The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Gregory comments on the current fascination with Asian culture in America. Check it out; it’s an interesting post.
My reaction to the bit about the ad placed for “Asian-American women” to appear “in costume” at a party is twofold: first, that’s a pretty over-the-top thing to ask; second, I want to attend that party. C’est la vie….
All through the warm December and first few days of January, here in Buffalo there was a distinct sense of waiting for the shoe to drop, since all that warm weather meant we’d go into the coldest periods of winter with Lake Erie remaining in its liquid, snow-generating state. And today, the lake finally said “Enough is enough!”, stretched its back, cracked its knuckles, and started generatin’.
We’ve got several inches already, with more to come late this evening when the snow bands shift northward again. Bring it on!
Maybe it’s just my general stance of apathy toward college sports, but I really don’t care about the whole BCS “controversy”. I just don’t care, and I don’t care if they have a playoff or not.
For those even less interested than I, what basically is happening is this: the “National Championship” of college football, at the Division One level, used to be determined by two separate “Top 25” polls, one by the press and one by the football coaches. Basically, every week the coaches and writers would vote on teams, based on their results that week (if they’d played), and whoever was voted Number One in the polls after all the New Year’s bowl games were done was the champion. However, if both polls didn’t agree, you’d have two teams with a share of the championship. Oh, the horror.
So they came up with something called the “Bowl Coalition System”, or BCS, which used computerized rankings and whatnot to more “definitively” decide who the Number One team happens to be. But this year, there seems to be a lot of anger at the BCS system, because a team with an easier schedule was ranked above a team with a harder schedule, despite their identical records. Or something like that. Anyway, the BCS system, which was intended to stifle debate, merely shifted it. Oh, the horror.
Thus we have the inevitable cries that we must have a playoff system to determine the “National Champion”. This is because they do it in NCAA basketball that way, with the March Madness tournament of 64 teams. In basketball, they invite the best teams to the tournament, seed them up according to record and location, and then let them play. Single elimination, lose and you’re out, and a champion is crowned. No fuss, no muss. Obviously, then, college football needs a similar system.
Except, it’s not going to stop the debate. Not even close.
For one thing, football’s very nature as the most physical team sport out there means that they can’t have a field of 64 teams; otherwise, at a game a week, they’d have their playoffs winding into February, which the NFL would most definitely have something to say about. More likely, you’d just have the top four teams playing off against one another, but I guarantee that under any such system there would still be disagreement, because then you’re just going to have people complaining about whether the Number Five team, left out of the playoff, should have gone in Number Four’s stead. To say nothing of if some team goes 12-0, but then loses in the first round to a 10-2 team in the playoff: you’d still have a team with one loss finishing behind one with two, which is the entire justification as to why we desperately need a playoff in the first place! I went to a Division III school, and Division III has playoffs. One year while I was there, our team went 9-1, and was excluded from the playoffs. (I seem to recall an 8-2 team making it in, because of some rule or other. But that might be incorrect on my part.)
Basically, my whole take is, who cares? College football fans love to complain, and they’re going to complain no matter what, each year. So they might as well choose the system that encourages as much complaining as possible. So keep the BCS! There will never be a lack of controversy, and I find the idea that there should be a bit unconvincing.
To quote George Carlin: “The ‘undisputed heavyweight champion’….well, if it’s ‘undisputed’, then what’s all the fighting about?”
I finished a pretty entertaining novel last night, by first-novelist Ryk E. Spoor, called Digital Knight. Spoor is a person I’ve had (very) intermittent contact with over the last few years, via the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, where he goes by the handle “Sea Wasp”. Now, if you told me that a new novel by a guy named “Ryk Spoor” was coming out, I’d suspect it was a story involving vampires and werewolves in all manner of Lovecraftian highjinks. That’s a good thing, because that’s precisely what Sea Wasp has written here.
