In the course of reading reactions to Revenge of the Sith, I'm seeing something odd: conservative commentators bitching about the film because they've chosen to read it, much in the same way that they read seemingly everything, as an anti-Bush polemic.
To which I say, oh, shut up already.
Way back in 1977, the original damn film -- before Lucas even retitled it A New Hope and appended "Episode IV" into the opening crawl -- established that the Empire arose from the ashes of a failed Republic. It was always going to be about a democratically-elected leader making himself an Emperor through war and nefarious action.
Which, I suppose, makes Lucas a friggin' genius. I mean, this filmmaker from Modesto was so prescient that he was able to start laying the groundwork for a allegorical space-opera polemic about our current President, over twenty-five years before our current President was ever elected!
I guess these folks are mad because Lucas had to trim a subplot from Attack of the Clones, in which a Coruscant news reporter named Rath Danner is disgraced and forced from his job, for running-time reasons. It didn't advance the narrative. You know, the "narrative". Wink wink.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Paying the Price for his Lack of Vision
The dastardly Mr. Jones posts on the topic of his Revenge of the Sith anticipation, with the upshot being that he gets to attend not one, but two, advance screenings of the film.
Well now.
No, I'm not jealous. Really, I'm not. I'm actually far more excited about what the communal event of seeing it at 12:01 on Thursday morning is going to be like. Part of it is that this is the last Star Wars movie; part of it is that unlike when I attended a midnight opening day showing of Attack of the Clones, to which I went alone, this time I'm going with actual people, including one guy from work who's just about as keyed up for this movie as one can get. I just like the idea that I'll be seeing the film as part of the first paying crowds -- and that as I exit the theater at around 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. (depending on previews and whatnot), the folks paying for midnight screenings in Portland and Seattle and San Francisco will just be taking their seats.
Back when The Phantom Menace opened, the Wife actually got to see an advance screening because she worked for Pizza Hut (I had already left the Hut), and PH was one of the restaurants involved in the licensing blitz for the film. I had to work on the day of the screening, though, so the Wife got to see the first Star Wars movie in sixteen years three days before I did. Was I mad at her? Not really.
Now, the guy at The Store who was going to join our Opening Night party and then had to bow out because one of his college profs rescheduled a big exam for Thursday morning? That guy has a legitimate beef. Sounds to me like a certain prof is in need of a bit of Force-choking, because his lack of faith is disturbing.
Well now.
No, I'm not jealous. Really, I'm not. I'm actually far more excited about what the communal event of seeing it at 12:01 on Thursday morning is going to be like. Part of it is that this is the last Star Wars movie; part of it is that unlike when I attended a midnight opening day showing of Attack of the Clones, to which I went alone, this time I'm going with actual people, including one guy from work who's just about as keyed up for this movie as one can get. I just like the idea that I'll be seeing the film as part of the first paying crowds -- and that as I exit the theater at around 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. (depending on previews and whatnot), the folks paying for midnight screenings in Portland and Seattle and San Francisco will just be taking their seats.
Back when The Phantom Menace opened, the Wife actually got to see an advance screening because she worked for Pizza Hut (I had already left the Hut), and PH was one of the restaurants involved in the licensing blitz for the film. I had to work on the day of the screening, though, so the Wife got to see the first Star Wars movie in sixteen years three days before I did. Was I mad at her? Not really.
Now, the guy at The Store who was going to join our Opening Night party and then had to bow out because one of his college profs rescheduled a big exam for Thursday morning? That guy has a legitimate beef. Sounds to me like a certain prof is in need of a bit of Force-choking, because his lack of faith is disturbing.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
The Part of Tens
Chapter Ten of The Promised King is now up. In this chapter, a villain is met. Heh! So go read it. Chapter Ten. Now.
As always, this post is being kept up top, so if you're seeing this, keep scrolling down as newer content will appear beneath it sometime later on.
And for regular readers of The Promised King, note that the posting schedule -- with new chapters going up on the first and third Sunday of each month -- will result in a three week break before the next chapter appears, as opposed to the customary two. But it's not like Chapter Ten ends on a cliffhanger or anything. Heh!
As always, this post is being kept up top, so if you're seeing this, keep scrolling down as newer content will appear beneath it sometime later on.
And for regular readers of The Promised King, note that the posting schedule -- with new chapters going up on the first and third Sunday of each month -- will result in a three week break before the next chapter appears, as opposed to the customary two. But it's not like Chapter Ten ends on a cliffhanger or anything. Heh!
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
I'd just like to take a moment to thank this guy for the creation of his that's provided me with so much inspiration throughout the years.
Thank you, Mr. Lucas, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.
Burst of Weirdness (and, really, a bit of Coolness, too)
Check out the harpsichord pictured here. Really. Check it out.
It's fully functional, fully playable -- and with the exception of the strings, it is completely made of LEGOs.
(via Will Duquette)
It's fully functional, fully playable -- and with the exception of the strings, it is completely made of LEGOs.
(via Will Duquette)
Sentential Links
I'm not sure if "Sentential" is a word, but hey, who cares, right? Anyway, here are some sentences that recently caught my eye from blogs I read. If you want the context, click the sentence. OK? OK.
:: To be a biologist at the dawn of the 21st century is to be a librarian in the last days of Alexandria.
:: I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess.
:: Am I the only one who feels the need to sing at the top of my lungs when alone in the house and drinking?
(No, you're not. That's the only time I ever dance.)
:: The way I see it, women fall into two categories: thong wearing and non thong wearing.
:: People stink and they are stupid.
:: Reverend Dimmesdale, unsurprisingly, was unavailable for comment.
:: Why are axe-murderers distinguished as such?
(Hell, I dunno. PZ Myers labeled me as an axe-murderer, and I don't even own an axe. I have a saw that I have used seven times: to cut the bottom couple of inches off our Christmas tree trunk each year.)
:: We're supposed to believe that the nation's millionaires, having already had their tax rates slashed by a third over the past two decades, are still being bled to the bone by federal taxes.
:: The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit.
Good sentences, from better paragraphs and posts.
:: To be a biologist at the dawn of the 21st century is to be a librarian in the last days of Alexandria.
:: I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess.
:: Am I the only one who feels the need to sing at the top of my lungs when alone in the house and drinking?
(No, you're not. That's the only time I ever dance.)
:: The way I see it, women fall into two categories: thong wearing and non thong wearing.
:: People stink and they are stupid.
:: Reverend Dimmesdale, unsurprisingly, was unavailable for comment.
:: Why are axe-murderers distinguished as such?
(Hell, I dunno. PZ Myers labeled me as an axe-murderer, and I don't even own an axe. I have a saw that I have used seven times: to cut the bottom couple of inches off our Christmas tree trunk each year.)
:: We're supposed to believe that the nation's millionaires, having already had their tax rates slashed by a third over the past two decades, are still being bled to the bone by federal taxes.
:: The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit.
Good sentences, from better paragraphs and posts.
I'm shocked -- Shocked! -- to see that gambling is going on here!
New York State has a program that provides money grants to businesses that promise to add jobs. Now it turns out that many of those companies cut payrolls instead:
Gov. George Pataki's administration gives millions of dollars every year to businesses that promise to hire more people or retain jobs. It's a promise that is often broken. Almost half of those companies helped by New York taxpayers fell short of the job targets that are part of their deals with the state, records show. In fact, a quarter of the businesses took taxpayers' money and loans, then cut jobs.
Maybe if they spent some of that money not on grants to existing businesses, but maybe on tax breaks for people trying to launch new businesses -- you know, cultivating some entrepreneurship -- things might be going better.
It seems to me that what New York needs to do is worry less about propping up existing, and floundering, businesses and make it easier for new businesses to take root. The alternative doesn't seem to be working so well:
Take the case of Ingram Micro, a global computer-parts wholesaler with a distribution center near Buffalo. In 1999, it accepted $675,000 in taxpayers' money and promised to add 542 workers. Instead, it cut its workforce by nearly 400. The state demanded a penalty of $176,985, but an Ingram spokesman said it has not paid and is negotiating with the state. Last month, Ingram Micro announced it will lay off another 120 Buffalo workers and send the work overseas.
I don't have a problem, in principle, with government money being used to help businesses and to generate jobs and whatnot. But it seems to me that such activity should, you know, actually generate jobs. That doesn't appear to be happening here.
(BTW, I'm no expert on these things, but the Syracuse Post Standard seems to often have pretty good business and economics reporting, with particular focus on Upstate NY. I haven't lived in Syracuse for over two years, but I still check that site at least three times a week.)
This is absolutely nauseating:
The shots came from nowhere and within minutes the young Turkish mother standing at the Berlin bus stop was dead. A telephone call from a relative had brought her to this cold, unforgiving place. She thought she would only be gone for a few minutes and wore a light jacket in the freezing February wind. She had left her five-year-old son asleep in his bed. He awoke looking for his mother, who, like many Turkish women in Germany, harbored a secret life of fear, courage and, ultimately, grief. Now her little boy has his own tragedy to bear: His mother, Hatin Surucu, was not the victim of random violence, but likely died at the hands of her own family in what is known as an "honor killing."
A Muslim woman, killed for abandoning the fundamentalist version of Muslim life. And the worst thing is, this is not an isolated case: this may actually be a trend in Europe.
I believe that religious fundamentalism -- no matter which set of Scriptures is at its heart -- may be the ugliest aspect of human activity today.
(via Rox Populi)
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Had a condo made of stone-a!
I've been forgetting to link this item for a few days now: apparently modern science has settled the thousands-of-years-old mystery of what killed Egypt's King Tutenkhamen. It turns out that King Tut was not murdered, but rather suffered a leg fracture which led to gangrene. It turns out that there was no one standing on the sandy knoll after all.
Also, computer imaging technology has produced an image of what King Tut looked like. He doesn't look much like Yul Brynner, but what are you gonna do.
(Second link via Darth Swank, who's been blogging quite a bit lately and who demonstrates his pop culture skills in selecting a title for his post. Back at ya, Greg!)
Also, computer imaging technology has produced an image of what King Tut looked like. He doesn't look much like Yul Brynner, but what are you gonna do.
(Second link via Darth Swank, who's been blogging quite a bit lately and who demonstrates his pop culture skills in selecting a title for his post. Back at ya, Greg!)
Throwing Darts at a History Book
Kevin Drum posts on the topic of a list of 100 Greatest Americans someone collated for the Discovery Channel. Apparently it was a call-in poll thing, which explains why it's such an oddball list. I mean, consider:
1. I looked for Leonard Bernstein, and did not see his name. So I looked for Aaron Copland, and did not see his name. So I looked for Charles Ives, and did not see his name. You can see where this is going: not a single American classical musician on the list.
2. Jazz fans need not apply either: no Louis Armstrong, no Miles Davis, no Duke Ellington.
3. Sports heroes: I agree with Kevin's take on this -- surely Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan belong. But if we're also going to include a football player, should it really be Brett Favre? Yes, he's had a magnificent career, and he will make the Hall of Fame the first time he's eligible. But what about Joe Montana? Terry Bradshaw?
4. Presidents: Each one since FDR is represented, even Carter. Before that, we have Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. That seems odd.
5. Actors: Arnold Schwarzenegger, and no Humphrey Bogart?
6. Writers: No Walt Whitman. No Henry David Thoreau. No Thomas Pynchon.
7. John Edwards?! A one-term Senator and failed Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee? I like Edwards a lot and think he could have a bright future in politics, but come on!
I know, bitching about stuff like this is counterproductive and dorky. But those are two words that apply well to blogging a lot of the time, right?
1. I looked for Leonard Bernstein, and did not see his name. So I looked for Aaron Copland, and did not see his name. So I looked for Charles Ives, and did not see his name. You can see where this is going: not a single American classical musician on the list.
2. Jazz fans need not apply either: no Louis Armstrong, no Miles Davis, no Duke Ellington.
3. Sports heroes: I agree with Kevin's take on this -- surely Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan belong. But if we're also going to include a football player, should it really be Brett Favre? Yes, he's had a magnificent career, and he will make the Hall of Fame the first time he's eligible. But what about Joe Montana? Terry Bradshaw?
4. Presidents: Each one since FDR is represented, even Carter. Before that, we have Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. That seems odd.
5. Actors: Arnold Schwarzenegger, and no Humphrey Bogart?
6. Writers: No Walt Whitman. No Henry David Thoreau. No Thomas Pynchon.
7. John Edwards?! A one-term Senator and failed Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee? I like Edwards a lot and think he could have a bright future in politics, but come on!
I know, bitching about stuff like this is counterproductive and dorky. But those are two words that apply well to blogging a lot of the time, right?
The finger pointing at the moon....
Via MeFi I see that there's a new movie screenplay site called, creatively enough, the Internet Movie Script Database. And available for perusal on this site is the script for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. No, I haven't read it. I'd like to be surprised by some things on Wednesday night, after all.
But in the ensuing MeFi thread, I found this comment that demands response:
But in the ensuing MeFi thread, I found this comment that demands response:
A child could have written this hokey, bantering, creaky screenplay (from scene 39:"Anakin and Dooku continue their fight. It is intense!").
