Offerings before the Hiatus

I'm going on hiatus as soon as this post is complete, but before I go I have two favorite quotes to re-offer and some really good stuff I want to link now rather than later. I've posted these two quotes before, but I like them a lot so I'm offering them again. First we have rock critic Lester Bangs:

In a way, Jim Morrison's life and death could be written off as simply one of the more pathetic episodes in the history of the star system, or that offensive myth we all persist in believing which holds that artists are somehow a race apart and thus entitled to piss on my wife, throw you out the window, smash up the joint, and generally do whatever they want. I've seen a lot of this over the years, and what's most ironic is that it always goes under the assumption that to deny them these outbursts would somehow be curbing their creativity, when the reality, as far as I can see, is that it's exactly such insane tolerance of another insanity that also contributes to them drying up as artists. Because how can you finally create anything real or beautiful when you have absolutely zero input from the real world, because everyone around you is catering to and sheltering you? You can't, and this system is I'd submit why we've seen almost all our rock 'n' roll heroes who, unlike Morrison, did manage to survive the Sixties, end up having nothing to say.

And here's composer and sometime critic Hector Berlioz:

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.

Also, on the occasion of the apparent return to service of the Space Shuttle Discovery (assuming the launch goes as planned), I link this essay by Bill Whittle, written on the occasion of the destruction of the Columbia on re-entry over two years ago. While this essay, like all Bill Whittle essays, goes on way too long and has a lot of goofball digressions into what's wrong with liberals, it also winds up with one of the more unforgettable passages I've read in a blog post.

Do go read this post by Terry Teachout. I'd love to have a weekend like this: a car and no destination. And if you've ever considered reading David Weber's military-SF novels featuring Honor Harrington (a future Horatio Hornblower, obviously), check out Will Duquette, who is reviewing them in sequence (latest review here). I read the first two and enjoyed them, although Weber's infodumps are really irritating. And from what I've heard, they get worse as you go in the series. James Wolcott slaps down some folks who are really mad that Oliver Stone is making a 9-11-01 themed movie, here. (I must admit that I find the possessiveness a lot of folks on the Right feel toward 9-11-01 a bit creepy.) And finally, the guy who goes by the handle "D. Trull", whose site I have linked in the past because of his enormously sensible thoughts on the Star Wars prequels, has some preliminary thoughts up on Revenge of the Sith, here.

I don't rule out the possibility of a post showing up while I'm gone, if I'm able to set up camp on the mother-in-law's computer at all, but I wouldn't bet on it. At the very least, I will definitely post again on Wednesday, July 20. In the meantime, look through my archives, visit the folks on the blogroll, and so on. See you all on the flipside.

Another week, another chapter!

Due to the impending trek across Our Great Nation, I have posted Chapter Fourteen of The Promised King one week ahead of the normal schedule, which might seem like good news for the book's regular readers (all four of you -- hint, hint) except that this means that four weeks will now elapse until the appearance of Chapter Fifteen. Oh well. This break will give you all time to catch up on what you've missed, right?

So go read Chapter Fourteen, and don't forget that links to the other chapters are available as well.

(This post is being anchored at the top of this page for today and most of tomorrow, so scroll down through Sunday as new material will appear beneath it.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Stirling Bridge, Scotland.

I recently watched Braveheart again, a film which I've always liked a lot despite my knowledge that the history in the film is incredibly bad. And when I say "bad", I mean that the film gets these facts right:

1. There was a guy named William Wallace.
2. This guy named William Wallace pissed off King Edward of England but good.
3. The Scots loved William Wallace because he pissed off King Edward of England but good.
4. King Edward of England got the last laugh on William Wallace, in the way that medieval Kings usually got the last laugh on their enemies.

Most of the other stuff in the film is complete fabrication. The Battle of Stirling, as depicted in the film, takes place on a plain old field and the charging English cavalry are butchered when Wallace and company hold up long spears for the cavalry to impale themselves against. However, the real battle was actually the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and this is where that battle took place.

This isn't the actual bridge; the original is long gone, but this one is thought to be very near the spot where the original bridge stood.

Here's a site that tells the actual history of the Battle of Stirling Bridge. History seems a bit unclear as to whether or not Wallace and his men all lifted their kilts and displayed their manhood to the English troops before slaughtering them, but I rather doubt it. Nor did he demand, before battle, that the English commander present himself before the Scottish force, bend over, put his legs between his knees, and kiss his own arse. The filmmakers made that up, too.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

OK, I was doing a bit of Googling and I came across this Christian fundamentalist site, which is pretty straightforward as Christian fundamentalist sites go -- not a whole lot of weirdness, but some outright creepiness (did you know that George W. Bush isn't Christian enough for some Christians?).

But I saw a link to something called the Confession Booth, and the old Weirdness Detector started ticking. I think it was the disclaimer ("The views represented in Confession Booth do not necessarily reflect the views of anybody but God") that did it. Sure enough, there's some good old flogging of the sinners there: homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, atheists...and "potty mouths" and "Democrats"! (I'm not kidding. Go look.)

Under "Liars", we find this advice: "YOUR ONLY HOPE is to SHUT THE HELL UP (James 3:5-6) and tell the truth." Well, telling the truth is certainly advisable, but did James really advise people to "shut the hell up"? Well, I'm not sure that's how I'd interpret that passage, but I'll give it to them. We're still not onto the real weirdness.

No, the Weirdness isn't to be found until you hit the "Divorced and Remarried" section. When you click through, you won't find any illumination of why divorce is so bad; nope, you merely find...well, you look. What a betrayal that must have been!

The silencing of a voice

Michael Lopez is closing down his blog. I can't argue with his reasons, since they're personal reasons and you can't really argue with the personal, but I'll miss reading him. I didn't agree with him all that often, but he was a very thoughtful poster who managed to create the best kind of disagreement: the kind where I say to myself, "Self, I disagree with that, but why?"

Michael promises to post something each day for the next week, and then he'll be pulling the plug -- apparently going so far as to delete the blog entirely. Well, I hope he at least saves his archives locally; he's generated too much material that I think he has every right to be proud of, even if he's now loathe to have it permanently available as a matter of Internet record.

I also hope that his retirement as an active blogger doesn't also signal his retirement as an active blog reader. And who knows, blogging can go in any number of directions: witness Steven Den Beste, who hung up his hat as a political blogger and instead went off to blog about nothing but anime. Maybe Michael will be back in some other form, after he's either recharged the batteries or found some new batteries.

But anyway, spend some time looking through the archives over at Highered Intelligence. There's a lot of good food for thought over there.

Yup, I like that one too...and that one....I know all the words to that one....crap.

Michele at ASV has a list of the most overrated songs in history, with lengthy commentary after each one. It's a really fun post to read (as is usually the case with Michele), even if I feel slightly dirty in still liking a lot of these songs. Here are her songs, with a few responses of my own:

1. Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven. Maybe part of why I like this song a lot is due to the fact that I've never really been one to study the meanings of lyrics. I just love this song's structure: you can barely feel the constant upping of the tempo over ten minutes or however long it is. I just think it's brilliant.

2. Don McLean - American Pie Yeah, it's self-important, unintelligible gobbledygook. But I still like it, for some reason I'm unable to illuminate. McLean's other songs make me wince. That one about Vincent Van Gogh is just treacle.

3. Lynyrd Skynyrd - Freebird Believe it or not, I've only heard this song a few times in my life. I gotta get out more. I like it, but I don't know it well enough to form an opinion on whether it's overrated.

4. Eagles - Hotel California I like this song, but I'm unimpressed when people tell me they know all its words. Sure, the song is eight minutes, but there's a minute of intro followed by three minutes of lyrics followed by four more minutes of guitar solo that only sounds good on the original recording. (Don't believe me? Listen to the exact same solo as played on the Hell Freezes Over reunion album. Ick.)

5. Meatloaf - Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Michele closes a lengthy diatribe about this song (which includes some really creepy descriptions of what happens when this song comes on the DJ's playlist at a wedding reception) with stating that she can't see anything redeeming about it. And she's probably right, since its lyrics portray the Artist As Disgusting Emotional Troll. But I guess that's what I like about it: that Meat Loaf made this gigando-hit out of a song that has him stand up, arena-rock style, and shout for all the world to hear, "I am a complete pig, and how do ya like that!" It's sort of admirable in that Archie Bunker kind of way, I guess. And I have to like that while other self-important rock acts were making epic songs out of incomprehensible poetry (see above), Meat Loaf is making a nine-minute epic out of a fifteen-year-old's one-night-stand at Inspiration Point. He's saying "You guys sing about a bustle in your hedgerow and stabbing things with your steely knives and cryptic shit about plane crashes outside Clearlake, Iowa. I'm gonna sing about the time I got lucky and dumped her the next day." Redeeming? No. Refreshing? A little.

