Something for Thursday

For some reason, versions of this with good sound to go along with good performances have been hard to find on YouTube, but I've finally tracked one down. The choir at college always ended their concerts with this (before doing a standard encore or two), and it's one of a few pieces of music that transports me back to those years in my heart each and every time I hear it. Here is Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal.

Hell's Masterchefs

Spoilerific musings on Hell's Kitchen and MasterChef!

:: Elise is freakishly annoying. She's not a bad cook, but she's lazy in the challenge loser punishments and just a generic loudmouth. And I frankly don't understand why people don't learn that taking the "I'm not here to make friends!" approach to a reality teevee competition never works.

:: If a favorite is emerging -- and it's not a strong favorite -- it's probably Will, from the Men's (Blue) team. He doesn't get a whole lot of screen time during services, which is a good thing, because screen time during services tends to go to the people who blunder. Will's main screen time comes during challenges, when he does well. I don't think he's had a dish criticized yet, and he did a 4-for-4 performance in the "cook four cuts of beef to specific doneness" challenge.

:: They made a big deal out of the 'balcony tables' overlooking the kitchen, but nothing's happened up there that I know of. Odd.

On MasterChef:

:: I like Jennifer a lot. She definitely has cooking skill, and...well, she's pretty. I'm shallow.

:: I wonder if the producers worked on Joe Bastianich's personal skills or something, but he is not nearly as obnoxiously arrogant as he was last season. He's still an occasional hard-ass, but he actually looks like he's enjoying doing the show this time out. There's a lot less of the "I shall now descend from Mt. Olympus to mingle with you groveling monkeys" air about him this season.

:: But then, it could just be that Bastianich is simply the second most insufferable prick in this year's edition of MasterChef. This guy Christian is just a complete douche. He's also a very good cook, obviously, but really -- douche. He's so convinced that he is carrying around giant bags filled with Awesome that it's been noticed by the chef judges, who are starting to take shots at him for it. Which he is ignoring. He reminds me of the awful Benjamin from two seasons back on Hell's Kitchen, a bullying toad who doubled down on his own screw-ups when one of the world's greatest chefs told him he was full of it.

:: I'd love to see a Mystery Box Challenge where contestants are not given a bunch of "the most amazing" ingredients, but rather, a whole bunch of crap. I'd like to see a challenge where they're told to make something decent out of beef kidneys, regular old American white bread, Velveeta, and stuff like that. Now there would be a serious Challenge!

That's about it. More in a few weeks, probably.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Laundry. Do you have a set "laundry day", or do you take the "Huh, laundry pile's gettin' pretty big and/or I'm out of work pants" approach to deciding it's time to run a few loads through the washer?

You disappoint me, Mr. Quint.

I've been enjoying the "Behind the Scenes Pic of the Day" feature over at AICN for quite a while now, even if it's curated by 'Quint', who is my least favorite of the regular AICN commentators. I think that Quint tends to be full of crap and tends to get on top of his hobbyhorses and ride them for broke. A good example of the former? In today's Behind the Scenes pic, which comes from Dr. No, Quint reveals what he thinks to be the three best Bond movies: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball.

One of those titles I can see. The other two? No way in hell.

Cool Behind the Scenes pic, though.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...."

I never liked Charles Dickens.

My first encounter with Dickens was in seventh grade, when we read A Christmas Carol. This was OK, as those things went. The story is very famous and everybody knows it and it's not a long story, so reading it wasn't terribly difficult. I was less than thrilled, however, two years later when another English teacher handed out copies of David Copperfield, which I hated. Hated hated hated it. I just couldn't see the point of the book, I thought the characters were all a bunch of melodramatic dunderheads, and as soon as the teacher told us how Dickens serialized his novels, I decided that David Copperfield and its ilk were basically soap operas for the Victorian age. And dead certain was I in these convictions, even though my own mother, when I opined thusly, said: "When it comes to literature, you're pretty wet behind the ears."

What can I say? If I had a nickel for every stupid thing I've ever believed, to paraphrase Stephen King, I could buy myself a pretty nice steak dinner. I've suspected for years that I was full of crap when it came to Dickens, but I never tried to rectify that situation by, you know, reading one of his books until just a few months ago, when I decided to give A Tale of Two Cities a go.

