Apropos of yesterday's anniversary of the JFK assassination is NPR's unveiling of tapes of ground-to-air communications between Air Force One and authorities in Washington in the aftermath of the death of the President. I haven't listened to it all yet, but much of it is compelling -- especially the necessarily cold detachment these people had to display on one of the most trying days in American history. The discussion of the means of transportation for JFK's body is particularly chilling and heartbreaking.

One small item of pride for me is the fact that while I have been overweight pretty much my entire life, I've never tried the Atkins Diet. Just about every other person I know who has ever wanted to lose weight has done so, and in every case they've done it for a few months, taken off twenty or so pounds, declared victory and abandoned it, and then put the weight back on. It sounds miraculous, indeed: eat all the fat and protein your heart desires, just cut the carbs back to almost nothing, drink four gallons of water a day, and watch the weight melt away; it's the "miracle" nature of the thing that makes it so alluring, I guess. I've never done it because I've never been able to convince myself that eating one thing -- protein -- for an extended period of time is healthy. I still believe that, despite the recent studies that have the Atkins-believers dancing with joy.

Not so fast, folks.

These studies contain, from my point of view, only one real surprise: that people on the Atkins diet don't experience a sudden spike in their cholesterol. Other than that, though, these studies are basically telling me what I already knew. Is it really a surprise that if you go on the Atkins diet for six months, you'll lose weight? We've all known people who have done that, so the studies aren't really yielding any great revelations. And I fear that people are not reading the fine print, where the researchers admit that the studies aren't indicative of what will happen to people who go on the Atkins diet for longer periods. Real, permanent weight loss -- where you don't put it back on as soon as you stop doing whatever it was that made you lose the weight -- is a matter of lifestyle, and I have yet to see any evidence at all for Atkins as a lifestyle. Don't show me people who have done the Atkins diet for six months. Show me someone who went on the Atkins diet in November, 1997 -- and is still on it. Show me that person's cholesterol; show me that person's overall health. Then I'll be impressed. I've never encountered a single person who has managed to stay on Atkins for anything longer than a hockey season. We all know that the Atkins diet works, in that one loses weight while doing it. But I see no evidence of an Atkins lifestyle.

I've also seen people suggesting, in the wake of the studies "confirming" Atkins, that we should return to the diet that prehistoric man enjoyed. The problem with that, as is explained so well here, is that we don't live like cavemen. We don't hunt and gather our food, we're not nomads, and in any case, there is a vast difference between the meat of a wild boar or a deer and that of a domesticated, grain-fed steer. There are also numerous cultures around our planet that eat heavy amounts of grain-based foods, who also have far less incidence of obesity than America does. Considering that, I have to conclude that "All protein, all the time" does not seem terribly adequate.

"Balance" is a fetish in news reportage circles -- the idea that both sides of a story must be equally described. In reality, it's a chimera -- one side always gets more airtime, or is otherwise favoured. You pick a moderate on one side, and an extremist on the other, assert that it's a balanced debate -- and you've just shifted the centre ground towards the second faction's territory.

Much has been written recently about the growing disconnect between American and European attitudes on world affairs. Science fiction author Charles Stross has a particularly interesting take on the phenomenon, which he has titled The Manufacture of Dissent. Stross feels that attitudes, for better or worse, are being shaped by biases both hidden and unhidden in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. I can't help but think that he's on to something here. I don't know much about European media (Stross is from Scotland), but I see this kind of thing very definitely playing out here in the United States, where commonplace belief now holds that our news media is relentlessly biased toward the liberal end of the political spectrum, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary.

(Crossposted to Collaboratory.)

Last week I was watching The McLaughlin Group on PBS, a political show that for some reason I've always liked -- especially the Saturday Night Live parodies of it, in which McLaughlin (played by Dana Carvey) would let his commentators get halfway through a sentence and then bark, "WRONG!" before moving on to the next thing.

But there was a fascinating segment, toward the end of the show, on a problem facing the military. Veterans of World War II and Korea are dying at a pretty brisk clip these days, pushing up the number of funerals with full military honors -- but the military only has something like five hundred buglers worldwide, which makes the playing of "Taps" at each funeral a difficult or impossible proposition. The military's solution is to use an electronic doohickey to sound "Taps" while a member of the military holds up a bugle and, well, fake it. I'm thinking, in the event of a funeral where there can be no actual bugler, why not just have a civilian trumpeter play "Taps"?

I played the trumpet in high school and college -- pretty well, too; I actually majored in it my first two years of college before I switched to philosophy -- and I had the high honor of playing "Taps" for several military funerals while I was in high school. They weren't official military funerals, actually; they were done under the auspices of the American Legion, which I'm sure is a different matter requiring a different protocol. But the men being buried on those occasions were veterans or former servicemen, and I was immensely proud to be able to play "Taps" for their funerals -- a small way for me, as a civilian, to pay tribute to the service they had done for their country. If there aren't enough official buglers around, then I suggest that civilian trumpeters are the way to go. I doubt there is a community anywhere in the country where one trumpet player can't be found, and believe me, playing "Taps" for a funeral is a surprisingly moving experience.

I don't know the first thing about the military regulations for such things, but surely they could be changed so that a civilian could sound the call for a departed veteran. At the very least, it seems to me that having a non-military person actually playing "Taps" is preferable to having a military person who can't play the instrument "acting the part" while the call is sounded electronically.

Thirty-nine years ago today, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas by either a lone gunman firing from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building, or by a team of snipers including a gunman behind the fence on the grassy knoll, or blanks were shot into the air and Kennedy then made a secret escape to the hills above Buenos Aires, where he lived to old age in anonymity and seclusion. I've never really formulated my own beliefs on the assassination; I find the idea of a conspiracy seductive, but the case is not entirely convincing. (Of course, the case for a lone gunman is not entirely convincing, either, which is the whole problem anyway.)

The Kennedy assassination is one of history's greatest "What if" moments, as in, "What if things had happened differently?" What if Kennedy had survived? Would Viet Nam still have happened? Would Nixon's rise to power have occurred? I don't know, but it's interesting to consider the possibilities.

A hypothetical transcript of a foreign policy briefing for President Bush can be found over on William Burton's blog. I found this quite amusing. (I didn't take it as making fun of Bush, but rather using the name of our current President to riff on a classic comedy routine. But, if you're offended, just pretend that it's a President Gore and whoever he would have made his National Security Advisor talking.)

It's time for a progress report on the Space Elevator. I really do hope that I get to see this in my lifetime, although I'm concerned about the security of such a project. This would surely be one of the most tempting objects in the world for terrorist activity, and if Kim Stanley Robinson's depiction in Red Mars of what a space elevator crashing to the planet is accurate, I'd be very frightened indeed.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Tintagel, Cornwall, Great Britain.

Continuing my brief tour of British sites important to the Arthurian legend -- and, therefore, to the novel I'm writing -- we have this photograph of Tintagel. This spit of land, connected to the mainland by a very narrow spit of land, is the legendary birthplace of King Arthur himself -- in the castle whose ruins still occupy the island.

As the legend tells, King Uther Pendragon fought a war against some British Lords. He was at a feast following a victory when he caught the eye of Igraine, the wife of one of his staunchest allies, Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, who dwelt in Tintagel Castle. Uther ordered Gorlois to give him Igraine, but Gorlois refused and fled the meadhall to return to his castle. A new war began, this between the former friends Uther and Gorlois.

While the war went on, Merlyn came to Uther and helped him gain entrance to the castle by using a magic spell to make Uther take on the appearance of Gorlois, so that Igraine would think it was her husband just returning from battle and coming to bed. Thus Uther took Igraine, not knowing as he did so that on the nearby battlefield Gorlois had been struck down and killed. So when Uther got Igraine with child, the child was illegitimate. When it was born -- a boy, named Arthur -- he was given to Merlyn to raise. All that happened here, on Tintagel.

One of my dreams is to travel to Britain and see at last all of the places that I've been writing about.

In children's literature, it sometimes seems that the lines of good and evil are very clearly drawn, in classic "Western" style: the good guys where white, the bad guys wear black, the innocent scurry to get out of the main street lest they get shot. This is illustrated, to give one big example, in the Harry Potter books. Whatever the charms of J.K. Rowling's novels -- and there are charms a plenty in them -- moral ambiguity is not one of them. (I'm talking real moral ambiguity here, of the type where what is right and what is wrong are blurred and when right can possibly arise from wrong and vice versa; not the "mistaken identity" or "evil in disguise" that is a common thread in the Potter works.) There is a Dark Lord, and a host of heroic figures arrayed in opposition to him, and that's that.

