From here, a weekly quiz:
1. Tell us about the last time that you got hurt in the arena of love.
I got a bad case of turf toe there. Ugh! (Seriously, if we're talking "romantic" love, it's been a long time, as I've been "off the market" since 1991. Which seems weird to me, because before she came along, I sometimes thought I'd never get "off the market".)
2. Have you ever been part of the wedding party, other than your own?
Nope. The Wife has, but I have not. I'm not sure the people in my life now who would be most likely to put me in their wedding party are themselves likely to be getting married any time in the foreseeable future, so I may live my life without ever giving the toast at a wedding. Which is a shame, because I could come up with a good one, I'll wager!
3. Let's say you find yourself in Hell after you die. Think about everyone you've known in your life. Who would be the one person that would least likely to surprise you by being in Hell with you?
Yeesh! Maybe that jerk-off who pushed me off my bike in seventh grade, breaking my collar bone. Ohhhh, if I ever find myself in his company again....
4. What brings you good luck?
The UPS man. He delivers tools when we order them through our supplier at work.
5. Do you have a photo blog? If so, feel free to share the link with us!
Not a "photo blog" per se, but there is my Flickr photostream, which is full of photo-y goodness.
6. What is your biggest source of news? (Internet? Newspaper? Television? Radio? The Daily Show? Other?)
The Interweb and the Buffalo News, mostly. Although the BuffNews is pissing me off of late.
7. What's the hottest you've ever been in your life?
I think there was one 100-degree day when we lived in Portland last, back in 1980 or 1981. One thing I like about Buffalo is that it's never hit 100; in fact, we don't even hit 90 all that often. People who happily bask in hot weather are people who should be watched carefully by psychiatric professionals, because that kind of thinking just isn't right.
8. If you had to choose a theme song for your blog, which would would you choose and why?
The theme to Star Wars! Or The Lord of the Rings.
9. Who was the last person you had an online conversation with that you've never met or talked to on your phone?
Probably Belladonna of Mind-muffins, whom I now track via e-mail and Facebook more than blogging. She and I have similar attitudes on a lot of stuff (although she doesn't care for ABBA, which I find highly odd!).
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Carpenterizin'
Occasionally at work I get to do some carpentry by myself. Now, I'm really pretty green as far as carpentry goes, but I'm learning as quickly as I can given that my only real opportunities to practice come at work (but when we get a house, hoo boy, then it's Carpentry Central!). When there are big projects to do -- building of cabinets, for instance -- I tend to wait until one of the more experienced carpenters in the company division is in residence, and then I pay as much attention as possible whilst helping. On simpler jobs, though, I go at it myself. Two weeks ago I had to build three of those A-frame type signs, which were intended for display along the street during special events.
A-frames aren't hard to make, really -- just time-consuming, as they involve quite a bit of cutting and joining. I had to cut six 3*5 sections of plywood out of full-sized, 4*8 sheets, using my circular saw:
My weapon there is a fairly cheap Ryobi saw, which gets the job done for my purposes. If and when I get more serious about this stuff, I may upgrade to a higher quality saw, but for now, this one's just fine for me. (Although, when I bought it a couple of years ago, the first thing I did was to replace the enclosed blade with a better one, a blade that had twice the number of teeth and a thinner kerf to boot.)
The 3*5 plywood sheets were for the faces of the signs; I built the frames themselves out of 2*4s which I cut down to proper sizes using a miter saw. I then joined the 2*4s together using one of my favorite gizmos, my pocket-hole jig. Pocket-hole joining is amazing to me: not only do they result in strong joints, but they're amazingly easy to do. Here's the jig in action:
You just clamp your workpiece in the jig and then use the bit that comes with the jig to drill your pocket holes. Then, afterwards, you simply drive your screws through the pocket holes into the piece you're joining to the pre-drilled piece, and everything gets pulled together really nicely. I love the pocket-hole jig. Long live the pocket-hole jig!
Unfortunately, I didn't think to actually take photos of my finished signs, so imagine they look kinda like this, but with better carpentry and no skateboard dude.
A-frames aren't hard to make, really -- just time-consuming, as they involve quite a bit of cutting and joining. I had to cut six 3*5 sections of plywood out of full-sized, 4*8 sheets, using my circular saw:
My weapon there is a fairly cheap Ryobi saw, which gets the job done for my purposes. If and when I get more serious about this stuff, I may upgrade to a higher quality saw, but for now, this one's just fine for me. (Although, when I bought it a couple of years ago, the first thing I did was to replace the enclosed blade with a better one, a blade that had twice the number of teeth and a thinner kerf to boot.)
The 3*5 plywood sheets were for the faces of the signs; I built the frames themselves out of 2*4s which I cut down to proper sizes using a miter saw. I then joined the 2*4s together using one of my favorite gizmos, my pocket-hole jig. Pocket-hole joining is amazing to me: not only do they result in strong joints, but they're amazingly easy to do. Here's the jig in action:
You just clamp your workpiece in the jig and then use the bit that comes with the jig to drill your pocket holes. Then, afterwards, you simply drive your screws through the pocket holes into the piece you're joining to the pre-drilled piece, and everything gets pulled together really nicely. I love the pocket-hole jig. Long live the pocket-hole jig!
Unfortunately, I didn't think to actually take photos of my finished signs, so imagine they look kinda like this, but with better carpentry and no skateboard dude.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Something for Thursday Friday
[Sorry, folks, but I had an unplanned hiatus from blogging, just because it's hot and unpleasant and I just didn't feel much like blogging.]
[Oh, and now I've edited the post after originally posting it. Sorry.]
I've mentioned the music camp I attended as a high school student, and was later employed by as a counselor. There were a number of ensembles for students: a full orchestra, a string orchestra, a small vocal group, a full chorus, two jazz bands, and two concert bands (one for junior high kids and one for high schoolers). Being there for two weeks was always a heady time -- you're away from home without parents, for possibly the first time in your life, and you're working very hard on music, probably harder than you've ever worked in your life. And...well, there are girls there. Yes, I had a few crushes there myself. No, I won't tell you about them! (Let's just say that in high school, my skills with the Fairer of the Genders were, shall we say, less than smooth. Luckily, I got to college and perfected my powers of hypnosis, which is how I managed to convince a certain girl there that I wasn't totally crazy. By the time she figured this out, it was too late! We were already married! HA!)
I had some passing familiarity with music camps from my sister's experiences with them when she'd been in high school some years before. Her music camps were always in college settings; campers stayed in dorms and performed in auditoriums. My camp, however -- called the Bristol Hills Music Camp -- was your canonical summer camp, located out in the woods. The land and the buildings were owned by the 4-H people. The camp was located in the hills above Canandaigua Lake, south of Rochester, NY. We lived in cabins, and were cautioned each year to make sure our bags of chips and candy bars and whatnot were secured lest the raccoons get them. The concerts were given in the main lodge, and outside the front door of the main lodge was this view. You know those stereotypical summer camp bonfires where the campers all gather to sing "Kumbaya"? We did that. For real. Sounds cheesy, but when you actually do it, it's awesome. And each night ended with an hour-long "mixer", at which there were games, refreshments, and dancing. The big thing there was doing the "Time Warp", from Rocky Horror. Everybody came sprinting for the dance floor when that came over the speakers.
Another memory? They'd get a couple of local bands once or twice each year to play a full-fledged dance. One band was awful -- those guys never came again -- but there was another band that played every year, fronted by one of the camp's actual faculty members and featuring a lead singer who looked like she belonged behind the counter at a truck stop diner. Her voice was lower than mine, but man, that crusty broad rocked. (I know, "crusty broad" isn't a flattering term, but it's what she was, and she was totally proud of it.) One year, they brought in a different band to play, and they were actually pretty good -- except that on this night, there was a total lunar eclipse that nobody had known was going to happen beforehand. As the moon faded from view, every camper ditched the band inside to watch the moon outside. I always felt a little bit bad for that band -- I hope somebody told them what was going on and that the kids weren't exiting the hall because they sucked. (I was actually the first person to notice the little brown spot on the edge of the moon that heralds the beginning of an eclipse, huzzah!)
Oh, and for some reason, I spent two years at that camp wearing a fedora. I have no idea why. Overalls, no. Fedora? Yup.
But the music? We played some amazing music there. The first time I sat down in my seat for the first concert band rehearsal, I was in something of a state of awe. It was the biggest ensemble I'd ever been part of. I'd never been a part of a group capable of producing that much sound before. It was just amazing. Over two weeks, we'd prepare one fifteen-minute-long program each week, to be performed at the concert at the end of the week. (I think the camp only operates one week now, which is a shame. Those two-week-long camps were extraordinary.) Each week would be under the direction of one of two different conductors; the first tended to gorgeous, Romantic works full of lots of melody, while the second tended to more cerebral -- but equally awesome -- works. (This second guy would, after a few years, start bringing in his own compositions, which I always enjoyed playing.) Music-making at a summer camp in the woods was just amazing; who else but a bunch of music geeks would, while rehearsing Sousa's Liberty Bell March, would discover that the steel pillars supporting the ceiling of the Main Lodge produced a perfect B-flat, and thus decide to station a percussion player right by that pole, armed with a mallet?
I wish I could remember every piece we played there, but sadly I can't. But several have stuck with me, including this set of variations on "Simple Gifts". Here's Chorale and Shaker Dance by John Zdechlik.
[Oh, and now I've edited the post after originally posting it. Sorry.]
I've mentioned the music camp I attended as a high school student, and was later employed by as a counselor. There were a number of ensembles for students: a full orchestra, a string orchestra, a small vocal group, a full chorus, two jazz bands, and two concert bands (one for junior high kids and one for high schoolers). Being there for two weeks was always a heady time -- you're away from home without parents, for possibly the first time in your life, and you're working very hard on music, probably harder than you've ever worked in your life. And...well, there are girls there. Yes, I had a few crushes there myself. No, I won't tell you about them! (Let's just say that in high school, my skills with the Fairer of the Genders were, shall we say, less than smooth. Luckily, I got to college and perfected my powers of hypnosis, which is how I managed to convince a certain girl there that I wasn't totally crazy. By the time she figured this out, it was too late! We were already married! HA!)
I had some passing familiarity with music camps from my sister's experiences with them when she'd been in high school some years before. Her music camps were always in college settings; campers stayed in dorms and performed in auditoriums. My camp, however -- called the Bristol Hills Music Camp -- was your canonical summer camp, located out in the woods. The land and the buildings were owned by the 4-H people. The camp was located in the hills above Canandaigua Lake, south of Rochester, NY. We lived in cabins, and were cautioned each year to make sure our bags of chips and candy bars and whatnot were secured lest the raccoons get them. The concerts were given in the main lodge, and outside the front door of the main lodge was this view. You know those stereotypical summer camp bonfires where the campers all gather to sing "Kumbaya"? We did that. For real. Sounds cheesy, but when you actually do it, it's awesome. And each night ended with an hour-long "mixer", at which there were games, refreshments, and dancing. The big thing there was doing the "Time Warp", from Rocky Horror. Everybody came sprinting for the dance floor when that came over the speakers.
Another memory? They'd get a couple of local bands once or twice each year to play a full-fledged dance. One band was awful -- those guys never came again -- but there was another band that played every year, fronted by one of the camp's actual faculty members and featuring a lead singer who looked like she belonged behind the counter at a truck stop diner. Her voice was lower than mine, but man, that crusty broad rocked. (I know, "crusty broad" isn't a flattering term, but it's what she was, and she was totally proud of it.) One year, they brought in a different band to play, and they were actually pretty good -- except that on this night, there was a total lunar eclipse that nobody had known was going to happen beforehand. As the moon faded from view, every camper ditched the band inside to watch the moon outside. I always felt a little bit bad for that band -- I hope somebody told them what was going on and that the kids weren't exiting the hall because they sucked. (I was actually the first person to notice the little brown spot on the edge of the moon that heralds the beginning of an eclipse, huzzah!)
Oh, and for some reason, I spent two years at that camp wearing a fedora. I have no idea why. Overalls, no. Fedora? Yup.
But the music? We played some amazing music there. The first time I sat down in my seat for the first concert band rehearsal, I was in something of a state of awe. It was the biggest ensemble I'd ever been part of. I'd never been a part of a group capable of producing that much sound before. It was just amazing. Over two weeks, we'd prepare one fifteen-minute-long program each week, to be performed at the concert at the end of the week. (I think the camp only operates one week now, which is a shame. Those two-week-long camps were extraordinary.) Each week would be under the direction of one of two different conductors; the first tended to gorgeous, Romantic works full of lots of melody, while the second tended to more cerebral -- but equally awesome -- works. (This second guy would, after a few years, start bringing in his own compositions, which I always enjoyed playing.) Music-making at a summer camp in the woods was just amazing; who else but a bunch of music geeks would, while rehearsing Sousa's Liberty Bell March, would discover that the steel pillars supporting the ceiling of the Main Lodge produced a perfect B-flat, and thus decide to station a percussion player right by that pole, armed with a mallet?
I wish I could remember every piece we played there, but sadly I can't. But several have stuck with me, including this set of variations on "Simple Gifts". Here's Chorale and Shaker Dance by John Zdechlik.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
"Somebody shoot this prick!"
During my college years, my mates and I would have "Movie Nights" on a pretty regular basis. Almost weekly, actually. This consisted generally of movies, pizza, and beer. Worse ways to spend a night, huh?
One of our common staples in our movie watching was the Lethal Weapon series. Now, at the time, there were only two Lethal Weapon flicks, although the third would come out at the end of our junior year. We loved these movies, and we could readily quote them as ably as we could Star Wars. And yet, once college was over, I pretty much let Lethal Weapon slide into memory a bit, only revisiting it briefly when Lethal Weapon 4 came out in the mid or late 90s. I remember that one being fun, but slightly forgettable. It's been at least eight or nine years since the last time I watched any of them.
This wasn't because I came to dislike them, I should note. They just faded from my memory. I moved on. Until, that is, I saw a set in a cheap DVD bin somewhere that included all four Lethal Weapons. For ten bucks, I had to buy it. This was about a year ago...and I forgot about the discs again. Until now. The other day I watched Lethal Weapon, the 1987 original. I expected it to feel like sliding into a comfortable article of clothing that I haven't worn in a very long time, and it did feel like that. But I also found myself admiring it more than ever. Lethal Weapon is still a terribly well-made film, exciting and thrilling and full of wit and verve. It has aged extremely well.
