Month: September 2005

OK. So I have a well-documented predilection for “workwear chic”, if such a thing can be said to exist.

But I am not going to go this far. Even I have my boundaries.

(via LC Scotty)

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I’m sure Sean will kick himself for not thinking of this title for his post, but anyway, he links a fascinating article about a guy who’s been on a kick re-engineering the lowly screw so it works better. This caught my eye because, while I’m unfamiliar (as of now) with the Sammy Super Screw, I do use the Tapcon masonry screw constantly at The Store. I recommend them highly. These are what I use to mount all manner of stuff to our brick and concrete walls: signage, shelving, and even the brackets for the US flags we have on the outside of our building. You just use the Tapcon drill bit (enclosed in the large pack of screws) to pre-drill your hole, and then the screw just goes right in and doesn’t work its way back out again. (Just use a good drill, though. Nothing sucks more than trying to drill holes in masonry with a crappy drill.)

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Yup, this is an occasion: I am actually going to bleg for the first time ever in this space. (I think. I’m sure I have some eagle-eyed, elephant-memoried reader who will recall sometime when I’ve blegged in the past.)

Anyway, if anyone out there owns the soundtrack CD to the film Cousins, and would be possessed of kindness sufficient to make me a copy of it (or even e-mail me the tracks), I’d be eternally grateful. I recently watched the film again for the first time in years, and I’d forgotten how gorgeous Angelo Badalamenti’s score is; also, I’d like to include one or two tracks from it in a film music compilation CD I’m planning to make as a Christmas gift for a friend or two.

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….because I want to lobby for a one-hundred percent budget decrease for County Hospital.

That’s right: I’m done with ER. I’ve made no secret that I’ve been bored for some time with the show. For God’s sake, Nurse Sam and her brat kid are the least interesting characters in the entire history of series television, and I say that as someone who as a kid actually watched that spin-off show about Enos from The Dukes of Hazzard. Watching Dr. Kovac pine for this self-absorbed train wreck of a woman is just mind-numbingly dull, and I’m finally tired of the show’s fourth or fifth iteration of bringing in a bunch of new med students who will be taught by the current batch of docs who were the new med students three seasons ago, before those docs left for other hospitals (and their actors for other shows). As much as I love Maura Tierney and Parminder Nagra, I’m just not interested in watching them learn the same life lessons about being an ER doc that Drs. Pratt, Carter, and all the others already learned.

But that was all the mounting sense of boredom. Last night’s episode of ER actually made me angry, and angry’s not something I need in great supply right now.

Without going into gory detail, the episode’s main medical storyline involved a woman who was carrying a baby as a surrogate mother for a couple who have been unable to conceive. The pregnant woman, already in labor, wants very much to have the baby vaginally, but the infant turns out to have moved into a breech-birth position. At this point, everybody and their brother — including the annoying “young gun” doctor played by Shane West (a very talented actor who was far better served by the infinitely superior scripts of Once and Again) — starts lobbying this woman to have a Caesarian section, to the point where the father-to-be is making noises about getting a court order to force the surrogate mom to have the C-section.

Well, she doesn’t have the C-section, and in the course of labor and delivery the infant’s umbilical cord is compressed, resulting in oxygen deprivation. Upon delivery, the infant has to be intubated and is whisked off to the NICU, since it’s established as being basically brain-dead. The father and mother depart without their child, and the surrogate mom apparently doesn’t want the child either.

Alert readers may sense that this subject matter was, for me, uncomfortably close to what played out when Little Quinn was born. But that’s the problem: many of the events depicted in the episode stand in absolute contrast to what our real-life experience actually was, to the extent that the ER show struck me as being almost dishonest. To wit:

:: There seems to be a perception today — tacitly endorsed by last night’s ER — that a C-section is a fairly benign procedure which should be invoked at any sign of difficulty at all. The fact is, a C-section is an invasive surgical procedure that is not the cure-all that ER implied it was. The episode’s constant implication that if only this stupid woman had consented to the Caesarian, her baby would have been born healthy is simply not true.

