IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Bon voyage to Friends, which has been one of my favorite TV shows ever since I started watching it, about halfway through its first season.

I'll have more to say about the show either tomorrow or over the weekend, once I've seen the finale. For now, well -- yes, I'll miss Friends greatly.

How to Discern a Blithering Idiot, Method #86949

[WARNING: short and infrequent political rant here!]

If a person maintains that the recent abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in Iraq is not a big deal because, hey, at least we're not as mean about it as Saddam Hussein was, then that person is a blithering idiot.

It sometimes seems to me that the right's basic response to, well, anything about Iraq these days is to stick their fingers in their ears and scream, "No more rape rooms! No more rape rooms! LA LA LA LA LAAAAA!!!" It's not really constructive.

You know what annoys me?

People who post to their blog "I HAVE A JOB!", but then don't tell what the job is. Harumph.

Anyway, congratulations to Jostein, who's been job-hunting for a while. Of course, he had to job-hunt in one of them socialist European countries, so he didn't have to, you know, worry about little things like, oh, dying for lack of medical care if the need arose, but still, getting off unemployment is a good thing. I do think it a bit odd that apparently Jostein didn't question that part of the application that read, "Do you have any objections to spending long periods of time on a wooden ship and killing people along the coast of Northumbria", but hey, you can't figure these Norse. Comes from being downwind of France, I guess.

Basketball Sadness

A member of the Canisius College basketball team, Richard Jones, collapsed and died during a practice on Wednesday. Canisius College is in Buffalo, and is sometimes referred to as one of the "Little Three", a collective term for the region's Division I basketball schools (Canisius, Niagara University, St. Bonaventure University).

Weird searches! We got yer weird searches here!

For some reason, the rate of really strange searches leading people to Byzantium's Shores has spiked over the last week or two. I don't know why this should be the case, but it is. Maybe Blogistan's water is affected, or something.

First of all, I don't really know what kinds of foods Uther Pendragon ate, although given the Dark Ages/Medieval period in which he lived, I would assume that chili con carne was not a staple in his diet. Probably a lot of grainy bread, gruel, porridge, tough and gamey meat, and lots and lots of ale. Unless he was a vegetarian.

Second, well, isn't it pretty obvious how you dissect a cow's heart? You got a heart, you got a scalpel, you got yourself some good fun dissectin'! (Although, for my money, the cow's eyeball was a lot more interesting to dissect.)

Third, I must admit that Star Trek's Lieutenant Saavik (a criminally underused character if there ever was one, in any franchise) never struck me as the kind of person to play baseball at Starfleet Academy. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

Finally, I'm in the midst of one of my "Annabel Lee" traffic spikes, when I suddenly start seeing tons of Google hits from people looking for info on Poe's poem. To any of those who might be also reading this, I hope what I wrote about that poem helps, but it should in no way be taken to be the work of any kind of scholar. In short, don't base your term paper on what I say. If you want to base your term paper on something of mine, go for my Star Wars, Star Trek, or James Bond stuff. You'll be on a lot safer ground, believe me.

One Magical Night

The trailer for Before Sunset, the upcoming sequel to the wondrous romantic film Before Sunrise.

It may be too much to hope that the new film is as good as the first...but I'm all about holding out hope.

Conflicting....impulses....

My strong skepticism and general contempt for all manner of "psychic" or "spiritualistic" tomfoolery comes squarely into conflict with my desire to give people a reason, any reason, to visit the Buffalo/Western New York region as I read this article about Lily Dale, NY.

But then, the Buffalo area (specifically, Amherst) is also the home of CSICOP. So, you know, you don't have to be full of crap to enjoy a visit to the Niagara Frontier.

O to have Lived in a Time of such Wonderment!

One reason I wish I'd been born a decade or two later: when I was making a regular practice of being dumped by members of the other gender, the news was always broken to me in person.

Nowadays, though....

The man in this picture is an archaeologist, and he is looking over a newly-discovered stucco relief of a Mayan deity in a likewise newly-discovered Mayan city. Many artifacts have been recovered, along with the realization that "Looters had missed the artifacts by inches".

Fascinating.

Oh, for heaven's sake.

I don't know, and I don't know why Google thinks I know.

Yeesh.

Here's another word I hate:

"Telephony".

I don't know why, but to me this sounds like a made-up word for which no real need exists.

(This post can only mean one thing: I'm tired and I have nothing much to say today. Go figure.)

Am I the only one....

....whose eyes glaze over every time Sherry Palmer appears on 24? I mean, for all the continual griping amongst fans about Kim Bauer ("Mountain lions and survivalists and wife-beaters, oh my!"), at least she has shown some character growth, and her story arc this year has been at least fairly interesting. But Sherry? Ugh. Here the show is getting pretty damned exciting -- a madman on the loose with some kind of super-duper-virus with which he could kill millions just by smashing the vial -- and then, last night, in pops Sherry Palmer with some kind of scheme to achieve power again, dredging up a subplot from earlier in the season that was pretty dull to begin with.

Assuming David Palmer is still around in Season Four, I hope Sherry is at long last done away with.

Yet another reason why I'm glad I live in Buffalo

This New York Times story paints a pretty bleak picture of climate trends in the American West:

"Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West ? one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation's history ? may have been based on a colossal miscalculation."

I occasionally see predictions that there will be wars over water at some point in the future. It seems strange to me that we'd have wars over a substance that covers something like seventy percent of the planet's surface, but then -- we are talking about humanity, here. We don't really need much by way of an excuse to have a war or two.

(via Making Light)

Oh, come on. It isn't THAT bad.

Not at all, really. No, it's not as good as it used to be, but it was already sliding a bit even when the Big Head was still in charge and it's generally still been of high quality this year.

I am, of course, talking about The West Wing.

I was noodling about Bartlet4America, when I discovered Don'tSaveOurShow.org, a site devoted to promoting the cancellation of The West Wing. Lord, people, get a grip -- Aaron Sorkin isn't God. The more of his stuff you watch, the more his bag-of-tics becomes obvious; and he was frankly lousy at crafting a serial drama. Plotlines would come and go; characters would disappear for no reason whatsoever (Mandy?); favorite snippets of dialogue would turn up again and again ("I got screwed with my pants on", "I'm a whole new woman", "We don't have time to do one thing at a time", et cetera).

Not to beat up on Aaron Sorkin, because I love the guy's writing. I own both of the West Wing script books currently in print; The American President is one of my favorite movies; and so on. But there's no way that The West Wing has completely fallen apart. So come on, people, let's rein in the histrionics. We still got a thing to do. Yeah.

(And I realize it's cool to see your site mentioned in Big Media, but really -- there's not as much cachet in getting mentioned by one of Entertainment Weekly's corral of crappy critics as you might think.)

(UPDATE: I wasn't really clear in that last paragraph. It was DontSaveOurShow.org that got mentioned in EW, not me. They have a scan of the article over there, if you really want to read Ken Tucker being boring and snippy.)

[Insert sound of head thumping table]

Here.

[thump thump thump]

Insult to Injury Department

Last week, American Idol saw the elimination of John Stevens, the big-band crooner wannabe.

This week, American Idol's musical theme is....big-band crooning.

It wouldn't be surprising to me if John is sitting at home right now, watching the show, and to crib a phrase from Alan Jay Lerner, using "language that would make a sailor blush".

Those in peril on the sea

More shipwreck stuff: here's an amazing set of photographs depicting ice buildup on a vessel in frigid waters.

The ship depicted is apparently a Coast Guard vessel that was searching for a missing fishing boat; what happens in such cold climes is that the salt spray literally freezes to the rigging and the decks and basically every exposed surface. If this ice is not cleared diligently, the ship can become top-heavy enough to capsize -- which is assumed to have been the fate of the missing fishing boat. It's a haunting set of images.

(via MeFi)

Poor Joe

Joe Morgan Chat Day, with one of the funniest introductions to a blog post I've ever read. It starts with a long series of quotes relating to drink, and eventually relates them all back to Joe Morgan, the ESPN baseball analyst and onetime star of some highly-regarded ballclub or other. (Probably the Reds, I guess. Everybody seems to hail from the Reds, eventually.)

I'm feeling obsolete....

Over at Terminus, Drew is contemplating the direction of his blog. Specifically, he's thinking of shifting from a predominant focus on politics to a focus on movie reviews and general commentary and the occasional picture of a beautiful woman. My thunder is in danger of being stolen! Put down my thunder, scoundrel!

More seriously, though, I'll continue visiting Terminus no matter what Drew does, but I suspect he may be overanalyzing what happens in his comments. I don't think comments are really all that good an indicator of what readership may want or respond to, for blogs whose traffic is under a certain threshold. (This includes mine.) I know that I am almost always surprised at which posts generate the most commenting activity (unless I'm specifically asking readers to comment), and it seems probable to me that the only time one really gets heavy commenting to political threads is if the blog is one of the heavy-hitters of Blogistan to begin with -- I'm thinking at least a "Large Mammal" on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, for example.

