Uh, Oliver?

It ain't gonna happen. Time to move on to something more productive.

In George We Trust!

No, not that George. I'm talking about George Lucas. I watched last night's interview with him on 60 Minutes, and as ever, he's a fascinating man. And if he is, as Drew Vogel calls him, "a washed-up hack", well -- I hope that when I am a washed-up hack I'm as successful as George Lucas, with his multimedia empire. Of course, I don't admit for one second that Lucas is a washed-up hack, but that's neither here nor there.

("Washed-up hack" seems a bit strong, in any case. You may not like his recent films, but "washed-up hack" seems like a phrase one might apply to, say, David Lee Roth or Piers Anthony, not a man who continues to be a filmmaking giant.)

Lucas spoke a bit about the strong possibility that Revenge of the Sith may draw a PG-13 rating, and that it may be too strong for children. I plan to see it first, before I make any attempt to take The Daughter to see it. (I wanted to take her to Attack of the Clones, when she was three, but the execution scene at the end pretty much ixnayed that idea.) She has seen all of the Lord of the Rings movies, but only on video, at home. While her favorite scene is the fight with the Balrog at the beginning of The Two Towers, I doubt she'd have the same opinion had she seen that on the big screen. Ditto the encounter with Shelob.

Also in the same interview, Lucas himself insisted that Episode VII will not happen and the cinematic Star Wars saga will end with the release of Revenge of the Sith. (Strangely, no mention was made at all of persistent rumors that a post-Episode III Star Wars television series is in development. I can't believe Leslie Stahl didn't ask Lucas about that.)

Now, as luck would have it, just last week in comments to this post of mine, Jayme Lynn Blaschke had this to say:

Supposedly last Star Wars movie ever. Lucas changes his mind like other people change underwear. I'll not completely write off 7, 8 and 9 until he's pushing up the daisies.

What Jayme is referring to is that back in the day, the Star Wars saga was always referred to as being nine films, not six -- although George Lucas has maintained in more recent interviews (and by "more recent" I mean, in the last ten years or so) that his real original idea was just to do six films. So I did a bit of research last night, looking into my incredibly-frayed copy of the book Once Upon an Empire: The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, which is basically an on-set diary kept by the unit publicist of The Empire Strikes Back. The book also includes interviews with just about every major person involved with making the film -- including George Lucas. And toward the end of the book, I find this exchange (on page 247, for anyone who owns a copy of the book):

AA [Alan Arnold, the book's author]: Tell me more about the overall concept of the Star Wars saga.

GL [George Lucas]: There are essentially nine films in three trilogies. The first trilogy is about the young Ben Kenobi and the early life of Luke's father, when Luke was a little boy. This trilogy takes place some twenty years before the second trilogy which includes Star Wars and Empire. About a year or two passes between each story in a trilogy and about twenty years pass between the trilogies. The entire saga spans about 55 years.

So there we have it: there were supposed to be nine films originally, so Lucas is wrong when he says he always intended just six.

Or, so we would have it, if the interview ended there. The very next exchange goes as follows:

AA: How much is written?

GL: I have story treatments on all nine. I also have voluminous notes, histories, and other material I've developed for various purposes. Some of it will be used, some not. Originally, when I wrote Star Wars, it developed into an epic on the scale of War and Peace, so big I couldn't possibly make it into a movie. So I cut it in half, but it was still too big, so I cut each half into three parts. I then had material for six movies. After the success of Star Wars I added another trilogy but stopped there, primarily because reality took over. After all, it takes three years to prepare and make a Star Wars picture. How many years are left? So I'm still left with three trilogies of nine films. At two hours each, that's about eighteen hours of film!

So, there we have it. Yes, there were once ideas for a total of nine Star Wars films, but when Lucas maintains that his original, core idea for Star Wars involved six films, he's telling the truth. Or at least, he's sticking to the story he's been telling since 1979, when this interview was conducted. His original story, the one which he wrote first and with which he is still emotionally invested, constituted six films. The seventh, eighth and ninth episodes were basically "afterthought".