:: The episode was billed in previews as a “turning point” for the Shane West character (who’s so unmemorable that I can’t even remember the character’s name), which strikes me as odd since the Shane West character had a “turning point” last year when he was on the scene of an accident at a party when an overloaded balcony collapsed. But he had one moment that was so stunningly awful that I can’t believe any doctor would behave that way: after the baby is delivered and placed in the bassinet for intubation, the surrogate mother asks how he is, and Shane West snaps at her, “He’s not breathing and he has no pulse. What does that tell you?” This was absolutely disgusting.

:: And quite frankly, I find the whole “Stupid woman ignoring the Knowledgable Male Doctor to her detriment” subtext of the episode unsettling.

:: After Little Quinn was born to quite similar circumstances as the baby on the show, it took more than a week before it was conclusively determined that he was brain damaged, and even then, there was no way of telling just how severe the resultant disabilities would be (or even what those disabilities were). On ER, the docs made their conclusive diagnosis of hopeless brain damage within hours. Little Quinn was on a ventilator for over a week before he was strong enough to breathe on his own; ER made it sound like a hopeless defeat that the hours-old newborn was still on the machine.

I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that this show, whose long decline from unmissable staple of my Thursday nights to a boring shell of what it once was, is over for me. For my medical-TV fix, I’ll still have House and, when it returns in mid-season, Scrubs.

So long, ER. It was a good nine years or so.

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The answers to my quiz from the other day are now available here. If you still want to try the quiz, go ahead — the answers are on a different post entirely, so as not to spoil it.

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Kinda busy today, so just some random bullet stuff:

:: Darth Swank is heralding a return to blogging. Hoo-ray.

:: I am now addicted to the FOX medical drama House, which views like if Scrubs were a drama and not a sitcom with Dr. Cox as its main character. House may end up replacing ER as my main fix for medical drama.

:: New definition of Chutzpah: Getting shown the back door at your managerial job for gross incompetence, and then getting hired on again at the exact same place as a consultant for just how bad things got at that job because of your gross incompetence. (Of course, you don’t actually admit your gross incompetence. You find the nearest convenient person from the opposing political party and throw them under the bus, because that’s what the talking points tell you to do.)

:: Official complaint about the New England Stupid Patriots, NFL Week Three, 2005 Season: Don’t tell me that the StuPats aren’t regular recipients of unbelievably good luck. (Yeah, yeah, they also had two major injuries in the same game. I’m not interested in debating the StuPats; only in bitching about them.)

:: Random NFL complaint: this crap about keeping information about player injuries as secret as possible is just getting absurd. Here’s the latest example, which I think makes Bill Belichick look like an ass (not that this, in my opinion, takes much). But he’s not alone: just try getting any member of the Bills’ coaching staff or front office to come clean as to just what Roscoe Parrish’s wrist injury actually is.

:: Distressed Jeans? Huh?! I always thought that the attraction of denim was that the stuff takes years to get that lived-in look and feel, and then retains that feel for years more. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

:: Via Alan (he of the “three or four readers”, who must have each voted an awful lot of times in the Artvoice thing), I see that one possible design for a signature bridge to replace the Peace Bridge (the bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario) has been unveiled, here. (PDF). Always helpful on my end, though, here are the two pictures from the New Millennium Group document. First is the bridge leading into Buffalo; second is the bridge leading into Fort Erie. I assume they’ll commission an actual artist to do better mockups, but for now these will suffice:

Of course, any new bridge is contingent upon getting the US Customs people to actually staff the damned inspection booths on our side. In fact, I’d kind of like to see how the existing Peace Bridge traffic flow goes on a busy day when the US Customs side is fully staffed.

:: Don’t forget about my quiz on cultural stuff, wherein I get to define what counts as being “cultured”, here. In fact, this would be a fun game to pass around Blogistan — everybody should make up their own quizzes along this line, sinc everybody has a different set of cultural stuff they call “home”. (Yes, I know that this is a really badly-done metaphor. I don’t feel like cooking up a new one.) Instead of everybody answering the same quizzes, everybody would answer everybody else’s quiz, and everybody would have their own quiz answered. Or something like that.

