Porky Goodness

I decided, kinda-sorta on a whim, to make some pulled pork the other day.

Now, in the past when I've had the taste for pulled pork, I've bought it already-made at The Store, either our own make of it or a brand like Lloyd's, which comes in a tub and just needs to be heated up. But while I used to love Lloyd's products, over time I've come to find them too saucy and too sweet, and I've further learned that pulled pork is basically a very cheap hunk of meat, cooked until it shreds, and then simmered a bit in sauce. More or less.

So I bought two items the other day. I bought a small roasting pan, with rack; this is to supplement our larger roasting pan, which is big enough to roast a nice-sized turkey, but is a bit cumbersome when one wants to roast a six-to-eight pound cut of meat or a chicken or a game hen or...you get the picture.

The other item I bought was, obviously, the meat. I bought an eight-pound shoulder butt pork roast, which I laid out on the rack of my new roasting pan and seasoned on both sides with a rub:



Then I covered the roast with foil and put it into the oven at 375 degrees, where it remained for the next four hours. It was about an hour into this process that I discovered a flaw in the Homemade Pulled Pork Plan: even though the cooking time is six hours, your home smells like wonderful pulled pork after just one. Talk about hunger being the best sauce, and smells stoking the hunger....

After four hours, I removed the foil and popped the roast right back into the oven, for another ninety minutes or so. At this point I was checking the roast's temperature every twenty minutes or so, aiming for about 175 degrees; when I finally reached that point, I took the roast out of the oven and let it "rest" on top of the stove for ten or fifteen minutes. (Believe me, folks, allowing cooked meat to "rest" before doing anything else is so essential to good cooking that, well, it's almost a deal-breaker; cutting meat just after removing from the heat will pretty much destroy any effect you have from your careful preparation. Trust me on this.)



Then it was time to shred and simmer a bit in sauce. I grabbed a couple of forks and shredded away, dropping the hunks of meat into my trusty crockpot. This took a lot longer than I had originally thought it would; even as tender as the meat was after that long in the oven, it still takes a while to physically shred eight pounds of the stuff by hand. Once I had it all shredded (except for a couple of large hunks of fat, which I removed), I poured in most of a bottle of barbecue sauce (a "Kansas City" style recipe sauce, although not the stuff that my good friend Mark likes to recommend because he knows the people who make it, but next time, that's what I'm using because trust me folks, it's good sauce), and then ran the crockpot on high for about half an hour, just to bring everything to a nice piping-hot temperature.

The final result? Utter sandwich heaven:



Of course, being that our household is just the three of us, this process yielded an enormous amount of pulled pork for us. We each ate two sandwiches that night; The Wife and The Daughter had some more for lunch the next day; I had it for lunch yesterday and will have more today; and yet, as of this writing, there is still a huge container of it in our fridge. So far we've got seven meals' worth of meat out of that roast, and we're not close to done yet. Total cost will be under a buck a meal for each serving we end up getting out of it. That rocks.

My process here wasn't any kind of "official" method for making pulled pork, but I put it together from reading some recipes online and looking at the shredded pork recipe in Emeril Lagasse's cookbook devoted to pot-luck dishes. It's as easy a cooking process as I've encountered. If you've never made your own pulled pork, give it a shot. It's easy!

Sentential Links #194

Wow, we're closing in on two hundred of these posts! Awesome!

(BTW, with comment moderation being the rule here now, I'm reopening comments on these posts, with certain rules that are known to the persons who have need to know them.)

:: That’s why Lott was offensive and Reid wasn’t: deeds, not words. Maybe one day the right will get that. But I’m not holding my breath, because really, all they’re interested in on this issue is juvenilia and playing gotcha, because that’s all they think it is. They don’t get it, and that’s just sad.

:: The most depressing thing is that if Fineman absolutely had to try to make some sort of convoluted connection between President Obama and President Bush, there was a natural analogy that sort of fit- the tsunami in 2004. (The "Katrina and the Haiti earthquake are the same thing" meme is pretty obnoxious, isn't it?)

:: 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.

:: And I? Well, although I am a mother who has long maintained that we are letting them go from the moment they arrive in our lives, I have learned this week that this is far more easily said than lived. But I'm fine.

:: Only on page 17ish and already seeking out “an incomplete concordance to Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.” (Ah, I read that book when I was in college. I loved it...but I'm pretty sure I actually understood less than half of it.)

:: Cats make excellent jurors. (Oh no they don't! They'll decide someone's guilt based on whether the box is clean or the food dish is full. A cat would acquit Ted Bundy if he filled the dish and petted him or her.)

:: Let me return to the original question: Isn't it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on.

What I miss is the society.

:: No matter what I do, it seems like I always will wonder about the road not taken. (Lynda's blogging is always best when she's being all existential! But she's working her way through what potentially could be, for her, a huge decision.)

More next week!

Get the crash cart!

My home away from home!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Well, it's not a crash cart, obviously, but it's my tool cart at work. If Batman had to push around his best weapons in a Rubbermaid cart, maybe it would look like this. Or something like that. OK, the Batman thing's a bad metaphor, but this is the cart I use at The Store as I roam around, fixing stuff. Most of the tools I tend to use on a daily basis are here, plus some I use a bit less frequently.

On the top shelf, there are three main items. First, and most obviously, is the case for my DeWalt 18-volt cordless drill. That's the only power tool I tend to wheel about as a matter of course; I do have others at my disposal, but I use none of them frequently enough to elevate to "Cart" status. Beneath the drill case, not really visible, is a flat box that is separated into a bunch of small compartments. This box contains screws and fasteners of different sizes and types.

In front of the drill case is my main tool bag. It's an electrician's bag by Husky, and this one contains the hand tools that I use most frequently. Here are all of my screwdrivers, nut drivers, lineman's pliers, diagonal pliers (sometimes called "dikes" for short), tongue-and-groove pliers, locking pliers, hammer, combination square, torpedo level, probes, inspection mirror, Allen wrenches, digital multimeter, and so on. The tape measure you can see there is my backup; my main tape is always on my belt.

On the bottom shelf of the cart I keep things I use less frequently. Way at the front, tucked near the corner, is a box of electrical repair supplies: wire, wire connectors and nuts, cable ties, fuses, and the like. Behind that is a second tool bag in which I keep things like crescent wrenches, a socket set, chisels and files, a flashlight on a folding tripod, Torx drivers, and most of my drill bits.

Behind that tool bag is a plastic tote that contains my kneepads, an extension cord, two kinds of Velcro, WD-40, air duster, wipes, and fishing line. (This is for hanging signs at work, which is a big part of what I do.) There's also a canvas pouch teetering there which contains my safety glasses, earplugs (essential for me when I'm using the table saw), a knit hat, and two pairs of work gloves.

Up top, by the handle where I push the cart, are several small compartments where all manner of stuff tends to accumulate: screws of odd sizes for which I have no assigned space in my fastener box, note pads, pens, and various other little things that pile up in the course of the job. Throw in a cup holder, and there you have it: my Cart of Infinite Repair. All I'm lacking are missiles with which I might target and destroy my foes!

Might want to check the whole screen, guys....

Here's a screengrab of what is, as of this writing, on the NFL section of the FOX Sports website:



The main headline there refers to Chargers tight end Antonio Gates, who may have a big day in today's playoff game against the Jets. Hence the pun in the headline, "Pearly Gates".

Except, over there in the sidebar on the left, the lead item is about a Chicago Bears player who died this morning. Seems a bit odd to have the giant headline "Pearly Gates" juxtaposed with the news of a guy who's just died, doesn't it?