Now, the problem here was that I already knew how the book ended. I didn't know all of the plot particulars, by any means, but I knew – from watching a teevee movie version of the book years ago – that the plot basically hinges on these two guys, one an Englishman and one a Frenchman, who happen to look nearly identical to one another, and I knew that the Englishman decides to save the Frenchman from the guillotine by putting himself in the other guy's place and going to the guillotine for him. Basically I was watching these events unfold and see how the story got from Point A to Point B.

When I decided to read A Tale of Two Cities, I thought it might be fun to replicate the original reading experience in a way. As the book was serialized, the chapters are all fairly brief, so what I planned to do was read two chapters a week: one on Sunday, and one on Wednesday. I think the actual publication frequency in Dickens's day was a bit less frequent than that, but I figured that in this way I would be able to experience the book in something approaching the way the original readers did: in small pieces, with the story being doled out slowly, over time, in a way that they couldn't do anything about.

This lasted until Chapter six or seven, somewhere in there. From that point, I was hooked and read the thing every day. I couldn't stop, and I certainly couldn't wait a few days to read more of it. I soon had to parcel it out a bit, because I didn't want to finish it too quickly. I didn't want the book to end.

All the elements were there: the intrigue in revolution-era France, with the commoners rising up against the aristocracy and sometimes proving to be little better than their previous superiors; the long queues of condemned prisoners being brought to the guillotine; a love triangle that unfolds in front of this increasingly tense and violent backdrop; hiss-worthy villains whose comeuppance cannot come soon enough; heroic acts of self-sacrifice and redemption. I couldn't be happier that I decided to give A Tale of Two Cities a try, because it propelled me along in a way that few books do. As the book's concluding chapters neared, I found myself wishing that I actually didn't know how it ended, and that I could come to Sidney Carton's final moments unsullied by foreknowledge. I wondered what it must have been like, having this amazing story dolled out, one short chapter at a time, and I can only imagine the gasps of the readers – and more than a few tears – as they realized just what was involved in Sidney Carton's final plan for Darnay and his final honoring of his pledge to Lucy to make any sacrifice that she might be happy.

The book's opening sentence – "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." -- is justly famous, as is the book's closing sentence (alluded to in the title of this post). The title is evocative, and it seems to me that it's not just referring to Paris and London, but to the two Parises, the Paris of the wealthy aristocrat who can think to make atonement for accidentally running over and killing a commoner's child by throwing his father a single coin, and the Paris of the poor, the Paris of those very commoners, where things like this can happen:

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud- embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

What an astonishing, amazing, heartbreak of a book. A Tale of Two Cities is one of those books that makes me temporarily despair as a reader ("What can I possibly read next to rival that?") and as a writer ("That book is on a plane of existence that I'll never reach."). It also makes me rejoice as a reader and a writer, on much the same grounds.

I wonder if my ninth grade English teacher is still around somewhere. I'd like to tell her that I'm ready to give David Copperfield a better shot.

Notes on the PopStuff

Some thoughts on a bit of pop culture stuff of late:

:: Here is actor Henry Cavill as Superman in the new movie about Superman, titled...Man of Steel.

In all honesty, I'm just not very thrilled with this. He looks OK, himself, although I wonder why the "Superman Curl" is missing from the middle of his forehead. The costume, however, bugs me. Proportionally it looks fine, but I hate that texture. I wonder why Hollywood decided that superhero costumes need to not look like cloth anymore; this looks like it was sewn from the material they use to make basketballs. I'm also not thrilled with the washed-out colors. I hope the film doesn't look like this.

:: A sequel to Cosmos is on the way, apparently. I'm kind of glad to hear this, but any such project will be missing one key element: the poetical prose of Carl Sagan. The new show will be "hosted" by PBS science show mainstay Neil deGrasse Tyson. I hope this is done well, and doesn't pander at all.

Of course, there has already been a sequel to Cosmos, at least in print: Sagan's own book Pale Blue Dot. (I excerpted this book once, here.)

:: Oh my God, they've killed Sean Bean!



You bastards!

[Insert joke about cutting the cheese here]

IBM Gouda Cutter At the Cheese Boutique, originally uploaded by BuffaloPundit.

