Month: February 2007

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S-s-s-soo…c-c-c-cold….

Wow, it’s cold in Buffalo this week. Scary cold. The kind of cold that makes you wonder just what kind of drugs or liquor the Inuits drink to voluntarily live in cold like this. Some observations:

:: Granted, my sample size isn’t huge, but I’m noticing a lot less overtly crappy driving over the last few days. I’ve only had one of those situations where I was driving down a road that’s usually four-lanes, but due to snow was down to effectively two lanes, only to be passed on my right — and fairly closely, too — by some guy driving a big pickup truck. That usually happens during these storms a lot more.

:: Six weeks or so ago I took my car into one of those Quick Lube joints for an oil change, which they did very nicely, thank you. I even let them run that Engine Cleaning stuff through my engine for twenty bucks (yes, you can tell me how dumb that was in comments, because I suspect I got fleeced a little bit there). But I did not let them replace my battery, even though when they hooked it up to their Magical Battery Scanner, my battery was rated as “marginal” and therefore stood an excellent chance of failing in the cold weather.

Well, we’ve just come through three of the coldest days I can remember, and each morning, my car started up just fine. Sure, there was a little grinding as the battery basically said, “Geez, do I gotta?” But each time, the engine caught just fine within five seconds of me turning the key.

Some “marginal” battery, eh?

:: TV News stations have got to stop this business of sending reporters outside to report on the weather. I have a window. I don’t need to see some schlub reporter bundled up in a parka standing outside in the dark to tell me that it’s really cold and snowing.

:: Rant time: The Daughter has missed the last two days of school, since her district closed due to the snow and cold. Fair enough. However, yesterday morning the decision to close the school was not made until 6:45 a.m., which was well after the usual time when the word can be disseminated effectively. How bad was it? Well, on a morning when the wind chill was double digits below zero, The Wife and The Daughter didn’t find out that school had been canceled until they’d been standing outside for ten minutes waiting for the bus. They weren’t alone, either; not even all the bus drivers got the word, so they ended up picking up all their kids and then being told to bring them all to the district’s bus garage to wait for their parents to come get them.

And then the Superintendent went on TV to defend her actions, insisting that concern for “the safety of the students” had forced her hand. Well, having kids on buses on their way to school, with others standing outside on horribly cold days waiting for buses which aren’t coming, doesn’t strike me as being terribly “safe for kids”. It’s not as if the snow happened with no warning; the forecasts were known to be for large amounts of lake effect snow and abnormally bitter cold, and in fact, a number of school districts decided on Monday to cancel Tuesday not because of snow but because of the cold.

:: This blast of cold brings back memories of winters in Iowa during my college years. I don’t know how you Minnesotans do this (minus the lake effect snow, of course). I’ll take our hundred inches of snow a year with temperatures that are usually around 20 degrees, over twenty inches of snow a year with winter temps down around -20. Yeesh.

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It’s just stringin’ words together

Well, folks, since the Buffalo News website doesn’t update until 9:00 a.m. ET, and since I don’t get home from work until around 3:30 p.m. ET, I won’t have a direct link to the Item In Question until late this afternoon. But you can get at it yourselves by directly visiting the News‘s Life and Arts section, here, and then following the links there. [UPDATE: Direct link is right here.]

What am I talking about? Well, I actually won the News‘s short story contest. This story is the first piece of my fiction that has ever appeared in print anyplace other than this blog, or my serialized novel The Promised King. This is my first nibble of success as a fiction writer, ever. So pardon me while I bask in the glory a bit.

Actually, forget it. Me basking in the glory can only, in the end, result in a scene like this:

So no basking for me. But that’s not to say that you all shouldn’t bask in my reflected glory. Bask, I say! BASK!

