Read a Qur'an Day

Read a Quran Day, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

A goodly Word
Like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed,
And its branches reach
to the heavens--

It brings forth its fruit
At all times, by the leave
Of its Lord.

--The Qur'an, 14:24

National Read a Qur'an Day

In response to the right-wing lunatic (is there another kind?) in Florida who plans to celebrate the 9-11-01 anniversary by burning as many copies of the Qur'an as he can, I will on that day post a photo of myself reading a copy of the Qur'an.

I don't have to go far to get one, either. I keep it right on my shelf, next to the Bible.



Anybody want to join me for National READ a Qur'an Day?

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

When you want a chocolate fix, do Tootsie Rolls get the job done?

Blogistan's new member

I'm Into Grace is a brand-new blog (one day old, only one post) by a woman I know from college. I got to know her fairly well back then by virtue of often sitting beside each other in band and orchestra -- our seating arrangements often put the Principal Trumpet (that was me) next to the Principal French Horn (that was her). She was bright, energetic, and a really good horn player. I assume she's still two of those things -- no idea about her horn playing. I hope she's kept up on that better than I have the trumpet playing!

Anyway, she is now a Lutheran pastor in Minnesota. (Garrison Keillor's jokes aside, it turns out that there really are Lutherans in Minnesota!) Her faith will apparently be a major theme of her blog. New blogs are always awesome, especially when they're by old friends!

Visiting Endor

Visiting Endor, originally uploaded by darthservo.

Wow...this is amazing. If you are anything like me and have therefore seen Return of the Jedi a whole lot of times over your years on this planet, then this spot is instantly recognizable. And it still looks the same as when Luke was shouting into his sister's ear, "Quick, jam their comlinks! Center switch!"

"We're always fascinated when we find leg irons with no legs in 'em."

Be it resolved: The Fugitive is a perfect movie.

This may seem a strong claim, and maybe it is. But I'm not talking about "perfect" in the normal sense of "perfect", to indicate that The Fugitive has no flaws at all. No, I'm talking "perfect" in, if you will, the "baseball" sense of the word. In baseball, a pitcher has thrown a "perfect game" if he doesn't allow a single opposing hitter to reach base. It's even more impressive than a no-hitter: it's no walks, no errors, no passed balls on third strikes, no batters hit-by-pitch, no nothing. No baserunners. At all.

And yet, you can watch any of the small number of perfect games in baseball history and, if you know baseball well, you can pick out imperfections. Maybe the outfielders are shied toward left a little too much at one point, so when a guy hits it deep to right, the right fielder has to sprint a long way to run down the ball. Or maybe the shortstop boots a grounder and only just baaaaarely manages to get the ball back up and across the field to the first basemen's glove a tenth of a second before the runner's foot lands on the bag. Or maybe the pitcher himself goes to a 3-0 count on a hitter before retiring him on a lazy pop-up or an easy grounder.

The game has flaws...and yet not one of those flaws matters, in the end. Not one of them has any effect on the end result. The game is perfect.

The Fugitive is like that. It has flaws. It has imperfections. But none of them matters. In the end, the movie is perfect.

Watching it again a few weeks ago, for the first time in a number of years, I was amazed at how well the suspense in the film still works. I know what happens, I know how it ends. And yet, I witnessed the whitening anew of my knuckles when Dr. Richard Kimble is scrambling about the innards of a dam, or finding escape into the crowd on St. Patrick's Day in downtown Chicago harder than one might think, or closing in on his wife's murderers even as the police close in on him. The Fugitive never fails to draw me in. Never, ever.

I'm sure the story is familiar: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), a noted Chicago surgeon, comes home one night from work, after having been called in to perform a delicate emergency surgery, to find his wife, Helen, brutally murdered (shot and bludgeoned). Worse, the assailant is still there, and in grappling with him, Kimble notices the man's distinctive feature: he is one-armed and wears a prosthesis. The one-armed man gets away, and Kimble is left to explain all this to the police, who don't buy any of it and quickly end up booking Kimble for Helen's murder. Kimble's insistence on his innocence and his fingering of a "one-armed man" as the murderer fall on deaf ears, all the way to his conviction and sentence of death. Ouch.

So Kimble is sent on a bus from court in Chicago to the state penitentiary, somewhere in the south of the state. On the way there, however, something goes awry, and the bus ends up on its side across a pair of railroad tracks. The guards and prisoners start scrambling to get out, Kimble last of all...and the light of an approaching train appears. Ouch, again.

