Sentential Links #245

Only one link this week.

:: But ours is one of those friendships that no matter how many years pass between our visits, we always pick up right where we left off. I have absolutely no doubt that we’re going to have a wondrous reunion the next time we see each other.

More next week.

Two Headlines

Two Headlines, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I still have my copy of the Buffalo News from September 12, 2001. Now I have another to keep with it.

No, I'm not delusional enough to believe that Osama bin Laden's death "ends" anything. It may mark a turning point in some ways against a particular enemy, but history is long, isn't it? Yesterday's events sprang from that awful day almost ten years ago, but bin Laden was out there before that; he was created, in a sense, by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.

And the first Gulf War came about, in part, because of American support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s...and that came about because of British Imperialism...and that came about because...well, it all goes on. In a way, yesterday's events can be traced back to Suleiman's victory at the Horns of Hattin, and before that.

But at least Osama bin Laden exists now only in history. No, he won't be forgotten. But he's another name for the history books now.

Well, that's good news.

Stolen from Facebook:



Also, I had a few posts ready to go yesterday, either in OpenOffice or in my head...but then I was without Internet for the entire day. Ugh! I'm thinking that my next raise at work will go toward funding FIOS here at Casa Jaquandor.

Anyhow, I'll actually have some fresh bloggage later on, probably tonight. (Gotta work and then go to the gym afterward.) But for now -- thanks to the American soldiers who got bin Laden, and to ALL the American soldiers who have worked to make this moment possible for ten years and more.

The hell with all of it.

Political rant below the fold.

Saturday Centus

Wow, I've been a crappy blogger this week. Only two posts. That's pretty weak. A weak week.

And now I'm reaching for lame puns.

Sigh.

Saturday Centus celebrates one year of writing prompts today. I haven't been along for the whole ride, but I've enjoyed the parts I've been around for. So....

As Emily received her anniversary gift from George, she remembered his proposal, in the empty big top after the show. And the jugglers and stilt walkers and lion tamers who stood up for them at the wedding. Their vows being interrupted by the elephants. The popcorn and cotton candy at the reception.

She made a sound like "oomph". Then she opened her eyes and, through the chocolate-cream covering her face, saw her smiling husband. Emily laughed as she picked up the coconut-cream pie, her gift for him. Although the traditional gift for a first anniversary was paper, this was life with a circus clown.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Once again, our DSL was very buggy yesterday and continuing into today, hence the lack of posting. But anyway: one of the local sports-talk radio guys here claimed on the air a few weeks ago that he had just that morning eaten his first banana. Ever. In his life. And he's over 40. White American male, over 40, ate his first-ever banana in 2011. Am I alone in thinking that this is incredibly weird?

Sentential Links #244

Two hundred forty-four. Wow.

:: And the books haven’t dated at all, despite or perhaps partly because of, their lack of graphic sexual and violent content. And that’s borne out by teenage girls to whom I’ve introduced the novels; they are immediately captivated by their glamour and excitement and do not care at all that the books are set in the 50′s and 60′s. It’s always fun when you can pass on something you’ve loved to the next generation, but passing on the Mary Stewart bug is sheer delight. (I really need to re-read Mary Stewart's Arthurian quartet -- actually a trilogy with one extra book tacked on after-the-fact -- one of these years. Probably soon, actually. I read it in college, during my big "Arthurian" phase, and I remember it as being wonderful.)

:: Which presents the age old question, if you were able to achieve immortality, what would you do with your time? Would you use it to intimidate, bully, and coerce innocent women, children and babies in the supermarket? The Living Dead are not a bunch of rocket surgeons, that's for sure! (Ooooooh, if you ever enjoyed thumbing through issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, this blog is for you. Thanks to the Facebook friend who linked it the other day!)

:: Last year I spent Easter at Laduree, and as much as I will always love it there I enjoy discovering new favorites in Paris. I recently stumbled across Meert on the long way home, tucked away on a tinier street of the Marais. One peek in the window and it was a coup de foudre au chocolat. Inside the most precious treats are perfectly organized and displayed on the shelves and in the cases, beneath a pastel ceiling adorned with tableaus of gourmandises. Candy coated happiness! (I just discovered this one, too. Happiness is new blogs to page through and read!)

