Month: September 2005

Sorry for the very recent silence, but there’s been family stuff of the “normal, but time-consuming” variety. Yesterday was Open House at The Daughter’s school. Man, have first-grade classrooms evolved. (And so, apparently, have first-grade teachers, but that’s one of those topics I probably should avoid for now.) And since we didn’t really feel like cooking dinner after the Open House, we opted instead to eat at our favorite streetside-grill joint (Taffy’s on Southwestern Boulevard and Orchard Park Road, for those locals who wonder about such things).

I’ve realized lately that I’m kind of a low-brow foodie. I like to call myself a “foodie”, but judging by other foodies, I’m really not one. I appreciate the gourmet thing, and I do enjoy those meals when I can get them, but really, my prefered mode of eating out is those little local joints at the streetcorners that serve burgers, hot dogs, Italian sausages, and all manner of other items deep-fried or cooked on a grill. I also like those little local pizza joints (I happen to think that Buffalo has lots of great pizza, having not succumbed to those weird cultists who think that the only places you can get real pizza exist on the even-numbered blocks in Manhattan).

And you know what else I like? That big watering hole/restaurant, usually called the “Something or such-and-such Hotel”, that occupies one of the biggest buildings along the main drag of every small town in Western New York. True, the food in these types of places is rarely “remarkable”, but there’s just something about the atmosphere of those places that makes the food better than it probably is.

And I like Chinese take-out places. No, their food is not even close to the amazing stuff I adore when I go to Toronto’s Chinatown, but it’s comforting, you know? I’m all about the comfort food these days. I like the occasional adventure in food, but by and large, I want my food to be nourishing and comforting. (Which probably explains my waistline, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, here’s some random linkage:

:: I guarantee I’ll have more to say about this in November, but for now, here’s a press release: the complete score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will be released in a 3-CD/1 DVD set on November 22.

This historic release contains over 180 minutes of music on three CDs, comprising the full score of the 2001 film, composed by Howard Shore. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recordings” marks the first edition of the three complete recording releases of the film trilogy whose score has been honored with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. This deluxe set also includes exclusive new artwork, packaging, and extensive liner notes culled from “The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films,” to be published in 2006. Enya’s song “May It Be,” which received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and which she performed at the Academy Awards ceremony, is contained on “The Complete Recordings” within all-new selection titles that reflect the complete score being released in its entirety for the first time.

Commence the saving of the pennies!

(Similar packages of the scores to The Two Towers and The Return of the King are in the works, but I don’t know what their frequency of release will be. If they’re a year apart, I will be, shall we say, a bit unhappy.)

:: Want to see a deranged sci-fi fanboy in action? Check out this thread on the FSM boards, where lots of people speak up in favor of the current Battlestar Galactica show while the FSM boards’ resident die-hard fan (and I do mean, die-hard) charges once more unto the breach to defend the honor of the nineteen episodes of BSG that ran back in 1978. Believe me, they just don’t get any more deranged than Mr. Paddon. (Well, actually, they do: he’s not the weirdo Objectivist over there.)

:: Via Atrios I see a spectacularly nauseating op-ed piece written for a college student newspaper that got its writer fired, and with good reason, when you read the tripe. I just note an interesting contrast in one of her opening sentences, versus one of her closing ones:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

And:

I have enough confidence in my country’s imperfect but steadfast law enforcement systems to carry out such profiling the way it should be done: in a professional and thorough manner, without going down the slippery slope of pointless and disrespectful encroachment on the livelihood or decorum of everyday Arabs and Arab Americans.

I’m trying to wonder just what this writer’s definition of “pointless and disrespectful encroachment on livelihood or decorum” would be. For some reason, I’m envisioning something that might take place in a Quentin Tarantino movie: “Bring out the Gimp!”

Oh, and there’s this gem:

I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.

You see, there’s the difference between the left and the right: this right-wing girl is making her case about whether it seems as though rights are being violated, while we liberals are concerned about if rights actually are being violated. That’s a distinction completely lost on the right these days, it sometimes seems.

(I’m also troubled by the apparent belief that “We can set aside rights for a while, because just as soon as we kill all the terrorists, we can get ’em back again.” Because, you know, getting back what’s been willingly — and, seemingly, cheerfully — given up is just that easy.)

