Month: May 2004

Jay Blalock reports on how he gets around his job’s crackdown on outside reading material.

Jay is that rarest of birds: a person who works in a call center, and seems to actually enjoy it. I find this almost completely mindboggling: I worked in a small call-center for a year and a half and hated it. To this day, that’s the only job I’ve had to which I did not feel the slightest guilt when I called in sick. (Which I didn’t do often.)

The rules at my center were pretty much the same: no magazines or novels were allowed, although the site supervisor wasn’t totally militant in enforcing this. My center was devoted to placing outgoing sales calls, so it wasn’t like we had stretches of time between calls to take up by navel-gazing (Jay’s operation is an inbound customer service center), but it could get pretty monotonous just the same, and a magazine or catalog or something often made the boredom palatable.

I worked at that job while I was in my “writing everything longhand” phase, so I tried doing my writing on the job, but it just didn’t work well. I couldn’t get a train of thought going on the stories or the novel, and if I did, I ended up spending an unacceptable amount of time off the phones. All in all, I’m glad I eventually realized that I am not geared toward a job in which my activity is actually measured in terms of minutes spent doing things, and not on actual things accomplished. I actually have far less chance to read on the job now than I did then, but that’s fine with me. In my experience, managers who subscribe to the theory that a minute not spent on company business is a minute wasted are managers who will invent all manner of stupid busywork to fill all those minutes that obviously can’t be devoted to generating sales and/or helping customers. Ninety percent of reports I’ve ever seen fall into this category.

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I recall that once, years ago during the first season of NYPD Blue, I was watching an episode with my family and my father suddenly exclaimed, “God, doesn’t anybody on this show actually look at someone when they’re talking to them?” I thought of this while reading Buffalo News critic Jeff Simon’s take on David Caruso’s acting style in today’s paper:

“Caruso’s solution to his actor’s problem (THOU SHALT NOT ‘ACT’ may well have been a clause in his contract) is to goose up every line with some of the weirdest and most musical line readings in all of television.

He delivers a good half of them with hands on hips. And with shades on. Or looking to the right or left of the person he’s speaking to, as if he can’t bear to be seen full-face by a fellow actor delivering the lines he was given to say….He never undermines the show, mind you, but his insistence on overplaying as much as he can get away with makes his performance one of the nuttiest performances you’ll see on television on a weekly basis. Imagine Jack Lord of Hawaii Five-0 crossed with William Shatner of the original Star Trek and you’ve got it.”

It’s a hilarious article, coming from a guy (Simon) who is rarely if ever hilarious. Check it out. The only glaring omission is that Simon doesn’t point out the way Caruso always seems to strike his poses with the position of the Miami sun in mind.

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Item the First: Eagle-eyed people may have noticed that early trailers and promotional materials for the movie Troy credited the film’s music to Gabriel Yared, while the film now in release sports a score by James Horner. What happened is this: Yared spent a year composing a score for the film, and said score was recorded; but then, when the film was shown to test audiences, some negative comments about the score were apparently recorded, and thus Yared’s entire year of work was dumped and Horner was brought in at the last minute.

This kind of thing happens fairly often these days, unfortunately. By the time a film reaches the “test audience” stage, there really aren’t many things that can be done to address concerns. You can’t rewrite and reshoot; all you can do is re-edit and re-score. This is why film music fans are well-acquainted with the “rejected score” scenario: a composer is announced as attached to a certain project, only to have his or her work dumped prior to release. Sometimes these “rejected scores” get CD releases of their own (Jerry Goldsmith’s Legend score is a good example), but most of the time these rejected scores either get reworked into later projects or become available as highly-sought-after bootleg recordings.

Gabriel Yared has recently made his rejected score available on his official site. The sound quality is very poor, but it’s enough to hear that the score is actually quite good. It’s undoubtedly better than whatever James Horner — a guy who peaked as a composer in 1995 and has been on autopilot ever since — pasted together in the two weeks he had to work with. What’s a real shame here is that Yared has previously been typecast as a composer (The English Patient and Possession are two prominent, and representative, scores of his), and Troy might have been his “breakout” epic work, much as Star Wars was for John Williams and Lord of the Rings was for Howard Shore.

Item the Second: As much as I have always loved John Williams’s music, I haven’t liked his work for the Harry Potter movies. (Williams did not directly compose the score for HP and the Chamber of Secrets, the second film; composer William Ross did the score based heavily on Williams’s themes from the first film.) A lot of Williams’s Potter music is, well, “happy”, and I’ve simply never cared for Williams when he’s writing “happy” music. (His Home Alone scores are the musical equivalent of eating the world’s biggest, gooiest brownie with no glass of milk to wash it down with. By the end, you’re screaming, “Stop the sweetness!”) I have higher hopes for his score for the upcoming HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban, since this is the installment of the series where the books start turning quite a bit darker. AOL has made the score available for listening here. I haven’t been able to get it to work yet — something about security settings — but I’ll check later on and report back.