6. Guns N Roses - November Rain Michele says that bad things happen when you diss GNR, but bring it on: I never once liked GNR. Hated 'em from the first time I heard "Sweet Child of Mine". Why, you might ask? Well, I think that Slash is a brilliant guitarist; love his work. The drummer and bass player seem OK (although no Alex VH or Michael Anthony). The problem with every GNR song is this: sooner or later Axl Rose starts singing, and at that moment my nerves instantly curl up. Seriously. The man's nasal delivery, coupled with his metal-esque tendency to blend singing with shouting, is to me the musical equivalent of when a large metal cabinet is dragged across a smooth concrete floor.

For this reason I have never owned a single GNR album, and I never will.

7. The Beatles - Hey Jude God almighty, I hate this song. I've never actually been much of a Beatles fan anyway. I tend, with almost no exception that I know of, to like their songs best when they're performed by anyone else, but as an actual act in themselves I always get this feeling that they're either a bubble-gum band just treading water until they can get to the business of revolutionizing music forever, or that they're in full music-revolutionary phase which turns me off anyway. But "Hey Jude" is just an annoying, unending, interminable piece of crap. I hate it well before the four minutes of "Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na" begins, and that part of the song just makes me cringe.

8. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run in the USA in his Glory Days. I like Bruce. Oh well. I don't like "Born in the USA" much, delivering its message as it does with all the subtlety of a brick through a plate-glass window, and "Glory Days" suffers from the same back-end fault that afflicts "Hey Jude", only in Bruce's case it's four minutes of "Well ALL RIGHT! Come ON NOW! Well ALL RIGHT! Come ON NOW!" But "Dancing in the Dark" is cool; I liked his song for the movie Philadelphia way more than I actually liked the movie Philadelphia; and I do like that 9-11 themed album he did a few years back (although I suspect Michele hates it). Anyway, I like Springsteen's voice. I like it when rock stars sing with a voice that sounds like it's been through too many years of riding a bus and drinking bourbon.

Here are a few additions of my own:

"Spinning Wheel", Blood Sweat and Tears. I don't know what I hate more: the insipid lyrics, the awful brass chords that punctuate the song, or the "Carousel band on drugs" that closes the song. The whole thing stinks. I hate it.

"I Swear", All For One. Ah, yes -- summer 1994, when I would work a shift at Pizza Hut and hear this g**damn song at least eight times in the space of a single night. (Yes, I counted once. Eight is accurate.) And if somebody took mercy and changed the radio to the country station, it didn't matter because some country artist did the same song the same year! Ugh. Anyway, the song is like eating the world's biggest fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie without any milk at hand to wash it down.

Any song by Aerosmith that had a video starring Alicia Silverstone. Especially whichever one had her rigging up a stuntman gizmo so she could appear to be committing suicide by jumping off a bridge, but then give her boyfriend the finger while she dangles on her safety harness above a busy freeway. Yeah, right. Or the one where she goes off for a night of debauchery with some other chick and steals a farmboy's pants. I like Alicia Silverstone just fine, but these songs were overwrought crud.

"Losing My Religion", REM. Now, it's not a bad song by any means. But did it really warrant airplay on par with Elton John's "Candle in the Wind -- Princess Diana version"? I don't think so. And all those playings of "Losing My Religion" kept "Everybody Hurts" off the air. (At least in my town.)

"New York, New York". This song does two things: first, it brings out the inner Sinatra that everybody thinks they have. And the problem with that, of course, is that the song also proves what should be obvious: that nobody actually has an inner Sinatra. That's why there was only one Sinatra. I tend to really dislike songs that get adopted by every drunk in a given room. Which brings me to....

"Sweet Caroline", Neil Diamond. Full disclosure: it's a lot of fun to be in a bar full of drunken patrons when this songs comes up on the jukebox. Equally full disclosure: the song is pedestrian, at best, in any venue where alcohol is not involved. What's funny, though, is that two generations of drunks singing this song have elevated those three descending brass notes in the chorus to actually being part of the lyrics. No longer does the song go like this:

Sweet caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I’ve been inclined
To believe they never would

No, it now actually goes like this:

Sweet caroline BUM BUM BUMMM!
Good times never seemed so good
I’ve been inclined BUM BUM BUMMM!
To believe they never would

"Brown Eyed Girl", Van Morrison. I love this song. But it's most certainly overrated, if its airplay as compared to the airplay of other, better Van Morrison songs is taken into account.

OK, enough of those for now. I'll leave off, though, with a funny joke I read on the MeFi thread I referenced in this post from yesterday:

Question: What did the Dead Head say when he ran outta dope?



Answer: "What is this crap we're listening to?"

Bada-bing!

Sentential Links #9

Good sentences from better posts for the week just gone by.

:: Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were. (Mr. Teachout, with all due respect, if you've got it in you to write like this -- and you damned well do -- then please oh please, stop wishing you could write as well as James Lileks. It's Lileks who should be coming to you for pointers.)

:: A secret: I fall a little in love with nearly every woman that I meet. Just a little - sometimes only for five minutes, sometimes forever. (And I thought that I was the only one who did that. This isn't actually from a blog post, but it is from a blog, so it counts.)

:: I mean we all stop dead in our tracks while walking to grab that piece of paper to write down a great idea, or line, or story, or thing to do, or thing to blog. Or is it just me? I wonder who else will be found guilty! (Guilty as charged. I'm constantly thinking up stuff. Some of it is just observational stuff to use in stories, some of it gets put into blog posts, some stuff just percolates around within my cranium. I think that this practice is one thing that marks one as a Writer-At-Heart.)

:: The authority of evolution is derived not from any edicts, there is no Central Committee, nor is there any Great Man who defines it all for us (concepts which are exceedingly hard to get across to creationists), but instead, it is derived from a great many experiments and observations of the natural world.

:: At approximately 7 pm EDT this evening, I left my office (5 blocks from the White House) to board the subway at Metro Center (2.5 blocks from the White House) to travel 12 minutes to walk 2 blocks to get home. During my journey, I saw not one sniffing dog. Not one meter maid. NOT A SINGLE COP. (Actually, that's the entire text of Roxanne's post. I hope she doesn't mind.)

:: The Home Run Derby has now gotten so out of hand that a crappy post-grunge band, Alter Bridge, a derivative remnant of the highly derivative band Creed, will now perform at the Derby. (How behind the times am I? I'm not sure I've ever heard anything by Creed, but all I know is that everyone who has ever mentioned Creed to me has also used the word "sucks" in the same sentence.)

:: The flypaper theory is dead and buried. (New redesign for Demosthenes's blog, by the way, which happens to be the first liberal political blog I ever read.)

:: There sure are a lot of different versions of Diet Coke these days, aren't there? (Yup, there are. And once again, the Blogger With Millions o'Hits posts about something that the Blogger With Hundreds o'Hits touched on two weeks ago. I'm just sayin'.)

:: Seriously, can anyone name a film adaptation that was superior to the book? (Yes, I can. The Bridges of Madison County.)

:: Can you tell catfish bother me a little bit? (There were about seven or eight sentences I could have chosen from this post, whose only wrong point is that Mississippi is not in the Midwest. It's in the South. The Upper Delta region might be termed in the Midwest, ranging as far north as the southeast portion of Missouri and the southern tip of Illinois. But as to that, it's worth noting that Cairo, Illinois is farther south than Richmond, Virginia. Yes, Cairo's in the same state as Chicago, which is most definitely a Midwest city, but consider: Buffalo is in the same state as New York City, but Buffalo's certainly not a Northeast city; we're a Great Lakes city, and it's about 293 miles from here to NYC. From Chicago to Cairo is even farther than that: about 348 miles, according to this site. But that's just a mere quibble. This is a wonderful post. Go read it.)

That's all for now. Remember, there will be no Sentential Links next week, because I won't be linking much of anything next week. (By the way, it just occurred to me that with the exception of my two moves, from Buffalo to Syracuse and back again, this will be the first real hiatus since this blog began which shall also involve a period of inconsistent Net access. What on Earth will I do!)

Too young for the long, strange trip.

This MeFi thread commemorates the ten-year anniversary of the last concert played by the Grateful Dead. I was never a Deadhead, having come of age too late to know what that scene was all about, but I remember hearing the news of Jerry Garcia's death on MTV one day in 1995.

Last week, Buffalo News rock critic Jeff Miers wrote this review of a CD/DVD package from a concert the Dead gave at Buffalo's Rich Stadium (now Ralph Wilson Stadium) in 1989.

More than just another release from the ample Dead vaults, "Truckin'" celebrates what fans, band members, Dead archivists and historians are calling one of the finest shows the band performed in its last decade together. The release also cements the Dead's long-held love for upstate New York, a relationship that yielded some now-historic - indeed, mythical - shows in cities such as Albany, Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.

"There is no question in my mind that Western New York brought out the best in the Dead," says the band's official audio and visual archivist, David Lemieux, speaking to The News from the Dead's San Francisco office last week.

