Oy.
Didn’t Ronald Reagan once have a personal law of campaigning that went something like “Never speak ill of another Republican?” I did read about that at one point, didn’t I?
Come on, guys!
Mmmmm….steamed prawns….
Back when I was active on Usenet, one of the more colorful voices on rec.music.movies was a fellow named Dave Thomas (no, not the Wendy’s guy, either), who would constantly claim to have the worst taste in movies EVER, and to back up his claims he’d rattle off long lists of movies that he likes that I’d never heard of, often Hong Kong action movies with titles like “Sucka Chop Suey Maidens From Hell” or some such. (I made that up. I hope that’s not a real movie title.)
Anyway, Dave was always an entertaining soul to have around until he listened to his better angels and ditched the newsgroup. The other day I discovered that he’s been running a review site devoted exclusively to B-movies, called Steamed Prawn Buns. Check him out; his reviews are a hoot and…well, you gotta admire anyone who has willingly seen some of the movies that he’s seen. I didn’t see it mentioned on his site, but Dave is the only person I have ever encountered who is willing to admit to liking Howard the Duck.
(Of course, the damn title of his site is making me hungry for dim sum, which you can’t find in Buffalo. Have I ever said that before? Yeah, probably….)
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Composite photo of the Toronto skyline.
What’s cool about this is that this photo is composited from four photos that were part of a time-lapse photography project. Someone actually set up their camera to take a new shot of the view outside their balcony every twenty seconds for fourteen hours, and then they actually put together a Quicktime timelapse of all the photos, so you can see dusk fall on Toronto and a weather front pass by. Very cool.
(Via The Modulator.)
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Haunting
If you like personal essays of the haunting variety, check out this one by Mike Finley. It’s about his reunion with his grade school bully…and much, much more.
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A Brief Writing Observation
Every so often I’ll get stuck at a certain point, unsure of how to continue with the novel in question. It’s not a total blockage, since I still know my destination; it’s more of a moment of indecisiveness, the kind I imagine Bugs Bunny experiencing when he pops up in Albuquerque and ruminates as to whether he should take the left turn or not. I end up trying one thing, deleting it (or crossing it out, if I’m going longhand) and trying something else, and then sooner or later I realize what needs to be done.
The observation is this: invariably, when I figure out what needs to happen at a spot like this, my immediate second thought is of my Muse grumbling thusly: “This is obvious, dummy! It took you three days to realize it? You imbecile! Why did I waste this story idea on you, anyway?”
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Online Comics Discovery
Warren Ellis points out a comics creator named Patrick Farley who produces his work exclusively online. Some of Farley’s content is free, and some of it is “gated” behind a micropayment system. I, being poor, have checked out some of the free stuff and found it intriguing. I also love the site’s design, so check it out. And if you have money, give some to this guy. (Or to me. Or to PBS. But preferably me.)
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And the award for Spewed Invective goes to….
Bara apparently has to endure a person of, shall we say, questionable value in one of her college classes. Here is what she thinks of him:
The filthy, disgusting, chauvinist idiot creep! That detestable, nauseating lump of mentally incompetent phlegm, whose shit-smelling toxic presence smears my theoretical class, is poisoning my very being with that vomitous stream of asinine prattle that relentlessly pours out.
And apparently, it got even worse the next time she saw him, when he apparently made a pass at her, and occasioned her to speculate on what she’d do if she ever occasioned to spend an evening in his presence. (It’s in her follow-up comments; drop down to the sixth comment.)
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What’s that bright yellow thing in the sky?!
Sad Classical Music
Lynn Sislo posts about sad classical music. (Apparently she gets search engine hits on that phrase, so I’m going to repeat it: sad classical music. Music that is classical, and sad. Sad music that is also classical. Classical things that are sad and that are music. Yep, that oughta do it!)
Anyway, I’ve never found any sad classical music, in the sense of “music that makes me feel sad”. Classical music can meditate on sadness, but somehow there’s something I always find uplifting in such music, exalting if you will, that works against the actual creation of sadness. There’s music that is wistful (Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, music that is melancholy (any number of Chopin piano pieces), music that is meditative (Rachmaninov’s Vespers), music that is heartbreakingly beautiful (Rachmaninov’s entire Second Symphony), but actually sad? I just can’t think of any.
Well, that’s not quite true. Berg’s Violin Concerto is probably sad. Portions of Mozart’s Requiem are sad, but other parts are fiery, some angry, some just plain fiery. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is sad, I think. But the list of genuinely sad classical works is, to me, very short. What many might consider “sad music” often ends up to me being something of a meditation on sadness, which isn’t quite the same as being sad.
(I haven’t said anything about lieder and the vast amount of art songs, because that’s the part of classical music that I know the least about, to a spectacular degree. When you factor in words, music can become very sad indeed. From the rock and country music worlds, I can probably fill this blog with sad songs, by virtue of the lyrics. I’m sure that Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert wrote some genuinely sad songs.)
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Fire the joke writers!
Shouldn’t this Tom Burka joke include something about IKEA?
And did anyone else notice that both David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel last night featured a video of Jay Leno, attending Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory speech, clapping lackadaisically and checking his watch?
And did anyone catch George Carlin on Leno? I love Carlin, but he always seems “neutered” when he appears on a network show. It’s so obvious that he’s had to comb through his material for jokes that don’t involve any of the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV”.
And at my next birthday party, I want Letterman’s “Spark Lady”. Just watch; you’ll learn what I’m talking about, if you don’t know already.