Swords! Damsels! Blood! Fire! Daring Escapes! Heroism! Villainy!

And all of those things are on display in the newest thrilling chapter of The Promised King, posted today! Yes, it's the twelfth chapter of Book One, marking the halfway point in The Welcomer. So go read it, first; link it, second; and if you haven't been following along, worry not: all the extant chapters are still available over there. I promise I won't think less of you if you haven't checked the book out until now. Really.

(Well, except for you, there in the corner. Yeah, you. Slacker.)

(As usual, this entry is being maintained at the top of Sunday's posts and will not be nudged downward until this blog is next updated on either Monday or Tuesday, so keep scrolling downward for newer stuff throughout Sunday.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Since the Astronomy Picture of the Day is now ten years old, I figure why not show my appreciation by once again swiping their bandwidth!




That's our own planet Earth there, half of it shrouded in night and the terminator showing its diffuse nature.

Thanks for ten great years, APoD!

Ummmm....

Let's see: twelve "open threads" in two days, as of this writing? Is Atrios just mailing it in now? Yeesh!

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I might have seen this before, and even linked it before, but I don't remember exactly and right now I'm too lazy to check, so here it is: if Jack Chick wrote a tract for Cthulhu.

Randomizing the Music

It's been a while since I did one of these "Shuffle all of the Tunes on your hard drive and list the top ten" things, so here are today's first ten tracks when I shuffle all of my music tracks. Just to take up space, you know.

1. "Kidfried" from The Matrix: Revolutions by Don Davis. (I need to listen to this score more. I never saw the movie and I confess that after I fell asleep in the first thirty minutes of Reloaded, it's not a high priority of mine, but the music's really quite good.)

2. "Kaerazaru Hibi" from Porco Rosso by Joe Hisaishi. (Joe Hisaishi might be film music's best-kept secret. The guy's golden.)

3. "Sword Dance" from Brigadoon by Lerner-and-Loewe. (God, I love Lerner and Loewe. This track is from the recording I reviewed for GMR here.)

4. "Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters and The Journey to Hogwarts" from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams. (Not my favorite Williams score, because the pastiche elements really don't blend very well.)

5. "Twilight Zone/Twilight Tone" by the Manhattan Transfer. (In truth, I don't know why I keep this around. I owned a two-disc compilation of theirs for ten years and probably listened to it twice before I sold it on eBay, but I ripped it to the hard drive before I shipped it out...and promptly have never listened to it again.)

6. "Hoshi No Flamenco" from Omoide Poroporo. (I don't know anything about this one. It's from a package of anime music Darth Swank once sent me.)

7. "The X-Files Theme" by Mark Snow. (Strange that this one should pop up the day after I posted this, eh? Trust no one!)

8. "The Immolation Scene" from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, by John Williams. (Great damn score.)

9. "Deal with the Dark Lord" from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, by John Williams. (Great damn score.)

10. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" from Millennium by Mark Snow. (I really miss Mark Snow's moody soundscapes.)

Maybe I'll do this again next week. Or maybe not. Who knows?

He WHAT?!

That Antiques Roadshow program just came on PBS this afternoon, and I remembered a particularly odd thing I caught when I had it on a week or two ago. I wasn't paying much attention, but a guy was having his comic books appraised. It seems he had copies of Fantastic Four #1, Incredible Hulk #1, and other really impressive items. Like I said, I wasn't really paying attention until the appraiser dude shook his head ruefully, gave a number, and said words that had the comics geek in me shrieking in agony:

"They'd be worth a lot more if you hadn't had them shellacked."

AIEEE!!!

Sentential Links #6

Here we go again. Click for context.

:: Holy Shizzy, Trump THIS, Donald! (This is a post title rather than a sentence from the post, because the post is just a picture. But the picture is really cool. Why don't we build stuff like that?)

:: I love this mystery. I will hate the person who exposes the man's identity, and why he does it. Let us wonder.

:: There are lots of evil regimes past and present to choose from, but I'm not sure which ones are acceptable references when describing the use of torture at Guantanamo. Can I get some conservative feedback on this?

:: My favorite sort of enthusiast is an enthusiast with a cocktail. (I like one with a beer, but you get the idea.)

:: There's so much wrong and invidious in this latest piece by Norman Lebrecht that one hardly knows where to begin to rip into it. (Of course, that dilemma doesn't stop ACD for one second from ripping into it!)

