"God, it's nothing but sixteenth-notes!"

So said I, the first time my piano teacher ever had me look at a piece by Bach. Lynn Sislo is amazed that someone blows Bach off.

The problem that Bach presents to the contemporary ear is twofold. First, listeners today generally are not able to process counterpoint to the degree to which Bach uses it. We're not talking about just the two-part inventions here; Bach wrote very long fugues for many voices, and contrapuntal listening is about the most demanding kind of music listening there is. We are much more typically expected to follow a single melody and its various harmonies, but that's about it. When even symphonic development like you might find in a Beethoven symphony is demanding to us, it's no surprise that a full-scale Bach fugue is extremely hard to dig into.

Second, there is the idea of emotion in music. I obviously can't speak for most listeners, but in my experience many people are more equipped to discuss a musical work's emotional fabric, in terms of contrasts and beauty and whatnot, even to the extent of saying things like "This piece makes me think of a stream in the woods" or some such thing. This kind of thing is just not to be found in Bach. It's not what Bach was about. Music-as-feeling was alien to him; music-as-devotion was Bach's stock in trade. Or, put another way, music as ritual. The idea of expressing himself through his music likely did not even occur to Bach, unless it was to express his own deep religious faith.

Listening to Bach requires almost an entirely different mindset than, say, listening to Schumann or Ravel. (And in all honesty, it's a mindset that I've never really spent much time developing. There's something about Bach that I'm not sure I can ever really get, no matter how much I might enjoy the Brandenburg Concertos and how amazing I find the unaccompanied cello suites.)

BTW, for anyone wondering about how to approach Bach, I highly recommend the chapter Leonard Bernstein devotes to him in his wonderful book The Joy of Music. I'm pretty sure the book is out of print right now, but any library that doesn't stink should have it.

Whoa, it's like the world's biggest corn popper!

Today I had the supreme pleasure of putting about eight large shopping carts' worth of potato chips, whose shelf lives had expired, into the big-ass trash compactor at the store. And then I hit the "Compact" button.

I gotta tell you, folks, if you haven't heard the wonderful sound of several hundred foil potato chip bags bursting under the pressure of a trash compactor, well, you're just letting the best stuff in life pass you by!

More blood! More thorns! More nails! More, more, more!

It seems that Mel Gibson's new film The Passion tells the Crucifixion story in very gory terms:

:: Roman guards employ a "cat-o'-nine-tails" that rips the flesh from Jesus' back.

:: As Jesus is being crucified, a supervisor scolds one man for not nailing his hands properly. He yanks Jesus' other hand, pulling the arm out of the socket.

:: To see whether Jesus is dead, a Roman soldier pierces his side with a lance. Blood showers down on the soldier.

Reading this, I was reminded of this passage from Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, in which King relates a few real-life experiences of his that he later brought to bear when writing his breakthrough novel Carrie:

:: One day her [Sondra, a neighborhood girl and later "model" for Carrie] mother hired me to move some furniture. Dominating the trailer's living room was a nearly life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. He was naked except for a rag twisted around his hips and loins. Above this bit of breechclout were the hollowed belly and the jutting ribs of a concentration-camp inmate. It occurred to me that Sondra had grown up beneath the agonal gaze of the dying god, and doign so had undoubtedly played a part in making her what she was when I knew her: a timid and homely outcast who went scuttling through the halls of Lisbon High like a frightened mouse.

"That's Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior," Sondra's mother said, following my gaze. "Have you been saved, Steve?"

I hastened to tell her that I was saved as saved could be, although I didn't think you could ever be good enough to have that version of Jesus intervene on your behalf. The pain had driven him out of his mind. You could see it in his face. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn't be in a saving mood.

What? No Ramen noodles?!

Via MeFi (back on the air at last!), I see this list of items a well-stocked pantry should include, which is part of a larger site of kitchen-related advice and information. We actually have a lot of this stuff on hand, which is pretty cool -- although it raises the question of why I eat the same thing (pasta with red sauce, garlic bread) four nights a week. Hmmmm.

Making the world safer, one bomb at a time.

When I read articles about the current state of Afghanistan, like this one or this one or this one -- all articles that make clear that much of Afghanistan is a hellish mess, that the Taliban is by no means a distant memory, that the lives of women there are not that much better -- it makes me wonder how anyone can maintain that our current Administration is doing anything remotely resembling a bang-up job in fighting the War on Terror.

Personally, I'd like to use a measuring stick that doesn't indicate success in terms of "Stuff Blown Up" (and I am in no way a person who believes that this war can be won without blowing anything up).

(Links via Jeanne d'Arc and Nathan Newman.)

What will our alien overlords make of call centers?

I crossed swords in a very mild way with Doc Nebula a while back, but as I noted then, there's something oddly compelling about the guy -- half of his writings repel me, but the other half are interesting in the good way. Case in point, his recent descriptions of the work environment in a big call center. Call centers are horrid, vile places to have to work -- and he provides some gory detail as to why. I worked in a very small call center that was owned and operated by the company whose product we were actually selling -- not the kind of shop Doc Nebula's working in -- and still, I well remember a lot of this goofy crap, right down to the bit about "Two minutes are provided between calls for administrative duties you may have -- but we'd sure like it if you didn't use them." (No permalinks for current posts, but there are permalinks for archived posts; so just check out his main page and see if he's written anything about work. I tend to skip over the stuff about "HeroClix", because I have no idea at all what that is.)

(Oh, and I don't know if I have any readers in Florida, or if I have any readers in Florida who are looking to own a dog, but apparently Doc Nebula really needs to find a new home for the dog of the house. Just in case.)

A novel done....not mine, alas....

John Scalzi finished his book the other day. Mine is still plodding along -- I rather unwisely went a week without committing a single word, but in that time I've also started to believe that I may have made an error in the plotline two chapters back. Now I am teetering on the fence between sticking in a patch and then writing over the problem, or just junking the material since then and redoing it all.

Sigh.

Leitmotifs in Film Music

If you follow any discussions of film music on the Net for long, sooner or later you'll see the word leitmotif, and unless you're already familiar with the term from music history, you probably wonder what it means. That's natural, because even within the film music fandom community, the leitmotif idea tends be misunderstood.

Stripped to its most basic terms, a leitmotif is a melody, or a melodic figure, that in a film score is associated with a character or object or idea or whatever. A perfect example is the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back, which is almost uniformly associated with Darth Vader. Thus, a leitmotif score is simply a film score that makes extensive use of leitmotifs.

Why do composers use leitmotifs? Because they lend unity and coherence and richness to scores. A skilled composer can use his motifs to play off one another, musically, as characters do; and the recurrence of themes and motifs as a score progresses enhances the audience's familiarity with a film and its characters. Not all film composers use the leitmotif tachnique; Jerry Goldsmith, for example, tends to employ a "theme and variations" approach in which a single theme or small group of themes wends its way through an entire score, along with atmospheric music that reflects Goldsmith's main classical influences, Ravel and Stravinsky.

More than that, a skilled composer who puts thought into the creation of his motifs will create them in such a way that the motifs themselves are interrelated in a proper way. Thus, for example, virtually all of the major themes in the Star Wars films that are associated with "the good guys" begin with wide intervals: the main theme (Luke's theme) opens with a fifth; Leia's theme and the Love theme from TESB open with a major sixth; the "Brother and Sister" theme from Return of the Jedi begins with a perfect fourth; the Love Theme from Attack of the Clones with a minor sixth. (Of course, John Williams historically seems to love the fifth, which is also the basis of his Superman and ET themes.)

Less obvious are some other interrelations of the Star Wars themes. The Imperial March (Vader's theme) and Yoda's Theme don't seem all that similar, but both follow the same rough melodic shape in their opening phrase (hum them both and you'll hear it), and the AOTC love theme is a minor-key variation of the Star Wars Main theme. The two major themes that don't fit into any particular mold are Ben's Theme (or the "Force Theme"), and the Emperor's Theme. These are pretty iconic, and are nearly always heard in pretty close to their original form. And there are loads of smaller themes that are not heard nearly as often – Jabba's Theme, Lando's Theme (only heard in TESB), and others.

How does Williams employ all these themes? This brings me, actually, to why I refer above to the common misunderstanding of the leitmotif technique. Most people assume that leitmotifs exist to basically "mirror" whatever or whomever happens to be onscreen; thus, when Luke Skywalker does something heroic, we should hear Luke's Theme; when Darth Vader is being evil, we should hear his theme, and so on. It doesn't really work this way, though: leitmotifs aren't just musical tags to be sounded at any point when that motif's referent is acting. This is what I call the "Easy View of Leitmotifs", the idea that they are the musical equivalent of nametags at a convention, or perhaps those little tags on thumbtacks beside each specimen in the dead butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.

