[UPDATE: I screwed up the timestamp on this post, which is why it's appearing Sunday night and marked as Monday. So I'm just changing it to a regular old Sunday post, for this one week only. It was supposed to run as a scheduled post tomorrow, but I blundered it. Oops! Plus I decided to add a few more links, because the post looked a bit half-baked to begin with.]
Continuing to traipse through Blogistan:
:: I listened to CNN while driving around the valley today, and it hits you when it’s no longer 50 people, but 50 people with names. Names and achievements. Names and families. Names and jobs. Names and lives lost.
:: Way back when, my friend Jeff was a lunatic behind the wheel of a car.
:: I worry about the artists and musicians and actors and other creative people who always live on the periphery.... but in this current moment of our history are precariously balanced on the edge.
:: "I am. I already was. I always will be."
:: So get busy. We’re running out of charming little towns. You don’t want to be stuck with Pismo Beach.
:: Vancouver, I'm sure, is a lovely city and British Columbia is a lovely province, but for now, for today, they can suck it.
:: It’s a sadly accurate cliche that fans of science fiction (myself included) become so engrossed in our genre of choice that we often forget there’s an entire world to explore, right here on Earth. (Now, that's just crazy talk.)
:: I can’t believe that in twenty years you never had a chance to use the sled.
:: I don’t mean angry or insane. I mean that Mad magazine shaped who I am, and I wouldn’t be half the schmuck I am without it. (Sometimes I miss MAD Magazine. My favorite feature was always the "Lighter Side".)
All for this week. More next week, perhaps.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Oddities abound!!!
:: Want a good, solid Republican solution to all your problems? Just type them in here, and it'll tell you. And if you don't believe them, then click the "That doesn't make sense" button. It's like having Eric Cantor right in your living room! (Alan linked this on Facebook.)
:: Via MeFi I see a group of photos on Flickr of two twin sisters, named Maurine and Noreene. Later, the sister were identified. This caught my eye because when I was in high school, there was a family of four sisters (none twins, though, all different ages) named Colleen, Maureen, Noreen, and Aileen. I guess you had to be there -- but this is a pretty interesting tale of genealogical detective work.
:: Er...what? (Maybe not safe for work. Via Warren Ellis. Hey, if you want to believe that this particular activity is wrong, great, but if I see someone wearing one of these, I'm going to be awfully tempted to ask something like, "So how 'ex' are you? Because I'm gonna need to know that before I shake your hand.")
:: Want a good, solid Republican solution to all your problems? Just type them in here, and it'll tell you. And if you don't believe them, then click the "That doesn't make sense" button. It's like having Eric Cantor right in your living room! (Alan linked this on Facebook.)
:: Via MeFi I see a group of photos on Flickr of two twin sisters, named Maurine and Noreene. Later, the sister were identified. This caught my eye because when I was in high school, there was a family of four sisters (none twins, though, all different ages) named Colleen, Maureen, Noreen, and Aileen. I guess you had to be there -- but this is a pretty interesting tale of genealogical detective work.
:: Er...what? (Maybe not safe for work. Via Warren Ellis. Hey, if you want to believe that this particular activity is wrong, great, but if I see someone wearing one of these, I'm going to be awfully tempted to ask something like, "So how 'ex' are you? Because I'm gonna need to know that before I shake your hand.")
Unidentified Earth #56
UPDATED: Link fixed.
OK, I think I'll be able to get back on schedule with Unidentified Earth now that life is seemingly (!) on the verge of returning to normal sinus rhythm here at Casa Jaquandor. As of this writing, there are exactly zero guesses for UI 55, so I probably made that one a wee bit too hard. So here's hint number one: this location is in a state that borders New York. We'll start narrowing it down, OK?
And meantime, here's the new puzzler:
Where are we? Exact name isn't required, but at least naming the state this is in and the significance of this locale is, for full award of some random number of Quatloos. Rot-13 your guesses, as always, please!!!
OK, I think I'll be able to get back on schedule with Unidentified Earth now that life is seemingly (!) on the verge of returning to normal sinus rhythm here at Casa Jaquandor. As of this writing, there are exactly zero guesses for UI 55, so I probably made that one a wee bit too hard. So here's hint number one: this location is in a state that borders New York. We'll start narrowing it down, OK?
And meantime, here's the new puzzler:
Where are we? Exact name isn't required, but at least naming the state this is in and the significance of this locale is, for full award of some random number of Quatloos. Rot-13 your guesses, as always, please!!!
Just testin' out my hammer.
In the "Credit where due" department, I just have to give major props to the creative geniuses behind Scrubs. Apparently this is to be the show's final season, and man, is it ever going out on a strong note. This season has been one terrific episode after another, each one filled with laughs and poignant insight that have been the show's hallmark since it first aired. I love that they've found ways to keep Dr. Kelso relevant even though he's retired, that they're doing the logical things with Dr. Cox, that the new interns are turning out to be interesting characters in their own right, that JD and Turk still engage in all manner of craziness, that the Janitor continues his unique brand of lunacy, and that they've managed to come up with a convincing way to give Ted a girlfriend.
I am so going to miss this show when it ends, and ABC's picking it up for one final glorious run almost gets that network off my hook for canceling Once and Again back in 2002.
And Sarah Chalke and Judy Reyes are just getting more and more beautiful! Wow, am I going to miss this show.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Yes/No Quiz
I did this on Facebook, and am now crossposting it here. The rules:
---
Kissed anyone one of your facebook friends? Yes.
Been arrested? No.
Kissed someone you didn't like? No.
Slept in until 5 PM? No.
Fallen asleep at work/school? Yes.
Held a snake? No.
Ran a red light? Yes.
Been suspended from school? No.
Totaled your car/motorbike in an accident? No.
Been fired from a job? Yes.
Sang karaoke? No.
Done something you told yourself you wouldn't? Yes.
Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? Yes.
Caught a snowflake on your tongue? Yes.
Kissed in the rain? No.
played strip poker? No.
Flown on a plane? Yes.
Been on a cruise? No.
Have any regrets in life? Yes.
Sang in the shower? Yes.
Sat on a rooftop? Yes.
Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes? No.
Broken a bone? Yes.
Shaved your head? No!
Blacked out from drinking? No.
Played a prank on someone? Yes.
Felt like killing someone? Yes.
Made your girlfriend/boyfriend cry? Yes.
Had Mexican jumping beans for pets? No.
Been in a band? Yes.
Shot a gun? No.
Tripped on mushrooms? No.
Donated Blood? Yes.
Eaten alligator meat? No.
Eaten cheesecake? Yes.
Still love someone you shouldn't? No.
Think about the future? Yes.
Believe in love? Yes.
Sleep on a certain side of the bed? Yes.
That's it. Kinda dull, but there it is.
1. You can ONLY answer Yes or No!
2. You are NOT ALLOWED to explain ANYTHING unless someone messages or comments you and Asks!
Now, here's what you're supposed to do... And please do not spoil the Fun. Copy and paste this into your notes , delete my answers, type in your answers and tag as many of your friends as you'd like to. Then see what happens.
---
Kissed anyone one of your facebook friends? Yes.
Been arrested? No.
Kissed someone you didn't like? No.
Slept in until 5 PM? No.
Fallen asleep at work/school? Yes.
Held a snake? No.
Ran a red light? Yes.
Been suspended from school? No.
Totaled your car/motorbike in an accident? No.
Been fired from a job? Yes.
Sang karaoke? No.
Done something you told yourself you wouldn't? Yes.
Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? Yes.
Caught a snowflake on your tongue? Yes.
Kissed in the rain? No.
played strip poker? No.
Flown on a plane? Yes.
Been on a cruise? No.
Have any regrets in life? Yes.
Sang in the shower? Yes.
Sat on a rooftop? Yes.
Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes? No.
Broken a bone? Yes.
Shaved your head? No!
Blacked out from drinking? No.
Played a prank on someone? Yes.
Felt like killing someone? Yes.
Made your girlfriend/boyfriend cry? Yes.
Had Mexican jumping beans for pets? No.
Been in a band? Yes.
Shot a gun? No.
Tripped on mushrooms? No.
Donated Blood? Yes.
Eaten alligator meat? No.
Eaten cheesecake? Yes.
Still love someone you shouldn't? No.
Think about the future? Yes.
Believe in love? Yes.
Sleep on a certain side of the bed? Yes.
That's it. Kinda dull, but there it is.
The thoughts that come
A couple of thoughts that keep occurring to me, in the wake of last night's plane crash in Buffalo:
:: While we were hanging out at baggage claim, just miles away people were perishing in a fireball. There was absolutely no sense in the airport that anything was amiss at all.
:: Some of the people who were hanging out in the ticketing area, just outside the security checkpoint, were waiting for people to walk off a plane that would never arrive. I wonder what goes on when this happens: what do they put on the teevee "Arrivals" screen? Do they make a PA announcement of what's happened, or do they just say "Would anyone waiting for Continental Flight Whatever please report to the Continental ticketing desk", or do they say nothing and just wait for people to learn as they will? How does this happen?
What a sad day this was.
:: While we were hanging out at baggage claim, just miles away people were perishing in a fireball. There was absolutely no sense in the airport that anything was amiss at all.
:: Some of the people who were hanging out in the ticketing area, just outside the security checkpoint, were waiting for people to walk off a plane that would never arrive. I wonder what goes on when this happens: what do they put on the teevee "Arrivals" screen? Do they make a PA announcement of what's happened, or do they just say "Would anyone waiting for Continental Flight Whatever please report to the Continental ticketing desk", or do they say nothing and just wait for people to learn as they will? How does this happen?
What a sad day this was.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Exhale....
The Wife is home, safe and sound.
The Daughter and I picked her up on schedule last night, no problem, no fuss, no muss. But on the way home from the airport, we did notice five or six police cars and emergency vehicles speeding, lights flashing, past us on the eastbound lanes of I-90. We didn't really think much of this...until this morning, when I learned that within fifteen minutes of The Wife's plane landing, another plane went down about five minutes out from the Buffalo Niagara Airport.
What a strange mix of horror and relief. But for anyone reading this blog who might have seen notice of a plane crash in Buffalo, The Wife was not on that plane.
The Daughter and I picked her up on schedule last night, no problem, no fuss, no muss. But on the way home from the airport, we did notice five or six police cars and emergency vehicles speeding, lights flashing, past us on the eastbound lanes of I-90. We didn't really think much of this...until this morning, when I learned that within fifteen minutes of The Wife's plane landing, another plane went down about five minutes out from the Buffalo Niagara Airport.
What a strange mix of horror and relief. But for anyone reading this blog who might have seen notice of a plane crash in Buffalo, The Wife was not on that plane.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Something for Thursday
The day before yesterday would have been the 80th birthday of film composer Jerry Goldsmith, who passed away in 2004. I'm a big admirer of Goldsmith's work, and note the occasion of his 80th with a remarkable cue he wrote for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This is heard during the scene where Admiral Kirk flies to the Enterprise for the first time, early in the movie; it's basically five minutes of looking at a starship. But what a starship she is, and with music like this, well....
For a taste of what Goldsmith at his height could bring to the table in terms of action scoring, here is what is, for me, the single best action cue he ever wrote (and he wrote a lot of 'em). It's "Raisuli Attacks", from The Wind and the Lion:
There are actually two cues here, put together: the second is "Guest of Raisuli", which begins at about the 3:12 mark. It's a delicate statement of the film's gorgeous love theme. I listened to this score for years before I saw the movie, and I was a bit disappointed, I must admit, when I finally saw the actual action scene "Raisuli Attacks" underscores. Hearing that music initially, I pictured a pitched battle of Ragnarokian scale. It's not, at all. I got over it; The Wind and the Lion is really a terrific film.
I've always been of the opinion that Goldsmith's output after around 1990 or so dropped off in quality a bit, but he still had an amazing career, and I think his music tended to get lost in the shuffle a lot because, unlike John Williams, Goldsmith tended to end up scoring, for lack of a better term, bad movies that are mostly forgotten except for their wonderful Goldsmith scores. Anyway, Goldsmith left behind a giant legacy in film music.
