Month: November 2006

Two years ago I reviewed a book for GMR called Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel, which is a steampunk-kind of adventure novel which postulates a world around the beginning of the twentieth century where the predominant form of long-range travel and shipping was not by sea but by air, in giant airships kept aloft by a gas called “hydrium”. You can go read the review for more, but basically, the book was a thrilling adventure yarn.

I’ve just read the sequel, Skybreaker, in which our hero, Matt Cruse, reunites with the heroine from the first book, Kate Devries, in a quest to find an airship that was “lost at sky” forty years earlier, and to gain the riches of the lost ship’s reclusive owner.

I know, I know, it sounds all goofy, but these two books are about as fun as adventure yarns get. Seriously, reading them makes you want to pop up some popcorn and fill in the narrative blanks with music by Max Steiner or John Williams. The world Oppel creates is pretty snazzy, too; there’s a realism to the pseudo-nautical culture he creates for his airship “sailors”, and I loved how the ship that is designed to sail to very high altitudes is crewed by Himalayan sherpas.

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Quick notes:

:: Trips last Tuesday afternoon to three different brick-and-mortar music-selling establishments proved fruitless, so I had to order the complete Two Towers score from Amazon. It arrived on Thursday. I have only been able to listen to the first of the three discs thus far, but once again I’m astounded at the scope of Howard Shore’s conception, and the way all of his motifs effortlessly mirror other ones, creating one of the most unified sound-worlds I’ve ever heard in a filmscore. Just magnificent. I’m glad it’ll be a whole year to The Return of the King, because I have three hours of Two Towers music to study. I do wish that Doug Adams’s book on the LOTR music was forthcoming sooner, though.

:: Via MeFi I learn that one should probably not scrub one’s kid’s face with a Magic Eraser, a cleaning product that is designed to remove from walls things like magic marker. Who’da thunk it, eh?

:: When last I updated the space opera reading project, I noted that one of my selections was a work written in the 1930s by Jack Williamson, who was as of that writing still alive. That is now no longer the case: Williamson died on Friday. He was 98; his last novel was published in 2005, with his first published work dating 77 years before that. What a career. I salute you, Mr. Williamson: Clear ether!

That’s what’s going on today. Snore.

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Jonah Goldberg:

I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then fly back to Washington in Marine 1. His torso still scratched from the bear’s claws, his face bloodied and steaming in the November chill, he should immediately give a press conference at which he throws the bearskin on the front row of the press corps, completely enveloping Helen Thomas, declaring, “I’m not going anywhere.”

This will send important messages to Democrats and well as to our enemies overseas, who are no doubt high-fiving as we speak.

Ummmm…yeah. Because the guy you want as your Manliness Mentor is Dick Cheney, the guy who indulges in canned hunts where he still manages to mistake fellow old white men as fattened grouse.

(via TBogg)

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Still don’t feel much like blogging: big doin’s at The Store tomorrow (involving a visit by the very folks whose name is in big letters on the side of our building), for which we’ve worked very hard all week; fatigue from all the impromptu dancing I’m doing whenever I remember that the Democrats beat the snot out of the Republicans on Tuesday (guess that loony Howard Dean knew what the hell he was doing with that 50-State-Strategy of his, eh?); and general tiredness from putting up with a cold for the last few days.

So, just some more quick stuff:

:: Interesting stuff, as always, by Matthew Yglesias on the myth of Karl Rove (noting that Rove has often made errors of electoral strategy that always came close to failing, and finally failed spectacularly) and the myth of this election as a rise of Democratic conservatism (noting that in just about every case, Republicans were beaten by someone to the left of them, which can only serve to ultimately push the political tone in this country to the left).

:: If you haven’t been reading Shamus’s “DM of the Rings” comic, you really gotta. In this installment he notes that for a role-playing game fanatic, a new set of gaming dice is always a new event. It’s like getting a new box of Titleist golf balls, I guess. Even though I haven’t played AD&D in over a decade, I still have my dice in my desk somewhere; they’re in one of those nifty little drawstring bags that those small bottles of Crown Royal whiskey used to come in.

But my favorite dice were my DM’s. His dice all had pointy vertices, as opposed to the rounded ones like the ones that adorn the masthead of Shamus’s blog. With those pointy dice, you could hold the D8 between two fingertips and spin them like tops.

:: Film composer Basil Poledouris has died. He was a sadly underrated composer, and he will be missed.

