X2. Wow.

(For a spoiler-free review, go check out this one, by the Saruman to my Gandalf. I have no compunctions about discussing spoilers when I do reviews here. You all know the drill.)

In a lot of ways I'm still a comic-book geek at heart, despite the fact that I am no longer a regular reader of the medium. Even though I have no idea what's going on with Marvel Comics these days (How many Spiderman titles are there, anyway? What's with all these "Ultimate" lines of classic Marvel characters? ), I remember with fondness the years I spent following all the events in the Marvel Universe. I never tried much to get into the DC Universe, even when they decided to blow it all up and start over in the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths series. Marvel was my thing, and while Spiderman was my favorite, I also faithfully followed the adventures of the team of mutants created by Professor Charles Xavier.

So, I'm pretty much the intended audience of the X-Men movies.

I liked the first one, but I found it too short when it came out three years ago. Entire bits of plot exposition were omitted, and the characters were drawn in something like shorthand. The film started with a lot of the X-Men mythology already in place, which disappointed me a bit; one of the charms of my favorite comic-book movies has been the visualization of the character origins. Yeah, the last forty-five minutes or so of Superman is kind of pedestrian, but all the stuff leading up to that is so good that I'm OK with coasting the last act of the film. Ditto Spiderman, with its wonderful first two-thirds and nearly disastrous conclusion. This may be why I've never totally warmed to the Batman movies; the one that comes closest to really addressing the formative experiences of Bruce Wayne happens to be my favorite of the series, Batman Forever (the third one, when Val Kilmer played the Caped Crusader). But still, X-Men was still very good, even if I believed at the time (and still do) that if only they'd fleshed out their story a bit more with an addition half-hour or so, it could very well have been the best comic-book movie ever made.

Well, I guess the powers-that-be liked what they saw in that first movie, because in the sequel, X2 (lame title, that), the budget appears to have been expanded and the reins loosened. The result is, for me, the second-best comic-book movie I've ever seen. This movie is just pure, comic-book fun from the first scene to the last. I felt like I was actually reading one of those old Chris Claremont issues of The Uncanny X-Men.

In fact, if there's a problem with this movie, that might be it. I suspect that someone who doesn't know the X-Men from the Power Pack (look them up yourself, I'm not explaining them!) might have some problems following what goes on here. But then, maybe not. I really can't say, but the movie does assume familiarity with the first movie, and when the characters made passing references to those events, I fondly recalled the helpful little corner-boxes in the pages of the comic when someone would refer to a past happening, like if the current issue was #231, the box would read "That happened in #217. -Ed." The X-Men comics told stand-alone stories with less frequency than just about any other series that I could recall; instead, every story would usually end up playing some role in continuity somewhere, even if you couldn't initially tell how. Some reviews of this film that I've seen complain that the film spends too much time setting up the inevitable X3, and while I can see the complaint, I also think this is one of those "That's not a bug, it's a feature" moments. Anyone familiar with the comics knows that setting up future events is always a big part of what's going on, what with the always-shadowy origin of Wolverine (which I'm not sure was ever revealed in its entirety), the constant arrival of new and young mutants on the scene, the constant escape of some villains and the deaths of others, and the film's very last shot.

(You can tell who read the comic and who didn't just by observing their reaction to this shot. The ones who read the comic are the ones going, "Oh, WOW! How soon 'til the next movie! Holy crap!!", while the ones who didn't read the comic are going, "Gee, what's that thing? Huh? What's going on?")

So, while I can see that people unfamiliar to the X-Men mythos might have trouble grokking what's going on, well…I also have to note that I'm not one of them, and I write reviews based on my experience in a movie, not in terms of someone else. (Which is probably why I can get so very long-winded.)

I won't go into separate praisings of all the actors, because the afore-mentioned, above-linked Demon From DC pretty much nails all that. I will note that Hugh Jackman can have the Wolverine part until he no longer wants it; Famke Jannsen is wondrous as Jean Grey; and that I actually liked Nightcrawler, for once. (He was never my favorite X-Man, but this film pushed me quite a ways toward his corner.) I found Storm a bit lame in the first movie, but here, she was awesome. She was probably the X-Man most short-changed by the first film's lack of running-time. And I'm not sure which great actor I am more jealous of: Christopher Lee (who gets to play the villains in the LOTR and Star Wars movies), or Ian McKellen (who is Gandalf in LOTR and Magneto here).

A few final, random musings on X2:

:: When I stopped reading the comics (when I went off to college, and money for things like comics became a memory as distant as the dinosaurs), Magneto had actually "rehabilitated" and taken Professor X's place as the head of the Xavier School. So, I'm having a little trouble recalibrating for "evil" Magneto.

:: But then, I love how this film brought up an old plot-device that Chris Claremont often used in the comics: forcing the X-Men to team up with one of their usual enemies to combat a far worse one. The blurring of the lines between the good guys and the bad guys was a staple of the comics.

:: OK, time to admit a little ignorance…I never read anything featuring Lady Deathstrike. I get that she's a "follow-up" project to Wolverine, so she has the same adamantium skeleton and claws like his, but where did she get the same healing ability? That's Wolverine's actual mutant-power; everything else of his is "man-made". Does the fact that she has the same power mean that mutant powers can be replicated?

:: Magneto's escape may be the best bad-guy-escaping-the-inescapable-prison scene ever.

:: Bring on Dark Phoenix and the Hellfire Club for the third movie.

:: Cyclops could use something to do next time.

Novel Editing Update:

As of this morning, I am a little more than one-fourth of the way through the book. I have excised just under 3,300 words. That seems a little low, considering my goal is to get rid of a total of around 19,000; but I haven't hit the longest chapters yet.

Editing, thus far, seems to be a combination of ruthlessness ("Must....cut....more....words!") and annoyance ("My God, did I really write that?! Why would I ever write that?! It's incomprehensible crap!"). Of course, it always seems this way when I'm editing my own short fiction, but the effect is startlingly magnified on a project of this scope.

The definition of foul play: While Cat Number One is doing its business in the litter box (we have the covered litter box, which is much better for odor-control), Cat Number Two lurks inches away from the opening, waiting to pounce at the first sign that Cat Number One is finished.

I doubt very much that any cat lover ever forgets, in the back of their minds, that cats really are evil. But we love 'em anyway. 'Tis a cross to bear.

There will be another day for the citizens of Stuckeyville.

NBC has renewed Ed, one of my favorite shows despite some recent hiccups with the writing. (Remember: It's always the writing.) Interestingly, they are returning the show to its 8:00 pm Wednesday time slot, despite the fact that it actually performed better, ratings-wise, on Fridays at 9:00. But I'll take it.

It occurred to me this morning that Democrats don't do particularly well when using metaphor to express their points. At least, they're not as successful at it as conservatives are. Everyone can cite Ronald Reagan's mythical welfare-queen, drawing multiple checks to defraud the system, even though it was never substantiated; ditto the Viet Nam veterans who were spit upon and kicked and treated like scum upon their return from that war. But when Democrats try this, their efforts are generally pooh-poohed and investigated, with the results of said investigation somehow hanging around their necks like an albatross to a far greater degree than ever for a Republican. So it is that Al Gore, for example, takes on a reputation as a guy constantly "lying" to "reinvent himself" -- even if the "lies" are, in some cases, actually true and in other cases simple instances that could be attributed to a faulty memory, but nobody remembers, say, Phil Gramm and Dickie Flatt, or Dick Armey and the guy who lost his job because the government-run institution where he worked couldn't afford the minimum wage. It's weird.

Anyway, I'm wondering if Democrats shouldn't work harder to get their points across in more concrete terms, using metaphors if they can. For example, the "Top One Percent" Tax Cut. Now that we've established that the tax cut will mostly benefit the top one percent, and now that we've established just who the top one percent are (i.e., how much you have to make to get into that club), maybe we can illustrate it even better. Here are a couple of examples:

:: If you are elected to the United States Senate, and if you then become the Senate's Majority Leader, and you have no other sources of income other than your salary as Senator, in order to break into the top one percent you would need to double your income. (Senator Bill Frist's salary: $161,200 per year.)

:: If you become President of the United States, the news is good: you'll be in the top one percent, at $400,000 per year. Of course, you won't be in the Privileged Percentile by much, and if that percentile continues to move upward as wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority, you might well fall out of the Privileged Percentile over the course of an eight-year service as President.

:: But, proving the old adage that the job ins't worth a bucket of warm spit, as Vice President of the United States you'll only be slightly closer to breaking into the Privileged Percentile than the Senate Majority Leader ($186,300 per year). Maybe Dick Cheney can get an old crate and set up a Halliburton Stock Stand on the sidewalk in front of his secured location.

:: Maybe you were just selected by the Carolina Panthers in the sixth round of the recent NFL Draft. Sixth-rounders don't tend to command a whole lot in the way of signing bonuses and large, up-front contracts, so there's a good chance you'll end up playing for the league minimum for a player with less than one credited season of NFL service (assuming you make the team). The bad news: you won't crack the Privileged Percentile ($225,000 per season). But if you work hard, play the game well, and manage to hang on until your third season, you'll just make it ($375,000 per season). Of course, if you're around that long you can hold out and get the big bucks. For pointers on this, write to Emmit Smith's agent, or Bruce Smith's agent.

