Cartoon Violence for Men

I'm thinking a lot about football lately, in light of the recent 'Bounty' scandal involving the New Orleans Saints, their coaches, and their players, who engaged in a system of paid incentives to players for injuring opposing players. Saints head coach Sean Payton has been suspended the entire season without pay; former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has been suspended 'indefinitely', which means he gets to sit out a good long time before the NFL -- commissioner Roger Goodell, specifically -- decides to entertain his prospects for a return to coaching. There are also fines and docking of draft picks, I assume.

This whole business is deeply troubling for me as a football fan. I love the game and have for years; I love the strategies involved, and the beauty of well-executed plays and drives. I love how the game can elevate players to heroic status (although football is not unique in this). But here's an admission: one of the best things about football is its physical nature. And that, unfortunately, is just a nice way of saying, "Football is a violent game and we like our violence."

One thing that makes a football season so intense is that there are only 16 games. That's it: your team plays once a week, and one loss here or there can be calamitous for a team hoping to make the playoffs. In baseball, you have 162 games; the very best teams can still expect to walk off the field as losers at least 50 times in a year. But why does football only have 16 games? Because, obviously, the game is too physical -- too violent -- to be played more than that.

We love to see players hitting hard, and getting hit hard. We don't like to see players injured, which is why we applaud when they bounce back up, walk back to the sidelines, sit a minute or two, and then retake the field. It's why players who excel in a game despite being hurt -- say, Emmitt Smith in the 1993 regular season finale, when he had a huge game despite a separated shoulder -- can attain legendary status. We love quarterbacks who can stand in there and deliver a perfect pass despite the fact that they're about to get taken down by a hard-rushing defensive end. We adore it when a receiver comes across the middle of the field, leaps into the air, snags the ball, and holds onto it despite getting sandwiched between two defensive backs. We prize those moments when the running back charges full-speed into a cluster of bodies and, despite taking multiple hits from multiple players, still manages to churn forward enough to get the first down.

And on defense? That's when we love to see our boys dishing out the punishment. We love to see our defensive ends put the quarterback on his ear -- even moreso if the QB never sees him coming. We love to see an opposing receiver grab the ball, only to have one of our defensive backs slam him so hard that the ball pops out. And we think it's great when a linebacker comes flying in out of nowhere to knock a running back off his feet, backwards. We love the big hits, the ones so hard that the announcers go "Wow!", the ones so brutal that you can hear the fans in the stadium go "Ooohhhhh!", the ones where you can hear the actual impact of the hit captured in the parabolic microphones from the sidelines.

We know that these are violent hits, and we know that injuries are a part of the game, because they happen all the time. But some injuries are worse than others, and for most of them, we just hope the backup is ready to play. Even a bad injury -- say, a torn ACL -- doesn't seem as bad these days. It's a season-ender, but they'll be back next year. That particular injury is getting more and more treatable all the time; Wes Welker had one in a playoff game a few years ago, and time was then that would have seriously jeopardized the entire next season. Instead, he was back in time for the season opener.

Mostly, I think we view football violence as live-action cartoon violence. The crushing hits that football players dish out and endure are the equivalent of the disastrous things that happen to Wile E. Coyote whilst pursuing the Road Runner. For the most part, we expect our players to take monster hits, maybe get hurt a bit, but show up in the next scene. Maybe the next game. If it's bad, maybe after a few games or even next season. Once in a great while something very bad happens, a Mike Utley or a Kevin Everett, but I think that football fans, in their hearts-of-hearts, view that as the price of doing business, and for the most part, the thousands of guys who play football over the years take their hits and then retire and go on to live normal lives, free of football pain at last.

Except, thing is, now we increasingly know that they don't. Increasingly we must confront the fact that former football players have significantly shorter average lifespans, and we must confront the fact that football injuries, repeatedly endured over a period of years, take huge tolls in terms of quality of life after the game. We know that the brain is not nearly as able to bounce back from concussion as we used to think. We have to acknowledge that football is a game that takes a huge toll, and we have to acknowledge that all those hits we're cheering on Sunday afternoons have a price.

And just when we're acknowledging this, we learn that there are coaches and players out there who not only don't take this seriously, but see it as another way of gaining possible advantage on the field. That's what it's all about, and why it's so sickening. I've heard fans say that other football scandals -- SpyGate being the most famous -- are worse because that was actual cheating: doing something against the rules in order to gain competitive advantage. Well, by that definition, bounty programs are cheating too, and worse, they are cheating that involves the intentional infliction of physical injury. I don't think we hear this enough in this whole scandal. The Saints didn't just run a bounty program. They didn't just pay players to hurt their opponents. The Saints cheated, and so did anyone else in the NFL who has been doing this.

Football isn't cartoon violence. Football players aren't superhuman figures who can get run over by steamrollers and reinflate themselves; they're not beings who can escape pursuers by stopping to paint a train tunnel opening on a wall and then duck inside. They're human beings, as fragile as anyone else, and they are playing a game that works against that very fragility -- so much so that they have to wear body armor. That we still have problems with people taking this seriously is truly disheartening.

Something for Thursday

Here's some off-beat music by John Williams, underscoring one of the best main credits sequences I've seen, to Catch Me If You Can.



I need to watch this movie again....

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

I may have asked this one before...but anyway. You have a time machine which will allow you to see one, and only one, Broadway show in history, location and cast of your choice. Which one do you go see?

Visual Surveillance of Extremities

That phrase will be familiar to anyone who has read Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, a series which was an absolute favorite of mine when I was younger but which I haven't read in years. (I stared a re-read sometime in the early years of this blog, but never finished got beyond the first book, for no reason that I recall -- I still liked the first book.) Donaldson is presently writing the third Covenant series, this one a tetralogy, which I intend to read at some point. SF Signal has an interesting interview with Donaldson, which includes this bit about process:

First, I’m a person who has to concentrate-and concentrate exclusively-in order to accomplish anything. And second, I’m not a “facile” writer: I write slowly, with much sturm-und-drang. So I knew from the start that I can’t afford to just grab time when I can, or to wait for inspiration to strike. I have to make steady progress every day, or I’m doomed. (A music critic named Newman said of Beethoven, “Great composers do not compose because they are inspired. They become inspired because they are composing.” I don’t claim to be a great writer-how would I know?-but that’s one of my mottos.) And soon after I got going on Lord Foul’s Bane, I learned another crucial lesson: I have to pace myself. If I write as much as humanly possible one day, I’ll probably find myself too stunned to write anything the next. So I developed an approach which has served me well ever since: I’m in my office 8 to noon and 1 to 5 five days a week; I always quit at quitting time, no matter how I’m writing; and I never (well, almost never) work in the evenings, or on the weekends, or on holidays, or on vacation. This enables me to keep going day in and day out, week after week, month after month, until the first draft is complete. (Revision presents a different set of challenges, but I approach it in the same way.)

For some reason I'm always interested to read about writers' processes.

Yum!!!

Well, I have a new weapon in my kitchen's Arsenal Of Condiments. It's this stuff:

I 'discovered' jalapeno jelly at a local Mexican restaurant (Arriba Tortilla in East Aurora, NY), where a ramekin of the stuff is served as a side condiment with some menu items. I fell in love with the stuff almost at once. It's not hot at all, but it tastes like peppers anyway...there's a tiny amount of hotness to offset the sweetness. It's a wonderfully bright and intriguing flavor. So I bought a jar, and the other night I tried it for the first time on something I made myself. Not a taco or anything like that...but on a burger. I cooked a nice, thick patty and melted three slices of pepperjack cheese on it. Then I served the burger on a bun with several large leaves of leaf lettuce, with the hot pepper jelly (this very brand) spread on the bun.

