Month: February 2004

….otherwise known as the period between the end of football and the beginning of baseball, during which the only flash of light to be found is the Figure Skating World Championships. (No, I am not a March Madness fan, although there was some poignance to be found in Syracuse’s winning of the NCAA tournament last year on the day my family left that city.)

So, now that some hours have past, you’re probably thinking it’s time for cooler heads to prevail, and for me to dispassionately offer my congratulations to the newly-crowned Super Bowl Champions.

As Paul Buchman used to say, “Never gonna happen, my friends.”

But anyway, one of my commenters points out, after my initial gnashing-of-the-teeth, that “dynasty” talk is already starting with respect to the Stupid Patriots*. Yes, this may be premature in this era of “parity”, but the StuPats** do, perhaps, exemplify something I wrote after last year’s Super Bowl: I think that the idea that dynasties can’t happen in the salary-cap, free-agency era may be wrong. Here’s what I wrote then:

However, it seems at least partly true that the old style of dynasty may be a thing of the past: a team putting together a core of players and keeping that core together for a long period of time. Future dynasties, thus, may not be the result of accretion of great talent on a single team, but rather by great front-office personnel and coaches on a team. Scouts and coaches are going to be more important in the future, and whereas we very well may not see a Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s again, I also think we’re unlikely to see a situation where a Chuck Knoll or a Don Shula or a Tom Landry can coach a colossus but then spend ten years coaching mediocre teams because the colossus eventually got dismantled….Selection of personnel is going to get more important, and this is the real reason why the Bengals and Cardinals are such train-wrecks: not only do they lack talent, but they also lack the proper management team to bring in talent in an era when talent can be acquired much more easily and not nearly as capriciously as in the day when there was the draft and little else.

The Bills have had pretty good player selection over the last few years, but the coaching lagged. The StuPats, though, have had both excellent player selection and coaching (yeah, Belichick’s a freaking genius, yada yada yada). Add to that the fact that they apparently have a cluster of picks at the top of this year’s draft, which will allow them to bring in young talent that will theoretically come of age after the current bunch of nauseating StuPats like Ty Law and Willie McGinest move on, and this might just well be as much of a dynasty as is possible in today’s NFL. (Or they could finally make me happy and start going 5-11 again. But we all know that just isn’t going to happen, especially since in this football version of Der Freischutz Adam Vinatieri seems to be enacting, he never gets to that sixth bullet. And yes, that’s an obscure opera reference.)

* Yes, I will be referring to them as “the Stupid Patriots” until the cycle begins anew, which I take to be the opening of training camp. Deal with it! If Steven Den Beste gets to talk nasty about France, I get to talk nasty about the Stupid Patriots.

** I will use “StuPats” as a contraction, occasionally, for “Stupid Patriots”.

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(Unseemly bashing of the Super Bowl Champions here)

This is as if Frodo had given the Ring to the Nazgul at Osgiliath.

Or if Luke Skywalker had held the lightsaber blade at his father’s throat, then stared at his own mechanical right hand, and then struck his father down anyway.

Or if Miss Tessmacher had let Superman drown.

Or if the Dallas F***ing Cowboys had beaten the Bills a third time.

Once again, the New England Stupid Evil Disgusting Odious Vile Hateful-in-every-way Patriots flirt with losing, catch a break at exactly the right time, and turn it into a game-winning field goal. Once again Tom Brady and his stupid, evil grin gets an MVP. (Why the hell do Championship MVPs get new cars? Can’t they buy their own cars, with their multi-million dollar salaries? I’ve never understood this, not even when Michael Jordan was winning MVPs.)

Oh well, at least the food was good, and the folks who predicted a blowout ended up, in Samwise’s words (in the book), “looking a lot of tom-fools”.

Stupid Patriots.

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A new month is dawning, and with it, a new masthead image, keeping with the Arthurian theme I’ll be exploring this year. The last painting, Carrick’s Le Morte d’Arthur, can be seen in full here.

And as long as I’m bidding January a fond farewell, I must note that last month saw the most traffic yet at Byzantium’s Shores, due largely to TBogg‘s link and, to a smaller degree, my “Buffalo Blog” adventures. Thanks to all my readers, loyal and otherwise. Keep stopping by!

