Passages

(This post updated Saturday morning. Photo added, and see below for additional linkage and comment.)

Hunter Kelly, the eight-year-old son of former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly, has died.

Hunter was diagnosed shortly after his birth with a very rare nervous system malady called Krabbe's Disease. The original prognosis was that Hunter would not live past his third birthday, but he survived to the age of eight before succumbing to respiratory failure. He lived to be with his father when Jim Kelly was inducted into both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and to the Bills' Wall of Fame.

Shortly after revealing the nature of his son's health problems, Jim and Jill Kelly formed a charity called Hunter's Hope, whose purpose is funding the continued research into cures for diseases like Krabbe's.

As the father of a child with profound health problems, I found the news of Hunter's death particularly painful. It's almost trite to note that parents aren't supposed to outlive their children, but even worse is to know just days, weeks or months into your child's life that you are almost certainly going to outlive them. Even as Jim and Jill Kelly battled for Hunter's life, and even as they saw him live day after day past the time when the original doctors thought he would be gone, they had to know that one day the battle would end as all such battles inevitably do.

Jim Kelly was a fighter on the football field and he's been a fighter off it. So too was his son. How sad that Hunter's one fight had a predetermined outcome.

"Every battle is won before it's ever fought," wrote Sun Tzu.

It isn't just about war.

UPDATE: The news of Hunter Kelly's death is, of course, all over the local news. Here is the Buffalo News article, which includes a sidebar with the official statement from the Kelly family. (As is the norm for the News's often-inept website, they present the Kelly statement as a .jpg image, and it's really hard to read at my monitor resolution. I'll keep looking for a linkable text of the statement.) Here, also, is the the official statement from the Buffalo Bills.

It may seem, to some, that the Buffalo area puts a little more stock in Jim Kelly than is really warranted for a football player. Maybe so, maybe not -- but Jim Kelly is generally beloved here as much as, say, Brett Favre is beloved in northern Wisconsin. For me, the glorious run of four straight Super Bowl appearances by the Bills coincided with my college years, and even though they lost each one of those games, watching the heroics of Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas and Bruce Smith and all the rest of them was for me a real connection to my home, 800 miles away. For four years, Jim Kelly was Buffalo to me. And in a way, he still is.

Five Reasons I'm a Geek

Following links in my referrals, and then following links from where those links led (whew!), I found this meme at Randy McDonald's LiveJournal. (Seems to be, by the way, a thoughtful right-of-center, SF-friendly journal.) It's just a list of reasons why I consider myself to be a Geek.

1. I can talk endlessly about Star Wars. This is, of course, of no surprise to anyone who knows me or reads this blog. I can seriously discuss just about any aspect of the Star Wars films. (Admittedly, my knowledge base ends where the "Expanded Universe" begins, since I've read little of that stuff beyond Timothy Zahn's terrific novels.)

2. I am a lover of film music. This seems to be an area reserved primarily for Geeks, I'm sad to say. Not only do I own more than 250 filmscores on CD, I can go so far as to sing more than twenty of the various motifs Howard Shore used in his Lord of the Rings scores.

3. I have spent time looking up specific phrases in Elvish. Granted, actually learning Elvish would carry a lot more water as far as Geek Street Cred is concerned, but many people think that Tolkien was geeky to begin with for creating actual languages. (As a corollary to this, I have used the fruits of some of my research in this area to create shirts that I wore to The Store during the Holidays. I'll post pictures sometime.)

4. I can list all of the James Bond films in their order of release, along with the names of the villains and the girls. In fact, I did this right here in this blog, way back in Year One. See the "James Bond Redux" series of articles in the sidebar, under "Notable Dispatches".

5. I started eating Cap'n Crunch after reading that scene in Cryptonomicon. Believe it or not, until that point I'd never tried Cap'n Crunch before. No, I don't know why. Now I love the stuff, but I only allow myself to indulge in a box of the Cap'n once or twice a year. (Probably because the box lasts about three days, or about 1.5 GGs, where one GG is the time it takes me to consume and entire box of Golden Grahams.)

Ewwwwwww!

Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Commander Riker is involved in some kind of "exchange program", and thus goes to live with the Klingons for a while? There's a scene where he learns that a particular Klingon culinary delicacy is best when served live. It's a plate of squirming...thingies.

Of course, you don't have to go to the Klingon homeworld to enjoy a plate of squirming tentacles:

In every scenario I played out in my imagination as far as eating this dish was concerned, I predicted nothing more than a brief slimy struggle then stillness — the last words of an insignificant creature low on the food chain. Silly me. I could not have underestimated my dinner more because once in my mouth, the tentacle went into attack mode and aggressively suctioned on to my teeth, tongue and bottom lip making it nearly impossible for me to manipulate my mouth in order to eat it.

And if reading this well-written post still doesn't give you the idea, watch this video!

Would I try this? I'm pretty adventurous, but no way. I'm with Woody Allen, who said of oysters words that can be likewise applied to octopus tentacles:

"I want my food dead. Not sick, not wounded, dead."

Yup. Dead food is good.

(via the evil axe-murdering evolutionist.)

I'm a double fashion victim

Ah, geez.

Apparently, waering pleated pants and tucking in my shirts makes my girth look...more girthy. (I know, "girthy" is not a word.) That's a problem for me, because when I'm not dressed in the manner in which I appear in the photos here, I'm almost certainly wearing pleated pants or shorts with the shirt tucked in.

Next I'll find out that long hair is out....

Your dreams aren't big enough, my dear

The other day, Lynn Sislo started off a post thusly:

One of the items on my list of "Things I'm Going To Do If I Ever Win a Gazillion Dollars in the Lottery" is to buy about 50 different recordings of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola (K364).

Gotta give her props for taste: Mozart accomplishes more sheer magic with the Sinfonia concertante in just thirty minutes than many composers do in hours.

I own two recordings of it. I don't play the studio recording with Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting Daniel Majeske (violin), Robert Vernon (viola) and the Cleveland Orchestra all that often, but it's nice. My prefered recording is Zubin Mehta conducting Itzhak Perlman (violin), Pinchas Zukerman (viola) and the Israel Philharmonic. This one is a recording of a live performance, and it's got just a bit more of that "live Mozart magic".

Of course, if I won a Gazillion Dollars in the Lottery, I wouldn't be buying recordings: I'd be commissioning them. All it takes is a dollar and a dream!

(A moment of High Geekery)

Upon the recent announcement of the existence of Planet Ten, was anyone else immediately wondering if the Red Lectroids were trying to get there "real soon"?

Way to take a stand there, Mr. President

[WARNING: Political content here. Leftism on display.]

I'm generally a charitable fellow, so I tend to assume that George W. Bush has some talents. Trouble is, I've never been terribly clear as to what they actually are. His life as a businessman reads like a virtual textbook on how to fail upward; his political accomplishments seem as due to timing and sycophancy as anything else; his communications skills are, shall we say, less than the best I've seen. I find the guy just mystifying.

But he does have one talent that I can identify: Bush has this remarkable way of saying exactly enough to keep his right-wing, Christian base happy without crossing the line into scaring the shit out of everyone else (except those of us on the left who know what he's doing). He's constantly throwing out little bones to the Pat Robertson crowd: his stem-cell "policy", his allusions to the Dred Scott case in speeches a few months back, and today, his contention that creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught in schools, "so people can understand what the debate is about."

Of course, there really is no debate, as the esteemed Dr. Myers continually demonstrates. But this is what Bush does: he goes only so far and no farther in mollifying his base. Does he fully endorse Creationism, coming right out and saying that that's what he believes? No. He does his two-faced "just so we can understand the debate" thing, which is of the same cloth as his "Hmmmm, we need to study it more" approach to global warming. And of course this all sounds perfectly reasonable, and the press reports it as the President sounding perfectly reasonable, because if there's one absolutely killer insight Karl Rove and the other handlers of George W. Bush have realized, it's that today's press will always concentrate on how the President seems, and not trouble much to see if the way he seems lines up with the way he acts. The press will buy right into this, since nearly every news story these days is just a straight "He said, she said" affair; reporters won't even think to ask if education should also be a "they say, we say" affair.

So, as long as I'm bitching about George W. Bush, what else is there? Well, there's the meme, which has almost become accepted conventional wisdom, that liberals like myself somehow "look down" upon "Red Staters", or "Republicans", or "average Americans", or however you want to frame it. And there's usually some quote from some far-out lunatic that no one has ever heard of to illustrate this. But I didn't quite realize it until I read this Lance Mannion post that the Right's way of looking down on Americans is far, far more pernicious:

In the Star Trek future, everybody has a talent and a skill. Everybody is necessary. Everybody contributes.