What's good about Lethal Weapon? Lots of things. It's a buddy story, obviously, as well as a "redemption" story. Gibson's Martin Riggs is suicidal after the death (in a car crash) of his beloved wife; Glover's Roger Murtaugh is tired and weary as he approaches retirement. Both men are thrust together in an uneasy partnership as they become involved in a case involving the murder of the daughter of an old Army buddy of Murtaugh's, a case that leads to bigger and bigger things until Riggs and Murtaugh find themselves up against a drug-running operation of ex-CIA spooks.
All of the typical "buddy" movie tropes are here -- the uneasy, suspicious feelings between the two men at the outset; the clashes as their respective differences in how to do things rear their heads; the gradual opening of respect between the two as they get to know each other; the final act in which they depend on each other; the final scenes where their friendship is openly established. What makes this all special in Lethal Weapon is, in great part, the chemistry between our two leads; if ever any two actors were born to be in a movie together, Gibson and Glover are the guys. What makes it work even more, though, is that the film avoids easy epiphanies and Big Moments of Truth. Instead, we see the little moments that depict the lowering of defenses, the growing of understandings, and the fostering of friendship. The script is very well written, in this regard.
Consider the early scenes just after Riggs and Murtaugh have been paired up. Neither is thrilled about the situation, and Murtaugh keeps making digs at Riggs over his tendency to charge full-speed ahead into situations ("See? I shot him in the leg, which is why we can question him now. You cuff him, and I'll stand over here, being happy.") There's a moment where Murtaugh admits that his birthday was the day before, and Riggs says, "Maybe I'll get you a present. It's the least I can do, after the warmth you've shown me today." And while Murtaugh doesn't really say anything to this, his facial expression relents. A bit.
There is a big confrontation scene which comes immediately on the heels of one of the film's biggest laughs; going from a hilarious scene (in which Riggs has to talk down a jumper from a tall building) right into a tension-filled confrontation as Murtaugh tries to ascertain whether Riggs actually is suicidal is a master stroke in the film. In this scene, Riggs admits that he thinks about suicide every day -- "Every. Single. Day." -- but the one thing that keeps him from pulling the trigger is the prospect of still being a cop. "Doing the job".
Which is why it's so great that when it comes time for one of the two men to realize that the case they've just wrapped up is actually anything but, it's Riggs who makes the realization. This partnership and this case are reawakening his brain. And in the same way, working with Riggs is reawakening Murtaugh's. It just works very well. I also like the depiction of Murtaugh's normal family life, and the way that Riggs becomes welcome in that family very quickly.
Of course, the main attraction of an action flick is...the action, which is first-rate all the way through, even during the admittedly goofy final fight between Riggs and Gary Busey's "Mr. Joshua". The film is full of first-rate stunt work, and Richard Donner is always good at directing chaos and mayhem so it's violent and kinetic and yet easy to follow. He even manages to make it plausible when Riggs takes off on foot after Mr. Joshua, who has just stolen a car.
Lethal Weapon is one of the best action films of the 80s. For my money, it's every bit as good as Die Hard, which is commonly held as the action movie gold standard.
One of our common staples in our movie watching was the Lethal Weapon series. Now, at the time, there were only two Lethal Weapon flicks, although the third would come out at the end of our junior year. We loved these movies, and we could readily quote them as ably as we could Star Wars. And yet, once college was over, I pretty much let Lethal Weapon slide into memory a bit, only revisiting it briefly when Lethal Weapon 4 came out in the mid or late 90s. I remember that one being fun, but slightly forgettable. It's been at least eight or nine years since the last time I watched any of them.
This wasn't because I came to dislike them, I should note. They just faded from my memory. I moved on. Until, that is, I saw a set in a cheap DVD bin somewhere that included all four Lethal Weapons. For ten bucks, I had to buy it. This was about a year ago...and I forgot about the discs again. Until now. The other day I watched Lethal Weapon, the 1987 original. I expected it to feel like sliding into a comfortable article of clothing that I haven't worn in a very long time, and it did feel like that. But I also found myself admiring it more than ever. Lethal Weapon is still a terribly well-made film, exciting and thrilling and full of wit and verve. It has aged extremely well.
First, though, a brief aside about Mel Gibson. His behavior seems to get more indefensible every time he shows up in the news, which is a damned shame. I once counted him among my favorite actors, and he was starting, in the mid-90s into the first years of the 2000s, to show signs that his career was progressing in an Eastwoodian fashion, from action-and-genre star to more serious actor and pretty good director. I still love Braveheart, and The Man Without a Face is a terribly underrated film, in my opinion. But apparently there's been a very ugly underside to Gibson all these years, and the last five years or so, he's found it impossible to keep that underside hidden as he was once able to do. It's a damned shame, really. I think that Mel Gibson is a fantastically talented man...but apparently he's a colossal SOB to such a degree that it's hard to like his work as much as I once did.
What's good about Lethal Weapon? Lots of things. It's a buddy story, obviously, as well as a "redemption" story. Gibson's Martin Riggs is suicidal after the death (in a car crash) of his beloved wife; Glover's Roger Murtaugh is tired and weary as he approaches retirement. Both men are thrust together in an uneasy partnership as they become involved in a case involving the murder of the daughter of an old Army buddy of Murtaugh's, a case that leads to bigger and bigger things until Riggs and Murtaugh find themselves up against a drug-running operation of ex-CIA spooks.
All of the typical "buddy" movie tropes are here -- the uneasy, suspicious feelings between the two men at the outset; the clashes as their respective differences in how to do things rear their heads; the gradual opening of respect between the two as they get to know each other; the final act in which they depend on each other; the final scenes where their friendship is openly established. What makes this all special in Lethal Weapon is, in great part, the chemistry between our two leads; if ever any two actors were born to be in a movie together, Gibson and Glover are the guys. What makes it work even more, though, is that the film avoids easy epiphanies and Big Moments of Truth. Instead, we see the little moments that depict the lowering of defenses, the growing of understandings, and the fostering of friendship. The script is very well written, in this regard.
Consider the early scenes just after Riggs and Murtaugh have been paired up. Neither is thrilled about the situation, and Murtaugh keeps making digs at Riggs over his tendency to charge full-speed ahead into situations ("See? I shot him in the leg, which is why we can question him now. You cuff him, and I'll stand over here, being happy.") There's a moment where Murtaugh admits that his birthday was the day before, and Riggs says, "Maybe I'll get you a present. It's the least I can do, after the warmth you've shown me today." And while Murtaugh doesn't really say anything to this, his facial expression relents. A bit.
There is a big confrontation scene which comes immediately on the heels of one of the film's biggest laughs; going from a hilarious scene (in which Riggs has to talk down a jumper from a tall building) right into a tension-filled confrontation as Murtaugh tries to ascertain whether Riggs actually is suicidal is a master stroke in the film. In this scene, Riggs admits that he thinks about suicide every day -- "Every. Single. Day." -- but the one thing that keeps him from pulling the trigger is the prospect of still being a cop. "Doing the job".
Which is why it's so great that when it comes time for one of the two men to realize that the case they've just wrapped up is actually anything but, it's Riggs who makes the realization. This partnership and this case are reawakening his brain. And in the same way, working with Riggs is reawakening Murtaugh's. It just works very well. I also like the depiction of Murtaugh's normal family life, and the way that Riggs becomes welcome in that family very quickly.
Of course, the main attraction of an action flick is...the action, which is first-rate all the way through, even during the admittedly goofy final fight between Riggs and Gary Busey's "Mr. Joshua". The film is full of first-rate stunt work, and Richard Donner is always good at directing chaos and mayhem so it's violent and kinetic and yet easy to follow. He even manages to make it plausible when Riggs takes off on foot after Mr. Joshua, who has just stolen a car.
Lethal Weapon is one of the best action films of the 80s. For my money, it's every bit as good as Die Hard, which is commonly held as the action movie gold standard.
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
In the interests of broadening the horizons, I'm going to diversify this weekly feature a bit, and start including conversation starters that are simple questions, as opposed to the "either/or" thing I've done up 'til now. I'll still do the either/or thing, but I'll take an occasional different approach. So here's the first new type of Wednesday Conversation Starter:
Why does ice clinking against the side of a glass sound better in lemonade than it does in any other beverage on the planet?
Why does ice clinking against the side of a glass sound better in lemonade than it does in any other beverage on the planet?
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
FOX! CURSE YOU, FOX!!!
So I settle in for my weekly dose of the beautiful Holli Hell's Kitchen, only to discover that the Major League Baseball All Star Game is on instead. Betrayer most foul!!!
I was hoping to write like George Lucas.
Here's a fun little tool that analyzes a piece of your writing and tells you what famous writer you write like. I did it twice, and here are my results:
And:
Funny thing? I put in two extracts from the same piece of writing (my current space opera project). So apparently I'm writing a "Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe...in space!!!" type of thing.
Which is pretty cool, because now that I think about it, I'd love to read a "Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe...in space!!!" type of thing!
And:
Funny thing? I put in two extracts from the same piece of writing (my current space opera project). So apparently I'm writing a "Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe...in space!!!" type of thing.
Which is pretty cool, because now that I think about it, I'd love to read a "Stephen King meets Edgar Allan Poe...in space!!!" type of thing!
Thoughts on the Taste
This weekend was Buffalo's annual food festival, A Taste of Buffalo, wherein fifty or sixty area restaurants set up booths in downtown Buffalo and sell sample-sized portions of their menu items. It's always a fun time; we've been going for over ten years now.
The prices have gone up a bit over the years. The way Taste works is this: you never pay the restaurants directly. Instead, you buy tickets at $.50 each (in sheets of ten), and then you "pay" the restaurants in tickets. Small items tend to go for 3 tickets each, mid-items will for for 4, 5, or even 6; most places have a "big" item that goes for 8 tickets. When we first started going, ticket prices at the booths topped out at 6 tickets, so items that were once $3.00 are now $4.00. No big deal, really, but we do budget for it.
Typically we spend between $40 and $60 down there, which isn't awful, for a family of three. And that's all food: we take our own drinks, packing a cooler bag with some Pepsis and a lot of water bottles. We also never drop by the beer tents or the wine places -- one joint was doing "wine slushies" for fifteen tickets each. We were quite full when we left, even though we got "burned" at one place whose 8-ticket item turned out to be very small indeed. (Oddly enough, it was one of our favorite local restaurants! It was doing barbecue ribs for 8 tickets. I like their ribs, so I plunked down my tickets -- and was handed a little paper basket with two ribs in it. Harumph.)
Anyway, we had several slices of pizza from various places, two different versions of Caribbean Jerk chicken, a cup of chicken wing soup, a pulled pork sandwich and some mac-and-cheese from a barbecue joint, as well as some ice cream and a few other goodies along the way. I have noted that there doesn't seem to be enough "new blood" every year, and we've been going to the Taste long enough that we have "old favorites". The addition of a second place offering Jerk Chicken was pretty cool, though!
We left when the crowds started getting too thick, which usually happens around 3:00 in the afternoon. (There was an awful bottleneck in the street at one point, which turned out to be because Senator Charles Schumer chose the worst possible spot to set up camp for his day of handshaking. It's always nice to see one's Senator, but he sure picked a lousy spot to stand!)
There was one other way that the Taste of Buffalo cost us a chunk of money on Saturday. After walking around downtown eating for three-and-a-half hours, we were all pretty tired when we got home. So when dinner time rolled 'round...we decided to get a pizza and some wings instead. There went another thirty bucks! Oh well. It was a great food day, though.
The prices have gone up a bit over the years. The way Taste works is this: you never pay the restaurants directly. Instead, you buy tickets at $.50 each (in sheets of ten), and then you "pay" the restaurants in tickets. Small items tend to go for 3 tickets each, mid-items will for for 4, 5, or even 6; most places have a "big" item that goes for 8 tickets. When we first started going, ticket prices at the booths topped out at 6 tickets, so items that were once $3.00 are now $4.00. No big deal, really, but we do budget for it.
Typically we spend between $40 and $60 down there, which isn't awful, for a family of three. And that's all food: we take our own drinks, packing a cooler bag with some Pepsis and a lot of water bottles. We also never drop by the beer tents or the wine places -- one joint was doing "wine slushies" for fifteen tickets each. We were quite full when we left, even though we got "burned" at one place whose 8-ticket item turned out to be very small indeed. (Oddly enough, it was one of our favorite local restaurants! It was doing barbecue ribs for 8 tickets. I like their ribs, so I plunked down my tickets -- and was handed a little paper basket with two ribs in it. Harumph.)
Anyway, we had several slices of pizza from various places, two different versions of Caribbean Jerk chicken, a cup of chicken wing soup, a pulled pork sandwich and some mac-and-cheese from a barbecue joint, as well as some ice cream and a few other goodies along the way. I have noted that there doesn't seem to be enough "new blood" every year, and we've been going to the Taste long enough that we have "old favorites". The addition of a second place offering Jerk Chicken was pretty cool, though!
We left when the crowds started getting too thick, which usually happens around 3:00 in the afternoon. (There was an awful bottleneck in the street at one point, which turned out to be because Senator Charles Schumer chose the worst possible spot to set up camp for his day of handshaking. It's always nice to see one's Senator, but he sure picked a lousy spot to stand!)
There was one other way that the Taste of Buffalo cost us a chunk of money on Saturday. After walking around downtown eating for three-and-a-half hours, we were all pretty tired when we got home. So when dinner time rolled 'round...we decided to get a pizza and some wings instead. There went another thirty bucks! Oh well. It was a great food day, though.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Why can't the gods ever target, say, Dallas like this?
I'm not sure what Cleveland did recently to so annoy the Gods, but yeesh. Getting shafted on national teevee by Lebron James was bad, but the passing of Harvey Pekar? That's just mean, Governors of the Universe.
I read Pekar's graphic novel The Quitter last year and posted about it here. At the moment I actually have Pekar's graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working out of the library right now, although I haven't started it yet. I'm a new admirer of Pekar's, and I'm saddened to know that he won't be producing anything more.
I read Pekar's graphic novel The Quitter last year and posted about it here. At the moment I actually have Pekar's graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working out of the library right now, although I haven't started it yet. I'm a new admirer of Pekar's, and I'm saddened to know that he won't be producing anything more.
Monday Mayhem
Monday Mayhem is not unlike Sunday Stealing, in that it provides quizzes for bloggers on a weekly basis. I figured I'd do one of them:
1. Lindsay Lohan was recently sentenced to 90 days in jail. What do you think her future has in store for her?
Jail time.