After the massive train wreck (one of the most impressive bits of mayhem ever filmed, in my opinion), Kimble finds himself free. And he runs, following the path of a river. Soon, however, Kimble's trail is picked up by US Marshall Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), who is confident, competent, perceptive, and deeply intelligent. Thus begins one of the best cat-and-mouse games in movie history, and what's so great about it is that it's a double game of cat-and-mouse: Kimble is fleeing Gerard even as he is pursuing Helen's murderer.

The film has lots of fine set pieces, including the train wreck, the chase through the bowels of the dam, and so on. As good as the set pieces are, though, it's all the stuff in between that really makes the movie work as brilliantly as it does.

:: The film really leaves a lot of good stuff to the viewer. Gerard is professional to the hilt, and yet he's put together a really good team where everyone knows one another well and respects one another. We see all this just in the way they talk to each other and they way they conduct themselves around one another; there's never that type of bit that a less well-written film would throw in ("Geez, Sam, the way this guy keeps getting away from us really reminds me of that guy we were chasing in San Francisco that time, huh?").

Likewise, even better, we see, without ever once having it stated, that Gerard is gradually figuring out the case behind Richard Kimble's arrest and conviction. There is never a moment where someone says, "Hey, Gerard, you're not startin' to doubt this guy's guilt, are you?" But we see this happening, slowly and gradually, as the trail Gerard follows leads him into the case and into contact with the same clues that Kimble himself is finding. He's slowly putting the pieces together himself, even as he has already told Kimble that he's not interested in the crime. Only near the very end of the movie, when Gerard has to shout out to Kimble, "I know you're innocent!", is it ever stated outright.

:: I can't think of any moment in the film where anyone does anything that is outright stupid for the simple reason that the plot needs that someone to do that thing to keep the plot moving along.

:: Richard Kimble takes so many amazing risks in this film, risks that he thinks through as best he can and only takes when he decides that the risk is the only way of moving forward. I'm not just talking about his sneaking into a hospital early on, in order to stitch up his wounds and get clothes and put together the next part of his escape in an environment he is familiar with; and I'm not just talking about his leap from the brink of the dam, which is the only choice he has (aside from accepting recapture). For my money, the most amazing risk in the film is when he finally learns the identity of the one-armed man. Kimble tracks the man down and discovers evidence in the man's house that ties him to other people in Kimble's world – doctors from his former hospital, pharmaceutical executives he met at a banquet the night his wife was murdered. Kimble has found...something, but he doesn't know what. He's found a piece of the puzzle. He knows it's a big piece, but he knows that he can't put the puzzle together. So he does something amazing.

He calls Gerard from the one-armed man's home, allowing the call to go on long enough for the trace to be completed. He knows that Gerard will come, even though he'll be long gone by the time Gerard arrives. So what is he doing? He's making the only move he can: he is gambling that Gerard will find the pieces and, with his own investigative abilities that Kimble himself doesn't have, help put the puzzle together for him. And he challenges Gerard to do what he'd already said he didn't: he challenges Gerard to care about the case.

Kimble has no way of knowing if this will work. He has no way of knowing if Gerard will start digging into the life of Sykes, the one-armed man, and uncover the man's unsavory dealings. He has no way of knowing what Sykes's unsavory dealings even are. Kimble knows that he can't flush out the bad guys himself, so he hopes that Gerard will do it for him.

Amazing stuff.

:: The cinematography of The Fugitive is fascinating. Transitions and the passage of time are often signified in the movie by sweeping, aerial shots of downtown Chicago. Many of these shots have the camera looking straight down on the city streets as the buildings float by the lens, some of the taller ones coming up so high that it's almost as if the camera may well brush their roofs or radio antennae. I'm not sure that these shots are symbolic in any way – maybe they're symbolic of Richard Kimble's attempts to perceive key details from a very far vantage point that is constantly moving – but they are certainly very stylish.

:: I love how the one time the film breaks away from Kimble's chase to give us a moment of his character is when he is standing around in the Cook County Hospital ER, in his stolen janitor's uniform, as a bunch of injured kids are brought in. He doesn't even consider doing anything other than what he does here: grab a kid's X-rays, make a diagnosis that the ER people have missed, and take the kid to the ER after faking a signature on the orders. (There's even a funny medical in-joke here, referring to the legendarily awful handwriting of most doctors.) It's not really a moment of great risk, in terms of capture, but it is a moment of risk in that it limits Kimble's movements in the future. But he can't think in those terms; he has to help that kid at that moment.