Apparently this commenter is of the idea that this bit of description is somehow problematic. Maybe he was looking for something along this line:
Anakin stares Dooku in the eye before lifting his lightsaber above his head and smiling. There's something in Dooku's eyes that suggests raw fear of this young Jedi, now no longer the easily-beaten boy of two years before. And when the fight begins again, it is of such intensity that the folk-singers of the Galaxy begin spinning their lyrics almost immediately....
Or something like that. I mean, as an action descriptor, this certainly brooks no comparison to, say, William Shakespeare's description of the stage events. Here's how the Great Bard did it, from the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet:
They fight.
Ummm...that's it? "They fight"? That's not very poetic, is it? Well, how about this, from the last scene of Hamlet, when Hamlet and Laertes are dueling:
LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES.
A tiny bit better, but not by much. "They change rapiers"? How would that happen? Is there some custom whereby at some point in a duel, the combatants exchange weapons? Or do they both drop their arms and then, recovering them, pick up each others' blades? Probably the latter, but that's my point: A script is mainly a blueprint, and it's up to the director to figure it all out. It's up to the director to "bring the script to life". A script's purpose is to provide structure, not to spell out every single detail along the way.
Or, to take a more contemporary example: the West Wing episode "Posse Comitatus". At the end of this episode, President Bartlet is at a theater watching a play when he slips out into a corridor to order a shadow operation to assassinate a foreign official who is also a terrorist. Bartlet's been struggling with the morality of this decision all through the show, but now he "pulls the trigger" and heads back to his theater seat. In the episode, we see Bartlet's silhouette cast upon a light curtain as he returns to his seat, clearly a visual metaphor for the "shadow operation" he has just ordered. It's one of my favorite visuals from the series. Here's how Aaron Sorkin, however, writes this moment in his teleplay:
BARTLET's still standing at the back of the mezzanine listening and watching. BARTLET looks over at the shaft of light that's been made by LEO opening the door. LEO looks over at him. There are people who've killed people and people who haven't and BARTLET'll never be in the second group again.
That's it. No mention of silhouetted shadows on curtains at all. That, apparently, was a decision made by the director or production designer or whomever.
Screenplays don't tell you everything. There's no way they can.
Beers to you, old Amigo....
Americans are drinking less beer.
I don't drink much any more at all, but when I do, beer and wine are my poisons of choice. I've always wanted to try mead, but I've never either found any available for purchase or wanted to go to the trouble of attempting to brew something I've never tasted.
Other than that, I don't have much to say on this topic. (Although I wish the article had mentioned the microbrew craze that roared to life in the 1990s; I wonder how that segment of the beer market is doing. I haven't had a "major brewery" beer in a very long time -- years, in fact.)
I don't drink much any more at all, but when I do, beer and wine are my poisons of choice. I've always wanted to try mead, but I've never either found any available for purchase or wanted to go to the trouble of attempting to brew something I've never tasted.
Other than that, I don't have much to say on this topic. (Although I wish the article had mentioned the microbrew craze that roared to life in the 1990s; I wonder how that segment of the beer market is doing. I haven't had a "major brewery" beer in a very long time -- years, in fact.)
It's the little things
One of the things that strikes me about parenthood is the tiny things that show up in day-to-day life where, if you're paying attention, you can tell that you're doing a decent job. I wonder if sometimes we're waiting for The BIG Moments In Our Kids' Lives, to see what they do, and we don't notice the little moments.
Case in point: The Daughter has been going outside with the new circle of friends she's found here lately. At about six o'clock, though, her friends all had to go inside (dinnertime, a trip to the store, and so on), so The Daughter came in for the night. I was just sitting down to feed Little Quinn and watch a movie, and the movie in question was the Errol Flynn flick The Sea Hawk, which is one of my all-time favorite films.
As the opening credits began to roll, The Daughter asked me, "What kind of movie is this?"
"It's an old pirate movie," I told her. "This movie came out when your grandparents were children. But that doesn't matter. It's still a good movie."
"Are the pirates bad guys?"
"Actually, in this movie, the pirates are good guys. The bad guys are Spaniards."
"What are Spaniards?"
"People from Spain."
"Oh." She watched a minute as the credits continued to roll, and as the wonderful Korngold score swelled into its secondary theme. "Is the movie in colors, or is it gray all the time?"
"It's called 'black-and-white'," I told her. "There's no color in this movie. A lot of movies used to be this way."
"Oh. I think I'll go play out on the balcony." And as she said this, she sat down on the floor. "I'll go outside as soon as I see what the pirates look like."
"That's fine."
The next time she got up was when "THE END" appeared on the screen, two hours later. And she cheered the heroic exploits of Captain Geoffrey Thorpe (Flynn); hissed the nefarious Lord Wolfingham and his co-conspirator, Don Alvarez (Claude Rains); said "Oh no!" when Thorpe's lover, Donna Maria, arrived at Dover too late to warn him of the Spanish trap awaiting him; she cheered when Thorpe and his friends made their escape on a stolen Spanish galleon.
I'm doing something right here.
Case in point: The Daughter has been going outside with the new circle of friends she's found here lately. At about six o'clock, though, her friends all had to go inside (dinnertime, a trip to the store, and so on), so The Daughter came in for the night. I was just sitting down to feed Little Quinn and watch a movie, and the movie in question was the Errol Flynn flick The Sea Hawk, which is one of my all-time favorite films.
As the opening credits began to roll, The Daughter asked me, "What kind of movie is this?"
"It's an old pirate movie," I told her. "This movie came out when your grandparents were children. But that doesn't matter. It's still a good movie."
"Are the pirates bad guys?"
"Actually, in this movie, the pirates are good guys. The bad guys are Spaniards."
"What are Spaniards?"
"People from Spain."
"Oh." She watched a minute as the credits continued to roll, and as the wonderful Korngold score swelled into its secondary theme. "Is the movie in colors, or is it gray all the time?"
"It's called 'black-and-white'," I told her. "There's no color in this movie. A lot of movies used to be this way."
"Oh. I think I'll go play out on the balcony." And as she said this, she sat down on the floor. "I'll go outside as soon as I see what the pirates look like."
"That's fine."
The next time she got up was when "THE END" appeared on the screen, two hours later. And she cheered the heroic exploits of Captain Geoffrey Thorpe (Flynn); hissed the nefarious Lord Wolfingham and his co-conspirator, Don Alvarez (Claude Rains); said "Oh no!" when Thorpe's lover, Donna Maria, arrived at Dover too late to warn him of the Spanish trap awaiting him; she cheered when Thorpe and his friends made their escape on a stolen Spanish galleon.
I'm doing something right here.
Learning something every day
I've followed a bit of Blogistanic debate the last week or so about President Bush and a speech he gave while traveling in the Balkans. Bush specifically referred to the post-World War II Yalta Conference, which has been a buzzword in long-term right-wing circles ever since (it refers to FDR selling out Eastern Europe to Communism; more here).
A Clockwork Bluejay has a pretty good (albeit forceful) rejoinder to Bush (and to a subsequent statement of questionable wisdom by Pat Buchanan), in which I learned that something I've always thought to be true -- that Adolf Hitler was actually elected to his position before be made himself dictator -- isn't entirely accurate. It turns out that basically Hitler was able to manipulate events despite never actually receiving a majority vote (or even a plurality). Fascinating.
A Clockwork Bluejay has a pretty good (albeit forceful) rejoinder to Bush (and to a subsequent statement of questionable wisdom by Pat Buchanan), in which I learned that something I've always thought to be true -- that Adolf Hitler was actually elected to his position before be made himself dictator -- isn't entirely accurate. It turns out that basically Hitler was able to manipulate events despite never actually receiving a majority vote (or even a plurality). Fascinating.
So what we need is a new homunculus.
Over at Laputan Logic, John leads off a post about the idea of a "homunculus" with two images that seem to me to be directly relevant to the situation Little Quinn has faced since his birth. The images are of two human figures, with the features distorted to depict what our bodies would look like if our body parts grew in strict proportion to the amount of brain volume devoted to sensory perception and movement of those parts. The gigantic hands are obvious, but what strikes me is the warped mouth and elongated nose. That's a surprising graphical illustration of what we've come to discover in the course of feeding Little Quinn.
I also notice that for all the jokes out there about the organ with which men do most of their actual thinking, that particular organ seems to be almost an afterthought to the brain in terms of area devoted to its functioning.
I also notice that for all the jokes out there about the organ with which men do most of their actual thinking, that particular organ seems to be almost an afterthought to the brain in terms of area devoted to its functioning.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Au contraire, Piston-Puss!
According to Jason Kottke:
There's no quick or easy way to clean up a broken bottle of maple syrup.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "quick" or "easy", but maple syrup really isn't hard to clean up. Depending on how thick the stuff is, simply do this:
1. Using a dustpan and something rigid, like a floor squeegee (if you own one) or a wide piece of cardboard (a pizza box works fine), push as much of the mess as possible into the dustpan. Get up all the glass in this manner.
2. Use the same piece of cardboard or squeegee to scrape off the dustpan into the garbage can (you'd damn well better have a bag in there!). Then put the dustpan in the sink.
3. Now, assuming you own a mop and bucket, this is easy. Fill the bucket with the hottest water your faucet will produce, and then mop up the remaining syrup with that. Don't use any soap, because you don't need to. Just make sure that plenty of the hot water gets on the spill, so you won't want to wring out the mop. The idea is to use a good quantity of the hot water to dissolve the syrup that is on the floor.
Remember: maple syrup is basically liquefied sugar, and sugar dissolves in water. It won't take long for the hot water to dissolve the syrup to the point that it mops up pretty easily, assuming that (a) your water is hot enough and (b) you've used enough of it. So don't be stingy: the trick to getting syrup off the floor is to use a lot of water on the spill. Most homemakers probably have trouble with a lot of spills because they simply find it counterintuitive to clean up a pool of liquid by immersing it in even more liquid, but that's how it works.
4. Clean the dustpan by simply rinsing it well under hot tap water and wiping it with a clean sponge or cloth. Again, no soap is needed. Just make sure all the bits of glass are in the garbage before you do this.
(This advice, by the way, is meant for hard floors like tile, linoleum, et cetera. Carpet is a whole different matter. You can still use hot water to get up the topmost surface of the spill, but to get down in there you'll need to use a steam cleaner, in all likelihood.)
Oh, and if you're really accident-prone and tend to have lots of spills in your domicile, look into using this product. Used correctly, it works wonders.
Logo-a-gogo
DC Comics has a new logo, which you can see, well, right here!
I don't really care about the logo, obviously. I just like the picture of the three superheroes, with Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman rules.
I gotta wonder, though -- who really cares about a comics company's logo? Are there really a lot of current readers of DC titles who might drop their support of their comics because the little logo at the upper left of the front cover has changed?
Will it recoil in horror if I play Barry Manilow on my stereo?
Matthew Yglesias is wondering about vampire-disposal techniques. Specifically, he's wondering if beheading works, or if the stake-in-the-heart is the only way to do it.
Well, really, there's no one way to do it. That is to say, within any one author's vampiric milieu, there's generally ways that work and ways that don't, but you won't find agreement across the board on this. With some authors, beheading works; with others, only the stake in the heart will do; with still others, burning is adequate. Most seem to accept that vampires cannot survive exposure to direct sunlight; many accept that vampires can be harmed -- caused great physical pain, if not outright killed -- by being forced into physical contact with holy objects. (In other words, touching one with a crucifix.)
Vampires, of course, are folkloric creatures, and folklore varies wildly from place to place, so you'd expect that the methods of killing them vary from place to place. However, assuming that beheading and the stake in the heart both work equally well for your particular vampire, there are reasons why staking is preferable that mainly have to do with the difficulty of severing a head from a human body.
No matter what we see in the movies, like at the end of Fellowship of the Ring when Aragorn manages to recover from getting his ass kicked by a giant orc with enough strength left over to lop off the beastie's head in a single stroke, it's much harder than that. Many beheadings were carried out less than successfully on the first attempt, and most famously, the executioner required three attempts to finish off Mary Queen of Scots. There's a reason why Dr. Guillotin's invention was so popular in France, after all; beheading is a non-trivial operation, and if you're attempting to kill a vampire, you want a method that has the best possible chance for success on the first try. Generally speaking, would-be vampire slayers whose first attempts fail don't get to move on to a second attempt.
Staking is a "higher percentage" procedure, since it's usually attempted during the day, so the vampire will be asleep and thus (a) unwilling to attack in broad daylight, and (b) confined to the coffin. Of course, staking is also a "Get it right the first time" affair; miss the heart or don't penetrate the chest bone, and you now have an awake and angry vampire coming at you. Staking is not easy.
Other stories have vampires being vulnerable to fire: if you can seal them up, you can them dispose of them by burning them. The problem here comes in sealing them up. Vampires, in many legends, have the ability to become non-corporeal, and thus they can escape from nearly any enclosure. (An episode of the original Star Trek, by the way, had fun with this very idea in positing a blood-consuming creature that was literally gaseous. The episode is called "Obsession", if you're interested.) This led to the creation of a pretty nifty means of vampire disposal: bottling.
