Month: December 2005

This will be the final post for 2005; I’m going to take the next few days off. I’ll return to posting either Sunday, January 1, or Monday, January 2. Monday’s more likely, but Sunday might happen. You never know.

Our New Year’s rituals basically involve the DVD player and a lot of finger food — higher quality finger food, to be sure, but finger food nonetheless, and on New Year’s Night we shall be watching the New Year’s From Vienna concert on PBS. We’re pretty low-key about New Year’s.

But for all my readers — regular and occasional, new and old, liberal and conservative, men and women, young and old — I wish you all the happiest of New Years and the very best for happiness and peace in 2006.

Here’s a health to one and all,
To the big and to the small;
To the rich and poor alike and foe and friends!
And when I return again,
May our foes have turned to friends;
And may peace and joy be with you until then!

Happy New Year, everyone!

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What follows is basically a bunch of links to posts from 2005 that I particularly liked. I realize that picking my own best posts is kind of like the fact that Dexy’s Midnight Runners actually had a Greatest Hits album, but for newer readers, this may constitute a good way of seeing what’s gone before. (I also recommend the posts linked under “Notable Dispatches” in the sidebar; those are the posts of mine that I like the most. I won’t be linking any of those in this post. And if anyone’s interested, my Best of 2004 can be found here.)

Onward, grouping the links by the month in which they appeared, starting with January:

The Writer’s Tool Kit
Heavy Metal and the Dudes Who Write About It

His Final Gift (fiction)
Search Engine Follies
I Heart Audrey Hepburn
Ten Things I’ve Done
Clapping between the movements: bring it on!
Thoughts on Pizza
Karl Popper Hearts Evolution
The Niagara Frontier: A panorama

The Year’s Best Sports Photo
I Heart George Lucas
I Heart George Lucas, and prove it by taking a Star Wars poll
Wonder Woman (the greatest comic book images ever)
Torture: why are we even debating this?!
A Blog Quiz
I Heart George Lucas, and prove it by buying a long-coveted toy
Lying about my fellow bloggers

I Heart George Lucas, and prove it by speculating on a customer service phone call in a Galaxy far, far away….
I Heart Doing Blog Quizzes
I Heart Libraries and think that America Would Suck Without Them
Best Album Cover Ever

I Heart George Lucas, and I don’t care who knows it!
Popular stuff that I just don’t get
I Heart my Neti Pot
I still Heart Blog Quizzes (this one’s about music)
How to Kill a Vampire
Sentential Links #1 (where it all began!)
I Heart George Lucas, yet again
I Heart George Lucas, and defend him from goofy right-wingers
I Heart George Lucas, and come up lacking for words after seeing his latest movie
I Heart George Lucas, and name my favorite visual moments from his movies
I Heart George Lucas, and find the words to say about his latest movie

I wanted to Heart Spanglish, but didn’t
NFL Stadiums from space, part one
NFL Stadiums from space, part two
NFL Stadiums from space, part three
NFL Stadiums from space, part four
Sammy vs DLR
My favorite X-Files episodes (outside the mytharc)

I also heart Cameron Crowe
Overrated Songs
Warp speed, Mr. Doohan.
Notes on re-reading The Lions of Al-Rassam
Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I Heart Superhero Movies

Favorite action sequences in movies
My Geek Credentials
Go long, Hunter Kelly
Men with stupid opinions about women
Photos from the Fair
Reconnecting
My quirks
Brahms’s Symphony No. 1
The “Seven Things” Quiz

How to create a Google redirect (a useful tip for getting around referral-blocking)
Katrina
Lifeboats (Katrina revisited)
Displaying a lack of intellectual curiosity
Katrina revisted, revisited
A quiz I came up with
Answers to the Quiz

Skiffy Movies

I still Heart George Lucas
Suicides rethought
All your hippies are belong to us!
The AOL Journals diaspora

The Brothers K, so far
The “War on Christmas”
Christmas Ornaments, one
Christmas Ornaments, two
Christmas Ornaments, three
Fifteen Things about Books
Fifteen Things about Writing
Fifteen Things about Music
Thoughts on the Canon

So there it is: 2005 on Byzantium’s Shores. And there was a lot of other stuff, too, so feel free to surf the archives a bit.

