And as a bonus: The Twelve Days of Star Wars Christmas.
Oy!
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Ummmm...well, I knew I had to find something incredibly odd when searching YouTube for "Star Wars Christmas". And did I ever. Here's C-3PO teaching R2-D2 how to sing. I have no idea when this was made.
And as a bonus: The Twelve Days of Star Wars Christmas.
Oy!
And as a bonus: The Twelve Days of Star Wars Christmas.
Oy!
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
It seemed that the Christmas season in junior high and high school always somehow managed to involve a viewing of some version of A Christmas Carol. My favorite was the George C. Scott version, but the musical version Scrooge, starring Albert Finney, was also pretty fine. From that film, here's the Ghost of Christmas Present confronting Scrooge with the realization "I like life!"
Friday, December 11, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I was a huge fan of Friends for just about all of its run (it lost some steam in its last season), and to this day, one of its Christmas episodes is among my favorite episodes of any teevee show, ever. So here's "The Holiday Armadillo":
Years and years ago, there were these people called...the Maccabees!!!
Years and years ago, there were these people called...the Maccabees!!!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Someday I'll see this live: here's the "Waltz of the Flowers" from Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker:
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
This is pretty cool. I found it just by searching on "Joy to the World". An organist named Martin Setchell wrote a toccata that song and performs it here.
My mother-in-law, who was a fine organist, would have enjoyed this.
My mother-in-law, who was a fine organist, would have enjoyed this.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
"We're the only ones who know! The only ones!"
After the Buffalo Bills managed to lose at home to the Cleveland Browns by a score of 6-3, despite holding the Browns to just two completed passes on the day, I decided that I was done watching them for the year and instead instituted a little tradition for The Daughter and I (since The Wife works on Sundays) called "Instead of the Buffalo Bills Theater". What this basically means is that instead of the Bills game, we watch a movie instead. It's a lot more fun than watching boring, badly-played football by a team that's probably not going to be here anymore pretty soon anyway. So, one film we recently watched was an old favorite of mine that I hadn't seen in a long time, it turns out: Steven Spielberg's UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Describing the plot probably isn't necessary, but maybe it is – the movie is over thirty years old, after all. Its opening scenes establish, via subtitle, that the events we're watching take place in the "Present Day", although the illusion is harder and harder to maintain, the farther out we get from 1970s-era cars, hairstyles, and architecture. Still, we open rather mysteriously as a bunch of government operatives arrive at a crappy little town – or maybe it's not even a town – in the middle of a desert in Mexico. Why is this group, led by a Frenchman, here? To investigate just why a group of fighter planes that disappeared in 1945 have shown up there, with no trace of the pilots. (It's the famous Flight 19, which disappeared without a trace while on patrol over the Caribbean.) A local, an old man who looks as poor as his surroundings, tells the investigators that "The Sun came out last night", and that it sang to him. He is mysteriously sunburned.
This is the first of a series of very odd events that take place, all around the world: a ship turns up in the middle of the Gobi desert, the entire population of a city in India is singing a series of tones given to them from the sky, series of numbers are broadcast to a radio telescope that seem to be the latitude and longitude for Devil's Tower, Wyoming. As all this goes on, with the shadowy government people investigating it (just who they are and who they answer to is never really explained, although at one point they're seen to be driving around in vehicles marked "UN"), two people in Indiana are drawn in via psychological "messages" given to them (and many others, apparently). Electrician Roy Neary is out investigating a power outage when he truck stalls and is flown over by a UFO; single mother Jillian Guiler is awoken to find that her son Barry has run off into the woods after all of his toys have turned on. Both Roy and Jillian become more and more obsessive over time as the visions being implanted in their brains become stronger and stronger. Both of them are put through harrowing experiences: Roy loses his job and his family becomes more and more estranged by his increasingly crazy behavior, with the final straw being when he decides to build an enormous Devil's Tower sculpture in his own living room, while little Barry, Jillian's son, is actually abducted by the aliens in what is one of the more harrowing sequences Spielberg has ever directed. (To this day, the scene of Barry's abduction is scarier to me than anything M. Night Shyamalan has done.)
