Rackin-frackin-dadgummit-schnitzen-furgle-urk!

This post headline is an attempt to render that "muttered swearing" that cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone used to do.

Remember the $700 brake job of a few weeks back? Well, my car's brakes are awesome now. The thing stops on a dime, quickly and quietly, no hiss, no grating, no growling, no grinding.

Although I can't say there's been no hiss, grating, growling or grinding since my drive home today from The Store, because I wouldn't have been able to hear any hissing, grating, growling or grinding over my now-incredibly-loud engine.

Because the rackin-frackin-dadgummit-schnitzen-furgle-urk muffler fell off on the way home.

There had damn well better be a top-secret government lab somewhere inside which obscene amounts of taxpayer money are going to developing a Star Trek transporter, because cars suck.

Rightwise born King of All England

Sean e-mailed me today with a link to this post over at Caveat Lector about the new King Arthur movie called, creatively enough, King Arthur. Dorothea's thoughts are interesting, so check them out. (And by the way, I wrote about King Arthur movies in general last October.

I may rent the current film when it comes out on DVD, or perhaps check it out of the library, but I have little intention of seeing it, based on the reviews I've read. Seriously, aside from Roger Ebert's review, I have heard nothing good about it, and I get to the movies rarely enough that I have to prioritize a bit; there are enough movies out that I have heard good things about that I don't think I'll bother with this one. Even if I do love a good Arthurian story.

I must admit that I have generally found Arthurian retellings from the standpoint that he was just some Roman warlord or Celtic prince or some variant thereof to not be terribly interesting, with the exception of Mary Stuart's wonderful trilogy (appended with the fourth book, The Wicked Day, whose sympathetic portrayal of Mordred is so effective that to this day I can't totally accept it when authors give me a vile and hateful Mordred). But in general, I'm not even sure that the best storytelling gold lies in simply retelling the legend anyway. It's been told a lot of times, and the problem with retelling it anyway is that by its nature, the Matter of Britain isn't one story but a collection of them, some of which are more important than others, some of which were there in the beginning and others of which have accrued in the centuries since, and so on.

The true strength of Arthurian storytelling is, I think, to be found along the story's edges: in the rise of Uther, perhaps, or in the lesser knights whose stories exist almost as "filler" in Malory or Tennyson. I'd love to see an Arthurian novel that tells me what Britain was like after the Battle of Camlann, when Camelot fell. And of course, longtime readers will know that the novel I'm working on is based on the idea of Arthur's eventual return. (Yes, this has been done before, but not, I hope, in the way I'm doing it.)

(BTW, it annoys me that the King Arthur movie advertising seems to assume that nobody knows about the "Arthur as Roman warlord" angle, as if this was some shocking thesis that only emerged two or three years ago, as opposed to a pretty old idea that's quite familiar to anyone who has read into the Arthurian legend at all beyond Howard Pyle.)

Hilarity in Translation

A long-popular source of amusement on the Net is to observe the odd linguistic constructions that arise when foreign languages are rendered in English, and for some reason the best examples always seem to spring from Oriental languages. Since I've made a habit recently of collecting Japanese and Chinese classical music CDs, I've seen a lot of this. I don't tend to make fun of it, because I know that translation is a tough thing, and I'm sure that the examples make perfect sense in their original tongues. (And for all I know, the Japanese laugh uproariously when English is rendered into inadequate Japanese.)

But I had to laugh when I unwrapped my latest purchase, a disc of works by Masumoto Kikuko (on the Fontec label, in case anyone wants to know) and saw the translated title, "Various Variety of Tones". I thought, "Sure, because I wouldn't want to get a a variety that wasn't various!"

Your "Holy CRAP!" quote of the day

Via PZ Myers I see this news item about a clergyman whose grand plan to host a big old-style book-burning was thwarted by local and county fire codes. It's a scary enough story that people still like to gather up stuff that they don't like and destroy it, but then I saw this graf:

Breedlove [the pastor who wants to burn heathen stuff] said a city fire inspector suggested shredding the offending material, but Breedlove said that wouldn't seem biblical. (italics added)

Tune in next week when Rev. Breedlove (surely the most misnamed clergyman in history) discovers that you can't stone the non-Christians to death anymore, either!