This is false. Leitmotifs are musical ideas, first and foremost; in fact, the great "inventor" of leitmotif, Richard Wagner, referred to them as "melodic moments of feeling". A skilled film composer will use leitmotifs to create a tapestry of emotional music, as opposed to a grab-bag of disparate themes that happen to "mickey mouse" the action onscreen. Thus, a common complaint filmscore fans make of leitmotif-based scores – that the motif is played when its associated character is nowhere on screen – is often misplaced. A recent thread on a message board, for example, criticizes the end of John Williams's Attack of the Clones score for playing the Imperial March (Vader's Theme) when the clone armies are shown in regiment, since Darth Vader doesn't even exist yet. But the March isn't strictly associated with Vader, but also with the Empire itself, and what Williams is musically conveying is that this moment is the true birth of the Empire, even though Palpatine has not yet declared himself Emperor and Anakin is still a Jedi.

Problems can arise with the leitmotif technique. Comparing the use of motifs in the Star Wars scores with the Lord of the Rings scores, I find that the latter are more unified in their conception than the former. This really isn't the fault of John Williams, though – he didn't have the luxury, as Howard Shore did, of knowing the entire story from the outset. He didn't know how important Darth Vader would become to the story, for instance, which is why there is no trace of the Imperial March in A New Hope (although he does base the Imperial motif from that film on the same interval – the minor third – from which he derives the "Rebel Spaceship Fanfare", a prominent motif throughout the original trilogy). Thus Shore was able to do a lot more "pre-planning" of his motifs, whereas Williams often finds himself "retrofitting" new motifs to fall into place alongside the old ones. Of course, he's Williams, so he does so brilliantly. But it's still a challenge and doesn't quite always work perfectly.

How important is all this to the enjoyment of a filmscore composed in this way? Well, what matters most of all in a filmscore is how it enhances, or illuminates, the emotional fabric of a film. But if you're after a deeper understanding of a score, it helps to consider how the motifs and themes are related and why they are constructed the way they are.

An Icelandic Beauty

Apparently Bara has received some complaints about her tendency toward self-portraiture on her LiveJournal.

Speaking solely for myself, I think she should do more self-portraiture. I mean, how could I think anything else? Especially since I first discovered her through her self-portraiture?

Anyway....

Anakin turns into WHO, now?!

TF.N has performed the helpful task, for those of us who claim we'd like to remain "spoiler-free" but have less backbone than that, of gathering every factoid about Episode III that has been officially leaked by Lucasfilm people.

My favorites are that Palpatine apparently has a really cool line that many people will want to use as their E-mail signature, and that Darth Vader does not use any of the buttons on his chestplate. I always wondered what those buttons did -- I mean, they're probably part of his life-support apparatus, but it doesn't seem to me he'd want the buttons controlling the device that keeps him alive in such a prominent place, right? I imagine a scene in the duel with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, in which Vader is basically beating the crap out of Luke, but then Luke says, "Oh, yeah?" and reaches forward and clicks one of those buttons. And then Vader stands there flailing because he can't breathe....nah, that can't be it. Maybe they activate the self-polishing mechanism of his helmet? I mean, it was always so shiny -- is there no dust in the Star Wars universe?

Another Blogiversary

Somehow it escaped my notice that Tom Burka had his one-year blogiversary the other day. Congrats to him!

Bugginess Abounds....

My comments seem to be acting up, and Metafilter's been down all weekend. Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop poppin' pills....

So, a little Gilbert & Sullivan and you think you're ready for Wagner?!

In today's Buffalo News, classical music critic Mary Kunz has a nice article in which she basically cheers for opera. (In fact, "Cheers for Opera" is the headline.) Lots of good advice here, basically boiling down to, "Just go!"

Actually go see an opera, because as wonderful as recordings are, they just don't capture it all -- nor, really, do videos or DVDs, although I haven't seen one in that way in a while, so maybe they've figured out how to better catch the action. I have seen terribly few operas in my life -- less than five, actually -- and I'd love to see more. (If a performance of Les Troyens ever took place in Buffalo, I might just be moved to kill for tickets.) Just keep in mind that you're watching and hearing the performance of a story. Nothing more, and nothing less.

"...in her tomb by the sounding sea."

Warren Ellis, who is spending an entire week doing nothing but linking music, directs attention to a haunting setting of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" (which happens to be a long favorite of mine -- see link in the sidebar).

When I was a music major, I often thought of setting this poem to music myself.

Voluntary Ignorance

This Popular Science editorial makes the point that the current level of scientific illiteracy isn't just pernicious, but in large part willful. In other words, we have chosen to relegate scientific knowledge to the status of stuff you might be quizzed about on Jeopardy! This strikes me as a pretty questionable attitude for a society whose continued wealth depends on science.

A key quote: "What's upsetting in these examples is not so much the positions taken by reasonable people on ethical and scientific issues as the fact that debates seem shaped by political operatives who bypass reason and instead leverage ignorance the way dot-com-era Wall Street leveraged phantom assets."

It's short, so read the whole thing.

(via Paul Riddell)

Youch!

James Capozzola cut his finger while attempting the slicing of an egg roll.

He doesn't say, but I suspect his problem might have arisen from a knife that became too dull. Folks, please: keep your kitchen cutlery sharp, especially if you cook at all frequently. Most accidents from knives result because the blades are too dull to cut cleanly, thus requiring the user to apply more downward pressure to the handle, in turn creating potential for those sudden slips of the blade that lead to bleeding digits. If your knife is properly sharp, you should not have to apply any downward pressure to the handle while cutting: gravity will do the job as you move the blade laterally. If your knifes are dull, get them sharpened. You will find that cutting requires less effort, and your risk of cuts will be greatly reduced. This is true of all knives, even serated bread knives.

And as long as I'm talking about knives, here's another tip. Suppose you're cutting up vegetables or meat and you need to transfer them from the cutting board to the soup pot or the wok or the frying pan or whatever. Many people will pick up the cutting board and then use the knife blade to push the veggies into the waiting pot.

Don't do this. Please oh please. This will hasten the dulling of the blade (assuming that you're using good quality knives, as opposed to crappy stainless steel ones).

What you should do in this case is either put the knife aside and use your hand to slide the items from the cutting board to the pot, or, if you must use the knife, invert it. Use the back edge of the blade, the non-sharpened surface, to push the veggies.

Aside from pots and pans, knives are the most important tools in a kitchen in which any cooking beyond heating canned soups is being done. Treat them with care and use them correctly, and there's no need to ever spill your own blood upon the counter and thus be forced into a phase of light blogging!

Endangered Relics

In the latest installment of ancient relics threatened by modern life and general unconcern, we have Peru's Nazca lines -- the gigantic pictograms the Incas "drew" in the Peruvian desert by clearing dark rocks to reveal white soil beneath, and which have largely remained static due to the region's arid conditions.

(via Thousand Yard Glare)

The Proliferating Questionaire

Nefarious Neddie answers the Ten Questions I answered on Friday. I would comment on the incongruity displayed by his claiming to not have sufficient writing time while simultaneously demonstrating his knowledge of obscure TV shows, but that just wouldn't be seemly, now, would it?

Heh heh heh.

Remembrance of Things Past, but with less French....

About two years and a month ago, I was lazily doing some Net surfing and engaged in one of my common Net timekillers: doing Google searches for former high school and college classmates. On this particular occasion, I decided to check what was up with a former fellow Philosophy major from the college days, whom I knew had gone into ministry. Thus I found Sean Meade's blog, the discovery of which made me think, "What on Earth is a 'blog'?" I quickly surmised that it was some kind of online diary or journal or something. Seemed like a nifty idea.

And then a week or two later, an article appeared in TIME Magazine, the gist of which was "Hey, there's these really cool things now called 'blogs'! And you can get one for free! Here's how you do it!"

I mulled this over for another week or two, thinking that this would be pretty cool indeed. At the time I was still quite active on Usenet, although I was getting really tired of basically staying "on topic" and thus repeating the same things I'd said over-and-over again. The idea of a "blog" was really appealing, since I'd occasionally considered setting up a personal site where I'd put up essays and such on a sporadic basis, but never come 'round to actually doing so. But the confluence of finding Sean's blog and that article about blogging in TIME basically clinched it.

So I signed up with Blogger and BlogSpot, created my first blog, decided I didn't like the title, scrapped it, and launched a different one. I needed a title, though, and I was having trouble coming up with one. I didn't want to have something like "Jaquandor's Rants", since I don't rant all that often; I wanted something mildly poetic that would basically convey the fact that I would write about anything that interests me (and a lot of stuff interests me). But I had trouble with the title: When writing fiction, I rarely start with a title. Instead, I write for a while until the story's title "comes" to me, but obviously this approach wouldn't work for a new blog that would go unread by, well, millions. I wanted something with at least a little cachet, and This Blog To Be Titled Later had about as much cachet as a shopping mall food court Chinese eatery. (Now, there is Chinese food that leaves me hungry an hour later, if only because it's so bland I can never finish it.)

About that moment, my eye fell upon my copy of Stephen Lawhead's novel Byzantium (which I really need to go back and re-read, since I never finished it the first time, and not because I didn't like it). And this was just after I'd finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic, with its depiction of a fictional Byzantium: a cosmopolitan place wherein all of the world's traditions and cultures met, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. So I had half the title (Byzantium by itself seemed incomplete), and then I thought of sea shores -- again, places where differing worlds come together, and places where some journeys begin and others end. "Eureka!" shouted I, disturbing the cat. "Byzantium's Shores! The very pinnacle of human coolness on Earth!" [Some details in this account have been embellished.]

