What's on the Tee-Vee

John and Roger did it, and since they're always stealing my goofy meme-stuff, I figure I should return the favor. Here's what I plan to watch on TV this season. (I end up taping a lot of shows for The Wife, who works when they're on, and then we watch them later whenever an opportunity arises.)

Monday Night:

8:00: Deal or No Deal. The Daughter likes this show; I mainly do computer stuff or read while it's on. If it's not on at all, I may watch Antiques Roadshow.

9:00: Nothing. That's usually bed time, so I'm reading to the Daughter and doing whatever afterwards. I might leave the CBS sitcom lineup on; that Charlie Sheen show is usually good for a laugh or two, but I can take it or leave it. (Isn't this to be the Heroes timeslot? I may give that a try.)

10:00: CSI: Miami. I was discussing this show at work today, actually -- David Caruso's acting is absolutely absurd, but it's either absurd in a way that you love it or in a way that you hate it. I, personally, love it -- he's the heir-apparent to the William Shatner school of emotive line delivery, where it's as if every syllable he utters is part of a soliloquy, no matter whether he's on screen with anyone else or not. When my interlocutor pointed out that Shatner's got some respect lately and has long since realized he's very spoofable, I decided that Caruso is Shatner circa 1982 or so. Caruso is now enjoying his TJ Hooker phase.

Case in point: For reasons too involved to go into in depth, this season's premiere of CSI: Miami took place in Rio de Janeiro. The opening scene had Caruso's character, Horatio Caine, striking his uber-dramatic Carusonic pose in front of that giant statue of Jesus that overlooks Rio from a mountaintop. Was there evidence of some sort up there? Was that statue's base a crime scene? Nope. It had no relevance at all to the story. Someone with the show simply decided that they couldn't film in Rio without having Caruso act all Carusonic in front of the giant Jesus statue. It was awesome, let me tell you.

(And when Caruso's not on the screen, there's a good chance that Emily Procter is. So I still win!)

Tuesday Night:

8:00: House. (Or Nova, if it's interesting and House isn't on.) I like House a good deal, although I do think they need to start shaking up the format a bit; the way it is now, you know that the main medical mystery won't be resolved at all until about 8:50.

9:00 - 11:00: Gee, nothing, really. Tuesday's a wasteland, although that will change in January when American Idol returns. (Also if Scrubs is still on Tuesdays when it gets back.)

Wednesday Night:

8:00 - 10:00: Again, nothing as of yet, although Jericho sounds interesting, so I may give that a whirl.

10:00: CSI: NY. My least favorite CSI show, really. I tend to read while it's on. Might give The Nine a try; might not.

Thursday Night:

8:00: My Name is Earl, followed by The Office. I'll watch these two shows in reruns, even.

9:00: CSI. Still the best of the CSIs, with the best characters and the most dark humor.

10:00: Gray's Anatomy, which I taped an hour before whilst watching CSI. I'm frankly a bit tired of the whole "Meredith and Dr. McDreamy" subplot, but I still like this show. ER died for good in my mind last year, although it limped along for The Wife. But then she finally lost patience too when they did yet another "Send some character to Africa" story that was just like all the other "Send some character to Africa" stories, and then the worst cliffhanger episode on a network drama since Dynasty's "Moldavian Wedding Massacre". And since I recently saw that the show's idea-dry producers are bringing Sally Field back yet again, we're both done. I doubt we'll even watch the season opener to see if Nurse Sam and her brat kid finally die horribly. In its heyday, one of the best shows on TV ever. Now, a total embarrassment.

Friday Night:

8:00 - 11:00: Nothing at all. If The Wife is off, this will be catch-up-on-stuff-on-tape night; otherwise, it'll be movie night. (Although I may give this Men in Trees show a try, if it sticks around at all.)

Saturday Night:

8:00 - 11:00: Again, nothing at all. I don't much care about college football. This will be another movie night or taped-shows night, unless something else that I like ends up in a Saturday time slot. But even then I might not care enough to follow a show to Saturday night, which can even become a "no TV of any kind" night on occasion in our home. Seriously: at 6:00 pm, NPR here has Thistle and Shamrock on until 8:00, when Marian McPartland's wonderful Piano Jazz takes over. But starting at 10:00, I can indulge a wonderful two hours of comedy: our local FOX affiliate has back-to-back Simpsons eps then, followed by the local PBS station at 11:00, with Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Sunday Night:

1:00 pm: The Buffalo Bills, or playoff football after the regular season ends.
7:00 pm: America's Funniest Home Videos. Yeah, yeah. Another show the Daughter gets to pick.
8:00 pm: Whatever's on until The Amazing Race starts around 8:30. Best reality show of them all; I'm kicking myself for missing the first seven or so seasons.
10:00: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, courtesy of the good folks of Toronto. Will the show have legs? Who knows?

So that's it. I have to admit that more and more I'm thinking, "Screw the original telecasts of shows -- I'll watch them on DVD when they come out." I like immersing myself in a show's world for multiple episodes at a time; especially with shows that have ongoing arcs or storylines.

What you call "trendy", I call "following like sheep"! Harumph!

I was just weeding out some old e-mails, and I re-discovered that Will Duquette sent me this a couple of weeks back:

Har har! I suppose I could be trendy, but in the words of Aaron Sorkin, I don't have that kind of time!

I've never seen Cow and Boy before, and will have to check it out. (Being honest, though, I must note that "Cow and Boy" sounds like a title Gary Larsen might have thought up before settling on The Far Side!)

Sentential Links #66

Here we go again! Click and read. Or just click. Or just read. Or just sit there drooling. Hey, it's your life.

:: A little birdy once told me that the meaning of life is to acheive perfect roundness so we can launch into orbit around the great and bountiful Harvest Lord. (The solution to this problem is: Get rid of cable. That's how we did it!)

:: Corporate Conspiracy # 3,068: Whatever you do, don't get your hands dirty! Dirt is dirty! Germy, must sterilize, gross. Here are 5 billion toxic chemical products to clean and sterilize you. (Shades of George Carlin: "What are you gonna do when some supervirus comes along and turns your vital organs into liquid shit? You're gonna die and you're gonna deserve it 'cause you're f***ing weak, and you got a f***ing weak immune system!")

:: I've learned it too many times when I'm hungry and haven't eaten all day and can't decide whether to get Taco Bell or Jack in the Box so I get both and figure I'm hungry enough to eat eggrolls, a cheeseburger, soft tacos, and a combo burrito only to be completely stuffed about 60% of the way through, leaving me to not only throw away food for which I paid good money, but also popping Target's storebrand equivalent of Tums and feeling miserable the rest of the night.

:: So, to end where I began: anyone who wants to make, or is making, comics should read this book. (Scott McCloud has a new book out! I'll probably read it, even though my only ability at comics creation would be scripting, since my art is freaking laughable.)

:: Marvel's summer 2007 event will be written by Greg Pak and entitled World War Hulk. (The title alone is cool on about nine different levels.) Apparently, it's a miniseries (not a crossover), and will basically feature the Hulk vs. the entire Marvel Universe, which in my mind should be the premise of pretty much every single Hulk comic ever, so...sold! (Man, have I got comics on the brain lately. Not good. Comics are too freakin' expensive.)

:: Remember what I said before about maybe we'd be better off if the Wonder Woman movie wasn't made?

Well, fuck that. We need that movie, and we need it now. And we need it to make a bazillion bucks so that a bunch of knockoffs get made the next year. (Preach it! They made a Daredevil movie and an Elektra movie, for God's sake -- where the hell is Wonder Woman!)

:: This is my stuff bag. Sure, I got it free when I joined the Book of the Month club, but it doesn't really matter what king of freakin' bag it is. Just that the bag works for you.

:: Yes, you can—right this instant—read about the goings-on of this august body when it was populated with the likes of Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, with cameos by such luminaries as Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Gottfried Leibniz and Giovanni Domenico Cassini. (I swear, the Internet is getting closer and closer to being the Library Computer from Star Trek.)

All for this week. Good blogging this week, folks! Let's keep it up! We can win this thing!

If they bring it to my door in a flat, square box, then IT'S A PIZZA!

Ahhhh, the Pizza Wars are starting again!

Initiated by this site (which I saw on MeFi, but hadn't got round to blogging yet, and which is as of this writing down because it got FARK'd and BoingBoing'd and MeFi'd all in the same weekend -- but mirror links are provided there) wherein some fellow relates his obsessive effort to produce a New York City-style pizza, Alan and BuffaloGeek take their shots.

Says Geek:

However, there is nothing we disagree more vehemently on than the definition of good pizza. As you know, Pundito is a a fan of thin crust Neapolitan style and foldable NY Style Pizza…both are crimes against pizza.

