Photos from the White House

I really love the White House Flickr photostream, and I hope that even if there's a new President in a little over a year (which I don't hope happens at all, but if it does) that the next administration keeps doing this. White House photography just fascinates me, no matter who the President is. Here's a random selection of photos that I particularly like (this service only began with the Obama administration):











































Seriously, I could post a hundred more of these. I love this stuff.

And man, does the President keep a clean desk or what? Ye Gods! He's got so little stuff on his desk that if he wants to do some of his own computer work, he has to go to an adjoining office!

Go team!

I don't really have a whole lot to say about football right now, except for a couple of random observations:

:: Thank God that Tebow-mania is over for a while.

:: Of course, if ending Tebow-mania comes at the price of seeing St. Tom lift another Lombardi trophy, then I'm not sure it's worth it.

:: Go Giants and Ravens.

:: Note to future NFL teams: don't win any more than 14 games in the regular season. Six teams have won 15 or more games, and of those, only the first two -- the 1984 49ers and the 1985 Bears -- won the Super Bowl. Of the others, only the 2007 Patriots even made the Super Bowl, and they lost. The other three -- 1998 Vikings, 2004 Steelers, 2011 Packers -- didn't even get there.

That's about it. Two more chances for someone to end St. Tom's season with a loss. Let's go!

Sentential Links

Linkage....

:: There's a sense that a lot of us have that our public policy ought to be aiming to produce large gains for everyone. You often hear that for one reason or another the United States "can't afford" this or that. We "can't afford" to pay people Social Security benefits. We "can't afford" to build high-speed trains. We "can't afford" to give everyone early childhood education. But why can't we afford this stuff? Are we a poor country? No, we're not. We're one of the richest countries that's ever existed. Are we a poorer country than we used to be? No, we're not. But a very large share of the gains we've made over the past three decades have gone to a relatively small number of people. If the gains had been broadly shared, then the burden of paying for that basic infrastructure and public services would have to be very broadly shared. But the gains have been very concentrated, and so if we're going to afford that stuff, a large share of the revenue has to come from the people who've gotten the money.

That's not envy, that's math.

:: I could use a little Essence of Yo in my life! (I have never been able to make a yo-yo work. That is all.)

:: I will no longer be talking to Ron Paul supporters about Ron Paul. Paulites are like ultra-conservatives who believe in magic. Or they're just dumbass college kids who want marijuana legalized enough to not pay attention to the monstrous amount of racism and sexism this man spouts. I'm done with them. "Educate yourself" they always tell me. I have no choice but to assume this is meant as irony. (The most loud-mouthed Paul supporter I know is a college student who is also a 9-11 conspiracy theorist. I don't bother with Paulites anymore, except to occasionally wander into a pro-Paul discussion, ask something like "So what's the excuse-of-the-day for Paul's racist newsletters?" and then wander off without waiting to see what the answer is. Great fun!)

:: Too terrified to hurl themselves from a bridge or put a shotgun in their mouths or even take up smoking, they at least hope that each day is the day that a bag of sodium-laden chips triggers a massive stroke, after which would come blessed emptiness. But even rides on the carousel of death are now denied to them by their cruel creator. (Making fun of Funky Winkerbean is one of life's finer pleasures.)

:: To those who pontificate anxiously that the Internet keeps us separate and isolated from one another: You literally do not know what you are talking about. This PSA has been brought to you by Sheil-babe. (Preach it!)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

::  No. No no a thousand times NO.

::  Charles Stross predicts the future, part one and part two. Fascinating reading, even if I personally find his vision of the future a little...depressing.

::  A bit of 'inside baseball' on this one...but fine Buffalo blogger (whom I've known for years now) Alan Bedenko has been waging a somewhat mercurial campaign against Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun, whose writing tends to be harmlessly facile. The campaign seems a bit odd to me, but then, one would hope for better food writing in the region's most prominent regular publication, and that we don't have it seems to reinforce notions of Buffalo being a parochial backwater locale where the restaurant scene is too dominated by the likes of Applebee's. But whatever...a month ago, Alan wrote a post in which he noted that some odd factual claims by the owner of a restaurant Okun reviewed went unchecked, with hilarious results. Somehow -- and there's no doubt Alan didn't expect this -- he scratched the surface of something whose underbelly is very seedy indeed, and the comments on that post have been raging ever since. It's quite a thing to behold.