So I had a title, I chose my template, and I just charged right in and started blathering -- two years ago, this very day. I didn't do a lot of lurking about Blogistan before I started posting, so I didn't have any idea, really, of the "lay of the land". I didn't know who Glenn Reynolds was; Atrios and Kevin Drum and TBogg and many others hadn't even started yet. The first liberal blogger I found was Demosthenes, after he was linked by Steven Den Beste, who has been on my blogroll since almost the very beginning -- along with Sean.

Back then, I had a strict "No Politics" policy that I've gradually abandoned, realizing that I don't need such a policy since non-stop writing about politics really isn't my style anyway. I'd rather groove on stuff, with occasional descents into sheer geekery or pithy political comment. I like to think I've struck a decent balance: my obvious leftism doesn't seem to have directly pissed off any of my known right-leaning readers into leaving, which is really as it should be. I was also pretty staunch about remaining pseudonymous in the beginning, but that was born, really, of my first forays into the Net back in the early 90s -- when everybody had a "handle", and nobody much cared who anybody else was. I've loosened that up quite a bit; my writings on Green Man Review are in my real name, for example.

So where do I go from here? I just soldier on, I guess -- writing about things that interest me as I cast my nets out and see what I manage to dredge up from the depths. Two years and counting: not a bad way to have spent a lot of time since 15 February 2002 (incidentally, I now recall, the birthday of my second college room-mate -- I don't know why I thought of that just now). Lots of books read, music heard, movies seen, football games watched. In that span, my family has moved twice, and I have held two jobs, spent a great chunk of that time unemployed and looking in vain for freelance work, finished one novel and got halfway through the next, written a handful of short stories, and published one op-ed piece in The Buffalo News. And, best of all, I've encountered a lot of fine, fine people whose interests and writings continue to affect my own.

Thanks, then, to everyone who has ever linked this space and read it on a continual basis. What a trip it's been -- kind of long, and more than a little strange. Hmmmm....now what does that remind me of? Ah well, I'll figure it out later.

On to Year Three.

Digital Music, revisited (a repost)

(I first wrote the following article back in September, but I wanted to bring it up again today after Sean's post today that copyright and DRM, as we know them, are dead. Well, of course they are; but in all these discussions -- focusing on music -- we keep focusing on how these changes will affect the consumers, and to a lesser extent how they will affect the artists. We don't see nearly as much consideration of how these changes will affect the music. The post also links an old article from 2Blowhards; be sure to read that.)

---

There is a long post about digital stuff - - music, movies, assorted whatnot - - over on 2 Blowhards that's really worth reading. I want to single out two particular grafs (but the whole post, really, is pretty interesting):

* Aside from copyright concerns, the big worry people have expressed about the effect of programs such as Itunes is that they destroy "the album" as a creation. Now that the program itself is all about the individual songs, who's going to go to the trouble of listening to a carefuly constructed album?

Exactly right. One big argument in favor of digital music, and against the RIAA's pricing, is the "Sixteen bucks for two songs" argument, as in: "Don't you get mad when you pay sixteen bucks for a CD with twelve songs on it, when you only want two of them?"

Well, no, not really. I've never understood this argument. Yes, I used to buy rock or pop albums on the basis of the one or two songs I'd heard on the radio or on MTV, but then, I always understood the idea of the single as a marketing item for the album. And quite often, I found that often the best songs on an album are not the ones released as singles, and more importantly, a well-produced album is a delight in itself, in the sequencing of the songs, the interplay of their subject matter, et cetera.

Any classic rock radio station will play Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In the Wall, Part II" fairly often. And it is a great song, most assuredly. But it's even greater when you hear it in the context of the album of which it is a part. Digital distribution is going to kill that aspect of music, and that's a damn shame. Chalk it up as a further reduction of our cultural attention span.

Back to the Blowhard:

* But as I played with Itunes, one other worry occurred to me: it seems inevitable that Itunes (etc) will be the end of the song-that-grows-on-you. Why? Because you'll never give a song that doesn't instantly grab you a second (let alone a tenth) chance. I'm not the world's most impatient listener, yet with Itunes I find myself not just skipping the in-between-the-hits songs; I don't even transfer them to the hard drive in the first place. I also find that there's a strong temptation to listen to songs for just a few seconds at a time. Click -- and you get that rush that the first bars of a song you like deliver. And then it's Click again. Pretty soon you're like a rat who's developed a taste for speed; you're going from place to place, looking for another up. When you don't find it, you're outta there, and outta there fast.

Again, exactly right. This will encourage our fetish for instant gratification. I'm reminded of a bit of dialogue in the movie Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) describes his youthful initial encounter with the music of John Coltrane. I don't recall the exact wording, but it goes like this: "I listened to this record, and I hated it. I mean, I really hated it. I hated it so much that I took it home and listened to it every day, trying to understand why I could hate it so much. And then I realized that I loved it."

This isn't uncommon. I've had this experience many times, and not just with music (although you could take the same bit of dialogue, substitute the name "Hector Berlioz" for John Coltrane, and you'd have my exact story with regard to who is now my favorite classical composer). I suspect that we won't take time to get to know an artist, to allow his or her work to slowly cast its spell upon us. It'll be "Gimme magic now, or I'm on to the next person." That's not good.

What I fear (or, not so much "fear" as "suspect") is that this soon-to-be idyllic heaven, when there are millions of songs out there for pennies each, is going to have serious repercussions for not just the way we buy music, but for how the music itself will impact our lives. We should think about that.

Friday Burst of Weirdness

I'm not sure I recall just how I found this, but here's what is, in my opinion, the weirdest entry in this gallery of weird comic book covers.

The surest sign of a desperate blogger....

....is filling out a questionaire. On Friday, to boot. This one is from Lynn Sislo.

1. What is your favorite word? I suppose it would depend on the mood, right? I like "Golden" and "Mists". I enjoy the sound of "Mellifluous". I don't know, really -- I tend to like combinations of words more than specific words.

2. What is your least favorite word? Copacetic. I can't stand this word, especially when three or four years ago, all of a sudden, everybody was using it for some strange reason. (Like Lynn, I'm not enamored of "blog" either, but I've long since conceded that one.)

3. What turns you on (inspires you)? Good food; a story well told; a fine musical phrase; a city skyline at night; mountains; trees; ships -- both sea and spacefaring. A lot of things inspire me, I guess.

4. What turns you off? Management-speak. You people with jobs know what I'm talking about.

5. What sound do you love? All of them, really. Sounds are cool.

6. What sound do you hate? Anything over the PA system at Wal-Mart.

7. What is your favorite curse word? Well, I'm not proud of this, but the big M.F., probably. Although I've trained myself to not so much say it as mouth it forcefully. Also, in keeping with my admiration for all things Red Foreman, I'm very fond of "dumb ass".

8.What profession other than yours would you like to attempt? Hmmmmm. Don't know, really. Writing isn't my profession yet, but I'm already attempting it; and thus far I'm perfectly happy sweeping the floor at the grocery store. I could say that I wouldn't mind being a professor of something, but I've seen the crap that goes on in academia; likewise, I admire chefs like Emeril Lagasse and all those other folks, but the idea of working seventy to ninety hour weeks, putting in at least six days, doesn't appeal to me one whit. I guess I'd love to get paid for reading, but that's not really a profession.

9. What profession would you not like to participate in? There are many, actually. Law. Actual telemarketing, of the "Call people at home at dinnertime" variety. Air traffic control.

10. Presupposing that Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? "Hey there, I've been waiting for you. Pull up a chair so we can watch The Phantom Menace on my home theater system." Then he'd lean forward, wink, and whisper, "And boy, do all those wankers who continually bash George Lucas have a surprise in store when they kick the bucket. Heh heh heh!" And then he'd take me to meet Hector Berlioz; and he'd let me watch Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gregory Hines, et al in rehearsal; and....well, I don't know. I generally don't think much about Heaven. I just think it would be one cosmic moment in which I finally get it, you know?

Sowing a million seeds, reaping one potato

And that’s what space travel is all about. It’s all about peace and exploration and wonder and beauty.

So says SF author-emeritus Ray Bradbury, in this interview with, of all sources, FOX News.

(courtesy Bookslut)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon.

This is one of the iconic memories of my childhood -- before we moved to Western New York when I was ten, we lived in a number of places, including Portland, Oregon; occasionally we would drive the sixty miles or so from Portland to Cannon Beach, the nearest bit of Pacific Ocean shoreline to where we lived. Cannon Beach is dominated by the 235-foot tall megalith Haystack Rock, which sits just beyond the water's edge. It's been well over twenty years since I last saw Haystack Rock, but I vividly remember the hundreds, of not thousands, of seagulls and birds coming and going from their nests on the rock.

I want a cult following!

Even if you completely despise the very idea of American Idol, you might find this funny. It's William Hung, this year's most notorious bad audition.

"She bangs! She bangs!"

You might be a Buffalo Grocery Shopper if....

Here's a hypothetical. You go to the grocery store, and when you go to buy the brand of margarine that you prefer, you discover that there isn't any on the shelves. Thus, you decide to ask one of the helpful people working in the dairy department if there is any more out back. But there are two employees nearby! Which do you ask?