In the future we seem to be building, everybody is useful in so far as they can buy things. Otherwise, they’re pretty much just in the way.

That reads pretty accurately to me.

Alert readers have probably noticed a link in the sidebar to the Big Brass Alliance and After Downing Street, two blog-based efforts that center on the President's decision to go to war and how he made that decision. Personally, my take is this: President Bush's intention to go to war in Iraq dates to noon on January 20, 2001, and before that, it was just an intention in the mind of a guy who was running for President. I think that George W. Bush always wanted to finish things up in Iraq, after seeing how not finishing things up over there loused things up for his father. I think that Saddam was doomed from the second Bush raised his right hand to take the oath; I think that the understanding in the highest echelons of the Bush Administration from the beginning was that at the first sign of trouble from Saddam, he was done. It's long been established that Donald Rumsfeld was looking at Iraq invasion plans within days of the 9-11-01 attacks, and I also think that the lengths the Bush people have gone to maintaining the idea that Saddam had some tie to Islamic terrorism, no matter how slight, also demonstrates this.

Of course, I'm not totally upset that we went into Iraq at all. It has long bothered me that the world has become too damned willing to allow tyrants to remain in power (and I don't see the toppling of Saddam as being particularly encouraging in this regard, given the large number of other tyrants who are still around about whom we appear to have no inclination to do anything at all), and I think there's some nugget of truth in the idea that the Islamic world needs to be jolted out of its sixteenth-century mentality. But I can't frankly see where that's what we're doing now, and it doesn't augur well that so much of the President's case for why this particular man was a threat who had to be dealt with right now turned out to hinge upon so much evidence that was either nonexistent, made up, or trumped up beyond all scope of proportion. I resent the fact, quite frankly, that this President had to dishonestly drag me to where I might have honestly been willing to go.

Finally, in comments to this post, I'm asked if I plan to post more about politics in the future. Maybe, but the politics-to-everything-else ratio around here will probably remain pretty much what it has been, not out of any specific design on my part but because my own political thoughts just don't seem to crystallize into postable form all that often, and my blogging is almost always dependent upon my mood. So, the current post notwithstanding, I'm not planning on getting more political in the future, even though there's always the possibility that I might get political.

End of rant.

Poetical Excursions

This is an index to the intermittent series, "Poetical Excursions".


cummings, somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond

Jeffers, The Bloody Sire

Owen, Arms and the Boy

Hardy, Channel Firing

Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper

C.G. Rossetti, Uphill

E.A. Poe, Annabel Lee

E. Fried, The Measures Taken

L. de Gongora, The Ruins of Time

R. Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Tennyson, Blow Bugle Blow

Writings Elsewhere -- an Index

This is an index to writings of mine that appear online, outside of this blog.

For Green Man Review:

films:

Amadeus

music:

Skott Freedman, Some Company

Talisman, Music of Russian Princesses from the Court of Catherine the Great

Aaron Copland Omnibus

Brigadoon
(Complete Score Rerecording)

Emanuel Ax plays Haydn Piano Sonatas

Mendelssohn, Bruch: Violin Concertos (Midori, violin)

The American Tenors

Julie Powell, Heart of a Woman

Glimmer

A Laura MacKenzie Two-fer

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: filmscores by Howard Shore

Maggie Sansone, Mystic Dance: A Celtic Celebration

Sigurd Lie: Orchestral Works

Beyond the Sunset: The Romantic Collection, Blackmore's Night

Winter Carols, Blackmore's Night

Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto (Bell, Tilson Thomas, Berlin PO)
Sacred Bridges (The King's Singers, Sarband)

Fences, The Lonesome Brothers

Where the Mangoes Are, Kate McDonnell

Big Shoes, Dave Rowe

Tidings, Allison Crowe

Secrets,
Allison Crowe

Sigurd Lie: Orchestral Works

Mystic Dance: A Celtic Celebration, Maggie Sansone

House of Flying Daggers, Shigeru Umebayashi
Hero, Tan Dun

books:

Classical Music Intro Books (omnibus)

The Lewis Barnavelt Trilogy, John Bellairs

The Bastard King, Dan Chernenko

The Royal Road to Romance, Richard Halliburton

A Winter Marriage, Kerry Hardie

Latro in the Mist, Gene Wolfe

Take Joy: A Book for Writers, Jane Yolen

The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes, Larry Millett

Low Red Moon, Caitlin R. Kiernan

Daughter of Hounds, Caitlin R. Kiernan

A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, Nicholas Basbanes

The Last Light of the Sun, Guy Gavriel Kay

Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas

Trouble in the Forest: A Cold, Dark Night, Tristam Kyth

The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Celtic Music, Fiona Ritchie

Travels with Barley:

A Journey Through Beer Culture in America, Ken Wells

Bloodline, Kate Cary
Once Upon Stilettos, Shanna Swendson

The Enclycopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Jess Nevins

A Chalice of Wind: Balefire, book one, Cate Tiernan

The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca, Tahir Shah

Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson

Fitzpatrick's War, Theodore Judson

Horseman: The Hollow, book one, Christopher Gordon and Ford Lytle

The Unseen, books one and two, Richie Tankersley Cusick

Freddy and Fredericka, Mark Helprin

The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Celtic Music, Fiona Ritchie

Trouble in the Forest, Trystam Kyth

Evenings with the Orchestra, Hector Berlioz

I also once wrote several pieces for a website on Asian pop-culture called Destroy All Monsters, but that site has since expired. I don't know if those old pieces will surface on the replacement site, Yellow Menace, when that site relaunches sometime this year. I'll update if those pieces turn up again.

For now, they were on the film RAN, the animes Voices of a Distant Star and Black Jack: Infection, and the manga Ranma½ (volumes 1 and 2).

UPDATED 4-14-07

Did Ted Nugent play that Lee Greenwood tune with his teeth?

Over at Pratie Place, you can read an account of one blogger's visit to "Republican Woodstock". This is an absolutely fascinating post.

Action!

I don't recall if I've ever generated a list like this before, so here's an entirely random sampling of my favorite action sequences from movies. (Now, by "action sequence", I mean a discrete scene of action, unbroken by cuts to other scenes. So the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, which dominates the last hour of the film, wouldn't count, but the last charge of King Theoden down the Helm's Deep causeway and the arrival of Gandalf and Eomer would. OK? OK.)

In no particular order:

1. The desert chase, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

OK, I said "in no particular order", but this is just about the best damn chase sequence I've ever seen. It's outstanding. What I love most about it is the beginning: we've barely recovered from Indy and Marion escaping from the Well of Souls, and then them barely evading capture in the airplane, when Sallah comes to Indy and says, "The Ark has been loaded onto a truck." Indy doesn't miss a beat: "Truck? What truck?" (And John Williams's amazing action music here doesn't hurt a bit.)

2. Captain Thorpe against Lord Wolfingham, The Sea Hawk.
3. Robin Hood against Sir Guy of Gisbourne, The Adventures of Robin Hood.

I group these together because they're so similar: the final duels in their films, pitting Errol Flynn against the villain of the piece, with rousing music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even though the latter scene is the hailed classic, I actually like the former a little bit more, because its setting feels larger, and the "dueling shadows on the wall" effect is done just a little bit better.

4. Arrival of the helicopters, Die Hard.

This whole film is utterly thrilling no matter how many times I watch it, really, but to this day my pulse pounds during this part of the film toward the end, when the FBI agents think they're about to get the drop on Hans Gruber's terrorists; when Hans Gruber has a doublecross of his own in store; and John McClane is trying to get the hostages off the roof before Hans detonates the charges. (You know, to this day, I cannot believe that Roger Ebert gave Die Hard a negative review. Yeesh!)

5. Riggs and Murtaugh escape from General McAllister, Lethal Weapon.

Never, ever count Martin Riggs out, as his Chinese torturer quickly learns. I love how later on, Riggs doesn't hesitate before going after Mr. Joshua on foot...and nearly catches him.

6. The Pod Race, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

This is just a brilliant sequence, start to finish (except for the "farting cow" thing, which is one of the biggest missteps of George Lucas's life). To people who claim it's too much like a video game, I say, "Yeah, so?" I mean, really: So? Here we get our first glance of what Anakin Skywalker is all about, and it's grim determination and eagerness for glory.