This made for an amazing burger. Just wonderful. I generally tend to be fairly minimalistic with my burgers these days; I don't like piling on tons of toppings and sauces. I've had burgers in restaurants that slather on cheddar cheese and bacon and lettuce and barbecue sauce and several full-sized onion rings...so much stuff piled onto the burger that the flavor of the beef itself all but disappears. My approach to a burger is only a few things other than the meat -- at most, I'll put lettuce, cheese, onion, and a tomato slice on there, with ketchup and mustard. But another favorite of mine is mayonnaise, black pepper (a liberal amount), and onions. But this combo? Yeah, this one's going into heavy rotation.

A Facebook friend suggests cream cheese instead of the pepperjack. That sounds intriguing...and frankly, I may try that on a bagel first. Like...tomorrow!

Hot pepper jelly -- oh how did I live without you!

"You know nothing, Jon Snow."

I have now completed A Storm of Swords, being the third book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Perhaps undertaking this re-read in so short a time frame was not wise, because as I feared (and as I remember from when I read this book the first time), the feeling of the book stops being immersion in a big and fascinating world, and starts being a feeling of being worn down under a tremendous weight. And if that's what it's like to read it, I can only imagine what it's like for GRRM to write it. No wonder he's been having trouble.

My reaction to Storm is almost schizophrenic, so much so that I can barely determine where to begin. There is an awful lot of good stuff in this book, and there's some stuff that is indisputably great. There's also some stuff that's meh, and a bit of stuff that downright irritated me. But the overall impression is just unrelenting hugeness. Once again I am drawn to my soap opera metaphor for these books. Aside from a very few moments, I get almost no sense that there's a story that's being set up here. I get very little sense of forward momentum from the events of this book. What I get is just a series of events that affect all others, because everyone knows everyone else and lives have that pesky way of crossing. A good read? Absolutely. A fascinating world? Certainly. Interesting characters, both sympathetic and not? Indubitably. A story, though? Well...I'm just not sure.

Part of my problem with Storm is that it's simply too long. I'm sorry, but it just is. I'm not sure what the remedy for that might be, since a strategy of cutting the book in two didn't seem to work out as well as GRRM thought it might for the book immediately following. I'm not sure where the thing should have been cut, but there's just so much that goes on. That sounds whiny, probably, but I can't deny it. Over the course of nearly a thousand pages, most of the characters only manage to move no more than, say, fifty miles. Some go in circles. Some are captured, escape, and are recaptured again. Some make fairly improbable acquaintances along the way. Some characters from the last two books simply drop off the radar screen entirely. And yes, some die.

I am starting to conclude that GRRM is creating a story that is simply too big, if he's even creating a story at all. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me much to eventually learn that there is no ending to the series, no climax we're building to, and that what GRRM simply intends is to just create a series of massive books set in a fantasy realm that just details some marches of some people's lives. Maybe I'm wrong...and on balance, I suspect I am, because there are a few precious hints of a larger story to emerge in Storm...but it wouldn't totally surprise me. If I'm correct, the actual main story is the threat that's taking shape in the North while everyone else is fighting for thrones. But then, what part in that story for each and every one of these characters? I just don't know.

I liked the book. Loved it, even. But I can't deny that there were times when reading it felt like a slog, and not because of any deficiency with the prose – never that, because GRRM can damn well put the words together – but because it's just so big. I'm trying to come up with a metaphor here...maybe trying to have a perfect vacation to Disney World when you know you're only going to be there one day? Nah, that doesn't work...I'm not sure, I guess. But I can't get over the feeling with this series that it's not unlike that third slice of cake, the one that's just as good as the first two, technically speaking, but just isn't satisfying because by now it's just too much.

More random spoiler-iffic thoughts after the break....

Sentential Links

Linkage...but first, a cartoon clown named Binky.



If you actually played that clip...yeah, I'm sorry.

Anyway:

:: But this movie... It's not great. I know everyone saw it when they were kids and loves it to pieces, but it is so long, and frequently so, so boring. (What movie is he talking about? Click through to find out...let's just say that I could not possibly disagree more.)

:: What is heartening about Persepolis, and challenging to western assumptions about the lives of women in places like Iran, is the level of accommodation and subversion with which the rules are approached. The veil, for example, does not guarantee meek feminine submission, although its enforcement on a state level clearly seeks that; nor are decisions about how and why it is worn remotely simple (or always coerced) on an individual or even a community level. (It's been several years since I read Persepolis; I should probably do so again. And watch the movie.)

:: My fantasy rider would include grapes, pistachios (natural, roasted & salted,) a gallon of spring water, camomile tea, a fresh pillow with a clean pillowcase, a Snuggie, flowers, and, why not, 4 new hand towels. And peanut m&ms, all colors included, especially the brown ones. Basically I would consume the food stuff, turn on my nature sounds, snuggie up and take a nap.

:: If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. (Writing advice from John Steinbeck, which is always welcome. I don't follow this particular piece of advice, though. I just feel goofy reading my dialogue out loud. I do something kind of along the same line, though: I play the scene in my head, like a movie. I have no idea if this helps or not, but I just can't bring myself to say my own dialogue out loud. Even when I'm writing alone.)

:: Seeing this movie now, you'd never know this was such a big hit, because honestly, it is just terrible. Just... not offensively bad or something I hated, but just an aggressively mediocre movie full of misstep upon misstep. (What movie? Click to find out! I never liked it all that much to begin with, but it does have some kind of odd reverential status in geek circles for some reason. Or maybe it's not 'reverential' status, just...looked back upon with greater fondness than is warranted?)

:: Okay, now I’ll say it, I’ll dare to state the unthinkable… St. Patrick’s Day is the worst freaking day of the year. And I’m Irish!!! (I've always wondered what bartenders think of St. Paddy's Day.)

:: We stand fixated on the man who directed Star Wars.

Why? The reasons are beyond number and impossible to mention in geek company without causing a riot: the special editions, the prequels, the re-edits. The betrayal and heartache as thousands of fanboys and girls took up the cry “Han shot first!” We’re furious. We’re mourning. We’re hoping that the next generation doesn’t think that Anakin Skywalker is cooler than Han Solo. (I only link this to highlight how sick I am of this whole mindset. Now we're trying to psychoanalyze George Lucas, in our quest to understand how it could possibly be that he made something that a bunch of people don't like that much. Seriously...give it up. And allow me to renew my objection to anyone who thinks that Han Solo's story is utterly, completely changed by Greedo getting off a shot in the cantina. All that does is neuter a big laugh in the movie, not a character. Stop, people. Just...stop.)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!!!

:: I've seen this in a lot of places, but Jedediah gets the credit. A bunch of these videos have shown up in the last year or two, but this one's got amazing sound, so turn up the speakers. It's the ride you'd enjoy were you, say, a spider or something, clinging to the side of one of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters, from launch to splash-down. These are just amazing.



Wow!

:: Two links from one of my favorite comics blogs, Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep!. There were all kinds of weird ads in comics back in 'the day', and it always tickles me to see them reproduced, because I remember a lot of them, and I remember thinking when I was six or seven, "Hey, I want that!" I can say with a high degree of confidence that I never wanted the Nancy Nonsense doll, however.

:: The other link from Slay Monstrobot: I am increasingly of the belief that I need to read the original Howard the Duck comics one of these years. Sure, the infamous movie was dreck, but...this just seems like gonzo genius to me.

More next week!

Shea's Buffalo at night

Shea's Buffalo at night, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I took this while standing outside the theater, waiting for the doors to open for Les Miserables. I insisted on getting there good and early, which didn't go over well with The Family, as we ended up standing outside in the wind for fifteen minutes until the doors opened. Not sure why I did that...going to an event at Shea's isn't like going to the movies, where you pick your seats when you get there. Oh well...I just chalk it up to being over-excited for Les Miz.

I altered this shot a bit to make it brighter and changed it to B&W and all that...those weird shadow-features just kind of emerged as I did the altering, and I thought they looked kind of cool, so I made no effort to get rid of them.

There are times when I wish I wasn't a maintenance man by trade...I look at this photo, and the first thing I see is several dozen light bulbs that need changing!