:: Oh yeah, as of yesterday, my age equals Thurman Thomas’s uniform number. Good old Squirmin’ Thurman!

See you all tomorrow, I hope. I may find something better to do than blogging, you know. (Perish the thought….)

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A while back I pointed to this FilmScoreMonthly message boards thread, in which a really angry fan of the original Battlestar Galactica show is flinging feces in every possible direction in an effort to smear the current Battlestar Galactica show. Well, ten days later, the thread is still going strong, with Mr. Paddon still fighting the good fight…and now providing the helpful information that he’s been actively writing fanfic for a website called GalaticaFanfic.com. Well, I’m always one to follow the linkie thingies wherever they go, and here’s what I found at that sight:

:: A story, described by its author thusly: “A Battlestar Galactica/Dune/Lost in Space/Dracula/Clan of the Cave Bear/Fabulous World of Krypton Crossover Fanfic”.

:: A poem called “There Are Those…Who Believe”, which opens with this amazing stanza:

Journeying through the naked stars, we be
A rag tag fleet surviving the whims of villainy
Forced by betrayal, our homes to flee
Needs must we seek out Earth, the 13th Colony.

:: A Christmas song, called “Muffy the Red-Nosed Daggit”.

:: A song called “You Are My Viper” (sung to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”).

I’m inevitably thinking of the immortal tagline from Wayne’s World: “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll hurl.”

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One piece of classical music that I listen to fairly regularly, playing it every six months or so, is Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1, which is probably one of the most-performed works in all of classical music. And listening to it, I can certainly understand why: it’s got the kind of grand epic Romantic sweep that audiences love, it’s got one wonderful melody after another (including one of the most famous classical melodies ever), it showcases both the full orchestra in all its glory and the virtuoso piano in all its pyrotechnic glory. Yup, I love the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1.

And I also hate it.

That may seem strong, but every time I hear it, I come away convinced that only the wonderful melodies (well, some of the wonderful melodies) and the work’s inherent, in-your-face drama are what keeps it around. Musically, the piece is a structural nightmare.

Consider the concerto’s very first melody, which is — as mentioned above — one of the most famous melodies in all of classical music. There’s a brief intro by the horns, and then the piano starts banging those big chords as the strings sound The Melody. Then, after the strings are done, the piano itself plays The Melody. Then there’s some virtuosic stuff, and then a big tutti section in which the whole orchestra sounds The Melody. And then, after a fairly awkward transition, the movement’s meter and tempo change — and The Melody is never heard again. So we’ve just spent five or six minutes becoming intimately familiar with a theme that Tchaikovsky just tosses aside.

There’s still good stuff to be heard, but the transitions are always awkward in the Concerto Number One, with Tchaikovsky constantly seeming to build toward a certain kind of idea but then inexplicably breaking off and doing something completely different (in the middle of the first movement, there’s a “building” passage that simply stops and then the timpani gives a loud roll, and we’re on to something completely different).

The second movement combines both the traditional slow movement with a bit of scherzo material that does nothing for me, and again, the two distinct “voices” of the movement don’t do more than simply exist side-by-side. As for the last movement, it’s probably the most successful of the three. Its structure is, at least, competent.

I’m generally not bothered as much by structural faults in music; but the overall mood of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 is one of excess. In the entire forty-five minutes of the work, there isn’t a single subtle gesture to be found. This concerto is a monument to musical wallowing. It’s almost like Peter Ilich, in writing this piece, said to himself: “Dammit, I’m going to indulge every musical instinct I have for this thing. Piss on holding back: if the idea occurs to me, it’s going in.”

So why do I still listen to it? Probably because it appeals to the part of my classical music loving soul that’s analogue to the part of me that likes to just grab a pizza and eat as much of it as I humanly can in one sitting.