OK, now that we’re all done basking: regular readers of this blog know that I came within a few hours of missing the deadline for entering this year’s contest. This story did not write itself, and up until about a week before the deadline, I didn’t even have the main idea in mind. So I can’t really say where the idea finally came from. It seems kind of an obvious idea to me now, with the tale written and done with, but when I read the assignment for the contest, my only thought was, “How in the hell am I gonna write this?”

Maybe I was just out of practice. The truth is that I have written very little fiction over the last few years. A lot of that was the sapping of my energies with keeping Little Quinn alive, and then the even worse sapping of my energies following his passing. I haven’t stopped writing entirely, of course: I’ve posted here fairly consistently, and I’ve also committed a number of acts of poetry which, as they were intended for people very dear to me in “real” life, won’t ever be posted here. But fiction? This was only the second story I’ve done since Quinn died. So a lot of my difficulty may have been due to atrophied muscles, so to speak.

But those muscles now have that nice, pleasant ache that comes of doing a light workout for the first time after an extended period of inactivity. Put another way: I’m writing fiction again, bitches!

(So yes, I’ll finally get The Promised King done. I mean that. I’m going to beat that book to a bloody pulp if I have to, but it’s getting done.)

The remainder of this post will be aimed at people who are likely viewing this blog for the very first time. Some of you don’t know me from Adam; others know me by virtue of working with me at The Store. Therefore, some notes:

:: If you’re wondering right now, “What is a blog?”, think of it as nothing more than an online diary. That’s really it. There have been rivers of ink and buckets of bandwidth respectively spilled and expended over the last few years discussing what blogging is and what it’s good for and all that, but at its most basic, it’s just writing. Online. Entries called “posts” are grouped by the dates on which they were written, and presented in reverse order of “freshness”: on the main page, the post at the very top of the page is the most recent one I wrote. You can use the archive menu, which is in the sidebar somewhere (down a bit from the top of the page) to read older material; the main page only displays the last eight dates’ worth of posts. Also, in the sidebar you’ll find all kinds of stuff: links to specific older posts within this blog that give you more background about me, links to profiles of mine that appear on several other websites with which I am affiliated, a number of favorite quotes from books I’ve read, a photo of me that changes to a different photo each time the page is loaded (go ahead, hit “refresh”, and you’ll see a new photo there), another list of links to older posts of mine that I like a good deal (sort of a “greatest hits” from the five years I’ve been producing this blog), and more. If you want to explore the blog, the sidebar is the key.

(Why the self-photo? Because the vast majority of my readers have never ever met me in person, and I don’t expect that to change. Being able to put a face with the writing is always helpful.)

:: What this blog is, and what it is not: Basically, I use this space to riff on anything that I may or may not think much about. It’s literally an online diary of the “Here’s what I read today, here’s a good movie, here’s something I saw on the Web somewhere, here’s what I think about something someone else said on their blog.” This blog is not “civilian journalism”. I’m not a reporter of any kind, nor do I devote large amounts of space to discussing Buffalo politics or the goings-on in this region. While I admire (and, in some ways, envy) the efforts of other bloggers to subvert “Old Media” in this region and in the country as a whole, I’m not an activist in that regard.

This blog is one of the many ways in which I engage the world “out there”. Jeff Simon, the Buffalo News movie critic, once described a film — Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, I think — as a “cinematic mix tape”. That’s kind of what my blog is: it’s a mix tape of stuff I like, with occasional rants about stuff I don’t.

:: This is not to say that I never write about politics here. I do, on occasion. I’d estimate that less than fifteen percent of my posts contain outright political content, and I post a lot, so generally you’re not going to see large amounts of politics in this space. But you will see some, so I should note that I’m pretty much a solid leftie-liberal-pinko who thinks that the world would be a lot better off had the results of the 2000 election more accurately reflected what the majority of voters in Florida actually intended to do (rather than the vagaries of what they actually did). So be aware: if your response to directly encountering Liberalism is to scream “GAHHH, get it off me!”, you will get some Liberalism on you here.