More next week!

Shut up, Joe. Just SHUT UP.

Warning: rant ahead!

"Greetings, Programs!"

"The Grid – a digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day...."

"You got in!"

"That's right, man! I got in."

The first time I realized, as a kid, that there were limits to how far my interests intersected with most of the other kids was when a movie came out in 1982 called TRON.

I was, probably, the 'nerd' in school, although I wasn't walking around with my button-downed shirt tucked into my too-high pants and my writing instruments tucked into a pocket protector. I didn't wear a tie to school. (I actually loathe neckties, I didn't learn to tie one until I was 24, and I only own exactly one necktie right now whose location in the bedroom I don't even know and have not worn since a job interview in 2003. But that's another topic.) I didn't know a blessed thing about sports, so when it came time to play football or softball in gym class, I'd have to have the games explained to me.

But even so, to be in fifth and sixth grade in the early 1980s meant that we were all, nerds and jocks, part of "Star Wars nation". By this I mean that, for the most part, we all saw the same movies, so even if I had no input on conversations of the weekend's football games, I could still join in with speculations on whether or not Han Solo would return from his carbonite prison, or talk about how bad-ass Indiana Jones was, and so on. I had a friend who was as big a fan of the James Bond movies as I was, so we had those. And so on.

But along came TRON, which I wanted to see because it looked freakishly cool. And I did see it that summer, planning to discuss it with all my friends that fall when I saw them again (TRON was a summer movie). To me, TRON was the obvious next thing in the line from Jaws to Star Wars to Close Encounters to The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark to ET. However, to my dismay, not one of my friends saw TRON. I remember a couple of abortive "Hey, did you see TRON?" conversations, all of which ended with something like, "Is that the weird movie inside the computer" or something? Yes. Yes, it was. At the time I was known for various reasons as the resident 'computer nerd', so it stood to reason that I'd like the computer movie. But computers weren't ubiquitous just yet.

(Now, in truth, I wasn't that big of a computer geek. I loved them, and I dabbled, but I never really had the determination to dig as deeply into computers as I could have, and anyway, a few years later my nascent fascination for computers took a big developmental hit when I got bitten by a beast called music. There's an alternate me, though, in some other universe, in which I became one hell of a hacker who eventually wrote programs for NASA. And there's still another alternate me, I would wager, that also became a hacker but for shadowy governments and groups based in Eastern Europe. That guy sports a goatee and likes to sit in quite contemplation, steepling his fingers together as be mulls over what manner of mayhem he wishes to unleash upon cyberspace this week.)

Now, this wasn't exactly a traumatic experience. OK, the other kids didn't see TRON. No biggie. I didn't watch football, they didn't see TRON or appreciate Star Trek. It was OK. But not until college would I find other fellow travelers who'd seen and liked TRON. The movie was my first intimation of a thing that might later be called "geek culture", but at the time, it was an underground thing. The geeks hadn't taken over the world just yet, and in truth, back then it didn't much feel like they would. So into my memory banks went TRON, filed under "Things I Like That Not A Lot Of Other People Did". I certainly never figured that TRON would get a sequel, even though the innards of the ENCOM system seemed like such fertile ground for exploration.

Thus, imagine my surprise when a sequel, to be called TRON Legacy, was announced.

I suppose it was inevitable, given Hollywood's current fetish for remakes and reboots and other ways of working with old properties instead of developing new ones. Lots of times, these kinds of projects make me roll my eyes, but others make me think, "Hmmmm, why not?" (And I'd be outright lying if I didn't admit that a part of me is just waiting for Firefly to get old enough for someone in a suit in Hollywood to say, "Hey, howzabout we reboot that?" Of course, with my luck, Joss Whedon will have no involvement and Roland Emmerich will direct a script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.)

I liked what I saw of the trailers to TRON Legacy, which seemed to be implying a grittier "World Inside the Computer" than the original, with a look that was unmistakably TRON but also slightly Matrix-influenced. And, even though the movie itself got generally mixed reviews, I found myself really enjoying it. Really enjoying it. TRON Legacy was, for me, like scratching a spot that I didn't realize was itchy until I touched it.