:: But then, maybe you don't like playing in the cold and the snow. Warm weather's your thing, and the green grass at Wrigley sets your heart a-flutter. It's baseball for you, then. Will you enter the Privileged Percentile making Major League Baseball's minimum salary for a rookie? It could be....this might be....oooooh, foul ball! No, you won't be in the Top One Percent. But you'll be closer than that poor slob in his rookie NFL season, at $300,000 per season.

:: OK, screw those two sports. You like ice. Lots and lots of ice. Hockey it is. Minimum salary for a rookie in the NHL: $150,000 a year. Keep looking. Senator Frist's job is looking pretty good, eh? (But if you wait a year, and enter the NHL in 2004, you'll make $185,000 a season. You'll be breathing down Dick Cheney's neck.)

:: Oh, wait a minute! Basketball! That's everybody's favorite. Everybody wants to be like Mike, right? And with all that merchandising, surely an NBA rookie making the minimum would earn the favor of President Bush's tax cut! We're in like Flynn! Well, not quite. But you're getting closer; closer, even, than the baseball guy. ($349,458 per year.)

:: OK, so you're in the NBA as a rookie, and you're this close to making enough to get that tax cut. Unfortunately, your equally-gifted-at-basketball twin sister, who just signed a rookie contract with a WNBA team, might be better off coaching a college team than trying to play professionally. And entering the Privileged Percentile? Fuhgeddaboudit ($30,000 per season).

:: Well, fine. I didn't want to do any of those things, anyway. I just take my chances with being a freelance writer. That's gotta be worth something....

[At this point, the writer of this post expired as a result of his head exploding. Al Qaeda involvement is not suspected in the explosion of the head, but Attorney General Ashcroft has promised a full investigation.]

I'm not following this flap at the New York Times much, except to note that I find stories like this really pretty funny when they come up. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert wrote when he reviewed the film Catch Me If You Can:

It is probably true that most people will take you at face value until they have reason to do otherwise. I had a friend who had risen to a high level in her organization and was terrified her secret would be discovered: She never attended college. My guess, and it proved accurate, was that nobody would ever think to ask her. It is probably an even better guess that no patient in a hospital would ask to see a doctor's medical school diploma.

This Blair guy, it turns out, was pretty much of a bullshit-artist. A lot of commentators want to read something big and momentous into this whole business -- something about hypocrisy and affirmative action -- but it's pretty clear, from what I've seen, that what's at work here is little more than that wonderful part of human nature that makes us all susceptible to bullshit. Hell, one could probably make a case that bullshit is even necessary for human interactions to proceed the way we generally want them to, so that when things like this NYT bit happen, we would almost be better off chalking it up as an example of "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" Ah well....

(BTW, it occurs to me that conservatives don't like the NYT because it's a liberal paper. And liberals don't like the NYT because it's not a liberal paper. Who does like it, then?)

The weather here in Buffalo has been uniformly lousy the last few days -- cold, windy, rainy. Since most of our weather patterns start as unsettled systems coming in from the west, I am putting the blame for this on the good people of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and the state of Michigan. Cut it out, people.

Kirk to Enterprise....

Department of Bizarre Convergences, Report #47563:

On Saturday afternoon, one of Buffalo's TV stations aired the film JFK. On Saturday night, another of Buffalo's TV stations aired Bull Durham.

Thus, in the course of six hours I got to hear Kevin Costner argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy for a vast conspiracy to kill President Kennedy (JFK), and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone (Bull Durham).

(The fact that I am actually observing things like this indicates one of two things: [a] I am in tune with and grokking the myriad possibilities of life, or [b] I desperately need to get some gainful employment so as to better apply my mental energy. I report, you decide....)

A couple of weeks ago I happened upon this blog by an Islamic cleric by sheer, random chance. It was one of the "Ten Most Recently Updated" blogs listed on the Blogger main page when I logged on. You never know what jewels you're going to find amongst the personal diary/juvenilia blogs.

John Hardy is always posting fascinating stuff, of which this post about Japanese sword lore is especially notable.

I'm back in the game again: after a cooling-off period, during which I waited for all still-extant rejection slips to wend their way through the United States Postal Service to my door (two of which had to go through not one but two forwardings), I'm sending four stories out today. (Actually, one went out last night as an e-sub.) One of these damn things has to sell sometime.

I also finished the book I wasn't liking very much last night. I'll probably write the review either tomorrow or Wednesday, hopefully for inclusion in next week's edition of GMR. This means that I can finally embark on my "Short Fiction Month" later today. I am going to offset the Short Fic Month so as to run into June. (And it now occurs to me that we're heading into that time of year when the "Best Of 2002" anthologies should start showing up in bookstores.)

It occurs to me that I should read up a bit on linguistics and etymology, since I love language and since I am attempting to become a Writer (as opposed to a small-w writer, which is a person who writes but doesn't get paid). Anyway, a couple of recent observations from the lingual district of Blogistan are on tap.

:: I'm sure I've indicated before that I find blog to be, itself, an ugly word. I just don't like it, and I deliberately avoided using it in the early days of Byzantium's Shores. I would use euphemisms like "e-journal" and such. I've since accepted the word, even though I still don't like it and even though I still question its necessity in the first place. But now I see some other words used to describe blog-related technical processes that just make me wince.

For instance: the RSS service I signed up for last week refers to its software "scraping" its registered blogs for new content. I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a medical procedure to me, and not a very pleasant one.

"Now, Mr. Simpson, please take these pills so we can start the procedure. You won't feel a thing. We just need to…scrape your blog."

"Ewwwww! Are you sure that won't hurt?"

"Not at all. Please take the pills."

"What are they?"

"Ten thousand milligrams of ibuprofen."

:: But I have to say, this one I like. It's a new bit of political slang, and I find it just hilarious. I wish I knew who coined it, but its genesis is in the liberal annoyance that so much ink has been spilled over the last decade about the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton. The word?

The Clenis. (Example in context.)

This word is often followed by a TM symbol, to signify that it's virtually become its own trademark.

:: This is an old one, actually, but I don't like the sound of "skins". (As in, "Download some new skins for your browser".) For some reason, I inevitably think of going out and killing a beaver or something similar and then decorating my computer with its pelt.

Whoops.

Oh, and speaking of the "$374K-a-year, Top One Percent" thing -- I'm no expert on economics and I'm not particularly inclined to work through all the math on my own (yeah, I'm lazy that way -- it's not that I'm bad at math, but when it comes to math I'm not very patient at all). So, as income disparity grows and more and more of our nation's wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, would it not follow that if these trends are allowed to proceed unchecked, than that $374K/year figure will actually go up? In other words, is the cut-off line for the Top One Percent going to keep going up?

I'm wondering because if someone manages to move from, say, $65K/year to $150K/year over ten years or so, but the Top One Percent figure rises disproportionally as well -- actually, I'm not sure exactly what that would mean. If anything. Any ideas, anyone?

The other day I bitched eloquently expressed my annoyance at the removal of composer Alan Silvestri from the upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean. In so doing, I realized that I haven't listened to much of Silvestri's music lately, so I did a bit of "crash listening".

Silvestri is generally viewed as a "B-level" composer. He's not one of the masters, like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, but he's a solid professional who always turns it good work which is generally very accessible but also has more of a distinctive voice than some of the duller composers working today. I think that viewing Silvestri as a "B-level" guy sells him a bit short; it implies that what he does isn't as good as the greats, whereas I think what he does is a bit different. Thus, if Williams and Goldsmith are the Wagner and Verdi of film music today, I see Silvestri not as a Bellini (a second-rate guy) but as a Sir Arthur Sullivan (a first-rate guy who's not doing hugely profound work by design and intent).

Silvestri's work tends toward pastiche, mainly because a lot of the films on which he works tend toward pastiche. But pastiche isn't something on which we should a priori discount or look down upon; and it's my view that when Silvestri is allowed to go beyond pastiche (which isn't all that often, admittedly) he can hold his own with anyone. So here's a general rundown on the Silvestri scores with which I'm most familiar. This is not exhaustive, but I think it captures most of his biggest profile scores.

:: Romancing the Stone. This was the first of Silvestri's scores that I recall noticing. It's notable for its use of Latin-American sounds, reflecting the film's setting of Colombia, as opposed to the more "Korngold-esque" style of adventure scoring.

:: Back to the Future, I, II, and III. Silvestri's work on this trilogy is actually pretty interesting. It's known best for the main BTTF theme, which is a big, brassy melody that's most often scored as a march and motif for Marty McFly's adventures. However, the trilogy's wide-range between time periods allows Silvestri to indulge in 50s style madcap comedy stylings, sci-fi adventure, and even Western-style Americana. It's all in great fun, even if the BTTF theme gets a bit repetitive.

:: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Here Silvestri does pastiche-to-the-max, what with his take on comic noir, cartoons, jazzy hard-boiled romance, and more just plain madcap foolery. He breaks absolutely no new ground in this score, but with this much fun being had, he doesn't need to.

:: The Abyss. While Silvestri is best known for his long-standing relationship with director Robert Zemeckis, this score to James Cameron's undersea SF thriller is one of my favorites. I love how Silvestri is able to suggest the unknown vastness of the world beneath the sea, capturing both the fear and the wonder down there. The action writing isn't his best – serviceable, but not particularly notable – but the other stuff is gold. (And it's my firmly held opinion that The Abyss is far, far superior to Aliens, a film whose near-classic status I find incomprehensible.)

