Month: April 2004

I watched a couple of nifty PBS shows over the last couple of nights. The first one was, admittedly, another in the long line of “rehashing the amazing work of Robert Ballard” shows that are always on PBS or Discovery; this one was called “Lost Liners” and was about, well, lost ocean liners. The show culminated, of course, in Ballard’s discovery of the Titanic wreck site, and there was the usual synopsis of the ship’s final hours, intercut with interviews with survivors (usually elderly people who were children at the time, and who remember hugging their fathers for the last time) and footage of the expedition that found the ship. It’s all very familiar, but I’m damned if the whole thing still isn’t incredibly fascinating.

The other show I watched was simply amazing. It was about a project, sponsored by a Minnesota church and abbey, to produce the first fully hand-written, illuminated Bible in centuries. I did a little web digging and found this site devoted to the project. This show was captivating on several levels. First, there was the simple focus on the craftsmanship of the project. The vellum parchment has to be treated and prepared before it is ready to be written on, for example; and as a longtime advocate of the fountain pen, I was enchanted by the calligrapher’s description of how goosefeather quills are prepared. We have an image on men writing with these large, poofy feathers, courtesy Hollywood, but this turns out to not be the case: the plumage is largely trimmed away, the “tip” has to be hardened by being soaked and then treated with sand, and then it has to be extensively trimmed with a blade to form a nib with which to write. No less fascinating was the preparation of inks, which are also hand-made.

More than this focus on craftsmanship — itself invaluable, as scholars have little knowledge of the methods used by medieval scribes — was the artistry in servitude to spiritualism. The calligrapher isn’t simply trying to update the Book of Kells, but create a twenty-first century work of art. One of his illuminations includes a tiny homage to the World Trade Center, and modern typefaces and coloring effects are put to extensive use:

There was a particularly striking device illustrating the genealogy of Jesus, in the shape of a menorah. One of the goals was to depict the Bible in a “multicultural” context, which struck me as an interesting choice given the state of the world today.

The show was simply titled “The Illuminated Bible”. Check your listings; if it’s on in your neck of the woods, don’t miss it.

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No, I didn’t start my hiatus early; I’ve just been very tired the last couple of days and haven’t had much of anything to say. It happens. I’d hoped to avoid it happening until I went on hiatus — the point of a hiatus being to help keep these things from happening — but there it is.

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Andrew Cory answers the five questions I posed to him a couple of months ago. (Start here and move backward.) One of my questions proved unanswerable, so he punted and ranked the Captains from Star Trek. Personally, I’d put Kirk second, but that’s just me. Picard’s pretty cool, although he tends to talk too much. I always thought that Picard needed to be a little more liberal with the phasers. Benjamin Sisko, though, most certainly does kick ass.

He also reviews a film version of I Claudius, which only adds to my conviction that this is a book I really need to read one of these days. Like so many others, alas….

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There’s a small discussion between Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum regarding food likes and dislikes. Matthew, it seems, likes everything whereas Kevin doesn’t like much at all. Here are some random thoughts of mine:

:: I love meat. Meat rules. Grilled, fried, broiled, roasted – meat rules. Chicken, steak, turkey, pork — meat rules. (I haven’t had lamb too often, but I liked it.)

:: In terms of vegetables, I like a fairly small number of them. I love just about all the salad vegetables – lettuces, endives, spinaches, et cetera. Mostly I prefer them in their raw form, with dressing (balsamic vinaigrette, yum). I can’t eat cooked spinach by itself, but cooked spinach as an ingredient in something is nice.

:: I’ve loosened up on tomatoes. I used to hate them in their raw form, but now I like them on sandwiches and burgers. I cannot, however, simply eat tomato slices by themselves.

:: Potatoes: fry ’em, roast ’em, or cube ’em and stick ’em in a stew. Just don’t give me those sliced potatoes covered in cheese, and I do not like mashed potatoes, either. (What’s weird about mashed potatoes is that I always think a pile of them with a pool of gravy on top looks incredibly yummy, but then I taste them and realize I still hate them.)

:: Other veggies I like include corn, just about all varieties of onions (except red and pearl), carrots (again, raw, not cooked by themselves, although cooked-as-ingredient is fine) and all manner of Chinese and oriental vegetables like bok choy. The Chinese know how to cook vegetables without turning them into mushy ickiness. I do not like asparagus, turnips, artichokes, rutabagas, or parsnips, although to be fair, it has been so many years since I tasted a parsnip that my tastes may well have changed.

