How to Tell if you're Freaking Tired At Work

Here's a sign that by the end of the week, with five consecutive nights of six or fewer hours of sleep (due to staying up late to feed Quinn and then get up early the next day for work), the mind isn't at its usual peak of sharpness.

Today there was company at The Store: the current patriarch of the family whom The Store is named visited, along with (I think) his wife and a couple of district managers. At one point during the visit, our own district manager turned and specifically greeted me by name, which impressed me immensely because this was, as far as I can recall, the first time the man has ever addressed me at all. (Not that he's mean or aloof or anything; I'm just one face in a very large organization.)

So when I went to one of the other store managers and had the following conversation:

ME: Wow, the DM just greeted me by name! I had no idea that he even knew who I was.

MANAGER DUDE: You're wearing a nametag.

(beat)

ME: Oh. Well that explains that, then.

Shortly thereafter I went to the coffee bar and had a frozen cappucino drink with a double shot of espresso. Because, you know, you can't be too careful.

How to look "Presidential"

In comments to this post, Lynn Sislo expresses frustration that her recent post on the "Presidential look" came and went with nary a bit of notice. So I checked the post out, and I have to plead "mea culpa", since I didn't notice the post either. I mean, I literally did not notice this post. And Lynn's blog, Reflections in D-minor, is not just one of my daily reads but one of my "check several times each day" blogs. Hmmmm.

Anyhow, in Lynn's post she ruminates a bit on what it means to "look Presidential", in the sense of that weird formulation of "Do you want this guy in your living room for the next four years?" I confess, I've always found this slightly odd, as if the President of the United States is something like that blond doofus who was OJ Simpson's permanent houseguest. I suppose that the "Presidential look" implies something of gravitas, some manner of seriousness or of import. But even then, it's hard to decide what is "Presidential" and what is not.

Of course, the "Presidential look" has become far more important in the TV age than it used to be. Just imagine, if you will, the electoral bloodbath that would result if either the present-day Democrats or Republicans nominated a guy who looked like this. That guy would never even get out of the Iowa caucuses today. We seem to have dueling instincts when it comes to our Presidents: on the one hand, we seem to want a guy who looks and acts with consummate dignity, where on the other hand we want a guy who "we'd like in our living room". But quite frankly, as I look over the portraits of our Presidents, there are damned few of them that I'd want to hang out with in my living room. Clinton, sure. Reagan, probably. Carter, Ford, JFK, Eisenhower, Truman. I wouldn't want either Bush in my living room. And Nixon? Fuhgeddaboudit.

(In fact, The Simpsons did a hilarious episode about this "President as neighbor" stuff, in which former President Bush -- Bush the Elder -- moves in next door to the Simpsons, and then moves away after a feud with Homer. The episode's punchline comes when Gerald Ford moves in to the now-vacant house and invites Homer over for "beer and nachos". And the two men trip and fall, shouting "D'oh!" in unison.)

And besides, we get used to our Presidents, don't we? I'm used to seeing Bush in his shirtsleeves -- so much so, in fact, that I almost think his suits look "off the rack" from JC Penney -- and I suspect that if he wins, I'll get used to John Kerry's abnormally long teeth. Of course, we don't get used to everything, and it's probably a good thing that some adviser or some such wise soul told Bill Clinton to ditch the too-short running shorts. One reason I resisted watching The West Wing when it first began, in 1999, was that I didn't think I could buy Martin Sheen as a President. Luckily, I got over that fairly shortly.

In fact, there's something: what about fictional Presidents? Which TV or movie Presidents are the most "Presidential"? I think that Michael Douglas's Andrew Shepherd in The American President is very Presidential; ditto Martin Sheen and Dennis Haysbert in 24. Morgan Freeman was a terrific President in Deep Impace; Bill Pullman in Independence Day, though, looked too small. Harrison Ford also looked too small to me as a President in Air Force One. By "small", I mean, lacking that sense of seriousness. But then, part of that could, in each case, be blamed on the movie as opposed to the actor.

Lynn also wonders if the American president should look "American". Well, I don't know what that means. I look American, don't I? But I'm reasonably certain I don't look "Presidential". Heck, I dunno. But it bugs me a bit that the Presidency has become less about policy and more about "looking the part".

Will they have a book exploring the "theory" that a lumberjack with a big blue ox carved it out, too?