7. Trying to get Boo's door, Monsters Inc.

I can't believe the sheer ingenuity of this scene. The stuff the PIXAR people thought to throw into this scene staggers me, and it demonstrates the degree to which the filmmakers thought through the implications of their story. In a world of monsters where electricity is generated by harnessing the screams of children from their closet doors, where the closet doors are actually portals into the monsters' world, wouldn't there thus have to be millions of doors? Well, yes, as the film reveals. And there's so much other stuff here, too: what happens when they jump through a door whose angle in the monster world isn't the same as in the human world, for instance. The PIXAR genius isn't in the animation: it's in the fact that the animations always serve the story, and the stories are so damned good.

8. Submarine chase, The Abyss.

Bud and Lindsay in one sub, a crazed Lt. Coffee in the other, a mile underwater. This is still my favorite James Cameron movie, and this chase demonstrates why. (And the way Bud and Lindsay escape their subsequent pickle, stranded in a flooding sub away from their undersea rig, never fails to twist my guts about.)

9. The final charge of King Theoden, The Two Towers
10. The charge of the Rohirrim, The Return of the King.

Both of these sequences make me want to stand up and cheer, every time I watch them. The way Gandalf and Eomer time their charge down the steep hill to coincide with the morning sun breaking over the rise behind them, blinding the orcs, is wonderful; and in the latter scene, Peter Jackson just milks it for all he's worth, with the spear-rattling and Theoden shouting "Ride now!" and the high shot over the battlefield as the Rohirrim wash over the Orcs of Mordor like a wave.

11. The chase through NYC, The French Connection.

I haven't actually seen this film in years, but this chase, with Popeye Doyle in hot pursuit beneath the elevated trains of New York (I can't remember for the life of me which borough) is surprisingly brutal.

12. Escape from Piz Gloria, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Well, naturally the best Bond movie would have the best action sequence from a Bond movie, wouldn't it?

13. Monstro the Whale, Pinocchio.

When I saw this as a kid, I thought for sure Pinocchio was going to buy the farm. (And in a way, he did.)

14. D-Day, Saving Private Ryan.

This doesn't really seem like a normal action sequence, being more a harrowing depiction of what went on that morning than an action sequence. But it's one of the most astonishing things I've ever seen in a film. I wish I could have liked everything that came after a little more.

15. The malfunction, Apollo 13.

You know it's coming, and when it does, it's still a surprise, almost. I love the intercutting between the astronauts and the ground crew as everyone tries to figure out what the hell is going on. This film should be required viewing, I think, for all those corporate managers all over America who are always waxing poetic about "teamwork" but never seem to know what real teamwork looks like. (And I also like that in Apollo 13, more than once it's the geeky science nerd with the slide rule who not only saves the day, but is absolutely essential in doing so. We could use a little more respect for smart people these days in our mass entertainment.)

16. The buffalo hunt, Dances With Wolves.

When I saw this in the theater (the second movie I saw with the girl who would later become The Wife, on what was no more than our fifth or sixth date), my jaw dropped and stayed there.

17. The Battle of Yavin, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

It's all one sequence, so it counts.

18. Getting ET to the ship, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

One of the most perfect action sequences ever filmed.

19. Danny versus Johnny, The Karate Kid.

My parents almost literally dragged me to see this damn movie, which I then loved. And then I had to admit it to them. That sucked. But still, when Danny assumes that awkward-looking stance for the "crane" kick -- that's a hell of a moment. (Bill Conti wrote a nice score for that movie, by the way.)

20. Kiki rescues Tombo, Kiki's Delivery Service.

Flight is a constant motif in the work of Hayao Miyazaki, and somehow he seems to actually know what flying on a broom would be like. (They should let him animate a Quidditch game for one of the next Harry Potter movies.)

21. Anakin versus Obi Wan, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

Come on, you had to know I was going to list this one!

And the funny thing is, I could round this list out to fifty entries without too much effort.

Nobody goes there anymore: it's too crowded!

According to Craig, one of our local talk-radio stations this morning was raising the red-flag that the new large projects either in motion or gearing up in downtown Buffalo will create....

(wait for it)

....congestion.

Well, shit. If there's gonna be thousands of extra people milling about down there, getting in the way of stuff, than let's call the whole thing off! I'd rather keep downtown Buffalo the way it is, where there are never any crowds to get in my way when I go down there to...umm...er...oh yeah, I never go downtown. And neither does anyone else, unless they work or live there. Hmmmm. That's quite the pickle. What to do, what to do....

I mean, look. Here's a capture from a downtown Buffalo webcam, taken shortly after 5:00 p.m. today. This is rush hour in downtown Buffalo, folks. Notice anything missing? Say, any evidence of people at all, aside from the cars on the Niagara Thruway off in the distance?



And no, this isn't some obscure corner of downtown where nobody goes. That's Niagara Square, which is flanked by all manner of government buildings (including City Hall), and it's also the center of Buffalo's radial street pattern. No traffic in Niagara Square, at rush hour on a Monday. Yup. That's certainly a status quo worth maintaining.

IMAGES OF THE WEEK

If I won some kind of sweepstakes where I could pick any city in the United States to spend one week, all accomodations provided along with a big wad of money for shopping and entertainment, I'd go to Chicago. No question. It's always bugged me that I never spent more time there than I did in the time I was in college, when my home-to-school trek involved traversing Chicagoland at least ten times a year.

Anyway, check out this wonderful photo-post about Chicago, by a blogger who hails from Pittsburgh. Great use of adjectives and great photos.

(And there's another blog I've just discovered, a day after rearranging the blog-roll to accomodate all of my last new discoveries and such. Curse you and your incredibly cool linkage, Michael Blowhard!)

I s'pose you hadda be there....

So we just got done watching America's Funniest Videos (shut up, The Daughter loves it, and the current Tom Bergeron-hosted incarnation is far more amusing than the version with Daisy Fuentes or the godawful Bob Saget), and one video in particular struck me as funny on a number of levels.

It took place during a youth soccer game, what looked like kids around nine or ten years of age. All of the action was taking place at one end of the field, and that was the direction in which our home-video Federico Fellini was aiming his camera. Ho hum: a soccer game. Lots of players standing in their coach-assigned spots, with a couple of them kicking the ball around in a micro-parcel of the actual playing field space. Yawn.

And then the little old lady with a cane wandered out onto the field.

And by "wander", I mean, she wandered. Had her gait not been fairly steady, I would have suspected her of being drunk. In fact, maybe she was. Anyway, this old lady wandered right across the field. She didn't just amble out onto a little bit of the field and then wander back off: she ambled straight across the field, right through the players, and right out the other side of the field of play. This went on for about thirty seconds or so -- quite a long time for such a thing, if you sit and time it -- and then they cut to a bit later to show the woman exiting the field on the other side.

The humor here, over and above some old lady wandering out into the middle of a soccer game, was twofold: first, nobody came forward to try and stop this lady or redirect her elsewhere, which I thought was pretty funny. But second, and even funnier, is the fact that in the bit of the clip that AFV showed, the game itself never stopped. It can't mean anything good for soccer if an old lady wandering right into the middle of the game field can't even disrupt the play!

A very public service message

I'm feeling a bit of change-mongering lately, so I decided to rejigger the sidebar a little more. I replaced the second self-photo near the top with a new one of me standing near my bookshelves, and I created a small "family photo album" near the bottom of the sidebar. Keep scrolling down to see it. And if you really liked the former photo number two of me at the top, the large version is still available here.

I've also been kicking around a re-do of the entire template, but I'm as yet undecided on whether I want to do all that or not. So if anyone thinks that Byzantium's Shores is just a dandy blog but would be even better with a new design, now's the time to chime in.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I have a friend at The Store who likes to quote movies and the occasional TV shows. Usually it's something I haven't seen, which generally has us agreeing that I'm horribly unschooled in the finer points of pop culture, with which I cannot disagree. Anyway, he recently came up to me and said the following (with punching emphases placed as indicated):

"I have a fever -- and the only prescription -- is more cowbell!"

I found this, of course, to be the oddest thing he's said all along, but he then explained it: there was a Saturday Night Live skit involving a Behind the Music special in which the Blue Oyster Cult, recording "Don't Fear the Reaper", is exhorted by a legendary rock producer to give the song "more cowbell".

I know, this sounds like just another goofy, and not very funny, SNL skit. However, I actually got to see the skit a week later, and I discovered why it's utterly hilarious: Will Farrell plays the band member whose sole job is to play the cowbell, and Christopher Walken is the producer who keeps stepping in to announce that he needs "more cowbell". Farrell is, of course, his usual funny self, but it's Walken who elevates the sketch to something special, by doing that "Christopher Walken" thing he does when he puts the emphasis in every sentence on a word that no one else would emphasize. Hence:

"I have a fever -- and the only prescription -- is more cowbell!"

