Month: December 2005

On pretty much of a whim I took one of those blog-quiz things a few minutes ago, called “What are the keys to your heart?”. I’m not going to post my results here, because they weren’t encouraging, really — this is the first Net quiz thingie that’s ever pegged me as an adulterer-in-waiting, which bugs the living hell out of me, frankly. But I am mentioning the quiz because in my experience, I can usually pick out what the result’s going to be based on my answers (and even on the choices given), but this particular quiz makes less than zero sense to me. The questions are literally all things like “God’s gonna destroy the world, but you can save one animal species. Which one do you save?” I have no clue whatever how my answers map onto the quiz results. Is this some kind of “shamanism” thing?

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A couple of notes before I shut down the Blogging Brain for the celebration of Christmas or Hannukah or Life Day or the Solstice or Festivus or whatever:

:: As I stated here, I’m soliciting questions on stuff — mainly, suggestions for posts — from readers, probably for use next week. Leave them in comments there, if anything leaps to mind. Anything at all.

:: Next week, by the way, I’ll be posting my selections for my “Best Posts of 2005”. Just a heads-up.

:: A small preview rant about the Bills: Nice game, guys — way to get that first road win, in the fifteenth game of the season, and way to show your pride when you’re 4-10 and in the running for a top eight draft pick. Ptooie!

:: For various reasons, I’ve halted my participation in the FSM Message Boards and have moved over to the brand-new Intrada Forums. Intrada is the “grizzled veteran” of specialty record labels focusing on film music, and I wish the forum well.

Time to close down the blog for a couple of days. I’ll return on Monday, the day after Christmas. Until then, be well and cool at heart; and may your Christmases be filled with peace, joy, music, love, tables abundant and glasses overflowing.

“Noel: Christmas Eve 1913”, by Robert Bridges (1844-1930).

A frosty Christmas Eve when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels or the bright stars singing.
Now blessed be the towers that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders (said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ in the belfries tonight
With arms lifted to clutch the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above and the mad romping din.
But to me heard afar it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderley to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect of th’ eternal silence.

(And wouldn’t you know it — in the course of writing this very post, I’ve just had a really nifty story idea occur to me. And it’s too late to write it for Christmas! Oh well, there’s always next year.)

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I’m not posting tomorrow at all, so the Burst shall happen today. And it shall be multiple in its Bursting. Cool!

:: Want to start a football or basketball team, and name it for one of the books of the Bible? Look no further: Christian Throwback Jerseys. I don’t really have anything against this, but it just seems odd, like the football players who always drop to their knees and pray after scoring a touchdown. George Carlin, pointing out the weirdness of this practice, once noted that the losing team never says things like, “The Good Lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage.” (Link via TBogg.)

:: Paul Riddell has an interesting consequence of a certain front of the “culture wars”: you never see atheists barge into churches on Sunday morning and start denouncing the believers. You do, however, see Creationists barge into Natural History museums and act disruptive in front of evolution displays, so much so that now the museums are finding themselves having to give their employees special training on how to deal with disruptive Creationists. (By the way, you’ll notice that I never use “Creationist” and “Christian” interchangeably. It’s my belief that Christianity and evolution are perfectly compatible.)

:: Boy, I hope they get GQ in the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Assuming that that is where Osama Bin Laden is hiding, the appearance of this woman in a photo shoot for GQ is surely going to make that little vein in his forehead strain with pressure to the point of nearly popping:

That’s Bin Laden’s niece..

God Bless the Weirdness!

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Via MeFi I see the 50 Greatest Gadgets of All Time. Of course, since the list comes from PCWorld, it’s more of a greatest tech gadgets of all time. For all-purpose gadgetry, I’d certainly include things like the drip coffeemaker (I’m always genuinely surprised that percolators are even made anymore, since their resulting coffee tastes like crap), the phonograph, and the astrolabe. (Yeah, it’s a gadget. Just because it was invented in something like 1200 AD doesn’t render it a non-gadget!)

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Continuing to post photos of some favorite Christmas ornaments — begun here and here — I’ll finish up the theme today. We do have many more wonderful ornaments, of course, but I’m not going to post any more than these for one highly practical reason: I need to save some for posting next year, right?