Eventually Roy and Jillian learn, along with others, that they are actually being called by the aliens, although they don't know who the aliens are, to Devil's Tower for the arrival of the Mother Ship, even though they're still not sure what's going on and may well be heading into their deaths. (The Devil's Tower region has been cleared of all people via the news of a train derailment that has spilled thousands of gallons of toxic gas into the air in those parts – or so the government has reported. It turns out that there was no toxic gas and that the livestock in the region was knocked out by the use of a sleep aerosol. One wonders how they'll explain this once everything's done – "Our bad, your cows were asleep, but everything's OK, come on home now" – but one also suspects that once the explanation for just why Devil's Tower and everything around it had to be cleared out gets made public, the apologies for the sleep gas will be the least important thing going on. I'd love to know what happens after CE3K, but more on that a bit later.
So the mother ship arrives, and turns out to be benign. Everything going on has simply been the aliens' way of saying "Hello", and in the end, all the people they've "abducted" are returned, including the pilots of Flight 19, little Barry Guiler (who is genuinely sad to see the aliens go), and a bunch of others. But before the aliens leave again, they take someone with them again, this time voluntarily: they choose Roy Neary. His selection and boarding of the ship, as John Williams's magnificent score quotes "When You Wish Upon a Star", is the film's emotional high-water point. The ship leaves, and the credits roll.
I'd be fascinated, though, to know what happens the day after. What happens? I'd assume they can't keep all this a secret, and that word of the First Contact will get out. So what then? What would the world be like once we know, for all time, that we're not alone? The film makes no suggestions thereof; neither does the later film Contact, which is content to allow many to believe that the first contact didn't even happen. And not just the world in general, but what would it be like, being Roy Neary's wife and learning of what became of him? Learning that he wasn't crazy, and that it was all part of a plan by these aliens? Her actions (getting increasingly upset with Roy before finally concluding that he's literally gone crazy and become dangerous enough that she leaves him, taking the kids with her) are entirely reasonable, and while it is to Spielberg's credit that he doesn't present her actions as unreasonable, we are left to wonder what it will be like for her to learn that no, Roy wasn't crazy after all.
Spielberg grew up in a broken household himself, and it is something of a recurrent theme in a lot of his early movies. The family in ET is a broken home; even in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is shown to be estranged from his father figure, Abner Ravenwood, and is later shown in Last Crusade to be somewhat estranged from his actual father. I read somewhere that Spielberg has admitted that if he were to make CE3K today, he wouldn't just have Roy Neary go off with the aliens without so much as a farewell to his family or something similar. And yet, Neary's actions themselves, as presented in the film, aren't unreasonable either. He doesn't have the chance to explain anything to his family, because he doesn't understand any of it, and by the time he does understand it, the time to leave is upon him, if he wishes to take it. On this one level, then, the film's resolution somehow seems both wrong and right at the same time. It's an odd thing, really, and only as we watch the film do we realize that we have no real idea at all of what the aliens were about in the first place. Spielberg makes no attempt to explain any of this. Where are they from? Where are they going? When do they plan to bring Roy back? Do they plan to bring Roy back? We never learn one answer to any of these questions, and the reason seems more practical than anything else: the film just doesn't have room for the answers. There's no point at which it would make sense for anything to be explained. That fascinates me.
Technically, the film still looks wonderful, even now that it's more than thirty years old. There are only a few moments that genuinely appear dated – a shot of Ronnie Neary in her "sensible shoes", a shot of the old-school dashboard radio in Roy Neary's electricians' truck – but everything looks natural enough, so it's generally easy to get into the spell of the film. The effects are amazing, crowned by the mothership, whose arrival is one of the most stunning special effects sequences ever filmed. Now, I'm not one to wax poetic about the model-making era of movie effects or to decry the way things look now that it's all done with computers, but that doesn't mean I'm not often amazed by the artistry involved in the great effects spectacles of the past. This is one of them.
CE3K is one of those films that doesn't get enough recognition for how influential it is. There's a great deal in its production design, its approach to atmosphere, and even its music that would show up in later efforts like The X-Files and other conspiracy or horror shows and films of the 90s and 2000s. I always take note, of course, of John Williams's score, which makes heavy use of atonal dissonances throughout but which also gradually moves toward a tonal climax toward the end, and of course, there is the masterful way Williams incorporates the aliens' musical communication motif into the tableau of his scoring at film's end. (If ever I start my own Geek version of the Freemasons, our secret handshake will incorporate the musical hand signals from CE3K. Anybody can make the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, but how many people know the hand signals from Close Encounters?)
