Month: October 2002

Now, that was an October, sports fans.

:: Congratulations to the Anaheim Angels on their victory in the World Series. I’ve made no secret that I was rooting for the Giants in this Series, but if they had to lose to anyone, I’m glad it was to a franchise that is probably equally-storied in its long quest for postseason glory. The Angels have come close so many times only to never make it all the way, including their agonizing ALCS in 1986 when they were a single strike away from winning the pennant, only to have the Red Sox take it (and then lose to the Mets in the Series). This franchise’s love-affair with futility is so storied, in fact, that a fantasy film was made a few years back about it, the subject of which is that it takes actual divine intervention for this team to win. Well, no supernatural antics were needed here. The Angels truly earned their championship, by constantly battling and never giving up. To face a five-run deficit in the seventh inning of Game Six, when the other team can win the Series by closing you out, takes immense character — which the Angels showed, in spades. (Of course, a bullpen meltdown always helps….more on that presently.)

:: Sometimes, when watching a sporting event, you can just watch the air escaping from a team or competitor, and you know at that moment — no matter how much time is still left on the clock, no matter what the score at the time of that moment — that it’s over, and the other team or competitor is going to win. Bill Buckner’s error in Game Six of the 1986 World Series is one such moment. The game did not end on that play, and the Mets’ eventual victory that night did not eliminate the Red Sox, but merely forced Game Seven; however, you could tell that for the Sox it was all over. Another such moment came early in the second half of Super Bowl XXVIII, the last of the Buffalo Bills’ four consecutive appearances. Thurman Thomas got the carry, but it was an awkward exchange from Jim Kelly, and Thomas ended up fumbling. The fumble was returned for a Cowboys touchdown. Now, as I said, this was very early in the third quarter — there were still over twenty-five minutes of football to play — and after that Cowboys score the game was only tied, 13-13; but you could see the look on the Bills’ faces: “Here we go again, this is where it starts, we’re about to take our fourth damn loss in a row in this stupid game.” Final score: Dallas 30, Buffalo 13. The Bills never even threatened to score again from that point in the game.

Well, another such moment came in Game Six this year, when the Angels rallied from five runs down. They put three runs up in the bottom of the seventh, so the score was still 5-3 Giants, but you just knew the Giants were about to lose, that Robb Nen was about to blow a save, that Troy Percival would come in and nail it down. It was as certain as the Titanic going down when they learn that the first five compartments are breached. It was over. Game Seven? A mere rubber-stamping of a pre-determined result.

:: The Angels also taught us in Game Seven how to deal with Barry Bonds. It turns out that the lesson might have been learned from studying Mark McGuire’s 70-home run season in 1998, when despite McGuire’s heroics the Cardinals finished with a losing record: the game’s finest slugger can’t beat you if you always ensure that he’s coming to bat with the bases empty. Bonds was 1 for 3 last night, with a single; if he’d gone 3 for 3 and homered each time, and everything else had been the same except for that, the Giants would only have tied the game.

:: A funny cartoon summary of the Series can be read here.

And on to yesterday’s NFL action:

:: I said last week that the Detroit Lions, who played my beloved Bills yesterday, were a bad team that could kill you if you overlook them. Well, the Bills did not overlook them, and thus they won — although not without making it pretty close, courtesy a Travis Henry fumble that put the Lions in perfect position to score the tying touchdown. Luckily, Bills linebacker London Fletcher made the initial hit on the Lions’ RB James Stewart on 4th-and-inches, stuffing the play for a loss and killing the Lions’ last hope for the day. The Bills defense was actually pretty good yesterday and downright impressive in the second half. I still think they need to get someone who can really rush the passer consistently; they have not had anyone who can do that since Bruce Smith was allowed to leave. (Not that Smith can still bring it like he used to, in his 18th year.) They did pretty well, though, at keeping Lions’ QB Joey Harrington confused and contained. Harrington didn’t play a bad game, but he did make some bad decisions at inopportune times. (Although one of his bad decisions miraculously turned out great for him: when he threw an ill-advised pass into double coverage in the end zone, the first Bills DB knocked the ball into the air, away from the receiver, at which time the other Bills DB on the play also knocked the ball into the air — right into the hands of Az-zahir Hakim, the other Lions’ receiver on the play, for the touchdown.) The Bills are a robust and surprising 5-3. They may actually have an outside shot at the playoffs. As for the Lions, they are 2-5 now, and I still have to consider them a bad team that can burn you if you’re not on your game for them. They are improving, though, and should have some good building blocks for next season.

