Bad Joke Friday

Seen on Facebook and now stolen.

Visit the cartoonist's website! His name is Kaamran Hafeez. I've probably seen his work before, as he has been published in LOTS of places.

Something for Thursday

You can't go wrong with Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Tone Poem Tuesday (the Happy Birthday edition)

Happy birthday, George Gershwin!


And also, Happy Birthday, Jim Caviezel!


And Happy Birthday, Olivia Newton John!


Also, happy birthday to me, but that's not so important.

Three Years!!!

Three years and a couple of days ago, someone joined our family.


















He may be welcome to stay now. I mean, the jury's out, but I'd say that things are leaning in his favor.

Bad Joke Friday (space joke edition)

This is actually a good joke. And for a bonus, it's a two-fer!

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

I didn't know this until I saw it online today, but The Hobbit was first published 80 years ago today.

At no point have I not loved this story (except for the handful of years I was unaware of it), and I don't expect that I will ever not love it. The Hobbit and its more noted follow-up, The Lord of the Rings, are on my shortlist of the stories that have shaped me the most: we're talking Star Wars territory here, to be honest.

I knew the story of The Hobbit -- well, most of it, anyway -- several years before I actually read the book. That's because my first encounter with this story was via the Rankin-Bass animated version that first aired in 1977. I don't recall if I saw it then or on a subsequent re-run, but it didn't matter: I loved this story quite intensely, and when I read the book a few years later, I was done for.


The Hobbit is often seen as a children's tale, inessential to the greater work that followed it, but I've never viewed it that way. Reading The Hobbit is as essential to the experience as anything, and I never ever re-read The Lord of the Rings without reading The Hobbit first. There is so much in The Lord of the Rings that simply doesn't make sense, or at least has the impact blunted, if one hasn't read The Hobbit. The eagles arriving at the Black Gate; the tonal shift about halfway through Fellowship into a more heroic mode; the history behind Sting and the mithril coat.

More than that, though, the adventure story that comprises The Hobbit contrasts greatly with the world-wide import of the events to come. The focus in The Hobbit is intimate, and the focus never wavers from this little hobbit named Bilbo who is ensnared in events larger than he can comprehend, and his efforts to make his way in a world he doesn't understand and barely wants to. The Hobbit is an adventure story, but it's an adventure story that ends somewhat ambiguously with the treasure won but one of its seekers dead. This anticipates the moral direction of what is to come, when the fundamental quest is not to find something but rather to lose something that is already found.

And it is, really, one hell of an adventure story.


Long live The Hobbit! It's been a few years since my last re-read, so...I think that I may be quite ready for another adventure!

Something for Thursday

This is weird. I never knew this song existed until the other day when I heard it as part of the soundtrack to one of The Daughter's video games. It's a peppy, zippy pop song from the 1950s...singing the praises of uranium. I am not making this up.

"Uranium Fever". As the kids say, I can't even.

On 'ownership'

In the course of a long post about Twin Peaks (of which I know nothing and cannot comment), Sheila O'Malley says this:

In today’s day and age, where every fan feels a sense of “ownership” over the thing they love – to an annoying degree – something like Twin Peaks was refreshing. Lynch/Frost knew the fan base was still there. That ground was set. But after THAT, they owed us nothing.

This is the proper attitude of artists. I realize that’s not a popular sentiment. But I am suspicious of popular sentiments, in general. More so now than ever.
I tend to agree with this. The most an artist owes is gratitude for good will offered their way, but that's about it. This sense of ownership can become deeply obnoxious when fans start to turn on their particular artist because they haven't been getting what they feel they are "owed". Of course, this goes the other way, too: the fans owe an artist not a hell of a lot beyond an honest attempt to approach and engage with their work.

I think that art is best when there is less feeling of being "owed" on both sides.

Tone Poem Tuesday

Got a spare two minutes? Give this a listen, then. It's a very short bit of tone painting, in the form of a folk dance, by Percy Grainger. Here is "Shepherd's Hey".

Something for Friday: Farewell, Cassini

The Cassini mission has ended with the space probe's final plunge into the Saturnian atmosphere. We learned a great deal from Cassini -- and we will continue to do so as more and more analysis of its data is done -- and I find it somewhat of a bright moment in a world where science itself is being deeply undervalued at precisely the time when we need good science most.

Thank you, Cassini.

Bad Joke Friday

Sky at morning, sky at night

Taken the same day:

Tone Poem Tuesday

It's increasingly clear that this feature is really "Whatever piece of one-movement classical music I want", because this isn't a tone poem but rather a selection of ballet music from an opera. Specifically, the opera is La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, and the ballet suite in question is the "Dance of the Hours". This is one of the most familiar pieces of music in the classical repertoire, mainly for having been parodied by comedian Allan Sherman in his summer camp song "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh". If you can manage to listen to the actual Ponchielli suite with fresh ears, it's really a wonderful and evocative work of classical dance music.

Sixteen years....

I wrote this story not long after the events of 9-11-01. It is not the story I would write today. How could it be? I was on the cusp of turning thirty, and at that point the scope of an attack of that magnitude was nearly impossible to process.

The City of Dead Works

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.

"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

The Secret to Maintaining Canine Happiness

Have cheese in your hand.

Symphony Saturday

Still not ready to discuss Mahler's Second yet, so meantime, we'll go back 120 years or so to Mozart. Here is his Symphony no. 29 in A major. This performance is on period instruments, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. This symphony is a short and fascinating listen. Mozart was eighteen when he wrote this, and on the cusp of his mature period. The music has lot of forward momentum, as does much of his best music, and it also blends youthful optimism with hints of the profundity that is to come in his later works.

Something for Thursday

Think Pink!


Why this? Well, I noticed a couple of years ago that my wardrobe is heavily representative of dark colors. Not all black, mind you, although I did have my all-black phase in high school like everybody (and black is a fine color anyway). But I decided I wanted to start brightening things up, slowly but surely.

Which brings me to my goal for wardrobe improvement now:

Pink!

Now, I'm not going to flood my clothes with pink, but I'm adding a few items here and there, starting with this dress shirt I found on eBay. (I rather like the banded-collar look, too.)


Hooray for pink!

(The song, by the way, is from the Fred Astaire/Audrey Hepburn film Funny Face, which I believe is the first thing in which I ever saw Ms. Hepburn. I've loved her ever since.)

On Immigration

As His Malevlonece, Mr. Trump, the President, is preparing to enforce an immigration policy that only a person who thinks that America is at its best a "Whites Only" club could love, here are my thoughts on immigration.

I believe that our nation's immigration policy should make it easier, not harder, for the peoples of the world to come here.
To work here.
To learn here.
To raise families here.
To find safety and shelter here.
To live here.
To practice their religions here.
To continue to do as immigrants have always done: enrich the country and make it wiser and better.

This I believe.

Tone Poem Tuesday

OK, this isn't a tone poem, it's a piece of film music--but it's a classic by John Williams, and as such it is as cohesive and well-constructed a piece of music as any great tone poem. In honor of having seen the movie on the big screen yesterday (the first time I've seen it in a theater since I was nine), here is the finale and end credit music to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.


Here's a blog post of mine about Close Encounters. My thoughts on this film have not appreciably changed: it's still a beautiful, magnificent film.

Bad Joke Friday

It's not wrong.