough money to pay for everything, you begin to put back some of the more expensive items. Like meat.

"'Meat? Twenty-seven dollars? Bullshit! I'll put back these steaks and grab a few more pound cakes. The kids shouldn't be eating meat anyway.'

"The nicest thing about putting things back in the supermarket is that you can put them anywhere you want. No one cares. You can leave the Robitussin next to the ham hocks and stick the marshmallows in with the Bacon Bits. They don't care. They have people who come around at midnight to straighten that stuff out, and in the morning everything is back where it belongs.

"By the way, next time you shop at a supermarket in a neighborhood that has a higher than average marijuana use, take a look at the cookie section. Combat zone. Half the packages have been opened, and all the really good cookies are gone.

"'Where the hell are the Mallomars?'

"'Oh, we can't get Mallomars into the store. Folks line up at the loading dock for Mallomars.'

"There are always plenty of crappy cookies. You ever notice that? Shitty, low-priced local cookies? Like 'Jim's Home-Style Cookies. Twenty-six varieties.' I say, 'Damn, Jim, if you can't make cookies in twenty-five tries, leave me out.'"

OK, that's all for that. See you next Sunday!

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Just say "Joe".

Keep an eye on Mike's Baseball Rants, for the return of Joe Morgan Chat Day.

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The final frontier....

It's been a while since I filched one of NASA's Astronomy Pictures of the Day, and I missed the Image of the Week due to my now-abating head cold, so here's a nifty shot of the X-43A experimental jet, which engaged in a test run last week in which it exceeded Mach 7.



I like how we're starting to design things that look like they belong in "the future", seeing as how just about everybody I know is disappointed on some level that the twenty-first century doesn't look the way it was supposed to. And I also like the fact that NASA is still using that blue circular logo of theirs -- kind of a "The more things change, the more things stay the same" type of thing.

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Time to simplify the alphabet?

Yes it is, according to this guy, who has apparently decreed that the letter 'C' is useless and should be eliminated:

"The sheer uselessness of a letter which just mimics the sound of not one but two different consonants is staggering. It only causes confusion and is probably costing companies millions every year."

Well, I rather like the letter 'C', aside from the fact that it's my middle initial. (No, it doesn't stand for anything, which gives me something in common with Harry S Truman.)

Link via Phileos, a blog whose viewpoint I don't entirely share but which also provides quite a bit of nifty linkage and also sports just about the spiffiest blog design I've seen. I mean, that is one fine looking blog. Go look.

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The walnut WHAT?

Sometimes you find a blog post with a headline that compels you to keep reading. Case in point. Oh, and Sarah takes on the Quiz-That-Ate-Blogistan, too.

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I'm going. Really.

I know I was supposed to be officially "on hiatus" today, but I had a few things I wanted to link and/or comment on before I go, and for some reason, Blogger wasn't publishing last night when I wrote the posts dated yesterday. OK? OK.

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Burying Christ

I've never been much for church-going, but I do immensely appreciate when a clergyman or pastor can find a new way -- new, at least, to me -- to illustrate something about the whole religious experience (usually Christian, but I'm open to anything, really).

Go check out the Gray Monk's text of a devotion he wrote a few years back, in which he speculates on what Joseph of Aramathea felt as he buried Christ.

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In praise of frozen pizza

I've pretty much always enjoyed frozen pizza, but it used to be that the frozen stuff was pretty obviously of inferior stature. I mean, we're talking Chef Boyardee canned ravioli versus fresh ravioli cooked in quality sauce, in terms of quality comparison. A frozen pizza was a "good quick meal", but it wasn't really an alternative if one was really, truly in the mood for pizza, you know? (Unless, of course, it was late at night in college and we were at least buzzed on beer.)

But these days, frozen pizzas have become a lot more sophisticated and a lot closer to what you'd find at a pizza place. Sure, it's still the equivalent of a run-of-the-mill pizza place, the kind of joint that is open until three in the morning in college towns and sells a large cheese-and-pepperoni for six bucks, but that's still a huge advance in quality. You get crust that actually rises in the oven and doesn't taste like crispy cardboard (even if it still does not have that bread-like taste or crunch of genuine oil-brushed fresh pizza dough). Cheese that actually melts, as opposed to simply "crisping" in that weird shredded state it was in to begin with.

The current crop of "higher end" frozen pizzas aren't as good as the quality local places, or the better chains like Pizzeria Uno, but they're getting pretty damned good these days. (Just make sure you follow the baking directions. Just sticking the thing in a preheated oven and taking it out before it burns really doesn't work anymore; if you actually do what it says on the box, the product actually comes out pretty nicely.)

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Why I like blogs, Reason #4592

I like it when bloggers just toss off some tiny little factoid about their day that makes you that much more curious about them, as people. As in this post by Scott of The Gamer's Nook.

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NBC's conditioning program is working.

I'm writing a few blog entries tonight before I go on hiatus, and the TV is tuned to NBC. I'm only vaguely paying attention -- there are a couple of guys in dark suits investigating a crime of some sort, so I assume it's some episode of one of the Law and Order shows, since that's just about all that NBC airs anymore.