:: For any coworkers of mine who may be reading this, welcome aboard. You’ll learn a lot more about me than you might have already known by reading through what I’ve posted here over the years I’ve been doing this (five years, versus the three I’ve been working at The Store). Some of it you may find interesting; other stuff you may find dull as ditchwater. You never know. You’ll learn about the depths of my unreasoning loathing of Tom Brady, and my equally unreasoning love of George Lucas. A number of posts here will give you some idea of what life with our son Quinn was like, and other posts will make you wonder what it is that I apparently smoke in great quantities when I’m not at work.

I haven’t been keeping this blog secret in any way; I haven’t mentioned it outright, but it is publicly available, and easily found by anyone putting my name into Google. This is just an aspect of my life that I don’t discuss much in person.

Now, having said that, let me state outright my personal policy on blogging about work: I don’t do it. Period. With the exception of Mr. Wegman’s death, when I posted a tribute here, I won’t even name my workplace — I only refer to it as “The Store”. This may seem a bit extreme, but I invest more than a little time in this particular hobby, and I want it clear at all times that in no way is anything I write here ever intended as the statement of a Person Working For The Store. I never post in this space as a representative of Our Company, so nothing that happens at work shows up in this space. Period. I don’t mention my coworkers by name, and I don’t share the funny anecdotes that arise from working day-to-day with as wonderful a group of people as I do.

Of course, this is mostly to hopefully make people breathe easier. I imagine that some folks read in the News that I’m an avid blogger, and then think, “Oh, shit! I hope he didn’t blog about the time I _____!” Rest easy: No matter what you ______ and no matter how funny it was when you ______, I didn’t write about it here.

But there’s a flip side there: someone may be thinking, “Hey, isn’t the time I ______ something that would be worth writing about?” And yes, many times it was. But in the proper place. Consider the many times you’ve tried telling an anecdote about something that happened at work that was absolutely hilarious at the time it happened, and how many times you end such a story with “You had to be there, I guess.” When you think about it, just about all situational humor is of the “You had to be there” variety, so before you can make that situational stuff funny to someone who wasn’t there, you have to make them feel as if they were there. That’s what good fiction is all about. So if I ever decide to write about a napkin full of red pepper seeds, or a cat named “Boobie”, or the difficulties of finding the perfect Wayne’s World or Clerks reference for any given situation, it will be in fiction and not here. With all the names changed.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the blog. I imagine I’ll get lots of questions about it, that’s for sure.

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“Twelve Presidents” (fiction)

This is the text of the story of mine that won First Place in the 2007 Buffalo News short story contest. I’m posting it on December 30, 2007, although it’s appearing in my February archives by the miracle of backdating blog posts.

Ernest Knight tried to conceal his wheezing as he pushed Hilda’s wheelchair up onto the sidewalk, but Hilda heard him all the same. Old and sick as she was, she still heard everything.

“Slow, Ern,” she said. “That heart of yours–“

“I’m fine,” Ernest replied. This eighty-six year old heart of mine is still strong enough to push my eighty-two year old wife.

Fifteen minutes later they arrived at a spot where the street sloped slightly downward toward the underpass. Ernest applied the chair’s brake.

“This spot all right, Dear?”

“Oh yes,” Hilda said as she opened an Agatha Christie book she hadn’t read in so long that she’d forgotten who did it. Ernest merely shuffled about.

“Lots of people already,” he said.

“Everybody loves to see a President,” Hilda replied.

Ernest took in a deep breath of November air, and let it out. Hilda was sick, and he was old. This will be our last President together, he thought; and then he turned his memory back to their first President together.

***

Lt. Ernest Knight of the Buffalo Police Force brushed an invisible speck from his shoulder and tugged at the collar of his newly-minted uniform. Sooner or later, it would start to get cold, but for now it was a hot and humid day, not uncommon for early September in Buffalo. The uniform didn’t help matters at all, but he was on special assignment and had to wear it. The line of citizens and well-wishers was already forming outside the Temple of Music, people who’d come to shake the hand of William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States.

