Heroes

We all have our own heroes, people on whose behalf we would shout from all the mountaintops of all the world if we could.

Dave Thomas's hero, his grandfather, is in very bad shape. My deepest condolences to him. Watching the long-term suffering of a loved one is probably the worst thing about being human.

Oh, dear Martha....

I've never been a big fan of Martha Stewart, but I do think she handled the situation surrounding her conviction and prison sentence with as much grace as could be expected. And, of course, longtime readers know that one of my two 'reality TV' vices is The Apprentice (the other being American Idol). So yeah, I'm watching Martha Stewart's version of the show.

It's about five minutes into the show, so I don't have anything to say about it yet, except to note that I think the Eurythmic's "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" as the theme song is a nifty touch.

UPDATE: OK, this is a first for me: I'm going to live-blog this damned thing. Some folks live-blog major speeches by the President of the United States; I live-blog episodes of The Apprentice. I'm sure there's a statement in there, somewhere....

1. Some male contestant whose name I forgot already: "You don't control my actions. I control your actions. Let's get that straight." Haven't people watched enough reality shows by now to know that when you say something like that on national television, you only look like a complete ass?

2. The contestants have named their companies "Matchstick" (staffed by "creative types") and "Primarius" (staffed by "corporate" types). God, those are horrible names. One sounds like a company that makes toys from balsa wood, and the other sounds like the bad guy in an old episode of The Transformers.

3. The companies' first task: to create a children's book based on a fairy tale they select, using a designer and illustrator. And then they'll have to read their children's book to actual children. And they're all nodding and grinning, because you know, creating a good children's book is just that easy. Yee-haw.

4. They're in the Random House building, where one conference room is apparently called the "Rudyard Kipling Room". The other team's in the "Dr. Seuss Room". Ick.

5. Some woman whose background is in publishing is the obvious choice to write a children's book. Well, duh.

6. "Hansel and Gretel" in an urban setting could really work. I can think of a thousand ways this could work. Neil Gaiman could do wonders with that; so could Charles de Lint. (Hell, for all I know, de Lint's already done this story, as prolific as he is.) These folks? I doubt it. All of the contestants are whining that it's too dark a story, which tells me that these folks don't know shit about fairy tales or children's lit, which can be very dark stuff indeed.

7. OK, I've just now decided that this "Jeff" guy (tall, bald, glasses) needs to be beaten with a large stick.

8. Everyone's saying "Kids aren't gonna understand this." Assuming the stupidity of kids is never the path to creating a good children's book.

9. Awww, Martha doesn't use "You're fired". She said, "You just don't fit in. Goodbye." But now she's writing a personal letter to the loser? "It sucks that you had to leave. But somebody had to go, and it was you." Wow...rub it in a bit. And according to the next-week-preview, she's writing letters to each loser.

OK, interesting premiere. I'll probably watch the damn thing every week. It's my curse.

This one looks harmless....

Via PZ Myers, I find this bit of instructions that I shall now execute, even though they seem to exist for no reason whatsoever:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Wow. My 23rd post was over three years ago, here. Unfortunately, that post is only four sentences long! Here, then, is that last sentence:

I've already bought it and it has shot to the top of my "To Read" list.

The book in question is Patience and Fortitude, by Nicholas A. Basbanes. (A wonderful book, by the way.)

A shameful admission.

This week, I have done something that goes against every instinct of my being.

I've used Hamburger Helper for the first time.

I know. Using some kind of boxed mix to whip up a half-assed meal that's in all likelihood loaded with enough sodium to halve the speed with which my blood arcs through my vessels. Indulging in food that's everything Lloyd Dobler would despise: bought, sold, and processed. Consuming a product whose label might as well read, "May contain meat-like substance."

The worst thing is that I'll probably keep a box or two of this stuff on hand. Like Ramen Noodles, it's an extremely easy quick meal for when I need something that's easy and quick.

Man oh man.

Is this frequency in use?

For a few weeks, I've been getting a "403-Permission Denied" error when I tried visiting SFSignal, but that appears to have ended. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I'm glad the site's back up. It had become one of my favorite SF-related reads.

Good stories: what I look for (a repost)

I haven't reposted anything in a while -- or, at least I think I haven't, hmmmmm -- so here's the meat of a post I first wrote back in February of 2004. It's about my "rules" for good fiction, as a reader.

