National Tau Day?!

Mathematicians want to dethrone pi. I hate this idea. First they took Pluto, and now they want pi? What's next? Some half-baked notion that humans and apes come from common ancestors? Suck it, Science!

Something for Thursday

In honor of the 100th birthday of film composer Bernard Herrmann, here are a few selections. First, the Love Music from Vertigo:



The theme from North by Northwest:



For the Fallen (a wartime elegy):



Herrmann was one of the very greatest of all film composers, and his legacy stands proud more than thirty years after his death.

War Horse

Steven Spielberg has a movie coming out this winter that I didn't even know existed until just this morning. Here's the trailer for War Horse:



This screams out "Movie that will have me crying like a little girl at the end".

(It also strikes me as odd that, when I watched the trailer on YouTube, it was preceded by an advertisement that is...a trailer for another movie. I have to watch a trailer before get to watch a trailer? Really?)

I'll take "People You Wouldn't Want To Hang Out With" for $500, Alex

Ye Gods:

Amherst police may think they’ve seen everything, but they’ve now arrested a 68-year-old woman accused of trying to stop someone from performing the Heimlich maneuver on a man in a crowded Niagara Falls Boulevard restaurant.

The incident occurred June 18, a Saturday night, when a 43-year-old man was choking and someone began to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.

“Leave him alone. Let him die,” the woman reportedly yelled out, according to police reports.

She then allegedly tried to grab the phone from a restaurant employee who was calling 911, police said.

Unfortunately, her plans were thwarted; the guy was fine by the time EMTs showed up.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

If you have one, who is your favorite teevee chef?

Bucky T. Katt?

Bucky of Get Fuzzy fame has a real-life doppelganger!

(via)

I can see why they love her....

Michele Bachmann: Liar or idiot? Or both? Hmmmmm....

"A pirate's life for me!"

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is, to hear most folks tell it, not a very good movie at all. Most reaction I've seen has ranged from tepid to outright negative, but then, I've seen very little reaction to this movie from people who didn't hate Dead Man's Chest and At World's End. I've almost got the impression that folks are teeing off on On Stranger Tides because they didn't get enough chance to talk about how much they hated those two films as well, but never mind that.

I thought On Stranger Tides was terrific. I enjoyed the living hell out of it, and I've been trying to figure out why my reaction to the film is so different from everyone else's. I suppose a big part of it is simply that I love these characters sufficiently that I'm more willing to go where they take me than others. I further suppose it's partly because I don't really see these movies as telling any kind of ongoing story, and certainly not the ongoing story of Jack Sp--Captain Jack Sparrow. I don't think that Jack Sparrow has an ongoing story.

This is contra, for example, Michael May, whose thoughts I deeply respect, but who was disappointed in the film:

The movie is very silly and cartoony, but that might have been forgivable had it actually done what it was supposed to do: continue the story of Captain Jack Sparrow. When last we left Jack, he’d become a kinder pirate and we do see that reflected in On Stranger Tides. But that’s what he grew into in the last trilogy. For his story to be worth continuing, he needs to go somewhere new.

The journey promised by At World’s End is Jack’s quest for immortality. He died in Dead Man’s Chest and was terrified of repeating the experience. It drove everything he did in At World’s End and made sense of his quest for the Fountain of Youth. But as Stranger Tides opens, Jack’s pretty much given up the quest and has to be pulled back into it. There’s no personal urgency to his finding it. Instead, he fills a role much like he did in the original trilogy: running around making things more interesting for the characters who actually have story arcs.

See...I'm not sure that's right. I don't think that Jack was terrified of death (beyond a normal sense of self-preservation). What's always motivated Jack has never been immortality; if he wanted that, he could have pocketed a coin from the Aztec treasure at the end of Curse of the Black Pearl and enjoyed his immortality that way. Of course, the movie established that that kind of immortality sucked, but then, he was hip to try to take Davy Jones's place as Captain of the Flying Dutchman. Why was this? He'd be immortal, right?

But he didn't want to be Captain of the Dutchman because he wanted to be immortal. He wanted to be Captain of the Dutchman because what always motivate Jack was freedom, and he defines freedom as being the Captain of a ship. Jack wasn't trying to avoid death in DMC and AWE, so much as he was trying to avoid being pressed into Davy Jones's servitude. He owed Jones a century of servitude; if he wanted long life, he could have simply taken Jones up on the offer. After all, a hundred years is unheard of for someone in Jack's line of work, right? So why didn't he just do that?

