Writing notes:

:: My "Snow White" story, the one that took me only a week to write, has now been rejected by its second market. Oh, joy. Apparently it "didn't stand out" (that's the reason they highlighted on the rejection letter, of all the ones listed as possible explanations). My immediate reaction was to get indignant and tell myself that it damn well does too stand out, and they're a bunch of pinheads who don't know anything, yada yada yada. But then, I remember that I still love that particular magazine. Hell, I'm still mad at them. I know my story's better than a lot of stuff they've published. Harumph. Editors! You can't live with 'em…pass the Beer Nuts.

:: I haven't been particularly good at making my thousand-words-per-day goal over the last week or so on the Novel-in-Progress, but that should change now. Some nagging details have resolved themselves, and I'm starting to move out of the novel's "set-up" chapters and into the "red meat" chapters. Or something like that.

NORM: I've been known to perspire a bit.

CARLA: We could grow rice!

OK, as I write this, it's about 11:30 at night and I've only just now turned on the Monday Night Football game. It's early in the fourth quarter, with Tampa Bay leading 10-0. These two teams played each other in last year's NFC Championship Game, and both are widely expected to go deep into the playoffs again this year. It's a close game between two teams who are developing a nice rivalry. So what are the ABC commentators, including John Madden, talking about right now?

The fact that the new Tampa Bay center, a guy named Wade, sweats a lot.

I mean, this guy sweats a lot. He sweats so much that Brad Johnson, the Bucs' quarterback, apparently has compared going under center with this guy to entering a rain forest. So sweaty, that the ABC camera crew is indulging us in multiple-angled closeups of Mr. Wade's sweaty posterior. I think I just heard a chorus of guys from the sports bar a half-mile down the road from my house going, EWWWWW!!!

But hey, at least John Madden hasn't used his tele-strator thingie to draw white circles around the man's sweaty nether-regions. Yet.

Oh, Atrios, Atrios, Atrios….earlier in the day you say something mean about the Secretary of Defense, and then you assume that those military jets above your home are buzzing the stadium?! Oh, you are so naïve!

Want to feel some nostalgia for the first mind-blowing experience of home computing you ever had? You know, back when a deciding factor for a system was how many K of RAM it had (as in, up to 16K or some such number), whether you could use an Atari joystick with it, and how good its games were? If so, this is the place for you.

My first computer was the VIC-20. Yup - - the fabled machine of 5K (only 3.5 of which was usable), a screen display of twenty-two characters. Five minutes of loading games from the tape deck. Cutting my programming teeth on code like this:

10 PRINT "BITE ME"
20 GET A$:IF A$=""THENGOTO20
30 PRINT "BITE ME AGAIN"
40 GOTO10

I had a lot of fun with that clunky thing…but then there was the technological revolution of the Commodore 64, the machine with a lot more memory (64K!), sprite graphics (which were a huge pain-in-the-ass to program, but there it was) and a 40-character per line display! Zap! Pow!!

I grew up in a home computing environment such that, when Macintosh came along and I learned that one doesn't simply turn it on and start typing in BASIC programs, I thought, "Then what the hell do you do with it? Sounds useless! And that 'mouse' thing is friggin' stupid!" Little did I know.

Sir Matt the Easily Devoured by Dragons owned a TI99-4A computer, if memory serves. Many a classroom argument resulted of our arguing over which was a superior system. It offended his sense of design, already potent in the fifth grade, that the VIC-20 should have the slot for cartridges (remember, ROM-cartridges were the main vehicle for games and such back then) located in the back of the computer, and he maybe had a point, but in any event those arguments now seem rather like the scene in Stand By Me when Gordo and Vern debate whether Mighty Mouse could defeat Superman.

We're on offense, you incredible nincompoop!

Week One of the 2003 NFL season is almost in the books (except for tonight's Philly-Tampa matchup, which ought to be a barn-burner of a game). It's interesting that a lot of the time you can hear the same cliches from both winning and losing teams on Week One: It's just one game. It's not an entire season. There's a lot of football left, and we've got a lot of work to do if we want to get to where we want to be.

But the thing with cliches is that they become cliches for a reason: there's a lot of truth there. A lot of teams have started 1-0 and missed the playoffs over the years, and a lot of teams have started 0-1 and made the playoffs. Excluding the possibility of ties (which are very rare in the NFL), by definition at least four of the sixteen teams that start their seasons 1-0 will miss the playoffs.

But damn, that 31-0 pasting the Bills put on the Patriots yesterday felt good! Truly, I haven't had that much fun watching a Bills game in several years, probably back to the Flutie era. There's just something about following your favorite team through the first couple of years of a rebuilding process, seeing the young players brought in and then the gaps filled in through free-agency, and then, when you think the rebuilding should finally begin to pay off, seeing it happen with a blowout victory over not just any other team but a division rival that's two years removed from winning the Super Bowl and a team that has had your team's number the last few years.

Week One was just an appetizer. But oh, what an appetizer it was.

The game wasn't perfect, by any means. The Bills' offensive line still does entirely too much holding (although, to my knowledge and incredible surprise, Ruben Brown didn't get flagged for any of it). They did a great job at the line of scrimmage, but I would have liked to have seen even more dominance. That should get better, though, as the year goes on and the line comes together again. Travis Henry, true to form, fumbled once. Drew Bledsoe's decision making was what it should have been, given that he generally had a lot more time to throw than he ever did last year (he was only sacked twice). He only threw one interception, and that was at the very end of the first half when he gambled on a pretty-much meaningless play. He also did a great job of spreading the ball to his receivers.

Of course, defense was the story yesterday, after I carped about it every week last year. They only sacked Tom Brady twice - - I'd still like to see more pass-rush - - but they hurried him a lot; they picked off four of his passes (when, last year, the Bills didn't pick off a single pass until their seventh game). They were very physical at the line. I would have liked to have seen them play a bit stiffer against the run, but they still held the Pats down in that regard. And I knew the Bills were getting a good player when they signed Takeo Spikes, but…wow.

Finally, on the matter of coaching: yeah, it's just one game, but I can't help but wonder if Bill Belichick's bag of tricks has finally been exhausted. Every time they showed him on the sidelines, he looked like he had no idea of what to do next. His team looked flat and unmotivated. (Cutting one of the best-loved players on the team four days before the season opener will do that.) He looked like a guy who had no answers, a guy to whom the pace of the game was dictated by his opponent. That's how Gregg Williams has occasionally looked in his first two years; it was great to see that shoe on the other foot for once.

Yeah, it's one game. But what a game. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills are 1-0. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills are in sole possession of first place in the AFC East. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills have shut out an opponent. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills played the sharper and more physical game than their opponent.

Oh yeah.

Some other NFL notes:

:: Kurt Warner fumbled six times. I wonder if he really needs a new environment now.

:: It looks like my nefarious scheme, in which I paid a guy to sneak into the Dolphins' locker room and turn their wall calendar to "December", has already paid off. Interestingly, their supposedly-great defense didn't manage to sack the Texans' QB, David Carr, a single time despite the fact that last year I think Carr set an NFL record for getting sacked. That clicking sound you hear is Dave Wannstedt's fingers on his computer keyboard as he updates his resume.

:: Vikings, Steelers, Redskins, 49ers…it looks as if every team I rooted for yesterday won. That hasn't happened since, well, I'm not sure it's ever happened. I saw no highlights of the Vikings' victory over the Packers, but I do note that it happened at Lambeau and that maybe Randy Moss has finally grown up, now that he needs to be a veteran leader on a young team.

:: I don't get ESPN, so I didn't get to see the esteemable Mr. Limbaugh on NFL Countdown. But according to TBOGG, his big attempt at prognostication backfired rather spectacularly. Heh. Indeed.

:: Sean is slowly, slowly weakening. He will bow to us. Oh, yessss….

I always figured there was something weird about Kevin Drum, seeing as he's a liberal Democrat who lives in Orange County. But now I see that he's one of those weirdos who, on the NFL's opening day, is more interested in tennis.

What a pinko.

A general assumption of the current economic malaise is that, although the recovery has not yet generated jobs, it's really only a matter of time and continuing the growth until employers have to increase payrolls. In other words, the business cycle will sooner or later lead to job creation, so the monthly reports job losses will end at some point.

But that might not be the case, unfortunately. The ominous lede is as follows:

The vast majority of the 2.7 million job losses since the 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are not coming back, which means the labor market will not regain strength until new positions are created in novel and dynamic economic sectors, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study has concluded.

Color me worried.

Talk about your "packed posts". Teresa Nielsen Hayden offers up a long post about New York City that's a feast of stuff to read and links to follow.

She may not blog often enough, but when Mrs. Nielsen Hayden posts, it's always a doozy.

My comrade-in-arms linked a rather disconcerting news item a while ago, about a group of Muslims in London who plan to have an event on September 11 to honor the memory of the hijackers. I didn't link it at the time, because I simply lacked the words to express the outrage and the inability of my mind to wrap itself around the idea that there are people out there who actually think that Atta and his eighteen friends performed an act of heroism. One of the things about our species that really terrifies me is that no matter what you do in this world, there will always be someone, somewhere, who approves of what you did.