Fenster Moop, one of the More Than Two Blowhards, reports that in order to mollify Creationists, the United States Parks Service is selling a Creationist account of the Grand Canyon's formation and "the Grand Canyon National Park no longer offers an official estimate of the age of the Canyon". Stuff like this embarrasses me.

(Of course, I'm flummoxed by Fenster's political stance, summarized as "Better Pat Robertson than Michael Moore". Wow-za!)

Answers, we got answers....

Here's the first answer to a question posed in response to my "soliciting questions and/or topics" post (to which replies are still allowed!). Lynn Sislo basically wants to know if I've ever written something here that I really liked and hoped would be seen and linked around Blogistan, but that received no attention at all. I suspect that this happens to just about anyone who blogs both regularly and for quite a while, but there have been two instances that stand out for me. Both were multiple posts organized around a certain theme.

First is the "Star Trek Redux" series of posts, in which I reviewed each Star Trek film. This I did as a follow-up, several months later, to the "James Bond Redux" series, which actually did gain some attention, back in the day: my traffic went from something like fifteen hits a day to forty. The Star Trek posts, though, seem to have been noticed by utterly no one.

The second case was even more disappointing. I really hoped that the posts I wrote last December 11, in honor of Hector Berlioz's two-hundredth birthday, would be noticed a bit by some of the "cultural" bloggers, but these posts received no attention either (aside from that day's usual traffic-levels). So yeah, that was especially disappointing, since Berlioz does constitute a very personal topic for me. I put a lot of energy into those, but the only external link they received, if memory serves, came via a message inside a MeFi thread.

(These posts are linked in the sidebar, by the way, under "Notable Dispatches".)

Of course, Lynn notes in her comment that she's basically whining, so I have to wonder if she has a post of her own in the recent past that she hoped would lead to attention and did not. Lynn?

OK, there's one question down. Any others, folks? Anything you want me to blab on about incessantly, or anything you want to know about Your Humble Narrator? Leave 'em in comments to either this post or this one!

Oh, Will. Will, Will, Will....

I love Will Duquette's blog, The View from the Foothills, and even though I don't agree with him on everything, Will strikes me as being a pretty fine individual. But in a post yesterday he wrote something that makes me wonder if he's even from the same planet I am:

I'm not a foodie, and I'm terribly afraid that culinarily New Orleans is wasted on me.

Wow! That's like traveling to, oh, Venice and looking for a Holiday Inn.

EDIT: The link above now actually links something. Oops.

Ponchos?

Matthew Yglesias hates ponchos. Well, OK then, but I like 'em just fine. Of course, my own fashion sense is probably suspect, but frankly, I'm only too happy if we're finally starting to trend away from the "show as much flesh as we can get away with" style of female dress.

Comics as Literature

Michael Lopez has some thoughts about a teacher who is using comics to teach literature.

Basically, I have no problem with this. Why not? The best comics can teach a lot about the use of irony in storytelling, about plot structure, about literary allusion, about character development, about setting, about conflict, and so on. These are all literary concerns. Of course, care has to be taken that the comics chosen are worthy in themselves, and not just "Cliff's Notes" in comics form. But then, I'm not terribly worried about the latter: the article mentions the worry that a graphic novel version of The Odyssey may replace the real thing, but I certainly never read the real thing in high school or college; in fact, I didn't read The Odyssey until a year ago, when I just decided to up and read The Iliad and its sequel. My only school-based exposure to Homer came in seventh grade, when we read some kind of abridgement or some such thing. It wasn't the same as reading Homer, obviously, but when I read The Odyssey last year I was struck by how much of it I recalled from that seventh grade abridgement.

As for graphic novel "adaptations" of other famous works, well -- graphic novels and comics simply represent another medium for storytelling, not a replacement for it. I can see using a comics version of Hamlet in tandem with reading the original, in much the same way that schools use films of the plays as teaching aids. The view of comics as "dumbed down" reading is just plain stupid, and the education professor quoted in the news article should be stripped of her academic credentials for even thinking such a thing. Comics represent an entirely different artistic experience. I am sick, sick sick unto death of the idea that one artistic medium is just a "dumbed down" version of another or that one entire area of expression is somehow inherently inferior to another.