In terms of story, TRON Legacy really doesn't break a whole lot of new ground. It gives us the kid (Sam Flynn) with the absentee father (Kevin Flynn) who has a lot of issues with responsibility and a willingness to flaunt danger, but who is called upon to embark on a Quest of sorts when he receives an odd piece of information that may bear on his father's fate. In Sam's case, Kevin Flynn's old friend Alan Bradley tells him that he's just received a message from Kevin Flynn's old video game arcade, a place that has been shut down for years. Sam goes there, finds a hidden door that leads to a secret computer lab set-up, and when he starts tinkering around, a laser-imager-thing fires up, pulling Sam into "the Grid", as the System is known.

The Grid, in the movie, is clearly the World Inside the Computer from the first film, fast-forwarded twenty-eight years or so. The script used terms like "Grid" instead of other terms that we might expect, such as "The Net", which seems to cover over a conceptual point that the film never really addresses: how the World Inside the Computer of TRON would be given the surging of Moore's Law and of the development of the Internet. Maybe a future sequel (one is said to already be in development) would look into this sort of thing: what would viruses be like in the World Inside the Computer? And how would Programs – depicted as people in the System – be affected by things like DRM? But maybe this sort of thing would be too esoteric.

TRON, though, didn't really deal with computer issues either, even for the computers of the 1980s. There was never really a sense of how bad things would be for humans – 'Users' – if the Master Control Program succeeded in taking over the entire system. Ultimately, the World Inside the Computer was a setting for a not-terribly-original story of plucky heroes defying the odds against a tyrannical villain; what was unique was the film's look and the paraphernalia of the story. A lack of originality in the original story can be overlooked, if at the same time we're watching things like Recognizers, Sailships, and, of course, light-cycles. All this is, of course, mainly because TRON purported to be inspired by the just-starting-to-snowball computer revolution, but what really inspired TRON was the then-in-full-swing video arcade game craze.

TRON Legacy shows us a World Inside the Computer where things have gone wrong since the original events that, at the time, were thought to be setting the stage for a Golden Age in that world. What happened? Why? And how does it involve Kevin Flynn, and by extension, his son Sam? This is the story of the film, which involves some of the programs from the original film, mainly Flynn's alter-ego program CLU. (Now, CLU had been executed – 'derezzed', short for 'deresolution', in TRON lingo – in the original film, so either Flynn had a backup CLU or this is CLU 2.0. The film doesn't say, but there's an interesting question to be explored in the TRONiverse regarding the ontological status of backups, which would literally be identical copies of programs! In a way, they'd be more perfect than clones, wouldn't they? Bring on TRON Episode III: Attack of the Backup Copies!)

TRON Legacy makes no real effort, as I note above, to 'update' the TRONiverse in a way that reflects what we now know about computers. Instead, it goes on its way, creating its own terminologies for the System. Thus we have a subplot involving Flynn's inadvertent creation of a sentient 'race' of programs, which are then summarily destroyed by CLU; what kinds of programs would those be, anyway? TRON Legacy studiously avoids drawing parallels between what happens in the Grid and what happens in our own computers, so again, we have a story that's unfolding in an amazing-looking world that's more organic and less stylized than the blocky, 8-bit-looking world of TRON. TRON Legacy is visually stunning, there's no doubt about that. One stylistic tic of the film that I noticed in a big way is the symmetrical construction of a good many of the big, establishing shots. If you like symmetry in your movie visuals, TRON Legacy is your movie. Another is that the film is firmly entrenched in the much-derided "teal and orange" tradition which is currently at sway in movies. I'm of mixed mind on this. On the one hand, I'm tired of the limited color scheme in movies today. But on the other, it works very well in TRON Legacy, seeming like an extension of the original film's blue-and-red.