:: I'm sorry, but I'm still in what I call the "indescribably wonderful" stage. You know, that part early in a relationship where everything is just perfect and you feel like you're living a dream. Sigh. It's all just so... indescribably wonderful. (Yeesh! Playing the "I got a new girlfriend!" card to absolve oneself from one's daily blogging responsibilities is just so lame. And this will probably kill his usual caustic tone, too -- now when he posts about politics, he's gonna be all cute and bubbly about it. Ach well...that Anna must be something!)

:: I hope Nixon won't go down in history as a great president. (Me either. The man was a lunatic who did a few good things and a whole lot of bad ones.)

:: Please note that what follows is, in no way, an attack on religion. It is merely a defence of science. I sincerely believe that the two need not be mutually incompatible. (Yes, it's about evolution, and it's a good post.)

:: This weekend is our 10th wedding anniversary. (Congratulations!)

:: Ten years ago today Krissy and I were married. (Ditto!)

:: Do you think there really is a "certain age" when long hair is not appropriate? (For women, absolutely NOT! For men, well, I dunno. For myself, I have no intention of cutting my hair. I just don't see the point of doing so.)

:: As a modern woman, I am surprised by Blind Alfred's contention that God cares about our hairdos. It smacks of micro-management. (This one is where I got the link for the one right above it. Man, there are a lot of great blogs out there.)

:: If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS?? (This is the most surreal bit of Creationist logic I've ever seen.)

:: The movie finally limped onto the Sci-Fi Channel alongside cheap filler from UFO and Nu Image, with a DVD from Lion's Gate ("We'll release anything!") not far behind.

Ve haf vays of making you talk!

stretch
Originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Here's a bit of how I spent my Father's Day, doing something we do pretty much every day: submitting Little Quinn to heinous torture therapeutic stretching. You see, he's very often stiff and unable to relax his muscles fully, so we have to help him by stretching him regularly. My favorite way is to sit sort-of "Indian Style", but not crossing my legs but putting them out in front of me, and positioning Little Quinn so his noggin is planted directly between my feet. In this way I keep his head centered while I stretch him a bit; otherwise he twists his head to the right, which is his "default" position.

Then we just stretch the little guy, as you can follow by clicking through and looking at the other photos in this sequence. First we gently stretch out his chest by opening his arms to their full extension and then lightly doing "flies" with them; then we work out his legs a bit. Sometimes he enjoys his stretching, while other times he gets mad at us. This particular session ended in an annoyed Little Quinn, but I'm fine with that. As I'm writing this, about an hour after that bit of stretching, he's sleeping away.

And as a bonus, he tried to end the session by coughing up the location of the WMDs. Foolish boy! Where does he think he is, Gitmo? Heh!

Improving the Aerial Game, II

Today I continue my four-part series of providing satellite images of NFL stadiums, begun last week with the AFC and NFC East stadiums. Up this week are the AFC and NFC North divisions. Again, I present the stadiums in order of the final 2004 standings per division.

AFC NORTH

Heinz Field (Pittsburgh Steelers)
M&T Stadium (Baltimore Ravens)
Paul Brown Stadium (Cincinnati Bengals)
Cleveland Browns Stadium (Cleveland Browns)

NFC NORTH

Lambeau Field (Green Bay Packers)
Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (Minnesota Vikings)
Ford Field (Detroit Lions)
Soldier Field (Chicago Bears)

Heinz Field in Pittsburgh appears to still be under construction above, although it's nearly finished as far as what can be seen from satellite can tell. If you scroll along the riverbank to the east, you soon come to PNC Park, where the Pirates achieve mediocrity on a daily basis.

M&T Stadium is pretty straightforward: just a bowl in a parking lot.

The Google Maps imagery of Cincinnati is surprisingly not available at the same level of resolution as most other cities, so that's the closest I can get to Paul Brown Stadium. It's the O-shaped building right on the river at the center of the photo.

Cleveland Browns stadium is right on Lake Erie, pretty much exactly where the old horrifying sandpit the Browns and Indians used to occupy stood. To the right of the stadium you can see a building with a dome on one end; that's Cleveland's Science Museum (a really cool place, too), and just beyond that is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (also a really cool place).

Green Bay's satellite imagery is, like Cincinnati's, not able to resolve at the level I'd like, although in Green Bay's case this isn't surprising, since Green Bay is not a large town (Green Bay has fewer people than Syracuse). Lambeau Field is, again, the large building with the green oval in the middle of the image.