But the lines are not so clearly drawn in many other works of children's lit. One of the finest examples is Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy. This series tells the story of a kingdom whose monarchy is controlled by corrupt forces, and whose populace is slowly moving toward revolution. It is almost a French Revolution story, except that it doesn't occur in France; it occurs in the fantasy realm of Westmark. A young printer's assistant named Theo is working in a time when the presses are being told by the government what to print or, even worse, shut down entirely. Theo's master is killed by the King's men after he prints something he shouldn't have, and Theo flees. He then encounters two roaming criminals, a ragtag group of university students led by a particularly charismatic man who has revolutionary thoughts brewing in his mind, and a girl with a hidden past. As would be expected of such a story, moral questions arise constantly: if the monarchy is failing, do the people have the right to do away with it, or the responsibility to repair it? Are men to be given self-rule? And, most importantly, is it ever right to take the life of another, even in the pursuit of the most lofty goals?

Alexander's books address these questions, and many like them. Easy answers are not forthcoming, but in a way that is more satisfying than if they were. The books are not merely studies in morality, though -- they are rollicking tales of war and deceit, adventure and mayhem, crime and revolution. If the plots rely a bit heavily on coincidence of the "chance encounter with some unnamed character early in the book turns out to be a crucial event because of who that character was" variety, it can be forgiven on the grounds that everything else in them works so well. Alexander has always been best known for his wonderful Prydain Chronicles, an epic fantasy based in part on the Welsh epic The Mabinogion, but Westmark is almost as good.

I'm a PC person, mainly because it's what I'm used to. I don't get particularly worked up when Windows crashes -- which isn't nearly as often, in my case, as it is apparently for others -- and I've never had a significant hardware problem. I've never had to crack open the CPU box and mess around with cards and whatnot. I'm on my second computer in five years, and that's because the first one just got too old. It didn't have enough memory, and the Web has finally reached a point where a 28K modem is not only slow but simply insufficient. (I'm on a 56K modem right now, which is sufficient for my needs. I don't do a lot of downloading of movies and video files, nor do I engage in music trading.)

However, it's hard not to feel occasionally inferior after listening to Mac users -- especially given the current Mac advertising campaign, which is basically this: "Dump your PC, ya dope!" The prevailing meme is that Macs are clearly the better machine, and it's only through a mass delusion on the part of the public and a conspiratorial manipulation of the marketplace by Microsoft that PCs are dominant. (Come to think of it, that's not unlike the recent Democratic Party campaign strategy.) So, as a PC user who is currently happy as a clam with his machine, I'm generally glad to read Steven Den Beste's regular shots across the Macintosh bow. Much of it goes straight over my head, but I found the recent post of his -- on Mac virus security -- especially fascinating. He argues, in short, that virus-writers devote their energies to probing Windows for security holes, because Windows and PC systems are so prevalent. The resulting lack of viruses attacking Macs is mistaken for superior Mac virus security. What we have here, Steven argues, is an example of the old fallacy: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

There is an interesting and rather creepy post over on S. L. Viehl's blog StarLines about the letters authors receive in the mail...and the fact that some of them come from convicts serving out their sentences. I like reading StarLines because Sheila shares a lot of details about what it's really like to be a writer, the day to day minutiae that fill a writer's life, a lot of which I have never before considered because I've never realized that it needed to be considered. This is one such example. Normal writer website advice tends to run along the lines of, "Write every day", "Be prepared for lots of rejection", "Read read read" et cetera -- all valuable and essential advice, to be sure. But I'm really thankful that Sheila is out there to provide advice along the lines of "Prepare for the day when convicted murderers read your work".

I've never cared much for those big Biblical epics they used to make -- films like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told. They always strike me as overwrought spectacles, with the actors within them Emoting! Every! Word! Because! It's! All! So! Important!! Every gesture becomes exaggerated hugely, every emotion is felt deeply, every line of dialogue is followed by an exchange of serious glances. In truth, the only thing that I ever really like about these movies is the music. Some of the greatest filmscores ever written come from the Biblical epics: Alex North's Cleopatra, Alfred Newman's The Greatest Story Ever Told, Miklos Rozsa's King of Kings. (OK, Cleopatra probably isn't actually a Biblical epic....)

Yesterday I finally managed to get through Ben-Hur in its entirety. I've seen it in bits-and-pieces over the years, but never from start to finish, and I've owned the score album for a while now. (The Rhino Records release of the Ben-Hur score, on two CDs with a lavishly illustrated booklet and copious liner notes, is one of the classiest film score releases I've ever seen.) I found the film in the local library's video collection, and figured, Hey, why not? I ended up being fairly surprised at how much I enjoyed the film.

I still observed some of the flaws I've observed in other Biblical epics: scenes that go on too long, overacting, spectacle-for-the-sake-of-spectacle, occasionally stilted dialogue. But I found a lot more in Ben-Hur to enjoy. Without going into the film too deeply, what struck me most was the way the story is structured so that the life of Judah Ben-Hur occasionally intersected the life of "a young Rabbi from Nazareth", and the way that Ben-Hur is constantly aware of something larger happening, that the events of his life are mirroring other events that are to change the world although he knows not how. I liked how the religious elements of the film are muted, so that our focus is constantly on Ben-Hur's reactions to them rather than on the events themselves. The film never shows Jesus directly -- he is not even named -- and yet his presence is felt all through the film, a bit of subtlety in a film genre that was never known for subtlety.

I also admired the film's pacing. Most Biblical epics, I have found, are the cinematic equivalent of Christmas fruitcake: heavy, leaden things that are digested for very long periods of time. Ben-Hur, though, somehow manages the feat of seeming shorter than it really is, by keeping the focus on Ben-Hur himself and his journey to revenge and redemption. The pacing isn't perfect, of course; the scenes of Ben-Hur as a galley slave go on and on, and the film comes dangerously close to grinding to a halt after the chariot race, but the film does not bog down nearly as much and not remotely as often as other Biblical epics.

Ben-Hur isn't a perfect movie, by any means, but I was surprised by how much I liked it, considering that it is part of a genre that usually makes my eyes glaze over and my hand grope for the nearest book or magazine.

James Coburn has sadly passed. He'll be missed.

Sometimes when I sign on to Blogger, I'll check one or two of the "Most Recently Published" blogs in the sidebar before starting work on Byzantium's Shores. So I glanced at this blog, and now I'm thinking: what on Earth is happening to written English? I'm generally forgiving of spelling errors, and I'm willing to overlook the occasional grammatical hiccup, but reading things like this particular blog make me wonder just what is going on with our language, as the spelling and grammar -- such as they are -- are so consistent as to suggest that it's intentional. Is this something of a new, urban-style dialect? Is English evolving apace, as it has for centuries? It's taken centuries to get to the point where readers of English need to have the earliest works in their own language -- Beowulf, say -- translated for readability, but now it seems to be happening in a time-frame better measured in individual years.

Or, is this just another bit of evidence that we're simply gathering up our standards and tossing them out with yesterday's newspaper?

The group read of The Brothers Karamazov that I announced a few days ago is about to get underway. Check Collaboratory for details.

The folks over at Soundtrack.net are online with the first detailed listen of Howard Shore's certain-to-be-magnificent score to The Two Towers, complete with audio clips. I, for one, cannot wait.

In other filmscore news, the CD for the new Bond flick, Die Another Day is now out. The music is by Bond-composer-in-residence David Arnold, and the title song is by Madonna. I haven't played the CD all the way through yet, but I like Arnold's music a good deal -- even the techno aspects of it, which are fairly controversial with score-hounds like myself. Madonna's song, though, is going to take a while for me. My immediate impression of it is: "Decent song, but it is not a Bond song." This song is about as far as you can get from the Shirley Bassey-Tom Jones Bond songs of yore.

Unique to the NFL season, of all the major sports, is the "weird day". Because everyone plays on the same day (except for the Monday night teams), whenever the weirdness all hits in a single day, it's more notable than in the other sports.

:: I'm not surprised that the Bills lost to the Chiefs. Arrowhead Stadium is a very hard place to play, if you're the visitor, for which reason I've become used to seeing me beloved Bills go in there and get clobbered. It used to be a yearly ritual in the Jim Kelly years, when the Bills were pounding everyone on the way to the Super Bowl, they would at some point in the regular season go to Kansas City and get beat 30-3 or something like that. So the Bills lost. But there were a ton of surprising aspects to the way they lost.

First, the game featured two of the league's highest scoring offenses matching up porous opposing defenses. That the margin of victory was a single point didn't surprise me. That the two teams combined for only 33 points did. In his "Two Minute Drill" this weekend, Chris Berman suggested a final score of 67-66, or something like that. So, 17-16 was something of a shock.

Despite the loss, this was probably the best job of coaching I have seen done by the Bills' staff. The game plan was perfectly devised: execute a ball-control offensive scheme, which would keep the Chiefs' firepower-laden offense off the field and thus keep the crowd quiet. On defense, the Bills brought a new focus on -- gasp! -- tackling, which paid off rather well. (Of course, I have to wonder why, if the Bills can evidently play this well defensively against a scoring machine on the road, they therefore got crunched against a less-high powered offense at home two weeks ago.) It would still be nice to see the Bills generate some more pressure on the opposing quarterbacks, and it would be really nice if the Bills' DBs could actually come up with the ball sometimes when it's going through their hands or bouncing off their chests. I counted three possible interceptions that the Bills didn't reel in yesterday, in a game where a turnover could make the difference...

