It's a boy!

David Letterman's kid was born, and as the title indicates, it's a boy. Congratulations, Dave! On the vanishingly rare chance that he reads this, I'd like to offer a few thoughts.

1. It's a baby. Don't try that "Will It Float?" game with him.

2. Ditto that game where you toss things off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that kids can't taste things until they are three. Remember this when you fall into the "But you loved peas when you were a baby!" trap.

4. You're raising a male, so if you're wondering how best to raise your baby into a real man, take careful note of this lengthy bit of rumination on manhood...and do the exact opposite. Please oh please.

I was going to try to come up ten of these, you know, for a "Top Ten" list. But then I got lazy. Enjoy the kid, Dave!

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Quiz Time!

If you're just dying to take a quiz today, you can test yourself either on 80s song lyrics (via John Scalzi) or on horror literature (via Jessa Crispin).

As yet, I have taken neither quiz. Or maybe I have, and am simply too embarrassed to share my results. You be the judge.

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What is "Real"?

Lynn Sislo, who's getting into the whole discussion of "Luddite", also says this:

It's funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real "real life." And there's another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of "real life" as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term "realspace" to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I've seen the word "meatspace" which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

She's right. I don't want to steal her thunder, since she mentions the possibility of a future post on this, but I don't get the whole separation of "online" stuff and "real" stuff -- or, like Lynn, I don't think of what I do online as any less "real". It's all real, to me; I just think of all the books I'd most likely have never read if I hadn't seen them mentioned online. Or the music I'd never have heard. Or the films I'd not have seen.

Just to give one example: my budding love of anime began when I saw Princess Mononoke. But why did I rent that film one night, four years ago? Because I already owned the score on CD and, loving the music dearly, wanted to see the film that accompanied it. But why did I already own the CD? Because I'd seen it glowingly reviewed a year or two before that, on one of the film music sites or forums I read. And the causal chain doesn't stop there, but goes back farther, and it keeps going on: for example, would I have started exploring other areas of Japanese culture (cinema, classical music, food) if not for my introduction to anime by way of a single film by way of a soundtrack CD?

What I do online informs my choices and offers directions for my "real" life that I'd be less likely to consider otherwise. I see no reason to separate the two, the "cyber" and the "real". And there I'll stop, before I start sounding like Morpheus in The Matrix.

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Hey, what's them black bars on my TV!

For those Luddites (sorry Sheila, I couldn't resist!) out there who aren't up on such things, Terminus has a nice two-part explanation of widescreen video releases and their implication for TV. I'd disagree with him about the worth of widescreen being used on such shows as ER and The West Wing; I like the widescreen compositions, and I'm willing to have a smaller image on my TV to get a wider shot. But he provides a pretty good explanation of what's going on, including a reminder that not all movies should be shoehorned into widescreen aspect ratios (like Casablanca and Singin' In The Rain).

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I hope he doesn't bring in the video for "Stupid Human Tricks"

I flipped over to The Late Show with David Letterman last night, to find Paul Shaffer behind the desk. It turns out that Letterman's significant other was in labor with their first kid. As of this writing, I'm not sure if the kid's been born yet or not, so here's hoping everything goes well and that the kid, when born, is healthy, has all his finger and toes, and is born with more backbone than, say, your typical CBS executive.

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When Critics Attack

I've been keeping an old copy of Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion in the bathroom lately, because it makes good bathroom reading: just thumb through, find a review, read it, and then...well, you get the idea. Ebert's always been my favorite film critic, even though I only tend to agree with him about 70% of the time, and he's never better than when he's teeing off on a bad movie. A case in point is this hilarious first sentence to his review of some action movie called Money Train:

"Like a guy working two shifts, Money Train keeps slapping itself to stay awake."

That's almost as good as his contention that the first Charlie's Angels movie was "eye candy for the blind".

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Movies, we got movies....

Apparently a lot of folks are listing Top Twenty Movies Since 1980, and since I'm always on the prowl for stuff to post, here's my own list. (And to be fair, I'll confine myself to a single Star Wars movie.) In no particular order:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981. The best of the Indiana Jones movies.

2. The Empire Strikes Back, 1980. Yeah, I personally rank A New Hope higher, but it came out in 1977.

3. Braveheart, 1995. Battle scenes galore.

4. Rob Roy, 1995. Even better than Braveheart, although the latter won Best Picture.

5. Pulp Fiction, 1994. A great film that spawned a lot of lame imitators, because those lesser filmmakers assumed that the film was remarkable for its jaded and hip tone and imitated that, without realizing that the film was really remarkable for its tight storyline and razor-sharp dialogue.

6. When Harry Met Sally…., 1989. Still my favorite romantic comedy.

7. Say Anything, 1989. The greatest teen romance ever filmed, period.

8. Beauty and the Beast. Disney's greatest film.

9. Bull Durham, 1988. The best baseball movie.

10. Princess Mononoke, 1997 (I think). My favorite Miyazaki film, although like every other blog post I've seen doing this, you could plug in any Miyazaki film at random here.

11. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. I flipped a coin between this and The Two Towers.

12. The American President, 1995. Lord, I love this movie.

13. Whale Rider, 2003. Wow. I literally just watched this one two nights ago. I'll have more to say about it later this week.

14. RAN, 1985 (I think). Kurosawa does King Lear. Stunning film.

15. Schindler's List, 1993. This is one of my "desert island" movies.

16. Amadeus, 1985 (guess). The best movie about classical music I've seen.

17. The Abyss, 1988. Still my favorite James Cameron movie. I prefer the Director's Cut, even though it takes the "preachiness" at the end a little too far.

18. Die Hard, 1988. This movie still gets the blood pumping.

19. Witness, 1985. Harrison Ford's best performance. I wish he'd get back to doing roles like that.

20. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982. Magnificent story, magnificently told.

There you go.

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We hates him forever!

The Pats won. Ugh.

I've previously established that I don't hold Bill Belichick as a great football coach, although he's a pretty decent one. Yeah, he's most definitely better than Gregg Williams, but George Halas, he ain't. Plus, he's the coach of my team's hated nemesis, the New England Patriots (of whose 2001 Super Bowl victory I will go to my grave thinking it was the most undeserved championship in sports history). But, I gotta give the guy at least this much credit: unlike many coaches in today's NFL, Belichick understands that sometimes the biggest factors in winning aren't scoring but time and field position. He showed this in last night's game against the Broncos, in which Belichick made a startling decision. Trailing by a single point and forced to punt the ball from his own end zone late in the fourth quarter, Belichick directed his long snapper to put the ball over his punter's head. The resulting safety extended the Broncos' lead to three points. Why willingly give up points?

Because, after a team gives up a safety, they have to kick the ball to the other team, but not from the end zone. Instead, they kick it from the 20 yard line -- which means that by giving up two points, the Patriots were able to put the Broncos into significantly less favorable field position. If they had merely punted, the Broncos would likely have had the ball in Pats' territory, and thus been able to move for a possible clinching field goal. Of course, they could have done this following the safety, but Belichick had to assume that his defense would be able to hold the Broncos -- which it did -- and then his own team would get the ball back in better field position than if they had held Denver to three-and-out after a normal punt.

I hate to say it, because I don't like the guy, but that was excellent football strategy on Belichick's part.

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The Roots of Anime

I've been meaning to link this for three days, and I've forgotten each day: Alexandra (the force behind the fine blog Out of Lascaux), who has been reposting her own oldies-and-goodies, has a fascinating post about anime and its roots in Japanese art. Anyone with an interest in anime should read this post.

(And Alexandra? If you want to write that book, write it. I'd read it!)

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Time for a round of "Pants On Fire"!

Sara Donati has an interesting blog about storytelling, which she has adequately titled Storytelling. She described an interesting exercise the other day, which I've done before. But when I did it, it wasn't part of a writing workshop or class, but rather one of those goofy games that managers like to do to start off meetings where people don't know one another. Usually I detest games like this, but this one appealed to me because it actually requires creativity.

What happened was this: During the standard "Go around the room and tell us your name and something interesting about yourself" phase of the meeting, we actually had to tell three things about ourselves. The catch, though, is that two of the three things were to be true, but one was to be false. And then the others in the group would try to quiz you and find out which was the false bit of biography. If you were good - - i.e., creative with a good eye for detail - - you could baffle the guessers.

This was easily the best "meeting icebreaker" I ever got to do, and I never thought of it as a writing exercise. Cool.

(Sara Donati, by the way, is the writer of a series of romance novels that my wife likes and which I've always been tempted to read. Maybe I will, this winter.)

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The Land where Giants and Colts and Dolphins play.

Often while watching football games on TV, I'll have to brief the Kid on which team we're rooting for and which team we want to lose, as you might expect. These discussions usually take the form of "the white guys" (i.e., the team in white or "road" jerseys) and then the "blue" guys or the "orange" guys or whatever color jersey the home team is wearing. OK?

So yesterday, after the Giants disposed of the Jets in OT, we cut to the Redskins and the Cowboys, not a game I really care much about, but it was the only late game we had, so that's what we watched. I informed her that we don't like the Cowboys, who were "the guys in the white shirts", or for short, "the white guys". Then she asks me about the other team, and I shrug and said the following (keep in mind that the Redskins' dark jerseys are brown in color):

"Well, yeah, we hate the Cowboys, but we don't really care about those brown guys much either, because they're the Redskins."

Now, there's a sentence I never thought I'd say. For a second I felt like I was a Klan member.

And now for some randomly collated thoughts about yesterday's football action....

:: The Bills, of course, were off yesterday, which accounts for my lack of rage and heart-palpitation this morning. In fact, the Bills had a good week even by not playing, because two of their three division rivals lost (the Jets and Dolphins, to the Giants and Colts respectively), and the third (the Patriots) could lose tonight when they play the Broncos. Thus, the idle Bills gained ground on one of the teams ahead of them and got some breathing room over the division cellar-dweller. Good news for everyone.

:: I suspect that Steve Spurrier's days in Washington may be numbered. The guy just looked totally bewildered yesterday against Dallas; he had no answers and nothing to offer while his offensive line, which might be the worst line I've ever seen, kept allowing young quarterback Patrick Ramsey to get tossed around like a rag-doll.

:: Readers who don't skip over my weekly football posts will recall that I've criticized the Bills for being too reliant on passing the ball in game-situations that would normally call for running it. This syndrome is sometimes referred to as "going pass-wacky", and it's a real thing. Buffalo News columnist Bob DiCesare had an excellent column in yesterday's paper about Bills' offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride, who, it turns out, has always been pass-wacky. It's a good column. Check it out. (A telling stat is that the Bills have faced third-down between the 20-yard lines 56 times this season, and they have passed on every one of them. Come on!)

:: Speaking of pass-wackiness, Tony Dungy and the Colts came perilously close to losing yesterday against the Dolphins because of it. Leading 23-17 with about three minutes to go, the Colts got the ball deep in Dolphins' territory. This was the perfect situation to just pound the ball on the ground, letting the clock run and forcing the Dolphins to spend their final timeouts before getting the ball back, on a day when the Dolphins hadn't been moving the ball consistently. (And if the Colts pound the ball on the ground and get a first down, the game's over.) But the Colts decided to go pass-wacky, which (a) doesn't grind enough time off the clock and (b) even worse can result in an interception, thus giving the Dolphins back the ball in the red zone. In this case, scenario B is exactly what happened: instead of running Edgerrin James up the middle (yeah, it was third-and-seven, but the clock is more important here), Peyton Manning goes back to throw and gets picked off. Dolphins' ball, at the 15-yard line, and if they score a touchdown and make the PAT, they probably win, unless they give Indy enough time to drive for a game-winning FG.

But maybe Tony Dungy knew what was going to happen. Maybe he looked across the field, spotted Dave Wannstedt on the Dolphins' sideline, and remembered that Wannstedt has put his own virtual trademark on "going pass-wacky". The Dolphins had all the time in the world to score the touchdown, they had Rickey Williams in their backfield...and yet, after rushing him just once, Wannstedt sends in a passing play. Dolphins QB rolls right, never sees Colts DE Dwight Freeney coming up behind him, gets sacked and fumbles the ball, which is recovered by the Colts. Game over. But then, what else to expect of Wannstedt, who in a low-scoring, tight game like this only had his offense run the ball 14 times in the entire game.

I don't care how good your defense is, Dolphins fans. Your boys aren't going to win the Super Bowl this year.

:: The Vikings have now fallen to defeat twice. My pick to win it all, the Bucs, are looking more ordinary with each passing week. I haven't checked the standings yet today, because I have the uncomfortable suspicion that not one team I picked to win a division is in the lead. Ugh.

Next week, the Bills travel to Dallas to take on the hated Cowboys. It's a must-win game (they all are, from this point on). Ought to be a good one. (I've pretty much become convinced that Bill Parcells is the greatest coach in football history.)

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Gypping the Gipper

Demosthenes brings up the subject of President Reagan and the Cold War.

I'm no fan of Reagan's, the original "family values" crusader whose own family was a train wreck, and the original "tax cuts are the solution to everything" President. Like Demosthenes, I've grown rather weary of the persistent habit of the American political Right to attribute any positive development in American life after January 20, 1981 to Reagan (which parallels their same habit of attributing any negative development since January 20, 1993 to Bill Clinton). And, like Demosthenes, I'm tired of the simplistic myth that has Reagan winning the Cold War single-handedly, by ratcheting up the rhetoric and the weapons-building, after the preceding seven Administrations had bumbled their way through four decades of appeasement, containment, détente, and other lackluster policies. Demosthenes is correct in noting that Gorbachev's rise to power was a far bigger factor in bringing about an end to the Cold War than is typically admitted, and may actually be a more important factor than anything Reagan did.

But I don't totally dismiss Reagan, though. For all the guy's inane "Evil Empire" blatherings when he took office, Reagan at least was able to recognize the opportunities a guy like Gorbachev presented, and though he was wary, he still took advantage of them and embraced the changes evident in the Soviet regime. I do think that Reagan tends to get way too much credit for the end of the Cold War. But he wasn't a passive watcher, either.

This was a fascinating time in history, not just for what happened but for all the "What ifs": What if Hinckley's bullet had struck home, elevating George H.W. Bush eight years earlier? What if Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, or any of the others hadn't died? What if Gorbachev had never risen to power, or what if he had been more of a hard-liner? Food for thought, probably, for the Harry Turtledove's of tomorrow.

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Only Luddites don't know what Luddites are!

Sheila has just encountered a word for the first time. The word is "Luddite".

Reading her post, I'm struck by a couple of things. First, I agree with her that a lot of times the "intelligent folks" can get really condescending and arrogant, although I'm not sure if that's the case with the William Gibson article she links (it's an AOL-only article, which makes me lazy since I'm an AOL subscriber but I didn't care to sign in to read it). And "Luddite" has definitely taken on a connotation of "enlightened dismissal"; it's commonly meant to be an insult.

However, I was surprised that Sheila had not encountered the word until relatively recently (within the last year). I know that she reads and writes a lot (man, does she write a lot!), but maybe she doesn't read the kind of stuff where the word "Luddite" comes into play. Similarly, I suspect that a lot of medical terminology that she knows fairly well would be totally alien to me, a guy whose medical vocabulary derives from watching a lot of ER and CSI. It's a fairly common error to assume that certain things that are common knowledge in our experience are also common knowledge outside that sphere of experience. (This is also part of why I don't believe that "common sense" really exists.)

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Priorities, man! Priorities!

How can SDB routinely spend 6000 or more words to explain US foreign policy, but only about 2500 to explain General Relativity? Surely the Bush Administration's policies aren't more complicated than Einsteinian physics!

(I'm just kidding here. Really. I love it when SDB writes about science, except for when he rains on the "space elevator" parade. It'll work. You'll see!)

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At least she's not an athletic supporter....

Lynn Sislo is a bit miffed because someone used the phrase "Bush supporter" to describe the awesome force for intelligent thought and artistic skill that is Britney Spears. Now, Lynn's probably right that the person writing this intended "Bush supporter" to be an example of how dumb Britney is, as if it's impossible to be an intelligent Bush supporter.

But when you actually track down Britney's quote on the matter, it's clear that she is, in fact, a dumb Bush supporter: "We should just trust the President because he knows what's best" (a rough paraphrase). Now, this exact sentiment would be equally dumb if the referent were, say, Howard Dean; so it's not that Britney's dumb because she's a Bush supporter. Better to say that in this case her awesome dumbness found voice in her Bush support.

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Traffic-babbling

I just want to thank everyone for stopping by. To my great surprise, October turned out to be my best traffic month ever, and by quite a margin, too -- the hits in October eclipsed the previous best month, September '03, with a week to spare. That's two months in a row I've set new records here, and four times in the last seven months. Woo-hoo!

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Of hiatuses, and the Bloggers who take them....

Mike Finley has put his blog on the back burner, which isn't that big of a surprise considering his sporadic posting and his previous comments on a general sense of ennui. I hope his hiatus doesn't last long.

Ditto James Capozzola, whose real life has also intruded.

Mike's Baseball Rants has gone on permanent hiatus...but in a good way. He left BlogSpot and took up Movable Type, so now he's writing...well, Mike's Baseball Rants. (I also just scanned through Mike's Halloween-day post...Holy Tabular Data, Batman!)

Finally, I should pass on to my loyal readership that I am planning a hiatus of my own for Thanksgiving. My current scheme is to not post from the day before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after, but who knows, I may just take an entire week off. It would be nice to do that without it being because we're moving from Buffalo to Syracuse, or back again.

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My place in space is mainly on your face.

I see that the film ALIEN is in re-release right now, and that over on AICN everybody's in a lather because the most fanboy-wankish project of all time, Alien Versus Predator, is apparently going to be a bad movie. (That they are surprised by this defies my imagination. How could a movie like that not suck?)

Anyway, I figured this would be a good time to drop an earth-shattering bombshell upon my loyal readers: I hate the ALIEN movies.

Yeah, I know, the first one's a classic of horror, but it just doesn't do it for me. Sure, it was effective the first time I saw it, but the couple of times I've bothered to watch it again it was rather like riding "Space Mountain" with the lights turned on: a movie whose entire reason for being is gross-out stuff and "beastie jumping out from behind things" scares loses something when I know what's coming. And unlike, say, Jaws, which has other strengths going for it - - theme, character - - ALIEN is like the wind-up toy that is a lot less interesting after playing with it for five minutes.

Then there's the sequel, ALIENS, which, again, everybody loves but me. It's slick and well-made, but the plot is just one predictable complication after another, so even while I was watching the first time (on video, in college) I found myself ticking off every culmination of ham-handed foreshadowing early in the movie. And quite frankly, the entire last third of the movie just drags on and on and on. In his review, Roger Ebert likened this part of the film to a roller coaster ride that lasts for half and hour. Personally, I liken it to one of my favorite lines from The West Wing: "I'm sorry. I hung in there as long as I could, but you've long since past the point where I stopped caring."

Finally, there was the third one, in which we go right back to beasties jumping out from behind things and lots of nastiness and drooling and whatnot. I never bothered with the fourth one. So, there you go. My deep, dark secret is out.

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Cetacean outrage

Oh, my God.

You know how we (well, a lot of us) try to avoid consuming tuna that is caught with nets that also endanger dolphins? Well, the Japanese have figured out an ingenuous solution to the problem. They hunt the dolphins directly. They lure and confuse the dolphins into coves where men in boats can easily kill them with sickles, spilling so much blood that the water literally turns red. (Warning: the link contains graphic pictures of bloody water which seem to have been Photoshopped to make the water red to an absurd degree. Personally, I find the pile of dolphin cadavers in the boat as damning as the bloody water.)

As much as I love the Japanese and Nordic cultures, their insistence on hunting marine mammals (and let's not indulge the fantasy that these animals are killed for "scientific research" reasons) disgusts me to the core. (I should note a bit of "balance" here, as there's a lot about my own culture that disgusts me to the core.)

(Link via John Scalzi.)

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Watch the skies, please.

This kicks a staggering amount of ass: a Flash-based planetarium. Turn off the lights, fire up some Vangelis on the stereo, and explore the skies!

(via MeFi.)

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Cityscapes, at night

Also stolen from MeFi is this incredibly nifty collection of panaramic pictures of Japan at night. Despite my one major gripe with Japanese culture mentioned above, I'd love to visit that country.

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Get candy. Get candy. Get candy. Get candy.

A good time was had by all on Halloween - - the most important being the kid, of course. The good news is that there doesn't seem to be the Local Health Nut anymore; you know, he's the guy who used to give out apples for Halloween. The bad news is that it's pretty much all the same now: the same Hershey's Miniatures, the same Dum-Dums, the same Tootsie-Pops, et cetera. The cool thing about Halloween used to be the amazing variety of candy one would end up with; we seem to have lost our "candy diversity". That's kind of sad, because let's face it, when half the bag is full of Kit-Kats, Tootsie Rolls, Smarties and Dum-Dums, it all looks the same.

There were some interesting things, though. The bag's weight nearly doubled after we hit the two houses that were giving out juice-boxes. I see they still make candy cigarettes these days, but they obviously can't market them as such, so they're just "candy sticks". The sameness of two-dozen rolls of Smarties was broken up by the discovery of "Extreme Sour Smarties", which I discovered unawares when I put three of 'em in my mouth. Yeesh. And the kid's first-ever encounter with a Jawbreaker was pretty entertaining. (She ended up spitting it out after sucking it for about five minutes.) At least she didn't get any Milk Duds.

