Ceci n'est pas une pipe

I glanced today at The Buffalo News, and noted that one of the two stories on the front page, and above the fold, was about Katie Couric's first night as anchor of the CBS nightly news telecast. Seeing that headline, in which a major news outlet reports as one of its most important two stories the goings-on at another major news outlet, made me think back to all those philosophy classes I took in college where we debated the metaphysical connections between a name and its object, and the relation of art to reality, a friend in those classes who loved the saying "The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon itself", and all that jazz. What's news is the identity of one of the persons whose job it now is to tell us what the news is. Whoa!

Catch a stingray by the tail....

What to say about Steve Irwin? His death was one of those half-shocking, half-not kinds of deaths, wasn't it? There's first the "Oh my God, the Crocodile Hunter died!", followed by the inevitable, "Well, given his choice of occupation, no wonder."

We used to watch his shows a bit when we had cable, but since we moved to Buffalo and abandoned cable, Irwin had pretty much fallen off our radar. He did get a bit overexposed a few years back, but I always admired his adventurous spirit and his adoration of nature: take Jacques Cousteau and make him into someone you'd want to hang out with, and you had Steve Irwin.

Death is a strange thing, though. Many people go in a normal, even "hum-drum" kind of way, but some people die in a way that does nothing but confer upon them some kind of legendary quality. If we were to all get deaths that match up somehow with our lives, then of course Steve Irwin would die at the hands of some animal in the wild. Of course Amelia Earhardt would vanish in an airplane. Of course Richard Halliburton would die in a mishap while trying to sail an authentic Chinese junk across the Pacific.

Or, taking fictional characters, of course Captain Kirk would die after defeating a bad guy in a fist fight on a remote planet.

Light-years ahead of his time!

Via Lynn Sislo, I've just read one of the most jaw-droppingly ignorant articles on science that I've ever encountered. It's so ignorant that I can only wonder just how this writer manages to get his pants on in the morning, and how he manages to type his columns given that his fingers must be in constant pain, what with the constant dragging of his knuckles across the floor. You can read the whole thing, but here are a couple of morsels to chew on:

According to Bryson, the first recorded attempt to date the creation of heaven and Earth was made in 1650, by James Ussher, archbishop of the Church of Ireland. Hardly wishy-washy, Ussher pegged the exact time and date: noon on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.

By what may be no coincidence at all, the family Bible that my grandmother inscribed to me almost three centuries after Ussher includes a time line, dating the creation of heaven and Earth in Genesis to 4004 B.C. Ussher's calculation is considered a joke in the scientific community, but seems to be gospel truth, according to standard Bibles.

Hmmmmm. None of the three Bibles I own include this timeline, probably because everyone has now realized that Ussher was full of it.

Even the Big Bang theory doesn't explain how life began because the gasses required for the Big Whatever-it-was don't include elements required to form and sustain life.

Yeah. The more complex elements were formed later on. Scientists know how this happened.

As another cosmic example, take black holes, which are formed of matter so dense that even light can't escape. That's why we can't see them, and the fact that they're invisible is the proof that they exist.

Because, of course, the only way to tell something exists is to see it.

Even though we really don't know who wrote the Bible, that gospel has stayed pretty much the same through many translations. But the gospel according to science seems to change almost every day.

Is this guy suggesting that maybe there exists a language such that, were the Gospels to be translated into that tongue, then in those translated Gospels, Jesus would escape the Crucifixion and move to Rome or something? What an absurd thing to say.

And here's the single best line from this article:

How long, exactly, is a light-year? The columns of this newspaper aren't wide enough to accommodate all the zeros required for one light-year in calendar years.

Oh, holy shit. I mean, really: Holy Shit with a Cherry On Top.

This guy's whole "argument" is basically that science is hard to understand, while religion isn't. He keeps coming back to the notion that the numbers science deals with are fantastically huge! Science is too hard for him, apparently -- but just from reading this article, his problem isn't that it's too hard for him, since anything is too hard if you don't know a thing about it.

When I was in college, there was a course called "Foundations of Science" that was required of every student. The course's intent was to simply give a very basic level of scientific literacy: what scientific method is, a bit of history and philosophy of science, a bit of simple lab work to see how experimentation is done, and so on. The course was team-taught by ten or so professors from the various science departments, and each week there would be one main lecture for everyone in the course followed by two or three meetings a week of smaller "discussion classes" that were each monitored by a single one of the professors.

I actually found the course mainly enjoyable, but a lot of my fellow students didn't like it on the "Why should we know about this" grounds, and I even heard that one professor who was teaching the course actually said to her students, "I don't like this course because there's no reason why you kids should have to know the philosophy of science. It has nothing to do with your lives or the careers you'll be pursuing, unless you're going to be scientists."

I couldn't believe that a professor of science would say such a thing. It has long scared the hell out of me that our scientific literacy is sinking at a time when our civilization is becoming more and more dependent on science to function. At the very least, a scientifically-literate populace wouldn't elect a bunch of creationists to a state school board, as Kansas did.

It scares me to think that people can know so little about science that they can write articles like this one, get them published, and influence others with them. We're a society that is slowly taking to the stars, communicates through a giant network of computers, faces some potentially severe problems with our energy sources -- and gives newspaper space to a guy who thinks a light-year is a unit of time.