My general suspicion is that the political section of Blogistan has pretty much "settled out", with there being almost no chance of a new blogger ascending to Atrios or Glenn Reynolds or Kevin Drum or Steven Den Beste levels. My parallel suspicion is that bloggers who don't focus on politics (by "focus" I mean, feature well over 50% of posts containing political content) probably will never climb to those levels either, simply because Blogistan has for good or ill become associated with cranky political commentary.

And now I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. Oh well....

Aaron will pay....oh yes, he will pay....

Now I look like an axe murderer. (Well, chainsaw, actually.)

Thumb-twiddling, in progress

Oliver Willis has joined the ranks of bloggers who have turned blogging into a real-life job opportunity.

And here I am, sitting in Buffalo, watching the Universe swirl right on by. Dooby dooby doo....

(BTW, is it just slight overkill that every entry on Oliver's blog bears a link to Senator Kerry's campaign?)

Just as long as it doesn't involve that skinny red-headed creep....

Oh, the searches that bring people here....like this one.

If such a thing exists, I do not want to know about it, OK?

Can we sell it AFTER its time?!

New York grocery stores want to sell wine. I say, bring it on!

When I went to college in Iowa, I enjoyed going to the local grocery store because I could stock up on the week's supplies: milk, chips, Ramen noodles, mac-and-cheese, and wine. Yup, wine. I enjoy wine, although my economic situation has rarely afforded me the opportunity to indulge that particular interest much beyond keeping a few bottles of red and port on hand. (Plus the small bottle of 1989 Sauternes I am aging until I sell my first novel.)

Unfortunately, in New York State, grocery stores are not allowed to sell wine. You have to go to liquor stores to get it. Now, in Buffalo, this isn't a problem at all: we have a lot of "liquor superstores" in the region, with the Premier Group being the best-known. In fact, there are three such stores within a ten-minute drive of my home (and two of those are within five minutes, and the closer of those two is just a ten-minute walk away). It's not like wine is hard to get in New York, unless you live in one of the smaller towns where the liquor store is just mildly less scary than a large-city bus station.

But it would still be great to be able to get wine in a grocery store -- especially a store like mine, whose focus in the last couple of years has been on meal preparation and in helping shoppers to select ingredients and offer suggestions for how to cook and entertain. Wine would be an invaluable part of that focus, and I can only imagine it would be immensely helpful for shoppers who are looking to get a bottle of wine to go with the meal they're preparing that day to be able to get that bottle of wine without having to make an additional stop somewhere else.

For serious oenophiles, I doubt that the grocery stores will ever really compete. There's only so much shelf-space to go around, and someone whose interest lies in collecting wine or maintaining a decent home cellar probably won't find much of use in a grocery store. Certainly that was the case at the Iowa grocery store I frequented ten years ago: the selection was all Gallo and Bolla.

One concern expressed in the Buffalo News article linked is the fear that grocers here would do the same: stock the most popular California wines and ignore the fine local producers. I would greatly hope that this would not be the case. New York State ranks second in wine production in the United States, and I for one would be greatly nonplused if I saw that local wines weren't being stocked on the shelves of local stores.

Still, I love the idea of wine being available in the grocery stores. "Wine is food," as the Frugal Gourmet used to say, and putting it in the grocery stores will only help to see it as such.

Bookshelves

A while back, PZ Myers posted a snapshot of one of his bookshelves and asked that others do the same, in a close-up so that he could actually pick out some titles. I finally got around to scanning one in. It's a pretty massive image, so I won't post it directly to the blog; instead, here it is. [EDIT, 7-17-04: I have removed the picture, because it was really big and took up lots of space.] The picture is of the top three shelves of the tall bookcase seen on the right-hand side of a pic in this earlier post of mine. (The larger version of the picture in that post is no longer available, by the way.)

Like Dr. Myers, I gravitate toward people's bookshelves whenever I'm in their home. In fact, my bookish nosiness goes farther than that: at The Store, if I see one of my coworkers reading a book while they're on lunch break, I will often barge in and ask them what they're reading. It's just a horrible quirk of mine. Sometimes I think I could provide color-commentary for shoppers at Borders:

"OK, folks, the man and his girlfriend have entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, and they're looking over the hardcovers first. The man reaches for a book -- look at the confident way he sticks his hand out there, he knows what he wants! -- ooooooh, he's looking at the newest Shannara book. Swing-and-a-miss! But what's this? The girlfriend has gone a little bit ahead of him, and she's looking at what looks like an Octavia Butler trade paperback...but she's holding her back to the boyfriend, like she doesn't want him to know what she's reading. The way he's grokking that Robert Jordan atlas, she probably doesn't have to worry....So let's turn our attention for a moment to that cute girl making capuccino in the cafe, just because we can...."

Recently the Wife and I attended a get-together at a local acquaintance's home. They live in a gorgeous new home, with something like 19000 square feet in their living room alone, eight TVs, six computers, two bedrooms for each kid, and a kitchen wherein Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, and Mario Batali could each make a separate Thanksgiving dinner at the same time and never run into one another -- and not a single bookshelf. I mean, not one. There was no evidence anywhere in that entire house -- and we got the grand tour -- of the presence of a single, solitary scrap of reading material beyond the Sunday paper and the phone book. It was just incredibly weird, almost creepy.

To me, a house without books is little more than a collection of walls, and a crappy apartment filled with books is more homey than a palatial house with none.

Late-Night Bush Bashing

Mickey links an LA Weekly article about David Letterman and his fairly fearless and cranky (and often hilarious) bashing of President Bush. My favorite Bush clip from Letterman's show has the President giving a speech when he says this:

"The left hand [gestures with right hand] didn't know what the right hand [gestures with left hand] was doing."

Letterman got a ton of mileage out of that.

(Although I'd sure hate to be whatever CBS intern has the job decribed in the article as sitting through hours of unedited Presidential news coverage. And I used to enjoy watching C-SPAN, back in the days of cable.)

Blogiversaries Abound!

Morat of Skeptical Notion enters his second year of blogging, and Darth Swank was too busy at work to realize he'd entered his third. Congratulations to both are in order!

UPDATE: The Dead Parrots Society also celebrates a year of blogging....by taking a hiatus. Oh well, at least that kept their most recent link to me at the very top of their page for several days!

More self-photographic goofiness

Since I now have not one but two people who think that my head-shot makes me look like I spend my spare time burying an axe in the skull of innocent Western New Yorkers, I rescanned the photo and spent a little time dinking around with my photo-editing software in an effort to lighten it up and make myself look a tad less evil and a bit more benign. (I would ask Robert, my professional photographer/artist friend, for help in this, but I know him too well to do so. He'd almost certainly Photoshop in a forked tongue protruding from my mouth or something. And no, this is not an invitation for all you weirdos out there to start Photoshopping my head. Not that I can stop you. Oh, crap.)

Anyway, I'm hoping that I look less murderous and more like the hippie that I was told I look like over here. I should have worn my tie-dye shirt that night.

Someday that'll be me, signing the title page....

Via 2Blowhards (in the middle of one of their "Elsewhere" grab-bag posts), I see this Lawrence Block article about signed books. It's a fascinating article:

"James Ellroy signed the entire first printing of My Dark Places, some 65,000 books in all. He wrote two words, James and Ellroy, 65,000 times each. That's 130,000 words, which is more than he took to write the whole damn book."

Interesting, that.

Even more interesting is the fact that occasionally The Store will get in some cookbooks by TV chefs that are signed -- such as the copy of Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking that I just bought today. I was going to buy it anyway, because I love cookbooks in general and Chinese cookbooks more specifically and big beautiful Chinese cookbooks with lots of color photos of the food most of all, and because I always liked watching Martin Yan on TV ("If Yan can cook, you can too!"), especially when he'd pull out his cleaver and bone a chicken in thirty seconds. All the greater was my surprise when I glanced inside the front cover to find the inscription in black marker: "Good food, good wine, good health, a wonderful life -- Martin Yan". That's just cool, especially since I missed out on the signed Alton Brown cookbook we had in stock a few months back.

To my knowledge, this is the only signed book that I own.

Honoring the Fallen

Here is why I admire Senator John McCain, even though I disagree with him on most issues. (Link via Pandagon.) I see nothing necessarily pro-war or anti-war in acknowledging the names of our fallen soldiers and in seeing their flag-draped coffins brought home, with all the attendant pageantry as befits men and women who have voluntarily placed themselves in positions of tremendous risk.