So what about that story, then? In terms of the dressings of the Grid, there's not a lot new – it all simply looks a lot better now. The light-cycle sequence in the new film is amazing, and there are more battle scenes involving the discs that Programs wear on their backs. There is a love story and there is a redemption story and there is the whole father-and-son story, which has double parallels because Kevin Flynn is not just Sam's father, but in a very real way, he is CLU's father as well. Jeff Bridges plays Flynn this time out as equal parts Obi Wan Kenobi and The Dude, to good effect, saying things like "It's amazing how productive doing nothing can be." We're not entirely sure how he's managed to survive twenty-plus years in the Grid, but it doesn't really matter. Bridges does double-duty, actually, also playing CLU with scenery-chewing malevolence. (He's also been digitally 'enyouthened', to make up a word on the spot, thus solving the problem of having CLU look like the Jeff Bridges of 1982 – or at least more like that than the Bridges of 2010.)

Sam Flynn is a pretty interesting character, too. On the one hand, he's your standard 'young man with daddy issues and trouble with responsibility', but he's not sullen or bitter, which is nice. It would have been too easy to have Sam brooding his way through the film, but he doesn't; he engages with the world, partly accepting it and partly disbelieving it.

The performance of the film, though, belongs to Olivia Wilde as Quorra, Kevin Flynn's main ally in the Grid. She is a blend of strength and intelligence and raw naivete, a program who serves a User incarnated before her, and who learns more about the world of the Users than anyone in the film should probably know. She shows up almost out of the blue, to help Sam, and we soon learn that she is Kevin Flynn's closest ally in the Grid – his only ally in the Grid, actually. She is also deeply interested in the world of the Users, having read the books that Kevin Flynn has surrounded himself with in his Grid apartment, but not quite understanding certain details:

QUORRA: Between you and me, Jules Verne is my favorite. Do you know Jules Verne?

SAM: Sure.

QUORRA: What's he like?

At the end of the film, Sam Flynn is able to bring Quorra with him into the 'real world', the world of the Users, and as the film closes, he is driving along on his motorcycle with Quorra clinging to his back as she looks with wonder on the sunset for the first time. Wilde does something here that amazes me: she doesn't so the slack-jawed stare that you might expect. Instead, she takes in the sunset, and then she turns back forward to lower her face and bury it in Sam's back, in a gesture of intimacy that's probably best saved for the back of a motorcycle. But even as she lowers her face, her eyes again flick upward and around, to see what she might see. She can't decide what to look at, but she doesn't want to stop looking, even as she acts on feelings for the son of her hero. Wilde's performance in TRON Legacy is pitch-perfect, and it is her character that is key to the whole film. Quorra's journey is the longest one in the film, and Wilde's portrayal of her quiet joy upon reaching her journey's goal is absolutely wonderful.

The music for the original TRON was provided by pioneering synthesizer composer Wendy Carlos. Given that film's video game subtext, the music was crafted to sound like video game music (and then was used in the actual TRON video game, which was, incidentally, a pretty awesome damned arcade game in itself!). TRON Legacy's deepening of the textures of its world calls for more intricate music, and it is provided by techno group Daft Punk, in what is frankly one of the finer electronic scores I've heard for a movie. It is otherworldly, sometimes rhythmically pounding and at other times dreamy, but almost always melodic and haunting. This is the kind of film music that makes me laugh when I hear other film music fans talk about how that particular art's better days are farther and farther in our past.

I would not contend that TRON Legacy is a great film. But it is a slick and extremely well-constructed entertainment.

Page One: The Dark Phoenix Saga (Uncanny X-Men)

Page One: The Phoenix Saga (Uncanny X-Men), originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

My main era of comics reading was in the mid to late 1980s, spanning roughly the latter half of seventh grade until the end of my senior year, when I decided to pretty much stop reading comics on the basis that there was no way I was going to be able to afford all my monthly titles whilst in school.

For the most part I was a Marvel fan. There were titles that I didn't much care for, but I really grooved on The Uncanny X-Men from the first time I read it (issue #183 or thereabouts, my first issue being one in which Peter Rasputin has to tell Kitty Pryde about a girl he'd met on an alien planet). My entrance into the Marvel Universe was pretty much of the "jump in, buy comics, read 'em and put it all together in my head" variety, but back then, you could do that. Sure, the Marvel Universe had tons of continuity going on, but it was still fairly manageable without resorting to lots of reference stuff.