What you did was tempt a vampire by putting blood in a bottle, so that when the vampire comes along, in order to drink the blood, he has to become non-corporeal and actually enter the bottle. Of course, he'll sense a trap, but the slayer will basically drive him on by brandishing crucifixes and crosses and spritz-bottles filled with holy water and the like, basically driving the vampire inside the bottle. Then, while he's inside the bottle drinking away (think of the Pepsi commercial when the kid sucked himself into his bottle of pop), the intrepid hunter corks the bottle. And to forestall any ability the vampire might have to "seep" through the cracks in the cork or wiggle out that way, the hero pastes a holy picture to the underside of the cork, thus driving the vampire backward. Then the hero simply tosses the bottle into a large bonfire. End of vampire.
Other methods are less reliable. If one fears that a recently deceased person might become a vampire, you could bury him face down, in hopes that he would dig downward, into the bowels of the Earth, as opposed to digging out and thus be able to terrorize the populace. Needless to say, this assumes a certain degree of stupidity on the part of the vampire that isn't really safe. The same idea applies to burying the dead at a crossroads, in hopes that the crossroads will confuse the vampire long enough that he'll still be standing there when the sun rises. Not particularly reliable either, that one.
Of course, one wonders why, if people were so afraid that corpses would turn vampiric, that they didn't simply stake every newly deceased person and be done with it. I assume there's some religious reason for this.
What I always wonder: do vampires have preferences for human blood? Is there such a thing as 'taste' where vampires are concerned? Would a vampire ever say anything like, "Man, that was a good one! He'd just taken his vitamins!"?
Well, really, there's no one way to do it. That is to say, within any one author's vampiric milieu, there's generally ways that work and ways that don't, but you won't find agreement across the board on this. With some authors, beheading works; with others, only the stake in the heart will do; with still others, burning is adequate. Most seem to accept that vampires cannot survive exposure to direct sunlight; many accept that vampires can be harmed -- caused great physical pain, if not outright killed -- by being forced into physical contact with holy objects. (In other words, touching one with a crucifix.)
Vampires, of course, are folkloric creatures, and folklore varies wildly from place to place, so you'd expect that the methods of killing them vary from place to place. However, assuming that beheading and the stake in the heart both work equally well for your particular vampire, there are reasons why staking is preferable that mainly have to do with the difficulty of severing a head from a human body.
No matter what we see in the movies, like at the end of Fellowship of the Ring when Aragorn manages to recover from getting his ass kicked by a giant orc with enough strength left over to lop off the beastie's head in a single stroke, it's much harder than that. Many beheadings were carried out less than successfully on the first attempt, and most famously, the executioner required three attempts to finish off Mary Queen of Scots. There's a reason why Dr. Guillotin's invention was so popular in France, after all; beheading is a non-trivial operation, and if you're attempting to kill a vampire, you want a method that has the best possible chance for success on the first try. Generally speaking, would-be vampire slayers whose first attempts fail don't get to move on to a second attempt.
Staking is a "higher percentage" procedure, since it's usually attempted during the day, so the vampire will be asleep and thus (a) unwilling to attack in broad daylight, and (b) confined to the coffin. Of course, staking is also a "Get it right the first time" affair; miss the heart or don't penetrate the chest bone, and you now have an awake and angry vampire coming at you. Staking is not easy.
Other stories have vampires being vulnerable to fire: if you can seal them up, you can them dispose of them by burning them. The problem here comes in sealing them up. Vampires, in many legends, have the ability to become non-corporeal, and thus they can escape from nearly any enclosure. (An episode of the original Star Trek, by the way, had fun with this very idea in positing a blood-consuming creature that was literally gaseous. The episode is called "Obsession", if you're interested.) This led to the creation of a pretty nifty means of vampire disposal: bottling.
What you did was tempt a vampire by putting blood in a bottle, so that when the vampire comes along, in order to drink the blood, he has to become non-corporeal and actually enter the bottle. Of course, he'll sense a trap, but the slayer will basically drive him on by brandishing crucifixes and crosses and spritz-bottles filled with holy water and the like, basically driving the vampire inside the bottle. Then, while he's inside the bottle drinking away (think of the Pepsi commercial when the kid sucked himself into his bottle of pop), the intrepid hunter corks the bottle. And to forestall any ability the vampire might have to "seep" through the cracks in the cork or wiggle out that way, the hero pastes a holy picture to the underside of the cork, thus driving the vampire backward. Then the hero simply tosses the bottle into a large bonfire. End of vampire.
Other methods are less reliable. If one fears that a recently deceased person might become a vampire, you could bury him face down, in hopes that he would dig downward, into the bowels of the Earth, as opposed to digging out and thus be able to terrorize the populace. Needless to say, this assumes a certain degree of stupidity on the part of the vampire that isn't really safe. The same idea applies to burying the dead at a crossroads, in hopes that the crossroads will confuse the vampire long enough that he'll still be standing there when the sun rises. Not particularly reliable either, that one.
Of course, one wonders why, if people were so afraid that corpses would turn vampiric, that they didn't simply stake every newly deceased person and be done with it. I assume there's some religious reason for this.
What I always wonder: do vampires have preferences for human blood? Is there such a thing as 'taste' where vampires are concerned? Would a vampire ever say anything like, "Man, that was a good one! He'd just taken his vitamins!"?
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
A Music Quiz
I saw this quiz on Tosy and Cosh (wasn't that a Tom Hanks buddy/cop movie from before he hit it big?), and I figured, hey, why not answer the quiz. So here I go. Answering the quiz. Yup.
1. Of all the bands/artists in your CD/record collection, which one do you own the most albums by?
Going by genre: in film music, John Williams dominates. In classical, it's Berlioz (although, for physical shelf space, all those Wagner operas take up a lot of room). In Celtic, I have a lot of The Chieftains.
2. What was the last song you listened to?
"Song"? Probably Van Halen's "Dreams" (which might be my favorite rock song of all time). Expanding "song" to mean "any musical selection", I heard a Debussy piano prelude on my way into work this morning. I didn't get to hear which prelude it was, though. (It was not "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair".)
3. What's in your CD player right now?
I'm not really sure, actually; I have a bad habit of leaving CDs in there when the thing is shut off. It's probably the Star Wars Episode III score, but it might also be a Blackmore's Night album.
4. What song would you say sums you up?
No one particular song. But a few that hit close to home are John Denver's "Looking For Space", the afore-mentioned "Dreams" by Van Halen, "Stairway to Heaven", and "Comfortably Numb". Including classical works, the scores to the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films, the symphonies of Berlioz and Rachmaninov, and so on.
5. What's your favorite local band?
Kilbrannan.
6. What was the last show you attended?
I'm very lax about attending live music. I don't even remember the last time I went to hear something live.
7. What artist do you consider to be very underrated?
Howard Shore and Hector Berlioz.
8. What's the shittiest band you've ever seen in concert?
I've never seen an outright shitty band.
Funny story, though: I was a counsellor at a summer music camp during my college years, and one night while at the camp they brought in a local band to play for a dance. It was actually a pretty decent band, but at one point I went outside to watch the moon rising behind the main lodge, and I noticed a brown spot at the edge of the moon. Yup: the moon was eclipsing. As the lunar eclipse reached totality, everybody attending the camp was outside watching, and the poor band was inside rockin' out for nobody. Ach well, they got paid, didn't they?
9. What band do you love musically but hate the members of?
Don't know, really. Wagner was a complete ass, that I know.
10. What is the most musically involved you have ever been?
I majored in music my first two years of college (before switching to philosophy, which probably answers the question "Why are you working in a grocery store?"). I was in the band and in the orchestra, playing the trumpet.
Our band was very good, but I was actually more proud of my work in the orchestra, because the orchestra program was a shambles my freshman year but through the very hard work of our conductor became pretty respectable by the time I graduated. It was exciting to be part of something like that.
11. What show are you looking forward to?
I've been living in the wistful hope that Howard Shore's touring Lord of the Rings Symphony would make a Buffalo stop with our own Philharmonic, but it doesn't look like that's coming to pass. Dammit.
12. What is your favorite band shirt?
Ummmm...I have no idea at all.
13. What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?
I would love to have been able to see Leonard Bernstein at work. Or to just sit in the Chicago Symphony's trumpet section when Adolph Herseth was in his prime.
15. Sabbath or solo Ozzy?
Neither. I never liked Ozzy much.
16. Commodores or solo Lionel Ritchie?
I have no idea. I don't recall any Commodores tunes, and the only Ritchie song I really ever liked was "Say You Say Me".
17. Blackjack or solo Michael Bolton?
What is Blackjack? (Seriously.)
18. The Eagles or solo Don Henley?
The Eagles.
19. The Police or solo Sting?
Solo Sting, all the way.
20. Doesn't emo suck?
What is emo? (Seriously.)
21. Name 4 flawless albums.
Genesis: Invisible Touch; Van Halen: 5150; Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms (the single greatest album of the 80s, as far as I'm concerned); Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen on Decca, Sir Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (the most towering achievement of recorded music, as far as I'm concerned).
22. Did you know that filling out this survey makes you a music geek?
So?
23. What was the greatest decade for music?
1781-1791 (The last ten years of Mozart's life).
24. How many music-related videos/DVDs do you own?
Only one, and that one I got as a review item from GMR. (It's Rachel Portman's opera The Little Prince.)
25. Do you like Journey?
They're one of those "in one ear and out the other" bands for me. Like Chicago, REO Speedwagon, and Air Supply.
26. What is your favorite movie soundtrack?
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
27. What was your last musical "phase" before you wised up?
Depends on your definition of "wise". I tried collecting jazz for a while, before I realized that I'm just not that attuned to jazz, which to me is wisdom in action. I did have a "New Age" music phase in college, but some of that stuff I still like (Tangerine Dream in particular), so I'm not sure.
28. What's the crappiest CD/record/etc you've ever bought?
I'm sure I've heard worse albums -- way worse, even -- but the biggest disappointment that I can remember is the CD of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's film music that Andre Previn conducted a couple of years back. How Previn made the music to The Sea Hawk sound lifeless and plodding will forever vex me.
29. Do you prefer vinyl or Cd's?
CDs. In fact, I still prefer CDs to moving digital files around, because I've heard too many horror stories of hard drives and whatnot going kablooie to want to trust my music to such ephemeral storage schemes. I loved vinyl in the day, but I didn't love the way it wore out. I do miss 144 square inches of artwork on the LP covers.
30. What is your guilty pleasure CD, that being the CD you love but would be ashamed to admit you have in your collection?
I'm really never one to feel guilty about my pleasures. (Remember: I'm one to stand up proudly and insist that The Phantom Menace is a good movie.) But if I were one to feel guilt about some pleasures, my liking of Yanni would probably fit the bill.
(Lynn Sislo answered some of these, too.)
1. Of all the bands/artists in your CD/record collection, which one do you own the most albums by?
Going by genre: in film music, John Williams dominates. In classical, it's Berlioz (although, for physical shelf space, all those Wagner operas take up a lot of room). In Celtic, I have a lot of The Chieftains.
2. What was the last song you listened to?
"Song"? Probably Van Halen's "Dreams" (which might be my favorite rock song of all time). Expanding "song" to mean "any musical selection", I heard a Debussy piano prelude on my way into work this morning. I didn't get to hear which prelude it was, though. (It was not "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair".)
3. What's in your CD player right now?
I'm not really sure, actually; I have a bad habit of leaving CDs in there when the thing is shut off. It's probably the Star Wars Episode III score, but it might also be a Blackmore's Night album.
4. What song would you say sums you up?
No one particular song. But a few that hit close to home are John Denver's "Looking For Space", the afore-mentioned "Dreams" by Van Halen, "Stairway to Heaven", and "Comfortably Numb". Including classical works, the scores to the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films, the symphonies of Berlioz and Rachmaninov, and so on.
5. What's your favorite local band?
Kilbrannan.
6. What was the last show you attended?
I'm very lax about attending live music. I don't even remember the last time I went to hear something live.
7. What artist do you consider to be very underrated?
Howard Shore and Hector Berlioz.
8. What's the shittiest band you've ever seen in concert?
I've never seen an outright shitty band.
Funny story, though: I was a counsellor at a summer music camp during my college years, and one night while at the camp they brought in a local band to play for a dance. It was actually a pretty decent band, but at one point I went outside to watch the moon rising behind the main lodge, and I noticed a brown spot at the edge of the moon. Yup: the moon was eclipsing. As the lunar eclipse reached totality, everybody attending the camp was outside watching, and the poor band was inside rockin' out for nobody. Ach well, they got paid, didn't they?
9. What band do you love musically but hate the members of?
Don't know, really. Wagner was a complete ass, that I know.
10. What is the most musically involved you have ever been?
I majored in music my first two years of college (before switching to philosophy, which probably answers the question "Why are you working in a grocery store?"). I was in the band and in the orchestra, playing the trumpet.
Our band was very good, but I was actually more proud of my work in the orchestra, because the orchestra program was a shambles my freshman year but through the very hard work of our conductor became pretty respectable by the time I graduated. It was exciting to be part of something like that.
11. What show are you looking forward to?
I've been living in the wistful hope that Howard Shore's touring Lord of the Rings Symphony would make a Buffalo stop with our own Philharmonic, but it doesn't look like that's coming to pass. Dammit.
12. What is your favorite band shirt?
Ummmm...I have no idea at all.