Oh, and not related to Halloween, but since I'm babbling about candy I might as well gripe about this here: What is Hershey thinking, abandoning the foil-wrapper in a paper sleeve for its chocolate bars? Now they just look the same as every other Mars Bar or Nestle product out there. No distinctiveness. I've therefore decided that whenever I want a chocolate fix, I'm going to go for some of the underappreciated bars out there. I love Butterfingers, but when I want one of those I'll get a Clark bar instead. Skor, instead of Heath. I'll get a 100 Grand bar once in a while. Something I've sought, and not found, for the last two years is a peanut butter cup in a brand I don't recall. Not Reese's, but some small brand that was wonderful because it had no chocolate at all. It was a peanut-butter cup of just peanut butter. Now, Reese's has something out right now called "Inside Out", which has a peanut-butter shell with a chocolate center, but what I'm looking for is the peanut-butter shell all the way through.

And for the love of God, bring back the Dark Chocolate Kit Kats and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! And do more with White Chocolate, which I love. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy if milk chocolate went away entirely, leaving behind only Dark and White Chocolate.

And here's a site about candy bars. And here's a quiz where you identify candy bars by the cross section. And here's one of many sites where you can get "retro" candy. And here's a hilarious Wil Wheaton post that the writers of Scream probably read. And...and...and....

(This post is what happens when a blogger ingests too much sugar.)

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Friday's Burst of Weirdness

Continuing my new tradition (launched last week) of posting here the strangest thing I've found in the intervening six days, I proudly call your attention to the strangest "extreme sport" I've yet seen. Combining "extreme outdoor activity" with "the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt", we have....

(I swear I am not making this up)

EXTREME IRONING!

And check out the galleries. It's a world gone mad!

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"In Longhand" (a short fiction excerpt)

Peter Bernstein put down his fountain pen and stared at the words he had just spent four hours writing. He had resisted the feeling at first, but it had come with increasing certainty until he could no longer deny it: he couldn’t finish this story, either. He carefully screwed the cap back onto his pen and placed it in the cup with the rest of his pen collection, and then he put the story in a drawer with all the other ones that he couldn’t finish. It was never a case of not knowing how the story should end; it wasn’t uncertainty as to what to write next. It was the certainty that what he was writing wasn’t any good. Surely he could do better than this. Surely he could write something better than a mere bodice-ripper. But maybe not. How many months since he had finished a story? And how long since that wondrous first sale, which had never been followed by a second?

He glanced at the index card taped on the wall with his credo written on it with his broad-nib Parker Duofold: Nulla dies sine linea. Never a day without lines. But his lines, his writing, never amounted to anything at all. How ironic that he had become a pen collector to have writing instruments equal to his prose – and now the prose was hardly fit for a disposable ball-point.

***

Early the next morning Peter got up and went to work. His classes were scheduled so that his teaching day was always done by two thirty, which gave him ample time for office hours and his various other duties. On Tuesdays his first class was at ten thirty, so he looked through a pile of papers from his freshman comp classes. When his mind began to wander, after the third time he read some teenager’s outrage that his or her tax dollars were going to keep murderers alive, he got up and walked to the Humanities Lounge to get some coffee. Sitting in the lounge, as always, was Professor Lawrence Tatum of the History Department.

"Peter!" Tatum yelled. He said everything in a near yell. "Find anything over the weekend?" A very large man with a great shock of red hair, Tatum had his day’s work spread across one of the lounge tables; the common joke was that his office might just as well be converted to a broom closet

"Nope," Peter replied. "I actually didn’t do any shopping this weekend."

Professor Tatum tsked. "You should always be on the lookout, Peter! For all you know, some stranger found a pen that was destined for your pocket."

Peter laughed. Professor Tatum was a voracious collector of antiques of all types, and he had amassed a very valuable collection over the years. He was planning to open his own shop when he retired. In fact, Tatum could have probably opened a shop now; he had some items of great value indeed that would fetch a high price at any auction. He only delayed because he still loved teaching history. Peter had actually met Professor Tatum at one of the local antique dealers, when Peter had been looking at vintage pens. Tatum knew of Peter’s pen mania, and he occasionally would acquire an item that would pique his friend’s interest.

"Never a day without shopping, young man!" Tatum said with a laugh as he gathered his papers and headed off to class.

He knew that Peter was a writer of sorts, and found Peter’s credo amusing.

On his way home that afternoon Peter walked through part of downtown, which he did a few times a week; he liked the variety of it, and he liked to observe people to incorporate into his stories. He walked through Chinatown, which was just a two block area with three Chinese restaurants, a Japanese place, and a couple of Asian gift shops. He loved this particular area, and he ate there at least twice a week. Today he stopped with interest at a formerly vacant storefront that had just acquired a new tenant; they had removed the tarpaulins covering the storefront just that morning. To his surprise, it was an antique shop. The front door, one of those heavy wooden doors that rattled threateningly when opened and closed, bore fresh gold lettering that read "Karl Strassheim, Antiquarian." Below these words was a picture of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of death, and below that, written in smaller lettering: "By appointment only." Peter peered through the glass in the storefront and saw that this Strassheim dealt in very fine antiques. Peter doubted very much that a place like this would ever be in the price range of an English professor.

***

Later that evening Peter went to Queequeg’s, a coffeehouse in his neighborhood. The owner was a freak for nautical decor, and her favorite novel was, as one might expect, Moby Dick. The walls and ceilings were covered with sea charts, fish nets, lobster cages, harpoons, old photographs of fishermen, and the like. Peter ordered his usual, the "Captain Bligh" (double mocha cappuccino topped with nutmeg) and then took over a booth. He loved to write here, and he pulled out some paper and the fountain pen he was using that week. Since he was currently "between stories", he wrote character sketches of the denizens of the coffeehouse. Most were younger than he, and some were even his students. He wrote about a number of these, describing physical characteristics first and then creating life stories for these people. And then a new arrival, someone he hadn’t seen before, caught his eye.

This man was elderly, possibly in his eighties. His thinning white hair was perfectly combed. A pair of rimless spectacles was perched on his slightly red and bulbous nose. He wore a white silk dress shirt under a black pinstriped jacket with a red silk handkerchief folded into the breast pocket. Peter watched the way the man very precisely measured three spoonfuls of cream into his coffee. Then he opened three sugar packets, one at a time, by flipping each one three times before tearing along a crease he folded in the top of each packet. After three sips of coffee, the man produced a leather-backed journal and began to write in it using a pen that Peter recognized even twenty feet away.

He had seem pictures of it in his pen collector’s books. It was a Pelikan M-900 Toledo. The black acrylic barrel was encased in a series of engravings in twenty-four karat gold. The manufacture of this pen, by the makers in Hamburg, required almost one hundred steps. Suddenly the vintage Sheaffer in Peter’s hand felt very inadequate. Peter was still staring at the gentleman when the gentleman looked up and met Peter’s gaze.

Peter shuddered. The man put him in mind of his Uncle Saul, who had traumatized Peter when he’d been a boy and his parents had taken him for monthly visits. Uncle Saul had been a stern man, a cold banker whose home had smelled of antiseptic and was full of things that little boys dare not touch lest they be locked in the cellar with the Beast Beneath the Stairs. Peter had no idea why a complete stranger should remind him of Uncle Saul. He gave a quick smile and then dropped his eyes back to the page again. He put his left hand across his brow, blocking his upward gaze with his fingers as he tried to refocus his attention on his writing and give off the impression of uninterruptible intensity of work. Let’s see, where was I….he took a slip of scratch paper and scribbled to restore the flow of ink to his pen.

"Here, try mine," a voice said. The voice was foreign – Northern European. Not French. Peter looked up and found himself face-to-face with the gentleman from across the room. He was holding out the Pelikan Toledo. He nodded and smiled genially. "You may find the nib to your liking, I think." Not Swedish or Norwegian, either….

"Thanks," Peter stammered as he accepted the pen. It was fairly lightweight, and when he unscrewed the cap and posted it on the opposite end the balance was almost perfect. He touched the silver and gold nib to the paper and wrote a few lines in his miniscule script. The pen left behind a smooth, thin line in sapphire ink. "I prefer black," he said as the man took the seat across from him.

"Chacun a son gout," he replied. He picked up Peter’s pen and looked it over. "Very nice," he began, peering at it as a jeweler would a diamond. "The Balance, made by the W.A. Sheaffer Company. Gold and palladium nib. Well preserved indeed; this pen has seen a number of caring owners. But look here: a few hairline cracks in the cap, where the clip is fastened." Age had not diminished this man’s visual acuity at all.

"You know fountain pens?" Peter asked as he handed the Pelikan back to its owner and recovered his Sheaffer.

"I know many old things," the man said, waving a hand of dismissal. "There is much business to be done in things that are old."

German! Peter realized. "You’re the new antique dealer in town," he said.

"Indeed." The man nodded slightly. "Karl Strassheim. I am new here in town; I lived in the South for a long while, but I regret that my life has come to the point where I need the cold. It reminds me I’m alive. I could not bear to take refuge from the world behind the gates of a sterile community in the bosom of the Tropics. Don’t you agree?" He smiled throughout, saying all this in a single unbroken breath.

"Yes," Peter said, momentarily taken aback. He did in fact prefer the colder climes.

"I thought so," Strassheim said. "May I have your name?"

"Peter Bernstein."

"Ah, Bernstein! Any relation to Leonard?" Peter shook his head. "Pity. I have one of the Maestro’s earliest batons in my shop. Tell me, Mr. Bernstein – may I call you Peter? I do like some informality – tell me: are you a practicing Jew, or do you merely carry the name?"

Peter’s eyes narrowed as he tried to judge this man. "I’m not what you would call religious," he finally said.

"Not many are," Strassheim said. He reached into his jacket, drew out a small brass case, and pulled a business card from the case. He placed the card on the table and wrote something on the back with the Pelikan Toledo. His fingers were long and fine-boned. "I may be able to help you, Mr. Bernstein."

"With faith?" Peter stared at him.

Strassheim raised his eyebrow. "With pens." He handed Peter the card, tipped his hat, and left the coffeehouse. Peter looked at the card. On the left was a gold-ink Anubis, the same design that Peter had seen on the door to Strassheim’s shop. Next to Anubis was Strassheim’s name and his shop’s address in raised purple ink. At the bottom, in red: "We know not for what we seek." Peter turned the card over, to where Strassheim had written: "Monday, precisely 4:00 p.m." His penmanship was perfect and patrician.

[Enter Keanu Reeves, doing ninja-battle with Hugo Weaving]

(I wrote this story a few years ago. It's the first horror story I ever wrote, so I'm putting up a piece of it today -- Halloween -- even though the horrific stuff doesn't come until later on. I suspect that the "Guy with writer's block" thing is something of a cliche; in fact, that was cited as a reason for one of this story's rejections. This was not meant as any kind of roman a clef; the writer in the story is not based on me, except in one detail: his fascination with fountain pens, which leads to the other stand0by horror cliche I used here: the "Mysterious Antiques Dealer", who actually is based on someone from real life, one of the very few times I've drawn inspiration from real people.)

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Hmmm....can a blogger be "Uplifted"?

A common meme in SF these days, beginning (I think) in the work of David Brin, is "uplift", wherein life evolves to a certain point but must then be acted-upon by an outside source to achieve sentience. And since Morat is dismayed at his slide in the Ecosystem, I'll toss out a cluster of links here intended to uplift him! (Yeah, it's a slow blogging day.)

His wife was in a car accident. She's banged-up but OK, apparently; sadly, her bosses at her retail job were less than sympathetic. He also picks on Gregg Easterbrook's belief in Intelligent Design; offers a take on Donald Luskin (actually, two takes); thinks that Wesley Clark's campaign has a few problems of the "viability" variety; and finally points to a partial quoting of something funny Jon Stewart said about our President.

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Silver (the Quick variety)

I haven't read Quicksilver yet, although my copy is sitting on my shelf, staring at me. (I have a number of things that need to be cleared from the deck first.) But I've noticed a couple of "in-progress" takes on the book: Morat seems to be enjoying the book, and Kevin Drum isn't. So we'll see.

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A Public Notice, from a former pizzeria manager.

When I worked in the wonderful pizza business, even though I was a manager I had to join our delivery drivers on the streets on really busy nights, like Halloween. So, if you order a pizza for delivery tonight, keep the following in mind:

1. It's Halloween, and it's a Friday night. This means pizza places will be very busy, so don't get upset when it takes longer than 30 minutes.

2. Likewise, everybody else will have the same idea as you: that by ordering between 4:00 and 5:00, you'll avoid the crowds. Forget it. Dinner rushes on Halloween tend to hit very early. Your best bet, actually, is to order late.

3. Not only should you expect longer delivery times because of the sheer amount of business, but you should expect that delivery drivers will be going a lot slower due to all the kids out and about.

4. If you're not offering candy to kids, and thus you're leaving all your outside lights off so as to avoid having armies of people knocking on your door, please reconsider ordering your pizza for delivery. Consider ordering carry-out and going to get it yourself. It's a tremendous pain to locate the houses whose lights are shut off (because then the numbers on the door aren't legible), which means it'll just take that much longer for the thing to get to you. And in some areas, drivers might actually be trained to not deliver at all to houses with no lights on. (Or, maybe you could turn on the light while you're waiting for the pizza and stick a sign on your door saying that you're not offering candy.)

5. TIP YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER !!! Really, you should be doing this anyway, but Halloween is probably the most stressful night of the year for people who make their living schlepping pizzas around. They're under pressure to deliver hot food to people quickly, and not run over small children while they do it. So if your pizza is $10.50, don't just give the person $11 and tell them to keep the change. And don't think for one second they'll consider candy in lieu of a tip. (Well, if they're good at their job, they'll accept the candy and act happy about it. But it's really not a nice thing to do.)

6. Even better, consider actually going to eat in the dining room at the pizza place. In my experience, our dining room was always dead-as-a-doornail on Halloween nights, when Halloween fell on a Friday or Saturday.

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Another Grand Master Passes

Science fiction author Hal Clement has died. He was an SFWA Grand Master in 1999, and memorials can be read here. I don't recall if I've read anything by him, but it's always sad to see the old masters pass on.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

'Young Woman on a Bridge at Llangollen' by Peter Edwards (oils).

I was noodling about a site of Welsh culture and art, and I found this lovely painting, which I reproduce here solely because the young woman pictured herein looks very much the way I picture the heroine in the novel I'm writing. That's all. This is the first time I've ever seen a painting that looks like my heroine, although I've seen a number of real people who do look like characters of mine. (And one blogger.)

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Good Lord, what an ailment....

Two different bloggers have posts that have me feeling a bit glum about the future of reading today.

First is this news item, cited by John Scalzi. It seems that kids just aren't used to handling books for long periods of time, and thus are getting headaches from the physical effort of reading...Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. That's all we need: a medical reason not to read. (Yeah, I'm taking this too seriously. Sue me.)

And if that doesn't make you give up all hope, this missive from one of the Blowhardic Duo might. There's a lot here, so read the whole thing, but the sad gist of it is Michael's belief that reading in-and-of-itself, in the form of sitting down with a book and just reading it, is going to continue to regress into its own little niche. Ugh.

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Poor Donald....

I didn't learn about the whole Donald Luskin-taking-legal-action-against-Atrios thing until late last night, and I didn't feel much like posting about it then, so I'll just chime in with my predictable view here that Luskin is always dumb and a stalker, but now he's just plain insane.

Anyway, it's funny how those who continually beat Democrats over the head for having trial lawyers as one of their big constituencies don't seem all that hesitant when it comes to having their own trial lawyers sue people who insult them.

And by the way folks, how can Luskin have any kind of claim against Paul Krugman for the whole "stalker" thing if Charles Johnson apparently doesn't have a strong claim against IndyMedia for the whole "child molester" thing? Anyone?

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A Late Day....

Yes, I am late in producing new material here today, because we decided to vacate the home for a while. In fact, we vacated the city: we trekked to Rochester, NY and visited the Strong Museum, which is a museum whose main exhibits are designed for children. There's an antique carousel, a small train, craft tables, and all manner of other stuff. Right now they are housing an exhibit centered around Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which allowed me to follow up a bit on the strong similarities between that story and Hayao Miyazaki's great film Spirited Away.

There is also a large Sesame Street exhibit, with walk-throughs designed to actually look like you are walking through Sesame Street. That was pretty cool. One thing I did not expect was a room with profiles of all the major cast members through the years on the walls, along with video monitors which play clips related to each member. I pressed the button for Mr. Hooper, and the video clip that played was the terribly sad scene where the cast has to explain to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper has died. They should have put a warning on that.

Anyway, a good time was had by all. The Strong Museum is a really fun place. Buffalo should have one.

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Up is Down! Black is White! Cats are Dogs!

[This post contains 100% political snarking.]

Digby's got the goods on the Bush re-election strategy. Since a period in which we've seen two major wars is going to be marketed as "Peace", I can't wait to see how a recession, a busted treasury, and two million jobs lost is offered as "Prosperity".

Yeesh.

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Et tu, Jane?

I just read a post by Megan McArdle in which she takes Democrats to task for stonewalling President Bush's judicial nominees because (and I can't believe she wrote this in all apparent seriousness) the judges in question, while being minority judges, are not liberal minority candidates.

Now, I'm not entirely sure why Megan would completely disregard the actual reasons stated for why a relative handful of judges are being opposed; nor am I certain shy Megan apparently thinks that Democrats actually expect the President to nominate "the same judges Al Gore would have nominated"; nor am I certain why Megan is of the apparent belief that it's their minority status that is riling the Democrats (that Charles Pickering fellow -- in what minority does he fall?).

And then, one of the commenters on the thread, in just the fifth comment, provides some factual data that pretty much completely disproves Megan's post. I can only assume that she has the flu and composed this post an hour after drinking half a bottle of NyQuil, because it makes so little sense that I had to check three times to make sure I was even on her blog in the first place. While I don't find it uncommon to disagree with her, I do find it highly uncommon to actually think she's being intellectually dishonest.

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You put the red one on the black terminal, right?

In another attempt to jump-start Collaboratory, I posted a couple of items there for discussion.

BTW, last year we tried to get a Collaboratory book club going, but we got a bit too ambitious and ended up getting crushed beneath the weight of The Brothers Karamazov. We're thinking of taking another crack at a book club, this time with I Claudius, I think. If there's abiding interest, leave a message there under the appropriate thread.

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Our man in San Diego

SDB thinks he's safe from the fires, for the most part, and he also provides a handy map that shows where the fires are (or were, at the time of the map).

He also provides a brief explanation of the numbering system for the Interstate Highway system: odd-numbered interstates are mainly north-south routes, while even-numbered interstates are east-west routes. I'd also add that when a relatively short "spur" or "loop" is added, a third digit is added to the front of the number, with the last two remaining the same as the "mainline" highway with which the spur or loop is associated. Thus, by way of example, in Buffalo we have the following:

I-90: This is the mainline Interstate that traverses the Buffalo region.

I-190: This is the spur that branches off I-90 and leads downtown and then to Niagara Falls.

I-290: This is a loop that branches off I-90 and curves around the northern suburbs of the city (Williamsville, Amherst, Tonawanda).

I-990: This is a spur that branches off I-290 and leads to the University at Buffalo's North Campus and a couple of miles beyond.

So, a "spur" will usually have an odd first digit while a "loop" will have an even first digit. (Strangely, this isn't the case in Syracuse, where I-690 is, despite its even first digit, a "spur" and not a "loop". I-490, though, is indeed a "loop".)

And if you find all this just incredibly fascinating -- and why wouldn't you? -- then you'll just love this page, which has more than you'll ever want to know about the Interstate Highway System, of which Charles Kuralt once said: "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything."

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As if the seafood wasn't reason enough....

Jessa Crispin points out that there may soon be a very compelling reason to move to Massachusetts.

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A Modern Parable

Well, not really a "parable", but a reflection. Or a meditation. Or a thought. Or....[head explodes]

Anyway, yesterday the wife and I had the wonderful occasion to foist the kid off on the grandparents for a few hours, during which we went shopping without the four-year-old in tow -- a one-time normal thing that has been elevated to luxury status since the coming of the kid. We went to a couple of consignment shops, to Barnes&Noble, and a few other places. We were early in getting to the restaurant where we were meeting the grandparents for dinner, so we passed a few moments by going into Clayton's, which is the Buffalo area's nicest toy store. This is where you go in Buffalo if you're looking for real toys: dollhouse furniture, the biggest selection of Playmobile stuff I've ever seen, kid's crafts, fine dolls (both porcelain and Russian matryoshkas), fine model railroad supplies, et cetera. In other words, everything you won't find on the shelves at Toys-R-Us or Wal-Mart.

What was amazing was that we've been looking, to no avail, for a couple of things in other toy places. I've been looking for wind-up bath toys for the daughter, like boats or whatnot. The wife has been looking for "sewing cards", apparently cardboard or felt cutouts in different shapes that come with yarn and have holes punched in them to let the kid lace the yarn through the holes, an item which I guess shows kids the concept of sewing. (I'd never seen these before, so if my description is weird, sorry.) We could not find either of these simple items in any big store -- not Wal-Mart, not Target, and not even Toys-R-Us. But we found both within five minutes of walking into Clayton's.