Sentential Links #64

It's that time again....

:: T minus two months or so until we have to name a baby girl, and I can promise you it won’t be "Emmillie" or "Graiyce" or "Wrooth." (I wonder what Mr. Jennings thinks of the popular new name, "Nevaeh"? Personally, I think that name is about as stupid as anything I can think of. All the amazing names in the Bible, and we've got to start spelling shit backwards?)

:: Of course, "Nevaeh" is an order of magnitude sillier even than Remington, simply because it takes an linguistic epiphany that would embarass a stoner ("Hey dude -- did you realize that butter spelled backwards is ... rettub?" "Duuuude.") and forces some poor kid to live with it until they die. (Just Googled "Nevaeh" on a whim. Hey, we can go lots of places with this! Like, "Hey, did you hear about the recent mystery novel manuscript found amongst the writings of JRR Tolkien? The killer kept saying Rodrom!")

:: I think you have to have loved someone to write a song about them. I loved Jessica. To a degree, mellowed by distance, time and life, I still do. (Or to write poetry.)

:: Law of Modern Warfare #001: When you bomb people for their own good, they never, ever get your point in the way you hope.

:: Cats are, after all, very cool.

:: It's the regular media---the MSM as they appear to like us to call them---who are obsessed with the idea that blogs are all about politics and nothing but politics, and this is not just unfortunate in that they are depriving themselves of some excellent and entertaining reading on movies, books, music, science, and life in general, on the job and in the home and on the farm and out in the woods and in the mind; it's potentially disasterous for us, the bloggers, and for our readers, and for the still inchoate art form known as blogging.

:: These are books that opened my eyes, or spun me upside down, so that the stars were underfoot and the trees were dangling from a green sky like monstrous feathery stalactites.

:: An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion. (Not actually written by the linked blogger, but click through anyway to see who did say this.)

All for now. Back next week.

Congratulations, Bucky.

You made the national news, at least on the MSN front page.

Now the police are searching for a suspected cop killer. Folk hero, my ass. Bucky Phillips is a piece of human excrement, whether he shot those state troopers or not. This is all his doing. His family and his cheerleaders in the Southern Tier, as far as I am concerned, are accessories to murder.

But at least Phillips is likely to get his wish. I will be astonished if he is taken alive. And I don't really care, just as long as he is taken. And soon.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Move over, George Lucas. Stand down, JRR Tolkien. Have a seat, Guy Gavriel Kay. Grab some bench, John Williams and Hector Berlioz and Sergei Rachmaninov.

I have a new hero.

Oh, and bonus weirdness: there was an episode of Friends where Ross gets on a train for upstate NY, hoping to run into a girl or something like that (been a while since I saw it), and he falls asleep and wakes up to see that the train is pulling into Montreal, or something like that. Well, this girl goes one better: she fell asleep on an airplane, and when she woke up, she'd made a round-trip home again after failing to wake up to disembark at her original destination. Oops!

Repent, Harlan! said the Ticktockman

So I'm reading John Scalzi just now, and I see that he's a bit upset that the big news out of the recent WorldCon isn't the Hugo win by Robert Charles Wilson for Spin (which I might read sometime, or I might not -- hey, is it a space opera?) but rather "a certain science fiction writer being a public jackass at the Hugo ceremony".

Well, it doesn't take much awareness of the SF community to figure out who made an ass of himself; I sighed and said to myself, "Gee, I wonder what Harlan Ellison did now". I figured maybe he showed up with the only existing manuscript of Last Dangerous Visions, hucked it into a trash can, and then set it on fire. Either that, or he publicly groped a prominent female SF writer.

So it was the latter: he groped Connie Willis, apparently. On stage. In front of, well, everybody.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden's take on this is exactly right:

Just as with George W. Bush's now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you'll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

Apparently Ellison has apologized. Maybe it's enough, maybe not. But behavior like this needs to be squashed like a bug, every time it happens.

(And of course, this post is mainly an excuse to use as a post title a pun on the title of one of Ellison's most famous stories. What a geek I am....)

Beasties ahoy!

This ought to be up PZ Myers's alley: the blue-ringed octopus.



Cute, isn't it? This little creature's venom can kill an adult human in minutes; its distinctive blue rings are not visible until the octopus is about to attack; and it illustrates Yoda's famed maxim that size matters not. The blue-ringed octopus is about the size of a golf ball.

More linkage from the MeFi thread wherein I learned about this little beastie.

And now the easiest part of the coach's job: the cuts!

The Buffalo Bills finalized their 2006 roster yesterday. Daimon Shelton makes the team, which was to be expected after the amazing prowess he displayed last season in third-down and goal-line situations. Ahem.

Also making the team is safety Coy Wire, signaling that the Bills remain committed to maintaining a strong presence of "Meh" on their roster.

Stay tuned, sometime this week, for my annual kickoff of football-related postings. It's almost time for a whole new season of bitching about the Bills' O-line, the New England Stupid Patriots, Joe Theissman's babbling idiocy, and more!

Bum bum bum BUUMMMM....

