Answers, the second!

Time to knock off a couple more answers to questions posed in Ask Me Anything! February 2012. As before, note that I'm still open to questions!

In this edition I'm going to tackle all of the political questions at once, so if you don't want to read ranty liberalism, just keep scrolling. I'll put the rest of this after the cut.

Something for Thursday

At one point during my piano studies -- mentioned the other day -- I was working on this piece. I was never able to really get it 'under my fingers', so to speak, but that's more a testament to some less-than-impressive work habits on my part than anything else. Oh well. Here is Chopin's "Polonaise in A, Op 40 No 1".

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Who is your favorite villain? Choose from anywhere!

Whatever that guy said? Do the other thing!

It's easy to Captain the Enterprise!



I think that at some point, Worf should have just said, "Captain! I recommend we hold position and do nothing whatsoever." This would likely have been met with Picard replying, "No, Mr. Worf, issue a Red Alert, lock all phasers on target, all crew to battle stations, raise all shields, and FIRE!"

Just because it made me laugh....

...I'm stealing this from Cal.

Answers, the First!

OK, I think I've waited long enough -- it's time to start answering the questions from Ask Me Anything! February 2012. And feel free to still ask, if you like...it's the 10th anniversary month here, so let's make this one special! If there's something you've always wondered about Yours Truly, or something you've always wondered what Yours Truly thought about it, or something you've never wondered about Yours Truly but it just occurred to you to ask, go for it!

My good old college friend (and husband of another good old college friend) Aaron asks: As a very slow reader (I started reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy in October and am just nearing the end. And, that is a pretty good pace for me), with a decent sized list of books on the "need to get to" list, should I add the Song of Ice and Fire series?

Krista and I are just finishing up the first season of the HBO adaptation, and have loved it, but it feels like so much is missing.

I just finished A Clash of Kings the other day (blog post forthcoming), and I do recommend it, thus far. My admiration of the series's first two books remains untouched; I'm most nervous now about the next two (as well as the fifth one, which I've never read yet), because I didn't like those ones as much the first time through. For a slow reader, these books do represent quite an investment -- I mean, look at these things! Since paginations differ, the best way to gauge lengths of books is word count, and check out the numbers on this site. Assuming these are accurate, and I don't see reason to doubt it offhand, the entirety of The Lord of the Rings checks in at approximately 473,000 words, while just the first two of GRRM's Ice and Fire books top 610,000 words. A Storm of Swords, GRRM's Book Three, is 404,000 words...meaning, that one book is a short novel shy of the entire Lord of the Rings. Wow.

Of course, word count isn't everything. Martin's prose, when he's on his game, can really propel the reader forward, in my experience; his dialogue can absolutely crackle, and the device of each chapter being told from the point of view of a different character is extremely effective when one gets used to it -- one effect I'm rediscovering is that I'll finish a chapter for a character I really like, Jon Snow for example, and then decide to keep reading until I get back to Jon Snow. What GRRM does, language-wise, is rarely as dense and descriptive-heavy as JRRT. So this is definitely a "Your mileage may vary" kind of thing.

As for the differences between the books and the teevee adaptations, I honestly don't know, as I haven't yet watched the teevee show beyond the first episode. I do plan to, though.

(BTW, on the subject of word counts -- I'm really hoping to bring the first draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in at no more than 180,000 words, with a further eye to cutting at least ten percent of the words upon the edit. We'll see!

Bill asks: Have you kept up your chops? Do you play anything besides trumpet?

Sadly, no. I haven't touched the trumpet since I played in a friend's wedding -- Aaron of Question Number One's wedding, actually! -- and that was in 1995 or thereabouts. Time and opportunities available tend to make it hard to do such things...not that there are no opportunities, but life has that odd way of moving on, and other interests surge forward, arise anew (when we have space to do so, one day, I plan to take up woodworking and carpentry), or resurface in a big way (I loved writing as a kid several years before I knew what music even was). My musical life now is pretty much as a listener, only. But that's fine for me; at least my musical training earlier in life has equipped me to appreciate music on a level that would be harder to attain had I never touched an instrument.

