The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Things that need to exist, #4872
I want an album of Christmas songs, done in the Cantopop style. I think that would be really cool.
Something for Thursday
Ralph Vaughan Williams, played by Hilary Hahn. Pure magic. Here's The Lark Ascending (it's in two parts):
The first time I heard this work was at a performance in Buffalo by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I went to that concert because they were going to be playing Mozart's Symphony No. 40, after this thing by RVW that I'd never heard before. This piece rocked my world, though. I think I held my breath for the entire work, for fear that my respiration would break the gossamer tapestry the violinist and the orchestra were creating that night....
The first time I heard this work was at a performance in Buffalo by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I went to that concert because they were going to be playing Mozart's Symphony No. 40, after this thing by RVW that I'd never heard before. This piece rocked my world, though. I think I held my breath for the entire work, for fear that my respiration would break the gossamer tapestry the violinist and the orchestra were creating that night....
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
A-rantin' and a-ravin'
Some random opinions on recent stuff, just to get it all out of my head for a little while:
:: The other day, the people supposedly in charge of developing Buffalo's waterfront area had one of those press events they like to have every eighteen months or so where they announce A Plan. At these events, they talk about pages being turned on Buffalo's history and about how we're finally going to see a new era of prosperity and bustle on the waterfront and so on yada yada yada. These events always feature pretty architectural renderings and sometimes even little scale models of what it's all going to look like when it's done.
My reaction? Wake me up when there's a guy with a shovel down there, digging up dirt. Until then, I have no use for pretty models and nice pictures.
:: How worried about the economy am I supposed to be? The main worry, I think, lies in the loss of either one of our jobs, and frankly, I don't see that happening unless things get drastically bad. We (that is, The Wife and I) work for companies that seem to be doing fairly well. My company is actually doing very well, and I tend to think that grocery stores will stick around since people are still going to have to eat. The Wife's company had a rough patch a few years ago but weathered that just fine and is now putting the brakes on aggressive growth (but not shrinking). We don't own a house, so we're not looking at that particular calamity. We're both probably at least thirty years shy of thinking about retirement, so seeing the 401k's take a hit doesn't seem like a long-term disaster for us. I know things are bad, but my reaction to the articles I read that have us all settling into an era of permanent economic contraction seem to me overwrought. The world will be a very different place in ten, twenty, thirty years. I don't know. My thoughts tend to be "This sucks and it's scary for a whole lot of people". Maybe my head's just in the sand, but then, I can't control the economy and I tend to not worry about stuff I can't control.
:: I am agog at how smug George W. Bush looks every time I see his revolting face on teevee or in the news. The man genuinely believes he's done good work in office. I just can't believe it. I am unable to think of a single aspect of American life that is better today than it was in January 2001 when he took office, one single thing that George Bush made better. Bush still thinks Iraq was a good idea. Cheney still spouts nonsense about the weapons of mass destruction Iraq never had. These people are the worst administration of my lifetime, and I was born when Nixon was in charge.
:: I've seen some discussion in Left Blogistan about the merits of the filibuster in the Senate. I'd love to see the filibuster go away; it's a tradition that needs to go. I'm amused to see the Republicans in the Senate vow to filibuster Barack Obama's judicial nominees when they start coming up for votes; apparently the whole "Every judge deserves an up or down vote!" principle is, well, not so much a matter of principle but a kinda-sorta guideline. But really, what I haven't seen pointed out is that what happens is not actual filibusters but just the threat of them. The minority party says "We're gonna filibuster that", a vote comes up to close debate, the vote fails, and the bill or judge or whatever is tabled; this then gets reported in the news as a bill or judge being blocked via filibuster. Here's what I'd like to see: when the Republicans threaten a filibuster, make them do it. I'll bet the appeal of using that particular weapon against Democratic policies and bills and judges will lose a bit of its luster if these guys know they're going to have to stand in the well of the Senate and talk for hours and hours on end. Come on, Mr. Majority Leader: let them threaten the filibuster all they want, and then make them do it.
:: New York's governor David Paterson has just announced that the economic downturn has resulted in budgetary problems for the state government which will result in tax and fee hikes along with cuts to just about everything under the sun. We hear all the usual suggestions here: cut school aid, cut Medicaid payments to hospitals, raise fees, et cetera. But wow, what a missed opportunity. Paterson could use this emergency as impetus to change New York's vastly bloated state government forever, and yet, all he's willing to do is cut staffers and eliminate a scheduled pay raise. This is a time which one would think would encourage some serious outside-the-box thinking, but it's not forthcoming. Why not look at eliminating the State Senate and going with a unicameral legislature? Why not look at eliminating the Thruway Authority? Why not look at reforming all of the various regulations that may make sense in New York City but, when applied to smaller municipalities upstate, are obviously stifling to growth? For God's sake, Governor, there's a chance here to right some of New York's long-standing impediments to progress. Yes, you have serious budget problems to fix, but you also have a chance to position New York for a stronger position once the recovery gets here. (And there will be recovery, folks. Nothing lasts forever, and that means the bad times must end too.) So, Governor Paterson: Why not take this chance to actually fix some problems?!
:: I am no longer a fan of the Buffalo Bills. I'm not switching teams, actually; I'm not much of a football fan at all now. I've thought for several years now that there have to be better ways for me to spend my time on Sundays than giving three hours to a game that's less fun to watch every year, but the point got driven home the weekend the Bills played the Browns. That was a Monday Night game, so on Sunday, the day before, I watched one play of one football game. (It was in the Cowboys game that Sunday night. Tony Romo threw an interception.) And I didn't miss it at all. So yeah, I think I'm parting ways with football.
But as for the Bills themselves: they're not good, they're not going to be good, and soon enough, they're not even going to be the Buffalo Bills anymore. So I'm done.
I would like to say that I do not think that Ralph Wilson doesn't care. I think he does; I think he also has very little clue as to how the NFL functions these days, and I think that while he cares, he also wants to do things on the cheap. I genuinely believe he wants to win and that he's trying to field a good team, but that he does not want to spend exorbitantly to do it. Unfortunately, that means he's relying on finding diamonds in the rough, and it just isn't working out. Dick Jauron simply isn't a particularly effective head coach. The personnel people with the Bills simply aren't making good personnel decisions. The team simply isn't very good, and the current approach is only likely to produce a good team of the random variety, one of those teams that suddenly one year looks great because everybody on the roster inexplicably has a career year at the same time.
Three years into Dick Jauron's tenure, this team is no better than it was before he got here. That's ridiculously bad. In today's NFL, a rebuilding program need only take a year or two. If you contrast the Bills' results since the last time they made the playoffs (1999) with that of the New York Giants in the same period, you see the difference most readily. The Bills have had exactly one winning season in that span of years – 2004, when they were 9-7. They have made no playoff appearances in that span, not one. The Giants, though, started that span with a Super Bowl season, then they missed the playoffs, then they made the playoffs again, then they missed the playoffs a couple of years as they rebuilt (drafting Eli Manning in the process), then they became a playoff team again, staying in the playoffs and winning a Super Bowl and being one of the NFL's best teams this year. Look at that: in nine years, they went from a Super Bowl to a rebuilding phase and back to the Super Bowl, in the same time that the Bills went...nowhere. I'm not going to analyze the reasons why this is the case; I merely note that the Bills are showing no signs of improving, and anyway, I think they're out of here as soon as Mr. Wilson dies.
So I'm done. I'm not spending my Sundays watching these guys anymore, and I'm not going to pay attention on Draft Day to see if they finally grab that offensive lineman I always wanted. I'll always remember Kelly, Reed, Thomas, Smith, Bennett, Hull, Talley, Tasker, and all the rest of those guys, though.
:: One other point on the Bills: I was a big backer of JP Losman back when he was still the young guy learning the ropes. Now that it's obvious he's never going to be much of an NFL quarterback (unless he somehow puts it together late in his career the way Rich Gannon did), I'd just like to note that I still like the guy and wish it had worked out for him. He always struck me, frankly, as a good guy. I really appreciated how when he was drafted he really went out of his way to adopt Buffalo as his new home town. He never acted like the guy who was here to collect his paycheck and then get out of town as soon as he could, and I appreciate that greatly. So no hard feelings, JP, and best wishes for the future. (Unless you somehow end up on the New England roster, in which case, you're dead to me.)
That's about all the opinionation I have for right now.
:: The other day, the people supposedly in charge of developing Buffalo's waterfront area had one of those press events they like to have every eighteen months or so where they announce A Plan. At these events, they talk about pages being turned on Buffalo's history and about how we're finally going to see a new era of prosperity and bustle on the waterfront and so on yada yada yada. These events always feature pretty architectural renderings and sometimes even little scale models of what it's all going to look like when it's done.
My reaction? Wake me up when there's a guy with a shovel down there, digging up dirt. Until then, I have no use for pretty models and nice pictures.
:: How worried about the economy am I supposed to be? The main worry, I think, lies in the loss of either one of our jobs, and frankly, I don't see that happening unless things get drastically bad. We (that is, The Wife and I) work for companies that seem to be doing fairly well. My company is actually doing very well, and I tend to think that grocery stores will stick around since people are still going to have to eat. The Wife's company had a rough patch a few years ago but weathered that just fine and is now putting the brakes on aggressive growth (but not shrinking). We don't own a house, so we're not looking at that particular calamity. We're both probably at least thirty years shy of thinking about retirement, so seeing the 401k's take a hit doesn't seem like a long-term disaster for us. I know things are bad, but my reaction to the articles I read that have us all settling into an era of permanent economic contraction seem to me overwrought. The world will be a very different place in ten, twenty, thirty years. I don't know. My thoughts tend to be "This sucks and it's scary for a whole lot of people". Maybe my head's just in the sand, but then, I can't control the economy and I tend to not worry about stuff I can't control.
:: I am agog at how smug George W. Bush looks every time I see his revolting face on teevee or in the news. The man genuinely believes he's done good work in office. I just can't believe it. I am unable to think of a single aspect of American life that is better today than it was in January 2001 when he took office, one single thing that George Bush made better. Bush still thinks Iraq was a good idea. Cheney still spouts nonsense about the weapons of mass destruction Iraq never had. These people are the worst administration of my lifetime, and I was born when Nixon was in charge.
:: I've seen some discussion in Left Blogistan about the merits of the filibuster in the Senate. I'd love to see the filibuster go away; it's a tradition that needs to go. I'm amused to see the Republicans in the Senate vow to filibuster Barack Obama's judicial nominees when they start coming up for votes; apparently the whole "Every judge deserves an up or down vote!" principle is, well, not so much a matter of principle but a kinda-sorta guideline. But really, what I haven't seen pointed out is that what happens is not actual filibusters but just the threat of them. The minority party says "We're gonna filibuster that", a vote comes up to close debate, the vote fails, and the bill or judge or whatever is tabled; this then gets reported in the news as a bill or judge being blocked via filibuster. Here's what I'd like to see: when the Republicans threaten a filibuster, make them do it. I'll bet the appeal of using that particular weapon against Democratic policies and bills and judges will lose a bit of its luster if these guys know they're going to have to stand in the well of the Senate and talk for hours and hours on end. Come on, Mr. Majority Leader: let them threaten the filibuster all they want, and then make them do it.