So, a couple of years after I started reading comics a lot, Marvel produced a trade paperback of something called "The Dark Phoenix Saga" from The Uncanny X-Men's issues 129 to 137. I knew enough about this storyline to know that it was already considered something of a classic of the genre, and I knew that Jean Grey's death was an event that was still showing repercussions throughout the Marvel Universe. Now I was going to find out how that death had come to pass.

That original trade paperback of mine is long gone, but I have since reacquired the "Dark Phoenix Saga" as part of one of Marvel's "Essential" compilations, which nicely and cheaply reprints lots of issues into a nice thick volume (albeit keeping the cost down by printing in black-and-white). I plowed through this entire volume a while back, and a lot of it comprised stories I didn't know, particularly the ten or fifteen issues leading up to the start of the "Dark Phoenix Saga", and a couple of issues that showed the aftermath.

The faults in Chris Claremont's stories tend to stand out quite a bit more in omnibus editions. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure if some of the most annoying style tics of his were actually tics of his or if he was directed by editors to do some of these things, but we're talking about Wolverine constantly pointing out his unbreakable claws, Cyclops constantly referring to his ruby-quartz visor, and so on and so forth. Or how it sometimes seems as though two or three pages of every twenty-two page issue is given to summing up stuff that happened before. And over time, Claremont's focuses on character interactions and complex webs of interrelationships tends to start to feel like soap opera; I remember one commentator describing his run on Uncanny X-Men as "Dallas with capes".

And yeah, that's all true. But it worked a lot better when you were reading these issues one at a time, once a month. And now, reading the omnibuses, those flaws aren't really all that distracting, when Claremont is firing on all cylinders...as he is in the "Dark Phoenix Saga".

This story starts out small. The X-Men are recovering a bit from a pretty tough battle, and there are apparently some conflicts of personality within the team (this is how things seem if you start here and not before). Professor X returns from somewhere (I don't recall where he was), and almost immediately, they detect two new mutants, one in Chicago and one in New York City. (The X-Men are always scanning for new mutants, so they might intercede and help them learn to deal with their mutancy in a world that is hostile to mutants.)

From such humble beginnings -- tired team, investigating two new mutants -- this story takes us on an ever-widening story whose scope gets bigger and bigger and bigger until, by the time we get to the final three issues or so of the "Dark Phoenix Saga", we've got full-blown space opera going on, leading to a showdown amongst ruins on the dark side of the Moon. And along the way there is a love story, seeds planted for future tales (this is where we meet Kitty Pryde, after all), and the slow but inexorable rise of Jean Grey's power until she can no longer control it.

Claremont -- along with artist Byrne -- presents one of the most cinematic stories I've ever read in a comic. In a real way, most of the comics stories of today -- and the comics movies -- can trace some piece of lineage, in terms of storytelling style, back to the "Dark Phoenix Saga". This is one of the stories that I would likely cite if someone ever asked me what stories they should read if they want to see superhero comics at their very best.

And now I want to read the bloody thing again!

Something for Thursday

I'm currently reading The Arabian Nights, so here is some music in that vein: a suite from Bernard Herrmann's score to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.



Of course, the ultimate work in this vein is Rimsky-Korsakov's stunning Scheherazade, of which I'll have more to say at a later date.

Heavens!

So, it turns out that a good possible way to get oneself a jump in blog traffic is to post something cool about libraries. That post was linked on a listserv for librarians, and then, this happened:

I gotta say, folks...this is really cool. It's been a very long time since I enjoyed any kind of spike like this. Linkage just doesn't seem to be the 'coin of the realm' that it once was for Blogistan, which results in numbers that pretty much settle into a certain plateau and then for the most part stay there for very long periods of time. But the old truism still holds, that the stuff I really hope will get some attention and traction someplace else doesn't, and it's a throwaway post -- of all the images I see on Tumblr all the time, why did I post that one and none of those? -- that catches someone's eye, inspires them to link it from a listserv with a lot of members, and then, for a day, the blog explodes (comparatively speaking -- there are many blogs out there for whom my traffic today would just be a Wednesday).

So anyway, thanks to the person who linked me in the first place, and I hope I gain at least a few new regular readers out of it!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Do you like the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder? And if so, which is your favorite?