I bought this one in a little store in the Pittsburgh Airport some years back, on my way home from a corporate training session for the company I was working for at the time. It was a store devoted exclusively to cutesy stuff relating to cats and dogs. Of course, anyone who actually spends time in the company of cats knows that this characterization of them is wholly inaccurate:

I love cats and always have and I can’t imagine not having at least two around, but a halo? Come on. This next one is far more accurate:

This is a much better depiction of the “lazy freeloader” aspect of Feline-dom, I think.

Next is yet another set of ornaments from that Past Times company. (Wow, I bought a lot of ornaments from them over the years!) It’s a six-piece set of painted glass ornaments forming a Nativity, right there on the tree. Here we have the baby Jesus and Joseph:

And here is Mary:

The set does include the three Magi, which are also on the tree. Now, when hanging these, we don’t really try to group them all together so the entire “Tree Nativity” is visible from one spot. (Of course, if we were being really accurate in observing the doctrine, we wouldn’t hang the Wise Men until after Christmas Day. But that’s quibbling, isn’t it?)

Finally, there is this, which is one of my absolute favorite ornaments ever. I bought this at a wonderful mall chain store, now closed, called The Museum Company. This store specialized in fairly high-quality reproductions and keepsake items inspired by the fine arts, and one year they had a selection of nautically-themed items: they had things like that whistle they’d use to signal the Captain’s arrival on deck, or a spyglass, and the like. And they had some really neat ships-in-bottles, including this wonderful ornament:

That’s all for this year. Tune in next year for more ornamenty goodness! (And tune in before that, of course, for non ornamenty goodness, of course.)

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I don’t know why I suddenly remembered this earlier today, but I saw it a while back and, if I recall correctly, I might have even bookmarked it before I lost my bookmarks in a browser mishap. Anyhow, here’s how I envision myself as a South Park character, after using this fun gizmo:

Yup, that’s how I’ve spent quite a bit of the last hour. At one point I had a Viking helmet, a battle-ax, and an eye patch. At least this is more realistic — and I can keep my coffee hot by stirring it with my lightsaber!

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I’m positively blushing.

And I was about to actually link a recent thread over on the FSM boards in which I exhibited maybe a teeny bit of malice (toward the Objectivist Weirdo, as you might expect), but the thread apparently got too malignant — and I wasn’t even that active on it — and got deleted by the Moderators, so my reputation as established by Sir Shandy is still unsullied.

Hoo-ray!

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A few days ago, Will Duquette said this:

Of course, I’ve been touting the virtues of genre over “literary” fiction for years.

And I agree, entirely. All of the fancy literary tricks of “literary fiction”, whatever that is, are late-comers to the game; what existed in the first place was story. Story speaks to something older, something wiser, about our species. Story is noble. Story puts us on the same footing as our earliest ancestors. Story has power. So give me story.

Lynn then follows up with this:

I don’t know anything about modern “literary fiction”; I don’t even know what people are talking about when they say “literary fiction” but it seems to me that the problem with today’s artsy-fartsy academics in general, whether the subject is literature, music or visual art, is that they are trying to control history in a way that past masters never would have dreamed of. They want absolute control of what ends up in The Canon instead of just letting history follow its natural course.

And again, I agree.

Then there’s this, written in a comment to this post:

What’s different today is that so little of pop culture has any lasting value. It’s aways been true that the bulk of pop culture was crap; today the crap to quality ratio grows higher by the minute. Can you imagine a musical (just to name one musical genre) as good as “West Side Story” or for that matter (closer to Dustbury) “Oklahoma” getting made today? Yet people, for good reason, still love those musicals. Will anyone be listening to Fifty Cent fourty years from now? Taste aside, it used to take real talent to be a musical star; talent today it’s almost a hindrance. And visual art is no better-Rockwell, who in fact was a damn good illustrator, was another Picasso compared with the likes of a Thomas Kinkade.

Probably the only field where talent still equals stardom is in movie acting; in fact arguably there are fewer stars today who are as poor at their craft as, for example, Joan Crawford or Clark Gable.

I disagree with Lynn’s comments about the literary canon-somebody has to decide what belongs and what doesn’t. I hope it’s somebody with taste and, yes, a little elitism in his heart. Otherwise Harold Robbins and Danielle Steele will be “taught” because that’s what people like. Or Oprah (God bless her) will decide.

I couldn’t possibly disagree more with this.

