I’ve added a link to the left to a place I had totally forgotten about, though I used to frequent the place quite often: Odin’s Castle. This is a site designed to be a clearing house on the Web for other sites devoted to history, mythology, and literature. There are a lot of excellent resources here. Check it out.
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The most underrated, ignored, and generally shafted show on network television, Once and Again, again appears to have its neck on the chopping block. ABC has moved the show around its schedule for three years, and still it has a dedicated audience; however, when a show moves that much it doesn’t get a chance to develop much more than that devoted audience. It is now on Mondays, and this appears to be its last chance to generate sufficient ratings to be renewed. A website devoted to saving the show, with a link to an online petition, can be found here.
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Standard operating procedure here is for us to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Thursday nights, after Friends. However, our ABC affiliate decided to air the current incarnation of Billy Graham, so for some unknown reason I watched the second half of last night’s Survivor episode. Why on earth are people still watching this stuff? To me it all looks the same: a bunch of narcissistic TV-star wannabes wandering around some godforsaken place, scrounging for water, complaining about one another, babbling into the camera about how “[Person X] isn’t doing squat to help the team/tribe/group”. They then gather for some kind of inane contest — last night’s involved eating fish that was allowed to go rancid, making me wonder if the contestants had to sign a waiver pledging not to sue CBS if they ended up with food poisoning — after which the losers head to an equally inane ritual with torches, a bonfire, and that Wonder-Bread host quizzing them about how things have gone wrong for them, how they’ll get back together as a team, et cetera. Then we get the montage of people writing names on fake parchment while dramatic music plays, and then Mr. Wonder-Bread reads the votes in an order preselected to heighten the drama, and then the ceremonial extinguishing of the torch, blah blah blah blah….I never cared for Survivor in its first incarnation, with its celebration of sneakiness and smarm in the name of “playing the game”, but at least it was something I hadn’t seen before. Now, having watched exactly one episode of the Australian version, not a single minute of the African version, and only thirty minutes of this incarnation, I can honestly say: It’s time for Survivor to go. Would the last one to leave the island please turn out the lights?
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Ah, spring in Buffalo: when fifty-five degree sunny days are followed by thirty-three degree snowy ones. But at least our summers have never, not once since they started keeping the stats, hit one hundred degrees.
The Bills signed linebacker London Fletcher from the St. Louis Rams yesterday. He replaces Sam Cowart, who went to the New York Jets. Cowart is an outstanding athlete, but he has had problems with injuries and missed all of last season after getting hurt in the first game. Ah well, take heart, Jets fans: if Cowart stays healthy, your team just picked up a hell of a linebacker.
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ER was actually decent last night, although the effort to create a kind-of Breakfast Club story using the romantically-entangled Carter, Luca, Susan and Abby was rather forced. Still, it was nice to see a different kind of storytelling on the show, one which didn’t rely on wild and gory medical traumas and the impending demise of Dr. Greene. Of course, they made clear in the preview for next week that the Greene death-watch begins in earnest next week, with the sepulchral voice over intoning “From now on….every minute matters….every patient he sees….” while Dr. Greene walks in slow-motion toward the camera. Ick.
CSI, on the other hand, was as entertaining as always with a story involving the murder of four Buddhist monks, shot in the head at point blank range while they were praying. The “third-eye” imagery of the bulletholes was a nice detail. What an excellent show — all the better because it actually shows science being done right, instead of resorting to lame pseudoscientific rubbish.
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Continuing my fascination with All Things Presidential, I am almost finished reading Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times by Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps. The book is a fascinating look into the life of a White House reporter, a life which is a delicate balance of long hours, wearying travel, occasionally lousy food, coffee by the gallon, arrogant press secretaries, presidents suspicious of the press, and a front-row seat for historical events. Thomas tells her story engagingly, arranging the book around themes rather than simply delivering a sequential account of her life, which is a wise choice. It enables her to concentrate on her larger theme, the way the relationship between President and Press has changed since she arrived in the White House press corps in 1961, beginning a career which would include every administration since John F. Kennedy.
