Fixing the Prequels - The Phantom Menace (part five)

part one
part two
part three
part four

And here we are again, taking stock of The Phantom Menace. When last we left our heroes, they had escaped Naboo and were now en route to Tatooine seeking repairs to their ship without which they'll never make it to Coruscant. They are unaware that the true menace behind the Trade Federation's invasion of Naboo is actually a pair of Sith Lords, who are even now working to figure out where they've escaped to.

So, let's jump right into it. In the movie, we cut from the awful scene between Jar Jar and Padme (which I replaced in the last installment with a scene between Obi Wan and Padme) directly to the landing on Tatooine. Instead, I'd move the later scene between Darth Sidious and Darth Maul, on Coruscant, to this point.

EXT: CORUSCANT – SKYSCRAPER – BALCONY

Darth Maul walks along the balcony beside his master, the shrouded Darth Sidious.

SIDIOUS: You have done well, my apprentice. The tracking information you discovered makes clear the direction the Jedi took the Queen, and the sensor data indicate that their hyperdrive had been damaged. Therefore they will be seeking repairs, and there are only three systems on that heading where they might have gone. Inspect each system until you find them. Kill the Jedi, and bring me the Queen.

Darth Maul bows his acquiescence.

SIDIOUS: The Jedi have never suspected that the Sith have returned, but the time has come to reveal ourselves. At last we shall have our revenge.

Here's something I've always thought about TPM: Darth Maul should never speak. He only has two or three lines in the entire movie, and those are dubbed by some actor with a fine British accent, and it frankly clashes with his appearance. Maul should be as mysterious as possible, and it would help immensely if we never hear his voice at all. So all of Maul's dialog? Gone. He's all about the body language.

So now I'd cut back to the Queen's ship landing on Tatooine. I like this entire sequence, really, and I'd only make a couple of cosmetic changes:

:: The shot of the ship approaching Tatooine from space should make a bigger deal out of the planet's twin suns. That's the iconic nature of Tatooine, and the suns vanish from the screen too quickly.

:: I like Jar Jar's complaint that the sun is "doing murder on mesa skin", but I'd move it to later in the Tatooine sequence, after he's been in that sun for a while.

One thing I've always liked about the sequence in the film is the way Captain Panaka looks less than enthusiastic himself about the Queen's "request" that "her handmaiden" accompany Qui Gon and Jar Jar into Mos Espa. I would only add a bit of reflection on Qui Gon's part: after he initially refuses to take her, and Panaka says "The Queen wishes it, she's curious about the planet", I'd have Qui Gon look at Padme for a long moment and have her return his stare, unflinchingly. Again, suggesting that there's more to this handmaiden than meets the eye. And then it's off to Mos Espa.

First off, let's get this out of the way: I'm a Jar Jar fan, but there should be no stepping in bantha droppings. I'm far less bothered by that than by the flatulent eopie later on, but still, while my version of Star Wars isn't about to turn the franchise into a gritty space opera version of The Matrix or Blade Runner, I'm not going to keep potty humor around.

However, Qui Gon indicates before they leave for Mos Espa that "This spaceport is not going to be pleasant", so I'd make it actually unpleasant. There doesn't have to be a whole lot here, but little glimpses of stuff here and there to make clear what kind of place they're entering. Maybe two pilots beating the stuffing out of a third who owes them money, or a drunken spacer leering at Padme, or beggars in the streets. Stuff like that. The script even says that they pass 'dangerous looking citizens of all types', but little if any of that reaches the screen. I've always been a bit surprised that Lucas didn't do any of this kind of thing, because it's always been clear in his movies that he knows his Westerns, and Western tropes tend to play a large role in various Star Wars films. (I wouldn't go so far, as some would, to claim that the original ANH is a Western with spaceships instead of horses, but it definitely has some Western-style stuff going on in it.)

Anyway, Qui Gon, Padme, R2, and Jar Jar go into a junk dealer's shop and meet Watto. Qui Gon tells Watto what he's looking for, Watto says he's got just what Qui Gon needs, and he and R2 follow Watto out back to do some haggling, leaving Padme and Jar Jar in the shop, where Watto's slave boy keeps them company. This, of course, is Anakin Skywalker, and he's meeting the only woman he'll ever love.

So here's where it starts. What would I change about this scene? Only one tiny thing: when Anakin asks Padme if she's an angel and she says, "What?", he tells her this:

ANAKIN: An angel. I've heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They live on the Moons of Iego I thimk. They are the most beautiful creatures in the universe.

In the script, Anakin goes on:

ANAKIN: (continued) They are good and kind, and so pretty they make even the most hardened spice pirate cry.

I actually like the entire exchange that comes after this. Anakin's a boy with dreams and talents, and he also has an eye for beauty. It fits nicely that at the heart of his eventual fall into the ultimate ugliness lies one of the most beautiful women in the Galaxy.

As a brief aside, for all the vitriol tossed George Lucas's way as a director, he handles this scene really well, I think. What really helps is that Anakin's question, "Are you an angel", comes out of left field; he just says it, matter-of-factly, meaning every word of it. There was no earlier moment in which he walks in, looks at the radiant girl, and gasps; there's no "meet cute" here. Just a confident boy who doesn't know that he's not supposed to be this confident about anything, who starts talking.

Oh, and I'd leave in the bit with Jar Jar messing with the stuff in the shop and getting in trouble; I like how Anakin and Padme are talking away, completely ignoring Jar Jar's attempts to juggle machine parts.

Qui Gon fails to strike a deal with Watto, and he heads on his way, dragging the others with him. While Watto says something to the effect of "I'm the only dealer in this town with the parts you need," it would have been nice to see a quick montage of Qui Gon dragging his companions all over Mos Espa, from dealer to dealer, confirming this for himself. Toward the end of the day, they'd be heading back to the ship, dejected and wondering what to do (here's where I'd have a noticeably sunburned Jar Jar complaining about the Tatooine suns, along with Qui Gon's conference with Obi Wan via comlink, with Obi Wan's quip about selling the Queen's wardrobe), when they'd come across Anakin again.

(Oh, I almost forgot: yes, I'd ditch Anakin's "yippee". That just doesn't work.)

Now, I'm not wild about the bit with Jar Jar sneaking a bite, and then having said bite flying across the cafe and landing in Sebulba's soup. That was just a bit too slapstick for my tastes (at least, for my tastes in a Star Wars movie), so I'd have something else happen. Maybe Jar Jar could accidentally wander into the path of Sebulba's speeder, causing the alien to swerve out of the way and hit a building or something. Anyway, the rest of this works fine too.

Anakin takes his new friends to his home, in order to shelter them from the coming sandstorm. Again, I like the ensuing sequence, although the initial part is a bit hard to follow, what with Anakin jabbering excitedly to Padme while Qui Gon's trying to introduce himself to Shmi Skywalker. That needs to be ironed out and directed better, I think; I'd have Anakin wait patiently while Qui Gon introduces himself, and then I'd have him sent away by his mother in one of those "We grown-ups need to talk" moments.

Next we learn that Anakin Skywalker actually made C-3PO. I know that this vexes a lot of SW fans, but I'm not one of them. I kind of like the ominous tone this fact lends the line in ANH when Threepio, being lowered into the oil bath, says, "Thank the Maker!"

Meanwhile, back on the Queen's ship, a transmission comes through from Naboo. It's the governor, Sio Bibble, with news that things on Naboo are getting very bad. "The death toll is catastrophic! You must contact me!" Obi Wan sees this for a trick, an attempt to establish a trace by their enemies, and orders them not to respond at all. I would just change it thusly, a little bit:

BIBBLE: (static-garbled) ...cut off all food supplies until you return... the death toll is catastrophic... we must bow to their wishes, Your Highness...Please tell us what to do! If you can hear us, Your Highness, you must contact me!

The Queen, terribly nervous, glances at Panaka.

PANAKA: Open a channel for response!

OBI WAN: No! Open no channel. The transmission is a trick. If we respond, they will be able to trace the transmission and learn where we are. Send no reply, no transmission of any kind. I know it will be hard, Your Highness, but you cannot respond.

Now we cut back to dinner at Anakin's, where Qui Gon begins to hatch his crazy scheme to get engine parts out of Watto after all: he'll appeal to the junk dealer's love of gambling. This whole scene is very nicely done; I particularly like Liam Neeson's delivery of the line "I wish that were so" when Anakin claims that nothing can kill a Jedi. The only change I'd make here? Well, yeah: Jar Jar's frog tongue. This actually does serve a narrative purpose – it establishes what Qui Gon's just said about Jedi reflexes allowing Anakin to fly a pod racer – but really, by this time we should have a pretty good idea as to what Jedi reflexes are capable of, right? Out that goes.

So it's night at Casa Skywalker, and Qui Gon would speak with Obi Wan on the commlink. Obi Wan tells Qui Gon about the transmission, asks what if the Naboo are dying, and Qui Gon replies, "Either way, we're running out of time."

This is where we cut to Coruscant, and Darth Sidious talking with Darth Maul. As noted above, I'd replace this scene with another conference between Sidious and Nute Gunray on Naboo:

EXT: NABOO – PALACE GROUNDS.

NUTE stands on a veranda with RUNE and a captive SIO BIBBLE as a Droid Captain reports. Behind him, several more droids hold three Naboo guards captive.

DROID CAPTAIN: These men have been caught inciting resistance among the citizens of Naboo.

