Month: August 2003

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ESPN’s tour of all the major-league ballparks hits Minneapolis’s Metrodome today.

I have a lot of fine memories of the Metrodome, all from my four years in college. I thrilled to the Twins’ exploits in the 1991 World Series, when they defeated the ever-evil Atlanta Braves in seven games. (The Braves are a tiny bit more palatable to me than the Dallas Cowboys.) The second of the Bills’ four Super Bowl defeats came in the Metrodome. And, I spent my twenty-first birthday there (in part). A bunch of my friends got together and went to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival during the day, and then at night we went to see the Twins beat the Royals, 9-2. I remember walking in and being struck by the apparent difference in size between a large venue in person and a large venue on TV; I actually looked around and said, “They had a Super Bowl in here?”

(In fact, there was a one-year stretch in which the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NHL Finals, and the NCAA Final Four were all held in Minneapolis.)

Of course, unless one is quite rich, one doesn’t get drunk spending one’s twenty-first at a baseball game. I had one beer, and the guy at the booth said after he looked at my ID: “Happy birthday. Five bucks.” But I figured, hey, I’d been drunk plenty of times. That sensation wasn’t going to become any more unique by virtue of doing it legally.

And one lasting memory of the four hours or so I spent in the Dome is of this horrible jingle for some local pizza joint that they insisted on blaring over the loudspeakers. To this day, I get this damn tune going through my head sometimes, even though I only heard it once. Dial four eight eight eight eight eight eight, for the very best pizza you ever ate….AGGGHHHH!!!

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The correct grammatical use of “sucks” can be illustrated thusly:

Having the World Science Fiction Convention just a ninety-minute drive away and being unable to attend because of financial constraints really sucks.

I expect this to be included in the next edition of Strunk and White.

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It’s interesting to note the way blogging – – both writing and reading – – takes shape to accommodate other bloggers’ habits, and how my own habits get slightly thrown out-of-whack when a favorite of mine either goes on a hiatus (as SDB did last week) or has some shift in life-circumstance which changes their posting habits (e.g., Pandagon). Some bloggers I tend to check in the morning, either because they post late-at-night, or – – more likely – – they’re Californians, and thus post some stuff after I, being an East-coaster, have retired for the evening. So it gets comforting somewhat, to get up in the morning and read SDB and Kevin Drum and TBOGG*; it’s also comforting to check back a few times during the day when Pandagon or Matthew Yglesias puts up something new on their “sporadic” basis. And it throws me off if bloggers I’ve tended to read at certain times of the day change their routines.

What’s strange in all this is that I haven’t settled into any particular posting habit of my own, as far as I can see. Sometimes I’ll write a day’s posts the night before, using Word, and slap them up in the morning. Other times I’ll just wait until mid-afternoon. Sometimes I’ll do an Yglesias-type day and post several times in a day. About the only main habit I’ve settled into is that I usually post nothing at all on Saturdays. Generally speaking, I try to do all of my posting for the day at once, but that’s not a habit so much as a preference that I don’t try to hard to avoid breaking. My point in all this? Glad you asked.

I don’t have one.

* Best wishes to Tbogg on the current difficulties facing his family.

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Well, isn’t that interesting: I’m writing this post on one browser window, and according to the other browser window I’m running, Byzantium’s Shores cannot be found. Erk. I suspected a problem was brewing last night when I discovered that my permalinks weren’t working again. Anyway, let’s get this fixed soon, guys. Thousands of lives are at stake.

UPDATE (two minutes later): Now the page is showing up again. I’ve entered the realm of Bizarro-Blogger.

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I read Kevin J. Anderson‘s A Forest of Stars this weekend. This is the second book in his Saga of Seven Suns series, which began with last year’s Hidden Empire. That book was a decent light read, although I found Anderson’s characters a bit wooden and his tendency for cute allusions and references gets annoying after a while. The big problem with Hidden Empire was that it felt like five hundred pages of set-up, with Anderson taking forever to simply get all of the pieces in the right positions.

No such problem afflicts A Forest of Stars, which is a much better read than the earlier book. It’s still light space-opera, with galactic conflicts, apocalyptic battles, ancient alien artifacts, a King and his scheming ministers, a society loosely based on Gypsies, a society of religious mystics, and aliens who are basically uncorking the galaxy’s biggest can of “Whoop-ass” on the humans.

The model is still George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. Anderson gives us lots of short chapters, each from the viewpoint of a different character. Even the title A Forest of Stars mirrors Martin’s titles in his concurrent fantasy masterpiece. Anderson still lacks, though, Martin’s skill at characterization, so a lot of the book seems more plot-driven than character driven. Most times that’s not a problem, but there are spots where certain developments seem awfully convenient, such as a pivotal discovery made by a character who has gone off alone into space for personal reasons. Anderson’s main skill, as always, is in using words to convey the visual sense of what’s going on in his story. If this book were made into a movie correctly, it would be eye-candy of the highest order. I’d love to see those huge, diamond-hulled Hydrogue war-globe starships.

The story of the entire series involves a titanic war that began when humans used an alien device to ignite a gas-giant planet into a star, unaware of the beings called Hydrogues who live in the depths of the gas giants. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and by the end of A Forest of Stars, there are four new and previously-unknown alien races on the scene, relegating humans to the status of mice on the battlefield.

The third book in this series should be out next summer, and there is a prequel graphic novel coming out this winter. This isn’t a great series, by any means, but as space opera I actually find it preferable to, say, the military SF of David Weber. Sometimes you just want a big, galaxy-spanning tale of aliens and war and love and political machination, and that’s what Anderson’s delivering.

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I am really starting to be glad we got out of the Syracuse area when we did, even if our stay there was for only six months. The big basketball championship aside, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t some kind of curse hanging over that entire region. And this one hits kind-of close to home: yesterday, one of the buildings at the apartment complex where we lived burned to the ground. It wasn’t the actual one, but judging by the address, the one that burned was within a quarter mile of our old apartment.

And while we did live there, a quarter mile in the other direction, a murder occurred. And there was the big ice storm in April, on the weekend we had to pack and leave. And there was generally a ton of snow. And the constant news of factory closings. And….man, there’s a pall over the Central New York region.

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