"There's a few reasons for this. First, cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and so forth were among the first to embrace the Dead, going all the way back to the beginning. The band always preferred playing these cities to the bigger places like New York City, for example. There was just a rich history of connection with people upstate, and in Western New York in particular.

"Second, how well they played, and how often they played in places like Buffalo created a lasting impact on those areas, a fan base that was incredibly large and incredibly loyal. When you watch the "Truckin'' DVD, you can see on all of the band members' faces how pleased they were with the gig."

Dennis McNally, longtime Dead publicist and author of the definitive band biography, "Long Strange Trip," sees other reasons for the undeniable strength of the band's Rich Stadium performance.

"That particular show is one of the high points from the period immediately following Jerry Garcia's collapse and his slipping into a diabetic coma, and subsequent miraculous recovery," McNally says.

"Like any sane person would do, the band members hit their knees - metaphorically, at least, if not literally - and said "Thank you' to whatever it is that they believe in. There was the very real sense that Jerry was glad to be alive, and the other guys were so relieved that he was still there, that they could still do this together, that it wasn't all over. As a result, I think they took it very seriously. There was definitely a feeling of, "Let's be damned good every night.' So, as you can see and hear from the Rich Stadium show, there was an energy and a joy in the performance. They had a song in their hearts."

That joy in the collective musical experience was apparent during the Rich Stadium show, from the opening moments of "Bertha," through a career-high take on "Not Fade Away" and a celebratory encore of "U.S. Blues."

I may have to look into getting this thing.

The Dole (and not the pineapple company, either)

There's a blogger from Rome, NY who codifies his frustration with his hometown in his blog's title, Rome, NY Sucks. He's a staunch conservative who, while enormously frustrated with the economic morass that is New York State (where, if you're anywhere outside New York City or Yonkers, the state government is as reluctant to admit your existence as the Department of Defense is to admit that of Area 51), has stuck around and tried to make a go of it. Kudos to him for that, but the lack of jobs in his town has taken its toll, and now he's very likely applying for public assistance.

Now, given that Romey (sorry, but I got nothing else to call you!) is a conservative who seriously dislikes public assistance stuff, he finds himself in a philosophical quandary:

Here's some interesting questions. Can you still be conservative and on government assistance? Does your opposition to handouts make you unworthy to receive them? Is it hypocrisy to be one of the people you criticize? I'd tend to say no.

I'd also say no, for all the various reasons, most of which are cited in the comments thread to his post. There's the "You paid your taxes, so in a way this is your right" argument, which I don't have a problem with at all. But there's something else: I also paid my taxes, and this is part of what I have been paying for. So, if you need to do this to get by for now, I have no problem whatsoever with it.

I've never been one to feel moral outrage for when people use their public assistance funds to buy anything other than Ramen Noodles and milk or whatever the cheapest subsistence-level stuff available happens to be. (Not including cigarettes and alcohol, of course.) In fact, I feel rather the reverse whenever I'm in a store checkout line and I overhear someone griping about what the person on public assistance is buying: "How can they get away with buying ice cream on Welfare? How dare they?" Well, I don't know the welfare recipient's life story, do I? I'm not going to jump to moral outrage without knowing what's going on. Maybe they're abusing the system, but in my experience, they're very likely not. They're unlucky, in that (a) they are unqualified for what few jobs there are; (b) those jobs don't pay enough to live on; and (c) they lack the means to either get qualified for whatever good jobs exist (and in these parts there aren't too many of those, either) or to move to where the better jobs are for which they are qualified.

I tend to find the assumption behind the disdain for people on public assistance to be that getting a good job is like shopping for toothpaste at Target: you just pick the brand that works best for you and off you go. You hear it in the rhetoric: "Learn some skills, dumbass." "Go to where the jobs are, you slacker." It just isn't that easy, and if there's a tendency by some (fewer, I suspect, than many believe) to use the safety net as a hammock, I find that preferable to allowing every falling person to plummet to the pavement by removing the safety net entirely.

Some evidently think that not only should society not provide a safety net on a moral basis, but that it is also immoral for a person to accept aid from any safety net that exists. I reject this view as well. I myself was on Unemployment for over a year, and without it, my family would have suffered greatly. And Little Quinn receives assistance from Medicaid that covers treatments that our employer-provided health insurance would not: his various therapies, for instance, without which he would be little better than an immobile child with little hope of recovery; or the in-home nursing assistance, which provides a trained medical professional to watch over him while I'm at work. To say that there is a moral fault in accepting this assistance is, to me, absurd; I would claim that it would have been morally negligent for us not to accept it. What were the alternatives? Look around for employers whose insurance plans might provide better coverage? and then work for the usual required year of service before the insurance kicked in, a year during which Little Quinn's prospects for improvement would have been set back immeasurably? for me (the secondary income) to stop working again? Not in this lifetime. We were stretched thin on a single income with one healthy child. Our heads are above water, and it's because of the state assistance we've accepted.

Do we like dealing with the state, and its mishmash of regulatory agencies and requirements? No. But we had no choice, and in a way, I'm glad, because I'm very wary of trusting the market to help in situations like ours.

I guess I just have trouble faulting individual people who are on public assistance, because they're people, and I can't look into their hearts. Nor can they look into mine. And that's not changing.

At long, long last!

Blogistan has what is, I think, its first film music-centered blog, Notes on Scores. It's about time, and welcome aboard, fellows!

What's this movie about?

Brad DeLong watched Casablanca recently, and notes as follows:

It is a fact that we are nine minutes into the movie "Casablanca" before we first catch sight of Humphrey Bogart. And we are twenty-five minutes into the movie before we catch sight of Ingrid Bergman, or of the third headliner, Paul Henried.

...

Would anything like that happen today? Would anyone in Hollywood today construct a movie in which the female lead is offstage for nearly the first half-hour? Would anyone in Hollywood today construct a movie in which the first ten minutes are starless?

Well, let's consider a few.

I'm not sure if the original Star Wars counts as "modern", since it's twenty-eight years old, but given that first film's Campbellian structure, it's notable that we don't meet our hero, Luke Skywalker, until about twenty minutes into the film. (In fact, this is interesting in that George Lucas originally shoehorned some additional stuff about Luke into the film's opening act on the advice of his friends and later rejected it because it mucked up his intended story structure. People are always saying of Lucas, "Geez, if he only had someone around to tell him how bad his ideas are." Well, here's a case where he was absolutely right to ignore them.)

The same year, we didn't meet Roy Neary until a similar amount of running time had passed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring may be a special case, since it opens with some background narration before we meet Frodo. But then, Casablanca also opens with some background narration. And in the Extended Edition, it's even longer before we meet Frodo: in the theatrical release, we cut from Galadriel's narration to Frodo sitting against a tree, where in the EE we have Bilbo telling us what Hobbits are.

Going back before Star Wars, there's Jaws. We meet Chief Brody pretty early on -- the first five minutes, I think -- but Matt Hooper doesn't show up until quite a while later, and aside from a brief scene during a town meeting, Quint arrives even later than that.

Twenty minutes or so of running time elapses in Princess Mononoke before we meet the female lead, although the male lead is introduced in the first two minutes of the film.

A special note must be made of Titanic's story structure. (And stop laughing, dammit. That movie was freaking brilliant.) We open with some lengthy expository material set in the present day, some of which is grounded by our introduction to the female lead -- but eighty years after the film's main story has taken place. Then we jump backward to 1912, where we meet the heroine at the age of the story. And then five minutes after that we finally meet the male lead, Jack Dawson. (No, the glimpse of his eyes as Old Rose flashbacks to the drawing of her nude sketch doesn't count.)

And in Amadeus, we don't actually meet Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart until around fifteen minutes in, after we've already become well acquainted with Antonio Salieri. (This might not be a good example, actually, since the main character of Amadeus is actually Salieri and not Mozart.)

Damn, this was a fascinating question on Prof. DeLong's part!

I should just rename this blog "The Quiz Place" and be done with it.

Yup, here's another of those damned quiz things I can't resist for the life of me. I've stolen this one from Erin.

10 years ago: Unmarried, working at Pizza Hut, no Internet access, no DVD player. But at least Braveheart and Rob Roy came out that year.

5 years ago: Minus a few months, we moved to Buffalo.

1 year ago: I was supremely worried about whether I could be a decent male role model for a baby boy. Little did I know that this was something I didn't have to worry about after all.

Yesterday: I consumed a mocha freeze with two shots of espresso at break time, a salad at lunch time, and a burger with steak fries for dinner. Watched an hour or so of The Two Towers.

Today: Got the hair trimmed (don't worry, just an inch or so to tidy up the ends and shave the back of the neck); went to Target to get a new memory card for the digital camera (128 MB, should hold 100 or so photos); grocery shopping later (very small run this week, since we'll be gone after Tuesday); a load or two of laundry; hopefully kicking The Daughter outside; watching something tonight on TV; starting a new story; choosing books and CDs for the trip.