As for other instruments, I played the piano in high school and college. I do wish I had devoted more effort to the piano, because in all honesty, I was actually fairly decent at it. But I never took the piano as seriously as I took the trumpet, so I never got good enough at it to do more than scratch a surface. I consider that one of the missed opportunities of my life. I suppose I should write a post about my piano teachers one of these years....

More answers to come, and feel free to ask more, if you like!

Sentential Links

Linkage...but first, the Bond girl named "Dink"!



Boy, the casual sexism of the early Bond films still makes me squirm. Anyway....

:: Do you remember back in the "old days" when you'd be out and about somewhere and something would happen, and you'd think, "I can't wait to blog about this!" It wasn't that long ago, really. But these days everyone seems to have a phone that connects to every server in the world, and most people just send these moments to Twitter or Facebook. (I miss the sense of free-for-all conversation that used to be the coin of the realm in Blogistan, but I suppose that was inevitable, as the conversations moved to Facebook and Twitter. Neither is perfect, either -- on FB, we select the people with whom we want to interact, and that's that; on Twitter, anyone can interact with us -- unless we block them -- but man, that 140-character limit can be a bear sometimes. I've seen people on Twitter who decide to abandon their blogs, and then they proceed to post blog-post length items to Twitter, 140 characters at a time, for many tweets in a row. This always irritates me, since Twitter updates chronologically, so unless one is actually on Twitter when one of these starts, you have to scroll backward to figure out what's being talked about. My audience here is pretty much what it is, although I do probably pick up a reader or two here and there, and lose a reader here and there. And that's about it...the traffic remains the same, and it's mostly Google image searches. Does this bug me? A bit...but I can't shut myself up, so there it is.)

:: A lot of people have asked me why I don't review the Grammys. Any organization that gives Chris Brown awards instead of putting him in jail is not one I take seriously.

:: Gary Carter was responsible for some of the most memorable moments I've ever spent watching baseball.

:: Why, Otis Redding. Why?

Why did you have to leave us so early? (This is a wonderful, wonderful post.)

:: Life is a complicated mix of good and bad, painful and pleasant. Through it all I decide which I will focus on .....what I have to be grateful for or what I have to sorrow about. I pick. I hope I can choose well. (My dear friend Lynda has had a rough start to 2012, after a wonderful 2011. I know that she will try to approach everything with as much strength and laughter as she can manage.)

:: Happiness is 20 kids making one pie. Look at the flour on their hands. Look at the smiles on their faces. If this doesn't make my 24 hours on 3 different airplanes worth the trip, I don't know what does.

:: When one believes in something you don't see or understand, too often we assume its them when it is us. There are fairies, there are gods, there are demons and there are angels. Who are you to say there is not? Without trumpets or wings, I know one passed this way.

More next week!

Godspeed, John Glenn!

Fifty years ago today, astronaut John Glenn launched in a spacecraft called Friendship 7 and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Here's a wonderful documentary, assembled by NASA after the mission's end, detailing the events of Glenn's mission, from pre-launch preparations to Glenn's post-splashdown arrival on the aircraft carrier.




I watched this film way back in third grade, when our class was doing a research project on space; I remember Mrs. Grosbeck, our teacher, looking with some dismay at the two giant film reels for this movie and realizing that we'd have to watch it in two installments. (That's something I recall from watching educational movies in school: seeing the teacher pick up the film reel, and noting its size which would therefore indicate its length. Big film reels, meaning longer films, made us happy. If it was a small one, someone in class would say something like, "Awww, a short one." Good times!) I've looked for this film on YouTube and in other places a few times over the years, and I'm thrilled that it's finally available. I could watch archival NASA footage for hours. It reminds me that there was a time when you could read about NASA and not see the phrase "budget cuts" in the next sentence.