A friend of mine said this, in an e-mail:

"Agree or disagree about this war, the majority of those faces last night [on Nightline] were 19-21 years of age. They should be seen. They shouldn't be just numbers. I can not imagine why some of the families were upset about this. When I saw the black & white photo of a smiling Kirk Straseskie, the young man from Wisconsin whose death struck me so hard, it was nothing short of profound. Here was someone who always wanted to be in the Marines since he was a little kid, someone who lost his life trying to save others because it was a natural thing for him to do, he had spent his life helping so many people. He deserves to be remembered. They all do. Seven have been lost from Minnesota. One took his own life. He wasn't included last night."

I have yet to live in a town where there is not a granite memorial bearing the engraved names of soldiers from that town lost in some war or other. Mostly they are Viet Nam, Korea, or World War II memorials; I've also seen World War I memorials and in one town a Civil War memorial whose names are so worn one must angle oneself against the sun to read them.

Memory is a fragile thing that disappears all too easily. We should not confuse it with politics, lest we debase both. All names and faces eventually fade away, but we should never hasten the process.

"Hey, shouldn't one of us be watching the prisoner?"

An American hostage in Iraq has escaped from his captors and been subsequently rescued by American soldiers.

I don't think this is any kind of omen for things in Iraq one way or the other, but it's certainly the best possible news for one man and his family.

Hey, I could do that with cats....

Angie McKaig, whose blog is always a good source of tech-related linkage, reports that she's launching her own business: a venture called Pampered Puppy, which is exactly what it says it is. If you're one of those dog-owners who spoils the animal, she's got you covered.

Good luck to her.

You let her watch WHAT??!!

Catherine on kids and movies:

"My eldest child has had an obsessive fear of sharks ever since my brother introduced her, at 4, to Jaws. It is so severe that I do even attempt to argue against her concerns, even in fresh water."

My parents would not let me watch Jaws until I was a teenager, which always struck me as weird since they took me to Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was nine. (Although my father might have thought better of it had he known beforehand about all the facial-explosions at the film's climax.) I don't recall too much other stuff about their parental concerns back then, since my film tastes as a kid were pretty tame. I was never all that interested in going to R-movies just because they were R-movies, and they occasionally took me if I asked. I wanted to see Bladerunner merely because Harrison Ford was in it (this was when Ford was starting to become the Coolest Thing Ever), and both my mother and I ended up hating that movie, not because it was violent, but because it was boring. (I still think so, by the way. I've watched Bladerunner a few times since then, and I still always find it nice to look at for a few minutes but then dull-as-ditchwater.)

So, what questionable decisions have I made with The Daughter, in terms of movies? Well, a year ago I watched Titanic while in the room with her. She was playing a computer game at the time, so I didn't think much of it, especially when she interpreted the parts when the ship's stern is tilting up into the air and people are sliding down the length of the ship in terms of the slides at the playground. And then, a day or two later, The Wife went to give the Daughter a bath...and that's when the paralyzing fear of water hit with full force. It took us about two months to get over that. So, I think I'll be keeping Jaws out of her eyes for at least a few more years. And, just to be safe, I'll do likewise with The Abyss. You can't be too careful with those water movies, you know.

The Daughter has also seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies. I generally skip past the really violent parts, but in general I find the violence in those films to be of an almost cartoonish variety. When I get the Return of the King DVD, though, I do plan to skip past some of the opening "warping of Smeagol" stuff -- especially that tight closeup of his rotting teeth as he sinks them into a raw fish. Strangely, her favorite part of the LOTR movies is the very opening of The Two Towers. She just loves the way Gandalf falls into "the hole", and then he catches his sword and starts beating up the big mean monster. All this, of course, both appeals to me (on the basis that I'm raising her with a delightfully warped sense of humor) and appalls me (on pretty much the same grounds). Plus, well -- the water movies seem to offer more in terms of a "real-world" scare. There aren't any orcs in the world these days.

Of course, there are the Star Wars movies, all of which she's seen. I don't find much objectionable at all in those, although my original intent to take her to see Attack of the Clones in the theater was quashed when I realized she'd likely have nightmares if she saw the execution scene, when the three big-ass beasties come out of their cages, on the big screen with their shrieks in blaring digital sound. But then, that scene is her favorite part of the DVD, so either I was overly protective, or the TV tends to reduce stuff like that to a less frightening stature. Anyway, when Padme swings down on the chain and kicks the "mean kitty" (that's what The Daughter calls that particular monster), well, for her that's the biggest laugh in the movie.

In general, my approach to film selection seems to be more skewed to trying to keep The Daughter from watching bad movies than from watching ones that are too violent. It seems to me that a good movie with content a bit beyond her age level is less likely to undermine what I'm trying to accomplish, as a parent, than a crappy movie is. I'd rather her watch the Helm's Deep sequence of The Two Towers now than, say, From Justin to Kelly at any age.

(BTW, Catherine's oldest is apparently going to prom. I applaud Catherine's sense of appropriate prom-attire, but all the same, when it comes time for my daughter to be thinking of such things, I hope she doesn't mind wearing a dress that hermetically seals in the back. And the fact that I'll be in the limo too. With a gun. And five boxes of bullets. And I don't even own a gun presently. It seems to me they should just rent guns out to fathers on prom night.)

Obligatory Traffic-Babbling

As is my habit at the start of each new month, I drone on a bit here about the traffic at Byzantium's Shores from last month. Because, you know, I could accurately use for this blog the tagline "Now with even more navel-gazing!"

April of 2004 was the fourth-highest month yet for traffic here. The record is still held by January; since then, hits have trailed off by about a hundred or so each month until April, when there was a slightly sharper drop. This was no doubt due to the fact that I took a week-long hiatus. I draw encouragement from the fact that the month's highest single day, in terms of hits, came a couple of days after I returned to posting, which I choose to interpret as the screaming hordes scrambling at the gates to get back in. Or something like that.

April also saw yet another failed attempt by me to score a link from the elusive Atrios, after I e-mailed him the news of Buffalo Congressman Jack Quinn's impending departure, which raises the possibility of a Democratic pick-up in the House. Every few months I poke Atrios with a stick, to no avail. C'est la vie!

And finally, I note that the fact that traffic didn't drop like a stone into the Marianas Trench after I posted my head shot at left means that I do not actually look like an axe-murderer, as some future subjects of a Chick Tract would have you believe. I win!

On with the show!

UPDATE: I have just been notified, on the Bright Weavings message boards, that I look like a hippie. I'll take that over the axe-murderer.

Scores Online

It turns out, upon further inspection after the "Tristan" post below, that the University of Indiana maintains quite a few music scores online. Looking at the full orchestral score to Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, in its online version, thrills me to the core. (I have owned a copy of this score for years, but still, this is amazingly cool.)

The posts! They're replicating!

Blogger is pretty notorious for eating posts, although I have been victimized by this less often than I sometimes think I should be, given the frequency with which I see other people saying things like "I had this great post, and Blogger ate it!"

What happens to me fairly frequently -- a couple of times a month -- is that a post will spontaneously duplicate on me. That's weird.

Saturday Burst of Weirdness

You'd think a guy as steeped in pop-culture as Quentin Tarantino would have cast someone other than Uma Thurman as the lead in Kill Bill.

Like, say, the Star Wars kid.

I sometimes wonder, late at night when I can't sleep, just what the world would look like if all the purveyors of high weirdness on the Web used their powers for good. And then I realize, that world would be pretty friggin' boring.

(via I Love Everything)

It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May....

....and thus, time for a new masthead: "Tristan and Isolde", by Edmund Blair Leighton.

The tale of Tristan and Isolde is one of those "periphery" tales that surround the Arthurian legends, much like Lancelot and Elaine or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Originally the tale was not part of the "Matter of Britain", but it ended up closely wound up with the Arthurian mythos. A good amount of information about "Tristan and Isolde" can be found here (incidentally, this is part of a larger site that appears worthy of further examination, since I only discovered it about ten minutes ago as of this writing).

This legend is also the source of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, the Prelude of which is often cited as a "dividing line" when chromaticism in music became so prevalent that tonality had ceased to exist. The Tristan prelude paved the way for composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Weber in the twentieth century to dispense with tonality altogether, for good or ill. (A complete copy of the vocal score to Tristan und Isolde can be viewed here. I don't know why I've never thought of it before, but the Web seems to me perfectly suited for making music scores widely available for lovers of classical music. Score-reading is a pleasure denied to too many music lovers, I suspect.)

Finally, a film version of Tristan and Isolde is under development, but I couldn't turn up any news that it may be filming or done filming or whatever. Given that I haven't seen one word about this film on AICN (a site which, like it or not, airs nearly every rumor on nearly every genre film project in existence), I assume that this film is still in drydock.