...as it did in the end, when Drew Bledsoe threw a fateful interception with four minutes left, killing the Bills' drive for the potential game-winning score. (They were only down by one, remember; all they needed was a field goal, and the crucial INT took place very near the end zone, if not inside it.) The Bills have played a bunch of games this year that were won by a great Bledsoe play. This one, sadly, is the first which they lost because of a bad Bledsoe play. Oh well.

So now the Bills are 5-5, and 1-2 in the AFC East. I hate to be a nay-sayer, but I think their playoff hopes are barely flickering. I see them splitting the six games that are left, to finish 8-8.

:: If you want to see "parity", look at today's NFL standings. Seventeen of the NFL's thirty-two teams have between four and six wins, with all the teams (except St. Louis and Chicago, tonight's teams) having played ten games. Seven teams have won seven or more, and only two have won two or fewer. Two divisions -- the AFCs East and West -- have all their teams at or above .500. Only one division leader -- Green Bay -- is running away with its division, and they are still by no means a lock for home-field advantage. That's what you call, "competitive balance". I actually prefer it this way.

:: I think that the football gods have been looking down upon me as I've been tracking the progress of my Super Bowl picks, the Eagles and the Steelers, and they've been shaking their heads and saying, "He just isn't getting it." So they decided to make it crystal clear yesterday, by taking out both teams' starting quarterbacks with bad injuries. Maybe Kordell Stewart can find his on-again, off-again form and get the Steelers back into the playoffs (assuming that Tommy Maddox doesn't come back for a while), but I wouldn't bet on Koy Detmer being the answer in Philly. Here's hoping, though, that Maddox's injury is not serious, and here's toasting Donovan McNabb's heart for playing the entire game with his broken ankle. Wow.

:: I think that the best Super Bowl matchup right now would be the Jets and the Rams, both teams who are in the hunt after being almost certainly dead-in-the-water just three weeks ago.

Michael Kinsley is one of my favorite political writers, but he's written a funny article today on the phenomenon of women who watch Law & Order obsessively. I rarely watch L&O, partly because I don't like formula shows; I prefer story arcs and shows that depict progressions in their characters' lives. For some people the attraction to L&O is precisely that its formula is so entrenched that the actors themselves are interchangeable, but that's what turns me off -- that, and a general boredom with courtroom dramas that set in with me years ago. (I think that David E. Kelley's one-note, "quirky" writing on L.A.Law is part of what's soured me on courtroom stories.)

(And I'd love to see NBC do a promo for L&O that said "We made this entire story up, without help from the headlines!" and "Don't miss the first five minutes after the first commercial break!". Just for a change.)

If you want to see a Buffalo sports fan go into an immediate bout of hysterics, just whisper one of the following pairs of words into his or her ear: "Wide right", "Homerun Throwback", or "No goal".

I mention this because two of these three items ("Homerun Throwback" and "No goal") are mentioned in ESPN's survey of the Most Controversial Plays in sports history. It's interesting how plays like this can still arouse controversy and, in such cases as the "Oh, give the Russians another three seconds" Olympic basketball snafu in 1972, anger.

In response to this post in which I complained a bit about the direction taken on the NBC show Ed, someone asked for my thoughts on what makes a successful long-term relationship.

I wish I knew.

The only answer that I can safely offer is that in a successful relationship, one should always find the idea of parting from the other person completely unpalatable, and always so -- even when a problem has occurred, when a bump in the road has been discovered, even when one is so fed up with the other person that (s)he wants nothing better than to go away. I think it was said best in When Harry Met Sally..., when at the very end, Harry (Billy Crystal) is rattling off a list of things he loves about Sally (Meg Ryan), and he concludes with: "And I love that you are the last person I want to speak to before I go to sleep at night." So, I think for a relationship to be successful, a person should believe of their partner: "Even when you've got me so mad that I don't want to be around you, the thought of not being around you disgusts me."

Not a very good answer, I suppose, but I think it's a start.

I recently went into a bit of a reading slump, where nothing I was reading was satisfying me, so I changed things up and read some graphic novels instead of the usual prose works that I read. I read three of these in particular:

:: Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories by Warren Ellis (writer) and John Cassaday (artist). This book is actually a collection of the first seven issues or so of the Planetary comic series that Warren Ellis wrote before moving on to his major work, Transmetropolitan (which I have yet to read). As an initial volume, I enjoyed it, but I suspect that I will find the second volume of Planetary more to my liking. These first issues are mainly concerned with setting up Ellis's characters and their goals and relationships, with the actual stories being self-contained and episodic in nature. They are interesting stories, though: one involves the ghost of a murdered Hong Kong police officer; another deals with an island near Japan (or part of Japan, I can't remember) that is home to some horrible and huge beasts. The stories are reminiscent of The X-Files, but with a world-wide focus, and they are investigated by a team of "heroes" who are working for a shadowy organization called "Planetary". This is really an appetite-whetting type of book, and on that basis it succeeds. I want to read more.

:: Watchmen by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator). Moore is one of the most renowned writers working in comics today, with his work on Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen standing out in his ouevre. His greatest work, though, is still Watchmen, the deeply cynical and dystopian story of masked superheroes in an alternate history where Richard Nixon did not fall after Watergate, but remained President and oversaw disastrous results in Viet Nam. As the book opens, a group of heroes called the Watchmen has broken up, with its members going their separate ways -- until one, the Comedian (the most bitter and cynical of the bunch) is brutally murdered. The story involves the search for the Comedian's murder, as well as a lot of delving into the lives of the Comedian's former colleagues, the most striking of whom is the masked vigilante Rorschach. The characters in Watchmen are no sanitized, "Avengers"-style heroes who always act on the side of Right. "Truth, Justice and the American Way" is no part of the equation here. Instead, we get broken relationships, shocking violence, an emergent subplot involving a plot to do something unbelievably monstrous to New York City (which, in the post-9/11/01 world, is even more horrific than Moore had intended), explorations of the psychological causes of vigilantism, and examinations of the whole morality of vigilantism in the first place. The book also plays tricks of viewpoint and subtext, including after each chapter extraneous material such as a psychologist's notes on the deeply disturbed Rorschach character and portions from books about the other characters. Another startling device is the constant return to a NYC sidewalk news vendor and the guy who sits on the ground nearby, reading a comic book about a shipwreck victim in the 1700s, whose plight somehow mirrors the events of Moore's own fictional world. The "comic-within-a-comic" that reveals other facets of the larger story reminds the reader of Hamlet, and like the Bard's best dramas, Watchmen provides no easy answers to the questions it asks. This is one of those stories that lingers in the mind for a long, long time once it's done. (Watchmen is also apparently being made into a film.)

:: Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs (story and art). I don't think I could possibly have picked a graphic novel farther in tone and style from Watchmen than Ethel and Ernest. Briggs is a noted author-illustrator, and this book tells the story of his parents -- of how they met in Depression-era London, how they courted and married, how they lived through World War II and the years after, how they coped with all of the changes that the twentieth century wrought on English culture, and how they grew old and passed on. They were poor commoners, Ernest a milkman and Ethel a maid, and they appear to have remained poor commoners all their lives, and yet the book conveys the simple ingenuity with which they approached their lives and the deep love they shared, despite the fact that they differed on many things. Ethel is the more conservative of the two, and when Ernest's favored Labour governments are not successful, Ethel seems to delight in poking fun at Ernest and his earlier promises of the good life for all. Despite all that, Ernest seems to be the more optimistic of the two, always able to find some way to get through in a shortage or down period, and he is able to get back by poking fun at the British Royalty as they encounter hard times. Briggs's art is warm and lovely, evoking the best of those sunny Merchant-Ivory films.

These three books, with their mix of horror, superheroes, English city and country life, each in their own way demonstrate the vitality and power possible in the comics medium. Ethel and Ernest is a surprising little gem, Planetary is a fun beginning to (hopefully) something grand, and Watchmen is a masterpiece.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Glastonbury Tor, Glastonbury, England.

Glastonbury Tor is a unique hill in southern England, 512 feet above sea level and topped with a tower and the remains of a church that was destroyed in an earthquake. The Tor is one of England's most mystical and spiritual sites, both in pagan Druidic tradition and in English Christianity. Glastonbury is said to be the spot where Joseph of Arimathea arrived on Britain, and by this association plus the site's association to British paganism, the Tor and the nearby ruin of Glastonbury Abbey are closely associated with the Arthurian legends. The Tor is sometimes taken to be the Isle of Avalon (the surrounding landscape may have once been covered by water), and the Abbey is one legendary burial place of King Arthur.

The image links to the finest collection of Glastonbury-related photographs I have found on the Net, with photos of the Tor, the Abbey, the Chalice Well (a place related to the Grail legend), and others.