Domed stadiums, as I suspected when I started this project, aren't that interesting from the air. The Metrodome looks like a giant pillow. It's also where I passed part of my twenty-first birthday, when I used my newly-legal status to buy a five-buck beer while I watched the Twins down the Kansas City Royals by a score of 9-2. Pedro Munoz doubled off the "hefty bag", and Kirby Puckett ran down a deep fly ball to center field. Nice day, that. No, I didn't get drunk.

Detroit's Ford Field appears to still be under construction (the surrounding parking areas look really unfinished), and Soldier Field is most definitely under construction here. The latter barely even looks like a stadium at the point this photo was imaged.

Tune in next week for a look at the stadia of the AFC and NFC South!

Can we trade OUR legislature for THEIR legislature?

For those who don't live in Buffalo, or anywhere near Buffalo, or who think of large quadrupeds rather than the Great Lakes' greatest city when the word "buffalo" is mentioned, our county government is in the midst of, well, complete collapse because of unimaginably inept fiscal management coupled with a state government that seems to think that places in New York State whose distance from New York City is measured in triple digits don't exist or something. And in addition to that, the Buffalo-Niagara Region is losing jobs and, therefore, population and economic clout at a really depressing rate.

With all of the shenanigans going on with the Erie County government, the recent travails of downstate's Nassau County (on Long Island), which went through a lot of what we're going through now and seems to be coming out of it OK, are getting lots of press. (See today's Buffalo News front page, for instance.) But we never seem to hear about what appears to be a stream of unspectacular but consistently good news coming from a county closer to home. I'm talking about Onondaga County, whose largest city is Syracuse. Check out this report from the other day:

The Syracuse area's job market continued to improve in May, with good news coming even from the long-slumping manufacturing sector.

The unemployment rate was 4.7 percent in May, down from 5.3 percent in the same month last year, the state Department of Labor said Thursday. The area's rate was below the state's rate 4.8 percent and the national unemployment rate 4.9 percent.

There were 3,200 more jobs in the area last month than there were in May 2004, the department said. The Syracuse area consists of Madison, Onondaga and Oswego counties.

Private-sector employment gained 3,500 jobs a 1.3 percent increase.

"That's a pretty strong growth rate for Syracuse," said Karen Knapik-Scalzo, an economist with the Labor Department.

Government lost 300 jobs.

Manufacturing lost 100 jobs, but such a small loss was peanuts compared to declines of well over 1,000 most of last year. The last time the area gained manufacturing jobs was September 1999, when it had 600 more factory jobs than it did in September 1998.

They've added more than 3000 jobs in a year, which is really good news of course, but the staggering thing to see about an Upstate New York economy is that government lost more jobs than manufacturing did. That just amazes me. Buffalo's own job-creation engine isn't quite doing so well, so maybe we could take a bit of time off from learning from Nassau County and see just what Syracuse is doing right.

At least it wasn't yellow....

I'm not the biggest fan of the comic strip Foxtrot, but this installment is pretty funny.

(By the way, I've seen some bitching in various forums about Anakin and Obi Wan "surfing" on lava during their duel at the end of Revenge of the Sith. They're not surfing, people; they're standing atop droids and roving platforms specifically designed to dip into the lava. There's one of them establishing shots early on, when we first see Mustafar, that makes this clear, but there's some folks what don't like to pay attention.)

New at GMR

I have two reviews up this week at GMR this week. The first is for a book about one man's journey through beer culture in America, titled, appropriately enough, Travels with Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture in America. (I referenced this one last week when I wrote about beer.) I enjoy off-kilter travel books, wherein writers undertake journeys for unusual reasons, and this one's quite a bit of fun.

Also up is my review of Beyond the Sunset: The Romantic Collection, a compilation CD by the band Blackmore's Night. I'm not sure what category Blackmore's Night would fall into -- they're not quite Celtic, and they're not really rock, and I'm not sure I'd call them "folk", although that might be the best word for it. They seem, so far as I can tell, to exist in some interstitial realm of their own, producing romantic music without a trace of irony. Sometimes it's nice to leave the ironic stance of contemporary America behind. (You can probably tell that I loved this CD, but go read the review for confirmation of your suspicions.)