Mr. Asimov on Libraries

I saw this on Tumblr, and I had to put it here. Apparently a town opened a new library, and as part of the festivities, asked a bunch of writers at the time to write letters about libraries to the town's children. This is the one that Isaac Asimov wrote. I've rarely seen a better summation of what libraries are for.

UPDATE: Wow, this post is apparently generating a highly unusual amount of traffic to my little old outpost on the Interweb! Hello to all new visitors, I hope some of you stick around...but I'm not sure of the source of the traffic, which seems to be coming from mail servers, which leads me to believe it's a post on a Listserv or some other kind of mailing list. If someone wouldn't mind dropping a bit of background as to where you're all coming from in the comments, I'd appreciate it!

Sentential Links

The first Sentential Links of the new year, huzzah! (By the way, as we are now officially in an Election Year, expect to see more political linkage crop up in Sentential Links...most specifically, links to blogs that I deem to be eloquently saying mean things about Republicans. Sorry, folks, them's the breaks.)

:: “RON PAUL 2012!” The logic being, RON PAUL 2012! Frankly, I just don’t understand the infatuation with this guy. He’s 76 years old and apparently doesn’t understand how the internet works – but about a quarter of Iowans think it would be spiffy if he was sitting in the big chair helming the most technologically advanced economy in the world. He talks up the whole personal responsibility thing, but won’t take personal responsibility for newsletters and tweets issued under his own name. (See what I mean? Right off the bat!)

:: My affection for the New York Giants (NFC) started in the 1960s. They were the team that showed up on my CBS affiliate most often, and I can still name some of them by heart (Sam Huff, Y.A. Tittle, Jim Katcavage, Dick Lynch, Andy Robustelli, Dick Modzelewski). (The Giants are the one team that I didn't hate for some time after they beat the Bills in the Super Bowl. And no, it won't be all politics, all the time! There are limits to my intestinal fortitude.)

:: “This is why you marry your best friend.”

:: The description on the bottle says it smells like a “fragrant blend of spices, fruits and herbs.” Really? That’s what they think it smells like? I suggest they sniff it again, after they stop sniffing that other stuff that they’ve obviously been sniffing. What it really smells like is a blend of hospital disinfectant and the cheapest, stinkiest men’s cologne you can imagine. (Not unlike "Cherry NyQuil". In what horrible, toxic-waste and Chernobyl-radiation-blasted region of Eastern Europe do they grow cherries that taste like this?!)

:: “There are times, sir, when men of good consicence cannot blindly follow orders. You acknowledge their sentience, but ignore their personal liberties and freedom. Order a man to turn his child over to the state? Not while I am his captain.” (One of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's finest moments. I'm thinking I may need to add Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine to my 'rewatch' pile. "The Offspring" is one of the finest episodes of any teevee show I've ever seen, ever. Some of Trek's best episodes were 'bottle shows', where the writers simply wrote for the characters and kept the technobabbly hoo-ha to a minimum.)

:: If current Internet speculation is to be believed, Christopher Nolan will do what supervillians have dreamed of for over 70 years now. Nolan will kill the Batman.

:: I maintain that pie is not about politics. "Pie is non-partisan," I have been known to insist. "It is meant to be shared, to build community, and spread good will. Pie knows no cultural boundaries." (Now this is absolutely true. I will cheerfully share pie with anyone, even a Republican!)

More next week!

I must not make fun of "Twilight"....

...and yet...

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!!!

:: I wonder if this guy has a partner-in-crime named 'Rama Lama Dingdong'.

:: Here's an interesting article about Choose Your Own Adventure books. If you're a certain age -- my age, perhaps -- you remember these books somewhat fondly. Told in second person, you'd read a few pages and then be presented with a choice, whereby you turned to page X if you chose to do A, or page Y if you chose to do B, and so on through the book, until you came to one of usually between 25 to 30 endings. "Interactive fiction" at its most basic, I suppose, but still, quite a bit of fun. My favorites were some of the space opera ones (of course), as well as a spy book called Your Code Name Is Jonah, a quite scary one called The Mystery of Chimney Rock, and...well, most of 'em were pretty fun. You could also learn from these, such as the one where you're lost at sea on a rowboat and you're parched with thirst and the sea water looks so appealing, so you choose to drink some. Bad idea, that!

