Month: September 2003

It’s a nifty month for planetary astronomy! We had Mars at its closest point to Earth in quite some time (my entry for “understatement of the year”), and now Saturn is at its best angle for viewing the rings in years.

Here we have Saturn viewed first in the ultraviolet spectrum, then in visible light, and finally in the infrared. Wow. I don’t care how much money it costs. I hope they either figure out a way to keep Hubble operating, or replace it with something even better.

(Link via Aaron, the motorcycling would-be astronomer/blues musician.)

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SDB has a couple of interesting posts today.

First, he discusses the enormous obstacle to Middle East peace that is Yasser Arafat. This is what makes the whole Middle East peace thing so frustrating: in a perfect world, it would be pretty obvious that getting Arafat off the world stage – – most likely by killing him – – would help things, but I’m just not convinced that the void created by Arafat’s departure would be filled with anything better. But then, leaving him in place certainly isn’t working out, either. I don’t think there can really be peace as long as Arafat is alive, but I don’t think the chances for peace significantly improve with him dead, either. Ugh. Talk about your quagmires: the Middle East has been one for how many thousand years now?

Second, SDB points to a news item in which some unnamed Saudi official claims that Osama Bin Laden specifically recruited a majority of Saudis for the 9-11-01 operation in order to make Saudi Arabia look bad. Now, I don’t read this person’s comments quite the same way SDB does – – SDB seems to think the Saudi source is claiming that the whole purpose of 9-11, from Bin Laden’s perspective, was to discredit Saudi Arabia by virtue of fifteen of the highjackers being Saudis. It seems to me that what’s being claimed here is not quite that, but rather that Bin Laden, having decided to execute a major operation against the US and on American soil, chose to do so in such a way that an additional benefit would be to discredit Saudi Arabia.

According to the ABCNews story, US terrorism experts pretty much reject the Saudi official’s theory, anyway. They think that the explanation for Bin Laden’s recruitment of mainly Saudis for 9-11 is more prosaic: there simply are more Saudis to recruit for terrorist activities, and they’re easier to get in place for their strikes (or at least they were, back then). I suppose it doesn’t occur to the quoted Saudi official that maybe his country is already discredited, in that it’s apparently easy to recruit Saudis to be terrorists in the first place.

(“My heart bleeds peanut butter“? That metaphor’s just weird! Between that and his “vanishing pants” thing of a few weeks ago, I’m starting to form some really odd mental images of Mr. Den Beste…)

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Apparently YACCS Comments have returned from the dead. And there was much rejoicing. I won’t bother keeping that other message-board thingie up, although I may resurrect it if YACCS goes down again for an extended time. We shall see.

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I recall reading somewhere that the sense of smell is the most strongly “emotional” of the five senses. Maybe that’s the wrong way of putting it, but it certainly seems that smell can bring up the most vivid memories and associations, at least sometimes. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of smelling something, in our adult lives, that transports us back to some specific time and place from childhood – – not a hazy remembrance, but a memory that is sharp and real. It can be Mom’s cooking, for example, and the changes in our palates between childhood and adulthood probably account for that feeling that we can never quite make it as good as she did, though if we’re good, we can come pretty darn close.

It can be other things as well. There used to be a “New Age” bookstore in Buffalo, called “East and West Books”, that I liked to frequent when I was home from college, because I was a philosophy major and this particular bookstore had a pretty good selection of philosophy and science texts beyond the Eastern mysticism that one might expect from such a venue. This store always burned a certain type of incense, in one aroma only, and they burned so much of it that books that had sat on their shelves for a long enough time eventually took on that same scent. I can still detect hints of that smell on books that I bought at that store today, even years after the store has gone. That smell, though, always brings back the vivid memories I have of that place, and I can even remember the almost-exact floorplan and location of the various categories within the stacks.

Intimately connected with memory is ritual, and scent can play a large role in ritual. This is why many religious services involve the burning of incense. But it’s not just actual ceremonial ritual that can be enhanced through scent. Our lives consist largely of rituals that are unremarked and unrecognized; sometimes those rituals disappear by virtue of necessity. But the proper alignment of scent can bring them back with startling clarity. This happened to me the other night.

My wife and I used to both work in the restaurant business, which among other things meant putting in long hours on Saturdays. Mostly, we worked the day shifts at our respective businesses, but when we finally got off work, it was typically quite late in the day for dinnertime – – sometimes it was after 8:00 in the evening – – and neither of us had any desire at all to cook something. Thus, our Saturday night meal, for almost four years, was Chinese takeout. Often I would go to pick it up, listening to Thistle and Shamrock on NPR in the car as I did so (that’s NPR’s Celtic music show). It was about a fifteen-minute drive from our favorite Chinese place back home, and thus the car would fill with the smell of Chinese food while I drove home to the strains of some Celtic reel or ballad. The final part of the ritual would be our sitting on the floor, in front of the TV with Chinese containers spread out on the carpet, eating our fill while watching The Pretender on NBC.

