The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
China’s first manned space mission blasted off yesterday, and the name “Yang Liwei” joined that of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard as their nations’ first men to fly into space. I should probably find this scary, for some political reason, but in reality I find it exciting as hell. I confess to being troubled by the seemingly-growing attitude of “Screw space exploration, let’s work on jacking the human brain up to a computer instead”. Personally, I don’t see why we can’t have both.
I wonder if Cubs manager Dusty Baker is having flashbacks to last year’s World Series, after the Cubs’ spectacular failure to nail down the pennant last night. Consider: in both the 2002 WS and this year’s NLCS, Baker’s team (the Giants and the Cubs) entered Game Six with a three-games-to-two lead, only needing one more win to take the series. In both Game Sixes, Baker’s team took a lead into the eighth inning. And in both Game Sixes, Baker’s team coughed up the lead and lost the game, allowing a decisive Game Seven.
Tonight we’ll find out if the scenario holds, because last year Baker’s team ended up losing Game Seven. So, we could end up with a situation in which Baker’s team is six outs away from winning the series…and ends up losing.
If this turns out to be true, and it really did happen, then…well, I don’t know how to complete that counterfactual.
I hope it’s not true, though. I hope we’re better than this. I pray that we’re better than this.
Filching links from Paul Riddell is always fun, so….
:: Remember that episode of Friends when Ross is about to marry Emily, his English girlfriend, but at the altar, he gets the name wrong and says “I, Ross, take thee Rachel…”? Well, apparently someone in the Bush Administration has seen that episode too. (via)
:: Heavens, this guy is striking a blow for Creationism by riding his horse! Sign me up! (via)
:: I have now seen the worst retail product in human history. Interestingly, the product description says that this thing is a “conversation starter”. Quite frankly, for me this would be a conversation stopper. I don’t want to talk to anyone who would willingly don this item. (via)
Unsurprisingly, SDB thinks that the Democrats are highly likely to suffer a defeat for the ages in 2004.
Equally unsurprisingly, I don’t agree.
Not that I don’t think that President Bush is likely to be a formidable opponent; and not that I don’t think that there is possibility for a landslide if the economy finally starts to create some jobs and the foreign policy stuff starts to get better. It bugs me that to a great extent we’ve made Presidential elections into quadrennial referenda on the thickness of the American wallet, but that’s where we are now. I doubt you’ll find a single Democrat in the country that doesn’t think that 2004 is likely to be a very stiff battle.
I don’t want to respond to everything SDB says, but one thing that does strike me as odd is his apparent belief that the Republicans have moved toward the center while the Democrats have not. I think, in many ways, this is a question of decoration rather than a question of actual movement of the party. Last week Kevin Drum made a pretty convincing case that the Republicans have not moved toward the center at all. SDB is right that you don’t see much of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other former figures of renown on the Religious Right paraded about anymore as the public face of the Republican Party, but you do see their policy ideas maintaining a stranglehold on the Republicans. It’s all window-dressing, really. It seems to me that the Republicans have done a mildly better job in the last couple of years of repackaging their wares, but it’s really the same bunch of policies.
And I’m far from convinced that recent elections really spell the doom of Democrats as SDB thinks. 2002 was not a landslide; we went from a pretty closely divided Congress to a still pretty closely divided Congress, and we still have Republicans feeling nervous enough about it that they feel the need to gerrymander themselves into power in Texas and Colorado through mid-decade redistricting. Likewise, I’m not sure how the California recall, in itself, represents a significant rejection of Democratic ideas.
One thing I do think that the Democrats need to figure out is if they want to try recapturing the center, or if they want to try moving the center back toward the left. That’s a pretty tough one, and I don’t pretend to even know what I think on that score.
For today’s dose of laughter at those getting what they deserve, check this out. Heh. Indeed.
As long as I’m citing Morat, I’ll point out his list of good modern fantasy. Here he’s not looking for epic series so much as good stand-alones (I think) that may or may not take place in mythic, “Middle Earth”-type realms.
On the list Morat offers in his post, I’ve only read Gaiman’s American Gods, which I loved immensely. It’s funny, scary, and poignant. I did think that it went on a bit too long, though. I haven’t read Neverwhere, but Gaiman’s Stardust and Coraline are both excellent (although Stardust is kind of “rough around the edges”).