:: I want some stories about a tough femme fatale who works for an eccentric, rich dude who wants to go on collecting knowledge and artifacts, but is too old to leave his creepy, old mansion to go on his own adventures anymore. That's the sequel to Atlantis that I'll never get unless I end up writing it for myself. (A nice post about Disney's Atlantis movie. As I pointed out in comments there, the late 90s and early 2000s were an interesting period for Disney; Pixar was just getting going, and Disney's films weren't as universally beloved as they'd been in the early 1990s. But still, Disney was producing good films, and even their lackluster efforts had interesting things in them. Atlantis is a solid, fun adventure film, and would likely be my favorite Disney film from that era, if not for the sublimely wonderful The Emperor's New Groove.)

:: She slipped away peacefully last month 6 days shy of 98. You see, for the last 21 years, she has been .... figuratively .... patting her foot, sitting on go, just waiting to join daddy. She's gotten her wish and they're probably off together playing golf, again.

:: When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be Phil Tippett. (I wanted to be Lawrence Kasdan....)

:: I love the anecdote about Tony Blair’s visit to Washington following 9/11, and he and President Bush were walking through the White House, and Blair made some admiring comment about one of the rooms, and Bush made some joke like, “You guys burned this room down.” There was a brief pause, and Blair replied, “My apologies.” (I hadn't heard that one.)

More next week.

Just checking in....

I took the day off from blogging because hey, it's Easter. See you tomorrow!

Saturday Centus

Oy. A picture prompt, this time. And it's a horrible one, too.



Like I said: Oy.

"Hello?"

"Mmmmmmfff."

"Hello! Wake up! Wakey wakey!"

"Mmmmmmmm-whuh?"

"Wake up, sleepy-head! Time to face the day! Oh, and nice sleeping cap. We don't wear those where I come from."

"Who are you?"

"I am the Ghost of Easter Future, bada-BING! And you've been very, very naughty."

"No I have not! I'm nice now. 'God bless us everyone,' remember? Tiny Tim's not even tiny anymore."

"What? Let me check my notes...what's your name?"

"Ebenezer Scrooge."

"Aww crap, you're not the CEO of British Petroleum. Sorry to wake you. I'll go now."

"Wait! Are those canoli?"

"Awwww...."

I'm not thrilled by this, but the picture prompts always throw me off....

High Five!

It's National High Five Day, which means it's appropriate to revisit one of the whacky docs from Scrubs!



High Five!

Yes, I'm posting a LOLCat.

Sue me. It's funny, and the cat looks like our Lester.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Something for Thursday

My favorite of Antonin Dvorak's symphonies is actually not the 9th, known by its nickname "From the New World". Wonderful as that symphony is, I adore the exuberance and wit of the Eighth. Here is the fourth, and final, movement from Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in G.

Wrenchin'

At the end of last year, all the big hardware stores started displaying what I came to call "dog bone wrenches", because they look like dog bones. On each end was not one single head to fit a single size of fastener, but a swiveling doohickey with four different heads on it to accomodate multiple fasteners. Here's a representative example. None of the reviews I read of such tools were particularly enthusiastic, and the things just look gangly and unwieldy, so I never even considered buying one.

But I was in AutoZone a month or so ago, and I saw these:



I was sufficiently intrigued that I bought them. They're not terribly expensive, as ratcheting wrenches go, and each one has four sizes on it, for a total of...let's see, carry the two...eight common SAE hex bolt sizes. You can kind of see how they get different sizes by looking at the upper end of the larger wrench in the picture there -- the ratcheting insert actually divides into two different sizes, depending on which side of the wrench is down and which is facing up. In practice, this does make operation a little tricky once in a while as a bolt head can slip all the way through, but I like having an option now for when my socket set isn't the weapon of choice (when the opening I have to work in is shallowed than the depth of my ratchet, for one).

These aren't awesome tools, by any chance, and I'd love to own a fuller set of ratcheting wrenches sometime in the future. But as ratcheting wrenches are pretty expensive, these two combo-wrenches make a pretty good compromise for now.

A Rant.

I've got to get this rant out of my system, but I'll hide it behind the fold. I'll even conceal it so you have to highlight it with your mouse to read it.

A-mazin'!