The book’s main character is an “information specialist” named Jason Wood, who spends his days doing contract work for law enforcement types who have special “information” needs — image enhancement, collecting data and searching it for patterns, and the like. His best friend is a Wiccan-type named Sylvia, and there’s a mildly-inverted version of the “Mulder and Scully” dynamic between the two (i.e., he’s a “skeptic”, she’s a “believer”) that Spoor is wise enough not to underline too heavily, given what happens almost immediately: Jason Wood finds a dead body outside his back door, a body which is sporting two puncture wounds in the neck and from which every red blood corpuscle has been extracted.
From here, Wood is plunged into a world where vampires are drug dealers. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires are hunted by werewolves. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires and werewolves have been at war for over half-a-million years. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires and werewolves have not only been at war for over half-a-million years, but where they are entities whose power derives from the very spirit of the world.
I know, this description of the book sounds ungainly, but somehow it all works. For one thing, Spoor’s tone is pretty “matter of fact” about it all, and he plays his material straight and narrow. He doesn’t much mine the vampire legends for their eroticism, which I found welcome (I’ve become tired of the sexual aspects of vampirism in recent years), and he leavens his supernatural explorations, which seem inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, with other plotlines redolent of techno-spy fiction, not unlike Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum. It’s a pretty heady mix, and Spoor walks the tightrope he sets for himself pretty well by confronting the problems head-on. At one point he gives Jason (his first-person narrator) this line:
But this was like opening the door to my house and finding Gandalf and Conan the Barbarian in a fight to the finish with Cthulhu and Morgan le Fay.
Spoor also appears to have given real thought to the kind of lifestyle an exceptionally long-lived vampire would lead, and also what the implications would be for the real world once word of the existence of werewolves got out. I confess that I have a slight problem with a vampire’s resistance to sunlight also applying to the lights of a tanning bed, but I was able to get past that, especially since it provided a good set-up for something later.
Spoor structures the novel in a different way: there isn’t a single plotline that winds through the whole thing. Rather, the book exists as a set of linked novellas, each one with its own climax and set of problems. I found this slightly off-putting, until I got to the third story-arc and recognized what was happening. The book is a page-turner, but it still felt slightly strange to read what was clearly a type of “climactic” battle on page 170 of a 380 page book. Also, the book itself leaves a lot open at the end, so I suspect a sequel is in the offing.
I didn’t find Digital Knight to be as much a horror book as a dark fantasy — it didn’t frighten me or make me want to leave the light on. This isn’t a Stephen King “scare” book, so if you want a story featuring supernatural beasties locked in a war through the ages, with generous helpings of hackerdom thrown in, Digital Knight is the book for you. Check it out. (And, if you’re interested, buy it. That will help a new author’s career along.)
Kevin Drum went to see Return of the King yesterday. Not surprisingly, given what I’ve seen of his reading preferences, he admits to not much liking the books, which is par for the course, I guess. But he says something that really got my goat:
But my biggest gripe, I think, is with Gandalf. As a wizard, he really sucks, doesn’t he? Sure, he killed a few magical creatures here and there, but basically he displayed virtually no magic power at all and really didn’t do an awful lot of sharp thinking either. Was he keeping his magical powers in reserve, or what? It just seems that a wizard ought to have better ways of helping the cause than wading into a sea of orcs with a sword. I’m just saying.
Now, some of his commenters step in an set him straight, but this really does reflect something important. For all the plaudits heaped upon Tolkien’s shoulders for basically “uplifting” the entire genre of epic fantasy, there’s a great deal in his Lord of the Rings that doesn’t seem to fit in with later incarnations of fantasy. Kevin’s take on Gandalf is a giant case-in-point. Someone new to LOTR will look at Gandalf being a wizard, and interpret that fact in the light of all manner of stuff since then: Merlin in Excalibur, the Harry Potter books and movies, and of course, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games. So it’s easy to look at Gandalf standing there on the ramparts of Minas Tirith as the orc armies approach and think, “Jesus, when’s he going to uncork something like a Fireball spell at them?” (Of course, if Gandalf functioned like an AD&D wizard, he wouldn’t be allowed to fight with a sword, right?)