Alan Bedenko posted this photo in his Flickr stream, and I had to post it here. Obviously it's a big cheese sitting inside some kind of cutting tool, which I at first wondered if it was some kind of antique miter saw...but Alan points out that it's actually a tool once manufactured for the purpose of cutting Gouda cheese. And it was made by IBM, believe it or not! If you click through to the big version, you can see "International Business Machines" engraved on that nameplate.

Who knew that IBM was once making food service tools? And I wonder what Apple's cheese-cutting implements looked like?

Wow, what was in the coffee today?!

Today at work, when I went to my break, I sat down with a legal pad to do a bit of outlining. Now, I've never been one to do a lot of outlining when I write. Mainly, I prefer to keep a few rough ideas in my head and then charge toward an ending, or I prefer to figure out my characters and then get them into a situation and see what they do. For the Space Opera project, though, I've found the going a bit rougher, to the point where a few months ago I realized I'd made the proverbial Wrong Turn in Albuquerque and ended up setting aside three whole finished chapters.

At that point, I decided to try an outline. Not a super-strict one, not a scene-by-scene and blow-by-blow accounting of everything that would happen, and not for the rest of the book -- just some brainstorming on the next two or three chapters from that point. It worked wonders, and those chapters have flowed pretty well. But now I'm where my last bit of outlining left off, so I sat down to repeat the process.

And suddenly...about eighty percent of the remaining plot of the book suddenly sprang into my head. I figured it all out, along with several plot twists that should lend excitement, and some character motivations that I'd been struggling with (one character in particular has to do something at some point -- this person just has to do this thing -- but I couldn't figure out why they had to do it, until now).

It's a heady moment, when you finally see the story in front of you. I haven't had that feeling in a long time. Back to the Planet of Mystery!

(No, it's not called the "Planet of Mystery" in the book. Nor is the book called "Planet of Mystery". Even though, right now, I kinda wish both of those things were true.)

Sentential Links #255

Two hundred fifty-five! I've always liked the number 255. It goes back to when I used to noodle around with my old Commodore VIC-20, writing little programs in BASIC. The number 255 came up a lot back then, because values for the POKE statement had to be between O and 255. Anyway:

:: I’ve long been confused by the saying that people come into one’s life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. To me, it actually makes more sense to say that every single person comes into one’s life for a reason, yet some of those people hang around for a season and others for a lifetime. (Maybe I'm just cynical, but the older I get, the less I believe that anything happens for "a reason". But I do wish it was the other way around.)

:: For now I’ll just give you a catch phrase: Shakespeare is not Dr. Phil. Reading Shakespeare is not an occasion for extracting neat, packaged “lessons” about life, love, or lawyering. (The fact that he is so quotable obscures this.) If Shakespeare had meant to write an advice manual, he would have written an advice manual. He was demonstrably well acquainted with the two main models for such a manual widely available in Renaissance Europe, Machiavelli and Montaigne. (Couldn't agree more. I'd almost say the same for the Bible...someone tells me that we should all live according to the Bible, there's never a convincing answer to my follow-up question, "Which part?" New blog to me, btw.)

:: Lately, when I read other blogs, I find myself getting more and more annoyed with "guest bloggers." I'm not reading Blogger X to get the thoughts of someone else, I want Blogger X. (I agree. I rarely read a blog when it's given over to guest-bloggers, and I myself have never once deployed a guest blogger here.)

:: So, always remember, when the shit is going down, Your Own Mask First.

:: If I'm going to get my sluttysparkle outfits out and make up my face and drink blue and purple drinks and dance with my friends, I do not want to do it to music that is sad as shit or that wants to hurt me (or make me hurt myself). (I'm not one for dancing, really, but I do agree with this. I much prefer pop music that sounds happy. Which is why...(oh lord)...I kinda dig some of Lady Gaga's songs. There, I said it.)

:: It's hard to envision a more thorough case of a lack of ideas, to come up with a more damning case of creative bankruptcy. Paramount has rebooted the franchise because of all that pesky continuity...and then all they can come up with is to "re-imagine" retell the old stories?? (I commented over on Snell's post about my lack of enthusiasm for the Star Trek reboot, for much the same reason. We're not going to get new stories; we're going to get the superhero-ization of Trek, where every time a new film is announced, everyone starts clamoring to know "who the villain is".)

:: It's never too late to write what you might have been writing. (This is utterly, absolutely true. As I noted in her comments, my space opera work-in-progress is a recycled story idea from back when I was happily writing Star Wars fanfic. It's got a whole new cast now, but the story is still there. Speaking of which, I've got to do some work on that story now!)