Remember: this means something. This is important.
Describing the plot probably isn't necessary, but maybe it is – the movie is over thirty years old, after all. Its opening scenes establish, via subtitle, that the events we're watching take place in the "Present Day", although the illusion is harder and harder to maintain, the farther out we get from 1970s-era cars, hairstyles, and architecture. Still, we open rather mysteriously as a bunch of government operatives arrive at a crappy little town – or maybe it's not even a town – in the middle of a desert in Mexico. Why is this group, led by a Frenchman, here? To investigate just why a group of fighter planes that disappeared in 1945 have shown up there, with no trace of the pilots. (It's the famous Flight 19, which disappeared without a trace while on patrol over the Caribbean.) A local, an old man who looks as poor as his surroundings, tells the investigators that "The Sun came out last night", and that it sang to him. He is mysteriously sunburned.
This is the first of a series of very odd events that take place, all around the world: a ship turns up in the middle of the Gobi desert, the entire population of a city in India is singing a series of tones given to them from the sky, series of numbers are broadcast to a radio telescope that seem to be the latitude and longitude for Devil's Tower, Wyoming. As all this goes on, with the shadowy government people investigating it (just who they are and who they answer to is never really explained, although at one point they're seen to be driving around in vehicles marked "UN"), two people in Indiana are drawn in via psychological "messages" given to them (and many others, apparently). Electrician Roy Neary is out investigating a power outage when he truck stalls and is flown over by a UFO; single mother Jillian Guiler is awoken to find that her son Barry has run off into the woods after all of his toys have turned on. Both Roy and Jillian become more and more obsessive over time as the visions being implanted in their brains become stronger and stronger. Both of them are put through harrowing experiences: Roy loses his job and his family becomes more and more estranged by his increasingly crazy behavior, with the final straw being when he decides to build an enormous Devil's Tower sculpture in his own living room, while little Barry, Jillian's son, is actually abducted by the aliens in what is one of the more harrowing sequences Spielberg has ever directed. (To this day, the scene of Barry's abduction is scarier to me than anything M. Night Shyamalan has done.)
Eventually Roy and Jillian learn, along with others, that they are actually being called by the aliens, although they don't know who the aliens are, to Devil's Tower for the arrival of the Mother Ship, even though they're still not sure what's going on and may well be heading into their deaths. (The Devil's Tower region has been cleared of all people via the news of a train derailment that has spilled thousands of gallons of toxic gas into the air in those parts – or so the government has reported. It turns out that there was no toxic gas and that the livestock in the region was knocked out by the use of a sleep aerosol. One wonders how they'll explain this once everything's done – "Our bad, your cows were asleep, but everything's OK, come on home now" – but one also suspects that once the explanation for just why Devil's Tower and everything around it had to be cleared out gets made public, the apologies for the sleep gas will be the least important thing going on. I'd love to know what happens after CE3K, but more on that a bit later.
So the mother ship arrives, and turns out to be benign. Everything going on has simply been the aliens' way of saying "Hello", and in the end, all the people they've "abducted" are returned, including the pilots of Flight 19, little Barry Guiler (who is genuinely sad to see the aliens go), and a bunch of others. But before the aliens leave again, they take someone with them again, this time voluntarily: they choose Roy Neary. His selection and boarding of the ship, as John Williams's magnificent score quotes "When You Wish Upon a Star", is the film's emotional high-water point. The ship leaves, and the credits roll.
I'd be fascinated, though, to know what happens the day after. What happens? I'd assume they can't keep all this a secret, and that word of the First Contact will get out. So what then? What would the world be like once we know, for all time, that we're not alone? The film makes no suggestions thereof; neither does the later film Contact, which is content to allow many to believe that the first contact didn't even happen. And not just the world in general, but what would it be like, being Roy Neary's wife and learning of what became of him? Learning that he wasn't crazy, and that it was all part of a plan by these aliens? Her actions (getting increasingly upset with Roy before finally concluding that he's literally gone crazy and become dangerous enough that she leaves him, taking the kids with her) are entirely reasonable, and while it is to Spielberg's credit that he doesn't present her actions as unreasonable, we are left to wonder what it will be like for her to learn that no, Roy wasn't crazy after all.
