The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Sean e-mailed me a link to this blog post, in which we are presented the opportunity to hear the theme songs of every James Bond movie. Well, almost, anyway: “We Have All the Time in the World” is not the “theme song” to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; that would be the instrumental theme of the same name, written by John Barry. The Louis Armstrong song is a love theme that is heard over a romance montage depicting James Bond’s courtship of Tracy Vicenzo, about thirty minutes into the film.
Also, I realize it’s all a matter of opinion, but the poster claims that the best Bond theme is Madonna’s song for Die Another Day? I like Madonna plenty, but that song was, quite simply, teh suck. But I actually have a hard time picking an actual favorite; I love just about all of those songs, excepting the ones for the Pierce Brosnan films. The World is Not Enough was an OK song, and Tomorrow Never Dies actually had two decent songs, the better of which (k.d. lang’s) was relegated to the end credits so that the inferior one (Sheryl Crow’s) could be on the opening credits. The songs I love best tend to have lyrics that make no sense — what the hell does it mean to “strike like Thunderball”, anyway?
You can also hear the song for the forthcoming Casino Royale there. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it’s got a pretty muscular opening, and it’s sung by a man, which is fairly uncommon for the Bond series.
Of course, the Bond theme songs quickly settled into a format that calls for big arrangements and big vocals, but it’s a style that has many times through the years come in for rich parody. My favorite Bond-song parody comes, of course, from The Simpsons: Max Power! “He’s the man with the name you’d love to touch….” (from SimpsonCrazy.com).
I’m not sure if there’s a more maddening writer out there than Gregg Easterbrook, who often manages to be so colossally wrong and utterly right in the same column. It’s weird. One minute I’m saying, “How can this guy be this full of crap now, since he was so on the money four paragraphs ago?” And then I’m saying, “How can he be so on the money now, since he was just so full of crap?” (The topic of evolution brings out the absolute worst in him.)
Anyway, I’m swiping a couple of items from his current Tuesday Morning Quarterback column:
Perhaps the most tedious aspect of politics is wrangling over credit or blame. First, since government usually can only influence events, not control them, rare is the case where Democrats or Republicans are clearly to blame or deserve full credit for anything. Second, all that matters to citizens is whether things go well, not who signed which piece of paper on what day. Here are three examples. It is absurd for Republicans to keep saying Bill Clinton is to blame for not killing Osama bin Laden in 1998. Republicans were in control of the White House from January to September 2001, and they didn’t do anything decisive about bin Laden either. It was absurd for Sen. John McCain last week to say that Clinton’s 1994 agreement with North Korea is the reason that nation (perhaps) developed an atomic weapon. Republicans have now held the White House for as long as Clinton administered his North Korea deal, and Republicans did not stop North Korea either. And last week when new low-polluting “reformulated” diesel fuel hit the market, it was absurd that Democrats claimed George W. Bush deserves no credit because the initial rule mandating the advance was signed by Clinton a few days before he left office.
On the diesel fuel advance, which will cut air pollution, Bush could have stopped the rule but instead supported it — over the howls of the petroleum industry, which refines diesel. Anti-pollution regulations typically allow industry five to seven years to design and manufacture the technology needed to reduce emissions. Owing to this lag it is common for one president to put into practice a regulation first proposed by his predecessor; Bush’s father signed the 1991 legislation mandating a reduction in acid rain, then Clinton actually carried out that reform. All that matters is whether the public benefits, and the new low-polluting diesel fuel, for which Clinton and George W. Bush ought to share credit, will lead to a big reduction in smog, plus a reduction in asthma incidence. Note that the country’s most important news organization, the New York Times, buried the arrival of polluting-reducing diesel fuel on page A22, since it is inconveniently positive news.