:: New York's governor David Paterson has just announced that the economic downturn has resulted in budgetary problems for the state government which will result in tax and fee hikes along with cuts to just about everything under the sun. We hear all the usual suggestions here: cut school aid, cut Medicaid payments to hospitals, raise fees, et cetera. But wow, what a missed opportunity. Paterson could use this emergency as impetus to change New York's vastly bloated state government forever, and yet, all he's willing to do is cut staffers and eliminate a scheduled pay raise. This is a time which one would think would encourage some serious outside-the-box thinking, but it's not forthcoming. Why not look at eliminating the State Senate and going with a unicameral legislature? Why not look at eliminating the Thruway Authority? Why not look at reforming all of the various regulations that may make sense in New York City but, when applied to smaller municipalities upstate, are obviously stifling to growth? For God's sake, Governor, there's a chance here to right some of New York's long-standing impediments to progress. Yes, you have serious budget problems to fix, but you also have a chance to position New York for a stronger position once the recovery gets here. (And there will be recovery, folks. Nothing lasts forever, and that means the bad times must end too.) So, Governor Paterson: Why not take this chance to actually fix some problems?!
:: I am no longer a fan of the Buffalo Bills. I'm not switching teams, actually; I'm not much of a football fan at all now. I've thought for several years now that there have to be better ways for me to spend my time on Sundays than giving three hours to a game that's less fun to watch every year, but the point got driven home the weekend the Bills played the Browns. That was a Monday Night game, so on Sunday, the day before, I watched one play of one football game. (It was in the Cowboys game that Sunday night. Tony Romo threw an interception.) And I didn't miss it at all. So yeah, I think I'm parting ways with football.
But as for the Bills themselves: they're not good, they're not going to be good, and soon enough, they're not even going to be the Buffalo Bills anymore. So I'm done.
I would like to say that I do not think that Ralph Wilson doesn't care. I think he does; I think he also has very little clue as to how the NFL functions these days, and I think that while he cares, he also wants to do things on the cheap. I genuinely believe he wants to win and that he's trying to field a good team, but that he does not want to spend exorbitantly to do it. Unfortunately, that means he's relying on finding diamonds in the rough, and it just isn't working out. Dick Jauron simply isn't a particularly effective head coach. The personnel people with the Bills simply aren't making good personnel decisions. The team simply isn't very good, and the current approach is only likely to produce a good team of the random variety, one of those teams that suddenly one year looks great because everybody on the roster inexplicably has a career year at the same time.
Three years into Dick Jauron's tenure, this team is no better than it was before he got here. That's ridiculously bad. In today's NFL, a rebuilding program need only take a year or two. If you contrast the Bills' results since the last time they made the playoffs (1999) with that of the New York Giants in the same period, you see the difference most readily. The Bills have had exactly one winning season in that span of years – 2004, when they were 9-7. They have made no playoff appearances in that span, not one. The Giants, though, started that span with a Super Bowl season, then they missed the playoffs, then they made the playoffs again, then they missed the playoffs a couple of years as they rebuilt (drafting Eli Manning in the process), then they became a playoff team again, staying in the playoffs and winning a Super Bowl and being one of the NFL's best teams this year. Look at that: in nine years, they went from a Super Bowl to a rebuilding phase and back to the Super Bowl, in the same time that the Bills went...nowhere. I'm not going to analyze the reasons why this is the case; I merely note that the Bills are showing no signs of improving, and anyway, I think they're out of here as soon as Mr. Wilson dies.
So I'm done. I'm not spending my Sundays watching these guys anymore, and I'm not going to pay attention on Draft Day to see if they finally grab that offensive lineman I always wanted. I'll always remember Kelly, Reed, Thomas, Smith, Bennett, Hull, Talley, Tasker, and all the rest of those guys, though.
:: One other point on the Bills: I was a big backer of JP Losman back when he was still the young guy learning the ropes. Now that it's obvious he's never going to be much of an NFL quarterback (unless he somehow puts it together late in his career the way Rich Gannon did), I'd just like to note that I still like the guy and wish it had worked out for him. He always struck me, frankly, as a good guy. I really appreciated how when he was drafted he really went out of his way to adopt Buffalo as his new home town. He never acted like the guy who was here to collect his paycheck and then get out of town as soon as he could, and I appreciate that greatly. So no hard feelings, JP, and best wishes for the future. (Unless you somehow end up on the New England roster, in which case, you're dead to me.)
That's about all the opinionation I have for right now.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Initiate Holding Pattern Delta!
No, folks, I'm not slipping into another hiatus. This is just a really busy period. More posts follow, hopefully, in a day or two.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Sentential Links #151
Only a few this week, as I've been really too busy to do much blog-surfing:
:: Most Dungeons and Dragons setting are watched over by a pantheon of gods, much like those found in Greek Mythology. These gods are typically related either through direct bloodlines and/or marriage (often incestuously) and dont really give a crap about the world below. These "gods" are forever fighting amongst themselves, cheating and backstabbing one another and subsequently dragging their worshippers into their indescretions.
:: Librarians have been told for years that they will become extinct as more and more information is made available on the Internet. We have not found this to be so.
:: The smoke detector wouldn’t have gone off because I was writing this post…
:: My admiration for William Carlos Williams just grew, as I read more and more poetry - his reputation certainly precedes him, but if you just read a lot of stuff, you start to see his influence EVERYWHERE.
:: First of all, you have to understand that I don't make or keep recipes. I'm one of those if-it's-in-the-pantry-and-it'll-work-throw-it-in kind of cooks.
That's all. Sorry, but it was a hectic weekend and it promises to be hectic until the New Year begins. I'll try to have Sentential Links next week, but no promises.
:: Most Dungeons and Dragons setting are watched over by a pantheon of gods, much like those found in Greek Mythology. These gods are typically related either through direct bloodlines and/or marriage (often incestuously) and dont really give a crap about the world below. These "gods" are forever fighting amongst themselves, cheating and backstabbing one another and subsequently dragging their worshippers into their indescretions.
:: Librarians have been told for years that they will become extinct as more and more information is made available on the Internet. We have not found this to be so.
:: The smoke detector wouldn’t have gone off because I was writing this post…
:: My admiration for William Carlos Williams just grew, as I read more and more poetry - his reputation certainly precedes him, but if you just read a lot of stuff, you start to see his influence EVERYWHERE.
:: First of all, you have to understand that I don't make or keep recipes. I'm one of those if-it's-in-the-pantry-and-it'll-work-throw-it-in kind of cooks.
That's all. Sorry, but it was a hectic weekend and it promises to be hectic until the New Year begins. I'll try to have Sentential Links next week, but no promises.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Weirdness on Da Web!
:: I kind of wish I liked the sound of handbell choirs more than I do (generally, my attention flags after just a couple of minutes of handbells), because to watch a good handbell choir is always fascinating. It looks easy enough -- it's just a bunch of people ringing bells -- but they have to ring the right bells at the right time, so if their timing is off, the entire tune will falter. This gets more impressive the more complicated the music is. In college we had a handbell choir that did religious music exclusively, but I generally find handbells more fun to hear if they're doing something offbeat, such as...the Main Theme to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies!
:: For baseball fans, it's always worth remembering what an entertaining jerk Rickey Henderson was:
Actually, messing with the heads of accountants is always good fun, so I can't hold this one against Rickey. And I always found something admirable about the fact that Henderson wanted to play so badly that toward the end he was playing semi-pro ball. After all, to paraphrase Annie Savoy, you gotta respect a ballplayer just tryin' to finish out the season.
:: OK, time for a little Star Trek bitching. At the risk of sounding like a deranged fan, this interview with one of the producers of the new movie -- via AICN -- presents what has got to be the laziest excuse for the movie cheerfully ignoring established canon that could possibly be cooked up. I would actually respect them more if they just said "We wanna start over with the same characters and do our own thing and screw your canon, so how do ya like that", but instead we get a whole bunch of goofy babble about how quantum physics establishes that there are infinite possible timelines, so they're just in a brand new timeline! Oh, come on. This is just dumb. Maybe we should use quantum physics to generate a timeline where we could finally see if an Imperial Star Destroyer could take out the Enterprise.
More next week.
:: I kind of wish I liked the sound of handbell choirs more than I do (generally, my attention flags after just a couple of minutes of handbells), because to watch a good handbell choir is always fascinating. It looks easy enough -- it's just a bunch of people ringing bells -- but they have to ring the right bells at the right time, so if their timing is off, the entire tune will falter. This gets more impressive the more complicated the music is. In college we had a handbell choir that did religious music exclusively, but I generally find handbells more fun to hear if they're doing something offbeat, such as...the Main Theme to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies!
:: For baseball fans, it's always worth remembering what an entertaining jerk Rickey Henderson was:
In the early 1980s, the Oakland A’s accounting department was freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house.
Actually, messing with the heads of accountants is always good fun, so I can't hold this one against Rickey. And I always found something admirable about the fact that Henderson wanted to play so badly that toward the end he was playing semi-pro ball. After all, to paraphrase Annie Savoy, you gotta respect a ballplayer just tryin' to finish out the season.
:: OK, time for a little Star Trek bitching. At the risk of sounding like a deranged fan, this interview with one of the producers of the new movie -- via AICN -- presents what has got to be the laziest excuse for the movie cheerfully ignoring established canon that could possibly be cooked up. I would actually respect them more if they just said "We wanna start over with the same characters and do our own thing and screw your canon, so how do ya like that", but instead we get a whole bunch of goofy babble about how quantum physics establishes that there are infinite possible timelines, so they're just in a brand new timeline! Oh, come on. This is just dumb. Maybe we should use quantum physics to generate a timeline where we could finally see if an Imperial Star Destroyer could take out the Enterprise.
More next week.
Between two and three days of my life I'll never get back
I've seen this "Alphabet Movie" meme-thing on a lot of blogs, in which you basically pick one movie for each letter of the alphabet. Here are the rules for this game (as quoted from SamuraiFrog, from when he did the game):
Since I myself wasn't tagged, I'm ignoring rules 5 and 6. Also, I decided to do this differently after I saw the twist that "Superwife" put on it: she listed one bad movie for each letter of the alphabet! And hey, it's always fun to rip on movies I don't like, so here we go.
But again, I'm doing bad movies. (By the way, Badmovies.org was a nice resource for browsing through lists of titles of movies I'd forgotten I'd seen, as a way of jogging the memory. Resurrecting bad memories, that is. Gee, thanks, guys!