For a taste of what Goldsmith at his height could bring to the table in terms of action scoring, here is what is, for me, the single best action cue he ever wrote (and he wrote a lot of 'em). It's "Raisuli Attacks", from The Wind and the Lion:
There are actually two cues here, put together: the second is "Guest of Raisuli", which begins at about the 3:12 mark. It's a delicate statement of the film's gorgeous love theme. I listened to this score for years before I saw the movie, and I was a bit disappointed, I must admit, when I finally saw the actual action scene "Raisuli Attacks" underscores. Hearing that music initially, I pictured a pitched battle of Ragnarokian scale. It's not, at all. I got over it; The Wind and the Lion is really a terrific film.
I've always been of the opinion that Goldsmith's output after around 1990 or so dropped off in quality a bit, but he still had an amazing career, and I think his music tended to get lost in the shuffle a lot because, unlike John Williams, Goldsmith tended to end up scoring, for lack of a better term, bad movies that are mostly forgotten except for their wonderful Goldsmith scores. Anyway, Goldsmith left behind a giant legacy in film music.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Final reminders! (Almost)
Today's the end of Blogroll Amnesty Week, so if you have a blog I should link or know of one, drop it in comments here. (I have zero submissions as of yet. And I would point out that in the course of blogroll revisions over the last year or two, I may have made inadvertent deletions that weren't intended, or blogs that might have been inactive and returned to active status. Let me know!)
And don't forget about Ask Me Anything!. I'm taking queries there until Saturday.
And don't forget about Ask Me Anything!. I'm taking queries there until Saturday.
Charlie Wilson's War
With the teevee show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, writer Aaron Sorkin apparently thought to establish himself as one of the great genius writers of teevee history. Or, at least, that's how it felt to watch that show, with its constant and open subtext of "Teevee sucks, but luckily there's a genius writer on hand to save it!" Studio 60 was quite the disappointing effort, I discovered; not just because the show managed to basically turn a fascinating premise into a fairly boring show, but because it also exposed Aaron Sorkin as being a bag-of-tricks kind of writer. So when I rented the latest Sorkin-scripted effort, the movie Charlie Wilson's War, I hoped that it would exhibit a return by Sorkin to his best days when he was writing the early seasons of The West Wing or the movie The American President. And yes, Charlie Wilson's War is a step in that direction, but I don't think it got all the way there.
Charlie Wilson's War tells a true story many don't know anything about. A Congressman named Charlie Wilson learns of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and decides to use his power as a Congressman to increase the CIA's budget to fund the Mujahaddin resistance fighters. However, he soon learns that the CIA's ability to help the Majahaddin is almost nonexistent because the Soviet weapons are so vastly superior to anything the Afghans have, so Wilson uses a number of contacts he knows to start to broker a clandestine operation where the US will fund the sale of Israeli weapons to the Afghans. (Somehow Pakistan is involved too, although I lost a bit of sight of the particulars.) It is, apparently, one of the largest clandestine operations in US history, if not the largest, and it played a great role in the Afghan defeat of the Soviet forces (with said defeat later being a major factor in the Soviet Union's collapse).
This is the kind of story Aaron Sorkin is actually ideally suited to write. It's got tons of inner details that he can use to create those long-winded speeches his characters always have; like so many episodes of The West Wing, the characters here are always able to rattle off the top of their heads the exact numbers of billions of dollars being spent on various operations, or the exact specifications of the Soviet helicopters that the Afghans are trying to fight off with World War I-era rifles, and so on. And sure enough, the characters in this movie have one Sorkin-esque speech after another.
Of course, that's the typical problem with a Sorkin script: all of the characters tend to talk like every other character, so the film's success hinges on whether we enjoy listening to these actors deliver their Sorkin-esque speeches. For the most part, the movie works in this regard. Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson strikes a nicely laconic tone of the kind of intelligence to tends to take people by surprise; Julia Roberts stars as the far-right-wing Texas oil woman who becomes one of Charlie Wilson's key contacts. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the third standout in the cast as Wilson's CIA contact, a man who is bitter and burned out and who yet still rises to the occasion to put together one of the CIA's great triumphs. The supporting cast is also strong: Amy Adams as Wilson's personal aide; Ned Beatty as a Congressional chair; and so on.
One reason that Sorkin's rapid-fire speechifying in his scripts tends to work better in movies than on teevee is, I think, the fact that movies aren't rigidly adherent to the concerns of running time, so actors don't have to recite their speeches as quickly as humanly possible, as they so frequently were on The West Wing and, in even more pronounced fashion, Studio 60. This allows the actors to find their own cadences, which helps mask the fact that Sorkin writes everybody's dialog the same way.
And there are also some real gems in that dialog, to be sure. After the President of Pakistan tells Charlie Wilson that he has some character problems (Wilson has just, among other things, tried to order a whiskey in the Pakistani President's palace), Wilson complains "I've just been told that I have character problems by a guy who killed his predecessor in a military coup." And later on, when he's trying to get the Pakistani president on board with his plan to supply the Afghan fighters with Israeli weapons, the Pakistani president says something like "For this to work, the world can never know that Pakistan and Israel worked together. We must appear to be mortal enemies." Wilson responds, "Yeah, I don't think that's gonna be a tough sell." Moments like these are offset by odd, almost slapsticky moments in which Charlie Wilson is having two conversations at once and for some reason has to keep shoving one interlocutor out of his office so he can talk to the other, or moments when characters like the wealthy Houston socialite can recite the contents of some House appropriations bill right down to the number of millions being on spent on this instead of that. Mostly, Sorkin's scripts these days don't give the impression that characters are talking; instead, they're reciting.
I also think that the movie doesn't take long enough for its subject matter. This is a big and fascinating story, and yet the movie seems to breeze by it all very quickly. We don't get much of a sense of what kind of man Charlie Wilson is, other than a womanizer and a heavy drinker. In the opening scene, Wilson is captivated when he sees that Dan Rather is on location on the CBS news, wearing a turban somewhere; Wilson obsesses over this point, even though at the time he's sitting in a hot tub next to three beautiful and naked women. Why is Wilson fascinated by this? We're told that he's not much of a Congressman ("Your chief legislative achievement in six terms is getting re-elected five times"), but we don't get much sense of how he's able to wheel-and-deal his way to getting what he wants. And the film doesn't tell us anything at all of what became of the principles of the story after this story ended, choosing instead to pay very brief lip service to the fact that if the US had paid greater attention to Afghan rebuilding after the end of the Soviet occupation, recent history might not have been so dominated by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Charlie Wilson's War is a slick and entertaining movie. But it feels a bit slighter than it should, played for more laughs than its story deserves, and ultimately, I didn't feel that I'd been told a story so much as had one suggested to me. This subject matter deserved a telling with more gravity than this.
Charlie Wilson's War tells a true story many don't know anything about. A Congressman named Charlie Wilson learns of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and decides to use his power as a Congressman to increase the CIA's budget to fund the Mujahaddin resistance fighters. However, he soon learns that the CIA's ability to help the Majahaddin is almost nonexistent because the Soviet weapons are so vastly superior to anything the Afghans have, so Wilson uses a number of contacts he knows to start to broker a clandestine operation where the US will fund the sale of Israeli weapons to the Afghans. (Somehow Pakistan is involved too, although I lost a bit of sight of the particulars.) It is, apparently, one of the largest clandestine operations in US history, if not the largest, and it played a great role in the Afghan defeat of the Soviet forces (with said defeat later being a major factor in the Soviet Union's collapse).
This is the kind of story Aaron Sorkin is actually ideally suited to write. It's got tons of inner details that he can use to create those long-winded speeches his characters always have; like so many episodes of The West Wing, the characters here are always able to rattle off the top of their heads the exact numbers of billions of dollars being spent on various operations, or the exact specifications of the Soviet helicopters that the Afghans are trying to fight off with World War I-era rifles, and so on. And sure enough, the characters in this movie have one Sorkin-esque speech after another.
Of course, that's the typical problem with a Sorkin script: all of the characters tend to talk like every other character, so the film's success hinges on whether we enjoy listening to these actors deliver their Sorkin-esque speeches. For the most part, the movie works in this regard. Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson strikes a nicely laconic tone of the kind of intelligence to tends to take people by surprise; Julia Roberts stars as the far-right-wing Texas oil woman who becomes one of Charlie Wilson's key contacts. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the third standout in the cast as Wilson's CIA contact, a man who is bitter and burned out and who yet still rises to the occasion to put together one of the CIA's great triumphs. The supporting cast is also strong: Amy Adams as Wilson's personal aide; Ned Beatty as a Congressional chair; and so on.
One reason that Sorkin's rapid-fire speechifying in his scripts tends to work better in movies than on teevee is, I think, the fact that movies aren't rigidly adherent to the concerns of running time, so actors don't have to recite their speeches as quickly as humanly possible, as they so frequently were on The West Wing and, in even more pronounced fashion, Studio 60. This allows the actors to find their own cadences, which helps mask the fact that Sorkin writes everybody's dialog the same way.
And there are also some real gems in that dialog, to be sure. After the President of Pakistan tells Charlie Wilson that he has some character problems (Wilson has just, among other things, tried to order a whiskey in the Pakistani President's palace), Wilson complains "I've just been told that I have character problems by a guy who killed his predecessor in a military coup." And later on, when he's trying to get the Pakistani president on board with his plan to supply the Afghan fighters with Israeli weapons, the Pakistani president says something like "For this to work, the world can never know that Pakistan and Israel worked together. We must appear to be mortal enemies." Wilson responds, "Yeah, I don't think that's gonna be a tough sell." Moments like these are offset by odd, almost slapsticky moments in which Charlie Wilson is having two conversations at once and for some reason has to keep shoving one interlocutor out of his office so he can talk to the other, or moments when characters like the wealthy Houston socialite can recite the contents of some House appropriations bill right down to the number of millions being on spent on this instead of that. Mostly, Sorkin's scripts these days don't give the impression that characters are talking; instead, they're reciting.
I also think that the movie doesn't take long enough for its subject matter. This is a big and fascinating story, and yet the movie seems to breeze by it all very quickly. We don't get much of a sense of what kind of man Charlie Wilson is, other than a womanizer and a heavy drinker. In the opening scene, Wilson is captivated when he sees that Dan Rather is on location on the CBS news, wearing a turban somewhere; Wilson obsesses over this point, even though at the time he's sitting in a hot tub next to three beautiful and naked women. Why is Wilson fascinated by this? We're told that he's not much of a Congressman ("Your chief legislative achievement in six terms is getting re-elected five times"), but we don't get much sense of how he's able to wheel-and-deal his way to getting what he wants. And the film doesn't tell us anything at all of what became of the principles of the story after this story ended, choosing instead to pay very brief lip service to the fact that if the US had paid greater attention to Afghan rebuilding after the end of the Soviet occupation, recent history might not have been so dominated by Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Charlie Wilson's War is a slick and entertaining movie. But it feels a bit slighter than it should, played for more laughs than its story deserves, and ultimately, I didn't feel that I'd been told a story so much as had one suggested to me. This subject matter deserved a telling with more gravity than this.
Kushiel
Kushiel's Dart is the first "fat fantasy" I've read in a long time; and I enjoyed it so much, I may find myself shying away from the genre for a while for fear of disappointment in whatever Fat Fantasy book I pick up next. Jacqueline Carey has crafted here a novel that put me in mind of Guy Gavriel Kay; in fact, I thought more than once while reading it that this is what GGK would have written if he'd been a woman. This was a wonderful, wonderful book that only let me down at the very end, when it came time for Carey to set things up for the sequel.
The setting was the first thing about the book to remind me of GGK. We're in a land that is basically Europe with the names changed, and the history is strongly based on Europe as well. In their "Middle Ages", the main action takes place in the City of Elua, named for Blessed Elua, an angel born in the aftermath of the crucifixion of Yeshua more than a thousand years before. Blessed Elua and his followers established a land where the guiding priciple is Love as thou wilt. Into the service of Naamah, one of Elua's followers, comes our heroine, Phedre, whom we meet as a child but who grows up before our eyes over the course of this 900-page novel. She is sold into the service of Naamah, which makes her a courtesan; later, she comes into the direct employ of a charismatic teacher named Anafiel Delaunay, who turns out (as does everybody in this complex book) to be much more than he seems. Phedre learns much about the world while in Delaunay's service, much that eventually puts her in danger as she finds herself engaged in the court politics of this dangerous land; but Phedre is a good student and sharply intelligent, so she becomes as much a player as an observer over time.
