Month: September 2003

Lurking around the message boards at Bright Weavings, the official site for author Guy Gavriel Kay (whose books, if you haven’t read them, are awaiting you with increasing levels of haughty impatience), I learned that Kay’s Canadian publisher already has a blurb on the web about his new novel, The Last Light of the Sun, which is coming out next spring. The blurb can be read here, for you folks who like to click links. For those of more impatient character, well, I quote it in full right now.

Over 250,000 books sold! In his eagerly awaited new novel, Guy Gavriel Kay turns his gaze to the northlands, brilliantly evoking the Viking, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic cultures of a turbulent age.

There is nothing soft or silken about the north. The lives of men and women are as challenging as the climate and lands in which they dwell. For generations, the Erlings of Vinmark have taken their dragon-prowed ships across the seas, raiding the lands of the Cyngael and Anglcyn peoples, leaving fire and death behind. But times change, even in the north, and in a tale woven with consummate artistry, people of all three cultures find the threads of their lives unexpectedly brought together…

Bern Thorkellson, punished for his father’s sins, commits an act of vengeance and desperation that brings him face-to-face, across the sea, with a past he’s been trying to leave behind.

In the Anglcyn lands of King Aeldred, the shrewd king, battling inner demons all the while, shores up his defenses with alliances and diplomacy-and with swords and arrows-while his exceptional, unpredictable sons and daughters pursue their own desires when battle comes and darkness falls in the woods.

And in the valleys and shrouded hills of the Cyngael, whose voices carry music even as they feud and raid amongst each other, violence and love become deeply interwoven when the dragon ships come and Alun ab Owyn, chasing an enemy in the night, glimpses strange lights gleaming above forest pools.

Making brilliant use of saga, song and chronicle, Kay brings to life an unforgettable world balanced on the knife-edge of change in The Last Light of the Sun.

Well, that certainly sounds compelling, even setting that first clause, which sounds like a cross between selling books and selling Quarter-Pounders. The blurb doesn’t make any mention as to this being the opening book in any kind of series or multi-volume work, so I have to assume it’s a stand-alone.

Who knows, maybe by then I’ll have a job and thus be able to buy the damn thing.

UPDATE: It’s confirmed that the book is a stand-alone.

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Well, yesterday morning I listened to CarTalk and thus learned the answer to the baseball puzzler that was vexing me the other day. It turns out that I was somewhat on the right track, but I overthought things a bit. The puzzle question, basically is this:

A guy goes into a bar and notes that a baseball game is on TV. He asks the bartender what the game’s status is, and the bartender says, “Bottom of the fifth, no score, nobody on, two outs.” Then the batter hits a grounder sharply down the first-base line, which the first-baseman cleanly fields – – and then hurls across the field to third base. The third-baseman catches the relay, steps on the bag, the ump signals “Out!”, and the inning ends. How is this possible?

Well, the answer (look away, if you’re still working it out) is that the guy was not watching the game directly on the TV, but rather in the mirror behind the bar. So it’s backwards. Oy.

My own answer, though, was clearly overthought. I assumed that he wasn’t watching any game at all, but rather the movie The Pride of the Yankees, in which Gary Cooper plays Lou Gehrig. A bit of lore about that film is that Gehrig, in real life, hit lefty, but Cooper simply couldn’t hit lefty without looking horrible. So the filmmakers made him a reverse-image New York Yankees uniform, and in the baseball scenes, shot everything “reversed” so that all they had to do was flip the film-image to make it look right. (Yeah, that’s a pretty foggy explanation.) So anyway, I was on the right track with the backwards image, but I did a bit too much thinking. Oh well.

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Lynn has a good post about Mozart. After reading it the other day, I listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Chicago SO, Solti, for those concerned with such details). And a month or two ago, I listened to The Magic Flute, for no particular reason other than that I love The Magic Flute. (It was the first opera I ever saw performed on stage, although that’s not really why I love it, since I had already owned two recordings of it by the time I saw it.)