NUTE: Execute them, Captain.

DROID CAPTAIN: Yes Viceroy.

The droids take the men away.

BIBBLE: You cannot kill us all, Viceroy.

NUTE: I trust it will not come to that.

DOFINE comes rushing up, holding a holo-projector.

DOFINE: Lord Sidious, Viceroy.

NUTE: Ah.

He takes the projector and activates it, causing a hologram of SIDIOUS to appear before them. BIBBLE is highly perplexed.

NUTE: Lord Sidious. The occupation goes well.

SIDIOUS: As well it should, Viceroy. And soon victory shall be ours. My apprentice, Darth Maul, has traced the Queen's ship to Tatooine, a system in the Outer Rim. He is on his way there now. When she returns, you will force her to sign the treaty.

NUTE: It shall be done, My Lord.

SIDIOUS fades; NUTE turns to BIBBLE.

BIBBLE: Who--

NUTE: So you see, Governor, the end to this affair is near.

Bibble now looks fearful.

And after that, we return to Tatooine, for the first hint of something that would vex Star Wars fans more than any other thing in TPM, with the sole exception of Jar Jar Binks. So, in our next installment, we shall discuss Midichlorians. Until then, may the Force be with you!

Bush went back, and to the left. Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.

Oliver Stone is making a movie about George W. Bush. If that hits theaters the same week Hillary Clinton is elected President, I think that millions of right-wing heads all over America will literally explode.

Sentential Links #125

Click these links or the puppy gets it.

:: I find myself somewhat grieving the fact that I will never, ever be back at that time of my life again. And terrified that I’ll never really be ready for the future I’m preparing myself to begin....

:: Because what I realized was this: fans of movies immerse themselves in the fictional world they imagine the movie takes place in and become obsessed with the minutia. I'm a different kind of film buff, I guess. And if that's fandom today, I'm glad I stopped participating in it around that time. It's not fun anymore. It's not about liking things anymore; now it's about not liking things. And I think that's just too bad. (A great post on the ugly side of Star Wars fandom, which has, to my eyes as well as SamuraiFrog's, become the main side of Star Wars fandom. There's some stuff that I disagree with in the comments -- Lucas's recent comment about TESB being "the worst one" was a joke he made at a tribute for someone, and not meant seriously; Lawrence Kasdan always seems to get the credit for TESB but none of the "blame" for ROTJ, to whatever extent blame is deserved -- but still, good stuff.)

:: Still, I can say that there are very few to whom I can more sincerely say "Rest in Peace," than Bobby Fischer.

:: I want a film that is faithful to Star Trek's pioneer spirit and Star Trek's swashbuckling heart. If I get that, but Kirk never served on the Farragut, well...so be it. (I get the sentiment, and I wish I could say that I agree. I think it should be possible to do both. That Rick Berman rarely figured out how to do it shouldn't mean that it's time to toss everything -- baby, bathwater, tub, and towels -- out the window. But here's the thing, really: Trek has so much baggage behind it that if rebooting it means totally starting over from scratch, why not really start from scratch and do something completely new? Why does it have to be Trek at all? Via.)

:: After completing his symphony, Beethoven confided to a friend: "I am at last learning to compose." (Good post on the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The thing is, as great as that movement is, I think it works best in its intended context, as the second movement of a four-movement work. Coming after the fairly dance-like first movement, the Allegretto is shattering. As for the poster's surprise that the Allegretto has been described as "folk dance", why should that be surprising at all? Wagner called the entire Symphony the "apotheosis of the dance". Via.)

:: See, this is how you gracefully retcon stuff, Spider-Man. You don't make a magical deal with the devil. That's just retarded. The way you do it is you get a man from the future to travel through time with his robot friend and another time traveler. Then you get him to team up with three other versions of a dead character and save the dead friend's life. (Good tip, thanks! And congrats on the wedding planning.)

:: Consider this a literary experiment. (Jayme attempts a blog-serial. May the Force be with him.)

All for this week. Next week, maybe something different. Or not. I'm a free spirit!

Missing Mirna....

Wow, I haven't blogged The Amazing Race much at all this go-round, have I? The show's as good as ever, but there weren't any teams that I found really loathsome this time out (unlike, say, Dustin and Kandace from the last two seasons). My favorite team was Kynt and Vixen, the goths in black-and-pink, but they were eliminated two weeks ago when they made a colossal error in not U-Turning a team that they knew to be behind them. My least favorite was the couple eliminated last week, but basically all they did was bicker constantly and treat each other incredibly poorly. They weren't very memorable, and I've already forgotten their names.

This is only my fourth time watching TAR, but this is the first time of those four that the finale sees three teams that I genuinely don't mind racing for the million. While I want TK and Rachel (the hippie-looking couple) to win, it wouldn't bother me at all if the grandson/grandfather or father/daughter duo won.

I don't know when or if the next season is taking place, but I hope it's soon. I imagine that the longer the writers' strike goes on, the more attractive another season of TAR becomes. What would I like to see in future races? I'd love to see more long driving transitions, in which racers are in foreign locales and have to drive themselves not five or six miles within one city, but maybe two hundred miles to another city, maybe even changing countries: they open the clue in Berlin and are told, "Drive to ___ in Prague." Or maybe some new complications: when the episode opens, instead of the clue saying "Fly to Buenes Aires", the clue could feature a clue of some sort to their destination; maybe a photo of a notable building in a city and the words "Fly to the city where this building is located". Or a new complication, which they could call "Pile Up". Only problem is, I'm not sure what would happen in a Pile Up.

Anyhoo, best to the three teams.

UPDATE: Watching the show right now. The final Roadblock is psychotic.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Hmmmm....

:: Researchers confirm that kids don't like clowns.

:: This isn't weird, actually -- 18 stunning bridges from around the world -- but it partially qualifies on the basis that I can't believe they want to build bridges in some of these places. Do we need a bridge to link Alaska to Russia? No way I would drive that thing. (via)

:: My Star Trek Year. This person is attempting to watch every episode of every Trek series, and all the movies, in the course of one year. He's also apparently reading some Trek books along the way. Wow. He does not seem to be watching the episodes in the order they were telecast, however. I can kind of see why; a massive dose of, say, the third season of TOS over the course of a week would probably have anyone heading for the bathtub with a couple of brand-new razor blades.

:: In honor of this past week's return of American Idol -- yes, I'm a fan, sue me -- I link the best Idol audition ever. This makes William Hung look like peanuts, folks.

T-minus 366 days and counting

One year until a new President can start fixing things. Hang in there, America. We can get through this. Stay alive, no matter what occurs!

Maybe we can all change our last names to "Joad"

A Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota opines thusly:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We're the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Imagine all those Minnesotan chests puffing outwards with pride as they stumble, bleery-eyed, from eight hours at one job to six hours at the next, maybe kissing the kid whose name they barely remember as they lurch out the door toward the 1991 Chevy in the driveway that might be able to last one more winter, just as long as that loud knocking noise the engine makes now and again doesn't turn out to be anything bad, all the while thinking, "Wow, this dull ache in my legs sure doesn't seem to want to go away," or maybe "Hey, with the coins I just found in the couch, I can get a quart of milk and a gallon of gas before payday!". But it'll all be good, because this Minnesotan will know that his or her Republican Congresswoman is proud of their efforts and is planning to help them out by cutting the taxes on their corporate masters, secure in the knowledge that the financial rewards of those tax cuts will make it down to the two-job working grunts real soon.

To the trough, boys!

The Big E

The USS Enterprise under construction in JJ Abrams's upcoming Star Trek movie:



That's a pretty cool image, even if shots of the Enterprise in drydock are getting a little passe, aren't they? I mean, the various Enterprises are shown in drydock in eight of the existing movies already. If you look closely, you can make out the front of the warp nacelles, flanking the saucer section behind. Maybe it's a trick of perspective, but those nacelles seem awfully close, don't they? And big? I wonder what the actual Big E for the movie will look like. I suppose it'll be like every iteration of the Big E: same basic shape but some different bells and whistles.

I'm still not wild about Abrams in charge of Trek, but then I'm not terribly wild about Trek anymore anyway. We'll see.

Recent Reading (KidLit edition)

In reading to The Daughter at night, we've recently started to read chapter books a bit at a time, each evening, as opposed to the single-volume storybooks that were the rule until then. This has opened up lots of new vistas for reading, and it's really rejuvenated a time of night that had for a while felt more like a chore than a treasured portion of our daily routine. I've generally tried to choose books that are slightly above her reading level, so as to keep her challenged and exposed to new stuff, and I've tried to choose books that I'd like to read as well.

(UPDATE: A reader asks how old she is; The Daughter is eight, and she's in third grade.)

Here are some of the books we've read:

:: Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. This is simply one of my favorite books of all time, be it for children or adults. This one is just sheer, total delight. This story of a young boy living alone with his mechanic father in rural England is full of charm, humor, and also some excitement when our hero, young Danny, learns his father's deepest and darkest secret. It's a wonderful "underdog blue-collar folks against the arrogant wealthy" type of tale, with one of the best endings I know. Why this book hasn't been done into a proper movie, I can't imagine. (Apparently it was filmed in Britain, but I've never seen it or even heard of that production until now -- a TV film for the BBC, perhaps?)