Here's a transcript of that skit, and here's the actual "Sunday Weirdness", which isn't really "weirdness" per se so much as a surprising bit of coincidence: the current issue of Wired has a sidebar item that tracks "More cowbell!" as a pop-culture meme.

Anyway, I plan to use the phrase "More cowbell!" in everyday conversation, as much as possible.

(Oh, and it suddenly occurs to me that if God granted me the power to impel any celebrity to keep a blog, I'd name Christopher Walken. Anyone else have any ideas?)

Randomize the music!

I haven't done one of these "Friday Ten" things in a while, and since it's Sunday, well...I suppose we'll call it a "Sunday Ten". Or something. Anyhoo:

1. "Love is Everything", k.d. lang. From Hymns of the 49th Parallel, one of the best CDs I've ever heard.

2. "A New Ending", Jerry Goldsmith, from Star Trek Nemesis. I sold my copy of the CD a while ago, but I ripped it to the computer before I did. This was more out of my allegiance to film music in general than out of any particular love for this score, because I consider it to be one of Goldsmith's few duds. (The FSM Board freaks adore this score, for reasons passing understanding. It never moves me above the level of "meh".)

3. "John Quincy Adams addresses the Supreme Court", from Amistad. I actually downloaded this speech from the Movie Speeches section of AmericanRhetoric.org. Not the best movie ever, but it is a really good speech, delivered wonderfully by Sir Anthony Hopkins. The underscore is, of course, by John Williams. It's pleasant Americana, nothing to write home about, really.

4. "Every Sperm is Sacred", by Monty Python. This is self-explanatory, I suppose.

5. "S'Wonderful", from An American in Paris, performed by Gene Kelly and Georges Guetary. I would have liked this movie a lot more if they could have paired Kelly with anyone other then Leslie Caron, with whom he has no chemistry at all. Good Gershwin songs, though. (Except for "I Got Rhythm", which I've never liked.)

6. "Concerning Hobbits", from The Fellowship of the Ring, by Howard Shore. I've done the Blogistan equivalent of spilling rivers of ink in praise of this stuff, but what's a little more? Sheer genius. I love how the first time we hear the Shire theme, it's given the Percy Grainger treatment.

7. "Rescue of Dances With Wolves", from Dances With Wolves, by John Barry. This is an absolutely magnificent score, beginning to end.

8 and 9. "The Time is Now", III and I, from Millennium, by Mark Snow. Moody, wonderful, brilliant TV music. I'm surprised two selections from this came up in the top ten here.

10. "A Blind Eye", from Road to Perdition, by Thomas Newman. I like Thomas Newman a lot. He's one of film music's most interesting new voices.

BZZZZTTT!!!

Over at Tosy and Cosh, John posts some commentary on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best albums of the last twenty years. I won't excerpt the entire list here, since I don't own very many of these albums and am incredibly surprised by the inclusion of certain items (not one but two albums by the Beastie Boys? Gimme a break!). And it goes without saying that since this list is skewed toward rock, pop, and a bit of country and jazz, some truly great items have slipped entirely through their cracks: Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings scores, that amazing live Les Troyens that Sir Colin Davis recorded with the LSO a few years back, Santiago by the Chieftains, anything by Lunasa.

I could go on, but I'll let it suffice that I can't take seriously a list of the "Best albums since 1985" that omits the still-brilliant-after-all-these-years Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. The album makes Rolling Stone's "Master List", but apparently didn't crack the top 100 of the last twenty years, which to me constitutes an amazing omission. It's certainly a better album than anything by the Beastie Boys.

(Speaking of Dire Straits, the other day I happened to glance up at the TV in the cafe at The Store when a commercial for Mark Knopfler's newest solo album came on. The commercial featured, believe it or not, the two computer-graphic appliance delivery men from the classic "Money for Nothing" video, albeit aged a bit after twenty years: the cranky, fat one has white hair and beard now.)

Sentential Links #10

Yup, after a layoff of a couple of weeks, it's time to get back into the swing of finding nifty sentences throughout the blog world. As always, click through the get the context.

:: Or put it this way: Let’s make tell our prospective audience that we’re arrogant and smug, that we don’t understand the people we’re trying to reach, and that in fact we don’t know much about the world we’re living in. Now there's a recipe for success... (I couldn't agree more.)

:: Yes, I love back-to-school supplies as much as the next autodidact, but their reduced prices at Target do not herald the end of summer, only the end of the "summer fun" aisle. (This is a new entry to the blogroll, by the way, and one of the blogs I had bookmarked when I had to reinstall Firefox and thus lost all of my bookmarks. I rediscovered it quite by accident the other day.)

:: What reason could possibly justify the expense of venturing off-Earth to found offshoot societies, absent direct threat or a compelling need? Ideology of some sort would seem to be required, that or obvious and immediate economic benefit. (Note to self: read the remainder of this series. Via Jay Manifold.)

:: In the meantime, I notice outbreaks of testiness between several of the NRO regulars. I fear it is only a matter of time before they turn on each other like the dusty gang in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (I dunno; I don't read NRO. I just like Wolcott's brand of snark.)

:: Only in New York can people talk about being in an ethnic food "rut" that contains not just Mexican, Chinese, and Italian, but also Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Brazilian. (Actually, that's the entire post. I just thought it was a funny observation.)

:: Many things piss me off. One of those things happens to be a football coach making several million dollars a year condescending to fans that loading up the schedule with patsies is something to be proud of. (This is precisely why I pay extremely little attention to college football. The first half of the season consists of watching Florida State beat the South Carolina Typewriter Repair Maintenance College team -- their mascot, the "Shift Key" -- by a score of 81-0, and then dropping in the polls because Oklahoma beat the North Texas Animal Husbandry School Fighting Grillies by a score of 84-0. My interest level would probably be different if I'd attended a Division I-A school with a real solid program, as opposed to my Division III alma mater, but I was in Iowa anyway and the Earth revolves around the Hawkeyes in those parts, unless you're one of the small percentile for whom it's the ISU Cyclones who command your allegiance. Anyway, I no longer care much about college football.)

:: Here in the non-internet world, we have a technical term for people who, without the permission of the authors, take copies of their books and give them away for free to lots of readers: we call them "librarians". (Actually, I'd quibble with this: Librarians don't give free copies of books out, they loan them out, with the expectation that they will get them back. That's an important distinction, albeit not entirely critical to Mr. Stross's larger argument.)

:: Yes, I know. I could always move to Florida or Texas, but are hurricanes really preferable to six feet of snow? (This is something I've always maintained about Buffalo, and the post linked here isn't even talking about Buffalo. I'll take snow over people not dying in heat waves; the temperature hitting triple digits, well, ever; the wind chill not being below zero for months at a time; the possibility of large storms from the Gulf of Mexico wiping us out; the possibility of large swathes of our water-facing properties falling into the lake as a result of either earthquakes or erosion; or entire communities having to evacuate because of wildfires?)

:: But oh, what a country we would be if we could revive a sense of shame in a man if he leaves the house in the morning without a sack suit, brogues, waistcoat with watch chain, shirtfront, string tie and skimmer! (You know, we can elect a Republican President every time out between now and Doomsday, and that won't be enough to get me to move to Canada. But if we start getting men to dress like this again, it's "Peace Bridge or Bust" for me. Ye Gods! via Lance Mannion.)

OK, that's it for this week. Peace out, y'all!

A Possible Homecoming

There is a possibility, if all the doctors can agree with each other, that Little Quinn may come home today. The last few days he has been receiving no real "treatment" for anything in the hospital; it's all been observation and feeding. So we may be able to finally get him out of there. The Wife left for the hospital a short bit ago, whilst I stay home to keep The Daughter company. Here's hoping that when The Wife gets home, she's got Little Quinn in tow!

Updates later as events warrant.

UPDATE: Well, look who got home just a short while ago!



Yup, there he is. Now we have to get his physical and occupational therapies lined up, so we can figure out just to what degree this whole ordeal set back his development. But as of right now, he's had a feeding and is sleeping nicely.

(BTW, I look like crap in this picture because I haven't showered yet. Just in case you're wondering.)

Quick Video Links

:: I don't think I'll ever get the appeal of soccer as a spectator sport, but if they played it like it appears in this British ad for Adidas, I'd probably watch with baited breath.

:: If you ever wondered how hard it was for the actors on Star Trek: The Next Generation to get their lines out, full of fake technobabble as they were, wonder no more: they relied heavily on the word "shit".

Via MeFi and SFSignal, respectively.

UPDATE: Above, I use the idiom "baited breath", which is, of course, supposed to be "bated breath". I am aware of the correct spelling, but this is one of those homophones that my fingers don't know, and thus refuse to type correctly unless I'm watching them carefully. (My fingers are pretty treacherous, actually: in The Promised King, I constantly have to be on alert lest my characters leap onto their trusty horses and take up the reigns before riding off.)