I occasionally refer to my days on Usenet here, and I’ll do so again now, because even on the rec.music.movies newsgroup, discussions about classical music – – of which film music is something of a bastard stepchild – – used to break out now and then. One view that came up fairly often, frequently enough so as to be depressingly common, was that Mozart is really not that important of a composer. His music is charming and lovely, to be sure, but he’s really only held in high regard because he was one of the greatest child prodigies in music history (only Saint-Saens comes close in this regard, and his music is nowhere near as highly regarded as Mozart’s). Mozart is “easy listening”, because he’s not complex at all. This view reduces Mozart to being a mere “placeholder” in music history, so that the textbooks have something to say of the period between Bach’s death and Beethoven’s emergence.

How anyone could ever seriously hold this view of Mozart is beyond me. It’s one thing to dislike his music (although, to be honest, I find that cognitive state about as mystifying as, oh, creationism), but quite another to argue that Mozart’s place in history is overblown. “He wasn’t an innovator”, they claim, ignoring his elevation of opera and his development of music as related to drama, or ignoring his elevation of the symphony and the concerto; they ignore Mozart’s more complex harmonic vocabulary and increased use of chromaticism; they ignore Mozart’s championing of new instruments and orchestral sonorities. Another claim is “Mozart’s music isn’t complex”, in which they equate “counterpoint” with “complexity”, by which measure just about every composer in history falls short alongside J.S. Bach.

And emotionally, it’s as if Mozart’s detractors have never listened to anything outside of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; hell, one doesn’t even need to listen to all that much Mozart to hear the incredible emotional variety and depth in his work. One can get an idea of it simply by watching Amadeus. The emotive character in Mozart is more tempered than that of Beethoven, but comparing a Classicist to the earliest of the Romantics is troublesome, in any event. Mozart’s emotional breadth may be more tempered by the classicist devotion to form and proportion, but there is more emotional variation to be found in Mozart than there is in Bach – – which is to be expected, because Bach’s primary musical motivation was a spiritual one.

These are pretty much random thoughts, not really developed into a cohesive statement. But I think what goes on with Mozart is the idea that since he lived in the era of powdered wigs, and since a few of his most famous works sound like music from the era of powdered wigs, then there is little reason to expect his music to appeal to those who live outside the era of powdered wigs. That’s an odd viewpoint, and it has little to do with the actual music of Mozart.

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I’ve been to Wal-Mart twice in the last three days, and it seems pretty clear to me that they’re not even trying anymore to maintain any illusion that they’re anything but a giant concrete box to which one flocks to buy stuff at prices purposely designed to funnel money out of the pockets of local business people and into the pockets of people in whatever town it is in Arkansas where the Wal-Mart people are located. Some observations:

:: The floors. Whenever I go to Target, for example, the floors are always clean. Ditto the local supermarkets (most of them). Wal-Mart’s floors, though, have that permanent-scuff-mark thing going on that’s about what you find in any thirty-year-old Goodwill store. And in some remote corners of the store, the floor is disturbingly close to what you find in a movie theater.

:: The bathrooms. Wal-Mart’s bathrooms didn’t use to smell, but they do now. And two out of four sinks having running water? Wow. And I love how they’re located in an unmarked corridor behind the customer service counter, as if the company is saying, “OK, here’s a bathroom. But you gotta find it yourself, and if you gotta wash your hands, find the soap and the water yer damn self.”

:: The customer service area. It’s just inside the main entrance, which is normal for big-box retailers, but whereas in other stores – – Target, again – – it’s always easy to get to, at Wal-Mart it’s on the opposite side of a railing and assorted whatnot to make it almost inaccessible from the cash register area. So, if you discover a problem after the point-of-purchase, you literally have to exit the store and re-enter to get to the service desk. Or, you decide that the dollar or whatever isn’t worth it. Tricky.

:: I suspect that Wal-Mart employs a team of engineers whose job it is to figure out exactly how much space can be used in their stores for merchandise, and still allow the passage of a single shopping cart in each direction. Each time I go to Wal-Mart – – I average about one visit a month; this week’s two was an aberration – – there is more stuff piled in what used to be the space between aisles, which has reached such a point that there are literally new aisles being created where there were none before.