Narratives in the News

One thing I've noticed over the last ten years or so is the growing need in the news media to come up with some kind of "Title" under which to categorize coverage of every major news story: "America, Under Attack!" was all over the place after 9-11; then it became "America Strikes Back!" when we attacked Afghanistan. I remember that I worked in an office during the first couple years of the Clinton Administration where we were subjected to Rush Limbaugh every day, and every hour led off with this deep-voiced guy saying "America -- Under Siege!"

Well, today at The Store I caught a bit of FOX News's continuing coverage of the Atlanta courthouse shootings and the heroic hostage who managed to get away and turn the guy in, and all through the coverage, FOX ran the tagline at the bottom of the screen: "Justice Under Attack". And I'm thinking, "Oh, come on."

That guy wasn't "attacking justice" just because he killed a judge and a deputy and a court reporter; he was a violent criminal committing a violent act in a bid for escape. That was it. Horrible, yes; an attack on an abstract concept, no. So why did FOX need that stupid tagline?

Oh, so CLOSE....

Longtime readers will remember that last summer, my long quest for my favorite, and elusive, candy bar came to an end when I found the Boyer Peanut Butter Smoothie, an all-peanut butter peanut butter cup, on sale at Vidler's in East Aurora. (Side note to my Buffalo readers: Vidler's is a freaking treasure. You must go there. Why that place isn't front-and-center on all of the Buffalo-Niagara region tourist literature is beyond me.)

Well, I'm at 7-11 this afternoon buying drinks for me and the kid (evil, thy name is "IBC Root Beer on tap at 7-11"), and I spied something nifty-looking: the fine people at Reese's, who have been doing variations on their classic Peanut Butter Cup for several years now (White Chocolate cups, Inside-Out cups, Big Cups, et cetera) now have a "Peanut Butter Lover's" limited edition out. Did I buy them? Oh, you bet.

And is it as good as the Boyer Peanut Butter Smoothie? Oh, it's so damned close...but no.

It's a really good item. I plan to fill my fridge with the things. But no, they're not replacing the Boyer delicacy, because Reese's just couldn't get beyond the idea that there had to be chocolate in this thing, somewhere -- so the bottom and sides of the cup are chocolate. There's the same peanut butter filling, and the "lid" of the cup is a peanut-butter shell, but there's still chocolate there. It's almost like someone at Reese's chickened out -- "It can't be all peanut butter! Who'd buy that!" -- and so, well, it looks like the small candy company from Altoona is still the king of Peanut Butter Cup World, as far as I am concerned.

(Sadly, Reese's is running a promotion where you vote for either the Peanut Butter Lover's cup, or the "Chocolate Lover's cup", which I have not tried -- I love chocolate, but what's the point of that thing?? -- and the Peanut Butter Lover's cup is getting its ass kicked as of this writing, 75-25%. Come on, America! Chocolate is wonderful stuff, but there are other candy flavors out there, awaiting your discovery!)

Liberatopia, revisited

Alan, the BuffaloPundit has been looking into the background of James Ostrowski, a guy who is trying to launch what he calls a "grassroots" campaign amongst Buffalo citizens to...well, I'm not sure what, exactly, beyond gutting government and slashing taxes to the absolute lowest level possible. He feels that the group in question, FreeBuffalo, more looks like a group pushing Libertarianism wherever it can than a group pushing what's best for Buffalo. As he said in this post:

The other thing that bugs me about Ostrowski and his group is what I perceive to be an underlying hostility; it's not love of Buffalo that's bringing them together, but hatred of taxes and politicians.

I hope that's not it, but from what little I've read, that seems to be about the right of it. I make no secret that I've never much grokked Libertarianism, because I quite frankly never feel like Libertarians really see all of the stuff in the real world that adds up to, you know, the real world. At least, not the ones who actually go whole-hog and identify themselves as Libertarians. Now, I think that libertarianism is a useful impulse for judging what we want government to be doing, but as a full-fledged approach to governance, it just doesn't do it for me.

