TBogg links a pretty bizarre article comparing and contrasting the Administrations of Presidents Clinton and Bush, concluding that Clinton was better because of sex. Clinton was sexy, and Bush isn't. Ummm....OK.
But then, Rachel Lucas says, no, it's the other way around: Bush is way sexier than Clinton. Ummm....OK.
The whole thing reminds me of the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally...:
(Just after discussing their differences on the film Casablanca, in which Sally insists that Ilsa actually wants to leave Rick for Victor, Harry and Sally are entering a roadside diner. Harry starts to say something, but doesn't finish the thought. Sally, though, nags it out of him just as they're entering the full diner....)
HARRY: Obviously you haven't had great sex yet. (Turns to waitress) Two please.
WAITRESS: Right over there.
SALLY: Yes I have.
HARRY: No you haven't.
SALLY: (loudly) It just so happens that I have had plenty of good sex!
(Silence, the whole restaurant looks at Sally. Sally realises what she has done, walks carefully with a tilted head towards the table.)
Maybe I'm just turning into a prude here, but this whole obsession with sex in or around the Presidency strikes me as, well, lame and stupid. If we're liberals, do we really think things were better in the 1990s because Clinton was fooling around on his wife? And if we're conservatives, do we really think -- as Rachel apparently does -- that it all got better when Bush played dress-up as a pilot and did his bit of Top Gun play-acting on the aircraft carrier? Are we really this colossally stupid?
(BTW, no person who refers to Clinton as a "sexual predator" or as an "accused rapist" -- even if one uses the "strike" tag to give it a "wink, wink" quality -- is to be taken seriously. Ever.)
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Via MeFi, I see that Gregg Easterbrook is back to writing Tuesday Morning Quarterback articles for ESPN.com. Great; I love his sportswriting. Unfortunately, Easterbrook seems to be nursing a bizarre fixation with Hillary Rodham Clinton (scroll down quite a ways; Easterbrook writes long articles and they're not divided into linkable sections).
Easterbrook is basically furious that Senator Clinton (by the way, since when are we all on a first-name basis with her?) doesn't give front-page credit to her ghostwriters, either on It Takes A Village or on Living History. Easterbrook insists that she couldn't possibly have written this entire book in the two-and-a-half years since she was elected Senator, and he likewise scoffs at the notion that famous people often don't give their ghostwriters front-page credit. He's pretty much full of crap.
When public officials write books like this, the process is not like Stephen King sitting down to write a new Dark Tower novel, nor is it like Barbara Tuchman sitting down to write a new work of academic history. I assume that, like many politicians and elected officials, Hillary Clinton kept notes and all manner of materials during her time as First Lady, if not an actual diary or set of diaries. This material, then, became the foundation of her book. But it would have to be sifted and organized, which is generally done by a team of people whose names are generally mentioned in the Foreword or Acknowledgements. In fact, Easterbrook actually names the people Senator Clinton thanks for performing just these duties (I assume), but he's annoyed that she would lie by not putting their names front-and-center on the cover.
The fact is, some people put the ghostwriters on the cover. Others do not. There does not seem to be any standard practice for this, so for Easterbrook to imply that Senator Clinton is doing something nefarious that other, more honest politicos don't do is simply misleading and wrong. He names a couple of instances where someone has given their ghostwriter front-page credit, clearly implying that this is the way it's always done and that what Senator Clinton has done is therefore a lie and a breach of trust. Easterbrook even goes so far as to suggest that this is relevant to Mrs. Clinton's Presidential timber. This is sheer nonsense. Another bone of contention for Easterbrook is the time frame involved: if Mrs. Clinton was writing this book, there's no way possible she could have done it in two years and still be Senator. Ergo, she's either a liar or a bad Senator. This argument, though, also requires assumptions regarding the process of producing a book like this that Easterbrook, who is not a dunce by any means, really should know are false. Thus, I can only conclude that Mr. Easterbrook is being a lot more dishonest than Mrs. Clinton is.
A couple of cases in point: first, there is a fascinating book called A World Transformed, which is billed on the front cover with two names only: George Bush and Brent Scowcroft. This book is taken from the personal notes and journals kept by these two men, a President of the United States and his National Security Adviser, during a pretty remarkable period in world affairs. No other names are given, but the Acknowledgements at the front of the book start right off with Bush and Scowcroft admitting that they neither researched nor wrote this book themselves. By Easterbrook's reasoning, then, the front cover makes them liars.
Bush and Scowcroft took about five years to produce their book (its copyright date is 1998; both men left office in January 1993 and I assume they didn't rush right home and start working on this project). But President Jimmy Carter, working in much the same way (providing voluminous notes and journals and other materials to co-workers for synthesis), was able to produce his Presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, in under two years. (Copyright 1982; Mr. Carter left office in January, 1981.) Mr. Carter's name is the only one on the cover. How could he possibly have produced such a memoir in under two years, all by himself? and at 622 pages, is longer than Mrs. Clinton's book? Liar! (Mr. Easterbrook helpfully informs us that "A work of that length would take an average writer perhaps four years to produce; a highly proficient writer might finish in two years, if working on nothing else." Exactly where he got these numbers is not divulged. Now, Mr. Carter's done a lot of writing since he left office, so perhaps we can call him a "highly proficient writer", for the sake of preserving Mr. Easterbrook's argument. But he'd just spent four years as President of the United States, so I can only assume that he was probably a bit out of practice as far as being a full-time-writer goes when he started work on Keeping Faith. The more likely assumption here is that Mr. Easterbrook is just making up numbers so as to make his anti-Hillary case look better.)
More cases like this abound: the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library listings show all author credits, so by Easterbrook's logic, either Ronald Reagan wrote An American Life all by himself in 1990, or he's a liar like Mrs. Clinton. And lest one object that these examples aren't comparable to Mrs. Clinton's behavior in that these books are by former office holders, well -- did George W. Bush really write A Charge to Keep all by himself in 1999, while he was (a) serving as Governor of Texas and (b) in the first stages of his campaign for President of the United States?
Gregg Easterbrook is simply too smart a man to not know that this is the way of it: sometimes ghostwriters are credited on the front cover, sometimes they are only mentioned in the Acknowledgements. I find it hard to believe that he's making an error of ignorance in this harangue. So what's the alternative? Well, what do we call a person who paints a distorted picture of the facts, so as to cast aspersions on another individual?
Mr. Easterbrook? Just what do we call such people?
Easterbrook is basically furious that Senator Clinton (by the way, since when are we all on a first-name basis with her?) doesn't give front-page credit to her ghostwriters, either on It Takes A Village or on Living History. Easterbrook insists that she couldn't possibly have written this entire book in the two-and-a-half years since she was elected Senator, and he likewise scoffs at the notion that famous people often don't give their ghostwriters front-page credit. He's pretty much full of crap.
When public officials write books like this, the process is not like Stephen King sitting down to write a new Dark Tower novel, nor is it like Barbara Tuchman sitting down to write a new work of academic history. I assume that, like many politicians and elected officials, Hillary Clinton kept notes and all manner of materials during her time as First Lady, if not an actual diary or set of diaries. This material, then, became the foundation of her book. But it would have to be sifted and organized, which is generally done by a team of people whose names are generally mentioned in the Foreword or Acknowledgements. In fact, Easterbrook actually names the people Senator Clinton thanks for performing just these duties (I assume), but he's annoyed that she would lie by not putting their names front-and-center on the cover.
The fact is, some people put the ghostwriters on the cover. Others do not. There does not seem to be any standard practice for this, so for Easterbrook to imply that Senator Clinton is doing something nefarious that other, more honest politicos don't do is simply misleading and wrong. He names a couple of instances where someone has given their ghostwriter front-page credit, clearly implying that this is the way it's always done and that what Senator Clinton has done is therefore a lie and a breach of trust. Easterbrook even goes so far as to suggest that this is relevant to Mrs. Clinton's Presidential timber. This is sheer nonsense. Another bone of contention for Easterbrook is the time frame involved: if Mrs. Clinton was writing this book, there's no way possible she could have done it in two years and still be Senator. Ergo, she's either a liar or a bad Senator. This argument, though, also requires assumptions regarding the process of producing a book like this that Easterbrook, who is not a dunce by any means, really should know are false. Thus, I can only conclude that Mr. Easterbrook is being a lot more dishonest than Mrs. Clinton is.
A couple of cases in point: first, there is a fascinating book called A World Transformed, which is billed on the front cover with two names only: George Bush and Brent Scowcroft. This book is taken from the personal notes and journals kept by these two men, a President of the United States and his National Security Adviser, during a pretty remarkable period in world affairs. No other names are given, but the Acknowledgements at the front of the book start right off with Bush and Scowcroft admitting that they neither researched nor wrote this book themselves. By Easterbrook's reasoning, then, the front cover makes them liars.
Bush and Scowcroft took about five years to produce their book (its copyright date is 1998; both men left office in January 1993 and I assume they didn't rush right home and start working on this project). But President Jimmy Carter, working in much the same way (providing voluminous notes and journals and other materials to co-workers for synthesis), was able to produce his Presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, in under two years. (Copyright 1982; Mr. Carter left office in January, 1981.) Mr. Carter's name is the only one on the cover. How could he possibly have produced such a memoir in under two years, all by himself? and at 622 pages, is longer than Mrs. Clinton's book? Liar! (Mr. Easterbrook helpfully informs us that "A work of that length would take an average writer perhaps four years to produce; a highly proficient writer might finish in two years, if working on nothing else." Exactly where he got these numbers is not divulged. Now, Mr. Carter's done a lot of writing since he left office, so perhaps we can call him a "highly proficient writer", for the sake of preserving Mr. Easterbrook's argument. But he'd just spent four years as President of the United States, so I can only assume that he was probably a bit out of practice as far as being a full-time-writer goes when he started work on Keeping Faith. The more likely assumption here is that Mr. Easterbrook is just making up numbers so as to make his anti-Hillary case look better.)
More cases like this abound: the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library listings show all author credits, so by Easterbrook's logic, either Ronald Reagan wrote An American Life all by himself in 1990, or he's a liar like Mrs. Clinton. And lest one object that these examples aren't comparable to Mrs. Clinton's behavior in that these books are by former office holders, well -- did George W. Bush really write A Charge to Keep all by himself in 1999, while he was (a) serving as Governor of Texas and (b) in the first stages of his campaign for President of the United States?
Gregg Easterbrook is simply too smart a man to not know that this is the way of it: sometimes ghostwriters are credited on the front cover, sometimes they are only mentioned in the Acknowledgements. I find it hard to believe that he's making an error of ignorance in this harangue. So what's the alternative? Well, what do we call a person who paints a distorted picture of the facts, so as to cast aspersions on another individual?
Mr. Easterbrook? Just what do we call such people?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the time of Lists, it was the time of bloggers complaining about Lists....
:: Aaron is bemused by VH1's Top 100 Songs of the Last Twenty-Five Years. (For some reason, VH1 had the entire list on the linked page, but now it's gone, and numbers 81-100 can be found somewhere by following circuitous links. I didn't look any farther for the rest of the damn thing, though. I saw it once, and that was quite enough.) I don't have anything to say, really, except to note that I can't conceive of any list other than "Songs Written By Human Beings on the Planet Earth between 1975 and 1998, Inclusive" that should include both "Another Brick In the Wall, Part II" and "MMMBop". (Just think: some music "expert", somewhere, was giving some input for this list. Thus, the words "Hey, 'MMMBop' is a really great song!" actually crossed someone's lips. Probably the same person who keeps laughing with Carrot Top instead of at him.)
:: The King of Dietary Fiber has some choice words for the folks at E!, on the occasion of their Ten Worst Sequels list. Yes, they list The Phantom Menace as number one. No, I'm not going to rant about it, because my compatriot already does. (Well, OK, just a little bit: anyone who cites TPM's opening crawl as an example of what's wrong with the film is a damn idiot, and that's that. We can't have a movie about a war that's brought on by a taxation-and-trade dispute? Well, shit, they'd better not make any more movies about the American Revolution, then.) I am flummoxed, as is my lieutenant, by the inclusion of The Color on Money. Now, this isn't my favorite movie -- I've only seen it a couple of times -- but I never thought it a bad movie by any means; actually, I recall it as being pretty good. I seem to recall Ebert complaining that the movie doesn't show the outcome of the pool-match between Newman and Cruise at the end, but as I recall, the point isn't that they're playing for it all, but that Newman is back in action. I may be wrong there, however. It's been a long time. But anyway, how can this list possibly omit the Highlander sequels (not that the first one was any good to begin with, but there it is)? Or the Superman movies (I'd include all of them, really). Oh, and not only is Speed 2: Cruise Control not as bad as everyone thinks, but Speed wasn't quite as good as everyone thinks. Both are slick action flicks, nothing more.
:: Aaron is bemused by VH1's Top 100 Songs of the Last Twenty-Five Years. (For some reason, VH1 had the entire list on the linked page, but now it's gone, and numbers 81-100 can be found somewhere by following circuitous links. I didn't look any farther for the rest of the damn thing, though. I saw it once, and that was quite enough.) I don't have anything to say, really, except to note that I can't conceive of any list other than "Songs Written By Human Beings on the Planet Earth between 1975 and 1998, Inclusive" that should include both "Another Brick In the Wall, Part II" and "MMMBop". (Just think: some music "expert", somewhere, was giving some input for this list. Thus, the words "Hey, 'MMMBop' is a really great song!" actually crossed someone's lips. Probably the same person who keeps laughing with Carrot Top instead of at him.)
:: The King of Dietary Fiber has some choice words for the folks at E!, on the occasion of their Ten Worst Sequels list. Yes, they list The Phantom Menace as number one. No, I'm not going to rant about it, because my compatriot already does. (Well, OK, just a little bit: anyone who cites TPM's opening crawl as an example of what's wrong with the film is a damn idiot, and that's that. We can't have a movie about a war that's brought on by a taxation-and-trade dispute? Well, shit, they'd better not make any more movies about the American Revolution, then.) I am flummoxed, as is my lieutenant, by the inclusion of The Color on Money. Now, this isn't my favorite movie -- I've only seen it a couple of times -- but I never thought it a bad movie by any means; actually, I recall it as being pretty good. I seem to recall Ebert complaining that the movie doesn't show the outcome of the pool-match between Newman and Cruise at the end, but as I recall, the point isn't that they're playing for it all, but that Newman is back in action. I may be wrong there, however. It's been a long time. But anyway, how can this list possibly omit the Highlander sequels (not that the first one was any good to begin with, but there it is)? Or the Superman movies (I'd include all of them, really). Oh, and not only is Speed 2: Cruise Control not as bad as everyone thinks, but Speed wasn't quite as good as everyone thinks. Both are slick action flicks, nothing more.
Interesting thing I noticed on SiteMeter lately: I have a regular reader who, when her visits are logged by SiteMeter, apparently has whatever page she had been viewing immediately prior to visiting mine listed on my SiteMeter as the referring page. So these pages didn't actually link me after all. I'm not sure why SiteMeter does this for her, and apparently for no one else (as far as I can tell, anyway), but I typically don't give it much thought. Except for this morning, because the non-linking referrer was InstaPundit. I saw that in my log, and I got all a-twitter for a minute, thinking that Insty had linked me and that I was about to receive more traffic than ever before. Alas, 'twas not to be....
(Yeah, this is a slow blogging day....)
(Yeah, this is a slow blogging day....)
Rachel's right: the statement she overheard in her class, with reference to Hillary Clinton, is indeed "asshatted". The problem, though, is that Rachel's own statement is also asshatted. And what's more, I'd probably bet money -- if I had some -- that more people would advance Rachel's claim than the other poor deluded soul's. So, if anything, I think Rachel unfortunately takes home the "asshatted" prize here. Or, putting it another way, which is more likely: that in ten years, the person uttering the original statement still believes it, or that in ten years, Rachel still believes her own statement?