It amazes me that simple things like these have been eclipsed into the realm of "specialty toys". I walk through toy sections in the big-box stores and my attitude is, "God, let's find what we want and get the hell out of here". But I walk through a place like Clayton's, and I start to actually think back to my own childhood, and I spot the things I used to play with, and a strange mixture of happiness and sadness sets in. I'm happy that I can still find these things and get them for my kid, but I'm sad because I wonder how many parents never even consider going to a place like Clayton's, and thus have kids who will never play with a single toy that Wal-Mart has decided not to stock?

Folks, if you have kids, don't do all your Christmas toy shopping at the big places. Find those small toy stores and get them something they'll never see at those big places. And spread the word.

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Link Clearance! Old Links at Low Prices!

Here some science related articles I've had sitting in my bookmarks waiting to be unleashed on my unsuspecting readers at just the right time. Tremble, pitiful mortals! Mwwoooo-hoooo-haaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!

:: Alien hunters get new respect. After years of being seen by many as a "fringe" activity, SETI research is finally emerging as legitimate scientific inquiry. Where is Dr. Sagan when we really need him?

Someday I hope to see the new Allen Telescope Array, once it's built. When I was in second grade and my family lived in West Virginia, we once drove by the radio observatory at Green Bank (back before they built the new Robert Byrd telescope). I find something beautiful, in a ghostly way, about large radio telescopes -- these giant lattices of steel and mesh through which we have deepened our knowledge of the Universe.

:: Archaeologists recently uncovered evidence that the Amazon basin may not have been an unexplored and pristine jungle before the arrival of the Europeans after all. Evidence shows that the natives of that region were far from stone-age savages, working the region into a network of villages and even building roads.



:: If you like whiskey, you're in pretty good company -- no less a personage than George Washington, hero of the Revolutionary War and First President of these United States, drank the hard stuff now and then. In fact, Washington had his own distillery at Mt. Vernon, and a group of whiskey makers recently used the distillery to recreate General Washington's own whiskey recipe (although, contrary to Washington's likely practice, they're going to age the stuff to make it taste better).



:: Here's a new theory as to why ships disappear at sea without trace or reason: they are swamped, unawares, by giant methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor. What happens is that the pressure at the ocean bottom causes methane to form ice-like structures, like the orange blob in this picture:



But these structures can break off and head for the surface, and as they "thaw", the methane reverts to gaseous form, making a huge bubble that can swamp an ocean-going vessel on the surface if it breaches at just the right spot relative to the unfortunate ship. If this turns out to be true, I wonder if the Bermuda Triangle is merely a region whose sea-bed produces a lot of methane.

:: If you plan to make an Egyptian-style mummy in the future, you'll be happy to know that the secret ingredient in mummification that allows preservation on the millennial time frame has at last been identified: an extract from the cedar tree. (To this day, my favorite bit of the mummification process is when they use a really long needle to pull the cadaver's brain out through the nose. Yeah, I'm warped.)

:: I'm not sure what the environmental implications are, especially for biodiversity, but an ongoing process to take a "census" of the oceans is revealing three new fish species a week, such as this new variety of scorpionfish:



Representatives of Red Lobster could not be reached for comment.

:: Applying Pat Robertson logic, maybe our abandonment of Sun-worship wasn't such a good idea....

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Look out Joe, here comes Jerry!

Yup, it's Tuesday, which mean the Buffalo News (which, being a major metropolitan newspaper, really should be able to afford a website that actually loads more than 60% of the time) runs Jerry Sullivan's football column. Today, he wants to fire Bills head coach Gregg Williams.

Now, I actually (somewhat) agree with that sentiment. I don't think the team is playing on a level commensurate with its talent, and that -- plus the lack of discipline evident after eight games -- seems to me to reflect mostly on the coaching staff. I don't think Williams has worked out, and I now doubt the Bills can make the playoffs. Assuming that at least ten wins are needed to make the postseason (unless one happens to play in the AFC North, a division which can be taken with an 8-8 record), the Bills would have to go 6-2 the rest of the way to make it in. I don't see that happening, not with games left against good teams like Dallas, Indianapolis, New England (as much as it pains me to admit it), the Giants, and the Dolphins (who I still expect to swoon, but you never know). With two-and-a-half years under his belt, and with an upgrading of personnel each year, Williams has yet to really achieve.

But Jerry's not content to can Williams when the current, lost year is over. Jerry wants him toasted right now. Firing a coach in mid-season should, to anyone familiar with football and its regimented, system-dependent nature, pretty much concede that the season is lost. But Jerry goes so far as to opine that such a move might not doom the Bills' season, citing -- of all things -- the Florida Marlins. You see, the Marlins entered the 2003 season with Jeff Torborg as their manager, but they fired him about a month and a half into the season (when they were ten games under .500) and brought in Jack McKeon, who proceeded to steer them to the best record in baseball after that point and the eventual World Series championship. Yeah, that was inspirational and all, but come on, Jerry. Are you really suggesting that a baseball franchise firing its manager one-fourth of the way through a 162-game regular season is comparable to an NFL franchise unloading its head coach at the halfway point in a 16-game season?

(Yes, he's really suggesting that.)

Jerry's column is peppered with all manner of stupidities. Sure, Jerry, the University at Buffalo Bulls are the more respected football team in Buffalo right now. Sure, Jerry, the Bills are "the national joke". Sure, Jerry, "Williams isn't a lame duck, he's a roast duck" is just the cleverest metaphor! And ultimately, Jerry doesn't even answer the question of, What would be the point of canning the guy right now? If you're only going to name an interim coach to play out the string -- which Jerry tacitly concedes would probably be the case -- how is that any less "giving up on the season" than just keeping Williams in place until the year's over and the whole thing can be handled in a manner that wouldn't be a mid-season distraction?

Jerry doesn't have an answer for that, but then, the column isn't about answers. It's about Jerry going, "Look how just darn MAD I am! Wheeeee!"

Worst...columnist...ever.

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Wow....

Via Atrios I found this rather stunning image of San Diego fire damage:



How did the flames manage to completely destroy nearly everything manmade, but leave the trees relatively unsinged, just fifty feet away? Was this due to the efforts of firefighters, or did it have more to do with the way the fires spread?

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Breaking the Theismannic Membrane

Nefarious Neddie observed my expression of disdain for ESPN football commentator Joe Theismann the other day, and points out a Theismann gem I didn't even know. After my expression of disbelief, Neddie instructed me to Google "Theismann Dumb Quotes", wherein I discovered this wondrous collection of idiotic sports utterances. Amazing beyond belief.

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I'm off to seek lions in the Scottish Highlands....

Matthew Yglesias points out a person whose NYC apartment search is likely to take quite some time. My suggestion for this person is: Move to Buffalo.

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From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-zee....

Lynn Sislo has answers to a A-Z Quiz, which I figure I'll answer in an attempt to further my goal of content-free blogging.

A: Actor. Harrison Ford, I suppose. Although his recent work has been lacking, in my opinion.

B: Boyhood Idols. Yeah, that would definitely be Harrison Ford.

C: Chore You Hate. Cleaning cat boxes. Ugh.

D: Dad's Name. Harry.

E: Essential Video In Collection. The Star Wars films. All of them.

F: Favorite Actress. There are so many that I like…just dig through the archives for my "Move Over Britney!" series.

G: Gold or Silver. Silver.

H: Hometown. Pittsburgh by birth, Buffalo by emotional attachment.

I: Instruments Played. Trumpet well, piano not so well.

J: Job Title. Writer/Blogger/Unemployed Schlub.

K: Kids. One.

L: Living Arrangements. Two bedroom apartment in suburban complex.

M: Mom's Name. Theresa.

N: Number People Slept With. I'm not answering this one.

O: Overnight Hospital Stays. None. Wife's had two.

P: Phobia. Hmmm….I recoil fiercely if you even mimic pulling back a rubber band and aiming it at me.

Q: Quote You Like. "If it's not baroque, don't fix it!" (From Beauty and the Beast. More quotes in my sidebar.)

R: Religious Affiliation. None whatsoever. I'm pretty militant in my reluctance to endorse any religious doctrine at all, because I think nearly every religion has something true and transcendent to say about the human condition, and at the same time every religion has something idiotic and bogus to say about the human condition.

S: Siblings. One older sister.

T: Time You Wake Up. These days, sometime between 7:00 and 8:00. If I'm really exhausted, I might sleep until 9:00, and it's not uncommon for me to wake up at 6:00 and just get out of bed under the assumption that it's useless to try to sleep any more than that.

U: Unique Habit. I'm not sure exactly what this means - - unique as in, I'm the only one in the world who does it? Or that I'm the only one I know who does it? Anyway, aside from people online, I don't know any film music collectors personally.

V: Vegetable You Refuse To Eat. Broccoli. President Bush the Elder's revelation that he also detests broccoli nearly had me changing my political affiliation. Luckily for me, there was all that policy stuff that allowed me to remain a Democrat with good conscience.

W: Worst Habit. My sweet-tooth knows no bounds.

X: X-rays Taken. Once when I broke my collarbone in seventh grade, and routine ones during dental visits. (The first dental hygienist who attempted to do this with me discovered my incredibly powerful gag reflex when she made no attempt to describe what she was doing with that little piece of X-ray film they stick in your mouth and simply starting sticking her fingers in my mouth. Heh.)

Y: Yummy Food You Make. Pastitsio (a Greek forerunner of Lasagna). I even posted a recipe for it here a few months back; sometime I'll look for the link.

Z: Zodiac Sign. Given my strong belief that astrology is a lot of hooey and that people who believe in it are boobs, I probably shouldn't know my sign. Sadly, I do. It's Libra.

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Can't they assign a GOOD movie?!

For some strange reason, I'm getting a lot of search engine hits recently from people looking for study guides and such for the film Dead Poets Society. I'm hoping against hope that teachers are assigning this movie under a "Here's how to make a bad movie about poetry" teaching plan, but somehow I doubt it. Anyway, I maintain a link to the article in question in the sidebar, if anyone really wants to know why the movie bugs me. Look under "Notable Dispatches".

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Ummm....a lot of 'em do that, John.

John Scalzi is shocked! shocked! to learn that his cat drinks from the toilet. Well, not all cats do this, but this right now may be the only time in my life when I haven't lived with a cat who drinks from the toilet. It's not universal, but it's not uncommon, either. Cats like cold water, which is what attracts them to toilet water: it's always cold, by virtue of being insulated by as much as two inches of porcelain. If you think your cats aren't quite drinking enough water, especially in summer months, try putting ice in their water dish when you fill it. This has often worked for our cats.

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Suckiest Sucks, Revisited....

I wasn't going to babble more about the Bills' blowout loss last night, but I notice now that since I wrote the post last night in which I mentioned Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan's constant harping that the Bills do not have an elite defense, he went and wrote his entire column in this morning's paper on the non-elite defense.

Now, I'm not about to claim that the Bills played a good game last night on defense, because they didn't. Their pass-rush, which I'm complaining about on a weekly basis, was abyssmal last night, failing to apply pressure to Trent Green even when they sent seven men across the line. They gave up 38 points and 375 yards, they had no sacks and they created no turnovers. That's bad. But Sullivan seems to want to put the entire blame on the defensive unit. As he writes:

But you can't blame the offense for this one. The Bills moved the ball well at times. Travis Henry ran for 124 yards on 22 carries. He might actually have scored a TD if Gilbride had the sense to run on second-and-goal from the 2. Henry ran for 87 yards after halftime. Too bad the game was already decided.

The Bills had to follow a simple blueprint to win. Run and stop the run. They ran OK. The only thing they stopped was any talk that Buffalo has one of the NFL's top defenses.

I can't blame the offense for this one? Really? The offense that scored three points in the entire game, with the team's other two points coming on a blocked punt in the end zone for a safety? The offense that, despite averaging 5.1 yards per carry against a team that everyone knew was susceptible to the run, only ran 26 times? The offense that only handed off to its Pro-Bowl running back, Travis Henry, nine times in the first half? The offense that turned the ball over seven times, with three of the resulting Kansas City drives resulting in points scored? The offense that went pass-wacky at all the wrong times, just as it has so often in this season? I can't blame that offense for this game, Jerry? Please.

This game as a total-team effort. The Bills blew this game in all phases. Let's not pretend it was a defensive melt-down, because it wasn't.

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Boring Traffic Stuff

Today I reached 25,000 total hits, and yesterday, October officially became my best traffic month yet, and there are five more days to go (including today). This also means that three of the last five months have been record-setting months here at Byzantium's Shores, and I've done it the old-fashioned way, with not an Instalanche in sight. (Well, I did have a couple of Den Bestelanches in June. But not an Instalanche.)

Yippee and Huzzah!

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Writing Update

The current word count is just over 67,000, which in terms of a mass-market paperback is roughly between 140 and 180 pages. The story is moving into the second act, and the problem now is that I have a lot of balls in the air here; I have to keep stopping and reminding myself of things like, "You haven't shown this character in four chapters, and we really need to know what he's up to before the next big battle scene because, you know, he sets that up."

I don't revise as I go, unless it's to go back and stick something in to foreshadow something that's going on right now -- the old rule being that if you have a gun going off in the third act, you'd better have that gun on the mantelpiece in the first act. (The greatest example of that rule in action I've ever encountered is the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which director Frank Darabont has every major plot device right out in the open in the film's first half-hour, and you don't even realize it until the end.) I haven't had to do as much of this lately, but in the early going of this particular book I had to a lot of "plot retrofitting". You might think that outlines might solve this problem, but I don't use outlines. Outlines are for the weak. Heh!

(Of course, it could well be that outlines are essential and that writers who don't use them are the kinds of whackos who ride motorcycles without helmets after drinking nine beers in thirty minutes....but we won't plumb those depths right now.)

Anyhoo, onward and upward!

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The suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked!

OK, I've pretty much given up on the Bills' offensive coaching staff now. I'm writing this during the third quarter, when the Bills are down 28-5. Even if they come back and win it, I'm giving up. These guys - - including Gregg Williams - - have no idea what they're doing. Williams and Gilbride need to go, as soon as this season is over. I've heard all the stuff about how Drew Bledsoe can't win the big ones, and yeah, he sure looked awful last night -- three interceptions, two fumbles, one lost, yada yada yada -- but the game plan never seems designed to fit his strengths, the team is always undisciplined, et cetera and so on. When these guys are making the same mistakes in Week Eight that they made early in the season, that's the coaching. For me it boils down to this: Would this same group of players have a 4-4 record, with two of those losses being blowouts, if Bill Parcells or Jon Gruden or Tony Dungy or Jeff Fisher were coaching?

What also gets me now is the way a lot of the radio and print commentators here gripe about the Bills' defense for not being as good as it can be, but hell, when these guys are constantly on the field, what does anyone expect? This is a common complaint for Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan, who is constantly saying, "This is an elite defense?" Well, no, it's not an elite defense. They don't get enough pressure on the QB, their pass-coverage often has holes in it, et cetera...but it's a good defense that would really look better if they weren't in the position of having to pitch a shutout each week. To win with an offense this bad, your defense has to be not just good, not just great, but one of the best defenses of all time. The Bills just don't have it. That's all.

:: Note to ESPN: Joe Theismann is a blithering idiot. The guy is just one dumb comment after another. For instance, just after the second play of the game: "I really like the way Drew Bledsoe is managing his offensive line tonight!" Or this, when the Chiefs took the ball for the first time: "I'll bet Dick Vermiel has his offense throw a long bomb right here!" (They ran the ball off the right side for five or six yards.) "There's no way the Bills kick to Dante Hall in this situation!" (They kicked to Dante Hall.) When the Bills were down 28-5 with two minutes left in the third quarter: "Bledsoe can still bring this team back!" Sure he can, Joe. God, the guy is a nitwit, and he never shuts up. John Madden may be annoying, but he's not stupid. Theismann is.

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Of belts, and the hitting below them

According to SDB, the weirdo-site IndyMedia has libeled the guy who runs the weirdo-site Little Green Footballs. Now, I personally think LGF is one of the most putrid sites out there, but IndyMedia's stunt here is just dumb and very likely libelous. Come on, guys.

UPDATE: Michael Lopez rains on the "It's libel!" parade by being so crass as to actually cite some case law. Geez, talk about a killjoy! (Mmmmm....Blended Puppy Soup....)

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The "Job-is-worthless" Recovery

According to economic journalist Jim Jubak, the economy is finally creating jobs. Problem is, the jobs suck. Woo-hoo.

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Lily Rules!

I turned on NPR yesterday morning and caught the last few minutes of an interview with one of my favorite people in the world, Lily Tomlin. I first encountered Tomlin when I was in second grade; for that one year only my family subscribed to HBO, and one month there was an hour-long comedy special of hers, which I recall enjoying immensely - - I watched in several times - - even though I didn't entirely understand the jokes. Some of her films are still favorite comedies of mine, like Nine to Five and All Of Me. And of course there's her work on The West Wing, which I love.

The NPR site has links to the actual interview as well as video clips of Tomlin's work over the years. The occasion of the interview is Tomlin's reception of the Mark Twain Prize for Achievement in Humor.

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Mr. President, a Mr. Falwell to see you.

Via Matthew Yglesias I see this Washington Post article, which seems to indicate a long suspicion of mine: Sooner or later, the Evangelical Christian Right, which is overwhelmingly Republican, is going to decide that it's been moderately silent long enough. In other words, President Bush's debts are going to be called in, which should make for some pretty interesting political theater. It's like they're saying, "Fine, we were quiet after our open-mike night at the 1992 Republican Convention, but we want the mike again." I'm reminded of that recent Steven Den Beste post in which SDB maintained that the Christian Right has been marginalized in Republican politics, an idea which struck me as being, well, totally wrong.

But what strikes me in this article is the opening graf:

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are making plans to turn gay marriage into a major issue in next year's elections, with some Christian groups saying that banning same-sex unions is a higher immediate priority for them than restricting abortion.

Presumably, these are many of the same folks who believe that human life begins at conception. The logical result, then, of their belief that same-sex marriage outweighs abortion is this: "We hate gays more than we value human life, and we are prepared to reflect that belief in our activism." That's a pretty breathtaking statement of values, isn't it?

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Is this what they mean by "Posthuman"?

OK, I know that I'm not as well-read in science fiction yet as I'd like to be, mainly because I pretty much abandoned the genre between the ages of 16 and 26. So, I'm not totally up on the concept of "Posthumans", and I need someone to explain it to me. Specifically, are "posthumans" the types of folks who can survive being swept over Niagara Falls with no protective gear and the types of folks who can kill a shark with their bare hands? Is that what the whole thing is about?

By the way, I've been to Niagara Falls dozens of times, and the Canadian side - - the side the guy went over - - is always incredibly packed with tourists snapping photos. How did nobody get a shot of him just as he went over? I don't care about pictures of him waving in triumph after crawling onto a rock at the bottom! I want a shot of him just as he hits the brink, what I call the "Holy Shit!" moment. Come on, somebody's gotta have that picture!

And also by the way, if the guy who went over the Falls is telling the truth and it really was a suicide attempt, then he's got to be the most colossal screw-up in human history. Imagine picking the single most sure-to-be-successful manner of killing oneself that probably exists, and still surviving with only a few scratches. Oy.

(second link via He of All Things Horrific.)

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Reruns, we've got reruns!

Question: When David Letterman takes a week off, why are the re-runs always episodes from about six weeks before? I mean, we just saw these! (As I write this, for posting Sunday morning, Dave is cracking jokes about Rush Limbaugh's comments about Donovan McNabb.) Can't they rebroadcast some really old episodes, from 1995 or so? I'd love to see an old interview of, say, Samuel L. Jackson promoting Pulp Fiction or some such thing.

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This book left me sweaty around the edges.

A month or so ago, I saw a post by Michael, one-half of the 2 Blowhards, about a crime novel titled Mobtown by an author named Jack Kelly. Michael's review caught my notice not because he really liked the book, although his review did pique my interest in the book on that basis, but because of the book's setting: Rochester, New York, circa 1959. That's just sixty miles down the road from Buffalo. I'm quite familiar with Rochester -- it's a nice town that, like just about every other city in New York whose name isn't actually "New York", has fallen on some seriously hard times in recent decades. (Yeah, I know, NYC pretty much fell on the ultimate in hard times in a single day two years ago. That's not what I'm talking about.)

I don't tend to read too many mysteries. For some reason, I almost always find that the last third of a mystery, when things start getting revealed, is dramatically less interesting than the "mystery" part of the story, and to some extent I found that was the case here, as well -- one of those "The journey's more interesting than the destination" things. But it's a really fun journey here, especially because these are locales I know, to some extent. Some of the book's action takes place at a theme park called "Gleeland", which I take to be the park now called "Seabreeze", which was named "Dreamland" during the years in which the novel is set. I've been to Seabreeze, and I've ridden the Jackrabbit roller coaster. I've seen the Genesee River Gorge as it cuts right through downtown Rochester. The Red Wings still play minor league ball there. It's a real pleasure to see these kinds of locales worked into a novel like this. And it's a pleasure seeing a noir story taking place outside of New York or LA or San Francisco.