:: James and the Giant Peach, also by Roald Dahl. This was new to me, actually; I love Dahl, but somehow I got through childhood without reading this one, although I did see the Tim Burton-produced movie several years ago, which turns out to have added quite a bit to the story. No matter; the main portion of the tale, in which James is liberated from the clutches of his vile Aunts when he comes into the possession of a giant peach, and the friends he makes inside that peach when he meets the insectoid denizens of the fruit, is the real meat of the story. This is classic Dahl, in which supernatural doings are presented simply as a normal part of the world, and in which our author thinks nothing of having the hero's parents killed by a rhinoceros on page one.

:: Stormbreaker, by Anthony Horowitz. We bought this book at the book fair at the school's Open House this year, mainly because it had a really cool cover. It's actually a halfway decent book, the first in a series of spy thrillers featuring thirteen-year-old Alex Rider, who is recruited by MI6 after his caretaker uncle is murdered while investigating an enigmatic industrialist who is about to donate free computers to every school in Britain. It's a pretty violent story, and there were times in the reading that I wondered if it would have been better left until she was older. She really enjoyed this one, however, finding the suspense sequences pretty spine-tingling. I imagine we'll be tracking down the subsequent volumes in the future.

:: Larklight by Philip Reeve is an amazingly fun book. We had a blast with this one, as we'd hoped, given that the book is subtitled "A Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space". It's literally a steampunk space opera: a SF adventure that assumes that certain scientific theories of the nature of the universe long-since disproved in the real world are actually true. Hence, the book posits the existence of the aether, strange beings on every planet, spaceships that literally look like seafaring vessels in the sky. There are space pirates, malevolent aliens living in the ruins of Saturn, ancient races on Mars, a spacefaring British Empire, and a harrowing journey into Jupiter's Great Red Spot. If you can accept the nature of the world Reeve has created here, Larklight is a rollicking blast of a story. We recommend it highly. Of all the books we've read lately, this is the one that earned the most heartfelt howls of protest from The Daughter when I told her that the page we were on was where we'd stop for the night.

Reading. I like it.

(Each of these books is good on the merits, so don't eschew them if you don't happen to have kids around.)

Pass the Popcorn!

Alan posts about the Ron Paul Newsletter fiasco today, and gets visited by lots of folks who fill his comment thread with poor spelling and even worse arguments as to why Paul should have no responsibility whatsoever for anything that was printed under his own signature. Fun wow!

Here's Kevin Drum on the subject:

Question: what's the difference between a "racist" and someone who was "complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists"? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except that at least the former is bit more honest about things.

So as damning as everyone thinks this stuff is, I think it's even more damning than that. We're not children here, after all. It's plain that Paul knew what was being published in his newsletters. It's plain that he was familiar with the well-developed strategy that inspired the early-90s turn to racist demagoguery. It's plain that he knew it was a key part of his fundraising appeal. Paul can weasel all he wants, but it's plain that he endorsed a strategy of overt appeals to racist sentiment in order to build support for his political career. If he's given all that up since then, it's only because he no longer needs it.

This whole affair highlights one of the reasons that I wish everyone would stop swooning over minor candidates who play the part of bold truthteller. When you have no chance of winning and therefore nothing to risk, it's cheap and easy to stick to your guns. But as Ron Paul has shown, back when it actually mattered he was willing to do whatever he needed to raise money and rekindle his political career. I don't doubt that he'd do it again if anything serious were on the line.

That's exactly right. It's also worth noting that Paul's steely-eyed libertarianism falters where women's rights are concerned.

The guy's a crackpot.

Passages

My mother mentioned in an e-mail the other day, among other things, that my first ever school band director died last week. I hadn't seen Mr. Beach (first name Jim) since I graduated high school, but back then he was a fairly heavy smoker and known for his fondness for booze, so his passing isn't exactly a galloping shock. He looked fairly advanced in years even when I first met him when I was in fifth grade, and his posture was even then terrible; he had a pronounced hunch in his back and his hair was already completely white. It was thus a surprise to learn that he was actually a year younger than my mother.

Mr. Beach was a fairly strange man, as I recall. As a band director, he was adequate, although this is hard to judge by the fact that he was the elementary and junior high band director, so it wasn't as though he was really tasked with great amounts of musical development on the part of his students. He was fairly encouraging of his more talented charges, but as a direct source of musical wisdom, I don't recall much from him.

However, I could be wrong here as well, since my own temperament later turned out to be strongly classical, and Mr. Beach's was strongly jazz oriented. Being a straight "band director" wasn't really his game, but he was quite good at getting the sound he wanted from the jazz bands under him. The one year that I remember him directing the Senior High Jazz Band was probably the best single musical experience of my high school years; for a high school ensemble from a small town, that band cooked. I can still hear remember our bass trombone player on a haunting arrangement of Gershwin's "Summertime", and I can still remember my own frustration that he would never let me play any of the solos. It wouldn't be until college that I'd realize what he'd surely already known: that I was no jazz musician and had no place in a jazz band other than being a really good section player.

I don't recall why Mr. Beach only had one year to direct the jazz band, but I do recall that there was some kind of incident that led to our school superintendent stepping in for some reason. The details were never explained to us, but to my knowledge, Mr. Beach never stepped in front of a jazz band again. I had already thought poorly of that particular superintendent, who was one of those guys who takes a position if and only if he thinks it can lead to the next position. (In a fitting postscript, four or five years ago I was in one of Buffalo's Media Play locations – before they all closed when the chain went belly-up – and recognized one of the cashiers as none other than that ambitious, arrogant superintendent. I found some kind of cosmic karmic justice at work in that; this guy who had once been highly impressed with his own authority in a small town school system was now, fifteen years later, wearing a uniform shirt and a nametag. In his mind, that had to be a blow.)

I remember something else. We used to have a summer jazz band at that school; we'd rehearse a couple of times and then we'd go out and play at various gigs. We'd play the Cattaraugus County Fair, various dances and festivals in the region, and the like. It always went over well; we'd mostly perform the great big-band classics, and the membership of the band would be augmented by other musicians who lived in the area. Those performances were always hard work, but they were also always a joy. One year at the Catt. Co. Fair, we did Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade", but in an arrangement that had an extended clarinet solo. Mr. Beach's main instrument was the clarinet, and he took that solo himself. To this day that one performance of his – the only time I ever actually heard him perform anything at all – remains one of the most beautiful bits of clarinet playing I've ever heard live, and I've heard a lot (Richard Stoltzman playing the Mozart clarinet concerto, for example). I wonder if Mr. Beach was one of the many musicians who went to school figuring to be a professional performer, and then found himself a teacher when gigs were harder to come by than he'd thought. I also wonder if he never quite made the transition to teaching in his head or in his heart. Certainly on the night I heard him play "Moonlight Serenade", it was as if Mr. Beach had grabbed a part of his life he'd maybe thought lost.

Anyhow, I can't really say that I learned a lot about music from Mr. Beach, but if he hadn't specifically recruited me for band when I was in fifth grade, I possibly would never have learned anything about music at all. Berlioz? Rachmaninov? Wagner? The Chieftains? Howard Shore? They'd all be just names, I suppose. And I certainly wouldn't have gone to college in Iowa, thinking to study music; and then I wouldn't have met a girl a year older than me who played the oboe.

We often judge our teachers by what they teach us, and forget the ones who didn't so much teach us as simply meet us at a crossroads and say, "Go that way. You'll like it." Well, Jim Beach put me on a road, sure enough. So thanks for the nudge down the road, Mr. Beach.

And wherever you are, I hope you're jamming with Benny Goodman.

Recent Reading

Here are some thoughts pertaining to some books I've read of late:

:: I often find biographies a mixed bag, as a reading interest. Autobiography is something special, but generic biographies can be tough. Even the most interesting of lives can be rendered dull and uninspiring in the hands of a dull writer; conversely, a life that wouldn't strike anyone as especially notable can, when told by a skilled biographer, become utterly fascinating. In the latter category falls David Michaelis's new biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts.

It's a long and exhaustive book, providing great amounts of detail as to the life of the great cartoonist, gleaned from Michaelis's access to Schulz's private papers and his work in contacting the people central to Schulz's life (the ones still alive, at any rate). Schulz lived a long and fruitful life, growing up in St. Paul (with a brief interlude in Needles, California). He had troubles in school. He was socially awkward, fiercely competitive, and (obviously) artistically gifted. He would serve in the Army in World War II, work for an art-lessons-by-mail firm, and eventually create the most famous newspaper comic strip in history. In chronicling this life in fairly impressive detail, Michaelis makes Sparky Schulz come alive. As the book went on, I felt that I was coming to know the great cartoonist. (This is odd in itself, given that a theme of the book is that Schulz was a hard person to get to know in real life.)

The book's masterstroke is the inclusion of many strips from the fifty-year run of Peanuts. The strips are selected with care, with each one providing a window through which we gradually realize just how much of Schulz's daily life informed the strip over its run. Anecdotes from Schulz's life, wisdom from his parents, his fascination with the movie Citizen Kane, his love of classical music: all that and much more made its way into the strip. Schulz knew several Charlie Brown's in his life, and his mother had once mentioned "Snoopy" as a prospective name for their next dog. Peanuts the comic strip, it turns out, is far more indicative of Schulz's inner world than I ever realized before.

This is one of the best biographies I have read. (I wish I could quote from the book, but I've already returned it to the library. I did post on the subject of the early Peanuts strips here a couple of years ago, however. Here's a review of the book by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.)