Whoa....I'm on the new Blogger....whoa....(grabs desk to keep room from spinning)
Immediate impressions: I prefer looking at my log on a different browser window entirely while I'm posting, so I'll just keep doing things that way. Also, I have to assume that my archiving ability will return at some point? I'm proceeding from the assumption that my archive posts still exist on the BlogSpot servers, and that this is a bug that needs to be worked out. It's a nice-looking interface, though. I'll give it a chance for a while, since, well, I don't have much choice otherwise. (It occurred to me that I could go to MovableType and host Byzantium's Shores on my ISP's web space, where my template graphics are already stored, but I think I'd still rather wait until I can afford full-hosting at LogJamming or Hosting Matters or some such place. That, and I'd still want my own domain name, which I can't afford right now.)
Immediate impressions: I prefer looking at my log on a different browser window entirely while I'm posting, so I'll just keep doing things that way. Also, I have to assume that my archiving ability will return at some point? I'm proceeding from the assumption that my archive posts still exist on the BlogSpot servers, and that this is a bug that needs to be worked out. It's a nice-looking interface, though. I'll give it a chance for a while, since, well, I don't have much choice otherwise. (It occurred to me that I could go to MovableType and host Byzantium's Shores on my ISP's web space, where my template graphics are already stored, but I think I'd still rather wait until I can afford full-hosting at LogJamming or Hosting Matters or some such place. That, and I'd still want my own domain name, which I can't afford right now.)
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Well, that was a short stint on unemployment. I guess Greg's happy that the Big Tax Cut created a new job, just for him, eh?
(BTW, Greg, if your new job puts you in any kind of position to hire a freelance copywriter....well, you know....)
(BTW, Greg, if your new job puts you in any kind of position to hire a freelance copywriter....well, you know....)
OK, here's a question: is it really that hard to read pages that have light text on dark backgrounds, or is this just something that people believe because someone "in the know" once told them that this is the case? I've never considered light-text on a dark background hard to read, in-and-of itself -- in fact, I remember playing text-adventure games for hours on an Apple II and other ancient dinosaur-computers where there was no choice other than light text on dark background, and I didn't go blind. (I wear glasses for mild farsightedness, but that's about it.) But then, the vast majority of weblogs I read are dark-text-on-white or some other light color, so I can't say that if I had to sit for hours in front of light-text-on-dark, I wouldn't find it hard. I guess I like a contrast more than anything. So is this site, for example, hard to read?
(I'm wondering because in the midst of complaining about some stuff, Rachel Lucas specifically states that she refuses to read light-text-on-dark, which means she'll never link me, I guess. But then, she'll also never link me because I am a "liberal wanker", so it probably doesn't matter anyway.)
(I'm wondering because in the midst of complaining about some stuff, Rachel Lucas specifically states that she refuses to read light-text-on-dark, which means she'll never link me, I guess. But then, she'll also never link me because I am a "liberal wanker", so it probably doesn't matter anyway.)
Collaboratory is showing some signs of life again, after a fallow-period; and as always, fascinating things abound at Laputan Logic, with written number systems up for the usual amazing discussion. Check them out.
The number of cars parked in the lot at Borders struck me as a bit odd this morning, but I didn't give it any thought. I also didn't give much consideration to the police car sitting in front, which I chalked up to the presence next door of Krispy Kreme. But when I saw a large number of men milling about outside the store, I started to suspect that something was up. Some of these people were wearing those vests with all the pockets, that outdoors-type folks wear. Some wore shirts with the American flag printed on them. A couple of guys were dressed in nice suits, with lapel pins in the shape of rifles. And two fellows wore t-shirts with the Second Amendment printed on the back -- one of which was complete, while the other excised that troublesome first phrase in the Amendment.
Yup, strange things were afoot at Borders.
I went inside, where I was promptly greeted by one of the store's workers. I'm never greeted at Borders. Not that the folks who work there are unfriendly, but it's not Wal-Mart: they don't pay someone to stand there and greet people. Glancing back into the store, I saw a huge throng of people gathered in the area between the book and music sections, with many more men dressed in much the same manly-fashion as the fellows outside. The worker approaches me with a notepad as I'm attempting to look through the magazines, and asks, "Are you here to see Mr. LaPierre?"
It was then that I noticed the immense display stand off to the left, which was jam-packed with books whose cover depict an American eagle, next to a table laden to groaning with more copies of the same book. Unbeknownst to me, in my biweekly jaunt to Borders to see what's new, I had wandered into a Wayne LaPierre booksigning.
It was a strange thing to behold. First, I had no idea that this event was taking place, so the mere fact of seeing that many people in Borders on what should have been a slow Tuesday was off-putting in itself. But then I looked over the crowd itself. There really wasn't any one characteristic shared by all of them, except that where most of the men were dressed in some way which made their gun-views (or political views in general) well-known, the women who were there for the signing (and there were more than a few) were dressed like...well, like they'd dress if they were going to the grocery store or whatever else they do when they're not at work. I don't doubt their commitment to the Second Amendment cause, but it struck me that the women were unwilling to actually incorporate that cause into their fashion for the day.
Other than that, there were other things I noticed. A few of these folks were standing rooted in a single spot, clutching their four copies of Mr. LaPierre's book in a white-fingered grip and looking quite as if this was the only way they'd ever be caught dead purchasing books outside a Wal-Mart. But there were other folks, also with their copy in hand, walking around book-shopping like normal.
So, in some ways, the crowd attending Mr. LaPierre's booksigning conformed to what I would expect of a crowd attended such an event. But in other ways, the crowd did not conform to any such expectation. And when you think about it, that's probably the way it is with any group.
Yup, strange things were afoot at Borders.
I went inside, where I was promptly greeted by one of the store's workers. I'm never greeted at Borders. Not that the folks who work there are unfriendly, but it's not Wal-Mart: they don't pay someone to stand there and greet people. Glancing back into the store, I saw a huge throng of people gathered in the area between the book and music sections, with many more men dressed in much the same manly-fashion as the fellows outside. The worker approaches me with a notepad as I'm attempting to look through the magazines, and asks, "Are you here to see Mr. LaPierre?"
It was then that I noticed the immense display stand off to the left, which was jam-packed with books whose cover depict an American eagle, next to a table laden to groaning with more copies of the same book. Unbeknownst to me, in my biweekly jaunt to Borders to see what's new, I had wandered into a Wayne LaPierre booksigning.
It was a strange thing to behold. First, I had no idea that this event was taking place, so the mere fact of seeing that many people in Borders on what should have been a slow Tuesday was off-putting in itself. But then I looked over the crowd itself. There really wasn't any one characteristic shared by all of them, except that where most of the men were dressed in some way which made their gun-views (or political views in general) well-known, the women who were there for the signing (and there were more than a few) were dressed like...well, like they'd dress if they were going to the grocery store or whatever else they do when they're not at work. I don't doubt their commitment to the Second Amendment cause, but it struck me that the women were unwilling to actually incorporate that cause into their fashion for the day.
Other than that, there were other things I noticed. A few of these folks were standing rooted in a single spot, clutching their four copies of Mr. LaPierre's book in a white-fingered grip and looking quite as if this was the only way they'd ever be caught dead purchasing books outside a Wal-Mart. But there were other folks, also with their copy in hand, walking around book-shopping like normal.
So, in some ways, the crowd attending Mr. LaPierre's booksigning conformed to what I would expect of a crowd attended such an event. But in other ways, the crowd did not conform to any such expectation. And when you think about it, that's probably the way it is with any group.
Time for some Star Wars babbling. (As opposed to "Angry Star Wars ranting about evil whining fans")
The Nixon to my Eisenhower has some thoughts about Han Solo and his recent listing as one of the AFI's Top Heroes, at the expense of Luke Skywalker. He's got some interesting thoughts, and he's got me thinking now. (Damn him!) My thought is: We all know that Luke experiences a hero's journey. Does Han?
I say, yes, he does. In some ways, he even has a longer journey to make than Luke, considering where he starts.
When we first meet Han, he is a cynical space smuggler and pirate. He conducts himself with swagger, he shoots first and maybe asks questions later (but probably not), he generally acts before really thinking everything through, he showboats for the benefit of the ladies (well, lady, but you get the idea), et cetera. He is, as my VP notes, a "scoundrel". And even though he has, in his words, "flown from one end of this Galaxy to the other", his worldview is, if anything, even more limited than Luke's, because he only sees things in terms of their immediate importance to him. So the farmboy who's never left Tatooine has a wider, more inclusive worldview than does the space pirate who has "seen it all". This is the essential point to understanding Han Solo's heroic journey.
(This is also why George Lucas's decision to have Greedo shoot first is such a mistake: it undermines our understanding of where Han Solo is, as a character. Han's shooting of Greedo contrasts with Yoda's later admonition to Luke that a Jedi "only uses the Force for defense, never for attack".)
Han's actions in A New Hope are almost exclusively geared toward self-preservation, whether it's working to get the Falcon off the Death Star or whether it's taking a lucrative (he thinks) charter so as to earn enough money to pay off Jabba the Hutt. Even after their daring escape from the Empire's clutches, Han says to the Princess: "I'm not in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well-paid. I'm in it for the money." This comes some time after Luke has taken his first baby-steps with using the Force, when Obi Wan says, "You've taken your first step into a larger world". For all his provincial farmboy naivete, Luke has already jumped past Han Solo.
This is the purpose that Han ultimately serves in the story: to provide contrast to Luke's heroic journey. (This is one reason why people who complain that there is no Han-analogue in the prequels are missing the point: they're misunderstanding why Han is in the story to begin with. A scoundrel/rogue in the prequels would stick out like a sore thumb in the story those films are telling.) Han is constantly one step behind Luke in terms of heroic development.
Toward the end of ANH, Han begins to show signs of doubt, but he still finds it hard to commit. (A man with commitment issues! Who'd have thunk it!) But in the end, commit he does: he turns around from his own self-interest, and instead comes back to help Luke at his most crucial moment. This is the moment where Han, too, takes his first step into that larger world (figuratively speaking; he's clearly not entering "the Force"). Note his words to Luke: "You're all clear, kid, so let's blow this thing and go home." (My emphasis.) He doesn't say, "Let's blow this thing and get back to the base". He says, "Go home". He's starting to identify with the cause, in some small measure.
Of course, it takes him a while. After ANH, he delays his payment of Jabba to help the Rebels, although he never actually joins them. But as The Empire Strikes Back opens, Han has had a scare -- a bounty hunter on Ord Mandell -- and decides it's time to get back to business. He makes no commitment to return to the Rebels once he pays Jabba; his manner conveys that he really thinks he's leaving these people for good, and getting back to what he had been doing before. Of course, he gets sidetracked again: concern for Leia keeps him from lifting off and flying away to his own tasks when the Empire arrives at Hoth, and then he gets her out of there on his ship. The film doesn't establish this, but through all the problems with the Falcon's hyperdrive and the asteroids and the space slug and the mynocks and the betrayal at Bespin, presumably Han's plan is to get Leia to the Rebel rendezvous and then go take care of Jabba. He never gets there, of course. But he's getting more involved, because he's in love with Leia. (I think this is pretty clear. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have gone back into the Rebel Command Center when the whole place is falling apart. He sure didn't go in there out of concern for General Riekann.)
So, it's on to Return of the Jedi, in which Han's heroic journey becomes complete. A lot of Star Wars fans don't like how Han is handled in that film, but I disagree, because this is where Han has been headed all along. Just a few years before, it would be unthinkable to him that a handful of people would risk their lives to wrest him from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, and this shows Han that his previous life is over. Thus it passes that, once he's rescued and his eyesight returns, he doesn't just accompany the other heroes to the Rebels. He joins them, making himself part of the whole and explicitly admitting, for the first time in his life, that there is something in the Galaxy that's bigger than himself and his smuggling and debts to Hutt mobsters. Of course, Han can't totally suppress his former impulses, so he cracks wise and blunders a bit when trying to sneak up on some stormtroopers in the forest and whatnot. But he accepts a dangerous mission, sticks with it until the end, and in a touching scene gets mad at Leia and then immediately apologizes and takes her in his arms as she cries. Such behavior, such concern for others, was unthinkable to the Han Solo of ANH or the first part of TESB. (ROTJ probably overdoes the wisecracking-Han element at the expense of the more serious Han, but the serious stuff is there.)
I confess that I'm not sure why so many fans are down on Han in ROTJ. Maybe it seems a tad anticlimactic that Han basically takes three films to get to where Luke was at the end of one. I found his journey perfectly satisfying. Harrison Ford has said that he wanted Han to die in ROTJ, but I think that would have been a terrible decision, and I'm glad Lucas vetoed it. I don't have a problem with heroes dying heroic deaths (Fionavar Tapestry, eh, Michelle?), but Han…I don't think so. There was a heroic death, and it was a big one: Vader/Anakin. Anything else would have been overkill: the loss of such a beloved character as Han Solo would have detracted from the emotional focus on the conflict in Vader's soul, thus cheapening it. And quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted to see Leia's sadness at losing the man she loves at the saga's end. (Lando dying, which I still believe is apocryphal, would have also struck me as a false note.)
Han Solo is ultimately a hero because he learns that sometimes "Us" is more important than "Me". His journey isn't the central one on the original trilogy, but it's a heroic journey nonetheless.
The Nixon to my Eisenhower has some thoughts about Han Solo and his recent listing as one of the AFI's Top Heroes, at the expense of Luke Skywalker. He's got some interesting thoughts, and he's got me thinking now. (Damn him!) My thought is: We all know that Luke experiences a hero's journey. Does Han?
I say, yes, he does. In some ways, he even has a longer journey to make than Luke, considering where he starts.
When we first meet Han, he is a cynical space smuggler and pirate. He conducts himself with swagger, he shoots first and maybe asks questions later (but probably not), he generally acts before really thinking everything through, he showboats for the benefit of the ladies (well, lady, but you get the idea), et cetera. He is, as my VP notes, a "scoundrel". And even though he has, in his words, "flown from one end of this Galaxy to the other", his worldview is, if anything, even more limited than Luke's, because he only sees things in terms of their immediate importance to him. So the farmboy who's never left Tatooine has a wider, more inclusive worldview than does the space pirate who has "seen it all". This is the essential point to understanding Han Solo's heroic journey.
(This is also why George Lucas's decision to have Greedo shoot first is such a mistake: it undermines our understanding of where Han Solo is, as a character. Han's shooting of Greedo contrasts with Yoda's later admonition to Luke that a Jedi "only uses the Force for defense, never for attack".)
Han's actions in A New Hope are almost exclusively geared toward self-preservation, whether it's working to get the Falcon off the Death Star or whether it's taking a lucrative (he thinks) charter so as to earn enough money to pay off Jabba the Hutt. Even after their daring escape from the Empire's clutches, Han says to the Princess: "I'm not in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well-paid. I'm in it for the money." This comes some time after Luke has taken his first baby-steps with using the Force, when Obi Wan says, "You've taken your first step into a larger world". For all his provincial farmboy naivete, Luke has already jumped past Han Solo.
This is the purpose that Han ultimately serves in the story: to provide contrast to Luke's heroic journey. (This is one reason why people who complain that there is no Han-analogue in the prequels are missing the point: they're misunderstanding why Han is in the story to begin with. A scoundrel/rogue in the prequels would stick out like a sore thumb in the story those films are telling.) Han is constantly one step behind Luke in terms of heroic development.
Toward the end of ANH, Han begins to show signs of doubt, but he still finds it hard to commit. (A man with commitment issues! Who'd have thunk it!) But in the end, commit he does: he turns around from his own self-interest, and instead comes back to help Luke at his most crucial moment. This is the moment where Han, too, takes his first step into that larger world (figuratively speaking; he's clearly not entering "the Force"). Note his words to Luke: "You're all clear, kid, so let's blow this thing and go home." (My emphasis.) He doesn't say, "Let's blow this thing and get back to the base". He says, "Go home". He's starting to identify with the cause, in some small measure.
