Month: May 2008

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Something for Thursday

Singin’ in the Rain has so many great numbers, that this one always seems to get overshadowed. Here, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) has taken Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) into an empty soundstage and set the scene with colored spotlights, a ladder, a fan to make a gentle breeze, a fog machine, and a large silver spotlight to create “moonlight”.

This is one of the songs I sing a lot, under my breath, when I’m working…and in my dreams, maybe once in a while I can dance like Gene Kelly. Maybe. For a minute, before I wake up.

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Boldly Going

I see at AICN that composer Alexander Courage has died. He had a very long career in Hollywood, both as a composer and an orchestrator, and he had his fingerprints on a great deal of amazing film music. But what is he best known for? Something pretty iconic, I think:

Before Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Dennis McCarthy, Ron Brown, Cliff Eidelman, and others came along, it was Alexander Courage taking us into the final frontier. And now he’s gone there himself.

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Sigh.

Right now, the only thing I find more tiring than the continued spasms of the lunatics who do nothing other than read the tea leaves in everything for any sign of the Coming of the Caliphate (hey, that can be the next Indiana Jones movie! Indiana Jones and the Coming of the Caliphate!) is that their moronic spasms still seem to work.

Of course, there are doubtless those who chalk this up as some kind of major victory for Western decency or something…but the cravenness of companies viz. their advertising is well established by now. Remember that Cingular commercial that had a guy briefly sing “Jimmy Crack Corn” during a phone call?

Anyway, congratulations to Michelle Malkin, who thus gets to add another notch to her “Mighty Blogger Against the Caliphate” bedpost. I hope it was good for her.

(And since I’m getting all political and stuff, sure, I’m thrilled at the prospect of lots of tell-all books about the disaster that is the Bush Administration. But Scott McClellan doesn’t get any props from me. Telling the truth five years after playing a large role in the actions that caused the damage to get done in the first place, when now the rest of the country has realized how disastrous the damage was and the polling numbers of the people who did it are in the toilet really doesn’t take a whole lot of guts. So thanks, Scotty. But you can still piss off.)

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Quizzes

Wow, is this blog getting boring…I’m resorting to more quizzes. Hmmmm.

From SamuraiFrog comes a quiz with some odd spelling in progress. Sorry about the all-caps too, but that’s how it came to me. Anyway:

1) WHAT BOOK ARE U READING?

I’m progressing slowly through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is a book to savor in small doses. I think it’s the literary equivalent of a box of very fine chocolates, so I’m reading it one chapter at a time. I’ll also have some other novel going on, although I haven’t picked one yet; it’ll probably be a space opera of some sort or another. I’m also reading Patricia Neal’s autobiography As I Am, on the recommendation of Sheila. I also need to return to my Moby Dick one-chapter-a-day plan one of these days. Maybe after I finish Strange and Norrell.

2) FAVOURITE BOARD GAME?

Hmmm. I enjoy Sorry! a good deal, although I haven’t played it in a while. I remember liking The Game of Life when I was a kid, but right now we don’t own that one. Maybe I’ll pick it up. I love chess, although I’m not any kind of master or anything.

3) FAVOURITE SMELLS?

Burning wood or incense. Candles. Pizza in the process of baking. A freshly poured glass of beer. Coffee. Vanilla.

4) WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD?

The realization of just how powerless you really are, and the realization that the difference between the life you should be living and the life you are living isn’t very large — but for all that, the difference is also insurmountable.

5) WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN U WAKE?

“Oh, f*** this f***ing day, so I can just f***ing sleep some more.” And if waking up interrupts a really good dream, that same sentiment goes through my head with a lot more f***’s.

6) FINISH THIS STATEMENT—’IF I HAD A LOT OF MONEY I’D…

How much money is “a lot” of money? Enough to retire right now and live at least at the standard of living I’m at now? Or “decent winnings on Deal or No Deal” money? Maybe I’d buy a house on a nice piece of land with lots of trees somewhere in Orchard Park or East Aurora. Travel sounds nice, but we’re gradually making it a complete pain in the ass to go anywhere. Maybe I’d buy a car that gets the best mileage possible. And I’d probably buy some books.

7) DO U DRIVE FAST?

I can, at times, but generally I’m the guy who gets freaked out because I’m going eight or nine miles over the speed limit and still getting passed as though I’m the old lady on my way to pick up coffee cake for tonight’s bridge club.

8) STORMS–COOL OR SCARY?

Cool because of the scary.

9) WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR?

A red Volkswagen Rabbit with a diesel engine. I liked that car, until the hood blew open while I was driving.

10) FAVOURITE DRINK?

Alcoholic? Rum, I guess.

11) FINISH THIS STATEMENT-IF I HAD THE TIME I WOULD…

I have the time. I just use it badly.

12) DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI?

You know what? If God came to me and said, “I will make it so that gas is back down to $1.50 a gallon, impose universal health care in the US, see that Bin Laden is captured, and get you a healthy raise for the exact amount of work you do now, if you just eat this bowl of broccoli”, I’d let the world stay as it is. If Satan were a food, he would be broccoli.