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Man, yesterday sucked to watch football. It started with me watching the Buffalo Bills basically roll over for the Atlanta Falcons (a quite good, but quite beatable team), and then I watched the Pittsburgh Steelers fail to stop the New England Stupid Patriots, who once again did their patented “We’re just good enough to not lose” schtick that has people all a-quiver over just how dreamy they are. It all made me want to vomit.

So, what of the Bills? Well, I’m still not giving up on J.P. Losman, despite his incredibly bad performance yesterday. It’s still the case that the mistakes he’s making are ones that experience will (hopefully) correct. He’s still not seeing the whole field, he’s still failing to pick up blitzers, and he’s still hesitating on his throws and telegraphing when exactly he’s about to throw the ball. I listened to one caller to a Buffalo sports-talk radio show call Losman a “bust”, only to hear the hosts make the points that I’ve been making on Monday mornings at The Store: Peyton Manning as a rookie set the record for interceptions thrown in a season; the Bills were 4-12 in Jim Kelly’s first year as starter. This is going to take time.

The lack of patience, of course, stems from the fact that the Bills haven’t made the playoffs since 1999, coupled with the fact that in today’s NFL teams can go from cellar-dwellers to title contenders in a much shorter time than it’s apparently taking the Bills. But with a new guy like Losman, the results we’re seeing right now are inevitable, no matter when you start him; if the Bills had kept Drew Bledsoe around and then given Losman the reins in 2006, then we’d see what we’re seeing now in 2006. So I say, get it out of the way now. If there are lumps to be taken, take them now.

But that doesn’t mean that the Bills have to feed the kid to the lions every week. Here’s some stuff that’s annoying me:

:: The lack of a really decent tight end to work the middle of the field, short-to-medium yardage, and give Losman a big target safety-valve. I don’t care if Mark Campbell gets open on the sideline patterns; that’s not the kind of safety-valve thing that Losman needs. He has to have a reliable big target on whom he can dump the ball when he’s in trouble.

:: The lack of pass protection. Longtime readers know that I’m constantly bitching about the Bills’ offensive line, but the line hasn’t been any better than average in years — probably since the end of the Super Bowl run in 1993. And while I think you can get to the Super Bowl, and win it, with an average defense, nobody’s getting to the Super Bowl with an average offensive line. Trey Teague is simply not a good center. I lost count yesterday of the number of plays in which he snapped the ball, squared to meet his defender — and then turned to see what his defender was doing, since the guy was already in the backfield. Without a good offensive line, the Bills will not be able to control the clock, establish rhythm, control the line of scrimmage, or give J.P. Losman time to study the field and apply the things he learns from watching game film.

:: Is Losman incapable of passing from a snap under center, with a four-receiver set? It seems that every time the Bills call a passing play, Losman sets up in the shotgun. Geez, you might as well have Crash Davis tell the batter it’s gonna be a fastball. They need to vary the look somewhat on passing downs. It’s easy for opponents to defend the Bills’ passing game when the passing game is so blindingly obvious.

And then there’s the defense — the magnificent, “We wanna be the ’85 Bears or the ’00 Ravens” defense.

Well, I’m not going to go digging through the records, but I very much doubt that either the ’85 Bears or the ’00 Ravens ever allowed a team to come into their home stadium and run for over two hundred yards against them. I also very much doubt that any of those historic defenses had to rely on constant blitzing to get pressure on the opposing quarterback, and I very much doubt that any of those historic defenses would have approached a guy like Michael Vick — who’s at his best when he’s running for his life — with a defensive scheme designed specifically to make him run for his life.

I see no reason, at this juncture, to alter my original projection for the Bills. Losman will struggle for quite a while (if he’s still playing this badly in November, I’ll start to worry a bit), and the defense just isn’t good enough to carry the Bills to the playoffs. So, to the extent that this season is playing out the way I expected, I’m not disappointed, exactly. But it still sucks to be a Bills fan and constantly feel like the team is just a year or two away from making a run.

Stupid Patriots…hate them so much…Stupid Brady….