My Mets Journal is all kinds of awesome, even for a non-Mets fan (and a person whose interest in baseball is hanging by a thread). This fellow is doing a drawing to depict something about every game the Mets play this year, and he's got some artistic chops. I love this!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Cal had a post about "hype" the other day, in which he discusses the upcoming wedding of a couple of Royals in the United Kingdom. In the post, he describes some things he's avoided because of the hype surrounding them:

I am totally consistent in my attitudes when it comes to hype. I hate anyone telling me that I have to see something or read something or listen to something. Nine times out of ten their recommendations are correct and I may get around to them eventually but initially I just want to run screaming in the other direction.

For example:

I have never seen 'E.T.' nor will I ever see it. If they show it on a plane I will have to take a parachute and jump.

Now, this strikes me as odd, since the hype over E.T. happened thirty years ago, and now the movie is pretty much a classic. Some hyped things fade away, as you'd expect, but others demonstrate that they can withstand the Test of Time, as it were, so by this point, reacting against E.T. because lots of people like it seems weird. So I said so, and Cal responded:

I just don't wanna see E.T. because I want to have ONE movie I never see and that seemed like a good one. If I never see 'Smurfs' then I am a discriminating movie goer. If I don't see E.T. then I am just a freak and I can live with that.

Huh. Here again I'm confused; the very nature of time and the fact that I'll never have enough of it pretty much guarantees that I'll always have a movie that's a classic that I never saw. Same thing with books. Same with music. That realization can be a bit liberating, actually; I remember, back when I was an active film music fan, that there was a particular record producer whom I thought was just a giant jerk, so I publicly stated that I wasn't going to be buying anything from his label, ever. Someone else chimed in to say, "You're just depriving yourself!" My response was, "I'll never have time to hear all the music I want to hear anyway." Which is true. (It also helped that the records the guy makes -- re-recordings of campy sci-fi film scores from the 1950s -- are of zero interest to me.)

So where am I going with this? Where's the Random Wednesday Conversation Starter? I'm not trying to pick on Cal here; I was just thrown a bit by the resolute nature of his being against the hype for what is now an old movie. Scary thought: E.T. is older now than Casablanca was when I was born.

Anyway, here's the question: What highly-regarded movie, or book, or whatever, exists that you're pretty sure you're never going to see, read, or hear, for whatever reason? (And thanks, Cal, for the thought-provoking post!)

"The things I do for love...."

That's a memorable line of dialog -- perhaps the most memorable -- from any of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books, and fortunately, it's spoken in the television adaptation of A Game of Thrones, in exactly the right way. That moment, early in the book, jolted me a bit as a reader as a genuine surprise. Martin would, in my opinion, go to this type of well a few too many times over the rest of that first book and in the three that came after, so much so that I remember reading A Feast for Crows with a constant sense of impending doom for every character. After a while, I have to admit that it got to be a little much, and sometimes I think of A Song of Ice and Fire as the fat-fantasy equivalent of Funky Winkerbean.

Maybe that's not fair; heck, it probably isn't. But while I've enjoyed Martin's books, I've never been as big a fan of them as many. I started to tease out the reason why when I read A Feast for Crows, and now that I've seen the first episode of the teevee adaptation, I'm seeing ASoIaF for what it is: it's a fantasy soap opera.

When I was a kid, I actually became for a time a huge fan of General Hospital. This was back when each summer would have a long and sometimes "action-packed" tale involving spies and espionage and intrigue of such nature, usually featuring characters like Robert Scorpio and his former wife Anna, who were both also former agents of the WSB (World Security Bureau), when they'd square off against the nefarious agents of the enemy DVX. As these storylines wended their way through the summer months, lots of other characters would see their own lives intersect with the "main summer storyline". This was all usually quite a bit of fun, but there were characters I didn't really care about, and thus their bits in the storyline tended to slide beneath my radar. And not all of the show's characters would be involved in the "main summer storyline", so once a week -- usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday -- there'd be an episode of GH that served only to catch us up on the characters who had nothing to do with the fun stuff. These episodes were largely boring as hell; I was watching the show for Robert Scorpio's heroics and whatnot, and I didn't really care one whit about Steve Hardy's son's relationship problems or the various infighting of the Quartermaine clan or the trials-and-tribulations of hooker-turned-straight Bobbi Whatshername. But that was the price to pay for the good stuff.