It's just wrong, folks.

I love John Williams as much as anybody, but I can't get behind this new theme he's written for Sunday Night Football on NBC. I just can't do it. The music itself is OK -- listen to it -- but hearing that, I think of droid armies on the march against the Jedi or a Nazi convoy trundling along a desert valley while Indiana Jones tries to overcome them on horseback. I don't think of football.

Now, this isn't Williams's fault, of course, and I don't think any composer could cause my brain to associate some new piece of music with football. I don't make too many strong connections between music and something in the concrete world, but this is one of my few such associations: this music is football. Not John Williams, not Jerry Goldsmith, not anything else. (Well, maybe Hank Williams Jr. But that's it.)

Are you ready...!

Facts? Pagh! We don't need no facts!

[WARNING: Here I rant.]

How nice. Apparently some blogger visited Buffalo at some recent point, and, having failed to be impressed, decided to write a blog post in which he lies about the city. A lot.

Now, we, the crack young staff of "The Hatemonger’s Quarterly," don’t want to rain on anyone's parade - though you'd be stupid to have a parade in Buffalo - but we happen to think that Buffalo, New York deserves to die. In fact, it possibly begs for a killing.

A few of our editors — let's just call them "Chip" — spent some time in Buffalo recently, and we must say that we wouldn’t spend 38 years in Buffalo without gunfire: Stuck in that dank hellhole, we’d shoot ourselves long before then.

No, fuck you. This post is nothing that anyone else out there who doesn't know Buffalo from any other place doesn't regularly dish out.

"It's miserably cold in Buffalo!"

Well, if you think Buffalo's too cold, then you must not like lots of cities in the US either, like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland ME, and so on. None of those cities has an average temperature in January more than two degrees higher than Buffalo's, and a few of them are lower.

If you think Buffalo is "miserably cold", then don't come here. But don't blame Buffalo for the fact that you're a damn wuss.

"It snows quite often!

No shit. But lots of places get more snow than Buffalo; in fact, Buffalo doesn't even crack the top ten cities in the US for snowfall. (We're eleventh, beaten out by the likes of Flagstaff, AZ.) Also, snow isn't the whole story of a winter. Frankly, I'll take more snow and temperatures in the 20s over less snow and winter temperatures in the single digits or colder (without factoring wind chill), which are the norm in the Great Plains cities.

Oh, and guess what! Lots of people -- gasp! -- actually like snow. I know, it's hard to imagine people enjoying winter and stuff, but there's a reason that we have stuff like hockey and the Winter Olympics. It's the snow and the ice.

So put on a scarf and grow the hell up.

"It's horribly windy in Buffalo!"

Hmmmm. Well, yes, we do have wind here. No doubt about that. But our winds don't bring us extremely frigid air from the Canadian plains in winter, nor do our incredibly dry winds fan the flames of our wildfires in summer, nor do our winds carry lots of moisture from the tropics except for a few brief periods in summer when everybody's hot and humid. Our winds mostly come across Lake Erie, which makes Buffalo one of the few places where the temperature in summer has never officially hit 100 degrees in all the time they've been keeping records. Yes, our winds do produce lake-effect snow, but refer back to the point above. (And that's only an issue as long as Lake Erie hasn't frozen over; once that happens during the winter, we're pretty much done with snow.) And our summer winds are good for boating. (Yes, people do outside-type stuff in summer here. It's because our summers are nice, and our autumns are the best on the damn planet.)

Here's food for thought for the Buffalo Wind haters: our average wind speeds are only slightly higher than locations in Hawaii. I hope the Hatemongers aren't vacationing there anytime soon! They might blow away, being so wussy and all.

Then we get this crap:

Further, as a cultural center, Buffalo’s moribund. Sure, it’s home to a good art museum. But that’s about it. It used to be a haven for avant-garde classical music (Lucas Foss, Morton Feldman), but now it’s completely dried up. The Buffalo Symphony plays nothing but standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience.

Yup, we have a good art museum. But which one? This one? This one? This one? This one? This one? I mean, the Hatemonger must be claiming that only one of these is a good museum and the others all suck, because surely he wouldn't be saying something like that without even knowing of the existence of those other museums. Why, that would be dishonest!

Also, Hatemonger must have taken in some of our local theatrical productions and found them wanting? He doesn't mention theater, but Buffalo's vibrant local theater is always cited as one of the city's cultural icons. Too bad they failed to impress Hatemonger. (Surely Hatemonger didn't fail to take in a show! That would be dishonest!)

I also have to thank Hatemonger for alerting me to the existence of the Buffalo Symphony. Here, all this time I've been following the exploits of the Buffalo Philharmonic, not the Buffalo Symphony! (He can't mean they're one and the same, right? Surely someone cognizent enough of Buffalo's cultural wealth wouldn't get the name of the orchestra wrong, would they?)