A is for Armageddon. It's a ridiculous film. As SF, it is complete dreck; for this little scientific accuracy in a movie, you might just as well watch a space fantasy like Star Wars and have done with it. But, as I've noted before, Armageddon is the lava lamp of movies: I can't stop watching the thing whenever I find it on the teevee. Hurg. Bad movie. That I watch every time I come across it. (Earlier this football season I actually ended up watching Armageddon instead of a Bills game, and I suspect those who have paid any attention to the Bills this season won't hold that decision against me.)
B is for Beaches. Treacly garbage that I hated. I saw it in college when they had a screening on campus; everybody told me I'd cry because it was such a tearjerker, but instead, I sat there glowering at the screen because the movie had these two women basically treating each other like crap for two hours. Ugh. (And I could live my whole life without ever hearing "Wind Beneath My Wings" again.)
C is for The Cat from Outer Space. This was one of those live-action Disney movies in the 1970s, the ones that always either starred Dean Jones or Ken Berry. This one had Ken Berry, and I saw it when I was in kindergarten or first grade, and it was complete crap. No need to hash out why; just look at that title.
D is for Dead Poets Society. I've said my piece on this movie here. Didn't like it.
E is for Earthbound. This too came out when I was a kid. An alien family crashlands their ship on Earth and evades the government while taking refuge with a geezer (played by Burl Ives) and his grandson or nephew or something like that. I remember liking it as a kid, but it was probably crap.
F is for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The one part of the movie I like is the destruction of the Corvette. Other than that, I find this movie really dull and not terribly funny. This could be due to my generic dislike for Matthew Broderick.
G is for Gymkata. OK, I haven't seen the entire thing. But I have seen the last half hour, which astonished me in its sheer awfulness. Near as I could tell, some dude with Mad Gymnastics Skillz managed to beat off an entire town's worth of attackers by using his Mad Gymnastics Skillz, at one point even finding a pommel horse in the middle of the town square. Ummm...sure.
H is for Highlander. I've never understood the cult fascination this movie holds for some people. The premise is goofy, and not in the "fun goofy" kind of way either; the acting is dreadful (except for Clancy Brown), with not even Sean Connery avoiding lines like "Are the stars pinpricks in the curtain of night?"; a bunch of guys fighting over a prize that's never revealed until they whole thing is over so we don't even know why we should care. Despite the presence of Connery and Clancy Brown, I still manage to dislike this movie.
I is for Independence Day. It's fun to watch, but there's just not a single plot point in this movie that makes any sense at all. Most famously there's Jeff Goldblum disabling the entire alien computer system with a virus he threw together on his 1995 Apple Powerbook, but this movie also has Area 51 having been a secret for fifty years but also being spotted by Will Smith when he flies over it in his fighter jet whilst in combat; it has a Senior Aide to the President of the United States who keeps her cell phone number listed in the local Washington DC phone book "for emergencies" (huh?!); it has the President being a fighter pilot whose Mad Fighter Piloting Skillz are still good enough that he can outfly aliens in space fighters; et cetera.
J is for Jaws IV: The Revenge. Jaws II isn't that bad a movie, really. III is downright bad. But IV is legendary for its awfulness, including the end where the shark stands on end while a boat runs it through. Ouch.
K is for The Karate Kid Part III. The first Karate Kid movie is fantastic. Seriously, it's a very, very good movie. The second one isn't bad either, although it is obviously nowhere near the same league as the original. But the third? Oy. It's just a disaster. More wisdom from Mr. Miyagi, more troubles for Daniel-san, and another fight at the end where it turns out that Daniel-san's karate is better than the other guy's. Why did they make this movie? I have no clue. (And while Ralph Macchio could pull off the sixteen year old kid in the first movie fine, and the seventeen year old kid a little less fine in the second one, here he looks like a thirty-year-old playing a seventeen year old.)
L is for The Lost World: Jurassic Park. What a terrible sequel this is; I can't believe Steven Spielberg went from Schindler's List to this. It's full of one implausible sequence after another, it kills off Richard Schiff, it has a thirteen girl fending off velociraptors by using her Mad Gymnastics Skillz, and so on. The last half hour is better because of the "T-rex on the loose in San Diego" stuff, but this movie is bad.
M is for Mission to Mars. This is one of the worst SF movies I've ever seen. It's boring, it tries to have it both ways with 2001-like hard SF combined with some "Face on Mars" mystical nonsense, and its score (by Ennio Morricone) is downright unpleasant.
N is for Nell. It's just physically impossible to take this movie seriously. I'm sorry. It's a neat idea for a story, but as filmed, I always wondered how many takes it took certain scenes to be filmed due to actors breaking out in laughter at the stuff the script had them saying. (I wrote this post a while back and have been sitting on it; since then I learn that it's one of Belladonna's favorites. Oh, forgive me! I really wanted to like this one; it's got a killer cast, for one thing, and it has some great ideas behind it. But about the fourth or fifth time somebody said "Taaayyyinnn innn daa weennnnnddd", or whatever it was Nell said over and over and over again, I just mentally checked out of the movie.)
O is for Ordinary People. I had to watch this in school, my sophomore year. Other classes were reading Mark Twain, while we were reading Judith Guest and watching this movie, which had the effect, ironically enough, of making me want to do myself in. Luckily, I got better. It took three consecutive viewings of Star Wars the weekend after we finished this one to get it out of my system. (By the way, I know I've griped over this before, but one of the great educational travesties of my youth is that my English teacher that year made us read Ordinary People while the other English classes were reading Mark Twain. Heckuva job there, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Was.)
P is for Predator II. I enjoyed the first Predator movie; it was an effective "monster on the loose" kind of movie, good for watching with a couple of friends and some beers on a night in college. Not so the second movie, which was little more than an excuse to use the same monster again. Bad.
Q is for Quest for Camelot. Someday an indisputably good movie will be made from the Arthurian legends. (Excalibur is pretty close, but its pacing is too sluggish and its use of Wagner and Orff in the soundtrack too distracting.) Until then, we'll have to live with all of the bad movies about Arthur and Camelot that have been made, and there have been a ton of 'em. Here's one, an animated piece of crud. Not recommended.
R is for Rambo: First Blood Part II. Or any of the Rambo movies, for that matter. (Maybe not First Blood, which I haven't seen and I've heard the best things about.) Rambo was embarrassing macho crap for the macho-men of the 1980s. Jerry Goldsmith wrote some good music for these flicks, but other than that, they're crap.
S is for Scream. What terrible dreck this movie is. There's nothing plausible about it, and it's a terribly confused movie, too: what is it? Spoof? Horror flick whose main notion is that other horror flicks should be taken seriously? It's just a stupid, stupid movie, filled with dumb characters who behave in ways no ordinary person would behave. And it had two sequels. Yuck.
T is for Thank God It's Friday. It's a shame this movie isn't better known, because it truly deserves the reputation that seems to have accrued around Saturday Night Fever instead. Whereas that film is a dark and cynical film about the lives of young adults who hang out in a disco, TGiF actually is the campy, goofy movie about the lovelorn adults who hang out in a disco. It does have a saving grace in a nice performance by Donna Summer, who sings my beloved "Last Dance" toward the end of the flick. Other than that, though, it's a bad movie.
U is for The Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Soze? Who gives a crap? Instead of a gripping movie about the criminals trying to execute a heist bigger than any of them, we get a lame mystery that I found interesting for all of thirty seconds, because that's how long it took me to figure out who Keyser Soze was. I genuinely can't understand why so many people think this movie is a classic.
V is for A View to a Kill. I feel a bit unfair here, because I genuinely can't claim to dislike this movie, even if I grant that Roger Moore was too old by this time to be convincing and that Tonya Roberts was less than good in a part that was also written less than well. But Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? He was terrific! I can't bring myself to hate this movie. But there's quite a lot wrong with it, I'll grant you that.
W is for Waterworld. I actually think this movie wasn't as bad as its reputation at the time made it out to be, but it's not that good, either. For one thing, it's pretty dull most of the way, and you'd think a set that cost something like $100000000 to build would look a bit better than a giant rusting hulk. And while I'm glad there was an SF film that gave a bit of thought to certain survival issues in an environment such as the movie depicts, did the opening scene really have to feature Kevin Costner urinating? Talk about setting an unfortunate tone.
X is for Xanadu. Just because I can't even think of any bad movies that start with X other than Xanadu. Luckily, Xanadu is truly awful.
Y is for Yes Giorgio. It's a romantic comedy starring Luciano Pavarotti as a tenor with confidence issues, and the female psychologist who has to help him regain his mojo so he'll sing at some big concert, or something. It's wildly bad.
Z is for Zen Monkeys in Love. OK, that's not a movie that exists, so far as I know. But I drew a complete blank on movies starting with 'Z' that I hated, and not even some extensive Googling turned up anything (though Zardoz looks pretty bad, though I've not seen it). So, if anyone can jog my memory as to a 'Z' movie I'm missing, let me know. I'm sure there are some, out there somewhere. (We watched Zathura a couple of weeks back because The Kid picked it out at the library, but it doesn't come close to being bad enough to merit inclusion on this list. It's more of a "Meh" movie.)
Why, oh why, did I watch all these? WHY???!!!
1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.
2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.
3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.
4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."
5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.
6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.
Since I myself wasn't tagged, I'm ignoring rules 5 and 6. Also, I decided to do this differently after I saw the twist that "Superwife" put on it: she listed one bad movie for each letter of the alphabet! And hey, it's always fun to rip on movies I don't like, so here we go.
But again, I'm doing bad movies. (By the way, Badmovies.org was a nice resource for browsing through lists of titles of movies I'd forgotten I'd seen, as a way of jogging the memory. Resurrecting bad memories, that is. Gee, thanks, guys!
A is for Armageddon. It's a ridiculous film. As SF, it is complete dreck; for this little scientific accuracy in a movie, you might just as well watch a space fantasy like Star Wars and have done with it. But, as I've noted before, Armageddon is the lava lamp of movies: I can't stop watching the thing whenever I find it on the teevee. Hurg. Bad movie. That I watch every time I come across it. (Earlier this football season I actually ended up watching Armageddon instead of a Bills game, and I suspect those who have paid any attention to the Bills this season won't hold that decision against me.)
B is for Beaches. Treacly garbage that I hated. I saw it in college when they had a screening on campus; everybody told me I'd cry because it was such a tearjerker, but instead, I sat there glowering at the screen because the movie had these two women basically treating each other like crap for two hours. Ugh. (And I could live my whole life without ever hearing "Wind Beneath My Wings" again.)
C is for The Cat from Outer Space. This was one of those live-action Disney movies in the 1970s, the ones that always either starred Dean Jones or Ken Berry. This one had Ken Berry, and I saw it when I was in kindergarten or first grade, and it was complete crap. No need to hash out why; just look at that title.
D is for Dead Poets Society. I've said my piece on this movie here. Didn't like it.
E is for Earthbound. This too came out when I was a kid. An alien family crashlands their ship on Earth and evades the government while taking refuge with a geezer (played by Burl Ives) and his grandson or nephew or something like that. I remember liking it as a kid, but it was probably crap.
