:: I kind of wish I liked the sound of handbell choirs more than I do (generally, my attention flags after just a couple of minutes of handbells), because to watch a good handbell choir is always fascinating. It looks easy enough -- it's just a bunch of people ringing bells -- but they have to ring the right bells at the right time, so if their timing is off, the entire tune will falter. This gets more impressive the more complicated the music is. In college we had a handbell choir that did religious music exclusively, but I generally find handbells more fun to hear if they're doing something offbeat, such as...the Main Theme to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies!
:: For baseball fans, it's always worth remembering what an entertaining jerk Rickey Henderson was:
In the early 1980s, the Oakland A’s accounting department was freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house.
Actually, messing with the heads of accountants is always good fun, so I can't hold this one against Rickey. And I always found something admirable about the fact that Henderson wanted to play so badly that toward the end he was playing semi-pro ball. After all, to paraphrase Annie Savoy, you gotta respect a ballplayer just tryin' to finish out the season.
:: OK, time for a little Star Trek bitching. At the risk of sounding like a deranged fan, this interview with one of the producers of the new movie -- via AICN -- presents what has got to be the laziest excuse for the movie cheerfully ignoring established canon that could possibly be cooked up. I would actually respect them more if they just said "We wanna start over with the same characters and do our own thing and screw your canon, so how do ya like that", but instead we get a whole bunch of goofy babble about how quantum physics establishes that there are infinite possible timelines, so they're just in a brand new timeline! Oh, come on. This is just dumb. Maybe we should use quantum physics to generate a timeline where we could finally see if an Imperial Star Destroyer could take out the Enterprise.
More next week.
1 comment:
Re: the Star Trek thing, I'm with you. I had the same thought when I ran across mention of this interview elsewhere: if you guys are going to remake a piece of classic pop culture, then have the balls to actually remake it! Just start over from square one a la Casino Royale. All this nonsense about parallel universes, etc., is probably meant to be a sop to the continuity-obsessed hyperfans, but it makes things needlessly complicated and will ultimately lead to more fan bitching than it would have if they'd just said "all you knew is gone." The one thing the Next Gen got right in its early seasons was minimizing references to the original and trying to find its own identity. This movie ought to be doing the same -- and the fact that they've got this time-travel/parallel universe storyline and Nimoy on board is a pretty good sign that Abrams and Co. are not real secure about what they're doing.
Besides, when did Star Trek become Time Trek? Seems like the franchise has become more and more about time travel as we've gone along, doesn't it? I'm bored of time travel and would prefer something about, you know, exploring strange new worlds instead of endless permutations of the franchise's own history...
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