As to repertoire, no one would dispute that the heyday of new classical music in Buffalo is over. But "standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience"? What twaddle. Yes, there are representative works from the standard repertoire in the offing for the upcoming season, works by Brahms and Schumann and the like. But this season will also see performances of Shining Brow, an opera written in 1991 by Daron Hagen; Miklos Rozsa's Violin Concerto, a work by a prominent film composer of the mid-20th century that isn't exactly an "old warhorse"; "Seven Passages" by contemporary Iranian composer Behzad Ranjbaran; Roberto Sierra's Concerto for Saxophones; "Three Hallucinations" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" by John Corigliano (one of the biggest names in contemporary classical music). And more.

If the blue-haired ladies in the BPO audience enjoy hearing all that, then good for them! That will make them more aware than some asshole blogger.

So let's re-write one of Hatemonger's paragraphs, shall we? The original -- "A few of our editors — let's just call them "Chip" — spent some time in Buffalo recently..." -- should actually read, "A buddy and I spent went to Buffalo on a business trip. We got there on a Tuesday and left on a Thursday, we never left our hotel room except to take a cab to wherever our business meeting was, and we spent the rest of the time sitting in the hotel bar drinking Bud Lite, munching stale Beer Nuts, and alternating between watching the news on Channel seven and listening to some guy named Bauerle who must really hate where he lives. And we figured, hey, that's good enough for us. Fire up the blog!"

You know what? You hated Buffalo? Then don't come back to Buffalo. We don't want you. It'd be one less asshole to export from our once-great and soon-to-be-great-again city.

(Oh, and by the way, Hatemonger: Niagara Falls isn't part of Buffalo. It's a whole different city, thirty miles away. Your mention of it in your post makes about as much sense as if I were to say that Manhattan sucks because Yonkers is ugly. And Timothy McVeigh isn't even from Buffalo, but from some other town that's a distance away. But don't let the facts get between you and the Stupid Well, because when you're thirsty for Stupid, you gotta drink deep and all.)

(Original link via Alan.)

Quiz Time!

I saw a quiz over at Paul's blog, so I will answer them as well, as is my wont:

1. A month before it happens you're told you're going to lose your memory. How do you prepare for it and do you attempt to regain what you've lost?

Hell yes, I try to regain it. I try to write down as much of it as I can, I suppose, but then I'd have trouble prioritizing things to remember. Hmmmm.

2. How do you describe your outlook on life?

"Life is quite absurd, and death's the final word...."

3. You fall in love with your soulmate, decide to get married, and then find out that person is going to die soon. Do you marry them anyway?

Absolutely. (But here's the thing about soulmates: I've never believed that there's only one.)

4. What are three of your favorite ice cream toppings?

I like hot fudge, chopped-up Reese's pieces, and fresh berries.

5. Is there one article of clothing you love to wear no matter how out of style it is?

Hmmm. That's a head-scratcher. I should think that over a bit. Gee.

6. Is there one color you wish would go away in fashion?

A color? No. But then, I think "fashion" is just about as stupid an endeavour as I can think of. I find it hard to fathom how a few people in some city somewhere can up and decide that this year, this is what looks good, but a couple of years from now, we'll all decide that it all looks horrible. And then a few years after that, the look we liked and then hated is judged favorably again! Screw that. I wear what I like.

7. What's the first department you head to when you go shopping in a department store?

Assuming we're talking about a place like Target, usually I either veer toward electronics or men's clothing, although I almost never buy anything in either. Hardware's always fun. Toys are a necessity. I usually save the DVD section for last.

8.How far away do you live from your parents?

Sixty or seventy miles, roughly. Maybe a little less, but the route from here to there requires lots of "over hill and under dale" stuff through the Southern Tier.

9. Growing up, who was your favorite cartoon character?

Bugs Bunny. Still is. Didn't care much for the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, because there was no hope for the coyote. And I love Sylvester, but there's this one with him where his owners go away for two weeks, but leave him a cupboard full of canned tuna -- but the mouse gets the can opener, and Sylvester is foiled throughout the whole cartoon. That one pissed me off. F*** you, Mouse!

10. You plan a romantic evening and everything goes wrong, including the fancy dinner you burned. What do you do?

Swear a lot, then apologize profusely as I order a pizza.

11. What's the last thing you bought at the store?

Which store? Today I brought home some hot dog and hamburger buns. Last time I was at Borders I picked up a copy of The Art of Revenge of the Sith and a better quality King James Bible than the one I already owned.

12. Have you ever walked out in the middle of a movie?

Never, but I have shut off DVDs or videos halfway through.

13. What celebrity do most people say you look like?

To my knowledge I've never been compared to a celebrity.

14. Is there any piece of jewelry you always wear?

I wear my wedding ring and another ring The Wife bought me most of the time, but not at night. Also, when I'm not at work, I wear a bracelet of silver beads that was made by a friend of The Wife's in honor of Little Quinn.

15. Have you ever tried to pick someone up?

No. I'm terrible in situations where I don't know people, and it takes me a little while to open up a bit.

16. What's the one thing you always manage to lose on your way out the door?

Nothing, really, although I do leave the grocery list at home occasionally.

17. Out of these creatures which one are you most afraid of:
A.) Snakes
B.) Spiders
C.) Rodents

Rodents, I suppose. Although I'm probably freaked out in equal measure by all three: not much if I just spot one somewhere, but if one manages to get onto my person before I've spotted it, I tend to fly into this mixture of fear and rage that's not at all healthy for the beastie to provoke.