2. What is the biggest fashion "don't" that you would like to police?
I don't believe in fashion "don't"s. I've long come to the belief that virtually all of fashion consists of some folks somewhere deciding arbitrarily what's "in" and what's "out". I have no time for that crap, at all.
3. How should we punish sites that lure us in with "read this" and take us somewhere where we are first greeted by a pop-up and then a series of click throughs to actually read the meat of the story?
They should be beaten with tire irons.
4. What is the most you will do to post a comment on a site? At what point is it not worth posting a comment?
I don't comment enough on my favorite blogs, but I've been trying to do so more often.
5. If you purchase something online and you are charged for postage, is it still reasonable to charge for "shipping and handling"? What exactly does "shipping and handling" entail?
Well, it's not just postage. There's the cost of the box and the cost of the time and effort to get the thing packed and, if it's just you by yourself, getting the thing to the post office. When I ship stuff I sell via eBay, I tend to charge a dollar or so more than what I figure the postage will be. (Or, at least I used to, before eBay decided to mandate certain shipping charges, which I find annoying.)
1. Lindsay Lohan was recently sentenced to 90 days in jail. What do you think her future has in store for her?
Jail time.
2. What is the biggest fashion "don't" that you would like to police?
I don't believe in fashion "don't"s. I've long come to the belief that virtually all of fashion consists of some folks somewhere deciding arbitrarily what's "in" and what's "out". I have no time for that crap, at all.
3. How should we punish sites that lure us in with "read this" and take us somewhere where we are first greeted by a pop-up and then a series of click throughs to actually read the meat of the story?
They should be beaten with tire irons.
4. What is the most you will do to post a comment on a site? At what point is it not worth posting a comment?
I don't comment enough on my favorite blogs, but I've been trying to do so more often.
5. If you purchase something online and you are charged for postage, is it still reasonable to charge for "shipping and handling"? What exactly does "shipping and handling" entail?
Well, it's not just postage. There's the cost of the box and the cost of the time and effort to get the thing packed and, if it's just you by yourself, getting the thing to the post office. When I ship stuff I sell via eBay, I tend to charge a dollar or so more than what I figure the postage will be. (Or, at least I used to, before eBay decided to mandate certain shipping charges, which I find annoying.)
Sentential Links #212
Linkage....
:: Thanks for helping me rehearse for my next grand jury appearance.
:: I am a middle aged, doughy white man. At 80 years old Ernie is thinner, far more fit and much more energetic than I will ever be. He also has more hair on his head.
:: One of the things most people don't realize about cows is that they are extremely crafty What I mean is, they are much smarter than one might think. Case in point: Fences.
:: Jennifer Tilly is one of my best friends. No, we've never met, but I know it. Deep down I am sure she and I would be buddies. She's funny and quirky, sexy as hell, and has a cartoon voice. What else do you need?
:: I love the rain, it hides all these tears.
:: I’m sure you all remember the excitement that led up to January 1, 2000! Today’s story, written 43 years before, predicts all sorts of amazing things, including a future in which pedantic trolls don’t go around saying, “Um, actually the new century doesn’t start until 2001.”
:: I am the kind of guy that loves new food products. If I see a commercial for some new cheez-it flavor or something, I have to try it. I am a sucker when I go into the grocery store and see 'NEW' on any product in big bold letters just teasing me. This is especially true for the cookie, cracker, chip or candy aisle. My ultimate weakness is a new flavor of Doritos, I have to have them.
More next week!
:: Thanks for helping me rehearse for my next grand jury appearance.
:: I am a middle aged, doughy white man. At 80 years old Ernie is thinner, far more fit and much more energetic than I will ever be. He also has more hair on his head.
:: One of the things most people don't realize about cows is that they are extremely crafty What I mean is, they are much smarter than one might think. Case in point: Fences.
:: Jennifer Tilly is one of my best friends. No, we've never met, but I know it. Deep down I am sure she and I would be buddies. She's funny and quirky, sexy as hell, and has a cartoon voice. What else do you need?
:: I love the rain, it hides all these tears.
:: I’m sure you all remember the excitement that led up to January 1, 2000! Today’s story, written 43 years before, predicts all sorts of amazing things, including a future in which pedantic trolls don’t go around saying, “Um, actually the new century doesn’t start until 2001.”
:: I am the kind of guy that loves new food products. If I see a commercial for some new cheez-it flavor or something, I have to try it. I am a sucker when I go into the grocery store and see 'NEW' on any product in big bold letters just teasing me. This is especially true for the cookie, cracker, chip or candy aisle. My ultimate weakness is a new flavor of Doritos, I have to have them.
More next week!
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: What a cool blog! It's a food blog that focuses on food and history. Lots of recipes paired with historical information, and it's cool to scroll down the blog and read the bits of food history that happened under each American President. Here, for example, is a list of provisions called for at the Second Inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant:
Sounds like a hell of a party, right? Go over there and read about how the party went!
:: Want to see ladies in bikinis reading lines from Star Wars IV: A New Hope? Sure you do!
:: When I was in grade school, there was a series of educational films that we'd watch in class on occasion. They were called "the Hot Dog movies", and they were short films on various subjects. They used a lot of goofy humor, and they included appearances by Woody Allen and Joanne Whorley. Apparently these films ran on teevee sometime in the early 1970s, but I saw them in class in third and fourth grade. One of the only ones that I really remember dealt with US paper currency, and as luck would have it, that's the only Hot Dog film I've been able to find on YouTube. Here it is. I just think this is pretty cool!
Anybody else ever watch these?
:: What a cool blog! It's a food blog that focuses on food and history. Lots of recipes paired with historical information, and it's cool to scroll down the blog and read the bits of food history that happened under each American President. Here, for example, is a list of provisions called for at the Second Inaugural of President Ulysses S. Grant:
Among other provisions were 10,000 fried oysters; 63 boned turkeys; 150 capons stuffed with truffles; 15 saddles of mutton; 200 dozen quails; 200 hams; 250 chickens; 400 partridges; 25 stuffed boar’s heads; 3,000 head cheese sandwiches; 2,000 ham sandwiches; 8,000 pickled oysters and 2,000 pounds of lobster.
Sounds like a hell of a party, right? Go over there and read about how the party went!
:: Want to see ladies in bikinis reading lines from Star Wars IV: A New Hope? Sure you do!
:: When I was in grade school, there was a series of educational films that we'd watch in class on occasion. They were called "the Hot Dog movies", and they were short films on various subjects. They used a lot of goofy humor, and they included appearances by Woody Allen and Joanne Whorley. Apparently these films ran on teevee sometime in the early 1970s, but I saw them in class in third and fourth grade. One of the only ones that I really remember dealt with US paper currency, and as luck would have it, that's the only Hot Dog film I've been able to find on YouTube. Here it is. I just think this is pretty cool!
Anybody else ever watch these?
Meme of Many Odd Questions
From Sunday Stealing:
1. First thing you wash in the shower?
My hair.
2. What color is your favorite hoodie?
My three tie-dyed hoodies, actually -- green, purple and red and blue.
3. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
I hope so, since I married her!
4. Do you plan outfits?
Not any farther than, "Hey, haven't worn this in a while."
5. How are you feeling RIGHT now?
Kinda nappy, actually. I think I'll take a nap. (I'm writing this late afternoon Saturday.)
6. What's the closest thing to you that's red?
My pocket knife, sitting on the desk.
7. Tell me about the last dream you remember having?
Can't remember any right now. My memories of dreams fade very quickly.
8. Did you meet anybody new today?
Not by name, but there were lots of strangers at Taste of Buffalo.
9. What are you craving right now?
Pizza. I'll probably buy one for dinner.
10. Do you floss?
Absolutely.
11. What comes to mind when I say cabbage?
Corned beef?
12. Are you emotional?
Yes. And no.
13. Have you ever counted to 1,000?
Nope. I've started as a getting-to-sleep measure, but never gotten there.
14. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it?
I alternate between both.
15. Do you like your hair?
Sure!
16. Do you like yourself?
Most times. Sometimes I gotta get away from myself, though.
17. Would you go out to eat with George W. Bush?
If he's buying, maybe. I'd be faking the niceties, though.
18. What are you listening to right now?
Nothing.
19. Are your parents strict?
Since I'm 38 and haven't lived at home for quite a few years, I'm going to say, Not really.
20. Would you go sky diving?
Maybe....
21. Do you like cottage cheese?
It's OK. I used to hate it, and now I don't. But I don't adore it, either. It's good and I should eat it more often.
22. Have you ever met a celebrity?
Nope.
Short quiz....
1. First thing you wash in the shower?
My hair.
2. What color is your favorite hoodie?
My three tie-dyed hoodies, actually -- green, purple and red and blue.
3. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
I hope so, since I married her!
4. Do you plan outfits?
Not any farther than, "Hey, haven't worn this in a while."
5. How are you feeling RIGHT now?
Kinda nappy, actually. I think I'll take a nap. (I'm writing this late afternoon Saturday.)
6. What's the closest thing to you that's red?
My pocket knife, sitting on the desk.
7. Tell me about the last dream you remember having?
Can't remember any right now. My memories of dreams fade very quickly.
8. Did you meet anybody new today?
Not by name, but there were lots of strangers at Taste of Buffalo.
9. What are you craving right now?
Pizza. I'll probably buy one for dinner.
10. Do you floss?
Absolutely.
11. What comes to mind when I say cabbage?
Corned beef?
12. Are you emotional?
Yes. And no.
13. Have you ever counted to 1,000?
Nope. I've started as a getting-to-sleep measure, but never gotten there.
14. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it?
I alternate between both.
15. Do you like your hair?
Sure!
16. Do you like yourself?
Most times. Sometimes I gotta get away from myself, though.
17. Would you go out to eat with George W. Bush?
If he's buying, maybe. I'd be faking the niceties, though.
18. What are you listening to right now?
Nothing.
19. Are your parents strict?
Since I'm 38 and haven't lived at home for quite a few years, I'm going to say, Not really.
20. Would you go sky diving?
Maybe....
21. Do you like cottage cheese?
It's OK. I used to hate it, and now I don't. But I don't adore it, either. It's good and I should eat it more often.
22. Have you ever met a celebrity?
Nope.
Short quiz....
Saturday, July 10, 2010
The point left a contrail above his head
Matthew Yglesias has been one of my favorite bloggers for years, but in commenting today on Lebron James, he misses the point about as badly as a point can be missed.
Look. This stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum, and we're not talking about, say, a District Manager for Fed-Ex going to work as a District Manager for UPS. There's a lot more at work here than an employee simply deciding to take a new job.
Mega-star sports figures who command salaries in the stratospheres of their sports simply aren't comparable, as employees, to people like Matt Yglesias, who work in a cubicle farm writing blog posts all day. These kinds of sports figures become identifiable parts of their communities in ways that the vast, vast, vast majority of employees in this country never even come close to being. That being the case, moral questions regarding James's departure can, and do, and ought to, come into play.
Besides, no one is saying that James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. In this day and age, no one would really suggest that, and when a great and beloved athlete manages to stay with one team for an entire career, it's viewed as (a) an anomaly, and (b) something of an equal effort on the part of the player and the ownership. Most times a player in that case will voluntarily forego a larger offer or two over the course of their career, if they think the situation they're already in is a pretty good one. The claim can be made that the morally preferable course would have been for James to stay in Cleveland, but nobody thinks he was obliged to do so.
The criticism, as far as I can see it, focuses on a number of issues surrounding James's decision to leave. There was the callous manner in which he did it, stringing Cleveland along so they couldn't get a jump-start on a post-Lebron era until after the Draft and once free agency was already in full swing; there was the way he pretty much treated the fans of that city as if they were disposable; there was the way he pretty much structured the entire episode so as to stroke his own ego.
It all reminded me of a scene in the movie Nixon. Late in the film, when Watergate is starting to bring the administration down, Nixon holds a press conference to make some sort of announcement. To that point, when he's announced stuff, the entire room has always erupted into applause, but at this event, he makes his announcement, steps back to receive the applause...and only his aides are applauding. Everyone else is just sitting there. That's what the Lebron James fiasco has looked like. He constructed this entire thing utterly convinced that everyone sees him as a hero, and now he seems a bit shocked that almost nobody actually does. (Give the Miami fans some time, when his teams start accumulating 55-win seasons and second-round playoff exits.)
Players can, and do, leave their original teams all the time. But when they do, it's generally for one of the following reasons:
1. They are significantly underpaid in their original market, and they are unlikely to come anywhere near their market value there.
2. They want desperately to win, and their current market seems unlikely to do so any time in the foreseeable future.
3. Team management decides to allow the player to leave, under the belief that they may be better equipped to win without the player or by replacing him at the position he plays.
4. The chemistry of their current team is unpleasant to the point that they want to play someplace else.
There are others, but those are the big ones that I generally see bandied about when players leave one team for another. And as far as I can tell, none of these really apply to Lebron James in Cleveland. They were prepared to pay him as massively as anyone else was; they've been a very good team in recent years; and...well, I can't really speak to the third point. But I haven't read anything about the Cav's locker room being a hotbed of miscontent.
James's willingness to leave Cleveland was clearly not motivated by money, and if James thinks he's going to a more winning-conducive environment in Miami, everything I've read indicates that he's likely mistaken. As for the last, well...maybe I'm wrong, but basketball has always struck me as the most prima donna-ridden of sports, and the Miami locker room will now have three prima donnas within it. If they don't win, look for things to deteriorate quickly, and heck, it might happen anyway if they do win. Lots of winning teams end up falling apart not because they get bad again, but because their chemistry can't be maintained.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that no one thinks that Lebron James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. Most folks, though, think that he had a moral obligation to not be a dick. And by any reasonable standards of dickishness, Lebron James was a dick of epic proportions.
I’m all for rooting against the new look Heat, but it is worth saying that a lot of the anti-LeBron commentary of the past couple of days bespeaks a major anti-labor bias in our popular culture. The guy had an offer from one employer and a competing offer from another employer—he took the offer he preferred. Is that really so terrible? Does he really have a moral obligation to work for Dan Gilbert’s for-profit firm indefinitely? Would you like to be told that if you get offered a better job, it’s unethical for you to accept it? I wouldn’t.
Look. This stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum, and we're not talking about, say, a District Manager for Fed-Ex going to work as a District Manager for UPS. There's a lot more at work here than an employee simply deciding to take a new job.
