Month: March 2004

One of the little mysteries of the 2000 elections was how Al Gore managed to lose his own home state of Tennessee. Of course, most on the right seized on the notion that he never really lived there, but generally, I suspect it’s just that his state has been trending more conservative in recent years. Had he not become Vice President in 1993, I wonder if he would have even been re-elected to his Senate seat in his next election.

Stuff like this makes me think, probably not. “Crimes of nature”, indeed.

(via Atrios)

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For some reason, I seem to steal “posting memes” from Lynn Sislo more than anyone else, such as this one. She comes up with pretty neat ones, though, so here goes. She doesn’t provide an explanation, so I’ll assume it’s “Five Favorites”.

MUSIC

1. Berlioz, Romeo et Juliet

2. Howard Shore, Lord of the Rings film scores (I consider all three to be one major work)

3. Pink Floyd, The Wall

4. Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen

5. Williams, Star Wars film scores (see note to Shore)

BOOKS

1. The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

4. Cosmos, Carl Sagan

5. The Book of Marvels (both volumes), Richard Halliburton

MOVIES

1. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

2. Casablanca

3. Schindler’s List

4. My Fair Lady

5. The Sea Hawk

(Note: I restricted myself to a single Star Wars film. I could as well have just listed all five movies to date and called it good.)

PLACES

1. Buffalo, NY (anywhere, really, but especially the Southtowns. I want a house in East Aurora.)

2. The Twin Cities.

3. Presque Isle State Park, Erie, PA.

4. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

5. Allegany State Park, NY.

FOOD

1. Pizza with sausage and banana peppers.

2. Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, with provolone and mushrooms. (I don’t care if the lack of Cheez-Whiz renders it an “unofficial” Philly cheesesteak. Keep that orange crap off my sandwich!)

3. Haagen-Dasz: Coffee flavor. (The stories I could tell about this stuff!)

4. Buffalo-style chicken wings. (I only indulge in these once in a long while anymore, since they’re so spectacularly unhealthy. But God, are they wonderful, if really done Buffalo-style.)

5. Grilled Italian sausage on a long, hard roll and topped with grilled onions, green and red peppers, and brown mustard.

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A couple of weeks ago, the Opportunity rover observed a transit of the sun from the Martian surface, by Mars’s moon Deimos.

Well, now Mars’s other moon, Phobos, has joined the transit party. My jaw is starting to ache from all this dropping!

(via Jay Manifold)

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A happy St. Patrick’s Day to all my readers, Irish-descent or not. (I am Irish on my mother’s side; my father’s side is German.) I had hoped to take the kid to Buffalo’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade the other day, but family misfortunes ruled that out. Maybe next year. So now I’m just sittin’ and bloggin’, whilst listening to my Naxos CD of “An Irish Symphony” by Sir Hamilton Hardy (1879-1941). Later I’ll listen to some Chieftains, although I’ll have to be careful and play the Irish stuff, and not the Welsh stuff or the Scottish stuff or the Galician stuff or the Canadian Celtic stuff or…you get the idea.

And maybe I’ll have a beer, since my brand of choice at the moment is, conveniently enough, Michael Shea’s. (Good thing, that — last time I bought beer, I came very close to getting Tsing-Tao instead, which just wouldn’t be appropriate.)

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Jay Manifold is wondering who Vivienne is (I assume he’s referring to this month’s masthead image, or else it’s a really weird question).

In many versions of the Arthur legend, Merlin is done in when he is seduced by a wicked woman who tricks him into revealing to her the secret of his deepest lair — usually a cave of crystal. The woman then seals Merlin inside forever, which is why he’s not around later on when things in Camelot start to turn for the worse. In Tennyson’s telling of the legend, Idylls of the King, this woman’s name is Vivienne. Thus, the picture above depicts her seduction of the old and weary mage.

Now, her name is not the same in all versions. Sometimes she is Vivienne; sometimes Viviane; sometimes Nynaeve or Nimue. Sometimes she is also the Lady of the Lake, other times not. These variations are part of what, for me, make the Arthurian legends so compelling.

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The real competition on American Idol has begun, and I’m not sure who I’m rooting for. There’s young crooner John Stevens, who is also a local boy, but he’s awfully young and I just can’t see his style carrying him all the way through to victory — especially with Randy Jackson getting more hostile toward him every time he picks up the microphone. (And Simon is nice to him! Weird….)