It reminds me of a time in high school, when during a football game, a player on the opposing team was injured sufficiently for the ambulance to be driven out onto the field. (No idea what came of that, but we never heard that it was truly awful, so I'm guessing he broke something.) During the delay, the fellows running the PA system decided to put on whatever music was on the radio. The song that came on, right on the chorus, was "Don't Cry Out Loud" by Melissa Manchester. Oops.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: The Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, in Legos. This is amazing.

:: Who doesn't like a good food fight in a movie? Here's a top ten list of such food fights. I'd personally put The Great Race ahead of Animal House, but that's just me.

:: Not weird, but extremely cool: the USS Independence:



I read about the ship over on Toolmonger, and they're right: that is just an impressive-looking vessel.

More next week!

Connections....

When horrible things happen, after we hear the initial news of the event and the enormity starts to sink in, what happens next is the local connection: what people around here are affected directly, either by their actually being there or having relatives there and the like. It's very natural, and it always illustrates how closely intertwined this world really is. The earthquake in Haiti seems far away at first, but as always, there are a number of local connections.

The one getting the most coverage here in Buffalo is a woman from West Seneca, a Buffalo suburb just across the street from Casa Jaquandor, who was in Haiti when the earthquake struck. She was there to complete the paperwork on adopting a child from that country. She is safe, as is the child; however, she had to return to Buffalo yesterday without her adoptive son, because there is no functioning government in Haiti right now to issue the kid a passport.

The news is possibly worse for another former Buffalonian, a college professor who used to teach here and who was inside a Port-au-Prince hotel when it collapsed in the quake.

The narratives from Haiti are very sad right now. Here's hoping they turn the corner as quickly as possible...but this is a country that has almost no infrastructure to handle anything even remotely of this magnitude. It's unimaginable.

To Barsoom!!!

AICN reports that John Carter of Mars is now shooting. I loved the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs's series when I read it some time ago (note to self: read the rest of those books), and I have to admit to being thrilled at the possibility of a good movie springing from that book. We're talking serious skiffy adventure here, folks -- for all the plaudits heaped on so many great SF novels for their forward-looking and insightful delvings into the nature of humanity and our place in the universe and how we deal with our technology and the threats we face from without and within, sometimes I want a story that can be illustrated thusly:



(image via)

An impolite thought....

I'm really sorry that Rush Limbaugh's recent hospital trip in Hawaii was not a massive, and fatal, heart attack.

Something for Thursday

Jim Croce's birthday was the other day -- or, it would have been, had he not died in a plane crash just six days before my second birthday. I discovered Croce about fifteen years ago, and I've loved him ever since. This is my favorite of Croce's many wonderful songs. Here's "Operator".



"You can keep the dime...."

Haiti

I wish I had something wise to say about what happened in Haiti today, but I don't. Give to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders or someone. This situation is awful.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

At KFC, do you get the standard sides (cole slaw and mashed potatoes) or something else?

Fixing the Prequels: Attack of the Clones (part eight)

part seven
part six
part five
part four
part three
part two
part one

Heavens, it's been a while since I left off. A long while, actually. Oh well, sorry about that...even if there hasn't exactly been a massive clamoring for me to continue this series. But really, if procrastination was an Olympic sport, I'd be Bruce Jenner. But now we're back to it, so hopefully I can work up a bit of momentum.

(Before I get back to my own business at hand, a brief word about something that's been shooting 'round the Interweb of late: some guy's 70-minute long rant-review of The Phantom Menace. No, I haven't watched it beyond the first 90 seconds or so. First, I found the guy's voice very odd – he seems to keep saying "Phrantom Menace" instead of Phantom; second, from the plaudits being heaped on that video by the usual suspects (people who like to bitch about the Prequel Trilogy on a regular basis), I gather that the review says nothing that I haven't heard before about the movie. He apparently puts on display some of the footage from the "Making of TPM" feature that's been in the DVD for years, footage from the first screening of the film's rough cut at Lucasfilm, and the apparent atmosphere in the room that TPM-haters like to interpret as everybody but George Lucas realizing that the movie is crap. No, folks, this stuff is not new, and I don't think it's particularly revelatory, either. Basically, though, I'm just not interested in yet another iteration of everyone's favorite complaints about TPM. I just don't share them, and for some of the many reasons why, see my previous posts on the subject (although I would single out one particular complaint in the video I've seen cited by people high-fiving it, that TPM has no "main character". For many reasons that I've already discussed, this is complete nonsense.) Jason Bennion also comments on the 70-minute review, for those interested.)

And now, back to Attack of the Clones.

When we'd last left off, Anakin and Padme were hanging out by the lake on Naboo while Obi Wan was actually doing some Jedi work-related stuff, investigating the creation of a clone army on Kamino. Specifically, Obi Wan has just finished meeting Jango Fett and left the bounty hunter troubled to the point of deciding to leave Kamino with his son, Boba. After that, we cut back to Naboo and the romantic adventures of Anakin and Padme – with, in my opinion, some very poor results. This sequence features what is, for me, the single most damaging scene in the entire Prequel Trilogy. But first, we get a brief look at Anakin and Padme at dinner (red type indicates material not in the final cut of the film):

EXTERIOR: NABOO LAKE RETREAT, LOUNGE - LATE AFTERNOON

The setting sun touches the mountain peaks. The lake glows in the rose-tinted light. Floating lamps gleam softly like jewels at the lodge.

INTERIOR: NABOO LAKE RETREAT, DINING ROOM - LATE AFTERNOON

NANDI places dessert in front of PADMÉ. TECKLA does the same for ANAKIN. The dessert is some kind of fruit.

ANAKIN: And when I got to them, we went into... aggressive negotiations. (to Teckla) Thank you.

PADMÉ: "Aggressive negotiations," what's that?

ANAKIN: Uh, well, negotiations with a lightsaber.

PADMÉ: (laughing) Oh.

PADMÉ picks up her fork and goes to spear a piece, but it moves! She frowns and tries again - the fruit moves. She looks up at ANAKIN. His eyes are on his plate.

PADMÉ: You did that?

ANAKIN looks up - wide-eyed innocence.

ANAKIN: What?

PADMÉ scowls at him. PADMÉ jabs at the fruit – ANAKIN subtly moves his hand and it lifts up from the plate and hovers in front of her.

PADMÉ: That! Now stop it!

PADMÉ laughs. ANAKIN laughs. She reaches out for the fruit - it loops.

PADMÉ: Anakin!!

ANAKIN moves his fingers. The fruit flies into his hand.

ANAKIN: If Master Obi-Wan caught me doing this, he'd be very grumpy.

ANAKIN is pleased. He cuts the fruit into several pieces and sends one back to PADMÉ. She bites it out of the air and laughs.

The only thing that genuinely bugs me about this scene is, frankly, the special effects, which always look off to me. The relative size of the fruit Anakin levitates across the table seems to change, and when Padme takes a bit of it, she doesn't seem to exert any actual effort, so it actually looks like what it is: she's biting nothing. The pear (or whatever it is) has been added digitally. But that's a small complaint, and I like Anakin's description of something he's done as "aggressive negotations". It's a nice little scene, and I like the idea of mischievous Anakin using the Force to move Padme's food around. That strikes me as exactly the kind of practical joke a Jedi would do. (It occurs to me that a Jedi pie fight would be a pretty creepy thing to watch, though – just a bunch of people standing still while pies are Force-thrown through the air.)

And then...the fireplace scene. The fireside chat. The scene by the fire. The scene that...well, while I don't think it's the worst scene in Star Wars history (that's still in The Phantom Menace, this is the single scene I'd re-do in a heartbeat if George Lucas himself asked me to make a single change in any Star Wars film. Seriously, this scene, in terms of the impact it has on what comes after, is orders of magnitude worse than Greedo shooting first.