Mega-star sports figures who command salaries in the stratospheres of their sports simply aren't comparable, as employees, to people like Matt Yglesias, who work in a cubicle farm writing blog posts all day. These kinds of sports figures become identifiable parts of their communities in ways that the vast, vast, vast majority of employees in this country never even come close to being. That being the case, moral questions regarding James's departure can, and do, and ought to, come into play.
Besides, no one is saying that James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. In this day and age, no one would really suggest that, and when a great and beloved athlete manages to stay with one team for an entire career, it's viewed as (a) an anomaly, and (b) something of an equal effort on the part of the player and the ownership. Most times a player in that case will voluntarily forego a larger offer or two over the course of their career, if they think the situation they're already in is a pretty good one. The claim can be made that the morally preferable course would have been for James to stay in Cleveland, but nobody thinks he was obliged to do so.
The criticism, as far as I can see it, focuses on a number of issues surrounding James's decision to leave. There was the callous manner in which he did it, stringing Cleveland along so they couldn't get a jump-start on a post-Lebron era until after the Draft and once free agency was already in full swing; there was the way he pretty much treated the fans of that city as if they were disposable; there was the way he pretty much structured the entire episode so as to stroke his own ego.
It all reminded me of a scene in the movie Nixon. Late in the film, when Watergate is starting to bring the administration down, Nixon holds a press conference to make some sort of announcement. To that point, when he's announced stuff, the entire room has always erupted into applause, but at this event, he makes his announcement, steps back to receive the applause...and only his aides are applauding. Everyone else is just sitting there. That's what the Lebron James fiasco has looked like. He constructed this entire thing utterly convinced that everyone sees him as a hero, and now he seems a bit shocked that almost nobody actually does. (Give the Miami fans some time, when his teams start accumulating 55-win seasons and second-round playoff exits.)
Players can, and do, leave their original teams all the time. But when they do, it's generally for one of the following reasons:
1. They are significantly underpaid in their original market, and they are unlikely to come anywhere near their market value there.
2. They want desperately to win, and their current market seems unlikely to do so any time in the foreseeable future.
3. Team management decides to allow the player to leave, under the belief that they may be better equipped to win without the player or by replacing him at the position he plays.
4. The chemistry of their current team is unpleasant to the point that they want to play someplace else.
There are others, but those are the big ones that I generally see bandied about when players leave one team for another. And as far as I can tell, none of these really apply to Lebron James in Cleveland. They were prepared to pay him as massively as anyone else was; they've been a very good team in recent years; and...well, I can't really speak to the third point. But I haven't read anything about the Cav's locker room being a hotbed of miscontent.
James's willingness to leave Cleveland was clearly not motivated by money, and if James thinks he's going to a more winning-conducive environment in Miami, everything I've read indicates that he's likely mistaken. As for the last, well...maybe I'm wrong, but basketball has always struck me as the most prima donna-ridden of sports, and the Miami locker room will now have three prima donnas within it. If they don't win, look for things to deteriorate quickly, and heck, it might happen anyway if they do win. Lots of winning teams end up falling apart not because they get bad again, but because their chemistry can't be maintained.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that no one thinks that Lebron James had a moral obligation to stay in Cleveland. Most folks, though, think that he had a moral obligation to not be a dick. And by any reasonable standards of dickishness, Lebron James was a dick of epic proportions.
Good eatin'!
Wow, it's been a while since I did a food post here, hasn't it? So here's a round-up of some recent(ish) meals at Casa Jaquandor!
:: Grilled bratwurst. Yum. Not much to say here, just...grilled bratwurst! Yum!
I heart sausages of all types, and bratwurst may be my favorite. It's just wonderful stuff. The trick is to get them off the grill at the exact moment the last little bit of pink in the middle has faded. It's an art form, it is!
:: A while back I posted about Chiavetta's chicken marinade, a staple of barbecue here in Western New York. At that time, it was still cold out, so I did the chicken in the oven. Well, I figured I should revisit Chiavetta's, in the preferred cooking method: over charcoal. So here it is. The steps are the same: Marinade for a long time, and then grill until done. Once the chicken is done, the instructions say to put the chicken into a pan on the grill and then heavily baste it with more of the sauce, allowing the flavor to permeate the chicken via steaming (or something like that).
Here's the chicken on the grill:
And here's the chicken on the table:
:: I love a homemade pizza, but I'm kind of ashamed to admit that when I do the job, it's not really homemade, as I've always used store-bought dough and sauce from a jar. Well, I decided that enough was enough on that score, so I made a pizza entirely from scratch a while back: my own dough and my own sauce, topped with cheese I grated and pepperoni and sausage made from a pig that I killed and butchered.
OK, that last part is a complete lie; my pepperoni and sausage came in packages. Do I look like the kind of fellow who could slay a pig? Of course not. Yeesh. But I did do the other stuff. Now I'll probably experiment more with other crust and sauce recipes. Here's how the finished product turned out:
It was really good. The dough recipe I used is an old one we've had around for a while that we got from Cooking Light Magazine -- oh Cooking Light, how we miss the days when you weren't a cheaply-done production! -- and the sauce recipe I used is this one. The cheese and pepperoni are straight-forward; I just grated my own part-skim mozzarella. For the sausage, I cooked up three large links of Italian sausage and then cut them up into large chunks. My firm belief regarding sausage on pizza is that the chunks need to be big.
:: OK, let's talk burgers.
I tend to be a bit on the lazy side when it comes to burgers at home. The Wife generally keeps us stocked up on frozen burgers that she gets from The Restaurant at which she works (don't worry, she pays for them!), and that's usually OK for me. Other times I'll pick up pre-formed fresh ground beef patties at The Store, some of which they flavor with stuff. They have a Greek burger with feta cheese mixed right into the beef that's terrific, as are the basic bacon-cheddar ones (with bacon pieces and shredded cheddar also mixed into the patties).
But every once in a while I want to taste the burgery-goodness flavor that you can really only get by grilling your own hand-made patties, so that's what I did a couple of weeks back. I picked up a package of ground beef that was roughly 1.4 pounds and divided it up into three patties of such equal size as I could make, for three 7-point-something oz. burger patties. I added nothing to the beef at all -- just the meat, although when the patties were shaped, I seasoned them on both sides with salt and pepper. (As Emeril Lagasse used to say on his shows, "I hate one-sided tasting food.")
Then it was onto the grill!
Cooking burgers on the grill is about as easy as cooking something can be; all you have to do is keep an eye on things and spritz the flare-ups with water when they get out of hand. Every article or teevee show I've ever read or watched on the proper cooking of burgers gives the same two pieces of advice, and I agree whole-heartedly. Those pieces of advice are:
1. Flip the burgers exactly once.
2. Do NOT press down on the burgers with your spatula in hopes of making them cook faster.
Those rules are for your benefit, folks!
Oh, and the third rule: let the burgers rest a few minutes before allowing consumption.
Yeah, one of them turned out a bit bigger than the other two. Beef portioning FAIL!
When I do the frozen patty thing, I'm generally happy to throw the burger onto a bun, top it with ketchup and mustard, and call it good. But a patty like this deserves a bit more by way of stuff on the bun along with it, so here's how my final burger ended up before I tucked into it. The only thing missing was a slice of fresh tomato. (Because when I was shopping, I didn't think to grab a tomato. Argghhh!)
:: By the way, as long as I'm talking about burgers, I had a brief discussion of this topic on Facebook and since I'm talking food and burgers here, I'll bring it up. There's a new fad in the burger world, but I must protest the nomenclature thereof. What am I talking about?
I hate hate hate the term "sliders".
Sliders, for those who haven't had this craze hit them yet, are basically miniature burgers. They're only about three inches in diameter, so consuming one takes about three or four bites. I'm not sure what the allure of these things is or why they're so popular right now, but as I understand it, the term originated with the White Castle fast food chain, which sells tiny little burgers in packages of ten or something like that. (We don't have White Castle in WNY, so I've never actually eaten one.)
I'm a bit baffled on the concept of miniature burgers to begin with, except for the idea that it might be a nice way to experience different mixes of condiments on one's meal of burgery goodness at one time, but that notion is of limited appeal to me, anyway. Maybe for novelty's sake it might be fun to have one little burger with ketchup and mustard, another with mayonnaise and onions, and a third with chili sauce, but...i'm just not that thrilled with the idea. For me, miniature burgers is probably a good thing to have for a kids' birthday party, but that's about it.
As much as I don't understand why these little burgers have become so popular right now, I do admit that I loathe the term "slider". Can't stand it. It's just an unpleasant sounding word for a food item. To be blunt, it sounds like a word one might use to describe an unwelcome experience one has with one's bowels. "Sliders" to me sounds like another word for "Montezuma's Revenge", if you take my meaning. Hate the term. Hate it. I'd find the whole concept if they called it something else -- miniwiches, perhaps. Or maybe teenyburgs. Or burgertwee's. Or maybe we could honor some height-challenged celebrities or chracters and call them Colemans, or Tattoos, or Artooburgs.
Anything other than that awful word, "slider".
And now, I'm off for the annual Taste of Buffalo food festival. Huzzah!
:: Grilled bratwurst. Yum. Not much to say here, just...grilled bratwurst! Yum!
I heart sausages of all types, and bratwurst may be my favorite. It's just wonderful stuff. The trick is to get them off the grill at the exact moment the last little bit of pink in the middle has faded. It's an art form, it is!
:: A while back I posted about Chiavetta's chicken marinade, a staple of barbecue here in Western New York. At that time, it was still cold out, so I did the chicken in the oven. Well, I figured I should revisit Chiavetta's, in the preferred cooking method: over charcoal. So here it is. The steps are the same: Marinade for a long time, and then grill until done. Once the chicken is done, the instructions say to put the chicken into a pan on the grill and then heavily baste it with more of the sauce, allowing the flavor to permeate the chicken via steaming (or something like that).
Here's the chicken on the grill:
And here's the chicken on the table:
:: I love a homemade pizza, but I'm kind of ashamed to admit that when I do the job, it's not really homemade, as I've always used store-bought dough and sauce from a jar. Well, I decided that enough was enough on that score, so I made a pizza entirely from scratch a while back: my own dough and my own sauce, topped with cheese I grated and pepperoni and sausage made from a pig that I killed and butchered.
OK, that last part is a complete lie; my pepperoni and sausage came in packages. Do I look like the kind of fellow who could slay a pig? Of course not. Yeesh. But I did do the other stuff. Now I'll probably experiment more with other crust and sauce recipes. Here's how the finished product turned out:
It was really good. The dough recipe I used is an old one we've had around for a while that we got from Cooking Light Magazine -- oh Cooking Light, how we miss the days when you weren't a cheaply-done production! -- and the sauce recipe I used is this one. The cheese and pepperoni are straight-forward; I just grated my own part-skim mozzarella. For the sausage, I cooked up three large links of Italian sausage and then cut them up into large chunks. My firm belief regarding sausage on pizza is that the chunks need to be big.
:: OK, let's talk burgers.
I tend to be a bit on the lazy side when it comes to burgers at home. The Wife generally keeps us stocked up on frozen burgers that she gets from The Restaurant at which she works (don't worry, she pays for them!), and that's usually OK for me. Other times I'll pick up pre-formed fresh ground beef patties at The Store, some of which they flavor with stuff. They have a Greek burger with feta cheese mixed right into the beef that's terrific, as are the basic bacon-cheddar ones (with bacon pieces and shredded cheddar also mixed into the patties).
But every once in a while I want to taste the burgery-goodness flavor that you can really only get by grilling your own hand-made patties, so that's what I did a couple of weeks back. I picked up a package of ground beef that was roughly 1.4 pounds and divided it up into three patties of such equal size as I could make, for three 7-point-something oz. burger patties. I added nothing to the beef at all -- just the meat, although when the patties were shaped, I seasoned them on both sides with salt and pepper. (As Emeril Lagasse used to say on his shows, "I hate one-sided tasting food.")
Then it was onto the grill!
Cooking burgers on the grill is about as easy as cooking something can be; all you have to do is keep an eye on things and spritz the flare-ups with water when they get out of hand. Every article or teevee show I've ever read or watched on the proper cooking of burgers gives the same two pieces of advice, and I agree whole-heartedly. Those pieces of advice are:
1. Flip the burgers exactly once.
2. Do NOT press down on the burgers with your spatula in hopes of making them cook faster.
Those rules are for your benefit, folks!
Oh, and the third rule: let the burgers rest a few minutes before allowing consumption.
Yeah, one of them turned out a bit bigger than the other two. Beef portioning FAIL!
When I do the frozen patty thing, I'm generally happy to throw the burger onto a bun, top it with ketchup and mustard, and call it good. But a patty like this deserves a bit more by way of stuff on the bun along with it, so here's how my final burger ended up before I tucked into it. The only thing missing was a slice of fresh tomato. (Because when I was shopping, I didn't think to grab a tomato. Argghhh!)
:: By the way, as long as I'm talking about burgers, I had a brief discussion of this topic on Facebook and since I'm talking food and burgers here, I'll bring it up. There's a new fad in the burger world, but I must protest the nomenclature thereof. What am I talking about?
I hate hate hate the term "sliders".
Sliders, for those who haven't had this craze hit them yet, are basically miniature burgers. They're only about three inches in diameter, so consuming one takes about three or four bites. I'm not sure what the allure of these things is or why they're so popular right now, but as I understand it, the term originated with the White Castle fast food chain, which sells tiny little burgers in packages of ten or something like that. (We don't have White Castle in WNY, so I've never actually eaten one.)
I'm a bit baffled on the concept of miniature burgers to begin with, except for the idea that it might be a nice way to experience different mixes of condiments on one's meal of burgery goodness at one time, but that notion is of limited appeal to me, anyway. Maybe for novelty's sake it might be fun to have one little burger with ketchup and mustard, another with mayonnaise and onions, and a third with chili sauce, but...i'm just not that thrilled with the idea. For me, miniature burgers is probably a good thing to have for a kids' birthday party, but that's about it.
As much as I don't understand why these little burgers have become so popular right now, I do admit that I loathe the term "slider". Can't stand it. It's just an unpleasant sounding word for a food item. To be blunt, it sounds like a word one might use to describe an unwelcome experience one has with one's bowels. "Sliders" to me sounds like another word for "Montezuma's Revenge", if you take my meaning. Hate the term. Hate it. I'd find the whole concept if they called it something else -- miniwiches, perhaps. Or maybe teenyburgs. Or burgertwee's. Or maybe we could honor some height-challenged celebrities or chracters and call them Colemans, or Tattoos, or Artooburgs.