1. Don't depress me. This is big: I don't like stories that are just depressing. But this does not rule out sad endings, because "sad" does not equal "depressing". Likewise, "dark" (or "gothic" or "downbeat") also do not equal "depressing". Schindler's List is a terribly sad movie; Seven is a depressing one. I guess the difference is that sadness can still seem to serve a purpose, whereas depression is without purpose: it's just there. I don't want a story in which characters are subjected to just one damn thing after another, with no hope at all for a respite or even a good lesson learned beyond "Life sucks". If I want "Life sucks", well, I'll just look at, you know, life.

2. Engage my emotions. This goes hand-in-hand with "Don't depress me". Even though I don't want to feel depression after reading or viewing a story, I do want to feel something. A story that is the emotional equivalent of an unsalted saltine cracker is not a story for me.

3. Tie up your loose ends. Unless you don't want to. I tried coming up with a better way to say this, but I can't. I love both kinds of stories I'm talking about here, really: I love it when everything ties up into a neat little package, and I also love it when a story lets some things stay open, as if to suggest that the story was really just a segment of someone's life that we've just watched. Guy Gavriel Kay does the latter a lot; John Bellairs does the former. Either works.

4. But if you're gonna tie up your loose ends, be careful about it. Too often, a "no loose ends" book or movie starts to feel like one: about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice a relentless pace at which one thread is tied up every few pages or minutes or so. And then there's Neal Stephenson, who leaves everything in the air until the last ten pages, and then whammo! It's all bundled up with duct tape and baling wire. That's not satisfying, really.

5. Great stuff along the way will make me forgive a crappy ending. But the stuff along the way had better be really great.

6. Beware the surprise ending, or the shocking revelation. I love being surprised in stories, but the surprises have to arise logically out of the content of the story, so even if I didn't see it coming, I can still reexamine the story and see the clues and note the construction by which the surprise or revelation comes. A great example of how not to handle this is the movie Basic Instinct, whose final shot reveals whether or not a certain character is the murderer. The way the story has been constructed, it could have gone either way and made equal sense. That's bad storytelling.

7. Show me something new along the way. Discovery is cool. And it doesn't have to even be something totally new; it can just be a new way of looking at something really familiar. Don't be ordinary.

8. The word "said" should comprise at least 97% of your dialogue attributions. And for the love of God, please don't use "ejaculated" as a verb of dialogue attribution. I can't read about someone "ejaculating" a sentence without thinking of that one scene in There's Something About Mary.

Finally, I can probably distill all this into a single, three-part rule: Don't bore me, don't make me feel bad for having been told your story, and don't do anything that breaks the spell you're trying to weave.

I could probably come up with lots more, but you probably get the idea. You probably also get the idea that I'm a pretty permissive reader. That I am, and I've never made any bones about it: I tend to like lots of stories, of different kinds, told in different ways.

I was just thinking if I should revise or extend these remarks, and I'm thinking, "Nahhh." They still reflect what I look for in a story, as a reader.

An illustration of delusionality in action

The other day I linked a thread on the FSM boards in which a raging fan of the original Battlestar Galactica show is frothing at the mouth about the current re-working of the concept on the SciFi Network (and that thread is still active, by the way, despite a call for peace by none other than Stu Philips, the composer who wrote the music for the original show back in 1978). In mentioning that thread, I noted that the BSG fan in question actually is not the most lunatic regular poster on the FSM boards; that honor, longtime readers will know, goes to a guy named Dan who is a raging Objectivist and whose fealty to the music of Jerry Goldsmith knows absolutely no bounds (we're talking about a guy who seriously believes that Goldsmith's score to US Marshalls -- no, I never saw that movie either -- is superior to John Williams's score to Star Wars).

Anyway, if you want to see what Our Objectivist Hero is like in action, here's a thread from the FSM "Off-topic" board, on the general subject of Hurricane Katrina. It's a pretty political thread, by necessity, but you get a good sense of the guy's inate creepiness. (Or, if you want to read him droning on about film music, here's a representative thread.)

Good news, bad news

The good news is that Byzantium's Shores is, as of this writing, the Number One result for this search. Yay, me!

The bad news is that...well, that the Buffalo Bills also looked like pansies yesterday. But then, the Bills almost always look bad when they play in Tampa. Whether they're playing the Bucs or the Giants in a Super Bowl.