F is for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The one part of the movie I like is the destruction of the Corvette. Other than that, I find this movie really dull and not terribly funny. This could be due to my generic dislike for Matthew Broderick.
G is for Gymkata. OK, I haven't seen the entire thing. But I have seen the last half hour, which astonished me in its sheer awfulness. Near as I could tell, some dude with Mad Gymnastics Skillz managed to beat off an entire town's worth of attackers by using his Mad Gymnastics Skillz, at one point even finding a pommel horse in the middle of the town square. Ummm...sure.
H is for Highlander. I've never understood the cult fascination this movie holds for some people. The premise is goofy, and not in the "fun goofy" kind of way either; the acting is dreadful (except for Clancy Brown), with not even Sean Connery avoiding lines like "Are the stars pinpricks in the curtain of night?"; a bunch of guys fighting over a prize that's never revealed until they whole thing is over so we don't even know why we should care. Despite the presence of Connery and Clancy Brown, I still manage to dislike this movie.
I is for Independence Day. It's fun to watch, but there's just not a single plot point in this movie that makes any sense at all. Most famously there's Jeff Goldblum disabling the entire alien computer system with a virus he threw together on his 1995 Apple Powerbook, but this movie also has Area 51 having been a secret for fifty years but also being spotted by Will Smith when he flies over it in his fighter jet whilst in combat; it has a Senior Aide to the President of the United States who keeps her cell phone number listed in the local Washington DC phone book "for emergencies" (huh?!); it has the President being a fighter pilot whose Mad Fighter Piloting Skillz are still good enough that he can outfly aliens in space fighters; et cetera.
J is for Jaws IV: The Revenge. Jaws II isn't that bad a movie, really. III is downright bad. But IV is legendary for its awfulness, including the end where the shark stands on end while a boat runs it through. Ouch.
K is for The Karate Kid Part III. The first Karate Kid movie is fantastic. Seriously, it's a very, very good movie. The second one isn't bad either, although it is obviously nowhere near the same league as the original. But the third? Oy. It's just a disaster. More wisdom from Mr. Miyagi, more troubles for Daniel-san, and another fight at the end where it turns out that Daniel-san's karate is better than the other guy's. Why did they make this movie? I have no clue. (And while Ralph Macchio could pull off the sixteen year old kid in the first movie fine, and the seventeen year old kid a little less fine in the second one, here he looks like a thirty-year-old playing a seventeen year old.)
L is for The Lost World: Jurassic Park. What a terrible sequel this is; I can't believe Steven Spielberg went from Schindler's List to this. It's full of one implausible sequence after another, it kills off Richard Schiff, it has a thirteen girl fending off velociraptors by using her Mad Gymnastics Skillz, and so on. The last half hour is better because of the "T-rex on the loose in San Diego" stuff, but this movie is bad.
M is for Mission to Mars. This is one of the worst SF movies I've ever seen. It's boring, it tries to have it both ways with 2001-like hard SF combined with some "Face on Mars" mystical nonsense, and its score (by Ennio Morricone) is downright unpleasant.
N is for Nell. It's just physically impossible to take this movie seriously. I'm sorry. It's a neat idea for a story, but as filmed, I always wondered how many takes it took certain scenes to be filmed due to actors breaking out in laughter at the stuff the script had them saying. (I wrote this post a while back and have been sitting on it; since then I learn that it's one of Belladonna's favorites. Oh, forgive me! I really wanted to like this one; it's got a killer cast, for one thing, and it has some great ideas behind it. But about the fourth or fifth time somebody said "Taaayyyinnn innn daa weennnnnddd", or whatever it was Nell said over and over and over again, I just mentally checked out of the movie.)
O is for Ordinary People. I had to watch this in school, my sophomore year. Other classes were reading Mark Twain, while we were reading Judith Guest and watching this movie, which had the effect, ironically enough, of making me want to do myself in. Luckily, I got better. It took three consecutive viewings of Star Wars the weekend after we finished this one to get it out of my system. (By the way, I know I've griped over this before, but one of the great educational travesties of my youth is that my English teacher that year made us read Ordinary People while the other English classes were reading Mark Twain. Heckuva job there, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Was.)
P is for Predator II. I enjoyed the first Predator movie; it was an effective "monster on the loose" kind of movie, good for watching with a couple of friends and some beers on a night in college. Not so the second movie, which was little more than an excuse to use the same monster again. Bad.
Q is for Quest for Camelot. Someday an indisputably good movie will be made from the Arthurian legends. (Excalibur is pretty close, but its pacing is too sluggish and its use of Wagner and Orff in the soundtrack too distracting.) Until then, we'll have to live with all of the bad movies about Arthur and Camelot that have been made, and there have been a ton of 'em. Here's one, an animated piece of crud. Not recommended.
R is for Rambo: First Blood Part II. Or any of the Rambo movies, for that matter. (Maybe not First Blood, which I haven't seen and I've heard the best things about.) Rambo was embarrassing macho crap for the macho-men of the 1980s. Jerry Goldsmith wrote some good music for these flicks, but other than that, they're crap.
S is for Scream. What terrible dreck this movie is. There's nothing plausible about it, and it's a terribly confused movie, too: what is it? Spoof? Horror flick whose main notion is that other horror flicks should be taken seriously? It's just a stupid, stupid movie, filled with dumb characters who behave in ways no ordinary person would behave. And it had two sequels. Yuck.
T is for Thank God It's Friday. It's a shame this movie isn't better known, because it truly deserves the reputation that seems to have accrued around Saturday Night Fever instead. Whereas that film is a dark and cynical film about the lives of young adults who hang out in a disco, TGiF actually is the campy, goofy movie about the lovelorn adults who hang out in a disco. It does have a saving grace in a nice performance by Donna Summer, who sings my beloved "Last Dance" toward the end of the flick. Other than that, though, it's a bad movie.
U is for The Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Soze? Who gives a crap? Instead of a gripping movie about the criminals trying to execute a heist bigger than any of them, we get a lame mystery that I found interesting for all of thirty seconds, because that's how long it took me to figure out who Keyser Soze was. I genuinely can't understand why so many people think this movie is a classic.
V is for A View to a Kill. I feel a bit unfair here, because I genuinely can't claim to dislike this movie, even if I grant that Roger Moore was too old by this time to be convincing and that Tonya Roberts was less than good in a part that was also written less than well. But Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? He was terrific! I can't bring myself to hate this movie. But there's quite a lot wrong with it, I'll grant you that.
W is for Waterworld. I actually think this movie wasn't as bad as its reputation at the time made it out to be, but it's not that good, either. For one thing, it's pretty dull most of the way, and you'd think a set that cost something like $100000000 to build would look a bit better than a giant rusting hulk. And while I'm glad there was an SF film that gave a bit of thought to certain survival issues in an environment such as the movie depicts, did the opening scene really have to feature Kevin Costner urinating? Talk about setting an unfortunate tone.
X is for Xanadu. Just because I can't even think of any bad movies that start with X other than Xanadu. Luckily, Xanadu is truly awful.
Y is for Yes Giorgio. It's a romantic comedy starring Luciano Pavarotti as a tenor with confidence issues, and the female psychologist who has to help him regain his mojo so he'll sing at some big concert, or something. It's wildly bad.
Z is for Zen Monkeys in Love. OK, that's not a movie that exists, so far as I know. But I drew a complete blank on movies starting with 'Z' that I hated, and not even some extensive Googling turned up anything (though Zardoz looks pretty bad, though I've not seen it). So, if anyone can jog my memory as to a 'Z' movie I'm missing, let me know. I'm sure there are some, out there somewhere. (We watched Zathura a couple of weeks back because The Kid picked it out at the library, but it doesn't come close to being bad enough to merit inclusion on this list. It's more of a "Meh" movie.)
Why, oh why, did I watch all these? WHY???!!!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Do not adjust your monitors....
Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the layout has changed a bit around here. I think that Earthlink has reduced the data transfer allowance for people using their bare-bones, free webspace that comes with basic membership, because I've been using up my allowed bandwidth in about ten or eleven days since I've returned to blogging, which is odd because my traffic is still roughly two-thirds of what it once was (and my traffic was never high to begin with), and I used to get through an entire month with no problem. I've reduced the use of images as backgrounds on the blog in favor of solid colors, which I hope helps the problem along.
I've also made a couple of other changes, such as my use of a new picture of the American flag for the sidebar. (I'd link the site where I got that flag picture for credit, but the site I got it from no longer exists; the pic comes up on Google's image search, but the site is an expired domain name default page. Oh well.) Finally, I ditched the Technorati widget that was attached to each post. It allowed, supposedly, the viewing of posts on other blogs linking to the individual posts here, but [a] I don't get many links, [b] I never used that tool anyway, and finally, [c] if Technorati was working slowly -- which seems to usually be the case with them -- the whole blog seemed to load glacially. I made the change a while back to switch the columns so the content would at least appear first if the sidebar was taking forever, but the last few days, that Technorati widget has been causing the sidebar itself to take forever to appear. So out it goes.
Enjoy! Or not.
(BTW, not that anyone cares, but I've stopped using BlogLines entirely for following those blogs I follow via RSS, in favor of Google Reader. For one thing, on Google Reader, posts that you've read don't disappear entirely, so I can go back an re-read them for a time.)
I've also made a couple of other changes, such as my use of a new picture of the American flag for the sidebar. (I'd link the site where I got that flag picture for credit, but the site I got it from no longer exists; the pic comes up on Google's image search, but the site is an expired domain name default page. Oh well.) Finally, I ditched the Technorati widget that was attached to each post. It allowed, supposedly, the viewing of posts on other blogs linking to the individual posts here, but [a] I don't get many links, [b] I never used that tool anyway, and finally, [c] if Technorati was working slowly -- which seems to usually be the case with them -- the whole blog seemed to load glacially. I made the change a while back to switch the columns so the content would at least appear first if the sidebar was taking forever, but the last few days, that Technorati widget has been causing the sidebar itself to take forever to appear. So out it goes.
Enjoy! Or not.
(BTW, not that anyone cares, but I've stopped using BlogLines entirely for following those blogs I follow via RSS, in favor of Google Reader. For one thing, on Google Reader, posts that you've read don't disappear entirely, so I can go back an re-read them for a time.)
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Something for Thursday
Wow, I actually forgot what day it was, for purposes of the blog. Sorry about that, folks!
Here's Danny Kaye and the Muppets.
Later! Inchworm, inchworm....
Here's Danny Kaye and the Muppets.
Later! Inchworm, inchworm....
Boldly Geeking
I wanted to highlight a few nice geek-posts I've seen the last week:
:: First, Jason takes note of some possible reason for optimism regarding the Star Trek relaunch by JJ Abrams:
Ah, the Star Fleet Technical Manual...I really should track down a copy of that book one of these years. It was a lot of fun to dig through, back when I was a kid. I never owned it, but one of the libraries we used to frequent had a copy in its collection. I remember looking at the lists of all the ships in Starfleet, and also noting the interesting designs of the ships as well. Sometimes the warp nacelles were on top of the ship, sometimes underneath; some ships had only one nacelle with no secondary hull, and so on. The USS Reliant from The Wrath of Khan was a nice throwback to these other formulations of Starfleet ships, and Jason's right to note that at least in this aspect of his visual design, Abrams is taking his cues from established Trek history.