(It also occurs to me that I should have archived the previous monthly mastheads, for newer readers. What I'm doing is using a different masthead image each month of 2004, drawing my selections from art devoted to the legends of King Arthur. I have already used the following paintings: January, February, March (not a painting, actually, but an engraving), and April.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Edmund Fitzgerald, in trouble on Lake Superior.

For me, the two most fascinating shipwrecks in history are that of the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down on November 10, 1975 in a severe storm on Lake Superior. I found this painting on a site devoted to the wreck (the painting links to it), and I just found this one pretty striking.

UPDATE: Darth Swank and Robert in comments remind me of the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, which went down in the St. Laurence River after being rammed by a Norwegian collier. The loss of life was greater than that of the Titanic, but the Empress of Ireland did not have anywhere near the mythic opulence of the earlier wreck, and the ship went down so fast that there was no time for the heartbreaking stories of families bidding each other farewell on the decks to take place as they had on the Titanic. Most fascinating to me, though, is the fact that the Empress of Ireland went down within sight of land (well, it would have, if not for the dense fog that led to the collision in the first place).

Here's a good writeup on the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, and make sure to check the rest of that site out as well, including the Flash-driven "Diagram of a Colossus", an interactive tour of the Lusitania.

WTF??!!

Apparently NBC is under the impression that viewers don't realize Scrubs is a comedy, because I've just watched a preview for next week's episode that punctuates the jokes with a laugh track.

Scrubs does not use a laugh track.

Oy.

The Powerless Samaritan

La Gringa wonders if she should be feeling guilty for not doing more to help the person who called her at home at 4:00 a.m..

Personally, I'm amazed she stayed on the line as long as she did.

(No, not that I'd have hung up on her had I been conscious enough at that time to process what was happening; in the more likely scenario, I would ascertain that the person on the other end is not a family relative calling to give me bad news, mumble something like "Wrong number", and then hang up.)

Mr. Quest

Today while driving around Buffalo in a U-Haul, I tuned in for a while to whatever the ESPN Radio show is that has replaced Tony Cornheiser's show since Cornheiser stepped down. I don't know who the host is now, but he was going on about the fact that he loves the old cartoon show Jonny Quest, and he was lamenting the fact that nearly every other old cartoon has seen some kind of successful revival, but Jonny Quest has not. He even said that he couldn't find anything online about the show, which makes me wonder if he was spelling it "Jonnee Kwesst", since it took me a single search under "Jonny Quest" on Google to turn up some stuff: this and this, for example.

I liked Jonny Quest a lot when I was a kid, although I didn't get to see it often because if I recall correctly, the places I lived didn't air it often. It was just a straight-forward adventure show, without a whole lot of goofy humor stuff. I remember that when there was a short-lived revival some years ago, I was excited because not only was it Jonny Quest returning, but because I worked at Pizza Hut at the time and we had the official tie-in stuff.

(Which, sadly, turned out to be pretty lame. There was what I thought was a nifty-looking Jonny Quest action figure, but it turned out to not be so much an action figure as just a figure: it was not posable. A pretty good example, really, of the crappy toys Pizza Hut always had for its kid's meals. There was also a plastic collectible drinking cup, with a picture of Jonny pointing at, well, you. One of my employees, who was a stereotypical dirty old man, took one look at this cup and said, "I think he wants you to pull his finger." That pretty much killed my excitement.)

Anyhoo, the guy on the radio show wondered why there has never been a JQ movie or something similar, except for that brief revival in the 90s. I suspect that it would be hard to pull off: a show about a bunch of crime-fighters who are all guys, except for one woman? Two of whom are kids? I can just imagine the critics pumping their reviews of such a movie full of speculations of homoeroticism. I mean, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly -- she who no doubt snuggles deep-down into her sheets with Pauline Kael's picture on them after every pretentious review she writes -- would be a veritable fountain of drool at the prospect of writing a review of a Jonny Quest movie full of "Wink wink nudge nudge" innuendos. Probably actually using the words "wink wing nudge nudge".

When To Run Screaming From Your Boss, #4857

A good time to make a very quick getaway from your supervisor is when he says, "We have some furniture to pick up from a few local stores. How do you feel about driving a U-Haul?"

So began a four-hour odyssey around the Greater Buffalo area today, as I went to three different establishments in a 14-foot U-Haul truck to pick up bookcases, tables, et cetera. For a grocery store. For reasons passing understanding. Oh well.

The drive wasn't bad, actually, except for the fact that none of the things I'm usually supposed to do actually got done in my absence. The truck had air conditioning, which was a plus given that it was actually pretty warm today, and I got to listen to a bit of the Jim Rome Show, although he didn't have any guests on that interested me today.

The weird part is that since I was out of the store until about 2:00, I had to take my New York State-required thirty-minute lunch break when I got back -- despite the fact that I was scheduled to leave at 3:00. So I took a half-hour off, sat around, then punched back in for thirty more minutes of work. C'est la vie.

And if you're not incredibly bored yet by this post, well, you need to get out more. I'm writing it and I'm bored.

(Oh, and this was all after I helped unload yet another #$*%&#!! truck full of trees and bushes for the #*$&%(@!! Garden Center. Hence, I'm incredibly tired, and hence the lack of posting until now.)

So long, John.

On American Idol this week, local boy John Stevens, the sixteen-year-old carrot-topped crooner who has been inexplicably moving on each week, finally saw his luck run out. He's been pretty much in over his head for several weeks now, and he's outstayed at least three more deserving contestants.

Still, John's departure was a bit sad to behold. Simon Cowell made a point last night of telling John what a class act he is, and John showed it one last time tonight: after reading the results, host Ryan Seacrest asked John what part of American Idol he was going to miss the most. John didn't hesitate at all as he pointed to the remaining five contestants and said, "Them."

Good luck, John.

Your semi-occasional dose of GAAHHHHH!!!

After I got done reading the fascinating post linked below over on Libertarian Jackass, I figured I'd keep on scrolling down.

And I saw this, taken from here. What we have here are the "Great Moments in Human Development", as viewed by that whackiest subset of libertarians, the Randites. At the bottom, we have Homo erectus discovering fire; then a cave painter; then an Ancient Egyptian scribe, writing on papyrus; then Aristotle; and finally, the crowning achievement of all human thought: Ayn Rand herself.

Yes, folks, they really think like this. Take my word for it.

Q&A on the War on Terror

Libertarian Jackass reproduces a set of questions, and their answers, on the War on Terror, focusing specifically on al Qaeda. It's a sobering read. Go check it out.

(Original article here.)

Scalzi on Music

For his recent "Reader Suggestion Week", I posed the following question to John Scalzi:

"Will things like iTunes destroy the way we used to allow songs to 'grow' on us, as we tilt toward buying songs that are immediately pleasing? And will the fact that apparently the individual song is increasingly the atomic entity with respect to music distribution, will this kill the idea of the album? And what place classical music in the grand world of downloading, when the paradigm of 'Hey, bands, just record your music in your basement!' doesn't really scale to symphony orchestras?"

He offered the following answer in the middle of a "grab-bag" post of all the questions that didn't inspire a full-length post of its own:

"Well, it's not like orchestras ever fit into basements. Didn't stop hundreds of years of symphonies from being written. And when you have the capability of being able to replicate an entire orchestra from a synth, what's to stop some ambitious person from composing a symphonic score?

Yes, I think iTunes et al will change how we approach music, but it'll change it back to what it was, say, in 1903, when most music was sold as songs (through sheet music). Albums are a fairly late development in terms of being the accepted basic unit of musical currency. Also, I think we've all always tilted toward songs -- it's why even in the era of albums bands always released singles. I've mentioned before that I do think the idea of an album meaning "a set number of songs determined by the physical limitations of the recording media" is going out the door, but I think musically ambitious bands will always release suites of thematically-linked songs. Would it be so bad to live in a world where Radiohead or Wilco could release album-length works and Britney and Justin simply released singles? Digital distribution allows for both."

I wish I could put my finger on it, but this answer just doesn't seem right to me, and I'm not sure why. I can cite a number of places where I diverge with John, but I'm not sure they add up to him being wrong. So, I'll just respond to a few items here.

:: First, I think he totally missed my fear, expressed in the opening of my question, that downloads will hasten the compression of our attention span, which is already alarmingly diminished. If we assume that most people who buy music by the song will only buy those songs whose first few seconds immediately appeal to them, have we lost something as a musical culture? I mean, if you bail out on Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique after the first four minutes, you still won't even have heard the idee fixe, the theme which ties together the entire work. That's an extreme example, to be sure, but I think it helps illustrate what I'm getting at.