:: Next up for the Bills are the defending champs. The Patriots are looking stunningly ordinary, losing at home yesterday to Denver for their fourth straight loss, putting their record at 3-4. There will be plenty of motivation to go around in this one: the Pats have to win it if they want to turn their season around; the Bills will want to beat the defending champs; Drew Bledsoe will want to show his old team that they made a mistake in trading him within the division. This one could be a barn-burner by the time it’s over.

:: Also re: the Patriots — can we possibly concede the role that plain, old luck played in their Super Bowl season last year? If Bill Belichick is that amazing of a coach, why have the Patriots been nothing to write home about except for that single year? and if he’s that great of a coach, why was his tenure in Cleveland so ordinary?

:: The New Orleans Saints appear to be this year’s shoot-em-up team, the team that goes out and scores a ton of points each week while also giving up a lot of points. They’re 6-2 after yesterday’s shoot-out loss to Atlanta (Falcons 37, Saints 35), and they’ve scored more points this year than anybody else except for Kansas City; but on the defensive side of the ball they’ve got some issues. Only seven teams are giving up more points per game than the Saints, and since the start of the 2001 season the Saints have only held four opponents to less than 20 points in a game (and not at all so far this year). Teams that have to win by scoring a lot almost always end up faltering at some point, when they inevitably encounter a defense capable of slowing them down.

:: OK, so Emmitt Smith is the greatest running back of all time, he’s a gamer, he played that all-important game years ago against the Giants with a separated shoulder and he gained something like 160 yards that day, he was the key to the Cowboys’ three Super Bowl wins in four years, yada yada yada. OK, it’s a great achievement. OK, he’s one of the top three RBs ever to lace ’em up. But man, did he have to do it all with the Cowboys, who are otherwise known as the Greatest Force For Evil In The Sporting World?

:: I guess Randy Moss decided yesterday that he wanted to play again. Yippee. I still think the Vikes should cut him and just start rebuilding now, as I don’t think they’re likely to be a good team again for at least two or three years.

:: Tampa Bay started Rob Johnson yesterday. From what I’ve read and saw on the news, it was vintage Rob: the offense never got anywhere near the end zone, and Rob got hurt when he scrambled. The Bucs won the game, though, via four FGs.

:: My Super Bowl picks: the Steelers were impressive yesterday, beating Baltimore on the road. Of course, the Ravens were without LB Ray Lewis, but still — they’re a good defense, and the Steelers haven’t been setting the league on fire, offensively. But the important thing is that they are above .500 now and in sole possession of first place in the AFC North. As for my NFC pick, the Eagles play the Giants tonight. Go Eagles. (Funny thing: you know how your local newspaper, if you’re in an NFL city or near one, will print the local team’s name in bold type in the standings and in the leader boards? In Syracuse, they only do that in the leader board with NFL players who are Syracuse University alums…which right now means that the only name appearing in bold is that of Eagles QB Donovan McNabb.)

Share This Post

While I am sorry that the person who found Byzantium’s Shores via this Yahoo! search undoubtedly went away without finding what they were looking for, I hope they found it somewhere. Probably over on Interact.

(It’s a joke, Sean! Put the lead pipe down!!)

Share This Post

STAR TREK Redux, conclusion.

(Part Four)

:: Star Trek: First Contact.