So what are the apparent flaws in the film? Well, a couple jump to mind. One would think that if a renegade escaped convict could elude capture and still manage to nail down the identity, location, and motive of the "real killer", all on his own, then surely the Chicago Police Department could have turned up some evidence that maybe, just maybe, their prime suspect was, in fact, innocent. Kimble's investigations are all pretty straightforward: he remembers damaging the killer's prosthetic arm in the struggle, so he reasons that the killer would have to go in to have his arm adjusted. So he checks those records and finds a group of one-armed men who did just that shortly after the date of the murder. Then he follows up on each one, learning that one is dead, another is already incarcerated, and that another is...a fellow with ties to medical people. You'd think the police, or Kimble's own lawyer's investigators, could have come up with some of this.

Also, Kimble seems to have enough money to stay on the lam for a while, doesn't he? Sure, he steals a wallet and borrows money from a friend (who later turns out not to be a friend after all), but he rents two different rooms, buys clothes and food, purchases stuff to make fake IDs with, and so on.

But those are really small flaws overall, in one of the most effective thrillers ever made.

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, stepping out your door....

After a summer that has seen a surprising amount of weather that's been truly unpleasant -- from our cool-and-rainy June to our incredibly hot-and-humid July -- we finally got a welcome taste of autumnal cool this weekend. Or, as I like to call it, "overalls weather". The highs were in the upper 50s and it was quite windy; and with The Daughter out of town with her grandparents, I took advantage of a perfect opportunity to venture out for once in overalls instead of shorts, look around my environs a bit and learn a little more about Orchard Park, the town I've called "home" for seven years now. This is, actually, one of my favorite pastimes.

So, yesterday, I went to Green Lake.



Green Lake is a small artificial lake in the southern part of town. It runs east-to-west, and is bordered on its northern shore by a park called Yates Park, which is the location for most of the big town festival-type events. (Except for July 4th fireworks -- it's too heavily wooded for those.) I've driven through Yates Park and along the north shore of Green Lake quite a few times, but I've never stopped to explore, until yesterday, when I learned, among other things, that in lieu of a town municipal swimming pool, Orchard Park has a swimming area in its lake.



I never knew this before. Why not? Who knows? But once again, it amazes me how many details about my own town have escaped me after a number of years living here.

Now, Green Lake is not very big. I'm not entirely sure on this point, but when comparing Green Lake on Google Maps to Thoreau's famous Walden Pond in Concord, MA, at the same level of resolution, Walden Pond looks substantially bigger. So with Green Lake, we're not talking about a juggernaut of a body of water. Just a pleasant artificial lake in the middle of a town.



After I parked and got out to walk, I headed for an overlook that's caught my eye several times when driving by. But I was instead captivated by the dam that creates the lake, and the stream that the dam blocks and which spills over the dam on its way through to Lake Erie. The dam isn't big, at all, and its back side is not a sharp drop but a long, gentle decline away from the lake to the bottom of a ravine where the stream bed lies.



The water runs down a slope of concrete that ends after about twenty or thirty feet, and then returns to a very rocky stream bed:



Actually, I suspect that those rocks were placed there and not part of the original stream bed. They seemed rather "artfully arranged" to my eyes.

At the bottom, there's a small waterfall which spills into a pool. The water was pretty green and sufficiently murky that I couldn't discern the depth of the pool there:



I suppose it's probably no more than a couple of feet, which is a shame; I'd love to find a nice secluded swimming hole around here one of these years. Anyway, after the waterfall (I'm being generous here, really -- the water falls no more than four feet), the stream babbles on and down, into what looks like a deep forest.



The illusion was spoiled, a bit, by the bits of trash along the stream bed (not much, but enough -- a few empty water bottles, a scrap of newspaper) and the graffiti on the trees. Yes, graffiti on the trees. Who knows.

More than that, though, I knew that civilization actually picks up not far beyond that deceptive-looking forest into which the stream flows, and when I got home and checked the stream's course on Google Maps, I discovered that this stream is the very one I often cross when driving to the nearest giant suburban shopping region (McKinley Mall). And the stream runs just beyond the property line of Ralph Wilson Stadium, on the "tunnel end" of the stadium. Eventually the stream joins another and flows through the harsh kinda-sorta wastelands of the old steel mill regions before emptying into Lake Erie.