As the newest Lieutenant on the force, it fell to Knight to supervise the uniformed officers outside the Temple in their efforts to control the crowd. Next time a President’s in town, he thought, at least I’ll be one of those poppinjays on horseback.

“Stop pushing, folks,” he called out when the crowd got a bit too restless. “The line will move quickly enough.”

“Oh please,” came the voice of a young woman. Knight turned to face her. She wore a blue dress and a matching blue hat, but what held Knight’s gaze were her wide hazel eyes and the red hair she wore in a style that was more daring than he usually saw in Buffalo. “We’ve been standing here for two hours.” She dabbed at the sweat on her lip with a handkerchief from her handbag.

“It’s hot for everyone, Miss,” Lt. Knight replied, recovering himself. “You were pushing this gentleman.” He gestured to a young-looking man in a dark suit immediately in front of her in line.

“Oh, it is all right,” said the young-looking man. “I just want to congratulate the President.”

“Well, the line’s moving again,” Lt. Knight said. “Good day, Miss.” He tipped his hat to her, and she smiled in return. A mischievous smile.

“They put too much starch in your collar,” she said. “At least it fits you well.” She smiled again. Lt. Knight couldn’t help but watch her as she disappeared into the Temple of Music. He would always remember that look in her eyes, the first time they met.

He would also remember afterward how that young-looking man never used the handkerchief on his hand to dab at the copious sweat on his brow.

***

Ernest continued pacing back and forth behind Hilda’s wheelchair. A passing policeman had told them it would be less than an hour now.

“Henry said this is a bad idea,” Ernest said. “He thinks we’re too old for this nonsense.”

“Henry always thinks we’re wrong,” Hilda replied, not looking up from her book.

Henry was the youngest of their three sons, and the most pig-headed. Born during the Wilson years – their fourth President – Henry had gone to war against the Germans in ’42 while his brothers, Walter and Joseph, had been sent to the Pacific. After the war, Henry had moved down south to follow the nurse he’d fallen in love with. Both Henry and Walter (born under Taft, Ernest and Hilda’s third President) were now nearing retirement themselves. (Joseph, their firstborn, had been buried in Arlington after Guadalcanal. He’d lived from Roosevelt to Roosevelt.)

“We should have voted for this one,” Hilda said. “He seems like a good man.”

Ernest nodded. So had McKinley.

***

“Lieutenant!”

Knight turned to his superior, Captain Hess, who’d just come from inside the Temple.

“Come inside,” Hess said. “Mr. Cortelyou’s nervous.”

That was George Cortelyou, personal secretary to the President, who’d been very nervous about security for this event.

“Yes, sir.”

Lt. Knight followed Captain Hess inside through the exit door, thinking incongruously that he’d get to see that young red-haired woman again. He shook that thought out of his head – and then he was in the same room as the President of the United States.

President McKinley was a big man, dressed in a black suit with a broad, white vest. At the moment he was greeting two children whose parents stood beaming behind them. The queue extended down the hallway opposite. There, third in line, was the young-looking man; behind him, the red-haired woman.

“Captain!” It was Mr. Cortelyou. He did look nervous. “We will close the doors in five minutes.”

“We’ll be ready,” Captain Hess replied. “Lt. Knight here will help clear the room.”

Nodding, Mr. Cortelyou moved back to the President’s right. Across the room from the President stood one of his personal bodyguards. It all looked perfectly in order. Lt. Knight caught the eye of the red-haired woman; she gave him a small smile. He chuckled, returned her smile, and turned his attention back to the line.

Next came the young-looking man, with his handkerchief still on his hand. He stepped up close to the President, who extended his right hand in greeting. But the young-looking man did not clasp Mr. McKinley’s outstretched hand. Instead–

Lt. Knight heard firecrackers.