Anything other than that awful word, "slider".
And now, I'm off for the annual Taste of Buffalo food festival. Huzzah!
DUZ!
I saw this ad on Flickr and it cracked me up. I'd never heard of "DUZ" before; obviously its heyday as a product was well before my time. I found the picture funny, though, because of that guy strutting around in the overalls, without a shirt underneath. I mean, I know they're comfy and they keep most everything covered, but you still gotta wear a shirt under those things. And a bowler hat? Huh? And that's a Sunday outfit?!
In fact, fans of Firefly might think, as I did, that this guy looks a bit like Badger, the bowler-hat wearing small-time crook on Persephone who aspires to being a less small-time crook.
Anyway, I wish I could still find DUZ on the shelves, because by all appearances, DUZ did everything!
Friday, July 09, 2010
A news headline I'd like to see
JAMES OUT FOR SEASON, CAREER IN JEOPARDY
CLEVELAND GIVES HARDING KEY TO CITY
You know, I've seen a lot of athletes do asshole things. I've seen Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro stonewall that they didn't do steroids. I've seen Mark McGwire go to Congress and say, "I'm not here to talk about the past." I've seen Pete Rose refuse to admit he gambled. I've seen Brett Favre's insanely annoying "Will I play or won't I?" nonsense every year for the last, oh, eighteen years or so. And it goes the other way, too, into ownership and management. I've seen the Buffalo Sabres completely bungle their efforts to hold onto their star players. I've seen the Bills release Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed without calling them first. I've seen Dan Snyder throw money at every player with a pulse, I've seen Jerry Jones decide that he just can't live with the coach who had just won him two Super Bowls, I've seen Art Modell move the Browns without warning, I've seen the Irsay family do the same thing with the Colts. And I've read about collusion, union busting, racism, hard drinking, drug abuse, sexual harassment, and even murder.
But damned if Lebron James didn't manage to put a unique spin on what he did. He may not be the biggest asshole in sports history, but in the words of sports talk radio hosts who do "Is [Name] the [biggest/best/greatest/worst/etc.] in sports history" topics, Lebron has "got to be in the conversation".
I just can't believe this all unfolded the way it did. I can't believe that Lebron James was almost literally holding court for prospective NBA owners. I can't believe he decided to announce his decision on a prime-time teevee special. I can't believe ESPN went along with it. And I can't believe that Lebron James didn't even have the decency to tell the Cleveland Cavaliers what his decision was before he announced it to everyone else.
I've heard some people defending James on various unconvincing bases. I've heard the "It's a free country!" defense, as if the fact that it's not illegal to be an asshole somehow renders it OK to be an asshole. Then there are folks scoffing at the idea that Cleveland fans should be upset at all; "He doesn't owe Cleveland anything!" goes the refrain here.
But in my view, he owes Cleveland a great deal. He's lived in that region his entire life, and he got to play for his hometown fans. He helped make that team into one of the best in the NBA, even if they didn't win a championship. I find the defenses of James very odd, because they come from people who will almost certainly sing Kobe Bryant's praises, when he eventually retires, for having played his entire career with one team.
James's behavior through this entire annoying ordeal has displayed some of the most breathtaking narcissism I've ever seen by a public figure. It really was astonishing to behold. I find his reasons, his excuses, nonsensical -- "It's about winning", he says, even though his Cleveland teams have been among the best in the NBA. It's not as if he's just made his dramatic escape from the LA Clippers. And while I am no expert on the NBA, people who are seem to be less than convinced that a juggernaut of multiple titles has just been forged in Miami, because so much of the Heat's space under the NBA salary cap will be devoted to just three players that the team is unlikely to be able to really fill out their roster with the kinds of non-superstar, but still excellent, talent that championship clubs in all sports need.
Lebron James did owe Cleveland something. He owed them respect and honesty. He gave them neither. I hope he never wins a title at all -- which is a result that has a lot more chance of happening than some might believe -- and if he comes down on the court at an awkward angle and his ACL just happens to rip asunder in the first five minutes of his first regular season in front of his new beloved fans, well, I won't feel a lot of sympathy for him.
A few links: Jason Whitlock of FOX Sports; Ethan Sherwood Strauss of Salon.com; Mr. Trend at Alterdestiny.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Something for Thursday
I've long had something of a love-hate relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.
The show came out sometime in the late 1980s, and ten years would pass before I'd see it on stage myself. But for a time, the songs of Phantom were...how to put this...ubiquitous. That music was everywhere, and after a short while, I was Phantom'd out.
Late in my senior year of high school, an amateur chorus in a neighboring town was looking for brass players for a concert they were doing...of Phantom songs. Then, at my summer music camp, we played an arrangement of Phantom's songs in the band, and then the very next year, in the chorus, we did a choral arrangement of the same Phantom songs. In college, my orchestra did yet another arrangement of Phantom songs.
Every year, my college had a music competition/festival thing in which high school students from all over Iowa and vicinity would come to play with college musicians and compete for scholarships. Those students vying for vocal scholarships would perform solos at the main concert. One year, no fewer than three young baritones did "The Music of the Night".
And nearly every student at school had Phantom in their CD collections. Most had the single-disc "highlights" record, but the hard-cores had the "Complete show" double-CD edition. And you'd often hear those discs blasting out windows and open doors, during that pounding motif on the organ -- you know the one -- that practically demanded to be played at Max Volume.
For two to three years of my life, it was Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. I got sick of the whole damned thing without ever seeing it. (And I wasn't disposed to dislike Andrew Lloyd Webber on principle, either -- I'd seen Cats with my family and loved it.)
Phantom fever finally died off a bit, as all things do, and I pretty much forgot about it, until 1999, when Shea's Buffalo Theater underwent some major refurbishment, the focus of which was expanding the stage so the theater could host the major touring productions of the day. This meant that Phantom of the Opera could finally play in Buffalo. Naturally, The Wife and I went. It was May 18, 1999; I remember that date because the next day we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on its opening day. We've always referred to that as "Phantom Weekend" ever since.
Seeing the show was quite the production, and it was nice to at last hear all those songs I'd been sick of for years in their proper context, as well as others that I did not know so well. In 2004, a movie version came out, and as I recall, it was reviewed pretty harshly, and we didn't see it -- until last week, that is, when I saw the DVD at the library and thought, "Well, why not? How bad can it be?"
And it turned out, not very bad at all. In fact, I thought it a fine production overall, well-sung and well-acted. The voice of Gerard Butler, who played the Phantom himself, took a small bit of getting used to, but I thought he was generally excellent, and the film puts the gorgeous spectacle of the stage show front and center, with lots of sweeping camera shots through that magnificent Parisian opera house. (Although I did think that the Phantom's lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs beneath the Opera, looked a bit too clean.) What was really cool, though, was the degree to which The Daughter loved the movie. She's watched it a couple additional times since, asked me to track down the music for her MP3 player, and, when she thinks no one is listening, she's been singing songs from the show. I find that awesome.
Anyway, as this is a Something for Thursday post, I need to put something musical here, to wrap up. I know that Michael Crawford is generally seen as the canonical Phantom, but I always found something slightly "off" about his voice, so I've never had the problem of comparing Phantoms to Crawford in my head. Colm Wilkinson's voice is much more to my liking, and it's his I'll feature now. Here's Colm Wilkinson, singing "The Music of the Night".
The show came out sometime in the late 1980s, and ten years would pass before I'd see it on stage myself. But for a time, the songs of Phantom were...how to put this...ubiquitous. That music was everywhere, and after a short while, I was Phantom'd out.
Late in my senior year of high school, an amateur chorus in a neighboring town was looking for brass players for a concert they were doing...of Phantom songs. Then, at my summer music camp, we played an arrangement of Phantom's songs in the band, and then the very next year, in the chorus, we did a choral arrangement of the same Phantom songs. In college, my orchestra did yet another arrangement of Phantom songs.
Every year, my college had a music competition/festival thing in which high school students from all over Iowa and vicinity would come to play with college musicians and compete for scholarships. Those students vying for vocal scholarships would perform solos at the main concert. One year, no fewer than three young baritones did "The Music of the Night".
And nearly every student at school had Phantom in their CD collections. Most had the single-disc "highlights" record, but the hard-cores had the "Complete show" double-CD edition. And you'd often hear those discs blasting out windows and open doors, during that pounding motif on the organ -- you know the one -- that practically demanded to be played at Max Volume.
For two to three years of my life, it was Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. I got sick of the whole damned thing without ever seeing it. (And I wasn't disposed to dislike Andrew Lloyd Webber on principle, either -- I'd seen Cats with my family and loved it.)
Phantom fever finally died off a bit, as all things do, and I pretty much forgot about it, until 1999, when Shea's Buffalo Theater underwent some major refurbishment, the focus of which was expanding the stage so the theater could host the major touring productions of the day. This meant that Phantom of the Opera could finally play in Buffalo. Naturally, The Wife and I went. It was May 18, 1999; I remember that date because the next day we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on its opening day. We've always referred to that as "Phantom Weekend" ever since.
Seeing the show was quite the production, and it was nice to at last hear all those songs I'd been sick of for years in their proper context, as well as others that I did not know so well. In 2004, a movie version came out, and as I recall, it was reviewed pretty harshly, and we didn't see it -- until last week, that is, when I saw the DVD at the library and thought, "Well, why not? How bad can it be?"
And it turned out, not very bad at all. In fact, I thought it a fine production overall, well-sung and well-acted. The voice of Gerard Butler, who played the Phantom himself, took a small bit of getting used to, but I thought he was generally excellent, and the film puts the gorgeous spectacle of the stage show front and center, with lots of sweeping camera shots through that magnificent Parisian opera house. (Although I did think that the Phantom's lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs beneath the Opera, looked a bit too clean.) What was really cool, though, was the degree to which The Daughter loved the movie. She's watched it a couple additional times since, asked me to track down the music for her MP3 player, and, when she thinks no one is listening, she's been singing songs from the show. I find that awesome.
Anyway, as this is a Something for Thursday post, I need to put something musical here, to wrap up. I know that Michael Crawford is generally seen as the canonical Phantom, but I always found something slightly "off" about his voice, so I've never had the problem of comparing Phantoms to Crawford in my head. Colm Wilkinson's voice is much more to my liking, and it's his I'll feature now. Here's Colm Wilkinson, singing "The Music of the Night".
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
I think it's crap, Chef!
Time for this week's griping and kvetching about Hell's Kitchen!
:: Holli's hair is so cute. Holli is so cute.
:: Ah, the blind taste test! The results are about what they always are, with the chefs only naming a handful of the ingredients they are fed whilst blindfolded and wearing headphones. Frankly, I'd love to see Chef Ramsay do this one sometime.
:: I still hate Benjamin. I can't get over how quiet and reserved he was when he was with the men, but now that he's with the women, he's the arrogant ass steamrolling over everybody. I hate that kind of chauvinistic crap. It reminds me of when I worked in restaurants, and if I was on duty with another manager who happened to be female, and the other manager went off to talk to a customer with a problem, every once in a while you'd get that customer who would refuse to believe the female they were talking to was a "real" manager.
:: Dinner service: Benjamin is shitting the bed from the outset, and Chef Ramsay is calling him out. Good. Hate this guy. Have I mentioned that? I'm sure it will come up again.
:: Fran's falling apart. Will this be her last hurrah?
:: Wow, everybody's stinking except for Holli, who is so cute and competent.
:: Elimination: Fran out, Autumn back to the Red team. Who cares?
:: Second episode! Preview shows fireworks! Huzzah!!!
:: Holy crap, those are some awesome looking lobsters. I'm already hungry. But naming them for departed chefs? How rude!
:: I always wonder about the dishes in tasting challenges like this. They sit around getting cold for a few minutes while the tasting chefs are introduced and whatnot.
:: Holli always seems to do well at these challenges, doesn't she? My small crush on her aside (can we see her in overalls again, please?), she really shows serious skill. Her dishes at these challenges are always well-received, and she's only had a couple of hiccups in the services. She could be this season's Christina (the eventual winner of Season Four).
:: And Holli's dish is so good that Chef Ramsay awards her an extra point to break the tie! Holli's awesome. And since her team wins, she'll get to wear normal clothes.
:: OK, those dorms are disgusting. There's something like three weeks' worth of cigarette butts in that big ashtray! I wonder if there's a rule that no one is to do any incidental cleaning at all, so that the cleaning can be held out as a punishment.
:: Ohhhhhhh wow...Holli...(I promise I'll stop this eventually.)
:: Hoo boy, throwing a time factor on the dinner service? I'm sure this will go swimmingly!
:: Oh wait, no, it won't. And Nilka, who has been pretty good until now, has just fallen apart completely. This was like watching the Titanic steam full-speed right into the iceberg. While its hold was full of explosives.
:: Wow, this is the tantrum that keeps on giving. It was a pretty wild moment. But you know what? It would have been astonishing teevee if FOX had not plastered this event all over its promos for this episode. I really wish networks would let the shocking moments be shocking moments.
:: Classy exit after all the screaming for Nilka. And they still have to put people up for elimination! Wow.
:: Ramsay specifically praises Jason's performance...so the team was seriously discussing nominating him? Duh. Actual nominees: Autumn and Ed. Ed's first nomination, Autumn's third? I think? I'm guessing he doesn't eliminate anybody this time, given Nilka's exit.
:: And I call it! Time for the black uniforms. Final six! Go Holli!!!
:: Holli's hair is so cute. Holli is so cute.
:: Ah, the blind taste test! The results are about what they always are, with the chefs only naming a handful of the ingredients they are fed whilst blindfolded and wearing headphones. Frankly, I'd love to see Chef Ramsay do this one sometime.
:: I still hate Benjamin. I can't get over how quiet and reserved he was when he was with the men, but now that he's with the women, he's the arrogant ass steamrolling over everybody. I hate that kind of chauvinistic crap. It reminds me of when I worked in restaurants, and if I was on duty with another manager who happened to be female, and the other manager went off to talk to a customer with a problem, every once in a while you'd get that customer who would refuse to believe the female they were talking to was a "real" manager.
:: Dinner service: Benjamin is shitting the bed from the outset, and Chef Ramsay is calling him out. Good. Hate this guy. Have I mentioned that? I'm sure it will come up again.
:: Fran's falling apart. Will this be her last hurrah?
:: Wow, everybody's stinking except for Holli, who is so cute and competent.