Parts of the novel left me a bit cold -- as I note, the climax didn't really grab me, and some of the standard private-eye novel cliches show up: the femme fatales, the action at the local boxing ring, the divorced private-eye who promises his kid he'll make the birthday party only to be detained by the local cops until well after the party is over. Still, it was a fun read, mainly for the locales and for Kelly's knack for the language of these types of stories. Michael quotes this bit of description, quite aptly:

Her lipstick had worn off, her hair was all over the place, and she was sweaty around the edges. But, man, could she dance.

A lot of the book reads like that. I hope Kelly writes a similar book for Buffalo. Thanks to Michael for the pointer.

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New at GMR

My newest review for Green Man Review is up: the novel The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes by Larry Millett, which is a novel about an English detective around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who apparently takes a lot of opium and hangs out with a guy named Watson. The game's afoot....

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Searching for Amazons

I see that Amazon now allows one to search not only titles and whatnot, but the entire texts of the books in its database. A lot of folks are thinking this is surpassingly nifty, but I'm not really sure. And quite frankly, I'm not even sure that it really works. I tested it out with two distinctive phrases from the last paragraphs of the chapter "The Siege of Gondor" from The Return of the King, which I would think would be one of the books in Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" database. (The phrases were "recking nothing of wizardry or war" and "great horns of the north wildly blowing".) The book was not listed among the results. Then I tried "Mindolluin", the name of a mountain also mentioned in the same paragraph, and still Return of the King failed to come up. Maybe I'm not understanding how this is supposed to work?

Also, it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to use the new feature, until I realized that it's hardwired into Amazon's search function. So any time you search, your search term results using "Inside the Book" are automatically returned, whether you want them or not. That could be a giant pain, could it not? I'm not saying this is a bad feature, but it seems to me the customer should be able to disable it.

(Just after I finished writing this, I saw that Jessa Crispin had almost the exact same thoughts, and two days before I did, to boot. Terry Teachout had the same thoughts. Geez, I'm getting slow on the draw.)

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That guy dancing in the street -- isn't that Marlin Fitzwater, former White House Press Secretary?

Congratulations to the Florida Marlins on winning the World Series. For the second year in a row, the team I was rooting for was defeated by a team I don't mind seeing win. You know the baseball gods are smiling upon you when your starting pitcher not only nails down the series with a complete-game shutout, but makes the final put-out himself when he fields a slow grounder up the first baseline.

Something that confuses me slightly about the outcome this year is how it reflects baseball's economics. I've long believed that baseball desperately needs to institute some real form of revenue sharing and probably a salary cap system, similar to the one the NFL has in place, which would level the playing field for the small-market teams like my own Pirates. But, the Marlins' title, as well as the recent competitive teams fielded by Oakland, Minnesota, Kansas City, and so on seem to demonstrate that small-market teams can compete. What they can't do is field a juggernaut like the Yankees or Braves; but they can make up for that with good scouting, competent player development, and proper management of the farm system. That's why the Marlins have been able to bounce back from losing something like 105 games in 1998 (one year after their first title and the fire-sale that they held the day after they won it), and that's why my Pirates are now entering their third rebuilding phase since 1992 (their last postseason appearance), even though they haven't had a winning season since that same 1992 season. I still think that baseball needs to get better revenue sharing in place, but this pretty much proves that bad franchises can't blame it all on economics.

I wonder if Cubs fans watched the Yankees' lackluster play in this Series and are now thinking, "My God, our boys coulda taken these guys...."

Finally, two small complaints to the FOX television people: when a team records the final out in a World Series victory, show the entire pile-up of celebrating players on the mound, will you? Last night's coverage cut to the glum faces on the Yankees' bench way too soon. I know, you have to show them, but let the celebration be seen first. Then you can show the losing team wondering what might have been. And the other complaint is more general about TV sports: does every large sporting event have to serve double duty as a promotion for that network's TV shows? I mean, I love That 70s Show, but do I really gotta see the cast shivering in the Yankee Stadium stands? Yeesh.

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O for a thousand eyes, that I might roll them at once....

That can mean only one thing: another gathering of those weirdos on AICN for a roundtable discussion of Star Wars and everything that is wrong with the Universe! Yep, you can read parts one and two today, with a promise of a third installment in another day or two.

Actually, it isn't nearly as bad this time as in previous installments (which set me to a lot of mouth-foaming, here, here and here). A big reason, I think, is that some guy named Carl Cunningham, who is apparently a fairly prominent Star Wars fan on the Net, is participating, and he seems to be both articulate and a guy who hasn't sipped the "George Lucas is a money-grubbing hack who has totally lost it" Kool-Aid. So, a lot of the discussion this time actually revolves around fannish speculation on the plot of Episode III: just when Anakin turns, how it might tie in with the other Episodes, et cetera. Not too bad, although some of the mental gymnastics the group performs get a bit weird -- especially in Part Two, when they start in on when the Original Trilogy will show up on DVD and what kind of filmmaker George Lucas really is and whatnot.

Moriarty's insistence on proceeding from the default assumption that every rumor is true until it is directly contradicted gets a bit annoying, but hey, at least no one mentions Greedo shooting first. Particularly refreshing is the afore-mentioned Carl guy, who immediately responds to the first whiff of "Lucas is out for our money" with something I've long maintained: If all he wanted was the fans' money, he'd have crappy DVDs of the Original Trilogy in stores already. And a bit later on, when someone mentions some interview that Gary Kurtz once gave, this Carl fellow actually points out that maybe, just maybe, Gary Kurtz (the producer of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back) doesn't know what he's talking about. Huzzah. (Kurtz's name is often invoked by fans who hate the Prequels as the real reason the first two films in the Original Trilogy are so good, as part of the "They're good in spite of George Lucas" argument that I reject completely.)

So, it's not as bad as the previous incarnations of the AICN Jedi Council. (I expect that the TalkBacks will, in due course, get flooded with all the annoying idiots who hate Star Wars because it's not The Matrix.)

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Move Over Britney!

Yep, it's time for another installment in my ongoing exploration of Notable Women Whose Dogs Britney Is Unfit To Follow With A Poop-Scooper! This time, we have Mary-Louise Parker.





OK: long-time readers will recall that I expressed some lack of fondness for Ms. Parker's work on The West Wing in previous seasons. Why the change of heart now? Well, basically: I'm changing my mind. I can do that, you know. I've liked her each time she's showed up this year on The West Wing, which baffled me slightly, so I checked her IMDB listing.

Basically, I had forgotten about a lot of good work she has done: Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes, and more. Thinking, then, about why I haven't been turned off by her on TWW this year when I was quite turned off by her the last two years, I realized that it's Aaron Sorkin's fault. But not in a bad way.

Ms. Parker has a fairly low voice, and her vocal delivery is pretty low-key, without a lot of enunciation (and sometimes she outright drawls). She's what I call an "expression actor", in that she can do more with her eyes and facial expressions than she can with her vocal delivery of dialogue. This, I think, put her at something of a disadvantage on The West Wing when she was required to partake in Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue; it simply didn't suit her well and I always found her speaking parts on the show to have an almost monotone-buzzing quality.

But now that Sorkin is gone, the dialogue on TWW has been slowed down a bit (although, quite honestly, it's still been pretty good), and the show has actually explored silence once in a while, which plays to Ms. Parker's strengths as an actress. Anyway, that's my theory. It came to me when I realized that I liked her most in roles where she doesn't say a whole hell of a lot.

And that is more than anyone really wanted to know....

Labels: ROWR

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Friday's Burst of Weirdness

This is an experiment that I might keep up with: a weekly posting, each Friday, of the weirdest thing I've encountered on the Net during the week.

This week is a very odd bit of animation, with music, called We Like the Moon.

(via Particles, a subdivision of Making Light.)

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Digital Distribution in Art (a repost)

(I don't normally do reposts -- in fact, this might be my first repost ever -- but the topic has come up lately, and rather than just rehash it all I can just repost. I wrote this back on February 9, 2003.)

I've been thinking a bit about the "digital distribution revolution" that is unfolding in the music world, and is beginning to bud in the film world -- the uploading and downloading of songs on P2P networks, the various copyright issues, and such. While I grant that the industry attempts to stuff the genie back into the bottle are equal parts laughable, draconian and dumb, I also have to admit a certain suspicion of the motives of many who are allied against the RIAA and MPAA. For all the high-sounding rhetoric about "freeing Mickey" (with which I generally agree; copyright was surely never intended to last for periods measured in decades) and "progress" and "the evil record companies" (with which, again, there really can be no dispute, since the RIAA's typical view of talent is not-that-distinguishable from indentured servitude), it seems to me that the bedrock motive always comes back to money. The RIAA does not want its golden goose killed, and the file-swappers are under the impression that a fabulous new day is dawning when paying for music and movies and whatever else is a thing of the past. "Information wants to be free" has always struck me as a ludicrous idea, especially since the conduct and quick anger of those who insist such never fails to convey the actual message of "I want my information to be free".

Some other thoughts, largely unrefined, have been stirring about in my brain for a bit, so I'll just throw some things at the wall. If anyone has answers or thoughts of their own, feel free to comment.

:: The means of distribution affects art in many ways. For instance, every article I read about filesharing and its related issues discusses the shared content in terms of songs. I see this in the Apple tagline, "Rip. Mix. Burn." I see this every month in WIRED, when some celebrity or important person is asked to list their current playlist, and it's always a selection of ten or twelve completely different songs. When WIRED recently compared a group of music-download sites, they used a single song as the test case. My point? While I do often speak of individual songs, I've always preferred to think of the song as something atomic, with the larger work -- the album -- as the actual work of art. I may be one of a minority in this regard -- I haven't done any research here -- but I wonder if something isn't being lost when our attention turns from albums to individual songs. I worry that the idea of a great album -- say, Brothers In Arms or Led Zeppelin IV or The Wall or Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely -- may die out as our focus shifts to finding those songs that we like.

A great album isn't merely a collection of songs. A great album has an entire character on its own that is defined by the way its constituent songs work alongside one another; how the mood of one song leads into the mood of the next; the ebb-and-flow of the tempi and style of the songs. What place, then, for an album in a world where the song is the standard of exchange?

:: I've thought of getting an MP3 player, once in a while, but I'm not at all certain how much mileage I would get out of it. This is because I tend to listen to entire albums, as noted above; but also for another reason: I just plain like CDs. When I read comments in WIRED that imply that the CD has become uncool and square, I really wonder how on earth this can be. I've never found CDs to be anything other than marvelous and wonderful. They are convenient; their sound is frankly better than an MP3; and I actually like things like cover-art and liner notes and whatnot. And I don't like the idea of my entire musical collection existing as nothing more than ones-and-zeroes on a hard-drive, subject to the various problems that affect hard-drives now and again. I like the physical reality of my CDs. Thumbing through my music collection and finding old gems that I haven't heard in a long while is always a pleasure; although admittedly I haven't tried, I can't quite believe that scrolling through a collection of folders and files on my PC would have the same cachet.

:: If the digital realm is really the future of content -- music and books and film and whatever else -- then I worry even more about the "digital divide", where so many people in our society are unable to join the online world, whether because of cost or disability or whatever. The Digital Divide is real, and it is large; and it seems to me that if we're going to transfer a significant part of our cultural expression to the digital realm, then we'd better make damned sure the Divide is reduced to almost nothing, if not eliminated entirely.

There are many people in this world who cannot afford a computer and whose only opportunity to go online is to use a public terminal at a library, if they can even do that. But a person who might not be able to spend $600 on a computer may still be able to scrape together $30 for a bargain-basement CD player. They need not be shut out of our culture entirely, which is what I fear may happen to an uncomfortably large segment of our society as we become more and more digital.

Digital media are wonderful and have stunning potential. But I'm unconvinced that the infrastructure exists to make our digital world a reality for all people, and if we can't bring the digital to all people, then I am not prepared to allow those people to fall by the wayside, thus creating a caste of Untouchables -- perhaps we would call them "the Unconnected" -- who are not only divorced from the Internet, but divorced from our culture itself even as they walk amongst us.

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Yeah, but did Resphigi compose a tone poem about them?

Kevin Drum decides that for this week's installment of Friday Cat Blogging he'll eschew new pics of his own cats in favor of some pics of the cats of Rome.

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The Diaspora Continues....

Slipping the surly bonds of BlogSpot today is John Lagado's Laputan Logic. Get thee hence:

www.laputanlogic.com

You folks who haven't visited this blog, which is a one-man-band blog version of The Discover Channel, need to check him out now, and often afterwards.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Concorde, coming in for landing at London's Heathrow Airport.

The Concorde jet, which travels at supersonic speeds, will cease to do so after tomorrow's last departure from JFK Airport in New York, and nothing is replacing it, mainly because companies that make and use such planes now believe no such plane can recoup its costs. The era of the Concorde is over.

The picture links to an MSC article by Michael Moran, who wonders: "Have we humans peaked as a species?" He writes:

Slave galleys, paddlewheels, stagecoaches, ocean liners and trans-continental rail service all had their day. Yet in none of those cases did humanity settle for something less when their day had past. In that, Concorde’s retirement may be unique.

In my more cynical moments, I tend to agree with George Carlin in that we were once a promising species, but now we're basically playing out the string. This isn't quite what Moran's getting at here, but I think this way too, more often than I should. I see science fiction authors and aficionadoes turning their back on space travel, at the very most consenting to robotic probes but that's it. I see us basically throwing up our hands and consenting to being screwed with our pants on, simply because "the market" and "the bottom line" demand it. And so on.

Most of all, though, I think we've lost our sense of wonder. That's a hell of a thing to lose, and I want it back.

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It sure beats a puttering mo-ped!

Aaron's wife, Krista, finally has a vehicle that befits her profession, which involves whacking on things with sticks. (She's a percussionist.)

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Knowing it when one sees it

Lynn Sislo is ruminating on an eternal question: What is art?

I've tossed that one around quite a bit in my life, and often I see the attempts at definition which sooner or later arrive at the altar of opinion, usually in a derisive tone: "Rap music isn't music." "Science fiction is fun, but it certainly isn't literature." And so on. A lot of times it seems to me that any such definition is basically fence-building, with the definition serving as the fence to keep the undesirable stuff away from the "good stuff".

In his book Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud comes up with a really inclusive definition of art: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity that doesn't grow out of either of our species two basic instincts: survival and reproduction." Now, this definition strikes me as unsatisfactory, but I'm sympathetic to it because it is inclusive. It's not a definition designed to set up borders and filters that will insulate us from the bad and allow in only the good. So even if that definition doesn't quite work -- and McCloud later admits it doesn't, in his follow-up book, Reinventing Comics -- I think he's on a right track.

My personal definition of art is also inclusive: "Art is any activity whose primary purpose is to stimulate the senses in such a way as to provoke an emotional response, a set of emotional responses, or a set of reflections." Art, to me, depends not just on result but also on intent. And that's why cooking, in my opinion, is every bit as much an art as is painting, composing, and writing. Cooking requires craft, to be sure, but a lot of times I see commentary on cooking-as-art overly dependent on the idea of craft. (I take "craft" to be "attention to the details inherent in any particular artistic medium".)

These thoughts are, of course, half-baked and in need of fleshing out; what I've done here is stick my flag in the ground and stake my claim. I'll worry about what I build there later.

0 hath spoken!

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Change Your Bookmarks

Scott Secrest has left BlogSpot for greener pastures:

www.archipelapogo.net

Go have a look. Any redesign plans, Scott?

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Digital Music

Andrew Cory, who has tried repeatedly to drink the Apple Kool-aid but evidently keeps picking up plain ice water, talks about the new iTunes for Windows thing. I have very little interest in downloading music, and I don't expect that to change until we reach a point when a significant amount of music I want is only available by download, which I suspect will be quite some time. For all the complaining about the price of CDs -- and I do think they need to come down in price -- they're still closer to being an egalitarian means of music distribution than downloading, which assumes a certain level of affluence. Plus, I just plain like having my music collection in a physical, tangible form. I have thought about ripping some of my CDs so I can listen to them while I'm at the computer, but that would be primarily a novelty, since the computer is in the same room as my stereo in the first place.

0 hath spoken!

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A Potential Warning!

A few minutes ago I checked my Technorati Link Cosmos, and found a new site linking to Byzantium's Shores that is, shall we say, a tad surprising. (As of this writing, it's the Number Two site listed there. Not Safe For Work!) Upon further investigation, it appears to be a porn site that's specifically designed to look like a blog. Scrolling downward, I found a very long list of links which I assume is where the link here is located; I also see that this site has 125 referrals already from Technorati, so I assume I'm far from the only one making this discovery this morning.

I don't know, maybe this is all harmless and maybe it's really just someone using blog format for a bit of "High Kinkiness", but in the wake of last week's "Comments Spam" attacks that infected many Movable Type blogs out there with porn links in the comment threads, my "suspicion meter" is set on "High". So, any of my readers with blogs of their own might want to be on the lookout. I'm not sure really what happens next here, but vigilance is always wise.

And this strikes me as a good time to reiterate my own Comments Spam policy: I will ban any IP addresses that attempt to do any such thing on my comments and I will report such behaviors to the appropriate ISPs.

UPDATE: And just like that, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has already found the exact same site. Somehow I suspect that the names "Woody" and "Peaches" are about to become quite infamous in Blogistan....

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Hmmmm....

Last week, NBC postponed the new episode of The West Wing that was to air Wednesday night, presumably because of the ongoing baseball playoffs (both the NLCS and ALCS had gone to sixth and seventh games, and both series involved a long-suffering franchise). Via The Modulator, I see that another theory for the pre-emption, which involves the episode's North Korea-related plotline. (The episode is now supposed to air tonight.)

I doubt that's the case, though, because NBC also put reruns in place of its Thursday night schedule the same week (up against ALCS Game Seven), and CBS likewise postponed a new episode of CSI Thursday night. (I don't watch anything on ABC, so I have no idea if they had to similarly postpone new episodes that week.)

I was surprised that the networks had anything new scheduled at all last week, but maybe they simply assumed that baseball's playoff ratings would continue to be less than the bonanza they used to be, only to be caught unawares by the drama of watching the Cubs and Red Sox come oh, so close.

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The TITANIC, the Administration, and Other Things That Leak

Darth Swank reports on a Defense Department memo, reported in the USA Today, which doesn't quite back up the "Everything's comin' up roses!" view of the War on Terror. Glenn Reynolds, of course, is incensed at the leak (this from the guy who kept maintaining that the Valerie Plame affair was "too confusing"), which is unfortunate because it's not clear that this is a leak at all, and anyway, the Department of Defense has put the memo up on their website. Now, I'm far from an expert here, so let me know if I'm wrong. But it doesn't seem to me that memos intended to be confidential get posted to the Web, even if they get leaked.

I sometimes get the feeling that if Reynolds were the Captain of an English ocean liner on its maiden voyage, his reaction to being handed a note informing him that a very large icefield lies ahead would be to light all the boilers and go full steam ahead.

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A Service Notice

Posting here may be a bit more sporadic than usual next week, as the Amazonian Queen Wife will be on vacation, which will mean setting aside my usual routines in favor of day-trips and whatnot. And Halloween is coming up, which means...well, I'm not sure what that means, except that I remember that my daughter is perhaps old enough to discover the joys of Milk Duds.

(I'm being facetious there. I hate Milk Duds, the most godawful candy in existence. Any candy that requires presoaking in lye just to render it chewable is not a candy I want on any kind of regular basis, even if it is only yearly.)

Oh, and check out John Scalzi's kid's costume. Apparently she likes to play with things before annihilation. Our kid's going to be Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz. Except she's blond. Go figure.

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A Minor World Series Note

Mike of Mike's Baseball Rants, who doesn't think too highly of Joe Morgan as a baseball pundit, might appreciate this: I was driving last night when the game started, and heard the first two innings on the radio. Very early on, Joe Morgan (the color-commentator on the official radio broadcast) says something like, "The Marlins will benefit defensively as the night goes on and the field dries out." I thought that odd enough to begin with, since the game was at night and presumably there wouldn't be a whole lot of evaporation going on.

But then, after I was home for a while and checked in on the game in the sixth inning, it was raining. So much for Joe's prediction.

(I actually like Joe Morgan a lot, but Mike's commentaries on him are usually very funny.)

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Google giveth, and Google taketh away

In an amazing twist of blogging fate, the guys over at Dead Parrots somehow ended up, for a time, with a post of their being Google's Number One site for "Steve Bartman" -- the Cubs fan who went for that infamous foul ball. The resulting traffic to their blog was, shall we say, staggering.

In that single day, they picked up about half as many hits as I've had in the entire time I've been writing this blog. Wow.

0 hath spoken!

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I'm not useless! Really!

Earlier this morning I was flipping past channels, heading for PBS so the kid could watch Sesame Street, when I just happened to catch about five seconds of Alan Colmes, the "liberal" who occupies the seat next to Sean Hannity on FOX News's "fair and balanced" show (in which Colmes always sits meekly by while Hannity foams at the mouth, shouts, interrupts, and generally behaves like Bill O'Reilly). Colmes's appearance this morning was on (I am not making this up) The 700 Club. I didn't watch any more than what I happened to see, so for all I know, Colmes got into a flaming debate with Pat Robertson and struck a blow for liberal decency and all that. (I doubt that.)

I did catch Colmes apparently defending himself against accusation that he serves no useful purpose on the show, by saying "I am not a potted plant!" That made me laugh. From what little I've seen of the Hannity and Colmes show (not much, admittedly), maybe Colmes is right: he's not a potted plant. He's that clump of dead root-bound soil that you discard from an old pot before refilling it for use with a new plant.