:: Longtime readers know that I like funny photographs involving Presidents of the United States in un-Presidential moments, regardless of party. So I think that Bush’s note about having a bathroom break is just comedy gold, man. It’d be even funnier if it turned out that the President had consumed four burritos for lunch that day. (This still doesn’t beat out Bush falling off the Segway, though, for this current President; and my favorite goofy Presidential photo of all time had President Clinton at some kind of economic summit or something in a tropical country somewhere, and he and all the people there with him had to wear these horrible shirts made of shiny gold fabric that hung down almost to their knees. Clinton looked ridiculous in that get-up.)

:: And finally: welcome aboard, Shakespeare’s Sister readers! Feel free to look around a while. I don’t blog politics all that much, but lately the Prez has been annoying me more than usual (you know, bungling a major disaster will do that). Mostly, though, I drone on about life in the Buffalo area; the challenges of raising an infant with cerebral palsy; thoughts on classical, film and Celtic music; favorite TV shows; Star Wars; and women whom I find to be far more worthy of fawning media attention than Britney. Check out the “Notable Dispatches” linked in my sidebar, and enjoy — just don’t tell me that I look like an axe murderer, because I don’t. Sheesh!

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Here are the answers to the quiz I made up for this post. (Ignore the date on this entry; I used Blogger’s ability to change dates to ensure that this post does not appear on the blog’s main page.)

Here are the questions again, with their answers:

11. Only two baseball players have ended the World Series by hitting a walk-off home-run. Name them.

Bill Mazeroski (1960, Game Seven, Pirates over Yankees), Joe Carter (1993, Game Six, Blue Jays over Phillies)

12. Roger Ebert wrote a screenplay many years ago. Name the director of the resulting film.

Russ Meyer directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

13. Name the two ingredients in a roux. (There’s some wiggle-room here, actually.)

Butter and flour. (I’ve heard of roux being made with olive oil and other fats, but most often I’ve seen butter as the fat.)

14. Leonard Bernstein wrote a symphony based on what poem by W.H. Auden?

The Age of Anxiety.

15. Harold Arlen, Vincent Gallo, Orel Hershiser, Ani DiFranco, and Christine Baranski all have this in common.

All were born in Buffalo.

16. Give the real names of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi.

17. Johannes Brahms wrote ____ symphonies. (For extra credit, Brahms wrote ____ of his ____ symphonies in major keys.)

Four symphonies; two in major keys (the Second in D and the Third in F).

18. In the 23rd century, the United Federation of Planets maintains only one crime that still carries a death penalty. Name that crime.

Visiting the planet Talos IV.

19. Name Wolverine’s mutant superpower.

Exceptionally fast healing from wounds. (The claws and his unbreakable bones are not mutant powers, but were given to him in some kind of medical procedure by some government entity.)

20. On what planet did Luke Skywalker learn the truth of his parentage? (There are two possible answers here, actually.)

Darth Vader told Luke during their duel on Bespin; Yoda later confirmed it on Dagobah.

21. In the opening passage of Neuromancer, what color is the sky?

The color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

22. In the James Bond films, what is Q’s name?

Major Boothroyd. (He is addressed as such by M in From Russia With Love, and Anya Amasova calls him by name in The Spy Who Loved Me.)

23. What hardly happens in Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire?

Hurricanes. (This is one of Professor Higgins’s diction exercises in My Fair Lady.)

24. What composer fell madly in love at first sight with actress Harriet Smithson? (For extra credit, what role was she playing at the time?)

Hector Berlioz. (She was playing Ophelia.)

25. Give the last names of the two Brians in 1988’s “Battle of the Brians”.

In 1988, Brian Boitano of the US defeated Brian Orser of Canada for the Gold Medal in Men’s Figure Skating at the Winter Olympics.

26. Four NFL coaches have lost four Super Bowls. Name the one who is NOT in the Hall of Fame.

Dan Reeves. (Don Shula, Bud Grant and Marv Levy are all in the Hall.)

27. What nineteenth century English writer is also known for introducing a certain style of postal box?

Anthony Trollope.

