Scotty’s a father. May the Force be with him and his family!
Into the light, lurkers!
One year ago I ran my first annual Delurking Week here at Byzantium’s Shores, and I figure it’s time to run one again. So, if you will, lurkers, please feel free to drop a note in comments! You can do so anonymously if you wish, of the “Shout-out from Walla Walla, Washington” variety; you can also do so via e-mail if so desired. Feel free to comment, ask something, whatever. I’m curious as to who’s out there!
(I’m especially curious about you. No, not you, you. Yeah, you. What are you doing with that chainsaw?)
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Where are we?
Wow — as yet, both of the last two Unidentified Earth installments, numbers 20 and 21, remain unidentified. Time for another hint for number 20, I guess. Part of this location — but not the part featured — appeared in a pretty well-known film, albeit as a different location within the film. Confused? I thought so! In other words, in the movie this location was referred to as someplace else.
I’ll hold off on hints about Number 21 until after it’s gone unidentified for more than a week.
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Grrrr.
Bills 19, Ravens 14
Wow — a win! I get to post about a win! Woo-hoo!
:: The Bills’ defense, which played exceptionally hard yet again and this time didn’t fold in the closing minutes.
:: Trent Edwards, who didn’t play spectacularly but played with a good deal of poise. I’m not terribly wild about Edwards yet, but it does say something that in his third career start he’s roughly doing what Buffalo fans hoped JP Losman would be able to do in his second season.
:: The quarterback “controversy”. Last week, in naming Edwards the starter this week, Dick Jauron cited JP Losman’s knee injury, an excuse which everyone knows is bogus and only puts off the actual moment when Jauron has to admit that he thinks Edwards is the best hope for the Bills’ future. That was dumb.
:: Losman’s career in Buffalo possibly being over. I’m pretty bummed that Losman apparently hasn’t panned out as a starter and is likely on his way out, because frankly I like the guy enormously. You have to go with who wins, obviously, or who appears more likely to become the guy you’re looking for. If Losman’s not the guy, then Losman’s not the guy, and so be it. But the way the staff is letting him twist in the wind is pretty cold, since he’s never shown himself to be anything other than a team player and a community guy.
And if Losman’s time here in Buffalo is at an end, I do hope that he becomes a quality starter someplace else. I still hope he has success and isn’t just a career backup. And I hope that’s in the NFC, so we don’t have to see him all that often.
:: Is offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild going to call a dumb pass play in every late-game obvious running situation that comes up this year??? He made such a call again, and it hurt the Bills tremendously: leading by twelve and deep in their own territory, the Bills faced a third-and-eight situation. Obviously you run the ball, grind more time off the clock, and then punt. Fairchild, however, calls a pass. Which the rookie QB misfires, resulting in a pick that later gets converted into a touchdown. Ugh.
:: The lack of size on the defensive line. If this team had a big run-stopper in the middle, imagine how good things would be right now.
:: Tom Effing Brady and the rest of his evil, stinking team. God, I am the biggest Colts fan on Earth right now.
Next up: at the Jets, with a late kickoff. That’ll be cool; I like the occasional late kickoff.
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Sentential Links #115
Without ado of any kind:
[Oh crud, by announcing that I was going to commence the linkage without ado of any kind, I actually employed some ado after all. Bummer. Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to wait for next week to have our first truly ado-free installment of Sentential Links. My apologies, and now, without any ado now, here are the links. I’ve carefully culled these, so I hope you’ll enjoy…oh bugger, there’s some more ado. Darn it all anyway! Blogging without ado turns out to be like McDonalds without deep fryers. How can it possibly work? Anyhow. No more ado. Seriously. We’re going right into the links, with no ado.]
[D’oh!]
:: A general rule for actors is: If YOU cry, more often than not the audience WON’T. If you do your damndest NOT to cry, if you work to hold BACK the tears, then you’ll have to mop the audience up off the aisles. (This is an older post of Sheila’s, which she linked in the midst of remembering Deborah Kerr. I loved this examination of An Affair to Remember, a film which has already made my 100 Movies list.)
:: The other day I performed the idiotic newbie-author ritual of hanging around by the table where my book was displayed to see if anyone would pick it up. When someone eventually reached for a copy, I fled, fearing he would recognize me from the author photo and make the mistake of thinking that I was simply hanging around to see if anyone would pick it up. (Geez, they put Alex’s book next to a book by William F. Buckley and directly beneath a book by Dinesh D’Souza! Doesn’t Alex deserve better literary company than that? BTW, I’ve already bought my copy, and I plan to read it sometime in the next month.
:: Simple, slick, painless, and foolproof. Typical Microsoft. (See, this is why I use OpenOffice, even if it’s occasionally buggy and sometimes very clunky to use. I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe AC’s post, though, so I Google’d a bit to see if this was really true, and if Microsoft had come up with packaging so bizarre as to require people to go online to figure out just how to open the box in the first place, and, well, wouldn’t you know it. Of course, I, being in the field of Maintenance in my day life, would simply spend about ninety seconds with the box and then say the hell with it and reach for Mr. Utility Knife.)