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Don't let McCoy get anywhere near it!

Still stealing stuff from Warren Ellis, a nifty new gizmo might be unveiled in Britain next year:

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk in real time could make its debut in Britain next year. Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

I assume this description will put any fan of the original Star Trek in mind of the Guardian of Forever, from "The City on the Edge of Forever" (incidentally, the greatest single episode of Star Trek ever, in any series):

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Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Literally.

It seems that the Powers-That-Be in Bangkok want to avoid President Bush and other luminaries being exposed to their city's riverside slums, so their solution is to put up a giant curtain, obscuring the view of the slum.

Talk about "Out of sight, out of mind" as a policy regarding the poor....

(Via Warren Ellis.)

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A Public Statement of Enormous Gratitude.

The UPS man dropped off a package for me, which was sent in my direction at the behest of one of my regular readers. Thank you, Michelle!

(And don't think for one second that I've abandoned my efforts at coercing you into Blogistan on your own….)

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I hope there's some gratuitous raping and pillaging....

Time for some Guy Gavriel Kay stuff. This time, we have early cover art (which is very tentative and subject to change) for the new novel, The Last Light of the Sun. On the left is the Canadian cover art, and on the left is the American version.



And that reminds me, I really need to watch the DVD of this movie one of these days. I bought it really cheap at Target just a day or two after coincidentally finding some enthusiastic reviews about it online. Also, my current plan after reading The Iliad and The Odyssey is to read my copy of The Sagas of the Icelanders. I've basically decided lately to start reinforcing my background in reading all the really old stuff.

(UPDATE: An alert reader -- a little too alert, if you ask me, harumph! -- points out that my above description of which cover is Canadian and which is American is in violation of at least one Law of Physics. Thus, the one on the right is the American cover, tentatively. Those responsible for the error will be sacked later today.)

0 hath spoken!

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Best Guest Appearance EVER!

Hyper-reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, of whom there are no pictures in existence, will "appear" on The Simpsons. Wow. You gotta love the literary chops of The Simpsons.

(via Jessa Crispin.)

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Scary Movie Scenes

Fun stuff, since Halloween's coming up: a couple of countdowns, here and here (second one "in progress", check back each day). I'll probably chime in with some of my favorites, but for now, this is a placeholder.

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Man, that guy's a heel!*

Maybe someone who's already read The Iliad can set me straight on something here: am I supposed to like or root for Achilles or something? Because quite frankly, he's striking me as a complete ass. "I don't care if all my countrymen get butchered by Hector, I'm mad at Agamemnon so I'm just gonna take my boats and go home." And I'm thinking, "Shut up and fight, you inveterate pansy!"

(I already know, of course, that Hector ends up dying in the end, by the way.)

*Get it? Achilles? Heel? Ha ha ha haaaaa!

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Ugly Stadiums and the Football Fans Who Love Them

As I write this (for posting on Tuesday), I'm watching a bit of the Monday Night Football game, and I'm struck by two things about football in Oakland. First, the Raiders are probably the most amazing example of a football team's cumulative age finally catching up to it in NFL history; and second, the Oakland stadium is one of the dumbest looking football stadiums in existence. To get the full effect you have to look at the aerial shots. Formerly called the Oakland Coliseum (renamed Network Associates Coliseum), it houses the A's and the Raiders, as it did back before 1983 or so before the Raiders went to Los Angeles for ten years or so. But when the Raiders returned to Oakland, it was with the insistence by owner Al Davis that the stadium's capacity be increased for football from its original seating for 45,000 (very low by NFL standards). So, they took the roughly circular stadium with former low-sitting bleachers in the baseball outfield and basically removed the bleachers and erected a giant three-tier seating area that basically makes the whole stadium look like a half-assed cross of two entirely different stadiums. Ugh.

(And the Raiders have just lost, failing to make the end zone to tie the game as time expired by a single yard. Wow.)

0 hath spoken!

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Epidemic Laziness

I may have commented on this before - - I've discovered that self-repetition is a fate to which longtime bloggers are probably doomed - - but it happened again, so I'll mention it again. I had a search-engine hit from someone looking for Cliff Notes on a Stephen King book, this time the novel Thinner. Now, I haven't read Thinner, but it seems to me that it either says something really cool about Stephen King that people expect there to be Cliff Notes about him (something about High Literary Worth or some such), or it says something really bad about our readers.

(I like King; when he's on, his work is superb. He's dreadful when he's off, though.)

0 hath spoken!

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Memo to David Blaine:

A month in a box? Pagh! Standing on a pole for many days on end? I scoff at you!

Now that is a stunt! Don't try this one at home, kids. Or here, for that matter.

(ADDENDUM: I should note that police here aren't yet convinced, as of this writing, that it wasn't some kind of hoax -- like maybe the guy dressed a blow-up doll in identical clothes and then hung out down below the falls for the appropriate moment to climb out.)

0 hath spoken!

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Addendum to today's Football Post

I forgot to mention that yesterday's Bills game was something of a Bills reunion day. Not only was Bruce Smith in town with the Redskins (the Bills didn't allow him any sacks, but he came close and man, is he still quick and muscular), not to mention Rob Johnson (as I noted before), but the big event was the halftime Wall of Fame enshrinement of Darryl Talley, the great former Buffalo linebacker. Talley was the heart-and-soul of the Bills' defense during the Super Bowl years, as well as being a fierce competitor and tenacious tackler. Talley was also known for wearing Spiderman spandex under his regular uniform. Also present for Talley's ceremony were other luminaries from the Super Bowl teams: coach Marv Levy, quarterback Jim Kelly, and running back Thurman Thomas.

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44 Days in a Box....sounds like the average call-center employee

David Blaine came out of the box. Think he actually spent the entire 44 days inside there? This guy doesn't.

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Hey Sheila! Check this out!

S.L. Viehl, who (among other things) writes science fiction and makes quilts, will appreciate this recent NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:



Some of the panels are originals; others are based on actual Hubble photos (linked at APOD). Wow!

0 hath spoken!

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The Descent Into Depravity Continues....

Donald Luskin is mad that Paul Krugman thinks he's a cyber-stalker. Well, gee whiz, Donald: all you ever write about is how monstrously evil Krugman is (and that's not a mischaracterization of Luskin's writings), and it's rather hard to buy into your current description of your attendance of a Krugman lecture and book-signing as a harmless little lark when you went on to describe it in a blog post thusly:

I have looked evil in the face. I've been in the same room with it. I don't know how else to describe my feelings now except to say that I feel unclean, and I'm having to fight being afraid.

I know you're all hot-and-bothered about Krugman and all, and I know that "you demand an immediate retraction". But really, Donald, after you actually called Krugman "evil", why shouldn't the only response to you be "If you can't stand the heat, then stay the hell out of the kitchen"? You reap what you sow in this life, Mr. Luskin. Get used to it.

(via TBogg.)

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Howzabout a side trip to Dayton?

Happy Birthday to Kevin Drum, who turned 45 and gets to celebrate by taking a trip to Cincinnati. He wants to know what there is to do in Cincy, and I don't really know. He could just drive across a steel-deck bridge and hum at the pitch his tires make, I guess, and then repeat "97-X, bammmm, the Future of Rock and Roll!" over and over, I suppose.

(The road trip in Rain Man did start in Cincinnati, didn't it?)

0 hath spoken!

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Writing Update

The novel-in-progress currently stands at just under 62000 words. Up today is the first death of a fairly major character, but this character was introduced for no other purpose than to kill him off, so I'm not too broken up about it. He's kind of a minor MacGuffin who basically exists to nudge the story toward the real MacGuffin later on (the Grail, of course -- it's an Arthurian story after all). There are deaths to come -- I think -- that are a bit sadder, though. And there's one very major character whose fate I probably won't decide until the time actually comes when I have to either spare him or have the knife plunge into his heart. Decisions, decisions.

Over the weekend, I also dug out the most recent short story that's been sitting around half-completed. This one's driven by an image that came to me a couple of years back -- a homeless man starts waking up every morning with a crisp ten dollar bill in his pocket -- and now it seems to be developing into a weird tale about a secret society of highstakes poker players, who all happen to be homeless. Problem is, I don't know the first thing about poker, so I'm kind-of cribbing small details from every poker scene I've ever watched in a movie of read in a book and generally trying to fend off the nagging suspicion that it really wouldn't kill me to grab a copy of Hoyle's when I'm at the library later today. You know, getting the details right.

And the story keeps veering off into other thematic regions which are surprising me: Would ten dollars a day, every day, have any real impact on a homeless person's life, or would it just be subsistence? And what, to the homeless, would constitute "high stakes" anyway? I don't know the answers to these questions, and anyway, my general approach to matters of theme is to try to suggest it but do no more than that. Heavy-handed message-sending tends to grate on my nerves ("If you want to send a message, use Western Union", the saying goes). I'm more surprised at the direction I've gone after following a pretty-much random mental image that came to me for no reason at all.

0 hath spoken!

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NFL Week Seven: Yee-haw!

Late October is when the NFL starts to really get interesting, especially here in Buffalo. The question on everyone's mind is: Which Bills team is the real Bills team? Is it the power-running, stifling defense team that throttled the Redskins yesterday 24-7, beat New England and Jacksonville earlier in the year? Or is it the team with the sputtering offense that leaves its defense on the field too long, resulting in one-sided losses to teams like Miami, Philadelphia, and the New york Jets and barely pulled on an overtime victory against Cincinnati? We Bills fans are desperately praying for the former, especially with a couple of stiff tests coming up: the Bills play at Kansas City (where they almost always get crushed) and Dallas the next two weeks.

:: The Bills actually ran the ball yesterday, and they kept running it. Even when Travis Henry got stuffed a few times, they didn't instantly go pass-wacky. Wow, patience with the running game! Who'da thunk it! (Attentive readers will know that I'da thunk it. In fact, I did thunk it. And "thunk" is one fun word.) They rushed the ball 39 times for once. They ignored the nay-sayers who constantly point out that Travis Henry fumbles occasionally (he didn't fumble at all yesterday). And they actually decided to use Antonio Brown, the rookie receiver-kick returner who's the fastest guy on the team, on an end-around play, which was a nive changeup to throw into the mix (certainly better than fake punts and halfback options and other nuttiness the Bills have tried).

A very welcome development, in addition to the definite signs of life in the running game, was in the success the Bills had passing the ball without Eric Moulds in the lineup. Drew Bledsoe had a fine game, going 19-26 for 244 yards, one touchdown and only one interception. The leading receiver yesterday was none other than Josh Reed, who has come under heavy criticism for too many dropped passes and failing to get open. My contention is that Bills fans have been a bit too demanding of Reed, who is after all only in his second year. I think fans' expectations of receivers have been warped by the careers of such players as Marvin Harrison and Randy Moss, players who are spectacular pretty much from the minute they enter the league, but it's far more common for receivers to take a year or two to develop. Josh Reed's rookie year was better than Eric Moulds's, and if he only catches one pass a game for the entire remainder of this season, Reed's second year will end up eclipsing Moulds's second as well.

The defense played a tight and physical game as well, punishing Redskins QB Patrick Ramsay and eventually knocking him out of the game. Their backup, the former Bills' starter and incredibly injury-prone Rob Johnson, came in and almost immediately was swarmed to the Ralph Wilson Stadium turf. (I still maintain that the Bills did the right thing in making Johnson the starter a few years back over Doug Flutie, even though it didn't work out.) The Bills held the Redskins to 56 yards rushing and allowed only ten pass completions. That's pretty good. They'll need that stiffness next week, though, when they see Chiefs RB Priest Holmes.

One final bit of negativity: the Bills are still far too undisciplined. They are still prone to stupid penalties, and in something I've never seen before, they had to call a timeout before running the very first play of the second quarter -- when they had a two-minute television timeout anyway. That's not the mark of a precision team that's hitting on all cylinders.

Other football stuff:

:: If there is one thing I'm getting sick of seeing in the NFL, it's the way every time a wide receiver has a pass broken up by a defender, he immediately whirls around at the officials and makes that wrist-gesture that mimicks the ref's throwing of the penalty flag. If you get the call, fine; if not, quit begging for it. Yeesh.

:: The Dolphins have now blown two winnable games at home -- first, their opener against the Texans, and then yesterday against the Patriots. And it's not even December, when they wilt every year. Rickey Williams, though, did have one of the most amazing plays I've ever seen, when somehow he managed to keep his knee from hitting the ground with only one hand and his toes to brace against when a Pats defender made the initial hit. You almost hate to see a team lose when they have a player with enough drive and strength to pull that play off. Almost. But it's the Dolphins, so I'm glad to see them lose.

:: But I'm not glad to see the Pats win, because now we'll start hearing all sorts of blather about how wonderful Belichick and Tom Brady are. Gack.

:: I only saw a single highlight from the Vikings' win over the Broncos yesterday. Vikings fans will know what highlight that was. That lateral had no business working. I'm glad it did, but I really hope they're not planning that kind of thing as a matter of course.

:: Now that we're approaching the half-way point in the season, and the races for the playoffs are starting to take some shape, it seems that my Super Bowl prediction for this year is in some trouble. Tampa Bay's awesome defense has looked pretty ordinary, and they're only 3-3 right now, not even leading their division and well-behind in the all-important home-field advantage race. My AFC Champion pick, the Tennessee Titans, are in better shape -- they're 5-2, just a half-game out of first place in the AFC South, behind Indianapolis. And not a single one of my picks to win divisions this year is in first place right now. Ouch.

October's almost out -- the World Series is on, and soon it will be November, when the NFL season starts to really pick up steam. The trees here are now well-past their peak, and we're just about in the time when snow becomes a realistic possibility in the Buffalo weather forecast. Bring it on!

0 hath spoken!

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Come in, mothership...come in, mothership...

Agents from Intergalactic Patrol have released this photo of Agent ZZZ from the Evil Vexorg Empire, as he prepares to contact his superiors for further instructions in their fell plot to destroy all mankind. It seems that Agent ZZZ forgot that he is only to perform this operation in broad daylight, so as to not call attention to the glowing of his head....

0 hath spoken!

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Yanks Go Home....

SDB appended the baseball themed post that I commented on the other day, with a metaphor that in the field of international relations, the United States is comparable to the New York Yankees in baseball. It's a decent metaphor, not just in the way that SDB says but also in that a lot of people believe, with some justification, that the way the Yankees do business, while certainly good for the Yankees, isn't always good for baseball in general.

SDB also says that, while other teams wax and wane, the Yankees don't. That's not totally true, although it's certainly true that the Yankees wax and wane less than other clubs. But they have had their periods of ineffectiveness, as this table shows. They didn't become a force until the 1920s, with Babe Ruth's arrival. This began their most remarkable period of extended excellence, for over the next forty years the Yankees never went more than three years without finishing in first place. But then, between 1965 and 1975, they did not finish first a single time, and six times in those eleven years they finished more than twenty games out of first place.

The Yankees rebounded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, finishing first four times in five years between 1976 and 1980. But after 1980, they didn't finish first again until 1996 (1994, actually, if one considers that strike-terminated season). And the worst Yankees teams ever were the ones that took the field between 1989 and 1992. This whole period, incidentally, encapsulates the career of Don Mattingly, who is one of the most popular players to don the New York pinstripes since Reggie Jackson.

SDB attributes the Yankees' success over the last eighty years to money, and I'm certain that's a big part of it. But I'm wondering how big a role money played, or even what role it played, in the days before free-agency when baseball players were pretty much forced into playing for whatever team they ended up with, unless they got traded. I'm no expert here, so I'm wondering how the Yankees managed to be competitive for all those years when they couldn't just go out and sign the biggest players to the biggest contracts. Did they simply have the best scouting and farm systems in baseball for all those years? Were they simply lucky to have one great player after another -- and I'm talking GREAT players here, many of them among the very best ever -- come through their system? How on Earth did the Yankees do it?

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The Trials and Tribulations of Guys Named "Gregg"

I wouldn't want to be a "Gregg" right now. Maybe a "Greg", or perhaps a "Gregory", but definitely not a "Gregg". The Buffalo papers and media are awash right now in speculations that the Bills' head coach, Gregg Williams, is either about to be fired or is deserving of being fired or should never have been hired and more. And then there's writer Gregg Easterbrook, of whom I have complained before and who is embroiled in a bit of controversy right now over something he said about Jews (earlier post of mine here), has apparently been fired from his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN. Kevin Drum reports here and here, and you can follow his links to all manner of discussion of what Easterbrook wrote, said, apologized for, et cetera.

It's no secret that I've been coming off Easterbrook's band wagon lately, but the manner of ESPN's dismissal of his services is rather odd. That is to say, it makes no sense. They didn't just fire him; they deleted all of his columns from their archives, and actually coded their internal search engine so as to report zero hits on any search for the name "Easterbrook", regardless of whether you happen to be searching for Gregg Easterbrook or some other, unrelated Easterbrook. This isn't a mere dismissal; it's the firing-equivalent of killing the guy, bulldozing his house and then salting the earth where it once stood. Weird.

Speculation now is that Easterbrook wasn't really dismissed for writing something odd about Jews, but because by criticizing Miramax's promotion of the movie Kill Bill, he was actually criticizing his boss. (Miramax and ESPN are both owned by Disney.) Talk about your thin skins at the Disney Company, eh?

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Ah, our modern world....

Roger Ebert takes a break from writing about movies today to wax eloquent about leaf blowers, and how much he dislikes them. I pretty much agree with his sentiment. Blowers are definitely useful for removing large amounts of leaves from the roof of one's domicile, thus preventing them from collecting and rotting in the gutters and rain spouts, but whenever I see someone dutifully shooing the leaves from one's yard with one of these gizmos, I am immediately certain that come June this person will be outside again waging a war on dandelions, those innocent yellow flowers which go away all by themselves in two weeks anyway, if left alone.

And in a nice bit of incongruity, at the bottom of Ebert's article is a small box containing "related advertising links", which in this case are advertising -- you guessed it -- sites that sell leaf blowers.

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Musical Notes from the World Series

As a card-carrying Star Wars geek (well, I'd carry a card if there was one), I got a kick out of the music played at Yankee Stadium last night for the player introductions before Game One. When the visiting Florida Marlins were introduced, the Yankees played the "Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back, which many baseball fans might consider more appropriate for last night's home team, but never mind. Then, the Yankees were introduced to the strains of "Throne Room and End Title" from A New Hope, complete with that wonderful opening brass fanfare followed by the march-version of the Force Theme (originally Ben Kenobi's Theme).

And I thought that Clay Aiken performed a fine rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, except for the moment when the fighter-jet flyover threw him off. I'll admit it, I love Clay's voice. (I'll also admit to liking Celine Dion. Ya got a problem with that?)

0 hath spoken!

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A loogie spit from the roof will strike the sidewalk with what force?

The city of Taipei is now home to the world's tallest building. I've just cranked the numbers, and I'm sure everyone will be fascinated to discover that Taipei's new building is approximately 3.1512 times the height of One HSBC Center, the tallest building in Buffalo. Hmmmm....that's a little more than pi, isn't it?

(The Taipei building is way cooler looking than One HSBC Center, too. I mean, is the Buffalo building the most boring looking building you've ever seen, or what? Every time I drive by it, it just screams out at me, "This is where accountants come to play!")

The MSN article mentions the skittishness some people now have about very tall buildings post 9-11-01, but I still get a kick out of very tall structures. What interested me more was the fact that the big concern for the Taipei building is seismic activity, as opposed to terrorist activity.

And I should note that to me it seems a bit like cheating to build a tall building and then cap it with some kind of ornamental spire just to nab the "Tallest Building" honors. At least the Sears Tower in Chicago is offices all the way up. Harumph.

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Can he legally change his name to "That Guy"?

Wil Wheaton writes an open letter to That Guy, the Cubs fan whose innocent thought of "Hey, a foul ball's coming right toward me!" may end up being the most famous incident of a fan affecting a game ever.

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Should be a real hootenanny!

I am going to give this John Scalzi post a day or two to gain some steam in the comments, and then I'm going to pop some popcorn and enjoy the show. It's gonna be a blast!

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It's a blitz!

According to Atrios, Gregg Easterbrook is in the process of issuing a standard non-apology apology (that's what you do when you inadvertently piss people off by saying what you really think, but yet you don't want to backtrack on what you really think). I used to be a fairly big fan of Easterbrook's, but I think he's losing it pretty quickly and soon he'll be like Donald Luskin but with a gift for words.

Anyway, here's an Esterbrook oddity I failed to note a few weeks back in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback football column. I won't provide direct quotes, but about halfway through Easterbrook (correctly) takes my beloved Bills to task for not running the ball in short yardage situations, especially on third down. And then, six grafs later, Easterbrook chides the Bills for handing off on two consecutive plays in a short-yardage, goal-to-go situation (because running back Travis Henry has a history of fumbling). So, failing to run the ball is bad. But so is running the ball. Well, I guess all the Bills need to do is get a kicker who can make field goals from any distance up to 120 yards, so they'll never have to either pass or run again.

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To Insure Proper Service*

Kevin Drum reports that California restaurant owners want the minimum wage to tipped employees reduced. While I generally agree with Kevin's assessment (that any idea that the restaurants would pass those wages on to other, non-tipped employees is laughable, and that I'm generally getting sick of the whole "Anything that makes our stock price go up is good" thing that's infecting our business culture), I'm not sure that Kevin's view of the income such workers make is accurate.