:: The Bodyguard. Yes, it had an Alan Silvestri score. This film isn't just the source of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You", which held sway as the Most Overplayed Song In History between 1992 and 1997 (when "My Heart Will Go On" seized that title). Here Silvestri wrote some noirish, bluesy music that I'm not sure was ever released on CD.

:: Forrest Gump. Silvestri really indulged his penchant for Americana in this film (which I still like, even though it's probably the most hated Best Picture in history). The score is one of Silvestri's most accessible works, full of melodies that are mostly characterized by simplicity, as befits the film's main character. There are two soundtrack albums for Forrest Gump: one features Silvestri's score, and the other is the song-compilation album (I will have more to say about song-compilation albums in another essay, someday.) The song-comp CD includes a suite of Silvestri's music, which basically consists of the suite he wrote for the film's end credits with a prelude of Forrest's Theme, played mostly on the piano before the strings swell and take it over. This is my favorite of all of Silvestri's melodies. I love how it offsets with the gently syncopated piano background, and I love how the piano continues to elaborate on the theme and provide background coloring even when the strings take over. As for the rest of the score, it's pretty much mainstream Silvestri, and that End Credits suite actually covers pretty much all of it.

:: Contact. My favorite of all of Alan Silvestri's film scores. This one is deceptive, sounding much simpler than it really is. In fact, if one listens to the End Credits suite from Contact immediately after listening to the same suite from Forrest Gump, one might initially think that Silvestri has fallen victim to the James Horner self-quoting trap. But the differences quickly become apparent, as the main Contact theme (Ellie Arroway's theme, I suppose) is punctuated by soft horn calls that imply, to my ears, Ellie's constant wishing for the stars. And there are passages in this score that capture the "Sense of cosmic wonder" that dominated everything Carl Sagan ever wrote (he wrote the original novel on which Contact is based). There is also some excellent suspense music, accompanying the scene where the alien transmission is first received. Silvestri builds the suspense nicely, but without loud histrionics; this befits the conflicting impulses in the SETI researchers ("Oh God, I think we've found it!" versus "Oh God, this can't be it.") This probably sounds trite, but Silvestri's score to Contact always makes me want to go off into a field and look up at the night sky.

:: Castaway. Silvestri and Zemeckis took a chance on this one: they left a great deal of the film totally unscored. There is virtually no music in most of the film, and all of the island sequences are unscored. The music only really starts up again when Tom Hanks finally gets off the island on his raft. At that moment, Hanks has done everything in his power, and now he is putting his fate in other hands. Thus, the music of the film is quasi-religious in nature. It isn't specifically liturgical, but I find it has a very solemn, hymnic feel. There's not a lot more I can say about it.

The largest-profile score of Silvestri's with which I am unfamiliar is The Mummy Returns. I have heard that it is an excellent adventure-film score, but I have also heard the complaint that anyone who has dipped into film scores at all will know: "They left the best part off the CD!" (That's another issue I'll delve into some other time.) Silvestri also wrote music for the TV series CHiPS. The wacky music you remember from those chases on the LA Freeway system, and the goofy stuff that accompanied those freeze-frames of everybody grinning at the end of every episode? Yep, Silvestri. But don't hold it against him. Everybody starts out somewhere.

23 September 2003:





That is all.

I'm pretty sure that my mother has no idea that I write this blog, so I'm not going to use this space to observe Mother's Day in her honor. But I will thank all of your mothers, who raised you all to have such discriminating taste as to read Byzantium's Shores. And now, as Yoda said: Pass on what you have learned! Save you, it can!

ummm....yeah....

Wow....first posts on atheism, and now SDB is once again spanking Apple Computer. It's like old times over on USS Clueless!!

Matthew Yglesias makes a very useful point for liberals and Democrats who want to argue against the Bush tax-cut plan: state the opposition in a way that people are more likely to understand. Few people really have any idea of just who falls into the "Top One Percent", so what Democrats need to do is stop saying "Top One Percent", and instead actually cite the salary figure that people need to be above if they want to be in Bush's privileged percentile. That number? $374,000 per year.

Looking at that number, I suddenly find it spectacularly unlikely that I will ever be in the Top One Percent, and what's more, I certainly don't know anyone who's even close, either.

The media critic on CBS Sunday Morning -- whose name I can never remember, despite the fact that he's been doing the reviews on that show for years and I've watched them for as long as he's been doing them -- reviewed The Matrix Reloaded this morning. He described the movie as one of "the most pretentious" action films he's ever seen. That doesn't bode well, and it seems to reflect some other reviews I've read. Virtually all of them agree that the film spends a great deal of time in talk-mode, with Laurence Fishburne spouting a lot more of the prophetic, mystical stuff from the first movie.

I'm one who didn't find the original Matrix all that interesting from the philosophical standpoint. The ideas expressed in its running time are pretty much covered in any standard, college-level introductory philosophy class, and all the Christ-like imagery got a bit heavy-handed. And I don't think the film improves on repeat viewings, once the "Wow"-factor falls off. So, if I'm the one person in the universe who thinks that of the big SF films to come out in 1999, that The Phantom Menace is the superior film, well, I'll just suffer in my loneliness.

I plan on seeing Reloaded, but it's not terribly high on my list of priorities. I'm much more jazzed about seeing X2 tomorrow.

Isn't that the loveliest looking cup of coffee you've ever seen? It sure makes this mug of Eight O'Clock Hazelnut Coffee that I'm drinking right now look kind of lame. Check out this article on Seattle's most exacting coffee master, the guy with the highest standards in a city that views coffee the way Buffalo views chicken wings.

I own a Krups espresso machine, but I don't use it that often because I misplaced the instructions in a move some years back, and I'm not entirely sure now of how to get the best results. Am I supposed to tamp the grounds into the filter basket, or do I level them loosely? Do I brew the espresso right into the demitasse cups, or do I brew it into the glass carafe and then pour it into the cups? Why is it that I never get that beautiful foam on top of my espresso?

I do grind my own beans, which is something, I guess. No "Taster's Choice" for me. I like to think that if Sam Jackson and John Travolta ever drop by, looking to dispose of some poor slob they've accidentally shot in the face, they'd be impressed with my coffee; but reading about this Seattle fellow, I'm not so sure.

(BTW: The linked article was written by Jon Bonne, who also wrote the articles I linked a few weeks back about the privately-developed space ship. This guy is getting paid to write articles about things that interest me, and they're generally fascinating articles, too. Therefore, I both admire him and want to kill him.)

I haven't begun my month of reading nothing but short fiction yet, because I'm trying to finish a novel for review at Green Man Review, and the book is very slow going, because I'm just not liking it. If it was a book I'd bought myself, or checked out of the library, it would be back on the shelf and forgotten already; but since I'm committed to reviewing it, I have to finish it.

I'm hoping to finish the damn thing this weekend.

Film Music excursions, part the third: Program Music, one.

The classic Disney film Fantasia opens with a bit of narration by musicologist Deems Taylor, as the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra take their place in the studio. Taylor spends a moment or two describing what is to come in the film, and this in turn involves the distinction between "absolute" music and "program" music. The distinction is simply this: program music is music that tells a definite story, while absolute music does not. Absolute music is abstract music, depicting nothing but a series of musical relationships much as the shapes and colors in an abstract painting depict nothing specific.

This seems, at first, a perfectly sensible distinction. But I had an experience in, of all places, a grade school music class that suggests otherwise.

This was that standard class we all knew and hated, when we'd all get handed a bunch of song-books, the teacher would play the piano and teach us the songs, and we'd sit there either half-heartedly singing or, more likely, just "lipping" along, hoping she wouldn't notice. (She always did, the crafty old bat….) Or sometimes she'd lecture us on some classical composer and play some music on the stereo and we'd once again sit like bumps, listening along. (I'm not sure why we ever had these classes in the first place. It always seemed to me that a better approach to music education would be to require every student to either learn an instrument for band or orchestra, or failing that, participate in the choir. But I digress.)

Anyway, one time Mrs. Herkishimer (not her real name; I don't remember it) wanted to demonstrate the evocative power of music or something like that. When we got into class and took our assigned seats, she proceeded to hand out to each student one sheet of white paper and a few crayons. Our mission, she then informed us, was to listen to the piece of music she was about to play on the stereo and draw what we imagined the music to be depicting. Soon we're all drawin' away while the air is filled with the strains of some orchestral masterpiece, and when it was done she asked us all what we drew. Since the music was pretty dramatic, some of us drew space battles; others drew forest scenes with big animals; some drew towering mountains, et cetera. No one, to my recollection, drew a ship plying the waters of a great and unknown sea, even though the piece turned out to be the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov's program music masterpiece, Scheherazade. That movement is titled "The Sea and Sinbad's Ship".

Since that day I've doubted very much that music ever, truly, expresses any concrete image. When we encounter a piece of music that bears a descriptive title, I suspect that in every case this is because the composer had that image in mind before he or she began the composing. Thus the music does not so much depict the image as it depicts what the composer had in mind, musically, when considering that image. The two are not the same thing.