I’m a fan of local Buffalo pizza for one reason only, it’s what I grew up eating. Nino’s, Bob & Johns, Bocce Club, Abbott, Avenue, Mister Pizza…all pizzas of my youth. While tasty and laden with crispy pepperoni memories, these pizzas fail the test of “Best Pizza in America”


When asked who makes the best pizza in the country, my answer is very simple. Lou Malnati’s, a Chicago institution and purveyor of fine deep dish pizza.

If God came back to Earth and asked to see evidence of gastrological perfection, I would take him to Lou’s for a slice of buttercrust deep dish pepperoni with mushrooms and hot giardiniera. If God is a vegetarian, I’d get him “The Lou”, which comes with basil and garlic spinach, mushrooms and sliced tomatoes covered with a blend of mozzarella, romano and cheddar cheese. Pizza perfection.

Retorts Alan:

He calls New York style / Neapolitan pizza a "crime against pizza". Oh, no you di’int. Since the Neapolitans invented it, it is the default; the standard by which all other pizzas are measured.

"Stop the Madness!" says I.

We actually had a mini-discussion of this before in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan, back in the days when Alan was still on Blogger. My thoughts, encapsulated here and here, have not changed:

Personally, I like NYC-style pizza just fine. But then, I like all styles of pizza just fine, really. Thin, foldable crust? Sure. Deep-dish Chicago-style, with the cheese tiled at the bottom and the tomatoes on top? Great. All styles in between? Bring 'em on.

"There are more pizzas in Heaven and Earth than are dream't of in our philosophy," wrote Shakespeare. And he was right. (Although, now that I think of it, I'm not sure the Bard was talking about pizza at all. Hmmmm.)

And a bit later on:

But what interests me is this (as I comment on his blog): everybody I've ever met who grew up on NYC-style pizza, with that type of pizza being their virginal pizza experience, loves it to the point of loathing every other kind of pizza that exists, anywhere. On the other hand, every person I've ever met who loves pizza but did not encounter NYC-style pizza first tends to love NYC-style pizza when they discover it, but they don't drop every other style of pizza in its favor. I don't know why this is, but it's true. Talk to a native eater of NYC-style pizza, and they'll react with horror at the idea of consuming any other kind of pizza. But talk to a non-native eater of pizza, and if they'll likely say, "NYC-style? Yeah, that's pretty good. So's Chicago...."

I think that's still the case. I'm always baffled by the notion that NYC-style pizza is some kind of Platonic ideal when it comes to pizza; pizza is a food that has evolved over many centuries, starting long before the folks in Naples with spices and meats served atop flatbread. There is no more a "standard" for pizza than there is a "standard" for chili, to name another food that varies wildly by region. (Don't believe me? Order chili in Dallas sometime, and compare what they serve you to what comes in the bowl when you order chili in Cincinnati.) Or wine. Or beer.

Note my verb there: pizza evolved. Nobody "invented" pizza. The folks in Naples may have developed the historical dish that's closest to what we now call "pizza", but they didn't "invent" pizza. At least, they didn't in the same sense that Thomas Edison "invented" the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph.

As an aside, though, would it matter anyway if the Neopolitans actually did "invent" pizza? Who ever said that inventions should never change? I used to listen to music on my record player, but no one ever told me that I wasn't really utilizing Thomas Edison's invention just because the record was a flat disc as opposed to a wax cylinder. And as another aside, Neapolitan pizza wouldn't exist at all as such if not for the importation into Italy of the tomato, which is originally indigenous to the Americas. (In fact, tomatoes were thought poisonous in Italy when they first arrived there, brought back from the Americas by the Spaniards; they were grown strictly as ornamental plants before they found their way into peasant food. Pizza, like so many other dishes, is originally a peasant dish that is now being fought over by the gourmet types!

So I'd say that the Neapolitan pizza is not the "standard by which all others are judged", since the Neapolitans did not "invent" pizza and even if they did, merely being the inventor of something doesn't imply that the thing will remain the exact same for the Rest of Recorded Time. So there.

I'd also take exception to Alan's contention that a Chicago deep-dish pizza is not a pizza at all, but rather a casserole. I don't frankly see on what basis deep-dish pizza can be denied to be a pizza, or on what basis it is a casserole. It's a leavened flatbread-style crust onto which is loaded cheese and whatever other toppings are used. It is casserole-like in that it is baked in a dish and then typically served in that same dish, but merely sharing some qualities with a thing doesn't make it that thing, right? An apple pie is baked in a baking dish, but that doesn't make it a casserole. Neither is a quiche. Chicago deep-dish pizza is pizza, and like all pizza, it stands squarely in the pie family of dishes, and not in the casseroles. QED. (Heck, I have some recipes for "casseroles" that aren't baked at all, but cooked in a slow cooker! Take that, Rigid Food Definition Police!)

Not, however, that I'd endorse Geek's view that NYC-style pizza is a "crime against pizza". I love a good NYC pizza. I also love Chicago deep-dish. Although, frankly, my personal preference tends toward the Chicago, because I adore that flaky crust. Oh man, that crust is just beautiful. But I'm not going to turn my nose up at a NYC pizza, either. And I love Buffalo's pizzas too. (Well, most of 'em, anyway.) So I get the best of all worlds: I don't have to turn up my nose at entire categories of pizza goodness! So, once again, I am supreme in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan. 'Twas ever thus!

And now, judging by the chirping crickets, I shall change the subject.

UPDATE 1-23-07: This post has been receiving several search engine hits per day for a while now, so for readers just coming, I more recently wrote -- with photos -- a post wherein I made my own Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Enjoy!

Who the hell is Paddy Chayefsky?

Last night, courtesy of Toronto's CTV station that my apartment complex's antenna receives, I got to see Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The official premiere of the pilot episode in the US is tonight, so there are spoilers below. (Unless, of course, you've already seen the pilot via any of the various online distribution schemes NBC employed over the summer to create buzz for this show. Here I've seen it a day before its official US premiere, and I'm still behind the curve.)

It's a very, very, very good show. The production values are amazing, and the acting is first-rate across the board. This was a big worry of mine, but take it from me: you'll be able to watch Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford without once thinking of Chandler Bing or Josh Lyman.

But.

Yes, I said "but".

If you've read any buzz about Studio 60 at all, you know that its basic concept is that it's a backstage show, set in and around the production of a Saturday Night Live-type sketch comedy show that's been on for twenty years, produced groundbreaking comedy and satire in its early years, but has since become safe and boring and -- the ultimate comedy crime -- unfunny. The producer-creator, played by Judd Hirsch (an actor I always love), finally snaps and walks right onto the stage during the live broadcast, whereupon he gives a long, rambling diatribe to the live national audience about the stunning wasteland that is television today. Network execs explode, exit the old producer, and the mess is dumped into the lap of the new network president (Amanda Peet), who decides to rehire the show's old head writer (Matthew Perry) and director (Bradley Whitford), who apparently quit or were fired from the show four years earlier.

The show features all the features you'd expect from a Sorkin/Schlamme show: dialogue that happens so fast you miss it if you so much as sip your beverage, long tracking shots that follow the actors through the winding corridors of a very complex set while they recite said dialogue that happens so fast yada yada yada, name-dropping galore to create a sense that this show actually is taking place in the real world, and so on. And yes, it's wonderful to have all that Sorkin/Schlamme goodness back again, four years after their departure from The West Wing (and, frankly, five years after their best TWW work was already behind them).

But here's the thing: it's almost too Sorkinesque, if that makes any sense. Watching Studio 60, I got the same sensation that I felt when I caught a couple of episodes of SportsNight on syndication a few years back. I'd never seen SportsNight in its original run, so I saw an episode of it after I'd seen three or four years' worth of West Wing. And the feeling I got was that I was hearing TWW dialogue, but not about TWW stuff. Same thing here: the tone of the dialogue is exactly the same, but the topic is TV and not politics. It may take me an episode or two to fully recalibrate myself to Studio 60.

And, of course, people like me who are pretty intimately familiar with Sorkin's writing will recognize those little "Sorkinisms" when they pop up. Phrases like "I hate your breathing guts". Someone telling a higher-up at length about this great idea they have, and when the higher-up says, "Great, when do we start?", being told something like "I already did." Characters not batting an eye when told bluntly by someone else about their own character flaws, or even seeming proud of them. Every affirmative answer to an interrogative being "Yeah". Never "yes", "uh-huh", "mmm-hmmm", "you bet your bippy", but "yeah". It's only a matter of time, I suppose, before someone on Studio 60 relates a bad experience with the metaphor, "I got screwed with my pants on", or until someone rigidly insists: "No, I didn't do that. I would never do that. It would be unthinkable for me to do that. [beat] But yes, I did that."