:: Bill Bryson, one of my newer favorite authors (by which I mean newer to me, not new as in a new author), has penned a brief life of Shakespeare, helpfully titled Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I enjoyed this book for what it was: a biography of the Bard for those who aren't really looking for anything exhaustive. The book is an entry in a series called "Eminent Lives", which consists of "great writers on great figures, short biographies perfect for an age short on time". At just under two hundred pages, this is exactly what the label entails.

In reading this book, I got the sense that frustration awaits anyone who tries to conclusively nail down the factual particulars of Shakespeare's life. The unfortunate fact is that very little is known of the Bard and of his life, aside from the works he left behind, most of which would have undoubtedly been lost if not for the efforts of those who produced the First Folio. Bryson addresses this paradox thusly:

It is because we have so much of Shakespeare's work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.

Since so little is known of Shakespeare's life directly, Bryson instead gives a compelling portrait of life in Elizabethan London and the atmosphere that confronted an actor and playwright in that period. Bryson also includes a chapter in which he strenuously attacks the notion that someone other than William Shakespeare penned the works now attributed to him.

Of course, the best way to get to know Shakespeare is not by reading about Shakespeare but by simply reading Shakespeare, but for a casual reader looking to place Shakespeare in some general context, this book suffices well enough.

:: Taking my own advice from the paragraph immediately above this one, I've started brushing up my Shakespeare, beginning with Macbeth. I last read this play in my junior year of high school, and it was the play that really started convincing me that maybe this Shakespeare guy wasn't just some long-winded poof who couldn't just have people say what they meant. I know, I know, the man wrote drama and as such it's meant to be experienced as drama -- not read but 'seen', in other words – but I like reading him. I'm halfway through Act II right now, and it partially amuses me that Macbeth seems to be willing to go along with the whole plan just because some witches and his wife say so.

(On a tangential note, is there such a thing as a Complete Shakespeare that isn't at least three inches thick? I'm thinking of the way Bibles are printed, on that hyper-thin paper so that the thing can be carried around without causing back strain or so that it can fit into a normal book bag that is also containing other books. My King James Bible is only an inch thick; is there a Complete Shakespeare that accomplishes the same task? Anyone?)

:: On a lighter note, I enjoyed Bill Geist's book Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America. Geist is a long-time fixture on CBS Sunday Morning, doing the kind of commentaries on out-of-the-way places that used to be Charles Kuralt's stock in trade. This is the kind of book where one learns of an Iowa town that holds a festival every year on the Summer Solstice, for on that day, the sun sets exactly in the center of the town's railroad tracks. Or the town at the bottom of the Grand Canyon whose mail is delivered via mule train. Or the town whose claim to fame is that many years ago there a chicken was beheaded but lived on for eighteen months afterward. Or the town in Oklahoma where virtually every bomb used by the US military is manufactured.

In a key bit of wisdom referring to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, where the "Field of Dreams" ballpark-in-the-corn can be found (upon which I've walked!), Geist writes:

The most famous line from the movie is "If you build it, he will come," most often quoted as "If you build it, they will come," and which I've found to be true about 90 percent of the time. Towns build goofy museums and people come. They build biblically themed miniature golf courses, where I got a hole in one on Noah, and people come. They build whole domed stadiums on spec, and professional baseball teams come. Everybody's looking for something.

How true is that.

More reading to come. I like the reading!

I knew I should have watched more Buffy....

EDIT: Links un-wrongified.

Hot on the heels of the Presidential Candidates as Star Wars characters, we have the GOP candidates as Buffy villains. Heh.

Not that anyone asked, but here's my take on the GOP field:

Mitt Romney: He strikes me roughly the same way George W. Bush struck me back in 2000, which gives me pause, given how Bush has turned out to be, well, a bad President.

John McCain: This is his tenth year of seeking the Republican Presidential nomination. I just don't trust anyone who wants to be President that bad, but I'll vote for them as long as I agree with them on at least some issues. Since I haven't agreed with McCain on anything since the whole campaign finance thing, that rules him out. Plus, his general stance of "All war, all the time!" with regard to foreign policy rules him out completely.

Rudy Giuliani: His program seems to be to take all of the bad characteristics of the Bush administration and turn their dials up to '11'. No thanks.

Ron Paul: Crackpot.

Mike Huckabee: Crackpot.

Fred Thompson: Yeah, right. He seems to want to be President in the same way that I want a pepperoni pizza with an order of breadsticks.

So there we go. As for Democrats? I'll vote for whoever we end up nominating, obviously, but I don't think we have an ideal candidate, either. I like Edwards's progressive stances but find his resume thin; I like Obama's personality but find his resume even thinner; I like Clinton just fine, although she falls into the "Wow, this person seems to want the Presidency just a tad more than I'm really comfortable with" category. Basically, I wish Al Gore was running again, but he's not.

Reading - A Quiz Thing

Snagged from Roger and T&C:

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

I don't remember learning to read, per se, because it happened very early on, via my mother. I could read before I went to kindergarten, I know that much; my parents have often told the tale of how my kindergarten teacher was kind of dumb and didn't even realize how it was that I was apparently shouting out the directions to the assignments before she could read them to us. I have no memory of doing that.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Academic writing, the real dry and scholarly stuff. Especially books that are doctoral theses reworking into book-form. From my college years, I loved my philosophy courses, but I had a terrible time with Existentialism; every one of the texts we read had me thinking, "Ye Gods, somebody open a window!"

3. What are your library habits?

Thursday night is Library night. We go there, get books and a movie or two and maybe a few magazines, and then stop at 7-11 on the way home for Big Gulps and a Slurpee.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I have become more and more militant about the value of libraries. To reiterate something I often say in this space, I can't understand people who refuse to use libraries because "they like to own their books". Even before the price of gas started shooting through the roof, the notion that my reading should be limited by my paycheck or credit limit bugged the hell out of me.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

Well, there's the standard "Hey, I should check that out" when some blogger I read strongly recommends a book. Here's a recent example of such; I have that book waiting for me at the library. There is also the "Hey, this blogger I read has written a book!" factor; Alex Ross is a prime example of that.

Setting aside specific titles, I do find that a lot of times I read the blogs that I frequent most often and come away thinking, "Wow, I wish I was as well-read as that blogger." This has the effect of fueling my desire to read more.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from: New book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

Hard to say. I don't read everything I check out of the library, since a lot of it comes due before I can get to it. As noted above, money's always an issue, so I have to be pretty careful about what I buy. I don't use Amazon as much as I used to, although I do buy from them several times a year. For used books, I like eBay, although there are several used bookstores around the Southtowns region that I really need to scope out one of these days. And there's always the quarterly library used book sale, which is always a source of treasure.

7. How often do you read a book and NOT review it in your blog?

I don't know, really -- maybe ten percent of books I read don't get mentioned here, for whatever reasons may apply. It sometimes takes me a while to write about a book I read. (There are also the reviews I write for GMR.)

8. What are your pet peeves about ways people abuse books? Dog-earing pages? Reading in the bath?

If they buy the book, they can do whatever they want with it! As media go, paper is pretty forgiving, much moreso than any e-gadget invented yet, which is why I have no great fear that paper books are going away anytime soon.

But I can't abide people who write or underline or highlight in library books, or people who rip articles or recipes they want out of the magazines, and the like. If it's not your book, treat it like it's not your book.

Ultimately, the worst abuse a book can receive is to go unread. I've got shelves upon shelves of books being mistreated thusly myself, so I can't cast the first stone on that basis.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Yes, at breaks and at lunch. Never while I'm "on the clock". When I'm on the clock, I'm the very model of a productive maintenance guy. Yesiree Bob!

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I think of what they've told me they like in the past, and if I identify a book that I think may line up with their tastes as I know them, I give it as a gift. I tend to only give books that I have personally read; it kind of seems rude to me to give someone a copy of a book that may or may not be Teh Suck. Now, an exception to this might be if I find some kind of unique or special edition of a book by a friend's favorite author; that I might give them, regardless of whether I've read them or not.

What I don't do, regarding books as gifts, is hector my friends after I've given them the book as to whether they read it or if they liked it or if they want to talk about their favorite characters. That seems rude to me, and I don't do it. I'd love to hear a friend tell me that the book I gave them is the best thing ever, but there's no guarantee that they'll like it, and really, nobody likes to be hectored over their opinion of a gift.

This is a tag-free quiz, by the way. Grab and go!

Sentential Links #124

And away we go:

:: Which, of course, is exactly what Jonah does in the book: set up a fallacious opposing argument, demolish it, then turn around and assert exactly the same sort of argument from the opposite direction. (I'm really surprised; when I want intellectual honesty, the first place I look is Jonah Goldberg!)

:: Someone said that the cost of THE GOLDEN COMPASS is more than all the revenue the WGA would receive if the AMPTP accepts our offer. And yet somehow our offer is irresponsible and would cause complete financial ruin to the industry.

:: When we hear "abandoned graveyard," I think most of us might be tempted to think that they simply stopped burying people there, and leave it at that. But for reasons I can't yet fathom, this particular graveyard was not only discontinued, but left to return to a state of nature.

:: Don't wait for inspiration. Just get to work. (Agreed. Something like that is my mantra for 2008 and beyond.)

:: Getting my photo taken with Peter S. Beagle, author of (among other things) The Last Unicorn. (Gaaaahhhh! I'm jealous.)

:: Now that I have a longer commute, I get to experience all the different types of bad drivers even more often than before. It’s time to start calling them out. (Driving rants are always fun.)