A. The guy in the white jacket who is actually putting milk on the shelves.

B. The guy in the generic black shirt who is standing off to one side, using a power screwdriver to mount a new paper towel dispenser to the wall.

If your answer is "B", you just might be a Buffalo Grocery Shopper!

(I very kindly directed her to the other employee, and she was pleased-as-punch. The great secret of customer service is that very often, it doesn't take all that much.)

Can they play him on a kazoo?

Lynn Sislo links a guy named Erik who says this:

I still think that those who publicly play Bach and Scarlatti on a piano should be branded and flogged.

Well, ummmmm....why? Yeah, I know, from a musicological perspective, the harpsichord is the appropriate instrument. But for one thing, pianos are a lot easier to come by these days; and more importantly, if pianists can't play Bach, what about brass quintets? or symphony orchestras, in the case of those transcriptions Leopold Stokowski did?

Similarly, should Liszt's piano transcriptions of orchestral repertoire be disavowed? Should concert bands and wind ensembles no longer be permitted to perform band transcriptions of classic orchestral works?

Music is a fluid art. It doesn't do well when placed under rigid constraints.

EDIT: Link fixed, and thus rendered non-useless.

Did he recently swallow a canary or something?

I've noticed the last few weeks that the news media seem to be running more pictures of President Bush in which he is smirking. No, I don't have any conclusive evidence of this, nor do I even wonder if its liberal bias returning or conservative bias abating or what. Just something I've noticed.

How many times can they back away from the brink?

I'm still enjoying The West Wing a lot, although I'm noticing a trend this year to have big crises develop that get resolved, well, within the hour. I was starting to think, over the last couple of seasons, that Aaron Sorkin's vaunted dialogue was starting to get repetitive (watch enough Sorkin scripts in performance and you'll see tons of reused memes, like the words "thing" and "Yeah"), but I do miss the fact that Sorkin knew that you don't always have to resolve things. Closure isn't everything.

The Sensations of Great Disturbances, in progress....

First of all, I must note that 2004 is shaping up very nicely. I already have a new job that I'm enjoying muchly, and there was the advance copy of Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel. Now I learn that pretty much the ultimate gift will be available in time for my birthday, five days after the release date. Wow-za! Oh, man....dare I hope that this is all leading up to a really nice bonus on the first Tuesday of November?

But anyway, I noted yesterday that John Scalzi dissed George Lucas, and I successfully avoided foaming at the mouth (although there were a couple of drops of spittle that were quickly wiped up). A grim sensation began to take hold, though -- as if one blogger's voice screamed out in terror, and then was suddenly silenced. Yup, the unspeakable has happened: the AICN Jedi Council has re-convened.

Hoo-boy....here we go....I shall now fasten by steel-like grip on the corners of my computer table. Running commentary is below: I'm reading this thing and commenting on it as I do so. Just because, well, I can. Imagine me as a disembodied Jedi in their room, floating behind them and whispering, "You bunch of friggin' wankers!"

(I'll try to find links to my previous AICN Council rantings a bit later on.)

...OK, apparently playwright Tom Stoppard has done some script work on Episode III. I loved Shakespeare in Love, so I can deal with this. And look: more bitching about midichlorians! And whining about the giant, gaping plot hole in Attack of the Clones: the identity of Master Sifodyas! (And here's me, thinking, "Who gives a shit about Sifodyas?")

...And here's some guy holding forth that Lucas sold out with Attack of the Clones and "gave the fans what they wanted". I'm sure the fans were screaming for the Anakin/Padme love story. I'm sure that the fans wanted that love story intercut with a complicated mystery and Republic politics. Aside from less Jar Jar, I don't know what "fanboy grievances" this guy thinks Lucas indulged -- unless it was simply all the battle stuff, which pretty much had to be there, right? I mean, given that the story requires it? Ummmm....sure. Moving on.

...They babble about the DVDs for a bit. Nothing about Greedo shooting first yet, but I'm sure it's coming....and they really want some rumored scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Vader plucks C-3PO's mechanical heart from his chest. I don't know, that sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?

...Moriarty says this: "Toy manufacturers have a real problem with manufacturing toys for PG-13 and R rated films." They do? Did I hallucinate all those Lord of the Rings toys?

...Apparently Natalie Portman is a snot on the set. (According to these folks, presumably none of whom have ever been on the set with her -- but then, AICN is pretty much the Internet home for "I have a friend who knows somebody who picks up drycleaning for this producer guy, and he says that Paris Hilton is in talks to play Queen Elizabeth the Second in the new World War II movie.")

...And there it is! Greedo shoots first!

...Followed immediately by "Release the original trilogy!"

...Predictions of box office grosses abound. Gnashing over why The Phantom Menace outperformed Attack of the Clones, and I think back to an interview George Lucas gave back before TPM even came out, in which he said that he expected Episode III to gross the least of all the films. Hmmmm.

All in all, not as obnoxious as previous outings, but you can still see where most of these people are operating under the premise that George Lucas is a bumbling hack who basically stumbled into making good movies by the sheer luck that he had a couple of talented people with him. Experienced readers know that I disagree with this, vehemently...but we'll let that dog sleep.

Cliches I don't understand, #48

Last night on American Idol, Simon Cowell trotted out this old chestnut in critiquing one of the participants: "It's like Chinese food -- I love it, but then I'm hungry again an hour later." I don't understand this. Whenever we spring for Chinese here, it's usually for dinner, and I can't begin to contemplate eating again until breakfast the next morning.

As for the show itself, well, I seem to have no feel whatsoever for what's going on this season. First they eliminated "Scooter Girl" last week, who struck me as an incredible weirdo when she first appeared but who quickly grew on me; then the judges continually gush over Fantasia, who I admit has undeniable presence but who also has yet to sing a song that I like, so I don't feel that I can judge her yet; and tonight, the hot blonde who did a torch-song rendition of "Orange Colored Sky" didn't get voted to the next round. Color me baffled.

Ohhhhhh, I'm sorry, but that was incorrect!

"I'm sorry, Wes, but I'm afraid you have not been able to overtake the current leader, and thus, we have to say goodbye to you now. But we have some lovely parting gifts for you tonight: a Bunn coffeemaker, this matching set of deck chairs, and of course, all of our contestants get the Home Version of The 2004 Race Game, so you and your family will have hours of fun calling attention to the current Administration's failures. You've been a great contestant, though, and don't forget: you may be eligible for an appearance on the new show we're working on, which we are tentatively scheduled to debut at noon on January 20. You could play a Secretary on the new show, so keep your options open! Let's give Wes a nice hand, ladies and gentlemen!"

Happy Birthday, Maestro Goldsmith

Composer Jerry Goldsmith, who along with John Williams is one of the living titans of film music, is 75 today. He's best known, probably, for his work on the Star Trek films, of which his score to Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a true classic. (The others are all superb, with the exceptions of Insurrection, which is merely good, and Nemesis, which is downright bad.)

He's written a lot of other wonderful scores, but Goldsmith's name tends to be in the shadow of John Williams because, well, Goldsmith writes scores for really crappy movies that nobody ever goes to see. His score to the third Omen movie, The Final Conflict, is magnificent -- but who on earth has seen that movie? Who on Earth has seen The Thirteenth Warrior (an appallingly bad swords-and-brawn epic)?

Of all the films Goldsmith has scored -- and there are many -- the only "classics" are probably Patton and Alien (and I wouldn't even include the latter). Since I suspect that, for the general public, film music is viewed only in the context of the film (a wrongheaded view, but prevalent), I expect that Jerry Goldsmith won't ever have the same cultural visibility of a John Williams or a John Barry (at the height of his career, which was quite some time ago).

Anyway, happy birthday, Maestro Goldsmith.

The Buffalo Weathercast

Aaron reports that a rare astronomical event will take place on June 8: a Venus will make a transit of the Sun. A transit, for those who weren't paying attention in class, is when a planetary object moves across the face of the Sun, as seen from Earth. In fact, total lunar eclipses are transits that merely happen to be eclipses by virtue of the Sun and Moon having the same apparent size when viewed from the surface of the earth (this is pure coincidence). Due to differences in the Earth's and Venus's planes of orbit, Venusian transits are very rare.

This guarantees, of course, that June 8 will be a cloudy day in Western New York.

Must....not....foam....at....mouth....

John Scalzi thinks that George Lucas is the weak link in the Star Wars chain.

Consider my lip "bitten".

(Although, aside from Greedo shooting first and a couple of instances of new footage upsetting the pacing toward the end of The Empire Strikes Back, just what is so damned awful about those Special Editions? I rather liked how they turned out, overall. The people who bitch that the new dance number in Return of the Jedi sucks really floor me -- it's supposed to be campy and dumb! What did they expect, Astaire and Rogers? OK, I'll stop now.)

Maybe he was on a secret mission for Henry Kissinger?

Kevin Drum's been doggedly following the documentary evidence, such as it is, surrounding the questions about George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. At the end of today's post, Kevin asks:

"Bottom line: if Bush's story is really true, he can put a stop to all this speculation instantly by simply ordering all the relevant archives to release his entire record, warts and all. Why won't he?"