Tomorrow: Going to church (outdoor services during July); more laundry; reading the paper; packing. Starting a new temp assignment.

5 snacks I enjoy: Combos. (Thanks for mentioning these, Erin -- now I gotta buy some today.) Red licorice. Zapp's potato chips. Fruit: apples, nectarines, white peaches. Those bulk trail-mixes with M&Ms, peanuts, raisins, chocolate chips and dried fruit.

5 bands that I know the lyrics of MOST of their songs: None that I know that well, sadly, but I'll name Van Halen, Pink Floyd, Zepellin, Elton John (I know, not a band) and Kilbrannan (my favorite local act; I gotta catch 'em live one of these years).

5 things I would do with $100,000,000: (Note to self: This reminds me of an idea for a post I've been knocking around for a while.) Eliminate debt. Buy a home on some land in the Southtowns. Put a chunk away for retirement. Put a chunk away for The Daughter's college education. Secure the best therapy for Little Quinn that $50,000,000 can buy. Blow the rest on chicks and beer and DVDs and stuff.

5 locations I’d like to run away to: I can't honestly answer this one, because where I'd want to run would be a function of where certain people were.

5 bad habits I have: Eating too damn much. Not writing enough fiction. Looking at my damn SiteMeter. Using "damn" in every sentence. Overcooking my red meat (but this one will right itself as I get practiced again).

5 things I like doing: Buying and reading books. Buying and watching DVDs. Buying and listening to CDs. Eating. Walking.

5 things I would never wear: Tank tops. Basketball jerseys. Those "low-riding" jeans. Baseball caps (unless required by work). Contact lenses.

5 TV shows I like: Scrubs, The West Wing (Say, didn't anyone notice how Season Six ends with the Democrats nominating a guy with a history of serious heart trouble for Vice President? Like that would ever happen!), CSI (the original's my favorite, although I like the others), American Idol (sue me), The Apprentice (ditto).

5 movies I like: Staying away from the obvious ones: Breakfast at Tiffany's, Captain Blood, The Last of the Mohicans, Princess Mononoke, Schindler's List (it bugs me how Saving Private Ryan, a vastly inferior film, has overshadowed Schindler's List in popular opinion).

5 famous people I’d like to meet: Limiting myself to just the living ones: George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Howard Shore, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Bill Clinton.

5 biggest joys at the moment: Sigh...a well-shaped tune, a well-told story, the friend who listens, the friend who talks (sometimes they're even the same people), my workplace.

5 favorite toys: The computer, the digital camera, the CD player(s), the DVD player (although soon to be replaced), and my pens.

That's it. No tagging, just grab-and-go if you're so inclined.

(EDIT: Link fixed. Whoops.)

The happy band of brothers and sisters

Taking stock of a few British bloggers: Jessica Duchen and Dave Thomas are OK, although Dave is right angry now. Warren Ellis was not in London today, but Michael Brooke was (he's fine, and he was just blocks away from one of the attacks).

As of this writing, The Gray Monk hasn't posted anything about today's attacks, and neither has Charles Stross (who lives in Edinburgh, but for all I know might have traveled to London this weekend). Jostein is Norwegian, but his girlfriend is British, so I'm hoping she's OK. (Didn't she used to have an LJ of her own? I didn't see any links in his recent comments threads.)

If I missed anyone, let me know. I think I got all of the British bloggers on my blogroll.

UPDATE: I missed Helen Radice, who was not in London at the time. Also, The Gray Monk finally posts, with news that his childred are all right and with deep, understandable anger. M. Smith of CultureSpace weighs in today, although I'm not sure if Smith is British or not (although Smith refers to living in London in 1997).

What's he that wishes so?

Al-Qaeda has apparently struck again, this time in London. I'm not exactly sure what they hoped to accomplish, but something makes me thing it's not going to work.

What makes me think that? Well, I know that terrorism is frightening and all that, but I also know that the British have been on the receiving end of two particular speeches that have me thinking that Al-Qaeda's choice of targets might have been miscalculated.

The first speech goes like this:

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

--King Henry V addressing the English troops at Agincourt, France, from King Henry V by William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene III.

And the second goes like this:

On Friday evening last I received from His Majesty the mission to form a new administration. It was the evident will of Parliament and the nation that this should be conceived on the broadest possible basis and that it should include all parties. I have already completed the most important part of this task.

A war cabinet has been formed of five members, representing, with the Labour, Opposition, and Liberals, the unity of the nation. It was necessary that this should be done in one single day on account of the extreme urgency and rigor of events. Other key positions were filled yesterday. I am submitting a further list to the king tonight. I hope to complete the appointment of principal ministers during tomorrow.

The appointment of other ministers usually takes a little longer. I trust when Parliament meets again this part of my task will be completed and that the administration will be complete in all respects. I considered it in the public interest to suggest to the Speaker that the House should be summoned today. At the end of today's proceedings, the adjournment of the House will be proposed until May 21 with provision for earlier meeting if need be. Business for that will be notified to MPs at the earliest opportunity.

I now invite the House by a resolution to record its approval of the steps taken and declare its confidence in the new government.

The resolution:

"That this House welcomes the formation of a government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion."

To form an administration of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself. But we are in the preliminary phase of one of the greatest battles in history. We are in action at many other points-in Norway and in Holland-and we have to be prepared in the Mediterranean. The air battle is continuing, and many preparations have to be made here at home.

In this crisis I think I may be pardoned if 1 do not address the House at any length today, and I hope that any of my friends and colleagues or former colleagues who are affected by the political reconstruction will make all allowances for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.

I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.

You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward toward his goal.

I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, "Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."

Winston Churchill - May 13, 1940

Now, I don't speak Arabic, so maybe Osama Bin Laden's speeches lose a lot in translation, but from what I've heard, he's got nothing on these fellows. It will take more than your cowardly car-bombs and your appeals to your God to win this, Mr. Bin Laden. What it will take to win is precisely what you don't have. One day you will learn that.

In the meantime, I express my deepest sorrows and sympathies to the people of Great Britain for what they have suffered this day.

(Links: Henry V, Churchill.)

"Technically speaking, the procedure IS brain damage."

That's one of the most chilling lines I've heard in a movie in a long time, and what makes it chilling is the way it's stated totally matter-of-factly. It's a line from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I watched two nights ago. I found the film brilliant and moving and touching, and its storytelling style -- with avant-garde effects, scene transitions that you don't see coming (and that blur the very idea of "scenes" to begin with), and a circular plot that tells its story completely out of linear fashion -- was riveting. It's really a good movie, and if you're looking for something offbeat, I heartily recommend it.

(The plot, for those unfamiliar with the film, posits a guy named Joel (Jim Carrey) who discovers that his lover, Clementine (Kate Winslett), has undergone a medical procedure to have her memories of him wiped from her brain. So he decides to do the same thing, but then has misgivings and tries to evade the procedure inside his own brain even as the procedure begins.)

I was non-plused by the apparent marketing scheme for the film, as evidenced by the DVD packaging that refers to Eternal Sunshine... as a "romantic comedy". It's an incredibly romantic film, but not in the usual sense of "boy meets girl"; it's much more a meditation on love than a story about love. And there are some very funny parts, but for viewers who think of films like Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally..., or Love, Actually when they think of romantic comedies, Eternal Sunshine... will likely have them wondering where the romance and the laughs are. Both are there, but not in the obvious places; Eternal Sunshine... makes you work for them.

But it's really rewarding if you do.

Oh, what the hey....

And here's another quiz-meme thing, this time stolen from Julia. Hooray!

1. Using your Current Initials, choose a different name for yourself:

King Constantine the Second

2. If you were born outside of your era, when would you want to be born?

The 1940s in New York City.

3. If you ran a store, what would you sell/have?

Books and music. It would be a place with high shelves, ladders on rails, handwritten signage alerting customers to good reads, used books in the cellar, plants in the window, a front door that bangs when it's opened and has a bell hanging from the knob. And a big gray cat that's allowed to go anywhere it wants in the store.

4. What part in a movie would you love to play?

Depending on the manner of my demise, I'd like to be a red-shirted person in a Star Trek landing party.

5. In your opinion, why do people suck?

Because they like lollipops. (Yeah, I could take this one seriously, but what's the point?)

6. If you had your own state, what would you put on your new quarter?

George Lucas.

7. What's the oldest article of clothing you own?

I own a couple of pairs of "vintage" overalls that I bought off eBay. I'm not sure how old they are, specifically.

8.What piece of furniture have you replaced the most?

Looking around, I'm surprised to see that we've never replaced any of our furniture. God, this stuff is old.

9. What instrument do you wish you could be more than great at?

The trumpet. (I was pretty good, back in the day.) Or, if you consider the orchestra itself to be an instrument (with the conductor as its performer), I'd take that one.

I'd also love to be able to play a few Celtic instruments -- Uilleann pipes or a bodhran, maybe.