:: Elimination: Fran out, Autumn back to the Red team. Who cares?
:: Second episode! Preview shows fireworks! Huzzah!!!
:: Holy crap, those are some awesome looking lobsters. I'm already hungry. But naming them for departed chefs? How rude!
:: I always wonder about the dishes in tasting challenges like this. They sit around getting cold for a few minutes while the tasting chefs are introduced and whatnot.
:: Holli always seems to do well at these challenges, doesn't she? My small crush on her aside (can we see her in overalls again, please?), she really shows serious skill. Her dishes at these challenges are always well-received, and she's only had a couple of hiccups in the services. She could be this season's Christina (the eventual winner of Season Four).
:: And Holli's dish is so good that Chef Ramsay awards her an extra point to break the tie! Holli's awesome. And since her team wins, she'll get to wear normal clothes.
:: OK, those dorms are disgusting. There's something like three weeks' worth of cigarette butts in that big ashtray! I wonder if there's a rule that no one is to do any incidental cleaning at all, so that the cleaning can be held out as a punishment.
:: Ohhhhhhh wow...Holli...(I promise I'll stop this eventually.)
:: Hoo boy, throwing a time factor on the dinner service? I'm sure this will go swimmingly!
:: Oh wait, no, it won't. And Nilka, who has been pretty good until now, has just fallen apart completely. This was like watching the Titanic steam full-speed right into the iceberg. While its hold was full of explosives.
:: Wow, this is the tantrum that keeps on giving. It was a pretty wild moment. But you know what? It would have been astonishing teevee if FOX had not plastered this event all over its promos for this episode. I really wish networks would let the shocking moments be shocking moments.
:: Classy exit after all the screaming for Nilka. And they still have to put people up for elimination! Wow.
:: Ramsay specifically praises Jason's performance...so the team was seriously discussing nominating him? Duh. Actual nominees: Autumn and Ed. Ed's first nomination, Autumn's third? I think? I'm guessing he doesn't eliminate anybody this time, given Nilka's exit.
:: And I call it! Time for the black uniforms. Final six! Go Holli!!!
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Should Lebron James stay in Cleveland, or sign wherever the money is best?
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Won't someone please think of the children!
I always think it's funny when someone thinks that they're making a profound point, whilst remaining utterly oblivious to the fact that the only point they're actually making is, "I am an asshole!".
A Book Quiz
Sheila did this, and as I cannot resist a good quiz, I shall do it too.
Worst Books Ever, or Five Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back
Five hours? I wish. I lost several days of my life, altogether, to crap like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, The Celestine Prophecy, Twilight, and others. As I get older, though, I get a lot less tolerant of bad books. I used to believe that I couldn't really frame a full opinion of something fairly unless I read the whole thing. Now, if I think it sucks after a hundred pages, I'm only too glad to set it aside and say "It sucks."
Books I Have Lied About Reading
Well, there were readings I was supposed to do in school that I never did, and only bluffed my way through in the discussions. Sometimes I was successful. Other times, less so.
Books I Have Lied About Liking
I don't really do this. If I hate it, I hate it. Why not say so?
Book-to-Movie Adaptations Where, Frankly, the Movie Was Better
The Bridges of Madison County is a bizarre little book, but the movie is really, really, really good. And Goldfinger the movie is better than the book (even if it's not my favorite Bond movie).
Books I Used to Love, of Which I Am Now Ashamed
"Shame" isn't the right word, but there are books that were once meaningful to me which I've now moved beyond. Much of Richard Bach's output falls in this category. (More on my once-thriving relationship with Bach's work here.)
Best Book Titles of All Time
The Lord of the Rings; They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; The Once and Future King; Lamb, or, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal; The Stars My Destination.
I love a good title.
Books That I Expected to Be Dirtier
Ummmm...I never really expect dirt in my books, so I have no idea.
My Real Guilty-Pleasure Reads, and Not the Decoys I Talk About Openly
Geez, why so much guilt? I feel no guilt about reading. I do keep dreaming about reading some book, and having some stranger squeal with delight as they see someone else reading their favorite book. This has never happened yet.
Books You Must Read Before You Die, but Would Rather Die Than Read
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: One day, I am going into the woods with The Brothers Karamazov, and only one of us is coming back alive.
Books I Refused to Read for a Long Time Because too Many (or the Wrong) People Recommended Them
Hmmmmm. Not really sure. I'm not one to avoid the popular thing because it's popular; I will explore something popular out of curiosity, but since I tend to read stuff when I want, I might wait for years before reading something that was popular a while back. Harry Potter was up to Prisoner of Azkaban before I read him, for example.
Books I Read Only After Seeing the Movie
2001: A Space Odyssey; The Hobbit (referring to the animated version of the 1970s). I'm sure there are others, but none are leaping to mind right now.
Books I Most Often Try to Persuade Other People to Read
Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Authors I Wish Had Written More Books Already
There was a writer named John J. Robinson who wrote a couple of terrific history books, Dungeon, Fire and Sword and Born in Blood, which deal with the Knights Templar and the Crusades and the formations of Freemasonry, respectively. He had a wonderful voice to his writing that I loved.
I also wonder why Caleb Carr has never done anything in his 1900s New York City after The Alienist and Angel of Darkness; I loved those books.
Overused Plot Points That Drive Me Nuts
I can't think of any, really.
Books in Which I Liked the Secondary Characters Better Than the Main Character, or Books in Which I Wanted to Beat the Main Character Senseless with a Tire Iron
Well, I certainly wanted to beat each and every one of the principles in Twilight to death!
Books I Lied About Reading and Then Wrote an A+ Term Paper On
I never did this. I never got an A+ on a paper, that is. I did get a couple of B's.
Books I Lied About Reading/Liking Solely to Look Smart/Pretentious
Nope, I've never done this.
Books I Wish I Hadn’t Finished, or Worst. Ending. Ever.
The Yearling. I only read that book because it was required by my seventh grade teacher, who was utterly stunned when I wrote a caustic paper on how much I hated it. The whole "Young boy grows up when he must kill his beloved pet" mini-genre sickens me. (In other words, F*** Old Yeller.)
Books I Read after Oprah Recommended Them
I don't pay any attention to Oprah's book recommendations. At all. Not because I'm anti-Oprah, but because I don't really care about her one way or the other. I know she's a force of nature and all that, but she's not really on my radar. (I did hear once that she said that she "doesn't read science fiction", which irritated me. But I wouldn't ignore her on that basis.)
Books I Will Never Read Precisely Because Oprah Recommends Them
Yeah, what I just said.
Literary Characters I’ve Developed Crushes On
Princess Eilonwy in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles; Jehane bet Ishak in GGK's Lions of Al-Rassan; Lady Guinevere as portrayed in Gillian May's Arthurian trilogy.
Books I Only Read to Impress Other People
Haven't we covered this? I read what I want to read. If you're not impressed, then sod off already.
Best Books Not to Read from Start to Finish, or Best Bathroom Books
Ahhhh! Get Fuzzy compendiums. (Hmmmm...is the right plural there "compendia"? Look that up, self.) Comics of all stripes. Books of nature photography. And cookbooks! I've planned entire weeks' worth of meals in the bathroom. And I haven't bought a copy in years, but Roger Ebert's yearly collection of movie reviews always made great bathroom reading.
Books I Shouldn’t Admit Made Me Cry Like a Baby
Why shouldn't I admit it? GGK's Fionavar Tapestry hits me on the sweet spot every damn time I read it. I had to resort to lots of strategic throat-clearing when I was reading The High King aloud to The Daughter, especially in that final chapter.
Books I Only Read for the Title
I'm not really sure what this means. Titles catch my eye and pique my interest, to be certain. Many books I choose because the title caught me first.
Books I Re-Read When I Have Nothing Else to Read
I don't do full re-reads all that often, but I do dip into favorite books a lot. Lord of the Rings, GGK, favorite scenes from Stephen King, et cetera. Any book I have read and enjoyed is fodder for dipping.
Books People Keep Recommending That, Frankly, Sucked Ass
I may sound like the proverbial broken record, but Jeez Louise, how could Twilight have been that awful? And don't tell me "It's a guy thing", or "Well, you were never a teenage girl in love so you won't know." It was Stephenie Meyer's job to make me understand that, not mine. I've read a lot of popular stuff that I didn't like all that much, but few that I've loathed to that degree.
Books My Teacher Made Me Read That I Really, Really Liked
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Johnny Tremain, The Scarlet Letter. Some others that I don't recall.
Books My Teacher Made Me read That Made Me Question the Value of My Education
I didn't care for Ordinary People. And the afore-mentioned The Yearling.
Here's a true story: as we neared completion of The Yearling, we each had to write a paper in which we either recommended the book or didn't. I didn't, primarily because I found the book awfully boring, and I didn't buy the central moral lesson. So I didn't recommend it, and got something like a B- on my report. The kid next to me said the same things in his report, but at the end, he said, "I'd recommend the book anyway." He actually asked the teacher, in class, why he got a higher grade when he too said the book was boring and the "Man up and kill your pet!" lesson was crap. The teacher sagely spread her hands and said, "You recommended it. There's no problem there."
So I probably could have said, "This book is complete shit, but I recommend it!", and she'd have given me an A-.
I didn't like that teacher very much.
Books That Made Me Want to Have Sex with at Least One Character
I was all set to say "As if I'd ever think such a thing!"...and then I remember the wonderfully sensual Kushiel's Dart. Sigh...and add Kushiel to my list of literary crushes up above. Can't wait to resume this series in the fall.
Books I Actually Read but Got a Poorer Grade on the Paper I Wrote on the Subject Than My Best Friend Who Did Not Read the Book
This never happened, but see above on The Yearling.
Books I Read Because the Author Looked Hot
Huh?!
Books I’ve Read Aloud
Many with The Daughter! The Prydain Chronicles, the Dark is Rising Sequence, et cetera.
Sadly, The Daughter has reached the point where she likes to read her own stuff at bedtime, so Reading Aloud time has come to an end at Casa Jaquandor. Those will always be some of my fondest memories of this whole parenting gig.
Books I Love Even Though the Last Twenty Pages Made No Damn Sense
The Neal Stephenson novels I've read fall into this category. His endings just come out of nowhere, really. Most times, though, the endings "make sense" in that I understand what happens.
Books I Have Written a Prequel/Sequel to in My Own Head
I don't think I've ever done this, really!
Books I Keep Meaning to Read, but Then I See Something Shiny
Well, my reading is all over the map. I could make a list of books I mean to read that would be hundreds of titles long. I rarely plan my reading; I just pick whatever looks like it may suit my mood from one book to the next.
Books I Will Go to the Mattresses for, Even Though I Hate the Writer
I can't think of one, really. Maybe Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which really is an awfully good summation of the pitfalls of writing both genres, even though I think Card is sufficiently loathsome that I can reasonably guarantee that I will never read any of his fiction, no matter how many people tell me how good Ender's Game is. Way I see it, I'll never have time to read all the books I want to read anyway, so if I don't read Ender because Card is a homophobic lout, I don't think my literary life will suffer.
Books You Must Read Because You Must Mock
I don't do this. I never read anything because I expect to dislike it. That really seems like a cynical thing to do, and like a terrible waste of time. I even read Twilight hoping to like it -- I love a well-written teen romance, and I love a good vampire story, after all.
Worst How-To Books Ever
Anything by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
Books That Were on the ‘To Be Read’ List the Longest
Brothers K, maybe. I've been meaning to re-read David Copperfield for years, too. (Read it in ninth grade and didn't like it, but I was in ninth grade and likely had difficultly, speaking in literary terms, of distinguishing between my arse and a hole in the ground.)
Books I Hated Having to Read in School, But Love Now
Shakespeare. I hated him at first. But then, I've always questioned the way we went about it: barely a month into ninth grade, and we're handed Romeo and Juliet. We barely know anything about poetry, much less all that iambic pentameter, and none of it seems to make any sense. I warmed up to Shakespeare a little more each successive year.
(This is part of my half-baked hypothesis that maybe teaching literature should start with contemporary stuff and work backwards, getting to Shakespeare at the end of the year, rather than doing the forwards-chronologically thing which puts the Bard in the leadoff position.)
Books Whose References Have Worked Their Way into My Household Lexicon
Ummmm...I'm not sure on this.
Books I’ve Read Because I Liked Their Cover Design/Font
Lots of them! As I note above, it's the covers that catch my eyes when I'm book shopping. Not every pretty cover I buy, but I do like to pick up books based on covers and look them over.
Books Which, When It Comes Right Down to It, I Would Have No Problem Burning
I'm still ripping on Twilight. But I can't burn it; I sent it to SamuraiFrog. But who am I kidding? I would never burn a book, except for, possibly, old phone books that I might use for kindling.
Books Which I Read Only for the Sex Scenes
The Call of Cthulhu. I was misinformed.
Books I Pretend to Like So People Won’t Think I’m a Snob, or Books I Pretend to Like So I Won’t Hurt Your Feelings
Oh, come on. That's just dumb. I'll admit to having had a passing fascination with Nicholas Sparks a while back (but I think that's worn off, since I've come to realize that he's basically the Funky Winkerbean of romance novels). And since a lot of the time I'm reading a space opera novel with exploding spaceships on the cover, or fantasy novels with sword-wielding strongmen on the cover, being thought a snob is the least of my worries!
Books with Covers So Embarrassing You Can’t Read Them in Public
None, really, although Christopher Moore's You Suck has a fun cover to hold up whilst reading in public!
Books You Are Sorry You Didn’t Read Decades Ago
Any that were written decades ago!
Wow, that was a long quiz....
Worst Books Ever, or Five Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back
Five hours? I wish. I lost several days of my life, altogether, to crap like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, The Celestine Prophecy, Twilight, and others. As I get older, though, I get a lot less tolerant of bad books. I used to believe that I couldn't really frame a full opinion of something fairly unless I read the whole thing. Now, if I think it sucks after a hundred pages, I'm only too glad to set it aside and say "It sucks."
Books I Have Lied About Reading
Well, there were readings I was supposed to do in school that I never did, and only bluffed my way through in the discussions. Sometimes I was successful. Other times, less so.
Books I Have Lied About Liking
I don't really do this. If I hate it, I hate it. Why not say so?
Book-to-Movie Adaptations Where, Frankly, the Movie Was Better
The Bridges of Madison County is a bizarre little book, but the movie is really, really, really good. And Goldfinger the movie is better than the book (even if it's not my favorite Bond movie).