13. What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?
I would love to have been able to see Leonard Bernstein at work. Or to just sit in the Chicago Symphony's trumpet section when Adolph Herseth was in his prime.
15. Sabbath or solo Ozzy?
Neither. I never liked Ozzy much.
16. Commodores or solo Lionel Ritchie?
I have no idea. I don't recall any Commodores tunes, and the only Ritchie song I really ever liked was "Say You Say Me".
17. Blackjack or solo Michael Bolton?
What is Blackjack? (Seriously.)
18. The Eagles or solo Don Henley?
The Eagles.
19. The Police or solo Sting?
Solo Sting, all the way.
20. Doesn't emo suck?
What is emo? (Seriously.)
21. Name 4 flawless albums.
Genesis: Invisible Touch; Van Halen: 5150; Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms (the single greatest album of the 80s, as far as I'm concerned); Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen on Decca, Sir Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (the most towering achievement of recorded music, as far as I'm concerned).
22. Did you know that filling out this survey makes you a music geek?
So?
23. What was the greatest decade for music?
1781-1791 (The last ten years of Mozart's life).
24. How many music-related videos/DVDs do you own?
Only one, and that one I got as a review item from GMR. (It's Rachel Portman's opera The Little Prince.)
25. Do you like Journey?
They're one of those "in one ear and out the other" bands for me. Like Chicago, REO Speedwagon, and Air Supply.
26. What is your favorite movie soundtrack?
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
27. What was your last musical "phase" before you wised up?
Depends on your definition of "wise". I tried collecting jazz for a while, before I realized that I'm just not that attuned to jazz, which to me is wisdom in action. I did have a "New Age" music phase in college, but some of that stuff I still like (Tangerine Dream in particular), so I'm not sure.
28. What's the crappiest CD/record/etc you've ever bought?
I'm sure I've heard worse albums -- way worse, even -- but the biggest disappointment that I can remember is the CD of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's film music that Andre Previn conducted a couple of years back. How Previn made the music to The Sea Hawk sound lifeless and plodding will forever vex me.
29. Do you prefer vinyl or Cd's?
CDs. In fact, I still prefer CDs to moving digital files around, because I've heard too many horror stories of hard drives and whatnot going kablooie to want to trust my music to such ephemeral storage schemes. I loved vinyl in the day, but I didn't love the way it wore out. I do miss 144 square inches of artwork on the LP covers.
30. What is your guilty pleasure CD, that being the CD you love but would be ashamed to admit you have in your collection?
I'm really never one to feel guilty about my pleasures. (Remember: I'm one to stand up proudly and insist that The Phantom Menace is a good movie.) But if I were one to feel guilt about some pleasures, my liking of Yanni would probably fit the bill.
(Lynn Sislo answered some of these, too.)
Monday, May 09, 2005
Geekage Ahoy!
Time for a bit of geekage...surprisingly, not about Star Wars. At least, not all of it.
First, the Star Wars stuff: there's a reviewer on AICN who goes by the name "Alexandra DuPont", who hated The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I mean, she detested them. So today she gives Revenge of the Sith a highly positive (and spoiler-dense) review:
First, the Star Wars stuff: there's a reviewer on AICN who goes by the name "Alexandra DuPont", who hated The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I mean, she detested them. So today she gives Revenge of the Sith a highly positive (and spoiler-dense) review:
It actually ties into why I'm in such a good mood about this film overall: It's actually worth discussing -- and not just in those exhausting "did it rock or did it suck?" back-and-forths where everyone's a loser.
Man, if that's the case, then am I in for a treat, because I've always thought that the first two films were very much worth discussing -- if I could find people who were willing to look past surface flaws that I never found all that damning.
In the same review, Ms. DuPont goes on to discuss the Firefly movie, Serenity, which I expect I'll be seeing at some point. I didn't read the whole thing, but I did like the opening paragraph of that bit, in which she discusses the fact that so many geek franchises have either ended or are about to end, and I found this sentence particularly clever:
The Wachowskis reduced the "Matrix" audience to the Venn-diagram intersection of philosophy undergrads, S&M aficionados, wuxia geeks and wankers in denial?
She also mentions Star Trek, whose current TV incarnation is about to disappear and whose further cinematic exploits are currently on hiatus. Personally, I'm fairly ambivalent about the end of Trek, which I find surprising even though I pretty much abandoned it halfway through Voyager's run and never caught an entire episode of Enterprise. The last Trek movie that I thought was any good was First Contact (btw, see the posts linked in "Notable Dispatches" in the sidebar for my opinions of all the Trek movies), and I thought that Nemesis was not just bad, but an embarrassing disaster of a movie. So basically I think that Star Trek's creative well has run completely dry, and if that's the case, it's better for it to be gone.
And I don't expect it to stay gone forever. Sooner or later, everything comes back -- witness the current success of the Battlestar Galactica series. What form will Star Trek take when it returns? Who knows?
I just read this Orson Scott Card article about Trek (link via Lynn Sislo), and as seems to be the case just about any time I ever read anything from Card's pen, I almost disagree completely, and I had to pretty much set the article aside when he referred to the franchise as "badly acted". Say what you will about the show's SF-nal quality (and it was never all that great, and at times it was downright awful in that regard), acting is about the last area in which you can accuse Star Trek of being lackluster.
It's interesting, from a standpoint of being within the SF ghetto, that the films and TV shows that Card cites as proving that filmed SF has finally caught up with written SF -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost -- aren't marketed as SF at all. But anyway, I don't think that Card's thesis that Trek's popularity was due to its "SF 101" qualities really works. What made Trek popular was never anything to do with SF at all. It was about the drama.
Of course, Card has already ruled that possibility right out of existence, positing that since the show was badly acted and badly written, it must have been popular for some other reason. (When in doubt, just call the audience dumb and call it a day, I suppose.) I fully grant that many of the fans of Trek aren't familiar with the best SF of the day, but they are probably familiar with other fine writing, and it's telling that the very best episodes of Trek -- episodes like "The Menagerie", "The Visitor", "Tapestry", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "The Trouble with Tribbles" -- hinge upon compelling drama between the characters, and not great SF. I note that Card lists a bunch of SF writers who were the genre's leading lights when Trek first debuted, leading off his list with Harlan Ellison -- who just happens to have written what many (including myself) think is the very best episode of Star Trek ever, "The City on the Edge of Forever".
I think that Star Trek was popular only partly because it was SF. It was also popular, partly, because it depicted a very optimistic future in a time when such optimism wasn't always thought to be warranted. It was also popular because it often showcased very finely written drama, often based on thoughtful, literate themes.
I don't think that the demise of Star Trek tells us nearly as much about the current state of filmed SF as Card thinks it does. In the end, the demise of Star Trek really only tells us about the current state of Star Trek.
Hailing frequencies closed, Orson.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
It's Mother's Day, otherwise known as Hallmark's Greatest Marketing Coup Day! But anyway, here's the local mother, with Little Quinn sacked out on her chest. This photo is from Christmas time, so Little Quinn is quite a bit littler here than he is now. I did a "black and white" thing on it, just because, I thought it would look cool that way.
As President Josiah Bartlet once said to his wife, "Nice job with the, you know, raising of the kids."
Hector the Humorist
I've just started reading Hector Berlioz's book Evenings with the Orchestra, which I've always wanted to read and a review copy of which fell into my hands unexpectedly (God bless GMR!). My copy is Jacques Barzun's translation. Berlioz's wit is legendary, and I already found just such an example on the first page, which I quote here:
[The set-up is that Berlioz posits the existence of an opera-house orchestra where the musicians spend their time in performance when they're not actually playing reading books, talking about the weather, and basically paying no attention at all to what's going on.]
One man only in this orchestra does not allow himself any such diversion. Wholly intent upon his task, all energy, indefatigable, his eye glued to his notes and his arm in perpetual motion, he would feel dishonored if he were to miss an eighth note or incur censure for his tone quality. By the end of each act he is flushed, perspiring, exhausted; he can hardly breathe, yet he does not dare take advantage of the respite offered by the cessation of musical hostilities to go for a glass of beer at the nearest bar. The fear of missing the first measures of the next act keeps him rooted at his post. Touched by so much zeal, the manager of the opera house once sent him six bottles of wine, "by way of encouragement." But the artist, "conscious of his responsibilities," was so far from grateful for the gift that he returned it with the proud words: "I have no need of encouragement." The reader will have guessed that I am speaking of the man who plays the bass drum.
I love wit in which long, ornate paragraphs that seem to be headed one place suddenly end up someplace completely different.
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
I haven't linked Mr. Sun in a while, so here's something creepy: he links a site about Levittown, PA. Great God almighty, that place looks creepy: one looks at the map of Levittown and wonders where the Indoctrination Center is.
And that photo that Mr. Sun depicts is just a hoot: I don't know whether to laugh at the guy sticking the TV behind a door, the unbelievable crappiness of his carpentry (did the guy get some kind of really good deal on slats of wood with a giant knots in them?), and the fact that the kid on the left is wearing a shirt that makes him look like he's wearing lederhosen.
Even creepier is the homogeneity of it all, as represented by this quote:
And that photo that Mr. Sun depicts is just a hoot: I don't know whether to laugh at the guy sticking the TV behind a door, the unbelievable crappiness of his carpentry (did the guy get some kind of really good deal on slats of wood with a giant knots in them?), and the fact that the kid on the left is wearing a shirt that makes him look like he's wearing lederhosen.
Even creepier is the homogeneity of it all, as represented by this quote:
Everybody lives on the same side of the tracks. They have no slums to fret about, no families of conspicuous wealth to envy, no traditional upper crust to whet and thwart their social aspirations.
Jee-bus, that's insane. And I've long been of the mind that I will never live in a place where my lawn needs to meet someone else's standard of care.
Screw that. I play the Air Timpani.
Michele of ASV wants nominations for "Best Air Guitar Song". Well, since I had my 80s headbanging phase like anyone else, I do actually have a nomination to make: "Rough Boy", by ZZ Top.
Yup, you read that right. "Rough Boy" is actually one of my favorite songs from the 80s, period. I'm not entirely sure why, but I find it to be a sad and beautiful rock ballad from about the last group you'd expect to give you a sad and beautiful rock ballad. The guitar work in the song is excellent, and what makes it a good air guitar tune is that you just can't wiggle the fingers of your left hand up and down your imaginary fingerboard in a sad approximation of Edward Van Halen guitar pyrotechnics; you actually have to put some expression into your air-guitar playing. And that's not easy. Anybody can play the air guitar. Not anyone can play the air guitar well. And certainly not anyone can do it with the angst of an 80s power ballad!
(BTW, check out Michele's 404 page. It's hilarious.)
Yup, you read that right. "Rough Boy" is actually one of my favorite songs from the 80s, period. I'm not entirely sure why, but I find it to be a sad and beautiful rock ballad from about the last group you'd expect to give you a sad and beautiful rock ballad. The guitar work in the song is excellent, and what makes it a good air guitar tune is that you just can't wiggle the fingers of your left hand up and down your imaginary fingerboard in a sad approximation of Edward Van Halen guitar pyrotechnics; you actually have to put some expression into your air-guitar playing. And that's not easy. Anybody can play the air guitar. Not anyone can play the air guitar well. And certainly not anyone can do it with the angst of an 80s power ballad!
(BTW, check out Michele's 404 page. It's hilarious.)
Is the armor too strong for blasters?
I just remembered that Craig linked this item:
I'm sure the Star Wars parallel is obvious, but looking at the walking robot, I'm actually more reminded of the ED-209 from Robocop.
Dinner rolls, egg rolls, eskimo rolls, blogrolls....
There's been some discussion about Blogistan lately (see here and here) about whether blogrolls are useful or not. The idea seems to be that since blogroll links tend to be very static, they artificially prop up the blogs that are at the top of such blog ranking services as Technorati and the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. And sure, it's incredibly hard to get one's traffic to that level, and once up to that level, it's also incredibly hard to fall off it (witness Steven Den Beste, who's still on the Technorati Top 100 as of this writing despite the fact that he stopped actively updating his original blog months ago). For a number of months I religiously monitored my status on the TTLB Ecosystem, and once I attained a certain position ("Marauding Marsupial", with approximately 75 to 80 inbound links), I never much deviated. I dropped when I went on hiatus, I'd jump back up when I returned, and so on.
My personal solution to this particular problem, though, was to simply stop caring. I only check Technorati to see who's linking me, and I never check my Ecosystem ranking anymore. (OK, I've just checked my ranking just now, for the purposes of this post. And guess what? As of this writing, I am still a Marauding Marsupial, with 83 inbound links. Yes, my ranking might well be better than that, since I doubt that every blog that links mine is actually on the Ecosystem, but I'm not bothering to check that.) I pay no heed to my ranking, and the only thing I actively monitor is links and my SiteMeter hits. What makes me happiest about the direction this blog has taken is not my ranking on any system or other, but on these facts:
1. My daily average number of hits has slowly increased to 160+. This varies day-by-day, obviously, but it's been maintaining that level for a comfortable while now.