That's a good question, considering that releasing service records in their entirety used to be par-for-the-course for Presidents (except in the case of Clinton, who never served), up until this particular President. My suspicion is that the answer to Kevin's question is twofold: First, there really is something embarrassing in Bush's service record, although almost certainly nothing that rises to the level of, say, Michael Moore's insistence that Bush is a "deserter" (why General Clark didn't distance himself from that is beyond me). There probably is a bit of self-preservation going on here; likely, Bush's service was spotty enough to warrant some kind of "slap-on-the-wrist" discipline, and they don't want that getting out.

Second, though, I suspect that the Bush people don't want to release the records because to do so would be to turn from their constant attitude to date of, "We are the Executive Branch, you will listen to us, you will take whatever we decide to give you, and you will like it." The idea that anyone should have any question about anything pertaining to the President beyond what has already been doled out piecemeal is completely alien to their mindset.

(To be fair, this is not a failing unique to the Bush Administration, although I think they elevate it to amazing levels, what with their tendency to bleat "But it's wartime!" at every instance of potential criticism and request for information. The Clinton Administration's reluctance to just fork everything over at the outset of the whole Whitewater mess kept that whole embarrassment simmering along, right up to the arrival on the scene of "that woman, Miss Lewinsky".)

In other news, the cloudless sky is blue.

If this is not the least surprising headline I have ever seen, I don't know what is.

Goodbye, Julie

Julius Schwarz, former literary agent and DC Comics editor, has passed away. This is sad news.

Here's another fine tribute.

The Writer's Ideal Day Job

I've seen this topic come up a few times in various writing-related message boards: what is the ideal day job for an aspiring writer or a writer who isn't up to subsistence levels of writing income yet? I'm sure that there's no absolutely ideal such job, since everybody's different and yada yada yada, but here's what I've discovered.

:: Any job that involves long periods in front of a computer screen is lousy for a writer, because it's really hard to spend seven or eight hours at a desk and then come home, sit down at a different desk, and keep right on doing computer stuff. My last job was in telesales, and the first few months there killed my writing output. Luckily, the solution there was obvious, for me: I wrote longhand at home, because the atmosphere was totally different. Plus, working longhand is the only way to be "portable" for a writer who doesn't have a laptop, and I really enjoyed packing it all up in my canvas Land's End book bag and taking it to Borders or wherever. The big downside there was that writing longhand is slower than typing, but I often found that all to the good, since I can often type faster than I can think. (The results thereof tend to show up here, of all places!)

:: A non-computer job, then, is good. But another consideration isn't just the "in front of a computer for hours" syndrome. There's the little matter of mental energy. A job that doesn't involve a whole lot of deep thought is good for writing, because then one can do a lot of "mental story processing" while working at something else. I'm finding myself doing this a lot at the store: let's be honest, wandering around with a broom and dust butler isn't the most mentally stimulating of tasks, but I get to do a lot of thinking about the current story or chapter in the novel, which is great. If you wish to be a writer, an essential skill to cultivate is the ability to think in a "writerly" way even when not actually sitting down just a-stringin' words along. In the current job, I have been finding myself thinking about my characters and what they're doing, even as I'm attending to the demands of the job at hand. I couldn't do this in telesales, because you just can't mull over an upcoming conversation between two characters while you're trying to con entice the pharmacist on the other end of the line to buy twice as much Phenytoin Oral Suspension as he says he needs.

Ah, but! You don't want too much consumption of mental resources on the job, else you won't be able to think about writing; but it can go the other way, as well. A job that requires one to do the same repetitive task, over and over and over again, for hours without change in tasks, is just as mentally draining and consumptive of resources as the sales job. This I discovered when working in the university library years ago; back then it usually fell to me to sort together the shipments of new cards for the card catalog, which came in thousands at a time. The effect of this was numbing. So, too, was the time in the telesales job when they had me do nothing but conduct "customer service" surveys, in which I made calls with no sales component. Again, the repetition killed my ability to divert mental energy to thinking about writing at the same time I was simply reading the same questions over and over again. So here you need a job that moves you from one duty to the next.

:: Restaurant management, I always found, had moments when I could think about writing and moments when I couldn't, and the higher on the management chain of command I ascended, the fewer the "writing-able" moments were. The implication here is pretty obvious: avoid too much responsibility, because it kills the ability to think about story.

:: I've never held any kind of editorial position, so I'm not prepared to advance any claims as to how spending hours upon hours reading dreadful story after dreadful story from the slushpile affects one's writerly acumen. I have my suspicions, though.

So what's the point of all this? Simply to say that I'm optimistic about my current job not killing my writing -- especially once I'm again used to, you know, punching a clock and actually doing something.

If only it were real....

Darth Swank is perplexed. Traffic at his blog is through the roof, but it's apparently due to an image on his site or something like that. He is directly soliciting tech help from the techies of....well, Techland, I suppose. So if any of my readers can help him with a fix so his SiteMeter is more realistic, he'd appreciate it.

I hope she steered well clear of the really tall canned goods displays....

Observed today at the store: a woman doing her shopping, and as she did so, she ticked off the items on her shopping list -- which was displayed on the top window of the screen of the laptop computer she had balanced atop the child seat. Wow. Some people really fetishize this whole "paperless life" thing, eh?

(My first thought was that she was some kind of vendor or management person doing something related to pricing or inventory, but no dice -- I saw her in the checkout lane, and again a minute later while I was sweeping outside.)

A WHAT for every student?!

Kevin Drum reports that his local middle school is supplying all students with PDAs. They're using mini-keyboards to type in their crappy essays and "beam" them to the teacher, who is just agog at how easy everything is. And I'm sure the teacher is paying close attention to spelling, and not merely running each student's work through the spellchecker. You know, so she can catch things like "too" when the kid means "to". Right. I'm enormously sympathetic to teachers and the work they have to do and the basic lack of respect they get for doing it, but all the same I'm not sure that we should really do things like this on the basis that it makes their lives easier.

Look. I'm a firm believer that we should be spending tons of money on our schools, that there should be one teacher for every ten kids, and that a teacher should make a lot of money. (I also wouldn't mind seeing the teachers' unions put up so many roadblocks to getting rid of bad teachers, but that's another issue.) But this "Give the latest tech toy to every kid" thing just drives me crazy, and not just because it pisses me off that kids are being given laptops when I might be able to afford a laptop sometime in 2006, if I play my cards right and sell a novel or two. Mainly it's because I envision all the little tykes with their spiffy iMacs or Vaios or whatevers, and then I immediately envision the way my seventh-grade math textbook, which had been brand new when given to me, looked when I handed it back in nine months later. And I was far from the worst student when it came to keeping my books from being dropped on the floor out of clumsiness or deposited there by virtue of my running into my school's version of Nelson Muntz.

Kevin also points out the tech support problems: are schools that give out freebie tech toys going to employ a full-time tech dude to change batteries and fix broken screens and repair keyboards and whatnot?

And finally, how many art and music programs could be funded for the cost of a PalmPilot for every pupil?

I am not locked in here with you; YOU are locked in here with ME.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rorschach Test, including the actual inkblots. I confess that my first thought is to print them out, blow them up, and give them to my daughter as coloring pages. Is this test still administered? My skepticism is captured by this statement from the site:

"Many psychologists think the Rorschach test is hopelessly unreliable; others see it as one of the cardinal tools of modern psychodiagnosis. Even among those who acknowledge the value of the test, there is disagreement on interpretation of responses."

In other words: "Lots of shrinks believe this is total bullshit, and the ones that don't think it's total bullshit don't agree on what it means." OK, then....sounds like a couple of the undergrad philosophy conferences I attended while in college, but without the possibility of being chucked in the sanitarium.

(via Scott of Archipelapogo, who's sporting a ton of nifty linkage lately.)

(And a cyber-gumdrop for anyone who gets the reference in the title!)

On this date....

...in 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded.

...in 1725, emperor Peter the Great of Russia died.

...in 1915, the film Birth of a Nation opened.

And, most importantly, in 1932: composer John Williams, the film composer to whose music I return most often, was born. Happy 72nd, Maestro Williams, and stay healthy -- Episode III is still in the offing!

(Historical events courtesy This Day In History by the History Channel.)

UPDATE: In Maestro Williams's honor, I am now listening to the score to The Empire Strikes Back, and as always happens when I listen to this music, I'm sitting here bobbing my head like a goof and thinking, "Best F***ing score ever!" We now end this moment of extreme geekery.

There is a malfunction in the AE-35 unit....

Over at Terminus, Drew Vogel has arrived at his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the course of his ongoing look at all of Stanley Kubrick's films.

What always gets me about this film is the minutiae of the daily-life details Kubrick has in the background. There's the famous shot of the flight attendant walking up the circular wall before delivering food to the pilots, and Heywood Floyd's phone call to Earth, but there's a lot of other small-scale detail in the course of the movie. Consider Dr. Floyd's briefing of the scientists at the Clavius Base: it's free of the kind of pretentious "movie speak" that a lesser film would have used, and a surprising amount of Floyd's verbiage in that scene is devoted to bureaucratic administrativia. And a few minutes later, while Floyd rides a shuttle with a couple of scientists out to where the lunar monolith has been "unearthed", they crack open a cooler and eat sandwiches. Imagine that: these fellows are on their way out to see the first true evidence of extraterrestrial life ever found, and they're saying things like, "What is this, chicken?" "Yeah, looks like it. Got any coffee?"