Because Jack wanted to be free, and that meant being Captain and having a ship.

There's a moment in AWE that illustrates this. Jack indicates to Will Turner that he wants to stab Jones's heart and become Captain of the Dutchman, to which Will responds, "But then you have to do the job, Jack. You have to ferry the dead, or you become like Jones." Jack's response is less than enthusiastic, so even that isn't ideal, because even though he'd be Captain, he still wouldn't be free. Jack is all about total freedom. Of course, at the end of AWE, he is willing to do the deed anyway, because it's the only way he'll ever be free of Davy Jones...until he realizes he must do something selfless and let Will Turner stab the heart.

Jack certainly does fear death to some degree, but when he realizes that there's no other alternative, he embraces it head on: he puts his hat back on, says "Hello, beastie!", and charges the Kraken. That's interesting to me, as is the scene in AWE when he is clearly sad that the Kraken is dead. Jack Sparrow is sensibly scared of death. But he's terrified at the prospect of living a life without freedom, living on someone's terms other than his own.

So, then, is Jack really planning to go after the Fountain of Youth at the end of At World's End? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure it really matters. What matters is that he already figures that Captain Barbossa is going to ditch him again. Is he going after the Fountain, or is he only keeping the charts as future leverage? We don't really find out, but in On Stranger Tides, Jack isn't really motivated by a desire to find the Fountain at all, except as a way of getting himself away from the current batch of miscreants who have literally shanghai'd him into their service. Jack finds himself in servitude aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge, which is once again an intolerable situation – so he immediately begins to plan a mutiny.

As On Stranger Tides ends, Jack is once again without a ship and planning on how to get one. Some have complained about this, but I rather like it. I'm coming to see Captain Jack Sparrow not as a character whom I need to see growing and changing all the time; I see him more as a character whose situations simply don't allow for him to grow much at all. I see him in similar light to James Bond. Aside from a very few films, James Bond doesn't grow or change much at all in the course of the series, and that's fine because no one expects him to, and when he finally does, the result is extremely notable. I like the usual trajectory for Jack Sparrow: he's cleverer by far than the people around him, but he's still somehow always watching his ship sailing away without him, or being dragged to the bottom of the sea by a Kraken, or being shrunk down so it can fit inside a bottle. I'm just not sure that I want to see Jack Sparrow changing; I'm not sure that I need to learn in great detail about what motivates him. I don't think he's that kind of character, any more than James Bond is, or, to take another recent pop-culture Jack, 24's Jack Bauer. Now there's a guy who is in similar circumstances to Jack Sparrow: he can never escape his lot in life, and he's constantly being dragged into adventures that maybe he'd just as soon not have. Of course, Bauer's a lot more morose about it than Sparrow.

Another similar character is Brad Pitt's Tristan Ludlow, from Legends of the Fall; Tristan doesn't change much at all over the years of his story, either, and at film's end, our narrator describes him as "the rock that everyone broke themselves against". That's Jack Sparrow.

So, on its own, how is On Stranger Tides? I, personally, loved it. I found it full of good old swashbuckling fun, and I loved that it didn't take itself nearly as seriously as its immediate two predecessor films did (as much as I loved those). The way the film gradually pulls us into its story was terrific – there's an impostor in London, claiming to be Captain Jack Sparrow and recruiting sailors. Obviously Jack is intrigued by this and investigates, in the course of freeing his first mate Mr. Gibbs from the gallows and escaping the King's men and finding himself in audience with the King himself and escaping the King's men again. As is typical, Jack does all this with varying degrees of success. Soon he's in a race against other pirates, the King's royal navy, and the Spaniards for the Fountain of Youth – which Jack isn't that enthusiastic about seeking out to begin with.

The film's major weakness is a subplot involving a captive Catholic priest on board Blackbeard's ship, and his love story with a mermaid who is captured because it turns out that in order to take advantage of the Fountain of Youth, one needs a freshly-shed mermaid's tear. I loved that little detail, but the film is so stuffed full of other things going on that the priest is only along to save the mermaid at the end. His character is pretty expendable, and he really could have been set aside; maybe Jack could set the mermaid free, thus showing us his usually-hidden selfless side. I also liked that the mermaids are really quite strange sea creatures, but aside from a single set-piece, they really don't amount to much in the film. I'd have liked to have seen more of them.