As a matter of historical perspective, the denizens of any particular epoch have never been particularly good at predicting what of their art is going to last and what’s going to slide into obscurity. This is something that has always struck me: the pure capriciousness of it all. There are artists whose work is popular at the time of creation and pretty much stays popular forevermore (Dickens, Beethoven); there are artists whose work is tremendously popular at the time of creation but falls away into obscurity as time passes (Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Antonio Salieri); there are artists whose work isn’t terribly well received at the time of creation but resurges later on (Bach, Mozart, Berlioz); there even are artists who are popular at the time of creation, and then fade for a bit, and then resurge again (witness the attention Raymond Chandler has received in recent years). And none of this is predictable.

The commenter above starts off with a colossal error: “What’s different today is that so little of pop culture has any lasting value.” The problem is easy to see: No one can possibly say this yet. The only way to judge what lasts is to wait and see what actually lasts. To say that nothing today has any lasting value is a mere statement of opinion, and nothing more.

Anyone can list specific artists that one doesn’t like and say, “Will anyone be listening/reading/watching/admiring this in fifty years?” Yes, I’ve done it many a time myself — it’s too handy a rhetorical device. But even if it’s inconceivable that readers fifty years hence will be perusing Danielle Steele, it’s far less so that they might be reading King, Kay, Chabon, Oates, or…I could go on.

Too often it’s tempting to romanticize the periods gone by — especially the periods that are well within memory, which is what trips up movie buffs: there are plenty of folks around who remember going to the theater to see Casablanca and Singin’ in the Rain in their first runs. But they probably don’t remember going to see any of the many forgettable — or just plain bad — films that I used to see on AMC, back when I had cable. I’d see these movies and think, “My God, people used to see crap like this?” Yes, they did — and some of those bad movies were hits. We tend to remember the hits and forget the misses — but it takes time for us to forget the misses. Right now, the misses are too easily remembered. I will remember seeing Godzilla and I will be angry that it got made. But culture at large will not. That’s important.

The way a canon is made isn’t for some one person, or small group of persons, to sit in an enclave and declare what gets in and what does not. Canon-making is messy. Canon-making is ugly. Canon-making takes time. So who gets to make the Canon?

I do.

And so do you. And so does Lynn, and Will, and Alex Ross, and Kevin Drum, and PZ Myers, and Warren Ellis, and John Scalzi, and everyone else. A canon is made as individual readers/viewers/listeners choose the works that matter to them, advocate for those works, study them, and canonize them. Some works will be venerated by many, and some by a few; some will be venerated by many now but few later; some will be venerated by few now but many later; some will be venerated by few now and fewer still later until they’re almost completely forgotten.

Nobody gets to decide what gets into the Canon and what gets left out.

Everybody does.

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I’ve seen this in several places (here and here, frex), so here’s a little “Four things…” quiz:

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Technical services assistant in a university library; pizza restaurant shift manager; pharmaceutical telesales; grocery store maintenance guy.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Star Wars (all six — cheating a bit there); The Lord of the Rings (all of it — still cheating); Casablanca; Dial M for Murder (I just bought in on DVD this very day! Joy!)

Four places you’ve lived: Buffalo, NY; Syracuse, NY; Portland, OR; LaCrosse, WI.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Of shows still airing, House; Scrubs; CSI; Nova. Of shows no longer airing, Once and Again; Seinfeld; Millennium; Star Trek: TOS.

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Pittsburgh, PA; Orlando, FL; Cape Cod, MA; Coeur d’Alene, ID.

Four websites you visit daily: Most of the websites I frequent daily now are blogs, but the non-blogs I visit daily are FSM, AICN, Bright Weavings, and Flickr.

Four of your favorite foods: Sausage; Chocolate; Ice Cream; Pizza.

Four places you’d rather be: I dunno — I love it right here. For visits, I’d like to have a week in Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Great Britain.

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In contemporary political parlance, the phrase “activist judge” actually means, “judge who rules against the Right”.

I’m glad we’re clear on that much, at last.

Bravo to the judge in the Dover case, who recognized Intelligent Design for what it is — watered down Creationism — and thus decreed its deserved removal from the science classroom.

As one might expect, Dr. Myers has all the linky goodness. Just go to his main page and scroll around. Science and rationalism won a victory today.

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