Still, it was a lovely place to find, this small piece of nature in the middle of boring old suburbia.



And Yates Park itself seems like a nice place -- it has swings...



...and cute little gazebos. Who doesn't love a cute little gazebo?



Communists, that's who. Seriously. Look at photographs of old Moscow during the Cold War. You know what you don't see there? Cute little gazebos. Tell me I'm wrong!

Sentential Links #219

Linkage! Getcher linkage here!

:: I decided to name my second Ameraucana rooster Upset, after the not-so-famous horse.

:: Madame Bovary? Comedic gold. Lord Jim? A laugh riot. Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick---the first ten chapters of both are as funny as anything by Dickens or Jane Austen. (I'm reading Moby Dick now, one chapter a day -- they're really short chapters, so this will take a while -- and I do keep getting the feeling that I'm missing a joke somewhere.)

:: Ask the Maple Leafs the last time a team who willingly plays home games in Toronto won anything. (This is the reason given in a post listing why every team in the NFL will fail to win the Super Bowl this year. Obviously we're referring to the Bills here, but...surely the 1992 and 1993 Blue Jays aren't that distant a memory, right?)

:: I have to say, I’ve never had someone attempt to insult me by telling me — and derisively, at that — that I wasn’t dumb enough to get something. That is a new one. And given all of the times I’ve been taken to task for being a fan of Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow, it’s kind of refreshing. (OK, same blog, but a different poster. I'm not a fan of Family Guy, although it does make me laugh at least once or twice in each episode. Usually because of Stewie, the megalomaniacal British-accented baby, or Brian, the intelligent, talking, alcoholic dog. Can't argue with the points about the show's misogyny, though. There are a lot of jokes in Family Guy of the "laughter more as a nervous reaction than a humorous one" variety. And I'm definitely not a big fan of Seth MacFarlane; The Cleveland Show and American Dad are both painfully unfunny.)

:: Red from Shawshank Redemption tells us that “Geology is the study of pressure and time.” It seems that geology and bedroom closets have much in common.

:: Dewalt just announced the launch of a new compact router designed to combine power, ease of use and ergonomics to provide high visibility, control, and performance. (What timing...I've been considering buying a router, and was wondering if I should get a cheap Ryobi one and then a laminate router. Looks like I'll be able to get both in one! Of course, if and when I start doing a lot more heavy-duty woodworking, a full-size router will be in the offing. But that's off in the future somewhat. For now, I just want this. And a Dremel 4000.)

:: The author is not a very happy person as he travels in his collapsible kayak around the isles. This is perhaps a bit understandable as he & his wife have just split up.

However, there doesn’t seem to be anything that can make him happy. People are either too helpful, or not helpful enough. ("The author" is Paul Theroux, one of whose more recent books I'm reading right now, as luck would have it. He does find a happier place later in life, although nobody's ever going to mistake him for Ned Flanders, I can tell you that.)

All for this week, folks!

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I've taken a liking to this ad for Johnnie Walker Scotch whiskey:



There's some really good timing there. Kudos to Robert Carlyle, who has been a favorite of mine ever since The Full Monty.

:: Neat-o-rama has a post on dams in the movies that is, well, neat. They left out my favorite dam in a movie, though: the Russian dam in the teaser sequence of Goldeneye. (Which is actually the Verzasca Dam in Switzerland, but hey, if we can't relocate it to Russia for a plot point, what good is it?)

:: Watch the International Space Station transit across the Sun:



But why is it moving so fast? Phil Plait explains.

More next week!

Computer woes, oh noes!!!

Well, the Tech Gods decided to suck up as much of my time as they could muster this weekend. Damn you, Tech Gods!

It began with the arrival of a trojan on the Main Computer here at Casa Jaquandor. (If my laptop is a tricorder, the Main Computer is the one that speaks to me in the dulcet tones of Majel Barrett.) This damnable thing -- called "Security Tool" -- is one of those trojans that takes the form of a fake security program, so it all of a sudden started popping up all over the place, giving me false "warnings" and refusing to allow me to run anything. After updating MalwareBytes and downloading something called SuperAntiSpyware and running both several times whilst in Safe Mode, "Security Tool" was still there. So I finally decided to simply pull the trigger on something I'd been meaning to do anyway: re-install Windows.