Now, I'm in New York and not California, so it may well be that he's right, as far as California goes. I was shocked to see that California mandates an hourly minimum of $6.75 for tipped employees, because here in New York that figure is $2.90 an hour. That's right, servers in New York get paid less per hour than the regular minimum wage, and they are expected to make up the difference in their tips. They are required to claim the amount of tips they make at the end of each shift, and in the event that this amount is not enough to bring their total hourly rate for the shift up to minimum ($5.25, last time I needed to know this), the restaurant is required to make up the difference.

Servers at the restaurants where I managed would occasionally try to either underclaim their tips so as to force us to pay them the difference, or at least they would complain that they weren't making the hourly difference in the middle of the shift. Our response was this: To equal the hourly minimum in an standard, eight-hour shift, a server must be able to make all of $19 in tips, and a server who can't make $19 in tips, in eight hours of waiting tables, is probably a server who doesn't belong waiting tables in the first place, unless something has happened in that shift to utterly kill business for that day. How much work does this entail, then? Well, if that server waits on just one table each hour (a stretch of an assumption), and that table spends just $20 (a fairly median amount in the restaurants I worked) and tips the straight 15%, that server will make $24 in tips, which is more than the amount needed to make minimum.

Of course, that's just cranking numbers to get to minimum. That has nothing to do with the more elusive idea of a "livable" wage, and whenever Kevin posts something about low-income workers, his comments are invariably filled with people who are under the impression that even in urban areas like Southern California one can live just fine on the minimum wage. In my restaurant experience, servers were always the highest paid employees (when you factored in tips), and in the largest volume restaurant of mine (Bob Evans, a family-style restaurant that's big in the East, Midwest and is growing in the South), my very best servers ended up grossing more than everyone else including the General Manager. So, I rather doubt that Kevin's on the right track when he says that "the overwhelming majority of waiters make only a few bucks an hour in tips".

(I should note that I never worked in a restaurant where servers shared tips with bussers, cooks and dishwashers, though. I know that practice exists, but I never saw it in play.)

I always had a tough time, as a restaurant manager, reinforcing the idea with my servers that they are in control of their compensation, because my general experience was that they were not. Tipping has become something of a robotic impulse these days, and few people really seem to put thought into how much to tip when it's time to pay the bill; they just do the 15% thing in their head (easy in New York, because all you have to do is double the sales tax, and you've roughly got the tip amount) and leave it at that. Large parties, though, very often seem to undertip, which is why many restaurants simply charge the gratuity up front for parties of a certain size or higher.

And servers, it must be admitted, can get a bit on the greedy side. If a customer came in and merely had a bagel and coffee, which came to something like $2.50, the server would occasionally scoff at the fifty cents the guy left behind, and they would be unmoved by my pointing out that they were tipped above the 15%. And income tax time always made for a fun period for us restaurant managers, because servers tend to be united in their belief that tip income should be tax-free. (They all believe this. They may not admit it, but believe me, they believe it.) Thus they were forever trying to figure out how to claim just enough to make the minimum and not one penny more. The IRS, though, has its own way of doing things: the dreaded "Allocated Tips" business, wherein the government assumes that a server working X hours should make $Y in tips, and if they claim less than that, the government simply taxes them on $Y anyway, often leaving the servers behind on April 15 if they ignored our warnings that this might happen. Every year, at least two servers in each restaurant I worked could be counted upon to run afoul of that little problem, and as every penny of my income was taxed as I made it, I never felt one jot of sympathy for them.

One last note: One of Kevin's commenters scoffs at the idea of paying servers too much, asking, "How much do you need to pay unskilled labor?" I really loathe the idea that servers are "unskilled". Managing a section of dining room, seeing that the customers there receive the correct items in timely fashion and insuring that their experience in the restaurant is a pleasant one, requires a great deal of skill. No, it's not surgery or writing computer code, but it's a skill, and believe me, not everyone has it, not by a damned sight. Those people carrying the trays in the restaurants aren't unskilled schlubs, they are people, and dammit, they should be treated and viewed accordingly.

* A myth exists that the word "tips" is actually an acronym for this phrase. This is false.

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A Bit of Quarterly Business

Every month or two I remind readers of FilmWise, which is a wonderful movie-quiz and trivia site. They have some new ones up now, including a difficult "narration" quiz (in which bits of narration are given from movies that have narrators) and a wonderful visual quiz in which the contestant must identify films being parodied on The Simpsons. Go there, now.

(If you're a new reader and you weren't around last time I mentioned FilmWise, be warned: there are time wasters galore here.)

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A Sporting Metaphor

Well, another long-suffering bunch of baseball fans will go right on suffering, and their suffering is probably worse than that of the Cubs fans, because it's not like the Red Sox are "lovable losers". Being perpetual losers is bad, but year after year after year of being competitive, of almost winning, is probably worse. Until the other night, Cubs fans really didn't have a Bucky Dent figure in their lore; Sox fans now have another one (Aaron Boone). Of course, real baseball people know that it was actually the decision to leave Pedro Martinez in the game that played the larger role, and that means that both long-suffering ballclubs made their exits this year partly by virtue of their managers' leaving the starters in too late.

Anyway, to the metaphor in my title. Remember that "Looney Tunes" cartoon in which Daffy Duck is to star, but every time he tries to get into the role of the cartoon, the animator's brush comes along and repaints the background, or what Daffy's wearing, or Daffy's body itself, driving him completely to distraction? And at the end of the cartoon, the animator is revealed to be none other than Bugs Bunny, who winks at us and says, "Ain't I a stinker?"

Well, if baseball's a big Looney Tunes cartoon, then the baseball gods are the animators, and the Cubs and Red Sox are Elmer Fudd (who never really has a chance at nabbing Bugs) and Wile E. Coyote (who always has some new scheme that he's convinced will work this time). That's the easiest way I can explain it. Fudd's just a bumbling guy, who once in a very long while might get Bugs Bunny into the dinner pot, but Bugs always figures out a way out. Wile E. Coyote, on the other hand, quite often has the Roadrunner almost dead to rights, but then something insanely improbable (or impossible) happens, leaving him in the dust again.

Those were two great series, though. I can't see the World Series living up to either LCS, even if it goes seven games.

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Uh-oh....I think he's about to change subjects....

SDB revisits one of his favorite tricks, the old bait-and-switch blog entry, in which he talks at length about something and then jolts over to relating this seemingly innocuous topic to US foreign policy and war stuff. Here we have over 3,300 words that start out talking about sports and baseball and the immortal wisdom of Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra, and nearly two-thirds of the way through this missive we get to, you guessed it, the latest pain-in-the-ass thing done by the UN and France.

I'm getting better, though. Bait-and-switch blogging used to catch me by surprise, but I was able to detect the transition in SDB's post this time. It came with this graf:

"But there's a long distance between what's possible and what's practical. There's a long distance between what's possible (i.e. what's not impossible) and what is probable. In life we have to operate at the level of the practical and probable; pursuit of vanishingly small possibilities is one of the ways to virtually guarantee failure."

I didn't need to scroll any farther down than that before the "Danger, Will Robinson!" voice started screaming....

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Whosoever pulleth this sword from this stone....

Over at AICN there's a bit about a King Arthur movie that's filming now, appropriately titled, King Arthur. It's pretty amusing to read the comments and all the Talk Back stuff, because many of these folks are completely unaware of any way of treating the Arthur story outside of the Sir Thomas Malory-and-T.H.White way of doing it. To the extent that Arthur is a historical figure at all, he's most likely a warlord from post-Roman Britain, not some King who ruled a glittering castle in the High Middle Ages. Harry Knowles is really revealing his lack of knowledge here ("This has nothing to do with the Knights of the Round Table!" he exclaims in breathless stupor), and a lot of his TalkBackers are charging in to follow. Well, at least some of them are. In some of the posts you can almost detect some thought processes going on, beneath the insistent profanity and typical Net-board oneupmanship that is so common to the TalkBacks. But even then you'll find people joyfully calling a movie that isn't even done shooting yet a "piece of shit".

Here's a picture from the new film (from this site):



Anyway -- and I'm just rambling on a bit here, really, 'cause it's Friday -- Knowles says that John Boorman's Excalibur is the definitive Arthurian movie. I can't agree, inasmuch as there simply hasn't been a definitive Arthur movie yet. And I'm not really sure there ever can be, unless someone were to do it Peter Jackson-style with a trilogy of big-budget three-hour films. This is because the Arthurian legend -- the "Matter of Britain" -- isn't a single story. It's a collection of stories, with no real "set" starting point and no real "central" story thread. Sure, overall it's the story of King Arthur's rise and the subsequent fall of his realm, but it's not clear what's essential there. Is the Grail Quest a central part of the story? Maybe it is, but the problem there is that Arthur himself never goes on the Quest, so you'd have a significant chunk of the story where Arthur's not around at all. Why did Camelot fall? The easy answer is because of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair, but even then problems arise: some versions of the story don't even include Lancelot (he was not even present in the earliest versions of the story), you still have to decide if Mordred (Arthur's bastard son) plays a role, et cetera. And then one has to decide whether to use Arthur's killing of the children, which might not play so well in Peoria.

The Arthurian story, then, needs to be changed significantly -- at the risk of seeming terribly incomplete -- or condensed drastically, if it's to work in a single two or three-hour film. The latter approach was taken by Boorman in Excalibur, a film which is admirable for its production values (Boorman gets the visual feel just about perfect) but one that I've always found rather antiseptic and unsatisfying. The film always feels to me like a re-enactment of a sacred drama, curiously unemotional. I don't mean to imply that I don't like the film, because I do -- I even own the DVD -- but it's not definitive by any stretch. It's got a lot of faults, including the use of excerpts from Wagner's Ring Cycle and Orff's Carmina Burana in the score, which I find terribly distracting.

The former approach -- making wholesale changes to the Arthur story -- was taken by the producers of First Knight, in which Sean Connery is Arthur, Richard Gere (!) is Lancelot, and Julia Ormond (whatever happened to her, anyway?) is Guinevere. Here, the focus is almost entirely on the love-triangle, with no fantastical element at all. No Grail, no Merlin, no Mordred (we get an evil guy named "Malagant"). Again, we get a very unsatisfying film that seems to reduce the Arthur story to something smaller than we feel it should be. I did like how they attempted to make Lancelot into not a "perfect" character brought down by the foul temptress Guinevere, but a flawed guy who tries -- and fails -- to rise above his appetites. But Gere is never quite convincing, and the film just cuts too many corners. (The score, by Jerry Goldsmith, is in my mind the most overrated film score of the last ten years. Film score fans seem unanimous in thinking it's a classic score, but to my ears it's bombast marked by endless repetition of a single theme.)

Then, there's Camelot, the Lerner-and-Loewe musical based on T.H. White's The Once and Future King, which is -- well, it's pretty close to unwatchable. I like Richard Harris as Arthur, and the songs really are wonderful, but all the other actors are lousy. (Except the guy who plays Pellinore; that guy's golden.)

For my money, the best Arthurian film is the television miniseries Merlin, in which Sam Neill plays the great wizard. Here, too, changes are made that some might find cloying, but they mostly worked, in my opinion. The story focuses, as expected, on Merlin, so a lot of the Arthurian details are either left out (no Grail) or reduced in importance, and the film's magical stuff seems partly out-of-place in the Celtic-Britain Arthurian mythos. But I do like this film, a great deal. (BTW: if you choose to investigate Merlin, get the DVD and not the VHS release. The VHS version is actually condensed, with a significant chunk of material excised for the tape's running time concerns.)

A few years ago there was a TV version of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, but I haven't seen it. It sports a wonderful score, though, by Lee Holdridge. And of course it's doubtful that any Arthurian movie made can ever totally escape the long shadow of this film.

(By the way, that guy playing Arthur in the movie Knowles is railing about is Clive Owen, who is rumored to be favored for the next James Bond.)

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Your Weekly Diet Tip

Here is an article that suggests ways to arrange one's refrigerator so as to encourage healthy eating habits. All good ideas, I guess, but I laugh at the suggestion that you need to pay attention to what's at "eye level". I guess this makes sense if you have a tall fridge with the freezer on one side and the fridge on the other, but if you're like me and you have a freezer-on-top fridge -- and that's the only kind of fridge we've ever had -- the advice to put stuff at eye level means that I should plan on gnawing ice cubes for a snack. Doesn't work.

Anyway, I pretty much find that if I have unhealthy stuff around, it doesn't matter where I put it in relation to the healthy stuff. I'm gonna eat the unhealthy stuff first, pure and simple. The trick is to not buy unhealthy stuff. At least, that's the way it works for me.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

I'm really not trying to rub it in, but this photo really sums it up, in my mind: the crushing sadness combined with the disbelief that it's over. I wonder how many people at Wrigley had to be ordered out of the stadium once it was done.

(The photo links the ESPN.com column by Jayson Stark where I found it.)

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Acceding to Popular Demand

OK, if anyone wants to read my story "What Happened To The Huntsman?" in its entirety (which I excerpted yesterday), send me an e-mail and I'll send you a copy. Make sure you specify a preferred format, because otherwise I will simply assume that a Word document is OK. And I'll send it as an attachment.

(I still have markets to whom I want to submit this story, so I can't post the whole thing here as that counts as "publishing", and thus screws up some of the "rights" stuff that publishers think about and which I hope to have to think about someday.)

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Spoilers are not created equal.

OK, the folks over at TheForce.net need to do a better job at marking the types of spoilers in their Episode III page. When reporting spoilers, they simply say "Spoilers here" and then post away using inviso-text, so you have to click-and-drag over the text to reveal what's written there, which is a fine system, as far as I'm concerned.

The problem is, they inviso-text nearly everything to do with the upcoming film, and they don't discriminate the Big! Honking! Spoilers! (like how certain characters meet their doom, if they meet their doom at all) from the minor interesting tidbits (like the possibility of a lightsaber duel mimicking the classic Errol Flynn "dueling shadows" thing that happened in The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk). It's the difference between this:

SPOILER: Darth Vader is Luke's father!

and this:

SPOILER: There's a chase through an asteroid field!

So there's me, with my basic inability to not read absolutely everything they post over there, learning stuff that I'd at least have liked to agonize over before eventually giving in and reading anyway. It would be nice if they'd mark the spoilers accordingly, letting me know when they're spilling the beans on some nifty bit of design or when they're unmasking the key plot element.

And yes, I would like some cheese with this whine, thank you very much.

(EDIT: Broken link rendered not-broken.)

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Cool Things From Ordinary Objects, #7859

Street Sign Mandala. Check it out, and make sure to click through to the large version.

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Leper Outcast Unclean!

I got a search hit today for someone apparently looking for an online map of The Land, the fantasy realm that is the setting for Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series. Well, just such a map can be found on this Thomas Covenant tribute site. The map there is of The Land as it exists in the first trilogy; there are changes to the locations in the second trilogy -- some places no longer exist, for example -- but most of the locations are the same. (I didn't dig around the site much, so I don't know if there is also a map of locales for the fifth book, The One Tree, which chronicles a sea voyage far beyond the confines of The Land.)

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Did he READ the memo?!

Via Atrios, I see that President Bush has finally reached his limits of tolerance for unnamed sources in his Adminstration telling things to the press. We know this because...jeez, this is too funny...an unnamed source told the press about it.

The grown-ups are in charge. These folks know what they're doing, so trust them. Heh. Indeed.

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The Libertarian Temptress

This just in: apparently Megan McArdle is…how can I put this, using my standard level of eloquence…well, she's friggin' hot.

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Some days it rains....

Fly-out to left, and for the Chicago Cubs, it's "Wait' til next year" once again. But while I don't like the Cubs, I know damned well how watching your team lose a Game Seven hurts, especially after your team had a 3-1 series lead and was only six outs away from winning the pennant in Game Six. I watched my Pirates lose consecutive seven-game NLCS's in 1991 and 1992. And in football, everyone knows what happened to my beloved Bills in four consecutive Super Bowls. And I know what it's like to watch other teams' fans, like the California Angels fans, or the Denver Bronco fans in 1997 or the New England Patriots fans in 2001, and think: "I wonder what that feels like."

When the Cubs advanced to the NLCS last week, I wondered how Cubs fans would adjust if their boys won the World Series to the end of the "Cubs Cult", when years of "Wait 'til next year" had ended and the Cubs became just another team that's won a recent Series. It didn't work out that way, of course, so the Cubs' mystique keeps going. But this wasn't just watching the Cubs flirt with first place only to finish out of the pack; this wasn't watching them get bounced in the first round. This was as painful as it gets.

My favorite Cubs fan (whom I goad for liking the Cubs, but I know that he's followed them at least as long as I've known him, which is longer than anyone in my life outside my immediate family) wrote yesterday about the feeling that "It's just a game", but he felt physically sick after watching the Marlins explode for eight runs in the eighth inning in Game Six. It does sound trite, to a certain way of thinking, but I don't think that way. Rooting for sports teams is something that gives continuity to our lives, and it's something that helps forge bonds across generations and across wide spaces of geography.

The Buffalo Bills' run of four straight Super Bowl appearances took place while I was in college (the first three, anyway), and I went to school 800 miles away from Western New York where people thought Buffalo was close to New York City, if not one of its actual boroughs. I was usually pretty good at avoiding homesickness, but still, it came up every once in a while, and for half the year at least there were the Bills. They were a tie to my home, something I could point to with pride. That's what sports teams give us, even if we're fans of a team that plays in a city we've never been to: a sense of belonging and commiseration. Even when our teams lose, we are secure in the knowledge that there are thousands of people across the country who are feeling the same damn way we are. And when they win, it's almost like we've joined some secret society of people who know, because they went through all the crappiness too.

I didn't root for the Cubs, but I know damned well how their fans feel. I see shots on TV of old people sitting in the stands at Wrigley, wiping their eyes while the visitors pile upon each other on the mound in celebration. I see Dusty Baker walking off the field with that little boy of his in tow, after yet another Game Seven loss. And I remember the unforgettable words of Terence Mann, in Field of Dreams:

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers; it has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and raised again. Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again. Oh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

Think about that: Baseball has marked the time. That's why we root for sports teams: to have some way of marking the time other than the day-to-day, year-to-year minutiae of our own lives. Baseball marks the time, and though I am not in their number, I know damn well that Cubs fans have marked the time more than any others.

And the Red Sox fans.

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Collaboratory

For all of my newer readers, I also post to a group blog called Collaboratory, which was originally the brainchild of Sean (who, incidentally, is the owner of the first blog I ever saw, so in a sense he's to blame for all the mischief I do here). Anyway, Collaboratory tends to go through spikes of activity when I and my fellow members post a lot and then we slacken off, for no particular reason. The idea of the site is to both generate conversation and just put up neat stuff, either in seriousness or in fun -- kind of a smaller-scale MeFi. Go have a look, and if anyone's interested in joining, drop Sean a line. He's kind of the "Captain" of the thing.

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What Happened To The Huntsman?

I seem to not have much to say today, so I'll just do something I haven't done in a while and stick up a portion of a story of mine. Here's the opening to my "Snow White"-inspired story, "What Happened To The Huntsman?", in which I explore, well, just what befell the Huntsman after he tricked the Evil Queen. Enjoy.

---BEGIN---

"You are clear on what you are to do, then?" asked the Queen, as she leaned forward on her throne.

"Yes, Your Majesty," the Huntsman replied.

"Say it."

"The girl’s heart," the Huntsman said. "In here." He held up the box in his hand.

"Good," said the Queen. "Then go." She rose and vanished through the doorway behind the throne. The Huntsman shuddered. Sometimes he had nightmares about where that door led.

He looked down at the box. Such a lovely thing – red cherry wood, impeccably carved and fitted together, with polished brass hinges and a clasp in the shape of…a heart. Her Majesty had been keeping this little trinket for years.

One of the guards cleared his throat, and the Huntsman turned to leave. In the anteroom, he stopped to check his reflection in the mirror.

"She’s going mad," the Huntsman said softly, so the other guards would not hear.

"’Tis true, I’m sad to say," the mirror replied, its ghostly face appearing in the center of the glass. "But she’s our Queen, come what may."

"She is our Queen," the Huntsman agreed. "But killing girls and keeping their hearts? This is dark madness. Far worse than usual."

"On this matter you seem conflicted," the mirror observed. "With what doubts are you afflicted?"

The Huntsman considered the box again. He also considered the gold the Queen paid him for each item he brought her, usually for a deer or boar, though. Being the Queen’s Huntsman was a good job, no question about that. It was certainly better than being one of the Prince’s guards. What a bunch of dullards they were…

"None, really," said the Huntsman. "I’m sure the girl’s blood runs as red as a stag’s."

"Skin of white and blood of red," said the mirror. "No matter, though – she’ll soon be dead."

The Huntsman stared at the mirror. "Why in God’s name are you speaking in rhymes?"

The mirror sighed, an odd sound for a mirror to make. "The Queen requires it. She thinks it makes me sound more mystical. But it’s not easy, rhyming everything, so I was practicing. But to return to the subject, you should do what is right."

"Does not the Queen decide what is right?"

"Her power rises," the mirror said. "But the Fates are beyond her. Wickedness shall fail." Suddenly the mirror’s face brightened. "Did you like that? It is called a haiku."

