Check out Nefarious Neddie on the subject of bad movie titles. Personally, I would submit Reality Bites as a bad title. Go and suggest others, if you so desire.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Traditional Basque sword dance, Bilbao, Spain
I find that travel writing is a big source of story ideas — if I don’t find direct suggestions for plots, I at least learn of all manner of wonderful cultures and customs that I can incorporate into my fiction. This image is from a slideshow for a recent Slate series of travel articles about the Basque country (roughly, the parts of Spain and France near the southern shores of the Bay of Biscay). The most interesting article, and set of pictures, were from the fourth day of the trip to Basque country, but they’re rather gruesome because they focus on the bullfight. Linguistic-minded readers will be interested in the Day Two report, which focuses on Euskara, the Basque language that seems totally out of place in Europe, with its lack of basis in the Romance or the Teutonic languages.
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Victor Laszlo could not be reached for comment.
Michael Lopez links a news item about a high school band director who had to apologize when the halftime show he’d designed included the display of a Nazi flag and the playing of the Nazi anthem.
That, as Michael notes, does sound bad at first, but upon further examination it turns out that the band director was trying to do a historical show about World War II and the combatants thereof; from the description, it sounds as if the Nazi anthem was played as, well, Darth Vader’s theme is employed in the Star Wars movies, simply as an indicator of who the enemy was. (Michael also rightly wonders why the Soviet Union’s theme was left out, which gives me cause to cite Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and its musical depiction of the Siege of Leningrad.)
It sounds to me that the band director’s real error was in attempting something of this level of historical sophistication at a high school football game. To be frank, this isn’t exactly the kind of crowd that’s likely to appreciate nuance.
(By the way, if you’re not reading Michael’s blog, you’re missing out on a lot of good stuff. Especially when he goes on a posting binge, which he appears to be doing right now.)
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Agent Smith will see you now….
Nefarious Neddie has some thoughts about The Matrix and Agent Smith and God and such things. I have yet to see Reloaded, so I can’t comment. But Agent Neddie’s thoughts sound intriguing.
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President Bartlet could not be reached for comment.
A few months ago I wrote about what I now refer to as Project Liberatopia, which is a movement afoot to gather up 20,000 Libertarians and move them all to a single state, so they can use their numbers to heavily influence their new local politics and enact as many planks of the Libertarian platform as possible (which seems to me to basically involve removing just about every plank of everybody else’s platform).
Well, we have a winner: the small state which will become home to all those wayward Libertarians is….New Hampshire! Congratulations, I guess.
Of course, what gets me is their insistence that “We’re not here to take over”…but what else would be the point of the exercise?
(By the way, the title of this post refers to the fact that, on The West Wing, President Bartlet’s previous office was Governor of New Hampshire.)
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Things I Didn’t Need to See, #78594
NBC’s Today Show has one of those street concerts of theirs on right now, this one featuring Sting (a guy I’ve always liked). He’s performing “Every Breath You Take”, and as he performs, NBC keeps cutting to shots of ordinary people and NBC workers dancing…one of whom was Willard Scott.
And I haven’t had coffee yet; it’s still brewing.
They also kept showing the techs and producers and behind-the-scenes people dancing, as well, which makes me wonder if someone in charge told them, “You might show up on camera, so you’d damned well better be dancing!”
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Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….
There is nothing, in October, like a nice big pot of chili. I’d offer a recipe, but I don’t really use a recipe – – I just kind of throw it together until it tastes right. But this time I did try one thing new: I put a pile of Fritos at the bottom of the bowl, and then spooned the chili on top of it. Simple, yet really tasty. (I think I got the idea from one of Emeril Lagasse’s cookbooks. Don’t laugh. I’ve made a lot of good stuff from his cookbooks, and I learned a lot about kitchen technique from watching his show. There’s a lot more going on than “Bam!” and “Kick it up a notch!”)
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The Stop-Start-Stop City
Long-term readers of this space may remember that I’ve mentioned a large indoor amusement-park attraction that was proposed last spring for Buffalo’s long-dormant waterfront. I was of mixed mind on this proposal: it struck me as the typical “silver bullet” project, just the latest in a long line of big-ticket projects that are put up on the drawing board, promised to create jobs and draw people to downtown, and yet never actually built. Nevertheless, I liked the actual idea, since it would entail an attraction for families to the Buffalo waterfront, whereas many other proposals are not exactly “family-friendly” (golf courses, casinos, etc).
Sadly, the proposal’s developers faced a deadline yesterday to have their plans ready to go so they could move on to the next step, and they missed the deadline. So the project is dead, and now Buffalo’s right where it started, with a miles-long swath of undeveloped waterfront land.
At the same time, Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello unveiled the latest installment of his repair of Buffalo’s finances. We’re talking “scorched earth” here, folks: job cuts totaling more than 700 positions in such departments as fire departments, police stations, and – – every politician’s first choice for job cuts – – teachers. Oy. Gee, since Gray Davis seems likely to be out of a job in a week or so, maybe he’d like to come take the reins in Buffalo. He certainly can’t do any worse.
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(But at least half of those words are wrong)
Writing update: my word count is now over 50000 words on the novel-in-progress, and it’s coming along nicely. The storyline is starting to come into focus in my head, and rather nicely too, if I do say so myself. I am writer, hear me roar.
(Of course, it’s not nearly so impressive as some folks who kill three deadlines each week and toss off 8000 words each day on four different books…harumph!)
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He’s not heavy, he’s our guest commentator!
Rush Limbaugh has resigned from ESPN, after the storm of controversy surrounding his incredibly goofy statements about Donovan McNabb and race in the NFL last Sunday. Of course, it’s one of those “non-contrite” acts of contrition: “I’m sorry what I said was taken the way it was, because, you know, I didn’t really mean it the way you took it. So I’m in trouble because you’re a bunch of overly-sensitive fuddy-duddies.”
And then, Limbaugh apparently went on his own radio show and gave this interpretation of events:
“All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something,” Limbaugh said. “If I wasn’t right, there wouldn’t be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sports writer community.”
Yup. Now one can determine the correctness of one’s beliefs by the level of outrage they inspire. Jesse at Pandagon has a pretty good takedown of this line of “thinking”.
Yesterday on the Jim Rome show, a caller asked of this whole affair: “Why are we surprised?” That’s about right. What Limbaugh said about McNabb pretty much falls right in line with things he has said on his own program, for years. The only thing I wonder is how much of what he says he actually believes, and how much is said simply because he’s one of those who likes to toe the line of controversy. Personally, I suspect it’s both.