This was borne out years later when I read Leonard Bernstein's invaluable book The Joy of Music, in which there is a chapter -- in the form of a dialogue -- where Bernstein questions the very notion of "descriptive" music when a friend of his describes some hills as "pure Beethoven". The whole idea of Beethoven's music evoking physical scenery strikes Bernstein as almost alien. He later brings up an Etude by Chopin, and posits that while Chopin is saying something in this music, it must be something that Chopin had felt could only be expressed in music, or else he would have used words to say it in the first place.

So I ultimately suspect that the connection between music and imagery is much weaker than many believe. What are the implications, then, for listeners of music, and for film music in particular? Stay tuned.

Last night's episode of ER was exemplary -- the kind of riveting episode that used to be so common in the show's early seasons, with just the right balance of medical thrills to personal-life stuff. The gimmick last night was that the show tracked the day shift and the night shift on the same day, alternating between the two and focusing on Dr. Carter (day) and Dr. Pratt (night). In many ways their shifts mirrored each other, and during one bravura sequence Carter worked to save a patient from an accidental drowning, and Dr. Pratt -- twelve hours later -- worked to discover whether this same patient had suffered brain damage. This sequence culminated in Dr. Carter telling the girl's father that she very well might not live, and if she lived she very well might not fully recover -- intercut with Dr. Pratt telling the same guy that his daughter had survived and was going to be fine.

The whole episode was masterful, and I love the fact that even after two hundred episodes, ER can still bring it. And that wasn't even the season finale.

My efforts to cajole, intimidate, and ultimately bludgeon someone else into Blogistan have proven successful. This time it's Aaron, a guy I've known for -- damn! -- fourteen years. I'm pretty sure his hair has always been longer than mine, but that might not be the case right now.

IMAGES OF THE WEEK





Three images of the planet Mercury, in transit across the face of the Sun.

A "transit", in astronomical terms, is when one object crosses in front of another. The most famous examples of transits are the eclipses, when the Moon transits with the Sun. Planetary transits are more rare, given the extra considerations of orbital positioning of the planets with respect to the Sun, their positions in the plane of the ecliptic, and so forth. But recently Mercury had a transit, and these images were captured during the rare event. In the second image, Mercury is the circled dot; that other dot is actually a sunspot.

BONUS IMAGE OF THE WEEK

I found the link for the main IOTW on Warren Ellis's blog yesterday. And I also found this little item of weirdness, which I just had to reproduce:



For just sheer oddity, you can't beat Warren Ellis.

Terminus recently completed his exhaustive survey of the James Bond films (while my own such survey can be perused under "Notable Dispatches", in the sidebar). Now he's planning another exhaustive survey: the films of Oliver Stone. I'm greatly looking forward to this. I've somewhat lost sight of Stone's work in recent years, but I think he's been unfairly pigeonholed as the "whacko conspiracy director" and generally underappreciated as a great filmmaker. I haven't seen all of his films, but I can't name a clunker of those that I have seen, and JFK and Nixon are two of my absolute favorite films of all time.

I speculated a while back (it might not even have been in this space, but on someone else's comments) that the rise of annoying reality TV shows might have a side-effect of shaking out the writers on the scripted shows, kind of like the theory that contracting Major League Baseball by a couple of teams would actually benefit the game by shrinking the talent pool and pushing some guys who are in the Majors right now back to the minors, where they really should be. Now I'm wondering if that's not actually happening, because it seems to me that my favorite scripted shows -- ER, 24, The West Wing, even NYPDBlue -- are especially strong right now. Yeah, it's just anecdotal evidence based on my own tastes, but still -- the scripted stuff that I'm watching is really good, and I keep hearing great things about the scripted stuff that I'm not watching.

Which goes to show that writers are the most important souls in the Universe.

I don't have much to say about American Idol, except to note that Josh Gracin made a classy exit. My money is on Kimberley Locke to exit next week, with Clay Aiken then winning the showdown with Ruben Studdard.

But then, I'm a guy who picked the Buffalo Bills to win three of the four Super Bowls they lost, so don't take my prediction to Vegas.

Judging by the amount of sheer tension that marked last night's episode of The West Wing, I move that Aaron Sorkin be subjected to one of the following two fates: (a) chained to his desk and forced to keep writing TWW, or (b) chained to his desk and forced to write the third season of 24 (or at least join that show's more-than-competent corral of writers). I wonder if Sorkin's hasty exit from the show had anything to do with the NBC and Warner reaction when they got the bill for last night's episode, what with tons of special effects and location shooting.

That last shot, of Leo McGarry walking briskly through the corridors, and then breaking into a run as he races across the Oval Office and out onto the hallway to the residence, was absolutely chilling. (But, to resurrect my old complaint, how much better would it have been if NBC hadn't cut all those promos a few weeks back touting "The fall of the Vice President...and a kidnapping!!!". Dumb-ass NBC....)

Oh, and while I'm not as down on Mary Louise Parker as I used to be -- I've warmed to her and her character substantially -- I found it incredibly hard to believe that a woman working in the White House, as the First Lady's Chief of Staff, would dress like Erin Brockovich while on duty. That strained credibility to a pretty big extent.

Here's a specific complaint I have about Glenn Reynolds: a post in which he complains that no one protests against Saddam, but everyone protests against the United States.

This is a standard complaint by the right/warbloggers -- SDB raises it often, for instance -- but it's simply not true, judging by the amount of mail I started receiving from precisely the left-wing groups like Amnesty, International and others when I subscribed for a single year to Mother Jones. I got mailings detailing all manner of atrocities and disgusting behavior by dictators all over the world, including detailed descriptions of what the Taliban was up to before they leapt to the Head of our Anger Class by getting behind 9-11-01. People have been protesting these tyrants for years, and anyone claiming that they haven't is either ignorant or lying. In Reynolds's case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, with the full implication that maybe when he bitches about the left he should extend a bit more effort into, well, knowing just what he's complaining about.

And if it seems as if these organizations are a bit louder about their demonstrations here, well, perhaps (a) it only seems that way because these organizations and their protests simply don't receive that much coverage unless they happen to be protesting something going on here, and (b) perhaps they're under the impression that the United States, being a democratic nation, not only sanctions people demonstrating against their government but in some ways actually endorses it. Some people consider such dissent as part-and-parcel of citizenship, much to the apparent chagrin of those whose idea of citizenship involves marching lock-step behind the President, no-matter-what.

I'm a sporadic reader of comics these days; it's just too expensive anymore to follow any of them on a monthly basis. I remember fondly when new issues were sixty cents; I could scrounge about for three bucks in change, head to the bookstore, and walk out with five new comics to read. Them's was the days....

Anyway, the comics reviewers at AICN have, in their own peculiar idiom (basically involving lots of sarcasm and profanity), done a bit of traipsing down memory lane for the best X-Men stories of all time. Ah, the memories...the Mutant Massacre...the Dark Phoenix saga...when there were only three "mutant-centric" series in the Marvel lineup (Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants), but the stories would be told in multi-issue crossovers amongst all those series...what fun it was. I could have done without X-Factor, actually -- and its ham-handed resurrection of Jean Grey. But still, it was all a lot of fun.

My archenemy, before holding his pinkie to his lips and demanding one million dollars from the UN, has dug up some of the first reviews of The Empire Strikes Back. It's useful to remember that no one thought that TESB was superior to A New Hope in 1980; the consensus view of TESB's superiority didn't form until some time later -- a few years after Return of the Jedi came out, at least. This reminds us that critics, while useful, are generally little better equipped to assess a work of art than anyone else, because, like everyone else, they can't see the future and know how influential the work is likely to be.

One can complain about what one perceives to be a work's faults as much as one wants, but when it comes to deciding what's going to stand the test of time, well -- it's all a crapshoot. There is no best, there is no "canon", and artistic favor comes and goes. So there.

Apparently the losses at the Iraqi National Museum are not as bad as originally feared. If I'm reading this right, the really special stuff -- the items kept in the glass cases, for all to see -- were taken to "special secure repositories", whose locations we are now keeping secret so as to protect them. This is good news. But I'm afraid I don't take much solace in the fact that looting was apparently largely confined to the basements where "more commonplace" items were kept, because it's later admitted that most of that stuff was not cataloged or photographed.

That means that we really don't have any idea what the hell was down there.

History is replete with all manner of precious, even priceless, items sitting unnoticed in uncataloged library archives, all over the world. Just recently, some manuscript work by JRR Tolkien was found in precisely such a state. So I have to say, even if it's not as bad as originally feared, it's still pretty horrible.

And I'm not sure what to make of the fact that we now apparently know the locations of Iraq's art treasures to a much greater degree of precision than the locations of those WMDs that we invaded to find in the first place.

Charles Stross's SF-writing brother-in-arms, Ken MacLeod, has a blog. He apparently doesn't update all that frequently -- probably because he's an actual published, working writer. Thus, I hate him.

A standard fixture of urban downtowns used to be the big, multi-level department store. It still is, actually, in many of the larger cities -- Macy's, Filene's, Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh, etc. -- but in Buffalo, the downtown department store closed years ago. It used to be AM&A's (which stood for "Adam Meldrum and Anderson's"), which was then bought out by the chain Bon-Ton. Bon-Ton still exists in the region, as anchor stores in most of the malls, but the downtown Buffalo location was finally closed six or seven years ago. The building was bought incredibly cheaply by a Buffalo businessman named Richard Taylor, who tried opening a new store; but he couldn't attain profitability in Buffalo's current downtown climate when the only real shoppers are the downtown workers coming in during their lunch hours. So Taylor's closed, and the building's been dormant ever since.