Spielberg grew up in a broken household himself, and it is something of a recurrent theme in a lot of his early movies. The family in ET is a broken home; even in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is shown to be estranged from his father figure, Abner Ravenwood, and is later shown in Last Crusade to be somewhat estranged from his actual father. I read somewhere that Spielberg has admitted that if he were to make CE3K today, he wouldn't just have Roy Neary go off with the aliens without so much as a farewell to his family or something similar. And yet, Neary's actions themselves, as presented in the film, aren't unreasonable either. He doesn't have the chance to explain anything to his family, because he doesn't understand any of it, and by the time he does understand it, the time to leave is upon him, if he wishes to take it. On this one level, then, the film's resolution somehow seems both wrong and right at the same time. It's an odd thing, really, and only as we watch the film do we realize that we have no real idea at all of what the aliens were about in the first place. Spielberg makes no attempt to explain any of this. Where are they from? Where are they going? When do they plan to bring Roy back? Do they plan to bring Roy back? We never learn one answer to any of these questions, and the reason seems more practical than anything else: the film just doesn't have room for the answers. There's no point at which it would make sense for anything to be explained. That fascinates me.
Technically, the film still looks wonderful, even now that it's more than thirty years old. There are only a few moments that genuinely appear dated – a shot of Ronnie Neary in her "sensible shoes", a shot of the old-school dashboard radio in Roy Neary's electricians' truck – but everything looks natural enough, so it's generally easy to get into the spell of the film. The effects are amazing, crowned by the mothership, whose arrival is one of the most stunning special effects sequences ever filmed. Now, I'm not one to wax poetic about the model-making era of movie effects or to decry the way things look now that it's all done with computers, but that doesn't mean I'm not often amazed by the artistry involved in the great effects spectacles of the past. This is one of them.
CE3K is one of those films that doesn't get enough recognition for how influential it is. There's a great deal in its production design, its approach to atmosphere, and even its music that would show up in later efforts like The X-Files and other conspiracy or horror shows and films of the 90s and 2000s. I always take note, of course, of John Williams's score, which makes heavy use of atonal dissonances throughout but which also gradually moves toward a tonal climax toward the end, and of course, there is the masterful way Williams incorporates the aliens' musical communication motif into the tableau of his scoring at film's end. (If ever I start my own Geek version of the Freemasons, our secret handshake will incorporate the musical hand signals from CE3K. Anybody can make the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, but how many people know the hand signals from Close Encounters?)
Remember: this means something. This is important.
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
In the first season of The West Wing, the Christmas episode had a storyline in which Toby Ziegler (the communications director, and my favorite character on the show) was contacted when a homeless man died wearing one of his overcoats. It turned out to be a coat Toby had donated to Goodwill without removing his card from the pocket...and it turned out that the homeless man was a Korean War vet. Toby used his influence to arrange a full military funeral for the man, which resulted in one of the first season's most memorable endings.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Sentential Links, postponed again
Sorry, everyone, but another long week at work combined with a busy weekend left me with less time to gather links than I would have liked. We should be back on track next week. Maybe. You never know. I'm capricious, that way.
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Something Celtic is always needed at Casa Jaquandor during the season. Here are the Chieftains with the "Christmas Bells of Dublin".
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Oddities abound!
:: Anyone who remembers the old text-adventure games of yore (as in, 1980s and before "yore") will be amused by Revisiting old-school text adventures as a jaded modern gamer. I thought it was hysterical -- I remember playing Colossal Cave for hours, eventually succumbing to the fact that I was 12 or 13 and typing in commands like "Kill Dragon with my butt". (Of course, in that game, the solution to the killing-the-dragon puzzle was elegant and a groaner at the same time....)
:: An antiquarian bookseller relates tales of customer woe. A sample:
Oy....
All for this week. Enjoy, folks!
:: Anyone who remembers the old text-adventure games of yore (as in, 1980s and before "yore") will be amused by Revisiting old-school text adventures as a jaded modern gamer. I thought it was hysterical -- I remember playing Colossal Cave for hours, eventually succumbing to the fact that I was 12 or 13 and typing in commands like "Kill Dragon with my butt". (Of course, in that game, the solution to the killing-the-dragon puzzle was elegant and a groaner at the same time....)