"It was wonderful," the Huntsman replied. The mirror is mad as well, he thought. And then: But I’m the one talking to a pane of polished glass. Who’s mad here?

"Fare you well," said the mirror.

"Thank you," the Huntsman said, and he took his leave. On his way outside, he passed by a window overlooking the courtyard. The girl was down there, singing away. She was always singing, just like that fool Prince. But not for long, he thought as he glanced yet again at the box.

---END---

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Ahhhhhhhhhh!

Today I am enjoying the year's first cup of steaming tea sweetened with honey. Mmmmmmm.

(For the record, it's Stash Fusion Green and White Tea. Stash makes some really nice teas; my favorite is the Licorice Spice, but that's a caffeine-free herbal blend, and in the afternoon I'm a caffeine guy.)

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Well, I've been a crab fisherman...and a NASA tech...and I've sold shoes...

Sarah Jane Elliott is given to wondering why so many writers' work histories, in her words, "read like some sort of employment sampler". I'd put in my two cents, but her take is pretty much mine. When you ask me what I do, I'll reply with whatever job I'm holding down at the moment. But I'll never answer that way if you ask what I am.

Of course, I'd never admit as much to a prospective employer, but then, I'm so committed to writing that I'm generally unwilling to put myself on their career tracks anyway. This can be a problem in today's "touchie-feelie" management world, when they're always talking about "values" and "developing people" and all that crap, when I'd just as soon be left alone and go home at the end of the day. And none of this matters right now anyway, since I'm not working.

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This test of the Emergency Broadcast System....

Another Blogger Test. Move along.

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China's first manned space mission blasted off yesterday, and the name "Yang Liwei" joined that of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard as their nations' first men to fly into space. I should probably find this scary, for some political reason, but in reality I find it exciting as hell. I confess to being troubled by the seemingly-growing attitude of "Screw space exploration, let's work on jacking the human brain up to a computer instead". Personally, I don't see why we can't have both.

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Cam we skip the eighth?

I wonder if Cubs manager Dusty Baker is having flashbacks to last year's World Series, after the Cubs' spectacular failure to nail down the pennant last night. Consider: in both the 2002 WS and this year's NLCS, Baker's team (the Giants and the Cubs) entered Game Six with a three-games-to-two lead, only needing one more win to take the series. In both Game Sixes, Baker's team took a lead into the eighth inning. And in both Game Sixes, Baker's team coughed up the lead and lost the game, allowing a decisive Game Seven.

Tonight we'll find out if the scenario holds, because last year Baker's team ended up losing Game Seven. So, we could end up with a situation in which Baker's team is six outs away from winning the series...and ends up losing.

0 hath spoken!

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Winning their hearts and minds....

If this turns out to be true, and it really did happen, then...well, I don't know how to complete that counterfactual.

I hope it's not true, though. I hope we're better than this. I pray that we're better than this.

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Good stuff from Paul Riddell

Filching links from Paul Riddell is always fun, so....

:: Remember that episode of Friends when Ross is about to marry Emily, his English girlfriend, but at the altar, he gets the name wrong and says "I, Ross, take thee Rachel..."? Well, apparently someone in the Bush Administration has seen that episode too. (via)

:: Heavens, this guy is striking a blow for Creationism by riding his horse! Sign me up! (via)

:: I have now seen the worst retail product in human history. Interestingly, the product description says that this thing is a "conversation starter". Quite frankly, for me this would be a conversation stopper. I don't want to talk to anyone who would willingly don this item. (via)

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Give it up, Oliver!

Oliver Willis has another picture of Britney up that, if anything, is even uglier than the one he posted a few months ago. Her posture's unnatural, she's too damned thin, her eyes still have all the expressivity of a plastic doll, and her hair looks like some kind of crash helmet from a 1930s-style Buck Rogers serial.

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MT Comments?

Has anyone else noticed that Comments on Movable Type blogs are really slow right now? Is this because of that plug-in all the MT bloggers are using to beat that spam attack from the weekend? (I'm on dial-up, though.)

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Whither the Democrats?

Unsurprisingly, SDB thinks that the Democrats are highly likely to suffer a defeat for the ages in 2004.

Equally unsurprisingly, I don't agree.

Not that I don't think that President Bush is likely to be a formidable opponent; and not that I don't think that there is possibility for a landslide if the economy finally starts to create some jobs and the foreign policy stuff starts to get better. It bugs me that to a great extent we've made Presidential elections into quadrennial referenda on the thickness of the American wallet, but that's where we are now. I doubt you'll find a single Democrat in the country that doesn't think that 2004 is likely to be a very stiff battle.

I don't want to respond to everything SDB says, but one thing that does strike me as odd is his apparent belief that the Republicans have moved toward the center while the Democrats have not. I think, in many ways, this is a question of decoration rather than a question of actual movement of the party. Last week Kevin Drum made a pretty convincing case that the Republicans have not moved toward the center at all. SDB is right that you don't see much of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other former figures of renown on the Religious Right paraded about anymore as the public face of the Republican Party, but you do see their policy ideas maintaining a stranglehold on the Republicans. It's all window-dressing, really. It seems to me that the Republicans have done a mildly better job in the last couple of years of repackaging their wares, but it's really the same bunch of policies.

And I'm far from convinced that recent elections really spell the doom of Democrats as SDB thinks. 2002 was not a landslide; we went from a pretty closely divided Congress to a still pretty closely divided Congress, and we still have Republicans feeling nervous enough about it that they feel the need to gerrymander themselves into power in Texas and Colorado through mid-decade redistricting. Likewise, I'm not sure how the California recall, in itself, represents a significant rejection of Democratic ideas.

One thing I do think that the Democrats need to figure out is if they want to try recapturing the center, or if they want to try moving the center back toward the left. That's a pretty tough one, and I don't pretend to even know what I think on that score.

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The Karmic Payback Plan, in action

For today's dose of laughter at those getting what they deserve, check this out. Heh. Indeed.

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Thin Fantasy

As long as I'm citing Morat, I'll point out his list of good modern fantasy. Here he's not looking for epic series so much as good stand-alones (I think) that may or may not take place in mythic, "Middle Earth"-type realms.

On the list Morat offers in his post, I've only read Gaiman's American Gods, which I loved immensely. It's funny, scary, and poignant. I did think that it went on a bit too long, though. I haven't read Neverwhere, but Gaiman's Stardust and Coraline are both excellent (although Stardust is kind of "rough around the edges").

I'm not sure if Morat was around for my spate of Christopher Moore related posts a few months back, but his books are just great. He's not actually writing fantasy, but rather "humor in a supernatural vein". For a list of all of Moore's books, check out Nefarious Neddie's post on the subject. I also tend to like a lot of "peripheral fantasy", meaning, fiction that's not classified as fantasy but is of definite interest to fantasists. Michael Chabon's work falls in this category; see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

In children's lit, one finds a lot of good fantasy writing going on -- Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, for example. Lloyd Alexander still turns out good stories, and of course, there's Harry Potter.

I've never read Terry Pratchett, so I suppose I should one of these days. Anyhow, Morat is still looking for more recommendations.

Finally, there's my obligatory mention of Guy Gavriel Kay. If you're not reading Kay, well then, you're just not living.

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Yep, it's time to babble about STAR WARS!!

Morat has some thoughts about Attack of the Clones and the prequels in general. He's one who has been disappointed in them, but he seems to be coming around. At least, he'd better be. I am less forgiving than the Emperor. Or something like that.

A fairly common complaint about the prequels has been that it all feels preordained, because we know what happens: the Jedi all get slaughtered, the Republic becomes the Empire, and Anakin becomes Darth Vader. Now, this has never really bothered me, but I can see where it's a legitimate stumbling block. There is a difference, though, between the story's events being preordained within the story and them being preordained in the mundane sense that we know already what's going to happen. (Not that Morat is making this mistake; I just wanted to draw the distinction.)

One thing that strikes me is that Anakin's fall is a side-story, almost, to the larger story of the prequels. If Qui Gon had never found Anakin, Darth Sidious would still be scheming and maneuvering himself into power...but his fall is necessary, though, in the sense that the beginnings of his fall -- his forbidden love of Padme -- plants the seeds, almost literally, for his later redemption. The other thing thought that has occurred to me is that Morat is right about the prequel focus being on Obi Wan in particular, and on the general incompetence of the Jedi in general. Not only are they completely taken by surprise when the Sith return, but it turns out that Yoda's own Padawan, Count Dooku, has been turned to the Dark Side.

So far in the prequels, there have been numerous mentions of Anakin being "the Chosen One" who will "bring balance to the Force", but what's telling is that the Jedi seem to have no idea what that means. They simply assume that it's all a good thing, and they never consider the possibility that in order for Anakin to restore the Force's balance he will have to descend into darkness and then find redemption. The Jedi seem to be making it up as they go; at one point, Yoda even says something like "We cannot allow them to know of our weakness" -- in other words, "We have no idea what's going on, but we gotta keep acting like we do." The Jedi are, dare I say it, vain.

Morat also says that he'd like Anakin to be revealed as the child of a rape. Personally, I doubt very much if that will happen; that somehow seems too dark for Star Wars. I wouldn't be surprised if George Lucas simply never mentions the whole "midichlorian/immaculate conception" thing again and simply leaves it as a little Easter egg to drive fans crazy. But in a sense it would add to the subtext, if Palpatine turned out to somehow behind Anakin's birth -- for it would give Yoda and Obi Wan one more chance to be wrong, in the end. In Return of the Jedi, Luke objects that he cannot kill his own father, which Obi Wan seems to think is the only thing that can fix things. But in the end, assuming Palpatine is behind Anakin's birth, the good side of the Force triumphs and balance is restored when Anakin kills his own father. But again, that's pure speculation, and Lucas might not have any such thing in mind.

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Shades of 1992

I watched a bit of last night's ALCS Game Four, and I have to admit, watching Tim Wakefield throw that knuckleball sure brings back memories of the awful 1992 NLCS. That was the year Wakefield first emerged, coming up from AAA to the Pirates in the second half of the season. He went 9-2, and in that year's NLCS against the Braves, he went 2-0 and would have been the MVP had not Francisco Cabrera somehow managed to complete the sale of his soul to the Devil just in time for the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven, thus condemning the Braves for all time to being Baseball's Most Evil Franchise.

Anyway, Wakefield's knuckleball still looks the same: a slow pitch that floats toward the plate and then drops like a rock just as the batter thinks, "Geez, look at that thing, I'm going to hit that into the upper deck" and then swings-and-misses.

(For those not up on baseball, a knuckleball is a special pitch that is thrown with as little spin on the ball as possible, so that its motion to the plate is wildly unpredictable. A knuckleball that looks like it's in the strike zone usually ends up anywhere but in the strike zone, so a knuckleball pitcher who does it right can totally confound opposing hitters not through pinpoint control, but through the laws of chaos, basically. Knuckleballs also tend to result in a lot of wild pitches and passed balls, because the catcher has no more idea of where the ball's going than anyone else. True knuckleball pitchers are rare because the pitch is so nutty.)

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Any appearance of impropriety is...uh, improper!

My addition of an Amazon tip jar to the sidebar is purely coincidental to the Fund a New Computer for Atrios Drive. Just in case anyone's wondering.

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Today, I'm going to ruin someone's life!

One fact of life that constantly amazes is how small-minded people end up in law enforcement, security, and other professions that vest them with authority that they really don't deserve. I'm sure we've all run into the cop who has nothing better to do than pull people over for a rolling stop at a rural intersection late at night when there are no other cars about, security guards who think it's their duty to interfere with shoppers at the mall, and so on.

What scares me now is that these kinds of people, who end up in these professions out of some latent need to wield power over other people, are now ending up in Homeland Security, where they can take their frustrations in life out on "all them foreigners".

(Link via Scott at The Gamer's Nook.)

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

I've finally made some extensive updates to the stuff in the sidebar: a few blogs have been added to the permanent blogroll (Other Journeys), new ones are under the rotating collection (The Common Room), new permanent links are up for other sites (Other Shores), and finally I added links to my reviews appearing on GMR and my one review at DAM (Writings Elsewhere). With all that, plus my handy "Google Search" function, I can't imagine why everyone doesn't just set Byzantium's Shores as their homepage.

Or something like that.

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Score One for the next generation!!

A short while ago I had one of those moments, fleeting but still encouraging, that make me believe that maybe I'm doing an OK job of raising the kid:

ME: Barney's on next.

DAUGHTER: I hate Barney. I wanna watch Peter Pan.

Yee-haw!

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Wow.

Apparently a number of Movable Type blogs were attacked over the weekend by some kind of bot that filled their comments sections with links to porn. This is, of course, one of those "beyond the pale" things...but I really have to admit that as someone who's still using Blogger and BlogSpot and YACCS, all free services with the occasional hiccups in service that come with being free, I find the whole thing just a tiny bit funny. As long as it's quashed and doesn't start happening again.

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Yet More Lazy Linkage

Stealing stuff from MeFi is always fun, so....

:: Think you know your rock album covers? Well, take the test. They give the cover art, stripped of identifying marks and words. (MeFi Link)

:: A discussion thread about Mormonism, the way other Christian denominations view it, the way Mormons view themselves, and more. There's even a link, embedded in the discussion, to a picture of the Mormon's sacred undergarments, if you've ever been curious about what they look like. (If you've ever seen a movie set in the American West in which a woman appears in her undergarments, you've pretty much got it.) The discussion thread here is contentious, as any religion discussion might be expected, but at the same time it's not quite as contentious as I'd expected.

Mormons, in my experience, tend to be genuinely mystified by the degree to which others dislike their religion. To me, it's a combination of three factors. First, the whole idea that there is an entire section of Jesus's life that no one knew about until 170 years ago or so is bound to upset people. Then, of course, there's the whole polygamy thing. Finally there is the vague air of secrecy that the Mormons seem to perpetuate, what with temples that the non-Mormon can't enter, stuff like the sacred undergarments, and so on. (That last factor also seems to apply, in my mind, to explaining some of the historical antipathy faced by Catholics.)

:: Quotes from science-fiction writers on Arnold Schwarzenegger's political ascendancy. I think some of these folks are a bit too dismissive, really. (But then, I don't think the California voters were dismissive enough, so it's pretty much of a wash.)

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Oooooh, destroyin' stuff!

Via Lynn Sislo -- who seems to find way more cool stuff than any one person has a right to find! -- I happened upon Things That Should Be Destroyed. Some of these things have apparently already been destroyed, at least metaphorically -- the "Pepsi Girl" seems to have finally disappeared -- but some, like Pat Robertson, are still around (and advocating the nuclear destruction of the United States Department of State, strangely enough). And I agree totally about neckties, which are the single most stupid and useless article of clothing currently in existence.

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You're punting on first down? Tampa Bay doesn't even do that!

The Buffalo Bills, the nation's most important sports franchise, got buried yesterday by the nation's most dispensible sports franchise, the New York Jets. The final score was a lopsided 30-3. The Bills scored a field goal on their first drive, and they never threatened to score again. They couldn't run the ball. They could barely throw the ball. They certainly couldn't protect their quarterback, who fell beneath the weight of various defensive linemen or linebackers seven times.

The Bills are now the proud owners of a 3-3 record, which isn't a disastrous mark to have but too many holes have been exposed in their team. My original prediction was for the Bills to win their division and go to the playoffs; I now believe that a record of 9-7 is more likely. That might be good enough to squeeze into the playoffs, if they are incredibly lucky, but I very much doubt it.

(Irrelevant stats: Each of the Bills' three losses so far this year has come to a team coming off a bye week, and two of those losses were to teams looking to win their first game of the year.)

I've never been a football fan to demand the head of the coach every time the team loses, but I'm now wondering if Gregg Williams simply isn't cut out to be an NFL head coach. I had thought, before the season started, that he was still on the upside of a learning curve, but so far this season I just don't see any "learning" going on. The same mistakes keep getting made, the same questionable decisions, the same lack of discipline on the team. This is a team that miscommunicates, especially on offense. This is a team whose offensive line last year plowed the road for a 1400-yard season by the starting running back, but who this year can't block at all for the exact same running back and, to add insult to injury, can't protect Drew Bledsoe one bit better than they did last year. This is a team with a good defense that is expected to play every game as if it's the 2000 Ravens defense, which they simply can't do.

What gets me, sports fans, is that the Bills keep getting shown by their opponents what they need to be doing, and they keep refusing to learn the lesson. Three weeks ago, when the Dolphins beat the Bills, they ran Ricky Williams 41 times. That's more than twice the number of times the Bills ran the ball yesterday. In only three of the Bills' games have they rushed the ball more than their opponent, and in only three of those games did they even rush the ball more than twenty times. The Bills simply aren't concentrating on running the ball, at all.

A common excuse for the Bills not running is that they're falling behind too often, so they have to throw, but I don't buy that. I remember watching a game the Steelers played five or six years ago, when Jerome Bettis was at the top of his form and in which the Steelers through turnovers and other goofs fell behind 21-0 in the first quarter. In that game, though, Steelers coach Bill Cowher kept his wits about him and kept pounding the ball in there. He based his offense on running the ball, his coaches drilled run-blocking into the line, and it paid off. That's why the Steelers almost always make the playoffs. Watching the Bills, though, I get the feeling that they run the ball once, and if they don't pick up nine yards, they abandon the run for the next eight plays.

Yesterday's game was the only time the Bills have lost by more than ten points, and it's the only time they've faced that ten point deficit before the fourth quarter, so I don't buy the idea that they have to throw to get back into it. A good coach makes adjustments; a good coach notices that Drew Bledsoe simply isn't comfortable with the flock of young receivers and journeymen they've surrounded him with this year, and game-plans accordingly. The pigheaded offensive scheming by Gregg Williams and by coordinator Kevin Gilbride has me wondering each week if I'm watching a Mike Martz-coached Rams game: "I don't care if they have nine DBs and only two linemen on the field, we're throwing the ball!" Ugh.

A word about Drew Bledsoe, since I suspect fans are going to start piling up on him. The Bills knew what they were getting when they got him: a guy with a terrific arm who relies on rhythm and protection, who's a good leader but can't single-handedly will a team back from the brink. I've never bought the bit that Bledsoe "can't win the big one", any more than I ever bought the idea that Jim Kelly couldn't win the big one. A lot of Bills fans are baffled at the way Bledsoe is playing after losing Peerless Price, but it's not just Price. After watching Bledsoe twice a year when he was with the Patriots, and now watching him with the Bills, I think it's not Peerless Price whom he misses, but Larry Centers.

Larry Centers is an odd guy: he's a running back by position, but his real value is as a receiver. He has more receptions than any running back in history, and more than just about all receivers, too, except for the really elite ones. He may be a Hall of Famer, on the basis of his receiving numbers. He's with New England now, but he played for the Bills the previous two years. Last year he had 43 receptions, and he was the main "safety valve" in the passing game, the guy who gets open for short yardage when the deeper receivers are both covered. Bledsoe has no such safety-valve player this year. None of the tight ends the Bills have now has emerged as such a threat, and the Bills' current fullback (Sam Gash) is more noted for his run-blocking than his receiving (which means, given the Bills' lack of intent towards the running game, that Gash's position and talents are doubly wasted. Why do I think this is a big deal? Because I remember how Bledsoe used to kill the Bills, every year when he was a Patriot, by constantly dumping passes off to tight end Ben Coates. Bledsoe-to-Coates was the combo that made Bledsoe a Buffalo-killer, and it really helped him last year. This year, he has no such outlet, so he has to stand in there while the pocket collapses, praying that one of his young and inexperienced receivers manages to get open or that Eric Moulds -- who sat out yesterday with a groin pull -- somehow saves the day by beating his inevitable double-team.

Oh, well, I could go on, but I won't. Maybe the Bills can get it together, but I'm not optimistic right now. What bothers me is that this is really the first time the Bills' results haven't matched up with my expectations based on the team's talent. I tend to be pretty realistic about the team, which is why I'm a frustrated fan now. This team is better on paper than they are on the field. Gregg Williams had better figure out how to even that deficit, or he'll be looking for a job next season.

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Site Recommendation

Susan Stepney, who is apparently a computer science professor in England, also has a nice website with a lot of capsule reviews of SF-stuff, if such interests thee (and other stuff, besides, but I went there for the SF).

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Rush to Judgement (politics here)

Newsweek on Rush Limbaugh and Addiction.

Since the Rush Limbaugh-addiction story broke, I've been somewhat torn on how to feel about it. In all honesty, I must admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude in the whole thing. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. I've never been particularly tolerant of those whose professed morality is as limited as Limbaugh's, and it's rarely surprising when their own frailties are exposed. I saw this kind of nonsense during the 1990s, when conservatives of all stripes would rail against Bill Clinton's infidelities when their own personal lives were hardly the picture of faith-and-chastity; I saw with Bill Bennett, who is perhaps the one person in America who has made more of a cottage industry from moralizing than Rush Limbaugh. The pattern is pretty familiar now, right down to the headache-inducing parsings following the outing: "My affairs were youthful indiscretions (committed when I was 40)." "You'll notice that I never talked about gambling, and at least I didn't bet the house we live in." "He got hooked accidentally, not like those people who look to get high."