Prometheus

I know, I know...I've said a bunch of times that I have little to no use for the Alien movies, which I suppose would rule me out of bothering to see the forthcoming Prometheus, which as I understand it isn't actually a direct prequel or anything of that nature, but is set in the same universe, so I suspect there'd be some overlap. This trailer for the film, though, is making me question that resolve.



This looks less like Attack of the Killer Space Vaginas, and more like a dark space opera, with ships exploring the unknown, massive alien artifacts, and so on and so forth. Who knows...and with trailers these days, you never know, because trailers can make the worst movies look like giant storehouses of Awesome, so we won't know until the movie comes out. But I am really intrigued by this trailer.

Luck o' the Irish!

It's St. Patrick's Day! Here's some stuff.

Wondering about the logistics of Darth Vader quaffing a beer? I assume he uses a straw through the grates of his mask. Or maybe he just has it in his meditation chamber, once he kicks back and takes his helmet off. Who knows...of course, I can't help thinking that maybe some of his problems in life might have been better dealt with by doing some drinking earlier on than by doing a lot of brooding and falling in with evil Chancellors and whatnot.

::  I know, I know, everybody says "St Patty's Day". But really, if you do this, please stop! It's St Paddy's Day, not Patty. Thank you.

::  "Danny Boy" is the cliche song for St. Patrick's Day and for any gathering of Irish or Irish-minded folk, so much so that it's nearly impossible to hear a fresh take on the song. For that, we need three incomprehensible Muppets.



:: You can never go wrong with John Williams. Here he is, teamed up with The Chieftains, for the End Credits of the Irish-emigration-to-America saga, Far and Away. It's a really kind of silly movie, but I like it because it's really earnest in its silliness.



:: And finally, I am absolutely tickled that this is on YouTube at long last. The great sitcom Cheers had a recurring storyline of sorts involving the battle of pranks and stunts between the gang at Cheers and the rival bar, Gary's Old Towne Taverne. These episodes were highlights of every season, right down to the final season, when the war was finally won. Just great stuff...and my favorite was the St. Patrick's Day episode, in which the gang arrives at the bar to find that the bar itself has been enclosed behind a cinder-block wall by Gary and his cohorts. (With Woody inside, by the way.) Still, Sam decides to keep calm and carry on, especially when the Irish band he's hired shows up to work its musical magic. And then...this happens.



This scene (which I consider one of the great all-time sitcom scenes) was actually written by Ken Levine and partner David Isaacs, so Levine provides the entire script of the scene here. Just great stuff. Also of interest is that the guy playing Sean, the lead singer, is actor Maurice Roeves, who also played Colonel Munroe in 1992's The Last of the Mohicans (the Daniel Day Lewis version), and a Romulan on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. According to Roeves's IMDb bio, he was born in Sunderland (in England) and considers himself a Scot!

:: Need a toast for tonight? Pick one from here.

:: And later on, I shall be happy to raise a glass to each o' ye!



May all your souls be in Heaven a full hour afore the Devil knows ye're dead!

Molto Mario!

Wow. What a surreal couple of days to be a Buffalo Bills fan, as they have signed the second-most coveted free agent player available this year. (He'd have been the most coveted, if not for Peyton Manning being available.) Williams is a former first-overall draft pick who has mostly lived up to his lofty potential thus far, except for an injury-shortened year last year, and he's only 27 years old, which means that as he enters what should be the best four or five years of his career...he's going to enjoy them here.

This is big. Stuff like this doesn't happen here. The Buffalo Bills don't usually grab any coveted free agents of any type; if they sign anybody at all, it's a week or two after the free agent signing period has started, and the guys they grab up are the NFL equivalent of leftovers.

Now, I don't think this is because the Bills are 'cheap'. I think it's because the last bunch of execs running things here, well, didn't really know what they were doing, so the Bills have been in this odd position for over a decade of not being good enough to attract free agents but not being bad enough to have top five draft picks to build with, either. But now they feel that the roster is looking up and it was time to add a big talent...which they did. Kudos to them.

Current GM Buddy Nix has been criticized in his first two years of basically standing pat at free agency, but I'm not sure what choice he had either year. The roster was in the worst shape of the entire sorry decade when he took over, so signing free agents would have generally made the Bills look like the Washington Redskins of recent years: a team with no clue trying to luck into a good team by throwing money around. Nix made clear that his intent was to build through the draft and then add some free agent talent. He's said all along that when he feels there's a player available who can significantly help this team now, then "we go and get him". Well, they did that!

Signing Mario Williams doesn't make the Bills an automatic contender, but it's a big piece to a puzzle that doesn't have as many remaining pieces as some believe. His presence will give the Bills something they haven't had in years: a guy on the defensive line whom offensive coordinators have to take into account. That's big in itself. If he can take on double-teams, it will free up the rest of the line to wreak some havoc. Basically, this move makes the Bills better at the all-important line of scrimmage.

What else do the Bills need, then? Another wide receiver, most of all. Another outside linebacker, possibly a better left tackle, and perhaps a cornerback (although the secondary should benefit greatly from the improved pass-rush that Williams's signing virtually guarantees). Williams's arrival gives the Bills a lot more flexibility when next month's draft arrives, as they are now no longer really beholden to drafting whoever the best pass rusher available when they pick happens to be. (They pick tenth overall.) Perhaps they might even consider themselves in a good enough position to trade down and add picks.

Williams's signing was not a quick process. He got here Tuesday and spent all of Wednesday here before finally signing on Thursday. Apparently he was doing quite a bit of touring the Buffalo area, which I suppose was necessary; teams that haven't been winning need to show off their cities to convince guys, and Buffalo's reputation, unfair as it is, is one that can be muted with some smart display of the good stuff around here. The best sign was when Williams showed up at the airport on Wednesday, not to fly to his next potential team, but to pick up his fiancee. That seemed to display that he was impressed and that he was giving this place serious thought. There's a school of thinking that says that Buffalo's poor reputation as a city is one factor that keeps free agents from signing here, but that has never made sense to me; if a player feels that a team is a winner, he'll go there. The Bills haven't been winners in twelve years, but for the first time there's a real sense that maybe they're about to be.

So anyway: Welcome to Western New York, Mario Williams! And may the Force be with you.

Something for Thursday

Well, I missed this feature last week, and I'm late this week, but here we go. I just want to pay a small tribute to Robert B. Sherman, who passed away last week. Sherman was one half of the Sherman Brothers, a music-and-songwriting duo that was responsible for many of the extremely catchy songs in Disney (and other) films in the 1960s. Here are some of them.











Not a bad legacy to leave behind.

I hate casinos

Yeah, that's pretty blunt, but there it is: I can't stand casinos. I don't understand the appeal at all. I mean, I understand once I find myself inside one. It's hard to resist all those flashing lights and cheering people and the way the casinos make you go up and down and in and out in an effort to make you forget the existence of an outside world; all the better to put you in the mood to lose your money. But in general, I have no desire to spend time in a casino, I never consider going to one when I'm looking for something to do, and I'm totally baffled by people I know who love to spend entire weekends at "the casino". It's just something I don't get.

But casinos can be awesome settings for amazingly cool stories, can't they, and not just fictional stories. Check out this amazing tale of a guy who took three different Atlantic City casinos for $16,000,000. And he did it straight-up. No card-counting here (although to be honest, I'm not sure why card-counting is considered 'cheating', unless 'cheating' is defined as 'doing anything whatsoever to increase one's odds over the house's'): he beat them fair and square, and fascinatingly, the casinos practically invited him to do it.

As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.

He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray.

The house’s hand showed an upturned five. Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. He was allowed to double down—to double his bet—on any hand, so when he was dealt a three on the first of his hands, he doubled his bet on that one, to $200,000. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. When he was dealt a three and a two on the next two hands, he says, he doubled down on those, for a total wager of $800,000.

It was the dealer’s turn. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. Johnson called the game—in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. Johnson won all four hands.