I once read a scathing critique of Aaron Sorkin's writing (don't remember where, or I'd look for a link) that pointed out how just about every character in his shows talks the same, with the same phrasings, the same long-winded sentences that occasionally become exercises in recursion. I can't totally deny the point, but when Sorkin's on his game, I'm left thinking, "Yeah, isn't it great!" On this pilot episode, at least, Sorkin's had time to hone this script to the typical sharpness that one expects from a Sorkin script when he's had time to hone it thusly. We'll see what happens later in the season.

And there's where some of my skepticism about this show comes into play: later in the season. The West Wing, being set in the political world of the White House, offered tremendous dramatic potential. The canvas on Studio 60, though, seems at my first glance to be substantially more limited. I'm just not sure how many stories there are to tell with a show like this, and I'm not sure how long it can go on before it starts feeling a bit stale. I'm sure we'll have stories about actor difficulties, and problems with the writing staff, and clashes with network executives, and cost overruns, and so on. There's no reason why that kind of thing can't remain interesting for a long time, but to do so, Sorkin may need to vary his writing style a bit. As much as I love to see the old Sorkin/Schlamme magic at work again, that can't be the sole thing keeping Studio 60 going.

And I'm already a little unsure of the degree to which Sorkin appears to be mining from his own personal experiences for this project: a show set in TV land about a writer-director team that left their old project under less-than-ideal circumstances, one of whom has a recurring addiction problem. There's a very definite feeling that Studio 60 is Sorkin's roman a clef, and it's very hard not to look at the show's constant indication that the fictional sketch comedy show sucked hard in the absence of its brilliant writer/director team as a slap at the three seasons of The West Wing that followed the Sorkin/Schlamme exit from that series.

But at the same time, I'm glad that Sorkin and Schlamme appear to be openly embracing the fact that show business is seedy as hell, that it really is populated with people who look for dead bodies so they can steal the coins off their eyes, and that it is a business of metaphorical incest where everybody knows everybody else and has slept with a good number of them. The West Wing somehow managed to blend a romanticized notion of politics, where public service is honorable and so are most of the people in it, with the old adage about how you shouldn't inquire too closely into the makings of laws and sausages. That same blend of tropes can't work with Studio 60; nobody really romanticizes Hollywood anymore, and certainly nobody really romanticizes television.

And there's the rub: I suspect Studio 60 will be a show that's much admired for its sheer quality. But I doubt that it'll be loved as its politically-themed predecessor was. So don't watch Studio 60 with The West Wing in mind. Instead, think of a seedy Hollywood tell-all book. Think You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. And don't look for a Jed Bartlet in this show. There isn't one.

CLARIFICATION: I didn't dislike SportsNight on the limited basis in which I saw it. But what I did see made me wonder (along with movies like The American President and A Few Good Men, also written by Sorkin) if Sorkin might not be a one-trick pony, albeit with a really amazing trick. His output is excellent, no doubt about that, but his dialogue really does sound the same from one thing to the next.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I'll probably have more to say tomorrow about the Bills' encouraging defeat on the road of the Miami Dolphins, but for now, here's something I noticed when looking at the FOX Sports recap of the game. Specifically, it's a section of that site where they compare the performances of the quarterbacks. Here's a screengrab of the little portion I'm talking about:



There's JP Losman's numbers on the left, and Daunte Culpepper's on the right. But note: there's a headshot of Culpepper, but none of Losman!

Hey, FOX Sports, what the hell is up with that?! Sure, Losman's still a young player who may or may not blossom in the NFL; and sure, the consensus opinion going into this season seems to be that Losman's a major bust of a first-round draft pick waiting to happen; but he's not a bust yet, he's a third-year player, and he is still for the moment a starting quarterback for a team in the National Football League. Shouldn't you guys have a friggin' headshot for the guy by now? Sheesh.

"In a different reality, I might have called you 'friend'."

By sheer luck, I discovered last night that one of Buffalo's TV stations had an episode of the Star Trek: The Original Series on last night. The original episodes are getting "Lucasized" with new special effects, primarily on exterior space shots. Even though I hadn't seen this particular episode, "Balance of Terror", in many years, the new effects still stood out in my eye. Not that the new effects are bad, mind you, but that the show's original look is pretty much burned on my brain. Still, for the most part, I found the new effects to be mostly in the same spirit as the old ones, although the whole exercise seems a tad odd to me -- digitally updating archaic special effects, but in such a way as to make the new digital effects look like the old archaic ones! Anyway, I just hope they don't do anything to the Horta when they get to "The Devil in the Dark".

And "Balance of Terror" is still a hell of an episode. I'd actually forgotten how good it is.

(Speaking of the Horta, the old DC Comics Star Trek book actually had a Horta as an officer on the Enterprise. In one hilarious moment, a feline-like alien used that Horta officer as a scratching post.

OK, I guess you had to be there.)

Just when they had him in the crushing grip of reason....

Here's a good illustration of why I tend to find discussion with Libertarians so maddening.

Basically, it seems that Germany has a law that makes homeschooling illegal. Setting aside the merits of that policy, Alan took exception to someone's rhetoric in discussing a legal case that arose from that German policy. Hitler outlawed homeschooling in his regime, and then the post-WWII German government also decided to outlaw homeschooling, so some Libertarians are calling the current German ban on homeschooling "Hitler's ban on homeschooling". Alan points out that Hitler also had the Autobahn built, but nobody calls that road "Hitler's highway", and he also points out that Germans are quite capable of discussing the current homeschooling policy without bringing Hitler into it.

The logical train seems to go like this:

1. I like trains to operate in tight accordance with their schedules.
2. Mussolini made the trains run on time.
3. Therefore, I like Mussolini.

Or, "It should make you uncomfortable to prefer your trains to being on time because Mussolini made the trains run on time."

And yet, nowhere does Alan either endorse or condemn the German homeschooling ban, and nothing he writes can even be reasonably construed as doing so. He's only talking about the rhetorical device of plugging Hitler into a discussion, and yet here come the misreadings, goofy accusations, and that favorite insult of Libertarians everywhere, calling Alan a "statist".

I love it when they drag "statist" out of the arsenal -- it reminds me of when I was debating the Objectivist loon over that the FSM boards, and he solemnly intoned: "You, sir, are a Subjectivist!" Heck, it reminds me of that scene at the bus stop in ET: The Extra-terrestrial, when Elliot gets into a verbal fight with an older kid, and they trade barbs back and forth: "You're so immature!" "And you're such a sinus supremus!" "Zero charisma!" "Sinus supremus!" "Zero charisma!" "Sinus supremus!"

It's all very odd, coming from folks whose flagship magazine is called "Reason".

(BTW, can anyone tell me what the hell a "sinus supremus" is? Seriously, I've always wondered. "Zero charisma" I get, having been a D&D player back in the day, but I've never been able to figure out "sinus supremus". It seems to imply very large sinuses, but that can't be it. Hell, if that were the case, there are plenty of mornings when I'd give my right arm to be a sinus supremus.)

A very public service message.

Just for my Buffalo and Southern Ontario readers: tomorrow night (Monday) is when NBC will be premiering Aaron Sorkin's new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. But if you want to see it one night early, Channel Nine out of Hamilton, Ontario will be showing it tonight at 10:00. I don't know if that channel is available on local cable, but we get that channel on the broadcast antenna that our apartment complex uses, so if you've got some good rabbit-ears, this is a good time to use them.

UPDATE: Crap! It's CTV out of Toronto, not whatever station's out of Hamilton. But it is Channel Nine on my dial, here in Buffalo.

Test. Check. Check. Test. Check.

Apologies, readers Regular and Sporadic, for the lack of material in this space over the last six days. The Fates apparently decided that we were due for one of their annoying visits, and they could not be convinced that their last visit was one on which they severely overstayed their welcome. But things should be getting back to some kind of normal now. Maybe.

Sentential Links #65

Time, once again, for our weekly jaunt 'round Blogistan....

:: Once and Again: Oh, YAWN! Gorgeous, well-to-do suburbanites with minuscule problems examined in detail once and again and over and over again. I could not care less. (Aieee!)

:: In my undergrad years I was part of an intense small theatre group that has remained in touch and sometimes close for nearly half a century. I had thought a church might be like repertory theatre and that ministers might be like English actors, moving from part to part smoothly. One for all and all for one.

:: September 11, 2001 was Primary Day in New York State, ultimately postponed. As the law stands now, it will be Primary Day (for all races except the Presidency) on average every seven years. Some people think it ought to be changed to a week later, in order to "Honor the dead". I don't. September 11 is a GREAT day to exercise one's freedom.

:: I don't know about you, but I'm coming to the conclusion that the Pentagon subcontracted this job to the same guys that James Bond's enemies always hired to design their headquarters — you know, the one with the prominently labelled SELF DESTRUCT button.