So, if FreeBuffalo is really a group pushing for a Libertarian Buffalo, count me out, please.

(Oh, look: Ostrowski lists the ten worst US Presidents. I'm not sure I want to follow the political beliefs of a man who would make such a list and give spots 2, 3, and 4 to Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Harry Truman, respectively. I seriously doubt that I'm going to reach the same political conclusions as such a person.)

(Supplemental Burst of Weirdness)

Apparently Kim has managed to annoy some people with her opinions, one of which is that Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series is way too longwinded and dull. That last seems like less an opinion than a statement of verifiable fact to me (I count myself among the extremely lucky ones, having given up on Jordan a hundred pages into the second book), but there are people out there in the world who genuinely still await each thousand-page tome in Jordan's series with drooling anticipation.

But what's truly eye-popping, in this case, is the nature of the complaint on Kim's blog in the first place:

I think half of you are talking crap. Robert Jordan is my favourite book series ever! Sick of the wheel of time, if you think WoT is the only book to have similar ideas to another book then get your thumb out of your ass because EVERY book has similar ideas to other books. You mightn't of read them so how do you know? And if WoT is a LoTR like you claim, which it isn't, I prefer it this way. LoTR is the shittest book I ever read. I didn't like the book, drawn out to long...Movies ok though. Anyway you can't have read all the books yet, or up to book 8. Moiraine dies in book 5, gandalf doesn't die. If anyway is like gandolf it's cadsuane. if thats how you spell it. and to Shai'tan being another name for devil or evil or wateva, everybook that mentions evil is just copying of satan by ur veiw

(That is cut-and-pasted directly, by the way; I have made no effort to correct spelling or punctuation.)

It's pretty much pure difference of opinion here, which is fine as that goes, except that here we have a die-hard fan of The Wheel of Time claiming that The Lord of the Rings, which in its entirety is less than one-third the length of WoT as it stands right now (in its still uncompleted state), is "drawn out too long".

This reminds me of the episode of Friends when a love-sick, lonely Ross shacks up with Janice, the ultra-annoying former girlfriend of Chandler's who popped up at inopportune moments throughout the series's run. Ross has become so whiney that Janice dumps him, at which point Ross suddenly snaps back to reality when he says to her, "I've become so bad that...I annoy you. Oh. My. God."

(I know that this reference is meaningless to non-Friends fans, but it's the best I got right now.)

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

It's been a long time since I cited Warren Ellis in my "Burst of Weirdness" series, since -- well, it's kind of like when in my high school gym class, we were playing "Touch Football", with the school's starting varsity quarterback on one of the teams, so of course the other (mine, of course) kept getting clobbered until the gym teacher amended the rules that that QB was the only one who could get tackled. (Not that it helped. We still got clobbered. But it was fun getting to take free shots at the guy. I very nearly nailed him myself, but for a wicked block in the back that I now know should have drawn a fifteen-yard penalty.)

What I'm saying is that Warren Ellis is basically a one-stop weirdness shop, and I could fuel the Sunday Burst of Weirdness until the End of Time just by citing stuff he links. But sometimes, there's something that I just gotta link.

Like this record cover.

I demand that the contents of this album be reissued on CD, with instruction booklet and supplemental DVD!

What this town needs is a big concrete bridge!

Lynn Sislo found this aerial photography site, where I discovered in the New York State section this aerial image of downtown Buffalo, which starkly lays out the big problem the city has to overcome in terms of changing its infrastructure to minimize past errors and develop things the way we now know they should have done all along.

At the photo's center is downtown Buffalo proper, with One HSBC Center, the city's tallest building, towering over our minor-league baseball stadium. That oval-shaped building near the bottom, with the silver roof, is HSBC Arena, which was built eight or nine years ago with the promise that a new arena would spur all kinds of development on that end of Buffalo. Well, look at the photo. There's no development happening there.