I love the style of this film -- listen to the portentous narration, loaded with patriotic fervor and the clear belief that space exploration is obviously what's next. "Today, John Glenn and the Mercury team challenged space...and they won!" And while all this goes on, a stirring music score throbs away in the background. A documentary like this would be dismissed today as slavish propaganda, and I suppose, in a way, that it is...but you know what, I just don't care. Our space program in the 1960s, even though we might wish it was less motivated by a desire to beat the Soviets, was a time of greatness that we achieved because we just plain wanted it. And it saddens me to think that our era of space exploration was so short that a landmark mission, fifty years ago, now seems almost quaint.

Come on, America! Why are we messing around? The stars are awaiting us!

Read a good account of Glenn's mission here (the photo above comes from there as well). What a thrilling time that must have been. I sometimes wonder if maybe the spaceflight 'glow' would have lasted longer if what is certainly its 'Golden Age' to this point didn't coincide with Viet Nam...but that's a hypothesis for another day.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

::  Want to take a few minutes and study a picture for all the SF-geek references within it? Sure you do. (It's mostly Star Wars references, but there's other stuff in there, too. I wish you could resolve it even larger....)

::  Roger Ebert reviews the new movie The Vow. This doesn't sound like anything I'd watch unless I'm in my fairly rare mood for whatever the Tearjerker Of The Day happens to be, but this closing paragraph of Ebert's caught my attention:

A footnote. The movie is said to be set in Chicago. It struck me as strange that it has such a large number of second-unit shots of the city: skylines, elevated trains, the Music Box movie theater. Yet the couple itself is rarely seen in them. There is one nice shot of the newlyweds running from the Art Institute across a footbridge into Millennium Park and ending up under the Bean, but otherwise something fishy is going on. Yes, the movie was shot mostly in Toronto. Poor Toronto. Poor Chicago. Poor Paige and Leo. Poor Jeremy, even.

I don't get this, really. I mean, I get why movies would film in Toronto -- it's cheaper to do so. But why go to the trouble of establishing its setting as Chicago with some second-unit stuff? Why not just set the movie in Toronto? Are we that afraid that Americans might say, "Hey, here's a movie we can see...oh wait, no, the movie's set in Toronto, not any good American city. Forget that!"? I just don't get this.

::  I may have linked this before, but if so, well...I'm gonna link it again. Check out NASA's current highest-resolution photos of our entire planet. You can look at both hemispheres. Amazing!

More next week!

Saturday Centus

Wow...I missed one last week. Totally, completely, slipped my mind. Ugh! Sorry, folks.

Anyway, this week's prompt is fairly tough: we're to write our autobiography in six words. Hmmmm....

Includes: One heart. Some assembly required.

That ought to do.

Page One: the Marvel STAR WARS comic

It's kind of odd to think of it now, but once upon a time, there was no Star Wars. I know, weird, huh? And once upon a time, the only stuff out there with Star Wars on it were the movie itself (which you had to see in theaters), a novelization of the movie with George Lucas's byline on it (but actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster), and the comic book by Marvel. Here's the first page of it.

The original are was by Howard Chaykin, who would stick around for ten issues before leaving and being replaced by Carmine Infantino for a while. The first six issues were strictly an adaptation of the movie, but based on the original shooting script, so you had the deleted early scenes with Luke Skywalker looking up at the sky during his work and seeing flashes of light -- the flashes of laser cannon fire between the blockade runner and the Imperial star destroyer -- and his conversation with Biggs, who reveals his intention to leave the Imperial Academy and join the Rebel Alliance. There is also the deleted scene between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt, which was eventually put back into the movie by George Lucas, but as there was no design for Jabba at that time, Marvel made him into a trim, bipedal alien.

After issue #6, Marvel found itself with a hit comic and no idea what was to come in the Star Wars saga, so they struck out on their own, first with a story tracking Han and Chewie as they return with their money to pay off Jabba. Unfortunately they get attacked by pirates, who steal the money; then they find themselves on a backwater world that's even more backwater than Tatooine, where they end up in a rehash of The Seven Samurai. Meanwhile Luke is sent out to look for a new planet for the Rebels to put their hidden base on, because the Empire is sure to counterattack at Yavin pretty soon. Luke finds a world that is nothing but ocean, where a whole separate war is going on. Then the heroes end up together on a space station that's a giant Las Vegas in space. And so on.