Anyhow, last Friday I was talking to a guy at The Store about my thoughts on the (then) upcoming game. I pegged it as a likely loss for the Bills, reasoning that the defense would play OK at first, but that the offense would struggle to the point of going three-and-out a lot and probably turning the ball over a bit, and that the defense would therefore be on the field for entirely too long and eventually succumb to the Bucs' running game.

Well, aside from the turnovers -- somehow, the Bills didn't turn it over all day (although they would have if the Bucs' defensive backs had held onto the ball) -- but everything else happened exactly as so. Three-and-out, three-and-out, three-and-out. A defense that looked a bit flat at the outset only got flatter, and the Bills lost a 19-3 ballgame that wasn't even that close. The defense was a disappointment: they seem to be able to bring all kinds of pressure when they're nursing a lead, but when they're playing behind, they seem almost tentative. And Jerry Gray's supposed genius for making halftime adjustments sure wasn't in evidence, either. In short, I was amazed at how flat the Bills' D looked yesterday.

J.P. Losman's play was nowhere near as good as it was in Week One; he kept missing receivers and forcing balls and, in one very costly moment, tried to throw the ball away from his own end zone -- but after he'd lost track of where he was and stepped out of bounds for the safety. Ouch. However, the things that Losman did wrong are things that, as he gains experience, he'll theoretically do wrong less often. He'll learn how to put the right touch on a ball that he's throwing to a receiver who's not blanketed, but who still isn't wide-open. He'll learn how to look off defenders and how to account for that one guy he consistently fails to account for. And so on. This was the type of game everybody knew they'd see sooner or later from Losman, and I'm kind of glad we're seeing it sooner. We learn in large part by screwing up, so if he's gotta learn, I say, let him screw it up right now.

I also tend to get grumpy about the Bills' offensive line, but even though the running game stunk yesterday, I was surprised that the Bills' O-line only surrendered two sacks, and under special circumstances: the first was the safety when the Bills were backed up right to their own goal line and happened because Losman stepped out of bounds before he could throw the ball away, and the second came in the game's waning minute when the outcome was decided and everybody just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. The Bucs' great pass rusher, Simeon Rice, wasn't much of a factor (he had the second of the Bucs' two sacks), which speaks well of new left tackle (or guard, I can never remember) Mike Gandy.

Receiver Josh Reed seems to be waking up again, after spending the last two years in the doldrums. Reed's got talent, and his re-emergence is a nice thing to see. However, one thing that the Bills have missed for years is a real quality pass-catching tight end. They haven't had one since Pete Metzelaars. I kind of suspect that this deficiency (I don't care, Mark Campbell is average at best) also hampered Drew Bledsoe, who had his best years as a QB in the NFL when he had Ben Coates making those catches over the middle in linebacker territory. There were quite a few moments yesterday when I thought that a really good tight end roaming the middle of the field would be just the safety valve J.P. Losman could use. Sure wish the Bills had one.

And one final note on the Bills: for some reason, Willis McGahee seems to be trying this year to run in the "Squirmin' Thurman" mode, doing a lot of east-and-west running and trying to be elusive. Where's the more Emmitt Smith-like runner from last year, the guy who was barreling north-and-south at full speed and who was knocking defenders aside with a lethal stiff-arm? Come on, Willis -- run it the way you know how. Let's see that burst and that strength again.

That's about all from yesterday (except, of course, hooray and a big thank-you to the Carolina Panthers, who brought the StuPats down to earth). Next up for the Bills: Atlanta's Falcons come to town, maybe with Mike Vick at quarterback. Now that ought to be exciting....

Ending one journey, and beginning another

There's always something both sad and exciting about reaching the end of one journey, because it usually means you're simply at the starting point of another.

Or, at least I hope there's something exciting about that, because that's the situation our heroine, Gwynwhyfar, faces in Chapter Eighteen of The Promised King, Book One, which has just been posted and is available wherever blogs are read.

Enjoy, and as always, links to the previous chapters are available in the sidebar over there.

(Remember, by the magic of TimeStamp Technology (TM), this post is anchored at the top of this page. Newer content will appear throughout Sunday, so keep scrolling down.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A Chinese erhu, in playing position.