:: Plus, a guy carries around a hammer that can end the world - how cool is that? (Gotta start reading this series....)

:: Which brings us to STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP, NBC’s great white hope from Sorkin and director/producer Tommy Schlamme, the SPORTSNIGHT/WEST WING team. (I've heard pretty much unanimous opinion that the Studio 60 pilot is brilliant; what concerns me is the show being consistently brilliant.)

:: In what sense does an event that features four Republicans but excludes the two senators who were representing New York at the time of the event, but who happen to be Democrats, leave aside partisan rancor?

:: My biggest disappointment of the past five years — the biggest by a very long way — has been the way that George Bush transformed 9/11 from an opportunity to bring the country together into a cynical and partisan cudgel useful primarily for winning a few more votes in national elections. (Mine too. I wanted to believe in George W. Bush after 9-11. Aside from the odd business of him sitting in that classroom for so long, I never had a problem with his conduct on 9-11, or in the days after; his speech to Congress a week later was as good a Presidential address as I've ever heard, and I strongly supported our invasion of Afghanistan. But the man has been one disappointment after another ever since, and "Mission Accomplished" is when he pretty much lost me forever.)

:: So, in just five short months in Rich Lowry World, we went from "The debate over troop levels" is "somewhat beside the point" and "to think that higher troop levels would have been a magic bullet is to indulge a very American faith in the power of mass to overcome anything" to "There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops" and "The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment." It's not just profoundly wrong; it's worse than that. It's ludicrous. (I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that Lowry was calling for more troops as the solution to Iraq. It's just astonishing. Maybe the Army Fairy will stick a few brand new armored divisions under his pillow or something.)

:: As we wrap up another ten songs and move ever so slowly toward our ultimate goal, I'd dare you to denigrate my musical taste, but for two things: you can't because it's so awesome, and nobody reads this anyway! I can expound on great songs according to me with impunity! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

:: THWUCK! That's just plain good writing...although it sounds like someone will be needing a moist towelette later. (This is actually an old post by the Tensor, but I'm linking it because I finished reading Galactic Patrol the other day and I have all this close at mind. I loved the book, I have to admit -- I figured I'd enjoy it, but man, it was just a terrifically fun read. I'll post more about the Lensmen series one day, but for now, I'd note that if anyone out there is looking to read this iconic space opera, start with Galactic Patrol, and not with Triplanetary. Ignore the fact that Triplanetary may be indicated as the first book in the Lensmen series. That may be true in terms of the chronology of the story, but that's not the order in which E.E. Smith wrote the books, and publishing order is almost always the best reading order. Also, the references in GP to the "ether" struck me as interesting as the book was written several decades after the Michaelson-Morley experiments disproved the existence of the luminiferous aether.)

All for this week. Clear ether!

Five

Five years hence. So much the same, so much not.

(Images from here.)

Normal blogging, including Sentential Links, returns tomorrow.

Fading Into Memory (a repost)

Posted on 9-11-03, but I still think this way:

The first major historical event of my lifetime was probably the resignation of President Nixon. I was just shy of three years old when that happened, and I have utterly no memory of it. In fact, I have no memory of President Ford, either. The first historical figure of whom I have any distinct memory is President Carter. Thus, the first five years of history through which I lived does not exist for me as memory. They're just pages in the history books, no less so because I lived through them than they are for my daughter who did not.

And for her, 9-11-01 will be the same way. I'll be able to describe to her the incredible sadness of that day; I'll be able to tell her where I was when I heard the news begin to unfold; I'll be able to relate how the news got worse and worse and worse. I'll be able to tell her how, for three days afterward, the skies were clear and unbroken by jet-plane contrails as air traffic was halted. I'll be able to tell her about Buffalo firemen standing in every intersection, taking donations for their brethren in NYC. All that and more, I'll be able to tell her. But it will never be as real for her as it was and is for me. For her, it will be like the Kennedy assassination or Nixon resignation are for me, and how Pearl Harbor was for my parents (Dad was two, Mom was four months).

We tell ourselves that we must never forget, that we must keep the pain real, that we must never allow those terrible moments to recede into history like everything else. But we fool ourselves if we think we can. September 11, 2001 is already receding into history, faster than we realize. And I believe that this is as it should be.

There have been so many horrible days in our nation's history, days when the darkness seemed ready to overwhelm us and threaten the very fabric of our nation. Each time, America has moved on, incorporating the bad days into the tapestry of its history. There will come a time when September 11, 2001 will be just another seminal event in history, more known than remembered. And it won't be a hundred years from now. It's already starting.

I've seen some complaints, online and off, that we aren't doing enough to mark the occasion. Perhaps it's unseemly to many that NBC should air reruns of its Thursday night lineup on such a momentous day, and in truth, it does seem odd to me that not a single prime-time special is devoted to the 9-11-01 anniversary, even though I don't believe that all three networks should devote their entire schedules to it. If this year's observance is less-than-satisfying, I'm still one who found last year's "All 9-11, all the time" approach, even in the days preceding the actual date, to be simply too much. I suppose that I no longer wish to partake in public mourning; and it does not strike me as particularly healthy to try each year to recapture or regenerate the anger and shock and desperation of that day.

For myself, I plan to do much as I did last year. I'll read some American poetry, listen to some American music, and perhaps watch an American movie or an American television show. It just seems right to me to take a bit of time to reflect on American cultural artifacts tomorrow, since it was not just America but American culture that was attacked two years ago. That is how I choose to remember and honor those who died: by reminding myself that America is still here, that our contributions to the world and our species are real, and that they will last far, far longer than Osama Bin Laden's hatred ever possibly can - - even if he crashes a thousand planes into our thousand tallest buildings.

There is more sanctity - - true sanctity, that which celebrates beauty in the face of a harsh world and an unforgiving universe - - in a Gene Kelly dance number, in a Frank Lloyd Wright building, in a Lerner-and-Loewe song, in the taste of a grilled hot dog, in the crack of a baseball bat, in the spiral of a perfectly-thrown football, and in a Robert Heinlein short story than there are in the hearts of a million terrorists who are prepared to immolate themselves and a thousand innocents in the name of a hating God.

"The CIty of Dead Works" (a repost)

Here is the first work of fiction I committed after 9-11-01. I've posted this a number of times before, so long-time readers will have seen it.

"The City of Dead Works"

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.

"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Finis.

Oh-and-one

Normally I'd write my postmortem on a Bills game on the following Monday, but I'm going to do so now while the game's really fresh on my mind. The Bills lost to the New England Stupid Patriots, 19-17, but the game was just as tight as that score indicates, and for everyone who has been predicting a disastrous year for the Bills, I have to draw a great deal of hope for this team's future.

Now, given the Godless MSM's adoration for All Things Brady, I'm sure the coverage of this game will focus on how the StuPats mounted a courageous comeback and how they showed amazing poise and how they overcame adversity in their own park and blah blah blah, as opposed to the team in disarray going on the road to the reigning dynasty's house, very nearly beating them, and making them look frankly ordinary in the process.

The Bills are still a losing team. Losing teams have chances to win and fail to convert. That's what the Bills did. But there are still distinctions to be made there: teams that are really downright bad just flail about and never look competent at all, but losing teams that have some pride, work hard, and are really trying to improve at least create a few chances along the way. I've been listening to a bit of the talk radio reaction over the past few minutes, and it's all the same old "They had their chances and they blew it!" stuff. But there's the rub: the Bills made their own chances today, in a way that they never really did last year.

The Bills lost this game because they weren't good enough to overcome a few dumb mistakes (Robert Royal's block in the back was a killer) and, in one extremely important play, simply weren't physical enough to make the smashmouth stuff happen. Today, they were nearly good enough to play with New England in New England. Who thought that would be the case yesterday? Last week? Last spring? At the end of last season? Who would have predicted JP Losman completing sixty-five percent of his passes in a season-opening road game against the StuPats, with no interceptions, several big third-down conversions after escaping pressure, and showing genuine awareness of the field most of the time?

In my NFL predictions post, I noted that I expected the Bills to lose more often than not this year, but I also noted that I hoped that their losses would be of a type where the teams that beat them come away knowing that they very well could have lost, and that they had to play a full game in order to win. That's what the Bills gave today. So even though they lost, call me optimistic for the team in the long term.

And for all the New England lovers out there, just think: they've got a lot of better teams than the Bills ahead of them. It wasn't Losman who completed under fifty percent of his passes today; that was the great Tom Brady, against about as green adn inexperienced a defense as he's likely to face. And when's the last time anyone heard the StuPats getting booed by the hometown faithful, as they were at halftime today?

Pick on the Bills while you can, NFL, because a few more games like today's might just indicate that their days in the darkness may be numbered.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness (and Coolness!)