Johnson didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even pause. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. He was just getting started.

Absolutely fascinating.

Answers, the fourth!

OK, I need to get going on these...last week's time-sucking did not do the blog any favors. So let's get going here!

A reader who prefers anonymity asks:

What "earworms" get stuck in your head?

"Hey Jude". That's a big one. Lots of Beatles songs, actually. Songs from Les Miz -- "Do You Hear the People Sing?" is a big one that I often find myself humming. Show tunes of all sorts! Generally, I often have some kind of music traveling through my head, and I'll often find myself humming it. I suppose it would be more useful to talk about earworms that don't get stuck in my head!

What's funny is how often I'll get earwormed with a song I can't stand. "Red Solo Cup" may be the single stupidest musical act ever committed by the hand of man, but damned if that horrible thing doesn't end up stuck in my ear for an hour after I inadvertently catch it on the radio.

Can you deliberately think of a piece of music and "play it" in your head? Can you bring to mind the music pieces you've played yourself?

I can do this with a lot of music that I know very, very well. I can sit back and listen, in my head, to the entirety of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, for instance. Ditto Berlioz's Fantastique, Beethoven's Seventh and Ninth, and so on. Large sections of John Williams's filmscores, and large portions of The Lord of the Rings. I have a very good musical memory...with one exception. Lyrics don't tend to stick with me, or song titles. I hear a song and I can always say, "Yeah, I've heard that," but if you mention a song by title to me, odds are I won't know what you're talking about. And if I know a song by title, there's almost no chance I'll be able to cite any lyrics without having taken trouble to internalize them beforehand. I don't pick up lyrics from casual listening.

What little time-waster games do you play, if any? Any logic puzzles (minesweeper, say)? Solitaire?

I don't really do this, for some reason...I like the default Windows games like Minesweeper and Solitaire and Free Cell; my computer shipped with a chess game that I like but never use any more, and I dug the Mah Jong game too...but I haven't played that one in a long time, either.

The only real game playing thing I have right now is that accursed "Words With Friends" on Facebook. I love that thing...but I only check it twice a day. Otherwise I'll stare at it for hours. (Anyone wants to play, go ahead and drop me one of those challenges!)

More to come! I should be able to finish up next time out.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

So, back when you were eleven or twelve, what word for an icky bodily function or substance would invariably send you into hysterics when you heard it? Come on, we all had one!

Return to Kitai

Those who have have followed the career of Guy Gavriel Kay long enough know that, since his last book came out just about two years ago, this is roughly when drips and drabs of information about his next book should start showing up. And, right on cue, we get some details. GGK is returning to Kitai, the fantastical medieval China which was the setting of the brilliant Under Heaven!

Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel is once more inspired by Chinese history, this time during the Song Dynasty, almost four centuries after the story told in his bestselling Under Heaven. The dazzling elements of the Song - cultural brilliance, vicious political rivalries, warfare against nomadic peoples, court mandarins versus the military - are rich ground for Kay's unique blending of fantasy and themes of history. Vivid among a large cast, a young man with a dream of regaining the empire's lost 'rivers and mountains' and a brilliant woman trying to shape a space for herself outside the 'inner quarters', where women are expected to live out their lives, confront the challenges and dangers of a world in turmoil. The Song Dynasty's legacy is prominent in the way Westerners imagine Chinese history to this day and Kay weaves a story that captivates on both an epic scale and within the intimate lives of his characters.

Apparently this book is due in 2013. It'll be a long year! (But that will give me time to re-read the GGK books I have, as yet, not re-read: Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, and Under Heaven.)

What if winter came, and nobody knew?

I find it kind of ironic that I'm re-reading George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire right now, given that one of the book's main plot points is that winter is coming to the world in the books, and in that world, each season lasts for years. This is ironic because this winter in Buffalo is the mildest I can remember -- we've had less than three feet of snowfall for the entire season, which is unheard of. We never made it sledding in Chestnut Ridge park because there simply was never enough snow up there to do it. There were, maybe, one or two storms that came through which dumped more than a few inches, and that was it. Ho hum.

What caused the mild winter? One hypothesis that interests me is the temporary effect of a volcano that erupted in Iceland last year. I think that the winter is too atypical to be chalked up to global warming, which may make winters such as this more common for Buffalo over the next century, but to have one winter like this suddenly appear seems too sudden to me to be blamed on a worldwide change in climate. However, I do once again notice that whenever we get a big snowstorm, I can count on hearing all kinds of people saying things like "Ha! It's snowing! Global warming, my ass!", but when an abnormally warm weather pattern comes along, I don't hear anybody saying things like, "Hey, that Al Gore must know what he's talking about!" That always amuses me.

Anyway, while I like winter, I do find myself a bit excited at the prospect of spring being actually pleasant around here, and maybe coming a bit early. Generally speaking, trees in Western New York aren't fully green until late May, and March and April are generally wet and muddy and pretty depressing, to be honest. Spring here sucks, and I think that's a big part of why winter around here gets such a bad rap: a hard season is followed by two months of yuck. Here's hoping!

As I write this, I have windows open at twenty minutes to midnight, and a nice cool breeze is sweeping through Casa Jaquandor. The first real airing-out of the homespace after several months of winter is always a nice feeling, isn't it?

All I have to say about Daylight Savings Time

That is all. Stupid DST!

Fifty most hated movies???

SamuraiFrog posted this list of "Fifty Most Hated Movies", with comment, and damned if I'm not going to do the same. I'll only bold the ones that I've actually seen, though.

50. Daredevil

49. Superman Returns

I didn't hate this movie, but it deserves quite a bit of its bad press. I actually liked the cast, but the movie was a bit too open about its reverence for the first Superman movie, and yet, it somehow seemed to take place in an alternate universe, at the same time, by seeming to refer to the original without actually doing so, by giving us a Metropolis that was a generic cityscape instead of being clearly New York with the names filed off, and so on. I remember someone on Aint It Cool News or someplace like that writing, "This movie doesn't just pay homage to the original Superman -- it calls the older movie up and breathes heavily into the phone when it answers."

48. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

47. Terminator: Salvation

For me, the Terminator story begins with the first movie and ends with the second. Never saw this one.

46. Exorcist II: The Heretic

45. Halloween (2007)

44. Fantastic Four (2005)

Didn't bother, because the trailers looked awful. But then, I was never a FF fan even when I read comics regularly.

43. Resident Evil

42. Jersey Girl (2004)

One of these years I'll get myself caught up on Kevin Smith's movies.

41. Constantine

40. Swept Away (2002)

39. Epic Movie

38. Clash of the Titans (2010)

37. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

36. The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions

I know, I'm bolding it, but I've only seen the first half hour or forty minutes of Reloaded. I've mentioned it in the past, but the movie literally bored me to the point that I dosed off. So when I awoke I turned it off and never went back to the Matrix franchise. I loved the first one when I saw it, but each viewing after that made me like it a little bit less.

35. Godzilla (1998)

I thought this might be epically fun...and instead it was bad, bad, bad, with a Godzilla whose size seems to change from scene to scene, with making Jean Reno play second fiddle to Matthew F***ing Broderick (sorry, but I can't stand the guy), and the supreme idiocy of Devlin and Emmerich using this film to strike back at Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. This movie is terrible.

34. Van Helsing

33. The Spirit

32. Crash (2005)

I can't even imagine myself wanting to see this movie.

31. Sucker Punch

30. Alien Resurrection

Never bothered, having hated the first Alien movie (and still do -- sorry, fans, but the Freudian horror for me basically boils down to Attack of the Killer Space Vaginas), not much liking the second movie (slickly made, but predictable as hell), and loathing the third, from the opening moments of "Hey, remember all the crap those people went through to survive the last one? They all died anyway. Sorry." And now they're making Alien prequels or some such? Count me out. I hate this franchise.