I've been listening to a lot of Chinese and Japanese classical music over the last couple of years, as I've noted previously. I've come to love the different sounds of the Asian ethnic instruments, particularly their percussion and strings. Today I was listening to a disc of erhu concertos -- this disc, actually -- and I found myself once again entranced by the different sound of the erhu, which I first heard in college when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra came to play in our auditorium.

The erhu, as seen above, is held rather like a cello, in a sitting position. Its bow is fitted between its two strings, and the resonator at the bottom is covered by a skin, rather like the head of a drum, that gives the instrument its distinct muted sound. Its pitch is similar to a violin's, but the skin over the resonator makes its sound somehow both muted and yet more piercing than the Western violin. Here is a sound sample, and some more information on the playing of the erhu can be found here and here.

Image from here.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

For some reason, Mr. Sun dropped off my radar until...just now. And he's still funny. Here's some stuff I liked a lot from his current front page:

:: Dick Cheney's about to have surgery, and here's how he may come out: The Cheneybot 2005!

:: OK, so this is a cheap shot. So what. I laughed.

:: Mr. Sun links a laser-guided slingshot. Man, that would make the David-and-Goliath story read a bit differently.

:: Follow the money.

:: The little piggies went to market, updated post-Katrina.

He's on the juice!

Yup, we've started Little Quinn on the juice. We figure that if The Juice could turn a cancer-survivor into an unstoppable Tour de France juggernaut, it could do wonders for our cerebral palsy-afflicted son!

OK, I'm kidding. We all know that Lance Armstrong isn't doping, and neither is Little Quinn. But we have begun incorporating real food into his feedings, in the form of fruit and vegetable juice.

We recently acquired a juicing machine from my sister-in-law (it was a duplicate wedding gift, I think), after we (well, mainly The Wife, but I support the idea) had done research on the feasibility of using juice in some or all of Little Quinn's feedings. Basically, the idea is that it's probably better for his digestive system, and maybe his body entirely, if he actually gets some food that isn't in the form of a powder formula that's manufactured in a plant via some kind of chemical process that involves real food at some early point in production.

On the advice of a chiropractor/nutritionist to whom we've been taking Little Quinn since shortly after we first brought him home from the hospital, we've been making a couple of his feedings a day from a certain amount of juice blended with a protein powder, a couple of vitamin supplements, and flax seed oil. It tends to be kind of nasty-looking stuff -- the carrot-juice potion is an unpleasant orange, and I'm not looking forward to seeing how the spinach stuff ends up looking. Ick.

So far Little Quinn has enjoyed this concoction based on the juice of carrots, grapes, and peaches, with nectarines, apples, and spinach waiting in the wings. Aside from some fairly large "fillings of the diaper" after the grapes, he seems to have had no problems digesting this stuff -- in fact, it seems that he's digesting it all easier than the manufactured formula, since when I go to vent his stomach for the next feeding after a juice-based feeding, his stomach turns out to be much emptier than usual. Also, his skin complexion seems better and he seems more energetic, spending less hours in deep slumber during the day (today being an exception to this; he's friggin' zonked right now).

Of course, if he's going to be a real Buffalo baby, I gotta figure out how to puree some chicken wings and cram them through his G-tube. I'll find a way. The wing, after all, has a lot of natural gelatin, which is why properly cooked chicken wings are so wonderfully juicy. Stay tuned....

Spotting beauty elsewhere....

Over at 2Blowhards, Michael has a neat post up about French actress Sophie Marceau, who happens to also be a Move Over Britney! Designate.

On a more substantive note, Michael also links a fascinating interview with author Blair Tindall, who has written a book about the inner "business" of the classical music world, and not in the "financial" sense of "business" (the title of her book is Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music). Well, after spending long hours as a kid reading about the lives of the great composers (in books like, appropriately enough, Harold Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers), I would certainly hope that today's classical music world involves a bit of sex and drugs. Today's musicians owe it to their forebears, don't they?

Anyway, from the brief interview -- and you'd better believe I'll read Tindall's book -- I liked this quote a lot:

Many in today’s society are introspective, and yes, some of them are musicians. People in diverse fields can be as intensely spiritual as the most accomplished artists. Musicians are human beings who experience life in unique ways just like everyone else; and fortunately, the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize.

That's something that I wish more classical music lovers would realize: the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize. There are ways of venerating music that don't involve putting it on some kind of pedestal and behaving in its presence the way we do if we're in a cathedral and the Bishop has just walked in to perform the sacraments.