That’s all. More blogging when I feel like doing more blogging.

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I posted this four years ago on Election Day, but it’s always worth re-visiting. Here is George Carlin’s take on the whole “Democracy” thing:

You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

Do I agree? No. Of course not. Well, not really. Maybe a little. You know, part of me. Half of me, actually. Or more than half. I just think it’s fun pulling the little levers.

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With the exception of the NYS Comptroller’s race, I’ll be voting for Democrats across the board tomorrow. In that particular race, I’ll be voting Green since the incumbent Democrat is a crook. (I may actually vote Green for Governor as well, seeing as how Elliot Spitzer can’t possibly lose but the Green Party would benefit from getting as many votes as it can, but I won’t make that decision until I’m standing in the booth.)

Lots of people say that voting a straight party ticket is bad, but I don’t really see that, except in extreme cases (if there wasn’t a Green candidate for Comptroller, I’d probably abstain). When confronted with an incompetent Democrat versus a competent Republican, I either abstain or vote for the nearest convenient liberal party, and for me, I don’t think my interests are served if I help elect someone whose stands on the issues don’t mirror mine. So for me, primary day is the time to exercise my distaste for incumbency.

And besides, I’m generally of the view that the national Republican Party is a cesspool, and my antipathy towards them extends downward, since today’s local Republicans are tomorrow’s national Republicans. So it’s all Democrats for me. I don’t put a whole lot of stock in independence as a voter. I’m a Democrat because there are certain things I believe and certain things I value and certain things I want my country to do and to be, and I cast my votes accordingly, and with the full knowledge that I’ll never get everything I want, because nobody ever does.

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You know, I’ve actually come to look forward to the ads Elliot Spitzer is running on TV in his campaign for Governor of New York, just because they’re all incredibly positive ads. (He has this luxury, of course, because his Republican opponent has zero chance of winning. If Spitzer were in an actual race, he’d be running as much muck ads as anybody else.)

Anyway, the main ad Spitzer’s been showing has him listing his “To Do list” upon taking office: he’s gonna reform Medicaid, and reduce property taxes, improve our schools, and so on. (I can’t help but watch that ad and think, “Shit, why didn’t anybody else think of that!”)

But anyway, I wonder if maybe Spitzer’s first task upon taking office shouldn’t be to hire some new typists in Albany, after a typo has resulted in the state’s drunk driving law being currently unenforceable. Oops.

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Not really feeling much like blogging the last few days, so here are some quick links to stuff.

:: After a very long fallow period, I’ve started offering merchandise again on eBay. There is a link in the sidebar to all of my auctions. Currently I’m offering a number of books, but some music may come later. No, I do not currently plan to sell any of my overalls.

:: Paul has a cyber-stalker.

:: Guy Gavriel Kay has another movie deal: he will be doing his own screenplay adaptation for The Last Light of the Sun, which is his most recent novel (at least until Ysabel comes out early next year). Of course, this means that GGK’s main focus over the coming year will be that screenplay as opposed to prepping another book. Sigh. (GGK’s The Lions of Al-Rassan is the other of his novels currently under movie development.)

:: I keep forgetting that Mrs. M-Mv posted a while back about St. Crispian’s Day, made famous in the greatest pep-talk ever written, the speech put in the lips of King Henry V by William Shakespeare in the play cleverly entitled, Henry V. She recommends watching the Kenneth Branagh film of the play, and I second that recommendation; but failing that, you can hear Branagh giving that speech here. (I’ve linked AmericanRhetoric.com before, but it’s been a while and it’s a great site full of speechy, oratorical goodness.)

:: Apologies to the Bears and Vikings fans among my readers, because I’m really gonna miss Brett Favre when he retires. I love watching that guy.

:: Another reason why my job is cooler than your job: this week I got to do a lot of jobs in which one of these was my primary tool.

:: I’ll say more about it some other time, but for now let me just note that last night I finally found a movie with a final line that’s as good as Casablanca‘s “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”: The Wind and the Lion, which ends with Sean Connery saying to a friend: “Is there nothing in your life worth losing everything for?”

:: During the week of Thanksgiving, this blog will be on hiatus. I’ll make an official announcement then, but regular readers should be aware, because I’ll probably kick off December with a second installment of Ask Me Anything!, and the week I’m off will be query-submission time. So start thinking! (Heck, you can even start asking stuff if you want, but no answers will be forthcoming until after that hiatus.)

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