So GRRM's massive fantasy series is getting kind of like that. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character, with that character being named in BIG LETTERS at the top of each chapter, so as soon as one chapter ends, you know just by looking at the next page where you're going next in the story. This is classic soap opera structure, and in the first two books it was extremely effective, but I'm finding that now as we're into our fourth book here, it's all starting to feel the same way it felt when I'd watch GH all those years ago. "Oh, cool! An Arya chapter! Her story's interesting!...Oh, bugger, another chapter about Sansa. Snore." If ASoIaF were to be filmed, I think it should be as a soap opera, titled Westeros!. And if they change actors, a voiceover guy could intone, "The part of Jaime Lannister will be played on this episode by...."

It's not that I didn't enjoy the book, because I did, mostly. But the feel of reading this series has become eerily similar in my mind to that of watching a soap opera. I'm not sure if that's what GRRM has in mind, but there it is.

I'm not trying to belittle things here, because it's fun to delve deeply into stories like this. But even so, reading that last book, I remember a certain creeping frustration that things weren't unfolding so much as grinding along.

Martin's series gets compared to The Lord of the Rings a lot, which interests me. I just re-read LOTR a month or so ago, so it's fresh on my mind, and what struck me this time is how surprisingly focused Tolkien keeps things: he's got the story he wants to tell, and he pretty much sticks with it. Martin, however, focuses everywhere. If Martin had written LOTR, we'd have long chapters describing the trials and tribulations of the folk at Bree. We'd have chapters showing the befouling of the Shire while Frodo and the others are away. We'd have the meetings of the Council of Wizards. We'd have chapters set in the North and around the Lonely Mountain, showing what the dwarves up there are up to. And Gondor? We'd see all of the intrigue there.

At this point, I'm not sure that there even is a story that Martin is trying to tell. I think he's immersing us for a very long time in a heavily populated world, a world where there are good people and bad people and people who are just kind of all right, and where sometimes these people do horrible things to one another and where love is not necessarily a happy thing and where sins of fathers ripple out through the generations and where there is murder and incest and people thought dead who turn out to not be dead and...so on. Basically, all the things you'd find in a soap opera.

I swear that I don't mean any of this disparagingly -- but I'm just not all that convinced by repeated claims that George RR Martin has done something staggeringly new and stunning and original with this series. It's a fantasy soap opera. General Hospital meets the Wars of the Roses. The Sopranos with swords. Dallas with dragons. The X-Men when Chris Claremont was in charge.

As for the show itself? Very well done, for the most part. A few more characters might have been named. I didn't care for the look of Winterfell, with all those round towers -- it seemed a bit too elegant in a long shots. But still, very effective. I took one look at Joffrey and immediately thought, "Oh, you little f***er. And the acting was uniformly excellent -- I liked the way everybody looked. I'm fine with Tyrion not being as ugly as described in the books. Part of my problem right now is that I'm spoiled by my knowledge of what is to come; like it or not, I can't set aside the more favorable opinion of Jaime Lannister that the third and fourth books created to hiss the pure shit that he is in the first two.

And as for the books, I remain deeply skeptical that Martin will ever finish them, and I remain deeply hopeful that if he does finish them, the very last line of the last book is "Hodor."

(Can't wait to see Hodor, actually. Talk about an actor lucking out -- he can memorize all of his lines in less than two seconds!)

Fixing the Prequels: Revenge of the Sith (part 1)

I've been meaning to get to this for a while, but various things have distracted me and kept it pushed down the priority list for several months. But now, it really is time to start the final edition of Fixing the Prequels, by turning to the final film in the trilogy, Revenge of the Sith.

Before I begin, it's worth a reminder of what I'm about here. I love the Prequel Trilogy (abbreviated 'PT' hereafter), and have since I saw each individual film on first release. I found them all involving, exciting, and in the case of Revenge, emotionally crushing at times. I know I'm a minority in this, but I've never much cared about that. Even so, I must admit that as much as I love the Star Wars prequels, I don't love them unreservedly, because they are flawed. There are things wrong with them.

That's not an unusual opinion, but I think that my view as to the degree of that opinion is. Most folks seem to hold the flaws of the PT as fatal flaws, sinking the films to the point where the only appropriate response to them seems to be outright mockery. I don't believe that. I think that a lot of the flaws in the films are overblown; others arise from misinterpretation or possibly a failure to understand what George Lucas was at times really getting at. And still more perceived flaws in the PT come, I think, not from a sense of genuine error on Lucas's part but the simple fact that, by the time Lucas made these three films, tastes had changed in a lot of ways.