I’m not sure if Morat was around for my spate of Christopher Moore related posts a few months back, but his books are just great. He’s not actually writing fantasy, but rather “humor in a supernatural vein”. For a list of all of Moore’s books, check out Nefarious Neddie‘s post on the subject. I also tend to like a lot of “peripheral fantasy”, meaning, fiction that’s not classified as fantasy but is of definite interest to fantasists. Michael Chabon’s work falls in this category; see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
In children’s lit, one finds a lot of good fantasy writing going on — Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, for example. Lloyd Alexander still turns out good stories, and of course, there’s Harry Potter.
I’ve never read Terry Pratchett, so I suppose I should one of these days. Anyhow, Morat is still looking for more recommendations.
Finally, there’s my obligatory mention of Guy Gavriel Kay. If you’re not reading Kay, well then, you’re just not living.
Morat has some thoughts about Attack of the Clones and the prequels in general. He’s one who has been disappointed in them, but he seems to be coming around. At least, he’d better be. I am less forgiving than the Emperor. Or something like that.
A fairly common complaint about the prequels has been that it all feels preordained, because we know what happens: the Jedi all get slaughtered, the Republic becomes the Empire, and Anakin becomes Darth Vader. Now, this has never really bothered me, but I can see where it’s a legitimate stumbling block. There is a difference, though, between the story’s events being preordained within the story and them being preordained in the mundane sense that we know already what’s going to happen. (Not that Morat is making this mistake; I just wanted to draw the distinction.)
One thing that strikes me is that Anakin’s fall is a side-story, almost, to the larger story of the prequels. If Qui Gon had never found Anakin, Darth Sidious would still be scheming and maneuvering himself into power…but his fall is necessary, though, in the sense that the beginnings of his fall — his forbidden love of Padme — plants the seeds, almost literally, for his later redemption. The other thing thought that has occurred to me is that Morat is right about the prequel focus being on Obi Wan in particular, and on the general incompetence of the Jedi in general. Not only are they completely taken by surprise when the Sith return, but it turns out that Yoda’s own Padawan, Count Dooku, has been turned to the Dark Side.
So far in the prequels, there have been numerous mentions of Anakin being “the Chosen One” who will “bring balance to the Force”, but what’s telling is that the Jedi seem to have no idea what that means. They simply assume that it’s all a good thing, and they never consider the possibility that in order for Anakin to restore the Force’s balance he will have to descend into darkness and then find redemption. The Jedi seem to be making it up as they go; at one point, Yoda even says something like “We cannot allow them to know of our weakness” — in other words, “We have no idea what’s going on, but we gotta keep acting like we do.” The Jedi are, dare I say it, vain.
Morat also says that he’d like Anakin to be revealed as the child of a rape. Personally, I doubt very much if that will happen; that somehow seems too dark for Star Wars. I wouldn’t be surprised if George Lucas simply never mentions the whole “midichlorian/immaculate conception” thing again and simply leaves it as a little Easter egg to drive fans crazy. But in a sense it would add to the subtext, if Palpatine turned out to somehow behind Anakin’s birth — for it would give Yoda and Obi Wan one more chance to be wrong, in the end. In Return of the Jedi, Luke objects that he cannot kill his own father, which Obi Wan seems to think is the only thing that can fix things. But in the end, assuming Palpatine is behind Anakin’s birth, the good side of the Force triumphs and balance is restored when Anakin kills his own father. But again, that’s pure speculation, and Lucas might not have any such thing in mind.
I watched a bit of last night’s ALCS Game Four, and I have to admit, watching Tim Wakefield throw that knuckleball sure brings back memories of the awful 1992 NLCS. That was the year Wakefield first emerged, coming up from AAA to the Pirates in the second half of the season. He went 9-2, and in that year’s NLCS against the Braves, he went 2-0 and would have been the MVP had not Francisco Cabrera somehow managed to complete the sale of his soul to the Devil just in time for the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven, thus condemning the Braves for all time to being Baseball’s Most Evil Franchise.
Anyway, Wakefield’s knuckleball still looks the same: a slow pitch that floats toward the plate and then drops like a rock just as the batter thinks, “Geez, look at that thing, I’m going to hit that into the upper deck” and then swings-and-misses.
(For those not up on baseball, a knuckleball is a special pitch that is thrown with as little spin on the ball as possible, so that its motion to the plate is wildly unpredictable. A knuckleball that looks like it’s in the strike zone usually ends up anywhere but in the strike zone, so a knuckleball pitcher who does it right can totally confound opposing hitters not through pinpoint control, but through the laws of chaos, basically. Knuckleballs also tend to result in a lot of wild pitches and passed balls, because the catcher has no more idea of where the ball’s going than anyone else. True knuckleball pitchers are rare because the pitch is so nutty.)