***

It was a little after noon now. Hilda put her book away, and Ernest wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t know how Henry lives down here,” he said.

“Henry never did like the snow,” Hilda replied.

“Well, we’re never leaving Buffalo again.”

“No, I suppose not, Dear.” Hilda touched Ernest’s hand. They’d lived in their current house, their second, since Truman’s defeat-turned-reelection. They’d moved after the boys had left, to a smaller place closer to little Anna’s grave. She’d been born, lived and died — of dysentery – all under Taft. Their only daughter.

Behind them a man with one of those new home movie cameras was climbing up onto the concrete balustrade to get a better view.

It would be about fifteen minutes now.

***

Two shots.

Blood, running scarlet across President McKinley’s white vest.

The guards, piling on top of the young-looking assassin.

The President, saying “Be careful of how you tell my wife.”

Mr. Cortelyou, shouting for assistance for the President.

“Knight!” Captain Hess, shouting. “Clear those people!”

The onlookers.

Lt. Knight sprang forward as the guards pummeled the assassin. “Don’t hurt him,” he heard the President say, but that would be the least of the President’s concerns.

Knight found that most of the onlookers had been ushered out by the other guards, but the red-haired woman just stood there, her hazel eyes wide with shock.

“Miss? Miss?”

“H-Hilda,” she stammered. “Hilda Watt.”

Lt. Knight put a hand on her arm.

“Let me take you home, Miss Watt.”

***

Ernest took Hilda’s hand. Somehow her hand felt the same as it always had, even though both their hands had changed so much over sixty-two years together.

He could hear the sirens now. The President’s motorcade was almost here.

***

As the doctors operated in fading light on President McKinley – fading light, at a festival with hundreds of bright electric lights — Lt. Knight took Miss Watt home. She told him many things about herself: she was to be a nurse as soon as she finished her studies; she loved coffee and hated tea; she was a suffragette. She’d been in that receiving line, hoping to hand the President a pamphlet she’d written about giving women the right to vote. For his part, Knight told her about his time on the police force, and how he’d wanted to be a policeman since he could crawl. He told her how he loved horses and didn’t much care for snow.

As darkness fell, he asked if he could call on her again. She said yes. And so it began, as President McKinley lingered. Their first President together.

The first night that Lt. Earnest Knight came to see Hilda Watt at her home, all proper-like, was the night that President McKinley died. Vice President Roosevelt was sworn in soon thereafter.

Their second.

***

The motorcade arrived. It slowed and came around the bend. Cheers went up from the hundreds of people lining the street.

Ernest looked down at Hilda, and found her eyes – still that beautiful hazel – turned up at him. Her hair was no longer red, but her eyes had never changed.

They both looked back to the street. There was the car, and in it, their eleventh President, and almost certainly their last. Neither expected to live to the 1964 elections. She was sick, and he didn’t see much point without her.

And as President Kennedy seemed to make eye contact with them, Earnest heard something he’d once heard before.

Something like…firecrackers.

—finis—

[Credit where due: For historical details on the events of President McKinley’s assassination, I drew heavily on this article by Wyatt Kingseed.]

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Green grow the rashes, O!

Simon recently did something I really really really need to do one of these years: he attended a Burns Supper, and he relates his experiences here and here. Burns Suppers are events that celebrate Scottish heritage and song, mainly through the verse of the Scottish National Poet, Robert Burns. Now, I have no Scottish blood in me whatsoever, but Burns’s poetry and song are central to the larger world of Celtic music, and I love his work on that basis. High on my list of books to get is a collection of Burns’s poems; he is represented in a number of anthologies I already own, but none are devoted just to him.

Here’s my favorite of his verses, “Green Grow the Rashes”, which has an equally beautiful tune. Dougie Maclean sings this wonderfully on his album Live from the Ends of the Earth.

Chorus:

Green grow the rashes, O;
Green grow the rashes, O;
The sweetest hours that e’er I spend,
Are spent among the lasses, O.