There's also the bizarre complaint that somehow, using comics to reach students who are especially resistant to reading constitutes a betrayal of the egalitarian nature of public education. Well, to me, public school should be egalitarian in that it should be available to everyone, and that it should allow everyone to succeed (i.e., learn) to the best of his or her own ability. It does not mean that every student should come out knowing exactly the same amount of stuff or have been exposed to an identical regimen of material. This is why there are honors classes in the first place. (Although, as always, I am reminded that it can err the other way, too. I was in an honors class that read Ordinary People; the same year, the "regular classes" read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ruminate on that for a while.)

Finally, a general thought on teaching literature. I'm no expert, obviously, nor have I ever attempted to teach literature, so this is just armchair theorizing (hmmmm, "armchair theorizing" seems a pretty good definition of "blogging"), but it continues to strike me that in many subjects in school -- mathematics, the sciences, languages -- one starts with something fairly easy and then works up to the harder stuff as one proceeds through the semester, the school year, and one's academic career. We don't teach calculus to high school students who haven't had a lick of algebra; likewise, chemistry classes don't start with balancing complex organic equations or diagramming molecules before they cover what a covalent bond is. But here we are, taking 14-year-olds and expecting them to be able to not just understand Shakespeare, but to actually love his work. This has always bugged me. Now, it doesn't seem to me that the solution is to "dumb down" the classics for the younger readers, or to avoid them entirely, but to redesign things from the curriculum standpoint so kids are building up to reading Shakespeare, not just jumping right in with him because he comes before some other people chronologically.

So maybe I'd suggest starting ninth grade English classes with a graphic novel or two, using them to introduce literary concepts, and then working in highly regarded, but less demanding, material, gradually working backward through the literary landscape. I'm certainly not suggesting that we abandon the "dead white guys"; I firmly believe that they have to be studied. And maybe using graphic novels actually isn't the best way to start teaching this stuff, but the fact that the approach even exists seems to me to be an indictment of sorts of the way we're doing it now.

Holding pattern today....

Probably not much for posting today, because I'm tired and I have a few other things on the plate that need to be cleared away. But for now, don't forget that I'm soliciting questions for me to answer or stuff to post about, as a kind-of low-effort content generating strategy. Leave your queries in comments to this post, or in comments to this one. (This doesn't have to be "topic suggestions", btw -- I'll even field personal questions, if they're not too invasive. Basically, I'm trying to step "outside my box" slightly.)

I'll take care of two queries from the earlier post right now, since their questions are easily answered:

Scott wants to know if I've heard anything about the soundtrack to the film Friday Night Lights, the current drama about high school football in Texas. I actually do want to see this film, but I haven't heard a thing at all about the soundtrack. The reason is fairly obvious, reading Scott's comment: it's apparently by a rock band, and for film music freaks, it's generally the case that any film music not performed and recorded by an orchestra is completely ignored. It kind of bugs me about the fandom, but there it is.

Also, Jess Nevins wants to know what Guy Gavriel Kay's most recent novel is like, since I never reviewed the book in this space. The reason for this, though, is that I reviewed the book over at Green Man Review. More detail is available there. It's a very good book -- not Lions of Al-Rassan good, but it's right up there with A Song for Arbonne and The Sarantine Mosaic.

So...any questions? Anyone? Bueller?

I'm kind of being lazy on the content this week -- you can tell, what with all the photos and such -- so I figure I'll just open it up to the Loyal Readers (both of you). Got any questions? Leave them in comments and I'll answer them, to the best of my ability. (Requests that I give a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that a layman could understand will fall on deaf ears, for instance.)

So, is there anything anyone wants to know, or failing that, see me babble about?

Random Stupid Observations

This post is exactly what the title says....

:: I don't care if the Beach Boys recorded it; "Kokomo" is not an "oldie", and does not belong on oldies stations.

:: How is it possible that Mountain Dew now apparently comes in something like six different flavors, and not one of them is a color that occurs anywhere in nature?

:: Is English steak sauce really that good? Not a week goes by at The Store that at least two people don't ask me where the English steak sauce is, and not A-1, dammit!

:: I used to like buying trade paperback books because the paper was generally thicker and nicer than the wood-pulp paper in the typical mass-market paperback. So when did TPBs start coming in that crappier paper?

:: Scrubs is the best damn show on TV. Really. Tonight's episode -- a necessity because John Ritter played John Dorian's dad on the show -- was hilarious, touching, and just plain brilliant.