Except I catch a couple mentions of aliens and conspiracies and whatnot.

It's not a L&O show, it's the movie Men In Black. Whoops.

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[click] GAHH! [click] GGAAHHHH!!!

This DPS post contains two links to highly disturbing items.

What amazes me most about Scalia is that he was confirmed by a 98-0 vote.

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2006: Taiwan's year of dread?

Via MeFi I see this article which speculates on how China may go about the reconquest of Taiwan, as early as 2006 -- that year being (a) when China's military strength would surpass Taiwan's defensive capabilities (I find the apparent fact that China couldn't do so already surprising, but this is based on complete ignorance on my part) and (b) two years before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. That latter point strikes me as being a bit odd; surely even two years after the fact, such a move on China's part would still cast a significant political pall over their Games. (Would the American President, either Bush or Kerry, repeat President Carter's move in 1980 and halt American participation in the Games? In fact, how would we respond? It seems to me we'd likely mobilize forces in the region, make a show of deep concern, but stop well short of going to war to protect Taiwan. But again, I'm very ignorant of the whole situation.)

Michelle, do you have any thoughts that you'd be willing to share?

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Ahhhhh, the Whacky Land o' Lakes....

My former college room-mate and walking encyclopedia of Minnesota sports lore just sent me a rather disturbing link that has me rethinking my long wish to live in Minnesota (if I had to live anywhere other than Buffalo, of course). I think that I may have to change my destination to Wisconsin. At least if those folks tried something like that, they'd do it with something edible. Like, you know, cheese.

(UPDATE: Great Scott! The damn things are everywhere! The linkage, the terrible, horrifying, ghastly, disgusting linkage!)

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Now where did that blog go? It was just there a minute ago....

A week or so ago, I noticed a blog called The Book Stops Here in my Technorati link cosmos. Upon brief examination, I decided that it looked like an interesting blog, but I didn't have time at that point to do any extensive reading, so I filed it away for future reference. Then it disappeared entirely, as blogs sometimes do...but now it's back, and it still looks interesting. I can't find any identifications as to who is behind The Book Stops Here, but I'm assuming for now that the blogger is female -- especially after this post.

(And I have to say, I am both humbled and pleased as punch to see Byzantium's Shores listed alongside such company as the blogs that populate her blogroll. I'm torn between high pride and something David Gerrold once wrote about critics, something about every ass wanting to stand with the King's horses.)

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They're called "Stones", apparently....

....and this guy's got 'em. Either that, or he's a freaking loon. I guess he'll find out tomorrow.

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Holy Posting Eruption, Batman!

Long-range scanners have detected posting activity amongst the dormant blogcanos of Highered Intelligence. Further investigation is pending.

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Burst of Weirdness

I was doing a routine sweep of the "Nature's Market" section of The Store the other day. That's where all the "Natural" and "Organic" stuff is, as well as the gonzo health products that you'd typically find at a GNC store. (By "routine sweep", I mean exactly that: I was toting a broom.)

I glanced at the health product shelves, and my eyes fell upon an item that has to have the most questionable name for a medical product I've ever seen. Now, upon further review, it's an "energy booster", so the name sort-of makes sense on that basis, but it amazes me when people who name things seem to have never been in junior high. The product? Up Your Gas!



From the site selling this stuff: "So the time you feel yourself yourself running out os gas, reach up for Up Your Gas!"

Now, is it just me, or does this call to mind not the idea of suddenly getting a nice boost of energy, but rather that one scene in Blazing Saddles? The scene with the cowboys eating beans?

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Questions

When in doubt, I can always grope for a timewaster. Here's one I found over on Left Coast Dementia. (I'm writing this on Thursday night, for posting on Friday. Why not post it Thursday night? Hell, I dunno.)

1 :: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:

"We forget nothing."

2 :: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?

A cup of pens and pencils.

3 :: What is the last thing you watched on DVD? On actual TV?

On DVD: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
On actual TV: ER.

4 :: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what time it is:

11:02 pm

5 :: Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?

11:01 pm (I'm writing this just as the late night news is starting, so this is a bit of a cheat.)

6 :: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

The TV, tuned to a rerun of Friends. The fridge, although the compressors shut off a minute ago. Nothing else.

7 :: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

About 5:15 this afternoon, to walk the kid while she rode her bike.

8 :: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?

I'm confused by this question: is it referring to the site from which I got the quiz? If so, I followed a link from my own blog.

9 :: What are you wearing?

Red henley shirt, blue overalls, black socks.

10 :: Did you dream last night?

Probably. I don't often remember dreams for very long. I do remember them, but they fade really quickly.

11 :: When did you last laugh?

I don't recall. I laugh a lot, though. I value zaniness.

12 :: What is on the walls of the room you are in?