Off the left is the city's waterfront, where the Buffalo River flows into the extreme end of Lake Erie (which just beyond empties into the Niagara River). That's the "Inner Waterfront", actually, and there's nothing doing down there. That bit of land over on the extreme left shows where the "Outer Waterfront" is -- it's the part of Buffalo's waterfront that sits right on Lake Erie, as opposed to the Buffalo River -- and there's very little happening down there, too. (Although there are some bizarrely huge plans in place.)

But notice one big thing about the city of Buffalo: downtown is very close to the waterfront, but on all sides facing the water, downtown Buffalo is hemmed in by elevated freeways. For reasons passing understanding, at some point years ago the powers-that-be in Buffalo decided that cutting downtown off from the water by erecting giant virtual barriers of concrete was a good idea, and now the city is brainstorming ways to fix this colossal error.

See that white-roofed building, just to the north of HSBC Arena? That's the old Memorial Auditorium (former home of the Sabres and other events), which is now slated to be gutted and turned into a Bass Pro Outdoor World store. The building is literally a stone's throw from not one but two elevated freeways, on two of its four sides. The higher of the two freeways, the one that runs southward past the HSBC Arena, is the Buffalo Skyway, which is one of the oddest roadways I've ever encountered. I actually love the drive up and over the Skyway; there's a wonderful moment on that road when you come around the Aud and all of Buffalo is right in front of you and for a split second it feels like you're flying (if you're driving fast enough). But a moment like that is high price to pay for such a giant concrete eyesore cutting off downtown from the waterfront, as well as casting under concrete shadow what should be the city's finest district.

We've got a lot of challenges here. Let's hope we're up to them.

"We shall double our efforts!"

Via John Scalzi I see that you can now get a LEGO kit of the second Death Star. How cool is that!

However, I have to note that between the LEGO-laser firing and the stand that supports this Death Star, the whole item reminds me more of Mike Wazowski than it does the lethal battle station from Return of the Jedi.

Passages

It's reported here that SF author Andre Norton is near death:

"She is losing the battle with her illness and is tired of fighting," wrote Sue Stewart on a Norton message board. "I made the decision late yesterday evening to bring her back home to be with us, her cat and her books when she departs.

Damn. At least we'll always have Norton's body of work -- which, since she was prolific and lived to 93, is quite a large body of work indeed. I need to read more of it, that's for sure.

Domestication, in progress

Three items of interest to home-bodies:

1. Tonight I made a favorite recipe of mine, Black bean and Beef Stew. This time, instead of using two pounds of ground beef, I used a little more than a pound of cut-up steak which I floured and browned, and made up the difference in meat bulk with thinly-sliced andouille sausage. And, to go with it, I made a loaf of beer bread, from the recipe in Emeril Lagasse's newest cookbook. (Yeah, I love Emeril. Deal with it. BAM!)

2. John Scalzi links the perfect recipe for roasted chicken. I'd try it, but I'm lazy: when I get a hankering for roasted chicken, I buy one for $4.99 at The Store. (But they're not organic. Oh well. Shoot my food up with chemicals, says I.) But there is a whole chicken in my freezer, so maybe I'll give this a shot.

3. I don't usually think of Snopes.com as a resource for home-ec type stuff, but this tip is right on: removing the layer of lint from the dryer's lint-trap isn't enough. You actually need to wash the thing.

OK, enough for now. I need to go hammer up some drywall or something.

Ten questions -- do I hear fifteen?

I now have two sets of five questions to answer. Anyone else want to ask me five questions, or have me ask you five questions?

Meanwhile, on the shores of Onondaga Lake....

I meant to link this two weeks ago, but I forgot. Since Buffalo and Erie County are in the midst of continued economic disaster (although there are hopeful signs for downtown Buffalo -- let's hear it for those "culturals"!), more cheerful economic news can be found in Syracuse, where the gigando-normous DestinyUSA project continues to grind merrily along. The big news is that a pre-Destiny project, a high-tech research center that will be necessary to develop the technologies that will make Destiny possible, has signed its first tenants:

Four technology companies will relocate here in the next few months - and will be the first tenants for Destiny USA's 1-million-square-foot research and development building to be constructed in Salina.