(Let me also say that this story reaffirms something of which I have never stopped being proud: I went to college in Iowa.)

Musical Electronica

Check out this amazing gallery of electronic musical instruments, from as far back as 1870. Film music fans should take note of the Theremin and the Ondes martenot.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Great Wall of China, obviously.

Via John Scalzi I see this journal dedicated to chronicling a mother's journey through China with a group of high school students. The journal is full of good photos, including the above stunning panoramic view of the Wall. I like "microblogs" like this, sort-of online travelogues.

(As for the Wall itself, every time I look at a picture of it ascending steep inclines like this, I think of the sheer force of will -- as well as the likely brutality -- it took to get it built.)

We need Kerry NOW!

This kind of thing is why we must elect John Kerry! This cannot be allowed to stand! Think of the children!

Seriously, though, congratulations to Terry Teachout on his appointment to the National Council on the Arts. Here's hoping he can use his newfound influence in Washington to get more Berlioz and film music on concert programs throughout the country.

Admiral! There be whales here!

One thing my wife and I did on our honeymoon was to board a boat at Plymouth, Massachusetts and ride said boat out to Stelwegen Bank, which is a prime feeding ground for humpback whales just off the tip of Cape Cod. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, even if the seas were pretty choppy and it was pretty cold that mid-May afternoon.

Well, now you can use this webcam to watch orcas in action (if they're in the camera's line of sight, obviously). It's official, folks: the Web rules.

(via The Modulator)

An update

The Mozilla problem I was experiencing with Blogger and BlogSpot seems to have been resolved. Actually, it stopped being a problem a couple of days ago, but I wanted to make sure, and it has not recurred since.

I'd also like to give props to the Blogger tech people; I e-mailed them about the problem and I received a response within a day that it was a high-priority bug that they were working on, and they do in fact seem to have fixed it.

I am not left-handed!

You know how in chess, there are openings and defenses and endgames and strategies that are named for the chess masters who created them? Like Will Duquette, I always assumed that William Goldman was parodying that kind of thing in the duel between Westley and Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride:

Their swords cross, then again, again, and the sound comes so fast it's almost continual. Inigo presses on, the Man In Black retreating up a rocky incline.

INIGO
(thrilled)

You're using Bonetti's defense against me, ah?

MAN IN BLACK

I thought it fitting, considering the rocky terrain --

INIGO

Naturally, you must expect me to attack with Capo Ferro --

And he shifts his style now.
MAN IN BLACK
(coping as best he can)

-- naturally --

(suddenly shifting again)

--but I find Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro, don't you?

The Man In Black is now perched at the edge of the elevated castle ruin. No where to go, he jumps to the sand. Inigo stares down at him.
INIGO

Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa-

And now, with the grace of an Olympian, Inigo flies off the perch, somersaults clean over the Man In Black's head, and lands facing his opponent.
INIGO

-- which I have.

Well, not so! Those names are real fencing masters. Follow the link for details.

(By the way, how on Earth have I never seen Tenser, said the Tensor before?! I'll bet Sean would like this one, too.)

Waste not....

Jeff Smith, once of Frugal Gourmet fame before his career was terminated by a sex scandal, has died.

I really don't have an opinion on whatever traspired or didn't transpire between Smith and the young men who came forward to sue him. The case was settled some years ago, the man's career pretty much ended, and that's about it. But I used to greatly enjoy watching his shows -- even the later ones, when it was clear that he wasn't really doing anything while that assistant guy, Craig Wollam, bustled about doing the actual cooking. I always liked Smith's ideas on food as a connector between us and the past, food as living history, and food as a possible means of making connections between people who have little else in common.

I own copies of nearly all of his cookbooks, and some of his recipes are still standards of mine; plus, if you couldn't stand him on TV, he really was a much better writer than a TV host anyway. There is some wonderful wisdom in his cookbooks, especially the Christmas one, that I do admit that I find a bit hard to square with the image of Smith that exists now. Well, anyway...I'll still read the cookbooks and make his recipes.