There’s nought but care on ev’ry han’,
In every hour that passes, O:
What signifies the life o’ man,
An’ ’twere na for the lasses, O.

Chorus

The war’ly race may riches chase,
An’ riches still may fly them, O;
An’ tho’ at last they catch them fast,
Their hearts can ne’er enjoy them, O.

Chorus

But gie me a cannie hour at e’en,
My arms about my dearie, O,
An’ war’ly cares an’ war’ly men
May a’ gae tapsalteerie, O!

Chorus

For you sae douce, ye sneer at this;
Ye’re nought but senseless asses, O;
The wisest man the warl’ e’er saw,
He dearly lov’d the lasses, O.

Chorus

Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her prentice han’ she try’d on man,
An’ then she made the lasses, O.

Chorus

Bring on the haggis!

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Sentential Links #86

Wherein we provide divers Links to other Blogges as time Permits, and wherein the Reader clicks them in their Fashion.

:: So it’s over and we face seven whole months without football.

:: I don’t mind people thanking God in these things, but I AM uncomfortable with the notion that God is on a particular coach’s or team’s side. Was God rooting for Tony Dungy, by all accounts a good Christian man, over Lovie Smith, who is theologically likewise? Somehow, I doubt God cares. Maybe, when I get to heaven, She’ll set me straight. (As George Carlin sagely noted, you never hear the losing team thanking God, do you? “The Good Lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage!”)

:: I cannot take full credit for blogrollosity. (Hmmm…is that a word? Well, it is now! I’ve been meaning to blogroll this guy, and probably will on my next edit of the blogroll. My solution, by the way, to the “blogroll a mile long” problem was to move my blogroll off my main page and into a post of its own, which is prominently linked on the main page. And I note that even in the act of recreating his blogroll from scratch, Atrios still isn’t bothering to alphabetize it!)

:: It’s time to revive the biosphere projects of the early 1990s. Given the private sector’s recent enthusiasm to develop space tourism technologies, perhaps another X Prize is in order. (I defy you to read this blog and not come away thinking about something.)

:: I can’t imagine the World Series without the Yankees, cars without gas tanks, books without covers, Greenland without glaciers, living happily in Dallas, shopping at a mall, keeping ferrets as pets, any social situation in which Joe Lieberman is taken seriously, anybody but Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, and a world in which I’ve been dead and forgotten so long that I might as well never have existed.

:: Work is going to be a much bleaker environment without my pal.

:: And now I am going to do something unseemly. I am going to respond by reviewing my own book. (Me too. My book stinks. There, how easy was that!*)

:: Help me. Tell me something profound. (A short post, better appreciated for the funny comment thread on which I make a cameo appearance, sticking up for Buckaroo Banzai.)

:: I think I found the nirvana of stew: Guinness stew. (I’m not the biggest fan of Guiness, but this sounds distinctly intriguing!)

All for now. More next Monday!

* No, I don’t think my book stinks.

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A new look!

Yeah, it was getting time to change the way the blog looked a little. I’m not quite done tinkering yet, but it’s getting there.

(Say, does anyone out there use Google’s photo editing software? I had a program that came with the old computer that I liked and knew how to use, but for the new computer, I’ve been using GimpShop, which is, frankly, way more program than I want to bother myself with. That thing gives me a headache trying to figure out the simple stuff I do to pictures.)

Anyway, more content will appear later. I gotta make some food now.

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Books, books, books

Notes on two books I’ve read lately:

:: In the course of doing my usual work at The Store and learning new skills, I’ve been perusing a lot of books and magazines from the library about various aspects of home improvement and carpentry. Many of these focus on “how-to specifics” of certain jobs, like rewiring light switches and installing skylights and ceiling fans and the like. Not many books seemed to deal with discussing the tools themselves, outside of the jobs themselves, which is why I was glad to find Measure Twice, Cut Once: Lessons from a Master Carpenter, by Norm Abram. Abram writes a bit about his life as a carpenter, and the things he’s learned over the years about the hand tools he uses.