So when I talk about "fixing" the prequels, I'm not about wholesale rewrites and bagging on the direction of the films in all particulars. I point out flaws along the way, but my goal is also to highlight the things in these films that I find admirable, the things that keep me coming back to them frequently. My approach is to address two kinds of flaws: the ones that I think are real, genuine flaws, and the ones that I've heard cited as flaws from other people over the years but which I either don't see as flaws or as fatal flaws. I'm about credit as much as criticism here, which I think is a more measured response to them than a lot of the people who deeply despise the Prequels would admit. It has long interested me that, in almost all cases of such discussion, the people who hold a negative view of something are the ones who invariably claim to be seeing the thing objectively. My response is to simply point out that having a negative opinion is not seeing something "objectively"; it's having a negative opinion.

And now, with all that preamble behind us, let's move on to discussing Revenge of the Sith, a fascinating film that even as I write this I'm not sure about, as to how I'd go about "fixing" it. This is mainly because I'm not entirely sure what I think is wrong with it. But as I work through the film, I expect some thoughts will crystallize. So let's start at the beginning, which means as it always does in a Star Wars movie, a crawl:

War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.

In a stunning move, the fiendish droid leader, General Grievous, has swept into the Republic capital and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine, leader of the Galactic Senate.

As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their valuable hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a desperate mission to rescue the captive Chancellor. . . .

It sets things up nicely. I especially like that opening: "War!" This crawl is pretty blunt, with none of the "politics" stuff that many claim to have been bored by in the first two Prequels. (How they could be "bored" by a couple of lines of text is something I've never figured out, but no matter.) What stands out to me in this crawl, however, is that second sentence in the first paragraph: "There are heroes on both sides." That's an interesting line, there; it seems out of place, but I think it works in an interesting way: it calls to attention the ambiguous nature of the Clone War, the War to Preserve the Republic: we know that it's basically a fake war, started for no other reason than to trick the Republic into destroying itself.

Revenge opens with a massive space battle, of which I've heard many differing opinions over the years. Detractors say that it plays like a video game on the big screen, and is impossible to follow. This has always struck me as odd, because it's always seemed to me that George Lucas goes out of his way to make this incredibly frenetic space battle as easy to follow as possible.

After the crawl, we have our traditional pan down to a planet and a spaceship. (AOTC, remember, actually followed its crawl with a pan up.) The planet is Coruscant, and the ship is a Republic attack cruiser. The music dies away almost completely at this point; all we hear for about thirty seconds is a steady, but off-kilter (because it's in 5-4 time), beat of drums. The camera starts to zoom in on the cruiser, when two new ships enter from behind: small fighter craft. Only two. We follow these two ships as they skim over the surface of the cruiser, out into space beyond it, and then back and dive. The camera follows over the edge of the cruiser, and there – spread out before us – is the enormous space battle.

As soon as the two Jedi starfighters come into view, the music starts in again, with the famous "Force theme". We don't need any dialogue or to even look into the cockpits to know that our two Jedi are flying these ships. Also, of all the ships coming and going in the skies above Coruscant, these are the only two ships of this type. This isn't like A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker was only one of a bunch of X-wings. Even more, the Jedi starfighters are, by design, similar to what will eventually become TIE fighters, and those ships' thrusters emit cone-shaped blasts of exhaust (presumably because the battle is taking place high in Coruscant's atmosphere, as opposed to in the vacuum of outer space).



Another thing that interests me about this space battle is that we see almost none of it. Really. This battle clearly involves several times as many ships and combatants as the big battle at the end of Return of the Jedi (of course, a one-to-one comparison there isn't easy because that one has a Death Star in it), but aside from lingering shots that quickly flash by, we are shown nothing of the battle itself. Nothing of the strategy, nothing of which side is winning and which is losing, nothing of tactics. All we see of this battle is what Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi see as they fly through it, on their way to General Grievous's flagship. The battle is frenetic, and there is a lot happening onscreen, but it's not at all hard to follow, so far as I can tell. The battle is entirely secondary to their main concern: getting through it alive to land on General Grievous's ship and find the Chancellor.

So, after quite a bit of space derring-do that involves flying directly through a cloud of attacking fighters, evading missiles, and dealing with a bunch of small droids who get onto a fighter's hull and then scuttle about taking the ship apart, our two Jedi heroes land on Grievous's ship. I like a lot of the dialogue through here: at one point, Obi Wan notes "This is why I hate flying!", echoing two lines from Attack of the Clones. I also like how when Obi Wan's ship is infested by the buzz droids, Anakin's first notion is to blast them off, which has Obi Wan screaming in protest, at which point Anakin says, "I agree. Bad idea." So he comes up with something else.