10. Record, Tape or CD?

CD. But I do miss the 144 square inches of cover art that records had.

11. What do you think would be the best concert ever?

This one, which I have to miss to go see my sister-in-law get married. Family!

12. What is the best part of your favorite movie?

The part where the hero does that thing that's so incredibly cool. It's either when Luke blows up the Death Star or when Rick lets Ilsa go.

13. What do you think is the most over-rated candy ever?

Sponge candy. It's inexplicably beloved in these parts; I find it nasty beyond belief.

14. If you were writing out your will, who would you give your CD collection to?

The Daughter. Or the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. But probably The Daughter.

15. If you could only debate two topics the rest of your life, what would they be?

The Star Wars prequels and whether film music is real music or not. (It is.)

16. Out of your friends, who would you say you are most jealous of, artistically?

Not really sure. The Indestructible Mr. Jones, maybe -- he's an awfully talented writer, but he writes less than I do these days.

17. Most jealous of....intellectually?

Well, Mr. Jones is pretty damned smart, but he and I are of opposite political stripes, so I'm not sure how that translates. Dunno, really.

18.What do you collect?

Books, CDs, movies, fountain pens.

19. What is broken that you have, that you wish was fixed?

The air conditioning in my car. Also, the DVD player is getting fritzy these days (but replacing that won't be a big deal, since they're so cheap now) and my computer's monitor is also getting fritzy (replacing that one will be a pain in the ass).

20. What do you do when you're home, sick?

If I'm at work, I wander around in a stupor and look for sympathy. If I'm at home, I sit in my chair and look for sympathy.

21. Story behind your username?

I've posted about this before, but I'm not going to search out the post just now. "Jaquandor" is the name of a minor character in the obscure 1980s comic book Six From Sirius, from which I stole all manner of names for my big Star Wars fanfic project that I wrote at the time.

22. Current Favorite Article of Clothing?

Is it just me, or does this question or some variant thereof come up in an awful lot of these blog-quizzes? Are clothes that interesting? Anyway, see the photos in the sidebar and this post, if it's not immediately obvious. (Except that the question is "Current favorite", and it's too warm these days for overalls, so now it's Bermuda shorts and t-shirts every day.)

23. Line from the last thing you wrote for someone?

Hmmm, what does "wrote for someone" mean? Here's a line of the last story I wrote, from a few months ago:

"But you are just one mermaid, and I am just one girl, and the Sea is so very wide."

24. A famous person you have met?

Former Buffalo Philharmonic music director Semyon Bychkov.

25. Favorite way to waste time?

Exercising my complete lack of self-control when it comes to answering blog-quizzes.

This appears to be a "non-tagging" quiz, so go ahead and do it if you feel like it. Or not.

Me! Me me me me ME! Me! Oh, and ME!

I saw this little meme-thing over at Quirky Chick, and I couldn't resist although I may well wish I had later on. Fill in the blanks, in comments. And be nice. (Yeah, right. At the very least, keep it clean!)

I ____ Jaquandor.
Jaquandor is ____.
Jaquandor thinks a lot about _______.
When I think of _________, I think of Jaquandor.
If I were alone in a room with Jaquandor, I would _______.
I think Jaquandor should _____.
Jaquandor needs ______.
I want to ____________ Jaquandor.
If I could describe Jaquandor in a word: _______.

Hurg.

A few days ago I somehow managed to totally gum up Firefox -- I mean, the thing stopped working entirely. After a restart, I discovered that my bookmarks had all been scorched and my home page reset to the default Firefox home page. I don't recall what site I was viewing exactly when this transpired, but I then proceeded to upgrade my Firefox to the most recent version.

So far so good, except I'm rebuilding my bookmarks again, which included a number of blogs that I was planning to link in the near future and now I don't remember which ones they were, so that irritates me. I'm also slightly annoyed that my extensions are gone, although I can get those back as soon as I stop being too lazy to go get them again. My favorite extension, by the way, turns out to be not BugMeNot! but the one that instantly copies selected text to the clipboard, which makes capturing excerpts for the blog incredibly easy. Now I'm having to remind myself anew to hit Ctrl-C after I select my text. And dammit, that's just too inconvenient.

I know. Boo-hoo. Bite me.

Blogging to work, working to blog....

Darth Swank emerged yesterday from a long posting lull to write some thoughts about the growing trend of people being fired from their jobs because they blogged about them:

Actually, I don't think the situation is quite as grey as Whiteny would have us believe. Many companies have policies about Internet use -- although "no personal use" policies are probably far from universally enforced -- but about company matters is farily obviously a no-no.

He mentions me as a person who occasionally blogs about work, but he notes a couple of things about the way I do it, which bear further comment.

First, I never mention my company by name. This is not so much an effort to conceal a secret (really, it doesn't take much of an investigation to figure it out), but a personal policy of mine because I do not want anything I write here to be interpreted as any kind of statement by "an employee of Company X", as opposed to a statement by me. That's why I always refer to The Store and never to the company name.

Second, I never mention coworkers by name, pretty much for the reasons you'd expect. My coworkers are private people to the same degree that I am a private person, and if they want to be named online, it's not really my place to do it for them. Now, if any of my coworkers had blogs, I might link them if they interested me and so on, but I doubt I'd explicitly identify them as coworkers unless they agreed I could, and even then I might not do so. (I did slip once and mention a coworker by name in this space, but I redacted that part of that particular post a day or two later when I gave the matter more thought. It wasn't a bad mention, at all; in fact, it was a post about names and what they mean, and just a pure coincidence that I had a coworker with a particular name, but I wasn't comfortable even doing that much by way of mentioning his or her name. So that graf was cut.)

Third, I try to restrict my postings about what happens at work to things that could occur in any such business (i.e., not just at my particular Store but any such large retail establishment) and to those such things that I find amusing or illustrative in some way of more general habits of people. I never post about things that anger or frustrate me at work, and I never post about the internal goings-on with my company.

Fourth: I will not post anything that makes my company look bad. Now, I'll be perfectly frank here and state that in my estimation I've never had any cause to even consider doing so, but I will not allow that to happen in any event.

Now, these policies -- especially the third one -- might seem to have some wiggle room, so I basically trust my gut with it all.

On a somewhat related note, Atrios took a bit of time between open threads (maybe he just ought to open up a message board or some such thing) to offer this advice:

I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and I have some advice for new bloggers: do it anonymously, at first at least.

That's OK advice, but I had to laugh at this bit:

If you write something on the internet, it's public. A big blog links to it, suddenly you go from 50 hits per day to 5000 in one day. 5 hours later, CNN puts it on their "inside the blogs" segment, and suddenly you've gone national to a non-blog reading audience who are perhaps unaware of conventions of blogging.

Yeah, that happens all the time. Three and a half years and I've never been linked by Atrios (although a couple of months ago I was linked by a post on another blog that was linked by Atrios), not even when I sent him a tip on a very close Congressional race up here in Western New York that resulted in a Republican seat going Democratic. And I did exactly what Atrios suggests: I was strictly pseudonymous when I launched Byzantium's Shores, and only gradually abandoned that approach as it became more and more of a pain to maintain the facade of pseudonymity.

Yes, you might get linked by a big blog before you're ready for prime time. But the much greater likelihood -- vastly greater, I'd say -- is that you'll blog in obscurity for a very long time, even if you do it under your real name and blog about really unsavory stuff.

Ooooh, Apu...time has ravaged your once-youthful looks!

Sorry that the blog has gone silent the last few days, but I have worked some unusually early shifts this week at The Store (early for me, anyway) because the overnight Floor Crew has needed a bit of help due to vacations and the like. Thus, by the time I've been getting home, my level of enthusiasm for posting insightful Meditations on Nearly Anything has been nearly nil. But today was the last of the hyper-early days, and I should get back into some sort of groove.

Oh yeah, and remember that I'll be gone for a week starting next Wednesday. Betrayer most foul!

Shoulder-high we bring you home....

One facet of working at a large operation like a grocery store that is open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-three days a year, that I've only occasionally noticed is that there are large numbers of my fellow employees whom I not only do not know by name, but nor even by sight. My day is always over by three in the afternoon, and there are quite a few employees who never come in earlier than that. They're not just faces in a crowd, or names I occasionally hear bandied about; they're complete strangers of whose existence I am entirely unaware -- in my own workplace.

Today I learned the name of one of these coworkers, on the occasion of his death. He was eighteen years old and worked in our parking lot, pushing carts and helping customers load their groceries. He died in a skateboarding mishap. His mother, alas, is also one of my coworkers, one whom I do know although not well. A very nice lady, seemingly well-liked by those with whom she works closest. One of too many mothers who don't remotely deserve to see their sons go before them, and who doesn't remotely deserve to have to spend the rest of her days with the Fourth of July being a painful reminder of what once was.