And then there's Angelica Malon, played by Penelope Cruz. She's an old flame of Jack's, who has turned to piracy for reasons of her own. As underdrawn as the Catholic priest is as a character, Angelica is perfectly pitched. She's almost a female Jack Sparrow, trustworthy at times and untrustworthy at others, and strongly motivated. The film leaves her fate wide open, and I do hope that she features again in the adventures of Jack Sparrow.

A couple other random notes about On Stranger Tides:

:: The score isn't as good as AWE, but it does add Spanish guitar to the proceedings, which is a nice touch. I've grown to really like the music for these films, which show that you don't need to take a Korngoldian approach to scoring a pirate movie.

:: The Pirates films are all beautifully photographed, and this one's no different. Rob Marshall takes over directing responsibilities for Gore Verbinski this time out, and he did a pretty good job, especially in the action sequences. I've come to really appreciate directors who are able to shoot action in such a way that you can tell what's going on. Verbinski was very good in that way, and Marshall keeps that going.

:: If the Black Pearl was sunk in battle, I really hope that sailors Pintel and Ragetti either survived or weren't on board. (Those are the short bald guy and the tall thin one-eyed guy from the first three films. The piratical C-3PO and R2-D2, in other words.)

:: Nowhere in On Stranger Tides does anyone mention rum; nor does Jack ever inquire as to why the rum is always gone.

:: I don't really care that the Pirates films cheerfully do whatever they want with the geography and geology of the Caribbean.

:: I wonder what seafaring bits of lore will be mined for the next Pirates movie? Maybe Jack Sparrow can have an encounter with a giant white whale. I suppose he could find Atlantis, or maybe the lost Templar fleet. Who knows?

(By the way, I can't recommend highly enough Michael May's thoughts on Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, and At World's End. Those are terrific posts, on the subject of character development in the first three PotC films. He has interesting thoughts as to who the main character of that trilogy is, and I'm inclined to agree with him.)

Bad feelings, and the people who have them

What haven't we done in this space in quite a while? Why, rant about someone's inability to understand Star Wars, that's what!

Cracked.com, always one of my favorite websites, has a piece up today called "5 Movie Fan Theories That Make More Sense Than The Movie". There's a bit about, you guessed it, Star Wars. Here it is:

Star Wars: Obi Wan Kenobi is OB-1, Clone Warrior

One of the most intriguing aspects of the original Star Wars trilogy was the brief mention of something called "The Clone Wars" -- in the first film, those three words alone are enough to change Luke's perception of Obi-Wan Kenobi from "cave-dwelling old creep" to "badass space warrior." The thing is, in those early movies they never actually told us what exactly the Clone Wars was, which somehow makes it sound even more epic: For over two decades, literally the only thing fans knew about it was that it involved clones and warring.

Of all the wild theories fans came up with during those cold, lonely Star Wars-less decades, there's one that stands out ...

The Awesome Fan Theory:

The "clones" were artificially grown Jedi, and Obi-Wan was one of them -- thus the clone designation "OB-1."

Picture this: Millions of cloned Jedi Knights battling across planets and spaceships in a badass whirlwind of laser-force space death. A "star war," if you will. It makes sense: If you had to clone someone to create an army of warriors, a powerful Jedi would be the most logical choice.

According to this theory, the name Obi-Wan Kenobi is actually a transliteration of his serial number: OB-1, first in a line of star-warring space wizards. In the first movie, Obi-Wan uses the alias "Ben Kenobi," supposedly because he's hiding from the Empire, but that doesn't really make sense: Why would you keep the same last name if you didn't want to be found? This would explain where the alias came from: It was the name of the original Jedi he was cloned from (and therefore his "father").

Oh, and it closes a gigantic plot hole in the prequels: The reason the old man Obi-Wan doesn't seem to remember any of the events of the prequels (such as not remembering having ever seen the droids before, or that Darth Vader built Threepio) is that the old man is just a clone. Also, imagine the awesomeness of the surprise ending they could have included in Episode II, in which the future Darth Vader starts his march toward evil by pushing the original Obi-Wan Kenobi off of one of those high walkways they apparently design into every spaceship.

What We Got Instead:

In Episode II: Attack of the Clones, we find out that the Clone Wars was actually a war between some crappy robots and ... an army of Boba Fetts. The Jedi are sort of standing in between, and then they're all killed by the Boba Fetts. Yeah.