A Star Wars Episode I poster, a National Geographic world map, a Casablanca poster, one of those reproductions of the world map from the Age of Exploration, a shelf with some knickknacks on it, a Celtic cross tapestry, a couple sets of the kid's portraits. Oh, and a wall sconce with candle.

13 :: Seen anything weird lately?

Well, there was the woman who approached me at The Store today to ask me if I could direct her to a store employee. (My work shirt has a big-ass Store logo embroidered on the right breast.)

14 :: What do you think of this quiz?

Kinda weird. But my head is slowly filling with mucus. The brain cells in steerage are screaming for their lives.

15 :: What is the last film you saw?

In the theater? The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I am currently watching, over several nights, that remake of Battlestar Galactica that was on the SciFi channel a few months ago. I don't know if that constitutes a "film", or if its "in progress" state renders inactive the past-tense "saw". (See how weird my brain gets when I'm nursing a cold?)

16 :: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?

A home in East Aurora, New York. (One of Buffalo's outlying suburbs – in fact, it might not even be proper to call it a suburb at all – and a very lovely town.)

17 :: Tell me something about you that I don't know:

I like Culture Club. That's a true guilty pleasure.

18 :: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?

I'd flip a coin between education for every person on Earth (including music and art, dammit!), or exempting the Buffalo Bills from the NFL salary cap. I'd probably do that first thing, but you know, the Bills....

19 :: Do you like to dance?

No, although I've always wanted to learn Irish stepdancing. (Yes, I bought all those RiverDance and Lord of the Dance videos. And I like 'em. Bite me.)

20 :: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or someone who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?

Both, which is what really scares me.

21a :: Imagine your first child is a girl; what do you call her?

"Haley", which is pretty convenient since that's what we did call her. I like it when things work out that way.

21b :: Imagine your first child is a boy; what do you call him?

"Aragorn". Good thing she was a girl.

22 :: Would you ever consider living abroad?

If it would be for a set amount of time – say, a year or two – maybe. But not permanently. Things would have to get pretty damned horrible here for me to ever want to leave. The United States is my country, and it is my home.

(This must be a fast-spreading meme: Lynn Sislo and PZ Myers also reply, independent of my discovering the quiz. Dr. Myers actually answers two quizzes; this is the second one. I'm not touching that first one he answers!)

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Uh, Kevin? I don't think you want to drink THAT Kool-aid.

I never thought I'd see the day when I completely and totally disagreed with a Kevin Drum post, but hey, sooner or later everything happens. (Not the idea of videotaping interrogations, but the idea of ditching the Fifth Amendment. Yipes.)

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A surgeon and a doc, above it all....

Well, just when I thought ER couldn't annoy me any more than they did when they killed off Dr. Romano, they topped themselves by killing off Sandy, Dr. Weaver's lesbian wife. Now, this time out, it's not like they killed off my favorite character (which was the case with Romano) – Sandy was a minor recurring character – but it had a "been there, done that" feeling, in a couple of ways. First of all, the manner of the death seemed too reminiscent of a remarkable second season episode that also involved the death of a firefighter; secondly, it all turns out to be set-up for a custody battle. Sandy had borne a child via in vitro fertilization; the episode ends with Kerry basically being shoved out the door by Sandy's family, now that they've swiped the kid on the basis that they are the blood relatives. Sigh. (And given how ER's writers totally muffed, in my opinion, the show's last custody battle, I'm not optimistic.)

I don't know -- ER has really decided to wallow in pathos this year, and there's no sign of any turning away from this trend any time in the future.

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Ugh....

OK, now I have a cold settling into my head.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

This probably explains my general sense of lethargy the last couple of days. Maybe I'll post more stuff tomorrow, but if the damned cold flares into full-fledged nasal ickiness, I'll start the hiatus early.

Keep checking, folks, and apologies.

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It's Official

This blog's reason for existence is May 19, 2005.

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Now THERE's a guy with the right attitude!

Terry Teachout relates the reaction of this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, and it's great. Someday I'll win something. Maybe.

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Uh, sure.

I really have no comment on this, except to note that I wonder why it is that I apparently don't live in the same world as some other folks.

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LGF?

Does "LGF" stand for "Little Green Footballs", or "Land of Gutless Fraidy-cats"?

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PBS: it's got some good stuff.

I watched a couple of nifty PBS shows over the last couple of nights. The first one was, admittedly, another in the long line of "rehashing the amazing work of Robert Ballard" shows that are always on PBS or Discovery; this one was called "Lost Liners" and was about, well, lost ocean liners. The show culminated, of course, in Ballard's discovery of the Titanic wreck site, and there was the usual synopsis of the ship's final hours, intercut with interviews with survivors (usually elderly people who were children at the time, and who remember hugging their fathers for the last time) and footage of the expedition that found the ship. It's all very familiar, but I'm damned if the whole thing still isn't incredibly fascinating.