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Well, this year is almost over, and any effort I expend trying to decide if the year was a good one or not inevitably ends in frustration. Part of me feels like this should have been the worst damn year of my life, but for some reason, I just don’t feel that way overall — and then part of me says, no, it really was crappy, and you just don’t realize it.

So I guess 2005 has to be held “in abeyance”. It’s the kind of year whose import will be better known to me far, far down the road. I just don’t know right now how to think of 2005, but I do know that it’s likely to be the most important year I’ve experienced since probably 1999 (when I first became a parent), or 1997 (when I was married), or 1993 (when I graduated college). I do know that years hence, when my face is lined and my hair is gray, some of those lines and some of those hairs will have 2005 stamped upon them.

At the end of 2004, I answered a bunch of questions in a meme-thing, and I’m going to repeat the questions here, with the answers adjusted for inflation. It’s as good a way to sum up the past year as I can think.

Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I made no resolutions at all, in the traditional sense of the word. I always intend to listen to more music, read more books, see more movies. I know I failed on the movies score, but as for the others, I’m not sure.

Did anyone close to you give birth?

Oh, yes — three good friends at The Store had babies, and a couple more who are the “friendly co-workers” also gave birth. Additionally, Aaron welcomed Little Elsa into his family.

Did anyone close to you die?

Oy. I sometimes feel like that poor kid died a thousand deaths, before the last one that actually kept.

What countries did you visit?

Coruscant, Mustafar, Naboo, Tatooine, Utapau, Kashyyyk, Al-Rassan. And many others, if only in my mind. Oh, and Canada.

What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

A peaceful heart.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

To be honest, I don’t really feel like I accomplished much of anything this year. I didn’t get published, I barely wrote anything aside from blog posts…I don’t know. I still didn’t get The Promised King finished, which means that soon I will have been writing that book for ten damn years. Jee-bus.

But you know, I’ve occasionally thought that maybe we overvalue “accomplishment”. Seriously — isn’t living enough, sometimes? I read some good books, heard a lot of wonderful music, saw Revenge of the Sith with one friend and cried onto the shoulders of another.

For 2005, I lived. That’s accomplishment enough.

What was your biggest failure?

Not finishing The Promised King, Book Two. (Same answer as last year.)

What was the best thing you bought?

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring complete score box set; a new DVD player; the first two seasons of The West Wing, Millennium, and Once and Again; a cross pendant for The Daughter; a pair of birthstone necklaces for The Wife (birthstones for both children); a little frog-shaped pin for a friend who loves frogs; cups of coffee for many people at The Store.

Whose behavior merited celebration?

The Daughter, who has been an amazingly kind and curious big sister to her baby brother. (Same answer as last year. That little boy could not possibly have had a better big sister. Perhaps one day she’ll have the chance to play that role again.)

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

I’m not sure I’d say “appalled” or “depressed”, but I definitely don’t approve of much of what the President of the United States has done. (Same answer as last year, except that I’d add in his entire batch of cronies.)

Where did most of your money go?

Food, coffee, diapers, books, DVDs, CDs. (Exact same answer as last year.)

What did you get really excited about?

The opening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; the start of the Bills’ season. One of those turned out well; the other, not so much.

What song will always remind you of 2005?

“I Can Only Imagine” (lyrics here); “Forever” (lyrics here). Both were performed at Little Quinn’s funeral.

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

Well, right now this seems like a really stupid question, doesn’t it? But what’s different now is that while the answer is definitely “sadder”, it’s a lot easier to see my way back to happiness now than it was last year at this time. That’s one good thing about death, I suppose — it tends to clarify the hell out of things.

Thinner or fatter?

Probably fatter, although not by a whole lot. The overalls are a bit more snug, but I’m not having to lengthen the shoulder straps or undo the side buttons at all yet. I am planning to go back to eating healthier once I’m past New Year’s. I’m not willing to officially “resolve” to lose weight, but it is a goal of mine.

Richer or poorer?

I have no idea, really, and I care now even less than I cared last year. I have a roof, a computer, blank paper, pens, books, music, and movies. I’m good. Let the other nitwits have their Lexuses.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Reading, writing, and holding Little Quinn.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Endlessly blogsurfing.

How will you be spending Christmas?

I guess this quiz is intended to be answered before Christmas, not after. Oh well. I spend it with the family, watching The Daughter play with her new toys and making dinner and generally resting and reflecting.

