Month: March 2005

Apparently Kim has managed to annoy some people with her opinions, one of which is that Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is way too longwinded and dull. That last seems like less an opinion than a statement of verifiable fact to me (I count myself among the extremely lucky ones, having given up on Jordan a hundred pages into the second book), but there are people out there in the world who genuinely still await each thousand-page tome in Jordan’s series with drooling anticipation.

But what’s truly eye-popping, in this case, is the nature of the complaint on Kim’s blog in the first place:

I think half of you are talking crap. Robert Jordan is my favourite book series ever! Sick of the wheel of time, if you think WoT is the only book to have similar ideas to another book then get your thumb out of your ass because EVERY book has similar ideas to other books. You mightn’t of read them so how do you know? And if WoT is a LoTR like you claim, which it isn’t, I prefer it this way. LoTR is the shittest book I ever read. I didn’t like the book, drawn out to long…Movies ok though. Anyway you can’t have read all the books yet, or up to book 8. Moiraine dies in book 5, gandalf doesn’t die. If anyway is like gandolf it’s cadsuane. if thats how you spell it. and to Shai’tan being another name for devil or evil or wateva, everybook that mentions evil is just copying of satan by ur veiw

(That is cut-and-pasted directly, by the way; I have made no effort to correct spelling or punctuation.)

It’s pretty much pure difference of opinion here, which is fine as that goes, except that here we have a die-hard fan of The Wheel of Time claiming that The Lord of the Rings, which in its entirety is less than one-third the length of WoT as it stands right now (in its still uncompleted state), is “drawn out too long”.

This reminds me of the episode of Friends when a love-sick, lonely Ross shacks up with Janice, the ultra-annoying former girlfriend of Chandler’s who popped up at inopportune moments throughout the series’s run. Ross has become so whiney that Janice dumps him, at which point Ross suddenly snaps back to reality when he says to her, “I’ve become so bad that…I annoy you. Oh. My. God.”

(I know that this reference is meaningless to non-Friends fans, but it’s the best I got right now.)

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It’s been a long time since I cited Warren Ellis in my “Burst of Weirdness” series, since — well, it’s kind of like when in my high school gym class, we were playing “Touch Football”, with the school’s starting varsity quarterback on one of the teams, so of course the other (mine, of course) kept getting clobbered until the gym teacher amended the rules that that QB was the only one who could get tackled. (Not that it helped. We still got clobbered. But it was fun getting to take free shots at the guy. I very nearly nailed him myself, but for a wicked block in the back that I now know should have drawn a fifteen-yard penalty.)

What I’m saying is that Warren Ellis is basically a one-stop weirdness shop, and I could fuel the Sunday Burst of Weirdness until the End of Time just by citing stuff he links. But sometimes, there’s something that I just gotta link.

Like this record cover.

I demand that the contents of this album be reissued on CD, with instruction booklet and supplemental DVD!

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Lynn Sislo found this aerial photography site, where I discovered in the New York State section this aerial image of downtown Buffalo, which starkly lays out the big problem the city has to overcome in terms of changing its infrastructure to minimize past errors and develop things the way we now know they should have done all along.

At the photo’s center is downtown Buffalo proper, with One HSBC Center, the city’s tallest building, towering over our minor-league baseball stadium. That oval-shaped building near the bottom, with the silver roof, is HSBC Arena, which was built eight or nine years ago with the promise that a new arena would spur all kinds of development on that end of Buffalo. Well, look at the photo. There’s no development happening there.

Off the left is the city’s waterfront, where the Buffalo River flows into the extreme end of Lake Erie (which just beyond empties into the Niagara River). That’s the “Inner Waterfront”, actually, and there’s nothing doing down there. That bit of land over on the extreme left shows where the “Outer Waterfront” is — it’s the part of Buffalo’s waterfront that sits right on Lake Erie, as opposed to the Buffalo River — and there’s very little happening down there, too. (Although there are some bizarrely huge plans in place.)

But notice one big thing about the city of Buffalo: downtown is very close to the waterfront, but on all sides facing the water, downtown Buffalo is hemmed in by elevated freeways. For reasons passing understanding, at some point years ago the powers-that-be in Buffalo decided that cutting downtown off from the water by erecting giant virtual barriers of concrete was a good idea, and now the city is brainstorming ways to fix this colossal error.