Tee-Vee on Dee-Vee-Dee

There aren't too many TV shows I'd want to collect on DVD in their entirety. I have the first season of Millennium, and I plan to acquire the second, but not the third (because if you watched that third season, you know how bad it was). I do want to eventually own all three seasons of Once and Again (currently I don't have any of them), and I'd certainly want each season that has so far elapsed of Scrubs. I'd also like to have the one season that exists of My So-Called Life (God, that was a brilliant show), and maybe a few others that are escaping me at the moment.

I was a big fan of The X-Files when it was originally airing, although I didn't really sign on for watching it each week until sometime in the third season. And yes, the last two seasons suffered greatly (here's what I wrote after the series finale aired, summing up my feelings at the time). But as much as I loved the show, there's no way I'd ever acquire any of its entire seasons on DVD. First, they're too expensive, and second, given the show's mytharc, having any season would really nag at me to get all of them. Not happening.

But while at Target today shopping for the Daughter's impending birthday, I noticed this item for sale, and I grabbed it up. It seems that 20th Century Fox is putting just the "mytharc" episodes of The X-Files into their own separate DVD packages, starting with this one collecting episodes from the first two seasons (plus the first two episodes of Season Three), and with three other sets to follow. This makes me happy, because as much as I enjoyed a lot of the "Monster of the Week" episodes, the mytharc is what really pulled me in. So I'm glad they're doing this.

But I also hope that they do an "X-Files Best Standalones" set sometime in the future, because while the bulk of the show's run probably comprises episodes I'm not eager to ever watch again (not that I'd turn them off if I ran across them on late-night TV), there are a lot of wonderful non-mytharc episodes I'd want to have on DVD. I'm thinking of episodes like these (links to this episode guide):

:: "Squeeze" and "Tooms". These two creepy episodes feature the nefarious Eugene Victor Tooms, who is able to squeeze his body into very tight places. The latter episode features one of my favorite Mulderisms, when Agent Mulder dips his fingers into an unknown substance that Scully then identifies as bile: "Is there any way I can get it off my fingers without betraying my cool exterior?"

:: "Beyond the Sea". I think I fell a little bit in love with Gillian Anderson the first time I saw this Scully-centric episoden which also stars Brad Dourif as a death-row killer who may or may not have some psychic abilities.

:: Sleepless. Here's a good episode, not from the mytharc, that revolves around Mulder's deep suspicion that our government is out to get us. It also introduces Rat Boy, a.k.a. Alex Krycek.

:: Die Hand der Verletz. Horror in a high school where the PTA closes each meeting with a prayer to Satan. You can't get better than that.

:: Humbug, one of the wonderful black-comedy episodes written by Darin Morgan. This one takes Mulder and Scully into the wonderful world of sideshow freaks.

:: Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose. Another Darin Morgan episode, this one starring Peter Boyle as a man who can foresee people's deaths. This one received much attention from X-philes for Clyde Bruckman's reply when Scully asks him how she dies: "You don't."

:: War of the Coprophages. Cockroaches. Lots of cockroaches. Lots and lots and lots of cockroaches. And an entomologist named Bambi. Seriously.

:: Jose Chung's From Outer Space. One of the weirdest damn episodes of TV I've ever seen. Whatever happened to Darin Morgan, anyway?

:: Home. Ever wonder what happens when one family inbreeds just a tad too much? This episode lets you know. This is one of the few television episodes I've ever found actually unnerving.

:: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man. I suppose this one might actually qualify as a mytharc episode, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it's one of my favorites. The "revelation" that the CSM is a failed writer is great.

:: Unrequited. Another of those "Experiments the government conducted on its own soldiers comes back to haunt it" episodes. I found this one riveting, personally.

:: Small Potatoes. Babies are being born with tails, leading to a shapeshifting rapist who takes on Mulder's form later on.

:: The Unusual Suspects. How the Lone Gunmen (those three conspiracy geeks who were always feeding Mulder information) came together. Fun episode.

:: The Post-modern Prometheus. I seem to recall a lot of people hating this episode, but I loved it. It's a kind-of retelling of The Elephant Man, and it features Cher (a lookalike, actually) as a plot point. I enjoyed the hell out of this one.

:: Bad Blood. Vampires in a small southern town. One of the funniest episodes ever.

:: Triangle. Chris Carter wrote and directed this episode involving a ghost ship and time travel and whatnot. I never thought Carter got enough credit for being a good writer.

:: How the Ghosts Stole Christmas. Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin play two ghosts who live in a haunted house. I like this one on that basis alone.