29. Spider-Man 3

I do not hate this movie; in fact, I find it highly watchable and even entertaining, despite the fact that it makes one wrong turn after another and starts to commit the crime of betraying its source material. I hate that a much better movie was going to be made before some asshole exec stuck his nose in and forced changes that harmed the film, and I really hate that the result was so much a mishmash that it doomed the existing efforts and triggered a pointless reboot movie that, when I finally do see it (almost certainly on DVD), I'll watch it with an enormous chip on my shoulder because it's so unnecessary. Ugh. I don't hate Spidey 3, but I feel like I should.

28. Sex and the City 2

27. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

I love this movie and despite some of its meandering and plot holes, I think it's terribly underrated. I'm a big fan of the whole franchise.

26. Planet of the Apes (2001)

25. The Avengers

24. Pearl Harbor

I've seen parts of it. I don't hate it, but man, is it bad.

23. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

22. Battlefield Earth

21. The Wicker Man (2006)

20. X-Men: The Last Stand

I refuse to watch this.

19. Aliens vs Predator

Never bothered. See above: F*** Alien.

18. Highlander 2: The Quickening

Oddly, I did not hate this one, because I expected it to utterly, completely suck, so I cheerfully munched my popcorn and laughed at it. I'd already hated the first one -- one of the dumbest things I've ever seen, a movie whose popularity eternally mystifies me -- so I expected nothing from this one. And hey, Michael Ironside. I paid to see H2 in a theater and had a good time, which is a lot more than I can say for the original, which I watched for free and hated.

17. Love Actually

People who hate this movie are like people who hate kittens: I know they're out there, but they are almost certainly a mutation of some sort.

16. Hulk

15. Catwoman

14. Avatar

I love this one! No, I don't think it's got one original thing in it, but so what? I liked the cast, I loved the effects, I love the pace at which Cameron allows the story to unfold. It's beautiful and I found it fun.

13. Lady in the Water

12. The Happening

11. The Last Airbender

I haven't seen a Shyamalan movie since Signs, which I liked. From what I hear, I have missed nothing.

10. Die Another Day

This movie actually has an awful lot of good stuff in it, but that all ends with the arrival at the villain's Giant Ice Cave or whatever. Don't hate it...but on balance, it's pretty weak.

9. House of the Dead

8. Titanic (1997)

I still love this movie, and I find the backlash against it really reflective of a cultural mean-spiritedness that always saddens me when I see it in action.

7. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

I refuse to watch any of these.

6. Batman and Robin

It stinks, but I still found it fun to watch. Oh well.

5. Psycho (1998)

I can't imagine why this movie got made in the first place.

4. Twilight

I refuse to see this movie. I want nothing to do with this whole awful, stinking, fetid excuse for a story franchise. The book was so achingly bad that any notion that I should go see the movie makes me wretch. (And as to that, again let me raise my objection to anyone who tries telling me that well, I can't really understand the book since I was never a teenage girl with raging hormones. It's the writer's job to make me understand things I've never done. I'm not going to do the writer's homework for her. I have no idea what it was like to experience love and loss in the backdrop of the French Revolution, but Charles Dickens did the heavy lifting for me.)

3. Forrest Gump

I don't hate it. I've never hated it. In fact, I still like it. But I do find its messages confounding, even if I don't totally buy the usual criticism that it's "Right wing values good, counterculture bad".

2. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Yeah, right. Defending this movie, and its two follow-ups, may well be my main reason for living. I still love it, to this day. (All together now, class: F*** Red Letter Media!)

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Nope, don't hate this one, either...although it really could have used one more pass through the rewrite phase. I'm not bothered in the least by the "Aliens" thing. The first three were based on the serial adventure flicks of the 1930s; seems perfectly reasonable to me that if we're going to move Indy into the 1950s, then paranoid science fiction needs to be the order of the day. If anything, I don't think the movie played this angle up nearly as well as it should have.

Here are some movies that I genuinely cannot stand, that didn't make the list:

Live and Let Die
The Usual Suspects
City of Angels
Wedding Crashers
Scream

Sentential Links

Linkage...but first, stinkage!



:: Design matters. Design, as it happens, currently makes it extraordinarily easy for better-off Americans to not notice that most of them are as much beneficiaries of “government handouts” as anyone else.* It’s hard to think this is entirely accidental.

:: Kudos to SMG for the most definitive world map of the setting so far, and possibly the last major one before we get the official maps later this year. (Amen to that! I love this map. And there's a book of Ice and Fire maps coming out later this year? Cool!)

:: Table readings are a necessary part of the production process.

:: He said, "Son, if I've learned anything in my life, it's that the hardest thing you're ever going to deal with is change." He paused for a moment, then a rueful little grin tugged at his lips. "Especially if you're like me and you just want things to stay the same."

:: A lot of fanfare for one little boy? Sure. But, whatever. His birthday only comes once every four years. And he's worth all of it.

That's about it. More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!...but not so much this past week, which was busy and led to a lot of time not spent in front of the computer looking for things Odd or Awesome.

But here's something: a brief tour of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's workspace. This guy is very rapidly becoming a hero of mine.



That desk lamp is in the running for Best Thing Ever. I want one! (And heck, I could probably make one!)

For Kevin, Val, and Walker Evans...and more....

Two of the finest people I know, Kevin and Val, have had to weather an awful lot of storms in the past few years, and now they have to say farewell to their beloved dog, Walker Evans. Here's some music that I turn to in such times...because words are awfully inadequate. None of this has specifically to do with relationships between humans and animals, but then, the great thing about music is that it doesn't have to map precisely to exact emotions to be of comfort.







(And in all honesty, I've had things like this on the mind all week, even before I heard about Kevin, Val, and W.E. It's been a sad week for people near and dear.)

Saturday Centus

Well, I've screwed this weekly writing exercise of late...I did one two weeks ago, but I forgot to link the bloody thing on Jenny's site, so no Centusians are aware that it existed! And last week's, I just missed entirely, because I just couldn't think of a way to do that one without dwelling on death. So let's see if we can't do things right, this time! Instead of a word-based prompt, Jenny Matlock asks us to write a story in 25 words, using 5 sentences of 5 words each.

"Is that our new planet?"

"Yes, that's it. We're home."

"I pictured it more blue."

"Yeah...welcome to New Earth."

"May it outlive the old."

Back on the Air

Sorry about the general lack of output in this space this last week, folks...it was a busy week, rather stressful, and occasionally downright crappy. But we're back now! (I think. Hmmmmm....)

And they did the math with SLIDE RULES.

Someone on Reddit questions the technological amazingness of landing humans on the Moon. Someone else sets them straight (salty language alert):

Oh no you fucking didn't. You have no idea.

The moon is 385,000 kilometers away, and spinning around us at roughly 1 kilometer per second. NASA engineers took a hunk of metal and explosions, stuck a few men in there, and managed to hit what is essentially a tiny moving target in the vast expanse of nothing that is space.

They also managed to make all of the technological shit work and stay working outside of the protection of our magnetosphere. You know, that thing the deflects the enormously damaging interstellar radiation and makes life on Earth possible. Those suits that keep astronauts alive out there? Those aren't just neat diving suits, they have to keep the pressure in, the radiation out, survive enormously abrasive moon dust, and still allow the person inside to move.

The lander had to come down safely on an uninhabited hunk of rock, not a landing strip, not a parachute into the ocean, a fucking slab of iron. Then, it had to shoot half of itself back up to the return capsule. All of this had to be precisely-calculated, otherwise they wouldn't have enough fuel. Or, if they weren't exactly correct, the could ram the return craft and kill everybody.

The mathematics and engineering involved are staggering. This isn't science fiction kid.

Preach it!

I lived on a cul-de-sac once....

There was a brief running story in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine a couple weeks back that had the strip's animal characters commiserating with their creator, Stephan Pastis, on his failure to win the highest award for cartoonists. (Pastis routinely draws himself into the strip; it's one of many reasons I love Pearls.)