2. I used to be able to count on getting at least 100 hits every weekday, but being below 100 on Sundays and well below 100 on Saturdays. Now, however, I am almost always above 100 hits, and have, in fact, dropped below the century mark in daily hits only once in the last month, and once in the month preceding that one. Yes, there are pros and cons to SiteMeter. It tracks every hit, for one thing, so if someone loads the page ten times in one day, that's ten hits. Does that give me an accurate picture of traffic here? I contend that it does. When I worked in the restaurant business, a sale was a sale, no matter if it came from the guy who came in for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same day. Nor do I mind all the search engine hits, because maybe, just maybe, someone will stick around a while.
I know that to some bloggers -- many bloggers, even -- those numbers sound seriously anemic. And it is slightly disheartening, I will readily admit, to see blogs like AMERICAblog start up and reach levels of traffic that blow mine out of the water in less than a year. But that goes with the territory, doesn't it? You never know. I'm not betting the farm, but maybe tomorrow I get Slashdotted. (Stop laughing. It could happen!)
Of course, I'm not a political blogger by main focus; once in a while I'll do a political post just because one bubbles out of me, but that's about it. And I don't suppose that Blogistan is really looking for an outbreak of Star Wars geekitude right now. I don't mind the slow growth of this blog, really. In some ways, it's kind of nice that there still are places in our society where slow growth is welcomed. (If Blogistan were network television, Byzantium's Shores would almost certainly have been cancelled a mere month or two into its existence.)
That said, what to do about blogrolls? Well, the fact is, the only blogroll I really use for jacking around Blogistan is my own. That's what it's there for: it's a collection of blogs whose content I endorse for one reason or another. It's not a list of daily reads (some of these blogs are lucky if I get to them once a month, and in truth, the ones that are in that position deserve to be read more often by me, but there just isn't time in my day to hit 'em all). I rarely use other bloggers' blogrolls for my own surfing habits, although I have been doing so more often lately, incidentally enough. It's especially convenient when some bloggers put their blogrolls into categories.
I provide RSS and Atom feeds here, but I don't use an aggregator. When I read blogs, I click links and read each blog as it loads. I know what aggregators do, but I don't frankly see why using one to read my blogs would be of any greater use to me than by simply surfing the links in my blogroll. I think that some people who use an RSS readers tend to overassume their level of use by others.
Plus, in terms of raw linkage, a blogroll link is worthwhile to me. I don't get too worked up about whether someone's blogroll is abnormally long or incredibly short; since a blogroll is free to maintain and since users are free to consult it or ignore it, I've never bought the idea that each additional link on a blogroll somehow dilutes the whole. But if someone puts Byzantium's Shores on their blogroll, that says to me that somehow, they've decided that my content is worthy of inclusion in their own little sector of Blogistan. Yes, it's even nicer when something I've written gets linked specifically, but the fact is, if I don't have enough time to read every blog on my blogroll, and if I don't have inclination to base every post of mine here on a post of someone else's someplace else, I don't really have the right to expect that of anyone else, either.
So my blogroll is staying put. It's a resource of mine, intended mainly for me; but if anyone else uses it as a resource, I don't see where inconveniencing them in favor of helping to break up the "dominant link hierarchy" is a worthwhile trade.
A few more points:
1. Blogrolls aren't really all that great at driving traffic to other blogs, unless your approach is like Steven Den Beste's old approach: he maintained a very short blogroll -- about ten blogs or so -- and he'd switch them out every three months to feature blogs that he felt were deserving of more traffic. (In other words, he didn't keep the same links to the "usual suspects" of his side of the political fence. No links to Instapundit, Emperor Misha, PowerLine, LGF, or any of those.) Blogrolls serve a more "secondary" purpose. Kind of like, oh, an encyclopedia, I guess. For doing actual research on any topic, you'd be insane to consult an encyclopedia. But no one suggests getting rid of encyclopedias.
2. If driving traffic to blogs is the goal, then the best way to do that is to link them in posts. Frankly, it would be nice if the "big guns" of Liberal Blogistan did this better. For a short while there was a meme circulating called "Subvert the Dominant Link Hierarchy", in which folks like Matthew Yglesias would link posts on less-traveled blogs, but that seems to have died out completely. Atrios doesn't seem to link more than a tiny percentage of the people on his blogroll in his actual postings (and half of his posts nowadays seem to be mere placemarkers for open comment threads). (And not to pick on Atrios, who is a daily read of mine, but if you're going to maintain a blogroll, at least alphabetize the damn thing.) You don't even have to make a big deal of it -- just a post like "This made me laugh", with a link, will steer traffic where you want it to go.
3. Hand-coded blogrolls load faster than automated ones maintained by services like blogrolling.com. I used to have a blogrolling.com blogroll here, but I dumped it after it reached a sufficient size that it was severely hampering the load time of this blog. If you're going to use a service like that, consider putting your blogroll not in a righthand sidebar, so the posts load first.
(And as I finish typing this post, I see that PZ Myers has thoughts of his own. He's put his blogroll on a separate page. And in his staggering wisdom, he's made me a "Weblog of the Week". At least he didn't describe my blog as being written by a guy who looks like an axe-murderer! Man, it's going to be a shame when our Creationist Overlords haul his ass off to the Tower....)
My personal solution to this particular problem, though, was to simply stop caring. I only check Technorati to see who's linking me, and I never check my Ecosystem ranking anymore. (OK, I've just checked my ranking just now, for the purposes of this post. And guess what? As of this writing, I am still a Marauding Marsupial, with 83 inbound links. Yes, my ranking might well be better than that, since I doubt that every blog that links mine is actually on the Ecosystem, but I'm not bothering to check that.) I pay no heed to my ranking, and the only thing I actively monitor is links and my SiteMeter hits. What makes me happiest about the direction this blog has taken is not my ranking on any system or other, but on these facts:
1. My daily average number of hits has slowly increased to 160+. This varies day-by-day, obviously, but it's been maintaining that level for a comfortable while now.
2. I used to be able to count on getting at least 100 hits every weekday, but being below 100 on Sundays and well below 100 on Saturdays. Now, however, I am almost always above 100 hits, and have, in fact, dropped below the century mark in daily hits only once in the last month, and once in the month preceding that one. Yes, there are pros and cons to SiteMeter. It tracks every hit, for one thing, so if someone loads the page ten times in one day, that's ten hits. Does that give me an accurate picture of traffic here? I contend that it does. When I worked in the restaurant business, a sale was a sale, no matter if it came from the guy who came in for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same day. Nor do I mind all the search engine hits, because maybe, just maybe, someone will stick around a while.
I know that to some bloggers -- many bloggers, even -- those numbers sound seriously anemic. And it is slightly disheartening, I will readily admit, to see blogs like AMERICAblog start up and reach levels of traffic that blow mine out of the water in less than a year. But that goes with the territory, doesn't it? You never know. I'm not betting the farm, but maybe tomorrow I get Slashdotted. (Stop laughing. It could happen!)
Of course, I'm not a political blogger by main focus; once in a while I'll do a political post just because one bubbles out of me, but that's about it. And I don't suppose that Blogistan is really looking for an outbreak of Star Wars geekitude right now. I don't mind the slow growth of this blog, really. In some ways, it's kind of nice that there still are places in our society where slow growth is welcomed. (If Blogistan were network television, Byzantium's Shores would almost certainly have been cancelled a mere month or two into its existence.)
That said, what to do about blogrolls? Well, the fact is, the only blogroll I really use for jacking around Blogistan is my own. That's what it's there for: it's a collection of blogs whose content I endorse for one reason or another. It's not a list of daily reads (some of these blogs are lucky if I get to them once a month, and in truth, the ones that are in that position deserve to be read more often by me, but there just isn't time in my day to hit 'em all). I rarely use other bloggers' blogrolls for my own surfing habits, although I have been doing so more often lately, incidentally enough. It's especially convenient when some bloggers put their blogrolls into categories.
I provide RSS and Atom feeds here, but I don't use an aggregator. When I read blogs, I click links and read each blog as it loads. I know what aggregators do, but I don't frankly see why using one to read my blogs would be of any greater use to me than by simply surfing the links in my blogroll. I think that some people who use an RSS readers tend to overassume their level of use by others.
Plus, in terms of raw linkage, a blogroll link is worthwhile to me. I don't get too worked up about whether someone's blogroll is abnormally long or incredibly short; since a blogroll is free to maintain and since users are free to consult it or ignore it, I've never bought the idea that each additional link on a blogroll somehow dilutes the whole. But if someone puts Byzantium's Shores on their blogroll, that says to me that somehow, they've decided that my content is worthy of inclusion in their own little sector of Blogistan. Yes, it's even nicer when something I've written gets linked specifically, but the fact is, if I don't have enough time to read every blog on my blogroll, and if I don't have inclination to base every post of mine here on a post of someone else's someplace else, I don't really have the right to expect that of anyone else, either.
So my blogroll is staying put. It's a resource of mine, intended mainly for me; but if anyone else uses it as a resource, I don't see where inconveniencing them in favor of helping to break up the "dominant link hierarchy" is a worthwhile trade.
A few more points:
1. Blogrolls aren't really all that great at driving traffic to other blogs, unless your approach is like Steven Den Beste's old approach: he maintained a very short blogroll -- about ten blogs or so -- and he'd switch them out every three months to feature blogs that he felt were deserving of more traffic. (In other words, he didn't keep the same links to the "usual suspects" of his side of the political fence. No links to Instapundit, Emperor Misha, PowerLine, LGF, or any of those.) Blogrolls serve a more "secondary" purpose. Kind of like, oh, an encyclopedia, I guess. For doing actual research on any topic, you'd be insane to consult an encyclopedia. But no one suggests getting rid of encyclopedias.
2. If driving traffic to blogs is the goal, then the best way to do that is to link them in posts. Frankly, it would be nice if the "big guns" of Liberal Blogistan did this better. For a short while there was a meme circulating called "Subvert the Dominant Link Hierarchy", in which folks like Matthew Yglesias would link posts on less-traveled blogs, but that seems to have died out completely. Atrios doesn't seem to link more than a tiny percentage of the people on his blogroll in his actual postings (and half of his posts nowadays seem to be mere placemarkers for open comment threads). (And not to pick on Atrios, who is a daily read of mine, but if you're going to maintain a blogroll, at least alphabetize the damn thing.) You don't even have to make a big deal of it -- just a post like "This made me laugh", with a link, will steer traffic where you want it to go.
3. Hand-coded blogrolls load faster than automated ones maintained by services like blogrolling.com. I used to have a blogrolling.com blogroll here, but I dumped it after it reached a sufficient size that it was severely hampering the load time of this blog. If you're going to use a service like that, consider putting your blogroll not in a righthand sidebar, so the posts load first.
(And as I finish typing this post, I see that PZ Myers has thoughts of his own. He's put his blogroll on a separate page. And in his staggering wisdom, he's made me a "Weblog of the Week". At least he didn't describe my blog as being written by a guy who looks like an axe-murderer! Man, it's going to be a shame when our Creationist Overlords haul his ass off to the Tower....)
Who made this decision for me?
ELEVEN F***ING DAYS??!!
You know what, folks: I wasn't even this excited for the impending release of The Phantom Menace back in 1999, and I ended up liking that damn movie, even if the rest of the Universe hated it (my reasons why, here). Part of it is that this is the end; even with a TV series potentially in the offing, Star Wars has always been to me an almost exclusively cinematic thing. Yes, I read a few of the "Extended Universe" novels, but with the exception of Timothy Zahn's efforts, none of the ones I read were all that great (a space slug was jumped on a motorcycle, I think, when The Courtship of Princess Leia came out). And part of it is that this isn't just the end of Star Wars, but almost of a kind of geeky golden age. Since 1999 I've had the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings films. Some folks have had the Matrix movies as well. Yes, I dig Spiderman and The X-Men, but neither of those quite hit me in the emotional center where my inner six-year-old still lives. A new Superman might be fun, and I'll see a new Batman, although without a whole hell of a lot of enthusiasm.
I'm also encouraged by the fact that the film's critical reception that I've seen so far seems pretty unanimous that this film gets either most of it right, or gets enough things right that it's worth seeing. That makes me happy. So is it the nineteenth yet? Lord, this is a tough wait!
I'm also encouraged by the fact that the film's critical reception that I've seen so far seems pretty unanimous that this film gets either most of it right, or gets enough things right that it's worth seeing. That makes me happy. So is it the nineteenth yet? Lord, this is a tough wait!
Saturday, May 07, 2005
It's better than sticking a french fry up there....
Today I bought a Neti Pot, as I had mentioned I was considering doing a short while back. (Here's the brand I bought.) A Neti Pot is a small vessel -- mine holds about a cup of water -- with a spout that is designed to fit into one's nostril. One fills the pot with warm saline solution (I used Kosher salt, since apparently you're supposed to use non-iodized salt), sticks the spout in one nostril, and tips the pot so the saline solution flows into the nostril, up and over the bridge of the nose, and out the other nostril. The idea is to rinse clean the cilia and mucous membranes of the nose, since they can become clogged with dirt and dried mucus and other nasty things that can ultimately lead to sinus infections (and therefore headaches), and also to create a vacuum effect (I'm not sure of the physics of this) that, while not flowing water directly into the upper sinuses, still encourages them to drain.