:: Special mention must be made here of broccoli. This is, bar none, the most disgusting food item on this planet. I cannot even abide the smell of this stuff cooking. Incidentally, the only episode of The Family Guy that I ever really liked involved that little megalomaniacal baby declaring his lifelong enmity against broccoli. I don’t care if broccoli is the most healthy foodstuff in existence. It is a hateful, vile weed that is unfit for human consumption. As Dr. Hibbard said in an episode of The Simpsons, “It tries to warn you with its awful taste!”

:: I love spicy food and I always have, although in more recent years I’ve downgraded the “heat” factor in favor of flavor. I do, though, still occasionally enjoy the sensation of burning taste buds and a sweaty brow.

:: I have a sweet-tooth that is almost all-inclusive. The only candy that immediately leaps to mind that I don’t like are those marshmallow Peeps. Those are gross. Chocolate rules – although I seem to be in the tiny minority that prefers both dark and white chocolate to milk chocolate. I love coconut. Ice cream is, to me, the best argument for the existence of God.

:: Beverages: I love coffee, which I doctor with quite a bit of sugar and brew fairly strong. (Turkish proverb: “Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as Death, and sweet as Love.”) I enjoy green tea with honey and quite a few herbal blends, although I’m not as much a tea drinker these days. I enjoy apple cider in the fall (cold only; I don’t like it heated), I drink Diet Pepsi each and every day, and I also dig grape soda every so often (about twice a year).

:: Alcohol: Beer, preferably red, and wine, also red. I adore Port. I flirted very briefly with Jack Daniels in college, but I quickly gave that up. My flirtation with tequila was even shorter, consisting of a single night and two shots. (No, I wasn’t drunk on two shots. I had two and decided that I just didn’t like the flavor. But then, I didn’t do that lick-salt-from-your-wrist ritual, either.) Rum-and-Coke is nice on occasion, but I haven’t done this in several years.

:: Popcorn rules. So does pizza. There’s a lot of great pizza in Buffalo. My favorite toppings are Italian sausage and green peppers, but basic pepperoni pizza is also nice. It’s a sign of my devotion to pizza that I worked at Pizza Hut for four years and never got tired of the food. (Don’t ask about my waistline at the time.)

:: I also drink a lot of water. This is essential, and I feel icky if I don’t.

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(CAUTION: I get a little political here. Move on if my occasional descents into such territory annoy you.)

In the course of a “grab bag” post, John Scalzi says this about the Iraq War:

“Look, I know that the people in the White House can never, ever say that the real reason we went into Iraq was because Saddam tried to put the hit on Dubya’s dad. But can the rest of us just stop pretending it was anything more than that? Please? And remember, I supported going into Iraq (on the grounds that Saddam was about 12 years past his expiration date), so I don’t think I can just be written off as another liberal whiner on this point. I supported our president’s decision to go to war on Iraq. I had absolutely no illusions as to why he decided to do it. Indeed, I submit that had 9/11 never happened, we’d still have had tanks trundling through Baghdad one way or another — because Dubya would have found a way to make it happen. It was personal. Saddam was dead meat as soon as the Supreme Court gave Dubya the keys to the White House.”

That fits my position almost exactly. I mean, almost exactly.

A friend of mine who is considerably more liberal than I (!) remarked to me when Bush was sworn in, “How long before we’re at war with Iraq again?” I confess that my answer was, “Probably not that long, I imagine.”

My whole wishy-washy position on invading Iraq was always that I thought it was probably the right thing to do, and Bush thought it was the right thing to do, but my reason for thinking so wasn’t the same as Bush’s. (And I do not buy for one second that Bush himself bought into the whole “We need to remake the Arab world” thesis, since he never said that. And if he did believe it, then I think he’s a pretty craven leader for never once trying to make his real case.)

That’s why I was nervous before the war and why I’m nervous now: two people may agree on what to do, but if they disagree on why, sooner or later some pretty big gaps will open up between them. If you have two different chess players each facing an identical board, and they each move the same knight to the same square, but one justifies it on the basis that it will allow a line of attack for his rook and bishop, while the other justifies it on the basis that he really likes horsies, well, one shouldn’t expect the two games to reach the same result in the end.

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You are now reading this post an hour later than you would have previously. Or an hour earlier. Or at the same time, in which case you’re either late for work or missing This Week With David Brinkley George Stephanopolous. Hell, I can’t figure it out.

I do know that I can’t stand Daylight Saving Time. I like sunshine and all, but I also believe that at 8:30 at night, it should be dark out, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.