Yup, you read that right: companies relocating to Upstate New York. The initial forecast for employment by these companies? Eight hundred jobs in two years.

While we in Buffalo are finally becoming aware that there's water all over the place, Syracuse is busy sticking its finger in the dike.

(Yes, I'm still skeptical about locating the world's biggest mall/resort/casino/hotel complex/sports complex/spaceport in Syracuse, but hey, if they're getting ready to actually bring companies in to the area and hire people, I'll put my skepticism on the back burner.)

Stop this meme before it kills again!

No link, since I've seen it all over the place lately -- actually, I've always seen this all over the place: it's the statement, usually made when someone claims that people in Profession X or Business Y or Avocation Z are not paid enough, that if they want to make more, they should just quit and go get a job where they're paid more. This is complete nonsense, and it is basically meaningless -- it's just a different way of saying "Oh, shut up".

Changing jobs isn't like changing brands of Raisin-Bran, and it's not a simple thing like it is to stop buying Kellogg's and get Post instead.

(That said, it's simply a fact that not every job is going to get paid what it might morally deserve. What's morally desirable and economically possible are often two different things. Take it from a guy who thinks that the person cleaning the grocery store bathroom should be making $19.00 an hour, but who knows he'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, if he voiced that opinion.)

Whew....(from a thousand miles away)

I'm glad to see that the man who [allegedly] shot four people, killing three, in an Atlanta courtroom yesterday has been captured. These events kept unfolding on FOX News yesterday, which I saw on the TV in the cafe at The Store, every time I walked through to sweep or change the garbages. It boggled my mind that security in a courthouse in one of the nation's largest cities could be so lax as to allow a criminal to wrest a firearm away from a deputy, and then allow him to escape after killing three people. But then, I don't have a whole lot of experience with city courthouses, so maybe it really is easier than I would suspect to do just that.

So let's make it harder, folks -- especially if the criminal in question, I read yesterday, has a history of sneaking weapons into his court appearances.

(BTW, I do not believe in capital punishment. But things like this really put that conviction to the test. I hate to admit this, but there really are times when I believe "We shouldn't execute that criminal" with all the conviction that I apply to my belief that "We shouldn't eat our dessert first".)

"Way to go, Kenobi."

I've just finished watching the trailer for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for the twelfth time, and I'm still wiping drool from the floor. Lord, this is going to be a good movie. It probably goes without saying that I can't wait.

Looking at the few bits shown in the trailer, it appears that what drives Anakin's fall to the Dark Side is not just his fear and anger but also his desire for power. The trailer depicts Chancellor Palpatine telling Anakin that the Dark Side can give him abilities "that some would call unnatural", with Anakin responding "Can I learn this power?" Later, Anakin is visibly angered when the Jedi Council refuses to grant him the title "Master". (Which gives a nice spin to the line in A New Hope, when Darth Vader tells Ben Kenobi, "Now I am the Master.")

We can already look back to The Phantom Menace for traits in Anakin's character that lead him to the Dark Side -- chiefly, his pride in his being the only human who can steer a pod-racer. He's already a kid who wants power, who craves uncommon ability. And that's before he ever falls in love with Padme.

All of which goes to show that George Lucas knows what he's doing, at the basic story level. But of course, we can't give him credit for that, in this era in which "Dialogue is everything".

(BTW, a commenter in this thread at Kevin Drum's blog dredges up one of the most eye-rollingly stupid criticisms of the Star Wars prequels that continually arises: "Why is Lucas telling us this story, when we know how it ends!" What twaddle. Does anyone complain about Mel Gibson making a movie about Jesus, when we already know the end of the story? The fact that we knew that the boat sinks didn't seem to dissuade people from flocking to see Titanic. The idea that stories are only worth telling if we don't know the ending beforehand doesn't stand up to the tiniest bit of scrutiny.)