So I tried the thing a few minutes ago, and my initial report is that my nose does, in fact, feel a bit more clear than it did before I tried it, although I suspect that multiple uses will be needed before I've totally cleaned things out up there. I also need to work on my technique a bit, since I'm sure the saline is only supposed to run out the other nostril, but I had some end up in the back of my throat as well. The whole procedure, from the time I started mixing the saline to the time when I wiped my nose and rinsed out the pot, took all of five minutes. The sensation was akin to the first time I swam in an ocean, and took salt water into my nose as opposed to fresh or chlorinated water. But this time the water was warmer, and since I was doing this voluntarily, I was quite a bit more relaxed. I performed the procedure over my bathroom sink, but I think that in the future I'll just do it directly in the shower. Easier cleanup that way, I suspect.
(And no, the water running out my nose wasn't green or thick or mucus-y or anything like that. It looked fairly clear. Still, it is inherently icky.)
I'll report back on how things feel after I've been doing this for a week or so, but so far, so good.
So I tried the thing a few minutes ago, and my initial report is that my nose does, in fact, feel a bit more clear than it did before I tried it, although I suspect that multiple uses will be needed before I've totally cleaned things out up there. I also need to work on my technique a bit, since I'm sure the saline is only supposed to run out the other nostril, but I had some end up in the back of my throat as well. The whole procedure, from the time I started mixing the saline to the time when I wiped my nose and rinsed out the pot, took all of five minutes. The sensation was akin to the first time I swam in an ocean, and took salt water into my nose as opposed to fresh or chlorinated water. But this time the water was warmer, and since I was doing this voluntarily, I was quite a bit more relaxed. I performed the procedure over my bathroom sink, but I think that in the future I'll just do it directly in the shower. Easier cleanup that way, I suspect.
(And no, the water running out my nose wasn't green or thick or mucus-y or anything like that. It looked fairly clear. Still, it is inherently icky.)
I'll report back on how things feel after I've been doing this for a week or so, but so far, so good.
Search Engine Follies
I don't wanna know.
I really don't wanna know.
GAAHHH, make it STOP!!
That is all.
(Yes, these are actual search results that showed up in my refers. Ye Gods.)
I really don't wanna know.
GAAHHH, make it STOP!!
That is all.
(Yes, these are actual search results that showed up in my refers. Ye Gods.)
Files, folders, and directories -- oh my!
Matthew Yglesias has a post about this new Macintosh OS that's making the rounds, and something called "Spotlight" and "Smart Folders" in particular. Since I'm a PC user who sees little reason to switch to Mac any time soon, my interest in this whole thing is little more than sporting, but I note one thing Matt says:
[I]t's a method of data organization that I think could transcend the entire "files inside folders inside folders" paradigm that's dominated computer usage since Mac OS first came out and then Microsoft mimicked it.
The whole "files inside folders" idea goes back farther than the original Macintosh. I remember using the mainframe computer at my father's university in the early 80s, when the pinnacle of home computing was either the VIC-20 or the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80 or the Texas Instruments TI-99 or whatever, and on that mainframe (built by a company called "Prime", if memory serves -- their logo was PR1ME), files were organized into folders and directories. The only difference was that the whole thing was a text-based, command-line interface, so there weren't any little pictures of manila folders on the screen. But you still heard users saying things like, "Geez, I can't find this file, and I'm certain I saved it to such-and-such a folder. Dammit!"
The Macintosh didn't revolutionize everything, folks.
Oh, come ON!
Give this kid a stern lecture about cell-phone use in school if you have to, but don't suspend him. Geez.
Think of the ad slogans, though!
The other day I asked if there was a medical reason why The Pill is available by prescription only, as opposed to being available over the counter (OTC, in pharmacy-talk). In comments to that post, I received two answers that that question.
First, Tyson of Autochthonous says this:
First, Tyson of Autochthonous says this:
The most common form of the pill is the combined oral contraceptive, which contains estrogen. Estrogen can in some cases lead to nasty things like blood clots, and it is a risk factor (in the Pill, anyway) for cancers of both the breast and the cervix; so physicians generally like to check up on you once a year to make sure the estrogen's not done anything particularly brutish.
To which Will Duquette adds:
Also, different "Pill"'s have different strengths and side-effects. Deciding what's appropriate for the woman in question is non-trivial.
I suspected as much, but I of course am not any kind of pharmaceutical expert (and no, having spent a year-and-a-half hawking generic liquid pharmaceuticals in a telesales job does not count).
I do recall hearing, a while back, about employer-provided health care plans that covered Viagra for men but not The Pill for women, which struck me as being about as sexist a policy as I could imagine. But there are almost certainly good reasons for The Pill being RX-only, at least in its current formulation. (Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think an OTC Pill would be a good thing, if they could develop such a thing.)
As long as I'm on the subject, the idea of pharmacists refusing to dispense The Pill even to women who have prescriptions nauseates me. It's none of their damned business, and in any event, I happen to know several women who are well beyond their child-bearing years who take The Pill because its hormonal contents somehow alleviate the more unpleasant symptoms of menopause. And I'd really like to know if those same moralizing pharmacists are dispensing Viagra to men while they're denying The Pill to women.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
See the reviews start to pour....
The "I hated the prequels, but...." reviews have started pouring in for Revenge of the Sith at places like AICN, but keep an eye on what the true believers have to say: the TF.N reviews are being posted tonight in their Episode III section.
By the way, as long as I'm jabbering geek-like every day on this blog, I'd like to say something about TheForce.Net. They're one of the first websites I started visiting regularly, when I first started going online way back in early summer of 1997. At that point, the site wasn't even called TheForce.Net; it was something like "The Star Wars Site from Texas A&M University". But even then the ite was pretty much the place to go for updates on the progress of the making of the Prequels. I recall fondly seeing things like a desert set strewn with wreckage (which later turned out to be part of the Podrace sequence of TPM), or a wedge-shaped ship being wheeled from one building to another (which turned out to be Obi-Wan's Jedi starfighter in AOTC).
TheForce.Net has been a daily part of my online life for just about all the time I've actually been online -- and, in fact, just about the entire time I've been married (since we first started going online on the computer we received as a wedding present). So I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the folks behind TF.N for all the hard work they've done over the years in keeping Star Wars fandom alive -- especially the positive aspects of Star Wars fandom. (And I hope that TF.N's traffic doesn't drop like a rock as the Prequels become memory!)
By the way, as long as I'm jabbering geek-like every day on this blog, I'd like to say something about TheForce.Net. They're one of the first websites I started visiting regularly, when I first started going online way back in early summer of 1997. At that point, the site wasn't even called TheForce.Net; it was something like "The Star Wars Site from Texas A&M University". But even then the ite was pretty much the place to go for updates on the progress of the making of the Prequels. I recall fondly seeing things like a desert set strewn with wreckage (which later turned out to be part of the Podrace sequence of TPM), or a wedge-shaped ship being wheeled from one building to another (which turned out to be Obi-Wan's Jedi starfighter in AOTC).
TheForce.Net has been a daily part of my online life for just about all the time I've actually been online -- and, in fact, just about the entire time I've been married (since we first started going online on the computer we received as a wedding present). So I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the folks behind TF.N for all the hard work they've done over the years in keeping Star Wars fandom alive -- especially the positive aspects of Star Wars fandom. (And I hope that TF.N's traffic doesn't drop like a rock as the Prequels become memory!)
Atonement....
I've been remiss in not linking Tosy and Cosh, a long-inactive but now active again blog with the makings of the kind of stuff that I blog about.
Which means that I should squash it like a bug, not link it. Geez, I can never figure this stuff out!!
Which means that I should squash it like a bug, not link it. Geez, I can never figure this stuff out!!
It's geek time!
I don't think there's a Star Wars fan alive who doesn't want a lightsaber. And not one of those plastic toys you can get at Target, but a real actual steel-cutting, Sith-beheading lightsaber. I know I want one, with a purple blade, of course. (Because purple's my favorite color.)
But did you ever wonder how a lightsaber works? Sure you did!
(Hilarious pictures there, btw. Via TF.N.)
But did you ever wonder how a lightsaber works? Sure you did!
(Hilarious pictures there, btw. Via TF.N.)
Feeding Frenzy
I've finally done something I've been meaning to do for a while: I've added a second feed for this blog, to go along with Blogger's automatic Atom feed. This one is, according to Feedburner, compatible even with newsreaders and aggregators that don't handle Atom. I also fired up my Bloglines account, which I've never used, and I'm still not sure I'll use it much, but you never know.
Anyhow, the new feed is available here.
Anyhow, the new feed is available here.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Pout, pout....
I've been waiting for this meme, which I last saw done by Matthew Yglesias, to get passed my way -- but then I saw that Kim thinks that we shouldn't have to wait to get "tagged" to do a list-meme, and by Gum, she's right. So here are five things that I just don't get the fuss over.
1. Bladerunner. We all have these: "classics we don't get", and Bladerunner is a big one of mine. I've seen it a number of times, and I just don't find it particularly moving or involving, except for Rutger Hauer's death scene. But everything up to then is dingy dullness. Stunning production design, of course, but a story that I always have to force myself to keep watching. (Oh, and the score by Vangelis is amazing.)
2. Batman. Whether it's the comics or the movies, I don't really get into the Dark Knight. I guess it says it all that my favorite of the Batman movies is the one that Val Kilmer did. For "Gee-whiz" superhero stuff, I like Superman. For superheroes with emotional baggage, Spiderman's my huckleberry. The multi-millionaire who's lonely and fights crime by night? Meh.
3. Alias. You'd think that since I loved The X-Files and the James Bond movies for years, this show would be a slam dunk, but every time I've watched it, I've felt uninvolved somehow. I just never found it interesting enough to keep watching on a regular basis, much less try to parse out the show's mytharc. Plus, it seems to me like nearly every episode's preview has someone with a gun to the bad guy's head, and yet, nobody ever kills him. Come on.
4. Law and Order. I watch about two episodes per year, and I'm good. I just can't tune in for the same formula, week in and week out.
5. Tim Horton's coffee. This is a Buffalo thing -- Tim Horton's is our local donut chain (also prevalent in Ontario), and people in these parts are religious in their devotion to the coffee there. Sure, it's good coffee, but I like the stuff at The Store better.
1. Bladerunner. We all have these: "classics we don't get", and Bladerunner is a big one of mine. I've seen it a number of times, and I just don't find it particularly moving or involving, except for Rutger Hauer's death scene. But everything up to then is dingy dullness. Stunning production design, of course, but a story that I always have to force myself to keep watching. (Oh, and the score by Vangelis is amazing.)
2. Batman. Whether it's the comics or the movies, I don't really get into the Dark Knight. I guess it says it all that my favorite of the Batman movies is the one that Val Kilmer did. For "Gee-whiz" superhero stuff, I like Superman. For superheroes with emotional baggage, Spiderman's my huckleberry. The multi-millionaire who's lonely and fights crime by night? Meh.
3. Alias. You'd think that since I loved The X-Files and the James Bond movies for years, this show would be a slam dunk, but every time I've watched it, I've felt uninvolved somehow. I just never found it interesting enough to keep watching on a regular basis, much less try to parse out the show's mytharc. Plus, it seems to me like nearly every episode's preview has someone with a gun to the bad guy's head, and yet, nobody ever kills him. Come on.
4. Law and Order. I watch about two episodes per year, and I'm good. I just can't tune in for the same formula, week in and week out.
5. Tim Horton's coffee. This is a Buffalo thing -- Tim Horton's is our local donut chain (also prevalent in Ontario), and people in these parts are religious in their devotion to the coffee there. Sure, it's good coffee, but I like the stuff at The Store better.
Your Geekery for the Day
Ever wonder about George Lucas's source material for Star Wars? Wonder no more. Fascinating, informative site.
Nobody goes there, it's too crowded
When did A Small Victory abandon political content? I don't miss it, actually -- I checked in there about once a week or so because I always enjoyed Michele's cultural content, which seems to be her main focus now. Check her out; there's a lot of fun stuff there now (and probably always has been, if you're on her side of the political fence).
I especially like this post, where she talks about the subjectivity of comedy. I think I read a Roger Ebert column once where he said that you can't really argue about comedy, since you either laugh or you don't; I also seem to recall that he extended this to erotic content as well ("Try talking a man out of an erection," I recall him putting it). I've never liked The Family Guy, but it's true: if someone laughs, that's the ballgame. Arguing about it is pretty useless. (But if you don't think that Scrubs is the funniest thing on TV, then you're hopeless!)
I especially like this post, where she talks about the subjectivity of comedy. I think I read a Roger Ebert column once where he said that you can't really argue about comedy, since you either laugh or you don't; I also seem to recall that he extended this to erotic content as well ("Try talking a man out of an erection," I recall him putting it). I've never liked The Family Guy, but it's true: if someone laughs, that's the ballgame. Arguing about it is pretty useless. (But if you don't think that Scrubs is the funniest thing on TV, then you're hopeless!)
Two things that should be combined!
Lynn Sislo posted about a "fishbowl" restaurant.
John Scalzi posted about a toiletbowl restaurant.
One idea, cool. The other idea, not so much. But then, I have a feeling that all the water at the former would have one thinking about the serving implements at the latter....
John Scalzi posted about a toiletbowl restaurant.
One idea, cool. The other idea, not so much. But then, I have a feeling that all the water at the former would have one thinking about the serving implements at the latter....
Any pharmacy experts around?