The Marvel Star Wars comics were really a lot of fun, especially during the period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Without guidelines of what to do (or probably with some vague limitations), the Marvel series was basically a lot of fun space opera adventure. I didn't get to read these stories until some years later, during the mid-1980s, after Return of the Jedi had come out, and as part of my big comic book collecting phase, I amassed the entire run of Marvel's Star Wars books. The generally light-hearted, adventurous, swashbuckling tone of those thirty-one or so issues of the book (their Empire Strikes Back adaptation would begin with #39) was partly in keeping with the tone of the first film, the film in which the mythic aspects of Star Wars weren't quite so prominent as in later films (although they certainly were prominent). The tone of the book would shift after TESB to put the Rebel Alliance and its struggles in sharper focus, and the Empire would become significantly more important.

After Return of the Jedi, the comics lost a lot of their focus. The series kept going until issue #107 (ROTJ had been adapted in its own four-issue limited series, with #83 or 84 being the first post-ROTJ story in the series). At the time, the book was setting up an alien invasion story, but this got wrapped up by necessity entirely too quickly. This was not surprising, really; Star Wars pretty much went completely dormant after ROTJ left theaters, and wouldn't awaken until 1991 and Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire, which would launch the entire "Extended Universe", which is still going strong to this day.

The Marvel Star Wars comic has been anthologized several times. Oddly, even though I still own all the original issues (albeit in my parents' garage), I haven't picked up the anthologies.

I can't help it...it always makes me laugh.

Picard - WTF is this shit?, originally uploaded by DarksideHalo.

Something for Thursday

For ten years of blogging, I feel like some Berlioz. Here's the "Hungarian March" from The Damnation of Faust:



And here's some Rachmaninov, in his celebrated Vocalise:



And here's some Gerald Finzi, his Eclogue for Piano and Strings:



And finally...All you need is love!

Ten Years in Blogistan

Ten years ago today, this post went live, and Byzantium's Shores was off and running. Wow.

I've told the story before of how this blog came to be, but why not...after all, today's the Blogiversary. In late 2001 or thereabouts, my main area of interaction with others online was on the rec.music.movies newsgroup, as well as a couple other USENET groups. It was quite the free-for-all in conversation at the time, but there was always a pressure to stay on the topic of the group, so if I wanted to discuss a book I'd read, it wasn't really in good form to do in on r.m.m. Unfortunately, those were the people I knew the best...and none of them were active on any of the book groups. That's just one example...but I started wanting to write about things other than movie music. (And to be honest, r.m.m. was hardly the most militant group out there when it came to policing off-topic discussions.)

Also around this time, I would occasionally plug an old schoolmate's name into Google and see what, if anything, came up. More often than not, nothing did, because back then there was no real social networking to be had and few people had any kind of online presence. But one friend of mine did turn up, a guy I'd known from college, Sean Meade -- who appeared to have an odd kind of website that consisted of things he'd post, which were arranged by date. This idea appealed to me, but I had no idea how to implement such a thing.

A little bit after that, I read an article in TIME Magazine about a new thing called "blogging", short for "web log", which was simply an online diary onto which one could post anything one wished. Like...essays about books, movies, music, and current events! So I checked out this site called "Blogger", familiarized myself with the concept, and created a blog.

Which I almost immediately abandoned.

See, that first blog was something called "Jaquandor's Rants" or something like that. I regretted that title almost immediately, because I didn't intend to just rant all the time. I abandoned that one and created another one, and in striking about for a title, saw a book on my shelf: a historical fantasy novel called Byzantium by Steven Lawhead. It was a quick leap from there to Byzantium's Shores. As I wrote in my second-ever post:

Why "Byzantium's Shores"? Well, for one thing it just sounds exotic to my ear, five syllables which strike me as fairly melodious.