I was reminded, though, of that news item by this post on a blog called Bloggy (which, in turn, I see via Atrios). It's a post detailing the picketing some Christian fundamentalists did at that new public school in New York City for gay students. There are a couple of pictures, one of which shows the placards these folks displayed. One of them reads, quite incongruously, "Thank God for Sept. 11".

Fundamentalists: ultimately, no matter which Holy Book they're reading from, there's not a lot to choose between them.

It's like we're looking at Wayne's basement...only, that's not Wayne's basement...isn't that weird?

Sometimes I think that my blog is too far "out there", and that I make odd choices about what to write about here. Then I see a blog like this one.

And just in case you're sick of the fact that our so-called liberal media constantly assuages the interests of dog-owners and ignores those of us who love cats, why, this blog's got you covered!

Embarrassing admission time: my "career" as a fiction writer began in fifth grade, when a few friends and I banded together to pretend that we were some kind of amateur film-making company and write scripts for said films. And yes, we were geeky losers. (Some might think that I still am, but that's a point for another day.) We would write these ten-page action-pieces featuring the great action heroes of the day, most notably James Bond and Indiana Jones. And we'd put the two together, for crossover madness. And, of course, since we were fifth graders not quite on the cusp of realizing that females actually are not "icky", we'd leave out the Bond-and-women stuff in favor of the "Bond defeats fifty ninjas with the aid of his eyeglasses-laser blasters that Q gave him" stuff. Zap! Pow!

Well, anyway, I recall that one of us -- it might have been me, but I honestly don't recall -- had James Bond working to thwart Blofeld's nefarious scheme to -- gasp! -- blow up US national monuments. Oh, how lame a plot that was! Oh, the innocence! National monuments, indeed. It is to laugh.

Alas.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has some thoughts about blog design, specifically as to the design of the new political group blog Open Source Politics. I confess that I had similar thoughts when I checked it out the first time; I was thinking, "Where's the content?"

We aspire to a dusty shelf. (Possession)

I took the daughter to a book sale at the local library yesterday. It was a "buck-a-bag" sale, in which you pay a buck when you enter the door, they hand you a big paper bag, and you then fill it with whatever you want from the books piled on the tables. Library book sales are always fun, because they're like Mr. Gump's box of chocolates in that you never know what you're gonna get.*

Sure, there are always things like Advanced WordPerfect 5.1 Tips or Get the Most Out of Your New Kaypro or TIME Looks Back at 1994. And of course, these sales are heaven if those trashy romance novels with Fabio and his lookalike-minions are modeling the cover paintings. But there are treasures, too, in amongst the crap: those old Disney storybooks, based on the movies, but nevertheless feature more words than pictures, for example. Or a nice copy, almost brand-new, of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and Now We Are Six. (How these got passed over by the other people there with their kids is beyond me.) And I found what looks like a brand-new copy of Gunter Grass's Danzig Trilogy, which I remember hearing about once before. I had no idea what it's about - - I didn't know, until I got home and looked it up in my Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature - - but since basically I'd already paid for it, I snatched it up. And I grabbed a few other items as well, stuff I've never heard of but yet possibly deserves better than incineration or life in a landfill.

Of course, when one is an aspiring writer, one cannot attend a library booksale without entertaining the thought that one day ages hence, my own long-out-of-print, long-discarded books will be part of the picked-over piles at some library. In the short term, I dream of selling my books…but in the long term, I can only hope that they will still be read. In the end, my dreams of immortality -- or at least, very long life -- through my books will probably run up against the more likely scenario of a person many years from now picking up a dusty copy of something of mine at a library sale, and standing there for a second or two, deciding if this author she's never heard of before is worth the price she'd pay for the book (next to nothing). I hope I don't come up wanting.

Oh, well...what else is there to do?

* Isn't that a bad metaphor, anyway? Most boxes of chocolates these days have little diagrams inside the lid that tell what each thing is. A much better box-of-chocolates metaphor comes from The X-Files, courtesy the Cigarette Smoking Man:

Life, it's a box of chocolates: A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is an empty box filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.

Uh-oh! Seattle has a ballot-initiative coming up that, if approved, would tax the purchase of espresso.

I wonder if anyone at Buffalo's City Hall is looking on in anticipation of perhaps instituting a Chicken Wing Tax here....

I'm guessing that this is why, in New York state, vehicle registration stickers are affixed to the inside, lower-left-hand corner of the windshield. We're sensible up here, though. You won't find that butterfly-ballot crap going on in New York, nosiree, Bob!

The NFL is apparently considering going to an 18-game schedule, which would be two games longer than the current 16-game season. (My arithmetic is indomitable….) This is seemingly a reaction to the recent spate of injuries in late preseason games to such players as Atlanta and New York Jets quarterbacks Michael Vick and Chad Pennington. I'm not sure how that would change the possibility of injury, really; it seems to me Vick could have been hurt in the regular season as well. In 1991, the Philadelphia Eagles were picked by some to go to the Super Bowl, until then-QB Randall Cunningham tore his ACL and was lost for the entire season - - in the regular season opener.

Not that I'm against an 18-game schedule, although I'm not all that keen on meaningful football games taking place in mid-August, which would be necessary (unless they push the Super Bowl back to middle or late February, the other option). But if injuries are really that big of a concern, I wonder if an 18-game season might be too much for the players. Football is a violent game, and it takes these guys a long time to recover once the year is over. The current schedule, 17 weeks long (to accommodate for 16 games plus one week off for each team) would probably best be expanded all the way to 20 weeks (18 games, plus two buy weeks - - I think two byes might be necessary). And with the additional games, I'd almost certainly expect the Player's Union to insist on expanding the rosters, and therefore the salary cap as well.

(And apparently people have been tailgating at Ralph Wilson Stadium, in anticipation of today's season opener for the Bills, since Thursday. Wow.)

I'd like to thank the idiot, nitwit, attention-starved because he's most likely shut in his grandmother's basement, titanic putz who was behind yesterday's denial-of-service attack that took out Blogger and BlogSpot for at least unleashing his hackery on Saturday, which is always my worst traffic day anyway. But still, grow up.

Good Star Wars news: according to TF.N, Ewan McGregor has reported being "very pleased" with the script to Episode III. That's good news because McGregor has made it pretty clear that making these movies, well, hasn't really been his cup of tea. He's complained about the amount of bluescreen work and the amount of acting he does all by himself, reacting to nothing; and he loudly complained when he heard the title Attack of the Clones for the first time. So if he's giving this one a stamp of preliminary approval, well, things might be going great for the final chapter.

(Not, of course, that I've ever thought things were going wrong, mind you.)

I'm glad that a year-and-a-half are going to elapse between the arrivals of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Episode III. Hopefully that time will cut down on the silly comparisons a bit. (Yeah, probably not. But I can always hope.)

As long as I'm lazily borrowing-and-linking stuff, I might as well pilfer something from MeFi: the worst cover songs of all time. I don't know…many cover-versions really are lousy, but I do like some of the ones they list here. I actually prefer the Phil Collins "You Can't Hurry Love" to the original, and I found the Dolly Parton "Stairway to Heaven" interesting. So what do I know?

(How the article fails to mention William Shatner's take on "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" is inexplicable.)

Further comments on my bit about cities and downtown sports venues can be found at City Comforts (on sports venues in general) and at Archipelapogo and BatesLine (both from the specific standpoint of Tulsa).

My current snacking obsession seems to be Newman's Own Organic Pretzel Rounds, in the salt-and-pepper flavor. These suckers are just a bit spicy, so the first one or two you eat aren't hot at all - - but by the time you're munching your tenth or eleventh one, you have the most wonderful urge to drink a bottle of water. Yum. (I don't really care that they're organic. I bought them because they were on sale at the local store the last two weeks, and I do dig the whole "donating profits to charity" bit that Newman's Own does.)

This little news item, courtesy of the martini-swirling Mr. Harris, puts me in mind of something George Carlin once said in the course of castigating modern Americans for their germ-paranoia:

You know what I do when I drop food on the ground? I pick it up and eat it! Even if I'm at a sidewalk café, in Calcutta, the poor section, on New Year's Eve during a soccer riot!

Courtesy Paul Riddell (whose journal is sporting a spiffy new design), I see this op-ed about the future of manned space exploration. After years of "NASA sucks, NASA sucks, NASA wastes our money, we hate NASA, NASA sucks", it's nice to read something different from someone who believes that space exploration is still important, essential, worthy, and basically unavoidable. I've despaired of this view of spaceflight ever since Carl Sagan died.

Earlier today I smashed through the 20,000 hit barrier. While it feels good, it's also humbling to note that Corrente will break that mark sometime in the next week or so, and they've only been around for about two weeks total. Ach, it breaks the heart.

Anyway, for the lucky reader who was actually Hit #20,000, claim thy prize: the online edition of the collected essays of Steven Den Beste.