13) FAVOURITE SPORTS TO WATCH?

Football.

14) ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU?

I love it when this question shows up in these blog-quizzes, betraying their origins as e-mail quizzes! Anyway, SamuraiFrog nicely posts photos of women in various stages of undress, which is always nice.

15) WHATS UNDER YOUR BED?

I have no idea, but wow, there’s a lot of crap under there. Maybe it’s time to get rid of a lot of it.

16) MORNING PERSON OR NIGHT OWL?

I genuinely don’t know, so I live as though I’m both, which results in me being a drooling moron by week’s end. (Which explains why I don’t normally blog on Fridays; the results are usually not encouraging.)

17) OVER EASY OR SUNNY SIDE UP?

Scrambled, or in omelet form. I’m not a fan of either of these two preparations.

18) FAVOURITE PLACE TO RELAX?

Depends on the type of relaxation, I guess. I like sitting at my desk, or on the balcony reading, or in the armchair reading, or in bed, reading.

19) FAVOURITE PIE?

Hmmmm. Well, this would depend, I suppose, on the method of consumption, yes? Apple (with ice cream), or coconut cream.

20) FAVOURITE ICE CREAM FLAVOUR?

Coffee. Or mint chocolate chip. Or cookie dough. Or…you get the idea.

Sheila starts a post as follows: “I wish I had a lifetime supply of:”, and then a list of such items as pertains to her. What about me? Hmmm. I wish I had a lifetime supply of:

:: Yeungling Lager.

:: Gigabytes (or terrabytes, once we reach that point).

:: Candles of all sizes.

:: Green tea.

:: Printer paper.

:: Printer ink.

:: Mucinex.

:: Espresso roast coffee.

:: Mozzarella cheese.

:: Bratwurst.

:: Shampoo and hair conditioner.

Quizzes: the reason I still have a blog at all!

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Sensawunda

Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow.

And oh yeah, WOW!

That’s the Phoenix lander that just arrived on Mars the other day — in the process of descent, via its parachute; you can even make out the tether lines. It’s things like this that make me think that with everything else going wrong, we’re still doing amazing things and getting things right and moving, ever so slowly, into the future. As Phil Plait writes:

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.

Wow.

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Sentential Links #141

Here we go:

:: What a small, strange world she lives in — one in which even simple breakfast choices are fraught with peril. What are her lunch and dinner choices like? When she goes to a restaurant, does she peer into the waiters’ station and wonder which servers are gays who wish to be married, peer into the kitchen and wonder which dishwashers are illegal aliens? When she makes her own meals, does she claw through the fridge and pantry like Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, frantically searching the labels for signs of politically incorrect associations? (Yup, Michelle Malkin’s on the prowl again, letting us know who needs boycotting now.)

:: Nothing says you are valued and appreciated for all you do like a lead based travel coffee mug. I can’t wait to use it.

:: Fundamental problem: Exercise and diet for its own sake is boring as hell. We geeks live in our minds and don’t deal with boredom very well at all.

:: He had to be stopped, for all women were his playthings and all men his pawns. (Possibly not safe for work…but really, really funny.)

:: Seeing the fabled city in the distance, Eric muses that it would have been better for the place to have been destroyed and all its people killed than to have any contact with modernity. (Well, yeah. Prime Directive and all that!)

:: I feel that to be a teacher one has to be something of a masochist.

:: Jonah was basically a good guy who had some important work to do. But God knew that at a key moment he was likely to lose courage. So God prepared a fish.

:: They hear, in Bach’s music, order, logic, control, a disciplined rightness that they associate with arithmetical sums and algebraic equations, but saying Bach’s music is like arithmetic is like saying that a human being is nothing but five dollars worth of chemicals; add some water and stir. (There’s a longer post in response to this somewhere in my head, but I’m having trouble teasing it out right now. I’ll leave it at this: it may seem trite to point out the mathematical correctness of Bach’s music, but to me it’s entirely the contrary. It’s the mathematical structure in Bach that allows his music to be supremely expressive of his deep spirituality. The universe at its most basic levels is mathematical, so in writing music where mathematical relationships hold sway so strongly over all other elements, it seems to me that Bach was expressing the sum of his being, and plumbing depths rarely seen by other composers as well.)

:: For me, this most cinematically intoxicated/intoxicating of the Indiana Jones pictures (the flawlessly put-together mining car roller-coaster ride adapts gags — involving a railroad switch, a large piece of lumber, a water tank — from Buster Keaton!) towers above the others in the series. Like the “Star Wars” trilogy (there’s only one trilogy), the “Indiana Jones” films reached their pinnacle in the second installment. (No, there was another Star Wars trilogy, you goof! But I like seeing someone else who doesn’t think that Temple of Doom is crap.)

By the way, I had no idea that there had been an Indiana Jones Blog-a-Thon! I always, without any exception, learn about Blog-a-thons that are on topics I’d be keen to write about afterward. Maybe one of these days I’ll get in on the ground floor…but until then, a couple of links from that Blog-a-thon:

:: I’ll freely admit that even to this day, it only takes a few bars of John Williams’ iconic “Raiders March” to make me want to eat PB&J sandwiches and put playing cards in my bicycle spokes.