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….may be found in film music, according to Brian Micklethwait, a person I’ve somehow not discovered before. Amazing, the stuff we come across. Here’s a representative quote:

What I’m saying is that thanks to Lions in Winter, Star Wars, Matrices and the rest of them, the basic musical grammar of classical music will go on being pounded into new generations.

Indeed, as Mr. Reynolds might say.

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Jay Manfold has an interesting series of posts about the Hubble Space Telescope — go here first, and scroll up. He points out some intriguing alternatives and future policy ideas that should make situations like the current one avoidable (such as, if the space-based device is unmanned itself, then make it serviceable by robot).

I do wonder a bit if Jay’s being overly optimistic about the parts of his argument that revolve around the government being willing to declassify stuff. I don’t think we should underestimate the attitude of any government — even ours — about guarding its secrets, even when the parties concerned are long dead. Just look at all the Kennedy assassination stuff that’s still under lock-and-key after 40-plus years, and the snail’s pace at which the Nixon tapes become public. Governmental secrecy is a huge nut to crack.

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I’m listening right now to Jerry Goldsmith’s score to the movie Legend, which was not used because the film’s producers got panicky and basically shredded the movie to the point of giving it an entirely new score prior to its American release (a sequence of events which repeated, almost exactly, with last year’s Timeline). Jerry Goldsmith’s luck, with regard to his film assignments and what happens to his scores, is generally about as bad as John Williams’s is good. If you ever find yourself watching a perfectly ghastly movie and yet saying to yourself, “Hmmmm, this movie blows, but the music’s rather good,” odds are you’re listening to a Goldsmith score.

I’ve never been as keen on Goldsmith as many other film music fans. He’s written a great many magnificent scores — Legend, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Total Recall, The Wind and the Lion, and each of his scores for the Omen films are favorites of mine — but generally speaking, criticizing Goldsmith tends to be looked upon by a lot of film music fans as the equivalent of loudly breaking wind in the midst of a coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey. You just don’t do it, and there are times when I observe discussions of some score of his that I found lackluster in which everyone else is waxing poetic about how amazing it is, and I wonder if I’m even on the same planet. (First Knight and Star Trek Nemesis are good examples — the former fails to stir my blood and the latter actually bores me, but many consider them to be at least minor masterworks.)

Over the last ten or fifteen years, in my ears, Goldsmith has displayed a tendency to write a barnburner of a theme, but then pound that theme into the ground so relentlessly that by the end of one of his score CDs (which tend to not be very long, for long and boring reasons) I am quite ready to never hear that theme again. This may have come about because of how his Legend score was treated — Goldsmith pulled out a lot of stops for this one, only to see the tapes end up in the vaults and the film scored by Tangerine Dream.

Anyway, Legend really is a top-notch score. Check it out — it was issued by Silva Records a while back. It certainly represents a level of compositional complexity to which Goldsmith just doesn’t seem to aspire anymore.

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Continuing my seemingly endless fascination with dead whales in recent days, check this out. Don’t worry, it’s not icky at all: it’s about a fossilized whale.

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OK, for some reason, my archive pages are still displaying the old, dark-style template I used to have in place. I’ve just republished the entire site, but the changes haven’t as yet propagated through the entire blog. Anyhow, my hope is that permalinks to older articles will work better once it’s all done. Unless, of course, I’m totally misunderstanding how the whole thing works.

And yes, I’m aware that this post makes exceedingly little sense.

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My reactions to dealing with Libertarians tend to run the gamut from backing away slowly (in general) to running away screaming (if they start quoting Ayn Rand). But sometimes I stand there, watching, and shake my head (case in point — you may have to scroll down a bit). That’s what I’m going with regard to this New York Press article:

With such a philosophy [“We’re pro-choice on everything!”], you might expect a Libertarian convention to look like Beyond Thunderdome’s Bartertown. Or, at the very least, like the interrupting Neil Saunders. But aside from one tragically comic mullet (sparse spikes on top, ponytail in the back), Manhattan’s Libertarians are white, middle-aged, professional males. There’s one Asian man in attendance and, among the handful of women, one is the spitting image of Onion columnist Jean Teasdale. I can’t take my eyes off her.

I am also baffled as to why I found this article linked here, but I guess this, too, falls in the category of head-shaking.

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