There have been a lot of sad events at The Store over the last year or more. I suppose this is inevitable when you have close to five hundred people working together in a single business, but still, it sometimes seems -- as it did today -- that every time we get done dealing with the last cause for grief, we're all suddenly required to suit up for the next one.

But still, we do it anyway, because we have no choice, and it's the only way to show our humanity in moments of sadness like this. I wish it weren't the case that the two things that bring out the best in humans seem to be Death and Love, but that's as impossible a wish as commanding the sun not to rise.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

-- A. E. Housman

I don't know if my fallen co-worker was an athlete, but he did die young, and he shouldn't have.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I just plain ran out of time yesterday for this, so here's something weird and one day late: Random Facts about Vin Diesel.

Bring on the empty chapters!

Errrr...well, Chapter Thirteen of The Promised King is now up, in which we break away from the fire into which our heroes had fallen at the end of Chapter Twelve (and that after narrowly escaping the frying pan), to catch up on the doings of some of the supporting players in the story, some of whom are nefarious players indeed.

Also note that since the normal date on which I'd post Chapter Fourteen, July 17, is a day when I will be away from the computer due to the week-long cross-country excursion I will be commencing in ten days or so, I will be posting Chapter Fourteen in just one week's time. So we shall have the unusual pleasure of two chapters in two weeks, and really, isn't that the best deal to be found in Blogistan? I think so!

(As always, I am keeping this post at top, so scroll down for more content as I post it through Sunday and likely Monday morning and afternoon.)

Sentential Links #8

Here we go with this week's installment of Good Sentences from Better Posts. Click and read, because if you don't, the puppy gets it. (Yeah, there's a puppy. There's always a puppy. No, I'm not gonna show you pictures. It's a real puppy.)

:: I always know if a performer is an artist or not by their clarity: not articulation or projection or other technical details, but by how, if an artist, every note makes sense, tells a story.

:: What's really objectionable, though, is the attempt to manufacture a chummy, affectionate bond between fans and players that should spring up organically or, if it doesn't, be left alone. (What I'm wondering is, do the Sox's TV guys still shout after every Sox homerun, "You can put it abooaarrdd, YES!"?)

:: Oh, and throw in Braveheart while you're at it. Willfully inaccurate, horribly overwrought, ridiculously racist AND crap. (Racist? I can see homophobic, but where's the racist stuff?)

:: Voting ends on Monday for the "Hottest U.S. Senator" contest. (Oh, my, no. No, no, no, no, no. Uh-uh. No. And what's with the look in Senator Murkowski's eyes? She looks like she's about to fire blast beams of hot death from her retinae. And seriously, has any human being ever managed to look as embalmed as Robert Byrd has for, what, fifteen years?)

:: I'm going to throw up.. (Me too. My stuff still isn't published, so harumph. But congrats, anyway!)

:: The harmful novels are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers’ tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without. (And he goes and gives a list of the most harmful novels, of one of which he intones: "This one took me only 45 minutes to read, and half a second to fling across the room." Oy! Via.)

:: Jungr's main point is that because of the emphasis on youthfulness and mostly because record companies don't want to invest in singers and let them develop their own unique voice over time like they used to do, there is no sex appeal and no experience in people's voices.

:: 54 people came in search of "japanese vagina." (Confucius say: "He who writes about the weird, will gather before him those who Google about the weird.")

:: I'll give you just a couple of "originalism's" fatal flaws.

:: A newspaper from 1814 is like a time machine. I jump in and I'm walking the streets of Manhattan, looking at shops, listening to people talk.

Enough for now. More next week. None the week after that, as I'll be off. And so it goes.

Improving the Aerial Game, IV

Here we conclude our four-week tour of the stadiums of the National Football League, as revealed to us by Google Maps. This week's NFL venues hail from the two West divisions, and are listed again in order of last year's final standings.

AFC WEST

QualComm Stadium (San Diego Chargers)
INVESCO Field at Mile High (Denver Broncos)
Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City Chiefs)
McAfee Coliseum (Oakland Raiders)

NFC WEST

QWest Field (Seattle Seahawks)
Edward Jones Stadium (St. Louis Rams)
Sun Devil Stadium (Arizona Cardinals)
Monster Park (San Francisco 49ers)

I left the Qualcomm Stadium image zoomed out one setting to show the immensity of that stadium's parking lot. Geez, that's a lot of parking.

INVESCO Field's exterior landscaping, probably for parking (I guess), is still under construction here, but the stadium itself seems to be mint-from-the-box new. You can make out the Broncos logo on the north side of the upper deck. That appears to be one tall stadium.

Arrowhead Stadium is nothing spectacular, so I left the zoom out one setting again so as to depict the next-door Kaufmann Stadium, where the Royals play baseball. Also note the titanic parking lot and the fact that snow is still present against some of the curbs. I'd guess this photo was taken in spring before the thaw had become complete.

Also zoom in on Oakland's McAfee Coliseum (formerly Oakland-Alameda Coliseum), which also hosts the home games of the Oakland Athletics. Here the stadium is decked out for baseball. The stadium was originally in a 'C' shape, with an open outfield, but when the Raiders returned to Oakland after their LA exile, Al Davis insisted that more seating be built. Hence the ugly barn-jobbed seating across the outfield that looks like the world's largest bleacher (which is what it probably is). Also note, since the stadium is reflectant of baseball and not football at the time the photo is taken, just how massive that park's foul territory is.

Seattle's QWest Field looks like it was shoehorned into a warehouse district. Is it built on the KingDome's old site? Anyone know?

The Edward Jones Dome was formerly called the TransWorld Dome; hence the TWA logo visible on its domed roof here. I wonder if that logo is still there? Anyway, this is the house that Kurt Warner built and then self-destructed within.

Sun Devil Stadium is due to be replaced in the next couple of years, so the eternally hapless Cardinals can go be hapless in a spanking-new park. Those lucky duckies! This stadium has seen three, count 'em, three meaningful games in the last ten years. It hosted Super Bowl XXX (Dallas 27, Pittsburgh 17); the Cards managed to stun the Vikings here a year ago to keep them out of the playoffs and put the Packers in; and of course, this stadium saw that spectacular Monday Night Football game in which receiver Rod Tidwell had the game of his life and caught the winning score with seconds left (and was seemingly badly injured before he came to, recovered his feet, and danced the night away). Of course, this last one was fictional and happened in the movie Jerry McGuire, but you can't take that away from Sun Devil Stadium.

And finally there is Monster Park, formerly 3Com Park, formerly Candlestick Park. I always like the way this stadium looks for football, but I also always thought it looked appallingly bad for baseball. Thank God the Giants got a new park, right on the water so their steroid-enhanced slugger could hit it to the sea-kayakers, eh? By the way, this appears to be the only GoogleMaps satellite image of an NFL stadium that was actually taken while a game was in progress. Look at the packed parking lot, including all the busses -- many in a giant cluster, and many more in a long line snaking all the way up the drive to the stadium. Cool.

BONUS ITEM: If you've ever wondered just how far apart the two NFL stadiums in the San Francisco Bay Area are, well, never fear: here's how the region shapes up. I've captured the tightest zoom I could in GoogleMaps that still included both Monster Park and McAfee Coliseum, and as a bonus you can see the Bay Bridge and, for you geeks out there, the Alameda Naval Station, where in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Commander Chekov and Lieutenant Uhura went in search of "nuclear wessels". (Because they needed to capture high-energy photons from a nuclear reactor so they could inject those photons into the dilithium crystal chamber on their stolen Klingon ship, thus triggering the decaying dilithium crystals to reform. Duh!)

McAfee Coliseum here is directly underneath the 'C' in the word 'Coliseum'. It's harder to spot outright than Monster Park, which is in a pretty distinctive spot on the SF peninsula.

Don't take drugs!

I watched Untitled last night. That's the name bestowed upon the Director's Cut of Almost Famous, a movie that I loved when I watched it a year and a half ago. I'm not sure why the Director's Cut is called Untitled, although I suspect it has to do with the film's subject matter of the rock-and-roll world of the 1970s, when true rock fans traded in bootleg albums by their favorite bands. Many of these boots have seen "official" release in the CD era, but back then, rock fans would (or so I'm told) speak in a kind of code while perusing each others' record collections: "Whoa, you've got the Iggy Pop live album from Denver in '69! Got any idea how long I've been searching for that album?" And so on.

(I made that example up, by the way, so if you know for a fact that Iggy Pop couldn't possibly have played Denver in '69, deal with it, OK?)

Untitled adds quite a bit of material to a film that was already on the long side, but I didn't mind; this is one of those films that immerses you in a world that you either never knew existed or if you did know it existed you either had no way of entering that world or (like me) it didn't matter because that world was gone by the time you were old enough to know about it anyway. Since I only saw the original release once, I'm not entirely sure what material was new for the Untitled DVD release, but there was quite a bit of stuff at the beginning with young William Miller (well, even younger William Miller, since he's only 15 for most of the film) that I don't remember, as well as an absolutely hilarious scene in which Stillwater (the film's rock band) is doing a radio interview with a stoner radio host who falls asleep in mid-sentence. As for that, I'm not sure what else is new.