This period of our lives spanned the time of our engagement and the earliest handful of years of our marriage. It ended when certain changes occurred: I left the restaurant business, my wife took on a work schedule that often involved working a closing shift on Saturdays, NBC canceled The Pretender to make room on its schedule for the XFL (to this day the single act of network television that has angered me the most). We didn’t decide to stop having Chinese every Saturday night; various things in our lives simply steered us in other directions, and we didn’t even miss it, much. We still have Chinese every so often (not as much as we’d like, but money’s tight right now), and when we do, we still sit on the floor to eat it. But the emotional fabric of those Saturday dinners, when we flopped down exhausted to watch a favorite weekly show, has been missing, and we didn’t even realize it. Or I didn’t…until we decided to have Chinese just this past Saturday night, and once again I drove home with the scents filling the car while my car speakers pulsated with the sounds of Uillean pipes and bodhran drums and whistles and voices raised in Gaelic lyrics.

Those smells sent me back in time. It was one of the spookiest sensations I’ve ever had – – nostalgia for something that, until that moment, I’d never realized I really missed.

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Time for another entry in my ongoing series, How Can You Look At Britney Without Laughing When There Are Women Such As This In The World?

Julie Delpy.

BTW, according to this site, which provides corroborating links, this fall Delpy will be rejoining director Richard Linklater and costar Ethan Hawke in filming a sequel to the wonderful and bittersweet romance Before Sunrise.

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Writing notes:

:: My “Snow White” story, the one that took me only a week to write, has now been rejected by its second market. Oh, joy. Apparently it “didn’t stand out” (that’s the reason they highlighted on the rejection letter, of all the ones listed as possible explanations). My immediate reaction was to get indignant and tell myself that it damn well does too stand out, and they’re a bunch of pinheads who don’t know anything, yada yada yada. But then, I remember that I still love that particular magazine. Hell, I’m still mad at them. I know my story’s better than a lot of stuff they’ve published. Harumph. Editors! You can’t live with ’em…pass the Beer Nuts.

:: I haven’t been particularly good at making my thousand-words-per-day goal over the last week or so on the Novel-in-Progress, but that should change now. Some nagging details have resolved themselves, and I’m starting to move out of the novel’s “set-up” chapters and into the “red meat” chapters. Or something like that.

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Oh, Atrios, Atrios, Atrios….earlier in the day you say something mean about the Secretary of Defense, and then you assume that those military jets above your home are buzzing the stadium?! Oh, you are so naïve!

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NORM: I’ve been known to perspire a bit.

CARLA: We could grow rice!

OK, as I write this, it’s about 11:30 at night and I’ve only just now turned on the Monday Night Football game. It’s early in the fourth quarter, with Tampa Bay leading 10-0. These two teams played each other in last year’s NFC Championship Game, and both are widely expected to go deep into the playoffs again this year. It’s a close game between two teams who are developing a nice rivalry. So what are the ABC commentators, including John Madden, talking about right now?

The fact that the new Tampa Bay center, a guy named Wade, sweats a lot.

I mean, this guy sweats a lot. He sweats so much that Brad Johnson, the Bucs’ quarterback, apparently has compared going under center with this guy to entering a rain forest. So sweaty, that the ABC camera crew is indulging us in multiple-angled closeups of Mr. Wade’s sweaty posterior. I think I just heard a chorus of guys from the sports bar a half-mile down the road from my house going, EWWWWW!!!

But hey, at least John Madden hasn’t used his tele-strator thingie to draw white circles around the man’s sweaty nether-regions. Yet.

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Want to feel some nostalgia for the first mind-blowing experience of home computing you ever had? You know, back when a deciding factor for a system was how many K of RAM it had (as in, up to 16K or some such number), whether you could use an Atari joystick with it, and how good its games were? If so, this is the place for you.

My first computer was the VIC-20. Yup – – the fabled machine of 5K (only 3.5 of which was usable), a screen display of twenty-two characters. Five minutes of loading games from the tape deck. Cutting my programming teeth on code like this:

10 PRINT “BITE ME”

20 GET A$:IF A$=””THENGOTO20

30 PRINT “BITE ME AGAIN”

40 GOTO10

I had a lot of fun with that clunky thing…but then there was the technological revolution of the Commodore 64, the machine with a lot more memory (64K!), sprite graphics (which were a huge pain-in-the-ass to program, but there it was) and a 40-character per line display! Zap! Pow!!

I grew up in a home computing environment such that, when Macintosh came along and I learned that one doesn’t simply turn it on and start typing in BASIC programs, I thought, “Then what the hell do you do with it? Sounds useless! And that ‘mouse’ thing is friggin’ stupid!” Little did I know.