:: Mindfulness is the key. Every individual moment is important.

:: There’s something very wonderful that occurs as ones brain gets a little dizzier with each solar rotation. We learn what’s important and what’s less so at any given moment, and yes, we finally learn to edit.

All for now. Tune in again next week!

Buffalo in the Limelight (sort of)

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra's music director, JoAnn Falletta, is featured on Naxos this month. I didn't realize she had that many recordings; among the seven listed there, four feature the BPO. I own two of them; time to track down the other two (the Copland and Respighi, specifically).

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Wow. I was about to come up completely empty this week, until I checked Lynn's blog and found the Star Wars Guide to the Presidential Candidates. Whew! Thanks, Lynn!

One Hundred Movies!!! (31 through 40)

Zounds! More than a month has gone by...yeesh. So anyhow, when last we left this series, we'd explored 60 of my favorite movies. Let's bump that up to 70 movies now, shall we?

40. The Crimson Pirate

A different kind of pirate flick, existing in its own kind of world, neither an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler nor a Pirates of the Caribbean-style epic. This film is executed in fairly tongue-in-cheek manner, with Burt Lancaster as the pirate captain who finds himself involved in some derring-do, as all pirates do, I suppose. What makes this one different is the way the thrills take place: Lancaster employs some spectacular gymnastic ability in some pretty wild action sequences, some of which are downright hilarious. If you think pirate movies mostly involve crossed swords and blazing cannons, check this out. Sure, swords are crossed and cannons blaze here as well, but they're not the focus they are in other films.

Signature moment: The Captain's escape from certain drowning.

39. My Neighbor Totoro

This is a children's film, quiet and contemplative, by Hayao Miyazaki, and it's one of his very best. Two young girls move with their father to a new house in the country while their mother recovers from an unspecified illness at a hospital. While exploring their new neighborhood, the younger of the two girls discovers that the giant camphor tree outside their house is actually the dwelling of a great magical being called Totoro and his two smaller brothers, or mates, or friends, or something like that. Their adventures with Totoro involve planting magical seeds, flying through the air by midnight, and going for a ride on a giant bus that is shaped like a cat. It's all pretty indescribable, but that makes it even more special.

Signature moment: Totoro discovers the pleasures of umbrellas.

38. Lethal Weapon

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in one of my favorite action movies, with Glover playing the aging cop (Roger Murtaugh) who's only looking to play it safe until retirement and Gibson as the suicidally depressed younger cop (Martin Riggs) who's been deemed too dangerous for just about anything. The crime they're called to solve is pretty pedestrian; the pleasure of the film is in the witty screenplay and the winning chemistry between Glover and Gibson, chemistry that would serve them well for three sequels (the first two of which are also, in my opinion, pretty good).

Signature moment: When Martin Riggs goes to a roof to talk down a jumper, with unorthodox results.

37. Jaws

I didn't see this movie in full until I was sixteen years old, and I watched it on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, in its pan-and-scan, edited-for-television version, and I still jumped when the shark rose from the water in front of Roy Scheider. Now that's effective movie-making. The movie never really falters in its pacing, and though its much-cited masterstroke of keeping the shark relatively unseen until late in the film was mainly due to the fact that the mechanical shark they built didn't work, the movie's a masterwork of mood. It also features the first truly great score by John Williams (who, I might add, did not steal the theme from Dvorak).

Signature moment: "Smile, you son-of-a-bitch!"

36. The Man Without a Face

This was the first movie Mel Gibson directed, and for some reason it never did all that well, which has always bothered me because it's very well-made, and it's a far better meditation on the relationship between good teacher and curious student than the stunningly overrated Dead Poets Society. By the way, whatever became of Gaby Hoffman? I thought she was a very promising child actor. I wonder what she's doing now.

Signature moment: Gibson and his young charge act out The Merchant of Venice in Gibson's living room.

35. Stand By Me

I made a number of attempts to read Stephen King when I was in high school, and I never much got into him. This, coupled with the fact that just about all of the movies they made from his books for a long time were crap, led me to conclude that King is a hack. I started to wonder if I'd misjudged him when I saw Stand By Me, based on a King novella. It's a solid, solid piece of storytelling, and highly insightful in its treatment of the dynamic between childhood friends who will inevitably drift apart in the end. I love the movie's elegiac tone, and the only fault I've ever felt with it is in the bookending bits with Richard Dreyfuss; I'm not sure that learning Chris's ultimate fate is really necessary.

Signature moment: It's a small moment, easy to overlook, but the shopkeep who speaks to Wil Wheaton as if a life without football is incomprehensible always stands out in my mind when I think of this movie.

34. Flash Gordon

What a cheerfully, deliriously fun movie this is! Seriously, it's just a blast. I recently bought the DVD and watched it with some trepidation, thinking it couldn't possibly live up to the hoot I'd had in the theater seeing it when I was nine, but no, it was just about as much fun as I remembered, if not moreso. Unbelievably goofy costume design, the two most wooden lead actors I've ever seen, some of the gonzoest action sequences ever filmed (that football fight especially), and production design that creates a look completely distinct from the reigning Star Wars and Star Trek look of SF films of the period. Oh, and the music by Queen? How can anyone not love it?

Signature moment: "Flash! I love you, but we only have eight more hours to save the Earth!"

33. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg's tale of the Indiana electrical worker who finds himself having visions of unearthly origin, ultimately leading him and others to a rendezvous with earthbound aliens, has been a favorite film of mine for years. What's so great about this movie, as with Jaws, is the way Spielberg blends his mystery with the mundane, so that ordinary things take on ominous tones, such as when little Barry Guiler's toys all start lighting up and moving for no reason. The John Williams score makes a fascinating progression from atonal mystery toward tonal glory at the end, and the visuals are as stunning as anything Spielberg or George Lucas have filmed since. It's an amazing movie.

Signature moment: The abduction of Barry Guiler is one of the most unnerving film sequences I know. I've never been able to hear Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are" without feeling a sense of dread, thanks to this one scene.

32. 2001: A Space Odyssey

I saw 2001 when I was only nine years old. It was screened at a science fiction convention that my sister and I attended in Portland, OR. I didn't get it. At all. I didn't understand the movie to save my life. I'm a young kid who's all hopped up on Star Wars, and here's this movie supposedly about space starting off with a bunch of apes in the beginning. Then we're in space, but there's this tall black thing on the moon...and then there's a computer that goes nuts...and then the movie gets really trippy. No, I didn't understand this movie at all. But what was weird was that I wanted to understand it; I didn't hate it or feel bored. I'm still not sure I totally understand it, but I do think it's one of the finest films of all time.

Signature moment: The waltz of the space ships, over "On the Beautiful Blue Danube". There are a lot of film music fans who genuinely believe that the film would work better had Stanley Kubrick actually used the Alex North score that he rejected in favor of his classical music temp track, but I've never agreed.

31. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Well, I don't know what I can possibly say about this movie other than to just note its place on the list and leave it at that. So that's what I'm doing.

Signature moment: All of 'em. Picking a favorite moment from this movie is like picking the prettiest flower from a field full of poppies. Can't do it.

And that's all for this entry. Still no space-based swashbuckler movies! How long can this go on?!

Worst Sentence Ever

Wow, this one's bad. Something I've noticed from sports writers in recent years is a desperate need to throw in pop-culture references when writing sports commentary. Sometimes this works well, but other times, it just feels unbelievably forced, and this example's amazingly bad. It's from this article which argues that the Jaguars are going to need their ground game to perform well if they want to beat the Patriots (a proposition that's so obvious one wonders why this article was needed in the first place; what's next, arguing that the Jags will also want to have more points than the other guys when the game ends?). It's a pretty pedestrian article, until two-thirds of the way through, when this happens:

It's pretty simple — successfully running the ball provides a time-of-possession element that may be more crucial than anything we've seen since the halcyon days of Linda Blair.

Dude, you're doing it wrong.

What is SF?

A bunch of SF writers are asked to define SF; hilarity ensues.

My favorite two definitions that I recall are: "SF is whatever I point at when I say SF", and "SF is when you push a button to make something impossible happen, while fantasy is when you wave your have to make something impossible happen."

I think that Damon Knight said the former, but I don't remember where I got the latter, so if anyone knows, feel free to give my memory a jog. Interestingly, that second definition still fails to classify Star Wars! Personally I consider Star Wars to be SF, although it's so strongly shot through with fantastic tropes that maybe it's best thought of as fantasy set in space instead of Middle Earth. But for some reason, that answer just doesn't feel right to me.

Grief

I wrote this essay a few months ago, hoping to have it published in The Buffalo News, but they rejected it. Maybe it was too much of a downer topic, but anyway, since as the editor of Byzantium's Shores I can accept my own writing*, here it is. The topic is, of course, grief, something I've had cause to think an awful lot about in recent years, and not just for the obvious reasons, either.

When a person we love dies, our friends and family surround us, offer us comfort, and pledge to do anything we ever need to get through the dark period. They laugh and cry with us as we remember the happy stories of the loved one we've lost, they put their arms around our shoulders and bring us meals because we're too weak ourselves to cook, and they assure us that they are praying for us at their own home churches too. They come to the funeral, they pay their respects one last time, and then they go home. They have their own lives too, and life doesn't stop for the living.