In the "I don't believe my amazing luck!" department, Spirited Away opens in Syracuse tomorrow. I'm going to see it next week, and I am thrilled beyond measure.

Today on the local classical music station I was privileged to hear Aaron Copland's wonderful ballet, Appalachian Spring. I've heard the work many times before, as it is a favorite of mine. (My favorite recording of it is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.) What was different today was that the radio station played the original version that Copland wrote for chamber orchestra, as opposed to the version for full symphony orchestra with which I am very familiar. Hearing the work in this new light -- with sections of the work executed in the more intimate tonal qualities of a chamber ensemble -- was very illuminating.

My referral log today reveals that someone came here looking for results of the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs in 1990. Assuming that this person wants to know the results of a game that year between the Bills and Chiefs, here's the answer: there was no game in 1990 between the Bills and Chiefs. They did meet in 1991, though, in a Monday night game from Kansas City which the Bills lost, 33-6. Later on that year, the two teams met in the second round of the playoffs -- the Chiefs were a wildcard team, whilst the Bills were the AFC top seed -- at Rich Stadium (now Ralph Wilson Stadium), with the Bills winning 37-14.

We adults -- especially those of us lumped into "Generation X" -- may lament the wonderful children's TV shows that were on when we were kids, shows like Electric Company and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (still on, but no longer in production). But there are some really fine shows out there these days, primarily on PBS. (Note to Republicans: Don't even think of trying to kill PBS, the way you did last time you swept the mid-terms!) These are a couple of new favorites in our household:

:: Caillou. This is a show about a four-year-old boy named Caillou (pronounced "Kye-you", some kind of French name) and his family. What I like about this show is the way it depicts a normal family and the normal things that Caillou learns about as he goes through life. I haven't yet figured out, though, why Caillou is bald when everyone else in his family -- including little sister Rosie -- have full heads of hair.

:: Between the Lions. Now this is a clever show. Aimed at literacy and hosted by some muppet-like lions, the show has a number of clever recurring segments like "Gawain's Word" ("Wayne's World", get it?) in which an armored knight unveils a new word, and a segment featuring "The Word Doctor: Dr. Ruth Wordheimer", starring the real Dr. Ruth. There's good stuff here.

:: Liberty's Kids. This one's a bit over-the-head of our three-year-old, but she still likes it. It's set during the Revolutionary War and tells the story of a trio of kids who are journalists for a newspaper done by Ben Franklin (voiced, utterly appropriately, by Walter Cronkite). The show actually examines some of the issues in the American Revolution, at a fun and basic level.

There are a bunch of other good shows out there as well. TV for kids isn't all about Pokemon and the Disney Channel, so check out PBS!!

Announcement.

Over on Collaboratory we're about to launch a group-read of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski. I'm not sure how soon we'll be starting, but I assume we'll finalize things by early next week. The translations currently in use are this one and this one.

Front-page posting on Collaboratory is members-only, although we're on the constant prowl for more members. The site is a kind-of "MetaFilter Lite", although much cooler. (Well, it would have to be, wouldn't it?) Posting on the comments, though, is totally public. So, if anyone would like to join us in reading Brothers K, come along for the ride! I'm pretty excited about this, because I've never dabbled much in Russian literature (using "not much" in the sense of, "not at all").

Artist Ted Nasmith, who is particularly notable for his Tolkien-related illustrations, now has an official website. I love Nasmith's work, but the website -- in its initial launch -- is in dire need of some tweaking. The thing extends off the edge of the browser window, with no way to scroll that I can discern. But what can be seen of Nasmith's paintings are beautiful.

(Crossposted to Collaboratory.)

I've been waffling a while on whether I wanted to do this, but I figured, oh, what the hey. What follows is the opening of my novel-in-progress, The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. Comments are always welcome.

:: CHAPTER ONE ::

In the first of the dreams that Gwynwhyfar would remember, she was a bird flying above the sea.
***
Over the waves she flew, the spray from the wind-driven waves splashing upon the underside of her body. Below her, beneath the surface of the water, she saw a pod of dolphins racing with the waves, periodically leaping up into the air and then back down into the sea. Then a huge gray shape formed beneath the waters; it was the great gray body of a whale rising from the depths. The whale broke the surface of the water and blasted spray into the air from a hole on the back of its head. It then plunged down again into the deep. A sudden darkness fell, and she turned to see where the sun had gone. The clouds were gathering behind her, great black storm clouds she prayed that she could outpace. She turned and flew again, speeding in a direction that she hoped would take her away from the mustering storm.

Ahead of her there appeared an island, thirty leagues long and twenty wide. She dropped down until she was just skimming the surface. The waters around the island were clear as glass, and beneath them she caught glimpses of schools of many-colored fish cavorting amidst the underwater reefs. There were sharks too, including one that tried to snatch her from the sky, but she was too fast. The beaches that ringed the island were marked by sand as white as snow. The island was green and verdant, and she found herself flying over orchards of apple trees.

There was a city of alabaster buildings and wide streets paved with white stone, but she saw no people. The city appeared to be utterly deserted, even as she flew over a building that was clearly a place of worship. In the courtyard of this building there was a golden disc shaped to look like the moon, marking this place as a temple to the Goddess. After the temple she flew over a long series of grasslands and then into the hilly country. At last she was flying over the three great mountains that rose from the center of the island into the sky. Their heights soared above where she could fly, and their peaks were covered with snow. Soon she was flying back down toward the sea on the other side of the island where there were dense forests of pine, and in these forests she looked for shelter from the coming storm.

There was thunder then, impossibly close behind her. She turned and, hovering above the trees, saw that the three mountains had exploded with fire and smoke in great columns that tore the sky asunder. And then the storm came, and she again flew away, trying to escape the fire and rain and smoke and wind. She flew over the island’s other beaches and again out to sea, but her strength was not enough by any measure, and she was driven down, down toward the boiling waters. Rivers of liquid rock streamed down from the mountaintops, and the island of green beauty, the island of apples, crumbled and sank beneath her into the depths of the sea. The storm raged around her, finally striking her down into the sea itself. Waves crashed over her, and in a flash her strength was gone. The water was cold, very very cold and she gasped for air as the winds howled and the waves mounted.

As the last wave towered above her, she glimpsed something out away from her, something golden….and then the waves took her down, down to the bottom of the sea.

***
"Gwyn! Gwyn! Wake up!"

Someone shook her, not exactly gently but not very roughly either, and she opened her eyes. The dream was still with her; usually her dreams vanished with a quick awakening, but this one had been far more vivid than any she’d had before. She shook her head to dispel the image and looked up into Brother Malcolm’s eyes.

:: To Be Continued ::

Now that I have arrived at The Climax of the novel-in-progress, I've realized something either cool or disconcerting: I'm writing a George Lucas-style climax. This is a climax where the action is taking place in three (or more) different locations, and I'm switching back and forth among them. I have a huge battle taking place outside a city; I have a smaller battle taking place at Stonehenge; and I have my heroine embarking on her mystical journey to Avalon to fetch King Arthur. The problem with such a complex climax is sequencing: first, I have to identify the order in which each event happens, or at least the order in which each event has to be shown. It's not necessarily the case that events occur in the order that they are shown, but they have to come in a certain narrative order to work together if tension is to be properly built so that when the Big Heroic Moment finally arrives, it actually feels like a Big Heroic Moment and that it's not anticlimactic, coming so late in the proceedings that the reader's reaction is "OK, I get it", as opposed to "Wow!".

The prime problem that I'm having is that the heroine's "mystical journey" is just that, and as such it kind of takes place outside the general timeframe of the other events. I'm afraid that if I include her journey in the cutting back-and-forth between the other places of action, I'll be forced to establish a framework in which that journey exists, and I don't want to do that. So what I'm leaning toward doing is sending her on her journey, and then moving the other two scenes along until their "pregnant moment" -- and at that point I'll cut to what the heroine is doing, which may take an entire chapter in itself. What to do once her journey is complete is not an issue; I could write that stuff in my sleep. So I think I know what to do, and my concern now is simply that I don't want to bore the reader with the "mystical journey" stuff.

Anyway, time to pick up the pen.

An interesting take on Harry Potter appeared on Slate the other day. The basic gyst of the article is that although all of the action of the books (and now the movies) revolves around Harry Potter, young Harry himself doesn't really do anything to influence that action on his own. He seems to coast through his various problems and antagonisms, achieving his victories more through his own inate abilities than through his own actions. Everything that happens to him, does so because of who Harry Potter IS rather than because of what he DOES. It's an interesting take, and to a degree I agree with it. I've noticed, even as the books have gotten darker and better, that everyone in the supporting cast -- all of the people around Harry -- are more interesting, as characters, than Harry himself. I hope that changes in the remaining books.