I read the discussion thread in the comments to this blog post, in which Lynn Sislo is participating avidly, and I have to say that I really truly don't like the "reverent" approach to music -- any music, really, but especially classical music. It's been my experience all too often that the people who insist on propping up some kind of artificial requirement of decorum before one can even come to classical music's table and sup on its delights are, in a real way, implying that the music is something separate, something outside of us. The atmosphere in classical music tends to be one of rigidly enforced reverence, and all that does is create an atmosphere where real internalization of the music is, if not impossible, made pretty damned hard. And that's a shame.

Sentential Links #17

It's that time again. Here is the customary roundup of usual sentences.

:: Oh they broke into our house
And they beat my dad with logs,
They raped my little sister,
And killed my dear old dog.

Everybody!

Limey scum, Limey scum!
I kills them all and still they come... (I've been Googling that set of lyrics forever, to no avail. Blogistan rules!)

:: She got her chair obsession psychoanalyzed and says it has something to do with communities - with homes, with talking - with how the Tunisian Jews would always sit around and talk to each other.

:: I've even had a cartoon face become my mental image of a blogger. Am I the only one with this problem? (Man, I hope she's not talking about me....)

:: Five pet peeves about eating out with Ayn Rand (OK, that's the title to a list. Funny blog-like site with nothing but humorous five-item lists. Via Lynn, of course.)

:: This sort of intolerant, brainwash garbage makes Neha angry enough to talk about herself in third person. (Ahhh, Neha's just discovered the gooey insanity of Chick Tracts! And here's me, without my popcorn....)

:: I have discovered that catfish doesn't do so well in the nuker. (Whew. Here's an all-important culinary tip, folks: if you want to re-heat food such that it actually has texture when you eat it, use your conventional oven and not your nuker. Yes, it will take ten or fifteen minutes versus two for the nuker, but the short investment is time is well worth it when you eat hot food that isn't rubbery.)

:: I'm not sure why I thought of that, but now you have a story about me in 1989. (OK, here's a story about me in 1989: after my high school graduation ceremony, I left immediately out the back door, drove home, and went out for a bike ride. Without telling my parents. Who were waiting on the school's front lawn for the post-grad school front-lawn crap. Oops.)

:: If Wyle E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn't he just buy dinner? (Hmmmm. Personally, I've always wondered why Wile E. stuck with a company whose level of customer satisfaction would make Wal-Mart look like Pa's Corner Grocery down on the corner, but this is a good question, too.)

:: Why is it that police don't seem to follow the rules of the road... well at least speed limits. (Years ago I watched one of those Current Affair programs or some such thing that did a feature on just this topic. They followed speeding cops to locations like their dentists, their laundromats, and the like. When they confronted one cop with a video, the cop tried to claim that a license is required to have a radar gun for checking drivers' speeds. Nice try, Officer Krupke.)

:: A German inventor says he's found a way to make cheap diesel fuel out of dead cats. (Gee, why not really get some bang for our buck, and use dead humans?)

:: It appears that Angela Merkel has been elected Chancellor of Germany. Which means, among other things, that once again Germany will be run by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable Wagner-lover. (Alex then provides an extract from a lengthy interview on Wagner -- and nothing but Wagner -- that Merkel recently gave. I wonder when the last time was that we elected a President here in the US who even came close to knowing this much about classical music? Not, of course, that I would advance this as a reason for electing Condi Rice in 2008.)

:: I can't really add anything to it, except to say that all of those issues get amplified with decreasing size of the institution, and liberal arts colleges do tend to be smaller and more personal. (Isn't that the truth. I went to college at a small school in a small town in Iowa, and I was constantly seeing my profs at the grocery store, at the local watering holes, even in the malls in the bigger town twenty miles south.)

:: The first time I took my son to the office to introduce him to everybody, a few weeks after he was born, H said, "Isn't it just amazing when they're this age? It's like they got one toe here on earth and the other 9 still up in heaven. Say hello to God for me, OK?" (Wow, is that a beautiful thought.)

It was a good week for Blogistan. Let's keep it up, folks! It's a jungle out there.