Lava -- isn't that a bar soap?

Mt. St. Helens has formed a new lava dome.



I remember how, back in 1980 when the mountain erupted last time, my classmates and I watched the news footage (our teacher wheeled in a TV for the event), and we were disappointed that there was just a lot of steam and eventually what looked like a pile of rubble that was the "lava dome". Well, when you're a kid, you think of a volcano erupting and you picture hellish scenes of white-hot liquid rock blasting into the air in great gouts and then flowing down the sides of the mountain. You don't think of steam and ash. It was slightly disappointing, in a way -- until May 18, that is, when the mountain showed just how destructive steam and ash could be.

(BTW, in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, Ernst Stavro Blofeld sets up camp inside an extinct volcano. But at the end of the movie, when Bond blows up the SPECTRE base, the film has long shots of lava flowing from the mountaintop! Ugh!)

(Also BTW, why doesn't Irish Spring bar soap still have commercials on TV? Those ads always had the most beautiful Irish red-headed women.)

Decency, on display.

Actually, there's no decency at all. Digby has some quotes from Free Republic posters about Christopher Reeve's death. Here's one of their threads. Yeesh.

UPDATE: PZ Myers also reacts to the Freepers.

Renaissance Art and Italy

If you have any interest at all in the topic of Renaissance art and its flowering in Italy, go read this post by Friedrich Blowhard. The subject itself is fascinating, and I agree with Friedrich that a lot of art history tends to treat art as if it exists in some parallel universe, somehow separate from "the real world". It used to bug me when music history texts would include a paragraph or two along the lines of "Here's what was going on when Mozart lived: the French and Indian Wars, followed by the American Revolution, followed by the beginnings of the French Revolution...now let's talk about Mozart's Minuet for Six Pianos and a Flute in C, K742."

Nice looking kid, but who's the goofy looking guy?

Here's what little Quinn looked like yesterday, in the arms of some guy who claims to be his daddy.



Now I can't help thinking of that exchange from the first Naked Gun movie, in which Frank Drebbin (Leslie Nielsen) tells his Captain something like "Congrats on your wife being pregnant again," and the Captain (George Kennedy) responds, "Yes, and when I catch the guy who did it--!"

Any printer geniuses out there?

Are there any tech wizards out there familiar with HP printers? I have a Deskjet 694C that we bought way back in 1997, but which has held up through many adventures, drafts of stories and the Damned Novel, copies of my Star Wars fanfic, and the like. I've had problems with the rollers grabbing on to the paper for several years now, but that's been a workable problem as long as I keep the rollers clean and occasionally hand-feed the paper.

But now, what's happening is this: as soon as the paper is drawn into the printer, the printer immediately ceases functioning: the error light flashes, and nothing ever actually prints. I've tried deleting the printer and reloading the driver software, which has had no effect. I have had problems with the current print cartridge occasionally; could that be gumming up the works at all?

Or could it be -- gasp! -- time to get a new printer entirely?

Billzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......

In the NFL's AFC Eastern Division, there are two teams that haven't lost a game and two that haven't won one. The Buffalo Bills, bless 'em, are in the latter category. A bad start is about to officially become a bad season, and there's the real possibility that the Bills' first-round draft pick next year will be a high one, maybe even in the top five. That would be the only silver lining to a disastrous season, if not for the fact that General Manager Tom Donahoe traded that pick to Dallas last year so he could take JP Losman. Ouch.

The Bills lost another close game yesterday to the undefeated Jets (and man, did my fingers just now rebel against the act of typing out "undefeated Jets"). They fell behind 13-0, but then they scored twice in the fourth quarter to take a 14-13 lead. And then their defense allowed the Jets to march calmly down the field for the game-winning field goal. Final score, 16-14. So the Bills have lost each of their first four games by an average of 5.5 points. Throw out last week's 14-point loss against the Stupid Patriots, and their average margin of defeat is just 2.7 points. It would be easy to take solace in the fact that they're losing close and hard, but it's still losing, and they're not showing signs of improving in the areas I keep harping on (offensive and defensive line).