I remember how, when I was in grade school, every so often one of my math or science teachers would sing the praises of the Metric system of measurement over the more familiar (to Americans) English system. And, sure, maybe it would be easier to just have all the units relate to all the other units by a simple factor of ten, but then you couldn't have nifty units of measurement like the Smoot.

What's a smoot, you ask? Why, it's the height of one Oliver R. Smoot. How did Mr. Smoot's height become a unit of measurement? For that answer, go check out the various links provided in this MeFi post by Steven Den Beste, who gets credit for the best MeFi post I've ever seen in the three or four years I've been following that site.

The funniest part of the tale, for me, is how the pledges measuring the bridge were set to use a string measured to Smoot's height until an upper classman happened to come by and make them do the task using Smoot himself as the measuring stick.

(BTW, it turns out that I am 1.03886799 Smoots tall.)

Time for REAL football!

This is it, folks! Line 'em up! Get my eleven guys over here, and your eleven guys over there, and let's see who's the most physical, the fastest, the toughest under pressure!

It's time for the National Football League!

I'm using too many exclamation points!

Here you'll find my starting opinions for the upcoming season. Some of these opinions may prove strong, and thus hold their positions; others may prove weak or ineffectual, and get benched for new opinions. Rookie opinions will have to prove themselves by working hard and learning from the veteran opinions, while some long-held opinions may be challenged and some of those may even hear those fateful words, "The coach wants to see you, and bring your playbook."

As always, before I delve into my prognostications, predictions, and poorly-planned provocations, let me note that when I write about football, I take the general approach of a smart and literate guy at the local bar who, despite being smart and literate and having a pretty decent vocabulary and a wealth of pop-cultural knowledge on which to draw for fancy allusions, has nevertheless quaffed a little too muhc Yuengling's to make sense all the time, and may in turn be given to ranting in a way that's unbecoming so smart and literate a personage. If you were keeping count, yes, I called myself "smart" and "literate" three times in that sentence, but that was mainly an attempt to innoculate myself against my inevitable detour into stupidity. So basically: read my football rantings with the same attention you'd give to a mildly buzzed guy at a bar who's watching SportsCenter when he should be at home massaging the wife's feet. OK?

So here we go, using a Q&A format:

:: On a scale of one to ten, with one being the '91 Redskins and with ten being the inaugural season of the Buccaneers, how much will the Buffalo Bills suck in 2006?

Five. Next question.

:: Explain.

Oh. OK. Well, they sucked last year. No doubt about that. The Bills went into last year boasting madly about how awesome their defense was going to be, how that D was going to remind people of the '85 Bears or the '00 Ravens, how JP Losman would be OK because that D would carry the team to a few wins while Losman was learning the ropes of starting in the NFL, how they'd make the playoffs on the basis of that amazing D.

So the Bills prompty went 5-11 on the year, with that amazing D coming in almost dead last in points allowed, yardage, pride maintained -- just about any statistic you can name.

But the D is only half the story, right? Sure -- and the offense was equally bad, if not worse. Everybody knew that Losman would struggle as a secord-year player, first-time starter; everybody, that is, except the Bills' coaching staff, who were apparently astonished that Losman wasn't ready to lead a winner of a team. So they panicked and put in Kelly Holcomb, a guy who's perfectly nice and may make a decent QB coach some day but who is clearly not going to lead anybody to an NFL title anytime soon. This decision had the effect of pleasing certain unhappy veterans on the Bills, which in turn undermined the coaching staff even further. So the staff got even more desperate. Head coach Mike Mularkey took playcalling duties away from his own offensive coordinator, and then he did things like pull the team's best offensive player, running back Willis McGahee, out of games in third-down and goal-line situations. He called gimick plays in games in which the running game had been working, frequently resulting in stalled drives for no points. His rosters might as well have not even included any tight ends at all, so small a role did they play in his years here, despite the fact that Mularkey was an NFL tight end himself and the fact that for a raw young quarterback, the best thing to have after a good offensive line is a tight end who can make those short, safe catches in order to keep the chains moving.

And then there was my personal obsession: the offensive line.

For what must have been the fifth consecutive year, the Bills fielded the worst offensive line in football. (Or second worst, after Houston's.) Mike Williams, taken fourth overall in the 2001 draft, finally stopped hovering in the "May one day realize his potential" category and sank, hippopotamus-like, into the mud of Major Draft Bust-dom. Standing at his side, watching opposing defensive lineman go right through his collander-like grasp, was Bennie Anderson. JP Losman was frequently dodging defenders by the time he'd even finished dropping back to throw.

So we had a defensive line that rarely generated pressure on opposing QB's and couldn't stop the run; a linebacking corps hindered by the tear of Takeo Spikes's ACL; and a secondary that was anchored by a selfish has-been (Lawyer Milloy, who once wisely intoned that "You can't feed your family Super Bowl rings"), and a selfish wanna-be (Nate Clements, who dubbed himself "the playmaker" and then got taken to school by every good receiver the Bills faced). We had a green quarterback who was undermined within the locker room and by the coaching staff. We had a running back who, despite unquestionable talent, seemed lackadaisical much of the time. We had a receiving corps led by an increasingly pouty veteran (Eric Moulds, whom I'm sure will find the state of the Houston Texans much more to his liking), and a group of tight ends whose existence I confirm by looking them up in Street and Smith's (because I sure never saw them on the field).

What a mess. Five years of Tom Donahoe's inattention to parts of the team combined with his failed efforts to fix other parts of the team led to a broken mess of a franchise.

Enter Marv Levy as General Manager, who then hired Dick Jauron as head coach, and then said goodbye to Mike Williams, Lawyer Milloy, Bennie Anderson, Eric Moulds, Sam Adams, Mark Campbell, and Trey Teague. Levy then said "Hello" to Robert Royal (TE), Craig Nall (QB), Larry Tripplett (DT), Melvin Fowler (C), and Peerless Price (WR). In the draft, after stunning Buffalo by saying "pass" to Matt Leinart, Levy said "Hello" to Donte Whitner, John McCargo, and a number of other defensive prospects. Levy addressed defense in his draft, once again ignoring, to my chagrin, the offensive line. He gave strangely large contracts to Peerless Price, a receiver who has had exactly one good year in his six-year career, and Craig Nall, a QB who has never done anything but back up Brett Favre. So the jury's still out on Marv Levy as GM, of course. But if most of his initial draft picks pan out, maybe the Bills will turn the franchise around sooner rather than later. (Tom Donahoe's drafts were pretty much "Meh", even with McGahee and potentially Losman included in the consideration.)

As a Bills fan, it's hard not to fall into the "Geez, they can't get worse!" way of thinking. If nothing else, the atmosphere of the locker room heading into this season is far healthier than the atmosphere of last year's locker room, which started out cocky and brash and then finished up bitter and dysfunctional. The Bills know that they're going to be underdogs every time they take the field, that no one expects them to be any good. So they have that going for them, at least. They're a young team again, so if they avoid injuries and everyone progresses OK, this might be the equivalent of the 1986 Bills, who went 4-12 but who also planted that year the seeds of eventual AFC dominance.

Can Losman succeed? Maybe, maybe not. He played poorly last year, but he played in about as bad a situation as an NFL QB can face. I won't be demanding giant accomplishments from Losman -- just more pose and better decision making. If he can complete more than fifty percent of his passes (which he didn't do last year, but has done this preseason), show more poise in the pocket, and cut down on the bad mental errors, I'll be happy.

The team is pretty thin in experience up front, on both sides of the ball. The receiving corps, on paper, is nothing to write home about. The defense might be OK, but the line is still lacking a forceful presence after Pat Williams left two years ago.

The fact is that a lot of things would have to break in the Bills' favor for them to not be under .500 this season. My prediction for them is 6-10, but my hope is that they'll turn from being the bad team that everybody wants to play to the losing team that nobody wants to play. If we get to December and they're sitting on a 3-9 record, but their average margin of defeat is, say, seven or eight points, and they're consistently moving the ball and scoring, then even a final 6-10 record might not indicate a wasted season, as last year's 5-11 did.

:: OK, so have you come around to loving Tom Brady and the team from New England yet?

Never! Stupid Patriots they are, and Stupid Patriots they remain. I will never bow before them! To capitulate would mean to embolden the StuPat fans. I will stay the course, and they shall be the StuPats until they post a record of 6-10 or worse once again, thus putting all to right once more in the football universe.

:: Uhhhh...OK. So you don't think the 'StuPats' will win the Super Bowl this year, then?

Nope.