Did you fall in love in 2005?

I fall in love on a daily basis. (Who ever said that you can only fall in love with someone once?)

How many one-night stands?

Now, aren’t all stands “one-night” stands? I mean, the only way you could have a two-night stand is to never leave the person’s bed for thirty-six hours straight, right? (Same answer as last year. I’m married, I intend to stay that way, and I’m happy to stay that way. So unless we’re including The Wife, the real answer is “Zero”. And if we are including The Wife, the real answer is…none of yer damn bizness!)

What was your favorite TV program?

Scrubs and American Idol. I didn’t watch season four of 24, because FOX packed something like four episodes into two consecutive nights when the season started, and that screwed me up. I thought The Apprentice: Martha Stewart actually started up OK, but just became duller and duller as the season went on. That 70s Show finally lost me. I gave up on ER, and discovered House. Gray’s Anatomy didn’t light my fire when it started, but it’s grown on me every week since then. I really liked the caper show Eyes that aired on ABC last spring, but it tanked and vanished after five or six episodes.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I don’t like to hate people. That said, there’s the Objectivist weirdo on the FSM message boards, but he doesn’t even count for this year, so there it is. (Same answer as last year, incidentally. If anything, I’m trying to hate even fewer people than before. It’s just such a useless damned emotion. Not giving a shit is a lot more productive.)

What was the best book you read?

I re-read The Lions of Al-Rassan.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

I recently listened to the Second and Fifth Symphonies by Sir Arnold Bax, and I loved his soundworld. The film music of Jan A.P. Kaczmarek hit me between the eyes this year, hard.

What did you want and get?

A tie-dye kit.

What did you want and not get?

A year with my son.

What were your favorite films of this year?

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

What did you do on your birthday?

I honestly don’t remember. I think The Wife had to work, so we probably did something together a few days later.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

The same as last year’s: “Workwear Chic”. Overalls galore, solid-colored shirts and sweaters, denim shirts, hiking boots. I discovered the magic of layers. (Yeah, I’m slow to the party.) I took note of all the people who told me that pleated pants make me look fat, and I duly ignored them. I grew the hair ever longer. I added tie-dye into the mix and will be making more of those in the next few weeks. (I got a nifty kit for Christmas, and I learned that The Store sells a line of fabric dyes too. I briefly considered tracking down a white pair of overalls to tie-dye, but I figured that would look goofy even by my standards.)

What kept you sane?

The Wife; music; wonderful people at our church and The Store and in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Watching episodes of Once and Again after having not seen the show at all since its 2002 cancellation brought me to once again realize how gorgeous Sela Ward is. (I started watching House before I discovered that Ms. Ward is on that program.) And all respect to Eva Longoria and Teri Hatcher, my favorite Desperate Housewife is Felicity Huffman.

What political issue stirred you the most?

“Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job.”

“Poor Trent lost his house. Well, we’re gonna rebuild it and I’m gonna sit on his porch.”

Sorry, right-leaning readers of mine, but I will not be dissuaded from my belief that the Bush Administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath constituted anything other than a colossal dropping of the ball, an initial refusal to admit that the ball had been dropped, a blaming of others for the ball’s dropping once it could no longer be denied that the ball was on the ground, and an attempt to seize credit when someone finally picked the damn ball back up.

Who did you miss?

I have very good friends who live beyond the “800-miles from Buffalo” line. I also got to see my sister for a day. (Same answer as last year, with one gigantic addition that I’m not even going to name because it’s so blindingly obvious.)

Who was the best new person you met?

I really don’t know. There were lots of people I met in 2004 but didn’t get to know well until 2005, and I expect this will be the same for next year.

Although I suppose one could say that I made the acquaintance of this Jesus fellow, even though I’m not at all sure what I think of him yet. This one will take a while.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005:

A few, really: Stop being so damned reserved and afraid of publicly emoting. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no other choice. When in doubt, put some music on. “Read. Think. Learn.” (Thanks to M-Mv for that last.) The best things in life to share are love, books, music, and pizza (but not necessarily in that order). Aeresol whipped cream doesn’t stick very well. Let people lean on you, because one day you’ll need to lean on them. Not all tears are an evil. Don’t punt when you’re in your opponent’s territory, and don’t blitz if there are more than six yards to go. No object fits in your hand so perfectly as your wife’s hand, and no object fits so perfectly on your shoulder as your child’s head. The Internet is made of people. (Thanks to Warren Ellis for that one.) “Hope is a good thing; maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

And as we head into 2006: “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning.”