Because PJ asks a good question in this post (which I've been meaning to link and keep forgetting to): Is there a medical reason why The Pill isn't available on an over-the-counter basis? I'd assume there would have to be, right? I mean, they wouldn't just say, "Gee, this pill has to do with sex" and make it RX-only, right? (Would they?)
Well, if I'd known THAT....
Now I wish the SATs would have been using their new-fangled writing requirement back when I took 'em in 1989, because if what PZ Myers reports here is correct, I would have aced the essay portion, since I have an amazing ability to rabbit on endlessly whether I know what I'm talking about or not:
Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public....He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score....He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays.
Now, maybe there's something awry with the statistics here. I was never that good with statistics. But if this is true, then...well, it doesn't say anything good, does it? It means that a key determinant in which college students get to attend is how many words they can use to say something they're not sure is right or not.
Oh my God! There are MEAN PEOPLE on the Interweb!
I'm not sure what the backstory is here, but apparently someone named "Deborah" posted photos of Aaron's niece to her blog back in October, helpfully describing this two-year-old girl as an "ugly freak child". This, of course, was discovered online by the parents of the poor toddler (we're talking about a two-year-old here), who were, I suspect, none-too-pleased at a public insult of their child. Well, apparently "Deborah" and her partner-in-crime "Julie" were caught by surprise, because they hastily (a) deleted the entry in question, (b) altered the main page of their blog so that the archives are pretty much inaccessible, and (c) posted two caustic entries to the main page of their blog thusly:
JULIE: What on earth is wrong with you people? Well, here are my suggestions: 1) Get OVER it! Jesus! Did someone call you a doodoohead one too many times in elementary school? Obviously Deborah didn't expect you or anyone who has anything to DO with you to "stumble upon" this website, and obviously she wasn't deliberately insulting you, or I'm sure she'd have done it straight to your face (and, likely, to the face of your child, who I'm sure is a REAL looker). Next time you go stumbling about the Internet, try not to stumble in places you don't belong, and next time, think twice about telling people what they should and shouldn't include as website content. Because it's really none of your business. If Deborah wants to, I'd even encourage her to make a website called "Why Your Baby is the Ugliest Damned Baby Ever", because she has a right to express her opinion just as much as the next person, particularly if she doesn't anticipate unwanted visitors.
DEBORAH:If anyone else has anything to say about what a horrible person I am, please keep it to yourself. I don't need a complete stranger's help to feel bad about myself. If you want to comment, you'll have to register. I don't get anonymity here so neither do you.
Well now. Let's count the errors of these two mental geniuses, shall we?
Firstly: let me cite two bits of related wisdom from John Scalzi. We have the Law of Internet Communication, which states:
Anything bad you ever write about someone online will get back to them sooner or later.
And we also have its corollary, the Law of Internet Invocation, which states simply:
If you name them, they will come.
Nearly everybody Googles or Yahoos their own name every once in a while, just to see what comes up. And if you say something about someone by name, and you say something bad about them, either they or someone they know will find it. So the fact that the two prize-winning thinkers behind "Pleasantville" are evidently shocked -- shocked! -- that someone they didn't want to see their public blog did in fact find their public blog marks them as, well, complete idiots.
When you post something publicly on the Internet, you don't get to choose who sees it, and you don't get to pick their reaction for them. The "If we really meant to insult you we'd do it in person" line is absurd, because an insult is an insult, whether one says it publicly, skywrites it publicly, paints it on a billboard publicly, or posts it on the Internet publicly. You don't get to pick your visitors in Blogistan: your visitors pick you. If Deborah and Julie don't understand this, well, then, it's Deborah and Julie who need a remedial course in how the world works, not the understandably and justifiably offended parents of a two-year-old.
Secondly: if you get caught posting something nasty about someone, doing cute tricks like making your archives inaccessible and deleting the entry in question will only get you so far. There's a thing called a Google cache -- with the Google cache of Deborah's insulting entry being available here; just scroll down until you see the words "ugly freak child" -- that keeps web sites available for a period of time. You can't cover your tracks, especially if the people you've offended are smarter than you and know about little things like Google-caches. Which, it suddenly occurs to me, might suggest a second corollary to John Scalzi's dicta above:
There is a high likelihood that people you insult online are smarter than you.
So, Deborah and Julie: you behaved like asses, and your response to behaving like asses was to behave like dumb asses. You could have simply apologized for the insulting remark; that you failed to do so and instead decided to stand up for your "right" to do so only marks you as petty creeps. It's fitting, perhaps, that from what I can tell, Deborah and Julie's blog focuses on The Sims, because it's pretty damned clear that neither of these two is equipped for interaction with real people. You know, the kind that have real babies, and not the cyber kind.
UPDATE: In comments here, Lynn points out that the comments there are disabled too. So Deborah says that you can't comment anonymously, and then prevents commenting at all. I didn't know that they were letting nine-year-olds into college these days.
UPDATE AGAIN: It turns out that Julie also has a LiveJournal, and that she's unaware that on LJ if you're not a LJ-user, you have to comment anonymously. She is also probably blissfully unaware that LJers can turn off anonymous commenting, and thus shut out all but LJers. Ah well. Now there is someone who's getting some bang for her college buck.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
"See no evil"
Here's a good article against the DVD player that bowdlerizes movies:
Grownups should also pay close attention to their own voices of conscience, showing maturity and wisdom by walking away from those things that cause them to stumble. It is also the responsibility of mature adults to protect young, vulnerable, untrained minds from encountering things they are not yet prepared to process, consider, interpret and respond to. To buy technology that claims to do it for us is irresponsible, naïve, and ultimately … a cop-out.
Amen.
Mr. Resolute
Michael Kinsley wrote an article praising President Bush's Social Security stuff, and Matthew Yglesias picks it apart. That's about it. I also noticed, though, Craig's take on the Kinsey article, and he goes on to state his admiration for George W. Bush because Bush does what he says. That struck me as odd, because it's generally my experience that with the exceptions of cutting taxes and invading Iraq, Bush has a long history of saying he'll do one thing and then doing nothing like it at all. Here's yet another example (via Kevin Drum).
A Blast from the Past, again
This morning I tuned into NPR for just a few minutes on the way into work (because WGR, our local sports talk station, went to station break at the time), and heard part of this story about the economy. In the course of the story, several people from around the country were given the opportunity to briefly give their impressions of how their local economies are going. I wasn't thinking anything of this, until they got to a couple from Portland, OR named Bryan and Chris Higgins. I'm ninety-five percent certain that this couple is one that I went to high school with.
Bryan graduated two years before I did, while Chris graduated in my class. I didn't know Bryan very well, but Chris was a very good friend of mine -- in fact, she's one of those friends that you're genuinely sorry to lose track of, the kind of friend you occasionally Google to see if you can locate any contact info. I'm even more certain that this couple is the one I knew after doing a bit of searching and finding this news article, which apparently received pretty good distribution. The accompanying picture looks a lot like the folks I knew, although I'm not totally sure. I remember Chris telling me she was going to study civil engineering in college, during one of those "What're you doing next year" talks all high school seniors have, and the quoted Chris Higgins is, indeed, a civil engineer. I also seem to recall hearing from an alumni source that the Higginses had, indeed, moved to Portland.
Anyway, you never know who's going to turn up on NPR or in the national news.
(And Chris, Bryan, if you see this, drop me a line!)
Bryan graduated two years before I did, while Chris graduated in my class. I didn't know Bryan very well, but Chris was a very good friend of mine -- in fact, she's one of those friends that you're genuinely sorry to lose track of, the kind of friend you occasionally Google to see if you can locate any contact info. I'm even more certain that this couple is the one I knew after doing a bit of searching and finding this news article, which apparently received pretty good distribution. The accompanying picture looks a lot like the folks I knew, although I'm not totally sure. I remember Chris telling me she was going to study civil engineering in college, during one of those "What're you doing next year" talks all high school seniors have, and the quoted Chris Higgins is, indeed, a civil engineer. I also seem to recall hearing from an alumni source that the Higginses had, indeed, moved to Portland.
Anyway, you never know who's going to turn up on NPR or in the national news.
(And Chris, Bryan, if you see this, drop me a line!)
Monday, May 02, 2005
How many days now??!!
The folks lining up at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith have a website up devoted to their endeavor, called, appropriately enough, Liningup.net. In a very real way, I envy these folks.
By the way, if you call the number (323) 462-9609, you'll get someone who's waiting in line. That number is for the pay phone outside Grauman's Chinese.
By the way, if you call the number (323) 462-9609, you'll get someone who's waiting in line. That number is for the pay phone outside Grauman's Chinese.
Nah. It COULDN'T be.
During the election period last year, it was not uncommon for me to read things in Blogistan and elsewhere to the effect that vandalism of pro-Bush signage on people's lawns was a widespread phenomenon, while the reverse was nearly unheard of. I thought that was B.S. then, and I think it's B.S. now.
Especially after reading this.
(via PNH)
Especially after reading this.
(via PNH)
Surprising Admissions
Here's an attempt to launch one of those "blog-meme" things. The idea is that I'll admit some things about myself that readers might find a bit surprising.
1. Even though I'm a political liberal, I admire the work of political cartoonist Michael Ramirez. I find that he has a fascinating ability to marry words with striking imagery, such as in this cartoon. I don't often agree with his point of view, but he expresses his views artfully, which I admire.
2. I never much liked Nirvana. I know, Kurt Cobain was a tortured genius and Nirvana's brief run was a seminal event in the annals of rock, but I just didn't dig their music that much. A big part of it was that I found Cobain's vocals nearly unintelligible.
3. I used to be pretty good at growing African violets. It was a hobby I pursued a bit in college and in the first years afterwards, but I've let it go since. Someday I plan to do it again, when I have space to devote to a bunch of the little plants.
4. I like the movie Forrest Gump. I'm not sure I get its message, but for some reason, its structure as it traces one man's lumbering through history always clicks with me. It's one of several movies I watch almost faithfully, once or twice per year.
5. Despite my intense dislike of uncomfortable clothing, I've always enjoyed wearing a tuxedo, for some reason. Maybe it's a throwback to watching all those Bond movies all the time.
OK, anyone else?
1. Even though I'm a political liberal, I admire the work of political cartoonist Michael Ramirez. I find that he has a fascinating ability to marry words with striking imagery, such as in this cartoon. I don't often agree with his point of view, but he expresses his views artfully, which I admire.
2. I never much liked Nirvana. I know, Kurt Cobain was a tortured genius and Nirvana's brief run was a seminal event in the annals of rock, but I just didn't dig their music that much. A big part of it was that I found Cobain's vocals nearly unintelligible.
3. I used to be pretty good at growing African violets. It was a hobby I pursued a bit in college and in the first years afterwards, but I've let it go since. Someday I plan to do it again, when I have space to devote to a bunch of the little plants.
4. I like the movie Forrest Gump. I'm not sure I get its message, but for some reason, its structure as it traces one man's lumbering through history always clicks with me. It's one of several movies I watch almost faithfully, once or twice per year.
5. Despite my intense dislike of uncomfortable clothing, I've always enjoyed wearing a tuxedo, for some reason. Maybe it's a throwback to watching all those Bond movies all the time.
OK, anyone else?
Sunday, May 01, 2005
To thicken plot, add cornstarch.
Yes, it's that time again: the first Sunday of the lusty month of May, and thus time for a new chapter of The Promised King. So behold Chapter Nine, in which our heroes' quest starts to get more perilous. If the book were a movie, this is when the score would start getting louder.
(This post, by the way, is being kept at the top of today's page for visibility reasons. Keep scrolling down for newer stuff, actually written after this post, but manipulated using Blogger's patented TimeWarp (tm) Technology to appear before this post.)
(This post, by the way, is being kept at the top of today's page for visibility reasons. Keep scrolling down for newer stuff, actually written after this post, but manipulated using Blogger's patented TimeWarp (tm) Technology to appear before this post.)
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Coruscant
Originally uploaded by Michael Heilemann.
Well, I might as well go whole-hog with the Star Wars blogging, right? Here's a Flickr photostream devoted to the legendary conceptual art for the original trilogy by Ralph McQuarrie, whose paintings for the first film George Lucas commissioned as an aid for him to use in pitching the film to the studios. In a very real way, McQuarrie's work made Star Wars possible.
I figured it came from years of sucking limes.
Following a few links (I don't remember which links, but there it is), I find a possible beginning of a humorous series of blog posts (at least, humorous to those of us who lean left): Wingnut Mouth.
...I was struck once again by the presence of a characteristic I frequently notice amongst the winger noise machine -- an oddly distorted rictus of the mouth that makes it freeze in inappropriate positions, causing a smile to look not so much like the expression of joy as a symptom of gastric indigestion.
Heh! Indeed!
Sunday Burst of Weirdness, Coolness, and everything in between
Dammit, I wish I'd thought of this: Darth Vader's blog. Alas, another wonderful idea had by someone else.
Ah well, at least Diary of a Ring is still mine! All mine!
Ah well, at least Diary of a Ring is still mine! All mine!