:: As an avid fan of the film and of John Williams I’ve listened to the score countless times over the past 27 years. But as a musical layman, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I noticed something clever that John Williams seemed to be doing with the Ark Theme. (Geez…I never realized that, either. Looks like an interesting blog…looks like this fellow had the same idea with that 75 things a man should be able to do thing that I did.)

:: It is no secret to anyone that Indiana Jones owes a great deal to James Bond.

:: Short Round allowed me to imagine that a kid could do more than go to school. In fact, there existed the possibility of me driving a car, jumping out of a plane, riding elephants, rescuing hundreds of fellow children and beating up some brat with a doll and a jewel hat. (I always liked Short Round.)

:: When I think of seeing Last Crusade for the first time in the summer of ’89, I can’t help but think of that damned girl. (Not part of the Indy Blog-a-thon, but there he is, anyway.)

And what did I think of Crystal Skull? I’ll let you know when I see it.

More next week!

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In Memory

Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“The Green Field of France”, by Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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Unidentified Earth 39

After taking a week off from Unidentified Earth last week, we now get back into it this week with a new entry below. However, UI 38, from two weeks ago, is as yet not only Unidentified, but not even guessed at. Hmmmm. Maybe this one was too hard? Nah, that can’t be it, but as is my policy, I always start leaving hints whenever a previous installment is still Unidentified when a new installment goes live, so: some years ago, several people saw this particular location much closer up than they, or anyone, would have liked.

And now for the new one! I suspect this will be Identified in pretty short order by at least two of my readers (if not more), but still, here it is:

Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, folks!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Well, well, well….

:: We’ve had “Stuff White People Like”, and we’ve had “Stuff Nobody Likes”, so of course next up is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Stuff God Hates. The idea of a sarcastic blog written by God just strikes me as terribly funny.

:: I had this bookmarked for use a few weeks ago, but then I had to reinstall stuff and lost the link until I remembered it just now. I don’t remember where I first saw it, so I can’t properly credit anyone, but somebody’s blogging Things that are younger than John McCain.

You know, I really try not to be “ageist”, because I know plenty of people of advanced age who are amazingly bright and competent, but there’s just something about John McCain that makes me think that his Presidency would largely consist of him sitting on a rocking chair on the Truman Balcony, throwing empty cans at the kids who stop outside his fence to gawk at the fancy white house he lives in and talking about how his knee’s hurtin’ so there’s probably gonna be some weather. (And yes, I’d think the exact same thing about the Democratic nominee if we were running, oh, Robert Byrd for President. Maybe moreso. If McCain were a young and robust 40-something, running on the exact same set of ideas, I’d still be dead certain to not vote for him.)

:: Western New York’s most recent brush with national news attention came last year when an inmate at a local jail, a hood named Ralph Phillips who goes by the nickname “Bucky”, escaped from jail and then spent several months on the lam until he was finally caught. The whole thing was mildly entertaining for a while until he shot and killed a state trooper, and after that, the State Police wrapped things up pretty quickly. Now, Bucky Phillips is no longer in a local jail but in the one of New York’s maximum security prisons. Well, there’s a story in the Buffalo News this morning about his behavior since he’s been sent to the Clinton Correctional Facility (somewhere in the Adirondacks), and the lede contains an item that made me go, “Huh-whuh?!” Here’s that lede; let’s see if any of my readers spots the same thing that stunned me:

Ralph ���������Bucky��������� Phillips, who fatally shot one state trooper and seriously wounded two others during the biggest manhunt in state history, is a troublesome prisoner who has been sanctioned nine times for inmate misconduct, including one incident involving explosives, state officials say.

Anyone else react the way I did?

And by the way, I’m looking at the picture of Bucky Phillips in the News story, and I’m struck by the fact that he looks eerily similar to the fellow who plays Jesus in some of the videos they use at my church for the Gospel readings. You be the judge: Bucky, or Jesus?

(The actor as Jesus is a fellow named Bruce Marchiano; I grabbed this picture from here. He’s OK as Jesus, but I actually prefer the guy who plays him in the Gospel of John video they use in services where the reading comes from that particular book. That’s Henry Ian Cusick, who can now be seen brooding his way through the lush scenery of LOST, along with everyone else on ABC’s popular serial brood-fest. It’s an interesting contrast between the two performances; you have a long-haired guy with a British accent doing Jesus with a strong mystical bent, versus an American with thick but not-terribly-long hair doing Jesus-as-smiling-best-friend. I don’t have a problem with the latter, per se, but just for watching the thing, I prefer the former.)

More next week, as always.

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Where She Resides

It was one year ago today that our second daughter, Fiona Quinn, was born. Her life spanned little more than two hours. How I wish she could have lived the way she was supposed to have lived; she would have had a wonderful big sister to show her the way. I wonder what gifts she would have had and what loves would have been hers. Alas, now she only resides with us as memories of two hours of life in a hospital room, of memories of dreams, and as precious ashes we keep in a music box.

“On My First Son”, by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

Happy Birthday, Fiona Quinn.

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