So, I re-installed Windows. Luckily, I keep things religiously backed up in a number of different places, so there's no actual data loss associated with this other than Firefox bookmarks and The Daughter's games, which can be re-downloaded and such. This, of course, did accomplish the task of ridding the computer of "Security Tool". It did not, however, have the other hoped-for effect of restoring functionality to that computer's CD/DVD drive. Thus I decided to start poking about inside the computer itself, wondering if possibly I screwed something up when I replaced this computer's power supply last year.

Well, what I found was kind of odd, and I don't know how to explain it, really. What's been happening is that as far as the computer's concerned, that drive doesn't even exist. Not only will it not open or close to accept discs, when I open the Device Manager in XP, it doesn't even show a CD/DVD drive there at all. So updating drivers wasn't an option, as the computer believes there is no device there to have drivers for. But when I was poking about, I noted the drive's SATA connections: one cord from the power supply, and one connecting it to the motherboard. I unplugged each one, wondering if the connections were loose somehow, and when I had the combination of the power supply cord being plugged into the drive but not the data cord, the drive made a couple of whirring noises. And sure enough, the drive worked -- in the sense of having power, opening and closing and the little light flashing -- while just the power supply cable was plugged in. As soon as I connected the data cord, however, nothing. Dead as old Marley.

So, what to do? Something funky with the connector? Something funky with the cable? Something funky with the motherboard's connector? I decided to test that last, which was the only one I actually could test readily. I unplugged the data cord from the SATA plug it had presumably resided in since the computer was built, and plugged it into another.

And wouldn't you know it: now the drive works. Kinda sorta. It doesn't seem to recognize and play CDs, but it does recognize and activate CD-ROMS and DVDs. Very odd. (I only tried a single CD, so maybe it just doesn't like that particular disc. Who knows...but I almost never use that computer for playing or ripping CDs, anyway; I do that on the laptop, which is working just fine.)

So, for the most part, the Main Library Computer is back on line and functioning normally. (Maybe even better for right now, until we start filling it up with crap again.) I just wish it hadn't sucked up the better part of my Sunday to do it...but at least for once, I was able to do some computer work without having to go drop money at Best Buy on new parts. (Although I almost said "The hell with the drive" and went to pick up a USB optical drive. Thank God I decided to check the connections before I went that route!)

Didn't I write this post?

I was just looking through a file in which I keep "in progress" posts on movies, and I found my partial thoughts on Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, which I watched with The Daughter, oh, quite a while ago. A year ago, actually. I thought that I had certainly finished that post and published it here, but it's not turning up in my searches, so maybe I didn't. Anyway, here's what I had, to begin with:

Back in 2005, when Howl's Moving Castle came out, I remember that while there were some highly positive reviews of the film, the general reaction seemed to mostly be that the film was, by some margin, the least successful work to date by Hayao Miyazaki. The reaction seemed to range from "Worth watching, but his least good film" to "Miyazaki's only dud". It took me several years to finally get around to watching the movie, and I must admit that I'm not sure why so many people were down on it, except by virtue of comparison to the films in Miyazaki's oeuvre before it.

My guess is that Miyazaki's previous work had been so good as to simply make a subsequent film that wasn't as good look even worse than it is by comparison, and that I was able to avoid looking at Howl's through Spirited Away-colored glasses by virtue of having waited so long to finally watch the movie. (I'd forgotten I owned it on DVD, believe it or not.) Miyazaki's two previous movies, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, are truly great films that manage to rise above being "classics of genre" and become actual "classics". So a more pedestrian effort like Howl's is standing in a much larger shadow. But I would say that the films need to be judged for what they are, and not what the other films around them imply they should be; and that a continuum exists that must be acknowledged. Surely there is a greater range of possibilities for a Miyazaki film than "Classic" on one end, and "Dud" on the other. I mean, not every James Bond film is Casino Royale or On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but that doesn't mean that every film not at that end of the pool is therefore Live and Let Die.

So, as for Howl's specifically, I found it highly enjoyable, if occasionally maddening in its Miyazakian way of not explaining stuff.