But what's rarely acknowledged, or even realized, is that the for the bereaved, the funeral is just the beginning of grief. The funeral is easy. Everyone knows how to behave and how to talk to a funeral. We are not nearly as good at dealing with what comes after the funeral, when the grief settles in like an unwelcome guest.

These days, it's hard to even notice that people around us are grieving. Gone are the days when rigid societal rules dictated how long grief would last, and when grief would be made obvious by the color of our clothes or of the drapes in the parlor. Sadly, also gone is our understanding that grief goes on not for weeks or months, but for years.

For we the grieving, it is not a temporary feeling but rather a semi-permanent state. It becomes a fact of who we are, which in turn becomes even more difficult in the face of a society that sometimes seems to believe that death and grief are not to be discussed any more than absolutely necessary. This leaves us feeling that our loved ones are best left unmentioned – or, worse, unremembered.

This is the worst of things. We want to talk about our loved ones! And not in the hushed or reverent tones best used for Saints, but in the messy tones of human feeling. We want to laugh anew at the happy stories, and we want to admit the things they did that made us so angry we could scream. We want to hear their names spoken. To know that they are still remembered, that their lives touched someone and continue to do so, is the best antidote to the sadness of grief.

So please, don't avoid mentioning our loved ones for fear of unnecessarily reminding us of pain and anguish. Grief is not a wound we must forever fear re-opening.

And when we do cry, know that it is normal and natural. Put an arm around us and cry with us, in silence even; hugs given in silence are among the most underrated things we can do for one another. Don't feel that you have to know the perfect thing to say, and don't feel that you have to openly admit the inadequacy of the words that you do say. You can send a “Thinking of You” card with nothing more than just your signature inside.

Grief is probably the most burdensome of human emotions. But like all burdens, it is most easily borne when shared; and shared, it need not even be a burden at all.

End of sermon.

* You'd be surprised how often I write a post only to have my Inner Editor send me a nicely-phrased rejection letter.

Grading the Folks

Since I can't help myself when it comes to stealing quiz-things, here's a quiz-thing from Messrs. Tosy and Cosh. Apparently this is supposed to gauge how advantaged you are when you enter adult life, or something like that. I'm not sure I buy the methodology, but hey, I'm always one for bolding stuff that applies to me!

So, the items, with occasional comment:

Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor

Were the same or higher socio-economic class than your high school teachers (Geez, I have no idea. Some of 'em, probably. Others, probably not. I didn't hang out with my teachers or go to their houses to see what kind of china they used or what cars they drove.)

Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent (Absolutely!)

Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 (Trumpet, piano, swimming)

The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (Well, you don't see too many long-haired hippie types in overalls on the teevee these days, so....)

Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18 (Yeah, what a good idea that was.)

Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs (I wish I'd have gotten off my ass in college and found a part-time job to help out. This is one of few things I'd do differently if I got to re-live my life.)

Went to a private high school

Went to summer camp (Ahhh, the Bristol Hills Music Camp! One of the greatest experiences of my life.)

Family vacations involved staying at hotels (Sometimes yes, sometimes it was the camper. Never really cared, as long as there was a pool and, when I got older, an arcade.)

Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (I honestly don't know. I never lacked for clothing, although I was never the one demanding the latest styles and whatnot. To this day, I have never owned a single pair of Levi's.)

There was original art in your house when you were a child

You and your family lived in a single family house

Your parent(s) owned their own house(s) or apartment before you left home (I'm leaving this one unbolded because I genuinely don't know when the mortgage got paid off, and I'm pretty sure that it was none of my business, anyway.)

You had your own room as a child (I don't remember ever not having my own room.)

You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course

Had your own TV in your room in High School (No cable, though, ran to my room, so I either used the aerial antenna on the house or just used the teevee as the "monitor" for my VIC-20.)

Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (I never flew until college)

Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family (OK, I'm cheating here, counting canoeing and kayaking trips as cruising. Hey, it's what we did. A part of heaven had better be just like the Clarion and Youghiogheny Rivers, or I'm going to be mad when I get there!)

Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (Not terribly often, but we did go. I still have a few very vivid memories of the year I was in kindergarten, and we went to Chicago to see the Treasures of King Tutankhamun. As I grew up, school took this function over more and more.)

You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. (Well, my parents generally didn't tell me how much bills were, although I did hear the occasional kvetching over high bills or the like. Also, once we settled in Western New York in 1981, we used wood for our heating exclusively until the gas lines finally got laid up to my parents' house, sometime while I was in college, I think. And even then they continued using wood for some years, until the wood stove itself gave up the ghost. I have fond memories of getting up on icy winter mornings and stoking the great iron beast with wood, of huddling around the stove as it heated up, of the terribly uneven heat of the thing as sometimes we'd overstoke the thing and end up with a ninety-degree house, of the cat who'd lick the stove when it wasn't containing a fire [with no apparent ill effect, as that cat lived to be twenty] and the occasional hilarity when Dad would mislay his checkbook and invariably become convinced that he'd thrown it into the stove. [He never actually did turn out to have thrown it in there, so far as I can recall.])

Received a beating from my mother when she discovered a wire hanger in my closet. (I sure learned my lesson that day: plastic hangers, or nothing!)

(OK, that last one didn't happen.)

So yeah: the Rockefellers we weren't, but neither were we the Ingallses.

Sentential Links #123

Wow. Been a while, eh?

:: You ever have a friend who is just... different when he/she drinks? I'm not saying that Jim Kirk has a problem, it's just that I get uncomfortable around him when he drinks. So do my dogs. (The post is a couple of weeks old, but who cares?)

:: And they're all gone now. I remain. I remember. Do they?

:: You know what they have on the cigarette package in Great Britain? In great big letters? (I have less and less sympathy for smokers these days, I have to admit.)

:: In some perverse tribute to you, I watched "High Fidelity"--or the parts I could see through my tears--tonight. (This blog continues to break my heart every time I read it.)

:: But at the end of the day, we have four Democrats with serious plans to forestall a major environmental crisis. On the Republican side, we have Mike Huckabee who thinks global warming is a serious problem but doesn't have any particular ideas about dealing with it. We have Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani who basically seem to be in denial. And then most bizarrely we have John McCain who acknowledges the problem, acknowledges its severity, acknowledges that the only solution is curbs on carbon emissions and then . . . won't endorse the sort of curbs that his own analysis suggests is necessary.

:: Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

:: And here's the good news: when the better candidates got taken out in 2004, we ended up with John Kerry, a decent man but a lousy candidate. This year, if Hillary does indeed go on to lose, we'll end up Barack Obama, a decent man and a terrific candidate. So at least we're making progress.

:: The truth is that, of course, I fully understand that the far right's influence on the mainstream remains limited by a number of factors, the greatest of which is the basic decency of such a large segment of the populace. There are at times much more important issues than these people. But it's important that someone keep a spotlight shining on them and their activities -- important because it's a fundamental part of making the public aware and informed, which is the most important part of effectively combating them and their poisonous effects in our culture and our lives -- and I'm well-equipped to do the job. (And a fine job they do, over there at Orcinus.)

:: Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? (Salty language alert)

:: Watch out, Eric! When the four different voices in Margo’s head all say the same thing, it means nothing but trouble.

:: No one wants to read a blog that's all flowers and rainbows and fuzzy bunnies. (So that explains the drop in my traffic over the last year! [rimshot] )

All for this week, as usual.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

It disappoints me greatly that this story comes not from Buffalo, but from Chicago.

How to serve your customers (if you hate them)

BuffaloGeek recently made a vehicle purchase at Joe Cecconi Chrysler, and the resulting transaction with Joe Cecconi Chrysler did not go well. It seems that the people at Joe Cecconi Chrysler consider customer service to have ended as soon as the vehicle is off the lot, and that any attempt by a customer to procure more service from Joe Cecconi Chrysler constitutes attempted theft of services or something similar. It appears that lying and refusing to talk to customers is the way things are done at Joe Cecconi Chrysler, which is a shame. It's not like there are lots of other Chrysler dealerships in the region; why, Joe Cecconi Chrysler is just about the only place to by a Chrysler for a fifty-mile radius, so it's not like the guys at Joe Cecconi Chrysler will miss out on commissions if word of the abysmal, combative, and downright rude customer service at Joe Cecconi Chrysler should get out.

So shop at Joe Cecconi Chrysler if you must, folks, but hold on to your wallets, and make sure you get all the service you think you'll ever need before you sign the dotted line with the salespeople at Joe Cecconi Chrysler.

Remember that name: Joe Cecconi Chrysler. That's a name you can trust.

Joe Cecconi Chrysler.

I-oh-way

When I was picking colleges, one small factor that led to me choosing to go to school in Iowa was the Iowa caucuses; I thought it would be really cool to be there for that entire process. This was in 1989, when I was about to graduate high school; I was anticipating the 1992 caucuses.

And then, when 1992 finally rolled around, Iowa's own Senator Tom Harkin ran for the Democratic nomination, which meant that the Iowa caucuses meant absolutely nothing and New Hampshire became the big prize.

Oh well.

My point? I don't have one, of course.

Fixing the Prequels - The Phantom Menace (part four)

part one
part two
part three

Wow, it's been a long time since I updated this series, so let's get right into it, shall we?

When last we left our heroes, they had just blasted their way out of the hangar bay on Naboo and are now heading toward space, in an attempt to get to Coruscant where Queen Amidala hopes to be able to gain the support of the Chancellor in the matter of her world's invasion by the Trade Federation.