With the “even-odd” rule well-established by this point, Star Trek fans had every right to expect First Contact to be a good film. For my part, though, I felt a certain sense of trepidation as the film’s release approached, because of what I knew about the film’s story. It can be summed up in a single word:

Borg.

I was not at all sure that I really wanted to see a Star Trek feature film about the Borg. Now, the Borg were very compelling villains in their episodes on TNG; I especially loved how they represented a direct counterexample to Star Trek‘s usual message of understanding, reason, and communication being the key to resolving problems between peoples. The Borg, by their very nature, are incapable of understanding, reason and communication. Their entire focus is on conquest and assimilation, which made them perfect foils for the Federation, and their relentless nature made for some of the most rivetting episodes of TNG ever produced.

The problem with the Borg is that with them a little bit goes a very long way, but by the time of First Contact‘s making, the Borg had started to feel a bit like the all-purpose Star Trek ratings tool: whenever the franchise appears to be in trouble, just throw in an appearance by the Borg and the fans will come running. This was especially true when the producers used the Borg to give Voyager a stiff dose of, for lack of a better term, sex appeal by introducing the Seven-of-Nine character. The whole story-arc of the Borg had seemed all-played-out, in my mind, so when I heard that the new Star Trek film was to feature them, I was a less than excited.

Fortunately, my fears were allayed: First Contact is excellent, far and away the best film to feature the TNG crew. Learning the lessons of Generations, the film establishes its two main storylines — the Borg’s invasion of the Enterprise, and their attempts to disrupt humanity’s first contact with an alien species — after a fairly quick preamble, and keeps alternating between the two storylines until they come together at the end in a fairly surprising way. The plot is basically that the Borg have decided that since they are not succeeding in assimilating humanity in the 24th century, they will go back in time and stop the humans from achieving warp drive — thus keeping them earthbound, and making their assimilation easy. This story allows a journey into some long-time Star Trek lore: the broken society that forms after the Third World War (I think), the discovery of warp drive by Zefram Cochrane (Cochrane originally turned up in the TOS episode “Metamorphosis”), and the first meeting between humans and Vulcans. Indeed, the whole film is filled with references to Trek-lore and history, including some nifty Easter-eggs like the fact that the warp nacelles on Cochrane’s prototype warp-ship are almost identical to the warp-nacelles on the TOS version of the Enterprise. There are a lot of small, Trekker-type moments in First Contact.

The film’s action plot is also exciting, although it falls into something of a pattern: the crew has to stop the Borg from doing X, and they do, only to realize that now they have to stop the Borg from doing Y, which they do, only to discover….but the final solution to the Borg problem is an exciting one, relying on Data’s emotion-chip but doing so in a fairly understated manner (as opposed to the histrionics Data was forced to undergo in Generations). Picard’s obsession with destroying the Borg is also well-handled, as at one point he is so bent on staying on the Enterprise and fighting them that he calls Worf a coward, to his face. This also plays into a nice moment of literary allusion, which are always common in Star Trek: Picard is compared to Ahab from Moby Dick.

The film does mis-step a few times along the way. In the first place, I find it unbelievable that even considering Picard’s experience of having been partially assimilated by the Borg years before, Starfleet would have its most powerful ship stay out of the battle. (And for that matter, it’s getting increasingly hard to believe that this crew is still intact — shouldn’t Riker be a Captain of his own ship by now?) There is also a fairly pointless diversion into Picard’s holodeck persona of Dixon Hill; that scene plays very oddly, although it does afford the chance for a cameo by the actor who played Neelix from Voyager. (There is another Voyager cameo in the film, earlier on, as well.) Jerry Goldsmith’s music is passable, with a beautiful theme of maturity but with action music that isn’t particularly memorable. And the whole time-travel mechanism, with the technobabble laid on pretty thick, seems to me to make time travel ridiculously easy. Can any ship do that, if the crew wishes it?

Still, First Contact is a rattling-good adventure film, mostly tense and exciting and with some heart. I enjoyed it immensely.