I'd like to flesh this out a bit, but I've only watched the film once and I don't remember a lot of the specifics. I recall some highly typical Miyazaki visual flair; what often makes his films so astounding is his ability to not just think up lots of weird stuff but to also come up with ways to depict that weird stuff in a world that looks familiar to us and yet still not have all of his weird stuff look ridiculously out-of-place. The "Moving Castle" itself is a piece of work, an enormous, ramshackle steam-powered vehicle that putt-putts around the countryside and maybe even from one world to another. It's an amazing piece of design.

I don't recall a whole lot of the story, although I do remember that I found it by turns captivating and a little frustrating, because Miyazaki didn't really explain nearly as much as I would have liked. Miyazaki has always been of the "let the viewer figure some stuff out" camp of filmmakers, but in Howl's, I found myself thinking -- for the first time ever in a Miyazaki film -- along the lines of, "Geez, a little more exposition might not be the worst idea here."

Characters? I liked and sympathized with them all, especially the Prince who is losing his soul as war engulfs his land. The most memorable character, though, is the inanimate scarecrow who has only one facial expression and who can't make any gestures at all, and yet somehow, through Miyazaki's genius, is able to seem like a totally autonomous actor in the story.

So yes, I liked Howl's Moving Castle, quite a bit. Is it Miyazaki's least successful film, story-wise? Maybe. But if it doesn't quite clear the bar, it at least gets up there, which a lot of films never do.

On second thought, let's not go to the Olympics. 'Tis a silly place.

A petition for pie-throwing at the Olympics. Sure, why not? I'm not sure how it would work, though. Would there be a scoring system? "Oooooh, a half-point deduction because that last hit left too much of the right cheek clean." Would there be an official Olympic recipe for the edible missile? (Heck, would the missile even be edible? Shaving cream, ewwwww.)

Anyway, I'm totally on board! I also think the London Olympics should include competitive haggis eating, warm-beer drinking, and...hey, wait a minute. We're the ones who invented pie throwing in the first place! Why do the Brits get to claim it as an important cultural thing? It's like how the tomato is seen as a classic Italian vegetable, and yet, not one person on the Italian peninsula ever saw a tomato until they were brought back to Europe from over here!

I have an ambivalent feeling about this

I liked these Star Wars posters (which I first saw here):

Something for Thursday

Incommunicado for much of the day. Hectic week! I can't believe how much we've had to spend on school supplies. I also can't believe the kinds of hyper-specific things that schools ask for now. Math class requires a notebook, and a folder with pockets, and four green pens. Huh? Is there a unit on Irish math? But anyway, back to the music. A bit of film music this time!

Lots of film music lovers are very discouraged about the state of film music these days. Increasing reliance on electronics; music being composed by musicians who are not trained in the classical techniques; a seeming obsession on the part of filmmakers with a certain type of musical sound; the complaints go on. I tend to be unconvinced by such arguments; historically, the people living in any particular era tend to be very poor at judging the work of their own artists, and the whole "test of time" thing requires the actual passage of time. The music that filmscore lovers decry now may end up being the classic filmscores of score fans twenty, thirty, forty years from now.

One voice fairly new to the filmscore scene is Michael Giacchino. This composer first began to get noticed by his music for videogames, and over the last seven or eight years, Giacchino has secured a lot of high-profile scoring assignments. He's done several Pixar films (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up), and he's been lucky enough to become the composer-of-choice for one of the bigger "new names" in movies and teevee, J.J. Abrams. Giacchino has been leading a fairly charmed life of late.

Of course, it helps that he writes some very fine music. His score to Star Trek 2009 sounded a bit odd in my ears at first, but the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me, to the point where I now think it's one of the finest scores of the 2000's. My favorite cue is the sad and beautiful cue that underscores the self-sacrifice of George Kirk and the birth of little James Tiberius. Here, from Star Trek 2009, is "Labor of Love".

Wow, it's like 2003 all over again!

Seen in the comments thread here:

Patriots were for the war, Traitors were against it.

Wow. I haven't heard that kind of rhetoric since the grandest days of warblogger chest-thumping. (The source is one of Alan's stalwart lunatic right-wing commenters.)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Football: the NFL or the college game?

Covering up

Lynn comments about a blog devoted to "bad" F/SF book cover art. I put "bad" in quotes because, well, not all of them strike me as being bad.

What interested me, though, is that I had to go all the way to page 19 of the blog to find a book that I actually own. I have that cover. Wouldn't call it "bad", just strangely uncompelling. And in fact, if you hate that cover to Carpe Diem, then you can probably rip on any of the other covers in those particular reprints of the Liaden Universe novels, because they all have the same kind of theme: a man, a woman, and a SFnal backdrop like a planet or a spaceship.