Oh yeah. These guys are way cooler than an endless apocalyptic horde of Jedi.

As for Obi-Wan, he forgot all about R2-D2 and C-3PO after spending three whole movies with them because ... you know what, at this point we don't even care.

This is the first time I've ever heard this "fan theory" in action. In all honesty...it's a pretty cool idea. But I have to admit that I was never really traumatized by not knowing what the "Clone Wars" were all about. Sure, I wanted to know, but I didn't devote a whole lot of thought to it. I figured it was a bunch of wars. Involving clones. Why worry about it?

But the rest of this is awfully wrong-headed. Surely it's not that difficult to pay attention to details? Starting with the question of why Obi Wan would use his original last name when he's in hiding, it should be remembered that he's not in hiding on Coruscant or some other heavily-populated central world. He's hiding on a sparsely-populated planet way out on the Outer Rim, a planet that isn't really even part of the Empire yet. There's no real reason for the name "Kenobi" to be particularly troublesome; the only people who really know about him are the Emperor and Darth Vader, and neither of them really has any reason to be concerned with events on Tatooine. In fact, Vader himself may be subconsciously intending to avoid that planet entirely, since it's where he grew up and met Padme.

And really, for all we know, "Kenobi" is like "Jones" in the Star Wars universe.

But the Cracked.com commentary goes off the rails when the writer assumes that the fan theory would fix a major "plot hole" in the Prequel Trilogy. The statement that "Obi Wan doesn't seem to remember what happened in the Prequels" is just silly. First of all, he never said that he had never seen the droids before. All he said was, "Don't seem to recall ever owning a droid." Owning. And he hasn't. He's worked with droids, but none has ever really called him "Master".

Second -- well, he's got to be careful, doesn't he? When the droids show up in his life again in A New Hope, he can't possibly expect them, and he can't just start babbling at them: "Hey, R2! I haven't seen this little droid in twenty years! And C-3PO! How's it going!" He can't do those things because Luke is right there, and Luke has no idea who he is or what he represents. And it's not like they have time, over the ensuing course of events, for Obi Wan to give Luke a lengthy recitation of the events of the Clone Wars. What does Cracked think that Obi Wan is supposed to do?

And third, of the two droids specifically -- it's well-established in Star Wars that astromech droids (R2-D2) and protocol droids (C-3PO) are pretty much a dime a dozen. It's also established that Obi Wan doesn't think too highly of droids in his early life. And there's just no real reason for Obi Wan to even know that Anakin built C-3PO. Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't. Cracked is assuming that the characters know as much as we do, and there's no reason to make that assumption.

There. Been a while since I ranted in defense of Star Wars -- I'd forgotten how good it felt!

Sentential Links #251

The road to 500 of these posts continues!

:: Can I just say that I'm really surprised and impressed that the world of A Song of Ice and Fire fans seemed to collectively, unconsciously decide not to spoil [spoiler excised] for the viewing audience who hadn't read the book? (I have a friend at work who watched the series, and talked a lot with me about it. He hadn't read the books, so he had no idea what was coming; that will be ending, though, because while he's not a reader, his wife is, and she's plowing through the series right now. I was careful not to spoil things for him, although he would ask things like "Does Daenerys's brother stick around a long time?", which I vaguely answered, "His exit comes sooner than you might expect." But I have to bite my tongue at other times, such as when he speculates on which characters are obviously going to be around for the length of the entire story. And speaking of Game of Thrones, I haven't watched more than the first episode yet, mainly because...well, there are scenes where people act so horribly that I'm not sure that I want to see them acted out. I found it hard enough reading about Cersei's framing of Sansa's direwolf, and I had a very hard time reading the scene where Joffrey has his servant beat Sansa. Seeing those scenes onscreen might prove...difficult for me. I've got them downloaded, so we'll see.)

:: I will miss Dunn's wild behavior, but can not feel sorry for someone who didn't care about his own life's worth. (I have to admit to feeling little sympathy for Ryan Dunn, myself. I don't even care if he was drinking -- operating any kind of motor vehicle at speeds the likes of which Dunn was at the time of his crash is a staggeringly unsafe thing to do, and the main blessing I can find here is that he only killed himself and whatever idiot was dumb enough to ride with him. Had there been other cars on the road at the same time, he could have killed them, too. I'm reminded of a couple of recent local accidents here -- one, a year or two ago, on one of the rural roads, involved some kid who loved driving his car really fast on those two-lane roads. He, too, joked with friends that he'd probably die at the wheel of his beloved car...which he did. With three other kids in the car with him.