Oh, they'll win the AFC East, certainly. And they may win it all once more before age and the salary cap inevitably cut them back to size, sometime in the next year or two. But I don't think they will, because I don't think their much-lauded "intangibles" are still there. Since they actually lost a playoff game last year, and looked bad in doing so, the rest of the league now knows that the StuPats are human after all. And more than that, I'm reminded of something else from the playoffs last year: the tone set by the StuPats in their public statements. In years past, they had always maintained that air of "Gee whiz, even we can't believe our good fortune" image, the "We just work hard and good things happen" air. Instead, there they were, talking in the press about whether or not they were getting enough "respect". And with that, the StuPats were just like every other pro sports franchise.

Besides, I don't think you can see that much attrition in the coaching staff and not see the chemistry suffer in the end.

So, yes, the StuPats are still quite good, and they might be good enough to win it all. But they're no longer "special".

:: OK, then, who is going to win the Super Bowl?

And now I predict the rest of the NFL! Hooray! Here, after much thought, is how I see the divisions ending:

AFC East: New England
AFC North: Pittsburgh
AFC South: Jacksonville
AFC West: Denver
AFC Wildcards: Indianapolis, Cincinnati

NFC East: Dallas
NFC North: Minnesota
NFC South: Carolina
NFC West: Seattle
NFC Wildcards: Philadelphia, Tampa Bay

Note that this year I've managed to avoid a repeat of my lunacy from last year, when I picked Arizona to make the playoffs. Ick. As much I'd love to see Kurt Warner have one more stellar year to prove that he's still got it and those three amazing years he had weren't the biggest fluke in NFL history, I think that's over with. And I'm not jumping on the Matt Leinart bandwagon yet, because I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of anybody who hangs out with Paris Hilton.

I'm also finding it hard to maintain the Indy love. Last year should have been their year, and they still failed when it mattered most. The Seahawks may suffer from a post-Super Bowl hangover, but I don't think they will, really, because they came out of that game pissed off and believing they'd been screwed out of their win. I don't agree with their assessment, but hey, I think they'll still be hungry.

So who do I predict, then? The AFC is pretty hard; I can honestly see any of the teams I've picked to get to the AFC playoffs making the Super Bowl. In the NFC, though, I think it's either Carolina or Seattle to beat.

So I'll take Carolina, and I'll take them to beat, oh, Jacksonville in the Super Bowl. Might as well go out on a limb, right? The two expansion clubs from 1994 will meet in the Super Bowl, and the Panthers will win it.

So let's kick off, already!

:: Jacksonville? Really?

Bite me. It's my blog. You wanna pick the Chiefs and Redskins, get your own blog!

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

I glanced today at The Buffalo News, and noted that one of the two stories on the front page, and above the fold, was about Katie Couric's first night as anchor of the CBS nightly news telecast. Seeing that headline, in which a major news outlet reports as one of its most important two stories the goings-on at another major news outlet, made me think back to all those philosophy classes I took in college where we debated the metaphysical connections between a name and its object, and the relation of art to reality, a friend in those classes who loved the saying "The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon itself", and all that jazz. What's news is the identity of one of the persons whose job it now is to tell us what the news is. Whoa!

Catch a stingray by the tail....

What to say about Steve Irwin? His death was one of those half-shocking, half-not kinds of deaths, wasn't it? There's first the "Oh my God, the Crocodile Hunter died!", followed by the inevitable, "Well, given his choice of occupation, no wonder."

We used to watch his shows a bit when we had cable, but since we moved to Buffalo and abandoned cable, Irwin had pretty much fallen off our radar. He did get a bit overexposed a few years back, but I always admired his adventurous spirit and his adoration of nature: take Jacques Cousteau and make him into someone you'd want to hang out with, and you had Steve Irwin.

Death is a strange thing, though. Many people go in a normal, even "hum-drum" kind of way, but some people die in a way that does nothing but confer upon them some kind of legendary quality. If we were to all get deaths that match up somehow with our lives, then of course Steve Irwin would die at the hands of some animal in the wild. Of course Amelia Earhardt would vanish in an airplane. Of course Richard Halliburton would die in a mishap while trying to sail an authentic Chinese junk across the Pacific.

Or, taking fictional characters, of course Captain Kirk would die after defeating a bad guy in a fist fight on a remote planet.

Light-years ahead of his time!

Via Lynn Sislo, I've just read one of the most jaw-droppingly ignorant articles on science that I've ever encountered. It's so ignorant that I can only wonder just how this writer manages to get his pants on in the morning, and how he manages to type his columns given that his fingers must be in constant pain, what with the constant dragging of his knuckles across the floor. You can read the whole thing, but here are a couple of morsels to chew on:

According to Bryson, the first recorded attempt to date the creation of heaven and Earth was made in 1650, by James Ussher, archbishop of the Church of Ireland. Hardly wishy-washy, Ussher pegged the exact time and date: noon on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.

By what may be no coincidence at all, the family Bible that my grandmother inscribed to me almost three centuries after Ussher includes a time line, dating the creation of heaven and Earth in Genesis to 4004 B.C. Ussher's calculation is considered a joke in the scientific community, but seems to be gospel truth, according to standard Bibles.

Hmmmmm. None of the three Bibles I own include this timeline, probably because everyone has now realized that Ussher was full of it.

Even the Big Bang theory doesn't explain how life began because the gasses required for the Big Whatever-it-was don't include elements required to form and sustain life.

Yeah. The more complex elements were formed later on. Scientists know how this happened.

As another cosmic example, take black holes, which are formed of matter so dense that even light can't escape. That's why we can't see them, and the fact that they're invisible is the proof that they exist.

Because, of course, the only way to tell something exists is to see it.

Even though we really don't know who wrote the Bible, that gospel has stayed pretty much the same through many translations. But the gospel according to science seems to change almost every day.

Is this guy suggesting that maybe there exists a language such that, were the Gospels to be translated into that tongue, then in those translated Gospels, Jesus would escape the Crucifixion and move to Rome or something? What an absurd thing to say.

And here's the single best line from this article:

How long, exactly, is a light-year? The columns of this newspaper aren't wide enough to accommodate all the zeros required for one light-year in calendar years.

Oh, holy shit. I mean, really: Holy Shit with a Cherry On Top.

This guy's whole "argument" is basically that science is hard to understand, while religion isn't. He keeps coming back to the notion that the numbers science deals with are fantastically huge! Science is too hard for him, apparently -- but just from reading this article, his problem isn't that it's too hard for him, since anything is too hard if you don't know a thing about it.

When I was in college, there was a course called "Foundations of Science" that was required of every student. The course's intent was to simply give a very basic level of scientific literacy: what scientific method is, a bit of history and philosophy of science, a bit of simple lab work to see how experimentation is done, and so on. The course was team-taught by ten or so professors from the various science departments, and each week there would be one main lecture for everyone in the course followed by two or three meetings a week of smaller "discussion classes" that were each monitored by a single one of the professors.

I actually found the course mainly enjoyable, but a lot of my fellow students didn't like it on the "Why should we know about this" grounds, and I even heard that one professor who was teaching the course actually said to her students, "I don't like this course because there's no reason why you kids should have to know the philosophy of science. It has nothing to do with your lives or the careers you'll be pursuing, unless you're going to be scientists."

I couldn't believe that a professor of science would say such a thing. It has long scared the hell out of me that our scientific literacy is sinking at a time when our civilization is becoming more and more dependent on science to function. At the very least, a scientifically-literate populace wouldn't elect a bunch of creationists to a state school board, as Kansas did.

It scares me to think that people can know so little about science that they can write articles like this one, get them published, and influence others with them. We're a society that is slowly taking to the stars, communicates through a giant network of computers, faces some potentially severe problems with our energy sources -- and gives newspaper space to a guy who thinks a light-year is a unit of time.

Sentential Links #64

It's that time again....

:: T minus two months or so until we have to name a baby girl, and I can promise you it won’t be "Emmillie" or "Graiyce" or "Wrooth." (I wonder what Mr. Jennings thinks of the popular new name, "Nevaeh"? Personally, I think that name is about as stupid as anything I can think of. All the amazing names in the Bible, and we've got to start spelling shit backwards?)

:: Of course, "Nevaeh" is an order of magnitude sillier even than Remington, simply because it takes an linguistic epiphany that would embarass a stoner ("Hey dude -- did you realize that butter spelled backwards is ... rettub?" "Duuuude.") and forces some poor kid to live with it until they die. (Just Googled "Nevaeh" on a whim. Hey, we can go lots of places with this! Like, "Hey, did you hear about the recent mystery novel manuscript found amongst the writings of JRR Tolkien? The killer kept saying Rodrom!")

:: I think you have to have loved someone to write a song about them. I loved Jessica. To a degree, mellowed by distance, time and life, I still do. (Or to write poetry.)

:: Law of Modern Warfare #001: When you bomb people for their own good, they never, ever get your point in the way you hope.