I've hit the big time! (and a useful tip for liberal bloggers)

Wow, folks -- I feel that in the last day or so I've kind-of "broken in" to Liberal Blogistan: I've been linked by both Shakespeare's Sister and Sisyphus Shrugged, linkage which is immensely appreciated. But the even greater badge of honor came when I logged into my YACCS comments control board and found a comment left on an old post, on the subject of right-wing bloggers blocking referral traffic from liberal blogs (a practice which, I continue to note, is limited exclusively to right-wing blogs). In a move that fills me with glee, Jane Galt (the blogger in question on the commented post) blocked my referral! Imagine: the libertarian genius whose blog traffic dwarfs mine (as of this writing, according to the counter on her main page her total number of hits exceeds mine by over 2,400,000 hits) feels the need to add me to her list of blocked referrals. Looks like a victory for Mighty Mouse!

(Yes, I'm Mighty Mouse in this scenario.)

However, Ms. Galt appears to have not really mastered the fine art of referral-blocking; maybe she should bone up on the Instruction Manual that the LGF guy wrote when he pioneered the trick. The links from the individual post-pages (I also linked that Galt post here) are blocked, but they're not blocked from the monthly archive page, here -- scroll down to the posts (Saturday, September 5) and see. As of this writing (about 10:30 p.m. Eastern time) the links still work from the monthly archive. Whoops.

But anyway, it doesn't matter, because there's an easy way for us liberal bloggers to get around this, and as a service to my fine liberal brethren, here's how it works. Instead of using the URL to the right-wing blog post in question when creating your link, first take this string:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=

Then, you simply append the post URL to the end, immediately after the equal-sign. So, if you're going to link Byzantium's Shores, instead of linking this URL:

http://byzantiumshores.blogspot.com

...you'll actually link this URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://byzantiumshores.blogspot.com

What you've just done is create a redirect through Google, which according to my brief experimentation with SiteMeter and this blog, shows up as a hit but one with an unknown referring URL. Likewise, I doubt Technorati would pick it up as a link. And besides, no blogger is going to be insane enough as to block referrals from Google, right?

So there you go, liberal bloggers -- break free of the traffic-blocking shackles! Link whomever you desire!

Hey, it's not just Greek mythology figures. Thor shrugged too!

Welcome aboard, Sisyphus Shrugged readers! Comments are open (although I've recently clarified my comments policy); some links to favorite posts of mine can be found in the sidebar section labeled "Notable Dispatches". Feel free to stay a while and come back repeatedly. My content isn't usually as political as it's been lately, but let's just say that Katrina pissed me off. (Or, rather, our President pissed me off. Not the first time, of course, but....) My general topics tend to lean toward life in Buffalo, NY; music (mainly classical, Celtic, and filmscores); the challenges of raising two kids when the younger of them happens to be an infant with cerebral palsy; blatherings on fantasy and science fiction (I'm an unrepentant Star Wars fanboy); and whatever else leaps to mind. I generally have no resistance to those blog-quiz meme things that flit around Blogistan every so often, and by some weird compulsion I tend to answer every one of them that I come across (the more general ones, and not usually the "Which one of the insufferable Camdens from Seventh Heaven are you?" type quizzes). My politics are unabashedly liberal, but that sort of thing usually constitutes around twenty percent of my content here. (Although I have the feeling that might change somewhat in the future.)

Cheers!

Motivation in the dugout

If you, like everyone else who works for corporate overlords who put those posters around the office with the beautiful photograph captioned with something "motivational", ever wondered what such posters would be like if tailored for Major League Baseball teams, wonder no more.

For the Pirates one, I might have shown a photo of Brian Giles and captioned it something like, "PERFORMANCE: Keep working hard, because you're only a year or two away from the next fire sale."

A minor query....

Right now the Daughter is watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the teevee (via one of them deeveedee's), and as I'm sitting here munching on a turkey sandwich and reading blogs, some of the movie is seeping into my head via osmosis, and really, it's a lot better movie than I remember it being. I recall not being terribly excited by it when I was a kid, but she's enjoying it muchly, and I'm finding the production impressive, the songs and music good, the acting fun in that "scenery-chewing kids' movie" kind of way, and I'm even finding Dick Van Dyke (whom I normally don't grok) enjoyable. So why isn't Chitty Chitty Bang Bang more of a classic family movie?