Now, before getting back into matters of script, a brief digression about visual effects. I've never been one to lament the rise of computer-generated effects in place of photographing models and stop-motion animation and the like of effects-laden-movies past, but there's one area of TPM that's always bugged me slightly, effects-wise, and it's the movements of the ships. Well, one ship in particular: the Queen's ship, which for some reason never really seems to have any real weight about it.

I assume that the Queen's ship is roughly the size of the Millennium Falcon or the original Blockade Runner. But in the OT, when those ships were onscreen, they seemed like real, physical objects. The Queen's ship always looks to me like a construct instead of an object. Just the way it tears out of the hangar bay and streaks upward into the sky in a perfect curve, achieving velocity seemingly the second it clears the doors of the hangar. Contrast that with all those times we saw the Millennium Falcon lift off from various locales; it always had to gather up a head of steam, so to speak, as we might expect a large vehicle to have to do in a planetary environment.

Oddly, this problem of the ships having "weight" only seems to really afflict the chrome-hulled cruisers of Naboo in the OT (except for the ship that lands on Coruscant at the opening of Attack of the Clones, which also happens to be my single favorite ship from the entire PT; how sad that it was only in about a minute of screentime!). The problem doesn't even extend, in my view, to the Naboo starfighters, so why this one ship really stands out as moving in a totally unworldly way has always vexed me a little bit.

You know what else bugs me about the ships in the PT? The fact that none of them have names. Most of the really important ships in the OT had names: Millennium Falcon. Executor. Avenger. Slave One. Tantive IV. Not so the PT, unfortunately. Giving this ship a name would have really enhanced the personality a bit.

So anyway, back to the script stuff. The escape from Naboo always seems to take a bit too little time for me, with too little sense of desperation. It seems, frankly, too easy. Mostly, this is a matter of pacing, since all the elements are there: the ship is under heavy fire, the shields are knocked out, the astrodroids deploy to fix the shields but start getting picked off, R2-D2's first heroic moment in the Star Wars saga, the escape into deep space. There's a lot of good stuff there, and I like the sequence as is, but it frankly could be better. It's this sequence, actually, that to me represents the greatest evidence that when making TPM George Lucas was, frankly, out of practice as a film maker. The editing here lets him down, when it's editing that is Lucas's strong point. Comparing this escape sequence with that of the Millennium Falcon from the Death Star in ANH is illustrative.

So what does the sequence need? More heft, frankly. This is the first space-based action sequence in the movie, and as such, it should stand out more than it does. Here's also a place where a toned-down Jar Jar could be used for small comic effect. This is how my version of the escape from Naboo would take place:

EXT: SPACE

The Naboo cruiser is powering through the upper atmosphere.

INT: COCKPIT

COMMANDER RIC OLIE sits in the pilot's seat, with two co-pilots flanking him. Standing behind him are QUI GON and CAPTAIN PANAKA.

RIC OLIE: They're still jamming our communications. Start calculating a course for Coruscant.

INT: MAIN HOLD.

OBI WAN leads JAR JAR into a cramped room where six astrodroids are in sleep-mode. Jar Jar's color is way off, his ears are drooping more than normal, and he moans as he holds his stomach.

JAR JAR: Mesa sorry! Mesa never fly before.

OBI WAN: Well, we past some closets coming down here. The Queen has more gowns.

JAR JAR: Ohhhh....

OBI WAN: Stay in here, and keep quiet. And don't touch anything.

Obi Wan turns and exits, leaving a moaning Jar Jar to sit down on the floor and put his head between his legs.

JAR JAR: Disen not my day.

INT: COCKPIT

CO-PILOT: Look!

RIC OLIE: I see them.

PANAKA: What is it?

RIC OLIE: Federation ships, two of them. Moving to cut us off. (to co-pilot) Activate our shields.

One of the Federation ships fires a couple of warning shots at the Naboo cruiser, which lightly rocks under the fire.

QUI GON: Perhaps you should accelerate to attack speed.

RIC OLIE: Attack speed? This isn't a Jedi attack ship! You're flying aboard the Queen Marisma the Golden, the Capital Cruiser of Naboo! [I plucked the name "Marisma" out of thin air. -Ed.]

Another burst of fire from the Federation battleship rocks the Marisma.

PANAKA: Commander, fire all thrusters. We're never going to run that blockade like this.

RIC OLIE: Captain, this ship--

PANAKA: Commander, on my authority as the Queen's personal Captain of Naboo Security, I order you to fly this ship in any way you need to! Get us through that blockade, Commander!

Ric Olie stiffens, and now his inner "gritty war pilot" starts to come out. He turns back to his console.

RIC OLIE: Transfer all auxiliary power to the secondary thrusters. We need more speed. And put all power in our front shields. They're not shooting at us from behind!

The sounds of the engines, deep in the ship, become more powerful and insistent. The lights dim as the power is diverted, and everyone shifts stance as the ship accelerates.

INT: MAIN HOLD.

The Queen's entourage is holding on for dear life. The Queen's gaze is locked on that of her earlier Handmaiden.

INT: DROID ROOM.

Jar Jar lifts his head, and then ducks it again.

EXT: SPACE

The Marisma's thrusters fire anew, and the ship picks up speed.

INT: FEDERATION BATTLESHIP – BRIDGE

DOFINE stands at the shoulder of a scanning operator.

DOFINE: They can't expect to run our blockade in that ship, can they?

SCANNING OPERATOR: They are accelerating to attack speed.

DOFINE: All guns fire!

EXT: SPACE

Now the Federation Battleship starts blasting away at the Marisma. The Naboo ship is stuck several times.

INT: COCKPIT

Panaka and Qui Gon have to hold on for dear life as the ship lurches under heavy fire.

INT: MAIN HOLD

The Queen and her entourage are in fear as the lights flicker.

HANDMAIDEN: We're closing on the blockade.

The Queen nods.

INT: DROID ROOM

Jar Jar is literally trying to become one with the floor.

INT: COCKPIT

Obi Wan enters and has to grab a handhold as a fresh volley of laserfire jolts the ship again.

RIC OLIE: Our shield generator's hit!

CO-PILOT: Activating astrodroids.

He presses a button.

INT: DROID ROOM

Jar Jar is whimpering on the floor when all six astrodroids suddenly snap to life and begin. Now he has to leap up and get out of the way as the astrodroids emerge from their cocoons and begin heading for an exterior airlock.

JAR JAR: Ohhh, what next!

He stumbles on the leg of one particularly familiar blue astrodroid and falls to the floor. The astrodroid whistles at him as it enters the airlock, from where it is ejected onto the hull of the ship.

EXT: SPACE

The six astrodroids are all clustered around an open portal into the ship's systems, where they are trying to repair some obvious blast damage. The Federation Battleship's bombardment continues, and one droid is blasted right off the hull almost immediately, quickly followed by another. The BLUE DROID is busily connecting wires while a third of his comrades is blasted away.

INT: COCKPIT

Obi Wan is watching the progress of the astrodroids via a video monitor.

OBI WAN: We're losing droids fast.

RIC OLIE: If we lose them all before they get the shields back up, they'll have us.

PANAKA: Keep flying, Commander.

The ship lurches again, particularly violently this time.

EXT: SPACE

One of the astrodroids is literally shaken loose from the hull of the ship by the latest impact, and tumbles shrieking into space. Now only two remain.

INT: DROID ROOM

Jar Jar is trying to pull himself up, via a handle on the wall. Unfortunately, the handle is to a parts locker, which pops open and dumps all manner of machine parts on top of him.

EXT: SPACE

The Marisma is now flying across the surface of the Federation Battleship. The two droids are still working feverishly on reconnecting the shield generators.

INT: FEDERATION BATTLESHIP – BRIDGE

SCANNING OPERATOR: I have them in range for precision cannons, sir.

DOFINE: Fire!

EXT: SPACE

A fresh volley of Federation cannonade blasts the fifth droid into atoms, leaving just the BLUE DROID working on the ship. Somehow the blue droid actually manages to evade several near laser blasts while he connects the last of the wires. Sparks fly as the power flow is restored, and the blue droid lets out a whistle of triumph.

INT: COCKPIT

RIC OLIE: Our shields are back up! The droid did it!

EXT: SPACE

The Marisma streaks away from the planet, leaving the Federation blockade in its wake.

INT: MAIN HOLD

The Handmaiden glances at a computer screen and sees the Federation ships receding in the distance.

HANDMAIDEN: We're away!

INT: COCKPIT

RIC OLIE: Prepare for jump to hyperspace. Lay in your course for Coruscant.

CO-PILOT: We can't, sir! The hyperdrive took a direct hit. We don't have enough power to get all the way to the central systems.

PANAKA: We got through the blockade but now we can't get anywhere?

QUI GON: Obi Wan.

OBI WAN: Yes, Master.

Obi Wan sits down at a vacant screen and starts looking through navigational charts. He quickly hones in on one system.

OBI WAN: We can go into the Outer Rim, Master. There's a system called Tatooine. Small, poor, mostly out of the standard shipping lanes.

QUI GON: Which means no Trade Federation presence there. Excellent.

Captain Panaka glances at the screen and reacts strongly to something he reads there.

PANAKA: Tatooine is controlled by the Hutts! You can't take Her Royal Highness there! If the Hutts capture her--

QUI GON: A calculated risk, Captain. But the Hutts aren't looking for her, are they? In their eyes we will be as everyone else in their worlds: travelers who are looking to repair a broken ship and be on our way. They need never know the Queen is there.