Why? Well, we need to look at the scene itself:

INTERIOR: NABOO LAKE RETREAT, LODGE, FIREPLACE ALCOVE -
TWILIGHT

A fire blazes in the open hearth. PADMÉ and ANAKIN are sitting in front of it, gazing into the flames. She looks up as ANAKIN leans in to kiss her.

PADMÉ: Anakin, no.

ANAKIN: From the moment I met you, all those years ago, a day hasn't gone by when I haven't thought of you. And now that I'm with you again, I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over - my mouth goes dry. I feel
dizzy. I can't breathe. I'm haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything you ask...

Silence. The logs flame in the hearth. PADMÉ meets his eye, then looks away.

ANAKIN: If you are suffering as much as I am, tell me.

PADMÉ: ...I can't. We can't. It's just not possible.

ANAKIN: Anything's possible. Padmé, please listen...

PADMÉ: You listen. We live in a real world. Come back to it. You're studying to become a Jedi Knight. I'm a Senator. If you follow your thoughts through to conclusion, they will take us to a place we cannot go... regardless of the way we feel about each other.

ANAKIN: Then you do feel something!

PADMÉ: Jedi aren't allowed to marry. You'd be expelled from the Order. I will not let you give up your future for me.

ANAKIN: You're asking me to be rational. That is something I know I cannot do. Believe me, I wish I could wish my feelings away... but I can't.

PADMÉ: I am not going to give in to this. I have more important things to do than fall in love.

There is silence as they stare at the fire. ANAKIN is thinking.

ANAKIN: It wouldn't have to be that way... we could keep it a secret.

PADMÉ: Then we'd be living a lie - one we couldn't keep up even if we wanted to. Mt sister saw it. So did my mother. I couldn't do that. Could you, Anakin? Could you live like that?

Silence for a moment.

ANAKIN: No. You're right. It would destroy us.

That first bit, with Anakin leaning in to kiss her, isn't in the finished film; but the way the scene plays, there's about six or seven seconds of body language between Anakin and Padme before he begins his "From the moment I met you" speech. Padme is turning away from Anakin, looking uncomfortable with something; Anakin is looking sad and disappointed. This makes clear that something has just happened, but the way it plays onscreen, we don't know what.

And then there's Anakin's speech itself, in which he just bluntly lays it all out there, making his love for Padme sound like an awfully unpleasant feeling. Now, since he's a Jedi and since he's been in love with the only girl he's ever met since he met her, I suppose it's possible that he wouldn't have picked up on this, but telling the object of your affections how miserable you are by feeling the way you feel about her isn't a strategy that's likely to bring her into your arms. But that speech isn't even my big objection, even though I'd rewrite it to be a bit less overly dramatic. Anakin is, after all, a deeply immature person, and this speech again strikes me as something that is awkward and overly dramatic by design. Anakin's a teenager in love with an adult, and he can't help but voice his feelings in the way teenagers sometimes do. Teenage love can be pretty unpleasant, sometimes. So I can somewhat see what's behind Anakin's lovelorn speechifying here, even if he comes off a bit too stalkerish. (Plus the simple fact that at one point he uses the same word twice in the same sentence -- "I wish I could just wish my feelings away!" I remember that line ringing horribly in my ear when I saw the movie at a midnight screening opening day.)

Where the scene starts to really go wrong, though, is Padme's response. She discourages him, yes; she tells him they shouldn't, that it's impossible, that she's a Senator and he's a Jedi...but she admits that there is something there. That's the crucial mistake. Lucas has Padme slamming on the brakes, when she shouldn't even be admitting to being on a ride in the first place. She should not even be aware of her burgeoning feelings for Anakin yet, much less admit their existence. And she absolutely should not seem to at least be partially open to the idea of keeping a relationship a secret. So, what should she have done?

She should have smacked him down, hard.

Yes, it would seem harsh and maybe even a bit mean, but it would also establish her as the clear mature person here; it would clarify Anakin's lack of maturity, so that over the remainder of the film he could be seen more clearly to have grown; it would make their love story more real by showing it to be more of a struggle and less of a pre-ordained drama to be acted out. It would establish Padme more as a strong character in her own right – we don't get nearly enough of a look at things from her point of view – and it would focus our sympathies on Anakin, which is where they should be. We need to be rooting for Anakin, which is hard when (a) he's being depicted as something of a crazy guy already, and (b) it's already being conceded that he's on his way to getting the girl.

So, it seems to me that the fireplace scene should go something like this:

Fire blazing in the hearth, ANAKIN and PADME sitting on the couch, looking at the flames.

PADME: You haven't said anything in a while.

ANAKIN: I just don't want this moment to end.

She meets his gaze, and he leans in to kiss her, but she turns her head away at the last second.

PADME: No, Annie. It was a mistake before, I can't let it happen again.

Silence as ANAKIN turns away and glowers. She makes no motion to comfort him.

PADME: You're still not saying anything.

ANAKIN: (angry) Anakin.

He looks at her.

ANAKIN: My name is Anakin. I was 'Annie' ten years ago, not now. Why can't you see me for who I am?

A silent moment....

ANAKIN: From the moment I met you, all those years ago, a day hasn't gone by when I haven't thought of you. And now that I'm with you again, I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over - my mouth goes dry. I feel
dizzy. I can't breathe. I'm haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. If you--

Finally Padme grows exasperated and stands up.

PADME: Stop it, Anakin. Can't you hear yourself? You live in a real world. Come back to it! You've been living a dream. How can I be "in your soul, tormenting you"? You barely know me, Anakin! I'm ten years older than you. Like it or not, you're still a Jedi Padawan, and I'm a former Queen and a Senator.

ANAKIN looks like he's been kicked in the gut. PADME shakes her head.

PADME: I see now that this was a mistake. I shouldn't have allowed the Jedi Council to assign you and Obi Wan to my protection. When this affair is over, I will speak with them.

She goes to leave the room, and stops at the door.

PADME: None of this was your fault, Anakin. But I'm not the person you've been dreaming about. No one is.

She exits, leaving a devastated ANAKIN to stare at nothing.

That's how the scene should have gone, I think. We know that Anakin's already in love with Padme, but she needs some time to get there, and a reason to get there. The reason the scene, as originally written and shot for the film, doesn't work is that if you're going to have a character acting weird, you need to have someone acknowledge that his behavior is weird. No one does that here, and it's damaging, as we can see that Anakin's love for Padme isn't the healthy kind.

And that's a good place to stop. Next time, we wrap up Obi Wan on Kamino and Anakin on Naboo. And I promise it won't be seven months until the next installment!

Notice....

Effective as of this post, I am turning on comment moderation for this blog. This means that all comments will be held until I am able to review them for publication. I do check e-mail fairly frequently throughout my day, but there it is. I hope this isn't too much of a pain in the arse, but many other blogs I read do it this way, with no wildly ill effects that I can see.

If anyone has a serious problem with this, well, you can always petition to get your money back.

Delurking Week continues!

Yup, it's Delurking Week here at Byzantium's Shores, so if anyone out there lurks but rarely comments, here's your chance to speak up! And thanks to those who have done so already. I like to know who's out there!

Slowest news day ever....

So I get up this morning, check the news, and see that Mark McGwire admitted using steroids in the 1990s when he was hitting all those home runs, and that Sarah Palin is now on FOX "News".

Yesterday may have been the least surprising news day in history.

Straw and Hay

Straw and Hay, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I made this dish for dinner a couple of nights ago, using a recipe from a Christmas-themed cookbook by the Frugal Gourmet. I'd always wanted to make it, but I always forgot about the recipe when not in the Holiday season, because that's the only time I tend to peruse this particular cookbook. (He gives the Straw and Hay recipe in honor of the donkey ridden by Mary to Bethlehem.) It's called "Straw and Hay" (Paglia e Fieno in Italian) by virtue of the two colors of pasta involved. I served it with a crusty garlic bread from The Store, and we loved it, although The Wife and I agree that next time, I should add shrimp.

