Sunday Burst of Awesome (and spectacular FAIL)

Oddities and Awesome abound! As do, unfortunately, colossal screwups.

:: In the Awesome department, if you ever wondered what it's like taping The Price is Right -- more specifically, the mechanics of moving all that crap onstage around -- this video sums it up nicely.


Somehow, as a kid, I always envisioned that soundstage as being absolutely immense. It always seemed to me like they were taping that show in the Astrodome or something.

Link via.

:: Here's a wonderful defense of Love Actually, in response to the same loopy-headed article I frothed about last week.

And you know what? Mustering the courage to say "Hey, i have some feelings for you" is not some inconsequential thing. As anyone who's ever been at the beginning of an affair knows, getting the nerve up to say "Want to take this further?" is a huge deal! It's hard, it's terrifying, and when it's over, you either live to romance another day, or the relationship ends. That's what Love Actually is about. Those terrifying moments before the proclamation. It isn't about afterward, where reality lives. It's about the beginning of the feeling of love.

I said on Twitter the other day that I have come to see the Keira Knightley storyline in that movie as a kind-of Rorschach test. People who hate the movie often seem to completely get that storyline wrong. Mark doesn't go profess his love to her in hopes that she will leave her husband; he knows she won't. He goes to get it all out, and admit his feelings as explanation and atonement for his having not been terribly nice to her until then. How people miss this is absolutely beyond me.

:: Finally, the FAIL of the week. I was thoroughly gobsmacked by this. You know those little decals that lots of people put on the back windows of their cars? The ones that depict their family's composition, with stick-figure parents and kids and dogs and cats and stuff? Well, the fine folks at ThinkGeek came up with Star Trek versions of those. Which is kind of a nifty idea. They even include aliens. Only...well, here's the set:

Take a close look at Lt. Uhura. Notice anything distinctive about the way they depict her in decal form? I congratulate Nichelle Nichols and Zoe Saldana on their mutual designation by ThinkGeek as Honorary White People!

I can only shake my head at shit like this. It's maddening. It can't be any kind of production issue, since they managed to get the skin tones of the aliens right. And they made the tribble brown. But the black human woman? The one who was played by a real life black woman? They whitewashed her, but good.

Unbelievable. Although actually, the sad thing is...it's not that unbelievable, really.

More next week, maybe.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

My alma mater, Wartburg College, does a big yearly music production at Christmas, called Christmas With Wartburg. It's always quite a production, with several vocal groups coming together with several instrumental groups to present a sacred program. Putting it together was a lot of work each year, and the performances consumed an entire weekend -- at the time we would perform twice on campus and then once in Cedar Falls, IA (a bigger town twenty miles away) and once in Des Moines.

I mention all this because our main rival school, Luther College, does a similar thing. Here's their rendition of "Angels We Have Heard On High", one of my two favorite Christmas hymns (I can't choose between this one and "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing"). As a still-loyal Wartburg grad, I'd love to be able to say that those nitwits from Luther screw it up, but...no, I wouldn't love to be able to say that. There's just as much talent there as at Wartburg, and this is really well done.


(But still...go Knights!)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

I have my issues with Aaron Sorkin, but there are still times when he grabs me and doesn't let go. Two brief scenes from the first season episode of The West Wing, entitled "In Excelsis Deo". The backstory here (among political stuff) is that Toby Ziegler (communications director at the White House) gets a call from DC police because a homeless man has been found dead, wearing a coat that had Toby's business card in the pocket. Toby realizes that the coat was one he donated to a shelter or something, and the card was still in the pocket; he learns that the homeless guy was a Korean War veteran, and uses the President's clout to arrange a military funeral, with the guy's surviving brother (also homeless) in attendance.

Along the way, we learn something of Mrs. Landingham, which is a good reminder that the Christmas season is not always a time of happy memories for everyone. There's a reason so much joy and so much melancholy tend to coexist at Christmas.

THIS must be the cover....

UPDATED below.

UPDATED again, below.

Well, my endless search for cover-art for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) has come to an end. This has to be the cover.

Obviously it won't be, but...this is SO evocative of what I hope is the book's "feel". I really want the eventual cover art to be something like this!

UPDATE: I pasted the picture on a starry background (which I stole from the Astonomy Picture of the Day, because that's what I do!):

UPDATE II: The artist who created the image above somehow found it here, and left a gracious comment. Her name is Liza van Rees, and more of her work is available here.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

A very old song now, sung by the always hauntingly beautiful Loreena McKennitt: "Let Att That Are to Mirth Inclined".

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

It's the March of the Toys, by Victor Herbert!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Do you enjoy it when people build elaborate displays of Christmas lights on their houses and then sync their blinking patterns to music?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

I've said this before, but where I'm usually able to separate music from specific associations to things in my life, there are exceptions, and Tchaikovsky's Suite from The Nutcracker is one of them. We played this every year in the Symphony Orchestra at college on the Christmas program, and in my junior year Fantasia came out on home video (VHS, huzzah!), so this suite invariably takes me back to Wartburg College, orchestra rehearsals under Maestro Janice Wade (who would get so mad if we tried to ritard in the very last bars of the Waltz of the Flowers!), and watching Fantasia.

