Month: October 2003

I turned on NPR yesterday morning and caught the last few minutes of an interview with one of my favorite people in the world, Lily Tomlin. I first encountered Tomlin when I was in second grade; for that one year only my family subscribed to HBO, and one month there was an hour-long comedy special of hers, which I recall enjoying immensely – – I watched in several times – – even though I didn’t entirely understand the jokes. Some of her films are still favorite comedies of mine, like Nine to Five and All Of Me. And of course there’s her work on The West Wing, which I love.

The NPR site has links to the actual interview as well as video clips of Tomlin’s work over the years. The occasion of the interview is Tomlin’s reception of the Mark Twain Prize for Achievement in Humor.

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Via Matthew Yglesias I see this Washington Post article, which seems to indicate a long suspicion of mine: Sooner or later, the Evangelical Christian Right, which is overwhelmingly Republican, is going to decide that it’s been moderately silent long enough. In other words, President Bush’s debts are going to be called in, which should make for some pretty interesting political theater. It’s like they’re saying, “Fine, we were quiet after our open-mike night at the 1992 Republican Convention, but we want the mike again.” I’m reminded of that recent Steven Den Beste post in which SDB maintained that the Christian Right has been marginalized in Republican politics, an idea which struck me as being, well, totally wrong.

But what strikes me in this article is the opening graf:

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are making plans to turn gay marriage into a major issue in next year’s elections, with some Christian groups saying that banning same-sex unions is a higher immediate priority for them than restricting abortion.

Presumably, these are many of the same folks who believe that human life begins at conception. The logical result, then, of their belief that same-sex marriage outweighs abortion is this: “We hate gays more than we value human life, and we are prepared to reflect that belief in our activism.” That’s a pretty breathtaking statement of values, isn’t it?

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OK, I know that I’m not as well-read in science fiction yet as I’d like to be, mainly because I pretty much abandoned the genre between the ages of 16 and 26. So, I’m not totally up on the concept of “Posthumans”, and I need someone to explain it to me. Specifically, are “posthumans” the types of folks who can survive being swept over Niagara Falls with no protective gear and the types of folks who can kill a shark with their bare hands? Is that what the whole thing is about?

By the way, I’ve been to Niagara Falls dozens of times, and the Canadian side – – the side the guy went over – – is always incredibly packed with tourists snapping photos. How did nobody get a shot of him just as he went over? I don’t care about pictures of him waving in triumph after crawling onto a rock at the bottom! I want a shot of him just as he hits the brink, what I call the “Holy Shit!” moment. Come on, somebody’s gotta have that picture!

And also by the way, if the guy who went over the Falls is telling the truth and it really was a suicide attempt, then he’s got to be the most colossal screw-up in human history. Imagine picking the single most sure-to-be-successful manner of killing oneself that probably exists, and still surviving with only a few scratches. Oy.

(second link via He of All Things Horrific.)

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Question: When David Letterman takes a week off, why are the re-runs always episodes from about six weeks before? I mean, we just saw these! (As I write this, for posting Sunday morning, Dave is cracking jokes about Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Donovan McNabb.) Can’t they rebroadcast some really old episodes, from 1995 or so? I’d love to see an old interview of, say, Samuel L. Jackson promoting Pulp Fiction or some such thing.

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A month or so ago, I saw a post by Michael, one-half of the 2 Blowhards, about a crime novel titled Mobtown by an author named Jack Kelly. Michael’s review caught my notice not because he really liked the book, although his review did pique my interest in the book on that basis, but because of the book’s setting: Rochester, New York, circa 1959. That’s just sixty miles down the road from Buffalo. I’m quite familiar with Rochester — it’s a nice town that, like just about every other city in New York whose name isn’t actually “New York”, has fallen on some seriously hard times in recent decades. (Yeah, I know, NYC pretty much fell on the ultimate in hard times in a single day two years ago. That’s not what I’m talking about.)

I don’t tend to read too many mysteries. For some reason, I almost always find that the last third of a mystery, when things start getting revealed, is dramatically less interesting than the “mystery” part of the story, and to some extent I found that was the case here, as well — one of those “The journey’s more interesting than the destination” things. But it’s a really fun journey here, especially because these are locales I know, to some extent. Some of the book’s action takes place at a theme park called “Gleeland”, which I take to be the park now called “Seabreeze”, which was named “Dreamland” during the years in which the novel is set. I’ve been to Seabreeze, and I’ve ridden the Jackrabbit roller coaster. I’ve seen the Genesee River Gorge as it cuts right through downtown Rochester. The Red Wings still play minor league ball there. It’s a real pleasure to see these kinds of locales worked into a novel like this. And it’s a pleasure seeing a noir story taking place outside of New York or LA or San Francisco.

Parts of the novel left me a bit cold — as I note, the climax didn’t really grab me, and some of the standard private-eye novel cliches show up: the femme fatales, the action at the local boxing ring, the divorced private-eye who promises his kid he’ll make the birthday party only to be detained by the local cops until well after the party is over. Still, it was a fun read, mainly for the locales and for Kelly’s knack for the language of these types of stories. Michael quotes this bit of description, quite aptly:

Her lipstick had worn off, her hair was all over the place, and she was sweaty around the edges. But, man, could she dance.

A lot of the book reads like that. I hope Kelly writes a similar book for Buffalo. Thanks to Michael for the pointer.