This led to this installment:

And of course, reading that, I had to look up this other strip, Cul de Sac. I'd never heard of the strip before (the Buffalo News doesn't run it -- but we get our crappy reruns of For Better or For Worse, so heckuva job, BuffNews!), but having read through a chunk of archives online, I have a new daily must-read. So thanks, Stephan Pastis! You've given Richard Thompson at least one new confirmed reader.

I'll pay you $1000 to shove the airhorn up Coach's arse.

If there's a sports story that's more simultaneously surprising and no surprise at all than the current "bounty" scandal that's enveloping the New Orleans Saints, I haven't seen it. Apparently former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams offered players financial incentives to hit guys hard enough to knock them out of games. The NFL has been investigating this for two years, and Williams has pretty much openly admitted it.

I'll make no secret that I never liked Williams. He was head coach of the Buffalo Bills from 2001 to 2003, and putting it plainly...he was an ass. He showed up at that first training camp, barking how he was going to change things around here and walking around camp with an air horn that he liked to blast in players' faces. Change the culture? Now, the Bills had just undergone a salary-cap driven roster purge that was going to send them to a 3-13 record, but this was still a team just two years removed from its most recent playoff spot (which is still, to this day, the team's most recent playoff spot). Nothing about Gregg Williams's public persona in Buffalo ever indicated anything other than "douche", so on that score, I'm not surprised that he's involved.

Likewise, this does shed a bit of light on just why Williams has never received another shot at a head coaching job. Most guys who fail at their first coaching jobs eventually get another shot, especially if their failed shot is with a team like the Bills, who have come to be seen as a mismanaged organization from the top. And Williams has still been highly touted as a defensive coordinator, winning a Super Bowl with the Saints. And yet, he's never yet received his second shot at a head job. Why? I'm willing to say that part of it is because he's done this kind of stuff for years, and that most of the NFL is aware of his dirty laundry and the nasty habit dirty laundry has of eventually coming out.

I've heard some disturbing rhetoric about all this, to the point that it's not that big a deal. This bothers me a great deal. No one disputes that football is a violent game, and if players get together before games and on the 'down low' offer each other cash to hit opposing players hard, well, all you can do is make that illegal and deal with it if you catch them doing it. But for coaches to be involved puts an official stamp on it. Something that's under-the-table becomes organizational policy, whether it's on the books or not. And that, I think, crosses a line. There's a very real difference between "I hit other guys because I play hard and that's my way of playing" and "I hit other guys because there's money in it for me".

Football is a game where players get hit, and where players get hurt. So are a lot of games. But the object should never be to hurt the other guy, and that's what bounties do. That's why they're bad. Put it this way: if you think that this is no big deal, and that it's normal in football and that the Saints just got caught (one commenter on Facebook the other day referred to it as a 'manufactured controversy', an odd sentiment given that it hasn't been fueled by the media but is rather the result of a two year NFL investigation), then you can't think that this guy is a dirty bastard:



ADDENDUM: I'm seeing a lot of comparison of this business to SpyGate. There's no question in my mind that this is far, far worse than SpyGate. But if there's one meme about SpyGate that I'd like to see put to bed, it's the notion that Roger Goodell came down super-hard on the Patriots for that. There was a big fine, but still an amount that for an NFL organization is the equivalent of a parking ticket. And yes, he stripped them of a 1st round draft pick -- in a year when the Patriots already had two. So even after going 18-1 and being found guilty of breaking NFL rules, the Pats still got to pick in the top ten of the Draft. No, they did not get hit hard in that punishment. Goodell handed down a punishment that was designed to look tough, but really wasn't. I suspect he'll have to come down harder on the Saints, but he can't strip them of a 1st rounder this year, because the Saints traded it away last year to move up. And here's a conspiracy thought: this has been a two year investigation, which means that it was ongoing a year ago, so the Saints knew that the chickens were going to come home to roost sooner or later. Maybe that played a role in their wishing to trade this year's pick away last year; they knew that if they wanted to use it, that might be the only way. Hmmmmm.

I'm not a big fan of advertising, but...

...I've got to give credit where it's due. This ad, which is a short film in the best sense of the word, is utterly captivating. If your connection to the Intertubes allows a fullscreen HD viewing, please do.

Thank you, Ralph McQuarrie

Ralph McQuarrie, conceptual artist for many films, died the other day. Every article and blog post out there cites his art that heavily influenced the eventual look of, among other films, Star Wars, and the frank truth is that without McQuarrie's concept paintings, Lucas might well have never convinced any studio to bankroll the film in the first place.

Here's a sampling of his work, via AICN:

Enjoy the stars, Mr. McQuarrie!

Yes, yes. To Mr. Jones you listen!

Mr. Jones on The Phantom Menace, after he saw the 3D version:

My wife kept suggesting a trip to see the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace during its 3D run over the past few weeks. At first, I thought she was just suggesting it because she knows my love of Star Wars, but it has begun to dawn on me that she is a genuine fan. (This may seem unusual to not know about your spouse, but my opinions and dedication to the universe are pronounced. When combined with our tendency to do things for the other out of desire to make that person happy, it is sometimes difficult to know what is a genuine preference or just a willing deferral for the sake of the spouse's happiness. It's wonderfully complicated.) So, we finally made it to a showing Sunday afternoon on a blissfully relaxing three-day weekend.

What I found was a film that surprised me. I found it to be well-paced, moving, interesting, visually stunning, and above all, fun. I don't mean this in an analytical Lucas-apologist sense -- I think I actually surprised myself with how much I appreciated and enjoyed the film when it was just me and my wife and no one around to have to defend it against.

I'd love to see the movie on the big screen again, but I've never liked the way 3D makes my entire frontal lobe physically feel like it's about to explode out my eye sockets. But still: TPM is great! Really! Truly!

Sentential Links

Time for linkage...but first, a song by Pink Floyd!



:: So again, because I can’t say this strongly enough: asteroid 2012 DA14 is not an impact threat for February 2013. (Now I can stop worrying and write that symphony!)

:: A lot of board games come out every year. Some of them are really great. Many of them are okay rehashes of what has come before. Some are crappy. And some are just sort of there. This post is dedicated to the last category. (Man, I really need to do more table-top gaming.)

:: This is what passes for a punchline, presumably because it's a line of dialogue actually makes you want to punch a fictional character.

:: It is good to be reminded that I have the ability to be grounded and full, that the world is not slipping away quite as fast as I think. (I am so doing this one of these days. Although we have an electric stove, so I'll have to allow that one.)

:: My vote for the scummiest people on the planet are the lowlifes who own and operate towing companies. Not the good folks from service stations or AAA providing roadside service; I’m talking about the dirt bags who tow your car from parking spaces, hold your car hostage, and then essentially rob you to get it back.

:: The people wanted those services that were provided by the government, and they were willing to pay more than the actual $200 that the tax increase would have cost them in order to get them. The thing is, they would rather pay more than pay the government for those same services. (But...gummint is always bad! Taxes bad! Market good!)

:: Just because everyone has been telling you for years that The Empire Strikes Back was the best of the original trilogy doesn't mean you have to keep quiet and knuckle under to the mob. That's what Goebbels counted on, right? So say it proudly: Return of the Jedi is the best of the six Star Wars movies! Come out of the closet! (When asked to name a Best Star Wars movie, I almost always name A New Hope, just because it came first and nothing else would have come after had it not been, well, frakking awesome. But in all honesty, I adore each and every one of these damn movies. Kevin Drum writes a nicely argued post in defense of RotJ, and I'll go one better to say that I like the Ewoks just fine!)

More next week!

I have heard the people sing

I suspect that a great many of us nurse various dreams, some big and some little, that go unfulfilled for many years. Those dreams are always there, percolating in the background of our minds, sometimes surging to the fore but most times just staying in the background, only surfacing as part of a general reverie of things we wish might be. One of my such dreams has for years been to see Les Miserables onstage.