See that white-roofed building, just to the north of HSBC Arena? That’s the old Memorial Auditorium (former home of the Sabres and other events), which is now slated to be gutted and turned into a Bass Pro Outdoor World store. The building is literally a stone’s throw from not one but two elevated freeways, on two of its four sides. The higher of the two freeways, the one that runs southward past the HSBC Arena, is the Buffalo Skyway, which is one of the oddest roadways I’ve ever encountered. I actually love the drive up and over the Skyway; there’s a wonderful moment on that road when you come around the Aud and all of Buffalo is right in front of you and for a split second it feels like you’re flying (if you’re driving fast enough). But a moment like that is high price to pay for such a giant concrete eyesore cutting off downtown from the waterfront, as well as casting under concrete shadow what should be the city’s finest district.

We’ve got a lot of challenges here. Let’s hope we’re up to them.

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Via John Scalzi I see that you can now get a LEGO kit of the second Death Star. How cool is that!

However, I have to note that between the LEGO-laser firing and the stand that supports this Death Star, the whole item reminds me more of Mike Wazowski than it does the lethal battle station from Return of the Jedi.

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It’s reported here that SF author Andre Norton is near death:

“She is losing the battle with her illness and is tired of fighting,” wrote Sue Stewart on a Norton message board. “I made the decision late yesterday evening to bring her back home to be with us, her cat and her books when she departs.

Damn. At least we’ll always have Norton’s body of work — which, since she was prolific and lived to 93, is quite a large body of work indeed. I need to read more of it, that’s for sure.

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I now have two sets of five questions to answer. Anyone else want to ask me five questions, or have me ask you five questions?

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I meant to link this two weeks ago, but I forgot. Since Buffalo and Erie County are in the midst of continued economic disaster (although there are hopeful signs for downtown Buffalo — let’s hear it for those “culturals”!), more cheerful economic news can be found in Syracuse, where the gigando-normous DestinyUSA project continues to grind merrily along. The big news is that a pre-Destiny project, a high-tech research center that will be necessary to develop the technologies that will make Destiny possible, has signed its first tenants:

Four technology companies will relocate here in the next few months – and will be the first tenants for Destiny USA’s 1-million-square-foot research and development building to be constructed in Salina.

Yup, you read that right: companies relocating to Upstate New York. The initial forecast for employment by these companies? Eight hundred jobs in two years.

While we in Buffalo are finally becoming aware that there’s water all over the place, Syracuse is busy sticking its finger in the dike.

(Yes, I’m still skeptical about locating the world’s biggest mall/resort/casino/hotel complex/sports complex/spaceport in Syracuse, but hey, if they’re getting ready to actually bring companies in to the area and hire people, I’ll put my skepticism on the back burner.)

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No link, since I’ve seen it all over the place lately — actually, I’ve always seen this all over the place: it’s the statement, usually made when someone claims that people in Profession X or Business Y or Avocation Z are not paid enough, that if they want to make more, they should just quit and go get a job where they’re paid more. This is complete nonsense, and it is basically meaningless — it’s just a different way of saying “Oh, shut up”.

Changing jobs isn’t like changing brands of Raisin-Bran, and it’s not a simple thing like it is to stop buying Kellogg’s and get Post instead.

(That said, it’s simply a fact that not every job is going to get paid what it might morally deserve. What’s morally desirable and economically possible are often two different things. Take it from a guy who thinks that the person cleaning the grocery store bathroom should be making $19.00 an hour, but who knows he’d be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, if he voiced that opinion.)

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I’m glad to see that the man who [allegedly] shot four people, killing three, in an Atlanta courtroom yesterday has been captured. These events kept unfolding on FOX News yesterday, which I saw on the TV in the cafe at The Store, every time I walked through to sweep or change the garbages. It boggled my mind that security in a courthouse in one of the nation’s largest cities could be so lax as to allow a criminal to wrest a firearm away from a deputy, and then allow him to escape after killing three people. But then, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with city courthouses, so maybe it really is easier than I would suspect to do just that.

So let’s make it harder, folks — especially if the criminal in question, I read yesterday, has a history of sneaking weapons into his court appearances.

(BTW, I do not believe in capital punishment. But things like this really put that conviction to the test. I hate to admit this, but there really are times when I believe “We shouldn’t execute that criminal” with all the conviction that I apply to my belief that “We shouldn’t eat our dessert first”.)

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