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

There are places I’ll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

Hailing frequencies closed, 2005.

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I like roller coasters, but only to a point.

For one thing, I don’t like to be flipped upside-down, which rules out most if not all of the niftiest coasters that come online these days. I like a fast ride that twists and turns, but I’m not into wild shifts in G-forces, and I’m not interested much in one-point-nine seconds of apparent weightlessness. I’m more excited by speed than by being whipped around. In terms of materials, I like both wood and steel. And if there’s one thing I like less than being flipped upside-down, it’s coasters that take place indoors, in the dark.

I don’t like Space Mountain, for example. I don’t care that as coasters go, its maximum speed is incredibly tame and that the exact same ride in broad daylight would be dull as ditchwater. I don’t like not being able to see where I’m going, I don’t like not knowing when the dips are going to come or whether I’m going to be tossed to the left or the right or even when the ride is going to end.

What am I gabbing about here? Well, I’ve come of late to thinking of our emotional lives as being a roller coaster of sorts. Sometimes we’re tossed upwards, sometimes we lurch left, other times we lurch right, and sadly, sometimes the bottom drops out and we plummet.

But if life’s a roller coaster, sometimes I think it’s of the Space Mountain variety, in that we never know if and when the drops and twists are coming. Now, as much as I dislike that in a theme park ride, I don’t mind it so much as a metaphor for life. What makes me hate the ride at Disney World is precisely what makes life itself worthwhile.

But I wonder if some people don’t much like that feeling in life, either. I’m wondering if some people out there hate the idea that they can just suddenly find their emotions plummeting, and they hate that it happens, and they hate that they have no way of knowing when it’s going to happen. And I wonder if these people are screaming just to have the ride be stopped so they can get off. I wonder if this is why some people commit suicide.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the series of articles I blogged about a while back, about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. One thing I recall is the notion that lots of times, people who commit suicide aren’t obviously suffering existential depression, and sometimes, the act of suicide is as impulsive as the act of grabbing a bottle of chocolate milk on my way out of The Store at the end of my shift. I wonder if they just hate those sudden, unseen drops, and if they just one day decide to do the one thing they can do to stop the ride so they can get off.

Anyway, sorry for the downer of a post, but it’s been one month today. Here’s where Little Quinn now resides:

We were there on Christmas day. There were a handful of other people in the cemetery, but it was all very quiet and peaceful, as it should be.

His grave is right about where all those footprints are, behind the two gravestones to the right. As of yet, he has no marker. I’m not sure when that will happen. He’s in a row of graves occupied by infants, and that roster of gravestones might constitute the saddest thing I’ve ever read. Several stones give only a single date, clearly for babies whose lives were over within the march of one day if they lived at all; all but one of these gave full names for the babies buried there. That one exception simply read “Baby Boy” and then the surname. This poor child never even had a name. There’s another stone for a child who died just six days shy of reaching her first birthday.

One month.

The tears still come, but they come by surprise. There are no consistent triggers; there are no subjects that if brought up in casual conversation cause the breakdowns. No, they just happen. Kind of like the drops on Space Mountain, and I hate them for the same reason. What keeps me going, though, is the knowledge that every coaster has to climb, too.

One month.

We often refer to the snow around here as a “blanket”. That metaphor is also terribly apt, right now. Little Quinn has a cold blanket — but I hope that wherever he really is, it’s warm enough that he doesn’t need one.

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OK, folks: if any of you watch ER, or have watched it enough over its run to know who some of the minor players on the show are (I’m looking at you, John), doesn’t the guy pictured in this post of Alan’s (who recently said something really stupid in an Amherst, NY town board meeting) look quite a bit familiar? Especially when you consider what it is he said, and who on ER he looks like?

God, am I a nerd or what….