18. What's the last gift you bought for a friend?

A dear friend of mine at The Store had a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I got her a couple of small items like a journal to write in, a candle, and a tiny incense burner.

19. Do you ever buy people things for no reason?

Often. I love giving people stuff.

20.What's your favorite way to spend a lazy summer afternoon?

Reading, writing, walking, putting music on the stereo and dancing while trying to look like I'm not dancing.

And there's the latest Blog Quiz thing....

Sunday Burst of Weirdness (the "Oops, I forgot so I'll do it on Monday" Edition)

Serpentes on a Shippe.

Sentential Links #63 (The Plutonic Edition)

Some of these deal with the recent decision to strip Pluto of its planetary status (as though the little planet-that-could had been caught doping in an attempt to pack on extra mass so it could maintain its position of planethood). Others deal with other stuff.

:: Just a little refresher: Pluto is smaller than our moon, people!

:: Pluto's been demoted? That's crap! (No, dearie: if it's not Scottish, it's crap. But I get the sentiment.)

(Oh, and congrats to the new Campbell award winner, who unfortunately decided to model the tiara that is now associated with this award, thus making him look like a really creepy televangelist.)

:: If you've been keeping an eye on any of the wire services (or Language Log), you may have noticed that the members of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague have been wrangling, Vatican-style, over the definition of the word planet. Judging by the periodic puffs of contradictorily-colored smoke the meeting is emitting, it sounds like they may be getting bogged down in the details. (That's where the Devil is, you know.) Well, defining words involves language, and language is what linguists study, so that means this is a linguistic problem. Let's roll up our sleeves and see what all the trouble is.

:: I submit that scientists own the science, but laypeople own the narrative. And the narrative of the nine planets of the Solar System is rich in mythology (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), serendipity (the discovery of Uranus), mathematical prediction (the discovery of Neptune), and Herculean effort (the discovery of Pluto). It has been enriched that much further by the stunning imagery of every planet except Pluto returned to us by the Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Magellan, Galileo, and Cassini probes. (Written before the ultimate decision, but still some worthwhile points.)

:: They wanted to base it on measurable scientific factors rather than a human-created, arbitrary dividing line. Unfortunately, what they came up with was a messy slight-of-hand pushed by the anti-Pluto radicals that opens the door to far more problems than it can ever hope to solve. (Read this post for a short synopsis on the new planetary definition's shortcomings.

My own position on this is, well, what is the big deal with considering Pluto a planet? Why does this matter? How will planetary astronomy be set back or advanced by this? I don't get it. And besides, this whole business reminds me that the real physical world is a messy place that can't always be mapped nicely onto a language where the act of creating definitions assumes binary states that may not exist. Anyway, back to the links.

:: If global warming is going on, every day must be warmer than the same day the previous year, every summer must be hotter, every winter must be less cold. There are no statistical effects, and definitely no random component to the weather. "Weather" is also a single unitary phenomenon which can be evaluated by one instrument, a thermometer.

:: When I was a kid, my parents used to play the I Ching once a year.

:: We now rent just about anything. We rent houses and cars. We rent tractors. We rent (to own) computers, TV's and furniture. We rent tillers and banquet halls. We rent like crazy these days. Why not rent a casket?

:: I’m so excited, I think I just Fergied in my pants! (Uhhhh...OK....but congrats on the 100,000th hit, guys!)

More next week. Tune in. Drop out. And stuff.

Something. On television.

I see that other folks (here and here) are listing twenty-five favorite TV characters, so I'll prove ever the follower of established trends and do the same! There are some ground rules: No puppets or cartoons (otherwise we'd all be listing Homer Simpson and Statler&Waldorf); No mini-series; No reality-show people; All characters must be regulars on the show.

Here are mine, in no particular order. Keep in mind that if I write this post tomorrow instead of today, I probably name at least fifteen characters who don't appear on this version of this list.

1. Fox Mulder, The X-Files.

2. Dana Scully, The X-Files. These two always had such a great chemistry. Back when the show was on, fandom tended to separate into two camps: "Noromo's" (for "no romance", i.e., folks who wanted Mulder and Scully to remain strictly platonic), and "shippers" (who wanted a "relationship" to exist between the two). I tended to fall into the Shipper camp, but it impressed me greatly how it just gradually became clear that Mulder and Scully were in love without there being a Moonlighting moment when the air just went right out of the show. And both were perfectly portrayed by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

3. Dr. Elliot Reed, Scrubs. Anyone who has ever known anyone who was freakishly smart and freakishly competent but who was also so neurotic as to be convinced that they were actually stupid and inept will recognize Dr. Reed. Sarah Chalke always plays her wonderfully.

4. Chandler Bing, Friends. I think that Chandler grew more as a character over Friends's ten seasons than any of the other five; when the series launched, he was pretty much the least interesting of each of them, seemingly existing only to inject wisecracks into the dialogue. (Frequently very good wisecracks, admittedly). By series' end, he'd become a committed family man whose heart was nearly broken when he and Monica could not conceive.