:: Star Trek Insurrection.

I don’t really have a whole lot to say about Insurrection, mainly because it’s really pretty generic. It’s not a bad film, by any means — its pacing is OK, its story is no more or less absurd than any other Star Trek movie story, the acting as always is fine — but it still seems formulaic. There is no reason why this story couldn’t be told as a two-part episode on television, as opposed to being made for the big screen. Insurrection doesn’t start off particularly promisingly — we have Picard chasing Data in a shuttlecraft, singing Gilbert and Sullivan into the radio in an attempt to override something that’s gone wrong in Data’s head, a scene which had me thinking, “My God, what are they doing here?” Thankfully, things get a lot better after that — but not amazingly better. So that’s really all I have to say about Insurrection. I’m not sure if it holds to the “Even-Odd” rule or if it breaks the rule: it’s not a bad film, but it’s not a memorable one, either.

:: Star Trek Nemesis.

See you this winter. Hailing frequencies closed.

Share This Post

Sometime over the weekend, Byzantium’s Shores recorded its 3,000th hit since I put up the “Sitemeter”. I’d take advantage of this auspicious occasion by doing some kind of jig or something, but honesty requires that I disqualify the roughly 794 of those hits which were….well, me, looking narcissistically on my own blog. Ah well, the sky’s the limit!

Share This Post

It’s too bad that the good news of yesterday — the capture of the DC Sniper (assuming that these suspects are the right men) — had to be cosmically balanced out with other instances of sad news.

Senator Wellstone.

Richard Harris.

Adolph Green.

And at least 90 Russians.

Share This Post

STAR TREK Redux, part four.

(Introduction, Part One, Part Two, Part Three.)

:: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

After the debacle (or near debacle) of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, there was no Star Trek film for three years. During that time, The Next Generation established itself on television as the true Trek heir-apparent, and it was realized that in any case the original crew was really too old to continue soldiering on. Concepts were floated for a sixth film, including a flashback story to Kirk and crew’s days at Starfleet Academy, in which the roles would have been recast with younger actors. Instead, though, one last film was made with the original crew intact, with that film also tying in loosely with a two-part TNG episode involving Spock (“Unification”). The film was intended to be a passing-of-the-torch to the new Star Trek crew and franchise. (I’m not sure on this point, but I think that Deep Space Nine was also under development at this time.)

The plot of The Undiscovered Country is a political allegory, at once explaining how it is that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are no longer mortal enemies by the time of The Next Generation and drawing clear inspiration from the end of the Cold War, which had come just two years prior to STVI‘s release. The film opens with some kind of large-scale disaster taking place in Klingon space — the explosion of a moon called Praxis, which we are told is “their key energy-production facility”. (The special effect that accompanies the destruction of Praxis is very impressive, and has since been called a “Praxis wave” when it has turned up in other films — notably the Star Wars Special Editions.) The loss of Praxis reveals that the Klingons have depleted their ozone, and thus the Klingon Empire is about to go into serious decline, with the fall projected in fifty years. Thus the stage is set for the Klingon Chancellor, a man named Gorkon, to become the Klingon version of Mikhail Gorbachev: he opens a dialog with the Federation, wanting peace talks so that his Empire can stop spending money on its military and instead spend it on saving lives. And guess which ship, under which Captain, is sent to rendezvous with the Klingon Chancellor and escort him to the peace table? Yep — Enterprise and Captain Kirk, who are apparently being pressed into one last mission before retirement.

All goes well — a tense dinner scene in which barbs are traded and tempers flare notwithstanding — until Gorkon is assassinated by a mysterious pair of killers. Kirk and Dr. McCoy are taken into custody for the murder, put on trial, and sentenced to life imprisonment on an icy prison-planet. This leaves Spock in command of the Enterprise, and he uses his time to logically figure out the details of the assassination and the uncovering of the conspiracy against the peace talks — a conspiracy that is revealed to be very high up, and not just confined to the Federation, either. All this leads to a race-against-time to stop the next assassination, along with a thrilling space-battle against a Bird of Prey starship that can fire torpedoes while its cloaking device is engaged. (I’ve always wondered just why it is that ships can’t fire while cloaked, but it’s pretty much an article of faith at this point.)

