Month: August 2004

(This post is being written at around 1:30 am on August 27, but I’m using Blogger’s post-date feature to back-date it.)

I don’t know if this is going to herald some grand return to blogging on my part. Probably not, since my energies are likely to be focused in another direction for a while.

Our son was born tonight.

But.

I’m not going to go into long details, but there were unforeseen complications toward the very end of the process. The condensed version: he’s being kept in the neo-natal ward until his condition is stabilized, and the worst-case scenario involves brain damage. And we may not even know about that for another six months.

But.

I have a son who may turn out perfectly fine (the doctor says he’s seen infants in worse shape turn out perfectly fine), to go along with my daughter who’s perfectly fine and less than two weeks from entering Kindergarten. For a onetime nihilistic hater of children (who still isn’t particularly fond of other people’s children), that’s quite a thing.

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I’m breaking my radio silence (“Situation unchanged, Admiral!”) just long enough to note the passing of another film music legend, Elmer Bernstein.

Bernstein’s filmography is a good long one. He was one of the composers who bridged the Golden and Silver Ages of film music — along with Jerry Goldsmith — and he was active pretty much up until the end, even being nominated for an Oscar two years ago for his score to Far From Heaven. (He lost to Elliot Goldenthal’s Frida.)

Bernstein’s music was always a veritable fountain of melody and excellent orchestration, and I heard in his work the voice of Aaron Copland and Americana perhaps more than in any other film composer’s. I love the scores to The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird, and even Heavy Metal. I don’t own nearly enough of his music. (He is far from the only composer for whom this is true, sadly.)

By all accounts, Bernstein was a gregarious and charming individual. I, of course, wouldn’t know, but I do recall watching him speaking on a show that American Movie Classics once broadcast about the use of music in film. Specifically discussing the scene in The Ten Commandments when the Hebrews begin the Exodus, he related how he noted that director Cecil B. DeMille had cut the scene so it was very ponderous and slow-moving, and thus Bernstein scored it accordingly. However, when DeMille heard what Bernstein had written, the director said something along the lines of, “No, no, no, that’s not right! I screwed this scene up and shot it too slow, so you have to use the music to speed it up!” This Bernstein did. What got me about this TV segment was that Bernstein told this story with a chuckle and a gleam in his eye. (To this day, Bernstein’s score is pretty much the only thing I like about The Ten Commandments.)

I could claim sadness at Bernstein’s passing, but instead I’d just like to note his amazing legacy of music. Well done, Maestro.

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Here’s some stuff gleaned from the blogroll today. I usually only do “Lazy Linkage”-type posts when I’m either busy or sick, both of which apply: this month is going to be very busy for me, and I’m nursing a really annoying cold right now. August is a stupid month to get a cold. December, January — those are months for colds. But August? When it’s sunny out and 78 degrees? That’s just wrong on so many levels. And this one must be pretty obvious, since in the course of wandering about The Store in my Dayquil-enhanced stupor today, nearly every coworker I encountered took one look at me and said some variant of, “Geez, are you sick today?” But hey, I got a lot of sympathy. I like sympathy. (But, to put things in a bit of perspective, one of my favorite coworkers had her first day back at The Store today after a lengthy leave-of-absence for medical reasons. It was good to see her back stocking the dairy cases.)

:: Michael Lopez links a piece on the easy access to porn by Naomi Wolf. It’s a pretty interesting article, and I agree with quite a bit of it. It bugs me to no end that erotic mysteriousness seems to be an unknown quantity these days. Also check out William Moon‘s follow-up. (William is Michael’s co-blogger.)

:: Sticking with Mr. Lopez, check out his advice for would-be re-enactors of The Paper Chase. I confess that I never, not once, considered going to law school. (And this will probably sound really weird and/or stupid, but I find law libraries really creepy. I don’t like it when all of the books on the shelves look the same.)

:: Anne Zook links a piece by Eric Alterman on how on Earth “liberal” became such a dirty word, along with offering her own thoughts along the way. I’ve wondered this myself a bit. These days, George McGovern is often cited as the ultimate political loser, despite the fact that he got beat by the biggest political crook in American history.

:: TBogg makes a music recommendation, for the new kd lang album. He’s the second blogger in a week I’ve seen recommending that album, so I’ll probably be picking it up. Like Tom, I love her voice but her songs themselves usually don’t thrill me. I do think she got kind of screwed-over on the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, for which she recorded a very good song that was used on the end credits while a much lesser effort by Sheryl Crow was used for the opening titles.

:: Aaron posts for the first time in a month, to show off his new fence. Next up: the front porch, on which he plans to sit and throw cans at passing kids on bikes while he shouts homilies about “back in the day”.

:: Wanna get published, but are tired of the constant pessimism in the whole enterprise? Read this. I hope this is portable from the mystery genre to fantasy and SF. I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be. And besides, I don’t really have a choice: it’s the stories, and me. They jump, I jump. Just like Jack in Titanic. (via The Book Stops Here)

:: Now, the announcement. I alluded above, and in a post a few days ago, that The Wife and I are expecting the imminent arrival of Kid Number Two at some point in the next several weeks. Aside from that, there’s enough other stuff going on in August that is going to be occupying my time: stuff like the annual Toy Festival in East Aurora, NY; the Erie County Fair; my company’s summer picnic thing; and just general writing stuff. So I’ve decided to go on hiatus starting now, and I’ll return once Kid Number Two has emerged from his/her cloning cylinder/gestation tube/birthing cocoon. Sudden, I know, but I was leaning toward a hiatus anyway, and with The Wife entering her maternity leave this week, the time seems right. (And besides, there’s the added incentive to keep visiting: that’s the only way my fine readers will know when the latest offspring of Our Alien Overlords is pluck’d from its maternal chamber.)