More than that, Phedre is a rarity among courtesans: she has a red mote in her eye, which indicates that she has been marked with Kushiel's Dart (Kushiel was one of Blessed Elua's followers), and as such, she is something called an anguissette, a person who experiences physical pain as erotic pleasure, which leads to some fairly difficult passages in the book wherein Phedre describes for us her erotic actions (the book is told in first person, from Phedre's perspective). Fair warning here, folks: if reading about what is literally sadomasochism isn't your cup of tea, this book won't be for you; but likewise, if you don't mind that material (which is very well written, and not really gratuitous, in my estimation), the rest of the book is worthy of attention.
I don't want to say a whole lot about the plot of this book, not just because I wouldn't want to spoil it, but also because it's a hard book to summarize. It's very long, being the type of book one loses oneself within. One of the book's most important characters, Joscelin Verreuil, who serves as bodyguard (and eventually much more than that) to Phedre, isn't introduced until after page 250. This is an actual epic of a book, with the action ranging over virtually the entire continent of "Europe". Along the way we meet roving bands of gypsies and their king; we travel north and east into the rugged lands dominated by Viking-like warriors called Skaldi, who are gathering underneath the banner of a new warlord; we travel west, over the straits, to the barbarian island realm where the blue-painted warriors fight for dominion. We meet the Master of the Straits, the being who controls the weather in the straits between Alba and Terre d'Ange (think the English Channel), choosing who gets to make passage and who doesn't. We meet nobles motivated by love and by hate, soldiers motivated by money and by loyalty, lords motivated by revenge and lust, and noblewomen whose motivations can't even be summarized in any real way.
Kushiel's Dart is the start of a series, and I have every intention of continuing on. It takes a really good "Fat Fantasy" to capture my attention these days, but this one did. Carey creates a vivid world here, familiar and fantastic, and she populates it with memorable people who stand out and command sympathies – even the villains. I loved this book.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Hey, WNED
On the off chance anyone from WNED, Buffalo's classical music station, reads this: this sort of thing does not predispose me to giving money to WNED, something I had actually been considering doing. Now I think I'll just buy a pizza instead, or maybe get that wireless router I've been considering.
John Landis always came on the radio when I was getting off work, and I enjoyed listening to his show. He was knowledgeable and always conveyed a great love of classical music. I can only assume that his termination had something to do with the fact that he'd been there for a long time and thus was probably making more money than some of the less-tenured hosts. If that is the case, I would hope that the WNED brass note that the "Let's fire the ones who have been around the longest and therefore make the most money" strategy didn't work out so well for Circuit City.
Anyway, best wishes to Mr. Landis, and hopes that he lands on his feet in these times when so many people are hoping to land on their feet.
John Landis always came on the radio when I was getting off work, and I enjoyed listening to his show. He was knowledgeable and always conveyed a great love of classical music. I can only assume that his termination had something to do with the fact that he'd been there for a long time and thus was probably making more money than some of the less-tenured hosts. If that is the case, I would hope that the WNED brass note that the "Let's fire the ones who have been around the longest and therefore make the most money" strategy didn't work out so well for Circuit City.
Anyway, best wishes to Mr. Landis, and hopes that he lands on his feet in these times when so many people are hoping to land on their feet.
From the Books: The Proud Tower
(A series of posts in which I post longer than usual excerpts from books of mine.)
A number of the liberal-leaning blogs I read have been arguing of late that the filibuster in the US Senate needs to be done away with, as it is a fundamentally undemocratic thing whose use has become so frequent and entrenched over the last few years as to render the Senate into a body which de facto requires a supermajority in order to pass anything. (Example.) I tend to agree with this argument; the filibuster's main virtue seems to be that it's been that way forever, and that, in itself, is never much of a reason to keep doing anything.
But I'm reminded of a historical episode I read about in a wonderful book by Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, in which she describes a similar problem faced once by a Republican Speaker of the House named Thomas B. Reed, at the end of the nineteenth century.
It's a fascinating tale. It doesn't end there with that one act of Reed's, of course; few things of this nature ever do. The Republicans would later lose Congress so badly that the Democrats were able to raise a quorum by themselves, and they then restored the silent quorum. This backfired after the next election cycle, however; the Democratic majority was greatly reduced such that now-Minority Leader Reed was able to frustrate Democratic legislative aims by using the silent quorum himself, until the Democrats finally relented and allowed the silent quorum to end forever.
(The Proud Tower is one of my favorite history books, by the way. It is a large-scale picture -- a historical snapshot, if you will -- of the state of the the world as it was moving inexorably toward World War I.)
A number of the liberal-leaning blogs I read have been arguing of late that the filibuster in the US Senate needs to be done away with, as it is a fundamentally undemocratic thing whose use has become so frequent and entrenched over the last few years as to render the Senate into a body which de facto requires a supermajority in order to pass anything. (Example.) I tend to agree with this argument; the filibuster's main virtue seems to be that it's been that way forever, and that, in itself, is never much of a reason to keep doing anything.
But I'm reminded of a historical episode I read about in a wonderful book by Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, in which she describes a similar problem faced once by a Republican Speaker of the House named Thomas B. Reed, at the end of the nineteenth century.
He [Reed] was determined, on taking up the gavel as Speaker, to put into effect a plan on which he had long deliberated, consulting no one, and on which he risked his entire political future. He knew that the fight would focus upon him the nation's attention and also that if he failed his Congressional career would be over. The stakes were high: he would either break "the tyranny of the minority" by the which the House was paralyzed into a state of "helpless inanity", or he would resign.
The system Speaker Reed had decided to challenge was known as the silent – or disappearing – quorum. It was a practice whereby the minority party could prevent any legislation obnoxious to it by refusing a quorum, that is, by demanding a roll call and them remaining silent when their names were called. Since the rules prescribed that a member's presence was established only by a viva voce reply to the roll, and since it required only a majority of the whole to constituted a quorum, the silent filibuster could effectively stop the House from doing business.
...
To Reed the issue was survival of representative government. If the Democrats could prevent that legislation which the Republicans by virtue of their electoral victory could rightfully expect to enact, they would in effect be setting aside the verdict of the election. The rights of the minority, he believed, were preserved by freedom to debate and to vote but when the minority was able to frustrate action by the majority, "it becomes a tyranny". He believed that legislation, not merely deliberation, was the business of Congress. The duty of the Speaker to his party and country was to see that that business was accomplished, not merely to umpire debate.
...
He reached his decision to attack the silent quorum, and planned his campaign, alone, partly because no one else would have thought there was a chance of success and partly because he was not sure that even his own party would support him. There were indications that they might not. Because of Reed's known views on the silent filibuster it was clear that quorum-counting would be an issue in the new Congress. REED WILL COUNT THEM, predicted a headline in the Washington Post, and the story beneath it said that even Mr. Cannon, Reed's closest lieutenant, was, opposed to the attempt. The Democrats were manning their defenses. Ex-Speaker Carlisle let it be known that any legislation enacted by a quorum which had not been established by a "recorded vote" woul dbe taken to court as unconstitutional.
Reed, however, had satisfied himself that he would be upheld if it came to law, and on the attitude of his own party he was prepared to gamble. He shrewdly judged that the Democrats in their rage would provoke the Republicans to rally to his support. When the first of the contested elections appeared on the schedule for January 29 he was ready. As expected, the Democrats raised a cry of no quorum and demanded a roll call. Reed's moment had come. Without a flicker of expression on the great white moon face, "the largest human face I ever saw", as a colleague described it, without any quickening of the drawling voice, he announced, "The Chair directs the Clerk to record the names of the following members present and refusing to vote," and began reading off the names himself. Instantly, according to a reporter, "pandemonium broke loose. The storm was furious...and it is to doubted if ever there was such wild excitement, burning indignation, scathing denunciation and really dangerous conditions as existed in the House" during the next five days. Republicans were wildly applauding, all the Democrats were "yelling and shrieking and pounding on their desks" while the voice of their future Speaker, Crisp of Georgia, boomed, "I appeal! I appeal from the decision of the Chair!" The explosion was "as violent as any ever witnessed in any parliament," a member recalled later. "Mr. Blanchard, Mr. Bland, Mr. Blount, Mr. Breckinridge of Arkansas, Mr. Breckinridge of Kentucky..."
Up jumped the Kentuckian, "famous for his silver hair and silver tongue." "I deny the power of the Speaker and denounce it as revolutionary!" he called.
The resonant twang from the Chair continued unregarding, "Mr. Bullock, Mr. Bynum, Mr. Carlisle, Mr. Chipman, Mr. Clement, Mr. Covert, Mr. Crisp, Mr. Cummings" – through hisses and catcalls and cries of "Appeal" irresistably rolling down the alphabet – "Mr. Lawler, Mr. Lee, Mr. McAdoo, Mr. McCreary..."
"I deny your right, Mr. Speaker, to count me as present!" bellowed McCreary.
For the first time the Speaker stopped, held the hall in silence for a pause as an actor hold an audience, then blandly spoke: "The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?"
It's a fascinating tale. It doesn't end there with that one act of Reed's, of course; few things of this nature ever do. The Republicans would later lose Congress so badly that the Democrats were able to raise a quorum by themselves, and they then restored the silent quorum. This backfired after the next election cycle, however; the Democratic majority was greatly reduced such that now-Minority Leader Reed was able to frustrate Democratic legislative aims by using the silent quorum himself, until the Democrats finally relented and allowed the silent quorum to end forever.
(The Proud Tower is one of my favorite history books, by the way. It is a large-scale picture -- a historical snapshot, if you will -- of the state of the the world as it was moving inexorably toward World War I.)
Monday, February 09, 2009
The original one-hit wonder
One of my Facebook friends, a guy I went to college with and who was a fellow trumpet player, posted this video of a comedian who was once a cello player and thus has a special reserve of hatred stored up for Pachelbel's Canon in D, because the poor cellist has to play that infernal ground bass, eight notes in all, over and over and over again:
As my Facebook friend noted, we used to play a brass quintet arrangement of this piece, which was OK if you're a trumpet, horn or trombone player, but not so much if you're the poor tubist. As I've noted many times, the most thankless tasks in classical music are playing the ground bass in Pachelbel's Canon and playing the snare drum part in Ravel's Bolero.
As my Facebook friend noted, we used to play a brass quintet arrangement of this piece, which was OK if you're a trumpet, horn or trombone player, but not so much if you're the poor tubist. As I've noted many times, the most thankless tasks in classical music are playing the ground bass in Pachelbel's Canon and playing the snare drum part in Ravel's Bolero.
I find his lack of faith disturbing.
Kevin Drum on Liam Neeson:
Oh, come now. I know that most folks think that Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman turn in sub-par performances in the Prequel Trilogy. I don't share that view, but I know that's the general consensus. But every single actor other than Neeson as Qui Gon? Ewan McGregor was embarrassing? Ian McDiarmid? Pernilla August? Christopher Lee? Every single actor not named Liam Neeson? I know, we're all supposed to hate everything about the PT, but come on, now. Sheesh.
Neeson is, after all, our greatest living actor. How do I know this? Consider: every single actor directed by George Lucas in the second Star Wars trilogy gave a performance that could only charitably be called embarrassing. The lone exception was Liam Neeson, who, against all odds, managed to overcome Lucas's leaden dialog and clunky direction and turn in an appealing, understated performance anyway. If that's not evidence that he's our greatest living actor, I don't know what is.
Oh, come now. I know that most folks think that Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman turn in sub-par performances in the Prequel Trilogy. I don't share that view, but I know that's the general consensus. But every single actor other than Neeson as Qui Gon? Ewan McGregor was embarrassing? Ian McDiarmid? Pernilla August? Christopher Lee? Every single actor not named Liam Neeson? I know, we're all supposed to hate everything about the PT, but come on, now. Sheesh.
Sentential Links #157
Start clicking:
:: I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years. (I've decided that I just don't care about the "tone" in Washington. I don't care one whit about it. Reading through various histories of politics, the "tone in Washington" is always acrimonious and nasty. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's the way it is, everywhere you have differing political parties fighting for stuff.)
:: Some days it's just this. And this is what I live for.
:: It’s a freaking lifetime when your midsectional and breastal frontage areas are suddenly exposed to God-knows-who. (Yeah...I'm gonna have to take her word on that one. Kerry's new to the blogroll, but she's actually an old friend from my high school days, found via Facebook.)