Item the Third: Unless something happens at the eleventh hour to thwart the release, on Tuesday the expanded CD of John Barry’s magnificent score to Dances With Wolves is due to hit stores. I’ve been waiting for this release for a long time: the original CD was pretty abbreviated, and omitted the film version of the music for the Buffalo Hunt sequence.

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Michael of the Blowhards discovers vampire fiction. Or, I should say, vampire fiction that existed before Dracula. Specifically, there is the fairly famous novel Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and there is John Polidori’s The Vampire which was in turn based on an idea originally entertained by Byron before he set it aside.

I’ve loved vampire stuff for years (Alan Ryan’s anthology The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories is one of my favorite books), although my interests in vampires don’t tend to be very well-served by the vast bulk of vampire literature out there. I tend to think more along the lines of the horror of vampires and the curse inherent in their existence, whereas it seems that most vampire stories either concentrate on the religious aspects of vampirism (often with a healthy dose of Catholicism), or on the erotic nature of vampires (must be all those finely-shaped female necks).

I have written two vampire stories in my “fiction career” (encapsulated in quotes because I’m not sure that producing a body of unpublished work constitutes a career). One was the standard “Boy meets girl, girl is really vampire” tale (and it’s available here); the other is quite a bit more horrific. At some point I took it into my head that maybe in Nazi Germany there was a colleague of Dr. Mengele’s who wondered if he could create a vampire from scratch, using the poor souls in the concentration camps to perform his experiments. I took several whacks at this story idea before finally completing a version I titled “The Balance in the Blood”, and to this date it’s still the most horrific thing I’ve written. I’m still not sure if I like it, although it alone of the stories I’ve written received the most “friendly” rejections. Go figure.

Vampires are hard to do: their lore is so standardized by now that one must either tick off the standard memes of vampire stories, or at least mention why they don’t work along the way. (Witness the bit in Interview with the Vampire, when Louis reveals that vampires aren’t particularly afraid of crucifixes, or the hilarious scene in Love at First Bite when the guy who’s convinced that George Hamilton is a vampire tries to ward him off with a Star of David.) If you skirt some of these issues, people will become confused as to whether you’re writing a vampire story at all; but on the reverse side is the fact that all that vampire lore can end up making a story pretty predictable.

And yet, there they are, those blood-drinking dwellers of the night, captivating the hell out of me. I wonder what it would be like, living in a world where the graveyards lose population at night. I wonder if they’d be unthinking, zombie-like monsters or erudite, suave almost-people whose personas are tinged with profound melancholy. It’s no wonder that I keep returning to vampires; it’s no wonder that I keep reading about them; and it’s no wonder that in my college-geek AD&D years, my favorite player character was my Necromancer whose favorite spell was “Vampiric Touch”.

(The title of this post, by the way, is an allusion to a wonderfully funny vampire story by Christopher Moore.)

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke has somehow drawn a particularly nice assignment: he gets to write some entries for an upcoming fantasy and SF encyclopedia, including one on my favorite of the DC Comics superheroes, Wonder Woman. I often think, where the hell is the great Wonder Woman revival? Why isn’t there a Wonder Woman movie in the works? Does it seem right that the Phantom got his own movie, but not Wonder Woman? (And I thought The Phantom was a pretty good little costumed-hero flick. Pretty good score, too.) It boggles the mind. I would love to see a Wonder Woman movie. Maybe even more than Spiderman.

And, of course, it’s been a while since I posted the following item, so for newer readers, here is my personal choice for the Greatest Single Comic Book Cover of All Time:

Zap! Pow!

(EDIT: Apparently I was spectacularly wrong in assuming Jayme was, er, female, assuming that the picture in Jayme’s Technorati profile is actually a picture of Jayme. I, of all people, well know the pitfalls of having a name that obscures gender. Whoops!)

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The other day, Steven Den Beste wrote a lengthy post about linguistics, which was mildly interesting (not because he was right or wrong or some degree in between, but because I find linguistics itself only mildly interesting). Then, a day or so later, Matthew Yglesias linked SDB’s post, in which he took a couple of mild potshots at SDB for long-windedness and pointing out that Noam Chomsky’s work, like that of many philosophers, may be valuable for something other than whether he is right or wrong. (We still read Aristotle, for example, even though nobody except for the Ayn Rand weirdos think he got it all right.) SDB then appended his post with one of his standard updates, saying of Matthew, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, sneer.”