I'm not so much a football fan that I watch games involving teams I neither care about one way or the other nor expect to fare all that well this year (in terms of making the playoffs), so I didn't watch any of the NFL season opener last night between the Jets and Redskins, aside from a handful of plays. I did watch, for about three minutes, the debate between the nine Democratic candidates for President, while waiting for last night's rerun of Scrubs to come on. I'm not as big a political junkie as I used to be. I'm content to read analysis and watch the major speeches - - States of the Union, Inaugurals, convention acceptance speeches, and the like. Debates don't do much for me at all, because they're always pretty lame.

In their construction which is specifically geared to the sound bite, they tend to make all candidates look bad. The only specific times I can ever remember a candidate really looking good in a debate were the 1988 Vice Presidential debate when Lloyd Bentsen wiped the floor with Dan Quayle, and the second Presidential debate in 1992 when Bill Clinton showed off his mastery of the "town hall" format and then-President Bush got caught looking at his watch, a non-faux pas if there ever was one. Debates don't encourage policy discussion. You get "policy McNuggets": the name of some idea, just tossed out there, with no exegesis or exploration of how it would work. And you get manufactured quips and pre-conceived one liners. Yeah, Edwards's use of "Hasta la vista" last night was really spontaneous. Sure. These kinds of lines always sound like what they are: precrafted bon mots which are memorized by the candidates who then wait for the appropriate time to drop them into conversation.

Debates, basically, are next to useless. They're like preseason football games - - fun to watch if you're really caught up in them, but not really indicative of anything substantive.

And besides, Scrubs is just a funny, funny show.

Jason Streed answers his five questions.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





A forest fire, courtesy NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

I spotted this stunning photo over on City Comforts, and my jaw just dropped. This is one of those moments when I was convinced I was looking at a painting, or a digitally-enhanced or manipulated image. Somehow, this image combines a sense of nature's cycles and one of impending doom that is arresting. Wow.

Aaron answers his five questions.

Cheap Shot time: she's ugly and stupid, too!!!

(I know, I know. I'll do proper pennance later. Or not.)

Political Robotics

(with apologies to Dr. Asimov)

I've seen some liberals, online and off, acting with incredulity at the ongoing tax-cut fetish afflicting conservatives today. "Surely," the liberals will say, "they remember the explosive deficits after the 1981 Reagan tax cuts. Surely they know that the tax cuts will not increase revenue and that the budget will not balance by virtue of taxes having been cut."

I was considering such a question the other day - - I can't recall which blog or news article I read it in; it doesn't really matter because it's quite common - - and I recall some nameless conservative I saw once on Bill Maher's old show. This person was railing against Bill Clinton, claiming that in eight years Clinton did not accomplish a single positive thing. Not one. Maher, of course, pointed out the balanced budget and the long economic boom, and asked, "If it wasn't Clinton, then who got those things done?"

The response? Ronald Reagan. This conservative (who I only saw on the show once, because I was a sporadic viewer, and have never seen again) actually claimed that it was Reagan's tax cuts in 1981 that eventually led to the economy of the 1990s and the budget surpluses and all the rest of it.

This led me to formulate the following calculus to which all conservatives seem to adhere:

One: Anything that has happened since 1981, that we like, is to be credited to President Reagan.
Two: Anything that has happened since 1993, that we dislike, is to be blamed on President Clinton.
Three: If necessary, we must define what we like and what we dislike so as to conform to the first two Rules.

The left has its share of robotic shibboleths too. We saw this during the recent blackout in the northeast. When I turned on my computer the next morning and started checking the news and blogs (even though I had not lost power at any point, I had turned the computer off), it didn't take long to see deregulation blamed for the blackout, even though the authorities still aren't entirely clear on why the blackout happened, as of this writing. Now, I'm pretty firm in my liberal beliefs; I've long since abandoned the idea that the free market is the solution to all problems (or, failing that, preferable even to solving any particular problem). But it seemed to me that perhaps we might, you know, wait a while before we started judging to what degree deregulation played a part in the blackout.

Clearly, I haven't spent nearly as much time identifying the "Liberal Laws of Robotics" as I have the conservatives, because, you know, who wants to sit around identifying the faults of those with whom he agrees? Not me! But one that I have seen is this:

Anything good that has transpired since January, 2001 is the result of Clinton policies that President Bush hasn't mucked with yet.

This, of course, is pretty similar to the "Three Laws" as formulated above.

The existence of these shibboleths, on both sides, is probably unavoidable. But it also tends to facilitate the reduction of political discourse to a kind of shorthand where ideas are never exchanged or evaluated. Be careful about such things.

Casinos in Buffalo, update:

The Seneca Nation of Indians recently made a decision about where they were going to put their second casino in Western New York. They're going to build it in Cheektowaga, which is one of Buffalo's biggest suburbs (and second to Amherst in terms of economic power). Cheektowaga happens to be where the Buffalo Niagara Internation Airport is located, and if the reports are correct, the casino will be built a few miles right down the road from the airport itself. Residents in that area, of course, are not entirely thrilled, mainly because the Genesee Street/Transit Road corridor happens to be a very heavily traveled road in these parts already, and would presumably become even moreso if a casino were in the offing.

Now, I'm not wild about casinos in general, because I don't think they generate much economic activity beyond the actual jobs within the casino itself. I refuse to believe that a casino will spark the building of a whole bunch of restaurants and whatnot nearby, since casinos are specifically designed to lure people indoors and keep them there. That's why they never have windows and why you have to negotiate a maze between entering the front doors and actually coming out onto the gaming floor. And in the case of the Seneca casinos, the vastly greater portion of the profits will go to the Senecas themselves, so it's not like this is some great tax-revenue cash cow. The state and the county get a small cut, but that's about it.

However, casinos are a done deal, pretty much. They're coming, and the powers-that-be around here wanted to put on in downtown Buffalo, which struck me as a terrible idea. Doing so would not spur new development downtown, and even worse, it would take a building or set of buildings off the city's tax rolls entirely, which is not what you need in a city where the budget gaps are a constant scene of disaster.

Besides, Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde recently made an interesting point: putting the casino near the airport might strengthen the need for a new mass-transit connection between downtown and the airport area, perhaps even by adding a new Metro-rail line. Metrorail is Buffalo's subway/light-rail system, which runs along Main Street only and stops right at the city limits, as opposed to logically going into Amherst and all the way to UB's North Campus. (This is due to resistance by Amherst, Buffalo's richest suburb. I suspect they don't want to make it too easy for them downtown criminal-types to come out to their fair city. A great example of regional thinking, that.)

If we gotta have this thing in our neighborhood, Cheektowaga makes a lot more sense than downtown Buffalo. And who knows, maybe when they build it I'll get a job dealing cards there.

A Theory.

A little while back, in the course of announcing his new AOL journal (to provide AOL's new blogging service a big-gun introduction), John Scalzi discussed the September effect. This was back in the days before the Web took off - - pre-NCSA Mosaic era, when Gopher and Usenet were the main Net tools. What would happen is that each September, when thousands of freshmen arrived at colleges and universities and thus got what was then their first whiff of connectivity, these new Netizens would plunge into Usenet newsgroups and generally pay little attention to things like learning Netiquette and reading FAQs and getting the lay of the land. For example, on the Star Wars newsgroup I read at the time, one could count on messages like this every September:

"Hey, I really like Satr Wars! Do you think Lucass will make anymore? It would be cool if he'd make Timothy Zhan's books into movies! And in RETURN OF THE JEDI there's a scene where Han grabs Leigha's boob!" (Not an exact quote of any one post, but many of them really did scan like this, typos and all.)

Many a flame war started because of newbies rushing in where angels feared to tread back then, because of the "September effect". Later on, the effect died away as home Net access became more and more common, although I often wondered if the September effect might have been replaced by a similar December effect, as all those new Christmas gift home computers were plugged in for the first time. And now, I see a new kind of September effect possibly emerging, although it's not as annoying as the old flood of Usenet newbies could be. (And I never participated on the really high-traffic newsgroups where the September Effect earned its place in Net lore.) In fact, since it impacts blog traffic, it's actually a bit endearing.

What's happening now is the sudden uptick in Google hits on blogs. Alexandra commented the other day that she's seeing a ton of Google hits to her site based on the search term "Lascaux", which happens to be one of the words in her blog's title, Out of Lascaux. I suspect that college kids enrolled in Arts 101 classes are being instructed to write two-page papers or some such thing on the cave-paintings of Lascaux, which is a logical starting point for an introductory arts class. So the tykes are rushing to Google, plugging in "Lascaux", and arriving at Alexandra's blog.

This happens a lot here, as well. Just in the last week or two, coincident with the beginning of the new college school year, I'm seeing a lot more Google hits for the poems listed under "Poetical Excursions" in the sidebar. (ASIDE: I need to do more of those…I always enjoyed writing them.) Sometimes I can even glean a bit about the student's assignment just from their search terms, because in addition to the title they'll include a term like "allegory", which leads me to believe they are under instruction to "Describe how Rosetti's poem 'Uphill' is an allegory." And then there are the ones like this, in which the student has apparently plugged their entire homework question right into Google. These folks are probably under the impression that Google uses a natural language interface, kind of like AskJeeves.