This book was a fascinating read for me, but I’m not totally sure about the audience at which it is aimed. I can’t imagine that experienced carpenters will find much value in it, despite the “Lessons from a Master Carpenter” subtitle; the book doesn’t quite read like the final distillation of wisdom from the learned master that acolytes on the verge of masterhood themselves only lack to take that final step. Nor is it exactly aimed at raw beginners, who walk into Home Depot and ask, “Where’s the hardware?” It seems ideally aimed, frankly, at people like me: people who know what the tools are and what they’re for, but don’t have a whole lot of experience with the finer points of hand-tool use.

:: The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany by Martin Goldsmith is a wonderful book, in so many ways.

Goldsmith is a radio host for NPR, hosting a classical music program. His parents, George and Rosemarie, were Jewish immigrants to the United States in 1941, when they escaped Nazi Germany. The Inextinguishable Symphony tells the amazing story of their lives in a land gone haywire, while they met, fell in love, and spent their lives focused on music until they finally realized they had to leave Germany or die.

George (born Gunther) and Rosemarie grew up in post-WWI Germany, when the weight of reparations and the general punitive measures imposed on that nation by the victors of the earlier war drove that country into the arms of the anti-Semitic madmen waiting in the wings. Eventually Gunther and Rosemarie found themselves in the orchestra of a “Jewish Culture Association”, or Kulturbund.

These organizations were set up throughout Germany as the country began the long process of segregating the Jews. The idea was twofold: to encourage the Jews to segregate themselves by providing them with cultural organizations of Jews and for Jews, and to provide a propaganda example that the Nazi government could use to demonstrate to the outside world that the German Jews had it just fine. I found it both fascinating and horrifying that the idea of the Kulturbund was a joint effort between a Jew and a high-ranking Nazi. The naivete of many German Jews that Goldsmith describes — that eventually Germany would come to its senses, and that by doing good cultural work within the confines of the Kulturbund, they could eventually be judged worthy of returning to German society — is simply heartbreaking. At many points the only response I, as a reader, could manage was to think, “How could they not see what was coming?” And it’s all the more remarkable when Gunther emigrates early on to Sweden, but returns to Germany because he can’t bear to leave the woman with whom he has fallen in love.

Amidst it all is the tender love story of Gunther, a flautist, and Rosemarie, a violist. Goldsmith’s prose sings as he writes of the love that blossomed between his parents. What makes it work so well is that Goldsmith obviously knows his classical music; books about music by non-musicians never seem to flow quite so well. I am familiar with many of the musical works referenced in the book, works that were touchstone pieces in the lives of Gunther and Rosemarie: The Magic Flute, La Boheme, Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, Mahler’s Second, Goldmark’s Rustic Wedding Symphony. Clearly Goldsmith is as well. That Goldsmith can write so convincingly about these works, and what they clearly meant to his parents.

Goldsmith doesn’t maintain his focus on just his parents, however; he sets their tale in the larger context not just of Nazi Germany and the fate of the Jews there but also with that of the remaining members of his extended family, most of whom came to bad ends. So few survived to carry on traditions of centuries of European life.

It’s am amazing tale, and I highly recommend the book.

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What channel is the Super Bowl on???

I only ask because I’m trying to watch the pregame stuff, and all I can find is this weird performance in a stadium that looks more like the opening ceremonies of a Winter Olympics than a Super Bowl.

(Oh, and during the final pregame analysis, everybody in the CBS booth agreed that nobody ever remembers the team that lost the Super Bowl. Well, whenever I tell anyone that I’m a Bills fan, you’d better believe that people damned well do remember some teams that lose the Super Bowl. Grrrr.)

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

This isn’t all that weird, but I figure that with the history involved between all parties, it’s bound to get weird at some point or other, so we’ll just call this a Sunday Burst of Proactive Weirdness: David Lee Roth is back with Van Halen.