:: Cats are, after all, very cool.

:: It's the regular media---the MSM as they appear to like us to call them---who are obsessed with the idea that blogs are all about politics and nothing but politics, and this is not just unfortunate in that they are depriving themselves of some excellent and entertaining reading on movies, books, music, science, and life in general, on the job and in the home and on the farm and out in the woods and in the mind; it's potentially disasterous for us, the bloggers, and for our readers, and for the still inchoate art form known as blogging.

:: These are books that opened my eyes, or spun me upside down, so that the stars were underfoot and the trees were dangling from a green sky like monstrous feathery stalactites.

:: An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion. (Not actually written by the linked blogger, but click through anyway to see who did say this.)

All for now. Back next week.

Congratulations, Bucky.

You made the national news, at least on the MSN front page.

Now the police are searching for a suspected cop killer. Folk hero, my ass. Bucky Phillips is a piece of human excrement, whether he shot those state troopers or not. This is all his doing. His family and his cheerleaders in the Southern Tier, as far as I am concerned, are accessories to murder.

But at least Phillips is likely to get his wish. I will be astonished if he is taken alive. And I don't really care, just as long as he is taken. And soon.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Move over, George Lucas. Stand down, JRR Tolkien. Have a seat, Guy Gavriel Kay. Grab some bench, John Williams and Hector Berlioz and Sergei Rachmaninov.

I have a new hero.

Oh, and bonus weirdness: there was an episode of Friends where Ross gets on a train for upstate NY, hoping to run into a girl or something like that (been a while since I saw it), and he falls asleep and wakes up to see that the train is pulling into Montreal, or something like that. Well, this girl goes one better: she fell asleep on an airplane, and when she woke up, she'd made a round-trip home again after failing to wake up to disembark at her original destination. Oops!

Repent, Harlan! said the Ticktockman

So I'm reading John Scalzi just now, and I see that he's a bit upset that the big news out of the recent WorldCon isn't the Hugo win by Robert Charles Wilson for Spin (which I might read sometime, or I might not -- hey, is it a space opera?) but rather "a certain science fiction writer being a public jackass at the Hugo ceremony".

Well, it doesn't take much awareness of the SF community to figure out who made an ass of himself; I sighed and said to myself, "Gee, I wonder what Harlan Ellison did now". I figured maybe he showed up with the only existing manuscript of Last Dangerous Visions, hucked it into a trash can, and then set it on fire. Either that, or he publicly groped a prominent female SF writer.

So it was the latter: he groped Connie Willis, apparently. On stage. In front of, well, everybody.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden's take on this is exactly right:

Just as with George W. Bush's now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you'll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

Apparently Ellison has apologized. Maybe it's enough, maybe not. But behavior like this needs to be squashed like a bug, every time it happens.

(And of course, this post is mainly an excuse to use as a post title a pun on the title of one of Ellison's most famous stories. What a geek I am....)

Beasties ahoy!

This ought to be up PZ Myers's alley: the blue-ringed octopus.



Cute, isn't it? This little creature's venom can kill an adult human in minutes; its distinctive blue rings are not visible until the octopus is about to attack; and it illustrates Yoda's famed maxim that size matters not. The blue-ringed octopus is about the size of a golf ball.

More linkage from the MeFi thread wherein I learned about this little beastie.

And now the easiest part of the coach's job: the cuts!

The Buffalo Bills finalized their 2006 roster yesterday. Daimon Shelton makes the team, which was to be expected after the amazing prowess he displayed last season in third-down and goal-line situations. Ahem.

Also making the team is safety Coy Wire, signaling that the Bills remain committed to maintaining a strong presence of "Meh" on their roster.

Stay tuned, sometime this week, for my annual kickoff of football-related postings. It's almost time for a whole new season of bitching about the Bills' O-line, the New England Stupid Patriots, Joe Theissman's babbling idiocy, and more!

Bum bum bum BUUMMMM....

It's just wrong, folks.

I love John Williams as much as anybody, but I can't get behind this new theme he's written for Sunday Night Football on NBC. I just can't do it. The music itself is OK -- listen to it -- but hearing that, I think of droid armies on the march against the Jedi or a Nazi convoy trundling along a desert valley while Indiana Jones tries to overcome them on horseback. I don't think of football.

Now, this isn't Williams's fault, of course, and I don't think any composer could cause my brain to associate some new piece of music with football. I don't make too many strong connections between music and something in the concrete world, but this is one of my few such associations: this music is football. Not John Williams, not Jerry Goldsmith, not anything else. (Well, maybe Hank Williams Jr. But that's it.)

Are you ready...!

Facts? Pagh! We don't need no facts!

[WARNING: Here I rant.]

How nice. Apparently some blogger visited Buffalo at some recent point, and, having failed to be impressed, decided to write a blog post in which he lies about the city. A lot.

Now, we, the crack young staff of "The Hatemonger’s Quarterly," don’t want to rain on anyone's parade - though you'd be stupid to have a parade in Buffalo - but we happen to think that Buffalo, New York deserves to die. In fact, it possibly begs for a killing.

A few of our editors — let's just call them "Chip" — spent some time in Buffalo recently, and we must say that we wouldn’t spend 38 years in Buffalo without gunfire: Stuck in that dank hellhole, we’d shoot ourselves long before then.

No, fuck you. This post is nothing that anyone else out there who doesn't know Buffalo from any other place doesn't regularly dish out.

"It's miserably cold in Buffalo!"

Well, if you think Buffalo's too cold, then you must not like lots of cities in the US either, like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland ME, and so on. None of those cities has an average temperature in January more than two degrees higher than Buffalo's, and a few of them are lower.

If you think Buffalo is "miserably cold", then don't come here. But don't blame Buffalo for the fact that you're a damn wuss.

"It snows quite often!

No shit. But lots of places get more snow than Buffalo; in fact, Buffalo doesn't even crack the top ten cities in the US for snowfall. (We're eleventh, beaten out by the likes of Flagstaff, AZ.) Also, snow isn't the whole story of a winter. Frankly, I'll take more snow and temperatures in the 20s over less snow and winter temperatures in the single digits or colder (without factoring wind chill), which are the norm in the Great Plains cities.

Oh, and guess what! Lots of people -- gasp! -- actually like snow. I know, it's hard to imagine people enjoying winter and stuff, but there's a reason that we have stuff like hockey and the Winter Olympics. It's the snow and the ice.

So put on a scarf and grow the hell up.

"It's horribly windy in Buffalo!"

Hmmmm. Well, yes, we do have wind here. No doubt about that. But our winds don't bring us extremely frigid air from the Canadian plains in winter, nor do our incredibly dry winds fan the flames of our wildfires in summer, nor do our winds carry lots of moisture from the tropics except for a few brief periods in summer when everybody's hot and humid. Our winds mostly come across Lake Erie, which makes Buffalo one of the few places where the temperature in summer has never officially hit 100 degrees in all the time they've been keeping records. Yes, our winds do produce lake-effect snow, but refer back to the point above. (And that's only an issue as long as Lake Erie hasn't frozen over; once that happens during the winter, we're pretty much done with snow.) And our summer winds are good for boating. (Yes, people do outside-type stuff in summer here. It's because our summers are nice, and our autumns are the best on the damn planet.)

Here's food for thought for the Buffalo Wind haters: our average wind speeds are only slightly higher than locations in Hawaii. I hope the Hatemongers aren't vacationing there anytime soon! They might blow away, being so wussy and all.

Then we get this crap:

Further, as a cultural center, Buffalo’s moribund. Sure, it’s home to a good art museum. But that’s about it. It used to be a haven for avant-garde classical music (Lucas Foss, Morton Feldman), but now it’s completely dried up. The Buffalo Symphony plays nothing but standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience.

Yup, we have a good art museum. But which one? This one? This one? This one? This one? This one? I mean, the Hatemonger must be claiming that only one of these is a good museum and the others all suck, because surely he wouldn't be saying something like that without even knowing of the existence of those other museums. Why, that would be dishonest!

Also, Hatemonger must have taken in some of our local theatrical productions and found them wanting? He doesn't mention theater, but Buffalo's vibrant local theater is always cited as one of the city's cultural icons. Too bad they failed to impress Hatemonger. (Surely Hatemonger didn't fail to take in a show! That would be dishonest!)

I also have to thank Hatemonger for alerting me to the existence of the Buffalo Symphony. Here, all this time I've been following the exploits of the Buffalo Philharmonic, not the Buffalo Symphony! (He can't mean they're one and the same, right? Surely someone cognizent enough of Buffalo's cultural wealth wouldn't get the name of the orchestra wrong, would they?)

