Month: May 2003

Last night’s episode of ER was exemplary — the kind of riveting episode that used to be so common in the show’s early seasons, with just the right balance of medical thrills to personal-life stuff. The gimmick last night was that the show tracked the day shift and the night shift on the same day, alternating between the two and focusing on Dr. Carter (day) and Dr. Pratt (night). In many ways their shifts mirrored each other, and during one bravura sequence Carter worked to save a patient from an accidental drowning, and Dr. Pratt — twelve hours later — worked to discover whether this same patient had suffered brain damage. This sequence culminated in Dr. Carter telling the girl’s father that she very well might not live, and if she lived she very well might not fully recover — intercut with Dr. Pratt telling the same guy that his daughter had survived and was going to be fine.

The whole episode was masterful, and I love the fact that even after two hundred episodes, ER can still bring it. And that wasn’t even the season finale.

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My efforts to cajole, intimidate, and ultimately bludgeon someone else into Blogistan have proven successful. This time it’s Aaron, a guy I’ve known for — damn! — fourteen years. I’m pretty sure his hair has always been longer than mine, but that might not be the case right now.

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IMAGES OF THE WEEK

Three images of the planet Mercury, in transit across the face of the Sun.

A “transit”, in astronomical terms, is when one object crosses in front of another. The most famous examples of transits are the eclipses, when the Moon transits with the Sun. Planetary transits are more rare, given the extra considerations of orbital positioning of the planets with respect to the Sun, their positions in the plane of the ecliptic, and so forth. But recently Mercury had a transit, and these images were captured during the rare event. In the second image, Mercury is the circled dot; that other dot is actually a sunspot.

BONUS IMAGE OF THE WEEK

I found the link for the main IOTW on Warren Ellis‘s blog yesterday. And I also found this little item of weirdness, which I just had to reproduce:

For just sheer oddity, you can’t beat Warren Ellis.

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Terminus recently completed his exhaustive survey of the James Bond films (while my own such survey can be perused under “Notable Dispatches”, in the sidebar). Now he’s planning another exhaustive survey: the films of Oliver Stone. I’m greatly looking forward to this. I’ve somewhat lost sight of Stone’s work in recent years, but I think he’s been unfairly pigeonholed as the “whacko conspiracy director” and generally underappreciated as a great filmmaker. I haven’t seen all of his films, but I can’t name a clunker of those that I have seen, and JFK and Nixon are two of my absolute favorite films of all time.

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I speculated a while back (it might not even have been in this space, but on someone else’s comments) that the rise of annoying reality TV shows might have a side-effect of shaking out the writers on the scripted shows, kind of like the theory that contracting Major League Baseball by a couple of teams would actually benefit the game by shrinking the talent pool and pushing some guys who are in the Majors right now back to the minors, where they really should be. Now I’m wondering if that’s not actually happening, because it seems to me that my favorite scripted shows — ER, 24, The West Wing, even NYPDBlue — are especially strong right now. Yeah, it’s just anecdotal evidence based on my own tastes, but still — the scripted stuff that I’m watching is really good, and I keep hearing great things about the scripted stuff that I’m not watching.

Which goes to show that writers are the most important souls in the Universe.

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I don’t have much to say about American Idol, except to note that Josh Gracin made a classy exit. My money is on Kimberley Locke to exit next week, with Clay Aiken then winning the showdown with Ruben Studdard.

But then, I’m a guy who picked the Buffalo Bills to win three of the four Super Bowls they lost, so don’t take my prediction to Vegas.

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Judging by the amount of sheer tension that marked last night’s episode of The West Wing, I move that Aaron Sorkin be subjected to one of the following two fates: (a) chained to his desk and forced to keep writing TWW, or (b) chained to his desk and forced to write the third season of 24 (or at least join that show’s more-than-competent corral of writers). I wonder if Sorkin’s hasty exit from the show had anything to do with the NBC and Warner reaction when they got the bill for last night’s episode, what with tons of special effects and location shooting.

That last shot, of Leo McGarry walking briskly through the corridors, and then breaking into a run as he races across the Oval Office and out onto the hallway to the residence, was absolutely chilling. (But, to resurrect my old complaint, how much better would it have been if NBC hadn’t cut all those promos a few weeks back touting “The fall of the Vice President…and a kidnapping!!!“. Dumb-ass NBC….)

Oh, and while I’m not as down on Mary Louise Parker as I used to be — I’ve warmed to her and her character substantially — I found it incredibly hard to believe that a woman working in the White House, as the First Lady’s Chief of Staff, would dress like Erin Brockovich while on duty. That strained credibility to a pretty big extent.

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Here’s a specific complaint I have about Glenn Reynolds: a post in which he complains that no one protests against Saddam, but everyone protests against the United States.

This is a standard complaint by the right/warbloggers — SDB raises it often, for instance — but it’s simply not true, judging by the amount of mail I started receiving from precisely the left-wing groups like Amnesty, International and others when I subscribed for a single year to Mother Jones. I got mailings detailing all manner of atrocities and disgusting behavior by dictators all over the world, including detailed descriptions of what the Taliban was up to before they leapt to the Head of our Anger Class by getting behind 9-11-01. People have been protesting these tyrants for years, and anyone claiming that they haven’t is either ignorant or lying. In Reynolds’s case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, with the full implication that maybe when he bitches about the left he should extend a bit more effort into, well, knowing just what he’s complaining about.

And if it seems as if these organizations are a bit louder about their demonstrations here, well, perhaps (a) it only seems that way because these organizations and their protests simply don’t receive that much coverage unless they happen to be protesting something going on here, and (b) perhaps they’re under the impression that the United States, being a democratic nation, not only sanctions people demonstrating against their government but in some ways actually endorses it. Some people consider such dissent as part-and-parcel of citizenship, much to the apparent chagrin of those whose idea of citizenship involves marching lock-step behind the President, no-matter-what.

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I’m a sporadic reader of comics these days; it’s just too expensive anymore to follow any of them on a monthly basis. I remember fondly when new issues were sixty cents; I could scrounge about for three bucks in change, head to the bookstore, and walk out with five new comics to read. Them’s was the days….

Anyway, the comics reviewers at AICN have, in their own peculiar idiom (basically involving lots of sarcasm and profanity), done a bit of traipsing down memory lane for the best X-Men stories of all time. Ah, the memories…the Mutant Massacre…the Dark Phoenix saga…when there were only three “mutant-centric” series in the Marvel lineup (Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants), but the stories would be told in multi-issue crossovers amongst all those series…what fun it was. I could have done without X-Factor, actually — and its ham-handed resurrection of Jean Grey. But still, it was all a lot of fun.

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My archenemy, before holding his pinkie to his lips and demanding one million dollars from the UN, has dug up some of the first reviews of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s useful to remember that no one thought that TESB was superior to A New Hope in 1980; the consensus view of TESB‘s superiority didn’t form until some time later — a few years after Return of the Jedi came out, at least. This reminds us that critics, while useful, are generally little better equipped to assess a work of art than anyone else, because, like everyone else, they can’t see the future and know how influential the work is likely to be.

One can complain about what one perceives to be a work’s faults as much as one wants, but when it comes to deciding what’s going to stand the test of time, well — it’s all a crapshoot. There is no best, there is no “canon”, and artistic favor comes and goes. So there.

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