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Via a pretty convoluted series of links (Anne Zook to David Neiwert) I see this ‘essay’ by one ‘Kaye Grogan’, which proposes that “Unfounded accusations against Presidents should be a felony”. One does wonder what the effects of this might have been had it been law in, oh, 1993 or later, but never mind. Instead I’m drawn to this paragraph:

“The Democratic party have probably written their own obituary, by not taking the bull by the horns and laying out a concrete plan to entice voters. Raising taxes have about run their course, and as someone brought out. . . pro-life Democrats are dwindling away. They are dwindling away about like an ice cube in 600 degree temperatures in Hades. Since the biggest majority of Americans are pro-life, this is and should be a disastrous platform for Democrats. Won’t they ever learn? Apparently not.”

Consider that. Not the same old idiotic idea that Democrats would win if they’d only be like Republicans (one imagines a Republican Henry Higgins, singing “Why can’t a Democrat be more like a Republican?”), but just consider the appalling grammar here. That should read “The Democratic Party has probably written its own obituary”; “Raising taxes has about run its course”; and “Since the majority of Americans are pro-life…”. (Why use the adjective “biggest”? Is there more than one majority?)

The rest of the article is similarly ghastly. According to the author’s bio, Ms. Grogan is a freelance writer with a body of published work. One can only assume she’s a valued customer of PublishAmerica, or that somebody out there is so desperate for a hack conservative who comes cheap that they shelled out a few nickels for Ms. Grogan’s horrible prose.

One can only hope. If this woman is making a living from writing like this, I may just have to open a vein or two.

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As might be evidenced by the most recent MOB! post, I’m in the middle of one of my quarterly obsessions with Les Miserables. I’ve never read the book, and I’ve never seen the Broadway show, but I’m damned if I haven’t been in love with the music for well over ten years now. At least four times a year, I go through a week where my CD of the entire show (that concert version they did at the anniversary some years ago, with the all-star cast and the encore in which the guys who sang the role of Jean Valjean in all the various international productions perform “Do You Hear the People Sing?”) comprises my only music listening. I don’t know what the deal is — I’m not even sure I could recite the entire story of the show, but I have never stopped loving the music.

I’ve been continually frustrated over the years that the touring production of Les Miz always seems to arrive in Buffalo when I’m either unavailable or unable to afford tickets. Now that I’m working, though, maybe I’ll catch the next one. (It was here last week.) I will see this damn thing, someday.

(BTW, if any of my readers has seen the show, is the “One Day More” number as spectacular as I always think it has to be, given the way it sounds on the CD? I mean, on disc, that number is a friggin’ barnburner!)

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Tonight is ABC’s annual broadcast of The Ten Commandments, to which I always tune in for twenty minutes just to laugh at the display of pretentious windbaggery. (No, not the same twenty minutes. I just randomly flip to it at some point.) I mean, really – what a pompous ass of a movie this is! And its traditional airing at Easter-time has always baffled me, as I noted last year on this occasion:

“I’m not the most astute person when it comes to matters of Christian doctrine, but I’m pretty sure that Easter is a holiday/festival that’s pretty Jesus-centric. You know, the whole crucifiction/burial/resurrection thing. So why is it that each year at Easter-time, ABC televises The Ten Commandments which is about Moses and the Exodus and has nothing at all to do with Jesus? I know that the Biblical epics that specifically deal with Jesus — The Greatest Story Ever Told, King of Kings — aren’t particularly well-known these days, outside of film music geek circles. But there is a classic costume epic that, while not specifically about Jesus, at least is set in and around the events of his life. That would be Ben-Hur, which is helpfully subtitled “A Tale of the Christ”, stars Charlton Heston, and is frankly a much better movie than the lugubrious overacted monument to pomposity that is The Ten Commandments.

So come on, ABC. Next year, ditch Moses and let’s have Judah Ben-Hur.”

Really, why is this the traditional Easter movie? It’s like if they honored Gene Roddenberry’s birthday by screening Star Wars.

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Gregory Harris is one of the finer people I’ve encountered since I emigrated into Blogistan. He’s of the same political stripe as myself, and he and I share a lot of cultural tastes. Plus, he’s an all-around good guy.

Which makes it all that more of a shame that, after looking out my window this morning to see three inches of fresh snow and then reading this post of his, I’m going to have to kill him.

(Well, OK, he earns a reprieve by linking this, just one post down from the offending entry. I’ll allow him to live after all. But I may still dispatch a thousand seagulls to cover his car in bird-poo.)

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