The other show I watched was simply amazing. It was about a project, sponsored by a Minnesota church and abbey, to produce the first fully hand-written, illuminated Bible in centuries. I did a little web digging and found this site devoted to the project. This show was captivating on several levels. First, there was the simple focus on the craftsmanship of the project. The vellum parchment has to be treated and prepared before it is ready to be written on, for example; and as a longtime advocate of the fountain pen, I was enchanted by the calligrapher's description of how goosefeather quills are prepared. We have an image on men writing with these large, poofy feathers, courtesy Hollywood, but this turns out to not be the case: the plumage is largely trimmed away, the "tip" has to be hardened by being soaked and then treated with sand, and then it has to be extensively trimmed with a blade to form a nib with which to write. No less fascinating was the preparation of inks, which are also hand-made.

More than this focus on craftsmanship -- itself invaluable, as scholars have little knowledge of the methods used by medieval scribes -- was the artistry in servitude to spiritualism. The calligrapher isn't simply trying to update the Book of Kells, but create a twenty-first century work of art. One of his illuminations includes a tiny homage to the World Trade Center, and modern typefaces and coloring effects are put to extensive use:



There was a particularly striking device illustrating the genealogy of Jesus, in the shape of a menorah. One of the goals was to depict the Bible in a "multicultural" context, which struck me as an interesting choice given the state of the world today.

The show was simply titled "The Illuminated Bible". Check your listings; if it's on in your neck of the woods, don't miss it.

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Sorry....

No, I didn't start my hiatus early; I've just been very tired the last couple of days and haven't had much of anything to say. It happens. I'd hoped to avoid it happening until I went on hiatus -- the point of a hiatus being to help keep these things from happening -- but there it is.

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Andrew Cory answers the five questions I posed to him a couple of months ago. (Start here and move backward.) One of my questions proved unanswerable, so he punted and ranked the Captains from Star Trek. Personally, I'd put Kirk second, but that's just me. Picard's pretty cool, although he tends to talk too much. I always thought that Picard needed to be a little more liberal with the phasers. Benjamin Sisko, though, most certainly does kick ass.

He also reviews a film version of I Claudius, which only adds to my conviction that this is a book I really need to read one of these days. Like so many others, alas….

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Food: I Like It.

There's a small discussion between Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum regarding food likes and dislikes. Matthew, it seems, likes everything whereas Kevin doesn't like much at all. Here are some random thoughts of mine:

:: I love meat. Meat rules. Grilled, fried, broiled, roasted – meat rules. Chicken, steak, turkey, pork -- meat rules. (I haven't had lamb too often, but I liked it.)

:: In terms of vegetables, I like a fairly small number of them. I love just about all the salad vegetables – lettuces, endives, spinaches, et cetera. Mostly I prefer them in their raw form, with dressing (balsamic vinaigrette, yum). I can't eat cooked spinach by itself, but cooked spinach as an ingredient in something is nice.

:: I've loosened up on tomatoes. I used to hate them in their raw form, but now I like them on sandwiches and burgers. I cannot, however, simply eat tomato slices by themselves.

:: Potatoes: fry 'em, roast 'em, or cube 'em and stick 'em in a stew. Just don't give me those sliced potatoes covered in cheese, and I do not like mashed potatoes, either. (What's weird about mashed potatoes is that I always think a pile of them with a pool of gravy on top looks incredibly yummy, but then I taste them and realize I still hate them.)

:: Other veggies I like include corn, just about all varieties of onions (except red and pearl), carrots (again, raw, not cooked by themselves, although cooked-as-ingredient is fine) and all manner of Chinese and oriental vegetables like bok choy. The Chinese know how to cook vegetables without turning them into mushy ickiness. I do not like asparagus, turnips, artichokes, rutabagas, or parsnips, although to be fair, it has been so many years since I tasted a parsnip that my tastes may well have changed.

:: Special mention must be made here of broccoli. This is, bar none, the most disgusting food item on this planet. I cannot even abide the smell of this stuff cooking. Incidentally, the only episode of The Family Guy that I ever really liked involved that little megalomaniacal baby declaring his lifelong enmity against broccoli. I don't care if broccoli is the most healthy foodstuff in existence. It is a hateful, vile weed that is unfit for human consumption. As Dr. Hibbard said in an episode of The Simpsons, "It tries to warn you with its awful taste!"

:: I love spicy food and I always have, although in more recent years I've downgraded the "heat" factor in favor of flavor. I do, though, still occasionally enjoy the sensation of burning taste buds and a sweaty brow.

:: I have a sweet-tooth that is almost all-inclusive. The only candy that immediately leaps to mind that I don't like are those marshmallow Peeps. Those are gross. Chocolate rules – although I seem to be in the tiny minority that prefers both dark and white chocolate to milk chocolate. I love coconut. Ice cream is, to me, the best argument for the existence of God.

:: Beverages: I love coffee, which I doctor with quite a bit of sugar and brew fairly strong. (Turkish proverb: "Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as Death, and sweet as Love.") I enjoy green tea with honey and quite a few herbal blends, although I'm not as much a tea drinker these days. I enjoy apple cider in the fall (cold only; I don't like it heated), I drink Diet Pepsi each and every day, and I also dig grape soda every so often (about twice a year).