:: An antiquarian bookseller relates tales of customer woe. A sample:
I have a first edition of the Gutenburg Bible, can you tell me how much it is worth?
Ma'am, what makes you think you have a Gutenburg?
Well, it's German and dated 1880.
Oy....
All for this week. Enjoy, folks!
Not even the Bills do that....
So I just hopped over to the FOX Sports website to look at the current football scores, and something struck me as a bit...improbable. Here's a screengrab:
Somehow the Saints have posted a negative score at halftime! There's got to be a fascinating football story behind this. So I clicked through to their coverage of the game itself, and....
Hmmmmm.
Obviously a techno-cockup. But personally, I think it would be funny if there actually was a way in football to have negative scoring!
(And now they've fixed it. The game is actually 17-17 in the third quarter as I write this.)
Somehow the Saints have posted a negative score at halftime! There's got to be a fascinating football story behind this. So I clicked through to their coverage of the game itself, and....
Hmmmmm.
Obviously a techno-cockup. But personally, I think it would be funny if there actually was a way in football to have negative scoring!
(And now they've fixed it. The game is actually 17-17 in the third quarter as I write this.)
To the Stars in Ships!
I've read a couple more space opera novels lately:
:: The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald was actually a re-read for me. The first time I read it was almost eight years ago, and I remember liking it but finding it a bit disappointing; it felt, at the time, like a retread of a number of tropes from Star Wars used in the service of a fairly unremarkable plot. Someone else, in the interim (I don't remember who it was), told me that it was a better book than that, so I decided to give it another go. Glad I did.
Yes, it does present a very comfortable read for someone whose primary fascination with space opera is Star Wars. Our heroes all wield blasters, except for the more mystical warriors who carry a more antiquated weapon (staffs, in this case). Yes, the heroes fly around in a circular-shaped starship that was an ordinary freighter before it was souped up into one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. Yes, we're in the wake of a galactic war. And so on. But I found the central story (a woman starpilot who has tried to make a life away from her famous family and their political connections is drawn back in when her mother is assassinated and her father charges her with finding out who did it) a lot more interesting this time out than I did the first time.
But this time, I wasn't as bothered by all that as I was the first time. Maybe it's that I've read a lot more SF in general and space opera in particular since then, or maybe it's something else, but The Price of the Stars actually is a highly entertaining read. I look forward to continuing the series, called Mageworlds, of which this is the first. The first book is fun and breezy, but it also leaves behind enough questions so as to make for a desire to return to this universe. (Who and what are the Mageworlds, for example?)
:: The Price of the Stars is good old pulpy adventure space opera, but Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton is what they're calling "New Space Opera" these days: it's full to bursting with SF ideas, along with lots of other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Pages upon pages upon pages of other stuff. If The Price of the Stars is a potboiler, Pandora's Star is an entire kitchen, staffed by a single mad chef of enormous skill.
Pandora's Star is a doorstop of a book, by an author who likes to produce doorstops. Set in a new universe called the Commonwealth, Hamilton tells a story that begins with a brief flashback to humanity's first landing on Mars -- and then flashes forward several hundred years to an astronomer who is studying a binary star system a thousand light years distant, when, as he is looking at the star through his telescope, the star disappears. An exploratory mission is sent to the star, which turns out to have been completely enclosed -- along with its sister star -- with an enormous energy field. What's behind the energy field, and why was the star enclosed? One of these questions is answered, and another is left open for the next book in the duology (Judas Unchained).
Hamilton's story literally explodes all over the place, on dozens of planets. There are underground political movements that rely on terrorist tactics; there are singularly devoted detectives; there are scientists and starship officers; there are rich families struggling to maintain their power and poorer families looking to gain it; there are aliens who travel the stars simply by walking from one planet to another (yes, that's what I said); there is a human society where people are regularly "rejuvenated" and where death itself has become rare (and even where dead people can be "rebirthed"), and where, in one of my favorite notions in the book, interstellar travel is conducted not by supralight-drive starship but by trains that simply roll through planet-based wormholes.