Of course, it takes him a while. After ANH, he delays his payment of Jabba to help the Rebels, although he never actually joins them. But as The Empire Strikes Back opens, Han has had a scare -- a bounty hunter on Ord Mandell -- and decides it's time to get back to business. He makes no commitment to return to the Rebels once he pays Jabba; his manner conveys that he really thinks he's leaving these people for good, and getting back to what he had been doing before. Of course, he gets sidetracked again: concern for Leia keeps him from lifting off and flying away to his own tasks when the Empire arrives at Hoth, and then he gets her out of there on his ship. The film doesn't establish this, but through all the problems with the Falcon's hyperdrive and the asteroids and the space slug and the mynocks and the betrayal at Bespin, presumably Han's plan is to get Leia to the Rebel rendezvous and then go take care of Jabba. He never gets there, of course. But he's getting more involved, because he's in love with Leia. (I think this is pretty clear. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have gone back into the Rebel Command Center when the whole place is falling apart. He sure didn't go in there out of concern for General Riekann.)
So, it's on to Return of the Jedi, in which Han's heroic journey becomes complete. A lot of Star Wars fans don't like how Han is handled in that film, but I disagree, because this is where Han has been headed all along. Just a few years before, it would be unthinkable to him that a handful of people would risk their lives to wrest him from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, and this shows Han that his previous life is over. Thus it passes that, once he's rescued and his eyesight returns, he doesn't just accompany the other heroes to the Rebels. He joins them, making himself part of the whole and explicitly admitting, for the first time in his life, that there is something in the Galaxy that's bigger than himself and his smuggling and debts to Hutt mobsters. Of course, Han can't totally suppress his former impulses, so he cracks wise and blunders a bit when trying to sneak up on some stormtroopers in the forest and whatnot. But he accepts a dangerous mission, sticks with it until the end, and in a touching scene gets mad at Leia and then immediately apologizes and takes her in his arms as she cries. Such behavior, such concern for others, was unthinkable to the Han Solo of ANH or the first part of TESB. (ROTJ probably overdoes the wisecracking-Han element at the expense of the more serious Han, but the serious stuff is there.)
I confess that I'm not sure why so many fans are down on Han in ROTJ. Maybe it seems a tad anticlimactic that Han basically takes three films to get to where Luke was at the end of one. I found his journey perfectly satisfying. Harrison Ford has said that he wanted Han to die in ROTJ, but I think that would have been a terrible decision, and I'm glad Lucas vetoed it. I don't have a problem with heroes dying heroic deaths (Fionavar Tapestry, eh, Michelle?), but Han…I don't think so. There was a heroic death, and it was a big one: Vader/Anakin. Anything else would have been overkill: the loss of such a beloved character as Han Solo would have detracted from the emotional focus on the conflict in Vader's soul, thus cheapening it. And quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted to see Leia's sadness at losing the man she loves at the saga's end. (Lando dying, which I still believe is apocryphal, would have also struck me as a false note.)
Han Solo is ultimately a hero because he learns that sometimes "Us" is more important than "Me". His journey isn't the central one on the original trilogy, but it's a heroic journey nonetheless.
Today marks the entrance into the market of my two latest stories. The baseball one, "One More Dying Quail", was inspired by the Gregg Easterbrook "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" football columns that I enjoy so much. Easterbrook likes to refer, every so often, to "the Football Gods", as in: "Mike Martz should not have run up the score against the Jets, because the Football Gods were watching, and that's why they lost the Super Bowl." So, I wrote a story about the actual "Baseball Gods".
And the other story, the Snow White one, has a very simple idea: just what ever happened to the Huntsman, anyway? The guy who was supposed to kill Snow White and present her heart to the Queen in that nice little box, but instead spared her life and tricked the Queen with the heart of a pig? I've never had a story pour out of me like this one did -- the first draft was done in a week, and in editing I only excised about 200 of its original 7500 words. Of course, my experience matters not a whit; it's the editors who matter. We'll see....
And the other story, the Snow White one, has a very simple idea: just what ever happened to the Huntsman, anyway? The guy who was supposed to kill Snow White and present her heart to the Queen in that nice little box, but instead spared her life and tricked the Queen with the heart of a pig? I've never had a story pour out of me like this one did -- the first draft was done in a week, and in editing I only excised about 200 of its original 7500 words. Of course, my experience matters not a whit; it's the editors who matter. We'll see....
Sean has found a few weblogs with connections to our mutual alma mater, Wartburg College in Iowa. (So named for the castle where Martin Luther holed up while on the run from Pancho Villa, where he spent his days translating Shakespeare from the original Klingon.) I'm thinking, there have got to be more Wartburg bloggers than that! Well, it's not a weblog per se, but here is a current Wartburg student who is also, apparently, a published fantasy author. This makes me think that while I was sitting around campus occasionally thinking it might be cool to write a fantasy book someday, this woman has actually done so. Consequently, she is published and here I am, ten years after graduating, still working on that first book. There's a lesson here, probably, but I'll need to drink some coffee before I can identify it properly.
(Sean notes that we weren't friends then. We weren't mortal enemies, either, lest anyone be wondering! We were both philosophy majors, and thus shared a lot of classes. I recall not understanding much of what Sean said during that period...but then, during my college years, "understanding" wasn't a particular strength of mine. "Pig-headed opinionation", though, was something I had in vast quantity. Ho hum....)
(Sean notes that we weren't friends then. We weren't mortal enemies, either, lest anyone be wondering! We were both philosophy majors, and thus shared a lot of classes. I recall not understanding much of what Sean said during that period...but then, during my college years, "understanding" wasn't a particular strength of mine. "Pig-headed opinionation", though, was something I had in vast quantity. Ho hum....)
Monday, June 09, 2003
Many wishes for Greg and a safe return, after he takes his family to see Dan Quayle in his simulated natural habitat.
PROGRAM MUSIC, part two.
I previously argued (a month ago, it turns out -- sorry for the delay in getting back to this) why I don't believe that music has any direct link with visual imagery, separate from "the power of suggestion" contained within a title or a work's general use. So, the attentive reader might wonder, if there is no necessary link between the visuals in a movie -- say, Star Wars: A New Hope and the score by John Williams -- then can it be that other music would have served to accompany the film's story?
Well, yes. To a point.
For reasons I described in the earlier essay on program music, I don't believe that a composer can actually evoke specific visual images through music alone. This is because the tools of music -- notes, chords, instrumental timbres, and all the rest of it -- are by their very nature abstract. The color green has a specific set of "real world" antecedents for us, owing to the fact that the vast majority of plants are green. So do blue, red, brown, and all the rest. An F-sharp, though, has no such real-world antecedent. We don't wander through the world noting specific instances of F-sharps, or F-sharp major chords. A goose flying overhead, returning to Canada from someplace south, may happen to sound an F-sharp as it "honks", but we don't associate the F-sharp with that bird. The same thing happens with an entire chord, and even entire scale systems.
Consider a simple example, the descending major scale, in just two instances: the Christmas carol "Joy To The World", and Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie ("Alpine Symphony"). The carol's "character" is one of festivity and religious joy, opening as it does with a grand statement of a descending major scale. The Strauss work, on the other hand, is a "program" work that purports to depict an entire day upon an Alpine peak. There's a mysterious opening of descending minor scales, which are followed by a motif that stands for the mountain itself; then, after a long crescendo, the clouds part, so to speak, as the entire orchestra bursts forth with a huge and melodic statement founded on the same descending major scale. The image in the Strauss is not one of religious joy at the coming of the King of Kings, but suggestive of a great, towering mountain revealed in all its magnificence in the first full light of dawn. One musical device -- a descending major scale -- serves to illustrate two different emotional qualities, through differences in meter, tempo, orchestration, and all the other tools at the composer's disposal.
Thus, it seems false to suggest that a descending major scale is, by itself, illustrative of anything at all. And this extends to other common musical assumptions as well, the most common being the belief that music in the major key sounds "happy" while music in the minor key sounds "sad". This is simply not the case; there are hundreds of examples of major-key music that will make you weep. So it's not up to the notes, or even the keys in which the notes fall, to convey emotion. (This stands in pretty stark contrast to what the Ancient Greeks believed, though; they insisted that specific keys, or "modes", stood for specific character traits, and that playing the wrong "modes" could actually cause a deterioration of character – the first real example of music being said to corrupt the listeners, lest anyone think that particular charge is unique to those who attack rock-and-roll.)
Music, then, takes on its emotional characteristics -- its artistic qualities -- from the composer's application of all of the various qualities at his or her disposal, which goes far beyond mere melody. Rachmaninov's famous Variations of a Theme of Paganini, for example, shows us the possibilities in just one melody, and those possibilities are legion. We hear a march, a dance, a mysterious meditation, and -- familiar to anyone who's seen the film Somewhere In Time -- a heartbreaking romance. Thus, the composer has to create a convincing work out of a plethora of different qualities in order to win us over and engage our emotions. All of those qualities, the tools in the composer's box, are related to sound and tone, but they're not synonymous with sound and tone.
What does this have to do, then, with film music? I'm getting there. Really. Sooner or later.
(Appendix: I wonder if music might have more specific emotive qualities to exceptionally gifted musicians. I'm thinking of the ones who have perfect pitch and who are very talented and notable. I seem to recall reading that D-minor was an important key to Mozart, and in the Georg Solti Memoirs I just finished, at one point Solti specifically cites A-Major as "the most brilliant of keys". This is an area that I should probably research more, but I still suspect that what I discover wouldn't affect my main thesis that music can only suggest certain emotions or relations of feeling, as opposed to specifically illustrating a particular visual element.)
I previously argued (a month ago, it turns out -- sorry for the delay in getting back to this) why I don't believe that music has any direct link with visual imagery, separate from "the power of suggestion" contained within a title or a work's general use. So, the attentive reader might wonder, if there is no necessary link between the visuals in a movie -- say, Star Wars: A New Hope and the score by John Williams -- then can it be that other music would have served to accompany the film's story?
Well, yes. To a point.
For reasons I described in the earlier essay on program music, I don't believe that a composer can actually evoke specific visual images through music alone. This is because the tools of music -- notes, chords, instrumental timbres, and all the rest of it -- are by their very nature abstract. The color green has a specific set of "real world" antecedents for us, owing to the fact that the vast majority of plants are green. So do blue, red, brown, and all the rest. An F-sharp, though, has no such real-world antecedent. We don't wander through the world noting specific instances of F-sharps, or F-sharp major chords. A goose flying overhead, returning to Canada from someplace south, may happen to sound an F-sharp as it "honks", but we don't associate the F-sharp with that bird. The same thing happens with an entire chord, and even entire scale systems.
Consider a simple example, the descending major scale, in just two instances: the Christmas carol "Joy To The World", and Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie ("Alpine Symphony"). The carol's "character" is one of festivity and religious joy, opening as it does with a grand statement of a descending major scale. The Strauss work, on the other hand, is a "program" work that purports to depict an entire day upon an Alpine peak. There's a mysterious opening of descending minor scales, which are followed by a motif that stands for the mountain itself; then, after a long crescendo, the clouds part, so to speak, as the entire orchestra bursts forth with a huge and melodic statement founded on the same descending major scale. The image in the Strauss is not one of religious joy at the coming of the King of Kings, but suggestive of a great, towering mountain revealed in all its magnificence in the first full light of dawn. One musical device -- a descending major scale -- serves to illustrate two different emotional qualities, through differences in meter, tempo, orchestration, and all the other tools at the composer's disposal.
Thus, it seems false to suggest that a descending major scale is, by itself, illustrative of anything at all. And this extends to other common musical assumptions as well, the most common being the belief that music in the major key sounds "happy" while music in the minor key sounds "sad". This is simply not the case; there are hundreds of examples of major-key music that will make you weep. So it's not up to the notes, or even the keys in which the notes fall, to convey emotion. (This stands in pretty stark contrast to what the Ancient Greeks believed, though; they insisted that specific keys, or "modes", stood for specific character traits, and that playing the wrong "modes" could actually cause a deterioration of character – the first real example of music being said to corrupt the listeners, lest anyone think that particular charge is unique to those who attack rock-and-roll.)
Music, then, takes on its emotional characteristics -- its artistic qualities -- from the composer's application of all of the various qualities at his or her disposal, which goes far beyond mere melody. Rachmaninov's famous Variations of a Theme of Paganini, for example, shows us the possibilities in just one melody, and those possibilities are legion. We hear a march, a dance, a mysterious meditation, and -- familiar to anyone who's seen the film Somewhere In Time -- a heartbreaking romance. Thus, the composer has to create a convincing work out of a plethora of different qualities in order to win us over and engage our emotions. All of those qualities, the tools in the composer's box, are related to sound and tone, but they're not synonymous with sound and tone.
What does this have to do, then, with film music? I'm getting there. Really. Sooner or later.
(Appendix: I wonder if music might have more specific emotive qualities to exceptionally gifted musicians. I'm thinking of the ones who have perfect pitch and who are very talented and notable. I seem to recall reading that D-minor was an important key to Mozart, and in the Georg Solti Memoirs I just finished, at one point Solti specifically cites A-Major as "the most brilliant of keys". This is an area that I should probably research more, but I still suspect that what I discover wouldn't affect my main thesis that music can only suggest certain emotions or relations of feeling, as opposed to specifically illustrating a particular visual element.)
Patrick Nielsen Hayden takes exception to some book reviewer's idea that the American Civil War was a "gentlemanly affair".
Somehow, I don't think that the phrase "What a gentleman!" was on the lips of the people of Georgia when Sherman came through their towns. And the Confederates got just as much blood on their hands. Even I know that much, and I'm far from knowledgable on the Civil War.
Somehow, I don't think that the phrase "What a gentleman!" was on the lips of the people of Georgia when Sherman came through their towns. And the Confederates got just as much blood on their hands. Even I know that much, and I'm far from knowledgable on the Civil War.
Short Fiction Month ends this weekend, on Saturday, I believe. I've entered a bit of a dry spell in the last few days, reading some stories that I didn't much like. As of right now, I have read 44 stories by 31 authors.
:: Maybe I'm just not reading the right Charles de Lint stories, but it seems that whenever I dip into his work, I find him sounding like...well, Neil Gaiman giving a sermon. I read his story "In the House of My Enemy", and while I enjoyed it, I also found a tone of "preachy-ness" that I always seem to find in de Lint's work. Weird. The Gaiman-esque urban weirdness is there, but so is the "moral lesson". (I'm probably doing both Gaiman and de Lint a disservice by thusly comparing them; de Lint's been around for years and Gaiman's work encompasses a lot more than urban fantasy. I just can't think of any other way to convey what I'm trying to say this morning.)
:: Last week I was at the library, and on the New Books shelf there was a collection that looked intriguing: Much Ado About Murder, which is a collection of mystery shorts inspired by or based upon Shakespeare. What's not to like about that? Well, a story called "The Serpent's Tooth" by P.C. Doherty, for one. This tale generates a murder mystery out of the Bard's own death, and...well, it reads like a cross between an episode of Matlock and the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episode of The Simpsons. This thing was ghastly. I haven't read anything else in the collection, and I'm not sure I intend to.
:: Just last night I corrected a major oversight of mine, for a guy who writes horror, among other things: I finally read "The Call of Cthulu", by H.P. Lovecraft. It's a classic, of course, and I don't have much to say about it except to note that I loved the imagination and the imagery, but the subtly racist elements of the story were a bit squirmy, and Lovecraft's prose several times threatened to boot me right out of the story.