:: The Unnatural. Hey, I mentioned this one a few days ago -- it's the baseball-centered episode David Duchovny wrote and directed. As I said last week, this is one of my favorite episodes of television ever, in any series.

Those would be a good start. I don't recall as many really good episodes from the later seasons, but there were a few -- whichever episode dealt with the unsolved murder of Agent Doggett's son, for instance.

see-oh-ell-ay, cola....

Alan of BuffaloPundit fame is of the belief that a certain line of scientific inquiry has finally yielded an answer, and that further inquiry along this line will be fruitless. He believes that we have finally created perfect diet cola, in the form of a brand-new item I knew nothing about until I read Alan's blog entry, Coca Cola Zero. Well, I was at Target last night with the kids and spotted a display of the stuff, and I bought a single bottle. I can't say that I found it all that indestinguishable from Classic Coke*, but it was the closest diet cola to its regular antecedent that I've tasted yet.

I decided, though, to give the Pepsi folks a try as well, so while food shopping today, I bought a twelve-pack of Pepsi One, which I am drinking now. As a commenter notes on Alan's blog, Pepsi One doesn't seem to hold its carbonation as long as any other diet cola I've tasted, which I find strange. That didn't bother me much since I tend to drink a can of cola in under four minutes, generally. But I did find Pepsi One's flavor to be fairly close to regular Pepsi, although its consistency was "thinner", if you know what I mean: regular Coke and Pepsi tend to have that thicker mouth-feel that their diet counterparts do not.

What's interesting to me is that Coke Zero is sweetened with aspartame, while Pepsi One is sweetened with Splenda. As artifical sweeteners go, I tend to like the flavor of Splenda (or sucralose) over aspartame, although the only place I really use artifical sweeteners is, in fact, in colas; I never attempt to bake with them although I do think Splenda tastes just fine in coffee. For tea, though, I'm not switching from honey, and my real favorite sweetener for coffee is Sugar-in-the-Raw, which I use when I get my morning coffee at the coffee bar in The Store. (I don't buy Sugar-in-the-Raw for use at home because it's too expensive for the two days a week that I drink coffee at home.) I wonder, anyway, just why it's taken so long for the Coke folks to make an aspartame-sweetened cola that tastes as close to the sugared version as Coke Zero does, given that Diet Coke -- which to my palate is only slightly preferable to the urine of a water buffalo -- has been also sweetened with aspartame for years. What have they done differently with this stuff? And will the Pepsi folks follow suit, refining their good old Diet Pepsi (still my favorite carbonated beverage) to remove that wonderful tinny aftertaste that I love so much? (I'm not kidding. I love that aftertaste. I don't know why. I know it's weird.)

* Is it necessary anymore to refer to "Classic Coke"? Is that "New" Coke still around at all, or has "Classic Coke" just become "Coke" again? And for that matter, is there any truth to the theory that "New Coke" was just a trick to cover up the switchover from sweetening "Classic" Coke with sugar to corn syrup? One of these days I'm going to have to track down some sugar-sweetened Coke so I can see what the real thing is really supposed to taste like. I know it's available around Passover, and probably in stores that cater to Jews who subsist on as orthodox a diet as possible. My own location of The Store doesn't carry it, since we don't have anything remotely resembling a large Jewish population in that part of town, but maybe one of the other locales has it.

Oh, and speaking of that, it's my understanding that the kosher food laws were established many centuries ago -- before the discovery of the Americas, and thus before corn was even known to exist. How can corn be a non-kosher item, then? Or does it have to do with the processes corn has to be put through to be edible, in terms of planting and harvest and the like? Any experts? I'm genuinely curious here.

Miyazaki-san

I was at the library tonight for my weekly visit, and I wandered past the newspaper rack and spotted the New York Times from the other day, with the Arts and Leisure section on top. Therein I spotted an image that, though I have never seen it before, was unmistakably a frame from a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Sure enough, it was a still from Howl's Moving Castle, the latest work by the master from Japan. And here's the accompanying article.

In an interview last week, on the morning before his latest movie, Howl's Moving Castle, had its New York premiere, he spoke about the new technology with a mixture of resignation and resistance. "I've told the people on my CGI staff" - at Studio Ghibli, the company he founded with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in 1985 - "not to be accurate, not to be true. We're making a mystery here, so make it mysterious."