I also finally started to see what they like about Fantasia Barrino so much. She’s the one the judges have gushed over, unanimously, each time she has sung, but I haven’t really been able to grok her stuff since she keeps doing songs that I don’t like that much. Last night, though, she did a good one, and I got a kick out of it.

I also really like that football player guy, Matthew Rogers; but for my money, I think I’m really rooting for George Huff. I really like his voice and his exuberance. In fact, I really like his exuberance, and the way he’s constantly smiling in that “Gosh, this is all just so much fun!” way of his. And this will probably sound weird, but he reminds me of Josh Exley, the alien-turned-1940s baseball player from the X-Files episode “The Un-natural”. The gist of the episode — which is one of my favorite episodes of any TV series, ever — was that an alien from a species that had no concept of joy discovers it for himself in the course of playing baseball. Like George Huff, the Josh Exley character was a good singer, smiled a lot, and just enjoyed the fun of it all. And George even looks like Josh Exley.

Maybe that’s a strange reason to root for a contestant on a reality show, but it’s my reason, and I’m sticking with it.

(BTW, I taped the last half hour and watched Scrubs instead — brilliant episode, as always. But did Paula Abdul actually manage to make it through an entire show without telling a contestant some variant of, “I’m so proud of you, you chose a really hard song, but you made it your own”?)

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The Buffalo Bills have started reworking their roster for next season. They signed former Eagles cornerback Troy Vincent, which should be an upgrade: departed CB Antoine Winfield is a vicious tackler, but he has the worst hands I’ve ever seen and almost never even comes close to intercepting the ball, which is really what you want out of a CB anyway. (One of the Buffalo radio sports guys said of Winfield, “A corner who tackles well is like a receiver who blocks well. What’s the point?” That’s putting it a bit strongly, but there’s a grain of truth there.)

The Bills also released veteran backup quarterback Alex Van Pelt, who has already signed on to do color commentary for the team’s radio broadcasts next year. Van Pelt is a classy and intelligent football guy, and I’m sure he’ll do fine on the radio, although I rather expected him to go into coaching rather than broadcasting. Off and on through his career, when the starters ran into trouble, some fans would call for Van Pelt to be allowed a shot at the starting job, which is testament to his leadership and football acumen. Too bad that his physical skills were never up to par, especially in the arm-strength department. Alex Van Pelt had all the attributes of a fine NFL quarterback — except the arm, which you really can’t do without.

Now the Bills are looking seriously at Billy Volek, the backup QB from Tennessee who is an unrestricted free agent. That would be a good signing. He’s experienced (four years) and young, so when Drew Bledsoe departs — sooner or later — the Bills would have someone to plug in for a while, if not for a long time.

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Why? Because starting today, he’s a paid blogger. I’m sure that one of these days, the Buffalo News will realize its dire need for a blog…but until then, Kevin’s evil and must be destroyed.

(Yeah, I’m linking him anyway. Who ever said I had to be rational?)

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In accordance with prophecy my general tendency to keep moving things around, I’m shifting the sidebar about. Firstly, there are a few folks I want to add to the blogroll, but I’m trying to keep the blogroll that’s actually maintained via Blogrolling.com at a certain length, because once it starts getting really long it tends to slow down the loading of the page. (Longtime readers of Brad DeLong‘s blog, for example, may recall some truly glacial load-times before he moved his titanic Blogrolling-powered blogroll to its own page some months back.)

So, what I’ll do is move all LiveJournal users to their own section in the sidebar, titled “Pilgrims from a Strange Land”. (This is because LiveJournals strike me as a bit odd. That whole “friends” thing is weird, and navigation of LJ archives tends to be a nightmarish affair.) Another new section is entitled “Mapmakers, Sages and Scribes”; this is where I’ll list professional bloggers — i.e., people who are either directly paid to blog or folks who are actual journalists for whom blogging is part of the whole package of their work. All this will open up a few spots in the main blogroll. Of course, blogs that are relocated from the Blogrolling-powered blogroll will no longer be marked as recently updated when they have new posts, but since not all blogs seem to respond to that service, this doesn’t strike me as a problem.

These changes will be effective…right now. BOOM! There, that didn’t hurt, did it?

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That’s an artist’s conception of Sedna, the most distant object found in solar orbit. The consensus seems to be that it’s not a planet, but rather a planetoid and, more specifically, an Oort Cloud Object. It’s out beyond even the Kuiper Belt — very far, indeed.

Man, does a single day go by anymore that I don’t go online, see some bit of planetary astronomy news, and think, “Damn, if only Carl Sagan hadn’t died just a handful of years before all this!”

(link via Jay Manifold)

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