It's no longer a dream of mine. Two nights ago, it became something I've done. What an odd feeling. Dreams don't have to be big to feel strange upon their fulfillment.

Les Miserables first hit me back in August of 1987 or 1988, one of those two years – probably the latter – when I attended Bristol Hills Music Camp for two weeks. This was exactly what the name implies: a summer camp for young musicians. There were vocalists and string players there as well, but as a trumpet player I was in the wind ensemble. One guy led the wind ensemble the first week, another guy the second. The first guy, Mr. Sprague, was more into 'showy' pieces, while the second, Mr. Rudgers, had a more 'cerebral' approach (in coming years Mr. Rudgers would use us as guinea pigs in his own compositions, which I always enjoyed – he wrote some good stuff). It was really a wonderful contrast; both men were fantastic at what they did, and I'm a big fan of variety. Anyway, it was during the first week of one of those two years when Mr. Sprague put on our program an arrangement of tunes from Les Miz.

I don't recall much of that arrangement at all, except that it was a pretty good arrangement. There was a cool solo for most of the instrument groups, and it ended with – what else – "Do You Hear the People Sing". I had zero idea what Les Miz was about, none whatsoever, but man, those tunes just sank into my heart and never left. And I suppose I wasn't the only one: I was friends (platonically, I swear!) with a really nice girl named Aimee, who spent much of camp that year trying to fend off the advances of a sax player who was nursing an enormous crush upon her. One day I walked by and he had kinda-sorta cornered her and was flirting with her by playing "On My Own" on his sax to her. Ahhh, the days of hanging out with people who were more comfortable communicating through a tune than any other way! There are times when, if I could turn back time, I'd go back there, and stay.

Like a lot of musical kids, I was in the habit of buying recordings of pieces we played, as a way of keeping an auditory scrapbook. When you play a work and fall for it, you want to be able to hear it forevermore, even if it's an arrangement for high-school level band and the best you can do is get an abridged version of the Original Broadway Cast recording. This is not abnormal...one of the most popular such arrangements back then was the one from The Phantom of the Opera, which is why nearly every fellow music student of mine owned that recording, too. For various reasons, though, Phantom wasn't the show that captured me for life. We never played its band arrangement at camp, and we never played any such arrangements in high school. (I suspect that Mr. Roosa would have chewed his own arm off rather than stoop to the level of playing an arrangement of tunes from what he would have seen as Broadway's current Flavor-of-the-Month, which was odd considering that when I played under him in the Pit Band for our school's production of The Music Man, he showed quite an understanding and flare for show music.) So Phantom slid right past me, but Les Miz charged right in.

I listened to that disc a lot – I still own it, actually, although I haven't played it once in a very long time, since it was supplanted by the astonishing live recording made at the Tenth Anniversary concert productions from the Albert Hall in London. That's the recording that is billed as the "dream cast", and so far as I can tell, it is. I've listened to that recording tons of times over the years. With Les Miz, I tend to go through phases where I listen to nothing but Les Miz for two weeks or so. And yet, in all that time, I never saw the show live, onstage. The touring production would come to Buffalo every two or three years, but somehow its arrival always coincided with an inability on my part to acquire tickets (lack of money) or something else (presence of a baby, which also took care of the money-for-tickets issue). It's only been in the last few years that I've been in a position to actually be able to afford tickets – and that was right on time for the touring production to wind up shop and for the original show to close on Broadway. I pretty much figured that Les Miz had passed me by.

But then, a year or so ago, we were in Shea's Buffalo to see Wicked, and I saw then that there was a new, 25th Anniversary Production of Les Miz set to come to Buffalo in 2012. I resolved, then and there, to get tickets, no matter what. The tickets ended up going on sale at a pretty inconvenient time – a couple weeks before Christmas, which kind of screwed up my Christmas budget – but I chose my seats and placed the order. This show was not passing me by again.

It may seem strange, forming so strong an association with a show that I have never seen, but it's all about the music to me, and there is nary a melody in Les Miz that doesn't hit me right in the emotional sweet spot. The emotions in this show are so open, so raw, and so perfectly captured by the melodies that express them. This is surely by design, as the tunes come and go and come again, with new lyrics each time, but some expressing similar things each time we hear them. But one of the show's signature tunes – that of Fantine's heartbreaking "I Dreamed a Dream" – is heard, and then is never heard again. This is the kind of thing that fascinates me. Of course it has to be this way, because Fantine's life is doomed, and she will never really have any close connection with anyone in the show other than Jean Valjean; even her daughter, Cosette, grows up knowing virtually nothing at all about her mother.

Les Miz blurs the line throughout between hero and villain, policeman and criminal, lover and hater. Jean Valjean is twice a thief and a parole-breaker and a rebel. Inspector Javert is single-minded nearly to the point of insanity, and his inability to process the fact that he owes his life to both Jean Valjean and his obsession with bringing Valjean to justice leads him to what might be the show's most dramatic moment, when he flings himself from the bridge into the waters of the Seine (in a pretty astonishing effect in the stage production, I might add).

A lot of time goes by in Les Miz -- seventeen years of it, and the story makes clear that we're only joining in the middle; Valjean's story began nineteen years earlier than that, with his theft of a loaf of bread, a single, simple act of larceny that will resonate through his life and those of others for so many years to come. We see Cosette grow to a woman, and we see Valjean age to infirmity. Along the way we encounter student rebels and see the tragedy that ensues when they give their revolution and no one comes; we meet the people who profit by picking over the corpses; we see redeeming love and hopeless love and hatred for hatred's sake. That's quite an evening.

I noticed for the first time, also, a theme of faith running throughout the show. Valjean is a bitter ex-con at the beginning, going so far as to steal from a priest, but when the priest intercedes on his behalf, Valjean is moved to live a life of faithfulness, going so far as to become a new person (even though it means breaking parole). And all throughout the rest of the show, Valjean's faith is well-nigh unshakeable, even on the eve of the final battle at the barricade, when he sings the amazing "Bring Him Home", a prayer for God to allow Marius to survive what is sure to be a failed rebellion. Contrasting Valjean is Fantine, who, in "I Dreamed a Dream", seems to have given up on faith entirely ("I dreamed that God would be forgiving"), now that she's been left by a man she loved and cast out of her job. But just as Valjean's faith was rekindled when someone interceded, so is Fantine's when Valjean intercedes, even on her deathbed. Thus it is that when it comes time for Valjean to die, it is Fantine who first comes to his side to show him the way to the next world.

It's also telling that, when Valjean joins the dead at show's end, the most overtly religious individual in the show – Inspector Javert – isn't there. Does this mean that he is in Hell? Have the words of his Act One song "Stars" come true?

And if I fall as Lucifer fell,
the flame, the sword!

But Javert does fall as Lucifer fell – at least, I'm sure he would see it that way – so has he been cast to the flame? I suppose that's so...but I can't help thinking how poetic it would be if it was Javert who came to Valjean at the end, thus fulfilling his long pursuit simply by bringing Valjean into death.

Having merely listened to the music all these years, I was a bit fuzzy in some of the particulars of the story (especially why exactly Valjean suddenly feels the need to flee Paris at the end of Act One); now, at last, it all makes sense to me. Emotionally, I was pulled in from the very first few bars, and I remained pulled in until most of the way through the first act. Some of the steam did come out of the show a bit, I thought, as various conflicts for the second act were set up and pieces were moved into place. But by the time that first act ended with "One Day More", I was back in; and through just about all of Act II, I was a complete wreck, all the way to that shattering last scene, when Valjean says his final farewells and is led into the afterlife by Fantine and Eponine. Though I was somewhat anxious before the show that it couldn't live up to my expectations, I felt almost no disappointment whatsoever by the time the final curtain came down.