Star Trek VI is my favorite of the entire series. I love its blend of large-scale storytelling with the personal interactions of the crew; the film ignores neither the advancing age of the cast nor the events of the previous films. The film’s humor is more based in wit than in slapstick, a welcome change from STV:TFF. (The single biggest laugh I have ever heard in a theater during a Star Trek film is in this installment: just after the shapeshifting female alien plants a long, wet kiss on Captain Kirk, McCoy rolls his eyes and grumbles, “What is it with you?” The two lines after that were completely inaudible.) The film is imbued with the sense that this really, truly is the last time we’re going to see these characters in action. In keeping with that, each character is given a moment to shine. George Takei as Sulu makes out especially well in this regard; he has finally earned his stripes as a commanding officer and spends the film not as helmsman of the Enterprise but as the Captain of the Excelsior. He even gets his own little “Shatner moment” when he barks to a crewman who tells him that the ship will fly apart if they go any faster: “Fly her apart, then!” There is also a very nice scene between Kirk and Spock, when the two discuss whether or not they have become obsolete. The film’s final scene, a last shot of the TOS crew on the bridge of the Enterprise while Kirk delivers his last Captain’s Log, strike the perfect note — and the cast members’ signatures appearing over the starfield at the very end is one of the classiest touches to a film I have ever seen.

Star Trek VI is not without its problems, most of which pertaining (of course) to the story’s logic. I’ve never been entirely clear on why the explosion of one Klingon moon means the eventual fall of the entire Klingon empire, and certain other moments in the story are entirely too convenient — Scotty’s discovery of the exact air vent where the stolen uniforms were stashed and the subsequent discovery of the assassins’ bodies, for example. The “revelation” of Lt. Valeris’s involvement comes as no surprise whatsoever. These are fairly minor quibbles, though. Pacing is also a bugaboo, but thankfully a small one — the film does drag in a couple of spots, but generally the film moves along at a fine clip.

As always, the biggest strength here is the acting — particularly notable is Christopher Plummer as Chang, the main Klingon villain who has a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. (“I’d give real money if he’d shut up,” McCoy growls at one point.) Kurtwood Smith is excellent as the Federation President, although I must admit that after years of watching Smith on That 70s Show I expect his character in The Undiscovered Country to bark out the phrase “dumb ass”. In another nod to TNG, Michael Dorn turns up playing a Klingon — the defense attorney for Kirk and McCoy. The music score, by Cliff Eidelman, is also superb — rich and brooding, and with a very nice “starfaring” theme that captures the essence of the Enterprise in flight.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is, for me, the best of all the Trek films, beating out The Wrath of Khan.

:: Star Trek Generations.

Fans hoping that a change from the TOS crew to the TNG crew would also indicate an end to the weird tradition of the “even” Star Trek movies versus the “odd” ones. Sadly, that was not to be. Generations makes so many mistakes that I can’t think of where to start.

The problem here lies, I think, in a fundamental misconception on the part of the film-makers. The film was made by pretty much the same people who produced The Next Generation on TV, and given that show’s general competence from a storytelling standpoint, I have to wonder how the film could err in its storytelling to such a degree. My theory is that the producers got “blinded by the lights”: they were making a movie, by Gosh, so obviously they had to make the thing Huge! Epic! Gigantic! They had to pack it with as much pathos as they possibly could. So, in less than two hours, we get: a midlife crisis for Captain Picard, a plot by some Klingons to destroy the Enterprise, a villain bent on getting into “the Nexus”, an emotion-chip for Data, the Enterprise crash-landing on a planet, some holodeck stuff set on an 18th-century sailing ship, the first adventure of the Enterprise-B, and (last but not least) the death of Captain James T. Kirk. I think the failure of the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach can be best illustrated thusly: The Wrath of Khan is four minutes shorter than Generations, and yet its story feels bigger. Anyone who has ever cooked anything knows that the more ingredients one uses, the more careful one must be to make sure all those ingredients work together — otherwise, the resulting dish is a melange with no distinct flavor or synthesis of flavors. That is precisely what happens here.