So here is this year's posting of the Suite from The Nutcracker. How I love this work! (And this is an unusually fine performance.)

Pursuing Capital

A bit of politics here, after the break. Keep scrolling if you don't want one of my rare bursts of liberalism in this space!

On we go....

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Found this (sorry, they don't allow embedding) on a YouTube Christmas playlist. I love it!

Sentential Links

Time for links! These are all from a new thing I'm participating in over in the Twitterverse, called "Monday Blogs". You link a blog post of your own using the hashtag #MondayBlogs, and then you visit others doing the same thing, retweeting as you see fit.

:: So there it is – that’s why I need to silence my inner critic instead of allowing it to silence me. I enjoy writing. I delight in it even when the words don’t flow and my brain fights me for every syllable. I have fun building worlds and filling them with characters that speak to me. I love creating something where there was only a negative space (a blank sheet of paper) moments beforehand.

:: I’m working on my next novel and I’ve had an idea. I must get the scene out of my head and onto the page before I forget. Step back everyone. Give the actors room to breathe. Are we ready? Lights. Camera. Action!

:: I think if you asked people where they wanted to spend the holiday season (whatever holiday you celebrate), a hospital would not be anyone's location of choice.

:: I will not have finished the program I am in, but I have decided to quit school and get writing. I will probably end up going back in the future to finish the degree, but for now, I am going to write and write and write.

:: Once you have made a few long-distance cycle trips, minimalist living comes naturally. Most of us found out the hard way. The pain involved in struggling up hills, knowing that so much of your effort is given over to hauling a load of crap one does not need, is agonising. Worse still is being told by a cycle mechanic that overloading is the reason for your broken luggage rack, spokes or wheel rim.

:: Most writers I know hear the whisper of their writing in their ears regularly, and often at the most inconvenient times: during work, at the dinner hour, driving to and from obligations and then some. There’s nothing like the holiday season, with its emphasis on giving to others, to force even more distance between you and your words. And yet, precisely because of the extra pull on your time, it’s important to find a way to keep some of your creativity alive for yourself at this time of year. I don’t know about you, but a little tendril of resentment (directed at nobody in particular) can creep into my spirit when I don’t get writing time.

:: I flip the page on my 365 Nouns and Adjectives Calendar to reveal November 30, 2012. Sure, we’re heading into December; it’s literally around the corner, or in this case, on the next flip. But hey, plenty of time to do all the stuff that needs to be done before December 25. I’m still enjoying the Thanksgiving afterglow, and then I flip.

More next week! Or not. Busy month, you know.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Just once, I'd like to be in a large public space where a surprise "flash mob" but of musicmaking happens. And if it happened to be one of the ensembles of our armed forces, I think I'd burst into tears on the spot.

Here's what happened at the Smithsonian, when the United States Air Force Band showed up.


(BTW, these musicians are highly-trained and high-educated individuals who go through an audition process that is as rigorous as those for professional symphony orchestras. Being in the Air Force or Marine Band isn't like joining band in college.)

"We need Kate, and we need Leo, and we need them NOW."

A dumb article attacking Love Actually is making the rounds, so I'll just re-link the post I wrote five years ago on the movie: "Let's get the shit kicked out of us my love!".

I'd add that the film isn't just about romantic love. It's about so many kinds of love, all of them listed by Hugh Grant in the movie's opening minute. Young Samuel's love story isn't even about his own romantic love: it's a backdoor entry into a story about the love between stepfather and stepson.

The movie also shows, quite rightly, that love is a different thing for different people. For some it's about finding the person to spend life with; for others, love's about the life that's been built. And for still others, it's simply about finding someone to "shag".

There are times when I read articles like this and I wonder if the point isn't really to just provide the world with a bit of half-arsed contrarianism. I think of people who seemingly walk the earth in search of things with which to disagree.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Why oh why oh why would anyone think to make this a goal of theirs?!


I'm sorry, folks, I can get behind a lot of daredevil stuff, but that's just batshit crazy.

:: Never liked that Rossini fellow.

More musician-on-musician insult goodness here.

(Oh, and Stravinsky's insults of Rachmaninov? He can bite me, too!)

All for this week. Maybe more next week -- but boy howdy this is a busy month already, and here's me, with TWO active writing projects....

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Someone Tweeted this a few days ago. It's good!

Writing: It only LOOKS boring!

I've taken enough writing-related photos over the last grumble-grumble years that it finally struck me: I needed to collect them in a Flickr set. So, here's the Flickr set. Mostly screengrabs of my writings or word counts, or photos of me sitting at various desks, staring at my computer screen as I attempt to force the English language to do my bidding.

It's a living...or it will be...oh yes, it will be....

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Christmas in Norway.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

I'm sure we've all wondered what "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" sounds like when sung in Japanese by Japanese children. Wonder no more!

Mandela

Farewell to a brave, great man.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Here's a carol from the Renaissance era: