Month: May 2006

If your domicile is home to a couple of nice and loving but occasionally very naughty kitties, just find a way to jack the heat and humidity inside way up. It sucks the naughty right out of ’em!

(Upper 80s and humid in Buffalo before June. This weather sucks, folks.)

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OK, folks, I’ve just ripped out the code that was powering the old YACCS commenting system. I’d left the old threads available for a while on the off chance anyone wanted to add anything, but it’s been long enough. They’re gone.

And since occasional YACCS outages tended to drag down the loading time of this blog, hopefully regular readers will experience more reliable response in the future.

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Same image I used last year:

Thank you all. I hope we’re still worthy of your sacrifice.

(In an unrelated note, it was six months ago today.)

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Last week saw the demolition of a nuclear power plant’s cooling tower in Oregon. You can watch it here. I found this interesting not just on the “blowing stuff up” account, but because I remember driving by this particular nuke plant when I was a kid and we lived for a time in Portland.

(I frankly don’t get the whole anti-nuclear power vibe, by the way. Surely we can do it safer by now, right? And as scary as Three Mile Island was, we’ve never come close to having a Chernobyl, which wasn’t exactly the best design for a nuke plant in the first place. But then, maybe I’m full of crap and nuke power is still inherently dangerous and I’ve just been lulled by the fact that Homer Simpson’s been working at a nuke plant for years without any ill effects. Well, except for that one time…and that other time…and the time that Homer….)

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Here’s an illustration of one of the problems with classical music these days. The LA Opera is set to premiere a major new work by composer Elliot Goldenthal, Grendel, which is based on the Beowulf legend but is told from the point-of-view of the monster. Goldenthal is one of the finer voices to emerge from Hollywood film scoring over the last fifteen years. His is a very distinct voice, and he has a gift for orchestration that goes well beyond the traditional. Goldenthal loves to use unusual instruments in unusual combinations, and for a noted film composer to get an assignment such as this, where he’s basically set free of the formal limitations of film scoring, is an exciting prospect.

Too bad it’s likely to be years before I can hear this work, because due to union re-use fees it will simply be too expensive to record Grendel in the United States. So unless I can find a way to travel to a city where Grendel is staged in the future, I’m unlikely to get to hear this work until a recording surfaces. It would probably have to be recorded in Europe, which I suppose might be more likely since Grendel is a major new work being premiered by the opera company of one of America’s largest cities, but how much other new music is never heard much because not only is it already not performed much by orchestras who are in thrall to “the standard repertoire”, but also because union costs preclude recording?

The union cost issue is one I’ve run into a lot in the film music fandom community. Because the union rules require that musicians get paid for their work whenever recordings are issued, it’s often the case that the revenues expected from releasing a film music recording are less than the union costs. This results in lots of film music never getting released. I hadn’t realized that the union costs can harm the cause of the promulgation of new classical music as well.

(On a somewhat related note, I was surprised to read via Alex Ross that John Adams’s famous opera Nixon in China has never been performed by either of New York City’s major opera companies. That doesn’t help the cause, either.)

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Here’s some stuff I’ve found on which I don’t have a whole lot to say in addition:

:: Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson gave a commencement speech at his alma mater in 1990, and here it is.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

Read the whole thing; it’s worth it (even despite a few obvious transcription errors). I have to admit, though, that while I admire Watterson’s ability to keep his creation “pure” and to walk away from it while it was still fresh, I am bothered by the fact that a man with such insight has pretty much chosen to withdraw from a world that desperately needs it. Oh well.

:: Along similar lines, this woman has found fulfillment as a pizza delivery driver. I’ve done that too — never actually as an official driver, but as a shift manager, it was occasionally my responsibility to go out and run some pizzas around, back in the day. I wouldn’t say I found it fulfilling, but it was sometimes a pleasant diversion, getting to drive around and listen to the radio while the restaurant was getting its ass kicked. Of course, there was high annoyance as well — people who would stiff the drivers on the tips, the unpleasantness of running deliveries on hot summer nights when the car’s A/C was on the fritz, running deliveries on Halloween night, realizing too late that I’d gone down West Washington street when my customer lived on East Washington. But if this woman is really happy doing that, then more power to her.

:: Along the lines of comic strips mentioned above, here’s an article which describes some of the approaches academia has taken with regard to Peanuts. Not the most interesting article in the world, but I did learn that Snoopy’s famed battles against the Red Baron only took place in the strip while the Vietnam War was raging.