:: For the moment let me just note that in Spain they have this interesting political system (”democracy”) wherein if your party loses the election, the other party gets to make policy until they lose an election.
:: What does it say about me that I could go with either interpretation? (Me, too. This post features one of the more clever LOLcat photos I've seen in a long time.)
:: I make an awesome hot salsa. I use cactus in it. (Wait, what?)
:: Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. (This isn't a blog post, actually, but a fascinating article on an overlooked aspect of comics: lettering. When I was a big comics reader, I got to the point where I could recognize letterers on sight, and in some cases where certain comics had the same letterers for years, I would be thrown off if an occasional issue came along lettered by someone else. The art and Chris Claremont's writing might not change, but an issue of X-Men without Tom Orzechowski's lettering? That threw me off!)
All for this week. Tune in next week!
:: I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years. (I've decided that I just don't care about the "tone" in Washington. I don't care one whit about it. Reading through various histories of politics, the "tone in Washington" is always acrimonious and nasty. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's the way it is, everywhere you have differing political parties fighting for stuff.)
:: Some days it's just this. And this is what I live for.
:: It’s a freaking lifetime when your midsectional and breastal frontage areas are suddenly exposed to God-knows-who. (Yeah...I'm gonna have to take her word on that one. Kerry's new to the blogroll, but she's actually an old friend from my high school days, found via Facebook.)
:: For the moment let me just note that in Spain they have this interesting political system (”democracy”) wherein if your party loses the election, the other party gets to make policy until they lose an election.
:: What does it say about me that I could go with either interpretation? (Me, too. This post features one of the more clever LOLcat photos I've seen in a long time.)
:: I make an awesome hot salsa. I use cactus in it. (Wait, what?)
:: Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. (This isn't a blog post, actually, but a fascinating article on an overlooked aspect of comics: lettering. When I was a big comics reader, I got to the point where I could recognize letterers on sight, and in some cases where certain comics had the same letterers for years, I would be thrown off if an occasional issue came along lettered by someone else. The art and Chris Claremont's writing might not change, but an issue of X-Men without Tom Orzechowski's lettering? That threw me off!)
All for this week. Tune in next week!
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Two Reminders, again
I'm taking questions for Ask Me Anything! until Saturday the 14th, and submissions for additions to my blogroll in honor of Blogroll Amnesty Week until Wednesday the 11th. Any questions are welcome for the former, and any blogs are welcome for the latter! Leave submissions in the comments threads at the linked posts.
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
I didn't see a whole lot of weirdness this week, for obvious reasons, but some stuff did catch my eye:
:: Alan reports on a somewhat questionable marketing strategy by a Buffalo website. There was also a follow-up that I find not entirely convincing.
:: Over at Back of the Cereal Bus, Drew Mackie regularly reports on odd search strings that bring people to his blog. In the latest edition of this, I saw one that almost made me spit green tea all over my keyboard:
I laughed and laughed, because the first time The Wife and I were watching teevee and saw a commercial with Ms. Seymour displaying her "Open Heart" design, which looks like this:
...we both laughed, and I can't remember which of us actually noted that it does, in fact, look partially like a human arse. I was then reminded of one of the funnier episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, in which Marie (Raymond's overbearing mother) takes a sculpture class and makes a giant sculpture that everybody but her sees as strongly resembling, well, a certain part of the female anatomy. (Clip here, although a plug-in download might be necessary to watch.)
That's about it for this week.
:: Alan reports on a somewhat questionable marketing strategy by a Buffalo website. There was also a follow-up that I find not entirely convincing.
:: Over at Back of the Cereal Bus, Drew Mackie regularly reports on odd search strings that bring people to his blog. In the latest edition of this, I saw one that almost made me spit green tea all over my keyboard:
Jane seymour open heart looks like a butt
I laughed and laughed, because the first time The Wife and I were watching teevee and saw a commercial with Ms. Seymour displaying her "Open Heart" design, which looks like this:
...we both laughed, and I can't remember which of us actually noted that it does, in fact, look partially like a human arse. I was then reminded of one of the funnier episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, in which Marie (Raymond's overbearing mother) takes a sculpture class and makes a giant sculpture that everybody but her sees as strongly resembling, well, a certain part of the female anatomy. (Clip here, although a plug-in download might be necessary to watch.)
That's about it for this week.
Comfort Food
Roger commented on a list of "comfort foods", indicating his thoughts on each particular item. I, of course, shall do the same. Because I'm a follower, not a leader.
Apple Pie: Yup, that's a comfort food. Especially served warm with a scoop of French vanilla or vanilla bean ice cream. Oh yes. (But I just can't do the "apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese" thing. That makes no sense.)
Baked Beans: I'm not sure I call them a "comfort food"; they're a nice and easy side dish. I do make a thing with sausage, baked beans and a few other condiments that I consider a comfort food, though.
Banana Pudding: Not really. I'm not that much into pudding, and I'm not wild about banana flavored stuff to begin with. Love bananas, but banana flavoring, not so much.
Beef Stew: I make a pot of beef stew a couple of times a year. Comfort food? I'm not sure I consider it "comfort" food, but I like it in the autumn.
Brisket Pot Roast: Not really. I like it and should make it more, though.
Chicken & Dumplings: This is probably one of the canonical comfort foods. I'm not sure I've ever had it, though.
Chicken Pot Pie: Yup. Comfort food all the way. I make a nice one, if I do say so myself.
Chicken Soup: Not really. My comfort soup is clam chowder, actually. I find chicken soup boring.
Chili: Again, a regular autumn and cold weather item for me. I'm not sure I call it "comfort food", though.
Chocolate Chip Cookies: Certainly. I love chocolate chip cookies. Homemade are the best.
Corn on the Cob: Sure. I adore it. Corn in all forms, really. And cornbread! A pot of chili without cornbread is unforgivable. (Well, beer bread is acceptable too.)
Fried Chicken: Absolutely. Especially if it comes in a bucket with biscuits, cole slaw, mac-and-cheese, and a wet-nap.
Gelatin: Meh. Not a big fan.
Green Bean Casserole: I don't like green beans, so no. The Wife insists on this being on the table every Thanksgiving or Christmas, though, whichever one we make ourselves.
Hot Dogs: I love them, but I'm not sure I consider them "comfort food".
Ice Cream: Sure. But then, I nearly live on ice cream.
Macaroni & Cheese: Certainly. Especially homemade. I make a baked version with sausage mixed in with the noodles, parmesan sprinkled on top. (One time I topped it with crushed potato chips, which I thought rocked, but The Daughter gave that thumbs down.) And yes, I like the box stuff. Sorry.
Mashed Potatoes: I don't like these. So no.
Meatloaf: Hmmmmm. I like meatloaf, but I haven't had it in so long that I don't think I can consider it a comfort food.
Potato Salad: Since I didn't like it until adulthood, I can't really consider it to have a nostalgic thing behind it. But I do love a good, mustardy potato salad.
Pumpkin Pie: Not really. I have one slice a year and I'm good. Mainly pumpkin pie serves for me as a contrast to the mound of whipped cream I consume with it.
Shepherd's Pie: Mashed potato topping rules this out for me.
Spaghetti: Hmmmm. Maybe. Never thought of it as comfort food; just a reliable, quick meal.
Tomato Soup: I loved it as a kid; I still like it but only have it maybe once or twice a year. But it cries out for a grilled cheese sandwich along with it. Now, if the sandwich is made from caraway rye bread and the cheese is sharp cheddar, then yes, we're talking comfort food.
Tuna Casserole: Sure.
What other comfort foods do I have? Tater tot casserole. Waffles and pancakes and French toast. Frozen pizza. Burgers at a drive-in, ice cream at a roadside stand. Vanilla and strawberry milkshakes.
Maybe anything I like is actually comfort food....
Apple Pie: Yup, that's a comfort food. Especially served warm with a scoop of French vanilla or vanilla bean ice cream. Oh yes. (But I just can't do the "apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese" thing. That makes no sense.)
Baked Beans: I'm not sure I call them a "comfort food"; they're a nice and easy side dish. I do make a thing with sausage, baked beans and a few other condiments that I consider a comfort food, though.
Banana Pudding: Not really. I'm not that much into pudding, and I'm not wild about banana flavored stuff to begin with. Love bananas, but banana flavoring, not so much.
Beef Stew: I make a pot of beef stew a couple of times a year. Comfort food? I'm not sure I consider it "comfort" food, but I like it in the autumn.
Brisket Pot Roast: Not really. I like it and should make it more, though.
Chicken & Dumplings: This is probably one of the canonical comfort foods. I'm not sure I've ever had it, though.
Chicken Pot Pie: Yup. Comfort food all the way. I make a nice one, if I do say so myself.
Chicken Soup: Not really. My comfort soup is clam chowder, actually. I find chicken soup boring.
Chili: Again, a regular autumn and cold weather item for me. I'm not sure I call it "comfort food", though.
Chocolate Chip Cookies: Certainly. I love chocolate chip cookies. Homemade are the best.
Corn on the Cob: Sure. I adore it. Corn in all forms, really. And cornbread! A pot of chili without cornbread is unforgivable. (Well, beer bread is acceptable too.)
Fried Chicken: Absolutely. Especially if it comes in a bucket with biscuits, cole slaw, mac-and-cheese, and a wet-nap.
Gelatin: Meh. Not a big fan.
Green Bean Casserole: I don't like green beans, so no. The Wife insists on this being on the table every Thanksgiving or Christmas, though, whichever one we make ourselves.
Hot Dogs: I love them, but I'm not sure I consider them "comfort food".
Ice Cream: Sure. But then, I nearly live on ice cream.
Macaroni & Cheese: Certainly. Especially homemade. I make a baked version with sausage mixed in with the noodles, parmesan sprinkled on top. (One time I topped it with crushed potato chips, which I thought rocked, but The Daughter gave that thumbs down.) And yes, I like the box stuff. Sorry.
Mashed Potatoes: I don't like these. So no.
Meatloaf: Hmmmmm. I like meatloaf, but I haven't had it in so long that I don't think I can consider it a comfort food.
Potato Salad: Since I didn't like it until adulthood, I can't really consider it to have a nostalgic thing behind it. But I do love a good, mustardy potato salad.
Pumpkin Pie: Not really. I have one slice a year and I'm good. Mainly pumpkin pie serves for me as a contrast to the mound of whipped cream I consume with it.
Shepherd's Pie: Mashed potato topping rules this out for me.
Spaghetti: Hmmmm. Maybe. Never thought of it as comfort food; just a reliable, quick meal.
Tomato Soup: I loved it as a kid; I still like it but only have it maybe once or twice a year. But it cries out for a grilled cheese sandwich along with it. Now, if the sandwich is made from caraway rye bread and the cheese is sharp cheddar, then yes, we're talking comfort food.
Tuna Casserole: Sure.
What other comfort foods do I have? Tater tot casserole. Waffles and pancakes and French toast. Frozen pizza. Burgers at a drive-in, ice cream at a roadside stand. Vanilla and strawberry milkshakes.
Maybe anything I like is actually comfort food....
Friday, February 06, 2009
Do the pipes still work, Dear?
Howdy folks!
I'm finally back and blogging in Western New York this evening. Actually, The Daughter and I arrived back home early last evening, but we had so much stuff to do post-flight, continuing into today, that I'm only now able to sit down and get caught up on Teh Interweb. So here I am.
Anyway, yesterday's cross-country return trip was just about the most picture-perfect day of travel I could imagine. The day was bright and sunny everywhere we went. Our first plane took off from Spokane right on time, and apparently the winds were favorably with us (like The Force!), because we were a half-hour early arriving in Minneapolis, where we were already scheduled for an eighty minute layover. The extra time was nice, as The Daughter and I were able to grab some lunch and then leisurely make our way from our arriving gate to our departing one. (The Minneapolis airport is huge. I'm always surprised by this, when I go through there.)
From Minneapolis it was off to Detroit, where we again arrived early, this time about fifteen or twenty minutes early. We disembarked the plane there, crossed the terminal to the teevee screens to find where we were to go for the final plane, from Detroit to Buffalo, whereupon we discovered that we were, in fact, taking the exact same plane. So we didn't even have to budge from where we were.