Well, setting aside the issue of whether Matthew’s post can really be construed as a “sneer” – it seems more like a rolling-of-the-eyes to me, but whatever – that’s not the end of it. It seems that SDB wasn’t content to leave it at that: when I read the comments on Matthew’s post, I read that SDB had employed the same kind of referral-block thing that LGF used against Nathan Newman some time back, first setting it up so that if one clicked Matthew’s link to SDB’s post, one was referred right back to Matthew’s blog (I did not see this and cannot directly confirm this), and later changing it so that it led to SDB’s 404-message (I have confirmed this). I thought, “No way”, but sure enough, it’s so: if you cut-and-paste the URL of SDB’s post from Matthew’s link into your browser, you get the post, but if you directly click Matthew’s link, you get the 404. And it’s not just this way for that one post: I did a search on Matthew’s blog for every time he’s mentioned SDB (using “Den Beste” as my search term), and sure enough, this is now the way it is for every time Matthew has linked SDB.

And it’s not just Matthew. Just looking through a few of the left-leaning blogs on my blogroll, I see that SDB has similarly blocked referrals from Kevin Drum. (Use this post of Kevin’s as a test.) As of now he does not seem to have got round to blocking Atrios or Tbogg, but that’s probably because those fellows haven’t linked SDB in a while.

I don’t know if there’s more to the story here than is public, but SDB has never struck me as the kind of ultra-thin-skinned guy he’s evidently decided to act like in this manner. At least, he’s always cultivated the image of Blogistan’s uber-rationalist, the guy who carefully constructs every argument and follows it through to logical conclusion no matter where it leads, the guy who prides himself on engineer-like thinking and who doesn’t really care what you or anyone else thinks. (I didn’t say that’s the way he really is, I said that’s the way he presents himself. Big difference.)

But coming from a guy who once went to great lengths to argue the evils of pseudonymity on the Web and who can at the drop of a hat identify at least six informal fallacies in any argument no matter how short, this kind of thing is very disappointing. No doubt SDB has some rationale for doing this – maybe he doesn’t want to have to wade through the e-mail crush that must result whenever one of the biggies of Left Blogistan links him, or something like that – but it hardly seems fair for him to block their referrals at the same time he’s linking them back. As several of Matthew’s commenters point out, SDB has no comments on his blog and he disabled his message board eons ago, so if he’s just worried about the onset of liberal trolls, well – that’s just sad. And it’s not like Matthew or Kevin link him all that often to begin with, so what is SDB afraid of?

For my money, this shows that SDB is lot less willing to let disagreement run off his back than he otherwise implies. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, sneer” kind of loses its cachet as a rejoinder when SDB is simultaneously reaching into his bag of tech-tricks to keep people off the scent.

UPDATE: SDB has since appended his post with the explanation that I expected: “There’s a difference between criticism of the material presented in an article and mocking disparagement of the author of the article. The former is welcome; the latter is not….I do not need any refer traffic from those who cannot tell the difference between these. That is why blog authors who express their ‘disagreement’ via ad hominem will be placed into another kind of ‘bozo bin’, and why direct refers from their sites will be refused by this server. (Their readers can still visit my site directly, but only by going to a small amount of extra effort. Most will not.)”

This rings rather hollow, given the number of ad hominem artists who have at one time or another been featured on SDB’s blogroll (Rachel Lucas, for example) or defended by SDB in his blog (LGF, for example). To SDB, apparently leftie namecalling is unacceptable ad hominem while rightie namecalling is “authorial voice”. OK, then. Of course, in the Matthew Yglesias post he links back, Matthew (a) doesn’t really sneer; (b) openly admits that he is not qualified to delve into merits of the argument; and (c) poses a larger point that SDB completely ignores. Therefore, it seems to me that the combination of summing up Matthew’s post as a “sneer”, combined with the characterization of Matthew as someone who “cannot tell the difference” between criticism and “mocking disparagement” (as lunatic a characterization of Matthew — and, incidentally, Kevin Drum — as I think I’m likely to see), constitute an ad hominem attack all on their own. (Plus, I’d almost bet money that I could find at least one or two examples of “mocking disparagement” somewhere in SDB’s body of work.)