I wonder how many students are instructed, in a Freshman Comp class, to write a brief position paper on, say, Iraq…and how many end up handing in something that sounds quite a bit like SDB. Probably a lot. I have to admit, though -- if there's a college student who's ripping off my defense of Attack of the Clones for a class, I'm only half-angry about it.

I wasn't going to write anything yesterday about the Bills' signing of former Patriots safety Lawyer Milloy until he was, you know, actually signed. Now that he is, my reaction is:

YES yes yes yes boo-yeah that's what I'm talkin' about!

Milloy might be on a bit of a decline - - his stats last year were off - - but even so, he'll provide veteran leadership in the Bills' secondary, which is talented, athletic, and very young. And he was a team leader for the hated Patriots, so anything that hurts them is good news for the Bills.

And speaking of the Patriots, this provides yet more evidence that Bill Belichick just isn't the wonder-genius that everybody thinks he is. That's twice in two years he's allowed an upper-echalon player to go to a division foe. In a Buffalo News article today, writer Jerry Sullivan -- never one of my favorites -- blathers on a bit about Belichick's "legend", presumably because he often seems to have the Bills' number. Fair enough, but the guy's just not that impressive on the whole, as far as I can see.

Look at his lifetime stats as a head coach: In eight total years, he's still under .500 (61-67). He's had only two postseason appearances. He's had only three winning seasons. His best regular season record, done twice, is 11-5. Belichick's reputation as a head coach is over-inflated, I think, by his improbable Super Bowl season two years ago. And his "dominance" of the Bills is understandable given how bad the Bills were two years ago, and how they were still a young team on the rebuilding path last year.

Let's not use words like "legend" to describe Bill Belichick, OK? One year does not a career make. He's got a long way to go before he's a legend. Right now, Jon Gruden and Dick Vermeil have far better claim to that title.

Words fail me.

What really terrifies me is that I did in fact read that comic for a time. This was during the 1980s, when every Marvel title had some group of aliens or supervillains or somebody who was the Greatest Threat to All Life On Earth Possible, and yet, only that book's title character ever really went up against them. Weird.

Anyway....

(link via Paul Riddell.)

Scott comments on my post below about Tulsa, Buffalo, and urban-renewal pitfalls.

A maintenance note: It appears that my commenting system of choice, YACCS, is having severe server problems which will likely not be resolved for another week yet. This is not acceptable to me -- I love comments, even if I don't get all that many of them -- so I've instituted a stop-gap measure for the interim period, a message-board system. You'll find the link after each post, in the usual spot. One proviso, though: it's all one big message board, as opposed to a separate comment thread for each post. So, when you comment, make sure you at least reference the post you're commenting on so I know what's going on. I also ask for civility and all the rest of that, but I don't tend to inspire a lot of raging comment (except from certain quarters, and I have other ways of dealing with the nefarious Mr. Jones....heh heh heh....) so I doubt that will be an issue. I'm also not sure how the new board handles user IDs and links to personal homepages or blogs or whatnot, so keep that in mind. You might need to physically sign and leave your URL within the comment itself. Or maybe not; I haven't investigated that much.

I could have gone with one of the other commenting systems out there, like BlogBack or BackBlog or HardTack or FatBack, but I figured the message-board thing might be different, and if I like it, I may just keep it as a general board connected to the blog after YACCS returns to full service. I do plan to continue using YACCS; I think it's been a pretty good system despite more frequent outages than I like. But that's a clear case of "Ya gets what ya pays for," isn't it?

So, enjoy. Comment away...and don't forget to mention which post you comment on.

Matthew Yglesias's political content will, apparently, no longer be appearing on his own blog, but on TAPped (the online presence of The American Prospect, where Mr. Yglesias now works). The bummer part of this is that TAPped is a group-blog but does not attribute its posts, so one won't know who wrote what. Bummer.

Oh, well. Anyone wishing to remove Mr. Yglesias from his or her blogroll is invited to replace him with....

(Shame? What's that?)

According to Lynn Sislo, the city of Tulsa is considering building a stadium downtown that would have a seating capacity of about 20,000. She's wondering about a number of issues involved, like parking, traffic, and the constant in urban politics that money spent on big-ticket items like sports-venues is very likely money that could be better spent on sewer maintenance, police precincts, schools, arts programs, and the like.

I found this story interesting because Buffalo has twice in the last two decades built new sports venues downtown. First, there's the baseball stadium. Its current name is Dunn Tire Park, but many Buffalonians (like myself) still think of it by its original moniker, Pilot Field. (It also spent a few years as North AmeriCare Park, a wonderful bit of HMO-love there.) The park was built in the late 1980s and opened (I think) in 1989. It used to see a lot heavier attendance for ballgames than it does now; I attended several games that were actually sell-outs. Parking didn't seem to be much of an issue, but my memory could be faulty. The park is just a block away from the nearest Metro-Rail stop, so a lot of folks park a ways away and ride the train to the stadium, for example.

Of course, it's one of the never-dying lies in America that sports venues spur economic development. "Restaurateurs will be champing at the bit to open near the park," we are told. "Think of the building that will go on around the new arena," we constantly hear. Of course, this is all nonsense. The area surrounding Pilot Field is no more hopping than it was in the early 1990s, when Buffalo's population was something like 30,000 people greater than it is now. Ditto HSBC Arena, the venue built for the Sabres in the mid-1990s. And it's like this everywhere: just read through the current tour of all thirty Major League ballparks on ESPN.com, and note how few of those articles describe a hotbed of activity beyond the ballpark walls. Sports arenas don't generate economic activity by themselves. They can help attract tourist attention if they're used for lots of other uses, but even those types of tourist-attraction events tend to attract insular fans who don't exactly spend lots of time touring the cities themselves.

Another thing worth remembering about Buffalo's ballpark is the climate in which it was built. Fourteen years seems like an incredibly long time ago now, but in the late 1980s, Major League Baseball's giant problems with competitive balance between large-market and small-market teams was only beginning to emerge into consciousness. Thus, Buffalo built Pilot Field with the dreams of one day soon being granted a big-league franchise. In fact, Buffalo was one of the finalists for the 1993 round of MLB expansion -- when, ultimately, the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies were created -- largely on the strength of Buffalo's growing rep as a sports town (the Bills were just beginning their Golden Age of AFC dominance) and the beauty of the ballpark Buffalo had built. The park was actually designed so that, even though it seats about 20,000 people, it could fairly easily be expanded to the 40,000-capacity it would need as a MLB park. It's interesting to me to note that Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards is always mentioned as the starting point to baseball's return to the traditional type of stadiums (baseball-use only, open outfields to overlook the cityscape, brick architecture, etc). But the trend actually started earlier than that, in the minor leagues. Buffalo was a part of that trend.

Nowadays, though, Dunn Tire Park Pilot Field is looking a bit worn at the edges. The stands are never packed anymore, though the place does do pretty good business during the summer. A lot of that is due to the fact that the Bisons are a minor league team, and thus their fortunes are pretty closely tied to that of the Cleveland Indians, their MLB parent club. The Indians are rebuilding right now, which makes the Buffalo team something of a pit-stop for talented players on the way up. And with the final burial of Buffalo's onetime hopes of joining the Majors with a franchise of its own, the stadium has never been upgraded. It's still a nice place to catch a game in summer, and the drum-and-bugle-corps shows they have there are a lot of fun, but the ballpark is no longer the place to be in downtown Buffalo, as it once was.

As for HSBC Arena, there's another sore spot. Built for the Sabres at a time when Adelphia Cable was on the rise and Buffalo was eagerly hitching its fortunes to Adelphia's star, the Arena is a beautiful venue indeed. But all the usual arguments were trotted out: without the added revenue of luxury boxes, the Sabres would lose money and then leave town. It would spur development in Buffalo's Cobblestone District. (Nope.) It would be used for all manner of special conventions and out-of-town events. (Not really. Part of the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament was held here a few years back, but that was that. This is a constant point of annoyance with me. Why can't Buffalo host a Final Four? or the Nationals or World Figure Skating Championships? No reason that I can see, except we never seem to try to get those events. As Toby Ziegler once said on The West Wing: "It's not the ones we lose that bother me, it's the ones we don't suit up for.")

And of course, Adelphia's fortunes dried up spectacularly in yet another of those "Big company cooking the books" scandals. The Sabres were sold, and for a time it appeared that they might be sold to someone willing to move them elsewhere. I was prepared to simply say, "Fine, let 'em go," until I learned that the Arena's operations are so expensive to the City and the County that without the revenue the Sabres bring into the place, the Arena would likely be shut down entirely. Talk about putting the horse in front of the cart, eh?