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Over the past year or so, I’ve seen the generalization creeping around that ticket sales for movies are down, and that therefore the movie business is in trouble. The movie industry seems to like to blame computer downloading, which seems odd to me although I’m not wild about downloading myself; others — particularly those on the cultural Right — blame the moviemakers. The most common refrain is: “Well, Hollywood, if you want to have your ticket sales go up again, make movies that people want to see!” Here’s a variant of it, as posted by Steven Den Beste a while back (navigate to post dated 12-15-05):

When will Hollywood get the message that if you want to sell a lot of tickets, you have to give the audience something it’s willing to pay to see? Especially all those neanderthal Christians (ugh!) in fly-over country?

The idea is that at long, long last American moviegoers have decided to vote with their dollars, and anti-Christian movies just aren’t going to be supported anymore. That’s why The Chronicles of Narnia is a success, according to SDB: it’s a Christian allegory and people really want Christian movies, while Brokeback Mountain is a gay-themed movie, and “Peoria and Nashville and Des Moines just aren’t interested in LGBT-themed films”.

And earlier than that, on SDB had opined thusly: “What I’d love to see, and quite frankly what I expect, is that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will make a fortune at the box office and Brokeback Mountain will turn out to be a dud. Wouldn’t that be nice?” One wonders why he’s so emotionally invested in this. The answer is, of course, a kind of bizarre tribalism at work in which Brokeback Mountain is not being touted because it’s a good movie — despite the near unanimity of critics saying that it is — but because anything pro-gay coming from Hollywood is, apparently, some kind of example of political correctness at work. This would be a lot more convincing if Brokeback Mountain hadn’t spent almost a decade in development hell, bouncing from studio to studio, facing such hurdles as lining up actors who were actually willing to play the leads. You’d think that Hollywood’s intention to cram LGBT stuff down “Flyover Country”‘s throats would operate more efficiently.

Equally ludicrous is the idea that the Narnia film constitutes an example of what can be done if the Christian movie-going public is taken seriously. Does anyone really think that Narnia got made because of its Christian allegorical street cred? Or did it get made because Disney looked around and saw Fox making money with the Star Wars prequels and New Line making tons of money with The Lord of the Rings and Warners making tons of money with Harry Potter, and said, “Hmmmm, what we need is a franchise, boys. And here’s a beloved series of fantasy novels just waiting for big-screen, epic CGI effects treatment, just like all those other franchises.”

(And while we’re on the subject, is it really fair to say that The Passion of the Christ never found a studio because it was a Christian movie, and that’s it? Does that make sense? Imagine you’re a studio exec, in charge of picking up projects, and in walks a director with two credits to his name — one of which won lots of awards but did unremarkable domestic box office, and the other of which also did unremarkable box office despite some critical acclaim — who tells you he wants to make an extremely graphic and violent film about the final hours of Jesus’s life, and he wants all the dialogue in this movie of his to be in Aramaic, and at the time, he’s even kicking around the idea of not having subtitles at all. Do you greenlight this project? Well, if you say “No”, history has already proven you wrong — but then, you’re in good company, along with all the guys who thought that a mythology-driven space opera wouldn’t have any kind of audience in 1977 or that a movie about a Civil War officer who goes out to the prairie and “finds himself” with the Indians would amount to nothing in 1990 or the dude who thought that of course another Julie Andrews musical after Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music would be box office gold.)

“Why doesn’t Hollywood just make movies that people want to see?”

Well, there are two answers to that. One is very simple: Hollywood does make movies that people want to see. Maybe ticket sales are down, but buying a ticket isn’t the only way to see a movie anymore, and it may be that what we’re witnessing isn’t so much a slump on the part of the makers of filmed entertainment but the movie theater losing its lustre as the preferred means of enjoying filmed entertainment. I probably see as many movies per year as I did ten years ago, but the huge difference is that I see far fewer of them in the theater. Ask yourself this simple question: How often do you see new movies come out and, as you’re reading the reviews in the paper, make a mental note to keep an eye out for it on DVD? Theater going nowadays constitutes a much greater investment of time and money than it did ten years ago, between ticket prices and concessions being way up on the money end and the twenty minutes plus of preliminary stuff that’s tacked onto movies on the time end. It used to be that a date of dinner and a movie could start at 5:30 and end around 9:30. Nowadays, dinner and a movie has to start closer to 5:00 or even earlier, and ends much closer to 11:00.

But I’m seeing DVDs for sale everywhere, and every time I go into Blockbuster and the video section at The Store, all the big-name new releases are always out of stock. Anecdotal, yes, but if Hollywood isn’t making movies that people want to see, how is it that everybody I know has seen the latest movies? I often hear people say, “I never go to the movies anymore”, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not seeing movies.