Since I'm sure this cookbook is long out print, here's the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/4 cup olive oil
4 cloves minced garlic (or more, to taste -- I used more)
1/2 pound spinach linguine
1/2 pound regular linguine
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Salt, Pepper, and additional cheese to taste, when served

Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain (but do not rinse) and pour into large bowl.

While the pasta cooks: In a small frying pan, melt the butter, and then add in the olive oil. In this mixture saute the garlic for just a minute or so, until it's barely browned and the mixture becomes deeply fragrant. Pour the garlic mixture over the pasta in the serving bowl and add the 1/3 cup grated Parmesan. Toss to combine, and serve hot.

I added a small pinch of kosher salt to my own serving, plus quite a lot of black pepper. Next time, I'll add shrimp; what I suppose I'll do is throw in some cooked shrimp to saute when I add the garlic, which should just bring the shrimp up to a serving temperature. Diced Italian sausage might also be a good addition to this.

What I loved most about the dish was how simple and easy it is. I usually take my time cooking recipes that are new to me, and even so, from the time I put the pot of water on the stove to boil to the time we sat down to eat, about twenty minutes elapsed. That rocks!

It's Delurking Week!!!

I'm officially declaring this Delurking Week here at Byzantium's Shores. If you read but never comment (or rarely comment), go ahead and drop a line right here! I'd love to know who's out there. I'll be keeping this post at the top of the page for most of the week, so lurkers of the world, chime in!

Reboots: Yeah, I'm sick of 'em

According to AICN, Sony Pictures has failed to come to an agreement with the creative team behind the first three Spiderman movies on the making of a fourth, so the whole team is out and now they're planning to reboot the franchise.

Yup, another reboot.

Look, some "reboots" are fine -- Batman Begins and Casino Royale both brought fresh direction to their respective franchises. I suppose Star Trek did as well, although I'm less sold on that film than most. But geez, do we need to keep rebooting things? Rebooting seems to be less about creative direction now and more about marketing and money and so on. I know they don't call it "show business" for nothing, but I'm tired of the whole "Keeping franchises alive by rebooting" craze.

For this flick, will we have to watch Peter Parker get bitten by the spider again? Watch him learn about his new powers again? Lose Uncle Ben again? From the look of things, Sony really really really wants a Spiderman flick in 2011 and will do whatever it takes to get one. Oh well.

A Quiz of Questionable Politeness

I saw this quiz at SamuraiFrog's place. It's a bit more explicit than the kind of thing I usually do, but...well, it's a new year and all, so here goes.

1. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up?

Rush Limbaugh. Preferably when he's standing next to Sarah Palin and Joe Lieberman.

2. You can flip a switch that will wipe any band or musical artist out of existence. Which one will it be?

Wow, this isn't nice. Ye Gods! I wouldn't want to wipe anyone from existence, but there's a guy who does parody songs for WGR, the local sports-talk station, whom everybody but me thinks is funny. I'd like to make him stop.

3. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?

Joe Lieberman.

4. What is your favorite cheese?

We just went from punching people and blowing people up to...cheese. Strange quiz, this.

And really, doesn't the answer depend on what we're doing with it? There are times when cheddar is called for, and others when anything other than mozzarella is an affront to God.

5. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your immediate disposal. What kind will you make?

Right now? Is this the last sandwich I'll ever eat? OK, then: Cappicola on a toasted roll, with mayo, romaine lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and banana peppers.

If it's just a sandwich right now, PB&J will be fine, please. With a big glass of milk.

6. You have the opportunity to sleep with the movie celebrity of your choice. We are talking no-strings-attached sex and it can only happen once. Who is the lucky celebrity of your choice?

OK: exploding people to food and now to sex? And why should I assume that of any random tryst with a celebrity of my choice, the celebrity is the one who's lucky? I mean, my skills aren't exactly...oh jeez, there's just no way to finish this sentence well, is there? Zoe Saldana, then. (She's on the brain because I watched Star Trek last week with the kid.)

7. You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who do you pick?

Natalie MacMaster, I guess. Wow, this is getting to be a creepy quiz.

8. Now that you’ve slept with two different people in a row, you seem to be having an excellent day because you just came across a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Holy shit, a hundred bucks! How are you gonna spend it?

These days, I probably go the boring route and use it to load up on some groceries in the freezer, or maybe I pick up a power tool of some sort that I don't already have.

9. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?

London.

10. Upon arrival to the aforementioned location, you get off the plane and discover another hundred-dollar bill. Shit! Now that you are in the new location, what are you gonna do?

Rent a car and drive around to see stuff. Eat some of that wonderful English food.

11. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. It is…?

Captain Morgan.

12. Rufus appears out of nowhere with a time-traveling phone booth. You can go anytime in the PAST. What time are you traveling to and what are you going to do when you get there?

Dallas, November 22, 1963. Because I would just have to know.

13. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?

The Constitution of the United States.

14. You have been given the opportunity to create the half-hour TV show of your own design. What is it called and what’s the premise?

It's called Stupid People Getting Kicked in the Ass by Nathan Fillion. The premise is inherent in the title.

15.What is your favorite curse word?

Dumbass!



16.One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?

I start screaming like a little girl. (As if you wouldn't.)

17. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the item?

My laptop bag, which will naturally contain the laptop, my external hard drive, and my Flash drives.

18. The Angel of Death has descended upon you. Fortunately, the Angel of Death is pretty cool and in a good mood, and it offers you a half-hour to do whatever you want before you bite it. Whatcha gonna do in that half-hour?

Kick Death in the junk because he's been entirely too much of a pain in my ass the last five years.

19. You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What’s it gonna be?

Flight.

20. You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?

Is anything different about the time? Do I get to change anything? Or just observe? I'd like to watch my own wedding again.

21.You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

Telling The Daughter that her brother had died.

22. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! Bitchin’! What country are you going to live in now?

Canada.

23. This question still counts, even for those of you who are under age. Check it out. You have been eternally banned from every single bar in the world except for ONE. Which one is it gonna be?

Hmmmm. I don't get to bars much, and the ones I do go to have restaurants. I guess I'd want to be able to go to Danny's for the soup.

24. Hopefully you didn’t mention this in the super-powers question…. If you did, then we’ll just expand on that. Check it out… Suddenly, you have gained the ability to FLOAT!!! Whose house are you going to float to first, and be like “Dude, check it out…I can FLOAT!”?

What's the difference between "flight" and "floating"? Am I just bobbin' away in the air? That sounds stupid.

25. The constant absorption of magical moonbeams mixed with the radioactive vegetables you consumed earlier has given you the ability to resurrect the dead famous-person of your choice. So which celebrity will you bring back to life?

Carl Sagan.

26. The Celestial Gates of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person, etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?

This is so obvious, I won't even say it.

27. What’s your theme song?

"We Have All the Time in the World", Louis Armstrong.

Not sure about this quiz, to be honest. The questions seemed too weird for my tastes.

Sentential Links #193

And now we're back in the swing with this regular feature. Enjoy....

:: This entire decade has been pretty much end-to-end suck.