Exploring the CD Collection, #12
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Original score by John Williams
London Symphony Orchestra
This score holds a very special place in my heart, and not just because it's the score to a Star Wars film, although that's right up there. It's also the first recording I ever bought, with my own money from my own allowance. I was eight at the time, and I remember the day I got it quite clearly. My father, sister and I went to a mall somewhere outside Portland, OR (where we lived at the time), and I specifically wanted to get the TESB record. If I recall correctly, the mall's record store was sold out, but for some unknown reason we found the thing on sale at Sears. I honestly remember that it was at Sears. (No, I don't remember which Portland mall it was, although I'm dead certain it was neither the Beaverton Mall, Washington Square, or Jantzen Beach.)
Anyway, I bought the album and happily read the liner notes and looked at the pictures on the way home. That release, on RSO Records, was a double-LP with a gatefold jacket and a booklet inside with nice, big photos from the movie. (As much as I adore CDs, I still miss big albums and their artwork.) And of course I played the thing when I got home - - although I had to sit in my parents' bedroom to do so, because that's where the record player was. (My sister owned her own record player, but as is the case with all little brothers, I was staunchly forbidden entrance into her room. I was to finally get my own record player -- complete with 8-track tape deck! -- the following Christmas.)
I played the living crap out of that poor record. I mean, that record never had a chance. By the time I played it for the last time - - the summer before I went to college, nine years after the initial purchase - - the thing was so scratched and pitted that the recording just sounded, well, sad. But here's the thing: when I listen to the 1997 RCA release of the TESB score (released in conjunction with the Special Edition of the original trilogy), I sometimes hear those "pops" in my mind in the places where the record needle slipped particularly badly, and over sixteen years since the last time I heard the score as John Williams sequenced it for that original album (with the cues well out of film order), my ear still occasionally strains against the "correct" sequencing.
So it's safe to say that I know The Empire Strikes Back better than probably any other film score. Probably better than any other musical work as well, I'd guess.
I'm not really sure what new I can say about the score itself. As far as I am concerned, it belongs on the shortlist of the finest scores ever composed for a film -- I'd put it right up with the great masterworks of Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rosza, personally. It's just that good. Williams goes beyond the pure pastiche of A New Hope here, looking less to ape a pre-existing conceptual sound world and establishes a sound world of his own, a Star Wars sound world. You can hear this as soon as the familiar strains of the Main Theme fade away after the opening crawl, and we hear darker, more mysterious music for the Imperial Star Destroyer dispatching the probe droids. Gone are the allusions to Holst and Elgar; gone too are the Korngold-esque action riffs (except for one notable fanfarish passage during the Battle of Hoth, accompanying Luke's single-handed defeat of an AT-AT).
Of course, the TESB score yields new themes, one of which has become one of the iconic themes of all film music. I'm referring, of course, to the Imperial March, or Darth Vader's Theme. This theme pretty much dominates the score (almost to the point of being heard too often), but there are other new themes here: Yoda's Theme (which opens with a phrase that follows almost the same contour as the first phrase in Vader's Theme) and the Love Theme (for Han and Leia) are the main ones, as well as a stately theme for Cloud City and a brooding motif for Boba Fett and the bounty hunters.
Where this score really shines, though, is in the emotional architecture that Williams is able to create. TESB is the emotional center of the Star Wars saga, when relationships are either exposed or deepened and the conflicts become internal as well as external. The most emotional cue in the entire saga, as far as I am concerned, comes in the cue "Yoda and the Force", when Yoda gives his most notable lesson to Luke Skywalker (levitating the X-Wing from the swamp after Luke fails because it's "too big"), and the entire series's finest action cue ("The Duel" or "The Clash of Lightsabers", depending on the release) underscores the flight of Leia and company from Cloud City just after the segment of the Luke-Vader fight in which Vader uses the force to hurl large pieces of machinery at his son. Much of this track, unfortunately, is lost in the mix of explosions, blasterfire, and shouted-out dialogue during the sequence, but it's masterful anyway -- listening to the track always makes me shiver, especially during the last section where a bouncing passage for brass gives way to the score's most desperate rendition of the Love Theme.
And then there's the spectacular ebb-and-flow of the Battle of Hoth music, which is finally collected in one long suite on the Special Edition issue of the score. Williams is able to keep ratcheting up the tension throughout, and I love the way he shifts from the heavily percussive music of the battle's opening sequence (when the walkers are first sighted) to the more desperate battle music, featuring a searing statement of the Ben Kenobi/the Force theme, as it becomes clear that the Rebels are going to lose this fight, followed yet again by the intensely suspenseful music accompanying Han Solo's attempt to get Princess Leia off the planet.
This score is dark, moving, exciting, and involving. It's everything I think a film score should be - - wrapped around strong melodies, forceful in its action music and haunting in its quieter moments. In truth, no film score written since has come close to it, until Howard Shore's monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Original score by John Williams
London Symphony Orchestra
This score holds a very special place in my heart, and not just because it's the score to a Star Wars film, although that's right up there. It's also the first recording I ever bought, with my own money from my own allowance. I was eight at the time, and I remember the day I got it quite clearly. My father, sister and I went to a mall somewhere outside Portland, OR (where we lived at the time), and I specifically wanted to get the TESB record. If I recall correctly, the mall's record store was sold out, but for some unknown reason we found the thing on sale at Sears. I honestly remember that it was at Sears. (No, I don't remember which Portland mall it was, although I'm dead certain it was neither the Beaverton Mall, Washington Square, or Jantzen Beach.)
Anyway, I bought the album and happily read the liner notes and looked at the pictures on the way home. That release, on RSO Records, was a double-LP with a gatefold jacket and a booklet inside with nice, big photos from the movie. (As much as I adore CDs, I still miss big albums and their artwork.) And of course I played the thing when I got home - - although I had to sit in my parents' bedroom to do so, because that's where the record player was. (My sister owned her own record player, but as is the case with all little brothers, I was staunchly forbidden entrance into her room. I was to finally get my own record player -- complete with 8-track tape deck! -- the following Christmas.)
I played the living crap out of that poor record. I mean, that record never had a chance. By the time I played it for the last time - - the summer before I went to college, nine years after the initial purchase - - the thing was so scratched and pitted that the recording just sounded, well, sad. But here's the thing: when I listen to the 1997 RCA release of the TESB score (released in conjunction with the Special Edition of the original trilogy), I sometimes hear those "pops" in my mind in the places where the record needle slipped particularly badly, and over sixteen years since the last time I heard the score as John Williams sequenced it for that original album (with the cues well out of film order), my ear still occasionally strains against the "correct" sequencing.
So it's safe to say that I know The Empire Strikes Back better than probably any other film score. Probably better than any other musical work as well, I'd guess.
I'm not really sure what new I can say about the score itself. As far as I am concerned, it belongs on the shortlist of the finest scores ever composed for a film -- I'd put it right up with the great masterworks of Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rosza, personally. It's just that good. Williams goes beyond the pure pastiche of A New Hope here, looking less to ape a pre-existing conceptual sound world and establishes a sound world of his own, a Star Wars sound world. You can hear this as soon as the familiar strains of the Main Theme fade away after the opening crawl, and we hear darker, more mysterious music for the Imperial Star Destroyer dispatching the probe droids. Gone are the allusions to Holst and Elgar; gone too are the Korngold-esque action riffs (except for one notable fanfarish passage during the Battle of Hoth, accompanying Luke's single-handed defeat of an AT-AT).
Of course, the TESB score yields new themes, one of which has become one of the iconic themes of all film music. I'm referring, of course, to the Imperial March, or Darth Vader's Theme. This theme pretty much dominates the score (almost to the point of being heard too often), but there are other new themes here: Yoda's Theme (which opens with a phrase that follows almost the same contour as the first phrase in Vader's Theme) and the Love Theme (for Han and Leia) are the main ones, as well as a stately theme for Cloud City and a brooding motif for Boba Fett and the bounty hunters.
Where this score really shines, though, is in the emotional architecture that Williams is able to create. TESB is the emotional center of the Star Wars saga, when relationships are either exposed or deepened and the conflicts become internal as well as external. The most emotional cue in the entire saga, as far as I am concerned, comes in the cue "Yoda and the Force", when Yoda gives his most notable lesson to Luke Skywalker (levitating the X-Wing from the swamp after Luke fails because it's "too big"), and the entire series's finest action cue ("The Duel" or "The Clash of Lightsabers", depending on the release) underscores the flight of Leia and company from Cloud City just after the segment of the Luke-Vader fight in which Vader uses the force to hurl large pieces of machinery at his son. Much of this track, unfortunately, is lost in the mix of explosions, blasterfire, and shouted-out dialogue during the sequence, but it's masterful anyway -- listening to the track always makes me shiver, especially during the last section where a bouncing passage for brass gives way to the score's most desperate rendition of the Love Theme.
And then there's the spectacular ebb-and-flow of the Battle of Hoth music, which is finally collected in one long suite on the Special Edition issue of the score. Williams is able to keep ratcheting up the tension throughout, and I love the way he shifts from the heavily percussive music of the battle's opening sequence (when the walkers are first sighted) to the more desperate battle music, featuring a searing statement of the Ben Kenobi/the Force theme, as it becomes clear that the Rebels are going to lose this fight, followed yet again by the intensely suspenseful music accompanying Han Solo's attempt to get Princess Leia off the planet.
This score is dark, moving, exciting, and involving. It's everything I think a film score should be - - wrapped around strong melodies, forceful in its action music and haunting in its quieter moments. In truth, no film score written since has come close to it, until Howard Shore's monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy.
We are the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything!
When we first moved to Syracuse two and a half years ago (geez, it still feels a lot more recent than that), I took the Daughter one day to our new local library, where she picked out a video that was apparently about a group of animated vegetables that told Bible stories. It was called "VeggieTales", and the hosts were a cucumber named Larry and a tomato named Bob. I wasn't too thrilled, since I tend to hate heavy-handed religious stuff for kids, but I quickly discovered that VeggieTales is not heavy-handed at all -- it's more good-natured than anything, the "message" part of the show is always nicely crafted, and it's always loaded with jokes that only adults are going to get. The nearest analogy I can think of is the film Wayne's World, which is actually a very good-natured comedy loaded with jokes that will sail over the head of all those thirteen-year-olds who were in the audience. Anyway, we've been really big fans of VeggieTales ever since. (The big factor for me, aside from the humor and the incredibly clever songs, is the fact that VeggieTales generally eschews the creepier aspects of Evangelism.)
So I was stunned to read this account of how Big Idea Productions (the makers of VeggieTales) went belly-up, and how they were well on the way to being belly-up before the strains of "Oh Where Is My Hairbrush?" ever played in our Syracuse living room. It's not "the death of VeggieTales", by any means, but it's still a fairly surprising and sad account of what happens when one person combines good intentions with bad business sense.
UPDATE: Here's a third-person account of the collapse of Big Idea Productions.
(Link via MeFi.)
So I was stunned to read this account of how Big Idea Productions (the makers of VeggieTales) went belly-up, and how they were well on the way to being belly-up before the strains of "Oh Where Is My Hairbrush?" ever played in our Syracuse living room. It's not "the death of VeggieTales", by any means, but it's still a fairly surprising and sad account of what happens when one person combines good intentions with bad business sense.
UPDATE: Here's a third-person account of the collapse of Big Idea Productions.
(Link via MeFi.)
Didn't anyone identify with Lobot?
Here's an interesting discussion on Star Wars, between three filmmakers, one of whom is Kevin Smith (of Clerks fame and a Star Wars fan of some repute) and two other guys with whom I am unfamiliar. It's basically more of the same stuff you'll see in any other similar bull session, but better because these guys are wittier.
At one point, though, Smith says something that I think is wrong. He speculates on George Lucas's reaction to the fact that Attack of the Clones made quite a bit less money than The Phantom Menace:
At one point, though, Smith says something that I think is wrong. He speculates on George Lucas's reaction to the fact that Attack of the Clones made quite a bit less money than The Phantom Menace:
Somewhere along the line, he looked at the worldwide gross of Phantom Menace and looked at the worldwide gross of Attack of the Clones, and saw a $200 million differentiation. And then started quizzing people, and going 'well, what do you think it is?' And they could be like, 'well… have you thought about reading the Internet, George?' And he might have checked out some people's opinions.
I genuinely doubt that this is the case. First of all, I remember an interview Lucas gave to Premiere Magazine back before TPM came out, and in that interview Lucas predicted that each prequel would do less business than the one before. I suspect he was totally prepared for what happened. Especially when you consider that what Lucas continues to do is not so much try to give fans what they want, but give them what he wants to give them, whether that matches what the fans want or not.
They also talk a bit about a common criticism of the Prequels that there's no character like Han Solo, which I find to be a fairly benign critique -- I'm thinking, "So what?" -- except that it's always framed thusly: "There's no one for me to identify with." And that's when I just lose the train of thought, because I frankly have never really understood the whole "identifying with characters" thing. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I was always more emotionally invested in the entire story, and the setting in which it takes place, than in the travails of any one character. When I played Star Wars on the playground, I was never one of the "I wanna be Han Solo!" or "I wanna be Vader!" types. I just wanted to play Star Wars. (Which maybe explains why, when I was writing Star Wars fan fiction, what I did was to steal Lucas's entire plot and have characters of my own act it out, as opposed to do something like having myself show up as the Rebel pilot to save the day.)
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