:: Part of Wal-Mart’s obvious strategy of cramming more crap inside its walls, at the expense of cart-navigation space, is smaller carts. But still, not small enough that two carts can actually pass one another within an aisle. If two carts meet each other in an aisle, proceeding in opposite directions, one must literally turn around and exit the way one entered. And if someone enters behind you, and someone’s coming the other way, you’d better hope the person moving the other way has the presence of mind to realize that the onus of turning around rests on their shoulders; otherwise, you’re locked in until one of the other two parties clues in. And if you, as a man, have ended up in this situation by ducking down, say, the “feminine hygiene products” aisle as a shortcut to the toothpaste aisle, well, forget it. You’re screwed.

:: Wal-Mart has also abandoned any pretense of making the shelves attractive, in favor of the “Here’s the crap, buy it so we can get more crap in its place” approach. Thus, the merchandise is no longer nicely removed from the large carton in which it originally arrived at the store and placed attractively on the shelves; instead, the employees merely use a box-cutter to slash open one entire side of that carton and slap the carton itself on the shelves. (Unless, of course, it’s not actually in one of the aisles but instead in one of those islands-of-merchandise Wal-Mart now erects in the formerly-wide spaces that divided one section from another. In that case, the cartons are simply stacked right on the floor, or perhaps on their original wooden shipping pallet.

:: Wal-Mart now entrusts employees who have absolutely no business having their voices broadcast across the store’s PA system to read long-winded bulletins about the latest specials over the store’s PA system. “Attention shoppers; is this thing on?” is not a phrase one should hear over the speakers. And certainly not twice. And it should never be obvious that, while the poor employee is reading the eight pages of specials (single-spaced, front-and-back) over the PA system, one of her co-workers is making faces and/or obscene gestures in a successful effort to make her laugh.

Everything about Wal-Mart nowadays signals an attitude of grudging acceptance of the customer. I think that Wal-Mart’s official business philosophy is now something like this: “Professionalism? Service? Convenience? Pish-tosh! We now have you all trained to come to us, sheep-like, for your two-gallon jugs of laundry soap for a buck and your ten-packs of Froot-of-the-Loom underwear. Abandon hope, foolish mortals, for we shall have your money.” And damned if they don’t.

UPDATE: Lynn makes a few points, in the comments, that I should probably address. It’s important to make the distinction that I can’t claim to disparage the entire company, but this does seem to be the way of it in most Wal-Marts I’ve been in, as well. There are four Wal-Marts in the Buffalo area, and to some degree they’re all like this. One of them is actually not as bad, but none of them is remotely as clean, pleasant, or easy to get around in as our Targets. The same is true of the ones I frequented in Syracuse, although there is a Wal-Mart SuperCenter about fifteen miles or so from Syracuse that we went to a couple of times that had none of these flaws. That particular store was spotless and pleasant. I had the same complaints, to a varying degree, about Wal-Marts in the Southern Tier; several in Pennsylvania; and several in West Virginia. I haven’t been in a Wal-Mart in a dozen states, but I’ve been in a bunch of them, and pretty far afield. I’ve yet to encounter one that I genuinely consider to be superior to Target. (I have been in a couple of crappy Target’s, but just as the one indisputably good Wal-Mart I’ve been in doesn’t outweight the generally inferior ones I’ve frequented, those lousy Target’s don’t detract from the ones that I really enjoy in Buffalo and Pennsylvania.)

What really puzzles me is that Wal-Mart is a relatively new entity in New York State, with the stores in the Buffalo and Western New York area having been open less than eight years. Target came in just a couple of years later, and those stores in this area are far cleaner and still look new. (This is not a consideration in Syracuse, where Target opened its first outlets just last November.)

It’s dangerous, of course, to extrapolate one’s experience in a single outlet of a large chain to the entire company. Having worked in large restaurant chains I’m well familiar with people coming in and saying things like “Geez, the one in our town stinks, but this one’s nice.” (Yes, I’ve been on the receiving end of it going the other way, too.) But if all politics is local, so too is consumer loyalty. All I have to go on is my experience.

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Andrew Cory has apparently been playing one of those “Run a city” simulation games, and he’s come to a startling revelation about the political affiliation of the automata who live in his little metropolis. Hmmmm….he’s probably on to something, but it seems odd that the default game setting is that people move away as soon as they’re unhappy about something. Couldn’t they program in some civic pride? Or, failing that, couldn’t they have people who are, on the one hand, pissed off to the point of showing up at City Council meetings and bitching up a storm (all the while refusing to entertain the idea that maybe they’ll need to raise taxes), but still too lazy to actually pack up and move?