More next week!

News, snooze....

I know, two posts about the Buffalo News in one day...but seriously, BuffNews, what in the heck is this? Political reporter/columnist Bob McCarthy spends his last two grafs venting about a local blogger.

A local blogger named Chris Smith has been downright giddy in recent days criticizing The Buffalo News for reporting that SEIU Local 1199 is paying employee Jennifer Hibit to manage Poloncarz’s campaign for county executive. Around here, something unusual and of interest to voters makes a good story.

But not over at WNY Media Network, where Smith toils. More important to the network, apparently, is the $3,750 Poloncarz paid to WNY Media Network for website design and video editing, according to state campaign finance records. In fact, the same records show WNY Media Network has handled Poloncarz’s video campaign for years.

Some local bloggers receive money from politicians. The Politics Column does not — and that says it all.

Well, that's fascinating stuff, right there. You've got all the hallmarks of a newspaper reporter who still -- in 2011, ferchrissakes -- thinks that bloggers are just dirty little folk who pound out missives without fear of retribution, or something. If he'd had more column space, I'm sure McCarthy would have thrown something in there about Chris's mom's basement, his Cheeto-stained fingers, and his pasty-white complexion. (Full disclosure: I've been reading Christopher Smith for years. But I'm not affiliated with WNYMedia.net, I don't get paid by anybody to blog, I have never accepted money from a candidate, et cetera, yada yada yada, sotto voce, e pluribus unum.)

What's interesting here is that McCarthy completely ignores any of the substance of whatever it was that Chris Smith wrote and went straight for the character attack. Now, I don't know what the substance of whatever it was that Chris Smith wrote might be, because...well, I just don't care. What does interest me is a newspaper columnist ignoring criticism entirely and instead directly accusing Chris of receiving money from a local politician. Nothing like a little ad hominem in your Sunday reading, huh? This is not just weak tea, it's lazy tea. Weak tea is what you get when you don't steep the tea long enough. Bob McCarthy didn't even take the tea bag out of the foil package before throwing it into water he didn't bother to boil. That's how lazy this is.

One might wonder just how crap like this made it past the editors and into print, but then you realize that the Editor at the News is only just now getting up off her fainting couch after learning that people like the paper for the coupons. That shocking revelation must have her seriously off her game.

(Oh, and as to the "They only love us for the coupons!" thing? Well, I wonder why it is that Buffalo News readers might value the paper highly for its large amount of coupons and ad circulars. I wonder just why that might be....

Notice no parallel headline trumpeting "Over 200,000 words of Pure Journalism Goodness!)

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Cracked.com's 5 Biggest Promotional Disasters lists five promotional offers that companies ran that ended up backfiring badly. They left out my favorite, which happened to Pizza Hut back when I was working for them. In 1997,the PH's in the Baltimore area (which I assume to have been franchised) ran a promotion connected with the Baltimore Ravens, in which for every sack the Ravens recorded, they'd knock $1.00 off the price of a large pizza. (This was a few years before the Ravens' defense developed into one of the best defensive units ever.) Well, along came a game against the Philadelphia Eagles, against whom the Ravens racked up nine sacks. Honoring the deal meant that you could get a large pizza from Pizza Hut for under two bucks. They made more than 15000 large pizzas (not sure over how many locations) in a four-hour period, and I assume that many of those were sold for either pennies over cost or at an outright loss. Whoops!

:: I never once thought about how slugs mate in all my life, until yesterday, when PZ Myers posted this video. It's one of the most fascinatingly wonderful things I've ever seen.



:: Astronaut Suicides. Your mileage may vary, but I found this to be a near-perfect blend of black humor and goofball absurdity.

More next week!

Saturday Centus (Sunday edition)

Day late, but I have a good excuse! Really! This week we have a shortened word count -- only fifty words, plus our prompt -- but how hard can that be, really? Time for some good old science (micro)fiction!

James entered the generation ship's flight-deck after being awoken first from two hundred years of cryo-sleep. All systems were nominal, and soon he'd awaken his fellow five hundred colonists. First, though, he wanted to see their new star. He opened the viewport to white light, and then he softly sang.

"You are my sunshine...."