Of course, this was never in much doubt. Abrams has always been good at injecting his projects with lots of small details for the segments of fandom that live for the small stuff. Witness all the people who devote time to digging through the inner details of LOST, and similar factors were at play in Alias. I'm not worried about that aspect of this project; I remain worried that Abrams is going to screw up the character dynamic of Trek.
Second, SamuraiFrog decides that he's a Star Wars fan after all:
I still haven't watched the complete Star Wars saga in one go, although a few times in college we watched all three of the Original Trilogy at once. My constant hope that the backlash against Star Wars eventually fades continues to hold sway in my mind.
:: First, Jason takes note of some possible reason for optimism regarding the Star Trek relaunch by JJ Abrams:
So, here we've got a good look at the unfortunate vessel that's only glimpsed in fast cuts and in between explosions during The Trailer. It's instantly recognizable as a Federation starship with its saucer-shaped primary hull and the blue-glowing deflector dish. But wait, you might be saying if you're familiar with the usual Star Trek vehicle architecture, there's something screwy here: the secondary hull (that's the bit that sports the deflector dish and the shuttlecraft hanger in the back) is on top of the ship, not below as on pretty much every other Starfleet vessel ever seen in a Star Trek TV series or movie. And there's only one engine nacelle? Has J.J. Abrams gone insane? Is this the sign we've all been looking for, the proof that he's abandoned all the established Trek lore and is waving his private parts at the existing fanbase? (Can you tell I've been hanging out on the fanboy message boards again?)
Well, no... in fact, I take the Kelvin's layout as a very positive sign of exactly the opposite. But you've probably got to be a real old-timer like me to recognize the clues. You see, the Kelvin is highly reminiscent of the very earliest design sketches for the good old Enterprise herself, which were upside-down relative to the way we're familiar with her looking. You can see one of these sketches on this page (scroll down to the section labeled "Artwork"), and several more in the old book The Making of Star Trek, if you can track down a copy of that. I think they were reprinted in the excellent book Inside Star Trek, as well (for my money, that one is the best volume ever written on the history of the original series).
As for the single-engine controversy, it's more-or-less understood nowadays that in the Trek 'verse, you need to have two nacelles, but that wasn't always the case. Way back in the '70s, even before Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- the Golden Age of original series fandom, in my opinion -- one of the primary sources for young nerds was a book called The Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. This volume was considered official "canon" for years until Gene Roddenberry decided it wasn't, and as I recall, it contained several one-nacelle ship designs.
Ah, the Star Fleet Technical Manual...I really should track down a copy of that book one of these years. It was a lot of fun to dig through, back when I was a kid. I never owned it, but one of the libraries we used to frequent had a copy in its collection. I remember looking at the lists of all the ships in Starfleet, and also noting the interesting designs of the ships as well. Sometimes the warp nacelles were on top of the ship, sometimes underneath; some ships had only one nacelle with no secondary hull, and so on. The USS Reliant from The Wrath of Khan was a nice throwback to these other formulations of Starfleet ships, and Jason's right to note that at least in this aspect of his visual design, Abrams is taking his cues from established Trek history.
Of course, this was never in much doubt. Abrams has always been good at injecting his projects with lots of small details for the segments of fandom that live for the small stuff. Witness all the people who devote time to digging through the inner details of LOST, and similar factors were at play in Alias. I'm not worried about that aspect of this project; I remain worried that Abrams is going to screw up the character dynamic of Trek.
Second, SamuraiFrog decides that he's a Star Wars fan after all:
Recently, Becca and I sat in front of our new, big widescreen TV and watched, in a single day, all six Star Wars films, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi. And it turns out I'm still a Star Wars fan. It was hard to be one for the last decade plus of humorless Star Wars fandom whining its overly entitled little head off about the thing it professes to love but openly hates (and, like an abused housewife, keeps returning to because no one understands it in that special way that they do). But I still dig it, and watching all six parts at once makes for a more unified experience than I thought it would. It all makes sense, and it all holds together. And it's surprisingly easy to get emotionally involved.
I still haven't watched the complete Star Wars saga in one go, although a few times in college we watched all three of the Original Trilogy at once. My constant hope that the backlash against Star Wars eventually fades continues to hold sway in my mind.
Christmas Quiz!
This quiz comes from Roger:
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
I always aspire to using wrapping paper, but end up using bags for most gifts.
2. Real tree or artificial?
We used to get a real tree every year, but now we use a fake one. It really is easier, even if every year our tree ends up looking like last year's tree.
3. When do you put up the tree?
When we say, "Wow, we gotta get the tree up, because Christmas is in X days!" I never get the people who have their trees already up on Thanksgiving.
4. When do you take the tree down?
Sometime in mid-January. Like I don't get the people who have the tree up on Thanksgiving, I also don't get the impulse to take it all down in December 26. Why the rush?
5. Do you like eggnog?
I tasted some last week that rocked my world, so I'll probably get some and mix it with rum. It's an unpleasant sounding name, though. Remember that episode of Star Trek TNG where Ryker is eating a bunch of Klingon dishes, and they all have names like "GAAGGHHH"? That's what "eggnog" sounds like to me.
6. Favorite gifts received as a child?
Huh. I'm not sure I can pick just one. Every year had its distinct gifts, its bits of magic that made my life great at that time. Sure, interests moved on and last year's toys would eventually fade, but I can honestly say that everything I received, with no exceptions that I can recall, was great whenever I received it. My parents, sister, and extended family were always really good at the Christmas gift thing.
Now, some toys I got do stand out in my memory. The first thing I saw when coming from my room to the tree in the living room in my kindergarten year was the stuffed Curious George I'd so desperately wanted. The next year there was, among others, a battery-driven dump-truck thing that was really cool; it moved on this little track and would dump its cargo and then turn around, all on its own, and go pick it up. Second grade's big gift was a starter model railroad set by Marklin (which is, I'm told, one of the finest model railroad manufacturers). Third and fourth grade are kind of fuzzy in my head for some reason, but at one of them I finally got my own record player which meant I no longer had to go to my parents' room to listen to my own records. (It also had an 8-track deck, huzzah!) And fifth grade was the year the VIC-20 arrived. Various years after that saw cool computer games, treasured books and records, and other wonderful items turn up under the tree. Ninth grade may have been when my parents bought me the kayak (now there's a pasttime I need to take up again), and a few years later, my E-flat trumpet.
I never had a bad Christmas as a kid.
7. Hardest person to buy for?
The Daughter, if only because I know I can't always get her all that she wants. It's the reality, but still, I hate that.
8. Easiest person to buy for?
The Daughter, because she's never yet complained about that one gift she didn't get. (That day is probably coming, though. I know I did it once, and then after the dirty look I got from my mother, never again.)
9. Do you have a nativity scene?
Yes. It's fairly beat-up by this point, and maybe we should look into a new one. We also have a set of glass Christmas ornaments that depict the people of the Nativity: Mary, Joseph, the Magi, and that baby who was there too. (These are pictured here.)
10. Mail or email Christmas cards?
Both, although I tend to be bad at getting the physical ones in the mail, so I end up giving physical ones personally to the people I know who are here.
11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
Ah, geez...I hate ragging on Christmas presents. It was probably something I got not from a family member, but at the annual Christmas exchange with the other kids at school.
12. Favorite Christmas Movie?
This year I resolve to finally watch A Christmas Story, which I've never seen. I honestly don't know how it's managed to completely slip through my cracks except for the fact that we don't have cable and thus are never able to partake of whatever channel it is that runs the movie for twenty-four hours straight every year.
That said, I know it's not everybody's idea of a "Christmas movie", but to me it is: Love, Actually, which takes place at Christmas and is shot in such a way that at many points in its running time the movie actually sparkles. I also love to watch My Fair Lady at Christmastime, although that's not specifically a Christmas movie; I merely associate it with the season because that's when I first watched it. I also associate The Sound of Music with the season, but that's probably because it's an ideal family film and family time's always a priority this time of year.
(I don't much like It's a Wonderful Life, by the way.
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
When I start thinking about it, really. I used to begin very early, in September even, but now I tend to be a November and December shopper. I do tend to end up shopping the last few days before Christmas, but that's not because I'm being the typical lackadaisical male, but rather because the way my paychecks run, I have to spread my shopping out thusly.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Unless donating something I received years ago to Goodwill or the donation bins at church counts, no. Although one year I did give a bottle of liquor I received for Christmas to a guy who helped us move, because he was quite the drinker and because the bottle was something I didn't really care for. (Kahlua, maybe.)
15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
Candy cane ice cream, mint flavored anything, Christmas sugar cookies, caramel corn, et cetera. Oh, and those chocolates with liquor in them. Those make the day a lot of fun.
16. Lights on the tree?
I prefer white, but the artificial one we have now has colored lights pre-installed. We always add a strand of white lights, though. Mono-colored trees are always nice for a change, though, especially for smaller, "auxiliary" trees; on these, I like blue lights.
17. Favorite Christmas song?
I'm pretty sure I did a post on Christmas music once, in years past...let's see, oh yes, here it is, which turns out to be...another version of this very quiz. Harumph...anyway, I do love "Little Drummer Boy". (And I really don't like "Carol of the Bells". It just doesn't ring my...well, you get it.)
18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
We always stay home, although travel someday might be fun.
19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer?
Sure.
20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
The severed heads of my foes.
OK, fine, not really. An angel.
21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Christmas Eve. We find that Christmas morning is a lot less hectic that way; the entire day becomes more relaxing and festive.
One year, when I was a teenager and my sister was home either from college or grad school, we opened the gifts on Christmas Eve, after she'd had a bit too much to drink, and thus the next morning she pretty much got to open everything again: "Oh, wow, did I get this? From who? Wow!!"
22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year?
All that "War on Christmas" crap I have to listen to. Look, folks, the fact is that the days are long gone when you can simply assume that everybody you're talking to is a Christian. Maybe you think that stinks, but you really need to get over it.
I also tire of people who can't seem to find the way to have fun, even with the shopping. Sure, there are lots of people around and it's crowded and it takes a while to get through the registers at Target. That's the baseline for this time of year, and you should factor that in as the cost of doing business and move on. I had a good time shopping on Black Friday afternoon this year, but I was really disheartened to hear people yelling at their kids in the middle of the stores after what had obviously been long days on their feet already.
23. Favorite ornament theme or color?
No color, actually, but I do love the painted glass ornaments, and I buy new ones every year, to the point where the tree is probably too "busy".
24. Favorite for Christmas dinner?
I don't really have a favorite. Sometimes we have turkey, sometimes we have ham. And one year, when The Wife was sick, I made pastitsio.