I don't have too much to say about football this week, primarily because the Bills did not play. Their bye week mercifully came immediately after the shellacking they received courtesy of the Patriots, so they could lick their wounds and maybe practice a bit on defense and get ready for what remains of their schedule. Notes on yesterday's action:

:: The AFC East is now a logjam, with the Dolphins, Patriots and Bills all at 5-4, and the J-E-T-S JetsJetsJetsJets still alive at 4-5. That said, it's starting to look like it's another year for the Pats, I'm sorry to say. The Bills have been overachieving, and with them heading into the tough part of their schedule I expect their defensive weaknesses to finally prove fatal. The Dolphins are in free-fall, and we're not even in December yet, which is when the Dolphins usually collapse. The Jets may have some surprise left in them, but right now the Pats are the most experienced and best coached team in the division. Ugh, but that seems to be the lay of the land.

:: Neither of my Super Bowl picks won yesterday, although at least the Steelers didn't lose, either -- they blew a big lead and came away with that rarest of NFL results, a tie. (I find it interesting that a tie occurred in the NFL so soon after a lot of public discussion as to whether the NFL should abandon sudden-death OT in favor of the college system.) The Eagles, though, got clobbered at home by the Colts in a game that featured four former Syracuse University players. Philadelphia is still leading the division, but they are well behind in the hunt for home-field advantage, which actually matters in the NFC. The Steelers are also leading their division, but it's a crappy division, so it's hard to gauge them accordingly.

:: The Rams are looking like the Rams these days, instead of the Bengals. Weird. I'll be interested to see what happens in the off-season this year, as I would expect other teams to be interested in Marc Bulger. I don't know if the Rams will make the playoffs -- they still would need to go 6-1 the rest of the way to have a real shot -- but they may finish up 8-8, which given their 0-5 start would appear miraculous. Of course, Mike Martz may end up getting a lot of the credit, which may not be a good thing.

:: The Vikings are 2-7. They benched Culpepper yesterday, but they nearly rallied for a win. Their first-round pick played his first game after a long, stupid holdout. This franchise is a total mess.

:: Am I missing it entirely, or does nobody ever talk about moving the Cardinals? Why does that franchise exist, where it does? Consider: Sun Devil Stadium, where the Cards play, has a seating capacity of 73,234. Attendance at yesterday's game (Seahawks 27, Cards 6) was 29,252. That means that the following cities could have sent every person living within their borders to the game: Jamestown, NY; Burlington, VT; Cedar Falls, IA; Hillsboro, OR. Amazing. (That's based on 1990 population figures, though -- I couldn't find any 2000 numbers. But I didn't look very hard.)

:: If the Packers get home-field throughout the playoffs, fuhgeddaboudit.

:: Speaking of the Packers: on his "Two Minute Drill" segment on SportsCenter last week, Chris Berman noted that the Pack excels at scoring just before halftime, which can be crucial to setting the tone of a game. Yesterday, against the Lions, they scored 14 points after the two-minute warning in the second quarter.

You may have thought that a thesaurus, while definitely a useful item, is also inherently nerdy and clunky.

Well, think again.

I recently read Evenings With Horowitz: A Personal Portrait, by David Dubal. This book recounts the relationship that classical musician and author Dubal formed with the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, during the Maestro's last years of life when he was called "The Last Romantic" and his every public performance took on the feel of a visitation by the Pontiff. It's a very readable book, notable for its biographical portrait of Horowitz and the first-hand look we get at both the way Horowitz loomed over the classical music community and the way he was, in many ways, a mercurial and selfish man. Horowitz, like all great artists, is a very demanding soul: demanding of his art, demanding of the people in his life, demanding of himself. It has been well documented how Horowitz had to leave his native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, never to return until 1986 when he was in his 80s; Dubal's book recounts a lot of that, as well, but it also gives us the sense that Horowitz never formed a true sense of belonging in the American society that he eventually took as his home.

The book is episodic in structure, and at times it feels like a series of vignettes about the Maestro, some of which are frankly more interesting than others. It also ends on something of a sad note, not only with Horowitz's death but with the fact that he and Dubal had a falling-out just months before his passing. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating account of a great musician and his relationship with a lesser musician who was no less passionate for music.

As a companion experience to reading this book, the other day I listened to my copy of Horowitz in Moscow, the recording of the monumental concert Horowitz gave when he finally returned to Moscow in 1986. The recording is magical and amazing. Even if Horowitz's Mozart Sonata (C Major, K. 330) is a bit uneven in the opening movement, the Romantic works on the disc -- Romantic music forming the spine of Horowitz's repertoire -- are staggering, particularly the Scriabin Etudes, which are played in a white heat that can still be felt listening to the CD in my living room instead of in the concert hall in 1986. Horowitz in Moscow is a great recording of one of classical music's premier events.

I only had four dollars in my pocket when I went to the public library today, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing. They were having a book sale, and this one was a good one. Library book sales are a "feast-or-famine" proposition, and this one's definitely a "feast". I'll probably go back before it ends. Today I picked up the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (which I have wanted to read for years) and Walter Cronkite's A Reporter's Life. (The biggest table, of course, was loaded with Harlequin romances; and there were lots of outdated computer books from Those Ancient Days of Yore....1998.)

I appear to be running the risk of turning into a political blog, but I just have a couple of notes and thoughts that I want to get out of my system.

:: So Dick Gephardt has stepped down as Majority Leader. This is hardly surprising, given the Democratic failure in this week's elections, but I don't think his departure is quite like Newt Gingrich's in 1998, in that when Gingrich departed he really departed: he resigned his seat entirely and left Congress. Gephardt's decision, to me, seems more like a bit of positioning for a 2004 Presidential run. (Not that he has a chance of winning the nomination, but that's what I think is going on here.)

:: As long as Democrats are sobbing in their beer this week, it might be helpful to consider the numbers. This was not a Reagan-vs-Mondale type of political blow-out; it was actually a very close election. The majority in the Senate that just changed hands was razor-thin to begin with, and now it's widened to paper-thin status. There seems to be a meme forming that the Republicans delivered a staggering knock-out type punch to the Democrats, but that's simply not the case. The races were sufficiently close that if 100,000 votes in the right races had changed hands (out of 40,000,000 cast), the Democrats would be doing all the chest-thumping about their mandate. I'm reminded of 1992, when the USA Today ran the headline "LANDSLIDE!" after Bill Clinton won the Presidency, despite the fact that Clinton failed to even win a majority of the votes.

:: I'm not running a warblog, but noting today's passage of a "This is your last chance" UN resolution, I'm thinking that it's time for the anti-war voices in the US to finally answer the question that keeps vexing me as I try to decide whether or not I'm for this war: What do we do if and when Saddam Hussein fails to comply? I really do not want to favor the war against Iraq, but I'm not seeing that there's much choice in the matter. It's sort of like that old chestnut: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains -- however improbable -- must be the truth." It's distasteful as hell, because I'm not convinced we have any plan for after the war that will make things appreciably safer, and because maybe we wouldn't be in this damnable mess if we hadn't created Saddam Hussein in the first place, and, well, because I don't like the company I'd be in if I decided that I favored the war. So, if the anti-war crowd is going to make the convincing argument for their position, now's the time. (By the way, one of the most convincing arguments for war that I've encountered can be found here.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





The Adirondack Mountains.

Now that I'm living in Syracuse, I'm much closer -- about an hour's drive, I think -- to the foothills of New York's Adirondack Mountains. These are some of the highest of the Northern Appalachians, but I'm not terribly familiar with them. I am hoping to rectify that in the near future.

Entertainment Weekly had an article a week or two ago about what's wrong with The West Wing. I didn't agree with everything the article said -- I find the ongoing storyline about Qumar fascinating, for example -- I have to agree with the article's writer on one thing: the show now has too many characters. There are so many supporting players now, weaving and wending their way through the main characters' lives, that it's hard to keep track of them all and now the storylines are starting to seem rushed as nothing is really developed fully, as opposed to being briefly updated before moving on to the next thing. Now they've added Christian Slater to the mix, and since he's a "Special Guest Star" I suppose that will mean more screentime for him, at the expense of...someone. I still love the show, though, and I still watch it faithfully, which is more than I can say for Entertainment Weekly. One of these days I'll remember to cancel the subscription....

One of my favorite television shows is NBC's Ed, about the small-town lawyer who owns the bowling alley. The show has an excellent cast of characters and a quirky type of humor that's reminiscent of Northern Exposure.

That said, something about Ed is bugging me this season.

Remember the scene in the movie Misery, when Annie Wilkes has just read Paul Sheldon's new manuscript, the one she's forced him to write after he's apparently killed Misery Chastain off in his latest novel? Annie goes into a raving rant about how when she was a child she went to the movies, one of those old serials, to see the resolution of the previous week's cliffhanger; but the resolution was actually a cheat because the situation had been changed, and Annie was the only one who noticed. Well, something similar seems to be happening on Ed.