You were a good man, Sparky Schulz

Do you have around $725 sitting in your pocket that you'd like to spend over a long period of time, say, twelve-and-a-half years? Then you can pick up The Complete Peanuts, comprising the entire fifty-year run of Charles M. Schulz's legendary comic strip in twenty-five volumes. As for myself, I suspect I'll be grabbing them from the library when they show up -- as the first volume did this last week.

As you might expect, it's fascinating to read the strip in its infancy, before Schulz's style had settled and before the tropes of the strip had really become established as a kind of mythology. It's not unlike watching the first season of a favorite television show that ran for years, although in the case of Peanuts, the effect is magnified by virtue that the strip had been around for more than two decades when I was born. The humor that I knew in the strip from growing up in the 70s isn't the same as the humor in the strip from its 1950 beginnings, with its odd combination of postwar optimism and bleak fatalism. (Yes, Peanuts could get pretty bleak sometimes. I look forward to learning more about that aspect of the strip as future volumes come out.) What's striking to me at the outset is that Charlie Brown isn't the "lovable loser" that we all know; in fact, he's at the center of his world almost in spite of himself, and in a few strips his behavior and outlook seem to anticipate another comic-strip boy who would come along thirty-some years later, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes.

And here's something interesting: Schroeder, who was always my favorite of the Peanuts supporting players (assuming that Charlie Brown and Snoopy are the two "leads"), starts out as a toddler, and it's Charlie Brown himself who gives him that first fateful nudge toward the piano:



And, a while later, we learn where another of Schroeder's obsessions comes from. Again, Charlie Brown does the honors:



And here's one that I just loved, the second I saw it:



First of all, Charles Schulz wasn't lazy. Often times when some comic strip or something similar wants to convey music, the artist will simply use some randomized musical notation that any person with a couple of years' worth of music lessons can tell you bears absolutely no resemblance to real music. It's just gibberish that only looks real because so many people don't know the first thing about musical notation. Schulz, though, doesn't do that. What Schroeder is whistling there is an actual snippet of a classical work, and a fairly well-known one: "Traumerei", by Robert Schumann (incidentally, a very common encore at Vladimir Horowitz's concerts and recitals).

But more than that is the very idea that Schulz is expressing here. It's that once upon a time, people found erudition and artistic awareness attractive. Give a girl the wolf-whistle, and she just tosses her head and stomps along; but give her a bit of Romantic piano, and she'll give you the time of day. And this wasn't an uncommon idea of the time; look, for example, at a bit of lyric from the musical Kiss Me, Kate:

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from "Othella"
And they think you're a heckuva fella.
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter 'er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer,
And if still, to be shocked, she pretends well,
Just remind her that "All's Well That Ends Well."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Yes, this is a comic song (sung by a couple of mobsters after an absurd subplot has played out), but really, does anyone think this anymore? Is this idea ever expressed in our stories these days? Is the ability to sing a bit of Schumann or recite some Shakespeare actually celebrated as a good thing, instead of being used in some kind of tip-of-the-hat to irony? I don't know -- maybe I'm totally off-base here, but I'm hard-pressed to think up examples.

Or maybe I'm wrong entirely; maybe Schulz was actually bemoaning the same devaluation of erudition in this strip, and I just don't know it because I wasn't around in 1950. But I'd still like to believe that hearts can be won by occasionally employing some Tennyson or some Puccini. I mean, if they can't be won thus, then what are hearts for, anyway?

Goodness! What would you learn if you paid to take his classes?

[snark alert -- move on if you don't like when I snark, which isn't often, but here it is.]

Wow. In one day, I've learned three fascinating things from Glenn Reynolds:

One, if you're a filmmaker whose stock-in-trade is provocative and controversial documentaries that espouse a left-wing political view, you're the moral equivalent of an Iraqi cleric who has led an uprising against American forces (and who is still kicking, by the way).

And two, if you're the Democratic nominee for President and you don't immediately drop everything on your schedule to rush back to Washington so Tom Ridge can brief you on the latest change in the Baskin-Robbins Terror Alert of the Month, you're just not serious about fighting terrorism.

And three, no amount of bad news can hold a candle to one village with a new well.

Why don't I read Instapundit very often? Pretty much the same reason I rarely drink Instacoffee, or fill my freezer with boxes of Instawaffles.