Incidentally, this kind of detail -- the fact that this is a place, with people doing everyday stuff there -- is one facet of why I love the Star Wars movies so much. One of the best "tiny details" of this sort comes in the scene where Ben Kenobi is cutting the power to the tractor beam: while he's working, two stormtroopers are standing near the door, just shootin' the breeze:

"You know what's going on?"

"I dunno, maybe it's another drill."

"Hey, have you seen that new BT-16?"

"Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about that. They said it's quite a thing to see."

I love stuff like that.

One of the most haunting aspects of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, which wasn't reflected in the movie, is how Dave Bowman carries on after he has to pull Hal's plug and everyone else on the Discovery is dead. In the book, Bowman buries himself in routine, and struggles to maintain some connection to the human race from which he is now separated by millions of miles. It's all very startling, and I've always appreciated how Clarke depicts Bowman's struggle to maintain his rationality in the face of wonder mounting upon wonder. In this way, the book exceeds the film.

Drew is correct that 2001 should not really be seen in connection with the sequel 2010, although the latter is a decent enough film that really doesn't hurt anything.

A Suggestion for scientific study

I think that some scientist should identify just why it is that Heavy Metal, which I watched a few nights ago, is incredibly bad if one starts watching it sober, but gets better and better and better until it's the greatest cinematic journey since Lawrence of Arabia if one drinks beer during the screening at the rate of one 12 oz. beer every fifteen minutes.

I mean, the movie's just dorky as hell, but if one drinks enough while watching it, it slowly becomes endearing -- and when the space ship that's shaped like the 1970s "Have a nice day!" happy face shows up, well, at that point you just kind of sit back and grin -- which happens to be what the two stoner-aliens piloting that spaceship do at that point, as well. And when Tarna shows up....geez, just thinking about it makes me want to crack open a beer. And I'm writing this on Sunday morning.

New at GMR

For the first time in the year I've been with them, one of my reviews is granted "Feature Review" status at Green Man Review. The review in question is Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel, The Last Light of the Sun, which should be available for purchase in Canada this week and in the US sometime in the next month. Scoring advance review copies of books rules, and getting one of Kay's -- well, that's just golden.

I also have a review up of a children's picture book called Hello, Harvest Moon.

I don't think Hostess would market these....

Janet Jackson's exposed nipple, in cupcake form. Because, you know, what's the point of a national scandal -- even so lame a scandal as this one -- if you can't memorialize it in a bit of pastry and icing?

(via Outside Counsel)

There's no earthly way of knowing....which direction we are going....

I hate it when I'm channel-flipping and I catch the last minute or so of a sketch on some comedy show which I suspect I would have really wanted to see in its entirety. Case in point: I flipped past FOX a short while ago, and MAD TV had a bit in which Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was crossed with The Apprentice.

In the bit I saw, an actor playing Donald Trump in an outfit that was part business suit, part whacky-suit a la Gene Wilder, and he was singing to the winning contestant of The Apprentice as the glass elevator of Trump Tower shot up toward the sky and out of the building.

Then the sketch cuts to a news anchor sitting at a desk, reporting that the Air Force has shot down a glass elevator that was flying unauthorized NYC airspace, and that President Bush has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to devote resources to "terrorist magic elevators".

Hell, I don't know, maybe the sketch sucked. But it sure sounds funny.

(Which reminds me of Al Gore's stint as Saturday Night Live host last year: my favorite sketch of that episode was when Gore played -- you guessed it -- Willy Wonka's accountant brother, the guy responsible for working the financing of a factory whose labor force is Oompa Loompas and which uses a river and waterfall as a stirring mechanism. For some reason, I just found Al Gore, dressed up in dusty Dickensian rags and barking lines like "You hear that, Willy? We're Oompa-Loompa-Doompity-Screwed!", absolutely hilarious.)

Bzzzzt, wrong answer....

I just have to say that I'd have a lot more respect for Janet Jackson if she'd just say, "Yeah, I displayed my breast on national TV for 1.9 seconds. Deal with it, you bunch of puritanical nutjobs." Especially after reading Peggy Noonan's latest screed in which she wrings her no-doubt icy hands. I think that Noonan has been playing some right-wing weirdo variant of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game", in which any event at all is connected with 9-11-01:

"I pulled my car into the carwash yesterday, and immediately after driving away with my pristinely shining new body and windshield so clear it's almost like I could reach right through it and touch the clouds where the little birdies frolic. But the illusion was spoiled when a monarch butterfly was caught in a downdraft, and found itself striking my windshield with such force that its poor, delicate body was splattered across the glass. And yet, as I looked upon that orange smear that had formerly been a pretty little butterfly, I had to think back to that day, that horrible day, when I found myself next to some guy who was no doubt thinking the exact same things I'm thinking now. And I think of 9-11, and all the little butterflies, and I realize that America's values are butterflies splatting upon the windshield of liberals."

I do wish, though, that someone would make a videotape of Noonan while she writes a column, just because I always wonder if she tosses her head while writing like she does while speaking on live TV. Over to you, Bob.

(link via TBogg, who is in the process of a redesign. Not that he asked my two cents, but he should keep the archives -- just move them down to the bottom of the sidebar, if need be -- and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think one needs to "upgrade" to use Blogger's RSS feature. I'm using it, and I've never upgraded anything.)

Grumble, grumble.....

The Bills are apparently close to bringing onto their coaching staff someone I've never much liked: former Bengals and Buccaneers head man Sam Wyche. I suppose he could be OK, but Wyche really isn't one of my more-liked football people. Oh well.

Friday Burst of Weirdness (a day late)

No, I didn't post anything yesterday. No real reason, outside of the fact that I was pretty tired and just didn't have anything cogent to say. (Leaving aside, of course, the issue of whether I ever have anything cogent to say.)

Anyway, here's what would have been the Friday Burst. I was just starting my freshman year of college when the Berlin Wall fell and the process of German reunification began, and since I was away from home for the first extended time in my life and that I was deep into my studies, I regretfully don't have as full a sense of living through that period of history that I do from living through other things that have transpired in my life -- my memories of the Iranian hostage crisis, for example, are more vivid even though they took place when I was in third and fourth grade.

So, I am prepared to grant that my sense of history surrounding the Fall of Communism is not what it should be; even so, however, I am not prepared to grant that I missed the seminal contribution of David Hasselhoff.

(via Warren Ellis.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Butterfly Nebula.

I was a bit busy this week, for obvious reasons, so I didn't do a whole lot of looking for images. So I resorted to pilfering yet another cool image from the fine folks at NASA.

Yep, we needed this!

You know the site TinyURL.com, which you use to make very short URLs out of really long ones? Well, Patrick Nielsen Hayden points out the reverse: HugeURL.com.

(OK, I had a Huge URL for use here, but it ended up making the blog into this horrible distended thing that required immense scrolling to use. So just take my word for it, OK?)

They're PAID to write that stuff?

Via James Capozzola, I see that the folks at National Review have something going on called a "Gibbeting List" -- people they hate from history who we'd have dug up and their moldering corpses displayed in iron gibbets. And not just actual evil people, but people whose only crimes seem to have been espousing different beliefs than these folks. OK, then.

I quite frankly do not know what to make of people who apparently think that Lyndon Johnson and the dictators of the Soviet Union are of equal moral worth. But I'm having trouble making sense of a lot of stuff lately.

Geez, I wonder if Ralph Fiennes isn't really a Nazi?

What on Earth is the big deal about Patrick Stewart not being all that enthusiastic about space exploration? When did we begin expecting actors to believe whatever we think their characters believed? Take Lileks, for example: driven to the usual dull-as-ditchwater crap in which "My God, an actor dares to believe something different than I! The Horror!" somehow becomes "How dare an actor open his mouth to do anything other than recite dialogue!"

But Lileks gets even worse: he's shocked to hear such things not just from an actor who had the unmitigated gall to play a science fiction hero, but an Englishman besides! Oh, no!

God, what an ass. "Boo-hoo, the guy who played my favorite SF character doesn't hold the same set of beliefs that I do." Get over it, already. Just keep writing boring crap about Target. And to think, on space travel I agree with Lileks and not with Stewart. Kind of reminds me of an exchange in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers:

GIDEON: Adam's right. I stand with Adam.

ADAM: Well, don't stand too close.

(By the way, Stewart's stance on this is not new. I heard him espouse this view in an interview at least ten years ago. And James, no, I do not think that Democratic Underground would feature that picture. Not much of a rhetorical flourish, though -- I don't recall seeing the picture you're obliquely referencing on too many sites like NewsMax or in Town Hall columns, so your "Let me make up a dumb hypothetical to accuse people of dishonesty before the fact" thought-experiment pretty much fails.)