Upon doing a bit more research, I find that this error is so common that it may become standard as our language evolves:

The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath that there’s every chance it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers....It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable.

So there you go. Bate, bait, where will it end? The befuddlement is enough to leave my breath thoroughly Beta'd.

Does that come with a cape and some tights?

John of Tosy and Cosh posts a list of his favorite superhero movies. So it seems right that I should do the same:

1. Superman. The original is still far and away the best superhero film I have ever seen. It's got humor, epic scope, and just plain fun galore. It's a great film. (Gotta get it on DVD.)

2. X-Men 2. This is the film that the first X-Men should have been. I loved the way it captured the whole "moral ambiguity" thing that marked the X-Men comic of the Chris Claremont years, when the X-Men would sometimes end up fighting side-by-side with a mortal enemy of theirs (Magneto, in this case).

3. Spiderman 2. The second Spiderman film got everything right.

4. Spiderman. The first Spiderman film almost got everything right, but the ending was a serious disappointment.

5. Batman Forever. The Val Kilmer installment, which is still my favorite Batman flick. I liked nearly everything about this film, and it still has my favorite line from a Batman film, when Alfred tells Bruce Wayne that young Dick Grayson has gone off in "the car": Wayne says something like, "he took my Porsche?" to which Alfred does a slow burn and says, "No, sir...the other car!" Cut to Dick Grayson having a blast in the Batmobile....)

6. X-Men. This film really needed an extra half-hour of running time to really get good. Some of the characterizations are really short-changed.

7. Superman II. This film is often cited as a rare sequel that's better than the original, but not by me. It doesn't gel together well for me, but I find it fun to watch. I don't really like the entire last half hour, though. Superman's ultimate victory over the supervillains is a great moment (the crunching of the bones in Zod's hand, and his subsequent moan of shocked agony, is priceless), but the stuff leading up to it goes on too long, the fight in the Fortress of Solitude just gets weird, and I hate the "hypnosis of Lois" thing at the end.

8. Batman Returns. I didn't like the first Batman flick that much, but I enjoyed the second a great deal. And you have to credit Tim Burton for making sure the film's best line, spoken to Catwoman, gets delivered by Chistopher Walken: "Can I get you anything? A ball of string?"

That's about it, I suppose.

Lining the Stream

I've just spent some time tidying up the sidebar at left, updating some stuff and rearranging other stuff. I've folded the blogroll devoted exclusively to LiveJournalers (weirdos that those folks are!) into the main blogroll ("Other Journeys"), as well as removed a few blogs that were either inactive or that I had not read in enough time so as to make me forget that I'd blogroll'd them in the first place. I've toyed with the idea of moving the entire blogroll to an inner blog post that I'd simply link from the main page, which would allow me to maintain more links and to categorize them without creating too much clutter in the sidebar, but I haven't got round to that yet.

Also gone is the 2005 reading list, for two reasons: one, it was just taking up space and making clutter over there; and two, the year is half gone and I've not read a single thing from that list yet. My reading habits tend to be, shall we say, capricious, and I should have known long ago that attempts to plan my reading that far in advance were likely to end in complete failure. These aren't books that I'm admitting that I'll never read, but they're books that I shouldn't try to promise myself to read. I see little reason these days to approach my regular reading as though it's a college syllabus. (I also finally changed the titles in the "Currently Reading" box to what I'm actually currently reading, since the former titles there hadn't been active in months.)

I've also updated the "Writings Elsewhere" section of the sidebar, with a mess of links to reviews I've written for GMR over the last year or so that I never linked here.

Now all I have to do is put a few photos of scantilly-clad dancing women in the sidebar and I'll be all set!

Next, a stuffed poodle named "Carmen".

The other night, the Daughter was playing pretend with a little stuffed puppy of hers, which is a pretty non-exceptional event -- except that she has apparently named this particular puppy "Papageno", which made my ears perk up, since I wasn't sure where she could have happened upon the name of a supporting character from Mozart's The Magic Flute. So, I asked her where she heard that name, and she shrugged and replied, "From a movie we watched in music class." I asked her what the movie was about, and she in turn answered: "It's about a princess who is trapped in a magic castle by the Queen of the Night."

"Does a prince rescue her?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," she said.

"Does he do it with a magic flute?"

"Yeah! Have you seen that movie too?"

"In a way of speaking," I replied.

The Magic Flute was the first opera I saw live, and to this day it might well be my favorite opera of all (its chief competition being Berlioz's Les Troyens). It goes without saying, of course, that the version The Daughter saw was a truncated, watered-down version, but every journey has to start somewhere, right?

They pull me back in....

Well, I finally succumbed, as I do every two or three years: I rejoined the BMG Classical Music Club. I do this every so often because the introductory "Ten CDs for the price of one" deal, or whatever it is, is really a pretty good deal, but the hard part is finding CDs that I want in the special booklet they send me every so often to get me to sign back up. This time, however, I found enough items that I wanted that it was fairly easy. The CDs arrived in the mail today, and I got a disc by Celtic group Altan and one by Celtic singer Moya Brennan; a disc by the Asian group Twelve Girls Band (hey, why not); a Dvorak violin concerto (don't recall the player), which I've always wanted to hear; a disc by Russian soprano Anna Netrebko; and the Elgar Violin Concerto performed by Hilary Hahn (who, by the way, is a Move Over Britney! designate). Yeah, BMG's shipping seems pretty high to me, but this first shipment was a little more than twenty bucks for shipping only, so that's six CDs for less than four bucks each.

Now I just have to buy one CD at regular price, pick out my three subsequent freebies, and I'm done. Of course, I'll wait until they send me one of their "Buy one, get two free" deals. (Assuming I remember to cancel the Featured Recording each month, which has usually been my downfall in the past with respect to the BMG club.) I've generally found, in the past, that if one is patient, one can get some good stuff through BMG. It's certainly worth joining and quitting, joining and quitting, joining and quitting....

Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?

Alexandra linked one of the funniest Star Wars related things I've ever seen. It seems that the some guy bought a pirated DVD of Revenge of the Sith, which turned out to be one of those "camcorder in the movie theater" deals, but with one weird thing: added subtitles, for some reason I can't quite fathom, derived from "a direct english translation of the chinese interpretation of what the script was saying". I guess, therefore, that the translation went from English to Chinese and back to English?

Anyway, go read the subtitles from various scenes. It's absolutely hilarious, the Star Wars equivalent of those subtitles of the opening credits to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Stop chirping, crickets!

Sorry about the lack of posting the last couple of days, but I've been a bit tired and have had nothing of interest to say, so I figured I shouldn't force it. As Confucius once said: "Forcing blog posts from a tired mind is the surest path to the blog sucking."

(Of course, there is some controversy as to the translation of this little-used Chinese verb; some linguists react strongly against the idea of Confucius referring to something "sucking".)

In more substantive news, Little Quinn's recovery continues well. He is no longer sedated and his breathing machine was removed on Tuesday morning. There was a period of about twenty-four hours during which it looked like he might need to be re-intubated, but that didn't happen, and now he is resting pretty comfortably, still on antibiotics but with no fever. In fact, the only reason he's still in the Pediatric ICU this evening is because there are no beds available on the regular floor, to which he has been cleared medically.

If life were a game of AD&D, Little Quinn's constitution score would be at least a 16, I think.

A Poetical Excursion

I used to write occasional "Poetical Excursions", in which I'd expound briefly on the bits of meaning I gleaned from various poems I'd read. I'm not sure why I stopped doing this, but I'm planning to start again. (Links to those old posts are available in the sidebar.)

While I may not have posted much about poetry in a long time, I have been reading poetry all the while, and I've been reading more poetry especially over the last six months or so. I've found that poetry is ideally suited to reading in short bursts -- such as, during lunch at work when I'm not already sitting with a friend -- and I've always believed that all writers, aspiring or otherwise, should read poetry to gain some insight as to just what is possible in language.

I particularly enjoy poetry compilations. True, collecting compilations results in a collection marked by multiple copies of many poems, but that itself strikes me as illustrative of poetry's expressive power: when you can find a single poem anthologized in both a compilation of war poetry and love poetry, you gain some insight into just what is in that slippery old word, "meaning".

This week I've been dipping into Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. It's a nice collection, containing old favorites I've seen elsewhere and new poems I've not seen anywhere, containing poems selected under the auspices of the Favorite Poem Project. What makes this collection interesting is the introductory passages to each poem, many of them the words of ordinary Americans who "nominated" these poems for inclusion. One of these messages struck me in particular when I read it earlier today.