:: I think John's a bit flip about dismissing my concerns about classical music in general in the age of downloading. No, composers didn't write symphonies and record them in their own basements, but there were a lot more orchestras then, as well. And I mean, a lot more orchestras. Every town had its own orchestra, many nobles even had their own orchestras, et cetera. Since the era we're talking about was mostly the pre-recording era, the premium was on performance, which no longer seems to be the case at all. Live music was music, whereas now recording has become so entrenched that we constantly have to remind ourselves that live music even exists. Some commentators I've seen (and I'm not sure if John would fit in this category) seem to think that the demise of Big Recording (assuming the demise of Big Recording) will lead to some grand rebirth of live music, which I'm not at all convinced will be the case. And the problem to classical music, in particular, seems to me to be potentially pernicious: as fewer recordings get made, fewer ensembles will exists in the first place, which means fewer opportunities for the composers to get their works performed at all. And besides, those hundreds of years of symphonies were largely written before the rise of the synth, electric guitar, and drumset.

:: I'm a bit dismayed at John's suggestion that the synthesizer can replicate a symphony orchestra. Approximate, yes. Replicate, no. I don't want to dismiss the possibilities of electronic music -- a lot of my favorite music is electronic in nature -- but I don't want to downplay its limitations. If we reach a point where there are only a handful of orchestras left, I really can't imagine that the fact that a synthesizer can simulate one will really inspire too much creation of new symphonic music.

:: John says that the musical culture will revert to that of 1903, when the song was the chief means of musical distribution, in the form of sheet music. This analogy troubles me, because the only point of convergence is in the song-as-musical-atom. Sheet music dominated, firstly, in the era prior to widespread recording; and second, more importantly, sheet music's popularity depended on widespread musical literacy to a degree that I regret to say I find unlikely to ever exist again. For sheet music to be of any use, someone has to be able to play the piano, and not just plink out a tune or two, but actually play the thing. Song-as-atom or no, music was a participatory thing to the people of 1903. Not so now. The song, back then, was still seen as just a first-step into music. Now, it seems as though the song is the only thing that matters. Witness, today, the track list of a mix CD John made for his daughter. It's all songs, and rock or pop songs to boot. Not an iota of orchestral music there, no suggestion of longer forms.

:: Finally, John says that digital distribution still allows for the concept of the album. I don't disagree, but that's not what I'm getting at. What can be done with digital distribution is one thing; what is likely to be done with it is something else. If Radiohead releases an "album", in the classic sense of the word, online, but people are able to buy either a song or two from it up to the whole thing, what's the point of the "album" in the first place? Can the "album" even be said to exist? It seems to me that the idea of artistic context that is inherent in the album concept would suffer dramatically in such a scheme.

(Postscript: I don't want this to sound like a big attack on John Scalzi, because I love the guy's blogs in general and his thoughts on writing in particular. But there's just something that bothers me about today's music talk: it's entirely about songs. Song this and song that, and here's a great song, and here's the ecletic bunch of songs on my iPod, et cetera. The word "music" now seems to be a singular plural for "songs". I really do worry that longer forms will no longer exist with any kind of true vibrancy.)

The Tempting of Luke

Wow, that sure worked: lots of good comments to the discussion question below, in which I ask if Luke Skywalker was possibly tempted by the Dark Side of the Force when Ben Kenobi was struck down.

The answers seem to trend largely to "No", which is why I am sure it will not surprise anyone that my answer is "Yes". Ha! Take that, Smithers! Er....anyway, my rationale follows.

First, I think it's important to distinguish that there are varying degrees of "temptation by the Dark Side". I fully grant that whatever Luke feels at that moment, Dark side-wise, is much, much milder than what he feels in The Empire Strikes Back after his vision of his friends in pain, and not even close to what he feels in the throne room in Return of the Jedi. But I do think he's tempted: just a tiny bit, perhaps, but tempted nonetheless.

It's worth noting how Yoda defines the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back: "A Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression -- the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight." (Emphasis mine.)

I'd submit that Luke most definitely feels at least two of those emotions in that moment, as he stands still and starts blasting away at the stormtroopers: anger and aggression. The closest thing he's ever had to a father figure has been struck down before his eyes, by the very man who (he believes) killed his own father, and in that moment, nothing to him matters except vengeance. He ignores Leia's cries for him to get aboard the ship, while heeding Han's helpful advice to blast the shield door controls. Only when he hears Ben's voice in his mind does he realize that he has momentarily lost perspective.

Now, in comments, Nefarious Neddie notes that not all instances of anger, fear or aggression constitute Dark-Side temptations, and I'd agree, although I'd also point out that in Obi Wan's duel with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, anger and aggression very nearly get Obi Wan killed. There's a closeup of Obi Wan's enraged face as he brings down a fierce blow which Maul barely parries, but this leaves Obi Wan open to Maul's "Force blast" which sends him over the brink of the shaft. The implication is that aggression and anger lead to dolorous ends, even if not always to a Dark-Side conversion.

What really convinces me that Luke's moment in the Death Star landing bay is a Dark-Side temptation, though, is a parallel moment in Anakin Skywalker's life in Attack of the Clones. It's been well-noted that Anakin's life in the prequel trilogy roughly parallel's Lukes, but with Luke making the right decisions at the appropriate moments while Anakin keeps making the wrong ones. Consider the two moments I'm talking about: Luke/Anakin witnesses the passing of his closest parental figure, in the company of those responsible (Luke sees Ben fall to Vader, Anakin cradles his mother as she dies in the Tusken camp). And then compare what happens afterward: Each lashes out at the perpetrators (even though Luke can't really get a good shot at Vader, he dispatches a number of his surrogate Stormtroopers). Each hears, in his mind, the voice of the Jedi who first "discovered" him, warning him away (Luke hears Ben saying "Run, Luke, run!"; Anakin hears Qui Gon saying, "Anakin! Anakin! NO!").

But -- and this is the important part -- where Luke heeds the voice he hears, Anakin ignores his -- and I think it's pretty clear that Anakin's slaying of the Tuskens is his first foray into Darkness. (John Williams, as always, tips us off: when Anakin tells Padme what he's done, we hear the Emperor's Theme alternated with Vader's Theme in the score.) The two moments, in my mind, are closely parallel, which leads me to believe that Luke was, in fact, tempted by the Dark Side at that point. But while Luke turns away from his temptation, Anakin gives in to his.

The Gold Watch

Andrew Cory suggests that when John Kerry debates President Bush this fall, he should explicitly mention the fact that he still has a piece of shrapnel embedded in his posterior. I'm not really sure this is a good idea; in my mind at least, if Kerry did this I would be forced to envision Christopher Walken telling a little boy, "I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years...."

Stealing the Government's Bandwidth

Actually, is it stealing the government's bandwidth, since I'm a citizen and I pay taxes and all that? Hmmmm....anyway, time for my standard "Too tired to blog, but wanting my posts to take up more space on the front page" trick of swiping a recent Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here are some nebulae:



For more details, go here. Weirdly, the APOD site uses nebulas as the plural of nebula instead of nebulae, which I always thought was correct but which I now see by looking it up that nebulas is an acceptable plural form after all. I don't know, it all seems pretty nebulous to me.

Bada-BING!

(By the way, I see via Patrick Nielsen Hayden that NASA has recently discovered that politics trumps science in the Bush Administration. Oh, goody.)

Your STAR WARS discussion question

Here's an experiment for the comment thread: a discussion question. Because, you know, I'm tired and scraping the bottom of an already shallow mental barrel for blog stuff. Here's the question:

Would it be fair to say that the scene in A New Hope immediately following Ben Kenobi's death -- when Luke is torn between escaping with his friends on the waiting Millennium Falcon and standing his ground against the stormtroopers (and, presumably, Darth Vader) to avenge Ben -- constitutes the first time Luke is tempted by the Dark Side of the Force?

A Class Act

Say what you will about Drew Bledsoe's recent performance with the Bills -- 2003 in particular -- the fact is that Bledsoe is still a classy guy. Today he agreed to a restructuring of his contract, which as most NFL contracts do these days would have put him into stratospheric heights with respect to the salary cap after this year. Now the Bills are no longer virtually committed to dumping Bledsoe after the 2004 season, which gives them enormous flexibility: if Bledsoe tanks in 2004, they can get rid of him more cheaply and move on to the J.P. Losman era, or if Bledsoe returns to form, they can keep him and give Losman another year of development in 2005. And the money not being spent now on Bledsoe means that the team may be able to pick up an additional free agent or two to plug into whatever holes still need filled.

I personally never viewed Bledsoe as anything more than "the guy to play while they groom the next guy", but it's nice that the Bills will have flexibility to really spend their time carefully developing the next guy.