Well, in the absence of anyone wanting to run a store out of that building, now there is movement to convert it into a school. This would actually be a special school, called a "charter" school, and there is a waiting list to get in. It would cater to talented and gifted students, would have a partnership with Buffalo State College, and would bring about 400 students plus the teachers and staff to downtown on a daily basis. Just about everyone admits that what downtown needs to get revitalization going again is people for more than just a few hours on weekends for special events. Just about everyone.

Everyone, that is, except a few business people who have suddenly decided that the building would be better served being demolished and replaced with a spiffy new office tower.

Just why this need suddenly exists now, when the school is trying to get set up for the 2003-2004 academic year and when the building has sat unoccupied for most of the last decade, isn't exactly clear. Just why a new office building is needed at that site, as opposed to any of downtown's many other vacant sites, isn't exactly clear. Just why these businessmen think that schoolbuses and such near the school would add to the currently non-existent downtown congestion isn't exactly clear. (Check this downtown webcam sometime to get an idea of what traffic is like during business hours in downtown Buffalo. This isn't the same street the school would be on, but it's very close, and it's what traffic is always like downtown.)

Cities that thrive do so by giving their children reasons to stay. Cities that wither and limp along, from decade to decade, do so by continually ignoring the future in favor of short-term projects that benefit a few rich people and by continually giving their children reasons to leave the nest.

Buffalo needs to decide which damn type of city it wants to be.

Kevin Drum complains about unopenable cereal boxes, which makes me wonder what's going on in Orange County. Here in Buffalo, the cereal boxes are very easy to open -- you just slide your thumb in there, in the middle, and then slowly move your thumb toward the side, thus breaking the spot of glue holding the box shut on that side. You then repeat this action, on the other side. Voila -- an open cereal box, no fuss, no muss.

But we'll exit this topic right now, before I move onto the #$&%*!!! plastic bag inside the no-fuss cereal box.

(Actually, Kevin's framing of the question reminds me of all those "If we can put a man on the moon..." complaints, which connected with the "sealed food" issue in the first place reminds me of an excerpt from MAD Magazine's parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

BOWMAN: What's for dinner tonight?

POOLE: There's a glass of steak, a glass of corn, a glass of potatoes, and a glass of bread with butter.

BOWMAN: Anything to drink?

POOLE: Yeah -- a piece of coffee.

Ah, to be ten again and reading MAD Magazine....)

Time for a few random notes....

:: My ISP had some trouble with the servers this morning, which is why the template was buggered for a bit. For once, this wasn't because I forgot to pay them. Things appear to be back to normal, though.

:: My RSS feed is now up and running. And despite the fact that I now have a functional RSS feed, I'm still a little bit fuzzy on just what an RSS feed is supposed to do. My understanding is that it's useful to people who use something called an "aggregator", which turns out to not be a device used to clean out clogged bathtub drains, as I had previously believed.

:: According to one search engine, Byzantium's Shores is number five on this search. Purely accidental, obviously, but still -- I'd love to know just what this search subject is about -- it sounds like a cross between a special episode of Dateline and a James Patterson novel. Anyone?

:: SDB has finally returned to writing about what drew me to USS Clueless in the first place: the logical genesis and ramifications of atheism.

OK, I tried adding BlogMatrix's RSS feed to Byzantium's Shores yesterday, and the thing still isn't working. Can anyone else who's using this service speculate as to why it's not working? Sean, maybe?

I'm all for the onward march of technology, but...well, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason."

Is there any stupid thought about the left that Glenn Reynolds will leave unsaid? (It's his very last line.)

The Cigarette-Smoking-Man to my Agent Mulder is annoyed at the lack of respect in the entertainment media these days for withholding spoilers. While I'm generally not obsessive about staying "spoiler-free" -- I don't actively seek out spoilers for movies, books and TV shows, but I don't automatically shy away from them, either -- he's definitely got a point. People seem to think nothing of dropping the big news in articles, such as the TIME article about the upcoming Matrix sequel that my CSM cites. And it goes a lot farther than that.

:: TV promos advertise when shows have surprise endings, completely ignoring the fact that much of the impact of a surprise ending stems not just from the surprise, but by our discovery that there's a surprise in the first place. "Don't miss the last five minutes" is always a disclaimer on NBC, as if anyone's going to watch fifty minutes of an hour-long show and then say, "Oh well, we've seen enough. Let's check ESPN."

:: When Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was still a month away from release, the soundtrack CD was issued. So Star Wars fans went out to buy the new CD, and when they glanced at the track listing, they find titles such as "Qui Gon's Noble End" and "Qui Gon's Funeral". Annoyance galore.

:: Book blurbs these days increasingly spoil a book's contents and plot points, or the book's cover art will depict a climactic event that's pretty essential.

It would be nice if we could restore at least some of the thrill of discovery to our entertainment.

I may have posted this before, but I honestly don't recall, so I'll do so again. Joseph Duemer taught a class this past semester in which one of the requirements was that the students therein write a blog. They can all be perused here.

A couple of more book-and-litrichaw notes for today:

:: A writer named James Frey is apparently aspiring to some lofty heights, and using a lot of profanity in voicing those aspirations. I do want to read his book. (And come to think of it, has anyone else had the experience that people whose last name is "Frey" tend to be a little...off?)

:: SF writer Charles Stross, one of the "new wave" of Scottish writers bringing energetic writing to the genre, has an interesting article on his blog detailing his process of novel-writing and his suggestions for first-time novelists. Upon reflection of how I've been going about it, I've pretty much done none of what he suggests. My process basically boils down to, "Write the whole story, and then revise it and revise it and revise it until it no longer sucks." Your mileage may vary.

A long-standing bit of cultural faith is that of all the millions of people who bought copies of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, a small percentage thereof actually read it -- most simply bought it so they could have it on their shelves and feel the vibes of brilliance cascading off it. A literary status symbol, not unlike toting around a copy of David Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

(I did read Hawking's book. But I make this claim with the adjoining disclaimer that my most frequent utterance whilst doing so was "Huh?" I also read the Eggers volume, which I greatly enjoyed. But since I came away from it with my heart most certainly not broken, I think I missed something there, too.)

There are many reasons why we read the books we do, and there are times when we select our books as status -- what we read reflects on who we are. Richard Bach once wrote, "If I want to understand someone quickly, I look at his bookshelf." This is also true of presidential candidates, who are always selecting those books that make them look either reflective, statesmanlike, or deeply faithful. Of course, there's nothing wrong with this per se -- especially if they're actually reading these books and not just dropping titles. But still, I'd love to hear a candidate say something like, "Well, I'm reading Lord of the Rings for the sixth time. And there's a new cookbook out by Alton Brown that's a hoot. I recently finished the new Tom Clancy, and I think I'm going to stop buying him in hardcover -- he's just too bloated. And say, when exactly does the new Harry Potter come out?"

In film music geek news, composer Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Contact, Forrest Gump) has been released from his duties for the upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean. This is, of course, a development of staggering bogusity. SIlvestri is a gifted composer of accessible, and yet distinctive, film music and I was really looking forward to hearing the results of his encounter with the "Big Swashbuckler" genre. Now, instead we'll get another bland, cookie-cutter score from Hans Zimmer's Media Ventures factory. So, yes, whoever is responsible for this decision should be made to walk the plank. Pronto. Geek mode "off".

(And it's my blog, so if I want to make up words like "bogusity", I will do just that. Harumph. Where the hell is my coffee?!)

Hey, a victory for the good guys! Kevin Drum has eclipsed Little Green Footballs on the Ecosystem. Go team!!

(But I'm still a "Crawly Amphibian". Must....get....links....)

I watched the last fifteen minutes or so of Alias's season finale last night. It was what I call a "Type II Cliffhanger". This is a cliffhanger where the show ends just after a huge revelation is unveiled about the plot or characters, and then we're left wondering (a) if it's true and (b) if so, what are the implications thereof? The classic Type II Cliffhanger, of course, occurs in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, when we're left wondering, "Jeez, is Darth Vader really Luke's father?"

TESB isn't exclusively a Type II Cliffhanger, though; it's actually a blend of Type II, Type III, and the more familiar Type I. Type I is simply when you leave your characters in serious jeopardy for their lives, and that's where the word "cliffhanger" comes from in the first place. In TESB this is the freezing of Han Solo. Other notable examples are the assassination attempt that closed out the first season of The West Wing, and the X-Files episode "Anasazi", in which we fade out with Mulder trapped in a buried and burning railroad car.

One of the most famous cliffhangers of all time, though, is the shooting of J.R. Ewing on Dallas. You might initially think this is a Type I cliffhanger, but it's not -- it's Type III. J.R.'s survival wasn't much in doubt (the character was by far the most popular on the show, which was then entering the height of its popularity). So what's Type III? That's when you either set up a mystery to be cleared up next year (or next movie), or simply leave the story unfinished. J.R.'s shooting, then, is actually known better by its mystery: "Who shot J.R.?" Likewise, TESB invokes Type III in a couple of ways -- it leaves the Rebels on the verge of utter defeat, it leaves us wondering if Luke will ever become a Jedi, we wonder who "the other hope" that Yoda had mentioned earlier is, et cetera. This is all in addition to Vader's revelation (Type II) and Han's unresolved fate (Type I).