I don't know how this all reflects on Tulsa, a town with which I am totally unfamiliar. I know that Tulsa's population is bigger than Buffalo's, but I don't know if that reflects the metro area or if Tulsa is one of those towns that thwarted suburban outflight by annexing the suburbs, which Buffalo can't do. I also don't know if Tulsa has any major league dreams of its own (the Tulsa Sabres, perhaps?). I'm always of mixed-mind on these kinds of things. I do think that big-league sports events can enhance a city's image, but only if they're done right. And it's not even always necessary. New Orleans has plenty of cache, despite the fact that the Saints always stink. Austin, Texas seems to be doing just fine these days.

So, on the basis of Buffalo's experience, I would say to Tulsa: Be careful. If you do it, do it right, and for the right reasons. Don't delude yourselves into thinking that downtown will become like Times Square by virtue of a big arena or ballpark. And if the choice is having an arena or having schools and arts, choose schools and arts. Please oh please.

(Hey, Sean and Scott: You fellows have Tulsa connections. What do you think of this? Care to weigh in?)

I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find that Kevin Drum has looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger as a gubernatorial candidate and found him wanting. It's always fun to see how these out-of-left-field candidates fare. Some, like Arnold, profess that they won't be beholden to anyone or any "special interests" at all, but proceed to pretty much do just that. Others, like Ross Perot, turn out to be crazy. ("I'm dropping out because George Bush's flunkies plotted to sabotage my daughter's wedding....") It's perenially fascinating, really. And there are the Jesse Venturas of the world, who vacillate between crazy and actually competent.

But anyway, someone in Kevin's comments section makes the point that Arnold is qualified because he was a successful businessman before he became a huge film star. Now, my knowledge of the particulars of Arnold's pre-Hollywood business career is limited to what this commenter says: that he invested his bodybuilding money in real estate and made a killing. I guess that's one possible definition of "successful businessman" -- i.e., "a person who takes a small amount of money and parlays it into a large amount of money". But really, is that enough? Is investing in the right opportunity at the right time really sufficient to be considered a successful businessman? I'm not sure that it does. What was made out of that investment? Who benefitted? What other wealth was created?

Really, I'm totally ignorant here on the particulars of Arnold Schwarzenegger's business acumen. But I have a hard time judging someone's business success by the just the amount of money they have now versus the amount of money they had five or ten years ago. It's kind of like that guy, Al Dunlap, who made a career of "improving earnings" at various companies by firing huge chunks of their workforces. Is there a point at which the scorched earth upon which one stands speaks louder than the number of zeroes in that person's bank balance?

Random notes:

:: Morat posted a few recommendations of good children's lit from the fantasy realm. I haven't read the Cooper, but the others are all first-rate.

:: Francisco the Fearless points out the long-awaited arrival on DVD of Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, which is really one of the very best adventure films ever made (even if The Sea Hawk just slightly edges it, in my view). I should also point out that a new rerecording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's fantastic score is being issued any day now, on the Marco Polo label (Naxos's sister label).

:: Now, that's how you do a spoiler warning!

:: Andrew Cory answers his five questions, and thus gets to cross the Bridge of Fate.

(EDIT: Link fixed to Andrew's site.)

I sure wish my comments would come back....

My current form of blog-based depression is counting the days until the brand-new group-run liberal blog Corrente exceeds my own hit-count. They're about two weeks old, and as of this writing they're about halfway to my hit-total. Aieee!!

Corrente is run by the folks who stood in recently for Atrios, and thus they enter the fray with a pretty-much built-in audience (as well as helpful pointers from Atrios himself). Judging by their apprenticeship over on Eschaton, I think they have some work to do in developing their own voice. It seemed a bit like they were mildly torn between echoing Atrios's tone and doing their own thing; hopefully now that they're on their own, they will gravitate toward the latter.

In other traffic-related babbling, my four-day hiatus last week was enough to send me plummeting through the Ecosystem, where I had been a marsupial but am now once again a flappy bird. I've started the upward climb again, though. And, as long as you find folks keep on visiting, I may hit 20,000 hits by the end of the week.

And finally, a fine lefty-blog that I've visited sporadically for a while, PLA by Dwight Meredith, is apparently now closed for business. I occasionally show no shame whatsoever in link-whoring in this space, so all you folks who have been linking PLA and are now looking for someone else to link, well....

Out of Lascaux is just a great blog. Case in point: Alexandra's brief exploration of candlelight in paintings. I love it when people point out things that I would never have noticed on my own in art.

Michael of 2Blowhards has some thoughts on current feminine youth fashion. I have to admit that I am probably moving into "fuddy-duddyism", because I am increasingly tiring of sex as the overriding theme in fashion, advertising, storytelling, and just about everything else these days. Instead, I am finding myself more and more drawn to things like elegance, charm and wit. Our society seems to be strongly gravitating toward titillation in place of emotion, but I find titillation without emotion hollow and useless. We've come to see "passion" as a physical thing, a function of hormonal activity, and maybe in some part it is. But passion is also an emotion, and I think that in a lot of ways we either are forgetting that or have already done so.

Here's a fascinating solution to the problem of how to keep freeways from neatly bisecting neighborhoods. The overpass in this case is being constructed to support buildings with shops and sidewalks, so that a pedestrian has the illusion of never crossing the busy highway below. This might be an idea of which Buffalo should take note.

Downtown Buffalo is located very near the shores of Lake Erie, as are the downtowns of many cities. But years ago, Buffalo erected a freeway, Interstate 190, that connects downtown to the New York State Thruway, I-90 (which is known locally as "the mainline 90"). I-190 also leads to the Peace Bridge to Canada, and serves as a route to Niagara Falls. It's an important, and necessary, highway. The problem is that it was built right between downtown and the Lake Erie waterfront, resulting in a disconnection between the city and the waterfront that was once its economic raison d'etre.

Some in Buffalo have suggested a project on the scale of Boston's "Big Dig" to put the 190 underground, thus allowing downtown an unbroken physical connection with the water once again. I doubt very much if there is likely to be money available here for such a project any time in the next, oh, fifteen years, but perhaps this overpass-idea might be a way to go intermediately. It would still be terribly expensive, though, as the downtown section of the 190 already is an overpass, about four miles long; also, someone over on City Comforts speculated that car exhaust might be a problem for the businesses on the overpass. But this is the kind of thinking -- creative and geared toward linking disparate parts together -- that Buffalo needs.

Oh, cool! There are a lot of neat metaphorical names out there for the collected efforts of we bloggers, e-journal writers, and online essayists. "The Blogosphere" is the most popular, obviously. Along that line, I would prefer "The Blogiverse", personally, but ultimately my favorite is "Blogistan", the suffix of which characterizes blogs as a kind of realm-unto-themselves where outside concerns might not matter as much, and where there is constant "battling" among camps (although blogger battles are infinitely preferable to the kind you find in real-life places whose names end with "stan"). But I've just come across a really nifty new one, based not on cosmology or geography but on biology:

The Islets of Bloggerhans.

Now that is a terrific metaphor! It comes from the Islets of Langerhans, which are the groups of cells scattered throughout the pancreas that make insulin and other enzymes essential to digestion. It's also one of the few poetically-named biological features; the name sounds more like a place that Gulliver should have visited on one of his travels.

(The article in which I see this term for the first time is a takedown of Glenn Reynolds and the whole "Cruz Bustamante is a racist" thing that I'm not paying much attention to, because I'm not in California.)

Education has been on the mind a bit lately, both from Blogistan (such as this fine education-centered blog) and from the fact that my kid will be entering some kind of schooling quite soon. It's pretty much an article of faith that our schools don't do well enough, and no, they probably don't. We're constantly being told that test scores are down, we're always hearing horrific anecdotes about the kids who identified Montana as our enemy in World War II or who spell "rabbit" with three M's. We hear about schools being used to inculcate certain values that not everyone wants their kids to have. We hear about sex in schools, and I personally am troubled by all of the arts and sports-program cutting that goes on. (It depresses me to no end to see parents complain to TV cameras at the school board meetings when those programs are cut, when those same parents voted down tax increases in the last election that would have kept those programs going.)

But then, I see America right now, and we're still the world's wealthiest nation, we're still the main economic engine for this planet, we're still producing musicians and novelists and painters and filmmakers. No, kids don't know all the stuff that I'd like them to know. But a lot of 'em know stuff that I never knew. So maybe the kids are morons, and it's just taking them a long time to put our country on the rocks. Or maybe they're not morons at all, and we need to lighten up or rethink what we consider to be moronic. Or maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Most likely, everybody is a moron. Now, that is a democratic view.

Ultimately, I think the proper purpose of education is best described as "minimizing stupidity". Unfortunately, we seem to be in an era in which identifying stupidity just isn't done; and anyway, I'm lately wondering if stupidity is hardwired into the human condition.