(A meta-writing note: I know that a lot of Centus participants are not SF fans, so when I do SF, I try not to engage in much use of some jargon that would be familiar to regular SF readers. In order to get the word count down, though, I had to use just such a term in my entry this week. So, for those wondering what a "generation ship" is, here you go!)

(Oh, and by the way, hey, Centus participants! I'm doing my twice-yearly Ask Me Anything! game, in which I solicit people to pose questions to me on the blog, which I then answer later in the month. I do this in February and August. If anyone wants to ask a question, just leave it in comments on this post. Questions can be serious or silly -- you can ask me serious questions about writing, or you can ask me things like "Hey, who did write the Book Of Love?" Anything goes, so join in if you wish!)

The Buffalo News has a sad....

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything more unseemly than last week's column in the Buffalo News by editor Margaret Sullivan, in which a focus group of readers revealed that what they liked most about the paper was the selection of coupons. At least, that is, not until this week, when a bunch of other readers chime in to say "We like more than the coupons!".

So today we have the Editor of the Buffalo News writing a column that is mostly cut-and-pasted from a series of e-mails in order to give the paper a sense of self-satisfaction. It's almost embarrassing to read this stuff. Exactly when did modern journalism become so damned masturbatory? There's a history to be written here, I think.

Page One: The Lord of the Rings

Page One: The Lord of the Rings, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I started "Page One" with The Hobbit, so here is page one of The Lord of the Rings. I love how the books open with contrasting chapter titles.

Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Sorry, folks, but yesterday was one of those "Wow, do I got a lot goin' on!" days. Not a bad day at all, just not a day that left a whole lot of time for posting here.

Anyhow...Ennio Morricone is not one of my favorite film composers, for various reasons (the main one being that I find a lot of his music emotionally distant), but he's been extremely prolific over the years, and thus I do like some of his work. Here is a selection from his score to the 1979 Jaws rip-off flick, Orca.



Happy Friday!

A reminder: Queries needed for Ask Me Anything!

A reminder, folks: Ask Me Anything! August 2011 is underway. Post questions in comments on this post, or via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pony Express. No limit on questions! No subject matter off limits (although answers may not be what you expect)! Every answer of value must GO!!!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

So, how hot is it where you are? And how do you cope? Are you a fan of heat, or is heat something you endure because you like most other aspects of where you live?

Blasters and spaceships, oh my!

I don't know what it is, but for some reason, in the warmer months my reading tastes gravitate strongly toward science fiction (and the occasional horror book). I associate fantasy with the cooler months. Why this is, I've never really figured out; I've read many a fantasy novel set in warm locales, so it's not as if the cooling weather puts me in mind of the snowy journeys through the Misty Mountains in The Lord of the Rings. This isn't to say that I won't read any fantasy at all during the warm periods, but...well, summer is when I want lots of exploding spaceships.

So, here's the skinny on three space opera books I've read of late!

:: The first was, technically, a re-read of The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the first novel in the ongoing saga of Miles Vorkosigan, one of the most famous characters in contemporary SF. I read this book before, several years ago, and I enjoyed it, but for one reason or another I never continued with the Vorkosigan series. No real reason why, really; I just never got around to it until I'd reached a point where I figured that if I was going to continue with the series, I should just start over.

The Warrior's Apprentice starts with Miles Vorkosigan undergoing the final physical trial he needs to complete before he can enter the military service of Barrayar, his homeworld. Barrayar places supreme importance on its military, but getting in will be difficult for Miles, because he is physically disabled. He is barely five feet tall, and his bones are extremely brittle and prone to breaking. Sure enough, he breaks both his legs in the first minutes of the trial, and Miles is forced to take on the life of a mercenary.

He actually isn't really forced into that life, per se, so much as he just kind of steps into one situation after another that causes a mercenary crew to just naturally gravitate toward him. It's a fascinating thing that Bujold does here: she depicts a character with enormous personal magnetism who uses it to his advantage without ever really seeming totally aware of it.

The Miles Vorkosigan tales aren't "sensawunda" space operas; they're as character-driven as just about any story can be. I look forward to reading more of them.