Do I feel much sympathy for Mr. Limbaugh? I do not, I'm sorry to say. I've tried, because I view addiction as much more of a medical problem than a moral one, and I think that if our society takes the reverse tack, society's wrong. But this is a guy who has been very vocal in his years on the radio in favor of "Just say no" and "Addiction's a choice, not an illness" and "Send them up the river". So if he broke laws I disagree with in order to get his fix, well...I still believe the laws are unjust, but it somehow seems fitting that a guy who has spent so much time advocating those laws now faces them. It's awfully hard to take the moralists seriously when their lofty pronunciations of "This is how everyone should live" so often turn out to be "Everyone else should live this way, except me".

Some liberals are hoping for some kind of conversion here, a kind of "atheist on the deathbed" moment in which Mr. Limbaugh will realize that he's been wrong about drugs and addiction and that maybe treatment should be the way to go instead of punishing them all, but I rather doubt it. Sure, when he gets back to the radio maybe he'll pay some lip service to it all, but I expect him to simply bring the topic up a lot less. But Gary Bauer, one of the most visible conservatives out there, said this in the Newsweek story:

From a moral standpoint, there’s a difference between people who go out and seek a high and get addicted and the millions of Americans dealing with pain who inadvertently get addicted.

No change here that I can see: "It's not Rush's fault that he got addicted. His addiction's not a matter of choice. His addiction is just bad fortune." The subtext, of course, is that Rush is a rich white guy who happened to get addicted, as opposed to all the poor folks who choose to do so. Well, I'm sorry, I really am. But Rush is still a rich white guy, and he'll easily be able to get himself cleaned up and move on. If it turns out that he really did break laws to keep his habit going, I'll bet any time he ends up doing is in a minimum-security facility. Again, I'm torn: Do I hope that Rush Limbaugh is treated in the way that I think the vast majority of addicts should be treated, or do I hope that Rush Limbaugh is treated in the way that Rush Limbaugh has long maintained that the vast majority of addicts should be treated? Tough question, that. And to return to Mr. Bauer's statement, I don't know if there's really a moral difference between a rich person's painkiller habit and a poor person's crack habit, and in a way, I don't really care. As Stephen King once wrote, in reference to his own addictions, "We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter."

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Hello--?

Just testing, because publishing is acting weird.

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Hommina hommina hommina....

From The Late Show with David Letterman, we have Grinder Girl:



And that's not all! Dave also provides weekly doses of Anna Jack, who does amazing things with hula hoops:



Who says there's nothing good of TV anymore?

(Links provided in comments by Mickey.)

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Further Stuff About Wal-Mart

A few weeks ago I posted a number of reasons why I don't like Wal-Mart, which had little to do with the chain's questionable labor and business practices and a lot to do with my generally less-than-pleasant experiences as a consumer at Wal-Mart.

Well, I'm not going to absolve Wal-Mart of running stores that, in my experience, aren't very enjoyable to shop in, but I will credit them for the fine store I was in yesterday. While gallavanting around the Southern Tier, we stopped in the Wal-Mart in our former town of residence (Allegany, NY, for those inordinately curious). This Wal-Mart was generally one of the nicer ones I've been in (although it was little better than a train wreck on Saturdays, when people flocked from the hills to do their weekly shopping), and since the last time I was in that store, several years ago, it has been extensively remodeled and redesigned so it's quite nice now indeed. The electronics section, for example, has been enlarged with several entrances added (every other Wal-Mart I've ever been in has one entrance to the electronics area, which makes for bottlenecks). The checkout area is devoid of cluttered merchandise, as are the main aisles, and the floors are as shiny as I've ever seen. It was all quite surprising, really. They do still have the "Carton cut open and put on the shelf" thing going on, as well as the "wooden pallet stacked with merchandise, just as it came in off the loading dock" thing going on in some of the aisles, but not nearly so bad as the Wal-Marts here in Buffalo. Oh, and big carts.

So, this one store was not dirty. Still evil, of course. But not dirty!

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A Brief Observation on the matter of....Coffee.

[Being a transparent attempt to merely take up space on the blog with a post of dubious content]

I really do prefer the way coffee tastes when I grind the beans myself, immediately before brewing. It comes out stronger, fresher, with more "zip". (If wine people can talk about "bouquet" and "finish", I can talk about "zip".) But last week the grocery store had my brand of coffee on sale, plus I had coupons for additional savings on the ground coffee only, and not the whole bean. So I got the ground stuff...and while not as good in the cup, it is kind of nice to not have to drag down the grinder every morning.

Being a big believer in brewing freshly ground coffee, I would never get one of those coffee makers they have nowadays -- the ones with VCR-style timers so you can load the grounds the night before and set the machine to start brewing at eight hours later. That's eight hours the grounds are sitting in the basket, exposed to air which dries out the oils and thus dulls the flavor, and that's eight hours your water is sitting in the reservoir with no air in it. (Aerated water makes good coffee, which is why you should let the faucet run for ten seconds or so before filling the carafe to transfer the water to the reservoir, and start your brewing immediately.)

My mother used to have the extremely questionable practice of brewing a large pot of coffee in the morning, drinking her two cups, and then turning the thing off and then microwaving cold coffee back to hot later in the day. The mere thought of doing that makes my skin crawl. And when I was in Target the other day, I was surprised to see that they still make percolating machines! I thought those had gone the way of the dodo when everyone realized that percolated coffee tastes lousy.

Now that winter is coming, it will soon be time to dig out the espresso machine. I don't make very good espresso, I'm sorry to say -- never practiced much -- but I love a cup of hot chocolate dosed with a serving of espresso. As for coffee accessories I don't own, I've always wanted to try using a French press and a stove-top vacuum pot.

Oooooh, pot's done brewing! Gotta go.

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They're probably Cubs fans, too.

Ooooooooh, lookie! More irate Star Wars fans over on AICN!

Here's the story: A few days ago, AICN put up a publicity notice for some screening of A New Hope that was to take place in Los Angeles. What was interesting is that the people screening the movie advertised it as the original version as released in 1977 (which George Lucas has removed from circulation) as opposed to the 1997 Special Edition.

So, the other night, this film festival (apparently some kind of retrospective on film history) announced that they were unable to get the original version, because - - consistent with his stated policy - - George Lucas would only allow them to screen the Special Edition, and that was that. Chaos, of course, ensued on the AICN TalkBack, in which we have more of George Lucas showing total contempt for the fans and for film history and raping everybody's childhood and selling out and blah blah blah blah blah.

But as I parse this timeline, I'm wondering: how the hell is this George Lucas's fault? This film festival went ahead and announced their screening of the original film before they knew if they had permission to screen it? And George Lucas is to blame?

Well, OK. Tomorrow night I will personally screen Return of the King in my home, and you're all welcome. But if I can't get a print and have to send you all home, remember the logic of the Idiot Star Wars Fan: It's Peter Jackson's fault.

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Holy Orange Gourds, Batman!

Yesterday the family and I trekked into the hills and farmlands of New York's Southern Tier to visit a place called Pumpkinville, an annual event for us. Pumpkinville is pretty much just what it sounds like: a small roadside tourist attraction devoted to, well, pumpkins. Lots and lots and lots of pumpkins. Not only do they have thousands of them nicely lined up by size in one spot, but if the pre-chosen ones aren't to your liking, you can actually wander out into the pumpkin patch itself to grab one. And there are farm animals to pet and feed, pony rides, crafts, apples by the bushel, a shed in which maple products are sold (New York being the country's largest producer of maple syrup), pumpkin-flavored ice cream, and the obligatory hay rides (although the hay ride now involves no hay, the bales in the wagon behind the tractor having been replaced by wooden benches). A good time was had by all, especially since the autumnal turning of the leaves seems to be at peak in the Southern Tier.

Then we proceeded to the town of Ellicottville, which hosted its Fall Festival this weekend. This is your basic street festival, with food and crafts and all manner of other stuff going on. Ellicottville is Western New York's largest skiing town; it's home to several of the area's largest ski resorts and has a real upscale, Aspen-like air about it. Thousands of people converge on this little town each year -- on the way out, we sped past traffic literally backed up seven miles on US 219 -- for this Festival. Ellicottville itself caters to a very wide area; wealthy people from Canada even travel there during the winter weekends.

Here is what the hills and ski slopes in that part of New York look like:



This photo is a couple of years old; there was no snow yesterday. Here's an even better view, from up on one the ski slopes themselves:



Is it any wonder that October is my favorite month?

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Howl! Howl!

I wrote a guest review of the film RAN for the Destroy All Monsters website. I'm not sure how insightful my review is, given my general lack of knowledge about Japanese cinema outside of Hayao Miyazaki's anime films, but check it out, anyway.

One of these days I'll get around to adding DAM to my links, because it's an excellent site about Asian popular culture. I learned about the site from Darth Swank.

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Something I Never Thought I'd Say:

Thank God for offshore drilling?

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How do you say "The Right Stuff" in Cantonese?

The Chinese government has confirmed that they are launching their first manned space mission next week. They're being pretty coy about actual details, but I certainly wish them success, as a person who thinks that manned spaceflight is still the best thing to happen in the twentieth century and an essential part of our future as a species. Here are a couple of interesting things from the article:

:: The people doing the flying will be called "Taikonauts", from a Chinese word for "space".

:: The launch is being scheduled to possibly coincide with a major conference of the Chinese Communist Party, so as to link spaceflight with politics. Sort of like 1957 again…I wonder if we'll have some prominent Senator announcing that we have no intention of going to bed by the light of a Communist moon?

:: According to reports, the ship will be additionally equipped with handguns, knives, and other weapons. This quote is offered: Astronauts will be able to deal with wild beasts, sharks and other dangerous animals or enemies. Kinda makes you wonder where they're planning on landing. The Afghan highlands? Iraq? (Actually, the article reports that Inner Mongolia will be the landing site.)

:: The article does not report on what the taikonauts will eat while in flight. I envision little squeeze-tubes of Kung Pao Chicken, but that's probably wrong. (Which reminds me of an exchange from MAD Magazine's parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey that I never tire of quoting:

DAVE BOWMAN: What's for dinner?

FRANK POOLE: A glass of steak, a glass of potatoes, and a glass of corn.

DAVE BOWMAN: Nothing to drink?

FRANK POOLE: Yeah, a piece of coffee.

Har har!)

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Political Anger Here!

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Dear President Bush,

The other day, Governor-elect of California Arnold Schwarzenegger said this, in reference to the giant budget problems he's about to confront:

"I will make sure that I can meet with President Bush as quickly as possible, because I have a whole bunch of business, California business, to talk to him about and take care of. There's a lot of money we can get from the federal government."

I just want you to know, Mr. President, that if you ride to Mr. Schwarzenegger's and California's rescue now, after allowing that state and its former (Democratic) Governor to twist in the wind along with all us other budget-challenged states, merely because the new Governor there is a Republican and you're naturally hoping to put California's electoral votes in play, not only will I never vote Republican again in my natural lifetime (and I have done so, more frequently than you might immediately believe), even if my mother runs on the Republican ticket against a known cannibal with a taste for children and kittens on the Democratic ticket for county dog-catcher, but at such as I'm actually employed and pulling in money again I shall start donating to any Democrat I can find, for the first time in my life.

Thank you for your attention, Mr. President.

(Link via Billmon.)

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O for a rake, that I might step on it....

Oy.

Didn't Ronald Reagan once have a personal law of campaigning that went something like "Never speak ill of another Republican?" I did read about that at one point, didn't I?

Come on, guys!

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Mmmmm....steamed prawns....

Back when I was active on Usenet, one of the more colorful voices on rec.music.movies was a fellow named Dave Thomas (no, not the Wendy's guy, either), who would constantly claim to have the worst taste in movies EVER, and to back up his claims he'd rattle off long lists of movies that he likes that I'd never heard of, often Hong Kong action movies with titles like "Sucka Chop Suey Maidens From Hell" or some such. (I made that up. I hope that's not a real movie title.)

Anyway, Dave was always an entertaining soul to have around until he listened to his better angels and ditched the newsgroup. The other day I discovered that he's been running a review site devoted exclusively to B-movies, called Steamed Prawn Buns. Check him out; his reviews are a hoot and…well, you gotta admire anyone who has willingly seen some of the movies that he's seen. I didn't see it mentioned on his site, but Dave is the only person I have ever encountered who is willing to admit to liking Howard the Duck.

(Of course, the damn title of his site is making me hungry for dim sum, which you can't find in Buffalo. Have I ever said that before? Yeah, probably….)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Composite photo of the Toronto skyline.

What's cool about this is that this photo is composited from four photos that were part of a time-lapse photography project. Someone actually set up their camera to take a new shot of the view outside their balcony every twenty seconds for fourteen hours, and then they actually put together a Quicktime timelapse of all the photos, so you can see dusk fall on Toronto and a weather front pass by. Very cool.

(Via The Modulator.)

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Haunting

If you like personal essays of the haunting variety, check out this one by Mike Finley. It's about his reunion with his grade school bully...and much, much more.

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A Brief Writing Observation

Every so often I'll get stuck at a certain point, unsure of how to continue with the novel in question. It's not a total blockage, since I still know my destination; it's more of a moment of indecisiveness, the kind I imagine Bugs Bunny experiencing when he pops up in Albuquerque and ruminates as to whether he should take the left turn or not. I end up trying one thing, deleting it (or crossing it out, if I'm going longhand) and trying something else, and then sooner or later I realize what needs to be done.

The observation is this: invariably, when I figure out what needs to happen at a spot like this, my immediate second thought is of my Muse grumbling thusly: "This is obvious, dummy! It took you three days to realize it? You imbecile! Why did I waste this story idea on you, anyway?"

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Online Comics Discovery

Warren Ellis points out a comics creator named Patrick Farley who produces his work exclusively online. Some of Farley's content is free, and some of it is "gated" behind a micropayment system. I, being poor, have checked out some of the free stuff and found it intriguing. I also love the site's design, so check it out. And if you have money, give some to this guy. (Or to me. Or to PBS. But preferably me.)

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And the award for Spewed Invective goes to....

Bara apparently has to endure a person of, shall we say, questionable value in one of her college classes. Here is what she thinks of him:

The filthy, disgusting, chauvinist idiot creep! That detestable, nauseating lump of mentally incompetent phlegm, whose shit-smelling toxic presence smears my theoretical class, is poisoning my very being with that vomitous stream of asinine prattle that relentlessly pours out.

And apparently, it got even worse the next time she saw him, when he apparently made a pass at her, and occasioned her to speculate on what she'd do if she ever occasioned to spend an evening in his presence. (It's in her follow-up comments; drop down to the sixth comment.)

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What's that bright yellow thing in the sky?!

We're enjoying a nice spell of Indian Summer right now in Buffalo -- temps in the high 60s or low 70s, sun, no rain, et cetera. Lovely.

My point? I got none. Move along.

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Sad Classical Music

Lynn Sislo posts about sad classical music. (Apparently she gets search engine hits on that phrase, so I'm going to repeat it: sad classical music. Music that is classical, and sad. Sad music that is also classical. Classical things that are sad and that are music. Yep, that oughta do it!)

Anyway, I've never found any sad classical music, in the sense of "music that makes me feel sad". Classical music can meditate on sadness, but somehow there's something I always find uplifting in such music, exalting if you will, that works against the actual creation of sadness. There's music that is wistful (Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, music that is melancholy (any number of Chopin piano pieces), music that is meditative (Rachmaninov's Vespers), music that is heartbreakingly beautiful (Rachmaninov's entire Second Symphony), but actually sad? I just can't think of any.

Well, that's not quite true. Berg's Violin Concerto is probably sad. Portions of Mozart's Requiem are sad, but other parts are fiery, some angry, some just plain fiery. Mahler's Ninth Symphony is sad, I think. But the list of genuinely sad classical works is, to me, very short. What many might consider "sad music" often ends up to me being something of a meditation on sadness, which isn't quite the same as being sad.

(I haven't said anything about lieder and the vast amount of art songs, because that's the part of classical music that I know the least about, to a spectacular degree. When you factor in words, music can become very sad indeed. From the rock and country music worlds, I can probably fill this blog with sad songs, by virtue of the lyrics. I'm sure that Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert wrote some genuinely sad songs.)

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Fire the joke writers!

Shouldn't this Tom Burka joke include something about IKEA?

And did anyone else notice that both David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel last night featured a video of Jay Leno, attending Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory speech, clapping lackadaisically and checking his watch?

And did anyone catch George Carlin on Leno? I love Carlin, but he always seems "neutered" when he appears on a network show. It's so obvious that he's had to comb through his material for jokes that don't involve any of the "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV".

And at my next birthday party, I want Letterman's "Spark Lady". Just watch; you'll learn what I'm talking about, if you don't know already.

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Lookin' at the Teevee

OK, I've just watched Law and Order, and for the life of me, no matter how many times I watch this show I cannot understand the following it inspires. But hey, at least next week's episode is apparently going to be "ripped from the headlines".

As for the other Wednesday night shows:

Ed seems to be doing a good job at moving past the oft-cited Moonlighting factor -- i.e., the way a show deflates when the two romantic leads finally "do the dirty", as Ed Stevens and Carol Vessey did. (Full disclosure: I hated Moonlighting both before and after they "did the dirty".) The keys here are a strong supporting cast around whom interesting stories can be told, and the fact that Ed was always best when Ed-and-Carol was a subplot, and that's what they are now.

And then there's The West Wing. Three episodes are probably not enough to judge, but I'm gonna anyway, because it's my blog. Anyhow: with the exception of Abby Bartlet's fury at her husband (obviously they're setting up some manner of blow-up later on), I think the show is doing just fine without Aaron Sorkin. Part of that is the fact that the cast and crew well knows what they are doing at this point, and part of it is good writing. Some of the political nuts-and-bolts stuff that marked the show's first two seasons is back, and the dialogue is, dare I say it, sharp. No, it doesn't sound like Sorkin's dialogue, but the characters still sound like themselves. To draw an overwrought analogy, Hemingway's not a lesser writer just because he doesn't sound like Dickens.

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Send 'em Bob Vila!

Andrew Cory has a list of things we need to get done before we should consider leaving Iraq.

The idea that we should be mostly out of there within a year is absurd (presumably this is so there aren't any pesky headlines like "Two More US Soldiers Killed" within, oh, two months of the election). It takes a lot of time to build a nation - - hell, I could make a case that the bit of nation building that started in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 still isn't done.

Anyhow, I like Andrew's list. It covers the basics of what the Iraqis will need to get their economy and their democracy and economy going again. I assume that when Andrew says that, say, 85% of the country needs to have potable water, he's talking about 85% of the people, not the geography. It is, of course, far from clear that all this can work in a country of Iraq's complexity - - what of the Kurds, to name just one concern - - but it would be nice to have a clear idea of just where we're going with all this, a clear idea which doesn't seem forthcoming when the Administration apparently can't figure out just who's going to be in charge of all this nation-building in the first place.

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Have you seen John Connor?

Just a shout-out to two bloggers, Sean and Jason, who seem to be lacking for either inspiration or opportunity to blog.

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Opiate of the Masses

As long as I'm responding to The Fiendish One, I also take note of this post in which he recommends a couple of books by Karen Armstrong, one on the history of monotheistic religion (which I own, but have not yet read) and one on the rise of fundamentalism (which I neither own nor have read). Matt suggests that Jessica Stern (the author of the book on terrorism I'm reading, see below) needs to read Armstong's book The Battle for God (the one on fundamentalism); I've just found that very volume cited in her endnotes, so I can only assume she has in fact read it.

Of course, I don't think Matt meant that in a "snarky" way, so I should note that understanding why fundamentalism comes to exists does not quite explain why terrorism comes to exist. There are a lot more fundamentalists in this world than there are terrorists, and while some religious aspect inspires many terrorists, I don't think that the religious element is sufficient to do so. What Stern seems to be investigating is what leads the strongly religious to become militantly religious. (I say "seems to be" because, as noted below, I'm only a short way into the book.)

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Money, the root of all decision making....

My unindicted co-conspirator wants to know why Major League Baseball has scheduled both of today's Championship Series playoff games at the same time.

The answer, as is becoming depressingly common, is that the television people want it this way. FOX Sports, which owns all broadcast rights to the MLB playoffs, thinks it can make more money by ensuring that every game is in prime time, except for Saturday (when nothing else is really going on, sportswise, except for college football. What surprises me is that whatever game is broadcast on the cable-only channel FX will apparently have better ratings in prime time than a regular FOX broadcast during the afternoon hours. FOX is also hedging its bets, because the playoff schedule shows that they're willing to have an afternoon, weekday playoff game if they have to, next week. But today's games are guaranteed to happen (barring rain), whereas Game Six of the ALCS and Game Seven of the NLCS, both scheduled for next Wednesday, are "if necessary" affairs. Presumably, if the ALCS goes to Game Six but the NLCS is already over by next Wednesday, then that game -- currently scheduled for 4:18 pm ET -- would be moved to prime time.

The way TV dominates sports is nothing new, but it can still be an annoying factor. Case in point: I was listening to a Buffalo sports-talk radio show this afternoon, and I learned that the Bills' game against the Washington Redskins, to be played on the 19th (a week from this Sunday) has been moved from 1:00 to 4:15, probably because FOX Sports -- which carries NFL games in which an NFC team visits an AFC team -- thinks it's a better looking matchup now, based on both teams' early success this season. Not that big a deal, really, except that the Bills draw on a very wide area for their ticket holders, and for people coming from more than 100 miles away to attend the game, a sudden shift of game time less than two weeks prior to the event is no small thing.

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