:: I once quit a job at a dollar movie theater when we were bought out by a larger chain that would require me to cut my hair to serve popcorn to the dregs of humanity. I wasn't willing to alter my appearance that drastically for minimum wage, in what I now realize was an asinine statement about me expressing my individuality. Ah, youth. I would go on to cut my hair about 2 years later on my own whim, basically after realizing that I can piss people off easier if I blend in among them. (Heh, I can relate -- I once interviewed with an outfit that does inventory for retail establishments that told me I'd have to cut my hair for the job, which started at $7 an hour and involved a lot of working overnight, when places were closed and therefore would involve absolutely no contact with anyone other than other people working for the same outfit. I didn't bother returning their calls for a second interview.)

:: I wasn't aware that being a rapist made you one half of an awesome scifi couple.

:: It is a recurrent irony of certain film artists' lives that upon their death, no matter what other accomplishments may have been theirs, if they won an Oscar the headline will read "Academy Award Winner Dies."

:: Beavers -- they're back! (I just love the ongoing sagas of the beavers and the ducks outside SDB's apartment building.)

:: Anyone could win all the money on Jeopardy every night if they wanted, because for each answer given on the show, there are an infinite number of technically correct questions.

:: I spent the morning wandering around the Southeast Lighthouse, which is so beautiful and so intense I almost felt like I was mainlining some awesome drug of choice.

:: Once again 6,000 people (my guess) came into Buffalo, spent money in our bars and hotels, and supported the Sabres by paying the ridiculous ticket prices from the box office ($237 a pop for seats in the 200’s or the 100-Level-I) and ordering $7 beer after $7 beer. And once again they went home with nothing but empty pockets and the stench of failure.

:: But I kept it up, clumsily, whether muse freed or fettered,
and now I have written a poem every day. (Awesome!)

And there we end for now....

Can we have Doctor Doom squaring off with Captain Hook?

I didn't really have a strong opinion of Disney's buyout of Marvel when it happened, but if the result looks this awesome, I'll be on board, pronto:



(via)

Creativity: I has it

SamuraiFrog saw fit to bestow upon me a "Creative Blogger" award of some sort, regarding "Creative Blogging". Hence the title. Wow, I can parse words! I is a reader!

Anyway, I tend to be awful about passing these kinds of things on, which I used to justify along the lines of "Crap, who has time for that?", but which I've come to see a bit as "Hmmmm, it's this kind of thing that used to make Blogistan really nifty, and maybe the passing of this kind of thing has helped make Blogistan a little less nifty." I mean, Blogistan's still cool and all, but it's come in recent years to resemble a bit that favorite store of yours that was All Kinds of Awesome when it opened, but now that it's been a few years, you still like to go in there, but maybe there's a little more open floorspace where there used to be merchandise, and maybe there's merchandise that doesn't appeal to you so much since the store is trying to attract those young kids with all the money, and so on. Kind of like Old Navy. (Shut up. I loved Old Navy when it first showed up. They weren't just Teeny Bopper heaven, they had stuff for people my size. And they had terrific overalls back in the day.)

Er...where was I? Oh yeah, the Creative Blogger award. I'm actually going to pass this one on, for once. You're supposed to hand it off to seven bloggers, but before you do that, you're supposed to reveal seven things about yourself. Of course, my problem with that last one is that after almost eight years of maintaining this blog, I'm almost out of stuff to "reveal" about myself, except for the stuff I have absolutely no intention of revealing. So I'm skipping that step.

But awarding to other bloggers? That, I can do!

:: Simple Tricks and Nonsense rocks because he and I are of pretty similar mind on an eerie degree of stuff, including our various pop culture remembrances. You gotta love a blogger who will put up a long post celebrating teevee shows like Tales of the Gold Monkey, that only lasted a single season twenty-eight years ago.

:: There are lots of comics-related blogs out there. Lots of 'em. Many are a lot of fun to read. Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep is one of my favorites. I love it when comics bloggers analyze entire issues of comics, sometimes panel by panel, illuminating the sheer goofiness of the whole thing.

:: Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish is probably what my blog would read like if I were smarter. And into home-brewing. (And delusional enough to live in Texas.)

:: Lynn Sislo's Violins and Starships has been a daily read of mine for...geez, I can't even remember when she found me or vice versa. She's curious about the world, smart, she likes SF, and she links all kinds of cool stuff.

:: Roger Green's Ramblin' with Roger is just that: a blog of rambling, and fine rambling it is, too. Lots of linkage and musing on life in this increasingly odd twenty-first century. And he posts every day!

:: Judith Heartsong has offered me a bunch of blogging awards over the years, more than a few of which I've failed to pass on, so here I return the favor. Her blog is almost entirely about being creative.

:: One of the most creative uses of a blog I've seen is my friend Robert Guttke's blog devoted to Philip B. Dedrick, a teacher who made a deeply powerful impression upon him. Blogging-as-memorial is a wonderful thing. He'll probably look askance at this type of award, but I do want to draw attention over there again.

Blogging and creativity should always walk together!

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: I would have figured that George Lucas's personal study was on this list of 10 places you can never enter.

:: If Star Wars characters were on Facebook.

:: One of my favorite recurring memes in Calvin and Hobbes was the way Calvin would give voice to his dark imagination in the form of the construction of snowmen, often times snowmen acting in horrible, horrible ways. Some folks then build them in real life, These are hilarious.

More next week!

Of goats and the men who gaze intently in their direction

Thanksgiving Day is a really nice day to go to a movie. We've seen both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace on T-giving in the last few years; this year, The Wife really wanted to see a movie, but there wasn't anything playing that I was really jazzed about. (Couldn't James Cameron have finished Avatar a few weeks earlier?) So, we settled on The Men Who Stare At Goats. It wasn't a great movie, by any means; in fact, it was a little frustrating, because it's fairly easy to see how they could have really elevated this material. But it's a slick, well-made, well-acted, and pretty funny little film. We enjoyed it.

I don't want to spoil too much about the story, but it interweaves flashbacks with "present day" stuff about a secret unit in the Army whose soldiers are trained in paranormal activities, like remote viewing, trying to pass through walls, and killing things simply by staring at them really intensely. (One of the test victims is a goat; hence the title.) Ewan McGregor is a reporter who gets turned on to this Army unit by a veteran; he files it away for future reference until he ends up in Kuwait in those hazy days post-Iraq War (or rather, during the War but post-"Mission Accomplished"), when he falls in with George Clooney, who is an actual member of the unit and who is on a mission to...well, that's never really made clear, and frankly, it's not that important anyway.

As McGregor journeys with Clooney across the Iraqi desert, Clooney fills him in on the history of the shadowy unit he serves. They call themselves "Jedi Knights", which is an in-joke that goes all the way through the movie and really wears out its welcome. In all honesty, I have no idea why the writers decided to call them "Jedi", because aside from that, there is no reference to Star Wars in the film, so the "Jedi" thing ends up being an odd kind of shorthand joke that we only laugh at because it sounds like we're supposed to laugh at it. (It doesn't really help the joke out to have Ewan McGregor say, "What's a Jedi?")

The film flashes by pretty quickly, and ultimately it's a light and fluffy piece of entertainment. I do wish the script had pushed the material farther; there's a lot of gold to be mined from the involvement of various world governments, including our own, in paranormal research and the attempted development of psi-weaponry during the Cold War era. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a perfectly fun little movie that seems to suggest, around its outlines, a much better movie to be made someday from similar material.

The Year of the Dark Side!

On New Year's Eve, we decided to do something we'd never done before: we went to downtown Buffalo for the annual Ball Drop and the ringing in of the New Year. Now, we've watched the Ball Drop on teevee a lot over the years; here in Buffalo, Channel 7 (our ABC affiliate) airs split-screen coverage of Buffalo's Ball Drop with the big one at Times Square, as part of New Year's Rockin' Eve.