What I also like about this whole sequence is John Williams's music, which is full of interesting things like quotes from the "Force Theme", sections in 5/4, and one heroic quote of the Rebel Spaceship Fanfare when R2-D2 dispatches the last buzz droid. This was a musical touch that I liked immensely.

Anyway, back to the General's ship, where Obi Wan and Anakin have just landed. There's an interesting touch here as the two Jedi take on a typically large number of battle droids: Obi Wan leaps out of his ship and ignites his lightsaber before his ship has even slid to a stop; Anakin, however, waits until he's stopped completely before grabbing his saber and hopping out to join the melee. I like that. It's the kind of tiny detail that gets lost amidst a lot of the melee, the kind of blink-and-you-miss-it thing that nevertheless illustrates something about the story and our characters.

Now Obi Wan and Anakin must make their way to the observation deck where the Chancellor is being held captive. This involves more run-ins with battle droids, malfunctioning elevators, and relying on R2-D2 when R2 is dealing with his own problems. (He has to hide from a couple of battle droids when Obi Wan starts talking to him through his comm-link.) I wouldn't change any of this material, because the banter and chemistry between Obi Wan and Anakin really works pretty well, in my opinion:

ANAKIN: I sense Count Dooku.

OBI WAN: I sense a trap.

ANAKIN: Next move?

OBI WAN: (grins) Spring the trap!

And this, the transition from the space battle to the derring-do aboard General Grievous's ship, is a good place to stop. Next time we'll rescue the Chancellor, land half a ship, and find out that Anakin isn't always shooting blanks. Excelsior!

Sentential Links #243

Linkage....

:: Is it possible that you get to a point where you own so many tools that you forget what you own? (Yup, it's possible. I've never bought new versions of tools I already own, but I have done jobs with the wrong tool only to discover later on that I own the right tool, and I then realize, "Huh, this would have made that job a lot easier.")

:: There’s a poetry here; dust from a local storm blowing a few kilometers above, but translucent enough to allow us to see beyond it to a different kind of dust blowing among the stars. (The video over there is amazing. For God's sake, go watch it.)

:: How dare anyone say that Game of Thrones is “boy fiction.” What a crude and useless phrase. I am proof that it is not the case, and I am not alone.

:: This leaves the most important issue. Is this the masterpiece of modern fantasy literature that it’s made out to be? No, not even close. (An older post, but I saw it for the first time this week. He's writing about George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. I'll probably re-read the series sometime in the next year, but my general view right now is that the first two books are really good, the third one's pretty good, and the fourth was a disappointing slog. We'll see what happens in the fifth, I suppose. Maybe.)

:: How many times are the going to try and make the same movie? They made it right the first time.

:: There’s such an utter disconnect with reality that AMERICAN IDOL has become the O.J. murder trial with a band. (It's funny: this is the third article I've read in a couple of days ripping on this season of American Idol, and yet, each writer has a different view of who's good and who sucks. That's kind of funny, to me.)

:: You can walk away from the things you never really liked doing in the first place.

More next week....

A lllooonnnggg quiz from Sunday Stealing

Like the title says: a lllooonnnggg quiz.

1. Tell us who the last person that you took a shower with.

I think The Wife would object. (To me describing what we do, not who the person is! Because it's The Wife. And now I've said too much. Stupid quiz....)

2. Tell us about your favorite tee-shirt. Extra points if you show a pic. (We know. What can you do with freakin' extra points?)

Probably any of my tie-dyed t-shirts. I don't really wear t-shirts with logos on them much anymore, and only once in a while the occasional picture of something. I prefer solid colors and the like.

3. Has anyone ever hit on you even though they knew you were taken?

I have no idea. One reason I continue to profoundly happily "off the market" is that I was one of those guys who had zero notion of how to distinguish friendliness from flirting.

4. Do you plan what to wear the next day?

Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends. One nice thing about a job with a uniform is that planning what to wear is not necessary.

5. How are you feeling RIGHT now? Why?

Full, because I just had dinner. (An Italian sausage on a bun and some roasted potatoes, if you must know.)

6. What's the closest thing to you that's black?

My portfolio. It's on my desk, right next to the laptop.