But that’s not even what really bugs me here. It’s that last parenthetical clause of SDB’s, where he openly acknowledges that most of their readerships won’t go to the small amount of extra effort needed to get around his little firewall. Linkage is really what makes Blogistan work the way it does. Even granting SDB’s distinction between “linkers” (bloggers who mostly link other stuff, like Glenn Reynolds) and “thinkers” (bloggers who produce mostly new material, like SDB himself), it’s still very rare to see a “thinker” produce something in Blogistan that’s without any connection to something else. That’s why the vast majority of even SDB’s essays kick off with an “On Screen” citation to something on the Web, be it a blog post or a news article somewhere.

By mucking around with the ins-and-outs of linkage in this way, SDB tacitly endorses the much-vaunted, and much-derided, “echo chamber effect” of Blogistan. The three blogs he cites as being so blocked — Matthew’s, Kevin Drum’s, and the Daily Kos (which I don’t read, and thus cannot comment on its content) — constitute three of the most heavily trafficked liberal blogs in existence. Thus, in one fell swoop, SDB has seen to it that most of his arguments will never be seen by these readers. And for him to react suchly against three blogs that have linked him a combined four times in the last six months (and with two of those coming yesterday) just seems, well, a bit over-the-top.

(To be fair, the Kos post SDB cites is deserving of at least some indignation, seeing as how it is riddled with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. That post is a sneer, and a poorly written one, no doubt about it.)

One thing that attracts me about Blogistan is the way controversies (what would on Usenet be called “flamewars”) tend to die out fairly quickly, as posts fall off the main pages of those blogs involved. Why SDB felt the need to do this is utterly beyond me, especially since his is one of the most-visited and linked blogs in existence. Ultimately, a person willing to go to such lengths to disrupt the way blogging works, and to thus direct such efforts at two guys who in my experience are really very mild even when they do engage in “mocking disparagement” (Daniel Davies said far worse about SDB back during the whole “bloody shirt waving” fiasco, in which I thought Daniel was in the wrong), and to do so even while linking back to those guys, seems to me a person whose blogging ego has inflated beyond the point where I can no longer take him seriously, and whose trustworthiness as a blogger I now question.

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The H.H. Richardson Complex, Buffalo, NY.

This imposing structure dominates the campus of Buffalo State College. It is a superb example of Buffalo’s great architecture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — and it is in very dire need of restoration and even in danger of being lost, even though it is a registered historical landmark building. The usual suspects are, of course, to blame: the City of Buffalo can’t afford to do the work, and the state and county refuse to help.

I was reminded of this building when I followed one of Steve of The Modulator‘s links, this one to Modern Ruins, a set of photographic essays of just that: buildings left to decay, like the Richardson complex (featured on the site here). One doesn’t have to go to Greece and walk the Acropolis to see ruins.

More views of both the interior and exterior of the Richardson Complex are available at the site linked by the photo.

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I actually saw quite a bit of weird stuff online this week, but I decided to go with an old formula that I hadn’t employed in a while: a two-term Google search, using “Cthulhu” as one of the terms.

So, I started by trying to see if I could find a spoof of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip by searching under “Cthulhu Peanuts”. This led me to Cthulhu Coffee, a site which has some recipes for items you could serve at a Cthulhu-themed party, I suppose. And, flipping through those recipes, I came across a Jell-O recipe that requires the use of a really cool, or really demented, kitchen device: a brain-shaped Jell-o mold.

I’m not sure what the weirdest thing in all that happened to be, but the whole thing was pretty weird, I suppose.

(By the way, if you visit Cthulhu Coffee, make sure to check out their sidebar navigation. It’s a hoot.)

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Undoubtedly, the most depressing sign of the onset of summer is the passing of children left buckled in their car-seats in hot weather while parents go off to do whatever. Sure enough, I see my first such instance today — only this one’s different, because a nine-year-old happened to walk by the car and observe the reddened, sweat-drenched infant.

Good God, people. CSI even did an episode that revolved around an infant left in a hot car. How can people not know this yet?

But then, not a day goes by at The Store that I don’t observe a parent allowing a child to ride a shopping cart by standing on the front-edge of the bottom rack and hanging on to the front, so that any frontal-impact of that cart against another object will be softened by the child’s body. So, I guess either people think it’s not going to happen to them, (“I was only going in for just a minute), or they have no real idea of the danger (“I can stop the cart in time and I don’t push fast”), or, well, child safety is something that goes away once you get to take the plastic plugs out of all the electrical outlets.

(link via Darth Swank)

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….I just caught the last couple minutes of whatever that “America’s Tribal Council” thing was, and I have to admit that I was pleased to see this guy get the big “second-fiddle” prize (with the prize being the same as that of the actual winner, so, you know).

(Don’t click if you don’t want to know before you watch the show.)

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