Now, I can't lie -- judging by what we've seen on teevee, I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about being downtown for our Ball Drop. For one thing, it involves being pack in with lots of people. For another, we'd been out very late the night before (for our TSO concert) and I'd then had to get up very early the next morning for a project at The Store, with the Ball Drop obviously keeping us up past midnight. But the biggest factor in my ambivalence was the fact that the teevee coverage always makes the Ball Drop look, well, lame. As in, "serving platter covered with Christmas lights being lowered out an office building window on a string and an extension cord" lame. So I figured I'd be freakishly tired while I froze my arse off standing around a huge crush of people waiting to watch a chintzy ball of lights come down a building before shoving my way through the crowds to get home. Luckily I was off the next day, but still.

Well, wouldn't you know it -- the Ball Drop was a terrific time.

Our parking strategy was a good starting point. Instead of trying to park close to the event, we decided to park in a lot down at the foot of Main Street, right outside the vacant-for-the-night HSBC Arena, and then ride the Metro Rail to the Ball Drop location. The Ball drops down the front face of the Electric Tower, a beautiful old building in downtown whose top tiers are always illuminated white except for the holiday season when they're lit green, red, gold. This is what we saw as soon as we got off the Metro Rail train:



Swirling spotlights kept arcing over the building and into the air, sending those wonderful blue shafts of light into the winter sky. The snow was falling, but the flakes were big and fluffy, there was no breeze to speak of, and the temperature was just cold enough that we could stand there for a little over an hour without wanting to kill ourselves. (Still, a roving hot chocolate vendor or two wouldn't have been a bad idea.)

Here's the view from the vantage point we set up for ourselves:



The Ball itself was a lot nicer looking than what we see on teevee: a glittering globe, completely covered with lights that were swirling and spiraling and generally looking all, well, glittery. We got there at about 11:00, so we had to stand in one place for the remaining hour. But that hour went pretty quickly, because there was a lot of entertainment on the stage there, at the foot of the building: trivia contests, appearances by Buffalo Sabres, the Mayor receiving what I couldn't discern to be either a cheer or a lusty boo, more trivia, lots of fun music, and then the final song of 2009. It was "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, which is, frankly, a song I could live without hearing again for a good long time.

But anyway, the final minute of 2009 came at last, and during the last fifteen seconds of the year, the Ball began to descend:



And at last, we were into 2010!



More music, lots of cheering and kissing. The third song of 2010 the deejays of the night chose was "ABC" by the Jackson Five (at which every single black person around us started dancing). Then we followed some of the dispersing crowd out of the area, walking down Main Street until we got to the next Metro Rail station, where we caught the next train and rode it back down to our parking spot. It took us half as much time to get home from the Ball Drop as it had the night before from the TSO concert.

One final postscript. The Daughter loves stuff that either glows or lights up, so whenever we're at a function that takes place at night, we'll almost always have to go to one of the inevitable street vendors who are selling such wares -- glow necklaces, glow sticks, light-up hats, et cetera -- and get something. She chose this thing that was clearly a knock-off of a lightsaber, even though it's incredibly chintzy and cheaply made, so much so that the guy could have hawked them for two bucks and made a profit. (Which is no doubt why he was hawking them for eight bucks each. I'm so easy.)

So The Kid came from from New Year's with a toy lightsaber, whose siren call I managed to disregard for over a week. Yup, I made it a week.

Until last night, when I finally gave into the temptation.



Wow, the Dark Side is more seductive!

Camels and elephants and fakirs, oh my!

I haven't read enough Michael Chabon to count him among my favorite authors, but I do hold him in fairly high regard, ever since I read The Amazing Adventures and Kavalier and Clay some years back. (Way back, it turns out; I blogged about the book during this blog's infant months, in July of 2002. Wow.) I've read a few of his short stories and admired them greatly, and I've enjoyed some of his essays and...that's about it. Chabon's one of those authors who is pretty much permanently on my "Hmmm, I need to read him more" list. (I've owned a copy of Summerland for four years now and not got round to reading it. Maybe when I finish the book I'm reading now.)

Anyhow, I recently read Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure. This is a straight-forward adventure story that was apparently originally published in serial form (in the New York Times Magazine). While the jacket copy cites influences such as Dumas and Fritz Leiber, I found it a bit reminiscent myself of Rudyard Kipling, albeit not of the "Competent Brit against the heathen hordes" variety. Our heroes are two Jewish rogues, a thin taciturn fellow named Zelikman and a more gregarious -- and large -- man named Amram. These two have been together for some time, traveling the roads of tenth century Asia, when they are somehow pressed into the service of escorting a prince of the Khazar Empire, who intends to return home and retake his rightful throne from a usurper. Clearly, Zelikman and Amram are more interested in simply escorting the prince wherever, getting paid, and leaving, but in the grand tradition of all such rogues, they are pulled into the rebellion, whether they like it or not.

The book is pretty light reading, and it's pleasantly brief; after a steady diet lately of big thick novels, be they SF or fantasy, it was nice to be able to toss off a nice, short and sweet adventure yarn that is still written by one of the best writers working today. Chabon's prose here feels slightly antiquated, which is perfectly in keeping with the kind of story he's telling here, and the characters still manage to leap off the page to a good degree. I also enjoyed the clever chapter titles, such as "On the Observance of the Fourth Commandment Among Horse Thieves" and "On the Melancholy Duty of Soldiers to Contend with the Messes Left by Kings".

Perhaps the best summation of Gentlemen of the Road is provided by Chabon himself, in the first sentence of his Afterword: "The original -- and in my heart the true -- title of the short novel you hold in your hands was Jews with Swords." That, in its wonderfully odd way, says it all. Recommended.

Uncle George!

George Lucas appeared on The Daily Show the other day:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
George Lucas
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Nice little interview, although Jon Stewart commits the usual error at the beginning by assuming that for some reason, Darth Vader is going to be spending lots of time on Tatooine after he becomes Emperor Palpatine's right-hand man. Seems more logical to me that chasing down Leia at the beginning of A New Hope is the first time he even gets near his old stomping ground after he buries his mother way back in Attack of the Clones....

Something for Thursday

And another prodigal regular feature round these parts returns. I may have used this before, but it's utterly gorgeous and I can reuse stuff whenever I want. Here is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing "Shenandoah".



This recording was fascinatingly used by Oliver Stone during the closing cast credits for his film Nixon...but I first heard it in the hands of my own college choir during my freshman year.

100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know

This is a first here at Byzantium's Shores: a post that arises because of something I saw on my Twitter feed. Specifically, it's a list of 100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know. Well, there's a fine old Interweb tradition with such lists. I'm going to reproduce the list as follows: bold for quotes I not only recognize but can cite by the character who says it (if it's a line of dialogue), and italic for quotes I recognize by source but can't recall who said it. All others will be left as-is. I'm also removing the source attributions from each one, so you can play along!

1. “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

2. “Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone, nine for the mortal men doomed to die, one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring the bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.”

3. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

4. “Spock. This child is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now, what do you suggest we do….spank it?”

5. “With great power there must also come — great responsibility.”

6. “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.”

7. “Five card stud, nothing wild. And the sky’s the limit”

8. “If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want… Well, that’s where you’re right. But - and I am only saying that because I care - there’s a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.”

9. “We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog.”

10. “If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer.”

11. “I’m going to give you a little advice. There’s a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.”

12. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

13. “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”

14. “Bill, strange things are afoot at the Circle K.”

15. “Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.”

16. “Didja ever look at a dollar bill, man? There’s some spooky shit goin’ on there. And it’s green too.”

17. “Alright, alright alright.”

18. “Heya, Tom’, it’s Bob from the office down the hall. Good to see you, buddy; how’ve you been? Things have been alright for me except that I’m a zombie now. I really wish you’d let us in.”

19. “Never argue with the data.”