:: Starpilot's Grave, by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald, is the second book in their "Mageworlds" series. The adventures of Beka Rosselin-Metadi continue, along with her various friends from the first book, The Price of the Stars. The earlier book established a galaxy that is post-war, a war against a group of villains hailing from 'the Mageworlds'. Here, Doyle and MacDonald set up the resumption of those hostilities, and by the end of the book, war has broken out again, with our heroine, Beka Rosselin-Metadi, assuming a leadership rule. Not a whole lot that happens in this book is a surprise, as it is clearly setting up the third act in the trilogy. It's all somewhat Star Wars-like, in general feel, and it's a fun read that isn't terribly demanding. My main complaint, as with Price of the Stars, is that there is still little explanation as to who the Mages actually are or why they are to be feared. I hope this is explained more in the final volume.

:: Finally, John Scalzi's The Last Colony was the third and final book in his Old Man's War trilogy, until he went and added a fourth book, making it not a trilogy anymore. Oh well. As with the first two books, this is a fast-paced and involving read that suggests a whole bunch of nifty Sfnal questions without slowing the pace enough to delve into answers. We rejoin our heroes from the first novel, John Perry and his wife Jane Sagan, who have adopted a girl named Zoe from the second book. They are asked by the Colonial government to head up a secret colony whose location is to be kept secret...because, it turns out, an alliance of aliens is systematically destroying colonies they deem to be "unauthorized". Lots of hilarity ensues: resistance against the aliens, coupled with the fact that they can no longer rely on their own government to be honest with them or give them aid.

Some of my key questions about this whole universe, dating back to Old Man's War, are finally explained, which is nice, and Scalzi gets a pot boiling quite nicely, creating a definite sense of tension as he depicts on the one hand an alien force that seems well nigh unstoppable and on the other depicts a group of colonists struggling to find an answer to a problem that is seemingly unsolvable. My main issue with the book lies with the nature of the final solution itself; in all honesty, it kind of seems to come out of left field and only barely manages to avoid feeling like an outright deus ex machina. But it's my understanding that some of this background is explained in a fourth book in the series, which focuses on the Perrys' daughter, Zoe.

More space opera to come!

Ask Me Anything! August 2011 edition

It's that time again -- Ask Me Anything! This used to be a February-only thing, but seeing as how it seems silly to only do it once a year, we now do it twice a year. Or something like that. Anyhow, all queries are welcome -- serious queries, unserious queries, queries about any topic at all.

Leave queries in comments herein, or e-mail them, or get 'em to me via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+. I'm everywhere, I am. It's like all the people who are normally around you are me! (I got that from an old SNL sketch in which Phil Hartman plays a drill sergeant.)

Anyway, the floor is yours, folks: Ask Me Anything!

UPDATE: There is no limit on the number of questions allowed. If you have eleven things you want to ask, go ahead and ask all eleven!

Sentential Links #254

Linkage (concentrating this week on blogs I haven't perused in a while):

:: Its pretty simple idea, an old story. A magic lamp that grants wishes. At the core,that is what the Green Lantern story is. Alladin. Sure the details have changed, the ring, the Corps, the Guardians, but in the end, the Lantern and it’s power is something we all have wanted. The ability to take what we picture on our minds and make it real.

:: Planking squirrels. What will they think of next?

:: Philadelphia is the worst place for genealogy I have ever seen.

:: Gee, I wonder why tech blogs are still, even in 2011, regarded as cesspools?

:: What we know of the Ninth's Finale suggests that Bruckner was planning no simple, triumphal answers to such questions. Faith would have won out in the end, but not without an enormous struggle, bordering on madness. At the end of his life, Bruckner was seen reciting the Lord's Prayer at the top of his voice, repeating each line for emphasis. He is also said to have suggested that if he did not live to finish the Ninth then God would have only Himself to blame. (I sometimes think I don't listen to enough Bruckner...and then I listen to some Bruckner. Imagine a meal of French toast made with extremely thick slices of pumpernickel bread, with no syrup. That's Bruckner.)

:: Between the three of us we asked about the editing process, how the character of Thrawn was created, how to get a foot in the editorial door, the issues with long series and different authors, playing in George's driveway, writing characters that other authors have created, and so many other tidbits that were washed away in the sheer excitement of sitting at that table. I know I'm not the first person to ask about Thrawn, but I couldn't help it.

:: Cold makes New Yorkers bundle up and scurry along and lets us indulge our natural tendency to stay out of each other's way. Heat takes away the physical barriers and leaves us contemplating each other unadorned, and that's by no means always a good thing.

More next week!