The backbone of Ed is the on-and-off romance between Ed and his life-long love, Carol Vescey. Last season, Carol ended up falling in love with the prickly-but-intelligent high school principal, Dennis Martino, who is a recovering alcoholic and who also has a hard time getting close to people. The key word here is "prickly", because Dennis showed flashes of warmth and depth last year, suggesting that he was a man with a streak of kindness but who was terrified to let it show. One telling episode was when Carol begged Dennis -- a former English teacher -- to critique a short story she had written, and he finally relented after much resistance and basically tore the story to shreds. Then, later on, when Carol's confidence is shaken, he writes out a list for her of opinions he's held that are at odds with reality, to show "his history as a critic". (The only item I remember is his onetime belief that "Aquaman will be bigger than Superman".) And there were other examples of this as well, which made the Ed-Carol-Dennis love triangle interesting: because it involved three likable, flawed characters one of whom we knew was going to end up heartbroken.

Unfortunately, the writers of Ed have changed the dynamic of the triangle in mid-stream, so it's becoming more irritating than interesting. What they've done is to change the "prickly" in Dennis to "prick". Now we're seeing that Dennis is a cold, manipulative jerk whose behavior toward Carol occasionally borders on the emotionally abusive. Not only does this make the whole love-triangle pretty much like every other love triangle on TV these days, but it's doubly bad because it totally contradicts what was established last year about the Dennis Martino character. It makes it easier for things to work out the way that we "want" them to work out, but now there is a note of falsity about the whole proceedings.

You have to be consistent with your characters, folks. It's pretty important.

Well, the Most Important Election in Modern History is over. America was at a crossroads this year, and the choice we as a nation had to make had never been more clear until yesterday. We have chosen the road that will determine the future course of our lives, our childrens' lives, our grandchildrens' lives....

....at least until 2004, when once again we will face the Most Important Election in Modern History as we again stand at a crossroads, when the choice before us will be clear as it has never been clear before.

And once 2004 is over? Well, it's just four short years to 2006!

I find it strange how we always couch our election rhetoric in the most dire language possible, as if every election that comes along is a moment in time like The Lord of the Rings, when the Third Age is ending and the Elves are leaving and the final reckoning with Sauron is at hand -- but at the same time, we also console ourselves with the other great meme of democracy: that if we decide we don't like what the folks we just put in office do, we just vote them out next time around. Democracy, for all its wonders, is a pretty schizophrenic thing, both profound and banal, both momentous and mundane. Democracy requires us to hold two contradictory beliefs: that everything depends on what choice we make today; and a wrong choice is pretty easily fixed down the road.

I'm a registered Democrat, so yesterday's results are disappointing to me, but they were not totally unexpected. The Democrats seemed to view winning yesterday not so much as a goal to be sought and worked toward, but rather a cosmic reality that demanded lip-service and hushed reverence. They constantly talked about the fact that the party controlling the White House almost always loses seats in Congress come the mid-terms, and yet no one considered the historical reason for that fact: it's generally a corrective act on the part of the public, a reaction to a new Administration's invariable over-reaches and foul-ups. The problem for the Democrats here was twofold: they already managed to take control of the Senate a year and a half ago, providing that very correction; and a war erupted. So in the former case the Democrats were partly victims of their own success; in the latter case, the Democrats simply messed up by acting the part of opposition in foggy, undefined fashion that never looked all that genuine (except in the case of Paul Wellstone).

So the Democrats over the last two years -- since the inauguration of President Bush -- have been a party of "against", of "opposition", of "No". All those have their place, but the election was a time for them to be "for" something and to advance real, alternative ideas. The "I'm not that guy" strategy, in politics, is always risky: just ask Doug Forrester, the Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey, whose entire strategy was "I'm not Torricelli" -- and whose entire strategy evaporated when Torricelli bailed out. "We're not Bill Clinton" was the Republican strategy in 1998, and it was a disaster. "I'm not Bill Clinton" was the unstated premise of Al Gore's campaign, and he's now a private citizen (although not by much). George W. Bush also used "I'm not Bill Clinton", but he did it in a positive way (and, anyway, he really lost). So, along came the Democrats with their "We're not Republicans" strategy this year. OK, fair enough -- but they never offered any answer to the follow-up question, "So what are you, then?"

Yes, I found yesterday's results disappointing. No, I don't see them as unmitigated disaster. Democrats who act as if the country has just made some horrible turn to the right and that liberalism is dead are as wrongheaded as Republicans who act as if they've just been given the Keys to the Kingdom. For all the sports metaphors we inject into our political debate in this country, the fact is that democracy is not the Super Bowl. The game is not over. The game is never over. So, Democrats, stop acting like you've just lost everything you've ever dreamed of. And Republicans, stop acting like you've just won everything you've ever dreamed of. Both of you, get up off the damn bench and get back in the game, because the game never ends. Only the players do.

POETICAL EXCURSION #9

"Arms and the Boy", by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

:: The dates of Owen's life make his fate fairly obvious: he was killed in action during World War I, ironically just a week before the formal cessation of hostilities. I am not certain as to when this poem was written, but it definitely appears to spring from Owen's "anti-war" period, which began roughly around 1917 and formed the last year of his life.

What interests me here is Owen's concept of human nature. Since humans are not equipped by nature for war, we must create our weapons ourselves: our teeth are not suited to fighting, we have no talons for shredding the bodies of our enemies, and our heads do not sport antlers. Owen says more than this, though, through his personification of the weapons that we have made. It is not that we long for war and thus create these things to fight it; it is that the weapons themselves that are "keen with hunger for blood" and "long to muzzle in the hearts of lads". The implication is of war as an unending cycle: we create the weapons, whose desire for blood we must then fulfill. War becomes less a means by which grievances between nations are prosecuted and matters of good and evil are settled, and more a primal thing: war not as necessity, but as appetite, and cruel appetite it is, a type of bloodthirst against "lads" who would be better eating apples.

It's Election Day, and a lot of voices in the Blogiverse have been analyzing issues and candidates and telling us to get out and vote. If I may be so bold, allow me to offer a differing view, courtesy of George Carlin:

You may have noticed that there's one thing I don't complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, "They suck". But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they're elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

....I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain", but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

(from Napalm & Silly Putty by George Carlin.)

It's a funny thing about gyms.

One of the nice benefits of the apartment complex in Syracuse where I now live is the presence of a gym, which we are able to use at will as part of our rental agreement. It's not a big gym: two treadmills, a recumbent exercise bike, a stairclimber, a Nordic-track like device, and a universal weight machine. It's a basic gym, but big enough and nice enough for my needs. The only thing missing that I would like to see is a set of free-weights.

The funny thing is that I think I may have uncovered a law of nature regarding gyms: in any gym, no matter where the gym is or how restrictive its clientele, there will be a regular person at the gym -- always a man, by the way -- who works out in jeans and a flannel shirt, who grunts and grimaces and moans his way through a workout which consists of benchpressing as much weight as he possible can, as quickly as he can, and slamming the weights together as loudly as he possibly can. This guy will, in between sets, wander around the room windmilling his arms and doing that useless stretch that every pseudo-athlete does: the one where you stand on one foot while reaching down and tugging on your other ankle, presumably stretching the quadricep or something like that. Why this guy does that stretch, and no other, is a mystery as his workout regimen is geared exclusively to his upper body.

I truly believe that if one were to open a gym in the wilds of the Yukon, accessible only by dog sled or water-landing plane that takes off from the lake ten miles away, that gym would have a guy like this as a member.

Well, I'm finally starting to get some hits from people searching Google for, well, "naughty items" -- such as this. Of course, I'm sorry that these potential readers are going away unfulfilled -- I think.

Memo to Tom Golisano:

Stunts like this do not lend credence to you as a man of Gubernatorial timber. I don't much care whether or not you run, or if it inconveniences the Democrats in New York -- they're the ones who nominated a lackluster candidate and watched as he ran a half-assed campaign against a popular and generally decent Republican governor, after all -- but lord, this "I've got a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! and that BIG ANNOUNCEMENT is: See you on Tuesday!" stuff is just plain lame. It's almost as bad as Perot's infamous "I'm dropping out because George Bush had his former CIA minions try to disrupt my daughter's wedding" bit from 1992.

And speaking of Golisano, I have to note that I generally find "independent" candidates dull and uninteresting. That Golisano built a company in New York that generated a good number of jobs is a laudable accomplishment, but I'm tired of the standard "Independent Businessman Candidate" claim: I created jobs, so I'm the right choice for Governor / President / Congressman / Coroner / Whatever. So your company did well; that's all well and good. But that's not enough: I need to see some evidence that you're also an expert on the public policy needed to create jobs. It's a different animal, so stop telling me that one equals the other. I'd also be glad to see one of these "independents" actually admit after the election that they got clobbered, and that running was basically a waste of time. The whole meme of "I got three percent of the vote, but that's a victory because it sends a clear message that we don't want business as usual!" is really rather tiresome. It's the political equivalent of the NFL-coach-on-a-rebuilding-team: "Yeah, we lost 44-3, but we showed some improvement on special teams and our punter had a career day." I'd like, just once, to see the political equivalent of Jim Mora after a loss (when Mora would occasionally shout "We SUCK!" into the microphone at the post-game press conference).