The Final Answers

Oooooh, I can just get these last answers in before the month ends. Only four questions remain. Two are from Roger:

What is your favorite reference book?

I don't rely on reference books as much as I once did these days, but I do have some on the shelves. There is the Merriam and Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, which is wonderfully useful for a reader, in looking up literary terms and small entries on various literary works. I have a full-sized Rand McNally World Atlas, as well as a smaller, abridged one that's useful for quick checks of locations. I greatly love my Historical Atlas, which is actually a old volume that I liberated from a discard pile years ago when I worked at the library at St. Bonaventure University. Historical atlases are wonderful things: maps of old national boundaries, maps depicting various military campaigns, maps of ancient kingdoms and empires, maps of the spread of human society across the world. If you like history at all, get yourself a Historical Atlas!

Somewhere I have a dictionary of musical terms that dates from my college years. David Dubal's Essential Canon of Classical Music is an amazing reference work, not just for those looking for something new to hear, but for those looking for quick information about the history of classical music.

There are lots of reference works relating to genre-specific subjects as well. I have the Star Trek Encyclopedia, as well as a Star Wars Galactic Atlas. These kinds of books are so much fun to thumb through -- as well as a couple of reference books pertaining to The Lord of the Rings, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Jess Nevins's Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, an Arthurian Encyclopedia, and the like.

Stretching the usual notion of a "reference book", there is also my study Bible (TNIV), two copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse (printed sixty years apart, so the contents are different), and various other large collections of poetry. I consider these to be reference books.

So which is my favorite reference book? Ummmm...Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. At least, that's the answer I'm giving today.

What is your favorite biopic about a musician? (Singer, instrumentalist, composer.) In fact if you made a list, that would be grand.

I don't see very many musical biopics, because a lot of them tend to fall a bit short. (Dennis Quaid's Great Balls of Fire was painful.) The line to tread is a fine one indeed: lay off the bad stuff in the person's life and the movie feels too reverential, but dwell too much on the bad stuff and it just seems like a tell-all expose. It's hard to strike that right balance.

Some films do, however, get it right. Chief among these is the utterly magnificent Amadeus, which is not only brilliantly made just in terms of craft (the acting, photography, and musical direction are all first-rate), but also wonderfully done in terms of story. The film actually manages to make the enmity between Mozart and Salieri into a compelling story. Of course, in order to tell that story, the film (and the play it's based on) must take a number of liberties with the real history. But so be it.

I've always liked La Bamba a great deal, although it's somewhat flawed, in my view, by the constant fatalism that hangs over the movie, by way of very foreboding airplane imagery throughout. We all know how Richie Valens's life ended, but the film treats the plane crash as a constant motif. I think it was Roger Ebert who described the film's tone by saying, "Watching the movie you almost get the feeling that Richie Valens would have been shocked to die in any way other than a plane crash."

One biopic I loved -- and haven't seen in years -- is Coal Miner's Daughter. I saw it with my mother when I was eight years old; I recall actually wanting to see it, which some might find surprising. ("What's the movie about? A country singer who grew up in poverty in Kentucky? Sure, I'll go!") I can't really say anything about the movie right now, because it's been a long time since I last watched it.

I only saw Shine -- starring Geoffrey Rush as a pianist with some mental problems -- once, but I recall finding it enjoyable.

Again stretching definitions a bit: Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous is totally fictionalized, but it's also heavily drawn from Crowe's own experiences as a young journalist writing about rock music in the 1970s. There's a wonderful British comedy called Hear My Song, which is also a fictionalized story based on a real event, in this case an Irish tenor who had to flee his country due to tax problems, and the young and brash and nearly penniless owner of a failing nightclub who decides to save his business by bringing that tenor back. And for totally fictionalized music movies that don't seem entirely fictional, there are Tom Hanks's underrated That Thing You Do!, Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, and the effervescent Once, featuring Glen Mansard and Markita Irglova.

Biopics I need to see? Ray, Walk the Line, Backbeat, The Doors. Oh, and Dreamgirls.

