Month: April 2004

When you think of someone you haven’t thought of for a number of years, and you make a mental note to check sometime to see if they’re still alive…and then, two or three days later, you discover (having forgotten totally about it) that they have just died.

Just the other day I was wondering if the guy behind the Guiness Book of World Records, Norris McWhirter, was still alive…and while looking through MeFi just moments ago, I saw that he just died.

Anyway, I always enjoyed thumbing through the Guiness Book in my youth, and like Bobby and Cindy Brady, I occasionally thought of setting my own record. I wonder if “Blathering on a Blog” is a Guiness-approved category?

Share This Post

This week, I have exposed my daughter to the wonder that is Neil Gaiman, via his illustrated children’s book The Wolves in the Walls. Illustrated by Dave McKean, who also did the pictures for Gaiman’s Coraline, this book tells the tale of a young girl who hears strange noises in the walls of her home. She is convinced that the sounds are made by wolves living in the walls, but her family insists otherwise, citing rats and mice and bats and casually intoning, “When the wolves come out of the walls, it’s all over”.

Of course, in typical Gaiman fashion, this fairly creepy start eventually gives way to a pretty humorous conclusion once the wolves actually do come out of the walls. When I was a kid, I always tended to enjoy the stories that had a slightly creepy air about them — Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak, John Bellairs — and I’m glad that Gaiman is keeping this kind of thing going.

Share This Post

Morat takes time off from caring for his two temporarily-wayward dogs, who are apprently dumbasses (and one of whom is apparently very tired), to wonder about which Star Wars parody song is best: Weird Al Yankovic’s, or Mark Davis’s. Well, those are both funny songs, but as far as I am concerned, no Star Wars parody song is ever likely to top my favorite of all.

By the way, researching this post yielded a wealth of Star Wars parody stuff on the Net to which I plan to devote much time exploring over the next few days. For now, though, have you ever considered that somewhere in the Star Wars galaxy, a series of words comprised of yellow letters in a block font are apparently floating unimpeded through space? Ever wonder what happens when those words inevitably encounter another object? Wonder no more.

Share This Post

Jayme Lynn Blaschke reports that Gardner Dozois, the longtime editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, is stepping down. Maybe the new editor will actually buy my stuff for once; I mean, how many more Charles Stross stories do we really need, anyway? Sheesh.

(Actually, the correct answer there is “A lot”, since Stross is awfully good. Sigh. Well, maybe we can lay off the Robert Silverberg stories…nah, he’s good too. Double sigh.)

Failing that, maybe the new editor can at least rewrite the standard Asimov’s rejection letter, the one that basically says, “We can’t take time to tell you exactly why we’re rejecting your story, but the odds are overwhelming that it was crap.” Oh well, best of luck to Dozois, a guy whose reaction to my well-wishes would almost certainly be, “Who the f*** is he?!”

Share This Post

Judging by the fact that traffic has not fallen dramatically, I can only assume that the picture of my mug in the sidebar has, in fact, neither struck my readers into stone or reduced their minds to insanity. All-righty then!

(As long as no one tells me that I look like a long-haired Drew Carey, I’m good.)

Share This Post

One of the giants of film music, Miklos Rozsa, was born 97 years ago today. Rozsa is one of my favorite film composers, with such brilliant scores amongst his output as Spellbound, Ivanhoe (my favorite score of his — what a swashbuckler!), King of Kings, and the magnificent Ben Hur. In recent years Rozsa’s star has also been rising as a composer of concert music, of which he wrote a lot; his violin and cello concertos, for example, are showing up more often on concert programs. His concert music is a great deal more “nationalistic” than his film music; in his concert work, Rozsa allowed his adoration for his homeland of Hungary to constantly shine through.

Check out Rozsa’s filmography; he was one of the hardest working composers in Hollywood. In the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Rozsa himself appears in an early scene at an orchestra hall (he’s the conductor). His autobiography, A Double Life, is supposed to be a wonderful book, but it’s long out of print and the copy at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library is non-circulating, alas.

(And for some reason, I have never been able to remember whether the ‘s’ or the ‘z’ comes first in his name. I always have to check. And thanks to Lynn Sislo for the reminder.)

Share This Post

A chilling Slate article by Dave Cullen reports that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not kill twelve classmates and a teacher five years ago, at Columbine, because they were angry at being made fun of by jocks or because they were Goths who got just a bit too into the whole death thing. The idea is that Klebold apparently was a suicidal little shit with a hot temper (never a good combination), and Harris was a psychopath (not in the pop-cultural sense in which any person who kills is a psychopath, but in the actual clinical sense). About writings on Harris’s website, Cullen has this to say:

“These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he’s not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority.”

Harris was, in all likelihood, going to snap sometime, somewhere. It happened in high school:

“Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.”

This is scary, scary stuff.

Share This Post

I don’t recall the last extended period of my life when I averaged more than six hours of sleep at night, and during college, I had stretches when I averaged less than five. So the students of Duke University should just deal with it, you know? Yeesh.