:: Alcohol: Beer, preferably red, and wine, also red. I adore Port. I flirted very briefly with Jack Daniels in college, but I quickly gave that up. My flirtation with tequila was even shorter, consisting of a single night and two shots. (No, I wasn't drunk on two shots. I had two and decided that I just didn't like the flavor. But then, I didn't do that lick-salt-from-your-wrist ritual, either.) Rum-and-Coke is nice on occasion, but I haven't done this in several years.

:: Popcorn rules. So does pizza. There's a lot of great pizza in Buffalo. My favorite toppings are Italian sausage and green peppers, but basic pepperoni pizza is also nice. It's a sign of my devotion to pizza that I worked at Pizza Hut for four years and never got tired of the food. (Don't ask about my waistline at the time.)

:: I also drink a lot of water. This is essential, and I feel icky if I don't.

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A paid writer, at work.

(CAUTION: I get a little political here. Move on if my occasional descents into such territory annoy you.)

In the course of a "grab bag" post, John Scalzi says this about the Iraq War:

"Look, I know that the people in the White House can never, ever say that the real reason we went into Iraq was because Saddam tried to put the hit on Dubya's dad. But can the rest of us just stop pretending it was anything more than that? Please? And remember, I supported going into Iraq (on the grounds that Saddam was about 12 years past his expiration date), so I don't think I can just be written off as another liberal whiner on this point. I supported our president's decision to go to war on Iraq. I had absolutely no illusions as to why he decided to do it. Indeed, I submit that had 9/11 never happened, we'd still have had tanks trundling through Baghdad one way or another -- because Dubya would have found a way to make it happen. It was personal. Saddam was dead meat as soon as the Supreme Court gave Dubya the keys to the White House."

That fits my position almost exactly. I mean, almost exactly.

A friend of mine who is considerably more liberal than I (!) remarked to me when Bush was sworn in, "How long before we're at war with Iraq again?" I confess that my answer was, "Probably not that long, I imagine."

My whole wishy-washy position on invading Iraq was always that I thought it was probably the right thing to do, and Bush thought it was the right thing to do, but my reason for thinking so wasn't the same as Bush's. (And I do not buy for one second that Bush himself bought into the whole "We need to remake the Arab world" thesis, since he never said that. And if he did believe it, then I think he's a pretty craven leader for never once trying to make his real case.)

That's why I was nervous before the war and why I'm nervous now: two people may agree on what to do, but if they disagree on why, sooner or later some pretty big gaps will open up between them. If you have two different chess players each facing an identical board, and they each move the same knight to the same square, but one justifies it on the basis that it will allow a line of attack for his rook and bishop, while the other justifies it on the basis that he really likes horsies, well, one shouldn't expect the two games to reach the same result in the end.

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Spring forward?

You are now reading this post an hour later than you would have previously. Or an hour earlier. Or at the same time, in which case you're either late for work or missing This Week With David Brinkley George Stephanopolous. Hell, I can't figure it out.

I do know that I can't stand Daylight Saving Time. I like sunshine and all, but I also believe that at 8:30 at night, it should be dark out, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.

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Questionable Ideology, serviced by Abominable Writing

Via a pretty convoluted series of links (Anne Zook to David Neiwert) I see this 'essay' by one 'Kaye Grogan', which proposes that "Unfounded accusations against Presidents should be a felony". One does wonder what the effects of this might have been had it been law in, oh, 1993 or later, but never mind. Instead I'm drawn to this paragraph:

"The Democratic party have probably written their own obituary, by not taking the bull by the horns and laying out a concrete plan to entice voters. Raising taxes have about run their course, and as someone brought out. . . pro-life Democrats are dwindling away. They are dwindling away about like an ice cube in 600 degree temperatures in Hades. Since the biggest majority of Americans are pro-life, this is and should be a disastrous platform for Democrats. Won’t they ever learn? Apparently not."

Consider that. Not the same old idiotic idea that Democrats would win if they'd only be like Republicans (one imagines a Republican Henry Higgins, singing "Why can't a Democrat be more like a Republican?"), but just consider the appalling grammar here. That should read "The Democratic Party has probably written its own obituary"; "Raising taxes has about run its course"; and "Since the majority of Americans are pro-life…". (Why use the adjective "biggest"? Is there more than one majority?)

The rest of the article is similarly ghastly. According to the author's bio, Ms. Grogan is a freelance writer with a body of published work. One can only assume she's a valued customer of PublishAmerica, or that somebody out there is so desperate for a hack conservative who comes cheap that they shelled out a few nickels for Ms. Grogan's horrible prose.

One can only hope. If this woman is making a living from writing like this, I may just have to open a vein or two.

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I dreamed a dream, in time gone by....