:: Maybe I'm just not reading the right Charles de Lint stories, but it seems that whenever I dip into his work, I find him sounding like...well, Neil Gaiman giving a sermon. I read his story "In the House of My Enemy", and while I enjoyed it, I also found a tone of "preachy-ness" that I always seem to find in de Lint's work. Weird. The Gaiman-esque urban weirdness is there, but so is the "moral lesson". (I'm probably doing both Gaiman and de Lint a disservice by thusly comparing them; de Lint's been around for years and Gaiman's work encompasses a lot more than urban fantasy. I just can't think of any other way to convey what I'm trying to say this morning.)
:: Last week I was at the library, and on the New Books shelf there was a collection that looked intriguing: Much Ado About Murder, which is a collection of mystery shorts inspired by or based upon Shakespeare. What's not to like about that? Well, a story called "The Serpent's Tooth" by P.C. Doherty, for one. This tale generates a murder mystery out of the Bard's own death, and...well, it reads like a cross between an episode of Matlock and the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episode of The Simpsons. This thing was ghastly. I haven't read anything else in the collection, and I'm not sure I intend to.
:: Just last night I corrected a major oversight of mine, for a guy who writes horror, among other things: I finally read "The Call of Cthulu", by H.P. Lovecraft. It's a classic, of course, and I don't have much to say about it except to note that I loved the imagination and the imagery, but the subtly racist elements of the story were a bit squirmy, and Lovecraft's prose several times threatened to boot me right out of the story.
Sunday, June 08, 2003
Embrace the Randomness!!!
:: Is there something goofed up with SiteMeter right now? It's tracking my daily hits OK, but the "Visits This Week" counter has been stuck on the same total for several days now, which doesn't seem possible. And the graph for Hits Per Month isn't updating, either. Anyone else having problems?
:: Someone found Byzantium's Shores by searching for "Philo Beddoe and Camelot". Anyone care to tell me why anyone should expect to find those two items together? (Camelot is probably self-explanatory; Philo Beddoe is the name of Clint Eastwood's character in Every Which Way But Loose.)
:: My triumvirate of leading ladies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, should anyone care, consists of Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and Deborah Kerr.
:: There are a couple of things I'd like to try, if I'm ever pluckish enough. First, I'd like to go into a Target dressed in a red shirt and khakis, and wander around until someone either asks me a question or attempts to give me direction. Then, I'd like to go into a Wal-Mart when they're about to do that creepy cheer of theirs, and just when they finish it, shout "AFL-CIO!!!" just to see how many blue-vested managers I can send into coronary convulsions.
:: Aaron wants traffic. Well, you should start with linking other blogs and then visit those ones every day, so that they notice you in their referral logs. Then, some of them will (theoretically) link back. Other than that, I have no idea how traffic generates. It seems utterly capricious at times -- I'll write a post that I'm sure will at least generate some comments, if not get noticed by someone, but nada...and then I'll do something else on a whim, and that generates traffic. Weird. (Of course, if Aaron links other blogs, then my ego-shot of seeing a blogroll that consists of me, and only me, will disappear. Woe....)
:: The Athlon Sports NFL preview magazine is out now, which makes me happy (although it seems a little early; I don't recall seeing those mags out until July before). I usually get a couple of these magazines each year, Athlon's being a given and the other being whichever strikes my fancy. I won't do my own Football Preview post until just before the regular season kicks off, but Athlon predicts the Bills to finish third in the AFC East, and their Super Bowl prediction this year is the same as mine from last year (Eagles vs. Steelers). Oh, and on Page 30 there's an article called "Tom Brady is the Devil". (Just kidding, Sean!)
:: Some people are wimps. Today the mercury topped the 70-degree mark for the first time in, well, a while, and people already have their central air units fired up. Come on!
:: Is there something goofed up with SiteMeter right now? It's tracking my daily hits OK, but the "Visits This Week" counter has been stuck on the same total for several days now, which doesn't seem possible. And the graph for Hits Per Month isn't updating, either. Anyone else having problems?
:: Someone found Byzantium's Shores by searching for "Philo Beddoe and Camelot". Anyone care to tell me why anyone should expect to find those two items together? (Camelot is probably self-explanatory; Philo Beddoe is the name of Clint Eastwood's character in Every Which Way But Loose.)
:: My triumvirate of leading ladies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, should anyone care, consists of Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and Deborah Kerr.
:: There are a couple of things I'd like to try, if I'm ever pluckish enough. First, I'd like to go into a Target dressed in a red shirt and khakis, and wander around until someone either asks me a question or attempts to give me direction. Then, I'd like to go into a Wal-Mart when they're about to do that creepy cheer of theirs, and just when they finish it, shout "AFL-CIO!!!" just to see how many blue-vested managers I can send into coronary convulsions.
:: Aaron wants traffic. Well, you should start with linking other blogs and then visit those ones every day, so that they notice you in their referral logs. Then, some of them will (theoretically) link back. Other than that, I have no idea how traffic generates. It seems utterly capricious at times -- I'll write a post that I'm sure will at least generate some comments, if not get noticed by someone, but nada...and then I'll do something else on a whim, and that generates traffic. Weird. (Of course, if Aaron links other blogs, then my ego-shot of seeing a blogroll that consists of me, and only me, will disappear. Woe....)
:: The Athlon Sports NFL preview magazine is out now, which makes me happy (although it seems a little early; I don't recall seeing those mags out until July before). I usually get a couple of these magazines each year, Athlon's being a given and the other being whichever strikes my fancy. I won't do my own Football Preview post until just before the regular season kicks off, but Athlon predicts the Bills to finish third in the AFC East, and their Super Bowl prediction this year is the same as mine from last year (Eagles vs. Steelers). Oh, and on Page 30 there's an article called "Tom Brady is the Devil". (Just kidding, Sean!)
:: Some people are wimps. Today the mercury topped the 70-degree mark for the first time in, well, a while, and people already have their central air units fired up. Come on!
I'd like to get indignant about the item pictured and linked below, but the thing is....a couple of times in college I had people ask for recommendations from my CD collection for just this reason. (I never suggested Mozart, though. I just don't associate Mozart with any of this kind of thing, for some reason.)
I don't know if this is indicative of anything regarding the ever-shrinking American attention span and its effect on cultural events, but I just happened upon a PBS broadcast of a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra concert (Cincy's orchestra is a very fine ensemble), in which their music director, Paavo Jarvi, is conducting Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The weird thing is that between the first and second movements, the program took a break for Jarvi to give some background on the second movement (which is one of the most gorgeous of all symphonic slow movements), including even quoting the main melody in part before returning to the concert hall for the actual performance. I've never seen this done before. If it helps people focus on Tchaikovsky's music, then great, but still I wonder if this means we've reached the point where we can't expect people to follow an entire 50-minute symphony anymore. What would they do for a performance of, say, Mahler's Third?
(By the way: Cincinnati's concert hall looks absolutely magnificent. If I have any readers from that neck of the woods, can anyone attest if it's as beautiful as it looked in the few brief shots of the entire hall that were on the program?)
(By the way: Cincinnati's concert hall looks absolutely magnificent. If I have any readers from that neck of the woods, can anyone attest if it's as beautiful as it looked in the few brief shots of the entire hall that were on the program?)
Greg dares to speak ill of a Steven Spielberg movie. Luckily, he chooses The Lost World to pick on, which is fine because that movie really is bad. I still remember my shock that Spielberg had taken such a sabbatical after the triumph of Schindler's List (which has a pretty-much permanent slot on my Top Five Movies of All Time list), and what he made when he returned from that sabbatical was The Lost World. Just a terrible, terrible movie that wastes some of my favorite actors. And the Junior Gymnast whose skills aren't good enough to get her on the Gynnastics Team at school, but are sufficient to defeat a hungry velociraptor? Ugh! Ugh ugh ugh!!
(Actually, in terms of the ratio of pretention to actual delivery, I may dislike Saving Private Ryan even more than The Lost World, which nobody expected to be a great movie. But I digress.)
(Actually, in terms of the ratio of pretention to actual delivery, I may dislike Saving Private Ryan even more than The Lost World, which nobody expected to be a great movie. But I digress.)
Will Shetterly, a noted fantasy author with whom I am currently unfamiliar, is now writing reviews for GMR as well. His first review is of the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This review is spoiler-free, but Shetterly says that his reviews-to-come of later seasons will likely involve spoilers. Anyway, Buffy fans can check him out. (I wonder if Blockbuster stocks the Buffy DVDs....I wouldn't mind giving the show a try one of these days....)
Notes on the Works In Progress:
:: I finished typing the initial draft of my Snow White story yesterday, and it came in at 7700 words, the shortest rough draft I have yet produced. Weird -- maybe I'm finally learning how to tell stories with less verbosity. I'm letting that story sit for a day or two before I edit it. I usually let stories sit fallow for a week or two before editing, so as to come back to it with less of a feeling of "immediacy", which I hope translates into a heightened ability to wield the red pen. In this case, though, I'm so enamored of the tale that I want to get it out to market sooner than later. So tomorrow or Tuesday I'll probably do the editing.
:: I'm already onto the next story, which is about a homeless person who experiences a peculiar turn of luck. In fact, I wrote three pages of it over the last few days, but this morning I scrapped those pages and started over, in less meandering fashion. I've long believed that a main reason many people who could write don't is because they're scared of what happens if they produce some work and then realize it's not going anywhere. The answer is, of course, "Toss it and start over". That old stereotypical image of a writer tossing crumpled sheets of typing into the garbage is somewhat romanticized, but it's also somewhat rooted in reality. There is a lot of stopping and going back, sometimes even all the way to the beginning. But in my experience it isn't as tortured as it's usually depicted, as if the writer is trying to produce Prose of Perfection on the first try. With me, it's a vague sense that something's awry which grows until I can no longer ignore it; and then I go back and figure out, as best I can, where things went wrong and I go back to that point.
So my answer to the "What if I produce crap?" conundrum is this: You will produce crap. So get it out of your system. (But what if what's left after that act of exorcism is crap, too? Well, that's the risk we all take, isn't it?)
:: Editing the novel proceeds, although I slacked off a little bit this week. As of this writing, I am a bit less than halfway through the manuscript -- call it four-ninths of the way through -- and have excised 7,422 words. I've noticed that a lot of what I'm cutting consists of lengthy passages where I describe my heroine's responses to and impressions of, well, everything. Stuff kind of like this:
I came to the realization that, if I don't care what my heroine thinks of these things, then my readers sure as hell are unlikely to care about them. So out come those passages, except for a few key ones that I think work to better effect because I took out all the other ones.
(And some of this new attitude of mine reflects advice once given to me by Mola Ram, but I'm choosing to view that as a coincidence. Yeah, that's it....coincidence....)
:: In Stephen King's book On Writing, there is a short appendix in which King presents the first few pages of a short story rough draft he wrote, followed by his revised version of that draft, with explanations of the various edits given. The complete version of that story, "1408", appears in his recent collection, Everything's Eventual. I read it this morning. In the little introductory blurb about the story, King says that that "Every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn." Well, damned if I didn't think of just such a story within minutes of reading that. (It's a good story, too.)
:: I finished typing the initial draft of my Snow White story yesterday, and it came in at 7700 words, the shortest rough draft I have yet produced. Weird -- maybe I'm finally learning how to tell stories with less verbosity. I'm letting that story sit for a day or two before I edit it. I usually let stories sit fallow for a week or two before editing, so as to come back to it with less of a feeling of "immediacy", which I hope translates into a heightened ability to wield the red pen. In this case, though, I'm so enamored of the tale that I want to get it out to market sooner than later. So tomorrow or Tuesday I'll probably do the editing.
:: I'm already onto the next story, which is about a homeless person who experiences a peculiar turn of luck. In fact, I wrote three pages of it over the last few days, but this morning I scrapped those pages and started over, in less meandering fashion. I've long believed that a main reason many people who could write don't is because they're scared of what happens if they produce some work and then realize it's not going anywhere. The answer is, of course, "Toss it and start over". That old stereotypical image of a writer tossing crumpled sheets of typing into the garbage is somewhat romanticized, but it's also somewhat rooted in reality. There is a lot of stopping and going back, sometimes even all the way to the beginning. But in my experience it isn't as tortured as it's usually depicted, as if the writer is trying to produce Prose of Perfection on the first try. With me, it's a vague sense that something's awry which grows until I can no longer ignore it; and then I go back and figure out, as best I can, where things went wrong and I go back to that point.
So my answer to the "What if I produce crap?" conundrum is this: You will produce crap. So get it out of your system. (But what if what's left after that act of exorcism is crap, too? Well, that's the risk we all take, isn't it?)
:: Editing the novel proceeds, although I slacked off a little bit this week. As of this writing, I am a bit less than halfway through the manuscript -- call it four-ninths of the way through -- and have excised 7,422 words. I've noticed that a lot of what I'm cutting consists of lengthy passages where I describe my heroine's responses to and impressions of, well, everything. Stuff kind of like this:
Bob walked through downtown Des Moines and gazed wonderingly up at the tall buildings -- both of them -- and tried to envision the men who had built them. How had it been, to walk on those girders twenty stories up, weighted down with hammers and nails and bolts and saws and stuff? And what had they done when the realization struck them that they had gone all the way up there but forgotten their tape measure? It must have been terrible for them. And what if they had come to work after a fight with their wives? Did they ever have the temptation to jump? Bob imagined them leaping from the top of those buildings and....
I came to the realization that, if I don't care what my heroine thinks of these things, then my readers sure as hell are unlikely to care about them. So out come those passages, except for a few key ones that I think work to better effect because I took out all the other ones.
(And some of this new attitude of mine reflects advice once given to me by Mola Ram, but I'm choosing to view that as a coincidence. Yeah, that's it....coincidence....)
:: In Stephen King's book On Writing, there is a short appendix in which King presents the first few pages of a short story rough draft he wrote, followed by his revised version of that draft, with explanations of the various edits given. The complete version of that story, "1408", appears in his recent collection, Everything's Eventual. I read it this morning. In the little introductory blurb about the story, King says that that "Every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn." Well, damned if I didn't think of just such a story within minutes of reading that. (It's a good story, too.)
There are a lot of wonderful sounds of summer: the crack of a baseball bat against a ball as it connects on the sweet spot, the flare-ups of a charcoal grill as the fat from a big ole beef patty starts to melt and drip down, the chirping of the birds, et cetera.
But one of my favorites is the unmistakable rumble of ten or more Harley bikes and choppers as they come down the main drag and zoom by. I never hear that sound that I don't immediately wonder if that's not the sound of an amphibious landing.
But one of my favorites is the unmistakable rumble of ten or more Harley bikes and choppers as they come down the main drag and zoom by. I never hear that sound that I don't immediately wonder if that's not the sound of an amphibious landing.
Saturday, June 07, 2003
Time for some short stuff for Saturday….
:: Admiral! There be robins here! Yep, the eggs are hatching. Attentive readers may (or may not) recall that a few weeks ago, a robin nested in the potted ivy plant that we have hanging just outside our balcony door. As of this writing, two of her three eggs have hatched. This means that we've pretty much lost the use of our balcony until the babies leave the nest, but that's OK, I guess. It's a nice little nature-lesson for the kid. (Oh, and baby robins immediately after hatching are…well, they're ugly: a mass of pink flash the size of my thumb, covered with little stubby-things that are feathers, I guess.)
:: Sean and his wife maintain a separate weblog documenting their experiences of raising their twins, mostly with those gently humorous moments that kids seem to provide in droves. They update in spurts, and they're in the middle of just such a spurt now. Check it out, if you're into such things. (My own daughter has discovered Slurpies at 7-11, and while she is fearlessly riding her bike at speeds that turn me into The Annoying Dad [tm], she has recently developed a paralyzing fear of slides. OK….)