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Donald O’Connor died last night. He’s best known, by many and most definitely by me, for his role as Cosmo Brown, best friend to Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) in Singin’ In the Rain, which is on my short list of the most perfect works of art ever put on film.

(By the way, I found a nice site devoted to the great MGM musicals – – you know, those movies where at the end, you sigh and say, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore….”)

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Jesse, over at Pandagon, is sporting a spiffy new design. Go check him out. (He’s a lefty political blogger, for those unfamiliar with him.) His redesign has me thinking a bit about permalinks, and the fact that there’s no real convention out there for how to do them.

Jesse’s permalinks used to be the actual titles of the posts, but now he’s changed that to a time stamp, which is probably the most common method out there. I used to have time stamps, but I didn’t like them; my thinking was that nobody cares what time I posted something, and the only way it could be useful is as an alibi in a murder case (“Judge Ito, I couldn’t possibly have done in Ron and Nicole, because my blog clearly shows two posts entered at the time of the murders!” “Ah, I see. Bailiff, release him!”). So I did away with the time stamp and changed my permalinks to the phrase “link this entry”, which struck me as the best way to do it.

The problem I have with permalinks, on most blogs, isn’t that there are so many different ways of doing them, but that in many cases it’s not obvious at all where the permalink is. For many bloggers, as I note above, it’s the time stamp. But many do something else: Steven Den Beste, for example, uses a small graphic of two chain links, above the entry and next to the time stamp, which is appropriate enough except that the “link” icon doesn’t appear in the color of SDB’s usual hyperlinks, so unless one directly mouses over it, one doesn’t know that icon links to anything. Oliver Willis‘s permalinks are at the end of the post, also next to the time stamp, but really hard to see: it’s a single plus-sign that can be easily overlooked.

The worst, though, are the LiveJournal blogs that I read, such as Bara‘s and Paul Riddell‘s. For these, the permalink is actually the link to an entry’s comments, which contain the text of the entry and the comments (kind of like your standard Movable Type blog, when you load a specific article instead of the blog’s main page), but in many cases this screen uses a default LiveJournal set-up, instead of whatever design tweaks that the blogger has made to his or her main-page template.

So, there are my half-baked thoughts on permalinks. Anyone still reading this post deserves a gumdrop.

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Darth Swank points out a collection of illustrations and cover-art from space books dating from all through the 20th century. It’s pretty cool to look at these, not just for the “retro” aspect but in that I grew up reading this stuff — a lot of these titles are the ones that shaped my fascination with, and hopes for, the future of space travel. In fact, this one is the first space book I remember reading, when I was in first grade, appropriately titled The First Book of Space Travel. (It was written in 1953, four years before Sputnik.)

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TBOGG informs me (well, he informs readers of his blog, of which I am one) that a recall has been placed on the Segway. Apparently those nifty gyroscopes that keep the thing upright don’t work so well when the batteries are low. Whoops.

I’m reminded, of course, of the episode of Friends in which Ross and Chandler have an escalating duel of prank messages about one another on their college’s alumni bulletin board. It culminates when Chandler posts that Ross has died in a blimp accident; Ross confronts Chandler, who replies, “It kills more than one person every year!”

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A lot of unfortunate deaths lately, and they’re all incredibly untimely.

:: Robert Palmer. How incredibly bogus. As an 80s/MTV child, I remember his videos very well.

:: Jaclyn Linetzky. No, not a household name, but anyone with kids and PBS has probably heard her voice, because she was the voice of Caillou, the bald-headed four-year-old, in English episodes of the animated children’s show Caillou. The show’s a favorite in our home. Ms. Linetzky died in a car crash.

:: Gordon Jump. I used to love WKRP In Cincinnati, on which Jump played the kind-hearted station manager, Mr. Carlson. He also was the Maytag repairman in recent years, and he had a notable couple of episodes as George Costanza’s boss on Seinfeld. (BTW, it appears that WKRP is falling victim to the vagaries of music licensing, in a pretty ugly way.)

UPDATE: George Plimpton. Never read him, but still, I gotta think that the Grim Reaper really needs to rethink his priorities.

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