And of course, the flight from Detroit to Buffalo basically involves traversing the length of Lake Erie, so this took about forty minutes. What was nice then was that the sun had gone down, and the night was very clear, so from our vantage point, sitting on the left side of the plane (and therefore facing north), as we made our way into the eastern portion of Lake Erie, The Daughter and I could see virtually all of the lights of Ontario's "Golden Crescent", which stretches from Niagara Falls to St. Catharines to Hamilton and around the bend of Lake Ontario toward Toronto. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Anyhow, now we're back and faced with lots of domestic stuff that needs taken care of. The cats made short work of a box of Kleenex, for one thing; for another, one of the boys (Lester, for those keeping score) loves to chew plastic bags of any sort, and he had himself a field day. There was a plastic bag from the local liquor store that he chewed the hell of, dragging it across the floor. Thing is, it still had the bottle of wine in it, since I hadn't got round to putting that bottle away when circumstances intruded. Plus the place hasn't been vacuumed in two weeks. Oof. Yeah, so no parties at Casa Jaquandor for a while.
But we're back and blogging, though. That's something!
I'm finally back and blogging in Western New York this evening. Actually, The Daughter and I arrived back home early last evening, but we had so much stuff to do post-flight, continuing into today, that I'm only now able to sit down and get caught up on Teh Interweb. So here I am.
Anyway, yesterday's cross-country return trip was just about the most picture-perfect day of travel I could imagine. The day was bright and sunny everywhere we went. Our first plane took off from Spokane right on time, and apparently the winds were favorably with us (like The Force!), because we were a half-hour early arriving in Minneapolis, where we were already scheduled for an eighty minute layover. The extra time was nice, as The Daughter and I were able to grab some lunch and then leisurely make our way from our arriving gate to our departing one. (The Minneapolis airport is huge. I'm always surprised by this, when I go through there.)
From Minneapolis it was off to Detroit, where we again arrived early, this time about fifteen or twenty minutes early. We disembarked the plane there, crossed the terminal to the teevee screens to find where we were to go for the final plane, from Detroit to Buffalo, whereupon we discovered that we were, in fact, taking the exact same plane. So we didn't even have to budge from where we were.
And of course, the flight from Detroit to Buffalo basically involves traversing the length of Lake Erie, so this took about forty minutes. What was nice then was that the sun had gone down, and the night was very clear, so from our vantage point, sitting on the left side of the plane (and therefore facing north), as we made our way into the eastern portion of Lake Erie, The Daughter and I could see virtually all of the lights of Ontario's "Golden Crescent", which stretches from Niagara Falls to St. Catharines to Hamilton and around the bend of Lake Ontario toward Toronto. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Anyhow, now we're back and faced with lots of domestic stuff that needs taken care of. The cats made short work of a box of Kleenex, for one thing; for another, one of the boys (Lester, for those keeping score) loves to chew plastic bags of any sort, and he had himself a field day. There was a plastic bag from the local liquor store that he chewed the hell of, dragging it across the floor. Thing is, it still had the bottle of wine in it, since I hadn't got round to putting that bottle away when circumstances intruded. Plus the place hasn't been vacuumed in two weeks. Oof. Yeah, so no parties at Casa Jaquandor for a while.
But we're back and blogging, though. That's something!
Thursday, February 05, 2009
On a jet plane
Well, as you all are reading this (theoretically), The Daughter and I are on the first of a series of flights which will bring us back to Buffalo. I've enjoyed seeing The Wife's family again, albeit under terribly sad circumstances, but I'm ready to be home. The Wife is staying behind for an additional week to assist her father with the continued adoption of a new life, so I'll be lonely for a few days. Sigh.
Anyway, for the rest of today, remember Blogroll Amnesty Week and Ask Me Anything!.
(Something for Thursday will return next week.)
Anyway, for the rest of today, remember Blogroll Amnesty Week and Ask Me Anything!.
(Something for Thursday will return next week.)
Suiting up
John Cole on the "debate" surrounding the stimulus package:
That's exactly right, and I find it extremely disheartening. I don't know if Democrats just don't want to look the way the Republicans looked the last eight years -- rubberstamping everything from the White House without giving it one whit of thought beforehand -- or if they're simply assuming that the natural rightness of their position will eventually win the day or if they're simply stupid or gutless. It doesn't matter: they need to quit trying to live up to this lunatic notion of "bipartisanship" and mix it up.
I'm reminded of something Toby Ziegler said in a first season episode of The West Wing, after they decide to not pursue a policy they all believe in but know would be politically difficult:
It's not the ones we lose that bother me,
it's the ones we don't suit up for .
Isn't that the truth.
Look, folks: "bipartisanship" is, and ought to be, right now, a dead concept. Seriously: it should be as dead as old Marley. For one thing, the current definition of "bipartisan" in Washington is that whether they're the majority or the smallest minority in a generation, the Republicans get what they want. I say, screw that. We've just come through a period in which Republicans got whatever they wanted just about all of the time, and the results are crap. Piss on what the Republicans want, for God's sake.
But for another thing, really, what's wrong with partisanship, anyway? What's so bad about it? The reason we have parties is that people have different ideas as to what direction the country should take. That's the way it works: people tend to group politically according to the kinds of policies they would like to pursue, and right now, we've just had an election where one party's ideas were strongly endorsed (or, if you'd prefer, the other party's policies strongly rejected). Democrats, and the national media, need to stop acting as though the Republicans still get to control the debate.
In other words, Democrats need to suit up. It's too important now.
No one is selling it. The Democrats are simply AWOL. All I see on my tv are Republicans talking about wasteful spending, as if they have any credibility on that topic. I would pay to see Barney Frank matched up against a Republican opposed to the stimulus bill, because every Democrat has an easy retort- “If you have so many good economic ideas, how come you never passed any of them along to the last President?”
It isn’t so much that Obama is losing control in the debate. The Democrats just aren’t participating, and this isn’t so much a debate as a Republican monologue. We all know, given our “liberal” media, how that is going to play out in the long run.
That's exactly right, and I find it extremely disheartening. I don't know if Democrats just don't want to look the way the Republicans looked the last eight years -- rubberstamping everything from the White House without giving it one whit of thought beforehand -- or if they're simply assuming that the natural rightness of their position will eventually win the day or if they're simply stupid or gutless. It doesn't matter: they need to quit trying to live up to this lunatic notion of "bipartisanship" and mix it up.
I'm reminded of something Toby Ziegler said in a first season episode of The West Wing, after they decide to not pursue a policy they all believe in but know would be politically difficult:
it's the ones we don't suit up for
Isn't that the truth.
Look, folks: "bipartisanship" is, and ought to be, right now, a dead concept. Seriously: it should be as dead as old Marley. For one thing, the current definition of "bipartisan" in Washington is that whether they're the majority or the smallest minority in a generation, the Republicans get what they want. I say, screw that. We've just come through a period in which Republicans got whatever they wanted just about all of the time, and the results are crap. Piss on what the Republicans want, for God's sake.
But for another thing, really, what's wrong with partisanship, anyway? What's so bad about it? The reason we have parties is that people have different ideas as to what direction the country should take. That's the way it works: people tend to group politically according to the kinds of policies they would like to pursue, and right now, we've just had an election where one party's ideas were strongly endorsed (or, if you'd prefer, the other party's policies strongly rejected). Democrats, and the national media, need to stop acting as though the Republicans still get to control the debate.
In other words, Democrats need to suit up. It's too important now.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Backing away slowly....
So I posted the conclusion of "The Balance in the Blood", my horror novelette about a Nazi doctor who conducts horrific experiments regarding vampirism on concentration camp inmates, and then I proceeded to surf the Interweb for a while, during which I came across this item about one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camp doctors, who was recently found to have died fifteen years ago. No real comment here, but it was a bit spooky.
Great Moments in Sequential Art
This panel from a recent installment of Pearls Before Swine made me laugh uproariously:
The storyline here was amusing -- the trio of stupid crocodiles adopting superpowers, each relating to obscure office skills like doorstopping, stapling, and removing paper jams from printers -- but what got me was "Curse you Hoolit Packurd!"
The storyline here was amusing -- the trio of stupid crocodiles adopting superpowers, each relating to obscure office skills like doorstopping, stapling, and removing paper jams from printers -- but what got me was "Curse you Hoolit Packurd!"
"The Balance in the Blood" (conclusion)
Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Old Willem Schliemann watches the sun drop beyond the Argentine hills. “It won’t be long now,” he says to no one at all, and it isn’t. The sky in the west is still violet when suddenly she is there before him. Her clothes are different, of course; fashion has advanced quite a lot in the fifty years since he’s seen her last. But she still looks the same: the gently curling hair, the unnaturally pale skin. In her right hand she holds a leather satchel that Willem has seen before, but not since that night when he last saw her. She does not smile. He wonders if she has ever smiled at all, through all the years since the Nazis came.
“I’ve brought you something,” she says in perfect German. She holds out the satchel, and he takes it. He does not look inside. “Should I call you ‘Father’? You gave me this life.”
“Life?” Willem chuckles at that. “Such as it is. You may call me that, if it pleases you. I always wanted a daughter.”
“Do you have sons?”
“I did, once. Maybe I still do.”
She sits down beside him. He hears something strange about her breath, and he realizes that she only breathes to talk. Do vampires respirate? he wonders, ever the scientist.
“What happened after the camp?” she asks.
“We went to Switzerland,” Willem says. “Doktor Muething’s brother – who controlled the money, being first-born and all that – had been quite the drunkard, which made it easy for the Doktor to steal enough of the family fortune to establish himself in Zurich when we got there. He told me then that he had no further use for me, and that I would be safer away from him in any case. So he paid my passage to Barcelona, and from there I was able to get passage on a steamer to Buenos Aires in exchange for my medical services on the journey. We were boarded twice by Allied patrols, but no one paid any heed to a German boy playing medic. I’ve been here ever since.”
“I know you have,” she says. “Except for your trips abroad. I’ve followed you everywhere. Except Cairo, of course. There is too much sun in Egypt.”
Willem only shrugs.
“I found him there, you know. In Zurich. He died there.”
Willem looks at her.
“Did you kill him?”
She shakes her head. “Heart attack. December 11, 1957. He took up smoking and became quite the drunkard as well after the war, you know. I did talk to him before the end, though. Did you know he was half-Jewish?”
Willem closes his eyes and nods, once. It is painful, even now. He still has that letter, the only one the Doktor ever wrote to him, despite the fact that it is evidence of his status as a war-criminal. “His father had a mistress, a young Jewish girl. She became pregnant at the same time as his mother – his father’s wife. The Jewish girl died in childbirth, and the wife miscarried. So they introduced the illegitimate child as both of theirs, and no one ever knew. Doktor Muething didn’t know until his father told him just before dying.” Willem shakes his head.
“He wanted to save us,” she says. “He believed that perhaps through vampirism the Jews could have power and freedom, which they had never had.”
Willem nods. The Reich is dead, and yet the hatred remains, Wolf Muething wrote in that letter. It will always remain.
“Am I to become one of your victims?” Willem asks.
“No. For something else.” She gestures to the satchel.
Willem opens the satchel and draws out a hammer and a wooden stake, one end of which is honed to a lethal point. He looks up at her.
“No balance lasts forever,” she says with a shrug. She stands and walks a few steps away from him. Her form is silhouetted against the deepening purple of the night sky. “They came for me in the dark of night. They came for us all, took us all away. They took away the world. You gave it back to me. For that I am ever grateful. But it must end.”
“I made you a vampire,” he says. “I gave you only the night.”
“It was the only way,” she replies. “There was no other. You could not give me Life after I was shot. But you could stay Death’s hand, at least for a time. I have walked the world for fifty-four years, and now I am tired. I want no more of night and dark. I want no more of blood, of corpses, of feasting upon death.” She turns to face him as a cool breeze stirs. “We are trapped in the cycle of death that they created. You can give me release. You can end the cycle.”
“That cycle never ends,” Willem says. He looks down at the implements in his hand, the hammer and the stake. Then he rises and walks over to her. She lies down on the ground in front of him, her hands at her side.
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” she says.
He kneels down beside her and places the tip of the stake on her chest, directly over her heart. The palsy in his hands makes it shake. He lists the hammer, and then he hesitates. Tears form in his eyes, and one rolls down his cheek.
“Please,” she says.