Just to take one example, the business with Data’s emotion chip adds nothing whatsoever to the story other than running-time (and, like the “Spock’s brother” business in The Final Frontier, an excuse for Data not to fight back in an instance when he should). True, there are a couple of humorous moments that arise from Data’s new emotions — I like the scene when he tries drinks in Ten Forward and realizes what it’s like to hate a flavor, and the moment when Data realizes that he genuinely enjoys scanning for life-forms is hilarious. But this business also makes for an interminable scene between Data and Picard in “stellar cartography” — a neat looking set that is wasted on a scene that could as well have taken place in Picard’s ready-room. Data’s emotions play no role in the ultimate outcome of the film’s story, so the whole thing is mere filler.

Other elements of the Generations story are annoying, from the standpoint of a Star Trek fan. The “big moment” here is, of course, Kirk’s death; and I suppose it’s fitting that he would go out in one last fistfight with a bad guy; but really, why?! Kirk’s demise as depicted here seems so arbitrary, so…insignificant. Yes, he stops the destruction of a planet filled with millions, but we never see those millions, and we don’t really get any sense that Kirk is that invested in what’s going on. The feeling is “OK, I’ll do you a favor this time, Picard, but please don’t bother me again.” And to be honest, I’m not sure Kirk’s death should ever have been shown. James T. Kirk seems to me the kind of guy to take a shuttlecraft through that wormhole in DS9, never to be seen again…maybe he has adventures galore, maybe he dies of old age on some unknown world, maybe he leaves the galaxy and becomes Emperor in Andromeda — I don’t know. But for him to die when some ricketty contraption on some backwater planet buckles and collapses with him on it…and when he doesn’t even get to deliver the blow that defeats the bad guy? Ugh. I will say this: the actual moment of Kirk’s death is well-done. He gets this “awestruck” look and whispers, “Oh my….” and then he’s gone, without so much as a slumping of the head or a closing of the eyes. He’s going where “no one has gone before”, in the truest sense. But the whole surrounding circumstance of Kirk’s death are lousy. And for that matter, why we needed to see Kirk again in the first place — or any of the TOS crew — is beyond me. We’ve already said goodbye to them, in The Undiscovered Country; the torch is passed — and yet, we apparently need one last time. Well, fine — but I want to know what became of Chekov and Uhura.

Generations fails on science-fictional grounds, as well. We’re in the Era of Technobabble now, with a miracle substance called “trilithium” that can “halt all the nuclear reactions within a star”, causing it to nova. That’s hard enough to swallow, but the device that accomplishes this goal is about the size of a Patriot missile — and, in the single worst SF moment in Star Trek history (which includes “Spock’s Brain” and that TNG episode where the crew “de-evolves) — the missile is launched from the planet surface, and we watch the missile soar up and into the sun, leaving a handy contrail in its wake. What a staggeringly awful moment! Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but it doesn’t mean that one should have to check one’s brain at the door.

So Generations is a colossal disappointment, even moreso than The Final Frontier, because at least that film showed some idea of what an epic-scale story involves, even if it was not successful in pulling it off. Generations confuses a “busy” story with an “epic” story. That would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the Star Trek producers not only had demonstrated knowledge of what an epic story is, they had actually written one and shot it when they made Generations. It was the final episode of TNG, “All Good Things”, which told a better story with more “sense of wonder” than Generations is able to muster even in its promising opening scenes. Had they made “All Good Things” into the first TNG movie and left Generations alone as an unexplored plot idea, things would have been better for all concerned.

To be concluded: First Contact and Insurrection.