Another was a motorcycle accident on Interstate 290 in Amherst, NY. That's one of Buffalo's northern suburbs. The Wife has told me that she'd be driving home on that road from work at around 10:30 pm, when she'd suddenly be passed by a gang of folks riding crotch-rocket motorcycles are ridiculous speeds. They'd be going so fast that she didn't even know they were there until they passed her. Well, a couple weeks ago, one of those groups was whipping along at over 100 mph when one of them lost control of his bike and wiped out. He and his passenger skidded across the pavement, right underneath a semi truck. The passenger somehow managed to not get run over; the bike driver wasn't so lucky. No alcohol there; just a moron who liked going fast.)

:: It’s very common to see familiar things in random patterns. We see faces in clouds, Jesus in a tortilla, and smiley faces everywhere.

:: Can we define science fiction and fantasy so as to clearly separate them? (That is, of course, the ultimate question. I think the answer is No, but I've been wrong before!)

That's all for this week. More next week!

A Query for Macintosh Users

My mother just stopped by with her Mac laptop to ask my help with something, and after an hour or so of futzing around and Googling, I couldn't figure out the solution. Maybe one of you can offer some guidance!

The problem: there is a webcam from Hawaii that she likes to have up when she's online. (Specifically, this one -- apparently that's the beach she and my father stayed on when they vacationed there last.) At some point recently, though, the webcam has stopped working. No image loads, no nothing. (The webcam does work on my computer, though, which gave me temptation to be able to say to a Mac user, "Get a PC!" Those types of situations almost never present themselves...and when one does, I can't go for it because, you know, it's my mom.)

Anyway, below the webcam window is a link to a Windows Media Player plug-in that you're supposed to install if the thing isn't working. So I go through the proper steps to run said plug-in -- specifically, this plug-in -- but when I restart Safari, still nothing on the web-cam. I restart the Mac, and still, no web-cam.

So I start tinkering around, and in the settings for said plug-in, I find an option that says something like "Use this plug-in for Windows Media Player content". However, that option was grayed out, so I could neither check nor uncheck its box. Googling a bit more, I find that apparently when Safari is running in 64-bit mode, it can adversely affect the functionality of certain media-related plug-ins. A-ha!, thinks I, as I then look up how to set Safari to run in 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. It turns out that there's a simple way to do this: you access certain settings for Safari in the "Finder" thing, and then just check the box that says "Run Safari in 32-bit mode". Only problem?

No such box exists on my mother's computer. As far as I can tell, her version of Safari will only run in 64-bit mode. No other option is available. So, I'm stymied and unable to get her web-cam to show her pretty pictures of a beach in Hawaii. Anybody out there got any suggestions?

(And Justin Long said that things just sorta work on Macs. Yeah, right!)

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: When a half-marathon runs by his house, what's an energetic young dog to do?

:: A while back I posted a video of a space shuttle launch from the vantage point of a solid-fuel rocket booster. Here's a similar video.

It's not that interesting a video for the first minute or two, because of the vantage point of the camera, but then we reach the point (at about the 1:50 mark) where the booster rockets separate and fall back to Earth, and it becomes amazing. You gradually see the second booster recede until it's invisible...and the Earth just circles around lazily, getting bigger all the time...and then the other rocket booster comes back into view. And if you freeze the frame at exactly the 4:28 mark, you can actually see the thrust exhaust contrail making a giant bow all the way from the launch pad to the other booster, still free-falling back to Earth.

The screen goes black at about the 5:38 mark; stick with it, though, because the video switches to the perspective of a different camera at that point. Which camera? Watch!



:: A Twitter followee of mine posted this: The world's ten geekiest houses. It'll be obvious which is my favorite, but they're all really amazing.

More next week!

39-37

As of this writing, the Pittsburgh Pirates are 39-37. They're close to entering July with a record at or over .500. That would be amazing.