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My newest review for Green Man Review is up: the novel The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes by Larry Millett, which is a novel about an English detective around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who apparently takes a lot of opium and hangs out with a guy named Watson. The game’s afoot….

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I see that Amazon now allows one to search not only titles and whatnot, but the entire texts of the books in its database. A lot of folks are thinking this is surpassingly nifty, but I’m not really sure. And quite frankly, I’m not even sure that it really works. I tested it out with two distinctive phrases from the last paragraphs of the chapter “The Siege of Gondor” from The Return of the King, which I would think would be one of the books in Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” database. (The phrases were “recking nothing of wizardry or war” and “great horns of the north wildly blowing”.) The book was not listed among the results. Then I tried “Mindolluin”, the name of a mountain also mentioned in the same paragraph, and still Return of the King failed to come up. Maybe I’m not understanding how this is supposed to work?

Also, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to use the new feature, until I realized that it’s hardwired into Amazon’s search function. So any time you search, your search term results using “Inside the Book” are automatically returned, whether you want them or not. That could be a giant pain, could it not? I’m not saying this is a bad feature, but it seems to me the customer should be able to disable it.

(Just after I finished writing this, I saw that Jessa Crispin had almost the exact same thoughts, and two days before I did, to boot. Terry Teachout had the same thoughts. Geez, I’m getting slow on the draw.)

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Congratulations to the Florida Marlins on winning the World Series. For the second year in a row, the team I was rooting for was defeated by a team I don’t mind seeing win. You know the baseball gods are smiling upon you when your starting pitcher not only nails down the series with a complete-game shutout, but makes the final put-out himself when he fields a slow grounder up the first baseline.

Something that confuses me slightly about the outcome this year is how it reflects baseball’s economics. I’ve long believed that baseball desperately needs to institute some real form of revenue sharing and probably a salary cap system, similar to the one the NFL has in place, which would level the playing field for the small-market teams like my own Pirates. But, the Marlins’ title, as well as the recent competitive teams fielded by Oakland, Minnesota, Kansas City, and so on seem to demonstrate that small-market teams can compete. What they can’t do is field a juggernaut like the Yankees or Braves; but they can make up for that with good scouting, competent player development, and proper management of the farm system. That’s why the Marlins have been able to bounce back from losing something like 105 games in 1998 (one year after their first title and the fire-sale that they held the day after they won it), and that’s why my Pirates are now entering their third rebuilding phase since 1992 (their last postseason appearance), even though they haven’t had a winning season since that same 1992 season. I still think that baseball needs to get better revenue sharing in place, but this pretty much proves that bad franchises can’t blame it all on economics.

I wonder if Cubs fans watched the Yankees’ lackluster play in this Series and are now thinking, “My God, our boys coulda taken these guys….”

Finally, two small complaints to the FOX television people: when a team records the final out in a World Series victory, show the entire pile-up of celebrating players on the mound, will you? Last night’s coverage cut to the glum faces on the Yankees’ bench way too soon. I know, you have to show them, but let the celebration be seen first. Then you can show the losing team wondering what might have been. And the other complaint is more general about TV sports: does every large sporting event have to serve double duty as a promotion for that network’s TV shows? I mean, I love That 70s Show, but do I really gotta see the cast shivering in the Yankee Stadium stands? Yeesh.

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That can mean only one thing: another gathering of those weirdos on AICN for a roundtable discussion of Star Wars and everything that is wrong with the Universe! Yep, you can read parts one and two today, with a promise of a third installment in another day or two.

Actually, it isn’t nearly as bad this time as in previous installments (which set me to a lot of mouth-foaming, here, here and here). A big reason, I think, is that some guy named Carl Cunningham, who is apparently a fairly prominent Star Wars fan on the Net, is participating, and he seems to be both articulate and a guy who hasn’t sipped the “George Lucas is a money-grubbing hack who has totally lost it” Kool-Aid. So, a lot of the discussion this time actually revolves around fannish speculation on the plot of Episode III: just when Anakin turns, how it might tie in with the other Episodes, et cetera. Not too bad, although some of the mental gymnastics the group performs get a bit weird — especially in Part Two, when they start in on when the Original Trilogy will show up on DVD and what kind of filmmaker George Lucas really is and whatnot.

Moriarty’s insistence on proceeding from the default assumption that every rumor is true until it is directly contradicted gets a bit annoying, but hey, at least no one mentions Greedo shooting first. Particularly refreshing is the afore-mentioned Carl guy, who immediately responds to the first whiff of “Lucas is out for our money” with something I’ve long maintained: If all he wanted was the fans’ money, he’d have crappy DVDs of the Original Trilogy in stores already. And a bit later on, when someone mentions some interview that Gary Kurtz once gave, this Carl fellow actually points out that maybe, just maybe, Gary Kurtz (the producer of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back) doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Huzzah. (Kurtz’s name is often invoked by fans who hate the Prequels as the real reason the first two films in the Original Trilogy are so good, as part of the “They’re good in spite of George Lucas” argument that I reject completely.)

So, it’s not as bad as the previous incarnations of the AICN Jedi Council. (I expect that the TalkBacks will, in due course, get flooded with all the annoying idiots who hate Star Wars because it’s not The Matrix.)

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This is an experiment that I might keep up with: a weekly posting, each Friday, of the weirdest thing I’ve encountered on the Net during the week.

This week is a very odd bit of animation, with music, called We Like the Moon.

(via Particles, a subdivision of Making Light.)

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