:: I just finished reading the memoirs of Sir Georg Solti, the late and great conductor most noted for his stewardship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and for his staggering recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Solti was a hero of mine, but I was unaware that he had written memoirs until I spotted them on the library shelves two weeks back. I remember the suddenness of his death in 1997, and parts of the book are haunting in this regard, particularly the last chapter, in which he discusses his views on some of the great works of the orchestral repertoire. Occasionally he says something like, "I haven't conducted that piece since 1965, and I plan to do so again in 1998 or 1999…." Alas, it was not to be. Solti didn't retire, ever: he was still going, full-speed ahead, when he suddenly died in his mid-80s. (I should also note that for all my love of a great deal of Solti's recordings, the one time I watched him conduct on television I found his beat utterly incomprehensible. I have no idea how the orchestra followed him. But then, the Chicago Symphony comprises some of the finest musicians in the world.)
:: Gul Macet is on the trail of some Star Wars Original Trilogy DVDs. Evil bootleggers!
:: Good TV shows get canceled, but CBS resurrects the horrible show of theirs with the talking baby. A pox, I say. A pox!
:: Shorter Steven Den Beste: Blogger sucks.
No, I'm not taking over SSDB honors. But I pretty much agree with everything he says here, and I've been hoping to switch to Movable Type with my own domain name, hosted somewhere else, for a while now. The problem is, of course, money. Blogger is free, disposable cash is tight, and my goals as a freelance writer have to take precedence now. I know, setting up elsewhere isn't that expensive: while SDB went whole-hog, with his own server and all, I've actually done some investigated and have identified a few options that would cost less than $100 yearly, I think. But $100 is a lot of postage stamps, envelopes, card stock (for reply cards), paper, and ink cartridges. At this point, I'm stuck with Blogger, I'm sad to say.
:: One more parenting note: I'm not sure yet, but I expect that problems may arise when my daughter goes to preschool in a year. Why? Because she knows this song. The song is on a Celtic album of mine that I play a lot. So, in twenty years or so when you're reading about all those subversive young 'uns in the paper, I think one of them is likely to be mine. And yet, my position is: I'm fine with it. Sigh….
:: I've been forgetting to link this all week: Scott has launched a photo-log to go along with his weblog. (By the way, does the name "Ufez Jones" mean anything? Is that a literary allusion of some sort? Just curious….)
:: We can't find the WMDs. We also can't find Digby. Hmmmmmm....where's my tinfoil hat?
:: Admiral! There be robins here! Yep, the eggs are hatching. Attentive readers may (or may not) recall that a few weeks ago, a robin nested in the potted ivy plant that we have hanging just outside our balcony door. As of this writing, two of her three eggs have hatched. This means that we've pretty much lost the use of our balcony until the babies leave the nest, but that's OK, I guess. It's a nice little nature-lesson for the kid. (Oh, and baby robins immediately after hatching are…well, they're ugly: a mass of pink flash the size of my thumb, covered with little stubby-things that are feathers, I guess.)
:: Sean and his wife maintain a separate weblog documenting their experiences of raising their twins, mostly with those gently humorous moments that kids seem to provide in droves. They update in spurts, and they're in the middle of just such a spurt now. Check it out, if you're into such things. (My own daughter has discovered Slurpies at 7-11, and while she is fearlessly riding her bike at speeds that turn me into The Annoying Dad [tm], she has recently developed a paralyzing fear of slides. OK….)
:: I just finished reading the memoirs of Sir Georg Solti, the late and great conductor most noted for his stewardship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and for his staggering recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Solti was a hero of mine, but I was unaware that he had written memoirs until I spotted them on the library shelves two weeks back. I remember the suddenness of his death in 1997, and parts of the book are haunting in this regard, particularly the last chapter, in which he discusses his views on some of the great works of the orchestral repertoire. Occasionally he says something like, "I haven't conducted that piece since 1965, and I plan to do so again in 1998 or 1999…." Alas, it was not to be. Solti didn't retire, ever: he was still going, full-speed ahead, when he suddenly died in his mid-80s. (I should also note that for all my love of a great deal of Solti's recordings, the one time I watched him conduct on television I found his beat utterly incomprehensible. I have no idea how the orchestra followed him. But then, the Chicago Symphony comprises some of the finest musicians in the world.)
:: Gul Macet is on the trail of some Star Wars Original Trilogy DVDs. Evil bootleggers!
:: Good TV shows get canceled, but CBS resurrects the horrible show of theirs with the talking baby. A pox, I say. A pox!
:: Shorter Steven Den Beste: Blogger sucks.
No, I'm not taking over SSDB honors. But I pretty much agree with everything he says here, and I've been hoping to switch to Movable Type with my own domain name, hosted somewhere else, for a while now. The problem is, of course, money. Blogger is free, disposable cash is tight, and my goals as a freelance writer have to take precedence now. I know, setting up elsewhere isn't that expensive: while SDB went whole-hog, with his own server and all, I've actually done some investigated and have identified a few options that would cost less than $100 yearly, I think. But $100 is a lot of postage stamps, envelopes, card stock (for reply cards), paper, and ink cartridges. At this point, I'm stuck with Blogger, I'm sad to say.
:: One more parenting note: I'm not sure yet, but I expect that problems may arise when my daughter goes to preschool in a year. Why? Because she knows this song. The song is on a Celtic album of mine that I play a lot. So, in twenty years or so when you're reading about all those subversive young 'uns in the paper, I think one of them is likely to be mine. And yet, my position is: I'm fine with it. Sigh….
:: I've been forgetting to link this all week: Scott has launched a photo-log to go along with his weblog. (By the way, does the name "Ufez Jones" mean anything? Is that a literary allusion of some sort? Just curious….)
:: We can't find the WMDs. We also can't find Digby. Hmmmmmm....where's my tinfoil hat?
Friday, June 06, 2003
In the "Little Things That Make A Difference Department", we have the following entry. In my efforts to launch my freelance copywriting business, I've been relying on direct mail to drum up prospects. Of course, this costs a bit of money -- postage, mailing supplies, et cetera -- but I've decided to go this route because I loathe the prospect of cold-calling. My last job involved a lot of cold-calling, and that was a business-to-business tele-sales job, selling pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical accessories (I tell you what!) to pharmacies -- none of that crap of calling Granny at home and trying to whittle down her meager sales resistance during the dinner hour in hopes that she'll authorize an eight-year subscription to Field and Stream. I never got very good at cold-calling prospects who had never spoken to me before, so I'm avoiding that like the plague in doing this.
My initial mailing consists of a sales letter, accompanied by a reply card requesting more information. The ones who actually return the card get a larger package: my brochure, business card, fee schedule, and a couple of samples. Then, I plan to call those people within a week of sending the package, because they'll at least be warmer prospects than some guy or woman who's only hearing of me for the first time in some phone call while they're doing something else. So far so good.
Except that in my first two mailings, comprising 120 or so letters, not a single reply card had come back.
I was prepared to chalk this up to a lousy sales letter and try again, except I decided to do one more mailing of the same letter-and-card with about 40 letters, but making one tiny change: I spent a little extra and put postage on the reply cards themselves. Today, three cards from that batch came in, and there may be more in the next day or two. Beyond that, and it's probably all done. Three replies out of 40 letters may not sound like much, but it's a 7.5 percent reply rate, which according to Bob Bly (the Joe Montana of FLCW's, and author of Secrets of the Freelance Writer) isn't bad at all. The key to success with direct mail is volume, which is why I'm trying to send out at least twenty letters a week. If I can get, say, 500 letters out over a few months, and get a 7.5 percent reply rate on those, that's thirty-seven responses, or warm prospects. And from that tele-sales job, I know that it's a lot easier to sell a warm prospect -- one with whom you've had some contact, and with whose needs you've made yourself somewhat aware -- than a purely cold one.
(But please don't ask why I didn't stamp the reply-cards in the first place. If I had all the answers, I'd be....well, the guy with all the answers, wouldn't I?)
My initial mailing consists of a sales letter, accompanied by a reply card requesting more information. The ones who actually return the card get a larger package: my brochure, business card, fee schedule, and a couple of samples. Then, I plan to call those people within a week of sending the package, because they'll at least be warmer prospects than some guy or woman who's only hearing of me for the first time in some phone call while they're doing something else. So far so good.
Except that in my first two mailings, comprising 120 or so letters, not a single reply card had come back.
I was prepared to chalk this up to a lousy sales letter and try again, except I decided to do one more mailing of the same letter-and-card with about 40 letters, but making one tiny change: I spent a little extra and put postage on the reply cards themselves. Today, three cards from that batch came in, and there may be more in the next day or two. Beyond that, and it's probably all done. Three replies out of 40 letters may not sound like much, but it's a 7.5 percent reply rate, which according to Bob Bly (the Joe Montana of FLCW's, and author of Secrets of the Freelance Writer) isn't bad at all. The key to success with direct mail is volume, which is why I'm trying to send out at least twenty letters a week. If I can get, say, 500 letters out over a few months, and get a 7.5 percent reply rate on those, that's thirty-seven responses, or warm prospects. And from that tele-sales job, I know that it's a lot easier to sell a warm prospect -- one with whom you've had some contact, and with whose needs you've made yourself somewhat aware -- than a purely cold one.
(But please don't ask why I didn't stamp the reply-cards in the first place. If I had all the answers, I'd be....well, the guy with all the answers, wouldn't I?)
Greg Greene is annoyed (courtesy Matthew Yglesias) that so many people still link The Agonist, who may well have committed plagiarism a few months back when he made extensive use of another source's material in his updates on the war in Iraq (during which he got a lot of traffic -- so much that he had to set up mirror sites before he was called out). I see his point, but there's little I can do about it, since I've never linked to The Agonist. Oh well....
But then, if the people who are changing their blogrolls to remove The Agonist are on the lookout for a blog to replace it with, well....look no farther than right here! Come on, folks!
(Yeah, I know it's begging. But a lot of people are still linking William Burton, and he's now going on four months without posting anything. Sigh....)
But then, if the people who are changing their blogrolls to remove The Agonist are on the lookout for a blog to replace it with, well....look no farther than right here! Come on, folks!
(Yeah, I know it's begging. But a lot of people are still linking William Burton, and he's now going on four months without posting anything. Sigh....)
I just love TV meteorologist euphemisms. The latest one to catch my ear is "Unsettled", as in, "The weather this weekend looks unsettled." Is there any line of work that has more ways of saying "We don't know what the hell is gonna happen" than meteorology? (Economics doesn't count, because I've never yet heard an economist say "I don't know what the hell is gonna happen". They always think they know. Yeah, we know they don't know. But not them.)
Here's something I've been wondering for a while: in spam e-mails, what is the purpose of that string of seemingly-random letters and numbers that sometimes follows the subject header? I'll get spam with subjects like this: "HOT BABES HERE! FUR73PPD889". What's with that stuff at the end? Is it noise generated by the spammers' automailing programs, or is it some kind of attempt to get through a spam-blocker, or what?
TBOGG takes a breather from his usual biting (and generally hilarious) political commentary to provide something of an ode to summer.
Aaron refers me to another of those Top 100 lists that are breeding like mosquitoes in the Louisiana backwaters: the Top 100 country songs.
I'm not the biggest fan of country music. So much of it leaves me totally, utterly cold. But when I find a country song or artist that I like, I really like it. I don't boast enough familiarity with country to have a lot of strong opinions on this list, but I do think that Eddie Rabbitt's "Every Which Way But Loose" should be on there. (By the way, the movie of the same name -- and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can -- are favorite guilty pleasures of mine.) I think "The Gambler" ranks ridiculously low, and "Lucille" should be there. I am also an unapologetic John Denver fan, so a lot of his songs should be there.
I must admit that "Stand By Your Man" is a "leave me cold" song; there's just something creepy about that song that makes me think of an abused wife not leaving. I know, that's not remotely the point of the song, and I have no idea how I ever even formed that association, so don't lecture me on how I'm missing the point. I know I'm missing it, but I can't help it, in this case. Oh, and the song has been irrevocably goofed in my mind by hearing Minnie Driver belting it out in a Russian accent in the James Bond movie Goldeneye. I don't think there are too many songs that can survive that treatment.
And maybe this makes me a bad American, but I just don't like "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood. The song itself is OK, I suppose, but the way it's been adopted as the Official Anthem of the Republican Party doesn't do it any favors. Sorry. (I'm pretty tired of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America", too. For some reason, my patriotic leanings are most stirred by "The Star Spangled Banner" and "America the Beautiful". I also dig Leonard Cohen's "Democracy is Coming", which is more of a protest song -- but then, protest is a big part of why America exists in the first place.)
I'm not the biggest fan of country music. So much of it leaves me totally, utterly cold. But when I find a country song or artist that I like, I really like it. I don't boast enough familiarity with country to have a lot of strong opinions on this list, but I do think that Eddie Rabbitt's "Every Which Way But Loose" should be on there. (By the way, the movie of the same name -- and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can -- are favorite guilty pleasures of mine.) I think "The Gambler" ranks ridiculously low, and "Lucille" should be there. I am also an unapologetic John Denver fan, so a lot of his songs should be there.
I must admit that "Stand By Your Man" is a "leave me cold" song; there's just something creepy about that song that makes me think of an abused wife not leaving. I know, that's not remotely the point of the song, and I have no idea how I ever even formed that association, so don't lecture me on how I'm missing the point. I know I'm missing it, but I can't help it, in this case. Oh, and the song has been irrevocably goofed in my mind by hearing Minnie Driver belting it out in a Russian accent in the James Bond movie Goldeneye. I don't think there are too many songs that can survive that treatment.
And maybe this makes me a bad American, but I just don't like "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood. The song itself is OK, I suppose, but the way it's been adopted as the Official Anthem of the Republican Party doesn't do it any favors. Sorry. (I'm pretty tired of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America", too. For some reason, my patriotic leanings are most stirred by "The Star Spangled Banner" and "America the Beautiful". I also dig Leonard Cohen's "Democracy is Coming", which is more of a protest song -- but then, protest is a big part of why America exists in the first place.)
I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and therefore I went out for my morning walk earlier than usual -- I exited the front door at 6:45 am. Within ten minutes of departure, I was passed on the street by a school bus that already had kids on it.
And I used to think that I had to get up too early to get to school....
And I used to think that I had to get up too early to get to school....
Thursday, June 05, 2003
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The "Three Graces" fountain in the Mirror Lake, Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, New York.
I like to use my Image of the Week to show off neat things in Buffalo that my readers probably don't know anything about. It's my way of showing Blogistan that Buffalo isn't just snow, chicken wings, and the Bills. But here's an example of something in Buffalo I had no idea about.
The Forest Lawn Cemetery is usually mentioned in any roster of Buffalo's architectural and historical sites (President Millard Fillmore is buried there), but I've never been there despite all that. So I spent some time today glancing through some online photo galleries of the cemetery, and there are some very striking bits of sculpture there that I need to go see sometime. A case in point is this fountain, which is actually a replica of a sculpture a Hudson River estate that was installed fairly recently (1987).
The "Three Graces" fountain in the Mirror Lake, Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, New York.
I like to use my Image of the Week to show off neat things in Buffalo that my readers probably don't know anything about. It's my way of showing Blogistan that Buffalo isn't just snow, chicken wings, and the Bills. But here's an example of something in Buffalo I had no idea about.
The Forest Lawn Cemetery is usually mentioned in any roster of Buffalo's architectural and historical sites (President Millard Fillmore is buried there), but I've never been there despite all that. So I spent some time today glancing through some online photo galleries of the cemetery, and there are some very striking bits of sculpture there that I need to go see sometime. A case in point is this fountain, which is actually a replica of a sculpture a Hudson River estate that was installed fairly recently (1987).
So, you want to read the books of Christopher Moore (who has a new one coming out any day). Well, Khan Noonian Singh has you covered.