As might be evidenced by the most recent MOB! post, I'm in the middle of one of my quarterly obsessions with Les Miserables. I've never read the book, and I've never seen the Broadway show, but I'm damned if I haven't been in love with the music for well over ten years now. At least four times a year, I go through a week where my CD of the entire show (that concert version they did at the anniversary some years ago, with the all-star cast and the encore in which the guys who sang the role of Jean Valjean in all the various international productions perform "Do You Hear the People Sing?") comprises my only music listening. I don't know what the deal is -- I'm not even sure I could recite the entire story of the show, but I have never stopped loving the music.

I've been continually frustrated over the years that the touring production of Les Miz always seems to arrive in Buffalo when I'm either unavailable or unable to afford tickets. Now that I'm working, though, maybe I'll catch the next one. (It was here last week.) I will see this damn thing, someday.

(BTW, if any of my readers has seen the show, is the "One Day More" number as spectacular as I always think it has to be, given the way it sounds on the CD? I mean, on disc, that number is a friggin' barnburner!)

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Whole-y Moses!

Tonight is ABC's annual broadcast of The Ten Commandments, to which I always tune in for twenty minutes just to laugh at the display of pretentious windbaggery. (No, not the same twenty minutes. I just randomly flip to it at some point.) I mean, really – what a pompous ass of a movie this is! And its traditional airing at Easter-time has always baffled me, as I noted last year on this occasion:

"I'm not the most astute person when it comes to matters of Christian doctrine, but I'm pretty sure that Easter is a holiday/festival that's pretty Jesus-centric. You know, the whole crucifiction/burial/resurrection thing. So why is it that each year at Easter-time, ABC televises The Ten Commandments which is about Moses and the Exodus and has nothing at all to do with Jesus? I know that the Biblical epics that specifically deal with Jesus -- The Greatest Story Ever Told, King of Kings -- aren't particularly well-known these days, outside of film music geek circles. But there is a classic costume epic that, while not specifically about Jesus, at least is set in and around the events of his life. That would be Ben-Hur, which is helpfully subtitled "A Tale of the Christ", stars Charlton Heston, and is frankly a much better movie than the lugubrious overacted monument to pomposity that is The Ten Commandments.

So come on, ABC. Next year, ditch Moses and let's have Judah Ben-Hur."

Really, why is this the traditional Easter movie? It's like if they honored Gene Roddenberry's birthday by screening Star Wars.

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I'm afraid it has to be this way, Mr. Bond.

Gregory Harris is one of the finer people I've encountered since I emigrated into Blogistan. He's of the same political stripe as myself, and he and I share a lot of cultural tastes. Plus, he's an all-around good guy.

Which makes it all that more of a shame that, after looking out my window this morning to see three inches of fresh snow and then reading this post of his, I'm going to have to kill him.

(Well, OK, he earns a reprieve by linking this, just one post down from the offending entry. I'll allow him to live after all. But I may still dispatch a thousand seagulls to cover his car in bird-poo.)

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There's a hole in our galaxy!

Radio astronomers are making a lot of progress in studying the center of the Milky Way lately, gaining their best measurements yet of the forces at the center of our galaxy -- forces that are driven by a black hole with a mas equal to four million Suns and a diameter of 14,000,000 miles. (That white dot in the picture, made by the Very Large Array, signifies the location of the black hole.)

Radio astronomy is essential to studying the galactic core because the region is so shrouded by dust that visible-light telescopes, like Mount Palomar or the Hubble Space Telescope, can't see into it. But radio telescopy has other difficulties to overcome: radiation emissions from the core are heavily distorted by all the forces at play there, so the task is compared to "trying to spot a yellow rubber duck through the frosted glass of a shower stall".

The amount of knowledge about our universe that can be gleaned from tiny wisps of data collected on the surface of our backwater planet, and the care with which that data is organized into knowledge of the cosmos by scientists, never ceases to astound me.

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How many feathers has Big Bird shed?

Surfing around MSN this morning, I see that Sesame Street is 35. Of course it's a staple in our home, what with a four-year-old present. (I wish they'd make some new episodes, but I've been largely spared since I started working at The Store.)

I think it would be funny if they did a cross between Sesame Street and West Side Story. Maybe there could be a rival street named for a spice -- say, Coriander Avenue -- with its own set of Muppets who do stylized musical battle with the crew from Sesame Street. Maybe it's just my warped imagination, but a death-match between Elmo and Fozzy Bear sounds pretty funny to me.

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Talk about type-casting!

Fans of Japanese cinema, especially samurai and gangster movies, may enjoy this profile of Japanese actor Seizo Fukumoto, who apparently has died onscreen more then twenty thousand times. Goodness, that's a lot of dying. I wonder if people recognize him on the street and ask him to "die" on the spot, kind of like how people would approach DeForest Kelley and ask him to say "He's dead, Jim".

Fukumoto's most high-profile role, apparently, was in last year's The Last Samurai, in which he does, in fact, die. (I haven't seen the movie, but the article spoils it.) Come to think of it, I wonder if South Park's Kenny is a small tip-of-the-hat to this man? I know that the South Park creators are well-steeped in an astonishing amount of pop-culture. Anyone know?