20. “Oooh right, it’s actually quite a funny story once you get past all the tragic elements and the over-riding sense of doom.”

21. “Fantastic!”

22. “I must not fear. / Fear is the mind-killer. / Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. / I will face my fear. / I will permit it to pass over me and through me. / And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see
its path. / Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. / Only I will remain.”

23. “This is the way society functions. Aren’t you a part of society?”

24. “Okay. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn… call the president.”

25. “No matter where you go, there you are. ”

26. “Do you know of the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.”

27. “Ray, if someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”

28. “Greetings, programs!” -Flynn, TRON

29. “I guess you picked the wrong god-damned rec room to break into, didn’t you?!”

30. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

31. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

32. “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

33. “It’s a moral imperative.”

34. “Talk with your mouth full / bite the hand that feeds you / bite off more than you can chew / dare to be stupid”

35. “Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.”

36. “This episode was BADLY written!”

37. “Worst. Episode. Ever.”

38. “Goonies never say die.”

39. “Nothing shocks me–I’m a scientist.”

40. “Bright light! Bright light!”

41. “The Road goes ever on and on/Down from the door where it began/Now far ahead the Road has gone/And I must follow, if I can/Pursuing it with eager feet/Until it joins some larger way/Where many paths and errands meet/And whither then? I cannot say.”

42. “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”

43. “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

44. “Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?”

45. “Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight blob of grease!”

46. “I’d just as soon kiss a wookiee!”

47. “But one thing’s sure: Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.”

48. “I know kung fu.”

49. “This is your receipt for your husband… and this is my receipt for your receipt.”

50. “Your soul-suckin’ days are over, amigo!”

51. “I don’t believe there’s a power in the ‘verse that can stop Kaylee from being cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct-tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.”

52. “Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?”

53. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”

54. “There is no Earthly way of knowing… which direction we are going. There is no knowing where we’re rowing, or which way the river’s flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a’blowing? Not a speck of light is showing so the danger much be growing. Are the fires of hell a’glowing? Is the grisley reaper mowing? YES! The danger must be growing for the rowers keep on rowing AND THEY’RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING ANY SIGNS THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!!”

55. “Time…to die.”

56. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”

57. “Check, please.”

58. “So say we all.”

59. “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.”

60. “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.”

61. “No matter what you hear in there, no matter how cruelly I beg you, no matter how terribly I may scream, do not open this door or you will undo everything I have worked for.”

62. “Ahh, a bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker.”

63. “He’s dead, Jim.”

64. “Who’s gonna turn down a Junior Mint? It’s chocolate, it’s peppermint - it’s delicious!”

65. “Bring out your dead.”

66. “My name is Inigo Montoyo. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”

67. “Why a duck? Why-a no chicken?”

68. “Redrum.”

69. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."

70. “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

71. “Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

72. “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

73. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

74. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

75. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

76. “You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh, damn you! Damn you all to hell!”

77. “Klaatu barada nikto.”

78. “Monsters from the Id.”

79. “ET phone home.”

80. “What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

81. “We thought you was a toad!” - Delmar, O Brother Where Art Thou?

82. “Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!”

83. “You don’t have to be a gun.”

84. “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!”

85. “Yeah, well. The Dude abides.”

86. “All things serve the beam.”

87. “You can’t fool me! There ain’t no Sanity Clause!”

88. “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

89. “And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…"

90. “Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.”

91. “Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.”

92. “Gimme some sugar, baby.”

93. “Well hello Mister Fancypants. Well, I’ve got news for you pal, you ain’t leadin’ but two things, right now: Jack and sh*t… and Jack left town.”

94. “Kneel before Zod.”

95. “Shall we play a game?”

96. “Daddy would have gotten us Uzis.”

97. “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.” “Hit it!”

98. “Make it so” / “Engage”

99. “Ya Ta!”

100. “End Of Line”

Fun stuff!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

OK, I let this feature slide through the holidays, but now we're back in the swing, so: for those of you who read Funky Winkerbean, do you read each individual strip as a joke, or do you tend to scrutinize each individual installment as some kind of set-up for a future downbeat turn of events and see a depressing subtext everywhere in the strip?

Why HDTV was invented

Back when we first got our flatscreen HD television, a bit less than a year ago, everybody told me that two things justified the purchase: movies, and televised sports. Now, with movies, this is clearly the case. Sports, I suppose; the only sport I watch much at all anymore is football, and it certainly does look better in HD, especially in a widescreen format so when the players are lining up, I can even see what the safeties are up to. (With the Bills, they're usually gesturing back and forth to see if the other knows where he should be, and then falling back as deeply as possible so as to allow opposing receivers to get ten yards of forward progress before they're even touched.)

Well, there's another reason. As is our New Year's tradition here at Casa Jaquandor, we watched the Great Performances PBS telecast of the annual New Year's From Vienna concert on New Year's night, as we've done for years. (I actually started watching this concert while I was in high school.) The concert -- performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under a different guest conductor each year -- is always accompanied by wonderful photography and dance in and around various locations in Vienna, relating to the history of that great city and of Austria during the time of the Strauss family. It's always been a gorgeous thing to watch, but this year was the first time we got to watch the concert in HD, and it was more than gorgeous: it was revelatory. Details from the Musikverein and the other locales just burst from the screen. The telecast was just amazingly beautiful, in a way I'd never appreciated before in the more than twenty years I've been watching this concert every year.

The musical part of the performance, by the way, was first rate in every way. The conductor was Frenchman Georges Pretre, and he made the effervescent elegance of the Strauss music shine forth so amazingly that the notes themselves seemed to sparkle. How I wish I could attend this concert in person, just one time! Here are two of the numbers from that concert, the most famous final two encores. I was unable to find a video of the first that includes the wonderful tradition in which the first notes are interrupted by applause, prompting the conductor to address the audience with a brief New Year's message, but the music itself is the thing. Here is On the Beautiful Blue Danube, accompanied this year not by ballet dancers but with a photographic journey along the Danube from its source to its mouth at the Black Sea:



And here's the final encore, by tradition the final piece played every year. Also traditional is the rhythmic clapping, directed to loudness or softness by the conductor. The Radetzky March:



Just wonderful music making.

NOOOOOO!!!

NOOOOOO!!!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

As I noted recently, we got a Wii for Christmas. The Daughter has taken to it like a fish to water, while I've taken to it like...well, not so well. The game we play most often is Super Mario Brothers, on which The Daughter is progressing nicely, while I put poor Mario through debilitating death after death, grisly demise after demise, and sad fate after fate.

Lots of times I can see Mario's shuffling from the mortal coil coming a mile away as I scramble to avoid various pitfalls and nemeses, but then there are the times in which the Smiting of Mario takes me completely by surprise. In those moments, I look like the photo above. Ouch. Poor Mario!

Not a Siberian in the bunch....

TSO Buffalo '09 IX, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Last week, we attended one of the two performances staged here every year by the Trans Siberian Orchestra. If you haven't heard them, well, they're an odd mixture of classical music, traditional Christmas music, and arena rock. Electric guitars are joined by electric violinists and synthesizer artists and a drum set the size of Poughkeepsie, all fronted by a series of vocalists who all tend to sound like Meat Loaf after smoking a carton of Marlboro's.

You wouldn't think that this kind of thing could possibly work, but somehow it does, even though it is occasionally very odd. It ends up being a lot of fun, though. We like their music a lot, and the show was a great time, even if it started about twenty-five minutes late and ran a lot longer than we expected (it ended just before 11:00 pm, and we didn't get home until midnight).

One funny thing came after the first set, when one of the leaders stepped forward to introduce the members of the band. One of the group's founding members was there; he's from Buffalo. Two others that night were from Binghamton and Horseheads, both towns in the Southern Tier of New York, about three hours away. There's always a local connection, isn't there?