25. What do you want for Christmas this year?
Books, time to write, music, good food, wine, a new winter coat, more know-how on maintenance jobs, less girth (still holding steady, but watch out, January!), world peace, January 20 to come as quickly as possible, an end to recession, and good will toward men. And pie. Gotta have pie.
26. Who is most likely to respond to this?
Anyone who looks at these quizzes and thinks, "Hey, I gotta post me some of that!"
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
I always aspire to using wrapping paper, but end up using bags for most gifts.
2. Real tree or artificial?
We used to get a real tree every year, but now we use a fake one. It really is easier, even if every year our tree ends up looking like last year's tree.
3. When do you put up the tree?
When we say, "Wow, we gotta get the tree up, because Christmas is in X days!" I never get the people who have their trees already up on Thanksgiving.
4. When do you take the tree down?
Sometime in mid-January. Like I don't get the people who have the tree up on Thanksgiving, I also don't get the impulse to take it all down in December 26. Why the rush?
5. Do you like eggnog?
I tasted some last week that rocked my world, so I'll probably get some and mix it with rum. It's an unpleasant sounding name, though. Remember that episode of Star Trek TNG where Ryker is eating a bunch of Klingon dishes, and they all have names like "GAAGGHHH"? That's what "eggnog" sounds like to me.
6. Favorite gifts received as a child?
Huh. I'm not sure I can pick just one. Every year had its distinct gifts, its bits of magic that made my life great at that time. Sure, interests moved on and last year's toys would eventually fade, but I can honestly say that everything I received, with no exceptions that I can recall, was great whenever I received it. My parents, sister, and extended family were always really good at the Christmas gift thing.
Now, some toys I got do stand out in my memory. The first thing I saw when coming from my room to the tree in the living room in my kindergarten year was the stuffed Curious George I'd so desperately wanted. The next year there was, among others, a battery-driven dump-truck thing that was really cool; it moved on this little track and would dump its cargo and then turn around, all on its own, and go pick it up. Second grade's big gift was a starter model railroad set by Marklin (which is, I'm told, one of the finest model railroad manufacturers). Third and fourth grade are kind of fuzzy in my head for some reason, but at one of them I finally got my own record player which meant I no longer had to go to my parents' room to listen to my own records. (It also had an 8-track deck, huzzah!) And fifth grade was the year the VIC-20 arrived. Various years after that saw cool computer games, treasured books and records, and other wonderful items turn up under the tree. Ninth grade may have been when my parents bought me the kayak (now there's a pasttime I need to take up again), and a few years later, my E-flat trumpet.
I never had a bad Christmas as a kid.
7. Hardest person to buy for?
The Daughter, if only because I know I can't always get her all that she wants. It's the reality, but still, I hate that.
8. Easiest person to buy for?
The Daughter, because she's never yet complained about that one gift she didn't get. (That day is probably coming, though. I know I did it once, and then after the dirty look I got from my mother, never again.)
9. Do you have a nativity scene?
Yes. It's fairly beat-up by this point, and maybe we should look into a new one. We also have a set of glass Christmas ornaments that depict the people of the Nativity: Mary, Joseph, the Magi, and that baby who was there too. (These are pictured here.)
10. Mail or email Christmas cards?
Both, although I tend to be bad at getting the physical ones in the mail, so I end up giving physical ones personally to the people I know who are here.
11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
Ah, geez...I hate ragging on Christmas presents. It was probably something I got not from a family member, but at the annual Christmas exchange with the other kids at school.
12. Favorite Christmas Movie?
This year I resolve to finally watch A Christmas Story, which I've never seen. I honestly don't know how it's managed to completely slip through my cracks except for the fact that we don't have cable and thus are never able to partake of whatever channel it is that runs the movie for twenty-four hours straight every year.
That said, I know it's not everybody's idea of a "Christmas movie", but to me it is: Love, Actually, which takes place at Christmas and is shot in such a way that at many points in its running time the movie actually sparkles. I also love to watch My Fair Lady at Christmastime, although that's not specifically a Christmas movie; I merely associate it with the season because that's when I first watched it. I also associate The Sound of Music with the season, but that's probably because it's an ideal family film and family time's always a priority this time of year.
(I don't much like It's a Wonderful Life, by the way.
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
When I start thinking about it, really. I used to begin very early, in September even, but now I tend to be a November and December shopper. I do tend to end up shopping the last few days before Christmas, but that's not because I'm being the typical lackadaisical male, but rather because the way my paychecks run, I have to spread my shopping out thusly.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Unless donating something I received years ago to Goodwill or the donation bins at church counts, no. Although one year I did give a bottle of liquor I received for Christmas to a guy who helped us move, because he was quite the drinker and because the bottle was something I didn't really care for. (Kahlua, maybe.)
15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas?
Candy cane ice cream, mint flavored anything, Christmas sugar cookies, caramel corn, et cetera. Oh, and those chocolates with liquor in them. Those make the day a lot of fun.
16. Lights on the tree?
I prefer white, but the artificial one we have now has colored lights pre-installed. We always add a strand of white lights, though. Mono-colored trees are always nice for a change, though, especially for smaller, "auxiliary" trees; on these, I like blue lights.
17. Favorite Christmas song?
I'm pretty sure I did a post on Christmas music once, in years past...let's see, oh yes, here it is, which turns out to be...another version of this very quiz. Harumph...anyway, I do love "Little Drummer Boy". (And I really don't like "Carol of the Bells". It just doesn't ring my...well, you get it.)
18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
We always stay home, although travel someday might be fun.
19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer?
Sure.
20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
The severed heads of my foes.
OK, fine, not really. An angel.
21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Christmas Eve. We find that Christmas morning is a lot less hectic that way; the entire day becomes more relaxing and festive.
One year, when I was a teenager and my sister was home either from college or grad school, we opened the gifts on Christmas Eve, after she'd had a bit too much to drink, and thus the next morning she pretty much got to open everything again: "Oh, wow, did I get this? From who? Wow!!"
22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year?
All that "War on Christmas" crap I have to listen to. Look, folks, the fact is that the days are long gone when you can simply assume that everybody you're talking to is a Christian. Maybe you think that stinks, but you really need to get over it.
I also tire of people who can't seem to find the way to have fun, even with the shopping. Sure, there are lots of people around and it's crowded and it takes a while to get through the registers at Target. That's the baseline for this time of year, and you should factor that in as the cost of doing business and move on. I had a good time shopping on Black Friday afternoon this year, but I was really disheartened to hear people yelling at their kids in the middle of the stores after what had obviously been long days on their feet already.
23. Favorite ornament theme or color?
No color, actually, but I do love the painted glass ornaments, and I buy new ones every year, to the point where the tree is probably too "busy".
24. Favorite for Christmas dinner?
I don't really have a favorite. Sometimes we have turkey, sometimes we have ham. And one year, when The Wife was sick, I made pastitsio.
25. What do you want for Christmas this year?
Books, time to write, music, good food, wine, a new winter coat, more know-how on maintenance jobs, less girth (still holding steady, but watch out, January!), world peace, January 20 to come as quickly as possible, an end to recession, and good will toward men. And pie. Gotta have pie.
26. Who is most likely to respond to this?
Anyone who looks at these quizzes and thinks, "Hey, I gotta post me some of that!"
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
BUY!!!
I'm selling some stuff, mostly books, on eBay. My current auctions are linked in the sidebar. There's some good stuff there! Buy! Now!!
Et tu....
Via Jason, I learn who I would be if I was an action hero (sorry about the formatting, but it's one of those things where you copy-and-paste the HTML code they give you, and I don't feel like fixing it manually):
Huh. I wouldn't have guessed him, but OK, I guess.
Huh. I wouldn't have guessed him, but OK, I guess.
Why I take the media less seriously these days....
When I go online and I look at [a] my homepage (MSN.com) and [b] the AOL.com opening page, and I see both pages prominently featuring a headline about something Joe the F***ing Idiot Plumber Whom Nobody With Half a Brain Gives Two Sh**s About said, I wonder why I bother reading the news at all.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Remember the Knights? We don't!
Hey, my alma-mater got a mention today in Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, under his "Obscure College Score" item:
I'm not sure if he's sneering at Wartburg there or not, but lots of colleges offer courses devoted to various teevee programs, and Buffy is generally fairly highly regarded, so I'm not sure what Easterbrook's point here is. He doesn't really clarify; he just tosses this out there. Maybe he's arguing that coursework on Buffy is why Wartburg isn't the most famous of schools? That seems odd, too...there are thousands of colleges in the United States, how can they all be well-noted?
Easterbrook also cuts out a bit of the course description, where those ellipses are. Here's what's missing:
Not sure I see anything wrong with this, then. Plus, when you look at the entire offering of the "Department of Inquiry Studies", a whole slew of courses turns up. There was no such department when I was there (1989-1993), so this is a fairly new thing, I suppose. It looks interdisciplinary in nature, though.
Anyway, go Knights! And boo, the Wisconsin-Whitewater...uh...Whatevers!
Double Bonus Obscure College Score: Wisconsin-Whitewater 34, Wartburg 17 (Division III playoffs). [Yay Wartburg! -Ed.] Located in Waverly, Iowa, Wartburg offers a course about the TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The course description reports, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer has become a focus of cultural and feminist studies ... showings of the series are a course requirement." (Go here, then look under the Department of Inquiry Studies for course 101 04.)
I'm not sure if he's sneering at Wartburg there or not, but lots of colleges offer courses devoted to various teevee programs, and Buffy is generally fairly highly regarded, so I'm not sure what Easterbrook's point here is. He doesn't really clarify; he just tosses this out there. Maybe he's arguing that coursework on Buffy is why Wartburg isn't the most famous of schools? That seems odd, too...there are thousands of colleges in the United States, how can they all be well-noted?
Easterbrook also cuts out a bit of the course description, where those ellipses are. Here's what's missing:
This section will use the series [1997-2003] to discuss issues such as coming of age, education feminism, morality, destiny, Good vs. Evil, sexuality, friendship, leadership, language and other topics. Students are expected to spend some time familiarizing themselves with the series outside of class and practice becoming critical viewers.
Not sure I see anything wrong with this, then. Plus, when you look at the entire offering of the "Department of Inquiry Studies", a whole slew of courses turns up. There was no such department when I was there (1989-1993), so this is a fairly new thing, I suppose. It looks interdisciplinary in nature, though.
Anyway, go Knights! And boo, the Wisconsin-Whitewater...uh...Whatevers!
Places to See Before You Die
Lynn provided a link to a list of ten places you should see before you die, which she then helpfully supplemented with her own list of ten places you should see before you die. I cannot, of course, resist any such notion for myself, so here they are: the official Byzantium's Shores list of ten places you should see before you die!