Sir Matt the Easily Devoured by Dragons owned a TI99-4A computer, if memory serves. Many a classroom argument resulted of our arguing over which was a superior system. It offended his sense of design, already potent in the fifth grade, that the VIC-20 should have the slot for cartridges (remember, ROM-cartridges were the main vehicle for games and such back then) located in the back of the computer, and he maybe had a point, but in any event those arguments now seem rather like the scene in Stand By Me when Gordo and Vern debate whether Mighty Mouse could defeat Superman.

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We’re on offense, you incredible nincompoop!

Week One of the 2003 NFL season is almost in the books (except for tonight’s Philly-Tampa matchup, which ought to be a barn-burner of a game). It’s interesting that a lot of the time you can hear the same cliches from both winning and losing teams on Week One: It’s just one game. It’s not an entire season. There’s a lot of football left, and we’ve got a lot of work to do if we want to get to where we want to be.

But the thing with cliches is that they become cliches for a reason: there’s a lot of truth there. A lot of teams have started 1-0 and missed the playoffs over the years, and a lot of teams have started 0-1 and made the playoffs. Excluding the possibility of ties (which are very rare in the NFL), by definition at least four of the sixteen teams that start their seasons 1-0 will miss the playoffs.

But damn, that 31-0 pasting the Bills put on the Patriots yesterday felt good! Truly, I haven’t had that much fun watching a Bills game in several years, probably back to the Flutie era. There’s just something about following your favorite team through the first couple of years of a rebuilding process, seeing the young players brought in and then the gaps filled in through free-agency, and then, when you think the rebuilding should finally begin to pay off, seeing it happen with a blowout victory over not just any other team but a division rival that’s two years removed from winning the Super Bowl and a team that has had your team’s number the last few years.

Week One was just an appetizer. But oh, what an appetizer it was.

The game wasn’t perfect, by any means. The Bills’ offensive line still does entirely too much holding (although, to my knowledge and incredible surprise, Ruben Brown didn’t get flagged for any of it). They did a great job at the line of scrimmage, but I would have liked to have seen even more dominance. That should get better, though, as the year goes on and the line comes together again. Travis Henry, true to form, fumbled once. Drew Bledsoe’s decision making was what it should have been, given that he generally had a lot more time to throw than he ever did last year (he was only sacked twice). He only threw one interception, and that was at the very end of the first half when he gambled on a pretty-much meaningless play. He also did a great job of spreading the ball to his receivers.

Of course, defense was the story yesterday, after I carped about it every week last year. They only sacked Tom Brady twice – – I’d still like to see more pass-rush – – but they hurried him a lot; they picked off four of his passes (when, last year, the Bills didn’t pick off a single pass until their seventh game). They were very physical at the line. I would have liked to have seen them play a bit stiffer against the run, but they still held the Pats down in that regard. And I knew the Bills were getting a good player when they signed Takeo Spikes, but…wow.

Finally, on the matter of coaching: yeah, it’s just one game, but I can’t help but wonder if Bill Belichick’s bag of tricks has finally been exhausted. Every time they showed him on the sidelines, he looked like he had no idea of what to do next. His team looked flat and unmotivated. (Cutting one of the best-loved players on the team four days before the season opener will do that.) He looked like a guy who had no answers, a guy to whom the pace of the game was dictated by his opponent. That’s how Gregg Williams has occasionally looked in his first two years; it was great to see that shoe on the other foot for once.

Yeah, it’s one game. But what a game. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills are 1-0. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills are in sole possession of first place in the AFC East. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills have shut out an opponent. For the first time in the Gregg Williams era, the Bills played the sharper and more physical game than their opponent.

Oh yeah.

Some other NFL notes:

:: Kurt Warner fumbled six times. I wonder if he really needs a new environment now.

:: It looks like my nefarious scheme, in which I paid a guy to sneak into the Dolphins’ locker room and turn their wall calendar to “December”, has already paid off. Interestingly, their supposedly-great defense didn’t manage to sack the Texans’ QB, David Carr, a single time despite the fact that last year I think Carr set an NFL record for getting sacked. That clicking sound you hear is Dave Wannstedt’s fingers on his computer keyboard as he updates his resume.

:: Vikings, Steelers, Redskins, 49ers…it looks as if every team I rooted for yesterday won. That hasn’t happened since, well, I’m not sure it’s ever happened. I saw no highlights of the Vikings’ victory over the Packers, but I do note that it happened at Lambeau and that maybe Randy Moss has finally grown up, now that he needs to be a veteran leader on a young team.

:: I don’t get ESPN, so I didn’t get to see the esteemable Mr. Limbaugh on NFL Countdown. But according to TBOGG, his big attempt at prognostication backfired rather spectacularly. Heh. Indeed.

:: Sean is slowly, slowly weakening. He will bow to us. Oh, yessss….

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