And Roger didn't ask this, but musicians who should have movies about them? In classical music: I know he's my beloved favorite composer, but Ye Gods, there's a great movie to be made about Hector Berlioz. Maybe I should write it. And I also think that there's a wonderful film waiting to be made about the romance of Robert and Clara Schumann. Rock musicians? Well, I don't really know a whole lot about the lives of many rock figures at all. Neil Peart of Rush, maybe. And Celine Dion. (OK, I'm kidding about Celine Dion. I think.)

What are your top 10 (or 5 or 20) favorite Beatles songs as performed by the Beatles? As performed by someone else?

OK, a random list. But I'm now thinking of a regular series of posts devoted to exploring Beatles songs. Hmmmm...good idea? Bad idea? Anyway, the list of songs that I like a lot:

Across the Universe
Let It Be
Hey Jude
Octopus's Garden
Don't Let Me Down
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Come Together
Hello, Goodbye
In My Life
With a Little Help From My Friends

And more. (I've never been a huge fan of "Yesterday", although I have warmed to it more of late.)

For years it was my general stance that I liked the Beatles as song writers more than as performers, because I tended to like cover versions more than the originals. I actually can't think of too many cover versions off the top of my head, except for Judy Collins's wonderful take on "In My Life". And the film Across the Universe is just one amazing Beatles cover after another.

And now, the final question, which is a pretty serious one. From Redsneakz:

With your losing Quinn, is it still hard (five years later) to read of babies and such?

Sometimes, very occasionally. It's nothing predictable, but once in a while, there's the "Where the hell is our happy ending?" reaction. I must admit that I have fairly strong internal reactions when I hear about some young guy getting a young girl pregnant, and then she has a gorgeous healthy baby, and I wonder about that. We did things the way they're supposed to be done; they did not. So why do they get the healthy baby, when we got fifteen months of medical struggle followed by death?

I'm almost always happy for people when I see them with their beautiful babies. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that, once in a while, my reaction to seeing a baby is to think, "Hey, God? What the F***?!"

One thing that happened as a result of Quinn's life and death was that my tolerance for a lot of standard religious platitudes is now nonexistent. When I hear things like "God has a plan, and sadly, his plan for you doesn't involve more than one child", I immediately think, "What kind of God is it who comes up with plans that involve making a baby suffer a life where he never eats and he has to fight for every breath and then dies at fifteen months?" And then I think, "Gee, if God's got his plan, then what's the point of all this prayer I'm supposed to be doing?" Because I imagine God saying: "Hmmmm, this fellow wants his son to be healthy. Let me check the plan. Hmmmm...oh dear...sorry, dude, I'd help if I could, but see, I've got this plan." One well-meaning person said something to the effect of, "Well, maybe God knew that Quinn was going to have serious problems and wanted him to have parents who could love him." And I'm thinking, "That's his only option? He's God. How about fixing the health problems?!"

I still struggle with those questions. In fact, I suspect I'm likely to be struggling with those questions for the rest of my life. The main consolation is that I'm sure I'm not alone.

And with that, Ask Me Anything! August 2010 draws to a close. We'll play again in February! Thanks for participating, folks.

Sentential Links, deferred

Folks, I had a pretty busy Sunday and an even busier Monday is on tap, so I'm skipping Sentential Links for the week. We're gearing up for the new school year here at Casa Jaquandor, so bear with! (No hiatus, but posting may be a tad light, depending on how the spirit moves me in the time I have.)

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound....

Only one thing this week, though. My usual traipsing 'round the Interweb didn't take me into too many weird places. This, though, I liked a lot:



It's amazing how descriptive this is, for any specific referent of the word "project". I've got my own project that I've been struggling with for a while now. I made a breakthrough of sorts this very weekend, though -- getting a scene finally right, I think, in the space opera novel.

By way of talking about writing process a bit: I don't like to do a whole lot of revising while I'm cobbling a first draft together, but for this particular work, I've found myself doing more than usual. Occasionally it's for prosaic reasons, such as when I decided to slightly change a couple of characters' names (both gained a single letter, but one of them, by virtue of that added letter, got an entire new syllable out of it!); others when I decided that I needed to go back and set up in Chapter Two something I'd decided to throw into Chapter Six on a whim (as in, "Hey, I know what would be cool here!"). The scene I just got done wrestling with is a First Contact scene, where My Heroes first meet the inhabitants of the planet they've just arrived upon. There's just no getting around the fact that this scene has to be right before I move on, because it sets the tone for so much of what is to come. Or I think it does. You never know.

Anyway, that's what's Weird and Awesome. Now, back to the project!