Here's another cool site about the Choose Your Own Adventure series that actually graphs out some information about each book and how the endings are distributed.

Incidentally, I've always been irritated that there really, truly is no way to get to the "Ultima" ending of Inside UFO 54-40 without just stopping reading and flipping to it. I remember that there is no traditional way of doing it, but I'd always hoped there was something overlooked in the book...maybe a page where each line starts with letters that spell out "Turn to page 101 to get to Ultima", or something like that.

:: I honestly wasn't wondering what Sylvester Stallone has been up to...and yet, now I know, anyway. Yeesh.

More next week!

Something for Thursday

After many years of watching New Year's From Vienna every single January 1st, the most famous waltz of all time is firmly associated with January 1st. So here it is: Ricardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in On the Beautiful Blue Danube.



Actually, here's another one. This one, instead of ballet dancers, takes you on a journey down the entire length of the Danube, all the way to the Black Sea.

Well, crud.

The Daughter nursed a minor head cold last week. I thought I had dodged that particular bullet. Today...not so much. Ugh! And I really meant to get some writing done today, too....

You never know WHAT is gonna come through that door.

A few months ago we subscribed to Netflix, so we could watch streaming shows and movies now that we had high-speed interweb. Netflix has been something of a mixed bag – more on that another time – but we found some shows to watch on Netflix that we've missed owing to our not being a cable teevee household. One such show is the History Network's Pawn Stars.

This show, for those unfamiliar with it, takes place in Las Vegas, at a pawn shop owned by a guy named Rick Harrison. Working with him is his father (called "the Old Man") and his son (called "Big Hoss") and a guy who is mostly played for comic relief (called "Chum Lee"). And what happens on the show is pretty straightforward: people come in with stuff that they try to sell, leading to some work identifying the items, and then the price haggling (if Harrison and company are interested in buying it). Basically it's Antiques Roadshow with some more personality to it, where money actually changes hands. Instead of someone being told that the gewgaw they've just brought in is really valuable and then they say, "Wow, I'm gonna keep it forever!", here we have people saying, "Great! That guy said I could get $10,000 for it, so I want $10,000 for it."

Pawn Stars is a lot of fun on several grounds – the guys on it are an entertaining bunch, the haggling is entertaining, and the items themselves are often fascinating. There are also "before-after" things, too, when Harrison and company buy something that's a wreck and then get it restored. These segments are so fascinating, actually, that their preferred guy for restoration now has his own show. (We haven't seen this yet, but it's called American Restoration. When this shows up on Netflix, we're there.) Where the focus in Antiques Roadshow is on the stuff, here the focus is more on the people and the connection they have with their stuff. Sometimes there are sad little vignettes, when people who are clearly down on their luck are trying to make a buck by hawking their stuff, and they get less than they clearly want; sometimes there are triumphs when someone discovers that an item they got someplace for very little is worth a whole lot. And then there are the people who don't know that what they've got are fakes. (One guy, in an early episode, has promised his wife that he'll make a lot of money selling his antique gun...which turns out to be fake and worth about fifty bucks. Ouch. Lots of curse-word beeping on that guy's reaction!)

Firearms of all sorts seem to be the most common types of items brought in on the show, but this is all very interesting – you learn a lot about the history of firearms by watching this show, and they seemingly never buy an old gun without taking it out to the wilderness and firing it. Exploding stuff is cool! For me, the most amazing item was a guy who came in with a big hunk of gold coins all melded together – it was part of the treasure from a shipwreck off the coast of Sri Lanka, discovered by Arthur C. Clarke and a diving buddy of his years ago, that turned out to be one of the richest treasure ships ever found. Harrison did not end up buying the treasure lump, but this whole transaction was amazing. (Clarke wrote a wonderful book on the finding of the ship, The Treasure of the Great Reef.)

This particular transaction raised the standard question: is Pawn Stars for real, or is it staged? I suspect that it's a mix of both; there's no way it could be one hundred percent 'real' and look as professional a production as it does. There are times when the influence of producers shows a little too much (such as when the second season starts and suddenly every episode had to have at least one conspicuous reference to Subway restaurants). But really, I don't care – the personalities are engaging (Harrison and company come off like a terribly fun bunch to hang out with), the show is fun, and the stuff is real. Well, usually, anyway.

