Month: June 2006

Via Fred, I see that the Royal Scottish National Orchestra wants Scotland to stop using “God Save the Queen” as its anthem. GStQ is a nice enough tune, but we can’t really expect the Scots to sing the sixth verse with any real fervor:

Lord grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush.
God save the King!

Yup. They sure wouldn’t like that, would they? So the RSNO has picked five possible replacements, and are soliciting people to listen to them and then vote for a favorite.

I’ve already heard most of these before — you run into this kind of thing a lot when you listen to a lot of Celtic music — but I wonder why they didn’t offer Dougie MacLean’s wonderful “Caledonia”?

(Speaking of anthems, I’ve never been wild about “The Star Spangled Banner”. I’d personally go with “America the Beautiful” or “This Land Is Your Land”. As for the big “unofficial” anthems we seem to have these days, I’m pretty tired of “God Bless America”, and I could live my whole life and very happily never hear “God Bless the USA” again.)

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Composer Gyorgi Ligeti has died. I don’t know much about him, really, aside from the use of a portion of several of his works in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey:

:: Atmospheres is used as an overture to the film (before the opening titles and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

:: The Requiem for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra is heard during the “Dawn of Man” sequence as the monolith appears to early man in Africa.

:: Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna is heard during the sequence when Heywood Floyd and a number of scientists venture out to confront the monolith on the moon.

:: The Requiem and Atmospheres are both reprised during the film’s Jupiter sequences, when the Discovery spaceship arrives at Jupiter and then when David Bowman leaves the ship and travels across space and time to…wherever it is that Bowman ends up.

Many film music afficionados believe that the film would actually have been better served by the score that composer Alex North wrote for it, but I’ve never agreed. Stanley Kubrick may not have handled that situation tactfully (apparently he didn’t tell North about his decision to stick with his original “temp track” of classical works), but I can’t imagine the film without the music Kubrick eventually used. Ligeti is a big part of that.

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I’ll update this more later on after I’ve read through the information about it, but some details on Guy Gavriel Kay’s next novel are available here. Looks like Ysabel will be a marked departure from the kind of thing he’s written before.

(But will it have a map???)

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I’ve just finished watching the second season of The West Wing on DVD.

This was when the show was at its best. This was when Aaron Sorkin was at the height of his powers, when the characters were still fresh enough to surprise but also well-established enough to be endearing, when the cast was really starting to become comfortable, and when the show’s direction was at its best.

If you don’t remember the second season, it starts with the brilliant two-parter “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen”, which picks up with the aftermath of the assassination attempt on the President that concluded season one. It also established what would become a favorite trick of Sorkin’s: interweaving a present-day storyline with flashbacks to past events. In “Shadow of Two Gunman”, we flash back to the early days of the Bartlet campaign when the staff is still meeting one another, and in the season’s final episode, “Two Cathedrals”, we flash back to when Bartlet as a schoolboy met Mrs. Landingham.

I could cite specific wonderful examples from season two, as well as some glaring flaws (Mandy’s disappearance was never explained; Felicity Huffman was introduced as a political rival to Toby Ziegler and then never seen again; “The Stackhouse Filibuster” was the show’s first outright bad episode), but what stood out to me in watching the entire season over a few weeks was the way Sorkin and company gradually move the MS storyline to the front and center.

Again for those who don’t remember the specifics, in an episode in the middle of the first season, it had been revealed that President Bartlet had been diagnosed some years earlier with Multiple Sclerosis and not divulged it during his campaign for the White House. Season two ends with a sequence of four amazing episodes in which Bartlet has to go public with his condition. But what’s so impressive is that so many of that storyline’s building blocks are maneuvered into place much, much earlier.

Well before the MS plotline takes center stage, it’s established that the President is loathe to switch into campaign mode just two years into his first term. Republican rivals begin to take precedence. Bartlet’s State of the Union address is established as an attempt by the President to move toward the political center. So well before MS is really mentioned, we’re already watching the White House gearing up for a campaign.

But it doesn’t end there: a whole other level of conflict is set up when it’s revealed that Bartlet had made a promise to his wife before his initial election as President that, because of his disease, he would only serve a single term. Now he is leaning to break that promise, which puts marital strife in the air also well before the MS storyline heats up.

And finally, even in the course of the real meat of the MS story, the show doesn’t let up anywhere else, either. In addition to that, we have a diplomatic crisis in Haiti and a domestic political hot potato in the form of the Federal Government’s lawsuit against the big tobacco companies. And then things get even worse when Mrs. Landingham, the person who’s been in Bartlet’s life longer than anyone else (even Mrs. Bartlet), is killed in a car crash.