Stage productions really have to rely on big gestures and great music to pull me in. There are no cinematic tricks available; you can't have lingering closeups of characters exchanging subtle glances, and you can't have super-convincing fight sequences using stunt performers. Scene changes have to be concealed somehow, and light has to be used to distract the audience. Misdirection is employed all over the place; two characters go to stage right and interact for a minute, hopefully keeping the audience looking over there while the scenery is changed on stage left. In the case of Les Miz, it was all very convincingly and nicely done; the sets were designed to convey the idea of what they represented and were left somewhat hazy out at the edges, so that our imaginations might fill in the details. I've read that the original production featured a giant turntable on stage that would rotate one entire set out of view; this one is more traditional, with props being brought in and out. Interesting use of the backdrops – which are based on paintings by Victor Hugo himself – are able, at times, to convey illusions of motion, and the costuming is what you expect: bodices and lacey collars and tricorn hats and the like.

As far as the cast for this particular production, everyone was excellent to outstanding. J. Mark McVey's Valjean was wonderful, and the show clearly doesn't work without a good Valjean. (No, he's no Colm Wilkinson, but that's like a Pirates fan judging every right fielder who comes along by the standard of Roberto Clemente.) While McVey earned the night's biggest applause with "Bring Him Home", the best vocals of the night overall came, in my opinion, from Andrew Varela as Javert, although Richard Vida's Thenardier and Betsy Morgan's Fantine were both memorable. I'm hard pressed to name a weak link in the cast I saw...and even if I could, I don't think I'd want to.

No, the stage production lived up to my 'expectations', such as they were. What I'm more nervous about is the filmed version that's to come this December. I remember reading in some comments thread someplace – maybe on AICN – back when The Phantom Menace came out, one person was trying to process disappointment by pointing out, "I've made Episode One in my head a thousand times since 1983." Well, I've made the movie of Les Miz in my head a thousand times too, over the years, right down to a recurring visual motif of a bridge over the Seine where a number of key events would all take place. The movie will have none of the limitations of a stage show, so how will it look? Will it exchange dark and evocative peripheries of the image for brightness and boldness and lots of swooping CGI effects? How will "One Day More", the Act I finale (and a showstopper that I find nearly overwhelming), be put together, given that it features a bunch of characters singing at the same time but who are not all in the same places? I suppose we'll see. I don't think it's too hard to get this kind of thing right...but then, I thought the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera was the bee's knees, and it's not too highly regarded.

And so I go on, having at last seen Les Miz. This may have been my final personal "Holy Grail" of live or filmed entertainment. I've held it, and I've found...illumination. The question now is, if the show comes to Buffalo again, do I see it a second time?

Actually, come to that...it's not really a question at all, is it?

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ramen Rater is a blog that reviews ramen noodles. This is awesome. Trust me. (If all you know of ramen is the super-ultra cheap stuff that sustained you in college because those fifty cents you found in the cushions of your couch represented five ramen meals, believe me, you don't know your ramen!)

:: Least Helpful is a blog that gathers examples of Amazon and other online reviewing gone seriously awry. How awry? Well, on reviewer actually thought "Go the F**k to Sleep" was a real children's book.

:: This is really cool: it's a timelapse movie of a period of time on the waterfront of Vancouver, BC.

Woodwards 3303, 10th Sep 2011 from abonstu on Vimeo.

I love the ferry boats that come and go, always following the same route; one zips away, and another zips in. Great stuff!

More next week!

Whooooosh!

Wow, is it ever windy today! In fact, this whole friggin' winter has been really windy. We've had spectacularly little snow so far this year, and now that it's March, except for the odd late-season storm that we're known to get, we're very likely pretty much done with snowfall for this year. According to last week's Buffalo News, we've had slightly more than 34 inches so far this year. Usually we've received more than twice that. A lot of people are happy about this, but I'm not...I like snow, and I like going sledding and walking in the snow at Chestnut Ridge park and other such places.

What I do not like is wind. I find wind incredibly irritating, because wind can pretty much render any set of weather circumstances unpleasant. High wind in winter is awful, because it makes the cold colder and more painful...but high wind in summer is just as unpleasant, because it makes it hard to do anything fun outside then, too. I've been to picnics when I've spent more time holding stuff down than eating; riding a bike in wind is just not fun at all; walking is drudgery, and I'm sure that jogging (which I'm planning on taking up when it warms up a little) isn't fun in the wind, either. Back when I used to go kayaking, paddling a boat into wind was a lot of shite. And just sitting in the grass and reading is tough to enjoy when the wind is having its way.

This winter has been very windy...it's felt like excessive levels of wind at least twice a week for three months, and I think we've had more Wind Advisories than Winter Weather Advisories. We've had a lot of days where we've sustained wind gusts of over 50 mph. And today we're having another one. I would gladly take twice the snow we've had this winter in exchange for half the wind.

Although, I must admit that overalls can be fun to wear outside when it's really windy. If you angle yourself correctly, the bib will fill with wind, like a little sail, and it's like you're being tugged around by the overalls. But aside from that...wind sucks.

For want of a cell phone battery....

I've seen it happen to lots of people over the years...but it had never happened to me, until last night. I dropped my cell phone on the floor, and the battery popped right off.

Problem is, this happened at Shea's Buffalo...in our seats, in the balcony. The phone dropped to the painted concrete floor. I didn't even see the battery go off, but it did; I picked up the phone, and lo! no battery. This was before the show, and before the people with tickets in our area started really filling in, so I had an opportunity to look for it. The battery had fallen behind a seat in the row ahead of us...but since the seats up there are stair-stepped, it was hard to reach it. Worse, it was sitting halfway into a strange metal box underneath the seat.

This, we would figure out, was a heat register.

I figured I would just get down and try to fish the thing out after the show ended, so I ignored my missing battery while Les Mieserables went on. (Post on that forthcoming...suffice it, for now, to say that I gave my cell phone battery exactly zero thought for the next three hours.) But when the show ended, I let the people around us move out, and then I was down on hands and knees, trying to reach the thing. Trouble was, I couldn't get my hands down in there -- the squeeze was too tight. And my hands are by no means massive.

Meanwhile, a couple of nice people stopped by to ask if they could help me retrieve whatever it was that I dropped. I told them it was my cell phone battery, and one of these fellows -- a young man in a very nice suit and who, I must say, has the tiniest hands I've ever seen on a grown man -- gamely reached in to try and grab the wayward battery, which was balanced precariously on the brink of the heat register. I had high hopes...until I heard the telltale ker-chunk sound, and saw the expression on his face when he looked up at me. It was the look of someone whose next words are going to be bad news, such as, "Sorry, but your company is moving to Bangladesh", or "Sorry, but we've just had a recall on the steak you just ate", or "Sorry, but your battery just fell into the heating ductwork of Buffalo's biggest theater."

Oh well. I couldn't be mad at the guy; it was a tough thing, he gave it his best shot, and he got down on his knees in a nice suit. Those are all things he didn't have to do, and the damned thing was precariously balanced there in the first place. But now, my cell phone is a brick. We'll be looking into either a replacement battery at some point in the next couple of days, or just upgrading our phones, as our current ones are about two years old. Normally I like to keep these things going for longer than this. I'm not one of those folks who gets a newer, nicer phone every year; my approach on electronics is to buy the best thing I can afford when I need one, and then use it until it dies (or until performance becomes unacceptable). But sometimes necessity forces its hand more quickly than at other times, and this is one of those times.

I wouldn't mind just replacing the battery, but we'll see. I wouldn't mind a new phone, either!

(PS: not that any readers do, but don't call or text me for now. Because I will answer neither!)

Can we have ACORN back now?

Politics below the fold....

Something for Thursday

An old musical hero of mine, trumpet virtuoso Maurice Andre, passed away this past weekend. I always preferred his tone to that of, say, Wynton Marsalis; Andre's silken tone is perfectly suited to the Baroque and Classical repertoire which he tended to dominate. Though I'm no longer a trumpet player, I'll always admire his skill and musicality.

Here is Maurice Andre, performing Haydn's Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra in E-flat major.



Farewell, Maurice Andre!