I was thinking about the Pirates' 1992 season, which started amazingly -- they charged out of the gate, playing five or six games and then going on a nine-game winning streak -- and ended with the most heartbreaking end to a sporting event in which I had a rooting interest that I've ever seen. Seriously: the Francisco Cabrera hit in the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven of the NLCS that year was more gutwrenching than even Scott Norwood's miss in Super Bowl XXV. While the Bills were on the edge the entire game of that Super Bowl, the Pirates really looked like they were going to break through to the World Series after two consecutive years in which they lost the NLCS. They took a 2-0 lead to the bottom of the ninth, only to see a nightmare of an inning unfold in which the Braves put up three to win the pennant.

I watched my fair share of Pirates games that season, whenever I could. ESPN had the Pirates a lot, and I'd watch them play the Cubs on WGN and the Braves on TBS. One of those Braves games stands out as one of the most hard-luck games I've ever seen a team lose. I remember the Pirates pitcher, Danny Jackson, for whom they had traded despite his awful record at that point in the season because they desperately needed left-handed pitching, throwing a masterful game but losing, 1-0. It was worse, even, than that, however. I was able to do some research and track down the actual box score from that game, and Ye Gods! Jackson pitched seven innings, and a reliever tossed the eighth. Between the two of them, they combined to throw a one-hitter. But that one hit was a solo home run by David Justice, and that one run would be all the Braves would need.

The Pirates actually had a great chance to score. I don't recall if anyone was on base at the time, but center fielder Andy Van Slyke hit a ball deep to center field. Deep to center field. In fact, he hit it out of the park for a home run -- or, rather, it would have been a home run had Braves CF Otis Nixon not run to the wall, jumped up, stuck his glove about a foot over the fence, and hauled in the ball. It was an astonishing catch, truly (you can watch it here), and one of the biggest "Oh, come on!" moments I've ever experienced as a sports fan.

Oh well. But apparently the Pirates are getting good again! Huzzah!

Saturday Centus

This week we're limited to sixty words, not 100.

Dear John,

I made it back. Why didn't you?

Tom

(One of many notes tucked lovingly into the space between the granite panels at the Vietnam Wall in Washington.)

Overalls weather!

Overalls weather!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Usually, from June to mid-September at the earliest, I might get to wear overalls a handful of times, because it's just too warm for them. Not that overalls are especially hot, per se, but the bib and the back part do tend to rest where...well, where I tend to produce the most sweat. I'm better at dealing with heat now than I used to be, but I'm still not up to wearing overalls in summer.

I'm not sure how the rest of this summer is going to play out, but so far in June, we seem to have a pattern going where it will get seasonably warm (or even a bit warmer) for a few days, say five or six days, and then we'll get two or three days of unseasonably cool days that lots of folks whine about but which I find highly pleasant and refreshing. This weekend is one of the cool weekends -- highs in the low 60s, which is not usual for June in these parts! So I get to wear overalls this weekend, huzzah!

Will this pattern hold? I doubt it, but I'd love it if it did. I'd love to be able to wear overalls to the Erie County Fair, but it's always too hot by Fair time. We're knocking on the door of July, which is always my least favorite month (mainly because of the heat), so we'll see.

By the way, that plant in front of me is one of two ivy plants that we have. That one is actually grown from a cutting I made off the original plant, which you can't see because it's behind me (except for one tendril sticking out from, well, behind my arse). Usually our ivies shed most of their leaves over the winter, even though we bring them inside, but that didn't happen this year, so both of them are doing abnormally well for being this point in the summer. Also note the hummingbird feeder -- we have three, The Wife loves hummingbirds -- and the hummingbird light next to the feeder. It's solar powered, so it charges through the day and lights up at night.

I like our balcony, and I wish it got enough sun that we could have a real producing tomato plant. That line of trees there, on the right side of the photo, keeps going well past where the camera is, giving us nice shade but also enough shade that tomato plants will grow but not produce fruit. Oh well.

"She doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time."

Peter Falk died the other day, after living a good, long life of acting. Of course his most famous role was as Detective Columbo, and naturally I saw a whole bunch of variations on his standard "Oh, yes, one more thing..." quirk as Columbo on Twitter and Facebook yesterday. I love Columbo as well, although I was a bit too young to really enjoy it in its first run; I came to know Columbo through re-runs in syndication years later and through ABC's resurrection of the character in the late 80s. (One episode I recall had William Shatner as the murderer, who was also a Rush Limbaugh-type talk radio loudmouth. Shatner and Falk played off each other pretty well in that episode.)