:: I noticed that Billboard has listed my new album under the category of rock. And a radio show in the midwest aired a track from it on their jazz program. And tomorrow I’ll be live in L.A. on a classical show. (Note to self: order Alex’s new CD one of these days.)
And that does it for this week. Tune in again next week.
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Eerie coincidences
A bit of a postscript to my post the other day about my online friend who died last week.
Over the course of commiserating with other online friends who knew Gummy well, I learned that his last full name was Gregory Twyman. With this piece of information and my knowledge that he lived in the Pittsburgh area, I was able to find Gregory’s obituary in the Pittsburgh newspapers. What was odd was that I happened to glance down the page of obits and saw another name that I knew.
My grandmother on my father’s side was a schoolteacher, many years ago, in a Pittsburgh school district. Now, all the time I knew her she’d been retired, but by trade that’s what she had been: a teacher. I come, actually, from a long line of teachers — in fact, I’m almost the odd one out in not being a teacher myself. But anyway, my grandmother had a friend named Esther Yessel. I only met Esther a single time that I remember, when she and my grandmother both visited us in the first years we lived in Western New York. This was around 1982 or 1983, I suppose.
Well, my grandmother turned 80 in 1986, and she died about six months later. In truth, I suppose I’ve generally assumed that Esther had also died sometime since then — but it turned out that she only passed away last week, at the age of 95. That was utterly stunning to me — not that she had been alive all those years (more than twenty since my grandmother’s passing), but that she died only last week, and that only by virtue of looking for my friend’s obituary did I learn of Esther’s own death.
What a spooky, spooky world.
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
OK, here we go with this week’s oddities of the Web. Fair warning first, though: both of the first two are kind of gross. In fact, these are all kinds of icky. Proceed at your own risk!
:: Guy who claims to have very little tolerance for spicy food decides to take a swig of the hottest hot sauce he can find at the store. I’m not sure if this video is real or not, but his reaction is intriguing. He seems to have come prepared with lots of stuff at hand to stem the heat. I’m surprised that’s the hottest sauce he can find, also — I’m not familiar with that stuff, but it can’t be hotter than Dave’s Insanity Sauce, can it?
(via)
:: This is even ickier. It’s exactly what the URL says it is. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(via)
:: This isn’t icky at all; for fans of the departed series That 70s Show, it’s just Red Foreman issuing a number of variants of his favorite threat: his foot in your ass.
OK, that’s it. Sorry for the ick.
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Unidentified Earth 21
Well, well, well! It seems that either I’ve come up with a stumper, or no one’s following this series anymore…anyway, Unidentified Earth 20 has gone as yet unidentified, with only one guess offered. Tsk, tsk, tsk. I suppose I should offer a hint, so…it is in the Middle East.
Ah well, the show goes on; time for the next puzzler.
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
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One Hundred Movies!!! (71 through 80)
It’s been a while since the last entry in this series, so let’s get going again! Here are the next ten of my favorite movies (give or take a few I may have forgotten about), starting at #80 and going to #71.
80. Forrest Gump
I’m not sure which movie has suffered the greater backlash, Titanic or Gump. (Come to that, Dances With Wolves also always has to be mentioned in the topic of backlashes against once-beloved movies.) I can sort of understand the backlash, but the sheer hatred that both movies now seem to inspire amazes me. I’ve never found Gump to be what its detractors say it is; I’ve never found it to be an apologetic film for either a conservative or a liberal mindset. In fact, I’ve never much found it to be an mouthpiece kind of film for any real viewpoint at all. I just think it’s a very well-made film with a well-told story about characters who are sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. For a film that takes the basic form and feel of a fable, it really doesn’t offer much by way of easy answers, and Gump’s own answer to the central question of the movie basically boils down to “I dunno.”
Signature moment: Lieutenant Dan’s final “reconciliation” with God, if that’s even what it is.
79. Every Which Way But Loose
Yes, I am openly admitting to loving this incredibly goofy flick. It stars Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe, a truck driver who earns extra money by bare-knuckle boxing in the backlots of southern California, with his buddy Orville (the always wonderful Geoffrey Lewis) and his pet orangutan at his side. Yes, this is a movie whose main characters include an orangutan named Clyde. And it’s full of country music, barroom brawls, and a motorcycle gang that’s only slightly less competent than the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. I’ve never really believed in the idea of a “guilty pleasure”, but darn it, this movie might just well qualify. This is about as goofy a movie as you’re likely to find. (I also like its sequel, Any Which Way You Can, although the first film is better by virtue of its bittersweet ending.)
Signature moment: When Philo finally meets Tank Murdock.
78. Braveheart
I wonder sometimes if this film gets its due, with the current renewal of interest in fantasy filmmaking. Granted, Braveheart isn’t fantasy (although it certainly isn’t history, either), but its approach to depicting the realities of a medieval kind of life turned out to be enormously influential. No suits of armor here that shine in the morning sun and somehow remain clean throughout days of travel; no banners of brightly colored cloth. Instead, everything is mud-spattered and worn, and the atmosphere of the exteriors is one of chill. The battle scenes of The Lord of the Rings would look very different if this film hadn’t pioneered the brutally violent approach to such sequences.