1. Route 20-A between Orchard Park, NY and the Finger Lakes region, in the fall.
Route 20-A (the 'A' stands for 'Alternate') has its western terminus at a place called Big Tree Corners, about two miles down from Ralph Wilson Stadium. It's an inauspicious start for a road, being a massive intersection with six corners in Buffalo's suburban southtowns; there's a Wal-Mart there, and a Tops market, and some other buildings some of which house businesses and others of which are marked, as it seems most buildings in this region are these days, "Leasing Now". But as one drives east on 20-A, first one goes through the very pretty village of Orchard Park, with some gorgeous houses, and then one comes to East Aurora, which is a quirky burgh in its own right, mainly owing to the fact that it's close enough to Metro Buffalo to benefit from it but far enough out to not really be a part of Metro Buffalo. But heading east after East Aurora, 20-A quickly becomes a hilly drive first through farm country, and then through regions of wooded hills that become higher as one eventually approaches the Finger Lakes. 20-A is my favorite autumn drive in an area that has a lot of great autumn drives.
2. Galena, Illinois
If you've seen Field of Dreams, you've seen Galena – or rather, you've seen the Galena of twenty years ago made up to look like a Minnesota town of fifteen years before that. Whatever. I myself haven't been through Galena in quite a few years, but if it's as I remember, it's a beautiful town at the bottom of one of the valleys of Western Illinois. The town is an amazing shopping locale, full of small boutiques and shops and emporia selling fairly unique wares, whether your taste is art or clothing or whatever. I'd love to go back one day. Galena is on Route 20, so I can literally leave my apartment complex, hang a left out of my main drive, and eighteen hours later I'll be in Galena. Hooray!
3. Cannon Beach, Oregon
The list Lynn links already lists the Oregon coast, but I'm picking out Cannon Beach specifically because that's where my family usually went on our excursions to "the ocean" during the years we lived in the Portland area. Cannon Beach is dominated by the Haystack Rock megalith, one of Oregon's most famous natural landmarks (probably behind Crater Lake and Multnomah Falls). I had no idea, actually, until just a year or two ago that at low tide one can actually walk right up to Haystack Rock; I always had the notion as a kid that it was permanently several hundred feet offshore. The beach itself is a white sand kind of beach, and like all such seaside towns, there's a shop – or there used to be, I have to keep reminding myself that I haven't been there in nearly thirty years – whose front bay window houses an old-fashioned taffy-pulling machine.
4. Route 14-A from Yellowstone National Park to Sheridan, Wyoming.
On the road map, this looks like about a hundred miles. It's about three times that, and it's stunning. Wyoming's a sparse place, of course, and this road takes you through the most sparse portions of it, or at least, that's my impression of it. It's a very long drive, but you don't really feel that it's terribly long, because of its stunning scenery and the occasional white-knuckle nature of the road itself as it winds up and down mountains that don't look that high until you're ascending or descending them and the person in the passenger seat insists on pointing out how far down it is. It's forests and ranch country for miles upon miles upon miles, punctuated by that charming Wyoming practice of having what on the map appear to be towns turn out to be single buildings with a sign out in front bearing the name on the dot on the map. Still, this was an unforgettable drive.
5. Stelwegen Bank, off the tip of Cape Cod.
Obviously, you get there by boat. You can take a boat from Provincetown on Cape Cod, or you can do as we did and take a boat from Plymouth (which has a longer trek to make out to the bank). Once you get to Stelwegen Bank, you get to see what happens when ocean currents are forced upward over an undersea bank, thus pushing the plankton-rich waters upward: the whales come, and they feed. There are lots of places, I think, where you can see whales; Stelwegen Bank is where I (and the Wife) saw them.
6. Presque Isle, Pennsylvania.
On the map of Pennsylvania, there's a little panhandle in the northwest corner, about fifty miles wide, that sits between Ohio and New York. And from this panhandle, a small peninsula juts out into Lake Erie and curls around, protecting the harbor of Erie, PA. That peninsula is Presque Isle, one of the finest summer fun locations on the Great Lakes. There are sandy beaches, fishing piers, boats of all kinds, hiking trails through wetlands, and many miles of paved paths for biking and rollerblading. The place is packed on weekends in the summertime, and it doesn't even matter. What amazes me about Presque Isle is that when I talk about it to my fellow Buffalonians, they invariably have never heard of it (although they will have heard of the water park that sits near the entrance to Presque Isle). Presque Isle is what happens when a place actually puts its natural waterfront to logical use.
7. Skywalker Ranch, Marin County, California.
No, I haven't seen it yet. And therefore, I can't die. Heh!
8. The "Field of Dreams", Dyersville, Iowa.
Yeah, it's just a baseball diamond in a cornfield. Yeah, the farmhouse is there. Yeah, you'll walk out into the corn and be a bit disappointed when you don't vanish to...wherever it is those old ballplayers go. And you know what? You won't care. It's gorgeous to see. (I have a friend at work whose big hobby is collecting sports autographs, so he's met many, many big names in sports. But for now, I can always trump him by pointing out that I've walked the baselines on the Field of Dreams.)
9. Any good science museum.
I love me a science museum! For my money, a top-flight science museum must have an Omnimax theater, a planetarium, and be chock full of exhibits that have you watch what happens when you push a button or pull a lever or something else. Science museums should fill you with wonder and the desire to explore. My favorite is Toronto's (the Ontario Science Centre), which is built onto the top and sides of a deep ravine, but I've been to, and loved, the science museums in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and, when I was a kind, Portland's. (I believe the Portland one, OMSI, has moved at some point since we left in 1981. It's probably gotten bigger, too.) Oddly, I haven't been to Buffalo's. Weird. I should address that one of these days. But there are great science museums all over the country, so find the nearest one and go.
10. The Northern Mississippi River Valley.
Starting from, oh, Dubuque, Iowa and moving northward, the Mississippi River Valley becomes a land of rugged hills and bluffs, green forests, and old riverboat towns. We lived for a year, when I was in kindergarten, in La Crosse, Wisconsin; I believe this is a large factor that led to my attending college in Iowa. The whole Upper Mississippi region is breathtakingly beautiful, but on a human scale, I think. Drive north, along the river, pausing to drink Leinenkugel's and eat brats with some real Wisconsin cheese. A wonderful area.
How about you, O readers and fellow bloggers? Where would you have people go while they still can?
1. Route 20-A between Orchard Park, NY and the Finger Lakes region, in the fall.
Route 20-A (the 'A' stands for 'Alternate') has its western terminus at a place called Big Tree Corners, about two miles down from Ralph Wilson Stadium. It's an inauspicious start for a road, being a massive intersection with six corners in Buffalo's suburban southtowns; there's a Wal-Mart there, and a Tops market, and some other buildings some of which house businesses and others of which are marked, as it seems most buildings in this region are these days, "Leasing Now". But as one drives east on 20-A, first one goes through the very pretty village of Orchard Park, with some gorgeous houses, and then one comes to East Aurora, which is a quirky burgh in its own right, mainly owing to the fact that it's close enough to Metro Buffalo to benefit from it but far enough out to not really be a part of Metro Buffalo. But heading east after East Aurora, 20-A quickly becomes a hilly drive first through farm country, and then through regions of wooded hills that become higher as one eventually approaches the Finger Lakes. 20-A is my favorite autumn drive in an area that has a lot of great autumn drives.
2. Galena, Illinois
If you've seen Field of Dreams, you've seen Galena – or rather, you've seen the Galena of twenty years ago made up to look like a Minnesota town of fifteen years before that. Whatever. I myself haven't been through Galena in quite a few years, but if it's as I remember, it's a beautiful town at the bottom of one of the valleys of Western Illinois. The town is an amazing shopping locale, full of small boutiques and shops and emporia selling fairly unique wares, whether your taste is art or clothing or whatever. I'd love to go back one day. Galena is on Route 20, so I can literally leave my apartment complex, hang a left out of my main drive, and eighteen hours later I'll be in Galena. Hooray!
3. Cannon Beach, Oregon
The list Lynn links already lists the Oregon coast, but I'm picking out Cannon Beach specifically because that's where my family usually went on our excursions to "the ocean" during the years we lived in the Portland area. Cannon Beach is dominated by the Haystack Rock megalith, one of Oregon's most famous natural landmarks (probably behind Crater Lake and Multnomah Falls). I had no idea, actually, until just a year or two ago that at low tide one can actually walk right up to Haystack Rock; I always had the notion as a kid that it was permanently several hundred feet offshore. The beach itself is a white sand kind of beach, and like all such seaside towns, there's a shop – or there used to be, I have to keep reminding myself that I haven't been there in nearly thirty years – whose front bay window houses an old-fashioned taffy-pulling machine.
4. Route 14-A from Yellowstone National Park to Sheridan, Wyoming.
On the road map, this looks like about a hundred miles. It's about three times that, and it's stunning. Wyoming's a sparse place, of course, and this road takes you through the most sparse portions of it, or at least, that's my impression of it. It's a very long drive, but you don't really feel that it's terribly long, because of its stunning scenery and the occasional white-knuckle nature of the road itself as it winds up and down mountains that don't look that high until you're ascending or descending them and the person in the passenger seat insists on pointing out how far down it is. It's forests and ranch country for miles upon miles upon miles, punctuated by that charming Wyoming practice of having what on the map appear to be towns turn out to be single buildings with a sign out in front bearing the name on the dot on the map. Still, this was an unforgettable drive.
5. Stelwegen Bank, off the tip of Cape Cod.
Obviously, you get there by boat. You can take a boat from Provincetown on Cape Cod, or you can do as we did and take a boat from Plymouth (which has a longer trek to make out to the bank). Once you get to Stelwegen Bank, you get to see what happens when ocean currents are forced upward over an undersea bank, thus pushing the plankton-rich waters upward: the whales come, and they feed. There are lots of places, I think, where you can see whales; Stelwegen Bank is where I (and the Wife) saw them.
6. Presque Isle, Pennsylvania.
On the map of Pennsylvania, there's a little panhandle in the northwest corner, about fifty miles wide, that sits between Ohio and New York. And from this panhandle, a small peninsula juts out into Lake Erie and curls around, protecting the harbor of Erie, PA. That peninsula is Presque Isle, one of the finest summer fun locations on the Great Lakes. There are sandy beaches, fishing piers, boats of all kinds, hiking trails through wetlands, and many miles of paved paths for biking and rollerblading. The place is packed on weekends in the summertime, and it doesn't even matter. What amazes me about Presque Isle is that when I talk about it to my fellow Buffalonians, they invariably have never heard of it (although they will have heard of the water park that sits near the entrance to Presque Isle). Presque Isle is what happens when a place actually puts its natural waterfront to logical use.
7. Skywalker Ranch, Marin County, California.
No, I haven't seen it yet. And therefore, I can't die. Heh!
8. The "Field of Dreams", Dyersville, Iowa.
Yeah, it's just a baseball diamond in a cornfield. Yeah, the farmhouse is there. Yeah, you'll walk out into the corn and be a bit disappointed when you don't vanish to...wherever it is those old ballplayers go. And you know what? You won't care. It's gorgeous to see. (I have a friend at work whose big hobby is collecting sports autographs, so he's met many, many big names in sports. But for now, I can always trump him by pointing out that I've walked the baselines on the Field of Dreams.)