5. Rick Sammler, Once and Again.

6. Lily Manning, Once and Again. Well, duh! I wouldn't love this show nearly as much as I do if not for the outstanding work done by Billy Campbell and Sela Ward as the leads, two emotionally wounded divorcee's in their forties who find each other and fall in love.

7. Toby Ziegler, The West Wing. It bothers me that Richard Schiff won't be on Aaron Sorkin's new show. Nothing against Bradley Whitford, but Schiff was by far my favorite actor on The West Wing.

8. Claudia Jean Cregg, The West Wing. Alison Janney's my second favorite actor from The West Wing. C.J. was a brilliantly written character.

9. Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Star Trek.

10. Captain Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My favorite Trek captains. Nothing against Picard or Janeway, but the original series and DS9 were my favorite Trek incarnations. (I've still never seen an entire episode of Enterprise, so I have no opinion at all about Captain Archer.)

11. Rayann Graff, My So-Called Life.

12. Enrique "Ricky" Vasquez, My So-Called Life. What an amazing show this was. Rayann was a troubled teen; Ricky was struggling with his sexuality. I haven't seen this show in years, but it's burned on my brain.

13. Frank Black, Millennium. Sadly, this show never figured out what it really wanted to be, so it produced two seasons that were often brilliant but disjointed and a third that wasn't very good at all. At the center of it all was Frank Black, however, a man haunted by...something, who was often trying to puzzle out...something. I loved this show and always felt that it was on the cusp of greatness before Chris Carter put the absolute wrong person in charge of season three. Oh well. Lance Henriksen's Frank Black was a standout of understated acting.

14. Nash Bridges, Nash Bridges. You know, I've never met anyone else who liked this show! But for a while, I found it highly entertaining before it got too soap-opera like in its last season. This show was always a lot of goofy fun, with Don Johnson and Cheech Marin playing flamboyant San Francisco cops who sped around San Francisco in a bright yellow Barracuda, solving all manner of violent crimes. Eventually Yasmine Bleeth even joined the cast, providing some nice cheesecake.

15. Dr. John Carter, ER. In the pilot, Carter was a surgical intern who barely knew which end of a scalpel was up; eight or nine years later, he was the steady hand running the ER. I've made no secret in the past that for me ER not only jumped the shark a while ago but, after jumping it once, kept circling back to jump it again and again and again (this past season's cliffhanger ending was just embarrassing); but I loved the show for a long time, and Carter's realistic growth, portrayed on a realistic time scale, is a big reason why.

16. Jonathan Quayle Higgins, Magnum PI. Man, did I ever love Magnum PI! Higgins was such a great character, too: he was mysterious without ever seeming mysterious. Was he really Robin Masters, rich author of potboilers? Did he really have all those exploits as a soldier in various militaries? Thinking back on the show, just who really was Jonathan Higgins? We never really knew, and we never really realized we didn't know, either.

17. John "Hannibal" Smith, The A-Team. Come on, who didn't love it when George Peppard would grin at the end and say, "I love it when a plan comes together!"? I loved it!

18. Detective Andy Sipowicz, NYPDBlue. A bigoted, sexist, alcoholic, and burned-out New York cop in the pilot, Sipowicz would spend the next ten years being put through what might be the toughest emotional territory I've ever seen a regular TV character suffer. He got shot, nearly fired, married, lost a son to violence, had another son, lost a partner to disease, lost his wife to violence, lost another partner to violence, married again, and eventually became the boss of his precinct. All the while played brilliantly by Dennis Franz.

19. Frasier Crane, Cheers and Frasier. What a great character he was.

20. Dr. Addison Shepherd, Grey's Anatomy. My current medical drama of choice. Lots of nifty characters here, actually -- but Dr. Shepherd is a good doctor and an interesting, sympathetic character. Since the show's major subplot continues to be the attraction between Dr. Meredith Grey and Dr. Derek Shepherd (often referred to as "Dr. McDreamy"), the writers could have made Dr. Shepherd's wife an uninteresting shrew, but they didn't do that: Addison is her own character with her own problems. Plus, she's a smokingly hot redhead.

21. Gil Grissom, CSI. A forensic scientist whose hobbies are roller-coaster riding and etymology. What's not to like?

22. Jamie Buchman, Mad About You. Helen Hunt's character on a show that was one of the better sitcoms for a few years, before it started sliding a bit. (And its final season was an unmitigated disaster.) To this day, sometimes if I suspect that The Wife is having a bit of fun at my expense, I'll say, "I heard a tone", to which she'll respond, "There was no tone!"

23. George Costanza, Seinfeld. Yeah, the show's genius was in its ensemble nature, but I was always a George fan. The episode where George decides that every instinct he's ever had has led nowhere, and therefore he must do the exact opposite of whatever his instinct may be, is a favorite of mine (to an attractive woman, George introduces himself: "My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents").

24. Jarod, The Pretender. Now here was a show that deserved a better fate than to be dumped by NBC just so they could free up Saturday nights for Vince McMahon's dumb-assed "Extreme Football League" crapfest. Jarod was a "pretender": a genius who was so smart as to be able to pass himself off as just about any kind of professional at all. He used this ability to go around the country righting injustices while a group of operatives from a shadowy organization called "The Centre" tried to track him down, for their own nefarious purposes. This wasn't a great TV series, but it was solidly entertaining.