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Friday Saturday Weekly Burst of Weirdness

The Burst of Weirdness is also a Burst of Goodness: Warren Ellis is having another "Hack the Filthy Monkey" game. He starts with this picture, the slogan of which is the wonderful "The filthy monkey, it plans". Then he solicits people to Photoshop it and alter it and do whatever with it. Great stuff ensues. Start here and go down. (Or up, depending on whether he posts more by the time I post this.)

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We Need Answers!

It seems to me that modern science has not done nearly enough research into what I call the "Women Make That Look Good" Phenomenon. I've long noticed that in any work environment in which employees are required to wear a uniform, the women of that operation always look better in that uniform than the men. This is no less true at The Store. The main uniform is this white dress-shirt that's kind-of tuxedo style, with a short, stiff, rounded collar. The women of the store, for the most part, look great in this shirt. The men, though, look like...guys in white dress shirts. There's got to be a Ph.D. thesis in this for some enterprising scientist!

(In fact, I'd generally say that women almost always look better in men's clothes than men do. The only exception? Neckties. I can't stand neckties on women, and whenever I see a woman wearing a dress shirt with a necktie, I'm reminded of that line of Harrison Ford's from Working Girl: "You're the first woman I've seen at one of these things who dressed like a woman, not how a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.")

(Oh, and the necktie thing only applies to standard neckties, not bow-ties. I have no opinion on cravats, as I have never seen a woman wearing one.)

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Request granted

Well, I'm not really sure on the particulars, but since I've asked people for Google-bombs myself (Buffalo blog!), I figure I should help William Burton out with his. So, Asus tech support.

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Uh, sure, James.

Speaking of Mulan in the MOB! post below, I see that over on MovieWave, James Southall has put up a review of Jerry Goldsmith's score to that film. Southall is a decent enough writer, if you're looking for a film music review site, but in the course of reviewing every Jerry Goldsmith score in existence (in conjunction with the composer's seventy-fifth birthday two months ago) he has proven so over-the-top in love with nearly every note to emerge from the pen of Jerry Goldsmith that for me it has totally compromised the usefulness of his site. His Mulan review provides yet another example of this kind of thing, when in the course of lamenting the small amount of Goldsmith's music present on the original Disney Records CD release, Southall writes this:

"Unfortunately, the score is given scant time to prove itself on the album, with just 25 minutes of running time in addition to an orchestral suite of the song melodies; this is particularly unfortunate given that it's probably the finest score ever written for an animated movie." [Emphasis added.]

Mulan is a perfectly nice film score. Good melodies, solid 90s-era Goldsmith action music (although, frankly, 90s-era Goldsmith action music tends to all sound the same to me). But the finest score ever written for an animated film? Give me a giant, colossal break here. Just off the top of my head, I can name a bunch of animated films that boast scores that are superior to Mulan's.

Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away -- in fact, any Joe Hisaishi-scored Hayao Miyazaki film has a better score than Mulan. Among Disney movies, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Bambi and The Rescuers Down Under all boast better scores than Mulan. (To be fair, these scores are generally more integrated with their songs than Mulan is, but that is part of their strength, especially in the case of Peter Pan, which is a score of such charming complexity that its CD never fails to delight me.) Atlantis and Dinosaur both had really good James Newton Howard scores, and both are better than Mulan's.

How about the brilliant Pixar movies? Randy Newman's work on the two Toy Story films is outstanding, and Thomas Newman's score to Finding Nemo most definitely outpaces Mulan.

Among non-Disney animated films, The Prince of Egypt has an excellent score by Hans Zimmer, who actually can write good music when he's not outsourcing his own duties. Michael Kamen's score to The Iron Giant is one of the high-points of that man's career (sadly cut short last year by the Damned Grim Reaper). The much-derided Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings has a score by Leonard Rosenman that is generally very highly praised by film music lovers (although, admittedly, I have never warmed to it). And then there's the great Carl Stalling: pick just about any of the many five-minute Looney Tunes cartoons for which he provided his wonderful pastiches of classical repertoire, and you'll hear music superior to what Jerry Goldsmith did for Mulan.

I've read MovieWave for years, and I knew Southall when we were both regulars on rec.music.movies. For me, he started going around the bend when he posted a rather mean-spirited review of Howard Shore's score to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a review in which he relentlessly complains about other people liking Shore's work more than he does (at one point, calling such people "masturbatory"). And he's thrown out similar digs in more recent writings, such as his more recent review of the score to Legend, again by Goldsmith: "A more recent trilogy of film scores that go with hobbits and elves does not even approach the ambition or scope of Goldsmith's Legend." This statement is so deeply at odds with what I hear in the LOTR scores that I'm not sure the gap can even be bridged; and besides, few things irritate me more than when someone adopts the "Here I am, the Voice of Reason which you are so fortunate to have!" kind of tone.