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A short while ago, I engaged very briefly in debate with PJ of Reading, Writing and Ranting about namecalling on the right versus the left. My position was that rhetoric on many left-wing blogs is no more or less obnoxious than rhetoric on many right-wing blogs, but I didn’t make my point terribly well and, for lack of figuring out a better way to say what I was trying to say, I dropped the subject.

Well, I’ve just discovered that Matthew Yglesias made the exact point I was groping around for back in June, here. I missed it at the time because I thought that Matthew’s TypePad blog was going inactive when he moved over to Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe thing, but now I see that Matthew’s been blogging in both places, as well as producing content for TAPped. Busy guy, that Yglesias fellow. Anyway, here’s what he had to say:

I’m less certain that this is really true, but I think you see different kinds of viciousness from the left and the right. Your rightwingers are much more likely to say something substantively scummy about someone else — flinging around casual accusations of treason and so forth. Your leftwingers, by contrast, are much more likely to engage in workaday meanness — name-calling and so forth. This stems, I think, from the stylistic dichotomy between Atrios and Instapundit. Glenn’s a really master of the artfully worded slander — “they’re not anti-war, they’re on the other side” and so forth — while Duncan has a much blunter approach — “InstaHack,” etc.

Of course, it’s not at all hard to find the same kind of thing in Right Blogistan — just check out Emperor Misha, Kim Du Toit and the like for regular examples of that sort of thing — but anyway, there you go. In any case, I find it hard to differentiate between strongly implying that people on the Left are traitors (or to state it outright) and calling Barbara Bush a “bitch”. Maybe that’s my own personal failing, but I don’t think so. (Especially when Mrs. Bush once referred to Geraldine Ferraro, then Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States, as being something that “rhymes with rich”. I wonder what word she was groping for, there….)

:: In another vein, I wrote again last week about right-wing blogs blocking left-wing blog referral traffic (along with a way to get around it!), noting that I’ve never yet heard of a liberal blog blocking referrals from a right-wing blog. In comments to that post, Lynn Sislo noted:

I’ve haven’t mentioned this before because I’ve been trying to remember the name of the blog in question. I definitely remember two or more years ago there was a far Left wing blogger who started blocking incoming referrals. I remember it well because the Right wing blogoshpere was all in a tizzy about it at the time.

Well, I’ve been around a while, and I don’t quite remember anything like that. But I did get my memory jogged earlier today, and I recall way back in November of 2002, James Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review did something that I suspect is what Lynn’s remembering: he announced a new policy regarding his blogroll. In short, he would no longer allow on his blogroll any blog that maintained a blogroll link of its own to Little Green Footballs. This really did have the right-wing up in arms at the time (witness this Steven Den Beste post on the subject, and scroll down to all the follow-ups, including one to Lynn’s old BlogSpot blog!), and in all honesty, I even agreed that this was a goofy thing for James Capozzola to do.

Of course, in retrospect it’s clearly even less important than it was at the time; with the rise of RSS aggregators and services like BlogLines, blogrolls have become a lot less important over time. I almost never surf other bloggers’ blogrolls, and when I find new blogs to read, it’s mainly by following links from the many blogs that I read already (like Lynn’s) or by doing searches on Technorati or Google’s new BlogSearch for posts about stuff that interests me. In fact, as of this writing, I couldn’t tell you if a single blogger on my blogroll had LGF on its blogroll or not. If a major blogger, right or left, made such an announcement today, the response would probably be a big yawn — especially since, when you get right down to it, Capozzola merely announced publicly the type of thing that we all practice tacitly anyway (while I don’t specifically look at blogrolls, the possibility that a blog written by someone who would blogroll LGF would hold my attention is probably pretty low). But at the time, it actually was a fairly big deal.

The major difference between what James Capozzola did back in 2002 and what some right-wing blogs do now is in the direction it goes. For all the bluster directed at Capozzola at the time, there’s a substantial difference between deciding whom you, as a blogger, are going to link and whom you, as a blogger, are going to allow to link to you. So while I wasn’t wild about what Capozzola did, I don’t think it’s equivalent to referral-blocking.

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