But more importantly, Byzantium was a place where east and west met along with new and old; it was a city which looked backward to the fallen glories of Rome and forward to the eventual rebirth of the continent that lay to its west. It seems a good fit, then, to cite such a place to name this space where I shall explore my own tastes -- tastes which range wildly from the techno music of Tangerine Dream to the symphonies of Mozart, from the abstracts of Jackson Pollack to the English pastorals of John Constable, from the magnificent verse of Shakespeare to the punching comedic prose of Christopher Moore. And then, of course, there is that wonderful poem by Yeats, as well as the wondrous fictional Byzantium that appears in Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic.

And then, the final word: "Shores". A journey can both begin and end at a shore, from either the land or the sea. No matter which direction one is traveling, a shore marks some kind of terminus.

Wow...you know, there's a reason why I rarely read my own writing. Could I have sounded any more like a pretentious ass? My God, that's just so twee, I can barely stand it. Ye Gods.

And yet, Byzantium's Shores stuck.

At first, I was strictly pseudonymous and said almost nothing of myself. I cut my Internet teeth in the mid-90s, when it was not an uncommon belief that it was unwise to post things online under your real name, and aliases were a lot more common then, so I merely continued the practice. As I went on, though, this began to feel more and more like a hindrance than anything else, so I gradually loosened the reins on that, allowing my name to appear here and there, and opening up as time went by. I revealed that I lived in Buffalo, and then Syracuse, and then Buffalo again; I discussed jobs of mine and the search for a new one; I discussed the birth of our second child, Little Quinn, whose story was vastly different than anything we'd ever prepared for. Opening up just seemed more and more natural, the longer I spent hanging out in Blogistan.

Oddly, I've never really fallen into any particular mold of blogging. I never blogged enough about politics to be considered a political blog, and even now, I tend to restrict my political comment to Sentential Links posts or to Tumblr, where I let the hair down a bit more even than I do here. I never blogged enough about any of the arts to fall into one of those categories, either. There was a relatively brief time when there was a "local" blogosphere -- what I called, for a time, the "Buffalo prefecture of Blogistan" -- but for the most part, the Buffalo blog scene is now pretty limited in scope and in sense of 'community'.

What kind of blog is this, then? I suppose it's just a personal blog wherein a guy with a fairly large set of general interests posts about anything that strikes him as post-worthy. And since that's really what it was meant to be in the first place, that means I've kept true to the original 'vision'. Yay, me!

So: what are some memorable moments I've had while blogging? Most obviously, the outpouring of support for Little Quinn's birth and later, his death. Seven-and-a-half years on, that event is still one whose ripples in the pond of my life are quite visible. Almost right up there was the end of our fourth attempt to add to our family, when baby Fiona was born at only 21 weeks' gestation. (And for those with long memories and who may be doing the math...yes, I said fourth. I never discussed the miscarriage that happened a year before Fiona, and likely never will. I have limits.)

Of course, it wasn't all sad. I've posted about Star Wars more times than I can remember (although, thanks to post tags, I can pull most of 'em up). And Star Trek. And James Bond. And The Lord of the Rings. And so many others...it's mostly been fun.

Other moments haven't been quite as much fun, I must admit; some of those were my fault. My off-the-cuff "Too bad he wasn't having a fatal heart attack" comment about Rush Limbaugh following his hospitalization for chest pains a few years back was, shall we say, ill-advised. I've said other dumb things over the years, because, well, you can't say stuff for ten years without having something dumb-arsed cross your lips or emerge from your keyboard once in a while. I do generally try to keep from offending people, but there are times when one's beliefs are by definition offensive to someone. Given that, though, sometimes it's best just to not throw gas onto the fire. I haven't been guilty of that very often...but I have been guilty of it.

What's made blogging so fun for me -- after the bit about having my very own forum to spout about what I want, when I want, how I want -- are the other bloggers and the readers. I'm not sure I'd have kept it up through the years without the folks who would read this stuff and, occasionally here and there, link it from their own blogs. I'm grateful to each and every person who has ever read or linked me, whether they were "drive-by" visitors or people linking me just to make fun of me. (This has not happened much...nor have I received more than a handful of hate-mails or insulting comments. But it was mildly disappointing to get a link from Fark.com only to have it turn out to be a "Hey guys, get a load of the big dummy!" kind of thing. Oh well!) I remember a few readers who were regulars but who fell away over time, for various reasons, and I remember the ones who are still around. I'm grateful for all!