He closes his eyes and is transported back to the night of her creation as clearly as if it were the night before. He and Doktor Muething had fled without the possibility of knowing what had become of their creation. He has known, since that very night of killing and creation, that she would someday come. And he has always been certain of why she would come, but this isn’t the reason. Not this. Never this.
“Our Father,” Willem says. “Our Father….who art….Our Father who art….” He searches for the words but they do not come. He wonders if Uncle Gunther would approve. He wonders what Uncle Gunther would say, what he could possibly say.
“Sometimes, Willem, all we can do is end the pain.”
And there, as he has done so often in his misbegotten life, Willem Schliemann finds the answer he needs in the words of his uncle. He lifts the hammer again and brings it down with all his strength. The stake drives through skin and bone, impaling the undead heart beneath. Blood, living and dead, erupts from the wound, gushing out in an impossible amount. She screams in agony and release, and when her scream ends her body ages again at last, accumulating fifty-four years in mere seconds. And then she is gone.
An hour passes as the sky darkens and Willem makes the preparations, and then he stands before the pyre as the flames consume his vampire. The words he recites are unheard by anyone, and yet he recites them just as he has practiced them for years. After all, the words are not for the living. They are for God.
A new century dawns as a Nazi says Kaddish for a Jew whose name he has never known.
Blogroll Amnesty Day Week
According to Jon Swift, yesterday was the annual Blogroll Amnesty Day, which began as a day when big bloggers could give themselves permission to eliminate blogs at will from their blogrolls and feel no guilt over it, but ended up being a day when blogs should help out other blogs by adding them to their blogrolls. That's what I'll do, so if you have a blog you want blogrolled or know a blog I should blogroll, go ahead and suggest it here!
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
A reminder
Don't forget, gentle readers: being February, among this month's festivities on Byzantium's Shores is Ask Me Anything!
So, if there's something you want to ask me, anything at all, go ahead and drop it in comments on the official Ask Me Anything! 2009 post. Or you can e-mail them, or do a Facebook message, or whatever. Anonymous questions are fine, just as long as they're not insulting (i.e., "Why not stop blogging, you blowhard dumba$$?").
So Ask Me Anything!
So, if there's something you want to ask me, anything at all, go ahead and drop it in comments on the official Ask Me Anything! 2009 post. Or you can e-mail them, or do a Facebook message, or whatever. Anonymous questions are fine, just as long as they're not insulting (i.e., "Why not stop blogging, you blowhard dumba$$?").
So Ask Me Anything!
Making Montages
UPDATE: Link fixed.
In comments to my "Men I admire" post, Roger asks how I made the photo montage of the men I cited. You can use this online tool to do the job (requires an account of some sort), but I just did it myself using Photofiltre. First I decided the size of the montage -- in this case, four rows of five photos apiece. Then I figured on the size of each individual shot; I think I went with 250 px wide by 300 tall.
Figuring thusly, the montage in the end would be 1250 px wide by 1200 tall. I created a blank new image in Photofiltre with those dimensions and then I had to crop each individual image down to 250*300. Once I had a 250*300 headshot, I simply cut and paste it into the final montage and then moved it into position. Easy as pie! It takes a bit of time, but then, I enjoy creating montages.
In comments to my "Men I admire" post, Roger asks how I made the photo montage of the men I cited. You can use this online tool to do the job (requires an account of some sort), but I just did it myself using Photofiltre. First I decided the size of the montage -- in this case, four rows of five photos apiece. Then I figured on the size of each individual shot; I think I went with 250 px wide by 300 tall.
Figuring thusly, the montage in the end would be 1250 px wide by 1200 tall. I created a blank new image in Photofiltre with those dimensions and then I had to crop each individual image down to 250*300. Once I had a 250*300 headshot, I simply cut and paste it into the final montage and then moved it into position. Easy as pie! It takes a bit of time, but then, I enjoy creating montages.
Evasive maneuvers
I'm seeing a bit of snarky commentary around the Interweb that since three of President Obama's nominees to high positions have turned out to have problems with getting their taxes paid, maybe it's a "party" thing. As in, Democrats don't pay their taxes and Republicans do.
Sure.
Well, it doesn't take much Googling to find a bunch of Republicans who have had their problems with tax evasion. One such name is the Idiot Who Won't Go Away, Samuel Wurzelbacher, otherwise known as "Joe the Plumber". When John McCain, whose campaign basically consisted of saying false things and elevating know-nothings from obscurity to prominence (see "Palin, Sarah"), thrust Wurzelbacher into the limelight, our plumber friend was having a bit of tax trouble in Ohio.
Of course, clearly the "We always pay our taxes, unlike those tax cheatin' Democrats" Party, when learning of Joey Drano's tax problems, promptly shunted off to Tax Evader Purgatory, never to be heard from again, right? Errrr...nope. But that's OK, because Joe's keen insight into the stimulus package clearly outweighs his little tax kerfuffle, right?
Sure.
Well, it doesn't take much Googling to find a bunch of Republicans who have had their problems with tax evasion. One such name is the Idiot Who Won't Go Away, Samuel Wurzelbacher, otherwise known as "Joe the Plumber". When John McCain, whose campaign basically consisted of saying false things and elevating know-nothings from obscurity to prominence (see "Palin, Sarah"), thrust Wurzelbacher into the limelight, our plumber friend was having a bit of tax trouble in Ohio.
Of course, clearly the "We always pay our taxes, unlike those tax cheatin' Democrats" Party, when learning of Joey Drano's tax problems, promptly shunted off to Tax Evader Purgatory, never to be heard from again, right? Errrr...nope. But that's OK, because Joe's keen insight into the stimulus package clearly outweighs his little tax kerfuffle, right?
Fixing the Prequels: Attack of the Clones (part four)
part two
part three
Okeyday, wesa back!
Continuing with our script-doctoring of Attack of the Clones, Obi Wan and Anakin have just apprehended the assassin who was trying to kill Padme, only to have that assassin killed by the toxic dart possibly fired by someone wearing a rocket jet pack. After that sequence is done, we cut to the next morning, when Obi Wan and Anakin report to the Jedi Council on what's been going on:
INTERIOR: JEDI TEMPLE, COUNCIL CHAMBER – DAY
OBI-WAN and ANAKIN stand in the center of the Council Chamber. The members of the Jedi Council are seated in a circle surrounding the two Jedi.
YODA: Track down this bounty hunter, you must, Obi-Wan.
MACE WINDU: Most importantly, find out who he's working for.
OBI-WAN: What about Senator Amidala? She will still need protecting.
YODA: Handle that, your Padawan will.
MACE WINDU: Whoever hired the assassin you caught last night will certainly hire another and another until the job is done, so until Obi Wan can get to the bottom of this plot, you, Anakin, will escort the Senator back to her home planet of Naboo. She'll be safer there. And don't use registered transport. Travel as refugees.
Anakin tries to conceal his eagerness at this assignment.
ANAKIN: As the leader of the opposition, it will be very difficult to get Senator Amidala to leave the Capital.
YODA: Until caught this killer is, our judgment she must respect.
ANAKIN: She may need more convincing than the judgment of the Jedi Council.
MACE WINDU: Anakin, go to the Senate and ask Chancellor Palpatine to speak with her.
The two Jedi exit the Council Chamber.
Here's where I'd make an addition. There was an exchange between Yoda and Mace Windu that happened earlier in the script, but didn't happen in the film. I mentioned it in the last installment, and here's where I'd put it. After Obi Wan and Anakin leave the Council Chamber:
MACE WINDU: Two attacks on the Senator, and we still cannot see who is behind this?
YODA: Masking the future, is this disturbance in the Force.
MACE WINDU: The prophecy is coming true, and the Dark Side is growing. It's been ten years, and the Sith still have yet to show themselves.
YODA: ...Out there, they are. A certainty that is.
This scene, and several that follow, are basically scene-setting talking scenes, without much to really address in terms of outright "fixes". In the scene above, I only add a couple of lines to clear up the nature of the danger Padme still faces.
Next, Anakin goes to Palpatine to ask him to basically order Padme to go home incognito. I like this scene a great deal and wouldn't change it at all. Here's the scene:
INTERIOR: SENATE BUILDING, PALPATINE'S OFFICE – DAY
ANAKIN and PALPATINE stand at the window of PALPATINE'S office and look out over the vast city.
PALPATINE: I will talk to her. Senator Amidala will not refuse an executive order. I know her well enough to assure you of that.
ANAKIN: Thank you, your Excellency.
PALPATINE: And so, my young Padawan, they have finally given you an assignment. Your patience has paid off.
ANAKIN: Your guidance more that my patience.
PALPATINE: You don't need guidance, Anakin. In time you will learn to trust your feelings. Then you will be invincible. I have said it many times, you are the most gifted Jedi I have ever met.
PALPATINE and ANAKIN turn away from the window and walk through PALPATINE'S office towards the door.
ANAKIN: Thank you, your Excellency.
PALPATINE: I see you becoming the greatest of all the Jedi, Anakin. Even more powerful than Master Yoda.
What's good here is how much is established in a very brief conversation. Anakin has a relationship with Palpatine that has clearly been blossoming for some time; clearly Palpatine wasn't just gilding the lily at the end of TPM when he told young Anakin that he'd be following Anakin's career with "great interest". This establishes that Palpatine has taken a hands-on approach with Anakin, even as Anakin has been learning of the Force.
Also, this exchange establishes that Anakin, the once fatherless boy, now has not one but two father figures in his life, Obi Wan and Palpatine, who are deeply divergent figures to begin with (even before it turns out that Palpatine is a Sith Lord). Anakin is constantly being pulled in two directions, which is what ultimately creates the conflict within him that first leads him to embrace the Dark Side and, much later, to reject it. There's a lot of this kind of subtlety woven throughout the Prequel Trilogy; it's too bad that Lucas never gets credit for it.
This exchange doesn't just establish that Anakin has two father figures, but also establishes the different approaches those two father figures take in Anakin's upbringing. Obi Wan is the stern taskmaster much of the time, constantly focusing on Anakin's errors and his need for control, while Palpatine is all about enabling Anakin, praising him, feeding his ego. Palpatine knows what he's doing, after all. He's planting the seeds in Anakin's eventual fall from grace.
After this scene, we cut back to the Jedi temple, where Obi Wan is conferring with Yoda and Mace Windu:
INTERIOR: JEDI TEMPLE, ATRIUM – DAY
MACE WINDU and OBI-WAN walk along the Temple corridors. YODA accompanies them, riding in a small floating chair.
OBI-WAN: I am concerned for my Padawan. He is not ready to be given this assignment on his own yet.
YODA: The Council is confident in this decision, Obi-Wan.
MACE WINDU: The boy has exceptional skills.
OBI-WAN: But he still has much to learn, Master. His abilities have made him... well, arrogant.
YODA: Yes, yes. It's a flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones.
MACE WINDU: Remember, Obi-Wan. If the prophecy is true, your apprentice is the only one who can bring the Force back into balance.
OBI-WAN: If he follows the right path.
While this scene is always cool to watch, what with the giant atrium of the Temple and Yoda hanging out on his floating chair, the scene doesn't really accomplish anything. Obi Wan's misgivings should be addressed, but not here, I don't think. I would actually cut this entirely, and instead cut from Anakin's meeting with Palpatine to his scene with Padme in the apartment. Here's that scene, as written by Lucas and Hales, with a few notations of mine scattered within:
INTERIOR: APARTMENT BUILDING, AMIDALA'S APARTMENT – DAY
ANAKIN looks as PADMÉ and JAR JAR talk, standing near the door of the anteroom to PADMÉ'S bedroom. DORMÉ moves about packing luggage.
PADMÉ: I'm taking an extended leave of absence. It will be your responsibility to take my place in the Senate. Representative Binks, I know I can count on you.
JAR JAR: Mesa honored to be taken on dissa heavy burden. (pompously) Mesa accept this with muy muy humility and da...
PADMÉ: Jar Jar. I don't wish to hold you up. I'm sure you have a great deal to do.
JAR JAR: Of course, M'Lady.
JAR JAR bows and goes out. PADMÉ walks briskly to ANAKIN. She is in a very bad mood.
ANAKIN: I'm sure that he'll do fine--
PADMÉ: (cutting him off) I do not like this idea of hiding. Had I known it would have come to this, I would never have agreed to Jedi protection.
Anakin tries not to look stung by this.