(The TSO has two touring groups, splitting the band's members equally, which is how they're able to have shows in so many cities in so short a time.)

I'm not sure we'll go see them every year, but we'll absolutely go again. I wanted to see lasers and fire and bright lights and rock band pyrotechnics, and I got all of those and more!

Sentential Links, postponed yet again

OK, folks, we'll be back with this feature next week. For real. Take it to the bank. Or take it somewhere. You know.

I'm now a Twit.

Yeah, I'm using Twitter now. God help us all. If you want to follow me, the user name is "Jaquandor", obviously. If you don't want to follow me, then...do nothing. I have no idea how much I'll use the bloody thing, but we'll see. I'm the kind of person who can't even say "Hello" in 140 characters or less, so....

Time for help from the techs again....

OK, folks, here's what's going on with The Main Computer here at Casa Jaquandor. I think I've written about this before.

Some time ago I replaced the CPU cooling fan, because the original one was rattling. Problem solved...except shortly thereafter, the computer started doing this thing where the case fan (our computer only has one case fan) would sometimes rev up to full speed, becoming very loud. It tended to do this in times of heavy load, such as during some of The Daughter's games and when we'd use a screensaver that uses the 3D graphics that our graphics card generates.

However, the problem got worse until the computer started randomly rebooting suddenly, often in the middle of one of the kid's games. This rendered many of her favorite games (Wizard 101 being the biggie here) unplayable. After researching, I concluded that the problem was the power supply, which I replaced last week. Unfortunately, the problems continued, which leads me to believe that the power supply wasn't a problem at all. Oh well; now I own a 650-watt power supply.

Doing further research, my current hypothesis is that the CPU is getting too hot when under heavy load like that and shutting down to protect itself. Fair enough, except I'd installed that nifty new CPU cooler that was working just fine. But, it turned out that I never replaced the thermal conductive grease that you're supposed to apply between the CPU and the cooler. So I got a tube of that stuff (it's only ten bucks), applied it, and then got the computer running.

The news was a bit encouraging, in that The Kid was able to play Wizard 101 for about thirty minutes before it caused the computer to reboot. In the meantime, the case fan was revved up to its full -- and loud -- speed the entire time she played. This leads me to believe that my working hypothesis involving CPU overheating is correct, but I'm unsure about how to proceed. I did read somewhere that thermal greases take a little time to "burn in", so they're not as conductive at first as they are after a while in position, so maybe the problem will go away? Or do I need to figure out some other way to further cool the thing? I know that case fans aren't expensive, but I'm unsure as to where I'd install one, as the back of the computer only seems to have an opening for one fan.

The other wrinkle is that a secondary problem has opened up: some important file has apparently become corrupted in such a way that the computer's optical disk drive no longer works. This is, obviously, bad, and I'm not sure of any way to address this other than simply reinstalling Windows. That would be more of a nuisance than anything -- I keep our content backed up religiously -- but I'm wondering if there's any chance that reinstalling Windows might help out the heating problem as well.

Does any of this make sense to any techies out there? Or am I chasing wild geese and would be better off just turning the machine over to the Geek Squad?

Sunday Burst of Weirdness (and Linkage)

Oddities abound! But first, a bit of interesting (to me) and un-weird linkage.

:: Apparently the song "Same Old Lang Syne" by Dan Fogelberg has become a Christmas staple, even though the song doesn't really have much at all to do with Christmas aside from the song's setting at Christmas time, and the quote of "Auld Lang Syne" at the very end. The song tells the story of how the narrator (Fogelberg) ran into an old lover, purely by chance, in a convenience store one Christmas Eve, and then spent an hour or two with her, reminiscing on their time together, before parting again. I don't recall hearing it much before this year's Christmas season, when I heard it quite a bit. I think it's a very fine song, wonderfully effective with poignant and poetic lyrics. Here's the song:



What I found interesting about this song is that it's true, and after Fogelberg's death some years ago, the woman in the song came forward. It's a fascinating story.

:: Yes, I do use some of these quotes in regular everyday conversation.

:: Oh, come on!

More next week, hopefully...yeah, probably. Sure, why not.

Ixnay on the Ad-picks-bay!

The other day, the Buffalo Bills held a hastily-called news conference to announce the hiring of their new General Manager: a guy named Buddy Nix, who was promoted from national scout to GM for the team. After everyone in Buffalo -- and I mean everyone -- agreed that what the team needs first and foremost is a good football person to take over the reins of the never-ending rebuilding project, the selection of Nix was billed as just that. But the reaction in Bills-land has been a pretty resounding "Meh". Jerry Sullivan's column from the other day is pretty representative of the negative reaction, while positive reaction has generally been of the "Well, they could have done worse" variety. I haven't heard anyone who is really excited by Nix's hiring.

To me, the least interesting of the objections to Nix are the ones related to his age (he's 70) and his experience until now. I tend to think that if we can generally think of men in their 70s as being qualified to be President of the United States, Supreme Court Justices, or United States Senators, then surely a man in his 70s can run an NFL team. (So can women in their 70s, for that matter.) Not interested in the age argument. Nor am I much convinced by its parallel argument, that hey, since he's 70, shouldn't he have become a GM way before this? If Nix had been toiling as a scout for three or four decades and was only now getting his shot at being GM, that would be one thing, but he's only been in the NFL scouting scene since 1993, when he left a long college coaching career for an NFL scouting career. Seventeen years of scouting in the NFL, rising up the ranks of two organizations in the process, doesn't strike me as an unreasonable amount of experience for a first-time General Manager. Just looking at one other notable example, Scott Pioli is finishing his first season as an NFL GM in Kansas City; his prior scouting and front-office career with several organizations (most notably the Patriots) started in 1992. So I'm fine with Nix's level of experience.

I'm also fine with Nix's resume. He worked in Buffalo through the mid and late 1990s, when the team was still good and was still drafting good players. Then he went to San Diego at the beginning of this decade, as the Chargers began to build into one of the NFL's better teams. (I have a feeling the Chargers will end up as this era's best team to not make the Super Bowl.) Now he's back in Buffalo -- actually, he was back last year as a National Scout. The first draft since his return, the 2009 draft, was actually not a bad draft at all and may turn out pretty good in the end, especially if Aaron Maybin develops over the offseason into a good player. Nix has the pedigree you want in a GM: he's been with two organizations for a long time each, during their good years.

The more compelling argument against Nix is the nature of the apparent search the Bills made for their GM. They didn't wait to interview candidates from other organizations (which you're only allowed to do when the season is over); from all appearances, they interviewed exactly two people: Nix and current Bills Director of Pro Personnel John Guy, who "happens to be black", thus satisfying the NFL's requirement that all teams interview minority candidates when hiring. The argument is that the Bills didn't cast a wide net at all; instead they went with someone in house, someone safe and comfortable. Maybe. We'll see.

I do think that Nix represents an upgrade over the previous football regime here. Obviously the results will tell the tale and the results won't be in for a few years, but as long as Nix isn't the type of guy to keep John McCargo around (or trade back up into the first round to pick him), maybe the team will be on the rise soon. Let's see what happens when he hires a coach.

Sinking the teeth in....

Well, I didn't really plan to drop out of sight completely during the week between Christmas and New Year's, but that's pretty much what happened, isn't it? Oh well. Nothing major, but The Wife was on vacation and we did other stuff that I'll write about later. Regular blogging rhythm should resume quite soon, though. Yay!

Make sure to check out my "2009 Summation" posts, just below this one. I actually posted them on the first and second, respectively, but backdated them to 12-31-09, so they'd group in the archives with the December posts.

On to 2010!