Here's some of what I posted when I first saw Almost Famous, in November of 2003:

This is a film that explores the lifestyle of a touring rock band that hasn't quite yet made it, and its effect on a young man just entering this world. With the film's endless bus rides, the strange groupies who make this band the center of their existence, the odd doings at various concert venues, and the occasional forays into sex and "what it all means", I suddenly realized after watching it that Almost Famous is actually Bull Durham, but about minor-league rock-and-roll instead of minor-league baseball. Cameron Crowe (who wrote and directed) brings the same sense of affection for the subject matter to Almost Famous that Ron Shelton did to Bull Durham, with much of the same effect: one realizes, watching this film, that there are entire lives being lived in the rock music world that only once in a while, and very briefly, come into contact with the rarefied air of the Led Zeppelin's and the Rolling Stones of the world.

The story is inspired by Cameron Crowe's own life. A 15-year old boy named William Miller somehow gets Rolling Stone Magazine to give him an assignment: get an interview with up-and-coming rock band "Stillwater". Through a long line of delays and stalling efforts, though, William ends up actually joining the band on its tour through the United States, during which he often calls his mother to tell her he's OK. (She is very worried about him; she completely distrusts the rock music world and at every interaction tells her son, "Don't take drugs". Good detail there: a lesser writer would have used the more commonly-known construction "Don't do drugs".) And along the way, William falls in love with a groupie who goes by the name Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson, who may be the most luminous person on earth today), who is already in love with Russell (Billy Crudup), the band's guitarist, who is in turn a guy whose heart is in the right place but nevertheless continually blunders and mistreats people.

Almost Famous is a virtual study in naivete. William is naive about pretty much everything; Penny Lane carefully constructs an air of wisdom about her, but it is eventually exposed as pure sham; William's mother is naive in her exclusively-negative view of the rock world; Russell is naive about pretty much all of his interactions with others; et cetera. The movie conveys a world in which everybody is wise about some things and totally clueless about others, and the only real difference is in the way some people's areas of cluelessness are more disastrous than others.

I've read a few reviews of Almost Famous since I watched it, and I've read some that take the view that Crowe's depiction of the rock world is too positive, and that the film is lacking in "edge". I don't know about that -- I can sort of see their point, but I suspect that Crowe adopted this tone purposely, because he's a guy who has made it big from pretty much the beginnings that we see for William. I just don't think that extra "bitterness" would help this movie; in fact, it would add a certain false note, a kind of "If I knew then what I know now" quality that's not always appropriate, because not every lesson needs to be learned in the manner that one learns not to touch a hot stove.

Now I just have to track down a copy of This is Spinal Tap. I'll bet that film, plus this one, would make a wonderful double feature.

Here's a GIANT case of the Willies

Remember a couple of months ago, when it turned out that a guy who'd been murdered in his home in New York City (at least I think it was NYC) posted an entry to his LiveJournal -- his last entry ever, it turned out -- about the creepy guy in his apartment who wouldn't leave (who turned out to be the murderer)? This blog is creepier.

According to posters on this MeFi thread, the blog was written by a registered sex offender who has now been arrested in conjunction with two missing children in Idaho, one of whom was just found alive today.

To get a real sense of how creepy this whole thing is, peruse the comments thread to the last post written, and enjoy your self-guided tour of the worst impulses inherent to our species.

I feel the need to listen to some Mozart right now, for its cleansing purposes.

(EDIT: This post's timestamp changed so it resides with Sunday's posts. It was originally posted on Saturday, July 2.)

Tagged again, on a Friday night

The Supreme Overlord of All Things Mannion has tagged me with a blog-meme, and since I can't resist the siren-call of these things, here goes.

Question number 1: What are three of the stupidest things you've done in your life.

Hoo-boy. Leading off with a guided tour of instances when I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque? What a harsh meme this is!

1. Back in fall of 2000, we moved from the Southern Tier to Buffalo so The Wife could start a new job and so I could look for one. One day I applied at The Store (a different location from the one I work in now) and at a pharmaceutical telesales company. The telesales company called me and set up an interview, which I aced; then they offered me the job. I wasn't terribly excited about the job, but I needed one and I was enticed after working six years in the restaurant business at the prospect of a day job at a desk.

One day after I accepted the telesales position, The Store called to offer an interview. Since I'd already accepted a job and since it paid one dollar more an hour, I never returned their call.

Bottom line: I sucked at the telesales job and I hated the telesales job (although I did work with some very nice people there), and I eventually got canned from the telesales job in a combination of factors involving their downsizing a few operations and my sucking at their job. Two months later, The Wife's company offered her the promotion that sparked our six-month Syracuse adventure, so I would have quit the telesales job anyway; but it would have been better if I'd already been working at The Store because then I would have been able to transfer to one of The Store's Syracuse locations. As it was, another eighteen months or so would elapse before I would finally be hired at The Store, in which time I would apply there no fewer than five times.

(And one of my current co-workers, who has become one of the dearest friends I have ever had, was working at that other location of The Store at the time that I ignored their call for an interview. So there's a person who could have been enriching my life over three years before I actually met her. Ugh.)

2. More prosaic, this one: While I was in college, my school replaced its thirty-year old tiny music building and even tinier art-department building with a beautiful Fine Arts Center befitting the growth of both departments. That new building, which took shape over my sophomore year, provided lots of amusement in its construction phase, because when you're a college student and you're bored and you've had a few drinks, a nearby construction site might as well be the island where Lorelei and the sirens live.

(My friend Chris probably knows where this is going, since he was there.)

Anyway, at one point during the construction, there was a large section of the first floor which had not yet been finished, beneath which the cavernous space of the basement opened up. Spanning one part of that big hole that was the future basement was a big-ass steel beam that extended outward probably two hundred feet or so, and then hung a right-angle to the still-unfinished recital hall. This beam stood probably fifteen feet or so above the basement floor (I don't recall if the floor had been poured at that point, or if it was dirt.) I took it into my head to walk this beam, since it was quite easily walked, being six-inches or so wide.

Well, this started to feel like a bad idea about fifty feet out, and it became a dead-certain bad idea at the halfway point. I have decent balance, but if memory serves, while I wasn't actually drunk I wasn't entirely sober, either. The hardest part was making the jump from the beam to the safety of the recital hall, which was itself at an awkward angle. And through it all, Chris is making the most of an opportunity to laugh at me doing something dumb. Harumph.

3. Five or six years ago I allowed my weight to balloon to unhealthy proportions, which required lots of effort to pare back down. I'm still overweight (and my current habits, while not as disastrous as the ones that I had back then, still need some taming), but not nearly as bad as back then.

Question number 2: At the current moment, who has the most influence on your life?

No contest. It's Little Quinn. (Newer readers, see the links in the sidebar under "Notable Dispatches" for what life with Little Quinn has been like so far.) What sometimes scares me is that I still can't always tell whether his influence has been, overall, good or bad.

Question number 3: If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to only pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

I generally don't like questions like this, because while I'm sure the five people I'd pick are people I personally would like to talk to, I'm not entirely sure they'd make an interesting dinner party together. Unless we're talking five separate dinners in which I get to eat with these folks alone. But:

1. Jesus of Nazareth, but only if I can get his thoughts on how Christianity today reflects what he actually taught. I have a feeling he'd have some frank things to say on the subject.

2. Hector Berlioz. By all accounts, Berlioz was quite the wit and was a keen conversationalist, and his temperament was pretty close to mine, from what I've read over the years that I've adored his music. Plus, I'd love to be able to play for him one of my recordings of the complete Les Troyens, because Berlioz himself never heard his masterpiece performed in its entirety.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien. In truth, I'd probably just cower at his feet and shout "I'm not worthy!" over and over again, which I'm pretty sure would creep Tolkien out, but still, hearing thoughts on the formation of Middle Earth from his own lips would, I suspect, be absolutely fascinating.

4. Genghis Khan. But only if he'd promise to not kill me and set my town on fire. (Seriously. Here's a historical figure who might have changed the course of Western civilization immeasurably had factors not dictated that his conquests stop where they did.)

5. Michael Curtiz. This man directed some of my favorite movies ever, and he was hilariously bad at speaking English. When he finally won an Oscar after being nominated many times, he said, "Always a bridesmaid, never a mother." And during filming of Casablanca, he turned to a stagehand and demanded that the set include a poodle. So when the stagehand dutifully fetched a poodle, Curtiz said, "What do I want with a dog? I said a poodle of water!" Or, when on another set he needed some riderless horses to enter the frame, he directed: "Bring on the empty horses!" (David Niven loved that one so much that he used it as a title for a memoir of his. And speaking of David Niven, I bet he'd be fun to eat with.)

Question number 4: If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

You mean, I can't wish myself Spiderman's powers or for a working lightsaber or anything like that? Where's the fun in that?!