As to repertoire, no one would dispute that the heyday of new classical music in Buffalo is over. But "standard fare for the blue-haired ladies in the audience"? What twaddle. Yes, there are representative works from the standard repertoire in the offing for the upcoming season, works by Brahms and Schumann and the like. But this season will also see performances of Shining Brow, an opera written in 1991 by Daron Hagen; Miklos Rozsa's Violin Concerto, a work by a prominent film composer of the mid-20th century that isn't exactly an "old warhorse"; "Seven Passages" by contemporary Iranian composer Behzad Ranjbaran; Roberto Sierra's Concerto for Saxophones; "Three Hallucinations" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" by John Corigliano (one of the biggest names in contemporary classical music). And more.

If the blue-haired ladies in the BPO audience enjoy hearing all that, then good for them! That will make them more aware than some asshole blogger.

So let's re-write one of Hatemonger's paragraphs, shall we? The original -- "A few of our editors — let's just call them "Chip" — spent some time in Buffalo recently..." -- should actually read, "A buddy and I spent went to Buffalo on a business trip. We got there on a Tuesday and left on a Thursday, we never left our hotel room except to take a cab to wherever our business meeting was, and we spent the rest of the time sitting in the hotel bar drinking Bud Lite, munching stale Beer Nuts, and alternating between watching the news on Channel seven and listening to some guy named Bauerle who must really hate where he lives. And we figured, hey, that's good enough for us. Fire up the blog!"

You know what? You hated Buffalo? Then don't come back to Buffalo. We don't want you. It'd be one less asshole to export from our once-great and soon-to-be-great-again city.

(Oh, and by the way, Hatemonger: Niagara Falls isn't part of Buffalo. It's a whole different city, thirty miles away. Your mention of it in your post makes about as much sense as if I were to say that Manhattan sucks because Yonkers is ugly. And Timothy McVeigh isn't even from Buffalo, but from some other town that's a distance away. But don't let the facts get between you and the Stupid Well, because when you're thirsty for Stupid, you gotta drink deep and all.)

(Original link via Alan.)

Quiz Time!

I saw a quiz over at Paul's blog, so I will answer them as well, as is my wont:

1. A month before it happens you're told you're going to lose your memory. How do you prepare for it and do you attempt to regain what you've lost?

Hell yes, I try to regain it. I try to write down as much of it as I can, I suppose, but then I'd have trouble prioritizing things to remember. Hmmmm.

2. How do you describe your outlook on life?

"Life is quite absurd, and death's the final word...."

3. You fall in love with your soulmate, decide to get married, and then find out that person is going to die soon. Do you marry them anyway?

Absolutely. (But here's the thing about soulmates: I've never believed that there's only one.)

4. What are three of your favorite ice cream toppings?

I like hot fudge, chopped-up Reese's pieces, and fresh berries.

5. Is there one article of clothing you love to wear no matter how out of style it is?

Hmmm. That's a head-scratcher. I should think that over a bit. Gee.

6. Is there one color you wish would go away in fashion?

A color? No. But then, I think "fashion" is just about as stupid an endeavour as I can think of. I find it hard to fathom how a few people in some city somewhere can up and decide that this year, this is what looks good, but a couple of years from now, we'll all decide that it all looks horrible. And then a few years after that, the look we liked and then hated is judged favorably again! Screw that. I wear what I like.

7. What's the first department you head to when you go shopping in a department store?

Assuming we're talking about a place like Target, usually I either veer toward electronics or men's clothing, although I almost never buy anything in either. Hardware's always fun. Toys are a necessity. I usually save the DVD section for last.

8.How far away do you live from your parents?

Sixty or seventy miles, roughly. Maybe a little less, but the route from here to there requires lots of "over hill and under dale" stuff through the Southern Tier.

9. Growing up, who was your favorite cartoon character?

Bugs Bunny. Still is. Didn't care much for the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, because there was no hope for the coyote. And I love Sylvester, but there's this one with him where his owners go away for two weeks, but leave him a cupboard full of canned tuna -- but the mouse gets the can opener, and Sylvester is foiled throughout the whole cartoon. That one pissed me off. F*** you, Mouse!

10. You plan a romantic evening and everything goes wrong, including the fancy dinner you burned. What do you do?

Swear a lot, then apologize profusely as I order a pizza.

11. What's the last thing you bought at the store?

Which store? Today I brought home some hot dog and hamburger buns. Last time I was at Borders I picked up a copy of The Art of Revenge of the Sith and a better quality King James Bible than the one I already owned.

12. Have you ever walked out in the middle of a movie?

Never, but I have shut off DVDs or videos halfway through.

13. What celebrity do most people say you look like?

To my knowledge I've never been compared to a celebrity.

14. Is there any piece of jewelry you always wear?

I wear my wedding ring and another ring The Wife bought me most of the time, but not at night. Also, when I'm not at work, I wear a bracelet of silver beads that was made by a friend of The Wife's in honor of Little Quinn.

15. Have you ever tried to pick someone up?

No. I'm terrible in situations where I don't know people, and it takes me a little while to open up a bit.

16. What's the one thing you always manage to lose on your way out the door?

Nothing, really, although I do leave the grocery list at home occasionally.

17. Out of these creatures which one are you most afraid of:
A.) Snakes
B.) Spiders
C.) Rodents

Rodents, I suppose. Although I'm probably freaked out in equal measure by all three: not much if I just spot one somewhere, but if one manages to get onto my person before I've spotted it, I tend to fly into this mixture of fear and rage that's not at all healthy for the beastie to provoke.

18. What's the last gift you bought for a friend?

A dear friend of mine at The Store had a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I got her a couple of small items like a journal to write in, a candle, and a tiny incense burner.

19. Do you ever buy people things for no reason?

Often. I love giving people stuff.

20.What's your favorite way to spend a lazy summer afternoon?

Reading, writing, walking, putting music on the stereo and dancing while trying to look like I'm not dancing.

And there's the latest Blog Quiz thing....

Sunday Burst of Weirdness (the "Oops, I forgot so I'll do it on Monday" Edition)

Serpentes on a Shippe.

Sentential Links #63 (The Plutonic Edition)

Some of these deal with the recent decision to strip Pluto of its planetary status (as though the little planet-that-could had been caught doping in an attempt to pack on extra mass so it could maintain its position of planethood). Others deal with other stuff.

:: Just a little refresher: Pluto is smaller than our moon, people!

:: Pluto's been demoted? That's crap! (No, dearie: if it's not Scottish, it's crap. But I get the sentiment.)

(Oh, and congrats to the new Campbell award winner, who unfortunately decided to model the tiara that is now associated with this award, thus making him look like a really creepy televangelist.)

:: If you've been keeping an eye on any of the wire services (or Language Log), you may have noticed that the members of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague have been wrangling, Vatican-style, over the definition of the word planet. Judging by the periodic puffs of contradictorily-colored smoke the meeting is emitting, it sounds like they may be getting bogged down in the details. (That's where the Devil is, you know.) Well, defining words involves language, and language is what linguists study, so that means this is a linguistic problem. Let's roll up our sleeves and see what all the trouble is.

:: I submit that scientists own the science, but laypeople own the narrative. And the narrative of the nine planets of the Solar System is rich in mythology (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), serendipity (the discovery of Uranus), mathematical prediction (the discovery of Neptune), and Herculean effort (the discovery of Pluto). It has been enriched that much further by the stunning imagery of every planet except Pluto returned to us by the Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Magellan, Galileo, and Cassini probes. (Written before the ultimate decision, but still some worthwhile points.)

:: They wanted to base it on measurable scientific factors rather than a human-created, arbitrary dividing line. Unfortunately, what they came up with was a messy slight-of-hand pushed by the anti-Pluto radicals that opens the door to far more problems than it can ever hope to solve. (Read this post for a short synopsis on the new planetary definition's shortcomings.

My own position on this is, well, what is the big deal with considering Pluto a planet? Why does this matter? How will planetary astronomy be set back or advanced by this? I don't get it. And besides, this whole business reminds me that the real physical world is a messy place that can't always be mapped nicely onto a language where the act of creating definitions assumes binary states that may not exist. Anyway, back to the links.

:: If global warming is going on, every day must be warmer than the same day the previous year, every summer must be hotter, every winter must be less cold. There are no statistical effects, and definitely no random component to the weather. "Weather" is also a single unitary phenomenon which can be evaluated by one instrument, a thermometer.

:: When I was a kid, my parents used to play the I Ching once a year.

:: We now rent just about anything. We rent houses and cars. We rent tractors. We rent (to own) computers, TV's and furniture. We rent tillers and banquet halls. We rent like crazy these days. Why not rent a casket?

:: I’m so excited, I think I just Fergied in my pants! (Uhhhh...OK....but congrats on the 100,000th hit, guys!)

More next week. Tune in. Drop out. And stuff.