It is an introduction to e.e. cummings's poem "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond". Here's the poem:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I've never really read much e.e. cummings before. The only time I recall encountering his work in school, there wasn't much of an exploration into what makes his work beautiful or powerful or whatever cummings is. The approach was to posit cummings as the token "modernist": "By the way, class, did you know that poems don't have to rhyme? Don't believe me? Here's a guy named e.e. cummings!" It all seemed so cute, especially with his refusal to capitalize and his unorthodox spacings of words and his runningwordstogether and the like. I often wonder if the lessons English teachers try to impart upon their charges are wasted upon readers who are not experienced enough to learn them.

But the problem with that is that there are readers who are ready for such lessons. Here's the introductory note for "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond", which is by an eighteen-year-old student from Georgia:

I have read this poem so many times that the spine of the book is broken and always turns to its page. Today I gave that book away to the first person that I have ever truly and sincerely loved. I gave her the book because there is no gift I could give her that would be more honest. This poem has shaped who I am. It has been a long journey, but cummings's poem set my heart on a course to find love, and I have arrived, only to truly understand the poem for the first time.

Since the Favorite Poem Project ended around six or seven years ago, I'd very much like to know just what that girl made of the gift this young man gave her. Did she read the poem and understand it the same way he did? Are they still together, with their lives somehow bound by the threads woven in words by e.e. cummings?

Oy. Or "oi". As in "Hanoi".

Sympathetic though I may be to the anti-war cause (even if I don't share that particular belief), I wish Jane Fonda would just shut up.

Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.

The actress, 67, said the protest trip would begin next March and she would travel on a bus powered by vegetable oil.

I really don't like Jane Fonda. Protest is fine, dissent is fine. Meeting with the enemy is not. Sorry, Jane, count me out.

(Oh, and count me out on a sequel to 9 to 5. I love the original, but Fonda was the least of the cast in that film, whose charm is generated almost entirely -- no, flat-out entirely -- by Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Dabney Coleman. I'm glad, though, to see that Ms. Parton has a sense of humor about the possibility of a sequel: "I've told them they'd better get on it before they have to call it the good, the bad, and the ugly because we ain't getting any prettier!")

There are always worse roads than the one you're on

If anyone in Buffalo is reading this and has O-negative blood, please answer the call. I don't, unfortunately.

Failing that, there are always prayers and hopes and vigils offered by moonlight in a sacred grove.

Further Updates

Little Quinn continues to improve today; he was apparently awake for part of the time this morning (he's been under sedation), the docs have decided to increase the volume on his feedings again, and they are having to suction his gullet even less frequently now. One set of cultures revealed some kind of bacteria that is covered by the antibiotics already administered, while other cultures have not been reported back yet.

We're hoping to get him home by this weekend.

I suppose "Harry Potter and the Slug Club" would have been a sucky title.

I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday afternoon, just as I thought I would, and I have a couple of spoilerish thoughts. So here's some empty space to protect you who would remain un-spoil'd:






























(remember: spoilers below!)






























OK, that should do it. From this point on, I make no attempt to conceal spoilers. I shall not be cagey in any way. I'm not going to refer to "the character who stunningly bumps off a beloved old favorite", I'm going to refer to them by name. Got it? Good. That was your final warning.

So Snape killed Dumbledore. Holy Shit, who saw that coming?

Well...I did, kind of. I don't think there was ever any surprise that Dumbledore died; I figured if he didn't die in the last book, he had to die in this one. The powerful mentor always has to be shown the door. Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Quint in Jaws. The old bartender in Cocktail. Gandalf (in a way). Uncle Ben in Spiderman. (More on Spiderman in a moment, by the way.) I never once doubted that Dumbledore would die, and not just because J.K. Rowling knows her Campbellian story structure, which the Harry Potter series roughly follows, but because she knows another principle of storytelling:

Create likable characters, and then put them through pure and unadulterated hell, for the greatest heroes are those who stand up and do the right thing even after their world has been irrevocably destroyed.

That's what Rowling has done here: she's given Harry his baptism by fire, and almost pushed him down as low as he can go. (But note that he can still go down even further: Ron and Hermione are still alive.)

So no, I didn't find Dumbledore's death surprising at all. It would have been more surprising if he'd lived, frankly. And it wasn't really that surprising that Snape killed him, given Snape's Unbreakable Vow.

Here, then, is where I start theorizing. The question is, then, has Dumbledore's trust in Snape really been that misplaced all along, which Rowling seems to want us to believe? Or is there something even deeper in play here? I strongly suspect the latter. The book opens with Snape swearing to protect Draco Malfoy and submitting to an Unbreakable Vow to do so. The implication is that, by refusing to help Dumbledore, Snape is fulfilling that Unbreakable Vow.

But since Draco Malfoy isn't really in need of protection at that exact moment, it would seem to me that Snape's departure with Malfoy is the fulfillment of his Unbreakable Vow -- which would make his killing of Dumbledore something different. Perhaps the fulfilling of another Unbreakable Vow? One he has already sworn to Dumbledore? That would explain Dumbledore's unshakable trust in Snape: it would have nothing to do with Snape's motivations, or whether Dumbledore has judged Snape's character or anything of the sort.

So I suspect that when Harry was a baby, before Dumbledore placed him with the Dursleys, Dumbledore swore Severus Snape to an Unbreakable Vow in lieu of killing the former servant of Voldemort, which Snape somehow fulfilled by killing Dumbledore.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong; this is a half-baked theory, of course, and I'm not well-versed enough on the arcana of the Potterverse to flesh this out any more than I already have. We'll learn soon enough, anyway. (Or not soon enough, since I want Book Seven now.)

A few other thoughts:

1. They can't figure out who R.A.B. is? Come on!

2. I actually enjoyed all of the teen-romance stuff. Maybe it's because I'm a hopeless sap, but I found a lot of that stuff funny and true to the way I remember those stupid youth romances going. But that leads me to....

3. So, I wonder if J.K. Rowling's list of favorite movies includes Spiderman, because the last scene in this book nearly perfectly echoes the last scene of Spiderman. It takes place at a funeral, and after the service, Harry tells Ginny that he can't be with her because it will be too dangerous for her to be Harry Potter's girlfriend -- just like the way Peter Parker tells Mary Jane Watson that he can't be with her (although, if memory serves, he doesn't spell this out exactly).

4. Thinking back on Voldemort's/Tom Riddle's youth, I wonder if maybe Dumbledore isn't quite as wise as he seems after all: "Hi Tom. You certainly seem to be a sadistic creep and a criminal in training, but come with me and we'll teach you how to be a Wizard!" It kind of reminds me of another time a young kid with a trend to fear and anger was taught to use mystical powers, with this other kid also growing up to change his name to something more nasty sounding...it even started with a 'V'....

5. Where are the remaining Horcruxes? I really don't know, and I'm not confident enough to hazard any guesses. Rowling has, in the past, hidden big things in plain sight (Moaning Myrtle's identity, Scabbers being Peter Pettigrew); and at other times, she's done new things entirely (hinting strongly at a death in Goblet of Fire, only to have it be Cedric Diggory, the Potterverse equivalent of Star Trek's red-shirted security guys). I've read a few discussion threads with ideas aplenty, and each idea I see has me saying, "Hey yeah! That would be a great hiding place for a Horcrux!" But OK, I'll hazard one guess: I wouldn't be surprised if one Horcrux is sitting in the Dursley's living room.

Here's a really good spoiler-filled post on the book, and here's an equally-good discussion thread. Barring an announcement from Ms. Rowling along the lines of "I'm two-thirds done with Book Seven, and it will be out for Christmas!", I hope to re-read the entire series before Book Seven comes out. And I also intend to be as spoiler-free as I can possibly be for it, which will be quite a change for me after my "Give me the spoilers NOW, dammit!" approach to Star Wars for the last six years.

At the very least, she'd better not take as long to come up with Book Seven as George R. R. Martin has to come up with A Feast for Crows!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Outside links for the Image this week. Michael Blowhard provides a link to a satellite image of Niagara Falls, which I thought I'd supplement with the Google Maps satellite image of the same place. The links:

Michael's satellite image
Google Maps image

Michael's image (not really Michael's image, of course, but that's a convenient shorthand) only depicts the Canadian falls, sadly; there's a prejudice about the Falls that has the Horseshoe Falls being more impressive than the American Falls, but for my money, the best place to see the Falls is from Goat Island, where you can stand on the brink of both Falls or even go down to the Cave of the Winds. Of course, the American city of Niagara Falls is an economic disaster to a degree that precisely mirrors that of Niagara Falls, Ontario as an economic miracle, but if I'm going to just look at the Natural Wonder of the Falls, I say, do it from the American side.