That conscious sense of mystery is the core of Mr. Miyazaki's art. Spend enough time in his world - something you can do at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which is presenting a sumptuous retrospective of his and Mr. Takahata's work - and you may find your perception of your own world refreshed, as it might be by a similarly intensive immersion in the oeuvre of Ansel Adams, J. M. W. Turner or Monet. After a while, certain vistas - a rolling meadow dappled with flowers and shadowed by high cumulus clouds, a range of rocky foothills rising toward snow-capped peaks, the fading light at the edge of a forest - deserve to be called Miyazakian.

That is absolutely true. After watching Miyazaki's films for several years, there really are times when I look at the world around me and think, "This could have come from one of his movies." Usually it's a particular sky or cloudscape that does it.

What I adore about Miyazaki's visuals, beyond the sheer majesty of the compositions themselves, is the attention to small details you might not even notice. (This is also something I've admired in George Lucas.) In My Neighbor Totoro, for example, there's a scene where a bicycle messenger visits the central family, and we see his bike parked outside the house in what must be a two-second shot. But it's not a static shot, as it would be for any other filmmaker: Miyazaki actually animated the front wheel, lazily turning in the breeze.

Via the same article, I see that New York City's Museum of Modern Art is hosting a film festival of Studio Ghibli's films. I'm not often jealous of my friends downstate, but I sure am now.

UPDATE: Link to NYT article fixed. Oops. (I have comments, people! Let me know about broken links!)

Passages

Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini has passed away at the age of 91. I thought I owned a few recordings by him, but a cursory glance through my shelves reveals nothing. It may have been a few recordings on LP or cassette that I never ported over to CD.

One of his musicians says this of him: "The man was made of music." That's a pretty lofty testimonial.

Our Partners in Peace

A few moments ago I had cause to reflect on one of the many exchanges from The West Wing that I find particularly memorable, from the episode "Enemies Foreign and Domestic". During a regular press briefing, C.J. Cregg fields this question and responds thusly:

STEVE: C.J., are you aware of the fire that happened at King Fatah Middle School?

C.J.: Yeah, that's a tragedy. Chris?

CHRIS: Saudi news is reporting that rescuers were prevented from getting to several female students by religious police.

C.J.: Yeah, I read that too. Steve.

CHRIS: Does the White House have a comment?

C.J.: I literally just got this a minute and a half ago. I haven't spoken to the President, or Chief of Staff, State or anyone in communications, this is just me.

STEVE: Well, do you have a comment?

C.J.: I don't, no.

STEVE: I'm sorry, C.J., but you're not outraged by this?

C.J.: [beat] Outraged? I'm barely surprised. This is a country where women aren't allowed to drive a car. They're not allowed to be in the company of any man other than a close relative, they're required to adhere to a dress code that would make the Maryknoll Nun look like Malibu Barbie. They beheaded 121 people last year for robbery, rape, and drug trafficking, they've no free press, no elected government, no political parties, and the royal family allows the religious police to travel in groups of six, carrying nightsticks and they freely and publicly beat women. But "Brutus is an honorable man." Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren't wearing the proper clothing. Am I outraged? No, Steve. No Chris. No, Mark. That is Saudi Arabia, our partners in peace. Bonnie, then Scott.

SMASH CUT TO: MAIN TITLES.

What made me think of this exchange? Lance Mannion's post about a woman he calls "everything that's wonderful about the human spirit", and whose current status has some disturbing implications about the way we're currently prosecuting the Global War on Terror.

More here.

Aww man I think the clock is slow....

According to Michele, dissing the names of David Lee Roth or Van Halen is verboten on her blog.

Van Halen is one of my two favorite rock bands of all time (Pink Floyd being the other). Of course, whenever I mention that I love Van Halen, the question immediately follows: Do I prefer the David Lee Roth years, or the Sammy Hagar years? My answer is usually that I love both equally, with the proviso that my very favorite Van Halen songs of all time -- "Dreams" and "Right Now" -- come from the Hagar years.

Those first six albums, the ones with DLR on vocals, are all terrific listens -- great hard rock with a lot of that sense of fun, with the occasional oddity ("Women and Children First", "Pretty Woman") thrown in for laughs. If I'm in a serious rocking mood, that's what I want to hear. I'm not sure if any song recorded before or since rocks quite as hard as "Hot For Teacher". (And I'm sure Aaron's just jumping up and down, waiting to tell his story right now....) And there might not be a more fun song anywhere than "Jump". But as much as I loved DLR's work with Van Halen, his solo stuff left me cold -- first his bizarro "hard rock meets Vegas Lounge Act", and then that band he put together for the album Eat 'Em and Smile. (Did no one notice the pun inherent in the title of Van Halen's next album after that, OU812?) Suddenly we were to believe that Steve Vai was actually a better musician than Edward Van Halen? Uhhhh...sure, Dave.