Books I Used to Love, of Which I Am Now Ashamed
"Shame" isn't the right word, but there are books that were once meaningful to me which I've now moved beyond. Much of Richard Bach's output falls in this category. (More on my once-thriving relationship with Bach's work here.)
Best Book Titles of All Time
The Lord of the Rings; They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; The Once and Future King; Lamb, or, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal; The Stars My Destination.
I love a good title.
Books That I Expected to Be Dirtier
Ummmm...I never really expect dirt in my books, so I have no idea.
My Real Guilty-Pleasure Reads, and Not the Decoys I Talk About Openly
Geez, why so much guilt? I feel no guilt about reading. I do keep dreaming about reading some book, and having some stranger squeal with delight as they see someone else reading their favorite book. This has never happened yet.
Books You Must Read Before You Die, but Would Rather Die Than Read
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: One day, I am going into the woods with The Brothers Karamazov, and only one of us is coming back alive.
Books I Refused to Read for a Long Time Because too Many (or the Wrong) People Recommended Them
Hmmmmm. Not really sure. I'm not one to avoid the popular thing because it's popular; I will explore something popular out of curiosity, but since I tend to read stuff when I want, I might wait for years before reading something that was popular a while back. Harry Potter was up to Prisoner of Azkaban before I read him, for example.
Books I Read Only After Seeing the Movie
2001: A Space Odyssey; The Hobbit (referring to the animated version of the 1970s). I'm sure there are others, but none are leaping to mind right now.
Books I Most Often Try to Persuade Other People to Read
Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Authors I Wish Had Written More Books Already
There was a writer named John J. Robinson who wrote a couple of terrific history books, Dungeon, Fire and Sword and Born in Blood, which deal with the Knights Templar and the Crusades and the formations of Freemasonry, respectively. He had a wonderful voice to his writing that I loved.
I also wonder why Caleb Carr has never done anything in his 1900s New York City after The Alienist and Angel of Darkness; I loved those books.
Overused Plot Points That Drive Me Nuts
I can't think of any, really.
Books in Which I Liked the Secondary Characters Better Than the Main Character, or Books in Which I Wanted to Beat the Main Character Senseless with a Tire Iron
Well, I certainly wanted to beat each and every one of the principles in Twilight to death!
Books I Lied About Reading and Then Wrote an A+ Term Paper On
I never did this. I never got an A+ on a paper, that is. I did get a couple of B's.
Books I Lied About Reading/Liking Solely to Look Smart/Pretentious
Nope, I've never done this.
Books I Wish I Hadn’t Finished, or Worst. Ending. Ever.
The Yearling. I only read that book because it was required by my seventh grade teacher, who was utterly stunned when I wrote a caustic paper on how much I hated it. The whole "Young boy grows up when he must kill his beloved pet" mini-genre sickens me. (In other words, F*** Old Yeller.)
Books I Read after Oprah Recommended Them
I don't pay any attention to Oprah's book recommendations. At all. Not because I'm anti-Oprah, but because I don't really care about her one way or the other. I know she's a force of nature and all that, but she's not really on my radar. (I did hear once that she said that she "doesn't read science fiction", which irritated me. But I wouldn't ignore her on that basis.)
Books I Will Never Read Precisely Because Oprah Recommends Them
Yeah, what I just said.
Literary Characters I’ve Developed Crushes On
Princess Eilonwy in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles; Jehane bet Ishak in GGK's Lions of Al-Rassan; Lady Guinevere as portrayed in Gillian May's Arthurian trilogy.
Books I Only Read to Impress Other People
Haven't we covered this? I read what I want to read. If you're not impressed, then sod off already.
Best Books Not to Read from Start to Finish, or Best Bathroom Books
Ahhhh! Get Fuzzy compendiums. (Hmmmm...is the right plural there "compendia"? Look that up, self.) Comics of all stripes. Books of nature photography. And cookbooks! I've planned entire weeks' worth of meals in the bathroom. And I haven't bought a copy in years, but Roger Ebert's yearly collection of movie reviews always made great bathroom reading.
Books I Shouldn’t Admit Made Me Cry Like a Baby
Why shouldn't I admit it? GGK's Fionavar Tapestry hits me on the sweet spot every damn time I read it. I had to resort to lots of strategic throat-clearing when I was reading The High King aloud to The Daughter, especially in that final chapter.
Books I Only Read for the Title
I'm not really sure what this means. Titles catch my eye and pique my interest, to be certain. Many books I choose because the title caught me first.
Books I Re-Read When I Have Nothing Else to Read
I don't do full re-reads all that often, but I do dip into favorite books a lot. Lord of the Rings, GGK, favorite scenes from Stephen King, et cetera. Any book I have read and enjoyed is fodder for dipping.
Books People Keep Recommending That, Frankly, Sucked Ass
I may sound like the proverbial broken record, but Jeez Louise, how could Twilight have been that awful? And don't tell me "It's a guy thing", or "Well, you were never a teenage girl in love so you won't know." It was Stephenie Meyer's job to make me understand that, not mine. I've read a lot of popular stuff that I didn't like all that much, but few that I've loathed to that degree.
Books My Teacher Made Me Read That I Really, Really Liked
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Johnny Tremain, The Scarlet Letter. Some others that I don't recall.
Books My Teacher Made Me read That Made Me Question the Value of My Education
I didn't care for Ordinary People. And the afore-mentioned The Yearling.
Here's a true story: as we neared completion of The Yearling, we each had to write a paper in which we either recommended the book or didn't. I didn't, primarily because I found the book awfully boring, and I didn't buy the central moral lesson. So I didn't recommend it, and got something like a B- on my report. The kid next to me said the same things in his report, but at the end, he said, "I'd recommend the book anyway." He actually asked the teacher, in class, why he got a higher grade when he too said the book was boring and the "Man up and kill your pet!" lesson was crap. The teacher sagely spread her hands and said, "You recommended it. There's no problem there."
So I probably could have said, "This book is complete shit, but I recommend it!", and she'd have given me an A-.
I didn't like that teacher very much.
Books That Made Me Want to Have Sex with at Least One Character
I was all set to say "As if I'd ever think such a thing!"...and then I remember the wonderfully sensual Kushiel's Dart. Sigh...and add Kushiel to my list of literary crushes up above. Can't wait to resume this series in the fall.
Books I Actually Read but Got a Poorer Grade on the Paper I Wrote on the Subject Than My Best Friend Who Did Not Read the Book
This never happened, but see above on The Yearling.
Books I Read Because the Author Looked Hot
Huh?!
Books I’ve Read Aloud
Many with The Daughter! The Prydain Chronicles, the Dark is Rising Sequence, et cetera.
Sadly, The Daughter has reached the point where she likes to read her own stuff at bedtime, so Reading Aloud time has come to an end at Casa Jaquandor. Those will always be some of my fondest memories of this whole parenting gig.
Books I Love Even Though the Last Twenty Pages Made No Damn Sense
The Neal Stephenson novels I've read fall into this category. His endings just come out of nowhere, really. Most times, though, the endings "make sense" in that I understand what happens.
Books I Have Written a Prequel/Sequel to in My Own Head
I don't think I've ever done this, really!
Books I Keep Meaning to Read, but Then I See Something Shiny
Well, my reading is all over the map. I could make a list of books I mean to read that would be hundreds of titles long. I rarely plan my reading; I just pick whatever looks like it may suit my mood from one book to the next.
Books I Will Go to the Mattresses for, Even Though I Hate the Writer
I can't think of one, really. Maybe Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which really is an awfully good summation of the pitfalls of writing both genres, even though I think Card is sufficiently loathsome that I can reasonably guarantee that I will never read any of his fiction, no matter how many people tell me how good Ender's Game is. Way I see it, I'll never have time to read all the books I want to read anyway, so if I don't read Ender because Card is a homophobic lout, I don't think my literary life will suffer.
Books You Must Read Because You Must Mock
I don't do this. I never read anything because I expect to dislike it. That really seems like a cynical thing to do, and like a terrible waste of time. I even read Twilight hoping to like it -- I love a well-written teen romance, and I love a good vampire story, after all.
Worst How-To Books Ever
Anything by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
Books That Were on the ‘To Be Read’ List the Longest
Brothers K, maybe. I've been meaning to re-read David Copperfield for years, too. (Read it in ninth grade and didn't like it, but I was in ninth grade and likely had difficultly, speaking in literary terms, of distinguishing between my arse and a hole in the ground.)
Books I Hated Having to Read in School, But Love Now
Shakespeare. I hated him at first. But then, I've always questioned the way we went about it: barely a month into ninth grade, and we're handed Romeo and Juliet. We barely know anything about poetry, much less all that iambic pentameter, and none of it seems to make any sense. I warmed up to Shakespeare a little more each successive year.
(This is part of my half-baked hypothesis that maybe teaching literature should start with contemporary stuff and work backwards, getting to Shakespeare at the end of the year, rather than doing the forwards-chronologically thing which puts the Bard in the leadoff position.)
Books Whose References Have Worked Their Way into My Household Lexicon
Ummmm...I'm not sure on this.
Books I’ve Read Because I Liked Their Cover Design/Font
Lots of them! As I note above, it's the covers that catch my eyes when I'm book shopping. Not every pretty cover I buy, but I do like to pick up books based on covers and look them over.
Books Which, When It Comes Right Down to It, I Would Have No Problem Burning
I'm still ripping on Twilight. But I can't burn it; I sent it to SamuraiFrog. But who am I kidding? I would never burn a book, except for, possibly, old phone books that I might use for kindling.
Books Which I Read Only for the Sex Scenes
The Call of Cthulhu. I was misinformed.
Books I Pretend to Like So People Won’t Think I’m a Snob, or Books I Pretend to Like So I Won’t Hurt Your Feelings
Oh, come on. That's just dumb. I'll admit to having had a passing fascination with Nicholas Sparks a while back (but I think that's worn off, since I've come to realize that he's basically the Funky Winkerbean of romance novels). And since a lot of the time I'm reading a space opera novel with exploding spaceships on the cover, or fantasy novels with sword-wielding strongmen on the cover, being thought a snob is the least of my worries!
Books with Covers So Embarrassing You Can’t Read Them in Public
None, really, although Christopher Moore's You Suck has a fun cover to hold up whilst reading in public!
Books You Are Sorry You Didn’t Read Decades Ago
Any that were written decades ago!
Wow, that was a long quiz....
Monday, July 05, 2010
"I am Darth Vader. From the planet Vulcan."
I haven't talked about writing in a while, so here's a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I've had in my head for seven or eight years now; it's an idea that's been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planet who leave their world to take their first trip to the Galactic Capital, or something like that. But on the way, their starship experiences some [ahem] technical difficulties and they end up on a strange planet they've never heard of before.
All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I've maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I'm not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I'm not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters -- my theory is that if the character's favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point -- but I do want to be able to keep things straight.
So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.
And I don't have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.
Why don't I have the names? Well, I figured they'd come to me, sooner or later. That's part of the problem. The other part is that I'm actually recycling a plot that I had started to use in an old Star Wars fanfic project years and years ago, and in that fanfic, I had the habit of just stealing names outright from anywhere I could get my hands on, seeing as how I was just writing it "for the love" and nobody aside from a certain co-conspirator was ever gonna read that stuff. So, in my fanfic, the world where this weird stuff takes place was called Veridian III -- which is the name of the ill-fated planet in Star Trek Generations. I stole a raft of other names, too; only a handful of names in that whole thing were ones I coined myself.
For my purposes, I want names that sound a bit more fantasy than science fiction, if that makes sense. Lately I've been reading some of the short fiction of Leigh Brackett -- why the hell isn't she ever in print, by the way? -- and that woman had a wonderful way with names. Her Mars and Venus abound with places and people with beautiful names: Shandakor! Astellar! Shuruun. Sinharat. Llyrdis. Her names are evocative and fit in with her worlds of adventure. That's the kind of thing I want...and it's the hardest thing in the world for me to come up with.
Enter, then, this Fantasy Name Generator. I'm not going to lie, folks -- I spent a chunk of today generating lists of names and copying down the ones I like. Some I'll use, some I may not; and some I like as "starter" names but will undoubtedly tweak a bit here and there. (In the book, I've already tweaked the names of two of my three major characters.) Hey, you have to start somewhere.
Naming is not a trivial thing. It's not a matter of just making up some random name, assigning it to a character, and moving on. I'm not one to believe that names necessarily define people, but there are limits to that. It would take a pretty good writer indeed to turn a character named "Dudley Bose" into a heroic figure, but luckily for Dudley, Peter F. Hamilton is a good writer. But then, as we get to know characters, names kind of take on the qualities of the characters, don't they? Ian Fleming was looking for a boring name for the secret agent he wanted to write about, since his original notion was that the agent was a boring guy to whom exciting things happened, and when he spotted the name "James Bond" on the cover of a book on birdwatching in the Caribbean, he thought, "Wow, there's a boring name! Giddyup!" Only now, years later, the name "James Bond" has connotations that are anything but boring. You can use names that connote something about a character -- Fleming did this a lot, actually -- but I like to go a middle road: names that don't define anything literally about a character, but maybe suggest something. A little.
Anyway, yes, I'm using a randomizer to name characters and planets and who knows what else. Sue me!
All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I've maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I'm not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I'm not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters -- my theory is that if the character's favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point -- but I do want to be able to keep things straight.
So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.
And I don't have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.
Why don't I have the names? Well, I figured they'd come to me, sooner or later. That's part of the problem. The other part is that I'm actually recycling a plot that I had started to use in an old Star Wars fanfic project years and years ago, and in that fanfic, I had the habit of just stealing names outright from anywhere I could get my hands on, seeing as how I was just writing it "for the love" and nobody aside from a certain co-conspirator was ever gonna read that stuff. So, in my fanfic, the world where this weird stuff takes place was called Veridian III -- which is the name of the ill-fated planet in Star Trek Generations. I stole a raft of other names, too; only a handful of names in that whole thing were ones I coined myself.
For my purposes, I want names that sound a bit more fantasy than science fiction, if that makes sense. Lately I've been reading some of the short fiction of Leigh Brackett -- why the hell isn't she ever in print, by the way? -- and that woman had a wonderful way with names. Her Mars and Venus abound with places and people with beautiful names: Shandakor! Astellar! Shuruun. Sinharat. Llyrdis. Her names are evocative and fit in with her worlds of adventure. That's the kind of thing I want...and it's the hardest thing in the world for me to come up with.