I think that Tolkien suffers sometimes not just because tastes have moved somewhat beyond the style of language he employs, but because his own story does not actually reflect the tropes of the genre he is credited with siring. Interesting.
:: As long as I’m rambling on about JRRT, here’s a nifty online Tolkien reference, The Encyclopedia of Arda. This might be helpful to folks who don’t know everything about Middle Earth but are a tad curious. Like me, in fact. (Despite my babblings here, I’m not a JRRT scholar or devotee — I’ve never read The Silmarillion, nor have I explored all those volumes of unfinished notes and peripheralia published in recent years by Christopher Tolkien.)
Link via MeFi. (If you peruse the MeFi discussion thread, you’ll find that someone speculates that making widely available information on Tolkien is why the Web was invented — aside from porn, of course. Which, in turn, leads to this. Not safe for work!)
The picture below purports to be a snapshot of a debate held for the Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, but look closely:
OK, you’ve got seven people standing at weird podiums that are shaped like the control panels of spaceships from a 1950s sci-fi movie. The way those red, white and blue pipes in the walls are arranged, it looks like these seven persons’ brains are connected to form one entity. And in the foreground, there are the silhouettes of three figures, watching the action.
Ergo, this was no “presidential debate”. It was an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000!!!
William Burton has thoughts about what is to come in 2004. I really hope that the last clause in his thirteenth prediction doesn’t refer to me. (I think I’m safe, since I rarely post here at midnight.)
Tacitus also has some predictions. I’m hoping, of course, that the fact that his football prediction is already wrong likewise bodes ill for his predicting power — specifically, the prediction just above that one.
As for my own predictions:
I predict that I will whine here about my own writing. I predict that I will also whine (or brag, as events warrant) about my traffic here. Other than that, my magic 8-ball keeps saying, “Ask Again Later”.
John Scalzi’s blog Whatever, not to be confused with John Scalzi’s blog By The Way, has received a much-needed makeover. (He says it was much-needed, not me!) He’s now sporting a space-based theme, to go along with his impending entry into the realm of “published SF authors”. Plus, he has bowed to my incredible wisdom and adopted Garamond as his default font. Boo-yeah!
(Actually, I don’t know if he’s ever even visited here, but until I hear otherwise, I’m claiming credit. Because I can do that. And I’d like a pony.)
Over on the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, someone posted a thread about “Underrated Love Themes”. Of course, “underrated” is kind-of a useless term, I’ve found; to say that something is “underrated” generally seems to mean “I don’t think people talk about this thing as much as I would like”. Not that this stops me from using the term, of course. Because, in my opinion, my own blog is underrated!
Now, what was I on about just now? Oh, love themes. Anyway, as I just posted over there, Jerry Goldsmith’s The Wind and the Lion boasts a gorgeous love theme. And here are some others, just off the top of my head:
:: The Sea Hawk, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. When the love theme swells as Dona Maria is just too late to stop Captain Thorpe from sailing from Dover, it’s one of the great moments in movie music.
:: The Wind and the Lion, Jerry Goldsmith. I’ve never seen the film, but the score has a wonderful quality that suggests Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade to me.
:: The Mask of Zorro, James Horner. Horner’s love theme from Titanic (the basis for the song “My Heart Will Go On”) is much more famous, but I find the one from The Mask of Zorro more beautiful.
:: Dances With Wolves, John Barry. This ended up being pretty much Barry’s last great score, unfortunately.
:: Far and Away, John Williams. I pretty much had to include a Williams theme here, and his score to the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman bodice-ripper about Irish immigrants tends to fall through the cracks in film music circles.
I could come up with a bunch more if I went through my CD collection, of course.