Clinton addendum: The recent fictionalized TV docudrama about the buildup to Sept. 11 ominously suggests Clinton’s State Department sabotaged the 1998 missile strike against al-Qaida in Afghanistan by warning Pakistan that our missiles were about to cross its airspace on their way somewhere else. Bin Laden fled his Afghan camp while the missiles were in the air, and it’s likely bad people in the Pak government tipped him off. But the revisionism skips why we warned Islamabad missiles were coming. Weeks before the strike, Pakistan had tested its first atomic bomb; Pakistan and India were on the verge of history’s first atomic war. If unknown missiles approaching Pakistan had triggered an atomic exchange, this would have been a moral horror. The Clinton Administration absolutely had to warn Pakistan, risking a tip-off: Any other course would have been immoral. The real question about the 1998 strike was why missiles were fired across Pakistan (from a submarine in the Arabian Sea) in the first place. Missiles could have been fired from the Persian Gulf across Iran into Afghanistan. Cruise missiles are hard to detect; Iran in 1998 was not on high alert as Pakistan was; and Shia Iran doesn’t much like Sunni al-Qaida. Thus flight across Iran might have avoided the tip-off.
Revisionism addendum: Suppose Clinton had, in 1998, ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and Taliban forces there, as the docudrama suggested Clinton should have. Surely the president would have been bitterly denounced by Republicans, and since Sept. 11 would never have happened, today the 1998 invasion of Afghanistan would be spoken of as a pointless fiasco of the highest order. Something to chew on when you think about the Iraq war.
And this is just plain funny:
he buildup continues for TMQ’s annual Obscure College Game of the Year — Indiana of Pennsylvania versus California of Pennsylvania at Hepner-Bailey Field at Adamson Stadium in California, Pa. on Nov. 11. California of Pennsylvania University offers courses online, so you don’t actually have to be in either California or Pennsylvania.
Credit where due. But I’m sure Easterbrook will get back to pissing me off in next week’s TMQ.
A little background: a couple of years back, it turned out that the budget of Erie County (in which Buffalo and its suburbs reside) was about to implode. The reasons are too long to enumerate, but mostly they boil down to a stubbornly sluggish local economy combined with a dwindling tax base and some questionable fiscal decisions made a few years before that, when things were less dire. The Head of our County Government, County Executive Joel Giambra, did a lot of things wrong in addressing this ongoing budget problem, but the biggest symbolic thing was when it was revealed that Giambra’s personal driver, a personal friend of his who was paid for his driving services out of County budget funds (meaning, out of local tax revenues), was drawing a salary of over $80,000 a year.
Let that figure sink in a moment: a guy was being paid one-fifth of the salary of the President of the United States to drive around the County Executive of a cash-strapped Upstate NY county.
Well, that guy was let go for obvious reasons, and many wondered what on Earth Joel Giambra needed a driver for, anyway. He’s not a Senator, a Congressman, or a Governor — why couldn’t he drive himself around? Was his time that valuable? (And if so, why haven’t his results been less sucky?)
Which brings me to today: apparently Giambra was involved in a minor traffic accident due to a light being out at an intersection:
Erie County Executive Joel Giambra was not hurt when another car collided with his on Tuesday afternoon in Williamsville. His driver was taken to ECMC but is expected to be ok. (Emphasis added)
So the County Exec still has his own driver. I wonder how much this driver is making. Somehow I suspect that it’s just a bit more than what I make.
Oops. Sorry, folks, I just completely forgot to do the Sunday Burst yesterday. And judging by the outcry, I can tell it was missed.
Yup. Quite the outcry.
Uh-huh.
Anyhow, even if I had that kind of money, I don’t think I’d spend over $1,000 for an outfit. Or if I absolutely had to spend that kind of money on an outfit, I’d make it a very fine tux, with white tie and tails. If I were a performing classical musician, maybe, or perhaps a Head of State of a mildly prosperous nation. But there’s no way I’d spend over $1,000 on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt.
For one thing, I don’t like polo shirts.
Click these links. Click them. CLICK THEM!
:: Is New York really the only city in the land where audiences can handle this gorgeous work by Japan’s greatest twentieth-century composer? (I just happen to be listening to this piece right now, as I write this. I love Takemitsu.)
:: I think maybe it’s time I paid more attention to Hawkman. Clearly I have been missing out. (Via. I’m rather speechless.)
:: Spap Oop! BWAAAhahahaha! (It’ll make sense when you click through. Trust me.)
:: If it makes you think, that’s okay but it shouldn’t depress you and it seems to me that Battlestar Galactica is going out of its way to be depressing. (Well, there’s always ER….)
:: Sunday evenings are the worst time of the week.