Which brings me to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I found it funny, when the film came out, how many reviewers complained about the film's lack of an ending. But Peter Jackson could have done even worse: he could have ended it the way the book ends. The film is Type III all the way: the final war against Mordor is being set up, and Gollum is scheming to lead Frodo and Sam into certain doom. But while most of the Type III stuff still applies in the book, when you reach the last page Gollum has already led the two Hobbits into certain doom. The book literally ends with the gates slamming shut with Sam on the outside, and the final sentence is this: "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy." Classic Type I, and I can imagine the howls of protest that would have erupted in theaters nationwide if Jackson had brought us to that point and then rolled the credits.

I suppose there could be a Type IV cliffhanger. This is the "accidental" cliffhanger, which exists for shows whose futures aren't certain at the time of writing, so that the writers have to leave things open enough for subsequent plotlines if they're renewed but settled enough for closure if they're not. This is what happened to Ed this year, what with the "at last" admission of love between Ed and Carol Vescey. It also happened on the second-to-last season of Magnum, PI; a surreal episode involving Magnum's death was made and televised, but then the show was suddenly renewed, so some backtracking was in order.

And that, friends, is more than you ever wanted to know.

One of my favorite bits from the great old TV series Cheers is when Sam is planning to go out with all the regulars at the bar to watch The Magnificent Seven, but he excludes Diane. She lays a guilt trip on him, and he decides to bag the watching of the movie because he's going to feel guilty. So everyone else decides not to bother, as well. They're all sitting around the bar, looking depressed...when Carla sings the first couple of bars of the famous theme music to the movie. Norm joins in, then the rest of them, until they're bellowing Elmer Bernstein's most famous melody while they're grabbing their coats and running out of the bar to go watch the movie after all.

I'm bringing this up, of course, because I finally watched The Magnificent Seven for the first time this weekend.

As seems to be the case with just about every classic Western I ever watch, I enjoyed it but didn't love it as much as many others do. This is probably because the basic plot of the film, which is already cribbed from The Seven Samurai (another film I haven't seen), seems familiar to me by now, and because I've never been enamored of Westerns to begin with. I loved the first third of the film, when the "seven" are coming together -- especially the quiet confidence of Yul Brynner's character. Once they get to the little village they're trying to protect, though, I thought the film slowed down a lot, and the climax didn't really seem to build so much as arrive.

Still, it was a fun movie. My favorite line, of course, is when one of the seven picks off a distant bad guy who's making his escape. The guy standing next to him -- the Western obligatory young guy who's not as good with the gun as he thinks -- says, "That's the best shot I've ever seen", and the shooter snaps back, "One of the worst. I was aiming for the horse."

A possible downside of my doing BlogRolling is that I check in after a few hours, see only a handful of "New Posts" indicators, and now I'm thinking, "You bunch of lazy dogs! Start blogging!!" Of course, then I have to remind myself that few, if any, of the people on my blogroll are unemployed freelancers.

A careful examination of my sidebar will reveal not only the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body (hidden in a secret code) but some other changes as well. On two of these I followed Sean's lead, and on the other (blogrolling) we apparently had the same thought at the same time. Weird. Or not. You decide....

:: I'm giving BlogRolling a try. This service makes maintaining my blogroll neat and painless, and also puts a little marker (this one: (^) ) beside any blogs containing new posts in the last twelve hours. I've also decided to list my blogroll alphabetically, instead of the pseudo-category scheme that I was using that, as it was not indicated anywhere actually in the blogroll, likely made little sense to anyone but me. (Basically, I had liberal bloggers together, right-wingers together, SF-community members and writers together, my Collaboratory cohorts together, and my arch-enemy on top. Now, it's just a boring old egalitarian alphabetical scheme.)

:: I signed up for an RSS feed; that's in one of the buttons toward the end of the sidebar. As of this writing it's not yet functional, but I think I'm waiting for some kind of completion to their registration or something. Either that or I just bollixed the whole thing to begin with.

:: And I added a "GeoURL" link. This service allows you to find out which bloggers are closest to your actual, physical location. I'm not sure if this is actually useful, but hey, it looked nifty.

(BTW, that Jimmy Hoffa thing was a joke. I have no idea where his body is.)

There's nothing like weird sports lore: did you know that in baseball, you can be the winning pitcher without pitching to a batter?

And Kevin Drum is wondering if any sport has a greater ratio of build-up to actual event than the Kentucky Derby. I'm not sure, unless one counts a figure skater's practice for the Olympics -- four years for about six minutes of skating. But then, there are events in between such as the annual World Championships. (Actually, it's Chad Orzel who's wondering this, but I read about it on Kevin's blog.)

EDIT: I dug up the box score from the game where the pitcher won a game without facing a batter. The short version of the story is that he came into the game with two outs, executed a pickoff maneuver which ended up catching a baserunner in a rundown for the third out, and then left the game. His team then scored the go-ahead runs in the next frame, giving him the win. Looking at his line, I see a goose-egg dutifully entered under his pitch count.

Oh, and I fixed the link to Mike's article. I used the wrong permalink.

Am I slowly going insane, or are television seasons becoming shorter by a day or two each year? I seem to recall season finales once taking place in late May, due to May sweeps, but now it's gotten to the point where every show that I watch will have aired its season finale by May 15th, not even halfway through the month. And some of the shows that I watch -- Ed, Scrubs -- had their finales last month. Of course, in the case of Ed it might well have been the series's finale. But still, I'd love to get back to the days when a TV season for a mainstream show involved twenty-four or twenty-five episodes, as opposed to the twenty-two that we get now. (24 is the notable exception, for obvious reasons.) I know it's not going to happen, because the actors want time to do bad movies and such, but this business of watching three or four new episodes, followed by a two month period in which there might be two new episodes until the next sweeps period, is just grating.

And while I'm griping about TV, it would be cool if ABC could tap into a whole new source of movies, so as to avoid showing Armageddon every two months. And unless my eyes deceived me, they've now shown Gladiator twice in the last six months. Ah well....

My most recent review for Green Man Review is up. It's for an album called Some Company by pianist/singer Skott Freedman.

I wrote a while back on the role of the critic, and my disbelief in "objectivity" whenever a critic writes a review. Specifically, I've always found tiresome the people who profess to simply being "objective" whenever they write a negative review. I used to get into lengthy debates with people on Usenet on this topic, people who genuinely thought that they were the arbiters of true greatness in art.

So I'm happy to see today that Roger Ebert agrees with me:

Subjectivity is the only possible approach to reviewing. What is a review but an opinion? Those who call for you to be objective are revealing that they have not given the matter a moment's serious thought. Most times, those calling for objectivity are essentially saying they wish you had written a review that reflected their subjective opinion.

To paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, once again Mr. Ebert gets it exactly right.

Everyone likes to make fun of old drivers, and I am no exception. Two recent observations:

:: When I am out for my daily walk and I'm on a street that has no sidewalk, old drivers move out less than just about any other group of drivers I can think of. Even pickup-drivin' rednecks with three rifles in the gun rack will move over for pedestrians and cyclists more than old people. And if I'm walking on a Sunday morning, and the old drivers happen to be on their way to church, I sometimes swear that they're actually moving in the opposite direction just to show their displeasure at me doing anything other than sitting in a pew on that particular morning.

:: Old drivers are known to be slow drivers. It's not uncommon to be speeding along some highway where the legal limit is 55 and encountering some fogey, usually in a white car (formerly an Oldsmobile, but since they're not making those anymore the make of choice will change), and have to hit the brakes so as to avoid rear-ending this person driving between 36 and 42 mph. There is, though, one place where "Old driver equals slow driver" does not apply: parking lots. For some reason, old people turn into Leadfoot Larry or Agnes the Accelerator as soon as they're in a parking lot. I can be backing out, slowly as can be, looking both ways at least four times, and yet as soon as the back end of my car extends out into the aisle more than four feet, LOOK OUT HERE COMES GRANNY!!

Oy.

(Yes, I know, this post is a bit snarky and age-ist. I'm genuinely sorry. But I've had encounters of both varieties in the last twenty-four hours, and I'm a bit annoyed at both. That, and the caffeine from my morning coffee is starting to kick in now.)

Sometimes in blogging you just have to go with the most obvious quip available:

"I'm shocked! -- shocked! -- to find that gambling is going on here!"

Ah well...I do have to admit a certain amount of glee in seeing the latest entry in the Right Wing Hypocrite Parade, and Bennett's a big one. This is the guy who has made a cottage industry out of preaching and generally being smug; the sheer tonnage of words he's spilled on the subject of how he thinks people Democrats should live would, to use an Aaron Sorkin analogy, stop a team of oxen in its tracks. But as per usual, these folks seem to think that the Sword of Morality only has one edge -- the left one.

(And for defenders of Bennett, I'd like to ask a question: positing the old canard that "Actions speak louder than words", I'm wondering if Bennett's charitable contributions to social welfare organizations over the years -- you know, the "thousand points of light" that are a priori preferable and better than similar public programs -- total significantly more than his gambling losses.)

Time for Lazy Blogger's Space-Taking Trick #7: Nifty pictures.

These are taken from a set of astronomy slide shows I found on MSN a while back. Enjoy.