7. Tell me about an interesting dream you remember having.

Ach...I can't. I rarely remember my dreams.

8. Did you or might you meet anybody new today?

Not officially "met", no. There are lots of people in church whom I don't know all that well, but I didn't "meet" any of them.

9. If you could be doing anything right now (or perhaps after you finish this ridiculous meme) what would it be?

I'd say "writing", but truth is, I could be writing right now. I guess I wish I could be traveling with The Wife.

10. Can you think of a meme question that's never been asked?

"If you were going to be hit with a pie, what flavor would it be?" Nobody ever asks about pie-throwing preferences. It's odd, really.

11. What comes to mind when I say China?

"Please step up and lead humanity into the future, because I'm not sure right now that America is going to get it done."

12. Are you overly emotional?

I don't think so...but some people might say that I am. Who knows?

13. If you could listen to just one rock album (CD, vinyl or mp3) which one would you pick?

One album right now, or one for the rest of my life? I'd go with Pink Floyd's The Wall, I suppose. (But Abbey Road is making a serious challenge!)

14. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it?

Both. But I "bite" with my lips, if that makes sense. Not with my teeth. That's unpleasant.

15. Do you like your car?

Love it! The only thing I don't like about it is that the A/C doesn't work and is highly cost-prohibitive to fix. (Have I mentioned that I'm driving a new car? New to me, that is? No? Hmmmm...need to blog about that.)

16. Do you like yourself?

What's not to like!

17. Would you go out to eat with Charlie Sheen?

If he's paying, you bet. I never turn down free food. If I'm paying? Well, if that's the case, it's a fast-food place, we bring separate cars, and he's not allowed to talk.

18. What was the last song that you listened to?

"Every Which Way But Loose", by Eddie Rabbitt.

19. Are (or were) your parents strict?

Not really. As I mentioned when a similar question came up on Ask Me Anything! last month, they tended to set some general rules and then wait for me to screw up. (Which I usually did.)

20. Have you ever wondered what attending a wild orgy (if only to watch or...) would be like?

I expect it would be like some of the movies we watched while drunk in college: sweaty and unpleasant-looking.

21. I say cottage cheese. You say:

Throw in a spoonful or two of slivered almonds, and yum!

22. Have you ever met a celebrity?

A few Buffalo Bills, my Congressman at the time (Amo Houghton, incidentally the last Republican for whom I cast my ballot), and former Buffalo Philharmonic conductor Semyon Bychkov.

23. What was the last movie that you watched at home?

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. (Which is a far better movie than its reputation.)

24. Is there anything sparkly in the room you're in?

Of course! I'm all about the sparkly. I have a wall sconce with a candle on it; from the sconce hangs a sun-and-moon sun catcher and several strands of Mardi-gras beads. And my dragon-head incense burner has some glitter on it. I love sparkly!

25. What countries have you visited?

The US and Canada. (I have it on my parents' word that I've been in Mexico, but I was too young to have any memory of it.)

26. Have you ever made a phone call while you were drunk that you've regretted? If yes, do tell.

Thank goodness, no. My days of getting drunk with any regularity were several years before cell phone ubiquity.

27. Where were you going the last time that you were on a train?

There's a train museum in Medina, NY that does special train runs on occasion. Christmas before last, we went for the ride. It's just an "out and back" excursion which takes about an hour. I love trains and wish we took them more seriously in this country. Our lack of high speed rail is one of the most maddening things I can think of.

28. Bacon or sausage?

Depends. I'll typically order sausage with my pancakes or waffles, but bacon is wonderful, too.

29. How long have you had a cell-phone?

My first one was for a year or two in 1999-2000, but we let the contract expire owing to financial constraints at the time. The Wife got a phone in 2004, when she found herself needing to make tons of calls regarding Little Quinn's health care; she added me to the mix in 2007, and I've had my phone ever since.

30. What other memes do you do regularly?

Saturday Centus. Other meme-things I check out, and if I like the week's installment, I do it.

31. Who is the craziest meme host?

Not a clue.

32. Who invented chop sticks?

I don't know, but he's right up there on my list of Top Inventors of All Time, along with the person who invented the sandwich, the individual who invented overalls, and whoever invented the Spork.

33. Who are you going to be with tonight?

When The Wife gets home from work, her.

34. Are you too forgiving?

Nah. Being forgiving is a good thing. I tend to stew for a while and then I get tired of stewing.