The second answer is a bit more complicated: it’s that Hollywood is making movies that people want to see, but it does so haphazardly, almost accidentally. Returning to The Passion of the Christ: would anyone have been surprised if it had flopped? Probably not — and many, if not most, of the biggest hits in film history have been surprise hits. As William Goldman wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade:

The “go” decision is the ultimate importance of the studio executive. They are responsible for what gets up there on the silver screen. Compounding their problem of no job security in the decision-making process is the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry:

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Nobody knows what’s going to be a hit, and nobody knows what’s going to be a flop, and since that’s the case, it’s kind of hard to justify the idea that the movie companies would be rolling in the money if only they’d just look at what was popular the year before and make more movies just like that.

For one thing, movie making takes time: Narnia and Brokeback Mountain were both almost certainly in preproduction already when Passion of the Christ was still in theaters. Even if there’s some great lesson to be learned from that film’s success, it would take at least two or three years to show up in the types of films being put out by the studios. That Narnia was marketed by Disney to the churchgoing public is a consequence of The Passion‘s success, but the fact that it got made at all is not. (And besides, we’re talking Disney here — behind that wholesome mouse lurks one of the most cynical corporations of all time, when it comes to marketing.)

For another, too often the lessons are contradictory. Sure, Passion made a ton of money. But how did other recent Christian movies do? I didn’t know that Luther had been made until my church held a screening. Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie flopped. The Omega Code never enjoyed any kind of widespread release — but wouldn’t the evangelicals flocking to it have been noticed? Not if they never flocked to it to begin with. The animated film The Prince of Egypt, which told the tale of Moses and the Exodus (and told it well — I did see that one in the theater) did pretty well, but its results weren’t that dramatic.

I’m always confused when people insist that there’s some great, untapped market out there — whether it’s for Christian films, or good “family” films, or whatever. I’m always confused because there are almost always films available that would appeal to these particular untapped markets, and these movies always slip away, unnoticed. It took video for The Iron Giant to become beloved, just to cite one example. (And going beyond just family or Christian movies, think of The Shawshank Redemption. I’m not sure if I know a single person who hasn’t seen it, and yet, it tanked horribly at the box office.)

In Hollywood, nobody knows anything. There’s no guarantee that making a bunch of Christian-themed movies, in the vein of The Passion of the Christ, is going to elevate ticket sales at all. It’s a pleasant notion for those who like to take the “Them versus Us” approach to cultural debates, but it’s a notion that’s sadly lacking in evidence supporting it.

I note that the other day, Roger Ebert handled this exact issue in his “Answer Man” column. I quote Mr. Ebert:

Q. If this was such a great year for movies, why are box-office receipts so far down from last year, even though admission prices are at an all-time high? Do you feel that there is such a growing disconnect between Hollywood and America that Hollywood had better wake up or face serious consequences? (Cal Ford, Corsicana, Texas)

A (Ebert): No, I don’t, because the “box-office slump” is an urban myth that has been tiresomely created by news media recycling one another. By mid-December, according to the Hollywood Reporter, receipts were down between 4 percent and 5 percent from 2004, a record year when the totals were boosted by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which grossed $370 million. Many of those tickets were sold to people who rarely go to the movies. 2005 will eventually be the second or third best year in box-office history. Industry analyst David Poland at moviecitynews.com has been consistently right about this non-story.

And finally, here’s an article by a religion reporter arguing that, contra atheist SDB, Hollywood actually does not despise Christianity.

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It’s always fun to see when some prominent blogger or other online writer notes something that Little Old Me blogged about a while back. In this case, in today’s TMQ column, Gregg Easterbrook discovers old-time candy, and notes in particular the existence of Mallo Cups, made by the Boyer company:

This year for Christmas, we filled the kids’ stockings with 1960s candy ordered from Hometown Favorites, explaining they were getting the candy that mom and dad got in their stockings as children. When the box from Hometown Favorites arrived, immediately I bit into my first Mallo Cup in 35 years. Turns out Boyer Candies, founded by Bill, Bob and Emily Boyer during the Depression as a door-to-door candy sales firm operated from the family kitchen, still makes Mallo Cups and Smoothies in Altoona, Pennsylvania. They even still have the little paper coin inside! The paper coins even still bear the cryptic instruction, STICK ON TAPE TO AVOID DELAY. Save 500 Mallo Cup points and send them to Altoona to receive a dollar bill: a transaction that was only attractive when Mallo Cups cost a dime and a first-class stamp was four cents.