I'm also noticing more of those political signs -- the ones that show up on busy street-corners, or in peoples' yards -- that don't even mention what office the candidate named on the sign is running for. This is just one more indicator that politics is about branding. Pataki is no longer a candidate for Governor, but a product. His signs consist of his name and, in smaller print at the bottom, the URL of his website. Not "Pataki for Governor", not "Re-elect Governor Pataki", not even "Four more years". Just "Pataki". We've reduced politics to advertising shorthand.

Well, now that the first Sunday in November is done, all I have to say is: Can I have October back? Anyhow, some sports notes:

:: I'll take Reality Checks for $500, Alex!!

That resounding thud heard yesterday resonating through the Lower Great Lakes region was the Buffalo Bills in their first meeting of the year with the defending Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots. (I could barely force my fingers to type those last six words....) A lot of Bills fans were set for a possible "changing of the guard" type of victory yesterday: the Bills were 5-3, they were on a three-game winning streak, their defense had performed well in those three games, they were at home with their new star quarterback facing the team that dumped him last year for the first time, the Patriots were reeling, they had lost four in a row, yada yada yada. Insert the voice of Chris Berman here: "That's why they play the games."

On Friday I predicted a Pats victory in yesterday's game, because I figured they needed it more and they were still, position for position, more talented than the Bills. Plus, while I've made no secret that I don't regard Bill Belichick as the next incarnation of George Halas, I do think that he is a more experienced and more wily coach than Gregg Williams, so he was more likely to have his team ready for what they were to face than Williams. Nevertheless, I predicted the game to be a squeaker. Instead, the Pats jumped out quickly and in the end turned it into a blow-out. Ugh.

What did not surprise me about yesterday's loss was the fact that the Bills' defense got riddled. Their recent success came against young teams starting inexperienced quarterbacks (Houston/Carr, Miami/Lucas (in place of regular starter Jay Fielder), Detroit/Harrington), so they were able to use a combination of blitzes and shifting coverages and misdirections to gain the upper hand in those games. That strategy didn't figure to work against a more experienced, battle-ready opponent like the Pats, and it didn't work at all. The Pats knew what the Bills would try on defense, so they came in with a game-plan full of screens and dump-offs and junk plays, almost all of which worked. At one point, those plays were being so effective that the color guy on CBS, Phil Simms, actually said something like "I guarantee that in the next three plays the Patriots will run a screen pass"....which they went on to do. Add to that some generally bad tackling by the Bills and their characteristic pass rush (which produced the staggering total of one sack of Tom Brady), and you pretty much have a defensive melt-down. So, the Bills' only real hope was to turn this sucker into a shoot-out.

And that's where the actual surprise of yesterday's game happened. The Bills were in the Red Zone at least five times that I can remember, and they came away with exactly seven points. That's it. They moved the ball well; Drew Bledsoe threw for three hundred yards, with his only interception coming midway through the fourth quarter when the game's outcome was no longer in doubt; Travis Henry averaged 4.8 yards per carry, although the running game fell by the wayside as the Bills fell behind; Peerless Price had nine catches, et cetera. But they couldn't score, which is the first time we've seen the Bills have that particular problem all year. It didn't help, of course, that kicker Mike Hollis missed all three of his field goal attempts, but the Bills' inability to get the ball in the end zone yesterday was shocking.

This game, then, really exposed the status of the Buffalo Bills: they are a good team in the making, but they are at least a year away and they are in need of some serious defensive upgrading before they can be considered any kind of real contender. Next week the Bills are off, and then after that they start the tough part of their schedule: in their last seven games, they have to play road games at Kansas City, the Jets, New England, and Green Bay. Of course, they won't lose the rest of their games: they close the season against the Bengals.

:: The AFC East race is, as usual, tightening up. The Dolphins appear to be starting their annual swoon (although this year's edition is a bit more cruel, resulting from injury to Jay Fiedler). The Patriots are at .500 and a game behind the Bills, but their remaining schedule is not as hard as Buffalo's. Look out.

:: The Raiders' defensive players are probably the most exhausted people in the United States today. Between the 49ers' final drive in the fourth quarter (which ended in a missed field goal as time expired) and their game-winning drive in overtime (after they won the coin toss and received the kickoff), the Raiders' defense was on the field for thirty-five consecutive plays. Wow.

:: My picks for the Super Bowl both won yesterday, and both are leading their respective divisions. The Steelers came back to beat the Browns and are now a solid 5-3, threatening to pull away from the rest of the AFC North. They also appear safe as far as home-field advantage goes: they won't have it, which bodes well for them to get to the Super Bowl. The Eagles also won at Chicago (well, at Champaign against Chicago). Home-field advantage is actually important in the NFC, and the Eagles are in a log-jam at the top of the conference. But they're solidly in front of their division, with a two-game lead on their nearest competitors.

:: In two of the Cowboys' last three games, it's turned out that scoring consisting of three field goals was enough to beat them. Considering that the Bills' Mike Hollis missed three field goals yesterday, I guess it's a good thing that the 'Boys aren't on the Bills' 2002 schedule. (In Hollis's defense, one of those kicks was a fifty-yarder, and another involved an odd snap so that the ball wasn't planted very well by the time his foot contacted pigskin.)

:: The most oft-repeated words in Cincinnati yesterday: "Thank God for expansion!"

:: If you're going to wear green jerseys for a game, at least pick a nice, dark shade of green. Say, hunter green, like the Philly Eagles. Bright green, grass-green, just doesn't work. Just ask Notre Dame. (Oh, and thanks, Boston College! You've saved us all!)

:: New York City is bidding to host both a Super Bowl and the 2012 Summer Olympics. I seriously doubt they'll get a Super Bowl, since the NFL is loath to hold the game in a northern city unless that city has a domed stadium. There have been thirty-six (or, in NFL parlance, XXXVI) Super Bowls, only two of which have taken place in northern cities (XVI in Detroit, and XXVI in Minneapolis). As far as NYC's Olympic bid is concerned, I don't know what cities around the world are in the running, but I wonder where they'd build an Olympic Stadium and an Olympic Village. (I'm genuinely curious here. I don't know NYC's geography very well at all.) Perhaps, if NYC wins the bid, this could be how Steinbrenner finally gets his new stadium -- if NYC does what Atlanta did after its Olympics and converts the Olympic Stadium into the new ballpark. Of course, that's assuming that Steinbrenner is willing to wait until after another ten years have passed before he gets his mits on a new park.

:: NBA weirdness: Karl Malone was held scoreless yesterday by the Sonics. He's played for eighteen years and is a lock for the Hall of Fame, and yet he was shut out for probably the first time in his life yesterday. I don't pay a lot of attention to the NBA -- well, to basketball in general -- but Malone being held scoreless is worthy of a visit by Agents Mulder and Scully.

I've added a permalink under "Other Journeys" to a pretty good left-leaning blog by William Burton, provocatively titled...."William Burton". Interestingly, every post Burton has ever written appears on the main page. He does not appear to have an archive set up.

Steven Den Beste is back on the air, with an interesting article on gambling. I don't much enjoy gambling; if I'm going to spend money on a vacation, I would like to at least get something -- the memory of a show, or a fun ride, or the like. And if I'm going to spend money on a machine that flashes neat lights at me, I'd rather it be a vintage 1980s video game, like "Ms. Pac-Man" or "Marble Madness" or "Defender" (surely the goofiest set of game controls ever). I've been to Casino Niagara, the big casino in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It's a gorgeous facility, and the constant tinkling of coins falling loudly into the tray of the slots is addictive, as are all the attractive lights and bells and such, but spending a few hours there -- while enjoyable -- leaves one with a very unfulfilled sensation. "So, that's it?" was my overwhelming feeling upon my departure from the place. (I only played slots; I steered well clear of blackjack because I am an amazingly bad card player. Of course, I suspect that blackjack is not a game that requires skill in the way that poker or 500 do, but I've developed something of a card-phobia over the years, so bad at cards am I.)

What also struck me about Casino Niagara was the escalator ride from the smoking floor down to the non-smoking floor. You know that line of faint haze that forms in a room where the air is still and you're burning incense? Imagine that line of haze, much thicker, as your head drops beneath it when the escalator carries you down to the non-smoking floor. And people were spending hours in that haze, happy as clams. Yeesh.

SF author Charles Sheffield passed away yesterday. To my knowledge I have not read any of his writing, but it is still sad to note the passing of a member of the community that I'm working to enter.