Moore's an enormously gifted writer of books that are filled with elements of supernatural horror (elements only; these aren't scare books) and lots of dark humor. (I mean lots. If dark humor's your thing, Moore is your guy.) My personal favorite is Island of the Sequined Love Nun, whose plot is indescribable. Bloodsucking Fiends is a hilarious take on the good old "Boy meets vampire" story. Lamb is Moore's most ambitious novel, and it starts out great (I will never get over the image of Jesus as a boy making his own face appear in the Passover bread) but becomes uneven toward the end. The others are as Khan says (although I keep forgetting to actually read Lust Lizard...strange!). Oh, and Practical Demonkeeping contains within its pages the best literary insult I've ever heard: "I have seen greater intelligence in the crotch lice of harem-whores."
Turning me on to Christopher Moore is, in fact, one of a handful of reasons why I have not yet done The Old Bird in....
Moore's an enormously gifted writer of books that are filled with elements of supernatural horror (elements only; these aren't scare books) and lots of dark humor. (I mean lots. If dark humor's your thing, Moore is your guy.) My personal favorite is Island of the Sequined Love Nun, whose plot is indescribable. Bloodsucking Fiends is a hilarious take on the good old "Boy meets vampire" story. Lamb is Moore's most ambitious novel, and it starts out great (I will never get over the image of Jesus as a boy making his own face appear in the Passover bread) but becomes uneven toward the end. The others are as Khan says (although I keep forgetting to actually read Lust Lizard...strange!). Oh, and Practical Demonkeeping contains within its pages the best literary insult I've ever heard: "I have seen greater intelligence in the crotch lice of harem-whores."
Turning me on to Christopher Moore is, in fact, one of a handful of reasons why I have not yet done The Old Bird in....
Mickey has an interesting post about Peter Jackson's revisions to the Lord of the Rings story: what he has left out, what he has added (or given extra emphasis), and what he has focused on to the exclusion of other things. It's pretty interesting. I don't entirely agree with him, but I see where he's coming from.
(Spoilers for Return of the King ahead)
Mickey's a bit worried about Jackson's failure to understand the point of Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" sequence. For those who have not read the book, and are not wary of spoilers, this is a sequence that comes after just about everything else is done: the Ring has been destroyed, Aragorn has become King and married Arwen, and the Hobbits of the Fellowship have returned home. But they discover that the Shire is no longer the peaceful, idyllic place they recall. Rather, it has been taken over by some mysterious individual (who turns out to be Saruman) and forced to live very differently: the doors have locks, the trees have been uprooted, et cetera. So our intrepid Hobbits rally the Shirefolk to drive out the ruffians. In the course of all this, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is then in turn killed by some Hobbits.
This episode does exactly what Mickey says it does: it shows how the great War of the Ring has ultimately affected the Shire; it shows that truly nothing will be the same in Middle Earth, not even the Shire. It's a stark depiction that the Third Age has ended, and it's not an isolated episode: in the timelines of the book's Appendices, Tolkien identifies the Scouring of the Shire as the true end of the War of the Ring.
But the episode also does what Jackson says it does: it sticks out like a sore thumb. I had the same reaction, the first time I read it back when I was ten: you get through all of the exciting stuff, the climax of the great quest, and then there's another hundred or so pages of aftermath and other things to be taken care of. I didn't really grasp what Tolkien was getting at until I re-read LOTR in college, and even then, the Scouring isn't something I really enjoy. I suspect Tolkien actually intended this to be the feeling of that chapter; the return to the early tone of The Fellowship of the Ring clashes mightily with all the heroic language that's been the book's hallmark pretty much since "The Council of Elrond", and when that tone returns with "The Gray Havens", it's a relief. We feel the way Frodo feels: it's time to leave this world.
The problem is that Jackson is making a movie on its own, as opposed to a straight telling of Tolkien's story. I'm really not sure how he could return the Scouring and not have the film of ROTK grind to a total halt. I suspect he's making roughly the right decision here, although I do hope he can find some way to indicate that the Shire after the War of the Ring is not the same Shire before it.
I also partially agree with Mickey's take on Jackson's de-emphasis of the Hobbits. But I don't agree that Frodo is the main character. While Frodo has been "wimpified" a bit in the movie, I think he's more the main character of the movie than he is in the books, where Tolkien chooses a structure that keeps Frodo offstage for great passages of material at a time (the entirety of Books III and V, mainly). When I did a research project on LOTR in high school, I found a number of scholarly articles on the work suggesting that the main character is not Frodo but Aragorn (note that the third installment is titled Return of the King, a direct reference to Aragorn). Frodo's quest is only the centerpiece of the story for a brief portion of the whole (from the Council of Elrond to the Breaking of the Fellowship), and after that his story does equal time with the larger War of the Ring.
I'm not sure if LOTR even has a "main character", in the sense that Indiana Jones is the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Orson Scott Card once defined a "main character" as the character in a story whose actions and decisions drive every other event in the tale. So, looking at it this way, I think the main character of LOTR is actually the One Ring, itself. Tolkien even uses language thusly, repeatedly ascribing intent to the Ring, and Peter Jackson has retained this aspect with lines like Gandalf's "It wants to be found", and Galadriel's description of the Ring "betraying" Isildur. The Ring is a character, and it is the main character, in much the same way that Darth Vader is the main character of the Star Wars saga.
And then there are those Star Wars fans who…oh, wait. I didn't want to rant about that today. Whoops!
(Spoilers for Return of the King ahead)
Mickey's a bit worried about Jackson's failure to understand the point of Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" sequence. For those who have not read the book, and are not wary of spoilers, this is a sequence that comes after just about everything else is done: the Ring has been destroyed, Aragorn has become King and married Arwen, and the Hobbits of the Fellowship have returned home. But they discover that the Shire is no longer the peaceful, idyllic place they recall. Rather, it has been taken over by some mysterious individual (who turns out to be Saruman) and forced to live very differently: the doors have locks, the trees have been uprooted, et cetera. So our intrepid Hobbits rally the Shirefolk to drive out the ruffians. In the course of all this, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is then in turn killed by some Hobbits.
This episode does exactly what Mickey says it does: it shows how the great War of the Ring has ultimately affected the Shire; it shows that truly nothing will be the same in Middle Earth, not even the Shire. It's a stark depiction that the Third Age has ended, and it's not an isolated episode: in the timelines of the book's Appendices, Tolkien identifies the Scouring of the Shire as the true end of the War of the Ring.
But the episode also does what Jackson says it does: it sticks out like a sore thumb. I had the same reaction, the first time I read it back when I was ten: you get through all of the exciting stuff, the climax of the great quest, and then there's another hundred or so pages of aftermath and other things to be taken care of. I didn't really grasp what Tolkien was getting at until I re-read LOTR in college, and even then, the Scouring isn't something I really enjoy. I suspect Tolkien actually intended this to be the feeling of that chapter; the return to the early tone of The Fellowship of the Ring clashes mightily with all the heroic language that's been the book's hallmark pretty much since "The Council of Elrond", and when that tone returns with "The Gray Havens", it's a relief. We feel the way Frodo feels: it's time to leave this world.
The problem is that Jackson is making a movie on its own, as opposed to a straight telling of Tolkien's story. I'm really not sure how he could return the Scouring and not have the film of ROTK grind to a total halt. I suspect he's making roughly the right decision here, although I do hope he can find some way to indicate that the Shire after the War of the Ring is not the same Shire before it.
I also partially agree with Mickey's take on Jackson's de-emphasis of the Hobbits. But I don't agree that Frodo is the main character. While Frodo has been "wimpified" a bit in the movie, I think he's more the main character of the movie than he is in the books, where Tolkien chooses a structure that keeps Frodo offstage for great passages of material at a time (the entirety of Books III and V, mainly). When I did a research project on LOTR in high school, I found a number of scholarly articles on the work suggesting that the main character is not Frodo but Aragorn (note that the third installment is titled Return of the King, a direct reference to Aragorn). Frodo's quest is only the centerpiece of the story for a brief portion of the whole (from the Council of Elrond to the Breaking of the Fellowship), and after that his story does equal time with the larger War of the Ring.
I'm not sure if LOTR even has a "main character", in the sense that Indiana Jones is the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Orson Scott Card once defined a "main character" as the character in a story whose actions and decisions drive every other event in the tale. So, looking at it this way, I think the main character of LOTR is actually the One Ring, itself. Tolkien even uses language thusly, repeatedly ascribing intent to the Ring, and Peter Jackson has retained this aspect with lines like Gandalf's "It wants to be found", and Galadriel's description of the Ring "betraying" Isildur. The Ring is a character, and it is the main character, in much the same way that Darth Vader is the main character of the Star Wars saga.
And then there are those Star Wars fans who…oh, wait. I didn't want to rant about that today. Whoops!
One bit of political rhetoric that has become supremely annoying to me is the old canard "We can't solve the problem by throwing money at it", which implies that whatever the particular problem in question happens to be, increased spending is in no way part of any possible solution. This statement is always intended to simply shut off debate and cast the other side as wasteful spenders who just want to flush money down the toilet. What the money would actually be spent doing is not even relevant, then, because no more money can possibly solve the problem. "Throwing money at the problem" is simply rhetorical hand-waving that usually means: "I just don't want to spend any money on that problem, but since saying so directly makes me look like a meanie, I'm going to phrase it in such a way that makes you look like a dolt."
Case in point: Erie County Executive Joel Giambra has come down as opposing any addition sharing of the county sales tax with the City of Buffalo, even though Buffalo's finances are such a train wreck that services are being cut with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel (several hundred teachers were laid off last week, for starters) and a control board is being appointed by the State of New York to get Buffalo's cash flow fixed.
Sales tax in New York state is seven percent. However, years ago Erie County decided to increase revenues by adding one percent on top of that, so in Erie County sales tax is eight percent. It's a yearly thing, and it's always billed as "temporary", but the County Legislature re-approves the additional one percent every year. And the County keeps all of that extra money, to be used throughout the county. The City of Buffalo gets thirteen percent of that money. However, the City of Buffalo accounts for a third of the County's population. But when asked if Erie County would consider helping with the City of Buffalo's dire budget crunch by giving it more of the County's sales tax take, County Executive Giambra's response was: "We can't solve the problem by throwing money at it."
How wonderful to hear such rhetoric coming from a guy who originally ran for County Executive on the idea of "Regionalism", claiming that "we're all in this together"…i.e., that the City of Buffalo's economic health is essential to the overall economic health of Erie County. How thrilling to hear from one of the key people in the whole business to boil his leadership down to, "You made the mess on your own, you clean it up." (Which isn't true, but hey, there are elections to be won and stuff.)
Consider: you're a physician, working in an emergency room. A patient is wheeled in who has been in an auto accident and has lost a limb. Blood is gushing everywhere. Sure, you're not going to help this guy by throwing band-aids at him. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to stop the bleeding.
(Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde wrote about this the other day, and he gets it exactly right.)
Case in point: Erie County Executive Joel Giambra has come down as opposing any addition sharing of the county sales tax with the City of Buffalo, even though Buffalo's finances are such a train wreck that services are being cut with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel (several hundred teachers were laid off last week, for starters) and a control board is being appointed by the State of New York to get Buffalo's cash flow fixed.
Sales tax in New York state is seven percent. However, years ago Erie County decided to increase revenues by adding one percent on top of that, so in Erie County sales tax is eight percent. It's a yearly thing, and it's always billed as "temporary", but the County Legislature re-approves the additional one percent every year. And the County keeps all of that extra money, to be used throughout the county. The City of Buffalo gets thirteen percent of that money. However, the City of Buffalo accounts for a third of the County's population. But when asked if Erie County would consider helping with the City of Buffalo's dire budget crunch by giving it more of the County's sales tax take, County Executive Giambra's response was: "We can't solve the problem by throwing money at it."
How wonderful to hear such rhetoric coming from a guy who originally ran for County Executive on the idea of "Regionalism", claiming that "we're all in this together"…i.e., that the City of Buffalo's economic health is essential to the overall economic health of Erie County. How thrilling to hear from one of the key people in the whole business to boil his leadership down to, "You made the mess on your own, you clean it up." (Which isn't true, but hey, there are elections to be won and stuff.)
Consider: you're a physician, working in an emergency room. A patient is wheeled in who has been in an auto accident and has lost a limb. Blood is gushing everywhere. Sure, you're not going to help this guy by throwing band-aids at him. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to stop the bleeding.
(Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde wrote about this the other day, and he gets it exactly right.)
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Hey, Aaron! Read this, and tell me if you're not thinking of our old fictional friend from college, in whose name we acquired a Discover card....
(OK, the story is this: once, Aaron and I took one of those ubiquitous Discover Card applications that proliferate on college campuses like rabbits, and filled it out with a fake name. [OK, we used that wonderful juvenile crack-up name, "Phil McCracken".] Under "Gross Income", we put something like, "Yes, it is." Under "Sex", we put something like "Never between meals" or some such, all the way down the line. For some reason, though, we used Aaron's actual mailbox address for the thing. Then we sealed it, dropped it in the mail, and forgot about it. [I don't recall if we were drunk at the time.]
Yep, you saw it coming: a few weeks later, a card arrives in the mail for Phil McCracken. They issued the card. And what's more, we had a female friend call Discover and claim to be Phil's wife, requesting an increase in the credit limit.
Since then, I've always had the suspicion, lingering in the back of my mind, that our entire economic system is in fact constructed upon a finely-tuned foundation of bullshit and nonsense.)
(OK, the story is this: once, Aaron and I took one of those ubiquitous Discover Card applications that proliferate on college campuses like rabbits, and filled it out with a fake name. [OK, we used that wonderful juvenile crack-up name, "Phil McCracken".] Under "Gross Income", we put something like, "Yes, it is." Under "Sex", we put something like "Never between meals" or some such, all the way down the line. For some reason, though, we used Aaron's actual mailbox address for the thing. Then we sealed it, dropped it in the mail, and forgot about it. [I don't recall if we were drunk at the time.]
Yep, you saw it coming: a few weeks later, a card arrives in the mail for Phil McCracken. They issued the card. And what's more, we had a female friend call Discover and claim to be Phil's wife, requesting an increase in the credit limit.
Since then, I've always had the suspicion, lingering in the back of my mind, that our entire economic system is in fact constructed upon a finely-tuned foundation of bullshit and nonsense.)
Annoying observation: don't you hate it when you pluck off that annoying little stub that sometimes forms at the edge of your fingernail (I guess it's called a "cuticle" or something like that)? And you only pull off just a tiny bit, the part that shows, and it doesn't hurt at all, so you go onto the next thing...and five minutes later you glance down at your now-bloody thumb?
I sometimes wish the human body was equipped with that female voice that cars have now: "Your door is ajar....your lights are on....your thumb is bleeding...."
I sometimes wish the human body was equipped with that female voice that cars have now: "Your door is ajar....your lights are on....your thumb is bleeding...."
Someone's a bit proud of himself, eh? (Actually, he should be. I'm sure my head would erupt into a billowing ball of smoke and fire within six days of starting law school.)
By the way, lawyers are now being educated on line. Interesting....
By the way, lawyers are now being educated on line. Interesting....
Last night, CBS aired the latest American Film Institute "100 Years" special. This year's focus was on heroes and villains, with the top fifty of each named. The show alternated between bad guy and good guy, finally winding down to the Number One of each. The whole list can be found here (It's a .pdf thingie), but for those wanting to cut to the chase, here are the top results:
Number One Villain: Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon)
Number One Hero: Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Those are pretty good choices. I have to admit that when I saw Darth Vader named the Number Three villain, I was wondering, "Who on earth are two villains badder than Darth Vader?" Of course, my personal view is "Nobody", but I guess I can grumblingly accept that Vader at least made the Top Three. (Number Two was Norman Bates.)