(I do, of course, reserve the right to post occasionally, if I so desire — say, if George Lucas brings all of his incomplete footage for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith to my home, or if Peter Jackson asks me to look over his draft for The Hobbit, or if George W. Bush inadvertently endorses John Kerry.)

Here, by the way, is my favorite picture of The Wife and The Daughter. (The original Move Over Britney! women, one might say.) I took this when we were in our “Six months in Syracuse” phase, more than a year and a half ago (wow, that long!), but they haven’t changed in my eyes, anyway.

So farewell, readers, and hopefully I’ll be back sooner rather than later!

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A Wonder Woman montage.

Darth Swank linked this selection of the 50 sexiest cartoon babes, which is a fairly nifty list, although I can’t imagine why anyone would put the woman from The Family Guy anywhere near a list like this, much less in front of such “cartoon babes” as Mary Jane Watson. (Speaking of whom, MJ only places fortieth? It looks to me like Peter Parker’s not the only one who doesn’t know what he’s been missing.)

Of course, longtime readers will know what’s coming right now, since I post it here every few months. I find the picture above stunningly gorgeous, and I once again renew my wish that someone would make a Wonder Woman movie (and do it well). But that still isn’t quite my favorite picture of the beautiful Amazon. That would be this:

And perusing the 50 “cartoon babes” named, I find it odd that apparently nobody has seen the film Heavy Metal; otherwise, surely Taarna would make the cut. I mean, well….

I mean, how on Earth can the woman from The Family Guy hold a candle to that? Much less Betty or Veronica from Archie?! Taarna would cut off all their heads before going off to save the universe from the Loc-Nar. (I know, it sounds dumb. So’s the movie.)

(BTW, the image gallery in the Taarna site linked above is NOT safe for work. Unless you work in a comic-book shop, or some other emporium wherein nudity and bondage are par-for-the-course.)

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Megan McArdle has decided to harness the power of blogs in order to further the cause of literature. Her efforts begin here.

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I’ve always liked “scientific kookery”: those whacko “theories” that are little more than conjectures with little or no evidence behind them, that still somehow to find lots of adherents amongst folks who are to other appearances perfectly reasonable people. I’m talking stuff like UFOlogy, Graham Hancock’s ideas about a very ancient technological civilization on Earth (predating the last Ice Age), and “Hollow Earth” theorists who think that the world is, well, “hollow”.

That last is a really fun one, and via MeFi I now see that if you have a spare $20,000 lying around, you can join an expedition departing in 2006 for the hole in the Arctic Ocean that leads inside our planet! Now who wouldn’t want to do something like that?

Since this expedition seems to draw heavily on Eskimo myths, I can only surmise that these people were too busy munching popcorn in the Indiana Jones movies when Dr. Jones warns his students against folklore and “taking mythology at face value”. Or that they missed the episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which the guy with double-vision is going to lead an expedition to climb “both peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro”.

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I have a new music review up this week at GMR, of three CDs by the upstate NY (Albany area) Irish bar band Hair of the Dog. Short version: I like these guys. Long version: here.

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I’ve just checked Christopher Moore‘s official website for the first time in quite a while, and I see that he has a new book coming out this winter, called The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. He has the first chapter online here, but I think I’ll wait.

Scrolling down the front of Moore’s front page, I see that all of his previous books have been reissued with consistent cover art. Too bad that consistent cover art is so consistently hideous. I mean, these covers look like they were done by Mrs. Micklethwaite’s artistically-challened third grade class. Yeecchhh. (At the opposite end of the spectrum is the cover of the Israeli edition of Bloodsucking Fiends, which would probably make me jump back if the bookstore had it face-out on the shelf.)

(I wrote about Moore’s most recent book, Fluke, a year ago, here.)

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Rejection massively reduces IQ!

So all those editors who refuse to buy my work are making me stupid. Well, that’s just great.

Actually, I don’t think this is the kind of rejection the article is talking about, but hey, anything to make it all not my fault!

(Link via Teresa Nielsen Hayden‘s latest open thread. TNH’s blog has the best comment threads you’ll find anywhere.)

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Congratulations to Mandalei (I have no idea if that’s her real name) on becoming engaged and, more importantly, getting to finally read bridal magazines without pretense.

In a related note, I’ve decided to address my current reading slump by dipping into The Wife’s bookshelf, since nothing on my own really appeals right now. So I’m going to be reading a couple of romance novels and other stuff clearly marketed toward the “wimminfolk”: you know, front covers with pictures of glasses of wine and the title in looping cursive script and the like. One thing that always amuses me is that men complain incessantly that they have no understanding of women at all, and yet, there’s all this written material out there like magazines and novels that men could surely peruse to gain some insights into women, and yet, they don’t. Weird. But then, my general opinion of “maleness” is pretty low to begin with.

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