Month: May 2003

Goofy Search-Engine Stuff:

:: My off-hand mention of the word “Clenis” brought in some hits. I never thought I’d see this as a search-term, but there it is. Now, if it proves to be an actual traffic-generator for a while, I’ll have to work it into the posts every few days, kind of like how I did when those Don Cheadle NFL ads were all the rage. (Is “Google-whore” a word? It should be.)

:: A favorite TV show of the kid’s is Caillou, an animated show from Canada about a four-year old boy named Caillou and his experiences (mostly rooted in normal, everyday life) with his parents and baby sister, Rosie. So I found this search a bit…disturbing. I hope this person was looking for something other than what I think they were looking for….

:: In 24-related news, I got a search hit the other day on the phrase “the Kim Bauer Power Shower”. You wish. (Yeah, so do I….)

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In the wake of the bombings in Casablanca, I suppose headlines like this were to be expected. And now, inevitably I’m wondering if they rounded up the usual suspects, or just any old suspects.

(EDIT: Well, they changed the headline on me since I posted this. The story’s old headline was something like, “Moroccan police round up bombing suspects”. Now it’s a bit more prosaic, and less reminiscent of the movie Casablanca.)

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All hail the Top 100 Video Games of All Time, which somehow omits favorites of mine like Myst and Riven. And I never got the fascination with the whole Mario Brothers thing — the original Donkey Kong was fun, but the subsequent entries in the Mario franchise never did it for me.

And my favorite game of all time is one whose name I cannot recall for the life of me. The player is a guy who is faced with bouncing balls of various size, and he has to pop them using these ropes-with-grappling-hooks that he shoots straight up, deploying them to break the balls in two. The balls get smaller each time you pop them, until they disappear entirely….in the first screen you’re faced with a single, large ball, which you then break into two, then those into four, and then into eight smallest-sized ones that finally disappear when you pop them. When you clear a screen of balls, you advance to the next screen, which has different combinations of obstacles and balls to pop. Does this ring any bells with anybody out there? I ruled on this game in college….probably because it wasn’t all that popular of a game, and thus I was always able to play it. But the patterns of balls-to-obstacles created interesting spatial puzzles to solve.

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Short Fiction Month Update:

Richard Matheson is a writer that anyone interested in the horror genre must read. His book Hell House is a classic in the “haunted house” vein; ditto I Am Legend for the vampire genre, and so on. Matheson is also one of the great writers of horror short fiction. Steven Spielberg’s first movie, Duel, is an adaptation of a Matheson story; Steven King has cited Matheson as one of his primary influences. You simply can’t delve into the horror genre in the 20th century without running full-square into Richard Matheson’s work.

I read two stories of his the other night: “The Funeral” and “The Near Departed”. I chose them pretty much at random; they appear in the same collection I own, and after reading “The Funeral” I chose “The Near Departed” because of its very short length. To my surprise, both stories involve a person making a very strange visit to a funeral director. “The Funeral” involves some very odd supernatural content, but interestingly it is “The Near Departed”, with its sly twist-ending, that is the more horrific of the two stories. Both stories exhibit Matheson’s gift for direct, clear prose and matter-of-fact reportage of details, some of which are actually the same in each story. (Each, for example, mentions the funeral director reaching for the pen in the holder.)

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(WARNING: Irrational anger ahead.)

If the President of NBC were to walk in my front door this morning, I would grab a hammer and beat him with it.

Last night I’m watching the hour-long season finale of Friends, and I’m prepared to switch over to CBS when it’s over so I can watch the season finale of CSI. But as the last minutes of the eight o’clock hour ticked away, with Friends still not ending, I started getting a little suspicious. Sure enough, it turns out that NBC ran Friends not for the advertised one hour, but for seventy minutes, thus ensuring that people like me who are fans of both Friends and CSI got screwed by having to choose between missing the first ten minutes of the latter show or the last ten minutes of the former show.

And NBC specifically advertised this episode of Friends as one hour. So: NBC blatantly lied, and they did it for no other reason than to screw people who watch CSI. What’s more: it’s not like they gave us a special ten-minute extra bonus of Friends. They just inflated the commercial breaks so as to take the show to 9:10 pm.