25. Ed Stevens, Ed. Big-city lawyer moves back to his small-town Ohio roots, and runs a law practice out of the bowling alley he runs. The "ten dollar" bets were always hilarious. Another show I miss, although it probably lasted about as long as it really could have.

For good measure, here are an addition ten characters I like, from the "recurring character" category. These are characters who weren't series regulars, but showed up every now and then:

1. Q, from various incarnations of Star Trek. How do you make a character who is virtually omnipotent interesting?

2. Harry the Hat, Cheers. It was sheer genius for the writers to make the final victory of Cheers over Gary's Old Towne Tavern come at the hands of Harry the Hat, who had robbed Sam Malone blind a number of times over the years.

3. Cigarette Smoking Man, The X-Files. He was "recurring" almost to the point of actually being a regular, I suppose. And I'm limiting myself to just one recurring character from TXF, which had a bunch of 'em.

4. Detective Martens, NYPDBlue. He was the Internal Affairs cop who showed up whenever one of the precinct detectives did something wrong (or might have). Everybody in the squad hated him. Still, he was played well.

5. Ryan Chappelle, 24. The manner in which Chappelle went from "recurring" to, well, never recurring again still surprises me.

6. Danny Concannon, The West Wing. He came and went, as a White House reporter and romantic interest for C.J. (later revealed as her post-White House husband).

7. Ben Sullivan, Scrubs. Played by Brendan Fraser, Ben Sullivan appeared in three episodes of Scrubs, the last of which is one of the greatest episodes of a television I've ever seen.

8. Mr. Edwards, Little House on the Prairie. He was always so much more flawed than any of the Ingalls clan.

9. Princess Ardala, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Yeah, Erin Gray was hot as Wilma Deering, but my crush was always on Pamela Hensley's Princess Ardala, who was one of the show's villains.

10. Mac, Magnum, PI. Now here's something odd: two different characters, played by the same guy. Thomas Magnum used "Mac" as a nickname for Lieutenant McReynolds, who was a pudgy naval officer with a sweet tooth. Magnum would often bribe Mac with dessert items in exchange for information he wasn't supposed to have, or access to places he wasn't supposed to get into, and so on. Mac was eventually killed in an explosion that was intended to kill Magnum. But then a few seasons later, Magnum thought he spotted Mac on the streets of Honolulu. This, however, turned out to be a con-man whose real name may or may not have been Jim Bonig. This second "Mac" would occasionally be an annoyance for Magnum, and also occasionally an assistance.

11. Newman, Seinfeld. OK, an eleventh character. Newman was just a classic. It's a constant aggravation of mine that the only time in my life when I've known someone named "Newman", it was before Seinfeld came along, so I could never greet her with a hearty "Hello, Newman!"

That's it. List your own favorite characters today! All the cool kids are doing it!

That ball wouldn't have gone out of most parks....

I wasn't involved at all, so as a pure external observer, I've been terribly impressed this weekend with how Buffalo Old Home Week has been going. It is unbelievably heartening to see the rolling-up of the sleeves on the part of many people in this region to get whatever we can going before someone gets Albany to wake the f*** up.

Anyway, as always, it's time for a pop-culture metaphor. This new bout of optimism in Buffalo has me thinking of the movie Major League. Remember Cerrano, the voodoo-practicing big slugger who, while able to send just about any fastball out of the park, cannot ever hit a curve ball to save his life, no matter how much he prays to "Jo Buu", his god? And remember, how in the climactic game against the Yankees, Cerrano comes up to bat in a crucial late-inning situation while also mired in a long slump? Standing at the plate, Cerrano addresses Jo Buu for the last time:

I pissed off now, Jo-Buu. I good to you, I stand up for you. If you no help me now, I say f*** you, Jo-Buu. I do it myself.

I'm kind of thinking Buffalo's getting to be a bit like that: F*** you, Albany. We'll do it ourselves.

Ask HIM Anything Too!

Oy! I keep forgetting to link this, but Mark is doing Ask Me Anything!. So go ask him stuff. Mark's a guy I went to college with; he played bass guitar in the jazz band and double bass in the orchestra. I once needled him in the middle of an orchestra rehearsal because our conductor decided to spend a minute of rehearsal time going over some tiny little portion of his part, something like two or three notes, which caused me to call out, "Mark, could you play that with more expression please?"

Two years

Happy birthday, Little Quinn, wherever you are.









We love you and miss you.

"Not one sparrow...."

A few years ago, a friend recommended to me the book The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. Trusting that friend's word, I bought the book -- but then lost track of it when the book ended up in one box, and then another, when we moved to Syracuse and then back to Buffalo. I had forgotten The Sparrow completely until a month ago when the friend reminded me of it. So I set aside space opera for a bit to finally read it, and I was well and truly astonished.

If you know someone who reads "serious" fiction and won't give science fiction a second look, or even a first look, this is a book you can give them.