That is, of course, almost certain to end well!

(I am, of course, that rarest of animals: one who refuses to fall squarely in the camps of either DLR or Sammy Hagar where Van Halen is concerned.)

:: And via Warren Ellis, here’s an idea that’s certain to sweep the nation: a gas station that only uses terror-free oil!

:: Like many a soul, I love a good steaming bowl of General Tso’s Chicken. Now, I always suspected that it wasn’t actually an authentic Chinese dish, in that you won’t find people making this in their kitchens at home in China, and it now turns out I’m right: General Tso’s Chicken was invented in New York City. It was invented by a Chinese chef, to be sure, and the food writer here claims that the dish still exists in the fine tradition of Hunan cuisine. But it’s not Hunan.

And you know what? I don’t care. Now I want some General Tso’s Chicken. Maybe next week sometime….

(via)

:: Here’s a cautionary tale for the twenty-first century: a substitute teacher faces up to 40 years in prison because the computer she used in a classroom subjected her students to a whole bunch of pornographic pop-ups. The computer was running Windows 98 and the school district had allowed the subscription to its filtering software the lapse, so anybody who knows the first damn thing about the Interweb knows that this computer was a malware disaster waiting to happen. And as the whole tale unfolds, there is unmatched stupidity on all sides — the police, the prosecutors, the legal system, everyone.

Welcome to 21st century America. Won’t someone please think of the children!

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Fanboy sighting at ten o’clock!

Well, I haven’t blogged seriously in a few days, so what better way to get back into the swing than with some high-power geekery? Some stuff, then:

:: Brent Spiner, who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is seemingly mad at Trek fans because Star Trek Nemesis tanked:

“We worked on the story with the intention of making it for the fans,” Spiner said. “With every Star Trek movie prior to that, we tried to find a way to bridge the gap between the fans and the general public. With ‘Nemesis’ we said, ‘Forget that! Let’s make a movie for the fans, because that’s the people who actually go to see the films.’ And what happened? They didn’t go!

“Usually the films opened big, even if they had a lot of competition, but ‘Nemesis’ didn’t even do that. That was a message from the fans that they were done with us.”

Well, Spiner’s leaving something out of his analysis here: namely, that Nemesis was an embarrassing piece of crap. And in the Internet age, it’s not bad enough that they made a really bad movie: the script had leaked to the Internet at least a year before the movie’s release, so the fans who Spiner thinks should have at least flocked to opening weekend already knew that the movie was terrible.

What really rankles, of course, is Spiner’s apparent belief that it was the fans’ obligation to come see their movie, no matter how bad it was.

:: Well, shit. According to AICN, Joss Whedon is no longer on the Wonder Woman movie project. That’s disappointing; I’d hoped that Whedon would be able to make for a good movie about Wonder Woman, as opposed to the seemingly inevitable cruddy superhero movie about her. I suppose a good movie could still be possible — the Spiderman flicks are good, Superman Returns was good, and I’ve heard good things about the most recent Batman movie — but Joss Whedon could have made it really special. Bummer.

I’m trying to think of just who would play Wonder Woman anyway. Most likely an unknown actress would be the best way to go, preferably someone with Greek beauty and looks. But if they can get this production going in the next couple of years, I just may have the perfect actress for Wonder Woman in mind, and unless you’re a fan of CSI: Miami, you probably have no idea who she is. I’m thinking of Sofia Milos:

Now doesn’t she look like a Wonder Woman in waiting? You be the judge!

And:

Quit rolling your eyes, older readers. It’s been a long time since I posted these!

Anyway, apparently there’s a new script for Wonder Woman around that is set in the character’s original World War II-era setting. I have a feeling that would have limited appeal to audiences, even though I personally greatly enjoyed “period” hero flicks like The Rocketeer, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and The Phantom. We’ll see.

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