Month: March 2004

Not much to talk about, but here are some items of interest. Or not. (Yes, it’s a slow day, and I had a lousy day at The Store. You know how to tell bad karma when you’re working at a grocery store? When you get paged to come quick because one of the front doors fell off its hinges. And that was at the end of my day. Yeesh.)

:: Alistair Cooke has died. I never heard his “Letter From America” radio feature, but I remember my mother’s faithful watching of Masterpiece Theater when I was a kid.

:: Matthew Yglesias links this poll of the 10 sexiest women. Regular readers will know that I nearly covered my monitor in Pepsi from my oral cavity when I saw who was Number One. But then, my idea of “sexy” involves brains and talent, and does not involve a stainless steel pole and guys waving dollar bills, so there you are. (Like Matthew, I don’t even know who a couple of these women are.)

:: All the writing books say not to try crap like this, but when you see news items that endorse it — with supporting quotes from the publisher, no less! — one is tempted to despair for the idea that maybe just writing the best book one can is the way to go. The publisher in question, though, seems to be a bookstore-chain associated label, rather like “Barnes&Noble Books”, so I’m not sure this really counts as “using a gimmick to get published” in the classic sense.

:: The Ten Best Rock Bands Ever. Start quibbling, I guess. I can’t really say — while I can’t deny the Beatles their place in history, I can certainly admit that I don’t much care for them as a listening experience. I almost always prefer hearing Beatles songs performed by, well, people other than the Beatles. And I will go to my grave thinking that “Hey Jude” is one of the most horrible, Godawful, please-drive-an-icepick-through-my-eardrums songs in all of history. But then, I’m a guy who thinks that Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits is the best rock album of the 1980s, so again, what do I know.

:: As a follow-up to my post a few days ago about why The Apprentice is better than Survivor, I see an MSNBC article that argues convincingly that The Apprentice is better than Survivor. Hell, if I’m ahead of the pro writers, how come I’m not one?

:: LiteBrite, on the Web. Believe me, it’s more fun doing LiteBrite on the living room floor with a four year old while The Simpsons is on, but hey, what do….[head explodes]

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Just a heads-up for my regular readers: I will be taking a week-long hiatus starting on Easter Sunday and ending the Saturday after Easter Sunday. This hiatus will coincide with the wife’s vacation, so we’ll be doing some fun stuff away from the computer, and anyway, it’s been a while since I took time off to recharge the blogging batteries. I’m falling dangerously behind on my 2004 Reading List, for instance.

Also, I’m kicking around ditching BlogRolling for maintaining the blogroll, just to speed things up, really. I never found it all that easier to use than by merely hand-coding links, and the “Recently Updated” thing doesn’t seem to actually work for all blogs. I’ll probably implement that change in the next few days. Nothing against BlogRolling, really, but the load-time issue is a biggie, and I just don’t gain as much by using that service as I thought I might when I signed up. (I was considering this move before the service was bought by some other company, so this isn’t some grand stand against the corporatization of the Web.)

Finally…well, there is no “finally”. That’s it.

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No links, but I’ve seen a few comments here and there that for purposes of the NCAA tournament, Duke has become the college basketball equivalent of the New York Yankees: everybody is either a fan, or hates them. Not being up on my college basketball, when did this happen? I seem to recall a lot of admiration for Duke and for Mike Krz….their coach. Did I miss something?

And speaking of the Yankees, I see they lost on opening day. Don’t get excited, Yankee-haters, and don’t get downtrodden, Yankee-lovers. The Yankees opened their 1998 season with two straight losses, and then they went on to win 120 games (I think…I’m not looking it up).

And then there’s my team, the Pirates, who have posted losing records eleven years in a row and are now in their third rebuilding phase, by my count. But maybe if this rebuilding project takes, Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy can have a speech like this:

“Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ’em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one… stayed up! And that’s what you’re gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.”

Oh well.

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Fascinating post about one man’s Christianity, here:

“I’m trying to get my head around were I stand right now vis a vis Jesus Christ. Not God; Jesus. God’s a done deal; God has returned my calls consistently over the past year and a half; as for Jesus, I can’t even get Jesus’ voice mail. He’s probably busy dealing with the whole Mel Gibson thing.”

Via the Unsinkable Mr. Jones, whom I know has done a great deal of reading about religious matters and whom I wish would write some of his own essays about his thoughts thereof.

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Yesterday when I logged on to Blogger for some posting, I noticed that three of the “Recently Published” blogs sported really minimalistic titles: “Weblog”, “A Blog is a Blog is a Blog”, and the self-referential “This Is Not a Blog”.

I failed to click through and observe any actual entries, however, so I can’t vouch for what the content might have been. I just found the presence of three such blogs on the list kind of funny. (Emphasis there on “kind of”, rather than on “funny”.)

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If you ever want to see some thin skins in action, just wander onto a film music discussion board and suggest, in as condescending a tone as possible, that film music doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as real classical music.

Some people out there, though, get it: of course it does. The Washington Times had a great article the other day about it. (I know, liberal bloggers aren’t supposed to approvingly link the Washington Times. Well, I’m doin’ it anyway. Harumph.)

Here are a couple of key passages from the article:

“The death of classical music in the 20th century has become an almost tiresome cliche, but maybe now is the time to ask if these reports of serious music’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps we have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Perhaps it merely went into hiding in a place where you would least expect it: the Hollywood soundstage…. As these new recordings and others amply demonstrate, it is long past time to recognize Hollywood’s greatest film scores as significant milestones in the legitimate classical repertoire. Continued academic snobbery and pointless experimentation will only further alienate musical culture from its traditional and popular roots in the unities of dramatic presentation and formal structure.”

Go read the whole thing. The re-recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood score to which the article refers is here. It’s worth noting that William Stromberg and the Marco Polo label have been re-recording classic film scores for years, and that this is only the most recent of their releases.

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Yet another nifty post by Lynn Sislo, in which she provides three abstract paintings but doesn’t identify the artists. One of them is apparently by a “name-brand” artist, while the other(s) are by amateurs. There’s some interesting discussion going on, too, but as is almost always the case, I don’t really “get” some of the statements made by people who seem to know what they’re talking about. Of course, my own personal definition of art is hyper-inclusive, and there’s also my general rejection of any objective standard of good versus bad, so there you go.

Anyway, I like the second painting she posts. It seems to me to be best organized around a visual theme.

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After finding clear evidence of water on Mars a couple of weeks ago, something even more exciting has been detected by Earth-based telescopes and spacecraft in Martian orbit: methane. What’s so exciting about methane? The methane molecule is not stable in the Martian atmosphere, so unless it is replenished it would disappear within several hundred years. And methane, so far as we know, could be replenished in two ways. One is volcanic activity (for which there is no current evidence of there being any on Mars), and the other is microbial activity.

Now, if they find a beat-up road sign reading “Barsoom City — 50 miles”, that’ll really be something.

(link via Warren Ellis)

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Sometimes I wonder if Atrios‘s staunch pseudonymity is just a test to see how long he can keep it up. Case in point: Kos has pictures of Atrios with the face blurred.

At some point it all becomes just an exercise in silliness, doesn’t it?

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Kevin Drum points out something funny. It seems that the Bush campaign is mad because John Kerry quoted scripture in the course of criticizing the President.

I know that a lot of conservatives think that the Bible is theirs and theirs alone to use as a rhetorical cudgel against their political foes, but something tells me they’re about to discover that it goes both ways.

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