Pandora's Star ends with a wild bang of a cliffhanger, so I'm greatly looking forward to reading the second book. (I've already noticed that Judas Unchained has something that Pandora's Star really could have used: a list of the dramatis personae. Sometimes it gets a bit difficult keeping track of who's who in Hamilton's universe, but it's worth it. This is as entertaining an SF read as I can recall, and a high-water mark in my ongoing space opera obsession.
:: The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald was actually a re-read for me. The first time I read it was almost eight years ago, and I remember liking it but finding it a bit disappointing; it felt, at the time, like a retread of a number of tropes from Star Wars used in the service of a fairly unremarkable plot. Someone else, in the interim (I don't remember who it was), told me that it was a better book than that, so I decided to give it another go. Glad I did.
Yes, it does present a very comfortable read for someone whose primary fascination with space opera is Star Wars. Our heroes all wield blasters, except for the more mystical warriors who carry a more antiquated weapon (staffs, in this case). Yes, the heroes fly around in a circular-shaped starship that was an ordinary freighter before it was souped up into one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. Yes, we're in the wake of a galactic war. And so on. But I found the central story (a woman starpilot who has tried to make a life away from her famous family and their political connections is drawn back in when her mother is assassinated and her father charges her with finding out who did it) a lot more interesting this time out than I did the first time.
But this time, I wasn't as bothered by all that as I was the first time. Maybe it's that I've read a lot more SF in general and space opera in particular since then, or maybe it's something else, but The Price of the Stars actually is a highly entertaining read. I look forward to continuing the series, called Mageworlds, of which this is the first. The first book is fun and breezy, but it also leaves behind enough questions so as to make for a desire to return to this universe. (Who and what are the Mageworlds, for example?)
:: The Price of the Stars is good old pulpy adventure space opera, but Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton is what they're calling "New Space Opera" these days: it's full to bursting with SF ideas, along with lots of other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Pages upon pages upon pages of other stuff. If The Price of the Stars is a potboiler, Pandora's Star is an entire kitchen, staffed by a single mad chef of enormous skill.
Pandora's Star is a doorstop of a book, by an author who likes to produce doorstops. Set in a new universe called the Commonwealth, Hamilton tells a story that begins with a brief flashback to humanity's first landing on Mars -- and then flashes forward several hundred years to an astronomer who is studying a binary star system a thousand light years distant, when, as he is looking at the star through his telescope, the star disappears. An exploratory mission is sent to the star, which turns out to have been completely enclosed -- along with its sister star -- with an enormous energy field. What's behind the energy field, and why was the star enclosed? One of these questions is answered, and another is left open for the next book in the duology (Judas Unchained).
Hamilton's story literally explodes all over the place, on dozens of planets. There are underground political movements that rely on terrorist tactics; there are singularly devoted detectives; there are scientists and starship officers; there are rich families struggling to maintain their power and poorer families looking to gain it; there are aliens who travel the stars simply by walking from one planet to another (yes, that's what I said); there is a human society where people are regularly "rejuvenated" and where death itself has become rare (and even where dead people can be "rebirthed"), and where, in one of my favorite notions in the book, interstellar travel is conducted not by supralight-drive starship but by trains that simply roll through planet-based wormholes.
Pandora's Star ends with a wild bang of a cliffhanger, so I'm greatly looking forward to reading the second book. (I've already noticed that Judas Unchained has something that Pandora's Star really could have used: a list of the dramatis personae. Sometimes it gets a bit difficult keeping track of who's who in Hamilton's universe, but it's worth it. This is as entertaining an SF read as I can recall, and a high-water mark in my ongoing space opera obsession.
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Time for a little break from the general musical thrust of this series, so here's the Food Network's Alton Brown, on the topic of Christmas cookies!
Part two:
I love me some cookies....
Part two:
I love me some cookies....
Saturday, December 05, 2009
There Once was a Savior from Nantucket....
I love the Susan Boyle story. I really, truly do. I think it's the greatest thing that a woman who stands outside the "norm" of what we look for in terms of stardom these days came forth with her own talent and blew everyone away. It's just fantastic.
But I was looking at her new CD the other day, and I was struck by some of the song choices on it. In truth, it's full of songs that I like, so maybe I'll give the album a listen someday. But it struck me as funny to see a song like "I Dreamed a Dream", a showtune in which a single mother who has just lost her factory job because everyone found out she's been turning to prostitution to make ends meet tells her sad story about the guy who "took her childhood in his stride" but then "was gone when autumn came", on the same album as "Amazing Grace", in which the grace "that saved a wretch like me" is extolled. No real point here, but I found that juxtaposition interesting.