INT: DROID ROOM

Jar Jar is rubbing his aching head when the Blue droid comes back inside from the airlock. The droid surveys the scene – a sick Gungan and parts strewn all over – and whistles as he shakes his dome-head.

JAR JAR: Sorry.

The Droid emits a whistle of disdain.

OK, that got pretty long-winded, but I make no apologies. So there. The basic notion is that there should be a palpable sense of desperation here, of danger.

Next up comes another scene where the Trade Federation baddies report to Darth Sidious. In the original script, Sidious orders Nute Gunray to "destroy all of the Naboo high-ranking officials, slowly and quietly". I like that and would restore it to the film. Then he asks if the Queen has signed the treaty, and Gunray has to admit that she has not: the Queen has escaped and that they can't track the Naboo ship, but Sidious says that the Sith can, and here we meet Darth Maul. I've always liked this scene, and really the only change I'd make would be to restore the afore-mentioned line about the high-ranking officials and an addition to the exchange at the very end, after the two Sith have faded from view:

NUTE: This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them!

RUNE: We should not have made this bargain. What will the Jedi do when they become aware of these Sith Lords?

What I like about a lot of this stuff is that it starts to become clear that the Trade Federation is also in the dark as to what's going on just why they're doing what they're being told to do. They're losing the plot as it were.

Also, I've always loved the way Darth Maul's hologram appears, looming over the shoulder of Darth Sidious; at that exact moment, John Williams's score has this ominous figure intoned by the low brass. It's a terrific entrance.

Meanwhile, back on the Naboo cruiser, we're officially introduced to R2-D2 and the Queen is briefed on what's going on now. I like this scene as is, and the only change I'd make would be to have the Queen in a different outfit, since my version of the escape makes clear that Jar Jar had thrown up on the old one.

And now, we arrive at what I hold to be the single worst scene in any Star Wars movie, and by a good margin. It's a very brief scene, really, but it's gobsmackingly bad. Padme (the handmaiden) is cleaning R2-D2 as ordered by "the Queen", when Jar Jar pops in and gives a brief summation of the day he's had. He's all cheerful and bubbly and it's basically just another bit of Jar Jar when, really, none is needed. Particularly bad, though, is Padme's line, "You're a Gungan, aren't you?" I always feel as though Jar Jar's response should be something like "Yousa know any other races of orange-skinned amphibians native to Naboo?"

The scene is nothing more than filler, to take up space between "We've got to get to Tatooine!" and "We're on Tatooine!". Nothing wrong with filler, per se; I've always felt, for instance, that The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring could have used some kind of filler between the escape across the Brandywine River and the arrival at Bree. But this particular filler scene is just awful. I squirm every time I see it. This little scene is, to me, the best piece of evidence in favor of people who claim that George Lucas's problem in the PT is that there's nobody around to tell him when something in his movie is crap on a stick. And as much as I love Uncle George, there's just no getting around it: this scene is crap on a stick.

So, how to fix it? Simple: no Jar Jar. This scene should have Obi Wan in it. Here's my version:

INT: MAIN HOLD

PADME enters, now dressed in simple working garb. She walks toward R2.

OBI WAN: (offscreen) Watch your step!

PADME stops cold and realizes that she was about to stumble over a sleeping JAR JAR, who is sprawled across the floor. She smiles at Obi Wan as she steps over the Gungan. Obi Wan is sitting at a table, with his lightsaber in pieces in front of him. She sits at the table opposite him and takes up a cloth; R2 whistles and rolls over for his cleaning.

OBI WAN: I tried getting him to sleep in a bunk, but he says he prefers the floor.

PADME: Gungans like hard surfaces. Once when I was – with The Queen on a diplomatic meeting with them, we all had to sleep on their floors. Our backs ached for a week afterward.

Obi Wan cocks an eyebrow but lets her minor slip pass.

PADME: Did you make that weapon yourself?

OBI WAN: No. The making of one's own lightsaber is part of the final trials before one becomes a full Jedi Knight.

PADME: You are not a Jedi Knight?

OBI WAN: I am Master Qui Gon's Padawan learner. But don't fear, Miss...

PADME: Padme.

OBI WAN: Don't fear, Miss Padme. I am almost ready to undergo the trials myself, and Qui Gon is one of the greatest of all Jedi. You are in good hands.

PADME: Which is why we're here, instead of in a Federation prison camp on our own planet.

She sighs.

PADME: We must find a solution to this problem quickly. The Naboo are peaceful people, but we have been used to our freedom for a thousand years. Being imprisoned will destroy the spirit of my world in a very short time.

OBI WAN: What is the nature of your dispute with the Federation? I've been trying to understand what could have motivated them to a blockade and an invasion, but it makes little sense to me.

PADME: That's because it makes little sense. We are an old world, but we are not terribly rich. Naboo is known more for its artisans and its scholars than its traders. There is little the Federation stands to gain by taking control of our shipping lanes. It won't make them that much richer than they are already, and it won't put them in any better position than they are now to establish themselves in the Outer Rim. Perhaps there is something deeper at work here. Our Galactic Senator, Palpatine, has told us of intrigues in the Senate that have drawn even him, a relatively junior delegate from a small world far from the Galactic center, into various factions who are constantly competing for power and influence on Coruscant. I fear that Naboo has become a mere pawn upon a very complex game board.

Obi Wan has been listening to this in fascination, as he begins putting the last pieces of his lightsaber back together.

OBI WAN: I must say, you have a very keen mind, Miss Padme. The Queen chooses her handmaidens well.

She smiles at him, a bit mysteriously, and he rises from his chair and holds his saber at arm's length.

OBI WAN: Ah, that should do it.

He presses the button, and the saber ignites, with its brilliant blue blade. But the blade's hum is oddly high-pitched, and the blade itself is only about twelve inches long. He frowns as he deactivates it and sits back down.

OBI WAN: Well that's not right.

Padme laughs, and R2 expresses his mirth with a series of whistles.

Something like this would give Obi Wan some needed screentime in the middle section of the film, as he disappears a bit. (That never really bugged me, but still, the character does get slightly shortchanged.) It also keeps his role as Padawan learner in perspective a bit, as well as flesh out a bit of the progression from Padawan to Jedi Knight. The bit about a Jedi finally making his own lightsaber reflects Luke Skywalker's own lightsaber-making in Return of the Jedi: in the OT, Luke is never an "official" Padawan learner, and yet he still in some ways undergoes the same tests required of an actual Padawan making his transition to Jedi Knight.

(By the way, I've always wondered why all lightsabers are the same length. Why not a lightdagger? Or Jedis jousting from the backs of some big beastie while wielding a twelve-foot-long lightlance? Now there's an idle thought for another time.)

Also, this version of the scene establishes that there might be a bit more to this particular handmaiden than meets the eye, as well as gives a bit of background to the entire political situation. One of the things that always intrigued me about TPM was the way that the entire plot on Naboo, in the end, doesn't really matter that much at all; Palpatine is able to get what he wants whether his schemes for Naboo are successful or not. He is playing a game with Naboo as one of his pawns.

In fact, this is a larger theme throughout all of the PT, and it's one I'd emphasize a bit more strongly than George Lucas did. It tends to get missed a bit, but virtually all of the intrigues and battles and conflicts throughout the PT are basically diversions constructed by Palpatine/Sidious to keep the Jedi from seeing what's really going on until it's far too late for them to do anything about it.

And that's where I'll end for now, since this got more long-winded than I'd originally planned. Next time we'll meet the boy who over the course of his life will save the Galaxy, destroy it, and save it again. On to Tatooine!

Eagles 17, Bills 9

I suppose I should post about the last game of the Bills' 2007 season, mainly for the sake of completeness.

:: The Bills finished 7-9 with one of the NFL's youngest and most injury-prone rosters. There's some talent here to build on.

:: Bills quarterbacks. Sure, Trent Edwards has shown promise. So did JP Losman and Rob Johnson, once upon a time. I'm not bothered by Edwards's play in those two games with horrible weather; he seems like a smart and competitive guy, so maybe he learns better to handle that stuff. I dunno.

:: Defensive line getting run down.

:: Offensive line often getting dominated.

:: Offensive playcalling: early in the season they'd call daring plays at really bad times while late in the season they seemingly stopped calling daring plays at all.

So there it is: they went 7-9, which is what I originally figured was the very best they could do. And yes, I do take a "glass is half full" view of this team; there's talent here and they're closer, I think, to being good than they were two years ago.

But Marv Levy has just resigned, leaving the team behind again after two years as General Manager, and the worst thing is that for claiming that he was never going to serve in that position for more than two years, he didn't have a successor ready to step in and carry on the work. So now there's uncertainty in the front office again.

And even more pressing is that Ralph Wilson, the team's owner, is still getting older. I really think that he'll be dead within five years, and when that happens, unless something dramatic happens in this area, I have come to think that the Bills are almost certain to leave. When that happens, I very much doubt my interest in football will continue.

This is almost certainly the last football post I'll be writing for this season, because I'm just not that interested in the playoffs or in continuing to try to invent new ways to call the Patriots names. As promising as the Bills were this year, I'm increasingly finding the NFL a joyless, mechanical affair, so much so that my posts on the subject are also joyless and mechanical. So, while I'll still watch football, I probably won't be blogging about it any more.

Thus, as long as they're still in Buffalo, go Bills!