Enter, then, this Fantasy Name Generator. I'm not going to lie, folks -- I spent a chunk of today generating lists of names and copying down the ones I like. Some I'll use, some I may not; and some I like as "starter" names but will undoubtedly tweak a bit here and there. (In the book, I've already tweaked the names of two of my three major characters.) Hey, you have to start somewhere.
Naming is not a trivial thing. It's not a matter of just making up some random name, assigning it to a character, and moving on. I'm not one to believe that names necessarily define people, but there are limits to that. It would take a pretty good writer indeed to turn a character named "Dudley Bose" into a heroic figure, but luckily for Dudley, Peter F. Hamilton is a good writer. But then, as we get to know characters, names kind of take on the qualities of the characters, don't they? Ian Fleming was looking for a boring name for the secret agent he wanted to write about, since his original notion was that the agent was a boring guy to whom exciting things happened, and when he spotted the name "James Bond" on the cover of a book on birdwatching in the Caribbean, he thought, "Wow, there's a boring name! Giddyup!" Only now, years later, the name "James Bond" has connotations that are anything but boring. You can use names that connote something about a character -- Fleming did this a lot, actually -- but I like to go a middle road: names that don't define anything literally about a character, but maybe suggest something. A little.
Anyway, yes, I'm using a randomizer to name characters and planets and who knows what else. Sue me!
Sentential Links #211
Linkage....
:: And of course, shallowly, I want to have erudite amazing dinners like that. But really, I prefer my world to theirs. Even with all the badness in it--1981 was not a bad-free year. Even with everything, I do not want their sixties, or their world.
:: I don't live near the ocean, but I do live just a few blocks away from a Great Lake which sure as heck looks like an ocean because it goes on forever. Well, at least to Cleveland. (New blog to me, yay!)
:: There's something about this quote that I find encouraging. Be you, with your own distinctive dash, with every step you take. That, in a nutshell, is your life's work. Go forth.
:: So that's my only real complaint about the costume--you've taken one of the more colorful characters in one of the more colorful universes, and turned her into--
--a woman all in black fighting a bunch of guys in gray suits against a gray background.
Woo. Hoo. (I don't hate the new Wonder Woman costume, but this is an interesting objection.)
:: I reproduce here this panel in isolation because I thought you’d all want to see, in as much detail as possible, the moment when the good drugs kicked in. See how Jenna’s eyes are bugging out?
:: Got me thinking though. What was the first movie I saw that didn’t have a happy ending?
:: I’m not ashamed of much when it comes to reading. And while I submit to the current usage of the term ‘guilty pleasure’ and use it myself, it doesn’t really fit. (I love this attitude and subscribe to it myself. Why should I feel quilty about liking something? That said...I'm not sure how Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" got on my MP3 player. I should delete that...sometime....)
More next week!
:: And of course, shallowly, I want to have erudite amazing dinners like that. But really, I prefer my world to theirs. Even with all the badness in it--1981 was not a bad-free year. Even with everything, I do not want their sixties, or their world.
:: I don't live near the ocean, but I do live just a few blocks away from a Great Lake which sure as heck looks like an ocean because it goes on forever. Well, at least to Cleveland. (New blog to me, yay!)
:: There's something about this quote that I find encouraging. Be you, with your own distinctive dash, with every step you take. That, in a nutshell, is your life's work. Go forth.
:: So that's my only real complaint about the costume--you've taken one of the more colorful characters in one of the more colorful universes, and turned her into--
--a woman all in black fighting a bunch of guys in gray suits against a gray background.
Woo. Hoo. (I don't hate the new Wonder Woman costume, but this is an interesting objection.)
:: I reproduce here this panel in isolation because I thought you’d all want to see, in as much detail as possible, the moment when the good drugs kicked in. See how Jenna’s eyes are bugging out?
:: Got me thinking though. What was the first movie I saw that didn’t have a happy ending?
:: I’m not ashamed of much when it comes to reading. And while I submit to the current usage of the term ‘guilty pleasure’ and use it myself, it doesn’t really fit. (I love this attitude and subscribe to it myself. Why should I feel quilty about liking something? That said...I'm not sure how Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" got on my MP3 player. I should delete that...sometime....)
More next week!
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Here's a really weird story. It's so weird, I'm not sure the historians didn't make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn't much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They'd organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch's so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they'd go. So you'd expect that the folks we're talking about here would have just said, "You know what? Our King is a douche. Let's replace him with a new King."
But these folks didn't say that. What they said was, "Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we're now thinking maybe we won't even have any more Kings. We'll do it all ourselves."
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn't work, and that notion -- "No more Kings and Queens!" -- took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here's a paraphrase:
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, "No Kings!" government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn't be taken away. It was a really weird idea...and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we're still here, and we're still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You're a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
(Hey! Uncle George is in there!)
:: Here's a really weird story. It's so weird, I'm not sure the historians didn't make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn't much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They'd organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch's so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they'd go. So you'd expect that the folks we're talking about here would have just said, "You know what? Our King is a douche. Let's replace him with a new King."
But these folks didn't say that. What they said was, "Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we're now thinking maybe we won't even have any more Kings. We'll do it all ourselves."
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn't work, and that notion -- "No more Kings and Queens!" -- took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we're all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we're already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we're being serious and we're not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How 'bout a letter? I've got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you're about as eloquent as my cow. You'll just write "Hey King, sod off" and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He's pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where's that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here's a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don't want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we're going to come up with a government of our own that won't even have a King. Now, we've just called you a douche, so you're probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you're a douche, so there's a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don't. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we're gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here's the list of ways you've pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don't have to be a douche, you know.
...
See? Really, dude. There's no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You've still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they're weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we're out of here.
Signed,
All the guys present
PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see 'em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, "No Kings!" government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn't be taken away. It was a really weird idea...and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we're still here, and we're still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You're a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
(Hey! Uncle George is in there!)
Thursday, July 01, 2010
"That's what I'm trying to tell you, Miles. You never said anything."
I've wanted to read Empire Falls by Richard Russo for several years now, and when I saw a copy at the library book sale a few weeks ago, I snatched it up. Last week I plowed through it. With just a couple of misgivings, my main reaction is, "What a book."
Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for 2001, and the award is well deserved. The book doesn't tell a single story, but instead gives a picture of life in a small town in Maine – the Empire Falls of the title – which continues to struggle on even though its economy is barely on life support after all of its local industries have packed up and moved away. The point of view switches between a number of characters, but the main one we follow is Miles Roby, a lifelong resident of the town who runs the local diner (the Empire Grill), is divorcing his wife, and is trying to raise a daughter through the tough times of adolescence.
Empire Falls's story meanders a great deal, as well it should; life, real life, never really seems to have any actual direction, as much as we might wish otherwise, and any momentum tends to be more a matter of perception than reality. Russo's novel, then, is more tapestry than plot-driven story, following the logical results of a group of quirky people interacting with one another over the years.
Russo demonstrates a keen understanding of the dynamics of a small town like Empire Falls: how everything is dominated by the rich person who still owns everything in town (or seems to), how the people who remain in the town in which they grew up find themselves continually reliving the social interactions they had in high school, which tend to be the same social interactions as the ones their parents endured in their high school years, and so on. The dream, for so many, becomes to simply to break the cycle by leaving town. Some make it, some don't, and some leave town only to come back.
The town's social life seems to revolve around two establishments, Miles's Empire Grill and the bar run by his soon-to-be-former mother-in-law. Through it all, Miles tends to be deeply stoic, almost maddeningly accepting of his lot in life, no matter how many people tell him that he needs to stand up, fight for what he wants, or just leave the town entirely. His younger brother David is constantly lecturing Miles on the shortcomings of his approach to life; David is the person who is always asking, "Hey, did you do the thing we talked about yet", only to be told by Miles in reply, "It wasn't a good time" or "It was really awkward" or, just plain, "No, I didn't get to it yet."
One of the regulars of Miles's diner is the loudmouth jerk who is set to marry his soon-to-be-ex, Janine, and Miles just stoically endures the continued presence of the guy who stole his wife. Miles even somehow manages to possibly lead on the crippled daughter of the rich woman who owns most of the town, a woman who happens to have been in love with Miles since high school.
And then there's Miles's father, Max, a ne'er-do-well who makes his way through life doing odd jobs and sponging off nearly everyone around him. Max is wise in his own way, but his wisdom is extremely hard to find underneath his constant stream of BS. It turns out, via flashbacks, that Max's wife – Miles's mother – had cheated on him once, while on a trip to Martha's Vineyard with her son along for the ride. The identity of the man she cheated with turns out to be one of the book's main secrets and revelations, which suddenly clarifies a lot of the dynamics between the various characters.
Russo's women are also all sharply drawn: Janine Roby, who is divorcing Miles and remarrying a man she clearly doesn't like, simply because he isn't Miles; their daughter Tick (a nickname, obviously), who is shy and awkward in high school and yet somehow has caught the eye of the star football player (who happens to be the son of the town cop); Janine's mother Bea, who runs the local tavern and who is constantly giving Janine very blunt advice about all the ways she is going wrong in her life. And above it all is Mrs. Whiting, the rich woman who dominates life in Empire Falls.
My only real problem with Empire Falls is that, while the first 400 pages or so of the book meander slowly through the life in this small town, in the last 100 momentum starts to build as the hand of plot starts to push things along. Through most of the book, it seems like a portrait of a town that we're only getting to see for a short time, but at the end, Russo starts tying up plotlines. Most of these revelations are satisfactory, but I was never sure I even wanted resolutions to some of those threads. And I flat-out did not like the novel's closing paragraphs, where one final character's story is tied up in a way that I found at odds with the tone of the entire book to that point. It feels like the punchline to a black humor joke, and I definitely did not like it.
But the rest of the book is awfully good.
Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for 2001, and the award is well deserved. The book doesn't tell a single story, but instead gives a picture of life in a small town in Maine – the Empire Falls of the title – which continues to struggle on even though its economy is barely on life support after all of its local industries have packed up and moved away. The point of view switches between a number of characters, but the main one we follow is Miles Roby, a lifelong resident of the town who runs the local diner (the Empire Grill), is divorcing his wife, and is trying to raise a daughter through the tough times of adolescence.
Empire Falls's story meanders a great deal, as well it should; life, real life, never really seems to have any actual direction, as much as we might wish otherwise, and any momentum tends to be more a matter of perception than reality. Russo's novel, then, is more tapestry than plot-driven story, following the logical results of a group of quirky people interacting with one another over the years.
Russo demonstrates a keen understanding of the dynamics of a small town like Empire Falls: how everything is dominated by the rich person who still owns everything in town (or seems to), how the people who remain in the town in which they grew up find themselves continually reliving the social interactions they had in high school, which tend to be the same social interactions as the ones their parents endured in their high school years, and so on. The dream, for so many, becomes to simply to break the cycle by leaving town. Some make it, some don't, and some leave town only to come back.
The town's social life seems to revolve around two establishments, Miles's Empire Grill and the bar run by his soon-to-be-former mother-in-law. Through it all, Miles tends to be deeply stoic, almost maddeningly accepting of his lot in life, no matter how many people tell him that he needs to stand up, fight for what he wants, or just leave the town entirely. His younger brother David is constantly lecturing Miles on the shortcomings of his approach to life; David is the person who is always asking, "Hey, did you do the thing we talked about yet", only to be told by Miles in reply, "It wasn't a good time" or "It was really awkward" or, just plain, "No, I didn't get to it yet."
One of the regulars of Miles's diner is the loudmouth jerk who is set to marry his soon-to-be-ex, Janine, and Miles just stoically endures the continued presence of the guy who stole his wife. Miles even somehow manages to possibly lead on the crippled daughter of the rich woman who owns most of the town, a woman who happens to have been in love with Miles since high school.
And then there's Miles's father, Max, a ne'er-do-well who makes his way through life doing odd jobs and sponging off nearly everyone around him. Max is wise in his own way, but his wisdom is extremely hard to find underneath his constant stream of BS. It turns out, via flashbacks, that Max's wife – Miles's mother – had cheated on him once, while on a trip to Martha's Vineyard with her son along for the ride. The identity of the man she cheated with turns out to be one of the book's main secrets and revelations, which suddenly clarifies a lot of the dynamics between the various characters.
Russo's women are also all sharply drawn: Janine Roby, who is divorcing Miles and remarrying a man she clearly doesn't like, simply because he isn't Miles; their daughter Tick (a nickname, obviously), who is shy and awkward in high school and yet somehow has caught the eye of the star football player (who happens to be the son of the town cop); Janine's mother Bea, who runs the local tavern and who is constantly giving Janine very blunt advice about all the ways she is going wrong in her life. And above it all is Mrs. Whiting, the rich woman who dominates life in Empire Falls.
My only real problem with Empire Falls is that, while the first 400 pages or so of the book meander slowly through the life in this small town, in the last 100 momentum starts to build as the hand of plot starts to push things along. Through most of the book, it seems like a portrait of a town that we're only getting to see for a short time, but at the end, Russo starts tying up plotlines. Most of these revelations are satisfactory, but I was never sure I even wanted resolutions to some of those threads. And I flat-out did not like the novel's closing paragraphs, where one final character's story is tied up in a way that I found at odds with the tone of the entire book to that point. It feels like the punchline to a black humor joke, and I definitely did not like it.
But the rest of the book is awfully good.
Something for Thursday
Alex North's score to the film Spartacus is considered one of the greatest of all film scores, and in film music fan circles, a nearly mythical quality has accrued around it, owing partly to the score's lack of a great recording. In this day and age of nearly every great score being remastered and released, Spartacus has stubbornly remained unavailable except in a single-disc, truncated CD release or a bootleg recording.
Until now, that is. Varese Sarabande is releasing Spartacus on CD, via an incredibly elaborate release that involves 6 CDs, one DVD, and a hardcover book. The package is massive, and it commands a hefty price tag (it's over $100), so I doubt I'll be buying this. But it's amazing news that it's coming out at last.
In honor of that, here's one of the finest love themes in all film music, Alex North's love theme from Spartacus.
Until now, that is. Varese Sarabande is releasing Spartacus on CD, via an incredibly elaborate release that involves 6 CDs, one DVD, and a hardcover book. The package is massive, and it commands a hefty price tag (it's over $100), so I doubt I'll be buying this. But it's amazing news that it's coming out at last.
In honor of that, here's one of the finest love themes in all film music, Alex North's love theme from Spartacus.
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