1. OK, this one kind of hurts to admit, but I'd wish for Steven Spielberg to direct The Phantom Menace, and I'd have the script reworked by Frank Darabont before filming. I wouldn't make any changes at all to the story itself, or to the production design at all, but even I must admit that this film's dialogue is the most clunky of all the Star Wars films, and since so much in the film depends on the kid (whose performance I've always liked), I'd put this one in the hands of Spielberg, who has never failed to get a good performance out of any kid with whom he's worked.

2. I'd wish for the University at Buffalo's Amherst campus to be relocated to Buffalo's East Side.

3. I'd roll back the NFL clock to the Bills' Super Bowl years, but I'd have Wade Philips as the defensive coordinator. I've always felt that the "Bend but don't break", less-than-physical style of Walt Corey's defenses during those years was the real main culprit in the team's loss of four consecutive Super Bowls. Consider: in two of the four years the Bills went to the Super Bowl, they fielded the NFL's second-to-last ranked defensive unit, and this despite the presence of players like Bruce Smith, Cornelius Bennett, and Darryl Talley. A more physical unit would have beaten the Giants and probably contained the Cowboys. (I do admit that the Bills had no chance whatsoever against the Redskins, whose 1991 team is probably the best team I've ever watched. Man, they were good. They went 14-2, with one of those two losses being one of those meaningless regular season finales after they've sewn up home-field advantage, and their two losses were by a combined five points. That was an awesome friggin' football team.)

Question number 5: Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live a the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

Geez, now I gotta Buffalo-bash. Forgive me!

I regret that Buffalo has no real Chinatown, and thus no restaurant that serves dim sum in the real way of having the dishes wheeled around on carts. I also regret that Buffalo currently has no top-flight children's museum, like Rochester does.

Two things to avoid? Hmmmm. Well, I'd avoid the Walden Galleria mall, because malls these days have the same stores everywhere. I first realized this about ten years ago when The Wife and I (before she was The Wife) took a few days off to travel to Pittsburgh for a weekend, and we went to a mall there -- and found the exact same set of stores that we always saw at the Galleria. That was when I first started recognizing the homogenization of American retail.

I'd also avoid the Rath County Building, unless my guests are toting two dozen rotten eggs apiece. If that were the case, the Rath Building would be Stop Number One.

Question number 6: Name one event that has changed your life.

Well, childbirth and marriage are too obvious, aren't they? So, I suppose, would be seeing Star Wars for the first time.

At some point in the summer of 1993, I went to the library in the Southern Tier town where I lived and glanced through the new books. I saw a novel by an author with a French-sounding name, and I thought the cover was just beautiful: it had mountains and soldiers and a castle and a guy playing a harp and a woman with an owl sitting upon her shoulder. I checked the book out, read the first chapter, and then never finished it for some reason (I think a trip interrupted my reading). While I didn't get back to that particular book by that particular author for another year or two, a seed was planted. The book was A Song for Arbonne, and the author was Guy Gavriel Kay. (The cover in question can be viewed here.)

Later I read Tigana, and then The Fionavar Tapestry...and I've never missed a GGK book since. As far as I am concerned, he is supreme among living authors. Reading GGK, though, made me aware that fantasy can go beyond endless quests for magical talismans by plucky stableboys who turn out to be royal descendents.

Question number 7: Is not a question. It's a command. Tag five other people.

Gladly! It seems to me that a married couple answering the same set of questions might be cool, so Scott and Kim are hereby tagged. The Triple Pundit also seems a bit untagged lately, so I'm now un-untagging her. Since he'll probably answer the questions anyway, I might as well give John an official tag (even though he's taking a hiatus that one hopes will be short). And finally, since the Dead Parrots are always interesting, whichever one of them (or all of them!) wishes to take this one up is thusly Tag'd.

Whew.

Like the cycles of the Moon....

Hoo-boy. Anyone who peruses the FilmScoreMonthly message boards on a regular basis knows that every so often a bout of idolatry centered on composer Jerry Goldsmith erupts. It's almost always of one of two forms: generic griping that Goldsmith only won a single Oscar in his entire career (a legitimate beef, really, if one takes the Oscars at all seriously -- but then, Cary Grant never won one, and Ernie Banks never got to the World Series, and so on), or of the "Hey I just listened to [Goldsmith score for some film that nobody remembers outside of Goldsmith freaks], and it just proves how wonderful he was, Jerry we miss you!!!" variety. This wouldn't be worth commenting, really, except for the fact that the outbreak of the Goldsmith Cult almost always elicits response from its self-appointed high priest, the Objectivist Weirdo.

Here are some representative quotes from the current thread:

Something to re-emphasize on my part is that the "Best Score" category is inherently designed, logically, to honor the superlative dramatist--not the superlative composer as such, per se.

This is why Jerry rightfully said in 1983 that he had deserved to win nearly every Oscar race he'd ever lost; it's also why--conservatively speaking--he should have garnished at least a dozen statues for his mantle over the years.

After Jerry died last year, our own "Timmer" wrote the following at another music board: "Though Jerry Goldsmith was not my favourite...composer...no one before or since...better [wed] music to film!"

That, my friends, is the very least that rationally must be said of Jerry Goldsmith, and it is why his story is the greatest travesty in the history of the Academy Awards. [Emphasis in original]

Well...OK. That's just opinion, but OK.

Then someone says that Ennio Morricone's score to The Mission deserved its win over Goldsmith's score to Hoosiers. Now, you gotta understand, for reasons I've never entirely grasped Hoosiers is utterly beloved by Goldsmith fans. To me, it's nice, but it's not remotely as good as Goldsmith's work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Chinatown, Legend, or LA Confidential. But anyway, our Objectivist Hero responds thusly:

Hoosiers was [much] more dramatically effective and potent.

Why he puts "much" in brackets is beyond me. Again, a simple statement of opinion, but OK. (Except that, as we'll quickly discover, our Objectivist Hero doesn't believe this to be opinion.)

An interlocutor responds:

Errr...that would be a big "No" from me, Dan. I agree with you that JG wrote a slew of great scores, but SOMETIMES he did NOT write the best score of the year...

But it's your opinion, so I'll respect it.

Now, I've never been terribly excited by the work of Morricone, but I absolutely believe that The Mission is a better score than Hoosiers. The former has a far more interesting sound-world and its melodies go far beyond the latter's mere Americana. But anyway, our O.H. responds:

I agree that sometimes someone else wrote the best score of the year, as in--I'd contend--1975 or 1985 or 1994, for instance. [OK, I guess. -Ed.]

I'd also contend that it is not my opinion that Hoosiers was the best of the score nominees that year, but a matter of philosophically-demonstrable fact. It's simply inconceivable that The Mission is as communicatively pregnant and important as Hoosiers is. [Emphasis added. Here we go. -Ed.]

This assertion will certainly upset you, and although that's not my hope, it's not ultimately my concern for a number of reasons, either. As the old saying goes, opinions are like ass holes; if there's no quantifying the value of film scores, then there's really no point in analyzing them at all, much less bestowing them with awards. [He's off to the races now. -Ed.]

So someone else, who has a lot of experience in talking with O.H., interjects:

I often disagree with you, but have come to accept that doing so simply makes me wrong. That doesn't however stop me from having the stirrings of admiration for your single-mindedness.

I can't wait until someone invents a cure for the common cold or achieves world peace and then you somehow prove beyond all reasonable doubt that it was thanks to Jerry.

This post isn't meant to be provocative, and if anyone thinks it is, I can completely disprove it.

"Stirrings of admiration" for his single-mindedness? I've never found it anything other than supremely creepy. But to each his own, I suppose. The bit about world peace is pretty funny, because our O.H.'s history is precisely that: he elevates Jerry Goldsmith to demi-god status, at least in the realm of musical drama is concerned.

But here comes the really [unintentionally] funny response:

Actually, a way to achieve world peace has already been discovered, and it is thanks, not to Jerry, but to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, the United States' framers, and Ayn Rand, among others perhaps. [Holy Crap, what a grab-bag that is. Ayn Rand as the prophet of world peace. Yup. -Ed.]

Dan

P.S: Note that sarcasm is invalid as argument, and that it does not impress me in this context. [BURN! or maybe not. -Ed.]

P.P.S: Pursue your values; accept no contradictions. [For some reason he's always trotting these two admonitions out. They're basically some kind of Objectivist speak, and rarely have any bearing on anything at all.]

Now, if you're wondering what "communicatively pregnant" means above, it's really not important. It all goes back to our O.H.'s attempts to concoct a full-blown philosophical theory of film scoring, from a standpoint that is totally devoid of understanding of how music works. Pay it no mind. Just bask in the pomposity of our would-be modern day Aristotle.

Sharpen the swords! Make ready with the rhetoric!

Hoo boy. President Bush will now get to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. All that other stuff was just the rehearsals; now we got ourselves a show.