Of course, longtime readers will remember when I touted the fine Boyer products myself, here and here. And the best part? I don’t have to go online to order old-time candies — I can just hop in the car and go to Vidler’s in East Aurora. Not only can I consume the candy that Easterbrook and others ate as kids, I can buy it in the same type of place they bought it!

(That online candy store sure looks cool, though, and old-time candy would be the perfect stocking stuffer, eh?)

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I suspect that we all have websites that we follow for a time, and then forget about for a time, and then suddenly remember for no real reason and check out again with either delight or dismay. One such case is James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month, which could be updated weekly as far as I’m concerned. Each month the site presents a photo of some unfortunate bit of architecture or urban planning or suburban catatonia, complete with pithy comment. Case in point is this selection, in which a typically hideous Frank Gehry building* is described thusly:

If your dog had a tumor like this the vets would just shake their heads and put him to sleep. The design follows the logic of cancer: invade and overwhelm the host organism.

The current (as of this writing; sometime in January it will be archived) Eyesore is actually a bit of positive comment on the downtown core in Troy, NY. We here in Buffalo might consider such.

* On Gehry: the first time I saw photos of a Gehry building, I thought it was really cool. Next time, still cool but obviously recycling the idea of the last one. And so on, until now I wonder if the guy has any ideas at all beyond the “crumpled tin foil ball” thing.

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According to Professor Bainbridge, the time has come for the cork to be replaced by the screw-cap for wine. I suppose that ultimately the quality of the wine is the ultimate concern, but there’s just a romance to pulling a cork, a sense of history about it: when I drive the worm of my corkscrew into the cork, I always feel a bit like I’m still doing something that people were doing two hundred years ago and more, even in this tech-driven world. But then, I’m little more than a rank novice when it comes to wine, and I doubt I’ll ever get farther than this, since I’ve never bought wine by the case and since my preferred method of wine shopping, aside from picking up a few standby favorites like Cockburn’s Ruby Port, is to wander the aisles at the local wine emporium (two of which are within two miles of my home!) and go, “Hey, that one there’s got the coolest label and it’s less than ten bucks!” Yeah, some conaisseur.

Anyhow, if wine goes the way of the screwcap, that’s fine with me, I suppose. But I have a couple of questions:

1. Is this more a drive for continued refinement of the quality control aspect of the vintner’s craft, or has cork-making itself suffered as a craft in recent years? In other words, are corks becoming more faulty these days, or is this just a case of a better way being found?

2. If, as I’ve read in the wine-reading I’ve done, the true enemies of wine are light and air, why is there so little love for the box? Is there something inherently inferior about the nonreactive bag in the heavy cardboard box to darkened glass? Is the box so good at preserving wine that the effects of aging are therefore nullified? Just curious.

For those who care about such things, my most valuable bottle of wine is undoubtedly a 375-ml (not sure what the specific term for that bottle size is) of Sauternes, bottled in 1989. I took a look at it the other day, and it has, as Wine for Dummies promised, aged to a gorgeous deep gold, not unlike a very old gold coin. When I bought that bottle, close to ten years ago, I decided that I’d open it when I sold my first novel. Lucky for me that Sauternes apparently ages very well.

As for the rest of my wine “collection”, I have something like fifteen or so bottles at this moment. A few reds, a few whites (I have three New York State Rieslings that I’ve got to try), and two bottles each of Port and Sherry. (I love Port and Sherry.) I also have two bottles of sparkling wine, a bottle of Sake, and a bottle of mead that I just bought today. Yup, I’m a rank beginner, and fine with it. After all, one of my reds on hand is something called “Red Ipocras”, which is a spiced wine. I imagine that if I tried serving that to James Bond, I’d be on the business end of his Walther PPK right quick.

(Original link via 2Blowhards. I also see that Professor Bainbridge, in addition to his regular blog that I don’t read that often for reasons passing understanding, has a blog devoted to wine. I may check that one out more often, even though I’m pretty much of a “Ooooooh, pretty!” guy when it comes to wine.)

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