As much as I like Columbo, though, Peter Falk's iconic role for me is -- and always will be -- the Grandfather who reads to Fred Savage in The Princess Bride. All he does is sit in a chair and gruffly read a book, but it's just so pitch-perfect a performance. The final line of The Princess Bride is, for my money, one of the best closing lines to a movie ever, and the movie gives that line to Peter Falk. The line? It's just three words, and Falk delivers it perfectly.

Here's a video I found, with Falk's entrance in the first scene and his exit in the last scene of The Princess Bride, complete with that oh, so perfect final line.



Thanks for the entertainment, Peter Falk!

Rainbow over New York

Rainbow over New York, originally uploaded by JaredsEyes.

The New York State Senate passes a bill that, when signed into law by the Governor, will make it legal for homosexuals to marry in this state.

I've been very bitter and discouraged on the political front lately, for a lot of reasons, so it's awfully heartening to see that yes, we do get it right once in a while. New York's state legislature usually resembles a tire fire that's been dropped on top of a train wreck. That they managed to make this happen is nothing short of astonishing.

Connecticut.
Iowa.
Massachusetts.
New Hampshire.
Vermont.
New York.

Forty-four to go. Who's next?

Correspondence of a Class Clown

Here's a love letter someone wrote to his beloved:

My own sweet bright light, Sally:

These trees are still young and new but already strong and sturdy -- and with a long life-span ahead of them. JUST LIKE OUR LOVE

They are also bathed in a golden glow -- as I am, when I'm in your presence. Your love bathes me in warm, golden wonderfulness.

Here's another, from the same fellow to the same lady:

The King loves his Queen -- and decrees that she shall receive all his kisses, touches, hugs and love forevermore

In return, he wants her to hold him in her heart for every moment they're apart

This same love-sick gentleman left notes for Sally, on post-its and index cards:

It you were any prettier, the Sun would be embarrassed that you outshone him.

I'm so in love with you I could burst -- but I promise to clean up the mess.

They're not all like that, though. Some of them are a bit more adult in tone, and some are downright dirty.

You're the Queen Kong of my heart.

You can climb my skyscraper anytime!

So, who is this guy? Who on Earth could have written love letters and notes like that? Well, by way of a clue, on the very first letter up above, I omitted the fact that he signed it "Pumpkin Balls".

Turns out, it was this guy:

George Carlin wrote these, and many many more, to his second wife, Sally Wade. Carlin's first wife (of more than 30 years) passed away in 1997; a year later Carlin married Sally Wade, and he remained married to her until his untimely death in 2008. Apparently they met in a bookstore, when Sally Wade's dog Spot hit it off with Carlin (who loved dogs and once claimed that "Life is a series of dogs"). Carlin would then apparently express his love for her by constantly writing her little letters, notes, postcards, and whatever else he could get his hands on.

A lot of it is goofily sentimental; a lot of it is downright odd; and a good portion of it is -- well, you still can't say a lot of that stuff on teevee. Wade has gathered a lot of this together in a book called The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade. It's all very sweet, and very Carlin. What's nice about this book is that the actual notes are reproduced, in Carlin's writing (which is sometimes very difficult to read), along with occasional doodles. Read in sequence, the book forms a portrait of the other, non-public side of Carlin's final decade. I personally found it more pleasurable to dip through the book at random.

Carlin's humor took a decidedly darker tone in his later life, but he wasn't all gloom and doom, as this book shows.

Something for Thursday

I've been on a big SF-reading kick lately (memo to self: blog about books), so here's some SF music: Michael Giacchino's end-credits suite from Star Trek 2009. I wasn't sure what to make of this score when I first heard it, a few weeks before I saw the movie, but it really grew on me to the point where it's one of my favorite scores from the last ten years of film music. It's just big, brassy, explodey-spaceshippy space opera music. I especially love how right off the bat he uses Alexander Courage's famous theme from Star Trek: The Original Series; and at about the 1:00 mark, he blends in the main theme that he composed for this film.



Of all facets of the 2009 Trek, it's the music that I think is most successful in capturing the tone of Original Series Trek at its best -- intelligent space adventure that is optimistic about our future.

Sigh....

New York State's awesome legislature has today addressed a long-standing issue that needed resolution...by making corn the state vegetable.

Corn is, of course, a grain.

I am more and more reminded of George Carlin discussing news media reporting on Mickey Mouse's birthday: "No wonder nobody takes our country seriously anymore; we spend valuable television time informing our citizens of the age of an imaginary rodent."