Friday Grab-Bag o'Stuff

Sorry for the very recent silence, but there's been family stuff of the "normal, but time-consuming" variety. Yesterday was Open House at The Daughter's school. Man, have first-grade classrooms evolved. (And so, apparently, have first-grade teachers, but that's one of those topics I probably should avoid for now.) And since we didn't really feel like cooking dinner after the Open House, we opted instead to eat at our favorite streetside-grill joint (Taffy's on Southwestern Boulevard and Orchard Park Road, for those locals who wonder about such things).

I've realized lately that I'm kind of a low-brow foodie. I like to call myself a "foodie", but judging by other foodies, I'm really not one. I appreciate the gourmet thing, and I do enjoy those meals when I can get them, but really, my prefered mode of eating out is those little local joints at the streetcorners that serve burgers, hot dogs, Italian sausages, and all manner of other items deep-fried or cooked on a grill. I also like those little local pizza joints (I happen to think that Buffalo has lots of great pizza, having not succumbed to those weird cultists who think that the only places you can get real pizza exist on the even-numbered blocks in Manhattan).

And you know what else I like? That big watering hole/restaurant, usually called the "Something or such-and-such Hotel", that occupies one of the biggest buildings along the main drag of every small town in Western New York. True, the food in these types of places is rarely "remarkable", but there's just something about the atmosphere of those places that makes the food better than it probably is.

And I like Chinese take-out places. No, their food is not even close to the amazing stuff I adore when I go to Toronto's Chinatown, but it's comforting, you know? I'm all about the comfort food these days. I like the occasional adventure in food, but by and large, I want my food to be nourishing and comforting. (Which probably explains my waistline, but that's another story.)

Anyway, here's some random linkage:

:: I guarantee I'll have more to say about this in November, but for now, here's a press release: the complete score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will be released in a 3-CD/1 DVD set on November 22.

This historic release contains over 180 minutes of music on three CDs, comprising the full score of the 2001 film, composed by Howard Shore. "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recordings" marks the first edition of the three complete recording releases of the film trilogy whose score has been honored with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. This deluxe set also includes exclusive new artwork, packaging, and extensive liner notes culled from "The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films," to be published in 2006. Enya's song "May It Be," which received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and which she performed at the Academy Awards ceremony, is contained on "The Complete Recordings" within all-new selection titles that reflect the complete score being released in its entirety for the first time.

Commence the saving of the pennies!

(Similar packages of the scores to The Two Towers and The Return of the King are in the works, but I don't know what their frequency of release will be. If they're a year apart, I will be, shall we say, a bit unhappy.)

:: Want to see a deranged sci-fi fanboy in action? Check out this thread on the FSM boards, where lots of people speak up in favor of the current Battlestar Galactica show while the FSM boards' resident die-hard fan (and I do mean, die-hard) charges once more unto the breach to defend the honor of the nineteen episodes of BSG that ran back in 1978. Believe me, they just don't get any more deranged than Mr. Paddon. (Well, actually, they do: he's not the weirdo Objectivist over there.)

:: Via Atrios I see a spectacularly nauseating op-ed piece written for a college student newspaper that got its writer fired, and with good reason, when you read the tripe. I just note an interesting contrast in one of her opening sentences, versus one of her closing ones:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

And:

I have enough confidence in my country’s imperfect but steadfast law enforcement systems to carry out such profiling the way it should be done: in a professional and thorough manner, without going down the slippery slope of pointless and disrespectful encroachment on the livelihood or decorum of everyday Arabs and Arab Americans.

I'm trying to wonder just what this writer's definition of "pointless and disrespectful encroachment on livelihood or decorum" would be. For some reason, I'm envisioning something that might take place in a Quentin Tarantino movie: "Bring out the Gimp!"

Oh, and there's this gem:

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

You see, there's the difference between the left and the right: this right-wing girl is making her case about whether it seems as though rights are being violated, while we liberals are concerned about if rights actually are being violated. That's a distinction completely lost on the right these days, it sometimes seems.

(I'm also troubled by the apparent belief that "We can set aside rights for a while, because just as soon as we kill all the terrorists, we can get 'em back again." Because, you know, getting back what's been willingly -- and, seemingly, cheerfully -- given up is just that easy.)