9. Any good science museum.
I love me a science museum! For my money, a top-flight science museum must have an Omnimax theater, a planetarium, and be chock full of exhibits that have you watch what happens when you push a button or pull a lever or something else. Science museums should fill you with wonder and the desire to explore. My favorite is Toronto's (the Ontario Science Centre), which is built onto the top and sides of a deep ravine, but I've been to, and loved, the science museums in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and, when I was a kind, Portland's. (I believe the Portland one, OMSI, has moved at some point since we left in 1981. It's probably gotten bigger, too.) Oddly, I haven't been to Buffalo's. Weird. I should address that one of these days. But there are great science museums all over the country, so find the nearest one and go.
10. The Northern Mississippi River Valley.
Starting from, oh, Dubuque, Iowa and moving northward, the Mississippi River Valley becomes a land of rugged hills and bluffs, green forests, and old riverboat towns. We lived for a year, when I was in kindergarten, in La Crosse, Wisconsin; I believe this is a large factor that led to my attending college in Iowa. The whole Upper Mississippi region is breathtakingly beautiful, but on a human scale, I think. Drive north, along the river, pausing to drink Leinenkugel's and eat brats with some real Wisconsin cheese. A wonderful area.
How about you, O readers and fellow bloggers? Where would you have people go while they still can?
Am I out of touch?
I'm seeing that apparently quite a few "liberals" are annoyed at President-elect Obama for...something or other. Now, I consider myself a good liberal, and I'm not annoyed at Obama. Not really. I mean, I would have liked for him to win another hundred or so Electoral votes, and I'd like him to stop smoking, and I'd like him to denounce California's Prop 8, but that's about it. His cabinet? I'm fine with it. His White House staff and advisers? I'm fine with them. His national security team? Yeah, I'm fine with them, too. I guess I'm not much of a liberal, or maybe it's just that I'm willing to realize that Obama isn't exactly like me in every respect and therefore isn't going to decide everything in the exact way I would and that's probably fine because there are probably lots of issues on which he's right and I am full of bird poop.
(I wonder what Obama thinks of the Prequel Trilogy?)
On another note, the other day John Scalzi discussed the small upward trend in George W. Bush's approval numbers, in which he's gone from 24% approval to 28%. John says:
Maybe, but I'd say that Bush, while not actively pinging the disapproval center of my brain by doing stuff that pisses me off, is now inactively pinging the disapproval center of my brain by basically sitting around and not doing anything at all except buying a new house in a super-rich, super-white suburb of Dallas. Things are falling apart all over and the new guy doesn't take over for more than a month, but hey, we can totally wait for the person who holds the office of President to actually do something. Rome's burning, and Nero's a-fiddlin' away.
January 20: not soon enough.
(I wonder what Obama thinks of the Prequel Trilogy?)
On another note, the other day John Scalzi discussed the small upward trend in George W. Bush's approval numbers, in which he's gone from 24% approval to 28%. John says:
I can certainly believe it; I mean, now that I know he’s on the way out, he doesn’t cause me nearly as much intestinal distress as he has over the last several years. This is not exactly the same as getting my approval, mind you. But his not actively pinging the disapproval centers of my brain is an uptick.
Maybe, but I'd say that Bush, while not actively pinging the disapproval center of my brain by doing stuff that pisses me off, is now inactively pinging the disapproval center of my brain by basically sitting around and not doing anything at all except buying a new house in a super-rich, super-white suburb of Dallas. Things are falling apart all over and the new guy doesn't take over for more than a month, but hey, we can totally wait for the person who holds the office of President to actually do something. Rome's burning, and Nero's a-fiddlin' away.
January 20: not soon enough.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Sentential Links #151 (The Dr. Acula edition)
In honor of the passing the other day of Forrest J. Ackerman, the following links:
:: Where do I start with Forrest J. Ackerman? The man is basically attributed with being the father of modern fandom, an institution that has been both the source of great fun and great annoyance in my life. Really, I hate to stick anyone with that label, since modern fandom is kind of a sham.
:: Some people, maybe even most people who had a collection like that would treat it as a mere investment, keep it to themselves, and worry constantly about its worth and safety. Forry, however, and to his great credit, was always happy to share it with whomever was interested. (If I had ever won the lottery, one of my fantasies was to buy the entire Ackerman collection, all of it, books and memorabilia and the whole shebang, and keep it together. Probably in Buffalo, of course, but it would have been together. Alas, I never won the lottery. Probably because I never play the lottery.)
:: Uncle Forry as many Ackermaniacs referred to him, was for me, my ghoulish Santa Claus. He didn't live at the North Pole or even the South Pole, but at a magical place called the Ackermansion - and it was my visit there in 1993 changed the direction of my life. (Not a blog, but how could I ignore Harry Knowles, who may be the Forry of the Internet age?)
:: Forry was a product of his time - a unique blend of the individual and world in which he lived. It could never happen again quite like that, and all of us who grew up with him share a very special experience that's hard to describe. (Same site, different essay, this by Peter Jackson.)
:: You become very conscious of the air you walk through after such an encounter. He gave me proof of the possibility and ability of Human Grace firsthand. That's the kind of good man he is. (Wil Wheaton reproduces a comment from someplace else in his own post.)
:: The first horrific dreams I ever had which were inspired by a book or magazine as opposed to arising from the depths of my own depraved brain came about when I was nine due to the image on the cover of this July 1964 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by Forrest J Ackerman.
:: "Then you must come back to the house!"
:: Forrest also was a writer, editor and literary agent who was one of the first to see the untapped potential of sci-fi (a term he coined) for the motion picture industry in the early 1950’s and helped, almost single-handedly, revive the horror movie in that same era.
:: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Fan.
He is trampling out the places with Amazing on the stand.
His fantasy collection is the greatest in the land.
Forrest J goes marching on.
I myself never once met Ackerman, nor did I attend any conventions where he was present, and I certainly was never anywhere near the Ackermansion. But it was hard not to be aware of him and his effect on fandom. The first time I heard of him was when I was nine and watching the old NBC show Real People, which profiled offbeat souls throughout America. One night they visited a guy who was apparently a huge science fiction fan and who had filled his home with all manner of collectible stuff. For a kid who counted himself lucky to own a handful of Star Wars action figures, this was enormously impressive. It was like learning that Disney World exists.
Anyway, I still remember the person doing the profile saying something like, "Who made up the term 'sci-fi'?" Ackerman responded, "I did." Of course, many SF fans don't much like that term (pronouncing it "skiffy", to denote SF that isn't to be taken seriously, like Lost In Space or the like), but it's hard to deny that the term is a contribution to the lexicon of modern America.
:: Where do I start with Forrest J. Ackerman? The man is basically attributed with being the father of modern fandom, an institution that has been both the source of great fun and great annoyance in my life. Really, I hate to stick anyone with that label, since modern fandom is kind of a sham.
:: Some people, maybe even most people who had a collection like that would treat it as a mere investment, keep it to themselves, and worry constantly about its worth and safety. Forry, however, and to his great credit, was always happy to share it with whomever was interested. (If I had ever won the lottery, one of my fantasies was to buy the entire Ackerman collection, all of it, books and memorabilia and the whole shebang, and keep it together. Probably in Buffalo, of course, but it would have been together. Alas, I never won the lottery. Probably because I never play the lottery.)
:: Uncle Forry as many Ackermaniacs referred to him, was for me, my ghoulish Santa Claus. He didn't live at the North Pole or even the South Pole, but at a magical place called the Ackermansion - and it was my visit there in 1993 changed the direction of my life. (Not a blog, but how could I ignore Harry Knowles, who may be the Forry of the Internet age?)
:: Forry was a product of his time - a unique blend of the individual and world in which he lived. It could never happen again quite like that, and all of us who grew up with him share a very special experience that's hard to describe. (Same site, different essay, this by Peter Jackson.)
:: You become very conscious of the air you walk through after such an encounter. He gave me proof of the possibility and ability of Human Grace firsthand. That's the kind of good man he is. (Wil Wheaton reproduces a comment from someplace else in his own post.)
:: The first horrific dreams I ever had which were inspired by a book or magazine as opposed to arising from the depths of my own depraved brain came about when I was nine due to the image on the cover of this July 1964 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by Forrest J Ackerman.
:: "Then you must come back to the house!"
:: Forrest also was a writer, editor and literary agent who was one of the first to see the untapped potential of sci-fi (a term he coined) for the motion picture industry in the early 1950’s and helped, almost single-handedly, revive the horror movie in that same era.
:: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Fan.
He is trampling out the places with Amazing on the stand.
His fantasy collection is the greatest in the land.
Forrest J goes marching on.
I myself never once met Ackerman, nor did I attend any conventions where he was present, and I certainly was never anywhere near the Ackermansion. But it was hard not to be aware of him and his effect on fandom. The first time I heard of him was when I was nine and watching the old NBC show Real People, which profiled offbeat souls throughout America. One night they visited a guy who was apparently a huge science fiction fan and who had filled his home with all manner of collectible stuff. For a kid who counted himself lucky to own a handful of Star Wars action figures, this was enormously impressive. It was like learning that Disney World exists.
Anyway, I still remember the person doing the profile saying something like, "Who made up the term 'sci-fi'?" Ackerman responded, "I did." Of course, many SF fans don't much like that term (pronouncing it "skiffy", to denote SF that isn't to be taken seriously, like Lost In Space or the like), but it's hard to deny that the term is a contribution to the lexicon of modern America.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Unidentified Earth 50
The fiftieth installment is at hand! Woo-hoo! And I can't believe nobody pointed out that I forgot to do this feature last week. Oh well. Anyway, here we are.
First, UI 49 remains Unidentified. Come on, folks; you don't need a pair of sunglasses to figure this one out.
And now, the new installment:
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
First, UI 49 remains Unidentified. Come on, folks; you don't need a pair of sunglasses to figure this one out.
And now, the new installment:
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Only one item this week. I saw more weird stuff than this, but this one stands alone. In fact, it just might give me cause to stop running this feature. I was literally rendered speechless by this. I know, other cultures and all that, but...huh?!
What am I talking about? Well, via PZ Myers, I've now learned that in Catalonia, an old Christmas tradition involves statuettes of famous people defecating. You get one of these statues and you hide it in your neighbor's Nativity scene for them to find, because it symbolizes fertilization and prosperity for the coming year.
I can't decide what I think about this. I'm leaning toward thinking it's possibly the funniest tradition I've ever heard of. The sheer irreverence of it, and apparently they've been doing this for two hundred plus years. Wow.
What am I talking about? Well, via PZ Myers, I've now learned that in Catalonia, an old Christmas tradition involves statuettes of famous people defecating. You get one of these statues and you hide it in your neighbor's Nativity scene for them to find, because it symbolizes fertilization and prosperity for the coming year.
I can't decide what I think about this. I'm leaning toward thinking it's possibly the funniest tradition I've ever heard of. The sheer irreverence of it, and apparently they've been doing this for two hundred plus years. Wow.
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