28. Everybody knows who shot J.R. Ewing. But who shot Bobby Ewing?

Katherine Wentworth. (Pam Ewing later “dreamed” Katherine running Bobby over in her car.)

29. Who said “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca?

Trick question, this: Nobody said “Play it again, Sam.” The line is nearly always misquoted.

30. Mabel Normand is credited with being the originator of what?

Normand was a noted star of slapstick films during the silent era. She is often credited with “inventing” the pie in the face.

So there you go!

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Aaron posted answers to this quiz a couple of weeks ago. Luckily, Aaron posts so infrequently that his answers are likely to be his top front-page post for the foreseeable future. Heh!

Er…anyway, here are my answers, just because.

1. It is Dan’s theory that one only has time to devote to 10 outside-of-work pursuits. What makes your list? This can be an idealized version of your life (e.g. pursuits in which you are interested but just haven’t found the time or ambition to start).

1. Little Quinn.
2. The Daughter.
3. Little Quinn, again.
4. The Daughter, again.
5. Reading.
6. Writing. (I’m including the blog here.)
7. Listening to music. (And I mean actively listening, not just sticking in a CD while I do the dishes. Although I do that, too.)
8. Movies and good TV shows.
9. Little Quinn and the Daughter.
10. Walking. (Not so much of this lately.)

2. What are the last five albums you bought? Are you just kind of buying albums on a whim these days or following any kind of overarching plan-such as exploring a genre or working your way through a backlog of albums you’ve wanted to buy for some time?

Hisato Ohzawa: Piano Concerto #3 and Symphony No. 3 (classical)
Alla Pavlova: Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3 (classical)
Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble: Beyond the Horizon (Asian)
Altan: Local Ground (Celtic)
Anna Netrebko: Sempre Libera (classical; operatic arias and extracts)

I look around blogs and websites and magazines for CD recommendations, and then I keep a little list to grab when I’m at Borders. Many times, I go in to buy a particular CD, and walk out with three CDs, none of which are the one I intended to grab. Nice thing about having wide-ranging musical tastes is that I can indulge a certain amount of capriciousness in my music purchasing.

3. Everyone has an issue (at least one)-political or philosophical-that is kind of their personal baby. One on which they feel they have an enlightened view in a greater world that just either doesn’t get it or doesn’t care. Tell us about it-and attempt to be brief.

Respect for science in general, with evolution in particular. The extent to which science is held as “just another competing worldview” today scares me, especially when so many of the problems facing us now are problems for which we’re really going to need to lean on science for solutions.

4. Prairie, mountains, woods, desert, lake, the sea. Which calls to you the most? Where would you most choose to reside? RANK THEM!

Uhhhh…this one’s intriguing:

1. Sea. (I’m going to cheat and lump the Great Lakes in with “Sea”, on the basis that in general you can’t see the other side of them when you’re on the shore.)
2. Lake.
3. Mountains.
4. Woods.
5. Prairie.
6. Desert.

I wouldn’t really want to live in either of the last two, although they make nice places to travel. But I need forests, topography, and not so much heat.

5. Guilty pleasure TV. Is there a show that would be condemned by your peers, but yet you find yourself watching it on a regular basis? Let’s hear it.

Well, most of my friends know I like American Idol, and more than a few also watch it, so that’s out (although most find my admiration of Bo Bice slightly “over the top”). The Apprentice, perhaps? I still watch that show, although I haven’t decided if I’ll bother watching the Martha Stewart version. In the mid-90s, I loved Beavis and Butthead, which I held to be mostly satirical in nature: I knew kids like that in school, and really, the show’s timeslot was perfect. (There is no better show to watch at two in the morning when you’ve closed your pizza restaurant on a busy Friday night than Beavis and Butthead.)

So since I can’t answer this with a TV show, how about a singer, instead? Most people react with derision when I tell them that I love Celine Dion.

This is a tag-free quiz, so do it if you’re inclined, and ignore it if you’re not.

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Google now has a search utility for blogs only: blogsearch.google.com. Someday, our very souls will be indexed by Google.

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Cruise ships on the Great Lakes? Scoff not, denizens of doubt!