ANAKIN: Don't worry, now that the Council has ordered an investigation, it won't take Master Obi-Wan long to find this bounty hunter.
PADMÉ: (frustrated) I haven't worked for a year to defeat the Military Creation Act not to be here when its fate is decided!
ANAKIN: Sometimes we have to let go of our pride and do what is requested of us.
PADMÉ: Pride?!? Annie, you're young, and you don't have a very firm grip on politics. I suggest you reserve your opinions for some other time.
[NOTE: I like this reaction of Padme's. It wasn't in the movie, but I like that she's willing to bite back at Anakin, and it further shows that she's not seeing him as a grown-up yet.]
ANAKIN: Sorry, M'Lady. I was only trying to...
PADMÉ: (trying to shut him up) Annie, please--
ANAKIN: (suddenly angry) Don't call me that.
PADMÉ: What?
ANAKIN: "Annie."
PADMÉ: I've always called you that... it is your name, isn't it?
ANAKIN: It's Anakin. When you say Annie it's like I'm still a little boy... and I'm not.
[NOTE: I like this bit, too. Padme does, over the course of the movie, stop calling Anakin "Annie", and this gives that a bit of context. I like that he's basically asking her to see him as more than the little boy from ten years before. That's how it should be.]
PADMÉ: I'm sorry, Anakin. It's impossible to deny you've...(looks him over) ...that you've grown up.
PADMÉ smiles at ANAKIN. He becomes a little shy.
ANAKIN: Well...Master Obi-Wan manages not to see it...
PADMÉ: Mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults than we would like. It's the only way we grow.
ANAKIN: Don't get me wrong... Obi-Wan is a great mentor, as wise as Master Yoda and as powerful as Master Windu. I am truly thankful to be his apprentice. Only... although I'm a Padawan learner, in some ways... a lot of ways... I'm ahead of him. I'm ready for the trials. I know I am! He knows it too. But he feels I'm too unpredictable... Other Jedi my age have gone through the trials and made it... I know I
started my training late... but he won't let me move on.
PADMÉ: That must be frustrating.
ANAKIN: It's worse... he's overly critical! He never listens! He just doesn't understand. It's not fair!
PADMÉ cannot suppress a laugh. She shakes her head.
PADMÉ: I'm sorry... You sounded exactly like that little boy I once knew, when he didn't get his way.
ANAKIN: I'm not whining! I'm not.
[NOTE: I'd ditch this last line, just have him glare at her.]
PADMÉ just smiles at him. DORMÉ laughs in the background.
PADMÉ: I didn't say it to hurt you.
ANAKIN: I know...
There is a brief silence, then PADMÉ comes over to ANAKIN.
PADMÉ: Anakin...
They look into each other's eyes for the first time.
PADMÉ: Don't try to grow up too fast.
ANAKIN: I am grown up. You said it yourself.
ANAKIN looks deep into PADMÉ'S eyes.
PADMÉ: Please don't look at me like that.
ANAKIN: Why not?
PADMÉ: Because I can see what you're thinking.
ANAKIN: (laughing) Ahh... So, you have Jedi powers too?
DORMÉ is watching with concern.
PADMÉ: It makes me feel uncomfortable.
ANAKIN: Sorry, M'Lady.
ANAKIN backs away as PADMÉ turns and goes back to her packing.
Once again I wonder if some stuff got edited out after filming, or if the scene was filmed the way it showed up in the film. Some stuff just isn't in the movie, and reading this over, I think that the scene works better as written rather than as shot. For one thing, Anakin's sudden complaint about Obi Wan's tutelage has a bit better context, in terms of the scene; he's confident at first, but the conversation quickly goes into areas he's not nearly as confident about, so he blunders a bit. His defenses down and his feigned confidence shaken, he slips into complaining about his feelings about his lack of progress as a Jedi (or what he sees as a lack of progress), then he can't help but tip his hand about his attraction to Padme, and that line of Anakin's in which he tries to recover some control my making light of what's happening ("So, you have Jedi powers too?"). It feels more like a conversation here.
But I like how she points out that he sounds like the boy she knew, and I like how the script has Dorme hanging in the background, hearing what's going on. Basically, though, I'm finding as I proceed in detail through these movies that a lot of these scenes actually work better as written than they did as eventually filmed or edited in the final movie, which leads me again to wonder if George Lucas's drive to bring each movie in under a certain time limit (as far as running time) was his undoing when the films aren't quite as successful as they could be.
(By the way: I love the visual with which this scene opens: hovering worker droids replacing the window that Obi Wan had jumped through the night before.)
Next we cut to one of Coruscant's spaceports, where Padme and Anakin are about to leave for Naboo:
EXTERIOR: CORUSCANT, SPACEPORT FREIGHTER DOCKS, TRANSPORT
BUS - DAY
A small bus speeds toward the massive freighter docks of Coruscant's industrial area. The spaceport is bustling with activity. Transports of various sizes move supplies and passengers as giant floating cranes lift cargo out of the starships. The bus stops before a huge, intergalactic freighter starship. It parks in the shadows of an overhang.
INTERIOR: CORUSCANT, SPACEPORT FREIGHTER DOCKS, TRANSPORT
BUS – DAY
ANAKIN and PADMÉ, dressed in Outland peasant outfits, get up and head for the door where CAPTAIN TYPHO, DORMÉ and OBI-WAN are waiting to hand them their luggage.
CAPTAIN TYPHO: Be safe, M'Lady.
PADMÉ: Thank you, Captain. Take good care of Dormé... The threat's on you two now.
DORMÉ: He'll be safe with me.
They laugh, and PADMÉ embraces her faithful handmaiden. DORMÉ starts to weep.
PADMÉ: You'll be fine.
DORMÉ: It's not me, M'Lady. I worry about you. What if they realize you've left the Capital?
PADMÉ: (looks to Anakin) Then my Jedi protector will have to prove how good he is.
DORMÉ and PADMÉ smile. ANAKIN frowns as OBI-WAN pulls him aside.
[NOTE: I like this last line. It should have been in the movie. Also, I should note that I like the actress who plays Dorme. She's pretty and in this brief scene she does some nice things with facial expressions.]
OBI-WAN: Anakin. Don't do anything without first consulting either myself or the Council.
ANAKIN: Yes, Master.
OBI-WAN: (to Padmé) I will get to the bottom of this plot quickly, M'Lady. You'll be back here in no time.
PADMÉ: I will be most grateful for your speed, Master Jedi.
ANAKIN: Time to go.
PADMÉ: I know.
PADMÉ gives DORMÉ a last hug. ANAKIN picks up the luggage, and the TWO PEASANTS exit the speeder bus, where ARTOO is waiting for them.
OBI-WAN: Anakin, may the Force be with you.
ANAKIN: May the Force be with you, Master.
They head off toward the giant Starfreighter.
PADMÉ: Suddenly, I'm afraid...
ANAKIN: This is my first assignment on my own. I am too. (looking at Artoo) But don't worry. We've got Artoo with us.
They laugh. OBI-WAN and CAPTAIN TYPHO watch ANAKIN and PADMÉ disappear into the vastness of the spaceport with ARTOO trundling along behind them.
OBI-WAN: I hope he doesn't try anything foolish.
CAPTAIN TYPHO: I'd be more concerned about her doing something, than him.
EXTERIOR: FREIGHTER DOCKS - CORUSCANT – DAY
The freighter slowly takes off from the huge docks area of Coruscant. It soon moves into the crowded skies.
Two final notes here: I've always liked Anakin's line "Don't worry, we've got Artoo with us." That's a good line; after all, nothing's ever as bad if you've got R2-D2 with you, right? And visually, the freighter that Padme and Anakin take from Coruscant to Naboo is one of my favorite starships in the entire PT. I love its dull exterior and the fact that it looks exactly like what it is: a big ship that takes stuff from one place to another. And John Williams's scoring of the departure is a wonderful little cue.
That's where we'll leave off for now. In the next installment, we'll look at the arrival on Naboo, as well as the adventures of Obi Wan Kenobi, Private Eye!
Excelsior, Star Warriors!!
Monday, February 02, 2009
Ask Me Anything!
It's February, the shortest month, otherwise known as Anniversary Month here at Byzantium's Shores. And that means, among other things, the annual playing of the game Ask Me Anything!, in which you, the readers, get to, well, Ask Me Anything!. That's right, any question is fair game, and no question will go unanswered. Now, not all answers may be serious, but most will. Ask me something serious. Ask me something silly. Dare me to be different! Dare me to be unique!
I'm going to keep the Questioning period open until the 14th, so as to give myself enough time to get the answers done. I'll occasionally put up reminder posts, but all Questions should either be posted in comments on this post or e-mailed to me directly. So, start your engines, folks: Ask Me Anything!
I'm going to keep the Questioning period open until the 14th, so as to give myself enough time to get the answers done. I'll occasionally put up reminder posts, but all Questions should either be posted in comments on this post or e-mailed to me directly. So, start your engines, folks: Ask Me Anything!
Mr. Data, set a course -- for love!
Sometimes you feel like reading a romance novel, right?
OK, I'll assume by the chirping crickets I just heard that I'm wrong here. But anyway, sometimes I want to read a romance novel. But not just any romance novel, mind you; I'm not looking for those books with the titles printed on the covers in flowery script over a picture of some long-haired guy whose chest is just a-heavin' in the wind. No, I want at least some modicum of muscle in my romances! So I was happy to discover Linnea Sinclair, writer of space opera romances. Yes, you read that right: space opera romances. Games of Command is the first of her books that I read, and damned if I didn't enjoy the hell out of it. Looking for a science fiction beach read? This is it.
In the wake of a war, at the end of which a tenuous truce exists and a shaky government is holding power, former combatant Tasha Sebastian is assigned to the ship commanded by her former adversary Admiral Branden Kel-Paten, a cybernetically enhanced man who is a hard, cold, by-the-books kind of commander. His big, dark secret is that he's desperately in love with Tasha Sebastian, a love which he dares not show because cybernetics are not supposed to show emotion and can be deactivated if they do. They take into their custody a wanted man, Jace Serafino, who happens to be telepathic, and is able to learn of Kel-Paten's feelings; and in the course of trying to figure out what to do about the potentially explosive situation, Tasha breaks into Admiral Kel-Paten's personal records, hoping to learn something definitive about his intentions and loyalties, but instead finds his personal journals where he has written extensively of his unrequited love for his second-in-command.
Yeah. Hilarity ensues, along with lots of action: adversaries trapped in shuttlecraft stranded in deep space; potential lovers who are also former enemies finding themselves relying on each other on a mysterious planet that's not what it seems; races against time; all the usual complications in a book that makes you want to read it over a big bowl of buttered popcorn. The story here is pretty much paper thin, but Sinclair is able to keep things moving pretty briskly, her dialog tends to crackle, and her characters are sharply drawn and sympathetic. In terms of SF, there's nothing here that you wouldn't find in a better episode of Star Trek (in fact, I kept visualizing the book's main ship, the Vaxxar, in terms of the good old NCC-1701-D. Recommended, even if it's not terribly good for you.
OK, I'll assume by the chirping crickets I just heard that I'm wrong here. But anyway, sometimes I want to read a romance novel. But not just any romance novel, mind you; I'm not looking for those books with the titles printed on the covers in flowery script over a picture of some long-haired guy whose chest is just a-heavin' in the wind. No, I want at least some modicum of muscle in my romances! So I was happy to discover Linnea Sinclair, writer of space opera romances. Yes, you read that right: space opera romances. Games of Command is the first of her books that I read, and damned if I didn't enjoy the hell out of it. Looking for a science fiction beach read? This is it.
In the wake of a war, at the end of which a tenuous truce exists and a shaky government is holding power, former combatant Tasha Sebastian is assigned to the ship commanded by her former adversary Admiral Branden Kel-Paten, a cybernetically enhanced man who is a hard, cold, by-the-books kind of commander. His big, dark secret is that he's desperately in love with Tasha Sebastian, a love which he dares not show because cybernetics are not supposed to show emotion and can be deactivated if they do. They take into their custody a wanted man, Jace Serafino, who happens to be telepathic, and is able to learn of Kel-Paten's feelings; and in the course of trying to figure out what to do about the potentially explosive situation, Tasha breaks into Admiral Kel-Paten's personal records, hoping to learn something definitive about his intentions and loyalties, but instead finds his personal journals where he has written extensively of his unrequited love for his second-in-command.