Geeks Ahoy!

The new and official poster for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has been released; it can be viewed alongside its brethren posters, each designed by Drew Struzan, here.

I've seen some criticism of the new poster on grounds like the Vader helmet being off-center and the lighting on the faces being weird and the like. But it seems to me that the new poster cleverly emulates a few design quirks of the very first Star Wars poster ever, the one painted back in 1977 by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I place them side-by-side below:

The off-set Vader helmet provides a bookend of sorts to the offset Vader helmet, facing the opposite direction, in the original poster, and the "starburst" surrounding the clashing lightsabers in the Revenge of the Sith poster echoes the "starburst" in Luke's lightsaber in the Hildebrandt poster. Also, the light pattern in those clashing lightsabers forms a circle, with a second, offset circle in the upper half, suggesting the Death Star.

So, it seems to me, the poster for the last ever Star Wars movie at least partially hints at that classic first-ever poster for the first-ever Star Wars movie. Very cool.

(I squashed the Episode III poster a little to get the images to line up correctly.)

Perceptive Children

Darth Swank's five-year-old daughter knows a thing or two about jazz.

Three Doofuses and a Sexy Drummer

I'm not sure if that was a rejected name for their band or not, but Aaron was a member of a band called 44, or Forty-Four, or Phorty-Phour, or Forety-Fore!, or some variant thereof. Pfourty-Pfour was a destined for legendary status in the Minneapolis independent music scene, but then a series of mishaps ensued -- one bandmember fell in love with a French actress and flew off to Paris to track her down, and he hasn't been heard from since; another attempted re-enacting Robert Pirsig's journey from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but this time on a motorized unicycle (the trip didn't come to a good end); one of the band's concerts ended in controversy after some confusion in the design specs resulted in a stage prop only being two-feet high instead of twenty feet (which made it look even worse when a dwarf came on stage to dance around it); another show ended in a fire breaking out on the stage when one of 44's amps couldn't handle its jury-rigged "Setting #12"; and the final straw came when the band's bass player slept with the drummer, resulting in a child (surprisingly, a legitimate child, since the bass player had previously married the drummer in a burst of astonishing foresight).

Anyway, to make a long story short, 44 only managed to record a single album before suffering a fate not unlike that which befell The Wonders in That Thing You Do!. But what an album it is -- lyrics of penetrating insight into the human condition, mingling love sentiments that are by turns wistful and searing with turns of phrase that allude to political troubles in Ireland, Canada, and Okinawa; guitar work that reminds one of the bastard love child of Andres Segovia and Edward Van Halen; and a hidden track wherein each band member solos with the Minnesota Orchestra. (It's a very hidden track. Only one CD player in 10,000 is capable of rendering it.)

And now you can hear that album. It's called Free Land Wall, and it's the last album by a once-rising but now-defunct Minneapolis bar band you'll ever need.

UPDATE: In comments, Aaron points out that he was only the bass player on a couple of tracks. So be it. And another band member points out some things the bandmates have been up to since they stopped making music together. I do think that Dan errs when he says that my identifying 44 as "a defunct band" implies that the bandmates have hung up their axes and dutifully reported for duty at various Twin Cities-area temp agencies and jobs behind the counters at Kinko's. I think everyone knows that just because a band breaks up doesn't mean the individuals from that band stop making music. Look at the Beatles. Not even Yoko could get those guys to shut up.

(And no, I'm not comparing Krista to Yoko. Not even close. Krista's way hotter than Yoko.)

Five questions?

So, no sooner do I say that "Gee, I'd like to see a round of the 'Five Questions' game start up again" than I see a round of the 'Five Questions' game start up again, here and here. So, anybody wanna ask me five questions? They can be hypotheticals, or anything you've ever wondered about Your Humble Narrator (within reason). Go for it, folks!

UPDATE: One taker, in comments. Any others? (Yes, this is mainly a shameless ploy to grab some easy blogging topics.)