It is clear, pretty much from the outset, that she does not think that that relationship has changed for the better. She describes how she enjoyed personal, and fairly frequent, interviews with Lyndon Johnson; but as time has gone by the various press secretaries have become more involved in public relations than in the dissemination of information to the public. She relates one incident when she and Sam Donaldson attempted posing a question to President Reagan during a photo op, only to have the president glance at his top aides before replying, “I can’t answer that. They won’t let me.” Thomas and Donaldson protested that Reagan was the president, to no avail. She also takes President Clinton to task for his own cynical use of the media.
It is always fascinating to read these first-hand accounts of events in our government, and Thomas’s book is welcome in that regard.
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The West Wing had an excellent episode last night, although it was slightly marred by NBC’s ludicrous advertising leading up to it — “The First Lady drops a bombshell! Don’t miss the last five minutes!!!” Well, it wasn’t really a bombshell — just a fine character moment as the First Lady resolves a personal issue arising from her secret medication of the President, something contrary to medical ethics. The way NBC was promoting the show, I half-expected Mrs. Bartlett to reveal her secret lover or something. (Well, not really; Aaron Sorkin is a far, far better writer than that.) Anyway, it was great to see a return to what made me love the show in the first place: a character-driven show laden with intricate dialogue, self-referential jokes, and multiple storylines that demonstrated that politics can be as personal as public.
Now, if they’d just show the Emily Procter character more….say, every episode….
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It really pays to check out the “bargain” table at Borders. While shopping there a few weeks ago, I took a passing glance at the bargain table and saw several copies of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, marked down to $9.99. That’s a hell of a bargain, given that the book’s original price is $40.00, and the normal markdown at Amazon is still $28.00. The book is a lavish volume that details a large number of mythical realms from literary works. Entries include Middle Earth, Narnia, Never-Never Land, Fionavar, Flatland, the various places to which Gulliver travels, and more. Any lover of fantasy should have this book, and having it for one-fourth the publisher’s price is even better.
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Ever a sucker for fantastic stories involving baseball, I enjoyed a new story by Gardner Dozois that appears in the current issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, entitled “The Hanging Curve”. In the story, the scene is set with the ultimate baseball situation: the top of the ninth in the World Series, Game Seven, and the home team (in this case the Phillies) are one strike away from winning it all (against the Yankees, who are only down by a single run and have a man on base). The pitcher winds up, throws, and then the ball stops midway to the plate. It simply stops in midair, and all efforts to move it are met with complete failure. The ball becomes, literally, a hanging curve — hanging there, in the air, for years as the players and then the game itself pass on. This striking image becomes the obsession of the home-plate umpire, who returns more than fifty years later to witness the ball’s sudden conclusion of its original journey. Analyzing the angle the ball takes as it flies through the spot where a catcher’s mitt once would have been, the umpire reveals what has been on his mind all these years: whether that pitch was a strike or a ball. The story is a nifty allegory about how, in the face of events of such unbelievable strangeness, we can still focus to exclusion of all else on those things that matter most to us.
The story also includes a few other neat details, such as Game Seven of a World Series only drawing ten thousand or so fans. Who knows how far in the future Dozois has envisioned this tale taking place, but to anyone alarmed by the recent refusal of baseball to clean up its act, such an image is very cautionary indeed.
(Gardner Dozois, by the way, is the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction and of the yearly anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, as well as an impressive number of other anthologies in SF. He is also, by the evidence presented in this story, a fine writer.)
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Scully’s baby is in mortal danger, Mulder is in hiding, and The X-Files is wallowing in disarray. It’s a shame to see the show sinking slowly, but I can at least take heart in that Chris Carter has decided to pull the plug rather than keep flogging it any longer. Two years ago (or thereabouts) the show lost that feeling that it was actually building toward something, that there was a “truth” that really was “out there”. I will grant that the mytharc involving Baby William has to a small extent restored that feeling, but so many plot threads have been left behind that I really don’t think any satisfying resolution is now possible. Oh well, just a few more episodes to go and then the whole thing is history. (And next week’s bonus: the new Star Wars Episode II trailer will air on FOX, just before The X-Files. Can’t wait for that.)