Traffic and Loading Stuff

For some reason, I am still getting tons of traffic from MSN's search engine for anything and everything related to Janet Jackson and the Nipple That Ate Mars. I wonder if Janet's new nickname among friends and coworkers is "Nip", a la Elaine in the episode of Seinfeld in which her nipple is visible in her Christmas card photo.

And I've noticed that the blog is taking quite some time to load. BlogRolling is, I think, the main culprit; looking at their news page, I see that they have had to do some maintenance to accomodate very heavy server demand. If BlogRolling and YACCS are both down at the same time, then loading will be positively glacial.

Samples? WHERE?!

Never have I seen so flummoxed a person as the old man at the store today who was trying to decide if his desire to get a free sample of pan-seared pork chops was stronger than his desire to not step in the four-feet-in-diameter pool of extra virgin olive oil I was just starting to clean up.

The desire for samples won out.

And he wasn't the last person to make that same decision.

There's a lesson here, somewhere. I know not what it is, but I'll be it's a doozy.

Holy Search Results, Batman....

Well, the whole "Janet Jackson Exposure Boob Super Bowl" thing has been great for my traffic the last few days; I'm getting tons of hits off Google and MSN searches for stuff about "the incident". (I've also has a ton of hits from people looking for information about a similar incident that took place at the "Supper Bowl", which I guess would be Snoopy's food dish.)

Anyway, blogging will probably be light for the next few days as the new job takes up a lot of my mental bandwidth. I'm not disappearing, though, so you all will have to keep visiting.

Back....away....slowly....

This thing freaked me out: Guess the Dictator or Sitcom Character. You think of a dictator or sitcom character, and it uses yes/no questions ot figure out who you are. It got me each time. Whoa!

(Yeah, I know, it's just a matter of gathering as much information as possible and comparing it against a database, but it's still fun.)

(via John Scalzi)

No city kicks more ass than Buffalo!!

I just got home from the first day on the job, sat down to read some blogs, and I find that TBogg has posted a plug for Buffalo celtic-rock band Jackdaw! Buffalo has a wonderful Irish and Celtic music community, led by Jackdaw and other groups like Kilbrannan. And Buffalo, you know, rules.

Buffalo thanks you, Tom!

Do we even HAVE priorities?

Time it took, after the related incident, to start this government investigation: two days.

Time it took, after the related incident, to start this government investigation: six to eight months and counting, depending on where you start counting from.

Time it took, after the related incident, to start this government investigation: one year, two months, sixteen days.

There are times when I feel like our country is Springfield-writ-large, and we're being governed by Mayor Quimby and Police Chief Clancy Wiggum.

What's that strange gyrating-sound coming from Dr. Sagan's grave?

Yes, that whole Jayson Blair thing was pretty damning, but as far as I'm concerned, the New York Times has done far greater damage to its legacy of quality journalism by posting this astrological look at the Democratic presidential candidates. What vomitous claptrap.

(NYT registration required, if you really want to read this tripe. Link via PZ Myers, who is equally annoyed. Probably moreso, since he's actually a paid scientist and I'm just a blogger who gets annoyed at pseudoscientific stupidity.)

An Unholy Trilogy

The Good: Last weekend, NBC aired Deep Impact.

The Bad: The next night, ABC aired Armageddon.

The Ugly: This past Saturday night, one of Buffalo's indie-stations aired the 1979 crapfest Meteor.

I wonder if they're trying to tell me something....

Well, at least he didn't choke on the Chex party mix....

President Bush fell asleep during the halftime show the other night. Any number of jokes could be made here, I suppose, but I have to admit that the "flashing" aside, given the quality of the halftime entertainment this year, the President's impulse was probably the correct one.

Oh, and check out the formatting of the linked story: four short grafs, and then a parenthetical that reads, "Story continues below", requiring the reader to scroll past some ads plopped in the middle of the thing....and the story's continuation consists of a single sentence.

So what ARE our priorities, anyway?

I think that Atrios has a point: why are we so incredibly tolerant of things in our popular culture like bullets shredding bodies, limbs being severed, and massive explosions killing hundreds -- and yet so incredibly scandalized by a wide-angled shot, lasting for mere seconds, of a female breast whose nipple isn't even exposed?

On CBS Sunday night, Janet Jackson's breast was exposed for seconds, and this is consuming our national discourse.

On FOX Sunday night, Independence Day was shown, a movie in which about nine total tears are shed for the loss of about half the entire planet's population.

Something seems out-of-whack to me.

Die-nasty

I just saw one of those Internet polls over on AOL about whether the New England Stupid Patriots are a dynasty or not. Most respondents seem to agree that to really be a dynasty, the StuPats would have to win at least one more Super Bowl sometime in the next handful of years, a scenario which can't be ruled out given the team's current salary cap structure (aside from Ty Law, they have no major headaches on the horizon) and their stockpiling of draft picks this year (barring trades, they'll draft seven players in the first four rounds).

The part of the poll that gave me pause was where a big majority -- I didn't write down the numbers, but it's commanding -- assert that the StuPats are "just as good" as the illustrious dynasties of the NFL's past. So, I figured I'd do a little digging into a few numbers, and compare the offensive and defensive rankings of the two New England champions versus the average rankings of the three teams that are dynasties by general agreement: the Steelers of the 1970s, the 49ers of the 80s, and the Cowboys of the early 90s.

(A couple of caveats: for the purposes of the 49ers, I did include their totals from the 1994 team, although I've generally been on the fence as to whether that team should be considered part of the 49ers "dynasty" from the 80s. And generally, I tend to view a dynasty as requiring more than half-a-decade to really be considered "dynastic". The Cowboys won three Super Bowls in four years between 1992 and 1995, but after that they were pretty mediocre. The only reason I consider the Bills to be a "lesser dynasty" is because nobody's ever done four conference championships in a row, but they fall in my mind more under "great historical accomplishment", rather than "dynasty".)

OK, here's the table, comparing the average offensive and defensive rankings of the three dynasties and the StuPats, as well as those teams' average margins of victory in their Super Bowls. Decimals have been rounded up, except under margin of victory.

Team	Avg. Offensive Ranking	Avg. Defensive Ranking	Avg. S.B. Victory Margin
Steelers, 1970s	6th	3rd	7.5
49ers, 1980s	5th	5th	19.8
Cowboys, 1990s	4th	7th	20.7
StuPats, 2000s	18th	16th	3

I also searched online for some statistical rankings of the numbers of live chickens sacrificed to Beelzebub by each of these teams, but all I could come up was anecdotal evidence at best. But my regular readers will certainly know my suspicions on that score, right?

The Non-Apology Apology, in action!

Justin Timberlake, on the Janet Jackson nipple exposure: "I regret the wardrobe malfunction."

We should hear more like this! How about George W. Bush: "No WMDs? I regret the intelligence malfunction."

Filmmakers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich: "Godzilla sucked? We regret the screenplay malfunction."

Former Red Sox Manager Grady Little: "We lost Game Seven of the ALCS? I regret the pitching staff management malfunction."

Whoever decided to go with "New Coke": "We regret the cola flavor malfunction."

Skater Tonya Harding: "I regret the lead pipe malfunction."

Any other suggestions, folks? Let 'em fly!

I might just start desiring an iPod....

....if they actually had ads like this.

Terry Teachout on Blogging

Here. Not much for me to add, except that I'm not sure about the latter clause of his point #8.

Why Miss Jackson, don't change on OUR account....

Warren Ellis, as always, has the definitive take on Janet Jackson's bit of exposure during the halftime show last night. Not safe for work!

And safe for work is Terry Teachout's take on the same thing, which would be definitive if not for Mr. Ellis's.

(Why didn't they save all of that funky NASA stuff from the pregame show for halftime? And for God's sake, I can't even fathom a universe in which Willie Nelson should play second-fiddle to Toby Keith. Aieee!)

MT Bloggers, beware!

I don't know how many of my regular readers are MovableType users, but you should know that I visited Kevin Drum's site a short while ago and noted some comments-spam shenanigans -- comments like "Great site! I'm so glad I found you!", and the URL links to some gambling site or some such thing. Keep an eye out, or whatever it is you do. (I'm glad they haven't hacked YACCS yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.)

Reality Bites

AICN reports today the passing of Mary-Ellis Bunim (57 years old, breast cancer). Bunim was one of the producers behind MTV's The Real World and Road Rules, as well as this year's The Simple Life on FOX. She paved the way for a lot of the current "reality TV" craze. I confess to having a soft spot for the earlier editions of The Real World, especially the San Francisco cast (the one with Judd Winick and Puck) and my personal favorite, the mellow London cast. (I've never forgotten the two American guys on that show -- the race-car driver who walks into a London grocery and starts loudly complaining because he can't find the ranch dressing, and the 17-year old playwright who wins an all-expenses-paid three-month stay in London and rarely bothers to get out of bed. I've always wondered if that kid has since realized the enormity of the opportunity he missed.)

I'm no fan of reality TV, American Idol excepted, but I did enjoy some of what Mary-Ellis Bunim did.

Damn...they didn't push Jeff Probst out of the helicopter.