I've also been thinking a bit lately about homeschooling, and I'm pretty certain that I don't want to do it. And I get worried when I read things like this post by Holly Lisle, in which she blatantly states that everybody should be homeschooling. I'm sorry, but I can't get behind that. I really can't. I think the option should be there, but I see no reason to assume that the legions of people out there who would be homeschooling are a priori better teachers than the people employed by the schools. Good teaching is a skill, and not everybody has it. I really don't think that a dramatic upswing in homeschooling would really have the effect that its adherents think it would. I don't know if it would be a complete trainwreck either, but I keep returning to a point made facetiously by George Carlin: "Kids are like anyone else. There's a few winners, and a whole lot of losers." Well, it seems to me that would apply to homeschoolers as well. (But not you, if you're teaching your kid at home. You are brilliant. It's the other folks.) And I think that we need to really consider hard the reasons people may have for homeschooling their kids. If the local school system is really that bad, and it could well be, that's one thing. If you don't want your kid learning about evolution, though, that's something else.

(ASIDE: Maybe it's because I am a liberal, but my eyes tend to glaze over whenever someone from the conservative or libertarian sphere characterizes public schools as a massive liberal values indoctrination program. First of all, judging by the political climate these days, it doesn't really seem that the great liberal scheme to use schools to trot out armies of identically-thinking liberals is working particularly well. Secondly, it's not usually all that clear just which "liberal" values are being foisted, anyway. "They just want to turn all kids into little liberals" is, pretty much, twaddle.)

Another odd thing about teachers is that I'm less and less convinced that there's much we can do, quantitatively, to see how "good" they are, except probably through test scores of their classes over time. I remember some teachers fondly because, to me, they were great teachers; they reached me on some level and taught me something I haven't forgotten. Other students, encountering the exact same teacher, might not have liked them nearly as well, or not at all. There were teachers I loved whom classmates of mine couldn't stand, and there was one very popular teacher in my high school whom I absolutely hated. As far as I was concerned, the woman was the nexus of all evil in our county, and I'm pretty sure she thought the same of me.

I also recall my eighth grade English teacher, who was just godawful. She was stiff and dull, she constantly gave us creative writing assignments that were better suited to fourth graders, she did our grammar lessons in robotic fashion, not one of the books she required us to read has stuck in my memory in the slightest degree...just horrible. When I later learned, on my first day of my senior year, that she would be my AP English teacher, my heart sank in the expectation of more drudgery and boredom. It turned out, though, that she was much more at ease with teaching seniors; it allowed her to indulge her real interests in literature as opposed to the stuff she'd done with us four years before. Just four years difference, teaching the same subject, made all the difference to her. I'm still amazed at the difference.

I'm not really sure if I have a point in all this, except that I'd like it if we could somehow find that balance between making sure kids know what they're going to need to know to function in this world, and not choking the love of learning from them. Kids have to be taught to hate learning. If we could somehow figure out how to get them to never ask "Is this gonna be on the test?" or "Why do I gotta learn this?" again, I think a lot of our educational problems might go away. I had a prof in college (just for one class though, which was a pity because I liked the guy) who said he hated the "card game" approach to teaching, which you find everywhere. It's when the teacher throws down a card (test question), and if the student wants to pass, he'd better have the right card to respond to each of the teacher's cards. I worry that in the rush to do all this testing, we're exacerbating the "card game" approach to education.

Here's a DVD technical question: As I've noted before, I use the Buffalo and Erie County Library system for a lot of my DVD viewing, because they have a great collection and I can request DVDs from anywhere in the library system and have them delivered right to my local branch, which is perfect, especially for older films or even foreign movies that aren't stocked at the local BlockBuster. (People who live in big metro areas and don't use their libraries might as well move to rural Montana.)

But, the B&ECPL has a practice of putting their nice, thick cataloging barcode labels right on the face of the DVDs themselves. This doesn't seem to interfere with playback at all, except that while watching any DVD I check out of the library my player makes a "buzzing" noise that I suspect is the wobbling of the disc as it rotates at high speed, with said wobble resulting from that label's weight throwing the disc out of balance. (These labels are thick.) I'm 98% certain that the labels are the cause of the buzz, because I never hear it when playing my own DVDs or ones I rent.

So, is there any possibility that playing these unbalanced DVDs can hurt my player, or is that buzzing just a minor annoyance?

The Department of Weird Convergences, which has apparently been on vacation near Crawford, Texas, wishes to note the following bumper stickers, noted within six inches of one another on the back of a Chevy pickup the other day.

:: A 700 Club sticker (with logo) that read, "This is still One Nation UNDER GOD." (Emphasis as marked on the sticker.)

:: One of those images of a little boy, with his trousers dropped and his posterior in full view, with an arcing line clearly meant to depict a stream of urine, impacting a "Ford" logo.

The Department is wondering if slapping the second sticker in such proximity to the first sticker has any "blunting" effect on the first sticker's message. Anyone?

I once met a man with a wooden leg, named Smith.

I'd forgotten what a good movie Mary Poppins is. The songs are all wonderful, and the acting is all first-rate. Although, I must admit that Dick Van Dyke's fake Cockney accent gets a tad grating after a while. But the film is undoubtedly the best pure musical Disney ever made. In fact, if it weren't for that Disney label - - had Fox or Warners made it, for example - - the film would probably be remembered as one of the finer musicals as opposed to a family/kids movie. It's also a terrific fantasy: it creates a whole little world within London where magic can happen and wonderment can be found. Here's an urban fantasy from yesteryear.

Of course, watching the film now, I can't help but keep reflecting on the "Sherry Bobbins" parody that The Simpsons did….

(So, what was the name of his other leg?)

Olympus Mons, the planet Mars.

Like everyone else, I've been going outside to scope out the planet Mars over the last week or so. I'm as fascinated by Mars as anyone - - a planet that's somewhat Earthlike, but also violently different, where humans will one day set up their first colonies on another planet. (My firm belief is that colonization is our destiny, and we'd best be about it.) Mars is there, and it's waiting. What are we waiting for?

(Here is a great gallery of Mars pics.)

NFL 2003, continued.

OK, I've weighed in on the Bills and the rest of the AFC East. Now I'll go on about the rest of the league a bit. (Not every team, though. I have my limits.)

:: If the Minnesota Vikings, my favorite NFC team, were to win the Super Bowl, I think it might make the third page of the Buffalo sports section. That's how hard it is to come by Vikings news out here. The Vikes struck me as a disaster-in-waiting at the beginning of last year, and for a time I genuinely believed that they should waive Randy Moss and just go right into a rebuilding project. Moss appears, though, to have moved a bit beyond his stupid attitude, and the Vikes in general appear to be improving, as far as I can tell. Every year there's at least one playoff team that totally surprises me. Last year it was the Browns. This year, it could well be the Vikings.

:: My second-favorite team overall is the Pittsburgh Steelers. I only root against the Steelers if, and only if, they are either playing the Bills or a Steeler victory would hurt the Bills (by, say, denying them home-field advantage or a playoff berth). That said, I expect that for the thirty-seventh consecutive year, the Steelers will get to the playoffs, that they will fail to advance to the Super Bowl, and that in the postgame press conference Bill Cowher will look like his jaw is about to burst into flame while his eyes blast Cyclops-like death-rays. But at least it won't be a case of Kordell Stewart suddenly realizing he's in a big game and thus lowering his play to the level of a drunken Arena Leaguer. That's progress, right?

:: So Jake Plummer is in Denver now. Maybe he'll flourish under a new system, better coaches and better ownership. But he's also got a number of years' worth of bad habits, bred or allowed to fester under the aegis of a crappy organization in Arizona. But maybe he's just the guy, now that a few years of Brian Griese has allowed the memory of John Elway to move, just slightly, into the area of local legend as opposed to the immediate past, to lead the Denver resurgence. The Broncos should have been better last year than they were.

:: And speaking of Arizona, so Emmitt Smith's going to finish out his days there. Big whoop. The only real question mark for Smith now is if, when he finally decides to hang 'em up - - probably after this year - - Jerry Jones will let him sign one of those one-day deals next summer just so he can officially retire as a Cowboy.

Here are a couple of questions about the Cardinals: Do Cardinals fans exist? And, if so, does it bother them that the greatest moment in their franchise's history, receiver Rod Tidwell's touchdown catch to beat Dallas and put the Cards in the playoffs, was a fictional moment from a movie?

:: Will Oliver Willis, Blogistan's source for All Things Redskins, be smiling this year? Well, Oliver strikes me as the kind of football fan who can find something to smile about even in a 3-13 year, so it's all relative. He won't be dancing in the streets celebrating the 'Skins' return to the Super Bowl, but he'll probably be encouraged with a 9-7 campaign.

:: So, who will actually win the divisions this year? Below are my predictions. Consider that last year, I correctly predicted six of eight division winners. Heh. Indeed.