Rick Harrison has a new book out about the whole pawn shop experience, called License to Pawn. The book is a fast, breezy, and extremely entertaining read. It's worth noting that Harrison and his family have been in the pawn shop business for years, and that what's seen on the show is just a small part of what really goes on in a pawn shop. The Harrison family has seen its share of seedy characters throughout the years, and there are a lot of wonderful anecdotes in the book that detail the colorful people who have come through on occasion. The show never depicts the dark underbelly of Las Vegas, but it's clear that Harrison and company have seen a lot in their years. There are even some haunting tales, including one poor fellow, socially awkward, whose main hangout in life was the pawn shop until he finally had to be forbidden to return after he sexually harassed a female employee and died soon after. And there's probably a fascinating show in itself to be made from the life of the person who has to staff the shop's overnight window (bulletproof glass, of course).

The book has chapters by the Old Man, Big Hoss, and even one by Chumlee, which strongly implies that Chumlee's not quite the big dumb lug the show makes him out to be. Each one is refreshingly up front about their own strengths and weaknesses; Harrison himself is proud of how smart he is, but he's also willing to admit that he was an awful student in school and that he can't resist some particularly crackpot schemes to make a quick profit. (One such scheme involves nickels. Lots of nickels. Believe it or not, Rick Harrison thought he'd make money by investing in nickels.) There's something about Harrison that is inherently likable; he comes off as the kind of guy whom you could consider a great friend even if you disagree with everything that comes out of his mouth. (Could be the fact that at one point in the book, he admits to being completely uninterested in fashion and declares a preference for...overalls!) Big Hoss and Chumlee have had drug-related struggles in their past, which they write frankly about, and my personal favorite anecdote in the book comes from Big Hoss's chapter. Here it is:

I'm sitting on the stool inside the shop at the night window and a woman walks up and asks me, "Do you buy gold teeth?"

"Yes, ma'am, we do," I tell her.

She's looking at me through the window, and she doesn't look like a drug addict or a desperate person. She's in her fifties. She's dressed reasonably well, her hair is groomed, she's not dirty. (Those three descriptions qualify as high class for the night window.)

She says, "OK, good. Do you have a pair of pliers I can borrow?"

Stupid me, I think the two questions are unrelated. I think she's asking to borrow pliers for reasons that have nothing to do with the question of the gold teeth. I'm thinking maybe she needs to fix her car, or maybe give them to a guy she's with so he can fix the car.

It was late. I probably wasn't thinking straight.

I grabbed a pair of pliers from under the counter and told her I'd need a driver's license to hold so I make sure I get my pliers back. She nods and hands her license through the slot. No big deal to either of us.

About a half an hour later, she's still nowhere to be seen. I'm thinking it's awfully strange that someone gave up their driver's license for a pair of pliers at three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas. Then again, it is three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas, so maybe it's not so strange.

Anyway, she finally shows up at the window with her mouth full of toilet paper. She drops a gold tooth and the pliers through the slot.

A gold tooth covered in blood.

For $40.

So now I'm wishing I hadn't given her the pliers. If I had been thinking, I would have realized why she wanted the pliers. The idea wasn't to refuse the pliers out of any moral judgment – she's got to do what she's got the do. I just shouldn't have supplied her with the means to do that.

I'm looking at the tooth, thinking, "Well, Big Hoss – now you've got to buy it." After all, she did go to the trouble to bring it to me.

Somehow this one vignette tells you so much about what happens at a pawn shop in the middle of the night in Vegas. You have it all – desperation, weariness, and a certain moral recognition that the desperate need to be afforded whatever dignity is in our power to spare.

Now I just wish Netflix would get some new Pawn Stars episodes available for streaming....

(images via)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

You have some cheese. You want to put the cheese on something. On what do you put said cheese? (Assume any flavor of cheese you wish for the purposes of this thought experiment.)

Most US Americans don't have maps!

But if they did, they should own this map. I want one! Seriously, if you've never given much thought to the lot of the poor cartographers in our lonely society, read the article. It's fascinating stuff.

For Lynn

A musical offering, for an online friend who last month lost her mother.