I love this film’s first half, with its dreamy appearance and pacing and dialogue that occasionally rises to poetry. The film slows down a bit in the second half as the court intrigues take over, but that’s fine by me. This film deserved the plaudits it got.
Signature moment: It would be easy to note the Battle of Stirling, with Wallace’s “Sons of Scotland!” speech, but for me, the film’s essential sequence is the courtship and secret wedding of Murron. Without those scenes, the rest of the film would be a dull exercise in medieval history.
77. Bull Durham
Almost my favorite baseball movie of all time! This is just one great moment after another, one of those movies that takes us to an offbeat location (a minor-league baseball team) and lets us live alongside the offbeat characters who live there. The film just oozes authenticity in its setting, which helps us to overlook the frankly bizarre nature of Annie Savoy’s approach to dating (“Within the confines of the baseball season, I am, strictly speaking, monogamous.”). Crash Davis is one of the great characters in moviedom, as far as I’m concerned.
Signature moment: So many, but I’ll take one little touch of minor league baseball lore that may or may not be the way things are done, but it just feels so right that if I found out that this never actually happened at all, I’d be disappointed. I’m referring to when the Durham Bulls’ radio broadcasters have to do an away game, so they get the game action via a teletype, and when there’s a hit, the guy takes a mallet and smacks a block of wood, as if to fool the listeners that they’re hearing the crack of the bats. I love that.
76. Field of Dreams
Definitely my favorite baseball movie of all time! It’s just a great piece of American fantasy. Yes, that’s exactly what it is: a fantasy. What else to call it? The film’s approach to the supernatural is as refreshing as the unlikely subject matter. No one ever sits around drearily theorizing as to just what particular power is at work in Ray Kinsella’s corn field, or why this particular power is steering Ray toward a reconciliation with his father. I love it when a film has enough confidence in its story to simply posit whatever it needs to posit, and then proceeds accordingly.
Years ago, during my college years, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I went to the Field of Dreams itself, in Dyersville, Iowa. It seems trite to say so, but it really does look like that, and yes, I was a bit disappointed when I walked out into the corn and found myself…in a field of corn.
Signature moment: My favorite part of this movie has always been the scene when Burt Lancaster as Doc Graham describes his one half-inning of play in the Majors, which was enough of a baseball career for him to put down his glove and return home to be a doctor.
75. The Poseidon Adventure
Ahhhh, the cheesy 70s disaster flicks! And this one’s just so much fun, with everyone in scenery-chewing form. One can almost sense the director saying, “OK everybody, overact as much as you want, just as long as you don’t overact more than Hackman or Borgnine!” As engrossing as the post-disaster stuff is, I also find something sweetly engaging about the first half hour or so, when we’re being introduced to the cast. This is definitely the only movie you’ll ever see where one of the characters offers the bit of wisdom to “Don’t let your son grow up to be a haberdasher!”.
Signature moment: Any of the arguments between the Preacher and Mr. Rogo. (I changed my Signature Moment for this movie after it was pointed out in comments that the first one I had up here was, really, a big spoiler for the movie.)
74. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I heart Audrey Hepburn. End of story.
Signature moment: “Moon River.”
73. For Your Eyes Only
I always cite this movie to people who insist that Roger Moore played James Bond for laughs most of the time. After the Bond films of the 70s, which were all studies in various kinds of excess and self-parody, the producers returned to the sorts of lesser-scaled espionage that marked the first couple of films in the series, resulting in FYEO, which was the strongest Bond film to come from Moore’s tenure in the role. It’s just a very well-made thriller, very welcome after Moonraker.
Signature moment: Bond’s final confrontation with Locque. In this scene, Moore is as ruthless and cold as Sean Connery ever was.
72. The Living Daylights
Timothy Dalton took over as Bond for TLD in 1987, which turned out to be another instance in which the producers had to dial down the previous film’s excesses (1985’s A View to a Kill). Dalton based his portrayal of Bond on the character as actually written in the books by Ian Fleming, resulting in a fascinatingly vulnerable type of James Bond. The plot is a complex espionage tale, seemingly more in league with a Robert Ludlum novel than a typical Bond flick. It also features one of the series’s best heroines.
Signature moment: The fight in the cargo plane at the end.
71. The Abyss
Perennially overshadowed by Aliens, but not in my book, as this is one of the finest SF films ever made. Seriously, this movie’s got it all – a unique setting, a mystery, loads of conflict between interesting characters, and some terrific “sensawunda” to boot. I actually prefer the Director’s Cut, although that version of the film does tend to lay on the preaching of the film’s “message” a bit thick. Still, this is one wonderful film.
Signature moment: Bud and Lindsay, trapped on a flooding submersible, with one functioning set of SCUBA gear, and too far from the undersea rig to swim for it. I always find this sequence harrowing.
And there we are. Next up: Numbers 70 down to 61!