:: Longtime readers know that I like funny photographs involving Presidents of the United States in un-Presidential moments, regardless of party. So I think that Bush's note about having a bathroom break is just comedy gold, man. It'd be even funnier if it turned out that the President had consumed four burritos for lunch that day. (This still doesn't beat out Bush falling off the Segway, though, for this current President; and my favorite goofy Presidential photo of all time had President Clinton at some kind of economic summit or something in a tropical country somewhere, and he and all the people there with him had to wear these horrible shirts made of shiny gold fabric that hung down almost to their knees. Clinton looked ridiculous in that get-up.)

:: And finally: welcome aboard, Shakespeare's Sister readers! Feel free to look around a while. I don't blog politics all that much, but lately the Prez has been annoying me more than usual (you know, bungling a major disaster will do that). Mostly, though, I drone on about life in the Buffalo area; the challenges of raising an infant with cerebral palsy; thoughts on classical, film and Celtic music; favorite TV shows; Star Wars; and women whom I find to be far more worthy of fawning media attention than Britney. Check out the "Notable Dispatches" linked in my sidebar, and enjoy -- just don't tell me that I look like an axe murderer, because I don't. Sheesh!

Answers to the Quiz Thing

Here are the answers to the quiz I made up for this post. (Ignore the date on this entry; I used Blogger's ability to change dates to ensure that this post does not appear on the blog's main page.)

Here are the questions again, with their answers:

11. Only two baseball players have ended the World Series by hitting a walk-off home-run. Name them.

Bill Mazeroski (1960, Game Seven, Pirates over Yankees), Joe Carter (1993, Game Six, Blue Jays over Phillies)

12. Roger Ebert wrote a screenplay many years ago. Name the director of the resulting film.

Russ Meyer directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

13. Name the two ingredients in a roux. (There's some wiggle-room here, actually.)

Butter and flour. (I've heard of roux being made with olive oil and other fats, but most often I've seen butter as the fat.)

14. Leonard Bernstein wrote a symphony based on what poem by W.H. Auden?

The Age of Anxiety.

15. Harold Arlen, Vincent Gallo, Orel Hershiser, Ani DiFranco, and Christine Baranski all have this in common.

All were born in Buffalo.

16. Give the real names of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi.

17. Johannes Brahms wrote ____ symphonies. (For extra credit, Brahms wrote ____ of his ____ symphonies in major keys.)

Four symphonies; two in major keys (the Second in D and the Third in F).

18. In the 23rd century, the United Federation of Planets maintains only one crime that still carries a death penalty. Name that crime.

Visiting the planet Talos IV.

19. Name Wolverine's mutant superpower.

Exceptionally fast healing from wounds. (The claws and his unbreakable bones are not mutant powers, but were given to him in some kind of medical procedure by some government entity.)

20. On what planet did Luke Skywalker learn the truth of his parentage? (There are two possible answers here, actually.)

Darth Vader told Luke during their duel on Bespin; Yoda later confirmed it on Dagobah.

21. In the opening passage of Neuromancer, what color is the sky?

The color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

22. In the James Bond films, what is Q's name?

Major Boothroyd. (He is addressed as such by M in From Russia With Love, and Anya Amasova calls him by name in The Spy Who Loved Me.)

23. What hardly happens in Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire?

Hurricanes. (This is one of Professor Higgins's diction exercises in My Fair Lady.)

24. What composer fell madly in love at first sight with actress Harriet Smithson? (For extra credit, what role was she playing at the time?)

Hector Berlioz. (She was playing Ophelia.)

25. Give the last names of the two Brians in 1988's "Battle of the Brians".

In 1988, Brian Boitano of the US defeated Brian Orser of Canada for the Gold Medal in Men's Figure Skating at the Winter Olympics.

26. Four NFL coaches have lost four Super Bowls. Name the one who is NOT in the Hall of Fame.

Dan Reeves. (Don Shula, Bud Grant and Marv Levy are all in the Hall.)

27. What nineteenth century English writer is also known for introducing a certain style of postal box?

Anthony Trollope.

28. Everybody knows who shot J.R. Ewing. But who shot Bobby Ewing?

Katherine Wentworth. (Pam Ewing later "dreamed" Katherine running Bobby over in her car.)

29. Who said "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca?

Trick question, this: Nobody said "Play it again, Sam." The line is nearly always misquoted.

30. Mabel Normand is credited with being the originator of what?

Normand was a noted star of slapstick films during the silent era. She is often credited with "inventing" the pie in the face.

So there you go!