(And the VCR wasn’t a solution, because I was already taping Friends for my wife, who had to work.)

Stupid NBC and their stupid damn #$%&^@!!! ratings-stunts. And while I’m bitching about NBC, gee whiz, how did I ever know that Law and Order would do one of their idiotic “ripped-from-the-headlines” stories about “a celebrity who dangles his kid over a balcony…and drops him”?!

OK, I think I’m better now.

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I decided to give “Chock Full O’ Nuts” brand coffee a try. Ugh. I am not impressed. This stuff makes a wimpy, weak cup — and this is the second time I’ve brewed it. I used less water this time, and it’s still weak. So I’m going right back to grinding my own beans when this can is done. Chock Full O’ Nuts? Well, it sure ain’t Chock Full O’ Flavor.

(I was actually going to return to bean-grinding anyway, but I decided to get some pre-ground coffee just to take a break from grinding beans every morning. That, and when the can is empty I can use it to store the whole-bean coffee in the freezer.)

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Mike, of Mike’s Baseball Rants, turns his attention this morning to my beloved Pirates, and the results ain’t pretty. It looks like Lloyd McClendon will be done soon, and in all likelihood he’ll be replaced by a safer, mediocre, white guy. Can’t wait.

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One of my favorite literary characters is Professor Roderick Childermass, from a series of children’s novels by John Bellairs. Professor Childermass is a cranky teacher of literature who has adventures involving ghosts and other nasty things with his young friend, Johnny Dixon, and much of the humor of these books is derived from the Professor’s temper and his inability to keep it reined in when he should. The Professor has in his house something called a “Fuss Closet”, which is a small walk-in closet which the professor has equipped with gymnasium-style padding on the floor and walls. Thus, when he is in his home and feels a tantrum coming on, he takes off his glasses, goes into the Fuss Closet, and proceeds to get it all out of his system.

Last night I could have used a Fuss Closet.

I mentioned earlier in the week that I mailed out four short stories on Monday. (Actually, three went out in the mail; the fourth was an electronic submission.) Last night, I went to do one last quick check of my e-mail before going to bed, and I discovered not one but two rejections from that batch of stories, from the e-sub market and one of the postal-mail markets (in the latter case, now I’m wondering what they’re going to do with my SASE). Both messages came in the space of about forty minutes.

A Fuss Closet would have come in very handy just then.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A German A4 rocket lifting off from the test facility at Peenemunde.

Peenemunde was the site of Germany’s secret rocketry program, where they developed their V2 rockets that Hitler hoped would win World War II for them. Of course, the V2 rockets did not prove to be Germany’s salvation, and eventually the Peenemunde complex was found and destroyed. But a number of its scientists, including Wehrner von Braun, found their way to the United States where they provided the invaluable technical expertise that got the American space program rolling.

The image links to a profile of Peenemunde today.

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I’m finding Jane Galt‘s “Diogenes-looking-for-an-intellectually-honest-person” act a bit cloying lately. First, she takes EJ Dionne to task for making an unverifiable statement (that, if Gore were President, he’d be pilloried by the press if he did the same things that Bush has done), and then turns around and prints a long e-mail containing a medical horror story whose sole purpose is to make another unverifiable statement (that this person’s medical care would have been disastrous under the Hillary Clinton healthcare plan).

And then there is another instance of her “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” defense of that book, The Bell Curve, in which she sharply criticizes the book’s critics while first saying, “I’ve read it, but I have no opinion on it”. This could be true, of course, but I find it hard to believe that someone as intelligent and well-read as Jane could read that book without forming an opinion of its merit, or that she would expend so much effort to taking on the book’s critics (this is not her first post on this subject) also without having an opinion on it. She seems to be expending an awful lot of mental energy on an issue on which she has no opinion. I mean, if she knows the book and its arguments well enough that she can castigate Steven Jay Gould’s attack on it as consisting of “egregious selective quotation”, how can she at the same time profess to not knowing the book and its arguments well enough to have an opinion on it? What gives?

(For the record, I have not read The Bell Curve, and I have no opinion at all about it. Whenever that book comes up in conversation, my general tactic is to nod sagely and reach for the pretzels.)

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