AFC East: Buffalo
AFC North: Pittsburgh
AFC South: Tennessee
AFC West: Kansas City
AFC Wildcards: New England, Denver

NFC East: Philadelphia
NFC North: Green Bay
NFC South: Tampa
NFC West: San Francisco
NFC Wildcards: St. Louis, NY Giants

The division I'm "iffiest" about is the NFC West. I'm mainly picking the Rams in the playoffs for sentimental reasons - - I just really dig Kurt Warner, and I'd like to see him return to form. I also think that my predicted order-of-finish in the NFC East could very well be reversed; the Giants just might be hungrier than the Eagles. (Each team has good reason to be hungry.) And there are always the Falcons…but Michael Vick's hurt right now, which might put them in a hole to start with. I'd also watch out for Minnesota, Seattle and Cleveland this year, too. Each of those teams could be a major spoiler or even get into the playoffs. Finally, I'm wary of leaving Oakland out of my post-season mix, but I also think they don't have enough gas in the tank to overcome the younger teams in their division.

:: And finally, who will win the Super Bowl? Well, looking at the last six Super Bowl champions, a pattern emerges.

1997: Denver
1998: Denver
1999: St. Louis
2000: New England
2001: Baltimore
2002: Tampa
2003: ???

What's the pattern? Well, aside from the repeat-champion 1998 Broncos, every one of these champions is a team that, to that point in franchise history, had never won a Super Bowl before. (Even the 1996 Packers could be considered part of this trend, since their previous championship had been 30 years before.) The era of parity and free agency has genuinely created an atmosphere where any team, run coached and managed well, can put together a Super Bowl champion. If 2003 keeps to this formula and crowns a brand new champion that has never won it all before, I expect it to be one of these teams: Buffalo, Tennessee, Atlanta (even though I'm not even picking them to make the playoffs!) or Philadelphia. Of those teams, the Titans and Eagles are probably the most desperate to win before the current window closes and they go back into cap-forced rebuilding.

But I don't think that's going to happen this time out, because I think we're going to see a repeat champion for the first time in five years. I think that Tampa will win it all, again - - mainly because they're returning pretty much the exact same team that won it all last year. They are still ascendant. Free agency hasn't stripped them yet, their players are not too old yet, and they are built around physical defense. About the only thing that I can see keeping them from winning a second consecutive Super Bowl is injuries. Who will they beat? Tennessee, probably. So that's my pick: The Buccaneers over the Titans.

Repeating in the NFL has always been tough, but I don't think it's any more tough in the free agency era than it was before. It's simply that the formula is different. If you can put together a Super Bowl-caliber team, and win that first championship early in the four or five years that are at most what you'll have to do it, then you'll be able to do what the Bucs are able to do this year: come back from a championship with almost the same personnel. What's harder now is creating a dynasty: building a franchise that dominates for year after year over a long period. I expect we'll see repeat champions at about the same clip as before: one will come along every five, six, or seven years. (Between the 1978/1979 Steelers and the 1988-1989 49ers, there were no repeat champions. But the period between 1988 and 1998 saw three repeats - - the 49ers, the Cowboys, and the Broncos.)

So, that's it. I will, of course, track the progress each week in boring fashion. So, I'm ready for some football!

One of the small side effects of hanging out in online writers' forums is that writers (in my experience) tend to be cat people, and inevitably there comes a post every so often in which someone's beloved cat passes away. If one is also a cat person, these posts are always very sad. There was such a post on a Usenet group I read the other day, and amongst the follow-ups of condolence I found this charming quote:

"Yes, dogs provided companionship while man was at the hunt. But it was cats who insisted that we invent houses and discover fire."

I don't know where that comes from, but man, is that a great quote.

Kevin Drum notes the latest example of school officials overreacting to a student's creative writing exercise. As Kevin notes, this bizarre belief on the part of many in education today that we can somehow eradicate brooding teenagers is causing a lot of problems. I did a fair amount of brooding myself, and I recall that some of my teachers accepted it and tried to "channel" it, while others apparently had no use for the non-popular sports types like myself. In general, I suspect that the brooding types are never really trusted, which is a particular bummer now that we've managed to convince ourselves that every brooding heart may be a beat or two away from sliding over the edge to murderousness. (Wow…"muderousness", what a word…)

I'm also probably lucky that my main creative outlet in school was music. I did write, but that was always "back burner" stuff and it was always Star Wars fanfic. Had my current love of horror developed back then, I probably would have generated some grim material indeed. But then, I've never really been one for using my fiction to vent the problems of my inner life. I don't base characters in my stories on people I know, nor do I put my characters into situations in which I have been before. I may borrow someone's interesting habits or something like that, but that's about it. So even in my "brooding teen" days, I would have been vanishingly unlikely to write a tale in which I arranged the deaths of my hated teachers. (And besides, my brooding was pretty tame, and there were only a handful of teachers I really disliked in school.)

Kevin's parting shot here is this: Everywhere you look, it's either overreaction or underreaction. Is it just the curse of humanity never to get things right? I'm sure that Kevin knows that the answer here is basically "Yes". We're basically a pendulum species that will never, ever quite reach the center where we find Nirvana, Heaven, Righteousness, or whatever you want to call that state of pure morality. Sometimes we swing way too far one way, other times we sway too far the other. All we can really hope for is that over time the wildness of our swings lessens a bit, and that our moral pendulum never again approaches, say, the position where buying and selling other human beings for servitude is OK; and what keeps the pendulum swinging in the first place is that no one knows what its rest-position would be, anyway.

Just in case anyone is wondering where my comments have gone, apparently the YACCS server croaked at some point early in the weekend, and due to (a) the fact that it is a weekend and (b) it's a long holiday weekend at that, the outage has lasted longer than normal. Hopefully commenting will be restored tomorrow sometime.

As if the SF Gods didn't think I already felt guilty enough about not being able to attend WorldCon despite its being just a hundred miles away, I see this report on Usenet this morning from an attendee who sat in on Guy Gavriel Kay reading from The Last Light of the Sun, the new novel coming out next spring:

So, here I am in Toronto, and yesterday (or Saturday or something), GGK read from his upcoming book.

By way of introduction, he pointed out that his past several books had all about about "sophisticated cultures". He didn't go into what he meant by "sophisticated", but he gave Arbonne's Court of Love as an example. It's not something that a low-literacy, bare-bones agricultural society could support. Ditto for educated doctors, professional muralists, etc. And Byzantium is the archetype of pre-Renaissance sophisticated civilization.

So with the next book he wants to do something different. It's post-Roman Britain, with Celts and Saxons and so on. The scene he read had kids out on a raid against a nearby fort. There was obviously still *art* -- poetry, music -- but it wasn't troubadors.

We'll see how different it turns out. The part he read gave no sense of who the "Romans" had been, or how the protagonists viewed them. (The only reference to previous civilizations was indirect -- someone mentioned the Wall of Hadrian-or-whoever.)

So there we go: We'll see the equivalent of Dark Ages Britain in the proto-Europe setting that's been the setting of GGK's last three novels. Thus, I expect that the title The Last Light of the Sun refers to the gradual fading of the Rhodian (Roman) Empire as the Imperial forces recede, leaving their outposts and forts behind and the requisite power-void to be filled. What interests me most about this is that it's precisely this setting into which most scholars try to find the actual historical roots of the Arthurian legends. I wonder if GGK is planning a type of re-exploration of the Arthur stories, given that he's already done some work in that milieu in The Fionavar Tapestry. (Of course, he could leave the Arthurian angle out entirely, too. You never know with GGK.) The other interesting angle is that, as I read the quoted post, it sounds as if GGK is creating a more "brutal" civilization for the new book.

And I missed the #$%&^*@!!! reading. AGGGHHHH!!!

(I'll try to post a link to the Usenet post once it shows up on the Google archive. As of this writing, it isn't there yet. I cut-and-pasted the text from my newsreader.)

SDB did what I think he does best the other day: he took an experience of his own and used it to illustrate something from science or engineering. In this case, tool-making. It seems he had some functionality problems with an updated version of his blogging software, and those problems gave rise to this fascinating essay about what tools should do and the pitfalls toolmakers of all stripes must avoid.

Although, I have to point out the section where he describes pants as a tool and the problems that can arise from poor "pants design". In the course of the article, SDB talks about tools "vanishing" and "unvanishing". Those are metaphors, obviously - - read the article to see what they mean - - but when I got to the pants section, SDB had me envisioning this engineer walking through downtown San Diego in wool pants and suddenly stopping to exclaim, "My pants have vanished!" And passers-by would shake their heads and say, "Oh, how sad…another Qualcomm engineer whose pants have vanished!"

Hmmm….it's possible my posting break was not quite long enough….

"It's not what you said, it's the way that you said it…oh my God, I'm a woman!"

-Joey Tribiani in a moment of gender confusion.

Here's a sign that I need the NFL season to start, pronto: the other night I watched An Affair to Remember, and the last scene got me blubbering like a baby. (It always does, though.)

But that movie is just a showcase of good acting. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr accomplish so much chemistry not just through fine dialogue (with which the film is loaded) but also through exchanged looks, expressions, and touches. That last scene, my god…when Cary Grant is telling Kerr about the painting he told his art dealer to give away, and then he suddenly puts two-and-two together…geez, I'm tearing up just thinking about that scene.