WIth DLR's departure and Sammy Hagar's appearance on 5150, though, the band went through an admitted change, but not a really shocking one. They accomplished the rare feat of staying true to the way they had been in the past, with rocking songs like "Best of Both Worlds" and "Good Enough", but they also stretched their horizons a bit to include balladry like "Love Walks In" (never mind that the lyrics make absolutely no sense) and that wonderful mixture of hard rock and pop-confection in "Why Can't This Be Love?" that only Van Halen seems to be able to really pull off. And, frankly, there's no song in the entire history of rock music that is more likely to pull me out of a bad mood than "Dreams". That song is, to me, such a perfect musical statement of optimism that I can't listen to it without getting a supremely goofy grin.

In terms of public persona, there's really no comparing the two. DLR's a depressing hack these days, while Hagar moved on to other things with quite a bit more class. I saw an interview with him, shortly after his falling out with the band, when he ruefully acknowledged, "I'll never make music again that's as good as what I did with those guys." That was a classy admission, I thought. I was glad to see him get back with the band, and I hope he's around to stay, because as Michele rightly notes, the Gary Cherone era really doesn't deserve to be mentioned. That will surely go down as one of music's greatest failed experiments, not unlike the 8-track tape and that album Robert James Waller recorded after The Bridges of Madison County became the best selling book since the Bible.

But now I think I'll put in my copy of Best of Both Worlds: Van Halen's Greatest Hits, and when "Dreams" comes around, I'll hit "repeat" for a few times. I listened to that song at least four times a day during the weeks after Little Quinn was born, for reasons you might expect.

We'll get higher, and higher, straight up we'll climb!

How come it's always tremors in the Force? Why not a ripple, or a teensy bump?

The inflatable Mr. Jones has undertaken picking his favorite moments from each Star Wars movie, beginning with A New Hope and proceeding to The Empire Strikes Back. He's claiming to do this daily, although his Return of the Jedi picks haven't occurred yet. We're waiting! I don't really have much to add to what he's said at this point, although he does throw down the gauntlet for me to pick out best moments from each score. Well, my last two entries in the "Exploring the CD Collection" series of posts (see the sidebar for links!) delved into the same two films he has so far mentioned, with the remaining four to come. Note to self: get cracking.

By the way, John believes that watching the films in story order may work just fine, while Matt disagrees. I tend to lean toward Matt's view, as far as a person brand new to the saga goes. I think that A New Hope really provides the ideal introduction to the Star Wars universe, being that it starts fairly small scale and only gradually opens up to epic quality; plus, it's the one that most strongly kicks off George Lucas's Campbellian structure for at least the first trilogy. Plus, for someone new to the series, I do think that it is absolutely essential that the Big Secret -- Darth Vader being Luke's father -- come as a surprise. In that moment, the entire tenor of the saga changed, and I think that's a feeling that would be lost if the series is experienced chronologically.

Now, had Lucas elected to actually start with Episode One way back in 1977, it's a dead certainty that the resulting film would have been almost nothing like The Phantom Menace, and not just from the standpoint of the effects being so much better. For my money, the saga's emotional resonance is strongest watching it in its production order, because with all of the things Lucas did to make the Prequel Trilogy anticipate the Original Trilogy, the story becomes cyclical in nature -- like a yin-yang symbol in cinematic terms.

A chronological viewing wouldn't be disastrous, I don't think. But it would be a different experience entirely from what everyone else saw.

(My view here is also colored by my experience in reading long-standing book series, where generally publication order is best as opposed to story order, unless the author specifically notes that the books were not actually written in the order in which they were published. It's just natural, when turning back the clock to an earlier time in a certain story or fictional world, to put things in that recall the already-published works. Guy Gavriel Kay does this in his Sarantine Mosaic, which is full of little touches that you won't pick up on unless you've read his previously-published novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, which chronologically takes place centuries after Mosaic. That's just one example. But Lucas does the same thing, really, in the Prequel Trilogy.)

Finding work in Buffalo? Who does that?

Congratulations to Jen, who will be working again. Now she'll be able to afford that extra quarter-penny of sales tax! (Man, isn't that finding the cloud's dark lining....)