The Sparrow tells the tale of humanity's first contact with another world. A signal is detected from a planet orbitting Alpha Centauri, a signal that comprises an alien voice singing, and an expedition is mounted by the Jesuit order to go to Alpha Centauri and make contact with the aliens. Years later, Father Emilio Sandoz returns to Earth as the mission's sole survivor, whereupon he is required by a Jesuit board of inquiry to explain what went wrong, despite the fact that he has been both physically and emotionally mutilated and violated.

What went wrong went horribly wrong.

The book is told on two different timelines: chapters set after Sandoz's return alternate with chapters set in the days of the signal's discovery. Thus, the reader is given the knowledge that the mission to Rakhat, the alien planet, is doomed before we ever meet any of the characters who will go there (save Sandoz). This imbues much of the book with a sense of impending doom that only becomes more intense as we get to know Russell's characters, who come alive on the page as few fictional characters do. These people seem real, and frankly, a good part of what keeps the pages turning is the terrible need to learn just how these vibrant people meet their end.

For the first half of the film, the dual-time setting device is a bit distracting, but as the events of the doomed mission gather momentum, it becomes much more effective. This is almost exclusively because of Russell's ability to make us care about her characters, and when their demises start to come, they are still somehow surprising.

I won't spoil the denouement of the book, aside to note that the mission fails not for simplistic reasons of good conflicting with evil, but because good people who intend nothing more than good things fail to note several things about the culture they are meeting. The book is a giant tragedy of unintended consequences.

Of particular interest is the book's spiritual dimension. Many of the characters are Jesuits, and Emilio Sandoz is presented as the most complex of these. His is not an easy faith; he constantly has to work at it, and his faith is nearly destroyed by what happens to him on Rakhat. Russell takes a fairly unflinching look at the nature of religious faith, and it is to her credit that this look reveals neither an overall positive view, nor an excessively negative one. By necessity, the book provides few answers -- as, we suspect, it must.

I found The Sparrow quite a brilliant novel.

Determining my S.Q.

My SQ is my "Shamus Quotient". How do I derive my Shamus Quotient? By simply assessing how my blog stands up to Shamus's list of commonalities amongst the blogs he reads. Since he's linked me a few times lately and commented here, I hope I fall at least into the "somewhat approved" category, even though my knowledge of anime is pretty much limited to the films of Hayao Miyazaki (whose work I utterly adore).

Anyhow, here are his seven commonalities. (I call them "commonalities" because I assume he doesn't sit with a checklist and strike blogs from his reading list if they fail to meet them all. But maybe he does. Hmmmmm!)

1. Informal, conversational style.

I think I'm more conversation than not, although I do tend to in my writing employ longer sentences than I do when I'm speaking, since when I read stuff myself I find that I take particular delight in a long sentence that is artfully crafted. Yeah, like that.

But then, I do use words like "yeah", "meh", and "dumb-ass" quite a lot, and those are definitely conversational words. So I'll mark myself down for this one.

2. I like people who use their real names more than those who use pseudonyms, and I like pseudonyms better than pure anonymity.

Hmmmm. Do I count as being pseudonymous still? I just realized that my real name isn't on the blog itself, but it is very easy to find via my various links under the "Your Humble Narrator" section of the sidebar. I'm not militant about my use of "Jaquandor" as a Net identity anymore, and nowadays, other bloggers seem about as likely to refer to me as "Kelly" as they are as "Jaquandor" or "Jaq". Since my real name is no mystery at all, I'll just mark myself down as meeting this one as well.

(Thus far nobody's referred to me as "that weirdo in overalls", but I figure that's gotta come sooner or later.)

3. No ads.

Check. No ads here, with the exception of the links to my own tip jar and the link to my eBay auctions, none of which I even have going at the moment. (I'll be getting back into that sometime soon, though.) I've occasionally considered signing up for Google Ads or BlogAds, but I don't want a third column on my blog, and I've given a lot of thought to the order in which stuff appears in my sidebar, and I wouldn't want to supplant any of that for some ads. If I ever make money from blogging, I'd like it to be because someone somewhere decided to contract me out for either a pro-blogging gig or for an article or two, not because of advertising here in my own space.

So, worry not, steadfast readers: Byzantium's Shores will remain ad-free (unless, of course, the Blogger people decide to force ads upon me, in which case I would probably ditch them and move the blog elsewhere).

4. I prefer dark lettering on light backgrounds.

My color scheme isn't exactly black-letters-on-white-background, but it still satisfies the criterion, I think.

5. I prefer to read what adults have to say, and I’m not talking about age here.

I'm torn here. Given certain subjects, I either write like a wisen'd adult (the saga of Little Quinn), or like a twelve-year-old fanboy (Star Wars). I'll give myself half a point here.

6. I like one-author blogs better than group blogs, but only because I like to know who I’m reading.

I've never even used a guest-poster for my hiatuses. Check.

Shamus also wishes that group blogs would put an icon denoting the poster at the top of posts. I haven't seen this either, but I have seen group blogs that put the poster's name at the top of the posts, like Making Light, About Last Night, and the Dead Parrots Society.


7. I like some info about the author.

Check, unless he means direct info right on the main page. One will, however, learn enough about me to know where I'm coming from by perusing the stuff under "Your Humble Narrator" in the sidebar.

So, my SQ turns out to be 6.5. Huzzah!