Anybody know anything about digital cameras?

Specifically, what should I look for in a digital camera, if all I want to do is just take normal photos of stuff like the cats and the kid and the wife and incredibly hot women locales in Buffalo? I was in Target today (yeah, I took the Kid, but don't worry, this isn't going to devolve into a Lileks piece) and they had a couple of digital cameras of a brand I don't recall hearing of before, at around $99.99 each. Are these likely to be crap, or are they adequate to producing decent enough photos for e-mails and for posting here? Let me know in comments or e-mail, please. A hundred bucks is about what I'm willing to spend, after I save up to it for a bit, but if there's a serious drop off in quality below, say, the $200 mark, I'd like to know if the $99.99 models would be a waste of money.

GRRRR!!

I just realized that my subscription to WIRED expired last month, which annoys me since I really look forward to that magazine each month, even if its apparent editorial policy of "Anything Digital equals GOOD!" gets a bit cloying at times. So I thumbed through a bit of old mail that I let pile up, and sure enough, there was a "Final Notice" mailing from WIRED that my subscription was about to end and I had to renew by early May to get the great savings. So it's my fault that I missed it. I realize that.

But you know, it would be nice if magazines didn't emblazon all of their subscription flyers they send out with messages like "ACT NOW!" and "ONE TIME OFFER!" and "DON'T ALLOW AN INTERRUPTION IN YOUR SUBSCRIPTION!", with that last one often being on mailings sent when the subscription is in absolutely no danger of running out anytime in the next six months. I know, to get the sale you have to create a sense of urgency, but after a while, doesn't it all start to look the same? Don't all those attempts to create "urgency" just end up being the sales equivalents of small boys shouting "wolf"? I might have paid that last notice more mind had it not been virtually indistinguishable from every other mailing WIRED has ever sent me.

Anyway, I'll buy a copy at The Store and send off one of those handy cards, and then everything will be happy again.

(Except for this: can't magazines stop enclosing five or six copies of their business-reply subscription card in the copies they're sending to subscribers?!)

Accounting Scandals: the Buffalo version

I noted that former Enron whiz Ken Lay was indicted the other day, at long last; I've seen less mention in Blogistan on the verdicts handed down the other day against Adelphia Cable's John and Timothy Rigas. This is the one that hit Buffalo hard.

It wasn't just that John Rigas was, for a time, the owner of the NHL Buffalo Sabres, although that was his highest profile role here. Far worse was the way the Adelphia Corporation was for a time "the next silver bullet" for Buffalo's economy. They were the big company that was sinking roots here; they were the ones expanding quickly, promising to build a sparkling corporate headquarters in downtown Buffalo that would create hundreds of new jobs in the burgeoning tech industry. None of that happened. No ground was ever even broken for the building, and once the dust settled from Adelphia's bankruptcy proceedings, the new corporate HQ site was chosen -- in Denver. So many hopes in this suffering city were tied to Adelphia -- and, by extension, to the Rigases. And like so many hopes that have gone before, and some that have come since, they are mere memories now of what might have been as Buffalo just keeps limping along.

I actually met both John Rigas and his wife, when I was working in the restaurant business. His wife -- whose first name I don't recall -- ran a furniture store in the town where I managed a Pizza Hut, and she often came in for her lunch of an order of breadsticks and a Diet Pepsi. She quickly attracted a reputation amongst us, since she insisted that both items be absolutely fresh upon her arrival: she had to physically witness us removing the breadsticks from the oven, and pouring the Diet Pepsi from the fountain. One time I actually saw her through the windows as she approached the door, and I cut her breadsticks at that moment -- but before she actually entered. She opted to wait ten minutes for the next batch. Funny thing was, this went on for months with none of us having any idea who she was other than "the cranky Fresh Breadstick lady".

But then one fall evening she stopped in and flagged down another shift manager, whereupon she told him that she appreciated all our efforts to give her exactly what she wanted, and she wanted to reciprocate by giving each of us tickets to either a Sabres game in her executive suite at Marine Midland Arena (now HSBC Arena) or to a Bills game in her suite at Rich Stadium (now Ralph Wilson Stadium). That's when we found out that she was Mrs. John Rigas. No, I didn't turn down her generosity; thus I got to see the Bills get beaten by the Jacksonville Jaguars to close out the home portion of their forgettable 1997 season.