Watching these episodes again, I found myself getting swept away again. I’m looking forward to watching Season Three now. I haven’t seen any of Season Three since those episodes first ran, and I recall the resolution of the MS tale feeling somewhat lackluster in comparison with the setup. But that may be an artifact of the times in which those episodes aired; when Season Three first aired, 9-11 had just happened and the MS storyline felt a lot less real. I also think that Aaron Sorkin started to lose a bit of steam in Season Three; that’s when he started doing things like introducing fictitious countries (Qumar, Equatorial Khundu). That wonderful sense, inherent in the first two seasons, that the show depicted events that really could happen in the real world, faded away a bit when they started inventing countries out of whole cloth.

But maybe I’m being unfair to Season Three. I’ll know in a few weeks.

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This may not be work-safe, but it’s not pornographic or anything. It’s a web-based comic strip dedicated to one particular subset of male junior-high type humor. Yes, it’s all very stupid. Yes, I laughed at a few of them.

And along the same lines, here’s a compilation of clips of “Sean Connery” appearing on Saturday Night Live’s recurring Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches.

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Astronomers have recently determined that our galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, boasts about one trillion stars. That’s about two-and-a-half times as many stars as our own Milky Way.

Stuff like this really makes me miss Carl Sagan.

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My Norelco shaver finally died this week. The motor still works, but something snapped inside the mechanism that drives the rotary heads, so one of the heads spins freely while the other two just sit there, not doing anything. So I had to go to Target yesterday and replace that, as well. Damn electronic doodads!

But that shaver’s longevity impresses me. I got it before my sophomore year of college, back in summer of 1990, and it last all the way up to last week. That’s almost sixteen years. Sure, I had to change the blades a couple of times, but it certainly can’t be argued that I didn’t get my money’s worth out of that shaver.

Now, in terms of “continuous service”, the shaver wasn’t actually sixteen years old, since I grew a beard for the second half of my college career and since I’ve had a beard for two years now. But for the first year, and then the eleven years between college and my working at The Store, I used that shaver at least four times a week, and I still use it now to trim the beardline once or twice a week. So that shaver got used quite a lot.

I’m always amazed at the frequency with which folks replace perfectly functional items in their households. I just replaced a sixteen-year-old shaver; my toaster oven is the same age as the shaver and is still going strong; my drip coffee maker is twelve years old and still works perfectly; I still listen to music on a shelf stereo system or a Sony Discman, both of which I bought in 1995; the lamp that sat in my bedroom through high school and then went to college with me now sits beside The Daughter’s bed; The Wife prepares waffles on a decades-old waffle iron that she actually acquired from her mother.

I wonder why it is that in all the articles about how to save money and stretch budgets and all that kind of thing, I rarely read this simple piece of advice: “When you buy a gadget, use it until it dies.”

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Just this morning, the scroll wheel on my mouse has decided that it’s had a good run and been useful and stuff, but now it’s time to give up the ghost and wander off to the great Circuit City in the Sky.

So now I gotta use my friggin’ arrow keys. Talk about retrogressing technology.

I can still depress the scroll wheel and thus get the drag-and-scroll, which I suppose I’ll start doing, and it’ll probably feel natural after a few days, but for right now I feel like one of those American tourists who goes to Paris, checks into the hotel room, and then wonders why on Earth the toilet has a button that squirts water up. It just ain’t right.

And on top of that, the computer itself has developed a tendency to lock up, requiring a BruteBoot (that’s what I call clicking off the power via the switch on the surge protector) to get things going again. The machine is pushing four and a half years old, so I know it’s had a good life. I suspect it’ll be time to look into a new machine within a few months. If I can stretch this machine’s lifetime out to, say, autumn, I’ll be happy. But it doesn’t do well with The Daughter’s games anymore (and her games are all pretty old), the letters on half the keys are worn away from constant use (not usually a problem for me, since I’ve been able to type for years without looking, but it sure makes things tough for those word-verification doohickeys on many blog commenting systems), and now the scroll wheel is apparently down for the count.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a good deal, since all I’ll really want is a CPU, mouse and keyboard; I won’t need a monitor since that’s still going strong, as is the printer. Again, I’m hoping to keep the current machine active for a while longer, with six months being ideal, but we all well know that may not work out.

(This would be the time, of course, for that super wealthy reader of mine to hit the tip jar. I’ve gotta have one rich reader, right? One?)

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Feel like crying? Then read this post

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