The film's third act flags a bit, as it tries to convince us that the always urbane and charming Grant is a starving artist and as we are treated to two horrible music numbers by children. But that actually heightens the sense of relief at the end, when the script finally returns to the sharp dialogue of earlier.

My oh my, it's September already. That means many things, of course, but most important is…

FOOTBALL!!!

Yes, it's time for me to start droning on about football on a weekly basis. It's my burden, and my curse. So we'll get right on with it, starting with the most important franchise in the NFL, without whom the entire league might as well fold up and die:

:: The Buffalo Bills.

The Bills started a rebuilding project two years ago, bringing in a new coach and a new General Manager, jettisoning the last bastion of talent from the run of Super Bowl appearances in the early 1990s, and opting to give Rob Johnson his shot at quarterback over Doug Flutie. Johnson didn't work out, but I still think the Bills made the right decision that year. Nevertheless, they went 3-13 in 2001 with the beginnings of a youth movement that continued apace in 2002.

The additions of Drew Bledsoe and Mike Williams on the offensive line a year ago, combined with a general sense of stability on the O-line that had been missing for several years, finally made the Bills a fairly potent offensive team. But their defense was terrible (although it improved late in the year), which ended up putting too much pressure on Bledsoe to win games all by himself. Repeatedly put into positions of having to win shoot-outs with his arm, Bledsoe began to force his throws and make bad decisions with the ball, and the Bills ended up limping to an 8-8 record. (I had predicted a 6-10 finish, so I was happy.)

So here we are, heading into 2003. The Bills made substantial upgrades to their defensive personnel in the offseason, adding linebackers Takeo Spikes and Jeff Posey and defensive lineman Sam Adams, along with a few others. The Bills' D was porous last year, allowing opposing teams to either rack up a lot of rushing yardage or letting their quarterbacks take advantage of the Bills' lack of a pass-rush to stand in the pocket while their receivers got open. I would like the Bills to have acquired one real pass-rusher in the offseason, but in any event they'll be a more physical team and they'll be much stiffer against the run, which should help a secondary that's more talented than their stats from the last couple of years let on. The Bills' D figures to be a lot better this year…but now, there are question marks again on offense.

I figure that on the basis of better defense alone they'll finish better than last year. Defense is the key to winning consistently in the NFL and always has been; if they can have fifty percent more defense than they had last year, I figure that will make up for the loss of twenty-five percent of their offense. Of course, they might have lost more than twenty-five percent. We don't know yet.

The biggest offensive loss was receiver Peerless Price, who was a free agent but thanks to the NFL's rules on such things, the Bills ended up getting a first-round pick from the Falcons for signing Price anyway, which they used to draft Willis McGahee, who would have gone in the first five picks had he not blown out his knee in last year's Orange Bowl. I doubt McGahee will play at all this year - - I don't care how much he insists he's healing ahead of normal, you just don't mess with stuff like that - - so Travis Henry again will bear the load of running the ball. (Yesterday the Bills traded Olandis Gary, who had been their likely backup, possibly implying that they mean to play McGahee later this year. I really hope they don't do this.) And he'll have even better blocking, with the O-line being young, more experienced, and with Sam Gash once again providing lead-blocking duties. Gash is now in his second stint with the Bills, and his first stint was outstanding.

The hope is that the running game will improve sufficiently to allow the Bills to control the clock and accommodate the loss of Price, which will now result in Eric Moulds seeing double teams pretty much on every offensive snap of the ball this year. Second-year-man Josh Reed has a chance to step up (and he showed a lot of promise as a rookie last year), but the Bills also lost Larry Centers, who was a big part of their passing game. Tight end Jay Riemersma, a guy whose reputation is surprisingly high in the NFL given his lack of production the last few years (not all his fault), is gone as well.

The last major question mark for the Bills is head coach Gregg Williams, who is in the last year of his contract despite the fact that his assistants are all signed beyond this year. Williams has shown a lot of growth in his short time with the Bills. He's not nearly as pig-headed now as he seemed when he first took over, and he's shown willingness to admit when something's not working and try something else. (One thing that always drove me mad about Marv Levy and Wade Philips both was their unswerving loyalty to their coordinators, no matter how lousy their results could be. Had Levy recognized Walt Corey's deficiencies as a defensive coordinator a few years earlier, he might have won one of those Super Bowls.) This year, Williams has added former Bengals head coach Dick LeBeau (a fine coach who had to work in Cincinnati, for cripes' sakes) to his mix. However, Williams also shows a tendency to make incredibly goofy decisions in games, and the team still shows a maddening lack of discipline that reflects directly on the head coach. (Ruben Brown is a nine-year veteran. Shouldn't he have learned how to not false-start by now?) Williams tends to get outcoached, but if his learning curve continues, those days may be over. Or maybe not.

So, how do I think the Bills will do? Barring disastrous injuries - - always a worry in the NFL - - their added defensive strength should translate, I think, to a few more wins. So I think they'll finish 11-5 this year. That might be good enough to win the division. It also might leave them out of the playoffs entirely. We'll see.

:: So, what about the rest of the AFC East? Well, longtime readers will know that I've never been sold on the Patriots and Bill Belichick (whose regular season record is still under .500 for his career). I still believe that their Super Bowl win two years ago constitutes the single most amazing confluence of luck in NFL history, when week after week the Patriots managed to either survive potential disaster by sheer happenstance or overcome teams that were better on paper but undone by bad coaching. Lots of folks are singing the Pats' praises for signing Ted Washington, but they guy has been titanically overweight for so long that I'm seriously skeptical as to whether he can stand up to an entire season in the trenches again, especially in a division where he's going to face Rickey Williams, Travis Henry, and Curtis Martin. And I'm still not convinced that Tom Brady is a great up-and-comer, as opposed to the current incarnation of a Mark Rypien-type QB (i.e., a guy who excels for a couple of years in just the right system). Defensively, they're still pretty good, but I'm just not sold on their offense. They were only 9-7 last year.

As for the Dolphins, well - - yeah, they've got all this defensive talent. But again, it's old defensive talent. Rickey Williams is great when healthy, but he's always an injury threat. They're unspectacular at QB, and they're woeful at head coach. I'm sorry, but Dave Wannstedt proved to me that he's a bad coach in last year's finale, when the Dolphins completed their usual December swoon by blowing a late lead in New England. A win would have given them the division. The loss kept them out of the playoffs entirely.

Finally, there are the Jets. I actually think that the Jets might have the best coaching in the AFC East, but they suffered a major exodus of talent in the offseason (a lot of them went to Washington, thus sending Oliver Willis into ecstasy) and Chad Pennington is hurt right now. So, who wins the division this year? Well, I'm going to go ahead and put myself right out on the limb. My predicted order of finish in the AFC East is:

1. Buffalo
2. New England
3. Miami
4. NY Jets

Stay tuned tomorrow for the rest of my football stuff, including my thrilling prediction of this year's Super Bowl champion.

Man, I take a posting break and Sean has his biggest posting outbreak in quite some time.

Anyway, I certainly agree with him that Christopher Hitchens is overly snide and arrogant. It's a real mark of a boor when they say something you probably agree with, and you run screaming anyway. I really don't think that the Ten Commandments are the ultimate foundation of all law or morality, and I think that one can have a just State without them, and I certainly don't think any kind of monument to them has any place in a court of law in this country. (And there are gradations here, too: putting a nice picture or plaque of the Commandments on the wall is one thing. But plunking down a multi-ton granite monument to them, front and center, just ain't right.)

But Lord, Hitchens is an ass. (No, I'm not linking his article. That's because he's an ass.)

We were ON A BREAK!!!

-Ross Geller, on many occasions.

And now, we're back into hot-and-heavy posting. I got quite a bit of work done on the novel while I had Byzantium's Shores on the back burner (although not all of it in the right direction - - more on that below), and I got some reading done, too. Breaks are always good, if you're a blogger like me who suffers from the compulsion of posting nearly every day. If you're not so afflicted, well, you're a lazy wanker. So there.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who kept looking in on things here. August ended up being my second-best month for traffic, even with a four-day break. At this rate, I expect to hit Reynolds-like levels of traffic by March of 2087.

I stalled out a bit on the novel-in-progress for the first couple of days of my posting hiatus, which was something of an unintended consequence. But then, late Friday night, while I was trying out new paragraphs and not liking any of them, I suddenly realized that I'd made a serious continuity error that necessitated tossing out the entire chunk that had me stalled in the first place. This involved striking about 1300 words from the chapter in question. I normally don't like jettisoning chunks of material that big, but if I gotta do it, I gotta do it. "Murder your darlings" is an oft-cited rule in writing for a reason.

I'm also wondering about the mental aspect of all this. Maybe my subconscious mind knew that I had screwed up, and was purposely gumming up the works until I recognized the problem. If so, that's pretty cool, but it would be nice if the subconscious's communications with the conscious mind would be a little more, well, conscious. You know what I mean?

(Edited slightly to reflect my actual traffic for August, which I misread before writing the post. I had originally identified the month as my fourth-best, instead of my second. Whoops.)