Hmmmm, time for some new posts.....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Posting here may be a bit light this week due to a rather intensive period at work. The Company has decided to operate a full-blown Garden Center at The Store, which is a sort-of "prototype" operation that will be replicated at other locations next year if we're successful this year. Last week saw the construction of the Garden Center. This week sees the delivery of plants. Lots and lots and lots of plants. Today I helped unload the first three deliveries, totaling almost a thousand plants (and by "plants", I also include trees and shrubberies [Ni!]). And when I left for the day, the fourth truck was waiting in the wings. So between all that hefting of plants, wallowing in dirt and potting soil, moving wooden pallets around, and climbing into and out of the backs of semis, I'm really rather tired.

(But hey, I got to drive a forklift. That's always fun. I haven't been able to drive a forklift in over ten years. There is no finer macho toy than a forklift, if you're a guy who doesn't actually have to drive one on a regular basis.)

Anyone want to run for Congress from Buffalo?

Buffalo Congressman Jack Quinn, a Republican from Hamburg (one of Buffalo's Southtowns), has announced his retirement this year. This could be a good seat for Democrats to pick up: the district is predominantly Democratic to begin with, and Quinn himself was a political moderate (he spearheaded a move to raise the minimum wage and has been fairly labor-friendly, by Republican standards). I'm excited as a Democrat at the prospect of a pickup here, but Quinn was a good advocate in Congress for Buffalo, and that's a legacy that needs to stand. This city needs all the help it can get.

Next week, watch as Jerry discovers that water is wet!

Yep, with the return of the NFL to the front of the sports page on Draft Weekend comes another wonderful article by Buffalo News sportswriter Jerry Sullivan, in which he points out that even after the draft, the Bills still aren't as good as the Patriots, as if it was possible for the Bills to make up that deficit in a single draft.

Keep up the great work, Jerry.

Book Memes, Two.

PZ Myers has three book memes in one post. One of which is The List, which I've already discussed, but I'll take on the other two. First is simple: what are my rules of what constitutes a good story?

I guess I'd lead off by saying that I don't think there are any "rules" for fiction; better, probably, to try to describe what characteristics are common to stories I love. With that in mind, here I go:

1. Don't depress me. This is big: I don't like stories that are just depressing. But this does not rule out sad endings, because "sad" does not equal "depressing". Likewise, "dark" (or "gothic" or "downbeat") also do not equal "depressing". Schindler's List is a terribly sad movie; Seven is a depressing one. I guess the difference is that sadness can still seem to serve a purpose, whereas depression is without purpose: it's just there. I don't want a story in which characters are subjected to just one damn thing after another, with no hope at all for a respite or even a good lesson learned beyond "Life sucks". If I want "Life sucks", well, I'll just look at, you know, life.

2. Engage my emotions. This goes hand-in-hand with "Don't depress me". Even though I don't want to feel depression after reading or viewing a story, I do want to feel something. A story that is the emotional equivalent of an unsalted saltine cracker is not a story for me.

3. Tie up your loose ends. Unless you don't want to. I tried coming up with a better way to say this, but I can't. I love both kinds of stories I'm talking about here, really: I love it when everything ties up into a neat little package, and I also love it when a story lets some things stay open, as if to suggest that the story was really just a segment of someone's life that we've just watched. Guy Gavriel Kay does the latter a lot; John Bellairs does the former. Either works.

4. But if you're gonna tie up your loose ends, be careful about it. Too often, a "no loose ends" book or movie starts to feel like one: about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice a relentless pace at which one thread is tied up every few pages or minutes or so. And then there's Neal Stephenson, who leaves everything in the air until the last ten pages, and then whammo! It's all bundled up with duct tape and baling wire. That's not satisfying, really.

5. Great stuff along the way will make me forgive a crappy ending. But the stuff along the way had better be really great.

6. Beware the surprise ending, or the shocking revelation. I love being surprised in stories, but the surprises have to arise logically out of the content of the story, so even if I didn't see it coming, I can still reexamine the story and see the clues and note the construction by which the surprise or revelation comes. A great example of how not to handle this is the movie Basic Instinct, whose final shot reveals whether or not a certain character is the murderer. The way the story has been constructed, it could have gone either way and made equal sense. That's bad storytelling.

7. Show me something new along the way. Discovery is cool. And it doesn't have to even be something totally new; it can just be a new way of looking at something really familiar. Don't be ordinary.

8. The word "said" should comprise at least 97% of your dialogue attributions. And for the love of God, please don't use "ejaculated" as a verb of dialogue attribution. I can't read about someone "ejaculating" a sentence without thinking of that one scene in There's Something About Mary.

Finally, I can probably distill all this into a single, three-part rule: Don't bore me, don't make me feel bad for having been told your story, and don't do anything that breaks the spell you're trying to weave.

I could probably come up with lots more, but you probably get the idea. You probably also get the idea that I'm a pretty permissive reader. That I am, and I've never made any bones about it: I tend to like lots of stories, of different kinds, told in different ways.

Book Memes, One.

There are suddenly a lot of book memes circulating. While I'll take a pass on the "List the great books you've read" one, here's one via Wil Duquette that I like: listing the ten books that had the biggest impact on my life.

Now, it's really hard to do this, now that I've been thinking of it for a day or two. It's tough to gauge impact, because I find that books can often lay in the tall grass, so to speak, for many years -- I'll read them, file them away in my brain, and then suddenly discover later on how they moved me in one direction or another. I've waffled on a lot of these titles, and who knows, I may come back and change them later. Anyway, here are ten books, some of which won't be a surprise to longtime readers. (These are in no particular order, and as I tend to do in "List" posts, I cheat. A lot.)

1. Cosmos, Carl Sagan. To this day, this is still the book that has influenced my overall worldview regarding the Universe and our place within it more than any other. I find so much more awe, so much more poetic beauty, so much more reverence in a Universe that is billions of years old and through physical processes eventually gave rise to life and consciousness than I do in the idea of a static Universe popped into being in just six days, six thousand years ago. The science of this book may be out of date, but I don't care. As far as I am concerned, it is a towering achievement of twentieth century science writing.

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. It's pretty obvious why, I think.

3. Salem's Lot, Stephen King. This is the first out-and-out horror book I read, once I was ready to really delve into the genre.

4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. This book provided the answers to questions I didn't even know I had.

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke. I'm pretty sure I read some science fiction before this, but this one cemented my love of the genre for all time. And not only that, this book showed me what was possible in the genre besides Star Wars space opera and Star Trek "sociological" SF.

6. The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander. (Yeah, it's a five book set, actually. Deal with it.) My first encounter with epic fantasy, two years before Tolkien.

7. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. It's not my favorite GGK novel, but it's the first that I read, and in the same way 2001 pushed me beyond my original idea of what SF was, Tigana broadened my horizons of what fantasy can do.

8. The Joy of Music and The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein. I group these together because the content of each -- essays, teleplays from Bernstein's TV programs, interviews -- are so similar in style and tone. These two books shaped my love of music more than any others. I always adored Bernstein's ability to adore and venerate a very wide range of music, and I have always tried to follow his example. (This is a man who would as soon conduct Mozart as he would David Diamond.)

9. Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades, John J. Robinson. A fascinating era of history, engagingly written by a writer who didn't produce nearly enough books.

10. The Book of Marvels, Richard Halliburton. This man's travel writings, all of which roughly correspond to the years between the two World Wars, are a clinic on how to convey "sense of wonder". Track down a copy, and when you read it, try to ignore the obvious anachronisms (like the fairly obvious "white man's superiority" stuff, which is par for the course for the book's day).

And, you know, why not a couple of honorable mentions:

11. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud can teach you a great deal about storytelling, and not just about comics.

12. The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, is less about storytelling and more about the possibilities inherent in a digital age.

13. Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade William Goldman. These will also teach you a great deal about storytelling; and for me, they pretty much squashed any idea that I'd ever try to sell a film script. (Not that I could sell the ones I've already written, of course, because they're Star Wars fan-fictions.)

14. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan. Essential reading, really, in this age of belief in UFOs and holeopathic medicine and various other nonsense items.

15. The House with a Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs. Just because Bellairs is a favorite author of mine, and this is the first of his that I read. Gothic fiction for kids. Great stuff.

16. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Humor, warmth, darkness, cruelty, love, pain, redemption, and the perfect ending. All in one book.

OK, that's it. For now. (I told you I cheat!)

Man, am I reading the wrong books....

One blog meme which I will not be picking up is the big list of great books that's going around, the idea being to bold the one's you've read. (You can see the list here, in Lynn Sislo's version.) I won't be doing this list because for one thing, I think it's a pretty odd -- it includes Shelley's Frankenstein, but not Stoker's Dracula, for example, and I'm not really sure how to count some works. There are things I read in high school to which I have not given a single thought since, so much so that I couldn't possibly talk intelligently about them beyond saying "Yeah, I read that in high school." Would that count? And while I haven't read Pygmalion since high school, does it count that I know My Fair Lady by heart?