What gives me pause is the factoid, contained in the story, that college students average between six and seven hours of sleep a night. Somehow, I suspect that this is skewed a bit. If my experience is any guide, ninety percent of the students are getting between three and five hours, while the remaining ten percent — the stoners, drunks, hop-heads, and just plain freakin’ lazy — pile on more than twelve or thirteen hours a night.

(via Mickey.)

(BTW, something of which I am proud is that I graduated cum laude, and yet I never once pulled an all-nighter studying. I did pull an all-nighter once watching The Wall and a couple other messed up movies, but that was a weekend and I made up for it by sleeping until noon. I think.)

Share This Post

A new project at The Store is the trial launch of an outdoor home-and-garden center, where we’ll be selling trees and bushes and flowers and mulch and plastic flamingoes and all the stuff you’d need to dispose of a dead mobster or two. If it goes well, the other Stores in Buffalo will do it next year. This is the week when we’re putting the whole thing together. I haven’t had much to do with it myself as of yet, but today at around 9:10 a.m. I was out there after carrying out some boxes of stuff. Then I stood and shot the breeze with the woman running the show for a few minutes.

About that time, I heard the unmistakable sound of a jumbo jet’s engines on final approach. One hears this a lot in Buffalo’s Southtowns, since most incoming flights to Buffalo Niagara International Airport approach from the south, but this was different. The plane was quite a bit larger than I’m used to seeing land here, and its approach path was much lower than any other plane that’s ever gone over The Store. It was very different, so much so that the guy standing next to me also said, “Doesn’t that plane look a little low?”

“Yeah, it does,” I said, glancing around at my coworkers, who were apparently taking no notice at all of the plane. After all, as I’ve said, planes in descent over the Southtowns is nothing new.

But what was new was how I could make out the stripes in the American flag painted on the tail, and I could clearly see the rather distinctive blue-and-white hull markings. And then I suddenly remembered the big news story in Buffalo over the last few days, and I realized that the plane I was watching as it made its slow, final approach was this plane.

I may be no fan of that plane’s most important passenger, but still, as an American, there are few thrills to compare with walking outside one’s workplace, looking up into the sky, and seeing Air Force One in slow descent. Today, the President of the United States flew over my head.

And only I and the guy standing next to me, out of perhaps fifty people in the parking lot, realized it.

Share This Post

Lynn Sislo on picky eaters:

“My grandson is a typically picky kid. Not that I don’t expect illogical pickiness from a four-year-old, but he disappointed me recently when he rejected my oatmeal-raisin cookies. To me, oatmeal-raisin cookies are one of the ultimate warm hug foods. When I think about it though, I guess I can understand how someone who has not been clued in on the cultural background that makes oatmeal-raisin cookies a warm hug food might object to a lumpy cookie with black wrinkley things in it.”

Now, that gives me pause. I have no problem with the idea of a kid turning up the nose at, oh, asparagus or spinach or lima beans or whatever. But an oatmeal-raisin cookie? And one that I assume has been baked in that wonderful way so that the cookie’s overall texture is one of gooey softness while still yielding tiny morsels of crunch where the oatmeal at the edges has browned and become encrusted with carmelized sugar? And hell, even given the idea that maybe, just maybe, the presence of little black lumps in the cookie might be off-putting, but I personally am the type of soul for whom the mere assurance that a food item is, in fact, a cookie will offset any ickiness of the appearance.

Like Lynn, I’m always flummoxed by really picky adults — the people who can go to a restaurant that has fifty or sixty items on its menu, and only find one or two things to eat. My sister-in-law detests onions, which makes cooking a bit of a challenge for me, since the entire family loves them. My father is repulsed by the idea of casseroles, for some incredibly odd reason; I adore them and am constantly on the lookout for new baked dishes. My mother beamed proudly when, in my twenties, I started drinking coffee at last (she having been a coffee drinker since her early childhood), but her elation turned to horror when I proceeded to dope it up with sugar. And so on.

Turning back to kids, I remember the first time I was told that most kids hate fish, and I thought, “Huh-whuh?!” I don’t remember ever not liking fish, although I still haven’t got round to enjoying clams (except for chowder, which I love) or oysters. I tried crab, willingly, when I was seven, and I have never stopped loving it. I wasn’t too fond of scallops until I was in my twenties, but I would eat them without complaint. When I got to college and met people who claimed to hate eating fish, I could no more wrap my mind around the concept than Einstein could accept the idea that God just might play dice with the Universe.

My own food preferences have shifted over the years. (I may have written about this recently, come to think of it….hmmmm….) I used to hate mushrooms in all forms, but now I actually enjoy them in a pizza or soup or Chinese dish, although I still won’t simply sit and eat them whole, and I still think stuffed mushrooms are gross. My appreciation of tomatoes and potatoes has also grown, although I will not consume the former by themselves even if in a salad or the latter in their mashed state. And so on.

Lynn suggests a 12-step program for the rehabilitation of picky eaters. Personally, I rather like the approach Blofeld used in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which he ritually hypnotizes picky eaters into being less-picky. Of course, he’s also hypnotically programming them to carry out his plan to cause worldwide sterility in plants and livestock, but I suppose we could leave out the world-domination stuff, eh?

Share This Post