I've mentioned before, in passing, the fetishizing of Jerry Goldsmith's music among filmscore fans. (Just go look at the FilmScoreMonthly message boards these days. One would almost think that a requirement of the shipping process for Varese Sarabande's recent limited-edition Goldsmith CD box set was that people buying it have to post a message to the FSM board upon delivery of the set.) Southall is one of the biggest, loudest voices in the Goldsmith cheering section, which is fine, but he seems to think his voice should drown out all others, which is not. Especially if he's going to take others to task for "masturbatory praise" in one review and then pronounce Mulan, a score which I think unlikely to be remembered in future years except by die-hard Disney or film music fans, "the finest score ever written for an animated film" in another.

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Move Over Britney!

It's that time again! A Woman Whose Voice Makes Britney's Sound Like the Death-Screams of a Thousand Drowning Sewer Rats, the wonderful Broadway star, and native Filipino, Lea Salonga.



I don't have a link to a gallery, because there don't appear to be too many Lea Salonga pictures out there, and no outright galleries that I could find. (If this picture was larger, I would have used that one.) Ms. Salonga has appeared in Les Miz, Miss Saigon and the recent revival of Flower Drum Song; she has also done singing work in films. I first heard her as the singing voice of Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, and she was also the singing voice of Mulan in Mulan.

Labels: ROWR

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

"First Rays of Light Illuminating the Youghiogheny".

The Youghiogheny River starts in Maryland and flows north, into Pennsylvania, where eventually it empties into the Monongahela River, which in turn joins the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The Youghiogheny flows through some remote wilderness country, and it boasts a good number of rapids that have made it a very popular river in the northeast to whitewater boaters (kayakers, canoeists, and annoying people in rafts).

The river's most distinctive feature comes at the town of Ohipyle, PA. Here, the river bends sharply and then sharply again, making a feature called "The Loop":



In this short stretch of river are four or five individual rapids, and it is common practice for boaters to "put in" at the top of The Loop, "take out" at the bottom, and then hike back to the start and do it all over again.

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Your Thursday Harbinger of Doom

Terry Teachout tells a NYC cabbie to take him to Carnegie Hall, and the cabbie doesn't know how to get there.

Now, maybe he's new to the area. Terry might have questioned him: "Do you know how to get to Madison Square Garden? LaGuardia? Grand Central Station? Lincoln Center? The Hello Deli?" Maybe he doesn't know crap about Manhattan. Maybe he was just filling in. Maybe he was one of the Apprentice contestants on a future challenge.

Maybe.

A little hope here, folks.

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Music -- some good, some, not so much.

A couple of good posts over at Reflections in D-minor (well, they're all good posts over there). First, she has a couple of Rachmaninov clips available (but only for a day or two). I adore Rachmaninov, and strongly recommend the recordings of his symphonies with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. If you can only get one of the symphonies, get the #2 in E-minor, which for my money is one of the greatest symphonic works of all time. Andre Previn's recordings of the symphonies are also pretty good. For the piano concertos, I'd go with Previn's recordings -- with Ashkenazy playing the piano. And look for the tone poems, such as Isle of the Dead and The Bells.

(It'll also help in listening to Rachmaninov if you familiarize yourself with the Dies Irae chant, which fascinated him. He quotes it in many of his works.)

Also, if you have any interest in the music of Antonio Vivaldi, Lynn has a few ideas there, too. I confess that I simply can't stand Vivaldi -- The Four Seasons drives me mad, and there was some Mass or something I had to play in college that I likewise detested. But then, the whole Baroque thing does very little for me; even Bach is a struggle most of the time.

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That does it.

My mind's made up: I will no longer be using BlogRolling. The service hasn't been responding at all today, which is the third day in the last two weeks this has happened. I'm tired of it, and the service didn't benefit me that much to begin with. As soon as I can actually access my blogroll again, I'm migrating the links to hand-coded HTML on the template.

So sayeth the Keeper of This Blog.

(Who said blog administrativia was boring? Well, yeah, it is.)

(UPDATE: God, trying to hit my daily reads is a pain-in-the-ass without the blogroll. I find myself thinking, "Now, what was Lynn Sislo's URL again? OK, I think I have the first three letters, let's see if IE can fill in the rest....ah, there it is!")

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Frustrations of a Grocery Store Clean-up Guy

In general, as most of my regular readers should know, I'm happy as a rat in liverwurst in my current job, bottom-of-the-ladder though it may be. But today put my enjoyment of the job to a serious test, because today (April 1, of all days) was when the New York State Health Inspector showed up. Not only do all the managers immediately shift into full-blown panic mode. "She can shut us down!" Well, yeah, she can, but not just on a whim. She's not going to "shut us down" because the oven hood is slightly dustier than we'd prefer. She'd shut us down because, oh, someone is defecating on the cutting table in the deli.

And who, do you think, received a dozen different calls for incredibly picky cleaning tasks? None other than your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger.

It was all highly tense and annoying, particularly with my name being called over the PA system so many times, but the tasks themselves were pretty minor. If that was the level of detail to which the Inspector had to delve to find stuff to criticize, then our operation is pretty clean, indeed.

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