A year or so later, I was working for another restaurant when John Rigas and his wife came in for breakfast on a Saturday morning. I pointed out to my crew who he was, and one of my employees -- a super nice young high school student who was just loaded with potential (geez, he's probably out of college now) -- actually got Mr. Rigas's autograph. I wonder if he still has it.

So now it turns out that I have a personal connection, tenuous as it is, to what I once thought was Buffalo's future and instead turned out to be an infamous part of its history. And the missed opportunities continue to mount. I'm saddened by what John Rigas did, and I'm glad that justice prevailed, but I'm also saddened at the idea of him sitting in a prison cell. He's an old man who once built something from nothing, kept reaching beyond his grasp, and then somehow managed to end up with nothing in the end. I'm left to consider anew the strange belief we have that justice should somehow be satisfying, when it so rarely is.

I left that Pizza Hut more than six years ago, and I've often wondered if Mrs. Rigas still goes there. Somehow I doubt it, but now that her husband is a convicted felon, well -- to paraphrase Rick Blaine, "We'll always have breadsticks."

And we'll always have Buffalo.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness (offered on Saturday because, well, I can)

I like coffee. I really do. I didn't develop a taste for coffee until midway through the 1990s, though, for some reason, even though I discovered the wonderment of Coffee Haagen-Dasz ice cream a few years before that. I typically have two cups in the morning, maybe three, although never more than that; I also enjoy the occasional espresso or cappucino or even some form of cold coffee drink, like one of them newfangled "frappe freezes" the kids are drinking these days. Crazy kids. Anyway, my coffee drinking method springs from the wonderful Turkish proverb: "Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." Therefore I take it black with a generous dosage of sugar, although when buying my cup at work I've taken to adding a bit of skim milk not for flavor purposes but because this instantly lowers the temperature a bit so I can drink it faster. Speed's of the essence, you know.

(BTW, check out How Coffee Works, from that "How Stuff Works" site that I don't spend nearly enough time perusing. Coffee's fascinating stuff, and I've always wondered how the leap was made from the raw beans to what we drink today."

So where's the weirdness, you ask? Well, I do admit that I take my coffee mildly seriously: at home I grind the beans myself, I don't use one of those coffeemakers with a timer so the grounds are sitting exposed to air for long periods of time, I periodically flush a vinegar-and-water mixture through the machine to clear out mineral deposits, et cetera. But I've never thought of myself as obsessive about coffee, and now I have proof that I'm not: I don't feel the need to consume coffee from every non-franchised Starbuck's location that exists. Here's the money graf:

It isn't all fun and games. "After about four stores, the coffee loses all taste," says Winter, who's unconcerned about any long-term effects of so much coffee. "It doesn't taste good at all—I'm not enjoying drinking it. After an extreme number of stores, I have to wash out the taste with water after every sip because it's starting to make me sick."

But maybe I could embark on a more benign quest...say, buying a book from every Borders in the world...I'll think on that a bit. While I'm drinking my morning coffee.

So, this is where I type stuff....

I know, not much to say today. More tomorrow. (BTW, expect light blogging Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, because the Wife is off and you know how that is. Plus, Sunday is this year's Taste of Buffalo, which means wandering around downtown eating ourselves silly.)

Let the Previously Plug'd, but not plug'd in a while, be plug'd again!

Longtime readers will know that I regularly plug FilmWise for all manner of cinematic quiz fun, but the newer readers may not know about it. This time, check out this one about subtitles, or this one in which you identify films where one character flips off another. Fun timewasting as always!

An Embarrassment of Riches

Lately I've found myself a bit less interested in the political side of Blogistan, and a lot more interested in the cultural side. Not that I've stopped reading the political folks, but I don't spend as much time following their links and I don't comment nearly as much as I once did. The upshot is that I've found a slew of new cultural and musical blogs, all of which are fascinating and many of which will be going onto the blogroll soon.

And if this blog doesn't have one of the best titles on a blog anywhere, then I'm just not looking hard enough.