Drew Bledsoe looked good again, making few really bad decisions, a few good ones on the fly, and completing a few big passes downfield. He threw one interception on the day, but that was when his Hail Mary heave-ho pass on the game's final play was caught by a Jet, so I don't really count that. On Hail Mary's, there's basically no way for a quarterback to control any aspect of who catches the ball, so if I had my way, INTs on Hail Mary's shouldn't even be counted against a quarterback's stats.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the Bills played, on the road, against an unbeaten team, with some significant injuries knocking out starters like Lawyer Milloy. But it was still too little, too late.

As for the rest of the league, some observations:

:: God, can we stop with the comparisons of the StuPats to the 1972 Miami Dolphins? That team posted a 17-0 record for an entire season. If the StuPats pull that off, fine, but this babbling about their streak over two seasons is annoying. I mean, before the Pats took their streak to 19 games, how many people even knew that the old record was 18 games? How many knew who held that record, or tied it last? Great teams are measured by championships. If the StuPats win another Super Bowl this year or next year, then maybe they can be considered a dynasty. But not until then. (And quite frankly, I don't think the current StuPats are remotely as good as some other great single season teams I've seen, like the 1991 Redskins or 1993 Cowboys or 1994 49ers. They're the best in the NFL right now, but I don't think they look as good as some of those teams.)

:: Now that it's October, and enough games have been played that the standings are starting to be meaningful, it's time to compare my preseason predictions to reality. Here are the current standings, with my division picks in perentheses:

AFC East: TIE -- NY Jets, Stupid Patriots (Stupid Patriots)
AFC North: Steelers (Bengals)
AFC South: Colts (Titans)
AFC West: Broncos (Broncos)

NFC East: Eagles (Eagles)
NFC North: TIE -- Lions, Vikings (Vikings)
NFC South: Falcons (Panthers)
NFC West: Seahawks (Seahawks)

So, thus far five of the teams I picked to win divisions are actually leading their divisions. Yay, me! But I seem to have been not only wrong, but disastrously wrong in the other three cases: not only are none of those teams leading their divisions, but all three currently stand with records of 1-3, and two are at the bottom of their divisions (with the Panthers avoiding the cellar by virtue of the Buccaneers' 1-4 record). But I did pick the Colts to be a wildcard, so that one's turning out well; ditto the Ravens, who are at 3-2 and are in the thick of whatever race exists right now. In the NFC, I took the Cowboys and Redskins to be playoff material as well. Neither seems particularly good, with Dallas at 2-2 and the Redskins at 1-4.

(I know that the two divisions that I list as tied aren't really tied, since the NFL's tie breakers have the Jets over the StuPats, for example. But for my purposes, identical won-loss records are a tie.)

Next week brings the Dolphins to Buffalo, so one of the AFC East's winless teams will notch up win number one. I suspect it will be the Bills, but you never know.

He finally flew again....

Kal-El, Richard Collier...Christopher Reeve. Alas.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK and BURST OF WEIRDNESS

(Combining two regular features this week into a single post of pictorial weirdness.)



I saw this picture over on City Comforts. I have no idea what this building is or what purpose it serves, but I'm surprised that given its location -- Vancouver, BC -- this building never showed up on an episode of The X-Files.

More Buffalo Blogs

Perusing City Comforts the other day, I chanced upon a Buffalo-based blog titled, appropriately enough, BUFFALOg. I've added it to the section of the sidebar devoted exclusively to Buffalo-based blogs, even though a quick perusal of the content there leads me to believe that I agree with BUFFALOg's writer very rarely. Ah well, it's still Buffalo!

(Just as long as there's no confusion over just what the real Buffalo blog is. Never shall I concede!)

Sadly, the leader of the French archaeological team was looking in the wrong place....

Somehow I failed to take notice that John Hardy, the resident Master of Esoterica over at Laputan Logic, is posting again, with a bit of redesign that makes his blog a bit more readable. If you like nifty, offbeat stuff, this is the blog for you. Go there and check it out...

...and in particular, note a jaw-dropping news item that I had no idea had transpired until I read it on John's blog first: archaeologists have found the palace of Genghis Khan, and they believe that his long-lost tomb may be nearby.

Genghis Khan's grave site is one of archaeology's enduring mysteries. According to legend, in order to keep it secret, his huge burial party killed anyone who saw them en route to it; then servants and soldiers who attended the funeral were massacred.

Here is the foundation of the recently-unearthed palace:



I can't help but look at this and wonder just where the "stately pleasure dome" might have stood.