Month: May 2003

I checked the DVD of Camelot out of the library last week, and on Saturday night I watched about half of it.

Now, Camelot has never been my favorite musical. Despite the wonderful songs (as if anything less could ever be expected of Lerner and Loewe), the King Arthur story needs a lot more space than is available in just about any movie. I don’t think the definitive filmed version of the Arthurian matter yet exists, although John Boorman’s Excalibur comes reasonably close. (I also admire the telefilm Merlin from a few years back, but it doesn’t specifically tell the Arthurian story, so it can take liberties as it needs.)

But now, oh my God, Camelot is almost unwatchable. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I mean, I always thought the dialog was clunky, but now I think it’s just awful. And the casting is staggeringly bad — Vanessa Redgrave as Guinivere is abominable, and watching Franco Nero perform Lancelot’s songs had me reaching for the remote. (Thank God they dubbed his singing. Otherwise I might have done myself in.) Richard Harris is the only good thing about this movie, but even he suffers a bit. I’ve never been able to really wrap my head around the idea of King Arthur as the well-meaning boob.

I’m just amazed at this movie. Really.

(While I’m on the subject of Arthurian movies, I listened to the score of First Knight the other day. That was a bad movie, too, but it at least tried something interesting with having Lancelot not be this perfect guy tempted by nasty Guinivere. As for the score, well — it’s by Jerry Goldsmith, which means that by definition it’s hailed as a masterpiece in film music fandom circles. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why. It’s competent, but not particularly distinguished, epic music. It really doesn’t sound like anything grander or better than any other epic music Goldsmith has done in the last fifteen years or so, and it’s not remotely as good as his classic works such as The Wind and the Lion. I think this is more an example of the “Jerry Factor” — the tendency of any Goldsmith score to be elevated to classic status by virtue of its being composed by Goldsmith — than anything else.)

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Huzzah!!!

In the greatest boon to CD shoppers in history, the Borders in Buffalo has ditched those horrible spinning-display towers for the Naxos CDs, and put them in normal bins just like everything else. They still keep the Naxos stuff separate, though, which is terrifically convenient, since I browse Naxos CDs differently than I browse the mainstream classical selection. (Since Naxos CDs retail around 7 or 8 bucks, I tend to be a lot more adventurous when buying them. I’m far more likely to try some composer I’ve never even heard of on a Naxos CD than I am on a full-price disc by, say, Deutsche Gramophon. And Naxos CDs tend to be of very high quality, in terms of performance.) But now the annoying towers are gone, which means that the Naxos CDs are much more likely to remain in alphabetical order.

But then, they didn’t have the specific Naxos CD I wanted in stock. Oh well. That just gives me another excuse to go to Borders next week.

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My review of that book I didn’t like is now up at GMR. No, I wasn’t too mean. I merely outlined some reasons for my displeasure.

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SDB is back to flogging atheism, this time within the framework of explaining the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.

I was glad to see SDB avoid a very common error in defining the two kinds of logic: the idea that deductive reasoning proceeds from general premises to specific conclusions, while inductive reasoning involves general conclusions derived from specific premises. This, however, is not the case: the difference lies not in whether the premises are general or specific, but in the logical relation between the premises and the conclusion.

In a valid deductive argument, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. This is not the case with an inductive argument: in an inductive argument, the conclusion can still be false ever if the premises are true. Thus, what is at stake with inductive arguments is the likelihood that the conclusion is true.

This also demonstrates the difference between an algorithm and a heuristic. An algorithm is a sequence of steps that, followed correctly and in the correct order, will yield a precise result, each time those steps are followed. A heuristic is also a sequence of steps, but there is no such guarantee with a heuristic. Thus, when a heuristic is called for, the trick is to choose the steps for the greatest likelihood of producing the desired result. In some sense, a recipe for a cake is an algorithm, whereas a military strategy for removing a Middle-Eastern dictatorship from power is a heuristic. (The distinction between algorithms and heuristics is of central importance in the field of artificial intelligence.)

Ergo, God doesn’t exist and my Jacksonian daddy can kick your Tranzi daddy’s ass. So there.

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The latest entry in the “Water is wet” Sweepstakes is now available.

Is anyone besides me wondering if life should bear this much resemblance to a George Carlin monologue?

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What are the three most beautiful words in the English language, taken together?

Of course, most people will say, I love you. That’s a no-brainer. But then, if you’re a long-time Star Trek viewer, you’ll remember that in the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Jim Kirk tells Edith Keeler that in a hundred years or so a novelist from Alpha Centauri (I think) will recommend the words Let me help over I love you.

Those are certainly two promising candidates. But there are other concatenations of three words that, depending on your circumstance, are far more beautiful than either of those. For a college student, Here’s twenty bucks and The Prof’s sick may well outrank the two above.

And for any male member of our species, I think there may be one three-word phrase that trumps them all. And it is….

We’re having ribs.

Oh, those three little words bring out the tears….

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Continuing with Short Fiction Month, I read two stories by James Thurber the other night. I’ve always loved Thurber’s off-kilter way of looking at the world, even though he’s unaccountably fallen off my radar screen in recent years. So I got out my Library of America Thurber collection and chose two tales, pretty much at random.

First was “The Macbeth Murder Mystery”, which is one of those stories that has even me, an aspiring storyteller, thinking: “How on Earth did this guy come up with this, anyway?” This is a very short story that is simply a conversation between two people, one of whom is a reader of nothing but murder mysteries like Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and all those. Problem is, she ends up in a situation where the only reading material at hand is a copy of Macbeth. Which she reads as a murder mystery, approaching it as if it were a Christie novel. And proceeds to critique, in the same way. The sheer delight of invention here, in so small a package, is wonderful; especially when our mystery-loving heroine announces, “I don’t think Macbeth did it” and goes on to outline why.

The second story was “You Could Look It Up”. Having just seen Bull Durham last week, and recognizing “You could look it up” as that film’s final line, I wondered if the Thurber story with that as its title could be about baseball. Sure enough, it is. This is the tale of an unnamed baseball team that is suffering a losing streak in the midst of a September pennant chase, and the very odd way in which they turn their luck around. I won’t say more than that except to note that I always thought dwarf-tossing was primarily a 1990s phenomenon.

Thurber is required reading for anyone looking for dark, off-center humor. What I especially love about him is that he wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, when various norms of propriety forced writers to look for more literary ways of suggesting what they had in mind. Reading the writers from those eras always makes me wonder if we’ve lost more than we bargained for when we became a more permissive, “anything goes” type of culture.

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That site I posted a while back, which compares real-and-fictional spacecraft to scale, has a new and permanent home. Among other things, there is now a portion of the Earth’s moon, to scale, on the same page that the Death Stars appear. And now I’m wondering, just how much power can they pack into that tiny laser beam, since they can blow up entire planets with something so incredibly small?

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SDB points us to a desperation ploy by German governments to raise revenue. They’re taxing brothels, apparently. However, I’m not sure it’s quite the way that SDB portrays it — he says they’re taxing sex, whereas it seems to me more accurate to say they’re taxing certain sex-related businesses. They’re actually not taxing sex in the same sense that here in America we tax, say, smoking.

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Aaron has a picture of what he thinks is Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, but is really the Channel 9 traffic chopper. Go point and laugh.

(Or, since Blogger’s permalinks are messed up again, go to his main page and scroll down. Once again I find it odd that since Google bought Blogger, the Blogger service has gotten worse. My own permalinks are also messed up, and I’m not able to republish all my archives, either. Ugh.)

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