I keep thinking about what is different now from when I launched this blog. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone were in theaters during their first run; only four of the seven Harry Potter books had come out. George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire stood at three volumes. The top teevee show was Friends. The first Spider-Man movie was due in a few months, as was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Just two NFL seasons had passed since the Buffalo Bills' last playoff appearance, and the newly-reigning Super Bowl champs were a team that I would grow to loathe more than any force in history: the New England Patriots!

The Red Sox and their "Curse of the Bambino" was still two years from coming to an end. I was working a telesales job at which I sucked. I was hearing things online about a space opera teevee show to come that fall, created by the guy who had created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We were two years away from the dawn of a site called Facebook. George W. Bush was barely into his second year in office, and 9-11-01 was a terribly real and raw force -- it was barely a memory even, when I started this blog, just five months and a few days after that awful event. I was two years away from hearing about a state-level politician from Illinois whom some said might one day run for President. Space shuttle Columbia was still in service and would be for another year, before breaking up on re-entry over Texas. Adele was 13. George Clooney was still the most recent Batman. Pierce Brosnan was still James Bond.

And at that time, The Daughter was just two-and-a-half. We were a year and a half away from deciding to expand our family. I knew nothing at all about cerebral palsy. My sister-in-law, now a mother of two, was three years away from marriage. About the only constant was that I had long hair and I was wearing overalls a lot...but I was two years or so from putting up a picture of same. I'm now writing this very entry on a laptop that I bought in 2007, five-and-a-half years into the blog's life. This is the fourth computer on which I've written entries for this blog (of computers we've owned -- I've also posted a few brief entries from other computers, such as ones at work [only when I'm on break!] and the like). And Computer Number Five for Byzantium's Shores is like to debut sometime in the next few months, as my poor beloved Dell Inspiron 1520 is becoming slower and slower in its advancing digital age. When this blog started, I would not own my own cell phone for another six-and-a-half years. I'm on my second cell phone now. It's still not a smartphone.

Ten years in Blogistan. How much longer? Who knows? Maybe a while, maybe not. I don't plan it, really. When I started I figured that I might have one year of this in me...and here I am. Who knew!

And that's enough navel gazing, I think. On with the blogging!



(And if you haven't Asked Me Anything! yet, what's it gonna take? I'm waiting for you!)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Adele: what is her deal? (No, seriously -- what's her thing? I was vaguely aware of the existence of a person named 'Adele' before this past weekend, but now I'm seeing her mentioned and linked everywhere. Is there something I'm missing out on in my ignorance? Edumucate me, folks!)

On Newt and the Moon

Charles Pierce:

I have to confess: The fact that N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civliization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civlizing Forces, proposed building a base on the moon by 2020, only to have the idea turned into a punchline and general ridicule, actually bothered the hell out of me. When did we become so quick to mock this kind of thing? When did our national imagination wither this way? When did exploration become just another "big government" program for pipsqueaks like Willard Romney to ridicule?

I'm old enough to remember when the space program was something capable of moving the entire world to wonder and delight. It seemed like something we all got together and did as a species.

I've been rewatching Carl Sagan's Cosmos lately, and as brilliant as the series remains -- even with some dated material, I'm still convinced that it should be required viewing for, well, every single person on Earth -- I can't help but feel somewhat elegiac about it, because Cosmos has at its heart an assumption that the dream of the stars would continue. Instead it's died, and the only time we get to hear anyone speak of it, the words come from the mouth of crazy moral midget Newt Gingrich.

At what point did we collectively stick our heads up our own asses, anyway?

On Whitney and the Anthem

In comments to the previous post on Whitney Houston, Kerry asks why I didn't post the video of Houston's now-iconic performance of The Star-Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXV. It's a fair question, worthy of a couple of answers.