Share This Post

I think that everyone knows what writer’s block is, but I occasionally go through a related phase that I’ve never seen addressed, so I’m wondering if I’m alone in this. I call this phase reader’s block.

I’m a voracious reader; my deeply held belief is that as a writer I have to be. A writer who claims to not be much of a reader is, as far as I am concerned, no writer at all but a mere dabbler-in-words. And of course, I own a rather impressive number of books. (I’ve never counted them, but after recently having to box them all up and move them in six days, I’m pretty confident that I can claim ownership of a lot of books.) So, I am never lacking for reading material, and in many different genres, to boot.

But occasionally I experience a “rough patch” in my reading, where nothing I pick up satisfies. It’s not uncommon to “bounce off” a book, to have a book be curiously uninvolving and unappealing. This generally manifests in a growing sense, particularly around and after the 100-page mark, of “Why am I reading this?” And it can be positively deadly if one reaches the halfway mark and can honestly say, “I don’t care what happens to these characters.” Most times, I take this as a sign that I simply don’t like the book and leave it at that — although I can name a number of instances where I’ve had this reaction to a book, only to return to that same book months or years later and discover how wonderful it really is. Isolated cases like these are to be expected in one’s reading life, and I take them in stride.

More problematic, though, are when a string of such instances occurs — when I start, and subsequently stop, reading four or five books in a row. I suppose it is actually possible that I’ve happened on a string of duds, but when I change my genres with each book I read and when my tastes are as diverse as they are, I find that likelihood rather low. I suspect in times like this that the fault lies not with the books but with the reader.

I’m bringing this up, naturally, because I’ve just gone through a rough patch in my reading of precisely the kind I describe here. I’ve “bounced off” four books in the last two weeks, and in at least two of the cases when I did so I could tell that I was reading a book that was, well, not a bad book. To draw a food analogy, I think it’s like going to The Olive Garden and searching the menu, knowing that everything is going to taste fine and be well-prepared but not really realizing that I’m really in the mood for Mexican and not Italian.

So, I’ve decided to change things up a little bit. I’m now reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, as part of my long-standing desire to read the classic works of literature that I somehow got through high school and college without reading. (Side rant: when I was in tenth grade, I was in an “advanced” English class. Our class was required to read Ordinary People by Judith Guest — who reads that book, anymore? — while the “normal” class was required to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I’ve always wondered just which class got the better of that deal.) I am also changing my media a bit, by reading some of the graphic novels I’ve been piling up but still haven’t got around to. Warren Ellis’s Planetary is the first of these.

Slumps are strange things. Sometimes the best thing to do for a slump is to change nothing and wait for it to end; other times one needs to take a different tack altogether. It’s hard to know which way is right for each slump, but right now change seems the way to go.

Share This Post

In a bit of happy news, I am restoring my link to Arts and Letters Daily, which is now back on the Web after the resolution of some legal issues. It’s a very fine place.

Share This Post

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Iron particles, suspended in oil, responding to a magnetic field. Photograph by Felice Frankel.

A few weeks ago, the NPR program Talk of the Nation — Science Friday did an installment about science photography, which frequently captures a great deal of the beauty that we often miss entirely when discussing scientific processes, discoveries and properties. We often think that there is a divide between art and science and that never the twain shall meet, but this is not always the case. One of the participants on that program was Felice Frankel, one of the more prominent science photographers today and an MIT research scientist. Her work is striking, and reminds us that to look at the world from a scientific vantage point need not imply that one ignores the beauty.

Share This Post

The big event in Syracuse today is the groundbreaking for DestinyUSA. The groundbreaking was actually for the hotel part of the project, the 47-story hotel that is supposed to be one of the anchors of the whole shebang once it’s done. Planners are envisioning up to 20,000 hotel rooms for the entire Destiny project, which seems especially mind-boggling considering that the entire Syracuse hotel market currently has 6,300 rooms. I really hope that this thing draws the way they say it will.

(News story here.)

Share This Post