But more than that, I prefer to maintain my belief that I am actually a fairly well-read individual, and posting visual evidence that I've not read the vast majority of those books would do damage to my self-image. And I'm all about self-image, you know. Uhh....or something like that.

And then there's Jason's copy of the list. Man, is he well-read. Yeesh. It reminds me of an exchange in an episode of The West Wing, when Josh Lyman glances over Charlie Young's shoulder at his school transcripts as Charlie is filling out college applications:

JOSH: Charlie, just how smart are you?

CHARLIE: I got some game.

Jason's got some game, too.

The Draft (NFL, that is)

One thing I love about the NFL is the way the long, slow offseason is punctuated at about the halfway point by the annual College Draft, when teams select their "players of the future", and hope for, say, a second-rounder who will become a Hall-of-Famer (Thurman Thomas) while avoiding a first-rounder who flops horribly (Ryan Leaf). The Draft is split over two days, with the first three rounds on Saturday and the last four rounds on Sunday. The Draft gives fans the first inkling of what their team is up to and how things might shape up in the season to come.

First thing's first, though: Eli Manning.

I can't stand it when young athletes enter the draft of some professional sport but then whine when they don't like who drafts them. I never really liked John Elway because he started his career with this kind of crap (the Colts – then of Baltimore – drafted him, but he pitched a fit and got himself traded to Denver), and so did Eric Lindros when he entered the NHL. My belief is that if you do something like enter the NFL draft, you take your chances. It's no secret at all that the bad teams get the first picks, so if you're one of the very best college players in the draft, you know you're going to play for someone who's rebuilding. And these days, if you really don't want to play for them, just put in your four initial years and then exercise free agency.

So Eli Manning, who pitched a fit about not going to the Chargers, got his wish and was traded to the Giants about an hour after he was drafted by San Diego. Fine. I don't blame Manning, really, for not wanting to go to San Diego, seeing as how that team's front office is only marginally better managed than that of the Arizona Cardinals, but still -- they had the first pick, and Manning's the guy. By pitching a fit, he's already shown without ever so much as putting on shoulder pads in the NFL that he places himself ahead of the team. So I hope he tears his ACL in his first game and never plays again. Seriously.

(And for some reason, I've never been too wild about Eli's older brother Peyton either, but I don't know why. I mean, he's a very good quarterback, but he just bugs me, somehow. Maybe it's my suspicion that he was named after a soap opera?)

Now for the really important stuff from yesterday's first three rounds of the NFL Draft (with rounds 4-7 happening today): how did the Buffalo Bills do?

Well, I dunno.

I mean, there's that metaphysical sense in which I don't know: you obviously can't predict the future. Back in 1991 or thereabouts the Indianapolis Colts had the first and second picks in the draft overall, which they used to take defensive end Steve Emtman and linebacker Quentin Coryatt. Those picks, everyone thought, would lay the cornerstone for the Colts to build a defense that would dominate for years. Instead, both guys suffered through short, injury-riddled careers before leaving the game. And then there's the whole San Diego Chargers' Ryan Leaf fiasco, which put the Chargers this year into the position of using a top five pick to take a franchise quarterback twice in five years. Ouch. So, I don't know how the Bills' picks will pan out, obviously. (And I've always had this sneaking suspicion that Mel Kiper has somehow managed to craft a career out of not really knowing anything.)

But in general, I think they did pretty well yesterday, but I was hoping for something slightly different. My belief, before the draft, was that the Bills had to get the following in the first couple of rounds, and hopefully in this order:

1. Defensive Back
2. Quarterback
3. Wide Receiver

What the Bills actually did was to make a trade with Dallas to end up with two first-round picks (and no second round pick), which they used thusly:

1. Wide Receiver (Lee Evans, Wisconsin, 13th pick in the 1st round)
2. Quarterback (J.P. Losman, Tulane, 22nd pick in the 1st round)
3. Defensive Tackle (Tim Anderson, Ohio State, 11th pick in the 3rd round)

So the Bills apparently got the speedy wide receiver they were looking for. I wouldn't have gone with a first-round pick at this position, since this draft is supposedly rich in WRs, and the Bills aren't exactly desperate at that position, no matter how the fans might whine. A local sports-radio personality used to maintain that receivers grow on trees, and while I don't think good ones are quite that common, I don't think they're so uncommon that a team with other deficiencies needed to spend its high draft pick on one. But maybe Tom Donahoe was thinking in terms of Eric Moulds's longevity, after Moulds's injury-prone 2003 season. I'm also not sure what message this sends to third-year man Josh Reed, who's a guy who has taken a lot of abuse from fans for what they perceive to be his lackluster second year, even though that second year saw much more production that either Eric Moulds or Peerless Price displayed in their respective second years.

I wanted to see a defensive back drafted this year, badly. The Bills' secondary is usually pretty decent at tackling, but they haven't had a real interception threat since Kurt Schulz left the team years ago. They need someone who can pick off the ball once in a while. Maybe they're thinking that since they signed Troy Vincent, they're fine in this aspect, but I'm not sure yet. All I know is that the Bills filled out their Draft Day One selections with a defensive tackle. This probably isn't that bad an idea, since I've been harping on their inconsistent pass rush for about two years now. I seriously doubt this guy will step in and start, but well, there it is.

And finally, they needed a quarterback, and they got one in Losman, who is apparently an even better athlete than the guys taken in the draft's top eleven (according to Len Pasquarelli, an ESPN football writer). This pick is obviously a warning shot across Drew Bledsoe's bow, but it's also necessary: nobody really expects the Bills to still have Bledsoe around in a couple of years, so they needed to get their quarterback of the future now, when he could sit on the bench and absorb the game a bit before being anointed the starter. To get Losman, the Bills traded next year's first-round pick to the Cowboys (along with a second and a fifth-round pick this year), which means that for the second time in three years, the Bills have traded a future first-round pick to get a quarterback. Losman will also be the third "quarterback of the future" for the Bills since Jim Kelly's retirement (Todd Collins and Rob Johnson were the first two), so here's hoping Losman's the third-time charm. I actually don't mind the Bills trading a bit to get him, since this draft is deep in quarterback prospects, and had they waited another year, the pressure to deliver on a QB would have been that much higher.

So, the Bills ended up addressing two of the three main areas in which I was concerned, and they seem to have done so fairly prudently – i.e., they didn't give up the farm like the Vikings did when they decided that Herschel Walker was an important enough guy to get that they unloaded enough draft picks on Dallas for the Cowboys to build a dynasty team. As for the rest, I dunno. I can't predict the future, and anyway, I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the college game to begin with.

My readers are, as always, welcome to opine in comments about their teams' successes or failures in the draft (even fans of the Stupid Patriots are welcome, although my only interest in the StuPats draft would be if they "drafted" a letter withdrawing from the NFL). And thanks to Sean for tipping me off about the Pasquarelli article linked above.

Harumph!

For the second time in three days, I see that Steve the Modulator in not being as thorough about reading every post of mine as he should be.

There is simply no excuse for not going through my blog with a fine-toothed comb, people! Don't make me open up a can of this. It wouldn't be pretty, believe me.

What if Ozzel hadn't come out of lightspeed too close to the system?

Last week at the library I found a copy of Star Wars Infinities: The Empire Strikes Back, and I couldn't resist, even though I've generally found Star Wars comics (and the Expanded Universe stuff, in general) to be a very mixed bag. And yes, Infinities: TESB was a mixed bag, but it was an interesting one.

The idea of the Star Wars Infinities comics is a kind of Star Wars alternate history: a small detail is changed in the plot of the movies, and then the resulting story is told from that point on. Apparently their version of A New Hope has Luke's torpedoes failing to destroy the Death Star, and in The Empire Strikes Back, the point of diversion comes much earlier: Han's attempt to rescue Luke on the frozen wastelands of Hoth fails. Luke dies, the Empire pretty much crushes the Rebellion, and so forth.

I don't want to say too much about the plot here, since the delight of such a story rests in a new set of surprises. Much of what happens in the film is reflected in the Infinities version – Yoda, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett still appear – but in very different ways. The story's ending, though, is very much of the "start with a bang, end with a whimper" variety, and it relies on a particular character exhibiting a kind of vulnerability we'd never expect that character to have.

I was also a bit nonplused by the comic's adherence not just to the main threads of The Empire Strikes Back, but also to The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The comic shows Boba Fett and Darth Vader without their helmets, drawn in such a way as to clearly reflect their origins as revealed in the prequels. I found this rather jarring. The original film obviously could not include all of that, and for that kind of material to show up here felt really out of place to me.

Still, the hour I spent reading Star Wars Infinities: TESB was a pretty entertaining hour, so if you're of a mind to see how it might have turned out differently, give it a try.