Wouldn’t that be a kick? Imagine being able to board a cruise liner in Buffalo and travel to, say, Cleveland or even Chicago and back. Or a cruise around the northern waters of Lake Superior. Or the harbors of Huron.

Who needs Caribbean cruises, anyway?

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(Political rant here)

So I see that President Bush has accepted the blame for the Federal government’s less-than-adequate response to Hurricane Katrina. Good for him.

And, to indulge more bluntness than I usually allow myself here, screw him.

This was not the contrition of a President come to grips with a serious policy gaffe; this was the act of a President who has strenuously denied reality for weeks until the public opinion polls finally could no longer be ignored. This is the man who acted to pass the buck to anyone and everyone he could think of, including the massively unqualified political crony he’d put in charge and who’d then mucked up the job in question (but not before trying to publicly praise the man for his “great job”), and then tried trotting out the tsk-tsk talking point of “not playing the blame game”. For years I’ve listened to conservatives insist that Bill Clinton governed by opinion poll, so color me unimpressed that George W. Bush is doing the same thing. Especially after he fiddled strummed while Rome burned New Orleans flooded.

Did the local and state governments screw up? You’d better believe it, and screw them, too. But looking at this Katrina timeline, the most damning line is this:

BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS

Here’s the President, with the Governors of one of his states having declared an official state of emergency three days before, and now strongly reiterating her request for help from the Presidential level…turning in for the night.

And then there’s this, from the President’s statement today:

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,” Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

“To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Bush said.

The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government’s ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in responding to Katrina.

“Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That’s a very important question and it’s in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond,” Bush replied.

He said he wanted to know both what went wrong and what went right.

Well, the President wants to know what went wrong. Sounds like a job for one of those Congressional hearing committee things. If only we had a Congress that thought that executive oversight was something to be done for Republican Presidents.

And isn’t it a bit chilling that the President is admitting that he just doesn’t know if his government is ready to suit up in the event of a severe terrorist attack? This is the President who was re-elected a little less than a year ago on a campaign consisting of little more than, “If you elect my opponent, you will probably die in a massive terrorist attack. I am gonna keep you safe; he is gonna get you killed. You’re safe with me, America. I got your back.” (And don’t even try claiming that this wasn’t the subtext of the President’s re-election campaign. Here’s how one prominent right-wing blogger summed it up.)

Except, well…he didn’t when he had four days’ notice that something bad was about to happen, and he doesn’t have the first clue if he’ll have our back when he learns of the event as Andy Card whispers it in his ear whilst in mid-photo op. Now here he is, safely in office and free from the concerns of seeking re-election again, and he can stand up and say, “Gee whiz, folks, I don’t know if you’re safe. We gotta figure that one out. It’s quite the headscratcher.”

I’m glad he’s going to take this stuff seriously now. It’s nice to think that maybe we’ll now have a President who takes policy seriously, and who doesn’t staff his crucial departments with cronies.

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath. E.J. Dionne notwithstanding, it’s a long time until January 20, 2009.

(And no, I’m not arguing about what a hypothetical “President Kerry” would have done. I’m angry about what the all-too-real “President Bush” actually did do.)

EDIT: Broken link removed completely, as I ended up using the link in another place but forgot to remove the HTML code.

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Lynn ruminates a bit on Alan Hohvanhess, the American composer of mystical bent who produced quite a lot of music. LOTS of music. The man was a fountain of music. Lynn’s point of concentration is on the question of whether producing a large output necessarily means that the quality of that output suffers.

The answer is, of course, Yes. Except for when the answer is No.

It’s tempting to scoff at the very idea of balancing prolificity with quality. “Look at Mozart!” we think. “As Kochel counted them, old Wolfgang A. produced 626 pieces in just 35 years, and the vast majority of those pieces are of high quality, with some being among the greatest musical works ever produced! QED!” And yes, those who argue against the idea that being prolific gets in the way of being good run into trouble here: they either have to discard their thesis, or argue that maybe the corpus of Mozart’s work really isn’t that good, after all. “Well, really — maybe you’ll regularly hear six or seven of the symphonies, but who cares about the other thirty-four? And yeah, Die Zauberflote and Le Nozze di Figaro are genius, but is anyone banging down the doors at the Met to get the good seats when they dust off Idomeneo?”

