Sentential Links #208

Linkage....

:: Other people are inconvenient.

:: I’m like a modern-day Medusa. (This fellow is photo-blogging his trek, on foot, all the way across America.)

:: This story has made me so damned angry and so utterly sad, I can scarcely articulate it and, at the risk of sounding maudlin, I confess that it makes me well up whenever I think about it. Maybe it's just that I'm so close to the Sixties and the Rock personalities of that time right now while I'm writing my trilogy. Maybe it's just that I loved Jimi. Maybe it's both, or maybe it's something that I haven't yet defined. I don't know.

:: Baseball is never proactive. It only changes once its shamed into changing. It took senate hearings and the threat of losing their Anti-Trust exemption to get baseball to really attack the steroid problem. A coach has to lose his life before protective helmets became mandatory. It took embarrassing replays of bad calls to get them to employ even limited instant replay. And now, especially if this horrible call stands, good luck preventing more instant replay situations from going into effect. (I have to laugh at the "If Selig overturns the call, it'll be a horrible precedent!" crowd. "Now he'll have to reverse every call! And the game will be destroyed! Won't someone please think of the children!" Nonsense, utter nonsense, all of it. The way certain baseball fans fetishize their sport and scream bloody murder if anyone wants to see it in any color other than sepia is truly mind-boggling.)

:: But here's the thing, guys. If you don't want to get tarred with the SF brush, you don't get to play with our toys, either. That means you do not get any of the following exciting action figures: monsters, immortal beings, time travel, alternate universes, glowcaves, Egyptian mythology, electromagnetic magic, insta-healing, psychic powers, Dark Lords, Lords of Light, magical touched by an angel fatecakes, teleportation, mystical islands, or bodily possession. Get your sticky hands off them--you'll only break them. Make a sitcom and shut up, if you want to howl about not being SF. Make a gritty procedural. Make Thirty-Something, I don't know. But don't make an SF show and then prance around telling everyone it's SUPER REALISTIC while trying to conceal your painful giant quantum rabbit erection. (This is the best anti-LOST rant I've seen yet. I'm not certain as to the validity of the complaints, but I do tire of creative folks who create SF stuff and then try to deny that it's SF because it's about characters as opposed to SF, which we all know is about whiz-bang stuff and no characters at all.)

:: 25 years ago this weekend, I carried a mini tape recorder into the theater with me so that I could bring The Goonies home with me. I recorded all of the audio. To this day, I swear I can recite every bit of the script while watching the DVD. (Ahhh, The Goonies. I remember my mother taking me to see that. We knew nothing about it save that it was some kind of fun adventure flick, which was right up my alley. I remember both of us watching it and suddenly realizing that it was taking place in Astoria, OR; we'd lived in WNY for four years at that point and our memories of Oregon were still pretty fresh. Later on in the movie we both chuckled when one of the kids was shown having bicycled from Astoria to Cannon Beach (you could see Haystack Rock in the background). I should watch that movie again...I've never seen it again in its entirety since that one time.)

:: Great Pickled Penguins!

All for this week!