With the Google Maps image, of course, you can scroll northward to see the American Falls, or zoom out to get both in one image. Michael's image was apparently taken in summer, and the color is very striking; the Google Maps one is apparently taken in early May, since the surrounding trees are brown but there's no trace of remnant ice which sticks around for a long time after winter's official end. Also, scrolling around to the surrounding cityscapes on each side of the Falls, I note a surprising lack of traffic, which also indicates that the photo was imaged out of the normal tourist season, and possibly quite early in the morning.

And in both images, you can make out one of the Maid of the Mist boats near the turbulent pool beneath the Horseshoe Falls. In Michael's image, the boat is still on its approach, while in the Google one, the boat is coming about to return to its dock. One of the most fascinating things to observe, actually, when visiting the Falls is the voyage of a Maid of the Mist boat. They move very slowly upstream, coming surprisingly close to the curtain of the Falls themselves, and then suddenly the boats whip about and move back downstream amazingly quickly. It's then that you realize just how powerful the current of the Niagara River is, first in noting the way the river just shoves that boat right back downstream, and then the subsequent realization of just how powerful the engines on the Maid boats have to be in order to navigate those currents.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Back in the day when I read a lot of conspiracy-theory related stuff (lots of fun, kooky stuff in that world -- I gotta read more of it one of these days), my delvings into the sub-conspiracry genre of alien life (think of the stuff that forms a lot of the backstory for The X-Files) I often saw the name Richard Hoagland, a former NASA employee who has since gone on to bigger and better things -- and by "bigger and better things", I of course mean "creating a career of sorts out of pimping looney ideas that NASA is covering up evidence of life in our Solar System, including the far side of the Moon and the artificial [yeah, right] structures on the Cydonia Plain on Mars".

Well, thanks to Paul Riddell, I see Hoagland's latest bit of hilarious madness: he thinks that an entire Saturnian moon is an artificial construct.

I love Richard Hoagland. I really do. As Paul Riddell describes:

Some examples of insane pseudoscience are worthy only of disgusted ridicule. Others, though, are like your insane little cousin who has the permanent hickey on his side from making armpit farts all day long: you should be disgusted, but you're laughing, and you can't quite explain why you're laughing.

That's exactly right -- Hoagland is the Cheech of the intergalactic conspiracy set. Anyone want to nominate a Chong?

For all your armor-plating needs

Suppose you're making an IMAX movie about tornadoes. You'd want to get footage as close as humanly possible to the tornado, right? Maybe even footage up until, and beyond, the moment when the tornado strikes exactly where the camera is?

Yeah, that would be cool...but how?

Why, by armor-plating a Ford pickup truck, of course.

Strangely, the article fails to mention the TIV's (Tornado Intercept Vehicle) top speed and gas mileage. For myself, there's no way on Earth I'd trust my life to this thing with a tornado bearing down upon me, but there's a very good reason for that: I come from a long line of Chevy men.

(Link via Warren Ellis)

Come on, J.K., get to the point!

I'm a bit more than half-way through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I'm enjoying the book immensely, as I've enjoyed each previous installment. (I'm rationing the book, almost, to stretch out the reading experience, although I'll probably give in to temptation and plow through it this afternoon.) This book seems less plot-heavy than the last two, and less outwardly flabby than Book Five, which is nice. Rowling's eye for detail and her gift for characterization are really shining through, and I have to note that she seems to have a gift for dialogue emerging as well, now that her characters are achieving maturity. Our boy Harry has some zinging one-liners in this book that had better be preserved for the movie version.

One thing that I must admit grates after a while is Rowling's deferred payback on tantalizing plot hints. There are a number of times when one character will notice something quite strange, or ask a very pertinent question, only to receive a reply along the lines of, "Well, that's a very important question that I will nevertheless answer at another time!" It kind of reminds me of all those times in old mystery novels when, halfway through the book, some minor character would figure out the identity of the murderer and announce, "I know who the killer is!" just as the killer pops out from behind a curtain and clubs them to death with a hammer or whatever.

But as ever, who am I to quibble with the writer who has made sufficient money from her fictional creation to outstrip the Queen of England in total worth?

By the way, do read Lance Mannion's take on the Potter phenomenon. (He gives no spoilers for Half-Blood Prince.) I think he's particularly astute when he says this:

The great good thing Rowling and her contemporaries have done, I think, is help create a community of young readers.

There have always been children who love to read, but they tended to do it all on their lonesomes, holed up in their rooms, and the joy they found in their books was a private joy.

But Harry Potter has opened the bedroom doors as wonderfully as he opened the Chamber of Secrets. All these young readers now talk to each other. They trade books, they get online and post in forums and on webpages, they build friendships around their mutual love of books, and they read more and they read faster. Reading isn't an escape from their lives and other kids. It's a part of their lives and a connection with other kids.

I think that what Rowling has also done is restored a bit of respect for story in literature, but my thoughts on that are a bit half-baked at the present time, so I'll just hold on to that nugget for a while. Kind of like the way, in Half-Blood Prince, XXXXXXXXXX keeps refusing to tell XXXXX how he XXXXXXX his XXX.

Sentential Links, delay'd

Everybody's sentences sucked this week. Fifty points from Gryffindor!

OK, kidding aside. For obvious reasons, my time for trawling Blogistan for glorious instantiations of grammar in the further pursuit of insightful content has been somewhat lessened of late, so the next installment of Sentential Links will appear next Sunday.

Crossing the afore-mentioned bridge

Well, Little Quinn is into Day Three of his hospitalization for bronchitis, and the doctors are now doing that "guarded optimism" thing they do, where they try to sound as pessimistic about a possible optimistic outcome as possible. I think they take classes in that or something -- "Advanced Bedside Manner 201", perhaps.

Little Quinn has not actually entered the "getting worse before he gets better" stage; his fever has slowly but steadily trended downward, and while he continues to have icky gunk suctioned from his lungs regularly ("icky gunk" being, of course, a medical term covered in "Basic Bedside Manner 101"), the docs are suctioning him a little less often and they're getting a little less icky gunk out of him each time they do it.

I'll say this: Little Quinn's a tough little bugger. I'm not sure where he gets it from, considering the whimpering fetal form that I assume whenever I contract any kind of mild cold.

UPDATE: I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone out there for their support, whether expressed as a comment in the post below or in e-mail. It all means a great deal to me.

Always another bridge to cross.

We had to have Little Quinn admitted to Children's Hospital in Buffalo this morning due to a respiratory infection that became obvious late yesterday afternoon. He was working hard to breathe, and even frequent doses of albuterol were not providing anything more than temporary relief. As of this writing, it is likely that he will be intubated in the next hour or so.

Further posting as events warrant.

UPDATE: Little Quinn is still in the hospital, and will most likely be there for a week or so, depending on how things turn out. He does not have pneumonia; the current diagnosis is bronchitis, either due to an infection in his lower airways or due to a reaction against something he inhaled. If the latter, he should begin to show improvement fairly quickly; if the former, he will actually get worse before he gets better as he fights off the infection.

However, the doctors are confident that we caught the issue early on, so Little Quinn has been on antibiotics for some hours now, in addition to receiving medicines to make him sleep and restrict his motions so he doesn't pull the tubes out. Throughout the ordeal, Little Quinn's blood gas levels have been normal, and his chest X-rays showed no evidence of pneumonia. We are now awaiting cultures generated from his secretions, which apparently take three days or so to process. So that's a bit of a waiting game there.

It all began last night with a fever and difficult breathing. We gave him acetaminophen and brought the fever back down to normal fairly quickly (he hasn't run a temperature since late last night), but the labored breathing continued. The final straw was at about 6:00 this morning, when his breathing became so labored that he went beyond wheezing and started chirping with each indrawn breath. Not good.

We came home from the hospital a bit ago to eat dinner, and will be going back after the docs do nightly rounds. Before we left, Little Quinn's breathing was looking very normal and his swelling had gone down to the point where the nurses and respiratory technicians had to re-do some of his tubes and connections to accomodate the lesser bulk.

It's hard, as always, to see Little Quinn on his respirator again, bringing back as it does some memories that I'm generally loath to recall. But what's different this time is the degree of certainty the docs are willing to express. The six-week ordeal of Little Quinn's birth was one round of "Let's do this and see what happens, and then we'll decide what to do next" after another, while this time is more of a binary state: "Either this is happening or that is happening. If it's this, we'll do X, and if it's that, we'll do Y." And this is all stuff that the docs have seen many times with children of all ages. That's about as encouraging a note as is to be found in this whole scenario.