Cassiopeia A, the remnant of an exploded star.



Jupiter and its four largest moons, sometimes collectively called "the Galilean Moons". From top: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.



The Whirlpool Galaxy.

I noticed today, while watching Toy Story with the kid, that one of the film's screenwriters is Joss Whedon, the guy behind Buffy and Angel. I have no way of knowing for sure, but somehow I'm suspecting that Whedon's contribution had a lot to do with the film's entire "Sid and the mutant toys" subplot.

I finally got around to relisting my books for sale on Ebay, so those links actually link real auctions and not the dead ones that I've been too lazy preoccupied to take care of lately. I'm also hoping to put a few more books up for sale in the next few days.

In terms of traffic, the just-concluded April was the best month yet for Byzantium's Shores. This is almost entirely due to my April Fool's Day post of "Even More Turgid Steven Den Beste", which was noticed and linked by Matthew Yglesias. If my traffic pattern holds, I can expect to fall a bit in May and then rise again in June. (However, my April spike was so large that it might take a while to really rise up to that level again.)

There have been a couple of essays appearing in Blogistan the last few days about weblog promotion (Truth Laid Bear and Volokh, mainly). While I check my stats several times a day (yeah, that sounds nerdy, but it takes all of six seconds to do so; I spend more time than that each day just standing with the refridgerator door open trying to remember why the hell I went to the kitchen in the first place), I've generally shied away from "direct promotion" of what I do here. I've never sent any e-mails directly asking for links, although I have done the "Hey, I wrote a post in which I comment on what you said the other day, and here's the link to that post" thing a couple of times. (It hasn't worked, but then, on the handful of times I've tried this tactic it's been with the "biggies" who probably get several dozen such messages each day.) I leave comments on other blogs, but judging by my referral history, that's a lousy way to generate traffic, and I don't leave comments in hopes of generating traffic, anyway.

So basically I operate on the "Just keep doing the best I can and hope people like it" style of promotion. I do wonder sometimes if my general subject matter doesn't have enough wider appeal, and my political content -- while more frequent these days -- still isn't my primary focus (nor, really, do I expect it to ever be, even if I've generally abandoned my former, strict "No politics here" policy). Generally I try to enhance what SDB calls the "stickiness" of Byzantium's Shores.

That said, a few random traffic-related thoughts abound....

:: I recall reading, somewhere recently, that Saturdays generally see the most traffic on the Net. If that's true, you sure can't prove it by my traffic patterns. My hits always drop like a rock on Saturdays.

:: SDB also redid his blogroll this week. Unsurprisingly, I didn't make the cut, since I'm not a Jacksonian. I'm an Arthurian. (King Arthur, not Chester Arthur.)

:: (Yes, I know that is the single worst joke I have inflicted upon my readers in all the time I've been doing this. But in Blogistan, nobody can hear you groan....)

:: Yeah, I know I said above that I never beg directly for permalinks. But you know, maybe all those people who link to William Burton could change that link to me, since (a) Burton hasn't posted anything new in almost three months and (b) alphabetically, Byzantium's Shores would fall in about the same place on those blogrolls. Come on, folks!

It's pretty obvious, by glancing at my blogroll, that my liberal instincts far outweigh my conservative ones. Sometimes I feel I should read more stuff by conservatives and libertarians; but then, I remind myself that I also think I should read more short fiction and poetry and Dostoevsky (ahem...) and Twain and Pynchon and Asimov and Dunsany and Wolfe and Wallace and Shakespeare and...you get the idea. In the long list of things I think I should read, those that I want to read get higher priority. So I pretty much confine myself to the handful of right-side thinkers I link here, and then I follow their links to other places that they recommend, pretty much on a specific citation basis.

And besides, I never know when someone with whom I disagree ninety percent of the time is going to say something I agree with one hundred and ten percent.

(This is also why it's generally good policy not to flame people when you think they're full of crap. Because when they do say something that you want desperately to applaud, to do so after telling that person how stupid they are doesn't seem...possible.)

A while back I selected Wonder Woman for my "Image of the Week". Wouldn't you know that today, by pure chance, I found an even better one.



Now, doesn't that just beat the crap out of all those black-leather clad heroines with cropped hair who are so prevalent these days? The image comes from this collection of the 25 greatest comic-book covers, which in turn links to the worst comic-book covers. (Check out Chaplains At War, for mind-boggling goofiness. Note that the guy on the right looks a lot like President Bush.)

Never before has a TV ad made me want to buy a car.

Until now.

How on earth did they get the tires to roll uphill?! That's the only part of the ad that kicks off my "Skepto-meter".

(Courtesy TBOGG, whose site had at this writing fallen victim to the BlogSpot hiccup I mention below.)

Okily-dokily, what's going on with BlogSpot now? Random BlogSpot blogs -- including, for a time, this one -- are coming up with a generic "Under Construction" page. What gives?

And it would be really nice if the people at Blogger would at least post news updates to the Blogger main page when issues like this crop up. It would, you know, make the whole thing seem less a craps-shoot.

The other day I commented on Matthew Perry's good fortune to have a side-gig to his normal work on Friends: reciting the wonderful dialog of West Wing writer-extraordinaire Aaron Sorkin.

I hope I'm not the one who jinxed it, because Sorking is leaving.

Writers leave shows, so at first glance this might not seem a total disaster; but this departure has the potential for calamity. Sorkin personally wrote the teleplays for just about every episode of the show, and it's his dialog that gives the show its distinctive feel. I'm not sure how well the new writers are going to be able to simulate Sorkin's rapid-fire wordplay, and I sort of hope they don't even try. Maybe they can take the show in a couple of new directions. I wouldn't mind seeing an episode, perhaps, from the viewpoint of one of those interns who are always in the background; or an episode focusing on the Press Corps.

I expect the show will last at least one more year, because they need to get it up to one hundred episodes to make it really marketable for syndication rights. But if NBC gets really desperate, they can turn the reins over to Dick Wolf. And then he can write in a big scandal and a storyline where President Bartlet gets impeached, thus changing the show into Law and Order: The West Wing Unit.

(That last suggestion is not meant seriously.)

A Public Service Announcement: This is why I consider a videotape containing two episodes of The Simpsons to be an essential part of any home emergency kit.

Putting it in "AD&D" terms, this guy must have a Constitution of 22. Wow.

I'm reading Eric Alterman's recent book, What Liberal Media? right now. I don't have much to say about it, except to note that it's an excellent rebuttal to the whole "The liberals control the media" meme that dominates conservative discourse. Other commentators, some of whom are on my blogroll, have said a lot more on the subject. I do note that, when a conservative complains that liberals have taken over the college campuses (a charge I don't readily accept, but it's another common one), a useful reply seems to be "Yeah, well, you guys got the media. Wanna trade?"

Oh, and Alterman's book -- as an object produced by a publisher -- is a ghastly production. I don't recall ever seeing this many typos before. Was the copy editor drunk or something?

A test of the emergency broadcast system....

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Lighthouse at Presque Isle State Park, Erie, PA.

I was noodling around looking for photos of lighthouses along the Great Lakes (the photo links to the fine site I discovered), and I found this one. I've been going to Presque Isle for years, and I never knew there was a lighthouse there, although it makes sense. Presque Isle isn't really an isle; it's a sandy peninsula that sticks out into Lake Erie and curls around, like a finger, creating a sheltered harbor for the city of Erie. It's also one of the most beautiful state parks I've ever been to, with its combination of lake views, sandy beaches, forests that give way to wetlands as you go farther out, et cetera. On the lake side, you can look out and see big ships plying the waters of Lake Erie; on the harbor side, there are usually sailboats and water-skiers and sea kayaks and whatnot. The park has great bike trails and walking paths, and it's one of the neatest places in the northeast.

An interesting thread has erupted over on MeFi about some chef in the DC area who has decided to be, shall we say, less than accomodating to diners' requests. The respondents in the thread seem to fall into two camps: those who say, "I'm the one spending money on the meal, so I should get it the way I want it", and those who reply, "Take your money someplace where your needs are more likely to be filled. You don't go to an Italian place for fried chicken." (Of course, a running joke in my family is that my father once did precisely that, and when he later complained that the chicken was lackluster, we all made fun of him....)

I tend to fall in the middle somewhere, I guess. I worked in restaurants for years, but they were chain-places, where we were generally told to bend over backwards to do what the customer wanted, within the confines of health regulations. There's a definite difference between what you can expect and demand of the line cooks at Friday's or Chili's, and what you should expect from a singular place where the menu has been specifically designed by a single chef to reflect his/her own culinary interests. But we'd still get our share of strange requests, odd complaints, and sad results of the ignorant customer. (By "ignorant", I mean, people who weren't aware of some facet of our operation or our food in general. Sometimes this was benign; other times the whole affair could have been avoided had the customer bothered to read the menu.)

I recall the customer who beckoned me over once to show me the underside of his slice of pizza, so as to demonstrate that we'd burned the crust. It was a perfect golden-brown. I couldn't understand why he considered this "burned", but as was our policy, we re-made his pizza. The second one was, in his eyes, perfect. It was also identical to the first one. Go figure.