Of course, that argument doesn’t get very far. Fact is, most folks will scoff at any argument whose crucial thesis lies in positing Mozart as fully subject to Sturgeon’s Law as anyone else. And that provides the answer, really: Mozart’s the freakish exception. Surely there were other prolific composers of Mozart’s day — how much music did poor Salieri write? — but those guys’ scores gather dust, while Mozart still lives on. So, maybe you can be prolific and good. But to pull that off, you merely have to be a genius.

I recall an essay I once read by Isaac Asimov, in which he described the life of a prolific writer. I seem to recall him implying that quality was, in fact, a secondary concern to the prolific person, but then, Dr. Asimov often wrote his essays from a tongue-in-cheek standpoint. Did Asimov produce some great work? Absolutely. Did he also produce some clunkers? Yup. So, I suspect, did Hohvanhess.

One thing that has stuck with me from the Asimov essay was that if you’re going to be a prolific writer, you have to really like writing — and not much else besides writing. I wonder if Alan Hohvanhess liked not much else besides composition?

(I don’t have any real opinion of Hohvanhess’s music. I haven’t particularly liked the works of his that I’ve heard, but I’ve only heard two of his works, which is, as we well know, not a representative sample. And the two works that I have heard, I listened to over five years ago. So I suspect that his work is due another listen, one of these days.)

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That’s what Paul Buchman, on Mad About You, was always saying to his wife, Jamie. For a time in the 90s, Mad About You was one of my favorite shows — I loved its way of taking delight in urban life, its general lack of Seinfeldian cynicism, and the warm chemistry between Paul and Jamie, played by Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. Of course, Mad About You spent two or maybe even three seasons on the air longer than it should have (its last episode was quite good, but its last season was pretty much of a disaster). Helen Hunt, of course, went on to stardom and became an Oscar winner, while Reiser slipped into a much lower profile, and in general, the mild success of Mad About You (it was never a ratings juggernaut, just a solid show for six seasons) was attributed largely to Hunt.

But reading this brief article by Reiser in today’s Huffington Post, I’m wondering if that’s really fair. Mad About You wasn’t a brilliant show, but in its best episodes, it displayed a pretty insightful view of the loving relationships between men and women, and it’s clear that this theme is still driving Reiser in his post-Mad work.

It seems that Reiser has made a movie, starring Peter Falk, called The Thing About My Folks. Here’s the money paragraph, which stopped me cold as soon as I read it quoted in full over at Lance Mannion‘s blog:

I always wished I could have known my parents before they were parents. I would love to have known who they were before they became the 70-year-olds I saw nodding off together to Tom Brokaw every night. There was great love between them for sure. But it must have been somehow different fifty years ago. What happened to those people? How did they become these people? My guess is it didn’t happen overnight, but gradually, imperceptibly. Like a glacier of routine and compromise. We end up the sum of all the things we do, and — for whatever reason — don’t do. Day after day, year after year, we become all the words we never speak, the trips we never take, the effort we never make and the love we never share.

Dammit, I wish I’d written that.

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I’ve just done some updating of the master blogroll, available here (and permanently linked in the sidebar), adding a few new blogs and removing a few that had gone inactive. (I do still check in on the inactive ones, via a folder in my bookmarks.) Nice things about maintaining the master blogroll off the main page are that it’s easier to format within a post rather than in the raw HTML of the main template, and I don’t run afoul of the “Holy crap, this blogroll is a mile long!” factor.

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I wanted to preserve this comment, left in response to this post at Alicublog, just because I found it funny and because the commenter in question doesn’t seem to have a blog of his or her own:

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.

Explain to a man that he’s not starving to death because of a lack of fish per se, and it’s not the fact that it’s illegal to fish and in fact there are a host of other problems that prevent him from fishing much less learning to fish especially given the price of good reels these days — no no it’s the inner disorders that prevent him from learning to fish, or maybe it’s not quite that, but — LISTEN I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANY F***ING FISH, OKAY?!

Isn’t that the truth.

(Link to Alicublog via Dr. Myers)

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