As for Atticus Finch, his selection as Number One hero struck me as both surprising and obvious, once I realized it. After Rick Blaine of Casablanca was named Number Four, I had a very hard time figuring who was more heroic than him. But Atticus makes perfect sense…and I'm reminded now that not only has it been a very long time since I saw To Kill a Mockingbird, it's been even longer since I read the book. (This book was assigned reading by my tenth grade English teacher. The other book I recall her assigning was Ordinary People. Well, one out of two ain't bad.)
Here are some random thoughts and inevitable complaints about omissions from the show.
:: I guess I should go ahead and infuriate my doppelganger right away: I hated The Usual Suspects. I thought it took interesting characters in an interesting situation and wasted them, choosing instead to focus on a lame mystery with a trick ending that I saw coming a mile away. Of the characters in the film, I thought Verbal Kint was the least interesting. There is no way he belongs on this list. There, I said it. (Of course, having noted that, I should also point out that years ago my doppelganger served me with a masterful analysis of the film, which is one of his favorites. I used to cite that exegesis as a reason why he should start blogging. And yet, he has yet to reconstruct that analysis and post it….)
:: Han Solo made the cut. Luke Skywalker didn't. I found this strange…the original Star Wars trilogy is constructed around Luke Skywalker's "hero's journey", in all its Joseph Campbellian glory. Han Solo has a parallel hero's journey (the "man who learns better"), and Han has taken root, I think, as the original trilogy's most memorable hero-character. This fact often crops up when people bash the prequels ("There's no Han Solo character, no cocky space pirate cracking wise!"). I won't go into that, because frankly I'm not entirely sure what to make of it other than to wonder just why people think that's necessary in a Star Wars movie. (Wise-cracking cynics aren't in great supply in the Lord of the Rings movies either, and I suspect that if they were, there would be complaints galore.) I do sometimes wonder, though, if Han Solo's character is more memorable as a function of Harrison Ford's career than anything else. If Mark Hamill had gone on to stardom, and Ford had remained in relative obscurity, would Solo have still made the cut on this list? I don't know. (I'm thinking out loud here, not framing an actual hypothesis.)
:: OK, call me a curmedgeon, but I don't think that they needed to include every Jimmy Stewart character from a Frank Capra movie. But then, watching It's a Wonderful Life always gives me the feeling of eating a gigantic, fudgy brownie…with no milk to wash it down.
:: "Man" from Bambi was a villain? Well…I guess so, but I'm not sure. I'm just not sure I buy into the concept of an unseen, faceless "force" being a "villain". It can serve some of the function, to be sure. Opinions? (It's not that Man is never seen that bugs me, but that Man is an amorphous mass.)
:: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street was named as a top villain. Nothing much to say, except to point out the fine review of that film by Terminus. Check it out.
And time to move right into the Complaints About Omissions department….
:: I like that Ah-nuld's Terminator was cited as both a villain (the first movie) and a hero (the second). But if Robert Patrick's T-1000 isn't one of the most memorable movie villains of all time, I don't know who is. "Have you seen John Connor?" Aieee!!!
:: Indiana Jones is one of the top heroes. Yup. And for my money, Belloq (from Raiders) is one of the top villains: charming, opportunistic, amoral.
:: Tim Roth's Cunningham from Rob Roy should be there.
:: So should John Malkovich's Mitch Leary, from In the Line of Fire.
:: I assume this list was devoted to American films, so clearly Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke shouldn't be there. But then, I've always loved Hayao Miyazaki's complex portrayal of her, which is evil at first glance but not so evil when all of her conduct is considered. She illustrates the idea that while villains are evil, they think they are good and view themselves as the heroes.
:: I'm likewise not sure if there was a cut-off date, and the LOTR movies are probably too recent anyway (or maybe they're not "American" enough, being made in New Zealand and all), but I would have liked to have seen either Ian McKellen's Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn on the list. (Of all the things in these movies, I am most pleasantly surprised by Mortensen, whose casting as Aragorn drew a solid "huh-whuh?!" from me when I learned of it.
:: The selection of Atticus Finch as Number One demonstrates that the essence of heroism is making the right decision when the choice is offered; a hero will do what is right, no matter the risk or what has gone before. That said, I have to wonder why Lt. John J. Dunbar, from Dances With Wolves, didn't make the cut.
:: I know it's not in fashion anymore, but I still love Titanic, and as far as I'm concerned, Jack Dawson belongs on the list. Sue me.
:: How on earth did Andy Dufresne (The Shawshank Redemption) not make it?
:: Romances have heroes, too; it's just that their heroic behavior isn't of the same type as a Rick Blaine or T.E. Lawrence or Moses. So on that basis, Lloyd Dobbler (of Say Anything) is a hero. Of course, the AFI somehow managed to leave that film off its list of the 100 greatest film romances, so I can't say as I'm too surprised here.
Oh well, that's probably enough bleating on this topic. The whole purpose of these shows is, of course, to drum up conversations and remind people of all those movies that they've either not seen in a long time or not seen at all.
Number One Villain: Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon)
Number One Hero: Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Those are pretty good choices. I have to admit that when I saw Darth Vader named the Number Three villain, I was wondering, "Who on earth are two villains badder than Darth Vader?" Of course, my personal view is "Nobody", but I guess I can grumblingly accept that Vader at least made the Top Three. (Number Two was Norman Bates.)
As for Atticus Finch, his selection as Number One hero struck me as both surprising and obvious, once I realized it. After Rick Blaine of Casablanca was named Number Four, I had a very hard time figuring who was more heroic than him. But Atticus makes perfect sense…and I'm reminded now that not only has it been a very long time since I saw To Kill a Mockingbird, it's been even longer since I read the book. (This book was assigned reading by my tenth grade English teacher. The other book I recall her assigning was Ordinary People. Well, one out of two ain't bad.)
Here are some random thoughts and inevitable complaints about omissions from the show.
:: I guess I should go ahead and infuriate my doppelganger right away: I hated The Usual Suspects. I thought it took interesting characters in an interesting situation and wasted them, choosing instead to focus on a lame mystery with a trick ending that I saw coming a mile away. Of the characters in the film, I thought Verbal Kint was the least interesting. There is no way he belongs on this list. There, I said it. (Of course, having noted that, I should also point out that years ago my doppelganger served me with a masterful analysis of the film, which is one of his favorites. I used to cite that exegesis as a reason why he should start blogging. And yet, he has yet to reconstruct that analysis and post it….)
:: Han Solo made the cut. Luke Skywalker didn't. I found this strange…the original Star Wars trilogy is constructed around Luke Skywalker's "hero's journey", in all its Joseph Campbellian glory. Han Solo has a parallel hero's journey (the "man who learns better"), and Han has taken root, I think, as the original trilogy's most memorable hero-character. This fact often crops up when people bash the prequels ("There's no Han Solo character, no cocky space pirate cracking wise!"). I won't go into that, because frankly I'm not entirely sure what to make of it other than to wonder just why people think that's necessary in a Star Wars movie. (Wise-cracking cynics aren't in great supply in the Lord of the Rings movies either, and I suspect that if they were, there would be complaints galore.) I do sometimes wonder, though, if Han Solo's character is more memorable as a function of Harrison Ford's career than anything else. If Mark Hamill had gone on to stardom, and Ford had remained in relative obscurity, would Solo have still made the cut on this list? I don't know. (I'm thinking out loud here, not framing an actual hypothesis.)
:: OK, call me a curmedgeon, but I don't think that they needed to include every Jimmy Stewart character from a Frank Capra movie. But then, watching It's a Wonderful Life always gives me the feeling of eating a gigantic, fudgy brownie…with no milk to wash it down.
:: "Man" from Bambi was a villain? Well…I guess so, but I'm not sure. I'm just not sure I buy into the concept of an unseen, faceless "force" being a "villain". It can serve some of the function, to be sure. Opinions? (It's not that Man is never seen that bugs me, but that Man is an amorphous mass.)
:: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street was named as a top villain. Nothing much to say, except to point out the fine review of that film by Terminus. Check it out.
And time to move right into the Complaints About Omissions department….
:: I like that Ah-nuld's Terminator was cited as both a villain (the first movie) and a hero (the second). But if Robert Patrick's T-1000 isn't one of the most memorable movie villains of all time, I don't know who is. "Have you seen John Connor?" Aieee!!!
:: Indiana Jones is one of the top heroes. Yup. And for my money, Belloq (from Raiders) is one of the top villains: charming, opportunistic, amoral.
:: Tim Roth's Cunningham from Rob Roy should be there.
:: So should John Malkovich's Mitch Leary, from In the Line of Fire.
:: I assume this list was devoted to American films, so clearly Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke shouldn't be there. But then, I've always loved Hayao Miyazaki's complex portrayal of her, which is evil at first glance but not so evil when all of her conduct is considered. She illustrates the idea that while villains are evil, they think they are good and view themselves as the heroes.
:: I'm likewise not sure if there was a cut-off date, and the LOTR movies are probably too recent anyway (or maybe they're not "American" enough, being made in New Zealand and all), but I would have liked to have seen either Ian McKellen's Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn on the list. (Of all the things in these movies, I am most pleasantly surprised by Mortensen, whose casting as Aragorn drew a solid "huh-whuh?!" from me when I learned of it.
:: The selection of Atticus Finch as Number One demonstrates that the essence of heroism is making the right decision when the choice is offered; a hero will do what is right, no matter the risk or what has gone before. That said, I have to wonder why Lt. John J. Dunbar, from Dances With Wolves, didn't make the cut.
:: I know it's not in fashion anymore, but I still love Titanic, and as far as I'm concerned, Jack Dawson belongs on the list. Sue me.
:: How on earth did Andy Dufresne (The Shawshank Redemption) not make it?
:: Romances have heroes, too; it's just that their heroic behavior isn't of the same type as a Rick Blaine or T.E. Lawrence or Moses. So on that basis, Lloyd Dobbler (of Say Anything) is a hero. Of course, the AFI somehow managed to leave that film off its list of the 100 greatest film romances, so I can't say as I'm too surprised here.
Oh well, that's probably enough bleating on this topic. The whole purpose of these shows is, of course, to drum up conversations and remind people of all those movies that they've either not seen in a long time or not seen at all.
Remember that guy who directed that movie that had an utterly disastrous screeing at Cannes last week?
The saga continues, and he's not a happy camper. He's particularly angry with Roger Ebert, apparently.
The saga continues, and he's not a happy camper. He's particularly angry with Roger Ebert, apparently.
Overheard at home plate of Wrigley Field during a Sammy Sosa at-bat: "Please don't let the bat break....please don't let the bat break...."
Jayson Stark, as usual, has a fine take on Sosa's corking-of-the-bat. I'd just like to know what on Earth he was thinking.
Jayson Stark, as usual, has a fine take on Sosa's corking-of-the-bat. I'd just like to know what on Earth he was thinking.
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Here's an interview with Colleen Doran, one of the most promising artists in comics today. Her epic fantasy/space opera A Distant Soil is a favorite of mine...even though I still have to finish reading the thing.
And here's an article of Ms. Doran's, about creative ways to organize one's space. I almost wish I could be an artist, because I want a map chest now.
And here's an article of Ms. Doran's, about creative ways to organize one's space. I almost wish I could be an artist, because I want a map chest now.
From the "Did that really have the desired effect?" department: Michael Lopez was listening to Dennis Prager on the radio, and he became tired of Prager's apparent habit of blabbing on and on and refusing to grant that any of his callers may actually have a point. Michael became annoyed at such radio chicanery, so he turned the station...
....to Bill O'Reilly's show.
Doesn't that seem a bit like eschewing the Ben&Jerry's because of its high fat content, and opting instead for the Haagen-Dasz?
....to Bill O'Reilly's show.
Doesn't that seem a bit like eschewing the Ben&Jerry's because of its high fat content, and opting instead for the Haagen-Dasz?
At some point in the near future, something momentous will happen: I will receive my first payment, ever, for a piece of writing.
[Looks around, hears crickets chirping]
It's not a story of mine -- if it was, there would be Java-scripted fireworks at the top of this page -- but rather a short article I submitted to the "My View" column in The Buffalo News, in which I contrast my experience of living in Syracuse with that of living in Buffalo. I shall, of course, post a link when the article appears. The money isn't much -- I'll be able to take the family out to dinner or a movie (or, if I select a sufficiently cheap establishment or make a meal of the popcorn, dinner and a movie) but it will be a professional credit that I will be able to show to other prospective markets and clients.
(And the ideas expressed in the article were, of course, developed in this space during the time we spent in Syracuse, although I didn't simply rework a post from here to submit to the paper. I only do that under my other pseudonym, Jayson Blair.)
[Looks around, hears crickets chirping]
It's not a story of mine -- if it was, there would be Java-scripted fireworks at the top of this page -- but rather a short article I submitted to the "My View" column in The Buffalo News, in which I contrast my experience of living in Syracuse with that of living in Buffalo. I shall, of course, post a link when the article appears. The money isn't much -- I'll be able to take the family out to dinner or a movie (or, if I select a sufficiently cheap establishment or make a meal of the popcorn, dinner and a movie) but it will be a professional credit that I will be able to show to other prospective markets and clients.
(And the ideas expressed in the article were, of course, developed in this space during the time we spent in Syracuse, although I didn't simply rework a post from here to submit to the paper. I only do that under my other pseudonym, Jayson Blair.)
The European Space Agency has three probes headed for Mars.
Given today's political climate, I wonder if the prospect of the French flag fluttering in the Martian breeze wouldn't be just the thing to jump start the American space program. I mean, we can't let them cheese-eatin' twits beat us to the stars, can we? Nosiree, Bob!!
(EDIT: One of my correspondents points out a slight flaw in my reading comprehension on the article....apparently two of the probes are NASA's, so the idea of a Franco-Martian alliance has been forestalled, thank goodness. "Me, fail English? Unpossible!" -The Simpsons)
I'm a bit saddened to note that I've fallen sufficiently out of touch with the field in which I majored in college (philosophy) that I can't even come up with an entry for this contest, as reported by Matthew Yglesias. So, at this point in my life I'd have to eschew the actual pick-up line in favor of creating a false aura of philosophical nature: I'd find a coffee house (but not Starbuck's, a local joint), wear black, wear my hair down, and sit at a table pretending to read Sartre and jotting down notes with an illegible scrawl in a beat-up spiral-bound notebook, whilst looking all intense and stuff. Bonus points if I haven't shaved in a while.
Yeah, that would have 'em swooning in the aisles....
Yeah, that would have 'em swooning in the aisles....
I'm sure everyone has wondered what would happen if Steven Den Beste and Warren Ellis were crossed in some kind of experiment a la The Fly.
Well, now we know.
Best post ever.
Well, now we know.
Best post ever.
Monday, June 02, 2003
Buffalo stuff today:
:: Michael Niman is a professor at Buffalo State College, and a writer of left-wing political columns for ArtVoice, Buffalo's main alternate weekly newspaper (their site may be down). Lately he's been writing a lot about Buffalo as a cycling city: Niman is a very avid cyclist, and his columns about biking in Buffalo have been even angrier and more provocative than the normal tone he brings to his political commentary. Over the weekend, he managed to get arrested in an altercation with police during a big cycling event. Being a walker, I know some of Niman's frustrations -- people in cars these days tend to be a little more unaware of anything on the road other than other cars each year, if they're even aware of those -- but judging by the tone of his recent articles, I can't say that his arrest comes as much of a surprise.
:: AmericanStyle Magazine's annual ranking of the Top Twenty-Five Arts Destinations is out.
1. Chicago
2. New York City
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Boston
5. San Francisco
6. Santa Fe
7. Philadelphia
8. Buffalo
9. Los Angeles
10. Milwaukee
11, New Orleans; 12, Columbus; 13, Pittsburgh; 14, Cape Cod, Mass.; 15, Cleveland; 16, Saugatuck, Mich.; 17, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; 18, Asheville, N.C.; 19, Athens, Ga.; 20, Albuquerque, N.M.; 21, Sedona, Ariz.; 22, Corning; 23, Baltimore; 24, Seattle-Tacoma; 25, Atlanta.