:: Finally, I’d rather carry one grateful passenger than 300 pissed-off ones. (New blog, by Jayne‘s husband. Found it when I saw that Jayne has shamelessly pilfered my Sentential Links series for a series of her own! Betrayer most foul!)
:: Nebraska is not exactly a style paradise, but the one thing you learn if you’re born there is that overalls are almost always sexy. (While I myself am an effective counterexample to this hypothesis, I certainly agree with the sentiment where the womenfolk are concerned.)
All for this week. Tune in next week to hear….
Oy. The Buffalo Bills, fresh off getting clobbered by the best team in the NFL, promptly went out and posted a lackluster 20-17 loss to the Detroit Lions, allowing the Lions to break into the win column for the first time this season. Ugh.
There’s not a whole lot of positive to be taken from this game — in fact, there’s even less positive to be taken from this game than last week’s game. Seeing your young team get rolled by the Bears is one thing, but seeing your team play poorly against the winless Lions? Ugh!
For obvious reasons, much of the focus after each Bills game this season is on how JP Losman played. Personally, I didn’t think he did too badly yesterday. He completed a majority of his passes, he threw for two touchdowns, and had respectable yardage numbers. However, he threw one very bad interception, fumbled, and got knocked on his ass all day. The interception came because he locked onto his primary receiver from the second the ball was snapped, and everybody watching the game could see it. I don’t really blame Losman for the fumble, since it came on one of those sacks from his blindside that QBs never see coming. Every QB in the NFL has fumbled like that before, so I don’t begrudge Losman that one. But I would like to see some more actual leadership from JP. Any Bills fan knows what Jim Kelly would have done if one single offensive lineman had given up 3.5 sacks to the NFL’s worst pass-rush. Everybody thought Kelly was a jerk when he called out Howard Ballard publicly after Ballard had a bad game in 1989, but right after that Ballard suddenly became one of the anchors of the O-line that carried Buffalo to four Super Bowls.
And besides all that, what I saw in yesterday’s game indicates that even if Losman’s just not a good QB, his play is far from being the Bills’ biggest problem. The Bills still are not a physical presence at the line of scrimmage. They just aren’t. JP Losman didn’t give up 120 rushing yards to the Lions yesterday. JP Losman didn’t let Roy Williams grab ten catches for 160 yards. JP Losman didn’t fail to block for Willis McGahee. And there‘s a point: I hear a lot of people talk in Buffalo about how McGahee doesn’t seem to have the burst that he had in college, and when is he gonna bust it out, and so on. But aside from when McGahee plays the Jets (and the Bills always run well against the Jets; Thurman Thomas owned them, too), when’s the last time anyone saw a running play on which McGahee was even able to hit the hole at full speed?
And frankly, I’m more and more inclined to believe that designating Nate Clements as the franchise player was a mistake. The Bills could get play like that from a rookie CB, for a lot less money. It was telling that on the defense’s biggest play yesterday, the fourth quarter interception of a long John Kitna pass, it was rookie safety Ko Simpson who came over and made the pick right in front of Clements.
No, JP Losman didn’t play terribly well yesterday, but he wasn’t a disaster either, and the Buffalo Bills have a lot of bigger problems than JP Losman.
Next up: the New England Stupid Patriots come to town. They’re coming off a bye week. Oy.
For most sports fans, I suspect, there is the team that you love the most, then there are a few teams you like and root for when they’re not playing your number one team, and then there are a few teams you absolutely detest, and then there’s a whole bunch of teams that don’t bug you one way or the other; they’re just there to give your team somebody to play.
For me, the Detroit Tigers fall into that last category. I neither hate them nor like them; they’re just kind of there. But this guy ranks about as high with me as a sports figure can rate:
I mean, in my personal sports pantheon, Jim Leyland ranks with Marv Levy, Jim Kelly, and Thurman Thomas. If he quit baseball and became head coach of the New England Stupid Patriots, I might…well, no, I wouldn’t go that far. A guy’s got to have his limits, you know. But still, seeing Leyland win his second pennant is wonderful, and I’ll be rooting for the Tigers in the World Series.
(Last time the Tigers won the Series, their most famous fan was Thomas Sullivan Magnum!)