:: And along the lines of Peanuts, we’ve just this weekend watched the 1969 movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which was made way back in 1969. It’s really quite good, and yet it seems to have slipped through the “cultural awareness” cracks. Most kids now only know the Peanuts gang through the Christmas and Halloween/”Great Pumpkin” TV specials. This film is something else. Its story, involving Charlie Brown’s participation in a spelling bee and his upward trip to the National Finals, basically serves as backdrop for a whole lot of Peanuts digression and some really trippy weirdness. For example, there’s a frankly amazing segment that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in the Disney film Fantasia, accompanying Schroder’s playing of Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata (second movement). Here’s a review of the film by Drew McWeeny (AICN’s “Moriarty”). It’s quite a film, really. I had no idea it even existed until I read Drew’s review a few months ago, and I spotted the DVD in the bargain bin at The Store yesterday, strangely enough.

:: When I was a kid I briefly dabbled in stamp collecting. It’s a fascinating hobby, and the main reason I never kept up with it was basically that it got crowded out by other interests. Here’s a story about an ultra-rare stamp that was recently “reunited” with the letter whose postage it provided. The letter was a love letter, appropiately enough.

One of the rarest stamps in the world, the Blue Boy sold for $1 million in 1981 and is estimated to be worth many times that now. Still, many wondered why this stamp — an Alexandria postmaster provisional printed on blue paper before U.S. government stamps were commonplace — survived when all others like it were lost or destroyed. If the envelope had been saved for sentimental reasons, did the letter also exist? If so, what did it say?

:: It seems that wiser heads have prevailed at NBC: sitting on Aaron Sorkin’s new Studio 60 at the Sunset Strip show, and noting that the show would get unmercifully clobbered at 9:00 on Thursdays (against CSI and Grey’s Anatomy, they have moved it to Mondays at 10:00 (up against CSI: Miami). This means that I can still execute my original plan of watching CSI and taping Grey’s, and then watching Grey’s at 10:00. Whew.

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The Da Vinci Load.

Not work-safe.

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Via this MeFi thread, I see that someone has “invented” a dipping-sauce cup “specifically designed” for the dipping of chicken wings. Now there‘s a problem that desperately needed solving! Those little round cups or ramekins of blue cheese just weren’t getting the job done! Now we have a wing-shaped ramekin so we can immerse the entire wing! (The point of which, of course, escapes me — now you’re getting blue cheese all over your fingers, and you’re dipping parts of the wing you’re not going to eat, anyway, like the ends.)

But the important thing is this: surely there’s a MeFi member in Buffalo who can set them straight on the fact that “Buffalo wings” were actually invented in Buffalo (toward the bottom of the thread, one poster tells the well-known Anchor Bar tale, but omits the name of the bar and speculates that the tale might be an urban legend).

If you’re wondering how to make authentic Buffalo-style chicken wings, I described the method a long time ago, but it’s worth reviewing, for folks who are in the unfortunate habit of calling pretty much any dish involving fried chicken wings as “Buffalo wings”. Now, I’m not a “chicken wing purist”; I think that the wing is a wonderful thing and there are many beautiful ways to prepare them. But I am a Buffalo wing purist. Put it this way: there are many, many ways to crush the juice from grapes and make wine. But there’s only one way to do it and make Champagne.

My favorite wings in Buffalo are the ones at Duff’s; there’s also a pizza place in Orchard Park called Capelli’s that we like a good deal. Good wings there. And I have to admit that the Quaker Steak and Lube chain has some terrific wingage. (The nearest one is in Erie, PA.) I’ve tasted wings prepared in any number of ways — breaded, unbreaded, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, all manner of sauces — and they’re always wonderful. But eating the genuine Buffalo wing is always like coming home again.

(I know, the Champagne metaphor above isn’t perfect, but it works well enough. No lectures, please!)

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Sorry for the lack of posting this week, but I’ve had a number of earlier-than-usual mornings at The Store for special projects. But hey, all is still well, and I can now add “stretch steel cable between two brick pillars” to my skill set. That’s me, Handyman to Blogistan.

Anyway, tonight I’m watching Live from Lincoln Center‘s clip-show. If you think that clip-shows suck, you haven’t seen Live from Lincoln Center do one. Wow. Now this is a clip show, and it’s wrapping up with that old chestnut that always gets my heart going pitter-pat, Luciano Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot.

A little while ago I read a summary of the Lost season finale, and something struck me, even though I gave up on actively following the show a year ago: it’s the TV show equivalent of those surreal computer games Myst and Riven. You’ve got desert islands that may or may not constitute the entire world, you’ve got lots of strange stuff all over the island that may or not mean something relevant, you’ve got strange numerological puzzles and weird mixtures of nature and technology. Someone should get J.J. Abrams in an interview and ask him if he was a big Myst fan a decade ago. (For the record, I loved Myst and Riven, but I never played the third one.)

Oh, and here’s an article that makes the pro-American Idol case. Now I don’t have to feel all dirty and stuff about loving the show…and heck, with the hippies winning The Amazing Race and now Taylor winning AI, I’m wondering if the old “things happen in threes” might apply and have the Sabres win the Cup.

Well, that’s it. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get back up to full blogging strength.

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