First of all...the performance wasn't truly live. She was singing, with the mike turned off, while her pre-recorded performance, great as it is, was played over the stadium speakers and to the broadcast audience. She wasn't lip-syncing, but I have a hard time seeing that performance as a truly live performance.

Second: well, this may be stupid. But I often have a hard time separating events from one another, and that anthem performance is irrevocably linked with one of the most painful outcomes I've ever experienced for one of my sports teams. (The only one that hurts more to remember, down to this day, is the Atlanta Braves' Game Seven defeat of my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates in the bottom of the ninth in the 1992 National League Championship Series.) I hear Whitney Houston's anthem, and so much more floods through my mind: botched tackles. A heroic game by Thurman Thomas, to no avail. And yes...Wide Right.

Because the next three Super Bowl losses were all by much greater margins, they're easier to remember for me. Super Bowl XXV, though, is the one they should have won. They should have been champions when that night ended, and they weren't, and what's worst is that as things unfolded, that was their best shot at it.

This all probably sounds pretty trite, but I have very powerful memories of that game. The Bills' Super Bowl runs all happened (except for the last one) when I was at college, 800 miles away from home. The Buffalo Bills were home. When I sat down to watch that game, it wasn't just to watch my favorite team; it was in hopes and expectations that when it ended, I'd be sharing the same emotional high that everyone back home would be feeling. Instead...I got a kick in the gut.

You know what the worst thing was that night? I had a sectional rehearsal for one of my musical ensembles that night, scheduled for 9:30 or so. I'd told my section leader beforehand, "Look, I'll be there, but not one second before that game ends. Because it's the Bills." So the damn game ended, and I had to get up and head out for a damned rehearsal, pretending that I was just fine and ready to get back to work. Which was, frankly, the very last thing I wanted to do.

I've been through an awful lot of shit since the night of Super Bowl XXV, so it may seem silly to still feel icky feelings about that night and how it ended. But I'm not really wired to separate entire events from things that happened in life outside of it, which is why as a rule, my memories of Whitney Houston's Star-Spangled Banner aren't terribly happy ones.

Hurg!

Sorry about the complete disappearance the last few days, folks, but Real Life got a bit busy there for a few days. Nothing major, just a lot of stuff that ended up on the plate at the same time.

So, if you haven't Asked Me Anything! yet, why the heck not? Get thee hence and drop a question there!

(Sentential Links will return next week.)

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Want to learn how to make a whole lot of mixed drinks? Just follow the diagram! (Although probably not after you've had a few. You'd end up with some seriously awful drinks, or some seriously amazing drinks that you will never be able to replicate.)

:: Ever wonder what things look like from the perspective of the Hula Hoop? Wonder no more!




(via)

That's about it. Tune in next week for more!

Whitney

I got home from grocery shopping last night to the news that Whitney Houston is dead. This is one of those odd celebrity deaths that is a combination of "WTF?!" and "Well, given what I know of her recent life, I suppose this isn't quite the galloping shock I thought it was at first."

I wasn't a huge Whitney Houston fan, but I never really disliked her, either. She did songs I liked a lot, and she did songs that I could live my life without ever hearing again ("Greatest Love of All" leads the way here). She had one of the amazing voices of all time, and she was, in her prime, able to use that voice of hers to do some pretty amazing things, and not all of them involved belting BALLADS OF ULTIMATE HUGENESS into the nosebleed seats at Super Big Arena or wherever it was that she was performing.

I find it a terrible shame and waste that her life ran off the rails and that she lost control to the extent that she did. Do I blame her? To a small extent, maybe, but then, I know enough about addiction and what it does to people to know that while Whitney Houston is the one who crossed that bridge, it's a bridge that often one doesn't even realize one is crossing until they're too far past it. (It remains, as I write this, to be seen just to what degree drugs played a role in her death.) Addicts make choices that lead to addiction, to be sure, but I don't for one second pretend that all choices are clear or obvious.

Anyway, it's a loss. For what it's worth, here's my favorite Whitney Houston song.