But I was looking at her new CD the other day, and I was struck by some of the song choices on it. In truth, it's full of songs that I like, so maybe I'll give the album a listen someday. But it struck me as funny to see a song like "I Dreamed a Dream", a showtune in which a single mother who has just lost her factory job because everyone found out she's been turning to prostitution to make ends meet tells her sad story about the guy who "took her childhood in his stride" but then "was gone when autumn came", on the same album as "Amazing Grace", in which the grace "that saved a wretch like me" is extolled. No real point here, but I found that juxtaposition interesting.
Sausage Baked Beans
Here's a very quick-to-throw-together (although not quick to cook) recipe, for those who, like me, consider the crock pot to be one of the most essential items in a kitchen.
I love the crock pot. Tomorrow I'm using it to make chili.
Ingredients:
1 lb. pork breakfast sausage (spicy or plain, whatever you like), cooked and crumbled
2 large cans of baked beans (By "large", the normal size of, say, Bush's baked beans. Use whichever flavor you like.)
1/2 cup Ketchup
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tbs. mustard
Combine all ingredients in the crock pot, stir to incorporate, and then put the lid on and heat on High for 90 minutes or so. Or on low for three hours or so. Serve as a side dish, or a main dish with nice thick bread and butter. Ideal for a fall or winter potluck.
I love the crock pot. Tomorrow I'm using it to make chili.
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
A gorgeous and sad song of the season...here's Sarah McLachlan singing Joni Mithcell's "River".
Friday, December 04, 2009
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Here's one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Canadian Allison Crowe, singing "In the Bleak Midwinter".
Thursday, December 03, 2009
A couple of strong opinions....
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Opinion the First: If I were to cheat on my wife, would that be any of Tiger Woods's business? No? Then his marital problems are none of mine. He owes me nothing by way of explanation or apology. That this story is commanding so much press in the sports world makes me ill.
Opinion the Second: Just when I think that the New York State Senate has exhausted the number of reasons I could loathe that institution, they come up with something new.
Opinion the Third: I'm unconvinced that President Obama's on the right track in Afghanistan.
That is all.
Opinion the First: If I were to cheat on my wife, would that be any of Tiger Woods's business? No? Then his marital problems are none of mine. He owes me nothing by way of explanation or apology. That this story is commanding so much press in the sports world makes me ill.
Opinion the Second: Just when I think that the New York State Senate has exhausted the number of reasons I could loathe that institution, they come up with something new.
Opinion the Third: I'm unconvinced that President Obama's on the right track in Afghanistan.
That is all.
Something for Thursday
Yes, I'll still be doing my Thursday offerings, even as I do the Daily Dose of Christmas. Here is Herbert von Karajan conducting the last movement of Brahms's Symphony No. 2 in D.
This is one of the most spirited movements of symphonic music I know, with a wonderful second subject (starting at the 1:25 mark) that comes back later in full flower. I love the mysterious-sounding section in the middle of the movement (roughly around the 4:30 mark) and the way that section just quietly and logically leads right back into a recapitulation of the spirited manner in which the movement started. (Pay attention to 4:51 to 5:12.) And finally, that wonderful, wonderful coda, with the final build starting at 7:52, those descending scales in the brass starting at 8:17, and the way it all ends up in the trumpets at 8:33 -- how I wished, in my trumpet playing days, to get to do this symphony!
Oh well. I can still listen to it, at least.
This is one of the most spirited movements of symphonic music I know, with a wonderful second subject (starting at the 1:25 mark) that comes back later in full flower. I love the mysterious-sounding section in the middle of the movement (roughly around the 4:30 mark) and the way that section just quietly and logically leads right back into a recapitulation of the spirited manner in which the movement started. (Pay attention to 4:51 to 5:12.) And finally, that wonderful, wonderful coda, with the final build starting at 7:52, those descending scales in the brass starting at 8:17, and the way it all ends up in the trumpets at 8:33 -- how I wished, in my trumpet playing days, to get to do this symphony!
Oh well. I can still listen to it, at least.
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