It's time again, I guess, for Little Quinn to be the Mighty Quinn again. Further updates will come as events warrant.

(Oh, and I almost forgot: in the "Adding insult to injury" department, the ER folks took Little Quinn's temperature rectally this morning [at home, we use the axillary method, under the armpit], which they then followed up with another dose of acetaminophen which they dispensed to him in suppository form. Then, this afternoon, he was given an IV line in his groin. Poor little guy!)

UPDATE II (Sunday, July 27): I posted a follow-up this morning, here.

Well, that should about do it, right?

Maybe it's time that I closed up shop on the blog, given that Byzantium's Shores has turned out to be the Number Two result for this search.

And do go look at the Number Three result for the same search. That had better be some kind of satire or something. Oy.

Huzzah!!!

That's what happens when I go on hiatus: people get married. Congratulations to Mary! I'm a bit surprised that she didn't use a reading from Richard Feynman, but hey, it can't be all physics, all the time, right?

Interviews

Over on Fantasy Hot List, Patrick interviews author Robin Hobb. Check it out. I haven't read Hobb yet, but she's a constant on my "Oh yeah, I gotta read that author" list.

"What would you have me do?"

So cries one of the central characters in Guy Gavriel Kay's magnificent novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, which I re-read for the first time in four years while on my trip out west for the sister-in-law's wedding. (When you travel with your family across the country so that the two women in your family can be in a wedding, while you yourself are not in the wedding, you end up with a lot of free time in the days running up until said wedding. Good thing I packed a bunch of books.)

I note in my post about GGK's novels that Lions is my favorite of his works, which is saying quite a lot considering the man has yet to write a book I don't love dearly. This is the story of a number of lives intersecting in a fantastic realm called Al-Rassan, modeled on the Iberian peninsula during the Moorish retreat. As has been GGK's wont ever since he completed The Fionavar Tapestry, the role of magic in his tale is so limited that the book might be an actual historical novel if not for the fact that his geography and religions, while analogous to real ones, do not exist.

While Lions is now my favorite of GGK's books by quite a margin, it wasn't always so. This is because Lions is similar to the film Casablanca in one major respect: it is actually better upon a second reading (or viewing), when the foreknowledge of how the story comes out in the end casts an elegaic light over the events leading up to that end that isn't present when one doesn't know how it all ends. This was my third complete reading of Lions, and even though I knew how that final duel turns out and even though I knew how that final duel came to happen, I still found myself actively wishing for it to not come out that way, and for a world to be forged from the ashes of the one dying in which Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn'Khairan could both live.

On this reading, I noted much more of the erotic undercurrents within GGK's tale; this is a very sensual book, to a degree I didn't appreciate as much the first two times I read it. And I did pick up on one more thing, which constitutes a spoiler of sorts: parts of the book turn on Diego Belmonte's ability to see future events, or events from far away to which he cannot possibly be privy. What I didn't pick up on until now is that Rodrigo Belmonte, Diego's father, has a similar such moment when he has a vision of his wife, Miranda, and his company physician, Jehane, standing on a hilltop against a deep sunset. I never caught that before now.

With GGK's novels, I tend to avoid full re-reads for several years, so as to allow certain inner details of the stories to recede into my memory that they might delight me anew each time. This practice works well, except that for it to work again, I can't re-read Lions again until 2009.

When Michael Jackson thinks you're a weirdo....

Oh, the humor of it all! It seems that Ann Coulter has managed to go so far around the bend here, on the subject of President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, that even John at Powerline and his mates are slowly backing away from her, saying "Frankly, it's hard to believe she's serious" and "I can't remember a time when she has been this totally misguided" (thus demonstrating that apparently John of Powerline is either completely unfamiliar with Ann Coulter or has no memory beyond eight minutes ago, but that's a fish to be fried another time).

Still, I think a right-wing feeding frenzy over this Roberts guy's right-wing street-cred will be a funny thing to behold. There's a very sizeable part of this country's right -- the sizeable part of it, perhaps -- that won't be happy unless they can put someone to the right of Kaiser Wilhelm on the Supreme Court.

According to Coulter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a "reliable left-wing lunatic". God bless Ms. Coulter! I like it when I can pop up the popcorn and enjoy the show before the Democrats have even stepped up to the mike.

(Link via Craig, who started off a post the other day with this: "George W. Bush never disappoints." Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations, eh? Heh indeed!)

UPDATE: Now, via Roxanne, I see that Coulter isn't even an original lunatic hack. Details here.

Casinos

I spent some of my daydreaming time at The Store today fulminating a post about casinos in Buffalo, since the Seneca Nation of Indians announced the other day that they're picking their site for their third Western New York casino, which will presumably be in downtown Buffalo. I had all of my arguments ready to go, and then I get home and find that Alan has already posted them. So ditto what he says: I don't like the idea of taking property off the tax rolls in a city whose tax base is already in a state of deep erosion; I don't believe there will be much economic spin-off effect; I believe that too many dollars from the casino, aside from the wages for the bartenders and the coat-checkers and the blackjack dealers, will end up in Seneca Nation pockets and not Buffalo pockets. I'm not wild about a downtown casino, but if we're to have this thing rammed down our throats -- and apparently we are -- then it had damned well better not be on the waterfront. That's the last place where we need a big-ass windowless box of a building.

I also don't think that casinos will do much to generate new tourism here. Everybody and their brother has casinos nowadays, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a place east of the Mississippi where one isn't within six hours of some form of casino gaming. Nobody's going to come to Buffalo because the Senecas build a casino here; our new casino will primarily be a draw for people already here.

TIME Magazine ran a two-story feature on the underside of the Indian casino industry a few years back, with part one here and part two here. It's a pretty creepy business, in my view, and I'd really rather not have my struggling city put this group in any kind of economic driver's seat.

Flowers....

It makes me a little bit sad that not every daughter gets to be the flower girl at a wedding. But my daughter did, and here's how she looked for the part.



Yes, those are rose petals hemmed in at the bottom of that outer veil-thing. She got the bottom of the dress a bit messed up in the course of dancing at the reception, but hey, who cares?

The word is given: Warp speed.

Everyone knows already, but James Doohan -- a.k.a. Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise -- died today. He had a good, long life and was by all accounts a warm and gregarious individual. I can't necessarily say that I'll miss him, since the TOS crew left the scene years ago -- better to say that I do miss him, I suppose.

I always thought that ending Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country with the animated signatures of the actors and actress of the TOS crew was the classiest ending to a movie I've seen. If I had any Scotch on hand, I'd raise a dram to the memory of James Doohan and his signature role -- ironic, I suppose, since Doohan wasn't Scots himself. So maybe a Yuengling's will suffice.

And yes, as the resident "miracle worker" at The Store, I do in fact multiply all of my repair estimates by a factor of four.

Uhhhh....Joel?

I skimmed over this Buffalo News article about Erie County Executive Joel Giambra while on break at work this morning, and I pretty much blew it off as the usual BS-fest that issues from Mr. Giambra: despite negative ratings that make Jimmy Carter at the height of the Hostage Crisis look like Ronald Reagan in 1984, this guy is doing the out-thrust jaw, stiff-upper-lip, damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-speed-ahead thing. There are times when someone's delusionary antics can be an entertaining spectacle, but this isn't one of those times. The Buffalo Niagara region is like a hot-air balloon that's been unfolded and is being filled with warm air, but there's this idiot who can't -- or won't -- untie the mooring ropes. That's Joel Giambra.

Alan, however, posts on the same article and points out a pretty breathtaking quote that I missed when I read it this morning:

"If Jesus Christ came off the cross today," he said, "I'm not sure he could get the County Legislature to go along with him."

When arrogant delusion gives way to Messianic delusion is usually when things start getting really frightening. Stay tuned.

(Oh, and Alan also links a really fine op-ed column that appeared today as well. I read it myself and wanted to cheer. Buffalo rules, and let's damned well not forget it!)

Half-bloods, mudbloods, it's all the same

If I'd been thinking more clearly, I would have scheduled myself for a longer hiatus to accomodate the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now, as it is, I have to be super-careful to avoid spoilers while noodling around Blogistan. I just bought my copy of the book today, and I plan to start reading it this evening. It shouldn't take me too long, given that I devoured the previous volumes pretty quickly.

(And it's also weird that I was so gung-ho about reading spoilers for Revenge of the Sith, but when it comes to Harry Potter, I'm covering my ears and shouting "LA LA LA LA can't hear you!")

Anyhow, yes, I am now back from hiatus. It seems that a lot has happened while I've been gone. Time to play catch-up.