One nice thing about film score collecting that appears to be going by the wayside is the fact that it was a sufficiently small market to avoid some of the more irritating tactics that surround film franchise merchandising -- there would be a single release of a film's score, but that's pretty much it. This has started to change in recent years, though. For instance, the soundtrack release of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was fairly irritating. The score CDs featured four different covers, which was fine by me, as I don't care much about such things. But then different releases of the score, sold at different outlets, included different "extras" on the disc. If you bought the thing at Wal-Mart, you got a screensaver or some such thing; however, if you bought it at Target, you got an extra track of music. (For me, music's the thing, so that's the version I got.) Another example was the score release for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the "normal" releases also had multiple covers (I got Saruman, simply because that's all the store had the night I bought the thing), as well as a "special" release in a leather-backed case that came with some other goodies (I don't know what), but no extra music.

And now the same sort of thing is going to be the case with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, with a normal release and a "deluxe" release and then a "limited" release only available online. What's particularly galling in this case is that the more expensive versions will include the extra track of music, but not the "normal" release -- but of course, the running time of the normal release will be the same as the other releases minus the "bonus track". Asking score collectors to pony up an extra $10.00 just to get that extra track is, well, kind of mean. I'll be getting the "normal" release. (Info on the various releases of The Two Towers can be found here.)

I watched Casablanca last night.

I used to watch Casablanca much more frequently than I do these days. One year, during college, I watched the film every Sunday afternoon for six consecutive weeks. Doing so has ingrained upon me a preferred way of watching the film, that is almost a ritual. I love to watch the film on an early winter evening, starting it around 5:00 or so, while it is still light out and with no lights on in the room. Then, as the film progresses, it becomes dark outside and as the light in the room diminishes, the light from the television -- from Casablanca -- takes over until it is the only light at all. It's odd, the rituals we create in our lives and the objects we use to create them. I'm sure there are better ways to watch Casablanca. In a theater, perhaps. But this is my way of watching it. And you know what? I just may watch it again today, transporting myself to the heat and desperation of North Africa in World War II, even as the snow falls outside in Upstate New York.

Some thoughts on Casablanca:

:: If there has ever been a film with better dialogue, I've not seen it. This film is a study, a virtual clinic, in how to construct dialogue. It isn't merely that the film is loaded with some of the most famous lines in film history, except one (do I really need to tell you that "Play it again, Sam" is not a line in this movie?). What amazed me so about the dialogue last night as I listened to it is the way the dialogue flows. The conversations in the film all follow a logical progression. So many film conversations sound like characters talking past one another, with lines that don't seem to follow from the context of what's been said, and we sometimes wonder: "Now why did he say that? Where did her line just now come from?" That doesn't happen here. These characters are really talking to one another: exchanging information and viewpoints, feeling out each other's emotions, seeking out weaknesses or strengths.

:: I read somewhere -- I think it was in Robert Silverberg's book Science Fiction 101 -- that Islamic carpet weavers will purposely introduce a flaw into the pattern of their magnificent rugs, on the theory that to fashion perfection by the hand of man would be an act of heresy toward God. I wonder if the same might be true in Casablanca's script, because there are only two false-sounding lines in the entire script. Both come from Ilsa Lund, during the Paris sequence. Once, when she tosses Rick a coin and says, "Franc for your thoughts"; and then a bit later, when the Nazis are coming and she says, "Kiss me as if it were the last time...." There isn't another false note in the entire screenplay, which would be amazing enough by itself. It seems almost miraculous, though, in light of the famous fact that the script wasn't even finished while the picture was shooting.

:: Max Steiner's score is absolutely wonderful. Three main motifs work their way through the score: "La Marseillaise", "As Time Goes By", and a darker theme, characterized by low brass, low strings, and deep timpani rolls. Of course, "As Time Goes By" is totally associated with this film. Fittingly, that melody does not appear in the score until the moment when Ilsa requests that Sam play it, but from then on it is woven into the score with amazing subtlety -- sometimes at the same time as the dark German music, sometimes forming a segue into "La Marseillaise". Max Steiner was one of the greats of film music's Golden Age, and Casablanca shows why. (The quality of his music is even more incredible when one considers that Steiner hated "As Time Goes By, and he was very nearly successful in his lobbying for the song to be dropped in favor of an original song he had written. Only the fact that Ingrid Bergman had moved on to another film and cut her hair for the new role, which made reshooting the necessary scenes impossible, saved "As Time Goes By".)

:: Have there ever been more great close-ups in a movie than in Casablanca? Witness the very long closeup on Ingrid Bergman, as Ilsa listens to Sam singing "As Time Goes By". I can't think of any actors or actresses today who could pull off such a long closeup.

:: A sometime-quoted rule of writing is "Always leave them wanting more". I hold Casablanca as a counterexample to that theory. At the end of this film, I do not want more. I don't want to know what Rick and Louis go on to do when they get to Brazzaville. I don't want to know about Victor Laszlo's work in the resistance once he escapes. I don't want to know if Ilsa and Victor have children after the war, and I don't want to know if Ilsa grows old and wonders about the life with Rick that she passed up. Casablanca does not leave me wanting more. It leaves me satisfied.

:: Only a film as good as Casablanca could have me overlooking the fact that the "Letters of transit" make absolutely no sense.

I haven't been making regular predictions of the Bills' games this year, because I'm not terribly good at the predicting business. But I'll make an exception this week, just for kicks.

While I think that the Bills may be better than I gave them credit for initially -- I had forecast a 6-10 season, and they're 5-3 already -- I think that the Patriots are still the defending Super Bowl champions (despite my feeling that their title last year owes more to the sacrifice of ninety-nine chickens in some kind of weird ritual than anything else), and while the Bills are playing quite well with their defense especially showing improvement in their last two games, this game simply means more to the Patriots. If they lose this one, their season is effectively done; they would be 3-5 and have to go at least 7-1 (and maybe 8-0) the rest of the year just to make it back to the playoffs. I think the Bills will be tough, and I think Drew Bledsoe will have a good game, but I think the Patriots will win it in something of a squeaker. So, my pick is Patriots 30, Bills 27.

What do you do when you are a former member of one of the most renowned comedy troupes in history? If you're John Cleese, you move on to various writing and acting endeavours, including taking over for Desmond Llewelyn as Q in the Bond films. If you're Terry Gilliam, you direct movies....really offbeat, strange movies. And if you're Michael Palin, you become a world traveler and film your exploits for the BBC and PBS. Check out his site; it's wonderful for the photography alone.

(crossposted to Collaboratory.)

Today recorded the first snowfall of 2002 in the Syracuse region, resulting from that most wonderful (or hated, as the case may be) fact of climate and geography: the lake effect. For those who have better things to do than watch the Weather Channel, the "lake effect" happens when cold air blows across the surface of a warmer body of water, picking up a substantial amount of moisture as it does so. Then, when that now-moisture-laden air moves over land again, the moisture comes out as precipitation -- generally, snow, and lots of it. How much snow falls, and where, is determined by the direction of the winds as they cross over the water onto land. Lake effect snow tends to set up in narrow "bands" of intense snowfall, so one can be in the middle of a blizzard in one spot while someone else, just miles away, can be experiencing no snowfall whatsoever. And even weirder is if one is outside the band where the snow is currently falling, one can actually see the band of clouds during the day -- there will actually be this long, dark stretch of threatening-looking clouds to the south or north.

The gigantic snowfall that paralyzed Buffalo last December was a lake-effect storm. In that case, the winds traveled up the entire length of Lake Erie, picking up pretty much the maximum possible amount of moisture before encountering the first bit of land at the lake's opposite end -- which just happens to be where Buffalo sits. Ergo, gigantic blizzard in the city and the south and eastern suburbs, but nothing in the northern suburbs and little in "ski country", which is about thirty-five miles south of Buffalo.

Now that I'm living in Syracuse, though, the operative lake is no longer Lake Erie but Lake Ontario. The key difference now, the "unknown factor" as it were (unknown to me, that is; I'm sure the locals know all about it) is that Lake Ontario, being much deeper than Lake Erie, does not freeze over during the winter. This means that lake-effect snow is a constant possibility all through the winter. In Buffalo, though, once Lake Erie freezes over during the winter -- Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes -- the lake-effect "snow machine" stops, and for the most part Buffalo stops recording snowfall.

Another key difference is that Buffalo is far enough inland that the infamous Nor'easters do not affect it, unless the Nor'easter in question is positively gigantic. (The "Storm of the Century" in 1993 is a prime example.) Syracuse, on the other hand, appears to be poised to catch the westernmost cusp of the Nor'easters as they make their Baltimore-Philly-New York-Boston-Portland trek. Thus, in short: I am bracing myself for a lot of snow this year.

Someone earlier today visited Byzantium's Shores via a Google search asking how many bullets Francisco Scaramanga's gun could hold in The Man With the Golden Gun. On the off chance that this person is still looking for that bit of info and looks back here, the answer is: One.

This is established in a bit of dialogue between Bond and Scaramanga at the end of the film, when Scaramanga proposes the gun duel between the two men. Bond says something like, "My six bullets to your one?" and Scaramanga replies, "I only need one."