Buffalo moved up, after being ranked ninth last year. Huzzah! Now, the city really needs to get going on taking advantage of this. What's more likely to draw people to Buffalo? Our arts institutions, which are some of the finest in the country, or a casino? And setting tourism aside, which is more likely to get people to want to move here?
:: Michael Niman is a professor at Buffalo State College, and a writer of left-wing political columns for ArtVoice, Buffalo's main alternate weekly newspaper (their site may be down). Lately he's been writing a lot about Buffalo as a cycling city: Niman is a very avid cyclist, and his columns about biking in Buffalo have been even angrier and more provocative than the normal tone he brings to his political commentary. Over the weekend, he managed to get arrested in an altercation with police during a big cycling event. Being a walker, I know some of Niman's frustrations -- people in cars these days tend to be a little more unaware of anything on the road other than other cars each year, if they're even aware of those -- but judging by the tone of his recent articles, I can't say that his arrest comes as much of a surprise.
:: AmericanStyle Magazine's annual ranking of the Top Twenty-Five Arts Destinations is out.
1. Chicago
2. New York City
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Boston
5. San Francisco
6. Santa Fe
7. Philadelphia
8. Buffalo
9. Los Angeles
10. Milwaukee
11, New Orleans; 12, Columbus; 13, Pittsburgh; 14, Cape Cod, Mass.; 15, Cleveland; 16, Saugatuck, Mich.; 17, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; 18, Asheville, N.C.; 19, Athens, Ga.; 20, Albuquerque, N.M.; 21, Sedona, Ariz.; 22, Corning; 23, Baltimore; 24, Seattle-Tacoma; 25, Atlanta.
Buffalo moved up, after being ranked ninth last year. Huzzah! Now, the city really needs to get going on taking advantage of this. What's more likely to draw people to Buffalo? Our arts institutions, which are some of the finest in the country, or a casino? And setting tourism aside, which is more likely to get people to want to move here?
Guilty pleasure: One of Buffalo's "independent" TV stations is showing the first season of MTV's Road Rules on Saturday nights. Man, that takes me back to the halcyon days of 1995....I miss the 90s. Well, some things about the 90s, anyway. I was a total slacker about writing, back then -- I was one of those "I write when the Muse strikes me" kind of people. It took me a long time to learn the lesson that the Muse strikes people who work hard at it, every day, with a lot more regularity than the people who don't.
Anyhoo, the only season of Road Rules I liked was the first one; watching a bunch of 20-somethings attempting to drive a Winnebago in city traffic lost its cachet pretty quickly after that. Now, if only I could see the San Francisco and London editions of The Real World again. I liked the London edition, even if they chose two of the most idiotic, vapid Americans they could have hoped to find: the hick race-car driver who wanders through a London grocery store bemoaning the lack of Ranch dressing and the 18-year old playwright twerp who didn't seem to ever leave the Real World house. I think that if I'd been given an expenses-paid, three-month stay in London, I'd manage to find something to do.
Anyhoo, the only season of Road Rules I liked was the first one; watching a bunch of 20-somethings attempting to drive a Winnebago in city traffic lost its cachet pretty quickly after that. Now, if only I could see the San Francisco and London editions of The Real World again. I liked the London edition, even if they chose two of the most idiotic, vapid Americans they could have hoped to find: the hick race-car driver who wanders through a London grocery store bemoaning the lack of Ranch dressing and the 18-year old playwright twerp who didn't seem to ever leave the Real World house. I think that if I'd been given an expenses-paid, three-month stay in London, I'd manage to find something to do.
Only two weeks remain in "Short Fiction Month", after which I return to reading novels. Sigh....
:: I read five stories from Roald Dahl's collection, Tales of the Unexpected. My favorites were "A Dip in the Pool" and "The Hitchhiker", although everything by Dahl is great. This man had one wonderful, twisted imagination -- not horror per se, just one story after another riffing on the idea of "unintended consequences". Dahl's stories are markedly different from his children's fiction, although his grim outlook is not entirely lost in the children's novels. (He's best known for Charley and the Chocolate Factory, but my personal favorite is Danny, the Champion of the World -- which really should be a movie.)
:: I've often read testimonials to P.G. Wodehouse, especially that he is one of the funniest writers of all time. I had forgotten about a Wodehouse anthology I bought a few years back (The Most of P.G. Wodehouse) until now, and thus I figured, "Hey! It's short fiction month!" So I read two Wodehouse tales. The first, "The Purity of the Turf", was mildly amusing. It's a story about English gentlemen and their sporting interests, and it's clever and entertaining. But the second Wodehouse story I read -- "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald" -- was simply side-splitting. This thing had me laughing from beginning to end. I can't describe it much, except to note that it's about a dunderheaded clod who falls hopelessly in love, at first sight, with a lovely lady he spies across a street. This man's single undeniable talent, unfortunately, is his impression of a hen laying an egg. The way this talent plays into the story's denouement had me giggling and guffawing like a fool. And Wodehouse's gift for language is enormous, adding to the humor with descriptions like this: "It has often been said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers." And now I'm laughing again. Wait a minute....
:: This month has gone to show that if I'm saddened by all the novels I'll never get to read, I'm even more saddened by all the stories I'll never read.
:: I read five stories from Roald Dahl's collection, Tales of the Unexpected. My favorites were "A Dip in the Pool" and "The Hitchhiker", although everything by Dahl is great. This man had one wonderful, twisted imagination -- not horror per se, just one story after another riffing on the idea of "unintended consequences". Dahl's stories are markedly different from his children's fiction, although his grim outlook is not entirely lost in the children's novels. (He's best known for Charley and the Chocolate Factory, but my personal favorite is Danny, the Champion of the World -- which really should be a movie.)
:: I've often read testimonials to P.G. Wodehouse, especially that he is one of the funniest writers of all time. I had forgotten about a Wodehouse anthology I bought a few years back (The Most of P.G. Wodehouse) until now, and thus I figured, "Hey! It's short fiction month!" So I read two Wodehouse tales. The first, "The Purity of the Turf", was mildly amusing. It's a story about English gentlemen and their sporting interests, and it's clever and entertaining. But the second Wodehouse story I read -- "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald" -- was simply side-splitting. This thing had me laughing from beginning to end. I can't describe it much, except to note that it's about a dunderheaded clod who falls hopelessly in love, at first sight, with a lovely lady he spies across a street. This man's single undeniable talent, unfortunately, is his impression of a hen laying an egg. The way this talent plays into the story's denouement had me giggling and guffawing like a fool. And Wodehouse's gift for language is enormous, adding to the humor with descriptions like this: "It has often been said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers." And now I'm laughing again. Wait a minute....
:: This month has gone to show that if I'm saddened by all the novels I'll never get to read, I'm even more saddened by all the stories I'll never read.
I completed my first draft of the "Snow White" story yesterday. This one took me by surprise. I've been nursing the basic idea of the story for a while, but I was unprepared for the way this one just poured out of me. Usually, in the course of writing a story I'll make a bad wrong turn or two, and end up going back and eliminating a lot of material. This one, though, was a straight shot from beginning to end.
Now, as to whether that translates to a better story -- i.e., one that sells to some market -- time will tell. I still have to type it up and then edit it.
(Oh, and the baseball story -- titled, "One More Dying Quail", a Bull Durham reference using a bit of arcane baseball lingo -- is now edited and will be heading out for rejection this week.)
Now, as to whether that translates to a better story -- i.e., one that sells to some market -- time will tell. I still have to type it up and then edit it.
(Oh, and the baseball story -- titled, "One More Dying Quail", a Bull Durham reference using a bit of arcane baseball lingo -- is now edited and will be heading out for rejection this week.)
Sunday, June 01, 2003
OK, just a quick "Grab Bag" of stuff today, and then more substantive (!) stuff tomorrow. Or not.
:: On the "Geek Test", Caledon Hockley beat my score, and suggests some of his own additions to the list. Here they are, with my answers:
-- You know what the only improvised line in The Empire Strikes Back is and who said it. YES
-- You know what the original line was supposed to be. YES
-- You know how many times Buffy has died in the series. NO
-- You know the real name of the 'Six Million Dollar Man' YES
-- You have calculated, with inflation, what that amount is today. NO
-- You know what K.I.T.T. stands for. YES
-- You have attempted to synchronize the CD soundtrack to the movie scene at home. NO
-- You become aggrivated when someone misquotes from a movie you know by heart. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars movies whose names aren't actually spoken in the movies. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars books that don't appear in the movies. YES
-- You know who "Q" is in at least two long-running series. YES
-- You can hum the theme to "Superman" in a moment's notice YES
-- You know what kind of a gun James Bond has to give up in Dr. No to get his Walther. YES
-- You have uttered, at least once in your life, "I HAVE THE POWER!!!" YES
-- You know who the original Green Lantern is. NO
-- You have used the phrase 'cunning linguist' with a straight face. NO
-- You have used physics skills in real life situations. NO (I'm not sure what would qualify, here.)
:: Speaking of the Geek Test, these guys are officially granted an automatic score of 100%. They don't have to answer a single question. They're a lock.
:: Sometimes I wish I knew the first thing about economics, if only so I could tell Jane Galt she's wrong without the intellectual content of my argument consisting of variants of "Nanny nanny boo boo!"
:: It's a beautiful thing when a guy in Dallas embraces his inner postal worker.
:: Atrios recently revealed himself as a Philadelphia gym teacher. For some reason, I am picturing him as Coach Cutlip from The Wonder Years.
:: Open letter to Barnes&Noble: The Southtowns area in Buffalo constitutes a perfect location. Buffalo has two B&N's, and both are in the northern suburbs. And there's a shopping plaza less than half a mile down the street which hasn't achieved full occupancy yet. And I just the other day found a back way there: an abandoned service road for the airstrip that used to exist behind my apartment complex, but exists no longer.
:: On second thought, a B&N or Borders within walking distance of my home would not be a good thing.
:: On third thought, I want one anyway.
:: Snopes.com is an invaluable resource, really and truly. Right now they have a post up about "noodling", a questionable means of catching catfish. I have a problem with something they write in this post, though: "Although tales of giant catfish as big as grown men are the stuff of urban legendry, some varieties of catfish can indeed grow quite large (such as the Mekong giant catfish, which can weigh as much as 650 pounds and measure up to 10 feet in length)...[snip]" Maybe I'm parsing this incorrectly, but are they saying that catfish as big as a man don't exist, but catfish way bigger than a man do exist? Huh?
:: Six or seven years ago, Buffalo's NHL team, the Sabres, moved into a new arena. Since then, the old arena -- Memorial Auditorium -- has sat vacant. The building itself is still quite viable, and people here are always talking about what to do with it. Now, it appears that two main possibilities exist: converting it into a casino which would be run by the Seneca Nation of Indians (which I think would be a staggeringly bad idea), and converting it into retail space anchored by something called a "Bass Pro Outdoor World" store, which as I understand it is a Borders for fishermen, but even better (imagine Borders outlets the size of Wal-Marts, and only in select cities nationwide). So, we can have a lame knockoff casino, when there are casinos in easy reach of most people in the country; or we can have a store that would have sport-fishermen flocking to Buffalo. Gee whiz, what to do? (The Buffalo News has a good editorial on the store today. I'm not a fisherman, so I wouldn't get too much out of it. But apparently these stores are big.)
:: Maintenance notes: 1. That supplementary blogroll ("The Common Room") I added is not powered by Blogrolling, so the blogs there won't be demarked when they are freshly updated. So don't avoid them on that basis. 2. Sometime this week I plan to add one more section to the sidebar, which will hold links to reviews and articles I write for Green Man Review, as well as adding a few new permalinks to "Other Shores". 3. I may be joining a webring. More details as they become available.
:: On the "Geek Test", Caledon Hockley beat my score, and suggests some of his own additions to the list. Here they are, with my answers:
-- You know what the only improvised line in The Empire Strikes Back is and who said it. YES
-- You know what the original line was supposed to be. YES
-- You know how many times Buffy has died in the series. NO
-- You know the real name of the 'Six Million Dollar Man' YES
-- You have calculated, with inflation, what that amount is today. NO
-- You know what K.I.T.T. stands for. YES
-- You have attempted to synchronize the CD soundtrack to the movie scene at home. NO
-- You become aggrivated when someone misquotes from a movie you know by heart. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars movies whose names aren't actually spoken in the movies. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars books that don't appear in the movies. YES
-- You know who "Q" is in at least two long-running series. YES
-- You can hum the theme to "Superman" in a moment's notice YES
-- You know what kind of a gun James Bond has to give up in Dr. No to get his Walther. YES
-- You have uttered, at least once in your life, "I HAVE THE POWER!!!" YES
-- You know who the original Green Lantern is. NO
-- You have used the phrase 'cunning linguist' with a straight face. NO
-- You have used physics skills in real life situations. NO (I'm not sure what would qualify, here.)
:: Speaking of the Geek Test, these guys are officially granted an automatic score of 100%. They don't have to answer a single question. They're a lock.
:: Sometimes I wish I knew the first thing about economics, if only so I could tell Jane Galt she's wrong without the intellectual content of my argument consisting of variants of "Nanny nanny boo boo!"
:: It's a beautiful thing when a guy in Dallas embraces his inner postal worker.
:: Atrios recently revealed himself as a Philadelphia gym teacher. For some reason, I am picturing him as Coach Cutlip from The Wonder Years.
:: Open letter to Barnes&Noble: The Southtowns area in Buffalo constitutes a perfect location. Buffalo has two B&N's, and both are in the northern suburbs. And there's a shopping plaza less than half a mile down the street which hasn't achieved full occupancy yet. And I just the other day found a back way there: an abandoned service road for the airstrip that used to exist behind my apartment complex, but exists no longer.
:: On second thought, a B&N or Borders within walking distance of my home would not be a good thing.
:: On third thought, I want one anyway.
:: Snopes.com is an invaluable resource, really and truly. Right now they have a post up about "noodling", a questionable means of catching catfish. I have a problem with something they write in this post, though: "Although tales of giant catfish as big as grown men are the stuff of urban legendry, some varieties of catfish can indeed grow quite large (such as the Mekong giant catfish, which can weigh as much as 650 pounds and measure up to 10 feet in length)...[snip]" Maybe I'm parsing this incorrectly, but are they saying that catfish as big as a man don't exist, but catfish way bigger than a man do exist? Huh?
:: Six or seven years ago, Buffalo's NHL team, the Sabres, moved into a new arena. Since then, the old arena -- Memorial Auditorium -- has sat vacant. The building itself is still quite viable, and people here are always talking about what to do with it. Now, it appears that two main possibilities exist: converting it into a casino which would be run by the Seneca Nation of Indians (which I think would be a staggeringly bad idea), and converting it into retail space anchored by something called a "Bass Pro Outdoor World" store, which as I understand it is a Borders for fishermen, but even better (imagine Borders outlets the size of Wal-Marts, and only in select cities nationwide). So, we can have a lame knockoff casino, when there are casinos in easy reach of most people in the country; or we can have a store that would have sport-fishermen flocking to Buffalo. Gee whiz, what to do? (The Buffalo News has a good editorial on the store today. I'm not a fisherman, so I wouldn't get too much out of it. But apparently these stores are big.)
:: Maintenance notes: 1. That supplementary blogroll ("The Common Room") I added is not powered by Blogrolling, so the blogs there won't be demarked when they are freshly updated. So don't avoid them on that basis. 2. Sometime this week I plan to add one more section to the sidebar, which will hold links to reviews and articles I write for Green Man Review, as well as adding a few new permalinks to "Other Shores". 3. I may be joining a webring. More details as they become available.
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