"The Chickens of Mars"

PZ Myers – who apparently thinks I look like a deranged chainsaw murderer, which I am not at all sure is not actually a compliment! -- has a link that can only elicit the response of "Oyyyyy….", accompanied by a slow shaking of the head.

Apparently the "Face on Mars!" people have had their thunder stolen by folks who are now poring over the close-up photos of rocks from the Martian Rovers and finding….










(wait for it)








Fossilized bird skeletons.

Oyyyyy….

Feline Indignity

La Gringa brings some awful memories screaming back by linking this. I once had to assist my parents in precisely this operation, and if I ever could select ten memories I'd gladly have removed from my brain, this one might just make the cut.

And I've also given baths to plenty of cats in my time, so this kitty's expression is well known to me:



"Someday, one of my larger brethren will kill you and eat your heart, pathetic human!"

Kegs, pitchers, bottles....it's all good!

In a corner of the area where we keep the beer, I saw that The Store recently got in a shipment of Leinenkugel's, which is a small brewery in Wisconsin. I liked this stuff when I had it in college, but I've never seen it here, so that's pretty nifty. (There really is something to be said for Wisconsin, a land where the major food groups are beer, cheese and sausage.)

Now, if only I could find Yuengling's in Buffalo, I'd truly be happy on the beer front. (And I know I should practice what I preach and taste the locals. I still haven't got around to drinking any Flying Bison yet. I'm not sure why The Store doesn't carry it.)

As long as I'm babbling about beer, I should talk about my preferred drinking glasses for the stuff. I have a nice, thick glass engraved with the Killian's Irish Red logo that I bought at the Coors Brewery; I like that glass a lot, although it's pretty heavy and the handle is only large enough for me to get three fingers through. Then there's the authentic German stein that a certain room-mate brought back from college for me, but that one's just a bit too nice to drink from – the thing's an actual work of art – so it stays on one of my bookshelves. (That, and when I drank from it, I was always afraid that if I had a few too many, I'd start clunking myself in the face with the stein's open lid.) My favorite glasses for actual drinking are a pair my sister bought for me. I'm not sure where she got them (some catalog, I imagine), but the handles are wide enough for a good, four-fingered grip; the base is thick and heavy while the glass at the top become pleasantly thin (and with no lip), making for nice balance; and the sides are engraved with the delightful health:

"Fill up the goblet,
Let it swim in foam,
that overlooks the brim;
He that drinks deepest,
Here's to him!"

I love that. It makes me want to take a long and deep draught, dance a jig, and go beat the crap out of an Englishman.

One keyboard, stilled...and Peggy Noonan's keeps writing

Longtime political columnist Mary McGrory has died. I always enjoyed her writing, and I will miss it.

(via Thousand Yard Glare)

Must....watch....Jerry....Orbach....

Remember the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which some aliens decide to enslave the crew of the Enterprise by getting them all addicted to a video game that directly stimulates the brain's pleasure center? And how they first had to deactivate Data, since he's immune to the game's effect?

Sometimes I think that Law and Order is the same kind of alien plot, and I'm Data. I mean, I think it's a good show and all, but two or three episodes a year and I'm good. And that's just the original show; I've never seen a complete episode of Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, Criminal Victims, Special Intent, Kojak: That 70s Law and Order, or any of the other ones.

(via TBogg)

Friday (!) Burst of Weirdness

Scott emerges from his Nook to provide me with this week's Burst of Weirdness, for when you want to combine your love of cannabis tobacco with your love of cuddly Japanese felines:

The "Hello Kitty" Bong.

Make sure you scroll down to the pictures detailing the bong's construction. They're hilarious, especially that first one: it makes me wonder if Kitty went vampiric on us.

Your Weekly Display of Idiocy

Someone saw a picture of John Scalzi's daughter (who is only slightly less cute than my daughter) and made the endearing comment, "Cute little wetback girl. I wonder if she'll grow up to do donkey shows like her whore mother."

And from there, this person only got stupider.

John, I must say, is taking this with a lot more evident humor than I would.

(No, this is not the start of a new weekly feature.)

I say, put him in Canton.

On the day that my family moved from Syracuse back to Buffalo -- just over a year ago, now -- I was excited when, in the course of the drive, my radio finally managed to pull in Buffalo's sports-talk station, WGR. This made me happy because I finally got to hear the Jim Rome Show again (it had not been available in Syracuse at the time, unless it aired on a tape delay at an odd time). And I've never forgotten the feature story on Rome's show that day: an interview with the agent of Pat Tillman, a player for the Arizona Cardinals, who had left football to sign up with the Army Rangers in the wake of 9-11-01.

It was a moving story of a patriot who set aside career for service to his country, and today the story received a postscript that I had never hoped to read.

Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Publicity still from the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

AICN posted a series of stills from this new movie today. The film is to be released in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. I find the design elements, which suggest Fritz Lang to me, utterly fascinating.

Summer in Iceland

Here.

And, as always, wait for the wonderful self-portraits to load, because Bara's beautiful.

Testify!

Jay on the Atkins Diet:

"Or maybe the populace will wake up, get off of an idiotic diet that works solely by throwing your digestive system into a panic and giving you THE GOUT as part of the bargain, and go back to diets which are at least halfway sensible like counting fat and\or calories."

Amen!

WTF?!

I've often numbered Michigan among the states in which I wouldn't mind living, but this seriously gives me pause. Allowing doctors to set aside their Hippocratic Oath at will? Nauseating.

(via Eschaton.)

Blogs...is there anything they can't do?

Via DPS I came across Kyushu Journal, which is a blog written by an American now living in Kyushu, Japan. Upon initial inspection, it appears to be an interesting read. Looking at its owner's bio, I see that he apparently plays the shakuhachi flute with some skill. I'm just guessing, but I bet he sits up a bit straighter and grins whenever he's watching a movie with a James Horner score.

And following links around, I see via Kyushu Journal a really good parable (I think it's a parable, anyway – maybe it's just a good story with a nice moral, or a "slice of life" observation?) by a blogger called Real Live Preacher.

Why he earns the big bucks

Last night's episode of The West Wing was notable to Matthew Yglesias from a policy standpoint. The same episode was notable to me for a continuity error in which Josh refers to Bartlet "winning Iowa", when Bartlet did not actually win Iowa. Oh well.

Sow a million seeds, reap one potato

I'm not much of a James Lileks fan. I linked him for a while when I was fairly new to blogging, but I also delinked him fairly soon thereafter when he stopped interesting me. I go to Target a lot myself, and with my own four-year-old daughter, so I don't need to revisit those trips in reading other peoples' blogs. Plus, I generally tend to keep a running list of stuff I need, and I go to Target either when the list gets pretty long or when the need for one item on that list becomes urgent. Lileks seems to grab the wallet and pack up the kid at the merest thought that he might need a new pack of Gilette twin-blades sometime in the next six weeks.

And generally, his political commentary isn't very good, either -- just a lot of anger, really, worded a bit more poetically, but even there he never manages to put anything in a new or interesting way. And the way he goes out of his way to locate the most un-nuanced left-leaning person out there and "fisk" what they have to say to within an inch of its life is just strange. I mean, we're talking about a guy who once fisked, with great gusto, Harry Knowles, for God's sake. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News. (And there, of course, was Glenn Reynolds all a-twitter with the wish that we "read the whole thing".)

But I still look over there once a month or so, just because I know that on average, Lileks does still produce an essay or post once in a while that strikes me as being really worthy, even if I think upon reading it, "Where's the guy who writes this stuff, and why doesn't Lileks let him post a bit more, instead of the pedestrian thinker with the tendency to rely on the too-cute metaphor?"

Anyway, I thought this was just marvelous. I hate to call such a fine piece of personal writing a "Bleat". It seems more like a song to me.

Things I want to see, #4897

I'd like to see a story set in a police department where the "regular cops" look up as the Internal Affairs guys enter, and say something like, "Hey, Eddie! I haven't seen you in months! How are things down in IAB, anyway? Any good collars lately?"

What's a blogger gotta do, anyway?!

(Unseemly whining contained in this post.)

All of a sudden, today I'm seeing that blog devoted to news items about Walmart linked like crazy all through Blogistan. Why, it's almost as if no one noticed that blog before today....no one but me, that is. Harumph!

You know what's creepy?

When you think of someone you haven't thought of for a number of years, and you make a mental note to check sometime to see if they're still alive...and then, two or three days later, you discover (having forgotten totally about it) that they have just died.

Just the other day I was wondering if the guy behind the Guiness Book of World Records, Norris McWhirter, was still alive...and while looking through MeFi just moments ago, I saw that he just died.

Anyway, I always enjoyed thumbing through the Guiness Book in my youth, and like Bobby and Cindy Brady, I occasionally thought of setting my own record. I wonder if "Blathering on a Blog" is a Guiness-approved category?