35. When was the last time that you were in love?

It's a constant state, with me.

36. Tell us about your best friend.

Well, he dropped in on me one day to convince me to run for President. I didn't think I could win, but he put together a team that...oh wait, that's Leo McGarry. Sorry, I've been watching a lot of West Wing lately. My best friend is The Wife. Duh.

37. What was the stupidest thing you learned in high school?

I didn't learn anything "stupid" in high school. I don't believe in learning "stupid" stuff. (Although I didn't really see the point of the typing class. But then, I never took that class.)

38. What was the last thing that you cried about?

What Sydney Carton does at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. God, what an amazing book that was!

39. What was the last question you asked?

"Did you wash your hands?"

40. Favorite thing to do this time of the year?

It's Buffalo, so: root for the Sabres, and bitch about our irritatingly crappy spring. Seriously, spring here sucks. It's like winter warms up into the 40s and then stays there stubbornly, for two months. Ugh!

41. If you had to get a (or another) tattoo, what would it be?

Washington crossing the Delaware. (No, not really. I have no desire for tattoos.)

42. How would your best friend describe you?

"He's 5'10", with long hair that's going gray."

43. Have you ever seen all three Twilight films?

No. Reading one book was bad enough. Awful, awful crap.

44. Ever walked into a glass door?

Yes. At The Store, on the day of Buffalo's October Storm in 2006, I was pushing carts in the parking lot because no one else from that crew could make it in. Everything was OK, until the power finally went out just as I was shoving a big stack of carts into the door. Wham.

45. Favorite color on that person that you are attracted to?

Purple. Or yellow. Or blue. Or red. Or black.

46. Have you ever slapped someone?

Yes. (I'm not proud of it.)

47. What hair style (for you) would you like to see return?

I don't care about style. Deciding what to wear because society arbitrarily decides what's "socially acceptable" is silly.

48. What was the last CD you bought?

Wow, I honestly don't remember. I haven't purchased a CD in years. I always loved CDs, but prices are unacceptable.

49. Do looks matter to you?

A little. Not as much as to many, I hope.

50. Could you ever forgive a liar?

Sure. And if it's a one-time thing and they're genuinely contrite (and the lie's of a certain magnitude), I can even trust them. But it would take a while.

51. What's the hardest bill to pay every month?

Currently, I do a pretty good job of budgeting for my bills.

52. Do you like your life right now?

Yes. There are things that could be better, of course, and things I hope to change for the better both near-term and long-term. But we're not wallowing in despair right now, either.

53. Do you sleep with the TV on?

No. We don't even have a teevee in our bedroom. I've been known to fall asleep during our later shows in the living room, though -- especially on nights when I've had to get to work at O-dark-thirty.

54. Can you handle the truth?

Depends on the truth, doesn't it?

55. Do you have good vision?

Yes. I got glasses for reading back in the 90s; I got a new pair in 2001. I then didn't go to the eye doctor again until just last year, whereupon the doc questioned why I was there at all, since my prescription hadn't changed at all in nine years. I had to show him how scratched up my old glasses were; I wanted a new pair for that reason alone, and I figured I might as well get the prescription checked. I only wear glasses for reading and computer stuff; otherwise I get a headache after a while.

56. Do you hate or dislike more than 3 people?

I don't like hate. It leads to the Dark Side. Dislike? Yeah, that's unavoidable. I don't put numbers on it, though.

57. How often do you talk on the phone?

Daily, although it's usually to The Wife.

58. What celeb would you like to come home to?

Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic.

59. What are you wearing?

An old burgundy Old Navy sweatshirt under a pair of blue Dickies overalls.

60. What is your favorite wild animal?

Of the land? I love bison. Of the sea? I love orcas. Of the Muppets? This guy!

61. Where was your facebook picture taken?

In my bathroom, because the light's good in there. (Calm down!)

62. Can you waltz?

Not officially, no.

63. Do you have a job?

Yes.

64. What was the most recent thing you stole?

I don't steal things, unless we're talking about the occasional pack of Post-it notes or Sharpie markers from work.

65. Have you ever crawled through a window?

Not to get into a house or apartment, no. There was some window crawling during college, when we'd wait until dark one year and go explore the construction site of the new music building as it was going up. One time I stupidly wandered out onto this very long beam and got myself to the point where I had to keep moving forward. That was kind of dumb.

And that's it! Wow, what a long quiz!