Somehow I missed the segue from the Super Bowl postgame to the beginning of Survivor: You Didn't See These Idiots Enough the First Time They Were On This Dumb Show. Suddenly there's a bunch of helicopters and boats mounting what looks like a re-enactment of Iwo Jima, but with a lot fewer people and no guns. No, I'm not suddenly becoming a Survivor viewer. I feel guilty enough about catching the equivalent of four complete episodes of the damned thing's last incarnation, but it seems odd to me to have an "All-Star" edition -- could Richard Hatch or one of the other people who have already won the show once actually end up with another million-dollar prize? That seems odd. It seems to me that they should have brought back all of the people voted off on the very first day of each previous edition, seeing as how they only got about 198 seconds of total screen time before getting the boot in their prior incarnations.

And so began the great period of darkness....

....otherwise known as the period between the end of football and the beginning of baseball, during which the only flash of light to be found is the Figure Skating World Championships. (No, I am not a March Madness fan, although there was some poignance to be found in Syracuse's winning of the NCAA tournament last year on the day my family left that city.)

So, now that some hours have past, you're probably thinking it's time for cooler heads to prevail, and for me to dispassionately offer my congratulations to the newly-crowned Super Bowl Champions.

As Paul Buchman used to say, "Never gonna happen, my friends."

But anyway, one of my commenters points out, after my initial gnashing-of-the-teeth, that "dynasty" talk is already starting with respect to the Stupid Patriots*. Yes, this may be premature in this era of "parity", but the StuPats** do, perhaps, exemplify something I wrote after last year's Super Bowl: I think that the idea that dynasties can't happen in the salary-cap, free-agency era may be wrong. Here's what I wrote then:

However, it seems at least partly true that the old style of dynasty may be a thing of the past: a team putting together a core of players and keeping that core together for a long period of time. Future dynasties, thus, may not be the result of accretion of great talent on a single team, but rather by great front-office personnel and coaches on a team. Scouts and coaches are going to be more important in the future, and whereas we very well may not see a Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s again, I also think we're unlikely to see a situation where a Chuck Knoll or a Don Shula or a Tom Landry can coach a colossus but then spend ten years coaching mediocre teams because the colossus eventually got dismantled....Selection of personnel is going to get more important, and this is the real reason why the Bengals and Cardinals are such train-wrecks: not only do they lack talent, but they also lack the proper management team to bring in talent in an era when talent can be acquired much more easily and not nearly as capriciously as in the day when there was the draft and little else.

The Bills have had pretty good player selection over the last few years, but the coaching lagged. The StuPats, though, have had both excellent player selection and coaching (yeah, Belichick's a freaking genius, yada yada yada). Add to that the fact that they apparently have a cluster of picks at the top of this year's draft, which will allow them to bring in young talent that will theoretically come of age after the current bunch of nauseating StuPats like Ty Law and Willie McGinest move on, and this might just well be as much of a dynasty as is possible in today's NFL. (Or they could finally make me happy and start going 5-11 again. But we all know that just isn't going to happen, especially since in this football version of Der Freischutz Adam Vinatieri seems to be enacting, he never gets to that sixth bullet. And yes, that's an obscure opera reference.)

* Yes, I will be referring to them as "the Stupid Patriots" until the cycle begins anew, which I take to be the opening of training camp. Deal with it! If Steven Den Beste gets to talk nasty about France, I get to talk nasty about the Stupid Patriots.

** I will use "StuPats" as a contraction, occasionally, for "Stupid Patriots".

....and overhead, the stars began winking out, one by one....

(Unseemly bashing of the Super Bowl Champions here)

This is as if Frodo had given the Ring to the Nazgul at Osgiliath.

Or if Luke Skywalker had held the lightsaber blade at his father's throat, then stared at his own mechanical right hand, and then struck his father down anyway.

Or if Miss Tessmacher had let Superman drown.

Or if the Dallas F***ing Cowboys had beaten the Bills a third time.

Once again, the New England Stupid Evil Disgusting Odious Vile Hateful-in-every-way Patriots flirt with losing, catch a break at exactly the right time, and turn it into a game-winning field goal. Once again Tom Brady and his stupid, evil grin gets an MVP. (Why the hell do Championship MVPs get new cars? Can't they buy their own cars, with their multi-million dollar salaries? I've never understood this, not even when Michael Jordan was winning MVPs.)

Oh well, at least the food was good, and the folks who predicted a blowout ended up, in Samwise's words (in the book), "looking a lot of tom-fools".

Stupid Patriots.

February, the Month of Champions

A new month is dawning, and with it, a new masthead image, keeping with the Arthurian theme I'll be exploring this year. The last painting, Carrick's Le Morte d'Arthur, can be seen in full here.

And as long as I'm bidding January a fond farewell, I must note that last month saw the most traffic yet at Byzantium's Shores, due largely to TBogg's link and, to a smaller degree, my "Buffalo Blog" adventures. Thanks to all my readers, loyal and otherwise. Keep stopping by!

The future of classical music....

....may be found in film music, according to Brian Micklethwait, a person I've somehow not discovered before. Amazing, the stuff we come across. Here's a representative quote:

What I'm saying is that thanks to Lions in Winter, Star Wars, Matrices and the rest of them, the basic musical grammar of classical music will go on being pounded into new generations.

Indeed, as Mr. Reynolds might say.

Bursting the Hubble Bubble, on the Double!

Jay Manfold has an interesting series of posts about the Hubble Space Telescope -- go here first, and scroll up. He points out some intriguing alternatives and future policy ideas that should make situations like the current one avoidable (such as, if the space-based device is unmanned itself, then make it serviceable by robot).

I do wonder a bit if Jay's being overly optimistic about the parts of his argument that revolve around the government being willing to declassify stuff. I don't think we should underestimate the attitude of any government -- even ours -- about guarding its secrets, even when the parties concerned are long dead. Just look at all the Kennedy assassination stuff that's still under lock-and-key after 40-plus years, and the snail's pace at which the Nixon tapes become public. Governmental secrecy is a huge nut to crack.

Goldsmith the Tunesmith

I'm listening right now to Jerry Goldsmith's score to the movie Legend, which was not used because the film's producers got panicky and basically shredded the movie to the point of giving it an entirely new score prior to its American release (a sequence of events which repeated, almost exactly, with last year's Timeline). Jerry Goldsmith's luck, with regard to his film assignments and what happens to his scores, is generally about as bad as John Williams's is good. If you ever find yourself watching a perfectly ghastly movie and yet saying to yourself, "Hmmmm, this movie blows, but the music's rather good," odds are you're listening to a Goldsmith score.

I've never been as keen on Goldsmith as many other film music fans. He's written a great many magnificent scores -- Legend, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Total Recall, The Wind and the Lion, and each of his scores for the Omen films are favorites of mine -- but generally speaking, criticizing Goldsmith tends to be looked upon by a lot of film music fans as the equivalent of loudly breaking wind in the midst of a coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey. You just don't do it, and there are times when I observe discussions of some score of his that I found lackluster in which everyone else is waxing poetic about how amazing it is, and I wonder if I'm even on the same planet. (First Knight and Star Trek Nemesis are good examples -- the former fails to stir my blood and the latter actually bores me, but many consider them to be at least minor masterworks.)

Over the last ten or fifteen years, in my ears, Goldsmith has displayed a tendency to write a barnburner of a theme, but then pound that theme into the ground so relentlessly that by the end of one of his score CDs (which tend to not be very long, for long and boring reasons) I am quite ready to never hear that theme again. This may have come about because of how his Legend score was treated -- Goldsmith pulled out a lot of stops for this one, only to see the tapes end up in the vaults and the film scored by Tangerine Dream.

Anyway, Legend really is a top-notch score. Check it out -- it was issued by Silva Records a while back. It certainly represents a level of compositional complexity to which Goldsmith just doesn't seem to aspire anymore.

Dead Cetaceans Society

Continuing my seemingly endless fascination with dead whales in recent days, check this out. Don't worry, it's not icky at all: it's about a fossilized whale.

Archive strangeness....

OK, for some reason, my archive pages are still displaying the old, dark-style template I used to have in place. I've just republished the entire site, but the changes haven't as yet propagated through the entire blog. Anyhow, my hope is that permalinks to older articles will work better once it's all done. Unless, of course, I'm totally misunderstanding how the whole thing works.

And yes, I'm aware that this post makes exceedingly little sense.

Atlas Snored

My reactions to dealing with Libertarians tend to run the gamut from backing away slowly (in general) to running away screaming (if they start quoting Ayn Rand). But sometimes I stand there, watching, and shake my head (case in point -- you may have to scroll down a bit). That's what I'm going with regard to this New York Press article:

With such a philosophy ["We're pro-choice on everything!"], you might expect a Libertarian convention to look like Beyond Thunderdome’s Bartertown. Or, at the very least, like the interrupting Neil Saunders. But aside from one tragically comic mullet (sparse spikes on top, ponytail in the back), Manhattan’s Libertarians are white, middle-aged, professional males. There’s one Asian man in attendance and, among the handful of women, one is the spitting image of Onion columnist Jean Teasdale. I can’t take my eyes off her.

I am also baffled as to why I found this article linked here, but I guess this, too, falls in the category of head-shaking.