Then there were people who would act incensed when they looked into our kitchen and saw cooks placing the toppings on the pizzas without wearing gloves. They would get horrified and disgusted; they would denounce our unsanitary conditions and promise to call the health inspector. I have no idea if they ever actually did make that call, but they would have been informed in any case that in New York State, at least, glove-wearing is not required in the preparatory stages of food that is to be completely cooked. Now, had we been handling the salad-bar condiments ungloved, or touching the cooked pizzas ungloved, that would be one thing. But that's not what we were doing. Whenever these people would complain, I would volunteer to show them our most recent health inspection report -- we kept them all on file -- but no one ever took me up on that.

In a related vein are the people who call back an hour after they've eaten at a given restaurant to claim we've given them food poisoning. Well, unless it's actually a food allergy, it takes at least four hours for food poisoning to set in, so these complaints -- one every few months or so -- never came to anything. We did have one case that was scary. A guy was traveling, ate in our restaurant, and got sick about six hours later. Seriously ill. He stopped in an emergency room, and was diagnosed with food poisoning. He called us and called our health inspector, who visited us the next day; immediately after his call we isolated the item the guy had eaten and refused to serve it to anyone else until the matter was resolved, et cetera. It later turned out, when the guy got a second opinion, that he had actually been passing a gall stone. He called us to apologize; we said we were sorry for his suffering in any case, and all was well that ended well. As for that first doctor, well -- I'm glad the guy wasn't really suffering a heart attack.

Then there were the people who didn't know some things about food. My favorite complaint here, which came up often, were the folks who thought that when you order eggs "over easy", that merely means the egg is turned in cooking. Actually, that's what "over" means. The "easy" part refers to the done-ness of the eggs, so if you're used to eggs that are pretty well-cooked and you order "over easy", you're likely to be disappointed. This wasn't typically a big deal; we'd just explain it to the customer and make him or her two more eggs.

And sometimes people don't read the menu thoroughly. The biggest culprit here was at the family restaurant I worked in. We had a number of breakfast combinations, involving various permutations of eggs, meat, home-fries, biscuits and gravy. None of the combinations, at the time I worked there, included hotcakes; but the wording in the menu promised "Buttermilk biscuits". People would see the word "buttermilk", assume they were getting hotcakes, and...you get the idea. That chain has since reworded those combos and added a couple of new ones that do include hotcakes.

But for sheer weirdness, there were people at the pizza place who didn't understand that a 14-inch pizza cut into twelve slices has just as much pizza as a 14-incher cut into eight slices. People would ask, "How many slices in a large pan pizza?" I'd say, "Twelve". "And how many in the stuffed crust?" "Well, we cut that one into eight, but they're the same diameter, so it's really the same amount altogether." At this, the customer's eyes would cloud over as they try to work through the cognitive dissonance. And for some reason, my offer to cut the stuffed crust into twelve instead of eight would only befuddle them even more.

And I won't even go into the old lady who would put salt in her coffee...or the theories we concocted about the well-dressed elderly gentleman with the thick German accent...or the parents who insist on inverting their high-chairs to put a baby-bucket in them...or the folks who would actually get offended if we attempted to seat them at a table as opposed to a booth...or the people who would show up at noon on Sunday, our busiest day, and not understand why their party of nine would have to wait a while...or the guy who actually called our 1-800 complaint line to register his displeasure that we weren't able to serve him on a night when a big thunderstorm knocked out something like three transformers, darkening two-thirds of the town and forcing us to close for the night at 7:00.

If you want to see those all kinds that are required to make a world, just work in restaurants for a while. You'll see 'em.

The year's first thunderstorm occurred this morning. Much excitement ensued, and the power stayed on. And Buffalo's typically late spring bloom is finally beginning; trees are now noticeably budding and some of them are actually becoming green. Wow....

I am no expert on poetry. I love reading poetry, but -- like short fiction -- I never think I read enough of it. And when I do read poetry, I tend to focus on the content and the imagery and what the words are saying. That's a lot of the battle, to be sure, but I've never been worth a damn as far as analyzing the mechanics of poetry. I don't know anything about "scansion", I'm not well versed in matters of rhyme scheme and meter (hey, Jason, are there any good introductory books on this stuff?), and aside from the really obvious ones -- sonnets, haiku -- I don't know anything about form in poetry. When I read Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" years ago, I thought a lot about its meditations on death and dying, and I didn't know until a couple of months ago that it follows a specific form (it's a vilanelle, apparently).

So I don't know if it's true that poetry is dead. But somehow I doubt it.

I'm not equipped to really evaluate this guy's arguments, except to note that his main claim seems to be that he can't name a single contemporary poet, so poetry has ipso facto become irrelevant. Well, I can't name a contemporary painter, and yet I doubt painting is dead; I don't know of any contemporary dancers in ballet, and yet I doubt ballet is dead; and how may people can name a contemporary classical music composer?

If you look around, I suspect you'll find that everything is dead to somebody. Poetry is dead. Classical music is dead. Film music is dead. Liberalism is dead. Conservatism is dead. Evolution is dead. History is dead. Baseball is dead. Fantasy is dead. Science fiction is dead. Blogging is dead. Good burgers are dead.

About the only thing that isn't dead these days is Elvis.

Well, it's official: SDB has become a conservative. I know this comes as no great surprise, really, but I've expected more of him than just cranky "They're taking over our campuses and indoctrinating our young" posts. I don't so much mind him being a conservative, really, even if he refuses the label. It's that with this post he's become an ordinary one.

And as usual, his writing on science and engineering stuff is far more interesting than his conspiracy-minded political meanderings.

(WARNING: I reveal below SPOILERS for episodes of 24 and The West Wing. Tread carefully.)

Boy, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution is sure getting a workout on TV these days.

First, on 24 the other night, Vice President Prescott engineered a cabinet meeting to discuss the fitness of President Palmer to execute the duties of his office. Following the detonation of a nuclear bomb on American soil, evidence has turned up implicating "three Middle-Eastern countries" in the plot; a military operation has been drawn up and launched, but President Palmer has called it off because Our Man Jack Bauer is after evidence that the whole thing is made up. But everybody else in Palmer's administration is insisting that the attack proceed, lest they lose the element of surprise. Thus the scheme to remove Palmer from power, which at the end of this week's episode, succeeded as Prescott took the Oath of Office and Palmer was escorted to a holding room. This all invoked the part of the 25th Amendment dealing with how a disabled or incapacitated President can be removed from office.

Then, last night on The West Wing, newcomer lawyer Joe Quincy -- played by Matthew Perry -- started sniffing out some details regarding a couple of minor press leaks in the White House, and he eventually turned up evidence that it was Vice President Hoynes who was doing the leaking, in the process of carrying out an extra-marital affair with a woman who has just received a seven-figure advance for a tell-all book. Thus, Hoynes resigned the Vice Presidency, leaving President Bartlet and crew also up against the 25th Amendment, the part that deals with a vacancy in the Vice Presidency. Bartlet now has to name a new Vice President, who will take office upon confirmation of both houses of Congress.

Who says you don't learn useful stuff on TV?

(Oh, and I'm glad to see Matthew Perry getting a chance to "stretch his wings" a bit on The West Wing. I've always been of the opinion that he's the most talented actor on Friends -- Jennifer Aniston being a close second -- and since he keeps getting crappy film work, maybe he'll get to demonstrate more of his range in a drama like TWW. Aaron Sorkin's writing is a different animal than what's on Friends, and even last night I couldn't detect any of the trademark "Chandlerisms" that I had feared.)

American Idol was something of a shocker last night. Trenyce ended up making her exit, which was not totally unexpected at some point soon; lately she's been ratchetting up the "Frenetic Factor" in her performances in an attempt to catch up with Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard and the quickly-ascending Kimberley Locke. (I may well have misspelled a number of names here. Oops.) Conventional wisdom, not only by the judges but by just about everyone I've seen or heard discussing the show, is that Trenyce and Josh Gracin were to exit soon, and the smart money last night was on Josh being eliminated. Yeah, he's a Marine and all, but the fact is, with each passing week he looks more like a fish flopping about on the deck of the boat after being plucked from the water. Josh's voice and performing style are geared to what he's admitted is his first love -- country music -- and he's simply at a gross disadvantage in trying to perform the pop stuff featured on American Idol. Trenyce has done pretty well lately, but Josh's performances have been shaky at best.

So, jaws across America dropped to the floor last night when Josh was voted "Safe" and Ruben was put in the bottom two, to be possibly eliminated. Ruben -- the crowd-favorite who's been favored to win the whole thing pretty much since it began. When that announcement was made, the live audience lustily booed, judges Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul nearly hit the roof in anger, and Simon Cowell literally said, "What?", thinking he'd misheard.

My take on what happened is that, for some reason, Josh has built up some good-will by taking potshots at Simon on live TV. I suspect Josh pulled in a pretty big "sympathy" vote this week, but after the voters were scolded by Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul that it's not a popularity contest but a singing competition, I expect things to get back to normal -- especially now that all the sudden-Josh voters see how close they came to eliminating Ruben, who is so far and away a better performer than Josh it's not even questionable. Josh was able to parlay some anti-Simon feelings into staying alive one more week, but I really don't think that's likely to work again. If he lashes out next week, he'll just start looking snarky.

Hey, at least I'm not watching that show with all the guys in masks or whatever.

Terminus has left Blogger and BlogSpot for greener pastures. Update your links, if you're so inclined -- he's a good lefty from Philly.