Yeah. Hilarity ensues, along with lots of action: adversaries trapped in shuttlecraft stranded in deep space; potential lovers who are also former enemies finding themselves relying on each other on a mysterious planet that's not what it seems; races against time; all the usual complications in a book that makes you want to read it over a big bowl of buttered popcorn. The story here is pretty much paper thin, but Sinclair is able to keep things moving pretty briskly, her dialog tends to crackle, and her characters are sharply drawn and sympathetic. In terms of SF, there's nothing here that you wouldn't find in a better episode of Star Trek (in fact, I kept visualizing the book's main ship, the Vaxxar, in terms of the good old NCC-1701-D. Recommended, even if it's not terribly good for you.
Sentential Links #157
Here we go:
:: Yes, I watched Sullivan on February 9, 1964, and I thought the group was all right. But I really couldn't hear them or enjoy them over all of that SCREAMING.
:: Almost seventy percent of the curling stones currently in use around the world came from Ailsa Craig. (Apparently Paul's doing a series of posts called "The ABCs of Curling", which makes me happy because curling is one cool sport, which I don't understand for the life of me.)
:: Plus FireKitteh sits on your lap and makes adorable noises.
:: Farm life is amazing, but it can also be heartbreaking—and frustrating as hell.
:: Mysterious space entity, we can't escape from it!
:: Twenty minutes of involuntary exposure to sub-freezing weather has a remarkably positive effect on feline behavior. Look… aren’t they sweet?
:: From the iconic opening riff of "Sweet Child o' Mine" and the driving staccato rhythm of Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song," to the weeping wail of Gary Moore's "Still Got the Blues," this behemoth is one of the most coveted instruments on the planet. If the Fender Stratocaster is the precision sniper rifle of the guitar world, then the Les Paul is a veritable Howitzer of sound. It's meaty tone can go from raunchy clack to the smooth and buttery lament of angels with just the flick of a switch.
:: One respects the office by honoring its place in a constitutional system, not by wearing a suit.
All for this week. Tune in next week!
:: Yes, I watched Sullivan on February 9, 1964, and I thought the group was all right. But I really couldn't hear them or enjoy them over all of that SCREAMING.
:: Almost seventy percent of the curling stones currently in use around the world came from Ailsa Craig. (Apparently Paul's doing a series of posts called "The ABCs of Curling", which makes me happy because curling is one cool sport, which I don't understand for the life of me.)
:: Plus FireKitteh sits on your lap and makes adorable noises.
:: Farm life is amazing, but it can also be heartbreaking—and frustrating as hell.
:: Mysterious space entity, we can't escape from it!
:: Twenty minutes of involuntary exposure to sub-freezing weather has a remarkably positive effect on feline behavior. Look… aren’t they sweet?
:: From the iconic opening riff of "Sweet Child o' Mine" and the driving staccato rhythm of Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song," to the weeping wail of Gary Moore's "Still Got the Blues," this behemoth is one of the most coveted instruments on the planet. If the Fender Stratocaster is the precision sniper rifle of the guitar world, then the Les Paul is a veritable Howitzer of sound. It's meaty tone can go from raunchy clack to the smooth and buttery lament of angels with just the flick of a switch.
:: One respects the office by honoring its place in a constitutional system, not by wearing a suit.
All for this week. Tune in next week!
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Wow!
UPDATED below.
That was truly a great game. Remember what I said earlier? Blowouts are a thing of the past. They'll be the rarity now.
Anyway, the Steelers have just joined the Cowboys as the only franchises to have won Super Bowls under three consecutive head coaches.
And Kurt Warner is, in my book, a Hall of Famer. I hate watching him lose in that way. In a just world, that guy would NOT be 1-2 in Super Bowls. He's a free agent now, so I hope he signs with some contender and gets back next year. That guy deserves better than this. He carried the Cardinals on their back.
UPDATE: In the postgame, the reporter sent to get Kurt Warner's reaction actually asked: "Do you want to try to get back to the Super Bowl?" What a stupid question. What's he going to say? "No, I just want to be on the roster of an 8-8 team for a year or two"? Maybe she was asking if he is considering retirement, since he's pretty old for a starting QB, but that was a seriously dumb way to phrase it.
That was truly a great game. Remember what I said earlier? Blowouts are a thing of the past. They'll be the rarity now.
Anyway, the Steelers have just joined the Cowboys as the only franchises to have won Super Bowls under three consecutive head coaches.
And Kurt Warner is, in my book, a Hall of Famer. I hate watching him lose in that way. In a just world, that guy would NOT be 1-2 in Super Bowls. He's a free agent now, so I hope he signs with some contender and gets back next year. That guy deserves better than this. He carried the Cardinals on their back.
UPDATE: In the postgame, the reporter sent to get Kurt Warner's reaction actually asked: "Do you want to try to get back to the Super Bowl?" What a stupid question. What's he going to say? "No, I just want to be on the roster of an 8-8 team for a year or two"? Maybe she was asking if he is considering retirement, since he's pretty old for a starting QB, but that was a seriously dumb way to phrase it.
Women I Admire
I figured that a "Men I Admire" post looked goofy by itself, so here's its obvious partner: women I admire. This isn't part of an official meme-thing, but hey, why not tag a few folks? Lynn, Nettl, Jennifer, Erin, and for someone I'd like to see do both, Belladonna. Obviously, anybody else can join in.
As before, click through to this photo's Flickr page for the identifications and mouseover notes (which are forthcoming, as of this writing).
Men I Admire
A while back, SamuraiFrog tagged me with this. I'd have had this done earlier if not for other circumstances, obviously. The rules:
A. Link back to the blog that tagged you.
B. Link back to the originator of this meme, which is The Dino Lounge.
C. Create your own list of 20 men that you admire and post them on your blog.
D. Tag 5 other people to participate in this meme.
E. If you like, please let The Dino Lounge know that you've participated in this meme so he can check out your posting and comment on it.
Rather than do a list, I put together the photo montage you see here. Click through to see it larger, with identifications and mouse-over notes. (As of this writing I haven't finished the notes yet.)
For tags: Jason, Mr. Jones, Roger, Belladonna, and Steph. (If they haven't done it already, obviously.)
A very public service message
Since today is Super Sunday, it occurs to me that some people out there might be wanting to try to make their own Buffalo-style chicken wings. Well, I've got you covered here, folks: some years ago I posted the recipe.
How to make Buffalo-style chicken wings. This is the only way to do them and call them "Buffalo-style" or "Buffalo wings". Cooking chicken wings in any other way does not result in Buffalo-style, folks, no matter how tasty they are. (And believe me, there are some amazingly tasty non-Buffalo wing preparations out there.)
How to make Buffalo-style chicken wings. This is the only way to do them and call them "Buffalo-style" or "Buffalo wings". Cooking chicken wings in any other way does not result in Buffalo-style, folks, no matter how tasty they are. (And believe me, there are some amazingly tasty non-Buffalo wing preparations out there.)
Hey look! Graphics!!!
My pictures are back, yay! I set things up to load graphics from each e-mail profile at a time, instead of loading all of the graphics from one profile at a time, so maybe I won't have to re-jigger things after ten days. I'm still wanting to get some actual web hosting one of these days, but it'll be mid-month before I can get to that, at the earliest. I am considering leaving the background water image off for good; anybody have any opinions thereof?
Blowin' out the wind
The Buffalo News's Larry Felser thinks that a boring Super Bowl is likely, because the game has so often been a blowout. Problem is, over the last fourteen years, it hasn't. The era of consistent blow-out Super Bowls ended, I think, with the 49ers' 49-26 pasting of the San Diego Chargers in SB XXIX; in thirteen games since then, there have been only two Super Bowls that I would consider blowouts: SB XXXV (Ravens 34, Giants 7) and SB XXXVII (Buccaneers 48, Raiders 21).
Now, how do we define a blowout? I personally consider a game to be a blowout if the margin of victory is more than seventeen points -- and sometimes, not even then. Basically a blowout occurs when the losing team is never really in the game, so a blowout doesn't necessarily have to be a 55-10 laugher like the 49ers drubbing of the Broncos in SB XXIV. Some games feel like blowouts but kind of aren't: Denver's 34-19 win over Atlanta in SB XXXIII was a borderline blowout, and I remember thinking during SB XLI that the game was either the most lopsided close game in history, or the closest blowout in history. Final score that day was Colts 29, Bears 17, but after the first quarter was over -- after Chicago ran back the opening kick for a TD and after Peyton Manning calmed down -- the game never felt close again, and I remember the TV guys talking at halftime about what the Bears needed to do to "get back in the game", when they were only down by two points.
Yes, the Super Bowl was usually a boring affair for a long time, but looking back over the history of the game, virtually all of the big blowouts came during the NFC's long era of dominance from 1985 to 1997; that era really did see blowout after blowout, with final scores like 38-16, 46-10, 39-20, 42-10, 55-10, 52-17; but even then, some of the games considered now to be boring blowouts really weren't, in my view: the Bills' 30-13 loss to Dallas looks like a blowout, but it was a competitive game followed by a collapse, and Green Bay's 35-21 win over New England wasn't a blowout either, with the Patriots hanging in there a while before the better team pulled away late.
Anyway, I haven't seen a truly boring Super Bowl since the afore-mentioned 49ers-Chargers game, and I see no reason to expect a laugher today, either.
(And I might not even watch the game, seeing as how I'm in the Pacific time zone right now which puts the game in the middle of the afternoon. That feels weird!)
Now, how do we define a blowout? I personally consider a game to be a blowout if the margin of victory is more than seventeen points -- and sometimes, not even then. Basically a blowout occurs when the losing team is never really in the game, so a blowout doesn't necessarily have to be a 55-10 laugher like the 49ers drubbing of the Broncos in SB XXIV. Some games feel like blowouts but kind of aren't: Denver's 34-19 win over Atlanta in SB XXXIII was a borderline blowout, and I remember thinking during SB XLI that the game was either the most lopsided close game in history, or the closest blowout in history. Final score that day was Colts 29, Bears 17, but after the first quarter was over -- after Chicago ran back the opening kick for a TD and after Peyton Manning calmed down -- the game never felt close again, and I remember the TV guys talking at halftime about what the Bears needed to do to "get back in the game", when they were only down by two points.
Yes, the Super Bowl was usually a boring affair for a long time, but looking back over the history of the game, virtually all of the big blowouts came during the NFC's long era of dominance from 1985 to 1997; that era really did see blowout after blowout, with final scores like 38-16, 46-10, 39-20, 42-10, 55-10, 52-17; but even then, some of the games considered now to be boring blowouts really weren't, in my view: the Bills' 30-13 loss to Dallas looks like a blowout, but it was a competitive game followed by a collapse, and Green Bay's 35-21 win over New England wasn't a blowout either, with the Patriots hanging in there a while before the better team pulled away late.
Anyway, I haven't seen a truly boring Super Bowl since the afore-mentioned 49ers-Chargers game, and I see no reason to expect a laugher today, either.
(And I might not even watch the game, seeing as how I'm in the Pacific time zone right now which puts the game in the middle of the afternoon. That feels weird!)
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Some oddities and wonderments:
:: This is terrific: a guy who has been making mock-ups of the covers to novelizations of popular movies, but with the art in a 1960s style. I love it! There are more throughout his Flickr stream.
(via)
:: Did you ever wonder what things might have been like if John Denver had had a slightly more off-kilter song-writing style? Well, me either, but still....
:: Every kid wants to play Airport Security!
(via)
More next week.
:: This is terrific: a guy who has been making mock-ups of the covers to novelizations of popular movies, but with the art in a 1960s style. I love it! There are more throughout his Flickr stream.
(via)
:: Did you ever wonder what things might have been like if John Denver had had a slightly more off-kilter song-writing style? Well, me either, but still....
:: Every kid wants to play Airport Security!
(via)
More next week.
Unidentified Earth #55
I know, it's been a few weeks since I got round to continuing this series, for which I apologize. Anyhow, UI 54 was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which was designed by that guy who likes to crumple a ball of aluminum foil and then tell his clients, "Yeah. Build it like that."
And now for the new puzzler. This one may be difficult! For full credit, I'll need the local referent of this spot.
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
And now for the new puzzler. This one may be difficult! For full credit, I'll need the local referent of this spot.
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
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